• Listen to our special four part series “Inside the Taliban”
• Background Brief: Taliban insurgency
• Can the US commit to Afghanistan?

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Tomorrow marks the eight-year anniversary of America’s presence in Afghanistan.  President Obama and his closest advisors are fiercely debating what’s next for the U.S. there. The debate has been framed as a choice between a narrow counter-terrorism option and a broader counterinsurgency plan.  But as The World’s Jeb Sharp reports, it’s much more complicated than that.

JEB SHARP: Americans are focused on whether more troops should be sent to Afghanistan but the dilemmas facing the administration go beyond Afghanistan itself. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation says the Obama Administration’s original emphasis on both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan was the correct one.

PETER BERGEN: The insurgency is based in both countries so whether we choose not to look at this thing holistically or not, the Taliban and its allies look at the thing holistically.  They’re trying to overthrow the government of Pakistan and they’re trying to overthrow the government of Afghanistan, and they’re also engaged in both sides of the border in planning attacks against international forces.

SHARP: But acknowledging that the two countries can’t be dealt with separately doesn’t make the policy any clearer.  What might seem logical for one country can inflame the other. Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution explains why ramping up forces and strengthening Afghanistan makes Pakistan nervous.

STEPHEN COHEN: The reason the Pakistanis are obsessed with Afghanistan is that they desperately worry about encirclement by India. There’s a natural strategic alliance between Afghanistan and India against Pakistan, and the Pakistanis are responding by a policy in Afghanistan which is as much anti-Indian as pro-Pakistani.

SHARP: Cohen thinks it was a mistake to label US policy Afpak or even PakAf  because it tends to assume the problem is located along the narrow strip of border between the countries.  In his view the problem is much larger.

COHEN: I’m at a loss myself for what to name it, but it is a complex series of issues involving a nuclear weapons state, actually two nuclear states because India’s involved and three if you include China, a failed state Afghanistan, and the rise of militant Islam which targets the United States.  It also targets Pakistan and India.  So perhaps the best title would be continuation of the struggle against Islamic extremism.

SHARP: Which brings us back to the Obama Administration’s goal of defending Americans against attacks by al Qaeda and its allies.  When the U.S. first went into Afghanistan eight years ago, the goal was to disrupt al Qaeda’s network and remove the Taliban from power.  But now, despite talk of a narrower focus on al Qaeda, the overall strategy still involves defeating the Taliban and creating a stable Afghanistan.  That means not just war fighting but also state building, which is notoriously difficult.  Just look at Bosnia says Jon Western, a Professor of  International Relations at Mount Holyoke College.

JON WESTERN: We’re now 14 years after the conflict ended in Bosnia and there’s been an enormous international effort to build a series of state institutions, and to establish good governance structures in Bosnia.  And today, here we are 14 years later and I think Bosnia is in a real crisis because a lot of the institutions that were constructed are not functioning very well.  And I think that just points to the dilemma of state building in general.  We knew a lot about what was going on in Bosnia.  You know, we know a lot less about Afghanistan.

SHARP: Western acknowledges he doesn’t have the answer for Afghanistan, but talk of expanding the mission makes him nervous.

WESTERN: My instinct says that escalation is probably the wrong thing to do, and probably to go more towards a more minimalist approach. I do struggle with the issue though. I mean, I have friends and former students who are from Afghanistan and, you know, they’re doing their best to make it a go.  And I would hate to see everybody just kind of throw up their hands and say well this is Afghanistan, this is, you know, centuries of tribal hatreds.  Let’s just be done with it.  Because I don’t fully buy into that, but at the same time I realize it’s a really, really difficult endeavor.

SHARP: Unless there’s a dramatic about-face by the Obama Administration that endeavor will continue for some time. That fact, as much as the debate over troop numbers and strategy, is what Americans are now confronting, eight years into a very long war.   For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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• View Matthew Bell’s pictures from the West Bank
• Israel and the Palestinians
• Matthew Bell’s ‘American Influence’ podcast

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH-Boston. Israeli police today deployed thousands of officers on the streets of Jerusalem.  Two days of Palestinian street protests have left the city on edge.  Palestinians are upset because they believe that Israel is trying to turn Jerusalem into a predominantly Jewish city. In the West Bank, housing construction in Israeli settlements continues apace, and that’s despite President Obama calling Jewish settlements built on lands captured by Israel in 1967 illegitimate.  The World’s Matthew Bell reports from the West Bank.

