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9. Full Circle
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165 9 Full Circle It was hot. And after three days spent searching the village of Andar in eastern Afghanistan for insurgent bombers and bombmaking materials, the U.S. and Afghan troops were tired and hungry. With a few soldiers keeping guard on the perimeter, the others removed their body armor and sat down to eat lunch in the courtyard of an abandoned mud home. It was the afternoon of October 2, 2009. Twenty-six-year-old Capt. Tyler Kurth was chatting with one of his soldiers when he heard gunfire and screaming. “As I turned to look, I see this particular Afghan police officer with his AK-47 at his hip, and he’s firing away in a sweeping motion,” he told reporter Jessica Stone a year later. “And it dawns on me very quickly that he’s not shooting past them. He’s shooting at them.” Kurth stood and reached for his sidearm. He stepped through Full CirCle 166 a doorway and came face-to-face with the attacker—a cop the Americans had nicknamed “Crazy Joe,” a tall man in his thirties who always wore black goggles. “He was shooting me,” Kurth recalled, “and [I saw] his little smirk on his face when he was doing it.” The young captain was hit in the chest and leg, the impacts spraying blood in a fine mist. Behind him, Sgt. Christian Hughes was still climbing to his feet. Crazy Joe shifted aim and shot Hughes in the legs. “I could see white, blood, and muscle,” the sergeant remembered later. Spec. Sean Beaver, Sgt. Aaron Smith, and Pvt. Brandon Owens were hit, too. Owens died quickly. Kurth managed to radio for a medical evacuation before slipping into shock. Sprawled in the dirt in shock, he watched Smith stop breathing. U.S. and Afghan soldiers raced to provide first aid to the survivors. Crazy Joe slipped away. Kurth and Hughes believed he had been paid by the Taliban to attack his comrades, but there was no way to be sure. Asked if he would ever voluntarily fight alongside Afghan forces again, Kurth was unequivocal. “Nope. Never again.”1 His sentiment would be shared by many U.S. and coalition troops in coming years—and by Afghan soldiers equally wary of their erstwhile partners from foreign armies. There would be far-reaching consequences of the mutual suspicion. Insiders Barack Obama swept into the White House in 2008 in part on his promise to end the Iraq War. In contrast, Obama actually vowed to escalatethe war in Afghanistan. “I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made strategically after 9/11 was to fail to finish the job here, focus our attention here,” he said of Afghanistan. “We got distracted by Iraq.” “The situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan,” [54.92.135.47] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:25 GMT) Full CirCle 167 Obama said. “And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism.”2 In 2007 on the recommendation of his top advisers, including Gen. David Petraeus, then-president George W. Bush had “surged” an extra twenty thousand troops to Iraq—a move that at the time was widely seen as helping tamp down on the sectarian violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion.3 Later, many observers would attribute the waning bloodshed to the self-segregation of the once mixed Iraqi population as well as to the spontaneous rise oftheSonsofIraqmilitiasthatpatrolledvulnerablecommunities, rather than to a modest and fleeting boost in U.S. force levels. Once in office Obama essentially copied the surge strategy in Afghanistan even as he accelerated the reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq. In 2009 an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan, boosting the American force there by half for a period of just over two years. But the Afghan surge, like that in Iraq, failed to meaningfully alter the course of the war. In September 2012 the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force issued a report charting armed violence in the country month by month . . . and found no decrease correlating with the thirty thousand U.S. reinforcements. In August 2009 there were some twenty-seven hundred insurgent attacks, including six hundred bombings. In August 2012, there were three thousand attacks, including six hundred bombings . “The same trend holds for every other month in 2009 compared to every month in 2012 for which there is data,” Wired war reporter Spencer Ackerman...