Retreating From Afghanistan Under Fire

Afghanistan Army soldiers, left, and their American counterparts on Thursday destroyed a Taliban firing position in a village in Kandahar Province. Bryan Denton for The New York Times

U.S. Military Faces Fire as It Pulls Out of Afghanistan -- New York Times

STRONG POINT HAJI RAHMUDDIN II, Afghanistan — When the last American soldiers to occupy this squat, lonely outpost in southern Afghanistan pulled out this week, they left the same way earlier units had arrived: ready for a fight.

They were leaving this violent patch of land outside Kandahar, the south’s main city, just as Taliban fighters were filtering back in from winter havens in Pakistan. It was, as First Sgt. Jason Pitman, 35, bluntly put it, “no time to get stupid.”

The Americans knew they would be most vulnerable in their final hours after taking down their surveillance and early-warning systems. The Taliban knew it, too, and intelligence reports indicated that they had been working with sympathetic villagers to strike at the departing soldiers. Two days earlier, the militants made a test run against the outpost, taking the rare step of directly engaging it in a firefight, albeit a brief one, soon after the first radio antennas came down.

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My Comment: Unlike Iraq .... I suspect that this retreat from Afghanistan is going to take a long time and it will be bloodyalso be very bloody.