MATTHEW BELL: In the hills above the Palestinian City of Nablus, the 800 or so Israeli residents of Yizhar have a reputation.  They’re known for being among the most hard lined of Jewish settlers. The area around Yizhar has been the sight of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, and even recently between settlers and Israeli soldiers.   Yigal Avitay gave me tour of Yizhar.  Avitay is a bearded and bespectacled 43 year-old father of eleven children.  He moved here in the mid-80s to raise a family in part of the Holy Land where he says there are too few Jews.  We drive past a row of small wooden homes along a ridge outside the main cluster of settlement houses.  Avitay says this was once a no-man’s land.  This is one of the illegal outposts that the Israeli government might tear down?

AVITAY: Yah, but it’s ridiculous because the government built the road and moved their electricity line, and moved the water line, and now because of American pressure or political reason they say, “Oh, it’s illegal.  Let’s destroy it.”

BELL: Avitay says the people of Yizhar are determined to stand firm in the face of American pressure, but he’s not so sure his own Prime Minister is.  Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly prepared to impose a freeze on settlement building, not an immediate all-encompassing freeze, as the Obama administration wanted but didn’t get.  This proposed freeze would be gradual and temporary.  But even that doesn’t sit well with Yigal Avitay. We arrive in front of a partly constructed cinder block foundation for yet another new home. Do you think people will …  I mean, if Netanyahu says stop, make a freeze …

AVITAY: Yah.

BELL: Will they stop?

AVITAY: Never. We not work for Netanyahu.

BELL: Avitay invites me to his home and switching to Hebrew he says pressuring the settlers to stop building will only achieve the opposite result.

AVITAY: [In Hebrew]

BELL: He says whenever the government and the news media oppose the settlements, the pace of building only speeds up, and that’s just what’s happening now.  Unfortunately, says Hagit Ofran, that’s true.  She is a 34 year-old activist with the group Peace Now, which opposes the settlements.  Ofran drives through the West Bank documenting new construction activities, and that’s keeping her very busy these days.

HAGIT OFRAN: One, two, three.  I don’t know.  A bunch.

BELL: New houses?

OFRAN: Foundations.  You see, it’s just foundations right now.  I want to … Before they kick us out of here, I’m going to take a picture and run back, okay?

BELL: Ofran suspects that contractors are rushing to start new building projects now.  She says that’s because they want to get projects under way before any settlement freeze is put in place.   When people question her motives, Ofran points out that she’s an Israeli Army veteran.  She says she’s a Jew who feels connected to the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, otherwise known as the West Bank.  But the settlements, she says, are an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians and the creation of a Palestinian state.

OFRAN: When Israel has continued to build, this is the opposite message for the Palestinians to say, “We’re not going to leave here.  We’re building here.”  Because if we were about to leave, why do we build and especially here which is out of what Israel likes to call settlement blocks.

BELL: Those settlement blocks are the large Jewish communities that mostly sit close to the 1967 green line that divided Israel from the West Bank.  In past negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians the two sides have discussed including these areas in land swaps and annexing them to Israel.  But if Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to pursue that goal, and assist in the creation of an independent Palestinian state, his governing coalition would probably collapse.  Eliza Herbst is a spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, which represents Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.  She’s part of a key constituency that doesn’t fully trust the Prime Minister.

ELIZA HERBST: Bibi Netanyahu was elected by a two-thirds majority of right wing nationalist individuals.  His constituency put him in the Prime Minister’s seat on the platform of development and the flourishing of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

BELL: This is Netanyahu’s second time around as Prime Minister.  In the late 1990s, he shook hands with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, and agreed to pull Israeli troops out of parts of the West Bank.  Supporters of the settlements said his moves amounted to surrender. They withdrew their political support and Netanyahu lost the next election.  Eliza Herbst says the Prime Minister is now on notice.

