Wanat : Combat Action In Afghanistan, 2008 [Illustrated Edition]

Combat Studies Institute

• Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781782894940
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Includes 16 maps, photos and plans
"The Battle of Wanat occurred on July 13, 2008, when about 200 Taliban guerrillas attacked NATO troops near the Quam, (large clan village), of Wanat in the Waygal district in Afghanistan's far eastern province of Nuristan. The position was defended primarily by U.S. Army soldiers of the 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.
"The Taliban surrounded the remote base and its observation post and attacked it from the Quam and the surrounding farmland. They destroyed much of the Americans' heavy munitions, broke through U.S. lines, and entered the main base before being repelled by artillery and aircraft. American casualties included nine killed and 27 wounded, while four Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers were wounded. The U.S. combat deaths represent the most in a single battle since the start of U.S. operations in 2001.
"The Battle of Wanat has been described as the "Black Hawk Down" of the War in Afghanistan, as one of the bloodiest attacks of the war and one of several attacks on remote outposts. In contrast to previous roadside bombs and haphazard attacks and ambushes, this attack was well coordinated with fighters from many insurgent and terrorist groups with an effort that was disciplined and sustained which was able to target key assets such as the TOW launcher with precision.
"The battle became the focus of widespread debate, generating "a great deal of interest and scrutiny among military professionals and from outside observers." mainly due to the relatively "significant number of coalition casualties".

Chapter 1 — Historic and Campaign Background of the Waygal Valley

Afghanistan’s history is one of strife and conflict. The people who have lived in what is today Afghanistan have seen a succession of foreign and domestic rulers and conquerors. The first Western invader to enter the region was Alexander the Great who overthrew the previous rulers of the Afghanistan region, the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Alexander continued east from Persia, entering the area from the southeast in 329 BC and operating throughout the region for three years. After passing through the current site of Kandahar (the Pashto equivalent of “Alexandria”), a city he founded, the Macedonian king wintered at “Alexandria in the Caucasus,” near the current site of Bagram Air Base. During the next campaigning season, Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush range through the Khawak Pass and conquered the Persian province of Bactria, establishing a Macedonian colony there and marrying Roxana, the daughter of a local noble. The Macedonian then re-crossed the Hindu Kush in 327 BC, and, with part of his army, followed the Kabul River Valley to the Konar River Valley where he came into conflict with local fighters who were probably the ancestors of the modern Nuristanis. Alexander defeated these people but was wounded in the shoulder in the process. He then turned east, crossed through the Nawa Pass into what today is Pakistan and rejoined the rest of his army in the Indus River Valley. There he fought his next series of battles. Although Nuristani folklore often portrays them as being the descendents of Alexander’s soldiers, modern scholarship and linguistic evidence indicates a far earlier origin of the Nuristanis. Still, the genes of Alexander’s warriors remain alive in Afghanistan.{1}

Nuristan Province and the Waygal Valley{2}

Located in northeastern Afghanistan, Nuristan Province is just south of the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush range, with its modest population of farmers found almost exclusively in steep valleys cut by small river courses between the mountains. This terrain and a lack of all but the most rudimentary infrastructure has historically marked the province as remote and primitive even by Afghanistan’s standards. Within Nuristan and Konar provinces, the Waygal River flows south from the Hindu Kush Mountains for 20 miles until it joins the Pech River at Nangalam. The Pech River, in turn, flows into the larger Konar River at Asadabad. The region is spectacularly rugged and divided into numerous small river valleys separated by steep mountain ridges, many in excess of 10,000 feet. The Waygal Valley is located primarily in Nuristan Province but the southernmost five miles are in Konar Province. The provincial boundary which also marks the ethnic boundary between Nuristanis to the north and Safi Pashtuns to the south is located one half mile south of Wanat. All of the valleys of Nuristan and Konar, to include the Waygal Valley, are rocky, deep, narrow, and steep-sided, most of them are classic examples of geological V-shaped valleys. One international observer simply stated, “The terrain is mountainous indeed. This is one of the most topographically forbidding operating environments in the world.”{3} Nine Nuristani villages are located in the northern and central Waygal Valley.{4}

