Fighting alone

Recent days have been especially hard for North Carolina-based soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pentagon says nine of them were killed within 10 days. Past Afghan winters have seen a pause in fighting, but this year U.S. forces are waging a ramped-up war against the Taliban and al-Qaida, and the fighting is likely to intensify. The military says it plans the largest offensive of the war soon.

All the more crucial, then, to learn from costly mistakes. Few have been costlier than those involving Combat Outpost Keating.

The New York Times' account of the just-released military report on how insurgents overran the U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan in October put it this way: "The report's findings are damning. Combat Outpost Keating in Nuristan province had 'no tactical or strategic value,' the report said. It was overdue to be closed, and measures to protect it were lax, even though it had been attacked 47 times in the preceding five months. Intelligence reports of a major attack went unheeded."

Air support was late in arriving and a "quick reaction" relief force did not arrive for 13 hours. By then, half of the defenders had been wounded or killed. It was the worst single ground attack on U.S. forces in the last year and a half.

Warfare is muddled and murky, but here a couple of things are clear. The soldiers, from Fort Carson in Colorado, fought heroically and effectively - with "conspicuous gallantry." But they faced a large group of attackers in a tactically disadvantageous situation. Higher-ups in the command chain knew about the outpost's vulnerability and had decided to close it, but did not do so soon enough. Some officers face disciplinary action.

That is only right. There were reasons why it was hard to close the outpost quickly, and certainly it is easy to spot mistakes in hindsight, but U.S. ground troops must never be left to fight with as little effective support as Combat Outpost Keating had.