One Hundred Victories (55 page)

{190}
See DOD News Briefing with Major General Robert Abrams, Regional Command–South commander, March 13, 2013, transcript posted at www.defense.gov, and Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Villagers Take on Taliban in Their Heartland,”
New York Times
, March 20, 2013.

{191}
Eighty-two percent of the Afghan army and police patrols in southern Afghanistan were conducted unilaterally—without coalition forces—in the period from July 2012 to March 2013, according to Major General Robert Abrams, Regional Command–South commander, in a March 13, 2013, press conference with the Pentagon press corps. The 205th Afghan Army Corps conducted six large-scale operations and in the last one was able to sustain continuous operations for sixteen days. One of its brigades sustained a battalion-sized operation one hundred kilometers away for three weeks. The air wing serving southern Afghanistan was still tiny, however, consisting of five Mi-17 and Mi-8 helicopters. It conducted its first independent air-assault operation in October 2012. It took thirty hours to mount two sorties of Mi-17s to respond to an attack by an estimated two hundred or three hundred Taliban in Day Kundi, but the Afghan army did successfully resupply its troops and evacuate the most serious casualties. The confusing terminology adopted by ISAF made it difficult to understand which units were capable of fully independent operations. Development of sufficient lift and logistics capacity had lagged as ISAF had focused on building infantry units, so an infantry unit might be well trained and led but still not capable of “independent operations” since it could not support itself. See the semiannual, congressionally mandated reports entitled
Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan
, Report to Congress in Accordance with Section 1230 of the National Defense Authorization Act (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2009–2012).

{192}
Author interview with Colonel Sean Swindell, November 4, 2012.

{193}
T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,”
Arab Bulletin
, 1917; republished as e-book (Seattle: Praetorian Press, 2011).