Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, kept a remote U.S. base in the country manned last year at the local governor's request despite warnings from his field commanders that it should be closed because it was vulnerable and had no tactical or strategic value.
McChrystal's decision to maintain the outpost at Barg-e Matal prompted the top American commanders in eastern Afghanistan to delay plans to close a second remote U.S. outpost, Combat Outpost Keating, where insurgents killed eight U.S. troops in an assault Oct. 3, a McClatchy investigation has found.
Keeping Barg-e-Matal open also deprived a third isolated base of the officer who would have been its acting commander and left its command to lower-ranking officers whose "ineffective actions" led "directly" to the deaths of five American and eight Afghan soldiers in an ambush Sept. 8, according to a high-level military investigation. ...
The two officers, Col. Randy George and Lt. Col. Robert B. Brown, and other U.S. officials had warned repeatedly that the two outposts were worthless and too costly to defend, two American defense officials and a former NATO official told McClatchy. ...
George, the American commander in four Afghan provinces that border Pakistan, has received a letter of admonishment; Brown, whose operational area included Keating and Barg-e Matal, has received an official reprimand. ...
Penalizing the pair is even more egregious, the U.S. defense officials and the former NATO official said, because their plans to close the outposts were consistent with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy of moving American troops from remote areas to economically important population centers.
The fact that officers in the field are being punished while no mention has been made of the role that their superiors played signals that those on the front lines always will take the blame when things go wrong, the first U.S. defense official said.
"This will make the Army even more casualty-averse," he said. "This is the worst message at the worst time for McChrystal to send." ...
Knowledgeable American officers and officials countered that the impoverished mountain backwater of 2,500 in Nuristan province has no strategic value, lacks any roads, is far from key population centers, traditionally has disdained the authority of the central government in Kabul and is historically hostile to outsiders, including other Afghans.
... "Bear in mind that this operation in what is undoubtedly one of the most remote and difficult locations in all of Afghanistan occurred at the time of discussion about revising our strategy to concentrate our forces in areas of dense population and strategic importance." ...