Irregular Warfare Podcast - Lessons from the Hardest Place: Twenty Years of War in Afghanistan

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

What lessons should the United States military take from twenty years of war in Afghanistan? This episode focuses on US efforts in the Pech valley, where the United States waged an enduring counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign over many years. Our guests, Wesley Morgan and retired Colonel Bill Ostlund, argue that the Pech represents a microcosm of the broader US war effort in Afghanistan, and that the collapse of the Afghan government following the withdrawal of US forces from the country in August 2021 was foreseeable by looking at what happened in the valley after US forces withdrew years earlier. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

General Powell, Secretary Powell has made the comment, we break it, we buy it. I don't know. Is that a fact? How about if you hurt our citizens, our country, our friends or support those that do, we will break you and leave you. Is that a strategy? Is that a national strategy? It sounds like deterrence. Is that a national strategy? It sounds like deterrence. And so what you saw pretty often over the years was the U.S. military and the CIA getting inadvertently played into, if not settling, at least weighing in in some way, in a local

dispute, being used as muscle by local factions in disputes that could be pretty hard to wrap your mind around. Welcome to episode 35 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell, and my co-host is Andy Milburn. In today's episode, we reflect on lessons learned after 20 years of fighting the war in Afghanistan. The Pesh Valley in Afghanistan's Kunar province was a place of contrasts for the Americans who served there. During the course of the war, it transformed from being a place of relative tranquility where U.S. troops were initially welcomed to one that earned a well-deserved reputation for remorseless violence.

Eventually, the U.S. troops withdrew from the Pesh, taking with them the memory of several hundred Americans who had given their lives and leaving it all in the hands of the Taliban. Our guests today, both of whom spent a considerable amount of time in the Pesh Valley, discussed their experiences there as a microcosm of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. And what that experience tells us about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and the American way of war. about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and the American way of war. Retired Colonel Bill Ostlund spent a portion of every year from 2007 to 2017 except for one as an infantry officer in Afghanistan, where he held multiple commands in both conventional and special operations units, and also held multiple key staff positions for the ISAF, SOCOM and CENTCOM commanders.

Colonel Ostlund retired from the military as the Director of the Department of Military Instruction at West Point and holds a Masters of International Relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Wesley Morgan is a journalist who has covered the US military and its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2007. His reporting has appeared in Politico, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is author of The Hardest Place, The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pesh Valley. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project

and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of national security professionals. Here is our conversation with Wes Morgan and Bill Ostlin. Wes Morgan and Colonel Bill Ostlin, welcome to what has become an unexpectedly timely episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast to discuss your experiences concerning the long war in Afghanistan. I just want to start by saying thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Kyle. Wes, we'll start with you. Your book, The Hardest Place, follows the history of U.S.

involvement in the Pesh Valley, Afghanistan, over several years. We will discuss how many of the observations you made about the Pesh Valley are relevant for the rest of Afghanistan, but before we do so, what drove you to focus on this particular region? Sure. I first went to Afghanistan in 2009 as a freelance journalist. I had started going to Iraq a couple years earlier. But in 2009, when I was 21 years old, it was my first Afghanistan trip. And then I started going pretty regularly between then and 2017 was my most recent trip, which was a trip just for this book. But one of those early trips in 2010, when I was still an undergraduate at Princeton University, actually, you know, freelancing during the summers, I embedded with a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division that was in the patch at a time when the battalion commander in the patch,

commander in the PESH, then Lieutenant Colonel, now Major General Joe Ryan, was kind of making the decision, realizing the decision that he wanted to recommend pulling out of the PESH to his higher headquarters. And I just got really fixated on the PESH and on understanding how it had gotten that way, how it had gotten to the point that I saw it in the summer of 2010, the summer of the surge. Wes, what motivated you to write The Hardest Place? Sure. I mean, really, it was honestly just a puzzle that I wanted to solve. I wanted to understand how each of those outposts got there. Because when I went to the Pesh in 2010, you know, and this was true to some extent in different parts of Afghanistan, but in Kunar, the U.S. presence had started so early because of the kind of the counterterrorism roots of the mission, that each of these outposts had a longer history than if you were to go visit the outposts in Sangin or the outposts in the Argandab, where maybe they go back a couple years by that point.

