Less than two months before he died in eastern Afghanistan, 1st Lt. Jonathan P. Brostrom made a surprise Mother's Day visit to his parents' home in 'Aiea.

"Some friends of his were over and made me dinner," his mother, Mary Jo, recalled. "At about 10 at night there was a knock on the door. One of the girls said, 'Mary Jo, there's a soldier with a bouquet of flowers at the door for you.' I thought she was joking, but there he was, straight from Afghanistan in his fatigues with a bouquet of flowers."

There also was a troubling side to Jon Brostrom's visit during his 15 days of rest and recuperation leave, revealed in private to his father, David Brostrom, a retired Army colonel.

The 24-year-old platoon leader showed his father videos of airstrikes with 500-pound bombs and other heavy ordnance being called in on Afghan homes harboring enemy fighters.

In one, taken with a camera held up to an optical device, the sound of an approaching jet can be heard as the camera focuses on a two-story brick or stone hillside home in a congregation of multistory dwellings.

The home disappears in a flash of red and an eruption of smoke and debris.

"Oh! Damn!" one of the soldiers says at the devastation.

The elder Brostrom, a helicopter pilot who had served in Operation Desert Storm, said he got into a heated discussion with his son over the tactics employed by the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team during its 2007-08 deployment to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

"I said, 'Why did you blow up that village? Why didn't you just walk away? Come back another day?' " David Brostrom said. "He said, 'You don't understand. I called in the mission, (but) it had to be approved at a higher level.' "

David Brostrom told his son that what they were doing wasn't "COIN," shorthand for the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy of showing firepower restraint and protecting the people. Not doing COIN just made more enemies.

"He didn't like (the bombings). I could tell. It's not what he was raised to do," David Brostrom said. "I kind of got into an argument with him. I said, 'You can't be doing this,' and he goes, 'It's not my decision.' "

No platoon leader has the authority to call in an airstrike. That has to come from higher battalion and brigade levels, Brostrom said. His opinion is that his son's battalion commander "was too aggressive."

"I think he just kind of overstepped his bounds, and once you go there, you can't turn back," David Brostrom said. Using that amount of force in Afghanistan is like throwing down a gauntlet, he said.

173RD FAULTED

It was the overly aggressive approach of the 173rd Brigade over 14-plus months in eastern Afghanistan that alienated the populace and led to the deadly Battle of Wanat on July 13, 2008, according to the Army's Combat Studies Institute analysis.

Nine soldiers were killed and 27 were wounded at Wanat.

The report, written by military historian Douglas Cubbison, faults the 173rd Brigade for essentially not moving beyond the "clear" stage of the "clear, hold and build" approach to counterinsurgency, which calls for clearing an area of enemy, holding that area, and building relations and infrastructure.

The highly "kinetic," or aggressive, approach favored by the 173rd Brigade over counterinsurgency efforts made previously by the U.S. in the region, "rapidly and inevitably degraded the relationship between the U.S. Army and the Waigal Valley population," Cubbison said.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has since banned airstrikes against residential areas, even if the enemy is firing from the buildings.

"We run the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage," McChrystal said in an Aug. 30 security assessment.

Soldiers who were in eastern Afghanistan with the 173rd Brigade from May 2007 to August 2008 describe an increasing spiral of violence and abandonment of humanitarian aid projects as mistrust deepened.

In a counterinsurgency environment, such a degradation in relations cannot be permitted to occur, and it was attendant on senior leadership to identify and reverse that, Cubbison said.

"This did not occur," Cubbison said.

"COIN" is defined in the Army's 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency as a simultaneous combination of offensive, defensive and stability operations.

To be sure, the paratroopers of the 173rd faced a confounding culture and an influx of Taliban in a remote area where they were overstretched. When the American soldiers left a village, militants flowed back in.

The militants in eastern Afghanistan were likely an amalgam of foreign fighters; "Afghan-centric" fighters such as Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, a group allied with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida; and local fighters, Cubbison said.

The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was having only limited success against these enemy fighters.

"COIN" in practice is extremely challenging, wrote Col. William Ostlund, Brostrom's battalion commander, in the July-August edition of Military Review. Ostlund led the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, which had responsibility for a large part of eastern Afghanistan.

"Clearing the mountainous valleys was impossible, holding them was problematic, and building capacity was a long-term venture," he said.

