School of War - Ep 29: Wesley Morgan on Afghanistan, Part 2 of 2

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

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.  Times  • 01:25 Illicit Economies • 04:13 Green Berets And CIA “Lost The Forest For The Trees” In Kunar • 06:57 Who Is Jim Gant? • 11:36 Self-Aware Proxy Warriors • 13:42 Counterinsurgency Styles and Outpost Building • 20:44 Central Government - Whether They Want It Or Not • 33:18 Cash For Calm - Paying For Peace • 37:22 War Winds Down In The Pech  • 41:30 The Afghan House Of Cards Collapses • 44:13 A Tired Afghan Army With No Good Options

As the special ops-driven cowboy days of the early years of America's involvement in Afghanistan's Pesh Valley, seated to a period characterized by mainline infantry leadership and peak counterinsurgency tactics, did matters there improve? Well, they didn't. Things went poorly as rotation after rotation of American troops struggled to orient on the complexities of fighting in a place so remote, so strange, that it's adjacent to the place about which Redyard Kipling wrote his famous, The Man Who Would Be King. Ultimately, Americans withdrew, first from the Pesh and then from Afghanistan. Here's part two of my conversation with Wesley Morgan, author of The Hardest Place,

about how it all went wrong. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. and the people who not see buildings there. We shall fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender. And, you know, I think it's easy when you think about poppy and opium in southern Afghanistan. I mean, everyone sort of assumes that trade is illicit. But what you are describing,

this whole economy is through the period that you're describing in the book, is illicit, right? I mean, it's all illegal. Why was that? It is all illegal. And it's, there is sort of an ironic. story to how it became illegal, which is, you know, American troops are not the only outsiders who get snookered by their sources, their, you know, their Afghan sources. So did the international

environmental NGOs. And basically what appears to have happened is that in 2002, these same sort of valley floor strongmen who have an interest in changing the terms of the agreement, the terms of the timber business, they become the first iteration of the Afghan government in Kuna. These various Valley Floor strong men, Haji Jahandad, you know, Rahulah, a few different guys, they become, you know, the border police chief, the police chief, the initial provincial governor. And they tell environmental NGOs, including the UN environmental program, that there is really serious deforestation occurring in Kuna, you know, kind of a real environmental problem. And that the way to stop this is with a ban on the timber trade altogether, illegalize it.

So the international environmental groups, they actually sell the Karzai government on doing this. And one of the first laws, one of the early laws that the Karzai government passes is this timber ban. What this does is it makes the timber trade illegal for everybody. But that means that basically the people enforcing this ban are also party to the timber trade. They are these sort of these lowland figures who are making money getting the timber out of the Coringal. So it really just empowers these these sort of these timber barons and their and their militias to change the terms of the agreement, to change the change how the business works with the Coringollies and say, okay, well, we're not going to pay you as much anymore because you're doing something illegal and we're the guys charged with enforcing that law. So we call the shots now. you know, we don't have to get into the question of why international NGOs are snuckered by, you know,

mobsters of the sort that we're discussing here. And, you know, also the fact that, you know, members of the Delta Force and Steel Team 6 are monomaniacly focused on hunting the highest profile bad guys at the expense of other considerations. That's also really not all that surprising. And as we'll come to in a minute, the fact that regular infantry are ill-suited to some of these dynamics, also not that surprising. How is it, though, that the Green Berets and the CIA, two organizations that theoretically are responsible to the U.S. government for regular warfare, unconventional warfare, how did they get dragged into all this nonsense and kind of lose themselves amidst all these dynamics? I mean, it's a great question. I mean, as you say, I mean, the Green Berets in particular, and we'd like to think this is true of, you know, CIA paramilitaries as well, I mean, they should be able to seek. through this stuff. But up in Kunar, it was just such a murky, complex, cloudy environment. And I think the emotions were so strong, you know, in the years immediately following 9-11, the people just,

they wanted in on the action. You know, I mean, they wanted, you know, what's the difference between, you know, a Taliban guy and a Hig guy? I mean, if they, if they both have ties to some Al-Qaeda guy, then it's worth going after them, right? And, you know, I think, you know, what you did see was a lot of Green Beret teams, you know, not this National Guard team, who who really were very cautious and really had a lot of perspective on the ways in which they might be being used and avoided the Coringol for that for that reason. But you see a lot of Green Doree teams that just want to get their gun on. And that's that's really what they, what they wind up, you know, conceiving of themselves doing. Now, there are there are stereotypes within special

forces of, you know, of the five active duty special forces groups. You know, there are stereotypes about which ones are more prone to this and which ones are kind of have a more cemented culture of really working with partners and kind of being more sophisticated. But I think this is something that the whole Green Beret community winds up dealing with in the years after 9-11 is, as they get thrust into these kind of roles of, you know, running and gunning, it's really appealing. And it can be hard to set that aside. I want to ask you about one, one character in your book who is sort of a recurring figure, Jim Gant in a second. But before we get to Gant, you know, you've obviously developed all these great sources with the Green Berets and I think with the agency as well. Have you

detected any reflection or serious reflection about the shortcomings of these organizations throughout this conflict? Yeah, I think so. I mean, CIA guys that I talked to with a couple of exceptions who were sort of the more senior ones, unfortunately, a number of the agency personnel that I talked to were pretty, you know, really had kind of had done a lot of thinking about this and we're pretty clear about, hey, yeah, we were being used all the time every day by people who were really good at figuring out how to use us. And in retrospect, we were pretty dumb about it. But this was this was this this is what happened yeah yeah after about seven months you know Marines we do these short deployments so seven months and I felt that I understood of the important dynamics you know governing