But, you know, Faba Sadabad had been established very early on in the war. Camp Blessing had been established very early on in the war. And, you know And guys who were serving at these bases didn't necessarily, or usually in fact, didn't really know why and when these bases had been established. I mean, that wasn't their job to know that. Their job was to handle the situation that they were in in the moment during their deployment. But I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to figure out why did each of these outposts get there? Yeah. And that's an interesting point. One of the themes you bring up in the book is that a lot of people who are implementing the policies or the strategy didn't really know the history of why they were there or the local context. I think we should get into that. But one thing that kind of stands out to frame the conversation is, you know, your book is about a very specific place

in Afghanistan, which is the Pesh, right? And, you know, Bill deployed there, but he also deployed to other places. I read the book as somebody who's never been there, but been in other places in Afghanistan. And I could have been reading about the exact same province I was in. You know, it translated. But I think that's a general question for both of you is do the findings and lessons that we have, you know, in this book about the Pesh. Do they kind of extrapolate to the broader conflict or do you think that some of this is just specific just specific to the region that you wrote the book on or that you had the experience in, Bill? Yeah, I think Wes did an absolutely phenomenal job of looking at a microcosm. I think Kunar is the fourth smallest province in Afghanistan, but it was so dynamic and had such a rich history

that we might talk about later. CT fight, then a conventional only, then a CT only fight again. But I think it was really, is a microcosm, the way he looked at it, is a microcosm of the larger Afghanistan. And just like you said, Kyle, could apply to, you know, certainly anywhere in RC East and probably most areas in R.C. South as well. I see Depeche as, and I treated it as kind of a microcosm of the bigger war, and it's not perfect in that way. For instance, you don't really see ISAF dynamics, NATO coalition dynamics, playing out in Depeche,

which are a huge part of anybody's experience who fought in the South or the West or the North. And in some ways, Depeche is very different from other places in Afghanistan. You have this timber dynamic instead of the poppy and opium dynamic. But it's a place where both the counterterrorism thread and the counterinsurgency thread were tied up together for so, so long that in many ways, it seemed like one of the perfect places to zoom in on. Wes, I want to pick up on that point and that interesting comment about the Pesh being, in a sense, a microcosm for the larger war. And then, you know, sadly, your book, as such, became quite prescient, with the difference

being that our withdrawal from the Pesh was a little more organized than our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Considering observations in your book, Wes, and your military experience in Afghanistan, Bill, are you surprised by how recent events have developed to include the Afghan military and government, how they fell to the Taliban so quickly once U.S. forces withdrew? And were there signs that this might be the outcome from your experience? You know, I think those that serve in Afghanistan have known the government and ANSF have coordinated with the Taliban and really other opposing forces at various levels to various degrees for various reasons since the earliest days. And in Kunar and Depeche, we benefited from that several times. You know, District Governor Zalmay was adamant, I'll just give him a call, which is

foreign to us, but sometimes it worked out and helped us. After decades of war, the Afghan population includes a large portion of transactional survivors. We just got to be honest about that. This is not a criticism. It's just a fact. You know, in July, I assumed accommodation by the Afghan government and ANSF was ongoing. When Bagram closed, 15 August as it did, when we pulled our air support ability to coordinate fires and our logistics from the ANSF, I assumed the ANSF would collapse relatively quickly, but they do this through accommodation, as is their nature. And I was sure the government would dissolve ahead of this complete collapse. And, you know, we can go into different ideas about could have this been done better or differently.

And, you know, an interesting thing, too, Andy, is after all the work invested, all the money invested, all the troops sweat, why did it go the way it did? But the commandos didn't go the same way, at least not in mass. Is there something to be learned about that? And I think there really is. That's a great observation on Bill's part just now. What is it that made conventional ANA forces perform differently from ANA special operations forces? that made conventional ANA forces perform differently from ANA special operations forces? And not just ANA either. I mean, this is probably a harder conversation to have and one that will take longer for the facts to come out. But there were CIA surrogate units that were founded at the beginning of the war and that were still fighting for the

U.S. government on the perimeter of the airport after the Afghan government had collapsed and they no longer had a government to fight for. That know, that's certainly a lesson, I think, you know, a case that people will want to study for a long time, as well as the cases of the myriad Afghan special operations units that benefited from U.S. and allied special operations mentoring. You know, as far as sort of how fast it happened, I mean, I'm not going to claim that I thought it was going to happen that fast. I didn't think it would happen that fast. But as far as kind of the way that it unfolded in, as Bill says, it being a collapse of accommodation rather than a collapse of sort of, you know, catastrophic battlefield defeat, I think that shouldn't be surprising.

And it's something that, you know, you see previews of not only in Depeche, but in many other parts of Afghanistan. When there's kind of a sense of inevitability of US departure, how do the actors, you know, how do they accommodate one another? And you see that in 2011, with the initial US pullout from the Pesh, the ANA commander who's left behind, well, not the commander, but the executive officer who sort of is the acting commander, very quickly sort of starts to make accommodations with the Taliban. And then it's up to U.S. forces who are now looking in from the outside to decide, well, okay, is he making accommodations with the Taliban that are going to allow his base to stay and maintain the ANA presence out there? Or is he making accommodations with the Taliban that

