School of War - Ep 28: Wesley Morgan on Afghanistan, Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Ep 28: Wesley Morgan on Afghanistan Wesley Morgan, journalist and author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, joins the show to discuss his experiences in the Pech Valley, one of Afghanistan’s most contested battlegrounds, and to talk about the U.S. counterinsurgency’s successes and failures. This episode is part 1 of 2. Times  02:52 Introduction 04:28 From Princeton to The Pech 07:25 The Age Dynamic  09:46 Fighting Styles In Helmand Province  12:42 The Episodic Nature Of Fighting In Afghanistan  13:42 The Terrain Of The Pech Valley 17:11 Seeking Bin Laden In Kunar  18:43 Kafiristan - Daniel Dravot’s Dream 20:27 Special Forces - A Tool For Every Task 24:21 The Role Of Seal Team Six and Delta Force 29:36 Seeking The Enemy  31:23 Who Was The Enemy In The Pech? 33:58 The Timber Mafia

So it's 2007, and you're a college student working on the campus newspaper, and one of your alums is a prominent general leading the American effort in Iraq. Naturally, you reach out for an interview. But what happens next? If you are Wesley Morgan, and the alum in question is David Petraeus, well, you find yourself, while still an undergrad, on the streets of Iraq as an embedded journalist. And you don't stop there. There's more trips to Iraq and ultimately to Afghanistan, where Morgan went on to become one of the most interesting observers and writers about America's long war in Central Asia, and especially in a remote, dangerous valley, one of the deadliest and ultimately the most famous in the country for the Americans called the Pesh.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end. and they stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Before we get to today's interview, I'd like to share a word from our sponsor, The Spectator. As the longest running magazine in the world, the Spectator eschews identity politics in favor of intelligent conversation and thought. From the war in Ukraine to the ideological war in the classroom, from the rise of inflation to the rise of cancel culture, the Spectator has been dedicated to stimulating reporting and analysis since 1828. The U.S. edition of The Spectator has just newly come ashore and is bringing the magazine's unique brand of high-quality writing and analysis to American audiences for the first time.

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I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Wesley Morgan. He's a journalist who's covered the U.S. military and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2007. His reporting has appeared widely, and he is the author of The Hardest Place, the American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pesh Valley. Wes, thanks so much for joining you today. Thanks for having me, Aaron. So, you know, you're your story fascinating one personally, and you've seen a lot of Afghanistan

in particular as much, if not more, than plenty of folks who have actually served there. So why don't we start by, could you just, you know, tell us a little bit about yourself how you got interested in, in journalism, but in war reporting specifically, and what took you to Afghanistan in the first place? Yeah, sure. I kind of grew up as a military history nerd. I mean, just, you know, reading everything I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam in particular.

That was always something I was really fascinated by. And then, you know, 9-11 happened when I was in eighth grade and I just got really hooked on the news. coming from first Afghanistan and then Iraq, just reading everything, everything that I could find about them, you know, from newspaper reports to, you know, books that started coming out of the wars. And then when I started college in 2006, and I just, I knew that I wanted to go see these wars and learn about them. And you kind of, the first, the first thing that I thought to do was, okay, I'll join ROTC because that's, you know, how you go see wars as you go into the military.

but that I very quickly wound up having another sort of strange opportunity come up to start going to first Iraq as a freelancer when I was actually 19 after my freshman year of college. And then did a couple of Iraq trips in 2007, 2008, and then first went to Afghanistan in 2009 during a year off between my sophomore and junior years of college and just got really hooked on Afghanistan and kept going back there. I'm sorry, I can't let all of this go because it's just so interesting and unusual I mean, first of all, did your parents know about this? And if so, what did they say? I think the main thing that my mom said was, well, we're not paying for it for the first trip, you know.