While located on the Indian border, during its era of rule in India, the British colonial government rarely became involved with Konar and Nuristan, although the British played a role in the appointment of the Amir of Pashat, the ruler of the eastern Konar region in the 1840s. Individual English explorers sometimes penetrated into the area. One such expedition into eastern Nuristan (then called Kafiristan) became the basis for Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 short story The Man Who Would Be King. In 1896, after the demarcation of the Durand Line solidified the political borders of his realm, the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan moved into Kafiristan and subdued the population. As a price for his future protection, he required the Kafiristanis to accept Islam and rechristened them Nuristanis, as they had seen the light of Islam, nur being the Arabic word for light. This was part of the process by which Abdur Rahman, a grandson of renowned Afghan leader Dost Muhammad, who ruled in Kabul for 21 years, introduced a stable central government to Afghanistan for the first time in its history.{5}

The next great external intervention in the northeast of Afghanistan occurred in December of 1979 when the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan to rescue and buttress a weak Marxist government that had assumed power the previous year in Kabul. Even before the Soviet intervention, Konar had been the scene of several early rebellions against the Marxist forces. After two successful early offensives along the Pech Valley in the spring of 1980, the Soviets restricted their operations in Konar and eastern Nuristan to the placing of garrisons along the Konar River at major population centers. Soviet successes and brutality in the Pech and Waygal region were such that many mujahedeen families and most of the leadership fled to Pakistan, not to return until the later years of the Soviet war. With that area pacified, most significant heavy fighting was centered along the corridor of the Konar River connecting Jalalabad to Asadabad and Barikowt on the Pakistani border. The Soviets focused on restricting the flow of anti-Soviet insurgents and their arms and supplies from Pakistan into Afghanistan through the Konar Valley. The mujahedeen returned to the Pech-Waygal valleys in the mid-1980s. The Soviets and Afghan Marxists executed a brief campaign in the Pech Valley that even penetrated to the Waygal Valley. During this period, Nuristan and Konar saw other fighting between Communist proxies, local landowners and communities, and organized criminal organizations attempting to gain control of the lucrative Kamdesh timber and gemstone interests within the region.{6}

During the civil war in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal and the ensuing Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban maintained only a token presence in the Pech and Waygal Valleys. Nuristan’s remote location, its rugged, severely constrained terrain, limited road network, and proximity to the Northern Alliance power center in the Panjshir Valley made a large presence unpalatable to the Taliban. The Nuristanis were also able to play the Taliban off against the Northern Alliance. Neither side attempted to lay a heavy hand on the region out of fear of driving the local population into the arms of its enemies.

Central government influence within the Waygal Valley has historically been limited although this has recently been changing. Similar to other remote areas, there was no permanent governmental administrative presence in the Waygal Valley until the post-Soviet era (1993) when a separate Nuristan Province was established and the Waygal Valley became designated as a district within that province. Eventually a district center was established at Wanat which had been a traditional meeting place for the Waygal Valley Nuristanis and the rough road linking the Pech Valley to Wanat was improved sufficiently to allow motor vehicles to reach the administrative center for the first time.{7}

As previously mentioned, two ethnic population groups are predominant in the Waygal Valley: the Nuristanis in the north and Safi Pashtuns in the south. Because of the rugged terrain and steep ridgelines throughout northeastern Afghanistan, the majority of the communities are isolated and relationships between and within the various ethnic groups are extremely complex. The Safi Pashtuns and Nuristanis speak distinctive languages and there are particular dialects within these languages. The Nuristanis especially have a large number of dialects, some of which are so divergent as to constitute separate languages. For centuries, the Nuristanis practiced their own polytheistic religion in a region otherwise dominated by followers of Islam. As previously mentioned, this cultural distinctiveness changed only in the late nineteenth century when Nuristan finally embraced Islam at the forcible demand of the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman. Nuristan was only established as an independent province in 1993 when it was created from the northern parts of Konar and Laghman provinces.{8}

The Nuristani people in the Waygal Valley differentiate themselves from other Nuristanis by referring to themselves as Kalasha. Although the Kalasha speak their own distinctive language, the people of the four southernmost villages further identify themselves as Chimi-nishey, while the dwellers of the northern villages call themselves Wai. The Nuristani population of the Waygal Valley also differentiates itself between Amurshkara and Kila-kara. This refers to the type of cheese they make. This is not the minor point that it appears. The type of cheese produced significantly influences how a family organizes its pastoral and dairy activities and this, in turn, reflects the differences between the amount and quality of summer pastures that the people of the northern half of the valley possess compared to the southern half of the valley. Such complicated distinctions validate the convoluted human terrain of the region. It must be noted that even within the same ethnic group, tensions of various types and severity abound between adjacent villages, the majority of whose families are often related. As Sami Nuristani, a resident of the Waygal Valley who is currently a college student in the United States noted, “Be prepared to hear contradicting requests. Also, be open to see some sort of rivalry between the inhabitants of different villages in the valley. You might hear one thing from one village and may hear completely the opposite from another village. It has been there as long as Nuristan existed.”{9}