amount to surrender accommodations? And this was something that, you know, the farther you are from the ground and from the picture, the harder it is to judge that kind of thing. You know, something we often forget is that although the U.S. departure has just been completed, it's been going on for a long time. And the loss of kind of a feel for what's going on in that governor's palace or in that district center, you know, as U.S. forces have retracted back into kind of a much higher level posture over the past three, four years, I think a lot of that feel that officers cultivated for their partners and for what their partners were doing and what their partners' interests were was just something that was not possible to sustain. So, I mean, I think that goes away towards explaining how the United States did not see the widespread negotiations and accommodations that were being made, you know, between the Taliban

and various Afghan officials in recent months. Yeah. And that's kind of an important point for that question, which is, you know, if like the withdrawal from the Pesh and withdrawal from other districts and provinces has been going on for years, if you look at each of those, a similar type of trajectory occurred there that has now occurred at the national level. And that's kind of the genesis of that question is, was this kind of foreseeable? The book follows the implementation of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, kind of with an emphasis on tactical and operational level implementation. I'd like to discuss what lessons, Wes, you found from the implementation of counterinsurgency at the tactical and operational levels. The ink spot is one of those things. So the ink spot is the idea

that we can put, you know, US and coalition forces in an area, they can establish security, and security will kind of spread out from there like an ink spot, if I understand that correctly. But in your book, you argue that some commanders believe that there was not an ink kind of blot that was forming. They were just staying in one specific spot. There was no spread of security beyond the exact location of U.S. and coalition forces. And I think one of the terms you use is that the range of security never exceeded that of the weapon systems of the U.S. forces that were in a specific location.

Using that as a start point, can we kind of discuss, you know, your observations for both of you on what worked and what did not work in the implementation of counterinsurgency in the Pesh and then beyond in Afghanistan? Yeah, I'd jump on there and just say, you know, I think our coin doctrine was really over-informed by Iraq and under-informed by Afghanistan history in U.S. realities, i.e. attention span. I would like to say that, once again, use Chris Cavoli, is Chris wasn't trying to nation-build in the Pesh Valley, but he would do projects, and he taught me an awful lot about this. It's like, again, transactional, it's utility. Chris focused on building roads. The first time I drove down the Pesh Valley,

26 kilometers from Asadabad to Camp Blessing, took me six and a half hours with Chris Cavoli. After we finished that road, there were times when I drove from the Pesh to Asadabad three times in one day as we went down there. finished that road there were times when I drove from the Pesh to Sadebad three times in one day as we went down there. It was huge to have power lines in in the local PCOP put road signs on there, watch out dangerous curve, test your brakes, you know things like that. That's a byproduct of why Chris wanted to be

able to move quickly through there and have government forces move quickly, do a good turn for the population so they could see, look, this is what a government does, delivers this. But he kept it, at least when he conveyed it to me, framed in a way that he wasn't trying to solve all the ills of Afghanistan in one fell swoop. He was a very thoughtful leader that saw a means to bringing greater security to the Pesh. Now byproducts spun off. I mean, I learned all about supply chain economics while I was in the Pesh river valley, you know, and hey, we get a micro hydro, we can get a little cold storage, we get a mill that grinds wheat, they don't have to be gouged, taken it to Pakistan. Hey,

these are all great things. But I wasn't doing those things for anything other than a security benefit for the most part. You have to be thoughtful and use your dollars that you have as bullets. And that's what we did. We expended 70% of the ordinance in Afghanistan in Kunar province during my time. We also expended 80% of the brigade's developmental budget in that province with development in 17 of 17 districts. It's not because I was trying to make Kunar look like Omaha, Nebraska. It's because it had a security effect. That was what I was trying to achieve. Yeah. I mean, the road is a great example. Roads as counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and

ink lines instead of ink blots were kind of all the rage for a period in Koyne and Afghanistan. But as Bill correctly notes, Depeche, which became almost like a golden example of what roads could do to transform a community, it began as a very narrow utilitarian project. I mean, when Chris Cavoli went up into those mountains with 132 infantry, he wanted to be able to resupply his troops with a lesser fear of IEDs. And there was a lot of IEDs on that Pesh road. And so he initially saw paving as this very kind of utilitarian, let's make this a safer ground supply route kind of thing. And then they saw additional benefits kind of blossom out of that. Now, what eventually happens though, over the years, as more units rotate through,

is you gradually see the fighting that had been up in the mountains and the side valleys, you see it creep down toward the road. And so you see these kind of these security bubbles or the security line of the road. You know, the development benefit is still there, but the security starts to collapse as U.S. forces become kind of more focused on defending their own outposts. They're patrolling less frequently into the hills, they're not doing air assaults as often into the hills, or if they are, they're sort of very large air assaults that happen once a year or something

and don't really have the kind of effects that they want them to have. And with the coming of the MRAP, you know, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, you really see U.S. forces become a lot more restricted to the roads that they themselves have constructed. And this contributes to kind of the way the war collapses down onto the road. I think this is an important point, though, because, you know, if you look at kind of a map of what districts and what provinces were secure or not secure, what does it actually