Well, how does a college freshman sophomore go to Iraq? Like, how did that actually happen? Well, it was a strange kind of set of events. I actually owe it to David Petraeus, sort of strangely enough. I, my freshman fall at Princeton, I was also starting to write for the school newspaper. And one of the things the school paper told me to do was go interview an interesting alum. And so I, you know, David Petraeus at that time was the Army three star general in charge of the Fort Leavenworth and the Army's Doctrine Running Hub, where he had just overseen the, you know, the writing of the field manual 3-24, the kind of infamous counterinsurgency manual. And so I looked him up on the alumni directory and I shot him a note and I said, you know, General Petraeus, would you be. up for an interview for the Princeton school paper. And he said, sure, and he was very generous with his time. We kind of stayed in touch. And then, you know, partway into my freshman year, it must have been

February or March of 2007, because he took command in Baghdad of multinational forces Iraq in February 2007. I got a note from him saying, basically, you know, Wes, where you up to for the summer? You want to come out and cover the surge for the Daily Princetonian? And so between, you know, the Daily Pristonian and the Long War Journal, which I I got in touch with and they helped fund that, you know, that initial trip. I went over for the summer of 2007, a portion of the summer of 2007, I think it was probably about five weeks kind of embedded in the greater Baghdad area. I really didn't know what to expect.

I kind of thought, oh, you know, they'll probably keep me in the green zone because I'm just a kid, you know, with no business being here. But this was at the height of the embedding system, a sort of, you know, maximum transparency and maximum, you know, maximum availability of embeds to reporters of probably the post-911 era. And so I just, you know, I showed up and they said, okay, what units do you want to went bed with? And so I thought, okay, I'll go to let me do this one on Hyva Street, this one in West Rashid, this one in Termina. How does that sound? And they, you know, got me on the flights and off I went. And so, you know, while I was there, that first time, I met some real war reporters like Michael Gordon,

then of the New York Times, who's always, who's kind of been a mentor of mine ever since. And Evan Wright, who wrote Generation Kill, who actually saw him in LA a few days ago and just kind of got hooked and thought, okay, this is, this is what I want to do. And as I kept going back, I met more reporters like that to include Alyssa Rubin of the New York Times, Joa Silva of the New York Times, who were really generous with kind of, you know, helping me see, see other parts of the war besides the embedded part that I, you know, initially, yeah. And you would have been about the same age as a good number of the troops. So those first few times you were over there. Yeah. Did that, did that affect your, you know, your, your, your nascent work? I guess most

reporters are substantially older than most of the troops they're interacting with. And so I guess they naturally gravitate towards NCOs and officers in their conversations. Did you find yourself talking to younger troops or just how did that whole dynamic work? Yeah, I kind of gravitated toward NCOs and officers because I wanted to understand what was going on and I wanted to make sure I didn't get killed. And so I would kind of, you know, I'd attach myself to some platoon sergeant or somebody kind of tag along with them down out on patrols. But yeah, I know it's it was an interesting dynamic.

I mean, that, you know, people, people would, you know, would make a big deal out of, oh, you're so young, you know, the youngest reporter around. But of course, I was the very same age as a large number of the, you know, especially young infantrymen out in these units fighting there. And within a few years, I mean, but I think I spent my 25th birthday in Afghanistan a few years later. And I remember on that trip kind of realizing that like, oh, wow, okay, so I would go out and in bed with these, you know, with these units. And at that point, as a 25-year-old, you know, some of the younger guys in these units

would kind of be like, oh, yeah, you know, this is the war reporter. He's like been around, you know, it's such an early young organization. that by the time you're 25 or so you're kind of old yeah yeah and you know so i guess in a in a way coincidental way you and i ended up in afghanistan around the same time i was there in 2009 and 10 you went there for the first time in was it was it 2010 what was that your first time in afghanistan i'm in afghanistan was 2009 and then the valley was 2010 so in 2009 i did a trip that summer that was that spring and early summer that took me to i spent some time with some green beret teams in Wardak just south of Kabul and then spent some time with these Illinois National Guard