In the article, Ostlund said his soldiers spent 90 percent of their time on counterinsurgency. Ostlund told Cubbison "our focus was on living with the population," but Cubbison takes issue with the claim, saying the paratroopers had almost no interaction with the locals.

What was building most was animosity, Cubbison said.

"Waigal (Valley) history is replete with deception, dishonesty, two-faced tactics, actions counter to Afghan culture and Islam," Ostlund was quoted by Cubbison as saying.

Ostlund did not respond to attempts to contact him. His superior, Col. Charles "Chip" Preysler, commander of the 173rd Brigade at the time, declined to comment.

Ostlund's battalion was engaged in 1,100 firefights, called in 3,800 bombs and gun runs, and lost 26 soldiers in its more than 14 months in eastern Afghanistan.

Cubbison said the missteps that led to the Army's overly aggressive approach in eastern Afghanistan can be traced to before the 173rd Brigade even arrived in the region.

The 3,500 soldiers who make up the 173rd were told in February 2007 that their mission was changing. Instead of going to Iraq, they would be sent to Afghanistan in three months.

While they had prepared for dealing with the situation in Iraq, they had little time to prepare for Afghanistan, Cubbison said.

"Adequate intelligence preparation of the battlefield was never conducted," Cubbison said.

Once in Afghanistan, the 173rd soldiers were immediately hit with a level of violence that made the COIN principles difficult to follow.

Long before the battle of Wanat, the 173rd Brigade suffered a series of setbacks that shaped relations in eastern Afghanistan:

• Its first casualty was Honolulu-born Pfc. Timothy Vimoto, the son of the 173rd Brigade's command sergeant major, who was killed by small-arms fire on June 5, 2007. The early loss left the newly arrived soldiers "with a distinctly negative impression," Cubbison said.

• In August 2007, an "incompetent and corrupt" Afghan Security Guards security chief at an outpost called Ranch House was fired by the Americans, and humiliated in the process, Cubbison said.

Shortly after, 60 or more insurgents attacked the 25 U.S. troops at the outpost with a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades. Aircraft repelled the attackers, but 11 paratroopers were wounded in the battle.

• On Nov. 9, 2007, there was an even more deadly attack. American soldiers participated in a shura, or town council meeting, near the Ranch House outpost. After leaving the meeting and while traveling to the Bella base, the American platoon was ambushed on a mountain ridge.

Five paratroopers with the 173rd, a Marine and two Afghan soldiers were killed. First Lt. Brostrom would help recover the bodies.

"After this ambush, the Chosen Company soldiers no longer fully trusted the Afghan people of the Waigal Valley. From this moment on, Chosen Company's emphasis shifted to kinetic operations, rather than counterinsurgency," Cubbison said.

• On Jan. 26, 2008, Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Ryan Kahler, 29, who had trained 2nd Platoon, was killed by an Afghan Security Guard near Combat Outpost Bella in what was determined to be a friendly fire incident, but that U.S. soldiers suspected was an intentional killing.

A SOLDIER'S VIEW

Chosen Company early on operated from three bases: Camp Blessing, Combat Outpost Bella and Ranch House. Wanat, about five miles from Blessing, was to replace Bella and Ranch House.

Sgt. Tyler Stafford, a Wanat survivor, remembers when Chosen Company first arrived in eastern Afghanistan, there wasn't much contact with the enemy.

But after the Nov. 9 ambush, "that's when everything really started to pick up big-time," Stafford said. "That's when we were getting hit at least twice, three times a week."

The ambush "was a big morale boost for (the enemy), and then they started recruiting," he said.

Sgt. 1st Class David Dzwik, who also was in the Wanat battle, reacted to Cubbison's accusation that the 173rd Brigade was too "kinetic" by saying, "We didn't start out that way."

In the deadly Korengal Valley, which was near the Waigal Valley and a place of violent opposition from the start, the 173rd soldiers didn't call in airstrikes on houses — at first, he said.

"The insurgents would get in the house, put the civilian on top of the house and shoot from the house," Dzwik said. "And the attacks got worse there because we wouldn't hit that."

At some point, that policy changed.

Once the decision was made to start bombing houses "that area actually came over to our side because the village elders were tired of the enemy showing lack of respect for their people," Dzwik said. "And once they did, our guys were able to come in and build that bridge again, and the Korengal Valley actually started shaping up because we showed a higher force than the enemy."