HERBST: Bibi Netanyahu turned his back on his voters once.  If he turns his back on his voters again, not only will he lose his government, but he’ll lose his political career.

BELL: As a reminder to the Israeli Prime Minister, hundreds of pro-settler activists from his own party are planning a rally for tomorrow to demand that Netanyahu say no to Washington’s call for a settlement freeze.   For The World, I’m Matthew Bell, Jerusalem.

WERMAN: Matthew took some pictures of some of those West Bank settlers he interviewed for that report.  To put a face to a voice, visit theworld.org.

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• The Harding Affair
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MARCO WERMAN: Warren Harding was not one of our great presidents.  In fact, most historians rank him as one of our worst, but author James David Robenalt thinks Harding deserves a second look.  Mr. Robenalt got hold of a microfilm copy of love letters Harding wrote to a woman named Carrie Phillips.  The letters reveal Harding’s passionate side and no small measure of political courage.  Robenalt tells all in the book, “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War.”  The book’s protagonists are the future president and his mistress.

ROBENALT: They were neighbors and they were both married and they started their relationship in 1905 long before the First World War, which is what this book is mostly about.  But they fell madly in love.  It was a very passionate love.  The letters suggest that there was three years of courtship, and then it became physical and boy did it become physical.  You know, he writes a lot about her body parts, and his love for them but he also writes in a very beautiful way about the meaning of love and of their relationship.  They were both caught in marriages that were not very good, and at the time they couldn’t find a way to get divorced and to get together.  So there is this real longing in these letters that come out from Warren Harding.

WERMAN: If you look at Warren Harding’s marriage, I mean, he kind of married the girl next door in Marion, Ohio, Florence Harding.  He could be kind of seen as an internationalist, though, when he starts seeing Carrie Phillips.  I mean, she moves actually to Berlin.  Why does she do that?

ROBENALT: Well, I come from that part of Ohio.  It’s the central and western part of the state, and that state was populated by a lot of German-Americans, and it was not unusual back in the time for people of that heritage to send their children to Germany to get education.  You know, the educational system here was still finding its way.  So Carrie took her daughter, Isabel, who was about 15 or 16 to finish her high school years in Berlin.  That’s why she went.  She left her husband, Jim Phillips, back at home and she went over there originally for a year, and she ended up staying three years.

WERMAN: Right, and when was this, prior to World War I, correct?

ROBENALT: She leaves in September of 1911, and she is supposed to come back a year later.  She doesn’t.  She comes back to see Warren Harding secretly twice on sister ships of the Lusitania and the Titanic.  It was the age of those grand ships.  Eventually, she came back in July of 1914 and, of course, World War I is the guns of August.  It’s August of 1914.  So she comes back just as the war breaks out in Europe.

WERMAN: Just to clarify, this is taking place when he is not president yet.  He was a U.S. Senator at the time, right?

ROBENALT: In fact, he had not run for Senate yet.  He had been a state politician.  He’d been the lieutenant-governor of the State of Ohio, and he was kind of out of politics during this period of time when she took off.  He had just lost the governor’s race in 1910 by a margin of 100,000 votes.  Everybody thought he was done and then in 1914, he wins by 100,000 votes and suddenly becomes presidential timber.  So it’s during that wasteland that this really amazing thing happens where she comes back and they meet and he writes about it.

WERMAN: Now you argue that Carrie Phillips may well have been a German spy.  What is the evidence for that, and presumably nobody knew about the affair and none of this rubbed off on Harding at the time?

ROBENALT: I do believe she became a German spy, and as a lawyer I set out the evidence and let the reader decide because it’s not cut and dried but I think it’s pretty clear.  This was a woman who in her letters with Harding spoke, you know, of the Kaiser and of Germany and was extremely pro-German.  And then when we finally got into the war, when the United States …  Remember the United States didn’t get into that war until about two and a half years into it, but we’re not ready.  Woodrow Wilson wants to send a million men over to France and he wants to send them all at once not a little bit at a time, which is what Theodore Roosevelt wanted to do.  We set up these camps over the summer of 1917, and there were 16 of them around the country, to train volunteers and draftees.  Well, Carrie Phillips and her daughter end up outside one of these camps, and they’re there for six weeks.