police advisors who were in Helmand, actually in Nadia Ali area, working out of Lashkargha. So it was kind of, it was just before, you know, there were U.S. Marine units in Helmand, and there had been for a couple of years, or at least a year or so, but they had not yet kind of moved into, you know, Central Helmand. And the first big brigade level marine element was just starting to flow into theater. Yeah, I showed up. My first battalion six Marines was the first battalion out the door as part of the sort of big Obama surge, the surge he announced in December. And we did, you talk about riptoas in your book, Reliefs in Place. We joked. We did a riptoa with the Taliban in Marja, which some of us. I read a really interesting paper recently about, I think it was one six had been there shortly before as part of the meeting, right? That's right. Not before my time, but that's right. Yeah. Very interesting comparison. There were two Marine battalions in Helmand in 2008. one six down in the south and then I think it was two seven up in the north. And they just had these diametrically different experiences because they were fighting in

totally different ways. One was fighting as a mew and a magtaft. And then one was sort of spliced up and had no support and had no. It was just they end up. There's sort of this, there's this officer who wrote a fascinating study of basically how the way they fought affected the way veterans of those two units kind of processed their experiences. Oh, totally. I mean, I'm not familiar with the comparison of those two battalions, but I am familiar.

And I didn't go on the first one, but I am familiar with plenty of Marines who served with one six on the first deployment to which you're referring in 2008 to the Garmshire area where they were. They were part of the Marine expedite. I think it was the 20, either 26 or the 24th Mew and fought with, you know, sort of the full weight of the American warmaking machine behind them in terrain that was relatively advantageous to the kind of technology that Marines can bring to the fight. and under relatively loose restrictions compared to what was to come. And so, you know, plenty of Marines who I then serve with in 9 and 10 in the Marjah area under sort of the General McChrystal regime of relatively tight rules of engagement, you know, had both experiences. And it was extremely disorienting to them. And I think in general, the second time around was much harder. I mean, in ways that, you know, we're not all due to American policy and to the Marine Corps.

I mean, resistance in Marja was tougher, I think, than some of the resistance they faced in Garmshire. But it's also hard to measure those things because resistance tends to melt away pretty quickly in the face of a mew, you know, fighting without the kind of restrictions that we had in 2010. And that's, I mean, in the hardest place, my book about Kunar and Nuristan, I mean, one of the things that you see over and over is, you know, there are these air assault operations endlessly up into these mountains that the first the Marines and then the army run. And every once in a while, they'll kill a bunch of enemy. And this sort of the possibility of killing a bunch of enemy like that is so tempting for sort of succession of commanders, year after year after year, that they keep doing these air assaults, even after it's very obvious that they're really not accomplishing anything. Yeah. Well, let's get into this because, I mean, it's a really remarkable book.

And I recommend it to all of our listeners today. This is going to sound a little over the top. But this is a real reaction I had was, you know, you talk in your. And the start of the book about, you know, sort of showing up in this, what was a very mature environment, militarily speaking in 2009, 2010, you know, established bases, you know, robust logistics, things kind of moving in set patterns. It seemed like it had always been that way. Soldiers, Marines didn't really have much of a memory of how things that started or how we kind of got to this place, which were clearly a kind of like obviously stalemate. And you're sort of launching off point is to ask yourself in the book, well, how did it get here? You know, how did things start up in this corner of Afghanistan? How did it get to this juncture?

There's almost this kind of, you know, it's reminiscent of, you know, the ancient Greek historian. It's sort of an inquiry into cause. Like, how did we get to this juncture and you take it right back to the start of the war? And it's really well done and well executed. And I'm sure, you know, obviously not the part of Afghanistan that I served in, but I'm sure everyone who was up there has to be grateful to you for the labor and documentation that you did here of their fight. And not just a kind of chronicle of it. There is a chronicling of it, you know, is sort of it's almost episodic, not because of your, you know, not because of, you know, not because of, you know, a literary approach that you chose, but because it is episodic, the units that come, they go, you know, but really pulling down to the sort of fundamental causes and themes and trends. So maybe could you, could you tell us, tell us about the Pesh, you know, tell us about this sort of the river, the tributary system, the terrain of eastern, northeastern Afghanistan. Like, just set the scene of it. What's it? What's it? What's it? like up there. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I've been to a lot of parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan. I haven't been much to the north or the west or the center. But as far as the south and east, you know, Kunar-Nuristan provinces, northeast of Kabul, they look very different from other parts of the south and east. And it's because they're, I mean, they're mountainous, which is true of other parts