While the Korengal was always notoriously violent, the Waigal Valley, where Wanat is located, was the exact opposite, Dzwik said.

"We were working with the people. We were completely non-kinetic, built a school for them," Dzwik said. "Village elders all the time were telling us they were our friends. We hired the local people, put tons of money into that."

But all along, many of those Afghans were cooperating with the enemy, he said.

"The Cubbison report said none of us respected the local people. Here's one of the reasons why," Dzwik said.

At the Nov. 9, 2007, shura, village elders told the Americans they weren't responsible for an earlier attack. But enemy forces used knowledge of the meeting to ambush the U.S. troops immediately afterward.

"Now, not only under Muslim law, but under tribal law, we were safe to come talk to them to and from their meeting. It's not that we didn't respect them, it's just they never followed their own rules," Dzwik said.

Dzwik disagrees with Cubbison's contention that the 173rd Brigade was too kinetic for the counterinsurgency being pursued.

"My feeling is we didn't go on the offensive enough," Dzwik said. "We were always reacting to (the enemy), because at that point in time, they had freedom of movement and they could always keep an eye on our bases. So we were always on the defensive."

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

Cubbison maintains the 173rd Brigade took its eye off counterinsurgency strategy. But some experts question whether the strategy is even possible in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan, where soldiers were strung out at mountain bases in an area historically known to be hostile to outsiders.

In a July report, the Institute for the Study of War said the U.S. strategy in the east required "massive amounts of artillery and airpower to defend" the bases. But the use of artillery and airpower alienated the very population the U.S. was trying to secure, the institute said.

An example of that came on July 4, 2008, nine days before the Wanat attack. A pair of pickup trucks full of Afghans and possibly fleeing from the vicinity of a mortar attack on an American camp were destroyed by Apache helicopters, Cubbison said.

Among the 17 dead were all the healthcare providers from the Bella Health Clinic, he said.

A U.S. investigation, which speculated that the death toll likely was lower, said the truck was observed with two to three people in the bed carrying a mortar.

"This attack, whether justified or not by U.S. forces, aggravated public opinion throughout the Waigal Valley against the Americans," Cubbison said.

Dzwik, the platoon sergeant at the time of the Wanat attack, said the enemy "pounced on that sucker really quick to say, 'Oh, look what the Americans are doing, they indiscriminately killed,' " when in actuality, fleeing militants may have mixed with civilians for cover.

But further damage had been done to relations, and the helicopter attack fueled the attack on Wanat, Dzwik said.

"God yeah. Absolutely," Dzwik said.

In September, the U.S. started to withdraw troops from some of the eastern Afghan outposts in what amounted to an admission that the strategy there had failed.

Col. Gian P. Gentile, who has gained notoriety questioning U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, opined in a blog on Wanat that if the forces aren't present and the conditions don't support counterinsurgency, a different approach is required.

Gentile, who runs the Military History Program at West Point, said it's possible to blame the losses at Wanat on the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led security force in Afghanistan, or the regional U.S. command in the east of the country, "for not resourcing the mission they chose with the proper forces."

Experts say a classic counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would require 250,000 to 300,000 U.S. troops — far more than the 68,000 there.

But Ostlund, the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry commander to whom Chosen Company reported, should be spared criticism "for supposed improper application of dubious population-centric COIN tactics in the most extreme of environments," Gentile said.

In May 2008, during his visit home, Jon Brostrom had showed his father another video. It was of a night artillery ambush by the Chosen Company soldiers in the Waigal Valley.

Some insurgents had been killed before dawn, and the Americans left the bodies and marked the location, David Brostrom said.

When suspected insurgents returned to collect the bodies, artillery was fired, including round after round of white phosphorous, Brostrom said.

White phosphorous is a controversial combustible : It can burn down to the bone. The U.S. military said in May that coalition forces used white phosphorous in compliance with international law, for marking targets, illumination, destroying unoccupied bunkers and other uses, but that it was not intended for use against personnel.

"I asked my son if he had positive ID that he was actually engaging insurgents and not villagers who had returned to the ambush site to pray for their loved ones," David Brostrom said. "We then had an argument over his answer."

Brostrom said he has provided the video to U.S. military officials, who are now re-investigating Wanat.

In his analysis of the battle, Cubbison said it is "absolutely conclusive" that the relationship between the American soldiers and the population of the Waigal Valley had deteriorated to the point of open animosity by early July, 2008 — just days before they were attacked.