Harding writes to them and says, “I hope you’re having a good time dancing with the officers and so forth.”  He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but she’s there trying to get intelligence about how quickly the U.S. is going to get involved and how quickly we will mobilize. So Germany wanted to have women spies outside of all these camps around the country trying to determine how quickly we were getting ready, and how quickly we were going to send troops and get into this war.

WERMAN: You point out in your book that one in five Americans at the time were of German descent.  So this is not kind of pre-World War I kind of us versus them or in ramp up to World War I.  It was much more complex than that.  And then the U.S. became quite vigilant with Americans who had German connections once hostilities really heated up and, of course, after the sinking of the Lusitania.  Did Carrie Phillips suffer from any of that?

ROBENALT: Once we were declared in war, there were a number of measures that Wilson put in place that quite frankly some of them were way over the top, and one of the things that grew up in the United States that we all should remember that nobody remembers is a group called The American Protective League.  It was local businessmen.  It ended up overnight being 250,000 of them all around the country spying on their neighbors and trying to report people who they thought were pro-German including Carrie Phillips.  Little tiny Marion, Ohio where Warren Harding and Carrie Phillips were from had their own Chief of the American Protective League, and they were following her around.  They were opening her mail and they were involved in all sorts of surveillance of her.  They concluded she was a German spy and that news eventually gets to Warren Harding as a U.S. Senator.

WERMAN: How did Carrie Phillips’ pro-German sympathies affect Warren Harding?  Did it convince him at all that maybe the war wasn’t something that we should be involved in?

ROBENALT: No, it’s one of the great parts of the story.  She threatened him in several ways, threatened to make these letter available to the Germans if he voted for war, and he wrote back, “Come what may, I’m going to vote for war and I’m going to vote against the Germans and I know it may be my death sentence politically in Ohio … “  Because there were so many German-Americans in Ohio, and he also recognized the threat that she may carry through with that threat and explode a bomb to kill him and kill his career with the exposure, but he still did it.  I mean, he did what was right.

WERMAN: The figurative bomb?

ROBENALT: Yeah, the figurative.  Yeah, that’s the way he put it.   And so he actually showed a lot of courage, and he also believed that the war should not be about the United States making the world a democracy, another big part of this story.  Woodrow Wilson, of course, says this is the war to make the world safe for democracy.  What he meant was, “I want Germany to go from being autocratic to a democracy because I think that is a safer form of government.”  Harding got up in the Senate and said, “That’s not the case.  It shouldn’t be our job to go around and change people’s government by force.”

WERMAN: So how many years did Harding and Carrie Phillips carry on their affair and how did it end?

ROBENALT: Well, as I say to people when I speak about this book, this was no Monica Lewinsky.

WERMAN: It certainly makes better reading than the Star Report.

ROBENALT: Yeah, it does.  They met in 1905 and their relationship lasted until he ran for President in 1920.  So it’s a 15-year relationship, and she ended up blackmailing him by the time they get to the presidency because she had just grown tired of him not leaving his wife and continually running for public office.  So she blackmails him for some money, and that’s how things kind of fall apart.  But it was a long-term relationship and if you read these letters, you cannot come away but thinking that this guy really loved this woman and said he would drop everything for her multiple times and it just never worked out for him.

WERMAN: James David Robenalt is author of the Harding Affair:  Love and Espionage During the Great War.  Thanks so much for your time.

ROBENALT: Marco, thank you.

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In Dhaka the best form of transportation is often a bicycle rickshaw.

Grossman: Bangladesh is crowded. It has a population greater than Russia’s crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. And water is never far away here. The nation sits on a broad coastal plain that’s just above sea level. Civil engineer Ainun Nishat says the country’s geography puts the dense population at risk.