of the east. But the mountains are really jagged. I mean, they're kind of, they're these very steep, sharp mountains with these kind of canyon-like, almost gorges for valleys that cut through them. And that's where a lot of the population lives is along the valley floors in these sort of green cultivated ribbons where the people grow corn and stuff and where roads run along the valley floors. But then you also have settlements, sometimes from sort of much older ethnic groups and populations that are dotted up on up deeper, higher and higher into the mountains themselves. And the higher and higher you go into the mountains, the greener things get. And so this is a part of Afghanistan that has really thick forest.

You don't really see it from the valley floors, you know, from the valley floors, you know, from the valley floors, the hillsides above you look kind of brown. There's kind of some, you know, some evergreen oak forests, some kind of shrubbed forest, stuff like that. But if you keep going up in the mountains, and often American troops would have seen this until they did their first air assault mission up into there and were like, whoa, where did I just get dropped off? Is this Pacific Northwest? There are the huge conifer forests, you know, pine, cedars, furs, really enormous trees. There was actually an East India company botanist who was so amazed by this trees, these trees, these trees when he accompanied an East India company expedition to Kunar in 1840 or 1841,

that he stayed behind when the expedition went back to Kabul just so he could keep kind of taking notes on the vegetation and stuff that he saw up there that was so unusual. But so these, you know, the mountains, the trees, the weather, these kind of wind up being a character in the story. There is much of an obstacle to U.S. forces as the Taliban are. And I say Taliban kind of broadly because, you know, what you see in this area is that when U.S. forces showed up there in 2002, there really wasn't any Taliban. This was a place that the Taliban had not had a strong foothold before 9-11. And what you see in the years that follow is the Taliban gains a very strong foothold there because they capitalize on an insurgency that kind of arises indigenously in this area in response to U.S. missteps and mistakes, which then the Taliban basically plugs itself into that insurgency and makes a lot of hay from it. But what you see going back to the to the very early years, very early months, really, in the spring of 2002, is that the unique

terrain, vegetation weather up there make the mountains north and south of the Pesh Valley, which is kind of a, it's a river that flows from way up in the mountains in Norristand province where there are these big lakes, you know, 15, 16,000 foot peaks. The Pesh flows down, you know, south and then east to where it joins the Koonar River at the Koonar's provincial capital, which is a small city called Asada, It's small, but it's the biggest city in Kunar province. And, you know, as the Pesh flows down there from the mountains in Nuristan to Asadabad, it's joined by these smaller tributary valleys, some of which are very famous, like the

Khorengal, the Weigal, where the Battle of Wannot happened, the Waterport, the Shuriyak, where lone survivor episode happened. And what you see in the early years of the war is U.S. forces kind of get drawn up there, basically because the terrain is such that Osama bin Laden himself went and took shelter up in that part of the country after he was displaced from Torabura and escaped from Toribora. So in the spring of 2002, joint special operations command operators and CIA guys start wandering on up into Kunar, basically just trying to find Arabs, trying to find all the Arabs that had been displaced out of the Battle of Toriborah.

And do we know how long bin Laden stayed in that area? I mean, I do not know. When did he, in retrospect, move on and end up in Pakistan? Not totally clear, but it was sometimes. in the summer of 2002 that he left. It could have been as early as, you know, June of 2002. So very shortly after the first Americans showed up in Kunar, or it could have been as late as September of 2002,

which, you know, in late September, early October, the Rangers and Steel Team 6 wind up doing a huge raid up in Kunar, lose their first helicopter up there, not to the enemy, but to the terrain. That's really, it's a dry hole, it's a miss, but they actually never know kind of how close they actually came. Because it's not, it's, we know in retrospect that Bin Laden, and in fact was in Kunar at this time in the Shigal Valley. That was where he went to after Toribora.

