The attack that killed eight Americans is just what McChrystal's revamped strategy is aiming to avoid.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - In one of the most lethal battles for American troops in the Afghanistan war, a wave of insurgents attacked a pair of relatively lightly manned bases near the Pakistani border over the weekend, triggering a daylong clash that left eight Americans and as many as half a dozen Afghan troops dead.
It was precisely the kind of attack the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is hoping to stave off by recently ordering troops to withdraw from such small outposts, concentrating instead on defending population centers. The outposts attacked Saturday had already been slated to be abandoned soon, the military said.
The toll was the highest in a single incident for American forces in Afghanistan since nine U.S. soldiers died in a strikingly similar insurgent assault 15 months ago on an outpost in the same northeastern province, Nuristan... [snip]
The attack will not alter plans to pull American forces out of the area, U.S. officials said. But they acknowledged that insurgents would almost certainly exploit the departure of Western troops for propaganda purposes, claiming to have driven them out....
[Just imagine what they'll say {and subsequently do} should we abandon the entire country.]
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