Afghans on the ground where I was and you you and others who have served in Afghanistan will appreciate that what I'm about to say is a kind of an arrogant boast I felt I understood about five you know on a good day maybe 10% of the dynamics that I that I really ought to have understood in order to actually understand what was going on around me so your book is populated with all these colorful characters and, you know, leaders of these various organizations, both American and Afghan, and, you know, we could talk for hours and hours. We don't actually have that this afternoon. But I want to ask you about one in particular special forces officer named Jim Gant. Who is Jim Gant? How did you first encounter him and what's his relevance to the story of the Pesh Valley?

Sure. I mean, so Jim Gant is kind of an infamous figure because of the way that his career ended in 2011, 2012, a decade after the events that I talked about him in relation to. Basically, years later, during the Afghan surge era, he goes back to Kunar, not to the Pesh Valley, but to an adjacent area and is empowered by top generals, including General Petraeus and the Socom commander at the time, the admiral who was in charge of so, Eric Olson, to set up kind of like a local police program, a militia program. And in the course of doing that, they kind of, they put him out there, he goes out there for an indefinite tour, just kind of the, you know,

In some ways, that's kind of the answer to this problem of, oh, only it's only, you know, at the seven month mark, are you just sort of starting to understand what's going on around you? I mean, what's the alternative? Well, maybe the alternative is sending guys like Jim Gant, who are willing to stay out here for a really long time. But it takes a toll. And Jim Gant really, I mean, he got, he got mixed up in some, I don't want to say mixed

up in. He, I mean, he was the perpetrator of some pretty illegal stuff by the end, by the end of his time there and wound up being pulled out, you know, by the Green Beret Command. you know, whether, whether how they dealt with him was, was fair or not. I mean, I think it's a controversial question among special forces. But a decade before that, his first combat tour after 9-11, as a young captain, well, not that young because he was a former NCO himself, but, but as a captain in charge of about eight Green Berets on a sort of an underman green beret team, he went to Kunar in 2003. And he was pretty frank with me about the fact that,

you know, I mean, on a day-to-day basis, what he was trying to do was get into fights. and that the place that you could do that was the Pesh Valley. And that's why he was sort of he was drawn, you know, he was drawn up into the Pesh Valley because there were fights to be had there. There were, you know, sort of supposed Taliban figures to raid and capture. And he actually was present at what I think was the first real interaction between Americans and Khorngalis. There's this incredible meeting that a Kunari American named Hyder Akbar,

who was the teenage son of the governor at that time, actually he did. recorded this whole meeting. It's a disastrous meeting from from from your account of it. I mean, it's just, it's just incredible. I mean, basically what, you know, what's happening is what I've described a little earlier. This is a meeting in which the, the lowland strongman, Ajjjanad, he has sent one of his representatives up into the coringola a few days earlier to say, okay, we're not going to be paying you as much for your timber anymore. Coringale, he's beat him up and sent him away. And so he comes back with Gant's Green Beret team, as well as with the Green Beret Company Commander. And what you hear in this recording is the, the, the

Green Beret Company commander, just making it painfully clear that he does not understand what his what his Afghan allies are using him for. He gives this really off-key analogy about, you know, clearly he's been told by his allies, oh, the Khorongolleys aren't paying their taxes. That's what's going on here. They're anti-government and they're not paying new taxes. And so he gives- this- Boy, do I have news for him. Sorry, please keep going. I mean, never mind that the, you know, that these guys have no role in tax collection. There is no tax collection system or anything like that at the time. But he gives this analogy to the Koringali elders that he's talking to. He's saying, look, when I get a parking ticket in the United States, I got to pay it.

That's part of being a good citizen. And then he makes them shake hands with their, you know, with their business partner, rival, who's brought him up there, pose for a picture. And at the end of the meeting, one of the guys takes Jim Gant to get aside and says, hey, don't come back here. Next time you come back here, we're going to be shooting at you. And pretty much from there on out, it's game on every time Americans go to the Koringal. And it's kind of incredible that this kid, Hider, I mean, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,

He recorded this meeting. So I have to say I've I've followed Jim Gant's story a bit over the years. And I haven't. I single him out. I mean, you have any number of really interesting characters in your book. But I single him out because all of his his struggles with his demons aside for a moment, he did seem.

I think he accomplished something that some of his peers as team leaders and special forces operators did not, which was, I mean, just to phrase it in the most minimal way, when he was acting as a proxy on behalf of some Afghan, you know, political unit, he knew it. He knew that that's what he was doing and he was doing it to some purpose. He had he had a kind of concrete plan for local engagement that was a fruit of his earlier experiences there and a fruit of his, the relationships he had built in eastern Afghanistan. And he's pursuing American policy based on these relationships in ways that were deeply in tension with the actual American policy pursued by his,

his chain of command. I'm curious to know if you agree with that assessment. I do. I mean, I think, I think that's right about kind of what he, what he, when he came back in 2009, 10, 11, and he was, he was, you know, he had taken stuff away from his 2003 Kunaar experience. Yeah, I mean, I think he had learned from from what he saw in the Coringal and in the Pesh. But yeah, in 2003, I mean, I think he really, I mean, the way he described it to me and the way it comes across in kind of the reports that he filed and, you know, that he showed me was, yeah, they just, they weren't very sophisticated about differentiating one kind of Afghan from another kind of Afghan. And they just, they were out looking for a fight.