But that didn't become clear to the U.S. military and the CIA until many years later. And just as a tribute to the kind of remoteness and alien nature of the places we're talking about, just a little further to the north of the places we're talking about, right, is a place called Nuristan, once upon a time called Kaffiristan, Kaffir being Arabic for infidel, and a reference to the fact that there are pockets of non-Muslims committed to a kind of polytheistic, you know, confessional orientation until what, a hundred years ago or so. This is the subject of the great Kipling story, the man who would be king is this part of the world.

But a man who would be king is based on, and it's totally fascinating. It's, you know, U.S. forces would show up in Kuhnur, and there are a lot of Nuristanis that kind of are in parts of Kunaar, but basically what they are is there is an old, an old series of ethnic groups. It's really not one, like, you know, we say Nuristanis, because that is the word that was applied to this area by the Afghan government in 18. 96 when they conquered the place. But really, it's a bunch of different ethnic groups with their own languages. Depending on how you count, there are five or six Neuristani languages. They're mutually

unintelligible. They have no written form. These are people who may previously have have ranged much farther into kind of the lowlands of Kunar, but gradually over the last, you know, thousand years probably kind of got compressed up there by Pashai people who have their own languages and who themselves were being pushed by Pashions. And so in the same way that, you know, kind of the physical difficulties of Afghanistan for U.S. forces were magnified in the Pesh Valley and its tributaries by the mountains, the weather, the forests, kind of the sort of the intelligence difficulties, the difficulties just understanding what's going on around you, of trying to figure out, trying to prevent yourself from being played, understanding what the motivations of your

sources are, all that kind of thing, are also magnified by in Kuna and Erasthan and the Pesh Valley that runs between them. Because, you know, anywhere in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces went, right there's this you're dealing with you're working through interpreters speak pashdo and dari up in up in the pash valley you need interpreters who speak pashto and dari but you also need interpreters who speak coringali and gambiri and wigali and you know this all these other languages that just make it so much more complicated tell us about these early groups you know we're talking about sort of tribes on both ends in a way aren't we tell us about these early kinds of americans from the special operations community who find themselves up in these valleys. What kind of troops are they? What are they

different? What are the kind of major groupings that they come from? Yeah, there's kind of a parade of the tribes of the U.S. military that sees itself through the Pesch over the years. I divided the book into four parts chronologically. The first part covers from the spring of 2002 when the first Americans showed up up through basically mid-2005 when the Operation Red Wings catastrophe happens. And the war kind of shifts into a different gear in the Pesh from that point. But so in that period of about about three years, what you see is first it's J-Soc, the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA. They are the first kind of stakeholders in Kunar. And they establish what becomes called a Sadabat base for the CIA, which, you know, lasts for a long time and it's kind of embedded within a larger military base.

So they show up there in April or May. But pretty quickly, they start kind of being reinforced by other special operations forces. So what we might call the white side soft, green berets in particular. And then by conventional army paratroopers from the 82nd, you know, infantry from the 10th Mountain who wind up kind of pulling security. But basically what you see happen is this succession of, you know, JASOC and the CIA go up there for their sort of narrow counterterrorism purpose of trying to figure out where bin Laden went.

They're unable to pick up the trail, although they actually come closer to it than they ever know. And basically they move on. In the fall of 2002, the J-Soc Task Force in Afghanistan gets stripped down to basically a skeleton presence as J-Soc gets ready for its sort of playing a major role in the war in Iraq. They come back briefly in the fall of 2003. There's a big surge of basically half the Ranger Regiment goes, flies up into these flies and drives up into these valleys, trying one more time to pick up in Lodon's Trail.

