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Editors note: This is part of a weekly series published every Monday between Memorial Day and Veterans Day honoring local veterans.

NEWTON FALLS Veteran Steve Lyden may be only in his 20s, but he will have the scars and memories of battle for the rest of his life after serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.

During his year in Afghanistan from December 2011 to November 2012, Lyden was in combat for nearly 400 fights.

We were in more fights than actual days we spent there, Lyden said.

He suffered injuries twice while there, which left shrapnel in his right leg from an explosive in battle. He also suffered more severe shrapnel injuries to the right side of his body when he was standing 5 feet away from a fellow soldier who stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) and was hit.

Lyden, now a Newton Falls police officer, said he has recovered and does not regret serving his country. Two years after graduating from Newton Falls High School, Lyden enlisted in the Army in 2010.

At first, I thought I would enter the Marines, but it didnt sit right so I walked into the Army, and the recruiter I had was great. I felt that was where I really wanted to be, Lyden said.

He went to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic infantry training and then went to Fort Lewis, Washington.

When he was first deployed to Zharay District, Kandahar, Afghanistan, in late 2011, Lyden was a private. By the time he left in late 2012, he had reached the rank of sergeant.

It may sound crazy, but I loved the thrill of being there. I did lose my best friend, who was killed in battle. I will never forget that. I have his name tattooed on my arm, Lyden said of his comrade, Sterling Wyatt of Missouri.

The two met at Fort Lewis and while they butted heads at first, they soon became friends, he said.

Lyden said being in Afghanistan was at times difficult because the Afghanistan people did not want them there.

The main goal was to try and make the people feel like we should be there to help them and better their living situation. As an infantry member, we were there to protect the people from the Taliban, Lyden said, noting he took part in hundreds of battles, sometimes several on the same day.

I didnt notice it at first, but I went flying. I woke up and picked up my rifle and kept going. Once the adrenaline settled down, I felt the burning in my leg, he said about being injured in an explosion.

A few weeks later is when he suffered another shrapnel injury to his entire right side. He spent a week healing from his injuries before going back to battle. Lyden said he was promoted to team leader as a private and then led the rest of the deployment for five months.

I could not have asked for a better group of guys to go to Afghanistan with. When a whole bunch of privates are put together, they butt heads and have differences, but as soon as the rounds are flying, everyone comes together. That coming together in battle was the best feeling I ever had,Lyden said.

After leaving Afghanistan, he returned to Fort Lewis for several weeks and also spent time at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, before coming home to Ohio. He has recovered from his injuries to some degree.

Lyden, who is medically retired from the military, received two Purple Hearts.

I feel proud that I was able to see combat and to see what the guys in my unit could do. I will always remember the group I deployed with, he said.

bcoupland@tribtoday.com

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Originally posted here:
Falls police officer fought in Afghanistan - Warren Tribune Chronicle

The Donald Trump Pentagon, in so many words, is saying that the Obama administrations decision to waive punitive sanctions and buy combat helicopters from Russia was a bad deal.

The Pentagons first congressionally required report on Afghanistan under President Trump says the Russian Mi-17 chopper has proved a failure in the long war and will be phased out in favor of American-made UH-60 Black Hawks.

The Obama administration came to realize the failure in its last weeks in office and stopped the deal.

The report this month on Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan marks official confirmation that the Russian model broke down too often for the Afghan air force logistics system to keep up.

Along with the increased expense and difficulty in maintaining the Mi-17 helicopter fleet, utility helicopters are in high demand and the required maintenance exceeds current capacity and capability, leading to maintenance backlogs and a reduced number of aircraft available, the Defense Department report said. Included in the recapitalization effort is an initiative to transition the force away from Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters to more reliable, cost-effective, and easier to sustain U.S.-made UH-60 helicopters.

The Mi-17 stood as an outlier in President Obamas economic-sanction-filled assault on the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to his invasion of eastern Ukraine.

The administration allowed Rosoboronexport, the state-run arms broker, to stay off the sanctions list as it pertained to maintaining Mi-17s amid $554 million in U.S. funds via Afghanistan to supply the helicopter. The argument for the full deal was that Afghan pilots and crew members were more accustomed to Russian-made weapons systems.