It's just really, that's pretty much the way, the way he put it. And, you know, I mean, one thing that you see with Depeche is because U.S. forces were involved there for so long, and because so many different American military tribes were persistently engaged there, you see a lot of people who kind of have formative experiences of one kind or another in the Pesh and in Kumar. You know, it's Jim Gantt, but There are a lot of other names that pop up in the book from, you know, from Mark Millie, the current chairman of the joint sheets. He was a one star who oversaw, you know, operations in regional command of East in 2007 to eight and he spent a lot of time focused on, on the Pesh and Kunar, because that was where

some of the heaviest fighting in his sector was. Chris Kovoli, you know, the nominee to be the new European command commander and Supreme Allied commander for NATO. He was a battalion commander for 15, 16 months in Kunar and Nuristan. The army in some ways, the senior ranks of the army, you're really populated by a lot of guys who dip their toes into Kunar Nuristan at one point or another in their careers. Well, let's talk about, we started with this gradual transition from sort of the first

tier of American special operation forces over to so-called whites off. Talk about the transition to regular infantry, which was, of course, not an overnight thing, sort of an ongoing on and off process. But by the time you were first there, the infantry was really, you know, significantly in control of a lot of. And I think it was the Army infantry by the time you were there, significantly in control of operations. How did, you know, in the face of these extraordinarily complicated local political dynamics, you know, how did the infantry handle attempting to manage all of that?

And also, I think it's probably the appropriate time because I think chronologically we are there. Talk a bit about counterinsurgency theory and how counterinsurgency theory came to, came into the fight in Afghanistan. Yeah. So the Marine infantry takes over in the Pesh in late 2004. but early 2006 is really the big turning point where the war in the Pesh becomes heavily conventionalized, you might say. In early 2006, the third brigade of the 10th Mountain Division rotates into eastern Afghanistan. And they have this kind of window of opportunity where

they are replacing another army brigade, but they also have this Marine Battalion working for them. And so there's this overlap period when they have more forces than their predecessors. And they are in fact going to have somewhat more forces than their predecessors. for the length of their deployment. And so going into this deployment, you know, the brigade and battalion commanders who were relevant here from Tenth Mountain were up. The brigade commander was Mick Nicholson, who goes on to be a four-star general and to run the whole U.S. and NATO show in Afghanistan in 2016, 17, 18, including, you know, sort of selling the Trump administration on the mini surge in 2017. But Nicholson and his subordinate Chris Kovoli, who's the battalion commander of the 132

infantry battalion. They have really, they go into the deployment talking the talk of what the military calls coin. This is before the field manual has come out. I mean, this is, they are an example of something that was happening throughout Iraq and Afghanistan where basically, relatively small units, whether it's a Green Beret team or or an Army battalion or H.R. McMaster's armored cavalry regiment, Tallahfar, you know, or Mick Nicholson's brigade in eastern Afghanistan, there's, there's enough kind of like collective memory about Vietnam, even though the army has sort of tried to turn away from that over the preceding, you know, 30 years, there are enough kind of smart officers who, you know, who have either their parents fought in Vietnam or they just, they read a lot about

Vietnam when they were cadet at West Point, that there is this, there is this, it's not doctrine, but it is this, this sort of notion of counterinsurgency population, population centric coin, where you commit a lot of troops, you build a lot of outposts, and you kind of create these ink blots of security to push the insurgency out, that many different units hit upon this independently. Before in 2007, it kind of becomes canon under Petraeus in Iraq. And Nicholson and Cavoli are an example of a unit that hit upon it independently. So they went into their 2006 deployment thinking, we're going to be doing, you know, infantry intensive, outpost-intensive coin somewhere in the Afghan East. And they kind of get steered by the CIA a little bit

to do it in the Pesh, as opposed to say, you know, Pactea and Pactica farther south along the border or somewhere like that. Because, you know, the CIA has this interest in, well, there's not a lot of U.S. forces up in Kunar and Nuristan. Kunaar and Nuristan, but an area of Pakistan where they believe that bin Laden and Zawakri may be hiding out. They hope that if Tenth Mountain builds a bunch of outposts up there, that will sort of help them recruit sources. And they kind of nudge Tenth Mountain into doing this because Tenth Mountain has made clear that they're going to be doing coin someplace. But so, yeah, in the spring of 2006, 10th Mountain, accompanied by one three Marines, they do a huge operation up into the Pest and the Khorngal, followed by another one up into the Weigal, in which the number of U.S. outposts in the Pesh itself and its tributary valleys goes from just one, camp blessing at the district center to they built the Coringal outpost. They build three little outposts along the Pesh Road. And then they build the ranch house and Bella outposts way, way up in the Wigal Valley. And so the scale of the war change. from an American perspective, from, you know, small elements of green berets and Marines that are operating at a camp blessing to the bulk of a battalion, you know, several hundred guys. These are, you're 700 man infantry battalions spread out among many outposts, both in the Pesh proper and in its even more remote and dangerous tributaries. So that's, and that's sort of, that's what part two of the book covers is the years from 2006 to about 2010 when a succession of U.S. Army of future battalions were, were, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, committed to this fight and kind of lived in this footprint that 10th Mountain created of outposts.

