Pulling Out of a Place We Never Should Have Been

The US military is giving up on the Pech Valley, a desolate wasteland even by Afghan standards, where 103 American soldiers have been killed. As the Times reports, this is a place American soldiers never should have gone:

the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place.

“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”