Historically, the small population of Nuristan has depended on the isolation of their compact settlements for military defense. Vast tracts of trackless mountainous terrain surround their villages. These tracts served as effective buffer zones for their communities and could only be exploited by well-armed herders who could take their animals there under protection. The Nuristanis controlled the highlands along with the attendant forests, pastures, gem-rich mountains, and water for irrigation that can turn a semi-arid land into valuable agricultural fields. After Abdur Rahman imposed peace on the region, the Nuristani population gingerly moved into these buffer areas on the periphery of their settlements. They constructed irrigation systems and agricultural terraces and built rudimentary shelters to use while tending their fields. Given population growth and sustained security, over time these rudimentary shelters were gradually improved and became permanent hamlets. To the south, the Safi Pashtuns had expanded across the lowlands of the Pech and Konar Valleys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the expense of the previous Dardic speaking inhabitants. The Safis were unable to expand their agriculturally based livelihood into the highland areas adjacent to Nuristani settlements. Accordingly, the lower Waygal Valley became a buffer zone between the Safis and the Nuristanis that saw periods of both cooperation and confrontation. In the early twentieth century when the central Afghan Government unilaterally settled a group of non-Safi Pashtuns from the eastern frontier area of Konar onto traditionally Nuristani land on the west side of the Waygal Valley, the Safi Pashtuns and the Kalasha Nuristanis cooperated to eject the newcomers. The area remains Nuristani to the present day. In 1945-1946 when the Pech Safi Pashtuns revolted against the Afghan Government, the central government successfully played the Nuristanis off against the Safis. However, in the jihad against the Marxists and Soviets, both groups cooperated successfully. Nevertheless considerable animosity exists within the valley and localized struggles both between the two ethnic groups and among several Nuristani communities are common today.{10}

In Nuristan, the largest unit that has significance is what anthropologists refer to as the corporate community, a process in which a closely interrelated geographic community with common economic interests shares in management and decision-making for the use and disposition of scarce and valuable natural resources. Waygal Village, for example, the northernmost and largest population concentration in the valley, actually is comprised of two different corporate communities, Beremdesh and Waremdesh. Conflicts, usually over resources such as pasture, forests, or water, were frequent between and within the corporate communities of the Waygal Valley and elsewhere in Nuristan. The potential for such conflicts between these distinct corporate communities was one reason why the Nuristanis had an extremely strong exogamy rule. French Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss developed the “Alliance Theory” of exogamy, the practice of marrying outside a local entity such as a family, clan, tribe, or community to build alliances with other groups. According to Lévi-Strauss’ theory, such practices result in enhanced opportunities for cultural and economic exchanges and unite diverse organizations that would otherwise engage in conflicts (either military or economic). Nuristani community leaders recognized the need to create at least some bonds between other communities to have social and cultural links to resolve conflicts that might arise, to engage in trade between craftsmen who specialized in products in different communities, and to call on one another for mutual assistance when necessary. Within Nuristan, efforts to act in unity above the level of the corporate community have proven to be difficult and fragile. Some of the current conflict in the region can be traced to the recent dissipation of solidarity within the corporate communities.{11}

In general terms, Nuristani ethnic groups live in homes traditionally constructed into the sides of mountains to conserve limited arable land. The homes are constructed with wooden supports and bracketed in such a manner that they are generally resistant to the frequent earthquakes that plague the region. Families tend to use their first floor for storage and reside on the second floor. Walkways, terraces, and ladders connect families and neighborhoods. Access to the ground or first floor is usually restricted and the ladders that connect residences can be readily removed to enhance security. Structures tend to be clustered or concentrated, literally stacked atop each other, with an extended family living with other such f...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Chapter 1 - Historic and Campaign Background of the Waygal Valley
• Chapter 2 - The Establishment of COP Kahler, 8-12 July 2008
• Chapter 3 - The Fight at Wanat, 13 July 2008
• Chapter 4 - Conclusions
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
• Glossary
• Bibliography