And let me, I'll share an observation or a conclusion, I guess, I came to during my time in the South and ask you if you think it applies up there in the East. And, you know, in the South, in particular where I was, you know, the tribal infrastructure was, it was there. There were, there were definitely tribes. But things were kind of shattered and mixed up and people moving around in that area for a long time. It wasn't the sort of, you know, ancient. and almost West Virginia kind of hollers that you've got up in the east there with a fair amount of stability, I think, in terms of movement of people. And even so, I had, by the time I was departing in the summer of 2010, having, having, you know, traveled to Afghanistan as kind of a,

you know, a true believer in counterinsurgency theory, is somebody who was persuaded at a distance, I never served in Iraq, but at a distance that it had been somewhat successful in Iraq and pacifying the insurgency there. I left thinking that we were trying to stick a kind of square peg into a round hole in the following way, that the whole premise of counterinsurgency theory is that you were establishing the legitimacy of some kind of central government and, you know, kind of imposing a pretty Western vision of politics of, you know, a sovereign central authority on a political culture that was much more, you know, disaggregated and, you know, possessed of a certain kind of fierce independence. And not only that, not just the kind of,

not just that tension, but also the fact that the central government was pretty, pretty demonstrably visibly, you know, a catastrophe, you know, the many respects, like these were the bad guys. He showed up with, you know, as it were, the, you know, the truckload of pedophiles and thieves and said to the local, you know, mafiosi, hey, guess what? These guys are in charge now. Isn't government grand. And it turns out they didn't agree. I'm exaggerating slightly for for comic effect, but I think only slightly in some cases. The Afghan army was better, I think, in general, than other entities of the government, but even they had their issues and, you know, other elements of the government were pretty, pretty catastrophic. So you had this situation where

there were obvious, you know, as opposed to the early years of the war that we were discussing just a few minutes ago, of small bands of American hunting bad guys in the mountains. Sometimes the bad guys are real. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes, you know, you're getting, you know, tossed into fights you don't fully understand. You have what is obviously a kind of better approach. It's more, it's more, it's meant to be more collaborative. It's meant to be something that kind of harnesses the, the genuine aspirations of locals to establish security. But at the same time, it's, it's trying to establish something. It's trying to put it this way. It's trying to sell a product that absolutely nobody wants or intends to buy in the form of the central government.

Is that, is something like that applicable up where you were? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I dial back on the last point of, you know, that nobody wants or intends to buy because there are people who want it and intend to buy it. And they play a big role in selling the Americans on how viable of a product it is, you know, to a greater degree than it actually is. You know, let me explain it this way. So, you know, Chris Cavoli, the battalion commander who goes up there in 2006 and spent 16 months up in the Pesh. He's about as like intellectually sophisticated as U.S. Army infantry officers come. I mean, he's an incredibly smart guy. And he really came to care. for and appreciate Afghans in a way that many of his successors did not. And he nevertheless really was snuckered by local officials, in particular the governor of Nuristan, who sort of talked a big game about what was what was possible and viable in terms of reconstruction and counterinsurgency in this area, but who themselves were not really viable partners. They were for the very same reasons that a guy like Kavoli could look to them and think, oh, this guy's great. This guy is someone we can work with. You know, he speaks flu.

in English. He's invested in the idea of democracy. He used to run some pizza shops in Sacramento. There's kind of any of the NFL with you. These are all the same reasons that to a lot of Afghans, this guy just seems like a total outsider American, even though he's telling you, hey, I'm from one of the sort of the dynasties of Nuristan. People respect me like a king. You know, my, my word goes. And so there's this huge chasm between the vision of Afghanistan that is being sold to the Americans by their immediate partners, and then the way other Afghans see those partners. So, you know, I'll fast forward for a moment to 2010 when I first go to the Pesh. The summer of 2010 is when counterinsurgency is really at its peak in Afghanistan. It's the summer of Obama's surge.

I mean, I think this is when you're a year in Marcia, the tail end of your tour in Marja. You know, Petraeus is just taken over from McChrystal. And the whole, the whole coin thing is going into the highest gear that it's going to achieve. And everywhere else that I went in the Afghan South and East that summer, you know, from the Argonab Valley in Kandahar to Pactica to, you know, with the Brits in Sangan and Helmand, everybody was touting to me, you know, these lofty goals that they had for their deployment at this, this summer of coin, right? Like these are the outposts we've built. These are the additional outposts that we're going to have built by the end of our tour. When we hand things off to our successor, these are the miles of road that we're going to lay.

these are all the ways that we're going to kind of bring things into the writ of the government in accordance with coin doctrine and practice. And yet when I go up to the Pesh in July of that year, I encounter a battalion commander a guy named Joe Ryan, who is pretty upfront with me about believing that in the Pesh over the preceding years where Coyne has already kind of had about four years to play out as four infantry battalions or five infantry battalions at that point have rotated through, coin hasn't worked. And the analogy that he uses is, you know, he's playing on the inkblot thing.