mean when they say, hey, this district or this province is secure? I think that might mean different things to different people. If you just look at that, you might say, oh, it's all green. Therefore, there's security in the whole area. But based on what you're saying, if I understand the idea of like an ink line or an ink spot, it's that that meant that on that, you know, strip of the road, which is a very narrow part of the whole entire province, there might have been security when there were forces there, but otherwise there's a whole kind of geography that that's not covered. Is that kind of a fair assessment of what, of what you observed? Yeah. I mean, I think district control is sort of, it's a hard thing to measure because I mean, districts are so different from each other, right? I mean, there are flat districts that are pretty evenly populated throughout the district. And then there are extremely mountainous districts where the only populated part of the district is a gorge-like valley that runs through it at a certain point. So what does control of one district versus the other one mean? It can be very hard to measure. I mean, I remember having a conversation about three years ago, again, going back to the Weigel Valley where the Battle of Wannut happened, where I happened to notice that in one of these quarterly reports that the U.S. government used to put out, the status of Weigel District had changed from,

it was like from red to orange or orange to red or something like that. And, you know, my understanding of the situation in Weigel at that time was that government forces held the district center and they held a ground line of control to the district center. And that was it. And I remember talking to, you know, some folks on General Miller's staff in Kabul, because I just was curious, I mean, what prompted this change in the status? I mean, what does it really reflect? And basically being told these district control numbers, we only produce them because we're mandated to produce them. We don't really know what they mean. I mean, this isn't a place where their U.S. forces haven't been in the Weigel Valley in years. I mean, how accurate is our picture really going to be about, you know, changing it from red to orange or orange

to red or what you may have? You know, we were well known, and this isn't a point of bravado by any means. It's what tactics we chose to use to bring security were pretty kinetic. But I felt very safe, you know, and when I say I, I'm talking about, I felt my soldiers were fairly safe and able to control the environment within, you know, a couple of kilometers of the road.

In 15 months, I had one soldier severely injured by an IED in the Korengal Valley. None. I had one first sergeant wounded, shot in a foot on the Pesh River Road in 15 months when we had 1,100 engagements there, but they were in the province or with the battalion. And I highlight that because, you know, one of the things we opted to fight in the valleys off of there, and we called them the capillary valleys, so we could keep the Pesh open. If we could fight there, we could develop along the Pesh. And again, that went to security. So we could fly up and down that road. And when I say fly, you know, protect the population, embolden the police who had a number of checkpoints along there.

But our ability to move along that road quickly brought security to the area. In our ink spot, if you will, from there was a couple of kilometers, you know, basically small arms range plus off of the road. One phenomenon you talk about in the book is what you call the Kunar syndrome, which is the idea that for many, Kunar and Afghanistan maybe in general was kind of a great situation to be in if you were a combat arms soldier or officer. And it kind of reminds me of a comment that Bill just made about, sometimes our focus would be kinetic.

I wonder if you could expand on what you meant by the Kunarn syndrome and if we could have a discussion about whether there is a predisposition to fight for some units in Afghanistan. Yeah, I mean, sure. That's a really hard question. I mean, there's an asymmetric warfare group advisor

who I quote in the book, kind of summing the problem up, which is that when you're too heavy with the hammer, you're going to leave a scar with the population. But in a place like Pesh or Korengal, if you're not heavy with the hammer, the enemy is going to be right at your throat and it's going to be killing your soldiers. And so that's the dilemma that Bill's soldiers were living in. And it varied from company to company, the degree to which they were living in it and how much firepower they had to employ. But the, you know, the Kunar syndrome that you're referring to was, I mean, I just found after spending all these years working on this book and spending a lot of time embedding with different kinds of units in different parts of Afghanistan and different parts of Iraq, there was almost a nostalgia often and by no means universal. I mean, you know, many people had their lives broken or ruined in the Pesh and the Korengal fighting in these places. But there was a recurring phenomenon that I found

of young leaders who compared to, say, their subsequent or previous deployment to the Argandab, where they're just walking around all day waiting to step on a bomb, and they don't really get to fight the enemy or kind of see the enemy, see who's inflicting the losses on them. I mean, Depeche was a place, Depeche and its surrounding valleys were a place where there were gunfights and where you could feel like you were, I mean, you could feel like you were inflicting damage on the enemy because you could see that you were inflicting damage on the enemy, which I think was, you know, kind of got some soldiers hooked. Yeah. And I would say, and I share this advice with my son who I'll say is deployed right now, is be careful what you ask for.

You know, Kunar is a great place to have served. It wasn't the place that a whole lot of people wanted to serve. wanted to serve. Now, before we deployed, we were focused on Huija, Iraq, somewhere that the 173rd, I had fought in when we jumped into Iraq 2003-4. I knew that was going to be a very kinetic fight if we were responsible for the Huija area. We were remissioned. In our training, it really didn't change all that much. We quit focusing so much on convoys and obviously did a lot more focus on dismount, but we were predisposed to understand how to use combined arms to lethally engage the enemy. You are not going to find a soldier that's ever served with me in combat that is cursing me because I did not approve fires. That is not going to happen.

