War Without End

Jesus. Bring these poor kids home. What in the world are we hoping to accomplish?

Many of the soldiers are in the remote valleys of eastern Afghanistan, forested slivers where outsiders—even those from elsewhere in Afghanistan—have never been welcome and the government's writ never really existed.

"If you don't understand the dynamics, you have no chance of getting it right," Gen. McChrystal said.......

The valley never became one of those places in Afghanistan where the coalition could measure progress in schools and clinics and irrigation projects built. Whatever they built, the Taliban destroyed. There is no local Afghan government here to work with.

"Everybody hates them in the valley," Haji Nizamuddin, a tribal elder in Korengal, said of the Americans. U.S. forces "shoot at people, they raid our houses and kill our women and children." Mr. Nizamuddin stressed that he wasn't pro-Taliban. He, like many people in the valley, simply wanted to be left alone, he said.