He says, look, there are absorbent services and there are non-absorant services. And Depeche has not proved to be an absorbent service. And I think, you know, there are a number of reasons for that. One is, yeah, the complexity of the society, right? I mean, Kuhner is very different from Helmand. I mean, you're right. Helmand is a much more fractured place. It's a place where there has been tremendous turmoil in terms of who is settled where

and people have been forcibly resettled by the Afghan government and all this stuff. Koonar things are, it's a little older, but nevertheless, I mean, it's a place, it's a really complex place. Even though it may look kind of like, oh, these are all sort of these different backwater hillbilly valleys to, you know, two American outsiders, different valleys have different relationships to the central government, depending on kind of how they were incorporated into the Afghan state in the first place. And central government is just really not a big feature in it. I'll give two examples. You know, on the Pesh Valley floor, Or, you know, there is a history of central government having a presence there.

But it's not a really positive history. Because, you know, for people in the Pesh, the war against the communists began with, even before the Soviets intervened, it began with the Afghan communist government destroying the town of Nangalam because there had been, you know, an anti-communist, sort of a nascent anti-communist rebellion there. Now, up in these two side valleys to the north and south of it, the Weigal and the Koringal, there's really not much history of there being like a district government there at all. And I should make clear, and one of the real problems with the post-9-11, you know, system of government, Afghan Republic was that people like district governors, provincial governors,

they were not elected. They were appointed by government. So, you know, the president, you know, for the overall administration, and then it sends governors out. But very often, these governorships are kind of rewards for loyal service during the campaign. that kind of thing. And so you wind up this one, this contributes to the dynamic where, you know, police commanders, district chiefs, they're buying their positions with bribe, and then they kind of earn it back. And the way they earn it back is by being, exhibiting predatory behavior

toward the government. I mean, toward the Afghan population in these, in these districts that they're kind of imposed on. In the Corrigal and the Wigal, there's no district center. Well, in the Weigal, the Center, but it's very, it's sort of, I mean, it really is just like, this one compound way up there. And in the Coringal, people appear to have no real interest in outside government of any kind. In the Weigal, it's a little more complicated. People are interested in central government,

but they have an existing relationship, kind of like a direct line between the Weigal Valley and Kabul, because those were the terms of their surrender in 1896, basically. When we're incorporated into the Afghan state, the deal was, okay, we'll put down our arms, but you will not send us a bunch of, you know, mid-level representatives that we have to deal with. We're going to deal directly with Kabul. And in turn, and a lot of Waigali children were taken to Kabul as hostages of the sort and

raised at the, you know, raised at the royal court and became civil servants and all this stuff. So, you know, what two American forces kind of look like just two hillbilly valleys, resistant to outsiders actually have, you know, very different complex relationships with Afghan government. And this plays out, you know, when you have civilian casualty incidents. You know, America troops kill a bunch of civilians by mistake in the Corrigal, as would happen repeatedly, tragically over and over again. And there really would not be a big stink about it in Kabul. But if they do the same thing in the Wigal, phones would be ringing in Kabul immediately because

of this, because of this existing relationship. But this, you know, I bring up the civilian casualties thing because I think this gets to, you know, a really important aspect of what's going on here, which is that, you know, there's this huge contradiction in the idea of counterinsurgency. I mean, there are several contradictions in it. But the one that I'm getting at here is that it's supposed to be, it has to be open-ended. It has to take a really long time. You have to kind of, I mean, this is what sort of advocates of counterinsurgency will stay.

It's well, we just didn't, we didn't stick to it long enough. You know, we didn't really put our back into it and show the enemy that we were willing to be there forever, however long it takes. But in a place like the Pesh Valley, I think counterinsurgency also had a real half-life, where as U.S. forces rotated through and made mistakes, inevitable mistakes, I mean, not all of them are inevitable, but it's inevitable that some of them will occur. You know, mortar rounds fall short. Groups of people are misidentified during an operation because, you know, they look like they're scurrying around the mouth of the cave, but actually their children taking

shelter outside the village. And early on, a lot of communities were pretty forgiving about it. There's an example with that Green Beret National Guard team in 2004. Captain Fry himself actually shot a civilian by mistake. He was out in, out in patrol in Nangalam, the main town. A mangy dog came at him. He shot the dog. Bullet went through the dog, ricochayed, and hit a shopkeeper square in the forehead and killed it.

And, you know, Captain Fry was, he was pretty worried that this was kind of going to be the end of their, the good thing they had going in Noglom. But in fact, the community really kind of rallied together and helped him understand what the way to make reparations was, explained to the community what had happened. And things kind of, it was smoothed over because people understood that he was well-intentioned. He had made a mistake. But communities become less, you know, less successful. of that, even though it continued to be well-intentioned, good faith mistakes, when it's not the first time or the second time or the third time, it's the umpteenth time, right? You know, in 2010, when a mortar round falls short and kills a little girl, it's just people are not going to, people are not going to, you know, forgive and forget the way they might have in 2004. And this is very much something that happens in the Pesh Valley. One way that I describe it is, you know, these outposts, they were created with the intention that they would be bubbles of security. But over time, they really became bubbles of danger. And this is what I saw in 2010 was, you know, in this, as you described it earlier, kind of a mature situation. I mean, U.S.

forces have been duking it out with the Taliban. I'm up in this area for a long time now. They've kind of retreated to their outposts. They buttoned down, and they banned down the hatches in these outposts, built them up into little concrete fortresses. And so, you know, from the U.S. side, it means that these outputs are relatively safe compared to what they were a couple years earlier when they were more Spartan. You know, when the enemy starts, you know, dumping Dishka rounds and RPGs and stuff, you know, down from the mountains, which have perfect visibility into your outpost, you've got all this concrete.