I think the weight of the United States of America should support our youngest infantryman. Now, to that, I lost my youngest infantryman six hours into this tour. And he happened to be our brigade sergeant major's oldest son. Did that influence how I fought for the rest of the 15 months? Maybe. It might have influenced how I fought for the subsequent 39 months that I was in command in Afghanistan. But again, when we put soldiers, and this is a little bit of a sermon, but I think when we put soldiers, and this is a little bit of, I guess, a sermon, but I think when we put soldiers in harm's way as commanders, we're obligated to support them with everything our country has. And if that means dropping a hammer on people, again, the AWG person who I know and I respect a lot that's quoted in Wes's book, his job was to figure out how not to get soldiers killed with IEDs. What he should have been saying is Auslan was the only one that didn't have somebody killed with an IED in that area. Let me figure out if the hammer was part of that. Okay. You know, I think

back to the original question, there was a bit of okay at least we can fight here that we were able to sustain throughout several several transitions whereas you talk about for the certainly during during a time period there in the pes, that there was a dissonance between conventional and soft operations. And really, so my question here is, is it as simple as saying, hey, we're better at counterinsurgency or they're better employed at counterinsurgency than they are in counterterror operations? Or was there something else going on that caused that dissonance? Well, yeah, it's a little complicated. I mean, the role that different special operations forces played in the patch over the years.

There's a case study in 2004 that a chapter of the book is on where you see two Green Beret teams have successive six-month tours in the patch, really doing the same mission, but taking diametrically different approaches to it, the same mission, but taking diametrically different approaches to it, where one is very focused on kind of building up security within the inkblot and building up the Afghan security force. And then another A-team comes in, kind of is seeing all the same information and just wants to start, wants to go pursue Al-Qaeda targets because it's sort of being influenced by the other tribes of special operations forces, the JSOC guys and the CIA guys down the road at Favasadabad, who are doing the counterterrorism mission, and for whom kind of the whole deal is we're looking for al-Qaeda targets and anybody who can lead us

to al-Qaeda targets. And, you know, as conventional forces came into the Pesh, first Marines, then Army infantry battalions, there was a tension. And it's a tension that you saw in pretty much every AO I ever visited in Iraq or Afghanistan, is there would be a tension between kind of the daytime war of the people who build the relationship, the officers and NCOs who build relationships with people, and then the nighttime war of special operations, direct action, strike forces that would come in and hit targets in the night. And, you know, until there were some coordination measures put in place, starting in the 2009 period, really, there was a very common

recurring story of, you know, special operations unit comes in, maybe it's acting on bad intelligence and kills the wrong people. More often, it's acting on good intelligence and kills the right people. But in the morning, there's kind of a gap between when that special operations force leaves in the middle of the night and when the conventional force kind of has to explain what has happened to the surrounding community. And in that gap, the Taliban, they explain it to the surrounding community. And that's, yeah, it's a very common story, not just in the Pesh, not just in Afghanistan, but throughout the war on terror, I think, is this disconnect between direct action special operations forces and conventional forces on the ground, where at times they were working at cross purposes toward each other, keeping information from one another,

not really cluing each other in about what they were doing. But Bill was there for, you know, back in Afghanistan for a pretty formative period when the task force tried very, very hard to, you know, to correct those problems, not just to correct them, but to change almost the whole purpose of the task force in Afghanistan. Yeah. And to that end, so I left Afghanistan as a battalion commander in really the first few days of August. And by the first few days of October, I was back in Afghanistan to just kind of see the task force and get an understanding of what the counterterrorism task force was about. And that was my first interaction with Admiral McRaven. And he asked a simple question. He asked something to the effect of, hey, Bill, you were just a battalion commander. Why do the battle space owners or integrators,

BSOs or IS, cause us more grief than the enemy or the Afghan government. And he elaborated on that. And it's largely about, you know, information operations and perceptions. And I said, well, sir, we don't understand your, you know, battle space owners don't understand your targeting methodology. And there's no transparency at all. It's just, you know, you come in and make a mess. In 15 months, you came in, you did three targets in Kunar.

I didn't see it as much help. I could have policed up all three of those targets, you know, in Ashura, and it wouldn't have been an issue. And all three were released, and they were just mad. You know, so we had a conversation, and I flew back to Atlanta. And I flew back to Atlanta. Before I landed, I had a message that said, you know, hey, you need to come back here and we're going to rewrite the strategy. Bill plays an interesting role here. He comes back later in the book.

