Learning lay of the land in Afghanistan Khost

KHOST






We all spend time in school learning about the Europeans who ventured out centuries ago to explore what was for them a "new world," or of the Lewis & Clark expedition that went out to chart the then-unknown reaches of the American West.




Khost Spira Afghanistan



 I have to imagine that one of the biggest challenges they faced in reporting what they learned was simply figuring out where to start. I say that because I have that same feeling as I think about how to describe to someone who has never been here the environment in which we find ourselves in our little slice of Afghanistan.






One has to start somewhere, though, and so I will fall back on what my instructor at the Infantry Officers' Advanced Course taught me many years ago about understanding a new problem - "See (understand) the terrain. See the enemy. See yourself." And, so, I'll start with the terrain.

 


 As if the jagged mountains cutting thousands of feet into the sky on all four sides of me were not enough to clue me in, all it took was about two minutes into my first run around the inside perimeter of our forward operating base to realize just how much getting used to our new home would take.






Khost City sits in a large "bowl" about a mile above sea level, surrounded on all sides by steep mountains that average anywhere between six to around ten thousand feet. When it rains on us here in the bowl, rest assured it is snowing up in the mountains.






To the east and south, close enough so that you feel like you can reach out and touch the snow-covered peaks, lies Pakistan. The mountains indicate the general location of the Durand Line. That is the arbitrary line that British diplomats and mapmakers drew over a century ago, right through the middle of the Pashtun tribes, to create what today is the "official" border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I place the word official in quotation marks because many people, especially the Pashtuns, who reside on both sides, have never accepted the border as legitimate, and they pretty much ignore it.

Afghanistan Khost

To the north and west lie the mountains separating Khost and Paktya, which at one time were a single province.






All told, our brigade's area of operations constitutes an area about the size of the state of Connecticut. By my best estimate, Task Force Raider operates in an area about the size of Berkshire County; Berkshire County if you were to take it and put it down in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.






Getting around is challenging to say the least. The only real road is the one connecting Khost with Gardez, the capital of Paktya Province. The "K-G Road" stretches approximately 65 miles from Khost to Gardez and has in recent years been the focus of a massive re-paving effort funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.






Much of it snakes its way through the treacherous K-G Pass, and in many places is nothing but a dirt trail with a 60-degree slope up a mountain on one side, and a precipitous drop into a wadi on the other. It does not take a lot of imagination to understand how huge Soviet formations were swallowed up in this terrain in the 1980s, as they battled the mujahedeen trying to keep the pass closed in order to isolate the Red Army garrison in Khost City.