You're kind of, you're relatively safe. You know, you're still taking casualties, but it's not, it's not the way it was a couple of years earlier. The Taliban, for their part, up in the hills, they've been fighting the Americans so long and in such kind of repetitive, this is a repetitive way that they know exactly how long it's going to be before, you know, the outpost zone, mortar shells start falling. versus how many more minutes it'll be before the howitzer start responding from Camp Blessing, versus how many minutes it's likely to be before the Apaches show up and then the fighter just with their J-dams. So they also are pretty good at just kind of initiating their attack,

staying around long enough to make the point they wanted to make and then skedaddling. So who's really suffering here winds up being the people living by the outposts? And these outposts were built right next to villages because they were intended to protect those villages. But what they wind up doing instead is is bringing these villages into into danger, into the crossfire. That's really interesting. You know, what we what we saw happen, you know, and most of the actual pacification kind of occurred after I left. I mean, it was, it was very, very hot the whole time I was there. But, you know, by the middle of 2011, certainly into 2012, you know, Helman cooled off quite a bit. And, you know, of course, the public reporting at the time with

with the Marine Corps and the sort of general chain of command in Afghanistan was telling the press in the world. As well, we won. We established, we established the legitimacy of the Kabul government and counterinsurgency is working. What all of us who had served, certainly at the anything, anything at the battalion level and below knew was that that was, you know, at best misleading. And what the reality was was that we just paid everyone off. I mean, that was the process through which the Helmand River Valley was secured. It generally speaking, at least when Marines were involved, didn't involve like literally. suitcases of cash. It was through these programs that you're familiar with, you know, various kinds of local militia programs. I think the first one I was involved in was the,

it's all these crazy acrony in interim security for critical infrastructure or ISCy, you know, and you go to the local. I know about that one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I lost track at some point, but you go to the local strongman and say, hey, can you give me five guys to, you know, watch the intersection, you know, we'll pay them. And of course, they kick back to their boss. And then their bosses, you know, for the most part, as best as I could tell, it was the only explanation that fit the appearances in most cases was negotiating up front some kind of kickback deal with the Taliban. So everyone got paid. The president Obama had sort of announced the, you know, that there was a, there was an

expiration date on this deployment anyway. So it was kind of in everyone's interest to just ultimately keep things on the back burner, you know, so long as the money kept flowing. And of course, as soon as the money ran out, you saw the whole thing fall apart pretty rapidly. As again, And anyone who would serve there, you know, sort of at the sub-batalion level could have confidently predicted, and most of us did. It sounds, you know, so was there that it sounds like things never really achieved that, that misleading and sort of deceptive in some ways, but nevertheless, for the period while it lasted, real kind of period of relative peace.

Was there anything like that in 11, 12, 13, or was it just kind of hot all the way through? And I guess the withdrawal started a little earlier up there too. So, yeah. So one of the dynamics that you see play out is that often things that happen more broadly in Afghanistan happen earlier in Koonar, in part just because everything started earlier up there, right? They started doing big time coin in Koonar in 2006 when Afghanistan was a resource strapped theater. And really, that was not what was happening everywhere else. And so there is actually, I mean, there is a period not in the Wigal or the Kornagal,

but in the Pesh proper. There is a period where things look like they're going great. Really, this period is 2007, 2008. There's actually, I mean, this is a period. David Colcullen goes out in visits, goes out and visits in late 2007, early 2008. And in his book, The Accidental Gorilla, he includes the Pesh as like a case study of what can be achieved when things go right. Well, you know, this is what right looks like as far as counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. And he talks a lot about the road that they built.

And the road was the vehicle through which the money came in, really, from the U.S. military into the Pesh. The road was initiated. There's always been a road in the Pesh. But when U.S. forces showed up there in 2003, it was a dirt and gravel road, and it took a long time to traverse, and it was very susceptible to IEDs. And by late 2005, early 2006, it's actually the most heavily IED stretch of road in all of Afghanistan. And so when Chris Covelli and his unit come in and start doing coin out there, they enlist the help of the provincial reconstruction team initially for kind of a very narrow practical reason. Kavoli tells the PRT commander, who's a fighter pilot who actually was his, his Christian classmate, strangely, because the Navy was sending it's sending fighter pilots and submarine captains out to the provincial reconstruction team commanders. He says, look, I'm losing guys to IEDs on this road.

I need the IED hotspots of this road paved so that they're less susceptible to IEDs. And the PRT does that. It actually does more than that. It paves the whole road all the way from Assadabad out to Nangalam. And in addition to, you know, dropping the IEDs down to pretty much zero. The other effect of this is that there is this boom in commerce. You know, travel time between Nagalama and Asadabad drops by like two thirds. There's no longer dust everywhere when you drive.