Ainun Nishat: “Bangladesh is nature’s laboratory on natural disaster. We have floods, we have droughts, we have heat waves, we have river bank erosion, we have storm surges, we have cyclones. “

Grossman: And global warming will make things worse, he says. Sea level is expected to rise two or three feet this century. To complicate matters, while the sea is rising, the land is sinking. You see Bangladesh sits on a big delta. This land was built up over thousands of years by sediment washing down the region’s major rivers to their mouths at the Bay of Bengal. But those rivers don’t deposit the sediment on land as they used to. They’ve been constrained by earthen embankments that force the sediment, about a billion tons a year, directly to the sea. Geographer Maminul Haque Sarker says without fresh sediment building up on land, the soil is compacting – it’s sinking – and the country is becoming even more vulnerable to sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker: “If you can manage the sediment better — better way, then it can mitigate some of your losses due to climate change.”

Grossman: That’s what some in Bangladesh are now trying to do… manage the sediment better.

Boats of all sizes and shapes are the used for transport and commerce throughout the waterlogged delta.

Grossman: A heavy-set man in pressed pants and a polo shirt is driving his car through the outskirts of Khulna, the third-largest city in Bangladesh. Shafiqul Islam is director of a small college, a former locally-elected official, and founder of the Pani or water-committee, a grassroots farmers’ rights group. He’s riding an a straight road on the crest of a dike along one of thousands of small rivers that criss-cross the delta. The water is murky, rich with soil washed down from the Himalayas.

Shafiqul Islam: “You need to understand, this is the river, and that is the farmland. Now you can see that the river is full of sediment.”

Grossman: The area around the river was once a mangrove forest. And though more than 50 miles from the sea, it’s so low and flat that the tide used to overflow the low banks of natural channels and flood nearly the entire region with mucky water. In the 1960′s, at the behest of the government, international aid organizations began constructing a system of dikes to create permanent river channels and stop the natural flooding. Islam says it was an attempt to protect farmers who grow rice here.

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam: “Because in our country we always think that the Western countries’ manners are very good and they are very knowledgeable, they know everything. But we are very poor countries, we don’t have vast knowledge, we don’t have good engineers here and therefore we have to invite engineers from outside.”

Grossman: But channelizing the rivers robbed the surrounding land of fresh soil. In a matter of decades, once-productive rice paddies had sunk so low they could no longer be drained into the river, which is necessary to farm rice. So the paddies became stagnant and infertile. People had no food.

Shafiqul Islam and others proposed a radical idea: cut the dikes, and let silty water flow onto the farmland for a few years to replenish the depleted paddies. Water officials rebuffed their suggestion. So in 1997, a band of frustrated farmers defied the government and did just that – breached the embankment.

Shafiqul Islam: “There were many police and government officials present while we cut the channel. But thousands and thousands of people were there to help us, and we did it.”

Grossman: As an estimated 20,000 farmers watched, a team of men hacked a hole in the dike with shovels.

Shafiqul Islam: “A huge amount of water went to the wetland side with silt. After the high tide is in full, the water remains stagnant for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at this time, the silt is deposited in the wetland.”

Grossman: The plan to save the paddies outside the city of Khulna worked. In three years the land had collected four feet of new silt. Rice flourishes here once again. Government officials now agree that selectively opening dikes for a new dose of sediment is a good idea. They’ve done it themselves in other areas.

Ainun Nishat: “This is something which is working. And we are champion of it.”

Grossman: Civil engineer Ainun Nishat, who has advised Shafiqul Islam, says although the purpose of cutting the dike in 1997 was to improve agriculture, his country could use the same method to raise the level of the land and protect it from the slow advance of the sea.

Ainun Nishat: “We are pushing the government to do it more effectively. We find the government not doing it with the proper enthusiasm it should receive.

Grossman: Bangladesh does plan to breach more embankements. And other low-lying regions are also exploring this idea. Earlier this year the state of Louisiana announced that it will try restoring sinking wetlands by redirecting sediment from the Mississippi River. But Sheikh Nural Ala, an official with Bangladesh’s Water Development Board, says this technique alone won’t save his people from rising seas.