And one of the things that he does as the JSOC Task Force commander is he is one of a series of ranger commanders who kind of reorient the JSOC task force so that it is supporting these infantry units out in the, out in the fight in the wilds. And that's something that you see in the PESH in 2009, 2010, particularly, um, is as the conventional units get kind of more burdened down by their armor and by their MRAPs, uh, and they kind of cede control of the hills to a degree. That's when you see the JSOC task force kind of picking up the slack and going up into those hills

and going after the bomb makers who are killing young American soldiers rather than kind of the, you know, sitting back on the airfield waiting for the big high value Al-Qaeda target to go out on, you know, without coordinating with the battle space owner. And it's a really interesting, you know,

it's an interesting evolution that happens in the book. You get a glimpse of it in the book, but happened more broadly in Afghanistan and probably to an even a much greater degree in places in southern Afghanistan where, you know, where the task force really threw itself into supporting conventional units and trying to figure out how to help them with their fight. trying to figure out how to help them with their fight. This conversation from the beginning to now has kind of looked at the balance between the effectiveness of U.S. kinetic force in a conflict that is, I think you would argue, kind of largely locally based and almost political in nature, right? It's a counterinsurgency. And one of the themes that you bring up in your book is the possibility that U.S. forces will never have the intelligence to fully understand how their dominant military power is actually being employed in the local political context. Wes, I wonder if you can kind of expand on that a little bit and the implications for the value of U.S. dominant force in a kind of local counterinsurgency context. of local counterinsurgency context. Yeah, I mean, this is something that you see early on in Afghanistan, you know, especially starkly, is US forces showing up and allying themselves with whoever they are able to ally themselves with. And then kind of the question becoming,

who is whose proxy? Who is working on behalf of whom? Because you get these relationships between US Special Operations Forces or CIA teams and armed factions that exist within the province who not only provide, in the early years, not only provided armed men to go out on missions, but they also provided interpreters and they provided intelligence. And so what you saw pretty often over the years was the US military and the CIA getting inadvertently played into, if not settling, at least weighing in in some way, in a local dispute, being used as muscle by local factions in disputes that could be pretty hard to wrap your mind around if you didn't have the right interpreters who spoke the right languages and who were willing to kind of

express the right kind of candor with you. You know, disputes between families that go back to a marriage a long time ago, disputes over water rights, disputes over timber, disputes over all kinds of things, that it's just U.S. forces coming into a province, a small Green Beret team, what have you. It's going to be really, really hard for them to understand the ways in which they are being eagerly used by local forces that already exist within that province for things that, you know, they just can't foresee. And you see that happen a lot. And again, it's not specific to Afghanistan. I mean, we've seen examples of this in Somalia where, you know, SEALs do a hit and it turns out that they were kind of played by the tribe that they were working with against a different tribe. And I don't have good answers about how to avoid that other than, you know, getting to know a place

which entails staying there for a long time and living there. And the flip side of that, of course, is, as we saw in the Pesh, I mean, the longer U.S. forces stayed there, the more they wore out their welcome just by kind of the accumulated violence of, you know, of just of being there fighting every day, every day, every day. And people inevitably being killed in the crossfire and in mistakes and people being killed by the Taliban, but it being blamed on U.S. forces as well. So for both of you, we're coming near an end here and we want to move on to implications. And the people of the United States and its allies and partners are still processing, obviously, what has happened over there. And it's drawn the entirety of the conflict, not just what's happened in the last month.

And there's a risk that we'll forget some of the hard-learned lessons from this war, both good and bad. And looking over the entirety of the conflict, what are some of the major lessons for policymakers and practitioners of our experience in Afghanistan? Yeah, I'll start with the tactical and just dovetail that into our previous discussion is we grew as a force in our competence and our ability to, to integrate functions in combined arms teams with multinational partners, multi-service, obviously in a joint context with our interagency and our coalition partners and, and,

and local partners. We, as we discussed, we had unprecedented integration between our top tier SOF, other SOF, and conventional forces. And I'd be interested to know how many joint exercises we've done in the last two years, because very quickly, we will step away from that. You know, remember when we started the war, the Rangers were guards for Delta. Okay. I don't, there was not a Marsov at that time. And now we're on the cusp. We've got some serious decisions to make. Are we going to keep and increase that tactical competence?

At a higher level, I think, you know, we really have to look at some of our leader selection systems. And I know the Army has done this and is trying to be much more objective with our battalion and brigade commanders, but we need to go higher than that. And, you know, I wrote an article that got a little bit of, you know, play called Trust on Leadership. And are we really finding our most competent leaders or are we promoting our most palatable? And there's a lot of hands in this, right? This isn't just a service issue because Congress has to confirm. Does the system recognize people who are the most competent? Do the systems find the people who may be a bit contrarian and push back on conventional wisdom and look for alternative ways to look at

problems. You know, in the context of Afghanistan, was your kind of experience that some of the issues we had were leadership issues then? And how could that have played out differently? Well, of course, over the long haul, they're on leadership issues. And the best leaders are going to say, because I take responsibility for everything that happened on my watch or my multiple watches. So by default, that's the case. If we want different results, we might want to look at who's responsible for those different results. And I think we need to grow senior leaders who are strategists. You know, our doctrine now has design methodology and joint doctrine and Indian Army doctrine. You know, this is about critical creative thought about complex problems. You know, can we

