Latest Editions

The battle of Wanat

Audio: Play | Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3

Jonathan Brostrom

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, lead reporter on a series that chronicles one of the costliest encounters of the war for US forces in Afghanistan… last year’s Battle of Wanat in Nuristan.

The Washington Post: The Battle of Wanat interactive feature

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Nuristan is one of the provinces most affected in that long war.  It’s where eight American soldiers and NATO says more than 100 insurgents were killed last Saturday.  And it’s where deadly fighting has continued since. Nuristan is no stranger to fierce battles.  Last year, the Battle of Wanat took the lives of nine U.S. soldiers in the course of a few hours.  The Americans were fending off the Taliban from a remote Army base.  The Washington Post today concluded a three-part series on the Battle of Wanat.  The lead reporter on the series is Greg Jaffe. He says the outpost was set up in a hurry.

GREG JAFFE: It was quite the first four days although the soldiers noticed weird things in the area that people seemed to be disappearing, the locals were upset about a U.S. air strike about a week earlier that killed the health care workers in the valley.  And they got overwhelmed by about 200 fighters.  The soldiers could sense it was a dangerous area.  They were getting up at 3:30 in the morning.  Dawn is the most dangerous time in Afghanistan.  It’s the time when the Taliban likes to attack.  So they got up at 3:30 a.m. expecting an attack and got hit hard, much harder than they expected around just after 4:00 a.m.

WERMAN: People did say that it was a mission that was poorly supported by senior commanders, and then was hastily executed.  I mean, I’m wondering how you feel today looking at this, having investigated this yourself.  Does the action at Wanat in some way symbolize the whole military’s role in Afghanistan right now?

JAFFE: Well, I think it shows the problem that you have if you commit force without sufficient resources.  I mean, it was poorly supported.  I think you could also make the argument in that the battalion and brigade commanders, the senior commanders, whose job it was to support it would say, you know, the entire war was poorly supported. And I think there are commanders over there right now who will say that the war is poorly supported.  So it goes to what you get when you don’t put enough into a war and when you ask commanders to make hard decisions.  I mean, the question is was this tough enough that they should have pulled back, and I think you can have an argument about that.

WERMAN: How has the military, the U.S. military changed what it does and how it operates in response to what happened at Wanat?

JAFFE: I don’t think it has changed significantly.  I think it has a little bit in the sense that there’s a strategy review that’s gone on, and the military has looked at these little outposts particularly in places like Nuristan and said that they don’t seem to make sense in isolated areas, in part because they’re too hard to defend.  The soldiers end up kind of falling in on themselves so they’re not interacting with the population.  They’re not out patrolling.  They’re just trying to protect themselves.  So they have decided that these things are a mistake.  We need to shut some of these down.  But as the weekend’s assault shows, you know, they’re still out there.  They’re not operating significantly differently and if the Taliban wanted to hit them like in mass force, they are very vulnerable.

WERMAN: General McChrystal has ordered the military in Afghanistan to kind of be cautious about how much fire power they use, and also to protect the civilian population. Do you think there’s more to Wanat than just these two things?

JAFFE: Yeah, I absolutely do.  I think there is a lot more to it.  I think the biggest lesson is, you know, you’ve got a limited force and you have to set priorities and you can’t be everywhere.  You know, there are some areas in Afghanistan that you are just going to have to see to the enemy, and Nuristan is one of those places.  I think the hard part for a number of years and unfortunately I think it’s still the case, we didn’t have a coherent strategy.  So it made it difficult for us to sort of figure out what was important in Afghanistan and what was not important.  And if everything looks equally important, you spread yourself think awful fast, and I think that that’s what the U.S. did.  So I think McChrystal has got to make some really difficult decisions, and he’s got to be really ruthless about okay what really matters to me.  Even if he gets 40,000 more troops, he’s still not going to have enough force to control the entire country.

WERMAN: Greg Jaffe, National Security Reporter for the Washington Post.  Thank you very much for your time.

JAFFE: Well, thanks for having me on.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.