It doesn't work. And then at that point, J-Soc kind of leaves the Pesh. and they hand things over to the Green Berets who are part of, you know, they're also special operations forces, but the way U.S. forces were structured in Afghanistan, there really were kind of three main tribes of U.S. military forces working in the country, often in the same places all at once. You have the J-Soc, you know, J-Soc, the Black Soft guys who have their chain of command. You have the Green Berets and, you know, Navy SEALs and Marine Raiders who later wound up reinforcing them, who are the White Soft, and they have their chain of command.

It goes to an organization called Sieges Soda, Fad Bagram, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. And then you have conventional forces. And so Green Berets basically inherit the Pesh mission. They spend a year, the year 2004, kind of running a camp, what they called an A camp, but a little forward operating base out in the Pesh Valley. It was named after a ranger who was killed there, J. Blessing. And then in the fall of 2004, basically Green Beret leadership gets tired of the place. There's a, you know, there's transition in leadership at Bagram, and they pull up stakes and leave, and it's left in the hands of Marines who had already been there kind of as an additional security element for the Green Berets, giving them a little extra manpower. There have been a Marine platoon living out at Camp Blessing, but now this Marine platoon Plus inherits what the Green Berets have been doing.

And now it's in the hands of conventional forces. We'll come back to Marines and conventional forces in a bit because in some ways the most brutal mid periods of the war. of your book takes place with them. But let's talk a bit about, you know, J-Socque versus white-side soft. And I think these are things that some listeners might appreciate some more, some more color on, if you will. Like what kinds of Americans are these? What, what characterizes somebody who's a green beret versus somebody who's, you know, in the Delta Force? Or, you know, I think folks who just followed the military a little bit, you think, you know, a Navy SEAL is a Navy SEAL is a Navy SEAL. What's the difference here between a white side Navy SEAL and somebody

who's, you know, part of the Special Warfare Development Group. Sure. Yeah. I mean, so the J-Sog task force, J-Sog is built around SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force, the Army and Navy counterterrorism, and special mission units. And kind of the way the Division of Labor was worked out in the years after 9-11, basically after 2002, Delta Force did Iraq and Steel Team 6, or Dev Group did Afghanistan.

And then Rangers supported them in both. And as the war progressed, you know, starting pretty early on, Rangers began to grow in kind of the role that they played. in the J-Sog Task Force from kind of being the little brother that you see in Black Hawk Down, for instance, kind of pulling security for the, you know, for the big guys to eventually becoming really a full partner in the enterprise and eventually inheriting Afghanistan from Sealtim 6. But this is a long evolution that happens over the course of a decade, basically. But so these units, Rangers, Siltim 6, Delta Force, and all the various organizations that support

them, they were very focused throughout the Afghan war on direct action, on hunting, insurgent and terrorist leaders initially pretty much just al-Qaeda ones and ones who were thought to be associated with al-Qaeda, but then gradually as the war went on kind of reaching lower and lower into the insurgent hierarchy going after, you know, middle and low-level bomb makers and so on. But that's what they're out there doing is raids, basically, raids trying to find people and kill them, kill or capture them. Then you have the, you know, what I referred to as white soft, white special operations forces, the, the Green Beret Task Force, at Bogram, which early in the war had some Navy SEALs attached to it. The SEALs kind of came and went

at different periods of the war, and then later Marine Raiders formed a part of the White Soft Task Force. They had a less clear mission. I mean, there was almost an identity crisis going on in Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, as these events played out. But, you know, in theory, Green Berets are kind of the unconventional warriors of the Army, you know, not so focused on direct action and kicking indoors, but with a strong specialty in training foreign forces, building out, whether it's irregular militias or, you know, a resistance movement or, you know, or an existing foreign military force. But that's sort of, that's what they're supposed to be really good at. But what you see in Afghanistan is you see this kind of clash between different parts of the Green Beret identity.