grow people that understand this and bring in cross-functional partners to understand the environment? How many times have we come back to Wes saying, well, you know, people didn't really understand the environment. And then, you know, as we talked about, I think the continuity of thought, you know, there was 48 years and five months between the fall of Saigon and the fall of Kabul. So I think the maximum effective range of good lessons learned in this case is about 48 years. Do we need to relook at some version of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine? You know, there were some pretty good takes in there that I think the people that lived in the valleys of the Pesh may want our senior leaders to look at. Yeah. When you talk about the Weinberger or Powell doctrine, Bill, I'm assuming you're

talking about we should only kind of go to a place if we're going to go in with overwhelming force to win. Is that kind of an accurate understanding of what you're saying? No, I think the piece is above that. You know, I think in Afghanistan, you know, was there a national security threat or a national security interest? Yes, I think we've defined that. Are there clear and attainable objectives? Questionable, right? Is the action supported by the american people you know i think deliberately we decided that wasn't important in fact i mean we even made the comment and i replicated the comment to my family is no i want you to enjoy labor day and not think about the terrorist threat at all that's why

i'm fighting the away game but maybe that and that's what I told my son this morning, you know, and maybe that's, I said, thank you. Thanks for fighting the away game. You know, but maybe we did that to a fault. You know, we certainly had the broad international support that's required. You know, is there a plausible exit strategy? exit strategy. Now, I've listened to a lot of podcasts of very famous people here that said nation building was our exit strategy. But is that an exit strategy? And then how do you define that? And how do you, you know, credibly justify everything that we did over there? You know, and then again, have all other nonviolent means been fully exhausted?

I think probably. I mean, we asked the Taliban, turn over Al Qaeda, not support them. Maybe something else to think about. You know, I think General Powell, Secretary Powell has made the comment, we break it, we buy it. I don't know.

Is that a fact? How about if you hurt our citizens, our country, our friends, or support those that do, we will break you and leave you. Is that a strategy? Is that a national strategy? It sounds like deterrence, but something to think about. One of the reasons I asked that is because we're talking about lessons learned for future wars, and some have argued that one of the lessons is that we should have come in with a heavy, strong force from the outset, and that would have brought stability from the beginning rather than kind of an incremental increase of forces over time.

The reading I got from the observations in Wes's book is that, and Wes, this is really for you, is that despite our best interests, sometimes increasing our presence actually has inadvertent negative impacts on stability. I kind of wonder if you could tease that out, if I read that correctly. Yeah, I mean, this is what I do have a strong opinion on is, you know, you hear this notion sometimes, oh, well, if we hadn't shifted the ball to Iraq, you know, if we just, if we put all those tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, well, then maybe, maybe, you know, instead of waiting for the surge era to do it, well, then maybe things would have come around. Well, who were those tens of thousands of troops have been fighting in 2002, 2003, 2004? sparked and radicalized by misunderstandings between, you know, local people and the most

kind of culturally attuned, adept troops that we had, CIA guys and special forces guys. You know, the friction between those guys and local populations and local power brokers was enough to kind of spark an insurgency. So I think the idea that tens of thousands of conventional forces running around in this country with even less knowledge and without an enemy to fight wouldn't have then created the same enemy to fight, I think is very wrongheaded. Yeah. Now, and to follow on that, again, Chris Cavoli, in one of our first meetings, made the comment, you got to be in tune with when are you the problem? When are US forces the reason that the fighting is continuing in a specific area? And I knew very, very quickly exactly what he meant. If you're just standing there as a target,

then they're going to be shooting at you and then you're going to shoot back and it's just going to be never ending. At a certain point in time, if you remove yourself, the violence may be removed as well. And I think that's kind of a corollary to what Wes was just saying. Yeah. And possibly something to kind of bring that around to the present day. I mean, when, you know, when Joe Ryan was making the argument in 2010, 2011, that U.S. forces were the problem in the Pesh, everybody was fighting because U.S. forces were there. Well, one of the things that he was wondering, I mean, he was elaborating both to me and to his own headquarters at the time was, what are all these insurgents going to do when we leave? Who are they going to fight? Because, you know, it was a pretty complex and shaky coalition of militant groups up in the Pech Valley. They didn't all get along with each other. They hadn't all been on the same side

before the arrival of U.S. forces. Plenty of them had fought against each other before 2001. And so one of his questions was, could our departure kind of actually set these people against each other, which in some cases it did. I mean, you know, the departure combined with the early phases of the subsequent drone campaign, in some cases really capitalized on dissension among insurgent ranks that bubbled to the surface after the U.S. departure. And of course, I mean, I am by no means an expert on the Taliban. My understanding of insurgency in Afghanistan is very rooted in Kunar Nuristan, which is a very unique place in terms of the role that the Taliban has in society there. It wasn't really there before 2001. It's