People start painting their shops, which they would never bother to do before because they would just wind it being covered in dust. All these gas stations spring up along the road. You know, prices of vegetables drop. It's great. But where the military then kind of overreaches is by trying to offer this same thing to the Coringollies and the Waigalis who don't want it. And so, you know, and this is where they run up against kind of the brick wall is the battalion that succeeds Cavalys is two 503 infantry, really hard charging airborne battalion out of Italy, led by a kind of army royalty kind of guy almost. I mean, self-made, you know, army royalty crew named Bill Oslund, who goes on to be a deputy commander of the Ranger Regiment and whose career really is also ruined by the Pesh because of a battle that happens up there. And then the results of that battle. But Bill Oslund really, I mean, he just he he he's not one of these guys who.

came to coin by himself. He's a guy who Petraeus was a mentor of his. And he, you know, the army was doing coin. So he was going to be doing corn. And he, he talked to the talk, very, you know, he really embraced it. But it was not something that he kind of had an intuitive grasp up. I mean, dealing with, dealing with Afghans, it's just not something that kind of came naturally to him. And what he, and so there was, to him, there was not kind of this distinction between, well, okay, this was achievable on the Pesh Valley floor. But the Korn, that's probably somewhere we're just going to have to keep fighting for a while. to help preserve what's happening on the Pesh Valley floor,

and then we'll figure out when we stopped fighting there. It was more like, well, this was done in the Pesh Valley floor by the previous unit. We're going to do it in the Coringal on our watch. And it just doesn't work. The Coringollies have no interest in this road. They have no interest in the falling vegetable prices. They just want Americans to leave so they can resume their timber business, which has been hugely interrupted by the arrival of American outpost that plops itself down

literally on the biggest sawmill in the valley. And so it just doesn't work in the Coringall. But it takes a long time for the military to kind of figure this out and adjust. And so how does the American War and the Pesh and its various tributaries ultimately come to an end? What's the decision-making process there? Well, it's very torturous decision-making process. This is what part three of the book covers is kind of this 2010 to 13 period, basically, as these outposts are gradually disestablished.

But what winds up happening is, you know, U.S. forces learn that, one, it's a lot harder to unbuild these outposts than it was to build them. because every one of these outposts grows into this little fortress by, you know, within a couple of years. And by the time you want to want to withdraw from it, it's got all it's got, you know, Conaxes full of weapons, it's got treadmills. It's got all this crap is built up in these outposts and they're way up in the mountains. And the helicopters that are required to pull all this stuff out are the very same limited pool of shenoc helicopters that every other battalion in the east is trying to get its hands on to use on big air assault operations. So these, you know, the withdrawal from the outposts winds up being big.

this just unbelievably drawn out process. I mean, it's like can be literally years from when, you know, a battalion commander realizes this outpost is not doing anything more besides protecting itself to when you finally actually get sign off from the four star in Kabul, the helicopters allocated and leave. So this takes just, it's just this endless thing. And then on top of that, what U.S. forces wind up discovering when they pull out of the Pesh in 2011 and they close, Bob Blessing and the other outposts in the Pesh, is that in all

this time that they've been fighting up there, something that they, really have neglected to do is to prepare the Afghan army for the day when it's going to stand on its own. And there's this real flavor to the American War, the U.S. Army's war in the east of there are advisors, the advisors will deal with the A&A and make them better. But we, the infantry battalions, are not really going to deal with the A&A and make them better. We are here to be fighting, you know, until such a time as they just, as they are ready for it. And the way that U.S. infantry battalions wind up using the A&A is kind of as like auxiliary. You know, they drag them along to fulfill requirements.

Okay, oh, there has to be, the Afghan troops have to be the first into any home. Okay, so that means we take an Afghan fire team on every patrol. Or maybe there's actually a number requirement. Oh, we need, there needs to be, you know, 10% of the patrol has to be Afghans or 20% or 30%. So we bring along that number of Afghans. We don't tell them anything about what we're doing. We don't ask them whether they think it's a good idea. And they just kind of wind up being dragged along and kept in the dark.

And what this does not, it was not a recipe for is, you know, an Afghan battalion that, is then able to sustain itself logistically or otherwise when the U.S. military leaves the Pesh in 2011. So what winds up happening is the military leaves, the Afghan, the Afghan unit stays out there because President Karzai insists on it because there's political significance to the Pesh that is sort of invisible to the Americans, or at least doesn't seem commensurate with the cost they've been incurring out there. And this Afghan battalion starts collapse and it draws the Americans back in. And they kind of have to start over it in a way. In 2012, basically Americans go back out of the Pesh, while late 2011 Americans go back out of the Pesh. They spent about two years

kind of building this Afghan army battalion up, probably in the way that they should have been doing in the first place, you know, years earlier. And then they leave again. And so you wind up in, you know, in 2013, 14, 15, 16 with this period where the Afghan army actually is out in the Pesh and actually is holding the Pesh road, but it's not messing around in the tributaries the way the Americans were. Instead, it kind of reaches, it reaches arrangements with the Taliban. of, you know, you leave us alone down on the, on the Pesh proper, on the Pesh Road and the communities on the Pesh Road, and we'll leave you alone up in the Coringal and the Waterpour and so on. And so the American involvement kind of shifts to a new form. And it becomes,

it's kind of a return, it goes full circle. It goes back to J-Soc and counterterrorism, but this time with drone strikes rather than with raids on the ground. I feel like I can probably predict some of the elements of your answer to this question, but zooming out from the east to the whole of the country. But with reference to the east, were you surprised as apparently some were by the pace of the collapse? Personally, I, the thing that I thought was going to happen in 2021 was I thought, okay, that this fighting season, Kandahar will fall and that'll be really bad. And then I figure out, you know, what to do next fighting season. And obviously it was much faster than that.