And this plays out in the Pesh Valley in 2004, as I describe in chapter three of the book, where you have two successive Green Beret teams that operate out of FAA blessing and operate. in the Pesh, in the same piece of terrain, living in the same base, dealing with the same informants, but with very diametrically opposed approaches to it and really very diametrically opposed conceptions of what it is that they're there to do. The first team, which is there for the first half of 2004, well, really from late 2003, is they're called ODA-936, operational detachment alpha-936. And they're a team of National Guard, Green Berets, from Utah, from the Utah National Guard. So they tend to be older than active-duty green berets. Most of them had been,

active duty green berets previously. You know, back in the 90s or even the 80s, there was one guy on the team who, you know, when he had been an active duty green beret was back in the era of like backpack nukes and, you know, training to go into the Soviet Union and blow up the trans-Liberian railway. But they had, they had an approach that was kind of, they saw themselves, the way the team commander described, the guy named Ron Fry, they saw it as J-Soc came in here to squash cockroaches. We're in here to sort of create light that will make the cockroaches not want to be here. And the light for them is they're building up a local security force.

There's really no Afghan National Army to speak up yet outside of Kabul. So they are sort of they're recruiting a militia to support what little there is of a government out in the Pesh Valley. And then they're going to try and create kind of an inkblot of security to use the old French, you know, counterinsurgency analogy that will make it hard for insurgents to operate in. And they're really focused on just the environment surrounding their base and the town of Nangalam, which is the big. town in the Pesh Valley and trying to create this little bubble of security there. And they're not so concerned about what's going on, you know, up in the hills outside of that, because they don't see that as really their mission. Then they're replaced in the summer of, in the early summer of 2004 by an active duty

green beret team from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who really see themselves much more as, like, yes, we work with an indigenous force, but what we do with it is we go and we chase the enemy up to wherever the enemy is, and we go and find them and kill them. So these two teams, they, you know, they're working in the same place, but they really, they have very different approaches. And where this comes to a head is in the side valley called the Coringal Valley, which is one of the tributaries of the Pesh and which the 19th group team had pretty assiduously ignored. I mean, basically they, they had figured out, although they didn't understand the details, that there were timber interests at play between the people who lived in the Coringal and the people

who lived outside the Coringal, whom the Green Berets were working closely with and who seemed to be, have an interest in getting the Green Berets involved in the Coringal. So they kind of kept themselves out of it. The third group team, they come in. They've been reading the same, you know, they've been reading the 19th group teams, Intel reports, which sources are saying, oh, there's, you know, Abu Ghlaas and al-Qaeda trainer is up in the coringal. This Taliban figure is up in the coringal.

He's involved in the temper trade somehow. And they basically just start going into the Coringal to pick fights. They see it as this is where the enemy is. Our job here in Afghanistan is to punish the enemy. for what it did to the United States. And so that's where we will just sort of go on missions, escalating missions. You know, initially, you know, just a team, then a company of Green Berets, then drag a company Marines along.

And by the time they leave in the fall of 2004, this is the situation that they hand off to three, six Marines, basically, is the Coringal is where the enemy is. Our job is to chase the enemy in the Coringal. At the risk of being flippant, your account of this evolution or devolution as the case maybe makes me think of Robin Williams's great film, Good Morning, Vietnam, in which one of the characters that he imitates on his radio, Adrian, something, the character Williams plays in the movie, imitates in the radio as this military intelligence officer who I'm not going to imitate the accent,

but there's this routine where he says, you know, who he introduces himself as being from military intelligence and says, you know, what I do. I find the enemy. And, you know, then he said, well, how do you do that? And he said, well, I go around and I ask people, are you the enemy? And if they say, yes, I shoot them. And there's, you know, there's a serious version of that lampoon that seems appropriate here. You keep saying these guys had the mindset that what they are there to do is go after the enemy.

And there are surely people who we can all agree are the enemy. If you are, if you are an Arab tied to the Al-Qaeda international network, you are the enemy. That seems unambiguous. You know, if you are on the payroll of the Quedasura Taliban, okay, as the years go on. Well, but then actually at the back end more ambiguously again, but for a period there, sort of unambiguously the enemy. But this describes, Wes, would you say those two categories of people describe what percentage of people bearing arms in a place like the Khorengal or the Pesh Valley?