not their heartland. But people who study the Taliban are in a really interesting time right now, watching, you know, now that the Taliban have what they want, now that they're in Kabul, who wins out and who doesn't? And, you know, and what is kind of what are intra-Taliban dynamics going to look like? And, you know, how do we even know about them? And how? And, you know, and what what is kind of what are intra Taliban dynamics going to look like? And, you know, how do we how do we even know about them? And how do we, you know, take advantage of them to the degree that we still are trying to pursue national interests in Afghanistan? Well, I'm going to follow up on that looking ahead, and you discuss the efficacy of drones in your book, it's a topic we have discussed during this episode, both as a compliment to the use of

conventional forces or ground force uh and now of course we're driven to this point of uh to use a phrase that's gaining vogue through necessity um remote counter-terrorism and this is for both of you uh what what do you think the prospects are of us being able to conduct have an over over the horizon ct approach to counterterrorism. Do you think it will work in Afghanistan looking ahead? I mean, I think we've learned that drones are most effective when they complement the ground force, and the ground force can complement the strike.

That means do the sensitive site exploitation and quell the misinformation That will be associated with that strike You know, I I think movies in and just lack of knowledge Overplay what a drone can really do You know a hellfire is is a very precise Weapon system but over the horizon means our best ISR platform, a Warrior Alpha, and that's an armed system, is going to spend 60% of its gas flying from an over the horizon base and returning. So if we're going to do this campaign, we've probably got to figure out a refill option. But then you're talking about probably up to four hellfires on the platform.

Really, you know, in a lot of conventional force commanders would ask me to do things that demonstrated that they didn't have an understanding of everything that goes into leads up to pulling that trigger, like the intelligence that is required. There's other platforms that have to collect the intelligence that affords us the opportunity to have high confidence that the kinetic strike, the drone is going to be effective. And people that make the comments that, hey, if they don't do X, Y, or Z, we'll bomb them into submission. I'm one that's Winchestered or dropped all the bombs a B-1 bomber has on a specific target. And I tell you, that's a lot more wishful thinking than reality. So you got to find the target. You got to have the platforms and the intelligence system to find the targets, be reasonably assured that you found the right target, and then you deliver those effects. If you can't do sensitive site exploitation,

you can imagine the Taliban are going to immediately say every good strike and every bad strike created insurmountable number of civilian casualties, and they're going to use that as propaganda to further discredit the U.S.'s efforts. So I think a drone campaign would be used at very, very high-level targets only. Yeah, and I think that opens the question of kind of, you know, where is the intelligence going to come from for whatever campaign, whatever counterterrorism with drone strikes and other types of airstrikes when we still have a friendly government that still controls cities and still controls surrogate forces that are going out and doing raids and

taking prisoners and generating intelligence that then can be fed into the military counterterrorism machine. A situation where there is no friendly government and it's just a completely enemy-controlled territory and there are no friendly surrogate forces that are going out and capturing prisoners and pulling stuff out of their pockets and their cell phones and so on, I think the base point becomes a lot harder.

How do you start generating targets? And then, you know, as U.S. forces learned during Operation Haymaker, their long drone campaign up in Kunar and Nuristan that started when, it was just starting when Bill left the Ranger Regiment. You know, one of the problems was, I mean, that campaign was not really nested with a ground effort. And there was not a possibility to do, you know, sensitive site exploitation after a strike. And so you kind of, you'd run through your target decks pretty quickly and graduate to going after lower and lower level targets. And you also, you know, you continued to be at the mercy of weather and terrain and a variety of other things that, you know, a movie

doesn't depict a Reaper drone having a problem with, but in fact it does. You know, I think we've got a lot to cover in the years. I think the focus of, you know, are we going to be a learning organization or not is going to be at the forefront of learn and retain our lessons here and incorporate them into our training bases because I think everybody wants to forget about Afghanistan except the Gold Star families and the veterans, which is a very, very small percentage of American society by design. So that's my greatest concern as we kind of go forward, I think. Well, the team at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, which includes a number of veterans from various services and levels of experience, shares your concern. And we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today to share your lessons learned. Unfortunately, we've run out of time,

but Colonel Bill Ostlin, Wes Morgan, we really appreciate you coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. This has been a great conversation on Irregular Warfare. Thanks so much, guys. Yeah, Kyle and Andy, thank you. Thank you very much. Keep doing what you're doing, guys. Thanks again for listening to episode 35 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Shauna and Laura discuss the dynamics of operating in the information environment with Dr. Raphael Cohen from RAND and Brent Colburn,

who has served as both the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. After that, Abigail and I discuss foreign fighters and the Islamic State. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you do not miss an episode. The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We generate written and audio content, coordinate events for the community, and host both up-and-coming as well as leading thinkers in the field of irregular warfare as fellows. You can follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government.

Thanks again, and we will see you next time.