The soldiers, U.S. Army paratroopers, spent 15 months, with Afghan army counterparts, in the northeastern Afghan province of Nuristan. Half the size of New Jersey, Nuristan in 2007 had no paved roads and almost no government for an estimated 750,000 people. U.S. troops throughout Afghanistan already had been stretched thin after American forces were diverted for the Iraq invasion in 2003, and again when President George W. Bush ordered a “surge” for Iraq to quell that escalating war. Fighting with what the U.S. military called “an economy of force,” the U.S. command in Afghanistan sent about 150 Army paratroopers to Nuristan’s Waigal district—a jagged slash of a valley between rocky, forested mountain walls that rise to 15,000 feet.

The U.S. soldiers’ mission was to stabilize Waigal and extend the Afghan government’s influence by funding local development projects, including possibly an improved road to connect the isolated farming villages to the outside world. Journalist Gregg Zoroya of USA Today conducted scores of interviews with the troops and recorded their courage and losses in a new book called The Chosen Few.

A decade after the combat recorded in the book, and more than 15 years after the war began, “our objective of a stable, secure and self-defending Afghanistan remains elusive,” said Scott Worden, USIP’s Afghanistan director. More than 11,000 civilians were killed or injured in the war last year, and about a half-million forced from their homes.

In Afghanistan, USIP supports government reforms and civil society efforts to build more participatory, responsive governance, including a reduction of corruption that weakens the government. Such efforts, including help for Afghans to build a more effective justice system and stronger rule of law, should be redoubled, Worden noted after the event, because they can prevent deeper crises more cheaply than any future interventions to manage them.

At the February discussion, which was streamed live on Facebook, veterans of the Waigal Valley deployment in 2007 and 2008 discussed their experience with Zoroya and the audience. For several months, the tiny U.S. force in Waigal—a couple of platoons stretched across several outposts—drew a few attacks each month. But some of those were fierce, causing the Americans and their Afghan army allies significant losses. In early 2008, the number of attacks increased. The Taliban, often fighting barefoot, “stood their ground,” said Scott Beeson, a sergeant with the force.

In July 2008, 49 of the soldiers, deployed alongside 24 Afghan National Army troops, were hurriedly building a new base at the valley’s biggest village, called Wanat, just days before handing it over to the unit that would relieve them. An estimated 200-plus insurgents attacked the unfinished base and nearly overran it in a four-hour firefight that was one of the most intense—and, for the Americans—costly of the war. Three-quarters of the U.S. servicemen were hit, nine of them killed, before their fire, and that of Apache helicopters called in for support, drove the insurgents off. U.S. forces abandoned the base two days later.

Zoroya’s book “reminds me that the classics written about soldiers and their trials … will always have a role to play in teaching people about what it costs for America to commit treasure and blood to a cause overseas,” said Paul Hughes, a retired Army colonel and USIP staff member.