Sheikh Nural Ala

Grossman: A permanent solution, Ala says, will likely involve a mix of techniques – including selective flooding of some areas, and using accumulated sediment to build higher dikes. And a new study says such measures are urgently needed. The study found that most of the world’s major deltas are sinking… and as the sea rises, flooding in these areas could increase 50% this century – putting tens of millions of people at added risk.

For The World, I’m Daniel Grossman, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Daniel Grossman’s reporting in Bangladesh is part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s climate change initiative. It was supported by the Kendeda Fund, Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, Barbara Smith Fund, Whole Systems Foundation and Abby Rockefeller & Lee Halprin and 7th Generation Incorporated.

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

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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.

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MARCO WERMAN: One of the nine Americans who died in the attack on that combat outpost in Wanat last year was First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom.  His father, David Brostrom, is himself a retired Army Colonel.  He says Jonathan arrived in Afghanistan in July of 2007.  He got a break ten months later.

DAVID BROSTROM: When he came home he showed me some videos he had taken of his combat outpost COP Bella which was eight kilometers up the valley from Wanat.  He had a video, which he told me was the day in the life at COP Bella and it was an enemy engagement and it was pretty heavy.  And I got very concerned and he told me that this type of thing happens about three times a day.

WERMAN: Sorry, when you say “heavy engagement,” what exactly do you mean?

BOSTROM: Well, enemy …  COP Bella is in a deep valley so the enemy would occupy the high ground looking down on the combat outpost and then they would bring in heavy machine guns and RPGs and, of course, light weapons and just continue to shoot down into the COP.  And then my son said, of course, they would go on alert and they’d shoot back, and this would happen, you know, twice, three times a day every day.  And my son said it was getting worse.  They had stopped doing any sort of Shuras in the local village …

WERMAN: With the councils?

BOSTROM: With the councils that are around COP Bella because of the increasing enemy resistance in the area and the danger of being ambushed.  So they would have all the shura inside the combat outpost.  They would make the elders come to them.  So my son told me that he was basically trying to survive.  When my son was home, he said that we’re moving out of Bella, and we’re going to another location and he told me but I’m concerned, my son was, because he said that he would be followed and he’s had death threats against his life.  And the elders and their shuras have told him that a large force would attack them.  I had discounted this.  I said, “Son, don’t worry about it.  You know, you can’t take everything seriously.  You’re going to be just fine.  Your leadership is going to do a good job taking care of it, making sure you’ve got all the resources.”  And then, two months later a visit at the door, an Army Major and a Chaplain telling me my son had been killed by small arms fire in Afghanistan.  As I started getting the facts from the news, I said, “My God, my son was right.  He was attacked.  He predicted this.”  So the original 15-6 when that finally came out …

WERMAN: 15-6 is a  … ?

BOSTROM: That was the investigation, the original 15-6.

WERMAN: Right.

BOSTROM: When the original investigation was presented to me I read it in detail, and a lot of issues were coming out in soldier statements that were not addressed.

WERMAN: Such as?

BOSTROM: Lack of defensive material.  Heavy engineers not showing up.  Lack of water.  Lack of food.  Running out of gasoline.  Intelligence.  It was very clear that something bad was going to happen.  None of these were addressed by the investigating officer or team that was looking at what happened at Wanat.

WERMAN: Sir, you’re a career and now retired officer and have seen a number of theaters of operation.  What do you make of the policy debate in Washington right now?  What should be done in Afghanistan?

BOSTROM: First off, I’m for the war in Afghanistan.  I think we need to be there.  I think it is a breeding ground for terrorism.  So I do think the war has been an un-resource for too long, and so when you do that, you’re going to have things like Wanat happen. You’re going to have tragedies because you don’t have enough assets to put out there to protect your soldiers.  My thing is pretty simple.  Give the commander on the group what he wants.  We did it in Iraq and we had some success.  So let’s do it in Afghanistan.

WERMAN: Retired Colonel David Brostrom, we’re very sorry for your loss.  Thank you very much for spending a few minutes with us.

BOSTROM: Thank you.

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