Troops leave Kunar base to chase Taliban

Washington Post:

After suffering significant setbacks in the fight against insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan troops have pulled out of a combat outpost where nine American soldiers were killed in a pitched battle with Taliban fighters Sunday..

U.S. and Afghan soldiers withdrew from the makeshift outpost near the remote village of Wanat as Taliban fighters swarmed the area near the border of the eastern provinces of Nuristan and Kunar, NATO and Afghan officials saidWednesday. An unspecified number of NATO and Afghan troops remain in the region near the edge of Pakistan's western border, said Capt. Mike Finney, a spokesman for NATO's mission in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.

...

Finney said ISAF troops were reinforced shortly after the devastating attack on the outpost and will remain in other parts of the region to fight the insurgency for the foreseeable future.

"We aren't abandoning the area. Far from it," Finney said. "The Taliban have dispersed, and we're hunting them down to make sure they don't do something like this again."

...

There must have been an assessment that the geography around the base was not very defensible. There were too many hidden avenues of approach to take advantage of US advantages in firepower. It does mean that the people of Wanat will be on their own in dealing with the Taliban.

I suspect there is much more to this move that commanders were not willing to share with the media.