In an era in Washington where any and all contacts with Russia by any Trump-connected person fetches intense media and Democrat scrutiny, the Obama administration showed that sometimes the political situation dictates that Washington must deal with Moscow.

Meanwhile, Moscow has lent credibility to the brutal Taliban insurgency by arguing that it is fighting the Islamic State terrorists anchored in Afghanistan.

The Obama administrations last Pentagon update on Afghanistan in December did not announce an Mi-17 cancellation or procurement of the U.S. Army workhorse UH-60.

In fact, the administration seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the Mi-17, praising its ability to perform cargo and combat missions for which it is uniquely designed.

But further reading revealed the helicopter, of which 46 are operational in Afghanistan, was growing increasingly unreliable. Logistics centers outside Kabul were not equipped to keep up, creating a timeline that would put all Mi-17s out of action in a few years.

At the current attrition and flying hour rates, the number of [Afghan air force] Mi-17s available for 2017 will be significantly diminished, and the Mi-17 fleet will become unsustainable by mid-2018, virtually eliminating the AAFs vertical transport and lift capability, the December report said.

At a press conference that month at the Pentagon, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said Russia has overtly lent legitimacy to the Taliban.

This public legitimacy that Russia lends to the Taliban is not based on fact, but it is used as a way to essentially undermine the Afghan government and the NATO effort and bolster the belligerents, Gen. Nicholson said.

And their narrative goes something like this: That the Taliban are the ones fighting Islamic State, not the Afghan government, he said. And of course, as I just outlined for you, the Afghan government and the U.S. counterterrorism effort are the ones achieving the greatest effect against Islamic State.

The four-star general said this year that Russia is providing arms to the Taliban in a direct alliance against the 8,000 U.S. troops stationed there.

Gen. Nicholson defended the original Russia-Mi-17 deal, saying Afghanistan requested the choppers before Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine and before sanctions were imposed as punishment.

Russia is not helping the U.S. plan to keep the Russian aircraft flying until the Black Hawks arrive.

Keeping the airframe in the inventory but not being able to maintain it would not be positive, the general said. And so the Afghan government has gone to the Russians and asked for their assistance in this. The Russians have not provided it.

The Mi-17 deal was particularly unpopular among members of Congress from Connecticut, headquarters for Black Hawk producer Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

Ill never understand why the U.S. government sent taxpayer money to Russia for helicopters in Afghanistan while Russia was supporting the [President Bashar Assad] regime in Syria and invading eastern Ukraine, said Sen. Christopher Murphy, Connecticut Democrat.

Today, amid the probes into Russian hacking of the Democrats, Mr. Murphy is a leading advocate of a theory that Mr. Trump and his Trump Organization maintained numerous ties with Moscow.

Perhaps such ties will turn up. To date, there have been reports of some investments by wealthy Russians but no extensive relationship.

Originally posted here:
After Obama's bad deal, American Black Hawks will replace Russian helicopters for Afghan air force - Washington Times

The move comes as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is conducting a broad review of the State Department's organizational structure with the intent of streamlining reporting channels, and potentially cutting several dozen similar senior positions.

But the decision to eliminate this particular post comes at a time when President Donald Trump's administration is re-evaluating US military strategy in Afghanistan, potentially paving the way towards sending several thousand more troops to the country. That timing raises questions about where civilian leadership fits into the strategy writ large.

A State Department spokesperson pushed back on the reports Friday, saying: "The secretary has not made a decision about the future of the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But the spokesperson added the department will maintain the Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs offices, which currently report to the special representative, to address policy concerns and the bilateral relationship with the countries.

The Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan post was created in the early days of former President Barack Obama's administration, ahead of a major troop surge in the Afghanistan War.

In congressional testimony last week, Tillerson said he was looking to cut back on special envoy and special representative positions in the agency to empower regional bureaus to take control of their issue areas.

"This is some of the confusion that we're getting out of the (State Department's recent employee survey)," said Tillerson. "We're hearing confusion around, you know, what's the mission, who owns it?"

Tillerson has also put a hold on appointing permanent officials to vacant special envoy positions until his review of the department's structure is complete. The Afghanistan-Pakistan position was one such position, and had been filled on an acting basis since the inauguration.

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State Department plans to eliminate special envoy on ...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan The 1,800-mile border between Pakistan and India has long been treated as a hostile red line between neighboring, nuclear-armed rivals. Its sole official crossing is a heavily guarded military post. Long stretches are illuminated by powerful floodlights, and the 340-mile, militarized portion that divides the contested Himalayan Kashmir region, known as the Line of Control, has been the site of alpine combat, long-distance shelling and periodic shootings of both Indian and Pakistani border troops.

In contrast, Pakistans 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan has always been more porous and politically complicated. Thousands of cargo trucks traverse its two major crossings every week. In the north, where ethnic Pashtun communities straddle both sides of the line drawn by British rulers in 1896, Afghans insist the real border lies deeper into Pakistan. They have long accused Pakistani authorities of allowing insurgents to slip across, stage attacks and retreat to safe havens.

[Pakistan shells border with Afghanistan as tensions rise over terrorist attacks]

Now, with thousands of steel posts and scrolls of deadly razor wire, Pakistan is trying to remove all such ambiguity.

Earlier this week, military officials announced that they are proceeding with a long-stalled plan to build a fence and heighten security measures along the entire border, beginning with the mountainous, semiautonomous tribal regions of Khyber-Paktunkhwa province in the north and gradually extending the work south through the lawless desert badlands of Baluchistan province.

This ambitious project, while unlikely to stop all human traffic, is aimed at sending a tangible signal to Afghanistan, and perhaps more importantly to officials in Washington, that Pakistan is a victim rather than a perpetrator of cross-border terrorism. Building a wall, military officials here assert, is the only way to control a border that has been permeable for far too long.

On Friday, as news spread that terrorists had killed 85 people in scattered attacks across Pakistan that included suicide bombings at both ends of the border, Pakistans military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, sent out a terse tweet: Security/surv[eillance] of Pak-Afg border enhanced. Stringent actions agst illegal Bdr crossers. Recent terrorist incidents linked to sanctuaries across.

Afghan officials have objected strongly to the new measures, saying they will disrupt normal, necessary cross-border traffic and unfairly punish families and communities on both sides. They also say the actions are unlikely to hinder the cross-border movement of insurgent groups sponsored by Pakistans security agencies.

But Pakistan, which routinely denies that it shelters anti-Afghan militants, has also been trying to turn the tables by ramping up accusations against Afghanistan for harboring anti-Pakistan militants mostly groups driven out of Pakistan by an aggressive military campaign in 2014 and 2015 and allowing them to set up base camps in tribal areas just inside the border.

In February, when Pakistan was stunned by a blitz of terrorist attacks that killed 125 people, including a suicide bombing at a historic Sufi shrine, the government promptly focused blame on Afghanistan, closed all border crossings and launched a cross-border shelling operation at the northern end against what it said were militant camps used by a group linked to the Islamic State.

[A wave of terrorist bombings tests Pakistani resolve]

Now, Afghan officials are blaming Pakistani-based Taliban militants for a massive bombing in Kabul and other recent attacks, and U.S. officials are considering an economic and diplomatic crackdown on Pakistan unless it takes action to rein in such groups. The army, which is building new border forts and surveillance operations in addition to the fence, says that better border-security management is in the interest of both countries and essential for peace and stability.

But Afghans arent having any of it, saying Pakistan has no right to build such a fence and warning that they may retaliate if the project continues. In the past, Pakistan made a mistake by constructing buildings along the border and faced strong reaction from us, said a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry. We hope they dont repeat such mistakes again.

Read more:

Pakistan targets Afghan Pashtuns and refugees in anti-terrorism crackdown

Between panic and euphoria, Pakistan tries to figure out Donald Trump

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Pakistan, accused of terrorist infiltration, starts to fence its border with Afghanistan - Washington Post

President Trump with Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, President Donald Trump unveiled his strategy for how his administration would fight the ongoing war against the Taliban and various other jihadist groups in Afghanistan. The good news and the bad news is that Trump himself will not be actively managing the U.S. participation in the Afghan conflict, but instead will give the Defense Department latitude to set troop levels and their level of engagement at its discretion, without interference from the White House.

Its good news because Trumps hands-off approach averts the risk of the president, an impulsive leader with no military experience, ordering a reckless escalation of the war for, say, PR purposes. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is perhaps the most intelligent, levelheaded, and mature member of the Trump administration (which is not to damn him with faint praise), and so far, intends to pursue the Afghan War as part of a regional strategy, in partnership with allies, and without dramatically increasing the number of American soldiers on the ground. Right now, hes only talking about deploying another 2,000-to-4,000 troops on top of the 8,400 already there. In terms of risk to our tax dollars and American lives, that is not such a heavy price to pay if Mattis is indeed successful at finally routing the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS in Afghanistan.

Hawkish pundits like Eli Lake are praising Trumps strategy for another reason: By declining to set a definite end date for the U.S. military engagement, it avoids the mistake critics of the Obama administrations approach said the former president made in broadcasting to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, as well as other regional malefactors like Russia, Iran, and Pakistan, exactly when it would be safe to gallivant around the Central Asian country again without the risk of running into an American soldier.

Now for the bad news. Mattis may be a grown-up but he is also a general, and giving a military leader carte blanche to handle a war as he sees fit, with little civilian oversight, certainly has its downsides. Lake notes that military commanders under Obama complained that the White House at times micromanaged the war and put restrictive limits on how much battle support our troops could provide to the Afghan soldiers they were there to train, but those restrictions were meant to avoid mission creep and a reescalation of our military role, as well as to ensure that our military kept the terms of the agreements we had signed with the Afghan government.

Letting the Pentagon decide for itself how to handle our presence there doesnt necessarily guarantee an escalation, but it raises the possibility of military men deciding (as they are wont to do) that more aggressive military action is the key to breaking the current stalemate, and thus opening a can of worms that proves hard to close. As Lakes Bloomberg View colleague Noah Feldman points out, The fundamental drawback to this presidential outsourcing comes from the way it structures incentives over the long run.

Put simply, the Pentagon will always ask for more. The Defense Department is not in the habit of saying it doesnt need any more soldiers, weapons, or money, and Mattis certainly has no reason not to take as much as he can get for a war that looks no more decisively winnable today than it has for the past decade and a half weve been fighting it. In Feldmans view, delegating authority for Afghanistan to Mattis lets Trump take credit for any victories and distance himself from any failures that might arise from the defense secretarys efforts.

Furthermore, while setting no deadline for withdrawal may not give the Taliban a precise idea of when the U.S. will no longer be a factor in Afghanistan, they know full well that their strategy of wearing us down until we get fed up and leave is working and will eventually prevail. Smoking the Taliban out of their innumerable hiding places in the Af-Pak region is a thoroughly unrealistic proposition, and whether in two years, five, or ten, at some point, we will leave. Millenarian fanatics with their eyes on Armageddon and the afterlife will happily wait us out a little longer if need be. Foreign powers great and super have been failing badly to stamp out Afghan insurgencies for going on 180 years now; anyone who thinks a little strategic ambiguity will make them crack is kidding themselves.

In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, Daniel L. Davis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, argues that Trump would be better off abandoning the pipe dream of defeating the Taliban and stabilizing Afghanistan militarily, which he describes as a physical impossibility given the countrys size and inhospitable terrain. Instead, the president would be far wiser to focus on the goal of protecting the U.S. from terrorism by engaging in a robust diplomatic effort to convince Pakistan to cease or severely curtail cross-border support for the insurgency. According to Reuters, the administration is indeed weighing a strategy of coercive diplomacy to pressure Pakistan in just that regard, which may include an escalation of drone strikes there, withholding aid, or even downgrading our relations. On the other hand, the goal of getting Pakistan to clean up its act is one both the Obama administration and the Bush administration before it tried and failed to achieve, and its not immediately clear why Trump should be any more successful.

However that plan goes, we can be sure that getting out of Afghanistan for good and all is the one strategy America wont try anytime soon, at least not as long as the public barely remembers were still there.

The Trump administration doesnt seem to be taking the threat of future Russian election interference very seriously.

Were about to find out what Mattiss Pentagon will do with mostly unchecked authority to conduct a war.

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A quick break from the off-camera briefings.

See more here:
The Trump Doctrine in Afghanistan: Let the Generals Handle It - New York Magazine