But yeah, so I was surprised by the pace. But I think, you know, all of the signs were there. I mean, we can talk, you know, more broadly about what happened. But I mean, I think, you know, I mean, basically there was an extremely brittle and hollowed out Afghan army that had been that was it was hollowed out partly by corruption, but also hollowed out by years of grueling fighting, which I think it's a point that a lot of Americans miss. I mean, in no small part because President Biden told them, you know, as Kabul was falling, this is because the Afghans aren't willing to fight for their country, which is, you know, kind of misses the point of there. A lot of Afghans had been fighting very hard for their country for a long time, up until the that point. And so you have this, you have this army by 2021 that, one, it's been through years of extraordinarily brutal casualties. I mean, you know, Afghan forces were losing in the, in the period of, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, preceding the Doha deal. The Afghan government was losing like 9,000, 9,000 guys killed a year, right, in often in very unproductive ways. But nevertheless, I mean, a very severe cost that accumulates to a very hollowed out army by the time.

to 2021. But you also have the, you know, this sort of the additional factor of between the Doha deal in early 2020 and 18 months later, the fall of Kabul, there is this period of relative quiet during which the Taliban knows the United States is leaving. I mean, I guess there's an outside possibility that they have to consider that Biden orders the United States to stay. But basically, I mean, but the Doha deal calls for the United States to leave. And I think there will be, there will have to be a lot of, you know, study done in the future on what, What did the Taliban do with those 18 months? I recently read the whole, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages of the, the military's declassified investigation report into the bombing at Abbey Gate, which really, you know, the supporting documents are about much more than the bombing and Abbey Gate.

They're about the whole withdrawal and collapse. And they include interviews with, you know, Admiral Vaisley, who was the Navy SEAL Admiral who was there for the summer in the weeks preceding the fall and his deputies and so on. And one of them, it makes the point, he's like, yeah. I mean, we, this was, this was an incredibly well-prepared thing. This was not, it was not, oh, in the, you know, in the spring of 2021, Biden announced the withdrawal and all of a sudden the Taliban, you know, decide, okay, now we're going to take over the country. It was, they'd had, they'd had a year to prepare for that. And they, and they did prepare for it. It both in military ways, probably, but probably more importantly in kind of, you know, just local, local negotiations.

I mean, going to battalion commanders, police chiefs, district governors, making sure that they knew the Americans were on their way out and that there was going to be a time when, you know, the Taliban might might need to call upon them. I remember just on the theme of the Afghan army fighting for its country, the a lieutenant who I worked closely with back in 2010, I remember asking him, you know, what he would do if this all fell apart. And he was a Pashto from the Panshir Valley. And he just said to me, you know, I'll take this uniform off and I'll put back on my old clothes and I'll go up into the mountains and I'll keep fighting. which I you know it's it's important and you you are right to point out to to not lose sight of of how many brave afghans there actually were and are out there other dynamic that i think is important is that you know in these sort of very flawed efforts to build and have afghan security force structure by the united states and nato over all of these years one of the things that we did

you know broadly the united states and nato was replicate our own kind of increasing reliance on special operations forces but in a very unsustainable way i mean i have I think this is one of the factors that will ultimately appear to have contributed to the collapse is that, you know, over time, as the Afghan National Army continued to come up wanting, you know, unable to do real offensive operations, the easy button always was, well, let's build another smaller elite unit, the ANA commandos, the triple three unit, the GPCSU, the Kitejas, that we can concentrate on on a smaller scale and we can get them to be really good. And so the U.S. and NATO did this repeatedly to the point where by 2018, 2019, like a quarter of the Afghan army was nominally commandos. And what this winds up being is that there's sort of there's a tiered system where there's there is the broader Afghan army that's really only equipped to a whole checkpoints. And then there is the offensive Afghan army, which is the commandos, who then are expected to do everything else. And so this has two really negative effects. One is it puts these commandos and all of the other smaller special units that are, you know,

they operate in that same space. It puts them in unsustainable positions just to being rushed like a fire brigade from one corner to the country to the next to the next to the next. And this becomes really clear in the summer of 2021 when these units really just are chopped apart in this way. But also it sucks talent up out of the conventional force. You know, I mean, if you're if you were an NCO or an officer with any kind of ambition or or patriotism or skill, and a quarter of the force is these better resourced, you know,

better motivated special operations forces, you're going to jump shift to them the first moment you possibly can. And so, and the result is an even further hollowing out of the larger conventional force, which I think, I think is a really important dynamic. Wesley, I'm inclined to ask you a dozen questions about what just, what you just said and how it applies to the U.S. military. And I think, you know, basically every, every minute of this conversation could lead to another hour long conversation. But you've been extraordinarily generous with your time. And we may have to call it a call it a day here. I'm grateful to you for your time. I'm also grateful to you for all the, all the effort that you took and, you know, the personal danger you exposed yourself to, to, you know, to, you know, bear witness and provide, I think, some really valuable analysis of this part of the war in Afghanistan. Stan, and you're a young guy and, you know, your career is still, you better be a young guy

because if you're not a young guy, I'm in trouble. But I look forward to what you're going to write next and all the other work you're going to do. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks so much, Aaron. Thanks for reading the book and for having me on. It's been a pleasure. This is a nebulous media.