Bad news out of Afghanistan, however

Greg Jaffe has an article in The Washington Post about dead soldiers (ours, unfortunately) in Afghanistan:

A large-scale helicopter-borne assault into a remote, insurgent-held sanctuary near the border with Pakistan left six US soldiers dead in heavy fighting with Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, officials said. The operation was designed to drive back the enemy in the remote and mountainous border region. One Afghan soldier was also killed in the assault.
The deaths show the difficulty US troops have faced in stemming the violence in Kunar province, one of the most violent regions of Afghanistan. The current US strategy, which focuses on major population centers, has led the military to shift emphasis away from the province and pull some troops out of its remote valleys. Violence levels throughout Kunar remain among the highest in Afghanistan.
The area in eastern Kunar province where the six soldiers were killed has long been a problem for US forces because of its proximity to the largely ungoverned regions of Pakistan’s tribal areas. In June, about 600 soldiers from the battalion involved in this week’s operation killed about 150 fighters in the same valley. Two soldiers were killed in that assault.
After the summer operation, commanders tried to establish an Afghan police station in Daridam, one of the main villages in the remote valley, but the Afghan police abandoned the area when US troops returned to their nearby bases.
“We built them a station,” Lieutenant Colonel J.B. Vowell, the local commander, said in an interview late last year. “We slung in a container, cut windows in it and surrounded it with barriers and sandbags. The police were too scared the Taliban were going to come back and kill them. The people are still timid, and the police are timid.”
In this week’s assault, US forces pushed deeper into the valley and closer to the Pakistan border than they had in years, killing large numbers of enemy fighters and uncovering several significant weapons caches, a military official said.
The six soldiers killed were Sergeant 1st Class Ofren Arrechaga, Staff Sergeant Frank E. Adamski, Specialist Jameson L. Lindskog, Staff Sergeant Bryan A. Burgess, Private First Class Dustin J. Feldhaus and Private Jeremy P. Faulkner.
Arrechaga’s wife, Seana Arrechaga, was included in a Washington Post story this year about the stress that Army spouses at Fort Campbell, Kentucky endure when their husbands are deployed.