Pesh and the Kornagal, a very tiny percentage of them. You know, as time goes on, a bigger percentage, especially as the Taliban kind of commits, commits its own manpower to the Kornagal. But at the beginning, I mean, there really was no Taliban in Kuna. You know, they had taken over. the provincial capital in about 1998, 1999, but they really had not penetrated further than that. They had been content to kind of leave it in the hands of this sort of balance of local warlords and timber barons. And so the United States steps into this mess, you know, these Green Beret teams

and CIA guys and J-Soc guys who show up in the spring of 2002. And they kind of, they pretty, pretty unquestioningly accept whoever it is that wants to work with them, right? If a warlord shows up and he has, you know, a bunch of armed men at his disposal, he's got an English-speaking son, that's pretty much good to go. That's a, that's a ready made ally. I mean, it's hard to blame them. I mean, who, you know, why would they not work with that guy? But what's up happening is, you know, as these green berets go out, I mean, basically to, you know, to continue with the Robin Williams, good morning Vietnam thing, they're going around asking, are you the enemy? And of course, people say, no, but they say, you know, that guy across the river. He's the enemy. And, you know, they'll say, oh, what, you know, he, he, he harbored an al-Qaeda operative after Torabora. Oh, we heard there were Arabs there. And that may be true, but very often there's an ulterior motive. And so what happens to U.S. forces in the Coringal is a great example of this is they get sucked into unwittingly other kinds of existing conflicts and disputes that have been either that have been playing out in this part of the country for a long time.

You know, they're everything from disputes over gem mines to disputes over timber, which is what you get in the Coringal to disputes over water rights or land pasture rights or, you know, marriage disputes between, families, but U.S. forces basically are used as a weapon in these disputes. And they don't really have the kind of the wherewithal in these early years on, you know, six-month rotations, often to understand the details of the feuds that they're being sucked into. You know, there's one, one Kunari who described it to me as, you know, very early on by 2003 or so, people were wondering who is whose proxy. Because, you know, from the American perspective, you know, we're here. We've got these indigenous, you know, indige that we call them, militias running around chasing. targets for us, but also those very same indige are identifying the targets for us. And basically,

you wind up taking sides in disputes that you don't understand you're taking sides in. And so in the case of the Coringal, what happens is Green Beret team 361, the Fort Bragg team that replaced the National Guard guys, they basically wind up on the side of lowland timber barons, who are the middlemen, whom the Koringalis sell their cedar to, who then in turn sell it to a Pakistani timber mafia who bring it to sale in the Persian Gulf where this cedar is really highly valued for both how great it is for kind of it's aromatic,

it's raw resistant, it's bug resistant, but also it has this sheen to it of being jihad wood because that was how it had been marketed to wealthy Gulfies back in the 1980s during the war against the Soviets, and it has kind of retained that prestige. And so, you know, this Green Beret team and then the Marines who follow them, they wind up on the side of these Safi Pashtun

and the Mille, the Pesh Valley and the Kunar Valley. And so from the Kornagali's perspective, what's happened is their business rivals have brought in American muscle. They haven't told the American muscle that that's what they are, but it is what they are. And so the Korn Ghalis, in turn, go to the Taliban. And they invite the Taliban in and they say, we need, we need our own muscle. And that's going to be you. And, you know, we'll give you a cut of our profits and so on.

but we need you to kind of to be here to help protect our timber interests. And so over time, what happens is this local dispute over timber in this very remote austere valley becomes this arena for these two really outside forces, the United States and the Taliban, to cut to, you know, to duke it out. And both of them wind up finding it very difficult to disengage. Thanks, everyone for listening. My conversation with Wesley about his book, The Hardest Place, ran a little long. So this will be a two-part episode.

Join next week as we talk about the escalation of the American effort in the Pesh, peak counterinsurgency, and how it all fell apart. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcast.