The Team House - Deadly Special Ops missions in the Pech Valley with Wes Morgan, Ep. 85

Episode Date: March 20, 2021

Wesley Morgan details the history of US military operations in the Pech valley in Afghanistan, a place of deadly battles and unforgiving terrain. We start with the history of the valley and America's first forays there in 2002, then get into the larger conventional and special operations campaigns that have taken place there with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network.org today. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park Man that sikes me up did you get you empted you out

you like that someone told me it's like the beginning of Tenet like the Christopher Nolan movie like you feel that you feel that vibe I hope you felt the vibe but we're here with Wesley tonight Wesley Morgan

he is the author of the hardest place this book just came out this week I apologize and I usually read the books through and through before we do these interviews I'm a quarter of the way through

it's amazing I'm Jack Murphy. This is episode 85 of the team house here with co-host Dave Park. Wesley, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. I'm excited to talk to you guys. Yeah, man. Thanks so much for doing it. You know, the first question we always asked our guests is your origin story. And, you know, since you're not a military guy, you're not an army bro, you're a journalist by trade. how in the world did you fall into this? And how did you end up writing a book, a history book, about the military history, the American military history,

in a specific valley, the Peck Valley in Afghanistan? What led you down that path? Yeah, sure. So I was always really interested in these wars. Like, you know, 9-11 happened when I was, I think, 13, maybe 14. And I got to college, and I kind of was thinking, I was thinking I'd do the Army route. I joined ROTC. That seemed like kind of the tried and true path for people that I knew who were, you know, interested in seeing these wars. But then I had a weird opportunity come up to start, actually when I was 19, to start going to first Iraq and then Afghanistan to freelance during the summers after, starting after the freshman year of college. So summer after my freshman year, I was in Baghdad for the surge, kind of bouncing around with different infantry units in Baghdad and the belts. back in kind of the heyday of embedding when it really was like, you know, they just asked where do you want to go?

And I'd say, you know, 1-28 infantry and East Rashid, please. And they would make it happen without a whole lot of, you know, this is, well, no, we'd rather go see this unit or no, there's a story that we want to show you over here the way it kind of became in later years. So I did a couple trips to Iraq. First went to Afghanistan in 2009 as Obama's surge was kind of just beginning. It was kind of down in Helmand in the spring of 2009. as the big Marine force was starting to show up. And then came back for the summer of 2010, the summer when the big buildup kind of came into place.

And during that summer, I would just bounce around. I'd go to different parts of the south and the east, just visit different battalions that were either I had heard that there was a company commander that I'd enjoy spending time with or something like that or just where I knew it was a really, you know, an interesting a O or a really tough fight or something like that. So that summer of 2010, I was filing stories, from a few different places, from, you know, Iron Rocketson Battalion 3187 in Pactica province,

from another 101st Battalion down in Zari, from a Royal Marine Commando Battalion in Sangan District in Helmand, which is the scariest place I've ever been. And from, and then I wound up visiting 1327, the Bulldog Battalion, from First Brigade of the 101st Airborne in the Pesh Valley. in the sort of July, August part of that summer. And it was a really interesting time to see the patch because every other unit that I visited, this is the surge.

These units are all expanding. They're building new outposts, new roads, more and new everything. And the commanders would talk to you about, because I would sort of, I'd sit down with the battalion commander on my way in, then spend a few weeks, you know, visiting different platoons and companies

and going on patrols with them and stuff. And then I talked to the battalion commander on the way out again. And those battalion commanders, they'd all be telling you about how all the progress they were making and how much more progress was going to be made by the time they handed it over to the next guy. And in the Petch Valley, it was a whole different story. It was, U.S. forces had been there a lot longer, kind of in the small outpost format. They had really started spreading out into the little outposts four years earlier way back in 2006. So several units into this, the battalion commander on the ground there, a guy named Joe Ryan,

who spent a bunch of his career in the Ranger Regiment, but this was back in the conventional army for his battalion command. He basically told me, like, look, we're not accomplishing much in this valley. This is, we've worn out our welcome. The guys before us had worn out our welcome. And I'm trying to figure out kind of how to pitch that to higher headquarters because I don't think we're accomplishing much here. And that was striking to me to hear.

And it was also pretty apparent when you'd see it. You'd go visit these little outposts that he had, you know, combat outpost, Michigan at the mouth of the Coringall. And these places were just getting, they were getting slammed constantly, and they would respond with everything they had, and they'd, you know, call in all the howitzers from Fob Blessing and the J-Dams and this and that. And it was like this dance between these two sides that were both dug in pretty deep under their fortifications, you know, kind of the concrete T-woles on this little fortress of Cop, Michigan. And then, you know, the enemy up in the hills seemed pretty clear under their

big boulders and everything that they knew exactly how long it was between, you know, when the 81s are going to start hitting and the 155s are going to start hitting and the J-DAMs are going to start hitting. So you kind of came away with the impression that neither side was doing a really significant amount of damage to the other. And they're really just the people were stuck,

the people who lived there were stuck in the middle of this thing. And that rather than being kind of counterinsurgency security bubbles around the outposts, the outposts kind of presented bubbles of danger for the people who lived in the valley. And also, I mean, the other thing that I came away with from that trip, I mean, besides just seeing how different

the patch looked from anywhere else I'd ever seen in Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean, guys who fought in Kunar will know, I mean, it's just, it's wild looking. Depending on where you land and what altitude you're at, it can look like it's just, it's beautifully lush and green on these little thin valley floors where they grow all the corn and everything. Then it's kind of arid

on the mountainsides. Then you go up a little higher and it looks like you're in the Pacific Northwest and there's ferns and, you know, huge pine forests and everything, which is just wild. But so, you know, I hadn't seen anything quite like that before, hadn't seen that type of fighting before in different, you know, different embeds, certainly never seen that much, you know, that much artillery expended or that many J-Dams dropped. And I also, you know, guys at these outposts couldn't really tell you why the outposts were there. And I mean, it was just not to say that it's, you know, the job of a, you know, a team leader or a squad leader to be able to tell you, oh, you know, this is the esoteric history of the war and why this outpost got here. that, you know, the company commander couldn't tell you this.

He could tell you what the sort of the task and purpose of the outpost now was, but he wouldn't be able to tell you like, oh, this one was put here in the fall of 2006, and it was, you know, these were the reasons why. It was kind of just there had been so many rotations going back to the early years when these outposts started being set up that like nobody remembered anymore. And this was compounded, I kind of come to learn, by the fact that more so than in many other parts of the country, the Petsch was a place that was always kind of a playground both for conventional forces and for every flavor of special operations forces.

You know, every tribe you can imagine on the allied side was messing around up there either all at once or in different phases. So there just was tons of information that got lost, that never got passed down from kind of one organization to another. And that's a recurring theme in the story of the book is, yeah, just, you know, something that J-Soc starts, gets handed over to Sieges Sotiv, that's just handed over to conventional forces. And nobody has any idea what the, you know, why it began after a few years. Right. Do you want to start off talking a little bit about the early years of going into the, into the Pesh? You know, you talk in the book about, you know, early Ranger operations going up around those mountain tops,

then Operation Red Wings, of course, everyone knows from Lone Survivor, some of the J-Soc operations up there. It is very interesting to chart, you know, I think you said at some point, like those guys, those first like Ranger patrols up there were like the first time anyone, any American had been up there in 40 years since like an anthropology student climbed up the side of one of those mountains. Yeah, so specific to the Koringal,

I mean, there had been lots of people in and out of Kudar and Nuristan, lots of Westerners, for all kinds of reasons. But the Coringal in particular, which is the side valley of the Pesh that really becomes very infamous, starting with Operation Red Wings in 2005, and then it kind of snowballs from there. Yeah, the Coringal is a place that had not been very welcoming to outsiders. I did talk to an anthropologist who had sort of tried to visit them in the 60s in the course of studying many of the language groups and ethnic groups in the Pesh Valley and its tributaries. and the Coring Goli's weren't interested. They wouldn't let him in. But yeah, I mean, I'd be happy to talk about sort of the origin story,

you know, how this all, how this all began and, you know, what all the different units were that were. Let's start there. Great, yeah. So essentially what happens is, you know, I wondered when I was there in 2010, you know, what is the origin story of each of these bases? How did each of these bases get there? So what I would do is I would just talk to as many people as I could

and have them try and introduce me to the guys who were there before them, and then have them try to introduce me if guys were there before them. And if I could talk, if somebody could introduce me to an interpreter along the way, I mean, that's even better. And eventually I did kind of roll

each of these outposts back to the early years of the war. So, you know, I think the first Americans to enter Kunar province, I think were some CIA guys with a couple of Delta Force guys attached in the fall of 2001, I think just passing through.

That's not, I mean, but they, so I choose to start the book with the next step. after that, which is in the spring of 2002, there's a J-Socicic Advanced Force Operations Team that drives up from Jalalabad and sets up a little fire base on an old, an old Soviet compound that the Afghans call Tovchi base for, or artillery base, because that's what the Soviets had used it for. And so this is roughly April, May 2002, that they do this. And essentially, the reason they come up there, and the guy who I finally kind of rolled this back to,

and talked to me about it. Well, there were a few, but one was Tom Greer before he passed away, you know, of the guy who had been the Delta Force Ground Force commander at Toribora. Because he had his book. From that role, sorry, go ahead. I just saying, Kill bin Laden was his book.

We have it around here. Exactly, right. So after this whole Torabora episode where Tom Greer had been, you know, the Delth Force commander on the ground, which you wrote about in Kilben Laden, and where bin Laden had gotten away, although there were, you know,

there were people thought at the time, that perhaps he had died, but he didn't. Once it became clear that he hadn't died, these J-Soc AFO teams that were spreading out in the Afghan East in early 2002, they were basically trying to figure out where he'd gone. Not just him, but his lieutenants, and really anybody who might be able to help with that. So basically they were hunting Arabs was what these was what these AFO teams were doing in the spring of 2002. And they were split up into like a southern and a northern element. And within the northern element. There was a team that

Greer told me was kind of seal heavy. Some of them were led more by Delta guys. Some of them were led more by Seal Team 6 guys. And a seal heavy one was the one that he sent up to Asadabat initially to kind of, you know, just to set up a spot. So they set up a spot.

And pretty soon more J-Soc units start rotating through. You get, you know, there's a Delta Force troop that visits that's commanded by a guy who's now, I believe he's, that, that that top special forces is two-star billet, but his guy's name is John Brennan.

Yeah. Major General John Brennan. So he was the, he was the troop commander who, you know, who passed through there in the spring, early summer of 2002. They started, you know, they sent a Ranger platoon up there from 275,

pretty early on, followed by, you know, a larger element company from the 375. And so all that summer of 2002, basically they were just, you know, digging in a little bit at this, at this, Sadabad outpost, which would become a very permanent fob that still exists today as an Afghan

National Directorate of Security Base, and just going and poking around in different valleys on pickup trucks and ATVs, just driving out to see who they could talk to and see what they could find. And you talk to a previous guest of the show, Ron Mueller is in this book a few times from his time in the CIA. And, you know, he points out in your book, like we didn't really have a very firm understanding of the human terrain at that time. Absolutely. And so this is something that they're just starting to get their hands around in that first year to 2002, 2003. But that becomes clear, you know, the deeper and deeper into Kunar and Nuristan you go,

the more you learn that it is, in addition to kind of the most severe physical terrain of any of the areas where U.S. troops were operating in the country, it was the most complicated human terrain to use that military jargon. in the sense that, you know, most of the country, people speak Pashto or they speak Dari, right? And Kunar and Nuristan, it's more complicated than that. There are

outside security forces to speak Dari. The most people speak Pashto, if not as a first language, then as a second language. But the people who speak it as a second language, they speak a wide variety of other languages. Little languages that exist up in these little pockets, way up in these side valleys.

Noristani languages, north of the patch, there are six distinct to Neurostani languages. We sometimes think of it as, you know, U.S. troops would say, oh, this guy speaks to Norastani. We've got a Neuristani interpreter. But it's not actually, that's not how it works. There are six distinct, pretty much mutually unintelligible Neuristani languages with no written form that you're going to have to find interpreters who can, you know, who you can trust, who you can work with in those languages. And then south of the Pesh Valley in tributaries like the Khorengal, there are their own Peshai languages. Khoringali, there's a bunch of them.

I mean, there used to be, there used to be a lot more of them. There was a, I think, German or Norwegian linguists who visited this place in the, in the 50s, who counted something like 20 languages within a certain radius of Nangalum, the main town. And most of those are gone now, but there's still quite a bunch. So if you can just imagine, I mean, the difficulties that are inherent in, you know, trying to do intelligence collection in a place where you don't speak the language, not try and do it in a place where you don't speak the, you know, the 10 languages. Right. and where there's always going to be a way, you know, you're not going to be able to find interpreters that you trust, you know, who speak Coringali or this and that, at least not for a long time.

And not to belabor the point, West, but I think, you know, based on what I read in your book and what you're telling me, you really have to see all these little pockets. It really is like an archipelago of little communities spread out through these valley systems because the terrain is just so brutal in these communities. are so isolated from one another. And I imagine that's why, you know, like in Europe, you know, 250 years ago, each village had a slightly different dialect. Right. And these are also, you know, when you look at the people who live up in the top of the Waterpour Valley or the top of the Ygal Valley or the top of the Coringal, these are people who over the course of the past few hundred years essentially retreated up there as the Pashtun Lowlanders moved into the patch and displaced them. I mean, so this was, these were the places, at least we think, in academics who study the area

think that these are communities that moved up there because they didn't want anything to do with anybody. And they were sort of retreating from the arm of the state. And so this, you know, this creates a dynamic that you see throughout the war where these are perfect places to hide if you're somebody who is evading the Afghan state or the American counterterrorism apparatus. So you have a long, long tradition that goes on today of people hiding out from us up there. Yeah, and I take it that because of that tradition, these are people who resist any sort of governance. often yeah it can sometimes be a little more complicated i mean in the sense that you know so the the coringollies are they are sort of the example of they've all they've you know they appear to always have resisted all

forms of government um now the wigal valley across the way is very easy for u.s troops who went up there to kind of think oh this is just another coringol this is just you know it's another bunch of hillbillies you don't want anything to do with us don't want anything due to the government but then there was another weird dynamic that was not immediately obvious but that you would learn to your detriment you know, as you went along, which is that the Waigali's, because of the particular way in which they were conquered and converted to Islam and incorporated into the Afghan state about 120 years ago in the 1890s, because of those particular circumstances, they kind of have a direct line to Kabul when they want to complain about things. Part of the conquest arrangement had a lot of young,

like Norris, Waigali kids go to Kabul as hostages, but hostages who wound up rising to fairly prominent positions in government. And so there is this connection, there is this sort of Waigali community in Kabul that's very influential that sometimes U.S. forces would learn that this was the case after they, you know, caused a civilian casualty incident inadvertently.

And unlike in the Koringal, all of a sudden it's a national level deal that's rising to the ears of President Karzai. Yeah, that's interesting. And it's interesting how you mentioned that they went to the mountains because, you know, when we talked to people who fought in Vietnam, you know, you had the same thing with like the mountain yards, you know, the mountain people, right? Those are traditional and then like the traditional hiding places.

And then if we look at our own Appalachian Mountains here and how the community is, or at least was very insular and isolated, I mean that, you know, you mentioned hillbillies, but I think that's a very apt term in the way we see it as people who are just a, a very insular and isolated community. But here in the Pescher, or where you're talking about, they had many of those communities that, you know, didn't have any much in common at all. Yeah.

And, you know, it's, as far as, you know, sometimes the people, sometimes the Americans that I met who kind of got this place the best were, in fact, you know, American special operators or contractors who came from, who came from Appalachia. And there's a, you know, there's a guy, it's a guy in the book who's, who's full name I don't use,

but who was an asymmetric warfare group contractor for years and years and years. Kind of, he'd been a legend in 175 as an NCO back in the 80s and 90s and had gone into Delta Force and all this stuff. And then wound up as an AWG contractor. And he was just kind of this like professional mountain man. Like he came from the mountains and he found them again in Kunar. And he just, he took to it. And he, in addition to being, as one conventional infantry battalion commander, who actually now is a four-star general in Europe, described this guy as a Rembrandt of Mountain Combat.

But he also, he kind of got the people. I mean, I think he understood where they were coming from. He understood what it must feel like to them when they've got these kind of stormtroopers that he's tagging along with, coming, marching up into their valleys, setting up outposts, you know, living in these spots in their valleys for, for, years at a time. So what were those first patrols? I mean, you talked about the first J-Soc guys, AFO. They set up a fob in Asadabad. Rangers are camped out there. And then you talk in the book also about some of the first ODAs that come in and they start trying to do the Special Forces mission. And I thought what was very interesting about that, that you point out the identity crisis that Special Forces has and that you'll have one ODA that is very human-centric very much.

Let's go out, win the hearts and minds. Let's get to know the community, like a community policing sort of approach. And then the next ODA will come in and it's like running gun. Like let's go mix it up with the bad guys, getting some firefights, kick some ass. Exactly. So what happens is in the fall of 2003, there's a big J-Sox surge. When the Bush administration basically says, we've got to pick up in Lodin's Trail again, figure out where that guy went when we took our eye off the ball to go to Iraq. Everybody focus on that. And so, JASOC and the CIA both kind of like shift their eye of Soron over to Kuhnuristan,

start looking at that place. And they wind up surging a pretty substantial portion of the Ranger Regiment. So the bulk of both first and second battalions and the regimental commander goes over for it. They just go way up into the middle of nowhere into some really small valleys in Nuristan, north of the Petch, where U.S. troops really don't visit in significant numbers again. Again, kind of the idea being, oh, you know, we're going to turn over rocks, we're going to talk to people, we're going to figure out where bin Laden went. It doesn't work because they can't talk to the people. And the people aren't going to talk to them anyway, even if they did speak the right language. And also because bin Laden is gone. They actually have kind of the right idea. I mean, they're looking in the right part of the country. Bin Laden, it turns out, had gone to Kunar after escaping at Toribora. And 175 and Dev Group kind of had a pretty near miss in terms of being just a few weeks a couple of months behind the very valley where he'd been at in 2002. But come this big surge, Operation Winter Strike in the fall of 2003,

it's just Operation Winter Strikeout is how a lot of the Rangers joke about it. Because by that time, bin Laden was gone. They turned up no useful evidence, and they leave. And the legacy of the operation is that there's a little base that gets left behind that was established by the town of Noglom. The Rangers called it HLZ1, and they just used it as a place to land stuff. drive convoys up to. Being a parent can be really challenging.

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Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. And it was brought up being named after a Ranger Jay Blessing who was killed in the course of the operation by an IED. But what happens when the J-Slock forces all leave at the end of the year to go move on to the next, you know, the next flashing target, you know, get ready for their, the next swing is going to be in P2K and in the spring of 2004,

an ODA stays behind. The Siege of SOTIF, the Special Forces group in Afghanistan essentially raises his hand and says, we can make something of this place. We can start setting up, they're trying to set up little acamps, as they call them, kind of using the Vietnam terminology, in various remote parts of the Afghan East and South, because there's really not much of an Afghan National Army yet. I mean, it's like a battalion in Kabul that's being put together. So what this Green Beret headquarters has the idea of is essentially like kind of thinking back on the model of the

Montan Yards in Vietnam and the civilian and regular defense group program in Vietnam, they want to set up like little bases in the mountains where they can train up local militias that can kind of fill the gap until an army comes online and then perhaps form something like a National Guard in a later security structure. So you see in the course of 2004, two different Green Beret teams, ODAs, fill this role. They rotate through Nongalam, Camp Blessing,

and they live in the valley. And in some ways, these teams are similar in the sense that any two ODAs are similar. I mean, they're manned and structured the same ways. Everybody's all been to the same schools and everything. actually they both have a real soft spot for kind of like Vietnam symbolism and iconology they do stuff like all kinds of stuff on this base

gets named after things from the John Wayne movie The Green Berets They make a you know one team makes a Has a big gate carved that looks just like the gate in the in the movie Well they named the dog after the character They do they named the dog after the After the little boy who has a dog Yeah exactly yeah I don't

didn't include the name because there's a there's a dispute on the internet as to how ham chuck is spelled and i figured it was safe or not to but um come here son you're what this war is all about um but so these are kind of the superficial similarities but in a lot of ways these two teams couldn't be more different um and it starts with just who the teams are so the first team is a team from a 19th group team out of utah so they're national guardsmen they're older a lot of them are Mormons. And they, some of them have kind of interesting

civilian lives like are, you know, a gem minor in Montana. Like, one guy was old enough that he had, he had been part of the thing, when he had been an active duty SF guy back in the 80s.

He had been on one of those teams whose job was to like strap a nuke on their back, you know, and like like go to Siberia. And so they're, they're older and they kind of, they get along well with the local people. And I talked to,

I mean, I talked to, for instance, an Imam up in Nangalam who remembers these guys pretty well. Your commander Ron is how they refer to this guy, Ron Fry, Captain Ron Frye, who was the ODA commander. They remember them as

just kind of being people who, people who were respectful, people who they had a lot of respect for in return. This team essentially focuses on building up this little militia and just patrolling right around the town, trying to sort of form a little government-like bubble

around the town. And now, you know, there are attacks that they endure. There are rocket attacks. There's, you know, at least one, you know, fairly serious attack where they get, you know, they get shot at from up on the mountains with heavy machine gun. But they don't, they don't react by sort of going on a goose chases up into the mountains to try to figure out who did this. You know, people are telling them like, oh, look, you know, they've got informants in town

who are saying, look, this is, the Coringollies did this. You got to go to the Coringall and deal with them. but Captain Frye kind of he sees it as something that he doesn't want to get involved with. He, the Coringall seems like it's, you know, it's not very far away, but in this environment, it's like a, it's like on another planet. I mean, it's, it's quite far away just in terms of the number of like ridges that you have to navigate to get over there. And he just thinks this is not, this is a distraction. I, you know, I don't want to deal with this. Something complicated is going on in there. So he leaves that alone. The way he put it was, you know, I knew that there were insurgents in there.

but it didn't seem like it was kind of worth our while to kick the hornets nest. Now, partway through the year, they get replaced by a third group team, which kind of paradoxically, it's both a much younger team in terms of just the ages of the guys. And it's both less and more experienced than the 19th group team. It's less experienced in that it is these younger guys who don't have these kind of like long careers and kind of, you know, older guy kind of attitudes that the 19th group team, 19th group team did, but it's more experienced in the sense that even though this is, you know, this is the spring summer of 2004, this is already their third Afghanistan rotation.

And they kind of come in there the way both, you know, the third group guys that I talked to from the team and the 19th group guys that I talked to from that team, the way they kind of remembered it from their different perspectives was they were very interested in or impressed by what the 19th group team had been doing. The way they saw it, this 19th group team had been had made itself look look. week. It was sort of sucking up rocket attacks and not doing anything about it. And they wanted to go out and do something about it. And they become a much more kind of offensive oriented team. And it's not that they ignore, that they're unilateral or that they ignore their, you know, Indige guys, as they call them. They use them pretty extensively. But the way this guy, you know, senior NCO on the team who talked to me a lot about it, the way he put it was, yeah, we have these

ASF, these militiamen. We have them to go and fight and find the enemy. And that's what they did. So they started going up into the coringal. They had a marine platoon with them for security. And they started just kind of just bringing them along for additional muscle. And they would go up into the coringal and they would, you know, they would find people. They would pull up, you know, a target packet on this sawmill owner who, you know, some kind of human suggests was involved in X rocket attack or YED strike. And they'd go get him or they'd try to. And it would result in a big firefight. And this ball just kind of starts rolling of the Coringal being the focus, the place where you go to get in fights.

And so what happens in the fall of 2004 is basically, as happens over and over and over again throughout the war, headquarters rotate out back at Bogram, new set of Green Beret colonels come in, no longer interested in this remote A-Camps project. They pull the plug on it. And so the Marine platoon that had been there as kind of the supporting security force is left there as the main effort now. And so now you've got a Marine platoon with a lieutenant and a company XO are the guys in charge. And they don't know anything about what the 19th group team had been doing six months ago because they weren't there for that. But they know what these Green Berets, the third group guys have been telling them is the deal.

And so they keep doing that. And that's kind of a dynamic that you start seeing playing out. And it's less than a year after that that you see Operation Red Wings happen and the whole, you know, the whole mess that that is. Yeah, do you want to talk, before we go into Red Wings just for a moment, I won't belabor that too much since so much has been talked about, written about it already. But one thing I did want to touch upon was in your book you mentioned that our deployments to these areas become like a self-licking ice cream cone or a self-fulfilling prophecy, that it's like we go out there and we smoke up some of the militia men, some of the bad guys up in the mountains. Of course, you know, Afghan sense of honor demands. They come and tag us back for that. you know, that can't go unanswered. And it just goes kind of back and forth without any like forward progress being made.

It does. And very often there are underlying factors causing this that the U.S. guys aren't aware of. And the reason they're not aware of it is because often the people giving them the intelligence are concealing from them the true reality of what's going on. You know, U.S. forces entered Kuhner and they pretty much, they got in bed pretty quick with the people who were willing to give them information and the people who were willing to supply them with armed forces of militias. So there's kind of a group of existing strong men in the province who both the CIA and special operations forces allied with for very understandable practical reasons. I mean, these were the guys who wanted to help and who had men with guns and who in fact had kind of existing intelligence networks. And they would provide good intelligence. I mean, they would, you know, they would,

they would send you out on, you know, they'd say, oh, there's going to be an arms cash here or, oh, this, this guy who did the rocket attack the other day is here. And it would work. But mixed in with that, they also would use these American forces for their own ends. Because what was happening at the time is there was kind of a resource grab going on. There was a mad rush going on in Kuna province, as there was in every other province in the country, to kind of divide up the spoils as the new post-2001 order formed. So in Koonar, the things that are kind of up for grabs are government jobs, sort of senior government positions, which carry with them the ability to extort bribes and money

and get money out of people. and then natural resources, which in Kunar takes the form of conifer forests, which have this very lucrative cedar way up in the mountains that people in the, that wealthy people in the Gulf like to use for, you know, cabinets and different things like that, which is huge, which is big business. And then gems way out in the western part of the Petch Valley. And so timber becomes a real flashpoint in that this is one of the things that the U.S. gets sucked into without knowing that it's getting sucked into it.

and there's an event that happens back in the spring in the summer of 2003 actually so before either of these green beret teams we're actually living out in the patch at fob blessing and before the big ranger surge up into the mountains but a few months before that when jim gant and his team were living out of fabasada bat and just kind of roaming around the province going up into the patch looking for gunfights looking for stuff to do um which because i think it's you know it's important to note that like if you if you have experience of the war in afghanistan that's from 2010 or 2014 or it can be hard to, it can be hard to understand how long of a leash these units had.

They had no leash at all, in fact. I mean, you know, generally when Jim and his team or other teams like them wanted to go out and do something and go somewhere really far away, I mean, they would, you know, they would tell their, they would tell the Aob guy at the base, like, here's, here's the five Ws of where we're going, you know, send it up, we'll be back when we're back. There was none of this, you know, kind of run it up the flagpole for approval from the general in Bogram.

So these teams were just kind of left to do to find jobs for themselves, to make themselves useful, make keep themselves busy. And one of the ways that Jim's team got itself busy was part of the origin story of the whole mess in the Koringal is in the summer of 2003, there's a little kerfuffle that happens in the Koringal where a member of the new government border guards goes into the Koringal. and gets roughed up by the Korn Gali's. And he comes back, and his commander, a guy named Hajijan God, who's the big border guard commander, complains to the Green Berets and CIA guys at Fobabasat.

Hey, these Korn Ghalis, they roughed up, you know, a government representative, who was out there to collect taxes. And so Jim and his team, and actually the Aob commander as well, get sent out to the Korn Gull to go sort this out. Now, that's the version of the backstory that was presented to them, by this guy and by Hajijah Khad. But it's not the real version of the backstory. I mean, essentially what really was happening was,

Hajjj Khan Dodd was a big, a timber baron, not in the sense that he was harvesting timber, but in the sense that he controlled the exit points from the Korngall Valley for the Korn Golleys to get their timber to Pakistan. So the Korn Golllies would sell their cedar first to him, and he in turn would get it across into Pakistan and sell it to this Pakistani timber mafia, who would then, you know, arrange for it to be distributed

it internationally. But so Hajidjad, he, in this kind of mad rush in the first couple of years, he gets himself named Border Guards commander. But he does not, in fact, have any authority to collect taxes or anything like that. So that's not what happened. That's not, he didn't, there was not, you know, a tax collector who got roughed up by the Koryngalis. What happened was a representative of Haji John Dodd went over to the Korn Golllies to change the terms of their business agreement to be more favorable to him and less favorable to them, because now he has the Americans on his side and he has the sort of the imprimatur of being a government official on his side. And the Korn Ghali's object and they beat the guy up.

And so, uh, Haji John Dodd, you know, tells the Americans, oh, he presents it in the way that he presents it. And Jim Gantz team winds up in the Korngall. And there's actually audio, um, from a young Afghan American, uh, who was, who was on as kind of a spare interpreter on this mission. He was the son of the, uh, the governor. Um, and he, he recorded this whole thing and it's, uh, you can listen to it. Um, You can hear the AOB commander giving this very off-key analogy describing what's happening. Basically, he tells the Coringollies who are gathered there. He says, like, hey, look, guys, you've got to pay your taxes.

Like, when I pay a speeding ticket, when I get a speeding ticket, I pay the ticket. Like, that's how civilization works, you know, got to play by the rules. And then, you know, before they leave, they make the, you know, the lead Coring Goli elder pose for a photo shaking hands with the guy who they'd roughed up a few days earlier. and they kind of go back to base and check the box and say, you know, dealt with that one, smoothed over the dispute, explained to them that they got to play by the rules. And of course, what's really happened is in the eyes of the Korn Ghalis,

the Americans have just come in as muscle on the other side. And so it's not too long after that that the Kornalis, who they had some affiliations with the Taliban before 2001. Most people in Kunaar didn't. Kuna was not a Taliban stronghold before 2001. It was much more, it's a Salafi place. Solofis in the Taliban aren't kind of natural. religious kind of

they don't go together very easily and there actually have been a lot of a lot of the strong men in Kunar have been allied with the Northern Alliance but the Taliban were one of the I mean the Coringalis were one of the few groups in the province that had had some ties with the Taliban

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We've got a problem. And so just as Haji Jandad brought in these American special operators for muscle, the Khorngalis bring in the Taliban for muscle. And this is kind of the self-licking ice cream cone, is that this is the dynamic that kind of, you know, the third group team a year later doesn't really understand that this is the dynamic. that they're interfering in. And so they start going in there

and it just becomes more and more clear to the Korn Ghalis that the Americans are a threat to their very lucrative business interests. And so the Taliban presence grows. Now there's more Taliban, more targets, more SIGAN coming out of the valley. Because the Taliban is there,

there's a particular Arab al-Qaeda figure named Abu Qlaas, who starts going there to provide training to them and everything. That, of course, generates more interest on the American side. Oh, there's an al-Qaeda guy up there. and before you know it

that Coringal is like this heart of darkness that you just that there are serious operations go into. I think that you know and correct me if I'm wrong I don't like to hear what you think Wes but I think that in the common analysis

we often think of people in third world countries or even not third world countries we tend to think of these folks as either savages we have a sort of that's sort of like racist view, that these are primitive people, that they're idiots.

Or we have this view that they are these sort of hapless victims of Western colonialism. That, you know, everything was great until we came in. But in, I mean, we see it in Syria. We've seen it in Iraq. You're talking about Afghanistan. Other parts of Central Asia. We've seen that these local people, these so-called savages or these so-called victims, are in all actuality, very clever, self-interested.

players actively involved in their own destiny. And they're very smart about how they're able to play the United States in their favor. Absolutely. I mean, as one Afghan friend, a Kunari friend of mine put it this way, you basically said, you think that Malik Zerin and those guys were the CIA's proxies? The CIA were Malik Zerine's proxies. And I think both are true. I mean, they were using one another for for their own ends, I think the difference might be the degree to which they're aware that they're being used. And I think some, some Americans special operators and intelligence collectors who were up there were very keenly aware of the ways in which they might be used and very alert to it. And many others were not. All right. Well, I was going to say that, you know,

I think that especially in the beginning of Afghanistan, particularly Afghanistan, more so than Iraq, Americans went in with a very naive approach. And we did not understand that when somebody, and this isn't just in the Pesh or in Korngal, but all over Afghanistan, that when we get, when somebody shoots at an American helicopter and we get reliable information that it was those people on on the other side of the river, that often nobody knew if that was true or not. It's just that there had been a blood feud between those, you know, that village or that tribe or that family and the family on the other side of the river for like a hundred years. and we just became their proxy. And it sounds like, I mean, that was very much at play, you know, like you say in the Corn Gaul, where we unwittingly became the, you know, working for the strong mafia. Yeah, we became the strong man's muscle and injected our actually created an escalation.

And again, you know, I think a lot of that is just our own naivity. And the fact that we don't, I was good. we don't have that type of tribalism in the U.S. I mean, we have tribalism for sure, but not to that. I don't know. I think we might find out what kind of tribalism we had if there was a, you know, if there was an occupying army that you could use to settle grudges with. Sure, absolutely. No, 100%. So Operation Red Wings, most surprising thing, biggest takeaway. Red Wings was a tough chapter to report out and research. I mean, for reasons that you can imagine, there's a tremendous amount of published material about Red Wings. Some of it is.

true. Some of it is not. A lot of people are really wary about talking about Red Wings just because of kind of the glut of material that's out there. Then again, there also were a lot of people who kind of once they realize that you are interested in kind of digging a level deeper and you're interested in more than just like who did what on the mountain on the afternoon of June 28th, which was not what I tried to reconstruct. You're interested more in kind of how did the recovery go down? Why did this thing go wrong? And what were kind of the cascading effects of the cascading effects of the Red Wings tragedy, then how it affected the war in Kunaar afterward,

actually a lot of people would kind of come in and talk about their roles in it. And a lot of people had roles in it, because even though it was a very, very small operation to begin with, you know, a seal task unit with a couple of platoons and a little reconnaissance element, and then the nightstockers who flew them in, when it went south, it became a massive, massive priority operation

that became, became the J-Soc commander's number one priority. It became, it was a huge thing that sucked in a tremendous number of people. So there are a lot of people who sort of had parts in that recovery. And in fact, you know, in that recovery, you kind of see the, both Red Wings itself and the recovery operation after Red Wings are great examples of kind of how dysfunctional at that point in the war the command structure was. You know, we get to a point later in the war where the various tribes of special operators

conventional troops are kind of sharing information with each other more, talking to each other. But 2005 is kind of like the low point of that. Really, nobody's sharing anything with anybody. You know, I mean, you've got the Siege of Sotif, the Green Berets who live on Bagram, who are responsible for one aspect of the war. And they've got a little seal unit attached to them, which is Christensen's seal unit, who are kind of the, you know, the red-headed stepchildren in this Green Beret task force. the Greenbury Task Force doesn't really know what to do with them.

So I guess I would say the most surprising thing was just the degree to which Eric Christensen, I mean, I think just being in a, being a guy who wanted to help, who knew he had a bunch of guys with real skills and real training, the degree to which he just kind of had to make a job for himself and for his men. You know, you might think of, or civilians might think of everything as being kind of very top down in the military. You know, the general tells the colonel who tells the, other colonel who tells the major who blah blah blah blah blah but in this environment it wasn't really like that i mean eric christensen was uh with a little a little task unit that um whose mission

was not clear uh and was trying to create a mission for them and so what he did was he try just he would shop his his wares around to anybody who'd listen and offer to help um and that was how operation red wings came about was just kind of through his initiative and uh basically you know offering the marine battalion that was you know out there patrolling eastern afghanistan and it had had some IED hits in the Pesh Valley and couldn't get up into the Coringal on its own, at least not with any regularity. Basically, he came to them and said,

look, not only do I have the guys who can do this, I know you have guys who want to do it too, but because of my location on Bogram, I actually, I can bring aviation resources to bear to make this happen. And it was this kind of strange, you know, low-level O4 bureaucracy that caused, that brought Red Wings into existence. So I'd say that was kind of the most surprising thing to me

was just the way that it came about and kind of the very ad hoc way that it came about. So let's then push forward, let's project forward the next iteration of the conflict in this valley. We're getting past the part of the book that I've read so far. So spoiler alert, you take the reins here, Wes. What happened next? Yeah, so the book is divided into four parts, just chronologically.

I end part one with Red Wings and with kind of what the Marine units in the area started doing after Red Wings, which was, I mean, basically Red Wings. Red Wings up to the stakes a lot for the U.S. military in Eastern Afghanistan. I mean, up to that point, something like 60 Americans had died in combat in Afghanistan, and then 19 die on a single day in the Coringale Valley, the valleys nobody's never heard of. And the kind of the small-time insurgent commander who did it, the guy who went by the, you know, the alias Ahmad Shah. I mean, he kind of, he rockets to the top in a way, both of, you know, Taliban resources. I mean, he was sort of an independent freelancing local guy, but he, when you've got video in your hands of, you know, having shot down an American helicopter, overrun a, you know, overrun a team of American special operators, that video is the currency with which, you know, you can negotiate with. with the Taliban bigwigs, Beck and Bashar for more money,

more men, more responsibility, you know, to be allowed to go into different areas and operate there. So he becomes a bigger time guy as a result of the operation. And then maybe to an even bigger degree than that,

he becomes a bigger time target on the U.S. side because he's got the blood of 19 Americans on his hands, and they want him bad. And so kind of the hunt for Ahmed Shah melds in with the other threads that are going on in the area, including the hunt for al-Qaeda, there's a guy named this guy, Abuayclos, the Egyptian guy who's up there, to drive what happens then in the spring of 2006,

which is a very large operation by the 10th Mountain Division that results in essentially three whole battalions go up into the Coringal and the areas around it. And sequentially, first into Coringal and then in some other valleys around the patch, they start building outposts. So where before there had been forward operating base of Sadabad by the provincial capital, and there had been Camp Blessing by the second biggest town, Nangalam up in the Pesh Valley. These 10th Mountain guys, they go out and they just start building more and more little outposts. They build one in the Coringall.

They build another in the Coringal. They go up into the Wigal. They build two up there. They build some more in the Petch Valley to support the whole thing. Another 10th Mountain unit goes farther up north into Kunar to kind of get into Nuristan via another approach and builds a bunch of outposts up there. So it goes from just a couple of bases and a small foot. print of like, you know, some soft teams and some marine platoons to, you know, a couple battalions living in Kunar, the bulk of a battalion in the Pesh Valley and its tributaries.

And why this happens is kind of, you know, well, what this heralds really is the beginning of this very low-tech, grinding day-to-day counterinsurgency war of, you know, hundreds of American infantrymen fighting in the Petch and its tributaries as they try to sort of create a security bubble, a sort of, you know, to use the language of like the counterinsurgency manual, they're trying to separate the people from the enemy. They're trying to create sort of security down on the valley floors so the enemy can't be in there and kind of expand the writ of the, you know, nascent Afghan government. So that's the sort of the, that was all very visible to, I mean, embedded reporters who went and visited these units at the time, both the 10th Mountain

guys and the 170, 30 airborne guys who came in and relieved them and became famous because of Restrepo and everything. But kind of the hidden aspect to it that was really interesting to kind of stumble upon in reporting this out is why the patch, why was that place, as opposed to other places in the Afghan East, the subject of this surge and this big, you know, this whole little, gets sprinkled with the loudposts in 2006 at a time when, you know, there was one U.S. Brigade for all of Eastern Afghanistan. And the answer basically is that third brigade, 10th, division had rotated into the eastern part of the country with a little bit more combat power than the unit that had been there before. Essentially, it had a surplus of one battalion.

And so the brigade commander, Mick Nicholson, who goes on to be the four-star overall commander in Afghanistan and who reappears periodically throughout the story. He's sort of as close to a I mean, he's, of all our general officers, he's the guy who just did Afghanistan over and over again, never Iraq. I mean, he was just the Afghanistan guy. But so this was his first Afghanistan to point. He came in there as a brigade commander. He had this extra battalion. I mean, he wanted to use it for something, right? I mean, he wanted to be useful with it.

And he can't talk. He wasn't able to talk about this specifically, but other members, other division officers did talk about it to me and then CIA guys talked about it to me. What this kind of was, was the term they used was counterterrorism through counterinsurgency. And basically what it was is that the CIA steered 10th Mountain Division, toward, of all the various provinces where it could have committed this extra battalion,

it steered them toward Kunar-Nuristan, basically saying, look, Kunaanuristan, they border these areas of Pakistan, Chitral and Bajar, which we believe are kind of the big serious headquarters of al-Qaeda right now. The thinking at the time was that that was likely where bin Laden and Zawakri were in those two districts, although we know in retrospect that is not where bin Laden was. That was very much the the kind of the conventional thinking within the agency was bin Laden's up in Chitralar

and they were having a really hard time recruiting human sources who had any kind of access in those areas. So the agency's thinking was well hey look if there's an American unit that's going to be going out and building a bunch of little outposts and doing you know population centric counterinsurgency somewhere in the Afghan East let's have them do it in Kunar and Nuristan because that way these little outposts can also act as kind of lily pad

where our collectors can talk to people and recruit sources who move back and forth across the border. Because there's all kinds of people like that, whether it's smugglers or cross-border traders or just people who do it for various tribal reasons. There's a lot of people who pass back and forth between, you know, Bajar and Chitral on the one side and Kuhner-Noristan on the other side. So the CIA encourages Tenth Mountain to do this. They don't tell them to do it, but they kind of, but they encourage to them like, look, if you're going to be applying this extra force somewhere,

like this is a place where there would be this additional benefit to us, an additional benefit at like the national level, the national counterterrorism priorities to be supporting. And so that's the kind of the backstory to why 10th Mountain went up there when it did. But it kind of fizzles. I mean, this whole, this dynamic of, you know, this supporting logic of why Kunar Nuristan, there's never really any follow-through to it.

Because, I mean, as Ron Mueller and other CIA officers, described to me, the agency didn't have the manpower to ever really make much of this. I mean, they did wind up setting up an additional base up way up in northern Kunar, but not really in one of these places where it was enabled by this big push. And they didn't wind up, it's not like they wound up embedding little, you know, case officers down with these battalions at these outposts or anything like that. That just didn't happen. I mean, it wound up being a case that, yes, there were like army human collection teams that now were deeper into places that they hadn't been before. And those teams did indeed recruit, you know, some sources who, you know,

who had cross-border links and so on and so forth. But it really didn't amount too much. Even at the kind of the slightly, the lower level than bin Laden where Tenth Mountain was looking at, I mean, they were looking at, we want to get Abu Kloss, we want to get Amashah, and neither of those things happened. The kind of the additional, the additional recruitment of sources didn't lead to those guys being captured or killed. What it led to was them, you know, going a farther underground, displacing back across the border to Pakistan. So then by the time the 173rd Airborne Brigade rotates in to replace it into the mountain guys in 2007, they kind of they inherit this footprint of like a dozen bases spread out in the Pesh Valley and its tributaries

and a complementary set of them in the Cavs Squadron, A-O, in northern Kunar and another part of Nuristan. And they're stuck with them, right? I mean, these are just, it's not like they can say, oh, we're not going to take this base or that base. we're going to only take these foo, right? Like they're taking the basis that they get. And but this, but this aspect of the rationale is no longer there. I mean, as Bill Oslund, who was the 2503 battalion commander later went on to be Ranger Regiment deputy commander and the J-Sog task force commander in Afghanistan, the way he put

it was, you know, infantry platoon on a mountain side is not a national intelligence collection asset. And these guys were struggling to kind of, we're struggling to regularly get into the little villages, you know, just outside their bases. Like they, they were not, they were not bringing in intelligence about where Haji Ghafore or Abu Iclis was, let alone where Osama bin Laden was. And so the 173 kind of comes in a little, with mixed feelings about this situation. I mean, they look at it and there's aspects of it that they're like, man, the Wigal Valley, this is too much. We don't want to be in the Wigall Valley. Other aspects of it, they kind of double down on.

So for instance, the Coringal Valley is a place where the 173rd gets really ambitious. You know, the way to the 10th Mountain guys had conceived of it was that we're in the Coringal basically as a, this is a place where, this is like a sponge. We're sucking up the Coringalian surgeon activity so that they don't bother the Pesh Valley Road where we've got the security bubble going. And it was like a, it was a shitty job for the company living up in that valley. But that was the way the 10th Mountain leadership conceived of it. 173rd comes in

and they really are more like they want to be able to incorporate the Coringal into the security bubble. They want to be able to they see that paving this road in the Pesh Valley, although it had been done for sort of very narrow

counter ID reasons initially, they see that it has with the sort of the quiet that the outposts have initially brought. There's all this new commerce. I mean, there's little gas stations

are being set up everywhere, cell phone shops. Like the Pesh Valley floor is looking pretty great in large part because of this road that Tenth Mountain and its PRT had paved just so that they'd have a kind of a hardball

supply route that would be less formal or other than IEDs. So from the 173rd's perspective, they think like, okay, roads, this is like the weapon in counterinsurgency. And so they decide they want to pave the Coringall Road to. And not just, they don't just want to pave it up to the outpost,

which, you know, Tenth Mountain had wanted it paved up to the outpost too so that it could be a supply route for the outpost. They want to pave it way up. the back of the Coringall Valley and then have another one coming up to the perpendicular valley so that they join and like basically the people way up in the top of the Coringall Valley are

connected to civilization via this hardball road and it does not work that way it doesn't pan out it's really not the kind of blaze that you can build a road that would survive for longer than a year or two and the people in these villages don't want it you know I mean they

the PRT commander comes in and makes the case to them and says, look, like, tomatoes are way more expensive here for you. Do you know what they cost down now in the patch with the, you know, with the nice road they've got down there? But it's just not, the corn gullies are not buying what the PRT and the 173rd are selling. And in the corn goal, it becomes a just really, really protracted, difficult fighting as the, as the corn goal, as the 173rd essentially tries to force this progress down their throat. At the same time that the 173 is trying to get out of the Y goal. So these are the kind of calculations that a succession of battalion commanders are making is like, well, look, where am I too vulnerable versus where can I make progress?

And in the 173rd's case, it ends with the Battle of Wannot in 2008, where as part of their effort to get out of the Wigall without looking like they're just abandoning the place, they consolidate, they close their two really, really remote outposts in the Wigall where they've had a couple of just sort of by the grace of God, like near disasters in late 2007. And they consolidate instead at a base that they think is going to be more kind of sustainable that's on the valley floor closer to where it meets the patch called Wannat. But the enemy gets to jump on them and hits them really hard in the opening days while they are starting to establish the outpost and nine paratroopers are killed, you know, which remains the largest number of American lives lost in a ground battle, you know, absent a helicopter crash or something like that in the Afghan war. And this kind of winds up being the high watermark in the Petch, this battle. I mean, from there on out, nobody's ever, nobody's ever as ambitious again. And the first infantry division battalion that rotates in a few days after that is a whole different kind of animal. It's a brand new battalion.

It's been stood up at Fort Hood just about a year earlier. It's really light on kind of senior NCOs. I mean, it's just in sheer numbers of them. It's very light on them. And it just winds up being a kind of a battalion that's not able to, not able to do the same kinds of stuff that the 132 from 10th Mountain and 2503 from the 173 had done before them. And in some ways, this acts as a forcing function and it allows the battalion commander there, a guy named Brett Jenkinson, to kind of be the first guy to call bullshit to say, like, what are we doing in the Coringall?

Because he can see that his guys, you know, whether or not it was feasible for the 173 to do what they wanted to do in the Coringall, he knows that his guys cannot do it. And so he essentially spends his deployment sort of, you know, trying to tell anybody who will listen at division headquarters, you know, this is bad news. The Coringall is a place that we got to get out of. And so he changes sort of the tone of the whole U.S. involvement in the patch, but he's not actually able to get out of any of these places.

Because it turns out being the case that it is a lot, lot, lot harder to close an outpost, let alone a cluster of five or six outposts in the middle of a valley that are, you know, accessible only by helicopter than it was to build it. And that becomes kind of the theme of the next few years of the book. So talk to us a little bit about the night war. Like you make this distinguishing, this sort of distinguishing mark between the day war and the night war. You said the day war is the conventional forces, the night war was like,

the J-Soc guys going out and doing raids at night. In parallel to the day war that you've been telling us about, what was going on at night? Yeah. So in Kunar, there was always the drumbeat of J-Soc raids, usually less in the patch and more out toward the Pakistani border, where Steel Team 6 would come and fly out and grab a guy who was thought to be a courier for Al-Qaeda or something like that. And then also the CIA had its own part in this nighttime war because Assadabad had wound up being a CIA base.

There was an Omega team of SEAL Team 6 operators that lived there and helped the CIA and their little local surrogate forces of Afghan commandos helped them get out and do stuff on the border. So in the early years, it's kind of like the conventional forces have the daytime war that's

in the interior in the Pesh Valley to the west of the border. And then the J-Soc and CIA guys are kind of work in the border more. But over time, they kind of meld together. And in particular, the way that happens is in, you know, basically there are very few Al-Qaeda targets to go after during this period, right? Because if you're an Al-Qaeda target with a brain, you don't come in,

you don't cross the border into Afghanistan unless you do so with, you know, very good communication security, all this kind of stuff. So for this reason, there actually are very few J-Soc missions into the patch, its tributaries between Operation Red Wings and the next few years. It can be frustrating sometimes to the conventional units that are up there because, I mean, they're dying for aviation and drone support. They have nothing. I mean, they're living on complete shoestring logistics because Iraq is, you know,

Iraq is the elephant in the room that has, you know, the vast majority of everything. So these conventional forces, they just don't have a lot of resources, but they can see that down at JLabad, there's a J-Soc contingent that has its own dedicated, you know, ISR lines, has its own dedicated little package of 160th helicopters. And they can see that just down the road at Asadabad, the CIA has this little force of Afghan commandos, the CTPT kind of terrorism pursuit team, who are these pretty high, about as high speed as Afghan forces get in the country, certainly much better than any of the Afghan partners that the infantry battalion is working with. And they have these, you know, these DevGrew guys

guys with them who are really high speed. And, um, uh, uh, uh, but, um, um, uh, but, um, um, um, uh, but, But they're really restricted to al-Qaeda targets. So when the conventional battalion has some mission, it says, hey, look, we've got a guy up in, you know, up in the Shariak who has been a big pain in our ass, who is, like, coming down and sitting IEDs or, you know, killing road workers or this or that. But he's farther up than, you know, then we can get in a foot patrol. And it's just not something we can do. Like, can you guys do this?

And the answer is inevitably no, because he's not an al-Qaeda target. It's not within the kind of the, it's not within the, it's not within. the legal remit of this little Title 50 CIA force at Assadabad to do that kind of thing. And early in the war, it's not within the remit of JASOC either. JASOC is Al-Qaeda focused. But as things go on, J-Soc in particular, the J-Soc task force, it grows. In 2009, it grows a lot in Afghanistan because the sort of the big focus shifts over from Iraq post-surge to Afghanistan for the Afghan surge.

and J-Soc comes into Afghanistan in a big way. They set up their big three-store headquarters at Bagram with Admiral McRaven. They start spreading out all over into the country, you know, before it had just been kind of mostly at Bagram, and then they would sort of do periods of presence down in other parts of the country. Now it becomes, look, we've got these regional task forces. You've got task force east at J-Bad. We've got task force south at Kandahar, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So in Kunar, essentially task force east is a seal team six squadron that lives at Jalalabad.

And in the course of 2009, new leadership comes into the JASOC task force. The Ranger Regiment takes over the big task force at, you know, the 06 level task force at Bogram. And with the blessing of Admiral McRaven, the JASC commander, the Ranger colonels in charge, In particular, Rich Clark was the regimental commander at the time, who now is the U.S. Socom commander. And then his deputy at the time was Bill Oslund, who just a year before had been in the patches of the battalion commander. They basically decide, like, look, we have all these resources. There's nowhere near the types of kind of al-Qaeda targets to use them against. We can be a supporting asset to the conventional counterinsurgency war.

and we can use our resources and our operators and our assets and everything, we can use that to go after the kind of targets that they need hit. And so basically the task force starts working in support of the conventional brigades, going after targets that they want hit, going after small-time guys. So you wind up seeing in the patch for this period in 2009 and 2010, both of these elements are, instead of fighting two separate wars, the way they have been, you know, all along, now they're kind of fighting nighttime and daytime halves

of the same counterinsurgency war. You know, the conventional guys are dealing with attacks from, you know, whatever small-time insurgent commander, Fazil Waheed, you know, objective burnside, whatever, down on the road during the day. But now they know that, you know, a Steel Team 6 troop might come and hike up the valley in the middle of the night and kill the guy.

And so there is this period of kind of increased cooperation. it doesn't always, it's not without glitches, because, I mean, there's kind of an inherent tension between these two types of missions. Very often, even when the task force comes in and gets exactly the guy that it's, that it meant to get, the Taliban is still going to exploit that for propaganda. It's still going to have been local men who were killed,

who have relatives, who are going to be angry. And there are still going to be misses. There are going to be times when they hit the wrong house and they kill the wrong people. And that, you know, it just keeps happening. And the Taliban doesn't have, or whoever the enemy is in that case, they're not going to retaliate against J-Soc who's no longer there. They flew away in their black helicopters.

They're going to retaliate against the 10th Mountain guys who are right down the street. Right. Nor are the villagers in the town going to be angry at J-Soc who's not there and they've never seen. They're going to be angry at the Americans that they interact with at the nearby outpost. So there's an example. there's a there's a ranger raid that hits a house in the little town right by cop Michigan, Kandagall.

And they, I don't know whether it's the right house that they hit or the wrong house that they hit, but whatever it is, one of the people that they kill winds up being the old man who was the cook for the A&A on the outpost. And it's a big, it's a big problem. And so the infantry guys on this outpost, they wind up joking that, well, so the J-Soc element went by the name, Tassock. force 373 at the time in Afghanistan, one of the sort of ever-changing set of numbers that it went by. But at the time, it was 373. And the joke became on this outpost that it stands for

the three minutes it took the operators to kill everybody in the house, the seven months of kind of hard patrolling and rapport building work that it undid. And the three years, I mean, generously three years that this is going to take to kind of smooth over with everybody. Was that a common theme with these J-Soc operations as the years went on? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, you see it get better in the 2009 to 2010 period in the sense that the task force is going after targets that the conventional force once hit. And in fact, the conventional force, the conventional brigade commanders are given, McRaven gives the conventional brigade commander's veto authority over any raids in their area. So that helps.

You know, I mean, previously, it had been much more like, you know, conventional force would not know about a raid until they were dealing with the aftermath in the morning, you know, which is a very persistent theme throughout Afghanistan is, you know, cleaning up the mess in the morning after a soft raid. How did, so how did that work that you're saying that the, the J-Soc elements, soft elements started to like call down to the local FOB commander and they started to coordinate these operations a little bit. Yeah, they did. And I think this was helped by the fact that in 2009, the Ranger Regiment took charge of the task force, the 06 level task force at Bogram. It's what you

have there that's different is, and especially down in the south where now you have a Ranger Battalion commander as kind of the regional task force commander. You know, they've walked in the same, you know, they've walked in the same shoes that these conventional commanders have walked in. I mean, like they have been that conventional commander themselves. The Ranger Battalion commander. He was a conventional battalion commander out somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan a year ago, before he was a rager battalion commander. And they can empathize a lot more with kind of and understand a lot more the difficulties that these conventional units have. Now, this is not true of, you know, Ranger NCOs, I mean, who are just there, who are just in regiment and that's what they've done.

But even the Ranger platoon leader, right, is a guy who, he was, he was an infantry or cavalry platoon. He was an infantry platoon leader somewhere else a year ago, dealing with this kind of stuff. So I think under the Ranger Regiment's leadership, you know, going kind of going forward from 2009, that definitely helped. And you see, you see cases where, you know, for instance, in 2009 to 2010, the battalion commander out in the patch was a guy who was just really good personal friends with the task force commander at Bogram. Yeah, a year later, the brigade commander at Jabat, when I first visit, I mean, he's a guy who sat in freshman math with. Eric Carilla, who then is the task force commander at Bogrom. There's a personal connection at that kind of like 040506 level that helps to coordinate the two efforts.

There also are people who are helping make it happen kind of at a little lower level than that. They're especially like AWG contractors and guys like that who are sort of helping to push to kind of push J-Soc lessons into the conventional force, helping the J-Soc guys understand the conventional forces needs. Yeah, so it gets better, but it's a violent business. And as just the sheer scale of the campaign ramps up in 2009 to 2010, I mean, inevitably, the number of raids ramps up and the number of deaths ramps up. So it's not like the problem goes away.

Let me pull on that little thread there for just a moment, a little sidebar before moving on. you mentioned asymmetrical warfare group playing a role in that and maybe we could talk a little bit about what those guys were doing down there in the valley because from my an outsider perspective okay asymmetrical warfare group they looked like a bunch of dudes to me who are like training joes how to like do mag changes and shit like what the fuck did these guys even exist for and the unit's defunct now i think they got shut down in the last six months but i mean so this is very interesting to hear about, you know, like, no kidding, boots on the ground, this is what they really do.

Right. So, yeah, I'd love to talk about what AWG did in the patch, because it was actually really important. And, you know, I've certainly seen out on embeds. I've seen cases where, you know, AWG teams visited and it didn't seem like they were doing much. And I think that in more recent years, AWG had kind of faded to, you know, a shadow of its previous self. But I think the real untold story of AWG in that kind of peak period of 05, 06, 07,08 was there were certain places certain places in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think Mosul may have been one of them, I mean, at least at certain periods,

but the Pesh certainly was one of them, where individual AWG guys really took it upon themselves to act as the reservoirs of knowledge that the army didn't have, of area-specific knowledge. So, you know, what kept happening during these, every year, every 15 months, there would be these reliefs in place between these conventional units.

You know, in the patch it would be, you know, 132 switches out with 2503, and they switch out with 1-2-6, and they only overlap for a couple of weeks. And there's only so much that you can learn in a couple of weeks. And it's very dependent on kind of how willing the new guys coming in are to learn and how willing the old guys coming out are to teach. And it's just not very long.

And so in the patch, there were a few particular AWG guys, both contractors and NCOs, who really took it upon themselves, one guy in particular, to go back there for these turnover periods and just kind of embed themselves with the company that they knew was going to get hit hardest, so like the one in the Coringal,

and just try to kind of hold their hand through it and teach them all the, as many kinds of things that they didn't learn during this transition as possible. And so, I mean, there are guys that these conventional that these conventional forces really, really looked up to and almost became kind of legendary figures. I mean, there's a guy who, again, he wouldn't let me use his name in the book, but there is this, there's this AWG contractor who started going to Kunar in 2004 and he didn't stop it until 2010 or 2011. He just spent an unbelievable amount of time in the province, and he got to know it so, so much better

than anybody ever did in any of these conventional units. And he was really looked up to by, I mean, he was kind of a mentor in many ways for company commanders, battalion commanders, company first sergeants, kind of an outside figure who could advise them and who they could talk to. He was just a cool guy for like the Joe's to see on these outposts.

I mean, because he's like, I think he was, I think his final rotation out to one, out to these little bases, he was like 54. And he was, you know, former Delta operator and everything. And just a really humble guy, I mean, just a guy, a guy who just saw himself as being there to like help these units make it. And so the Petsch was a place that AWG made a real difference. Guys, I just want to remind everyone, we're here talking to Wesley Morgan.

He's the author of The Hardest Place. New book just came out this week about the U.S. military history in the Petch Valley in Afghanistan. And I just want to remind everyone, thank you for watching tonight. We have like 200 people watching live. If you have any questions for Wes, please get them in. and if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, please consider doing so. Give us a little thumbs up, leave some comments. Let us know if you think we suck.

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Slowly and slowly we're getting more. No, actually, it's funny because I was going to follow up. I was going to ask the same question about AWD. Oh, yeah. You know, asymmetric warfare group is something that people saw over there, but a lot of people were unfamiliar with, and maybe a lot of people who didn't serve have never even heard it before. And it was either, like I said,

like your impression of them was like they were teaching Joe's how to, like, set up their plate carrier, or there are, like, rumors that there are, like, some black ops assassination unit whacking people in the night, And it's like, oh, no, it's good to hear you tell the real story about them. I'll give two examples of kind of concrete things that they did in the patch. So one was, you know, in 2004, when this particular contractor that I keep talking about, when he showed up there, AWG was filling a void in 2004, and it wasn't actually called AWG yet at that point.

It was a component of the Joint IED Task Force. But General Votel, who was heading the Joint IED Task Force, force had set it up in large part because of the IED problem and because the EOD community in the U.S. military just hadn't really adapted to it yet. You know, the role that you wind up seeing like Air Force EOD techs playing out in the countryside in Afghanistan, you know, going along on route clearance patrols, going along in every kind of clearance operation, that's not the role that they played in 2003 and 2004. They were much more about, look, we're on Boggroom cleaning up UXO. And they certainly did not have kind of expertise.

in IEDs and it kind of, you know, all the kind of technical intelligence type stuff that you can learn from IEDs. None of that was there. And so that was a role that AWG stepped into just by not by dint of having any real training or I think in many cases, you know, kind of explosives expertise, but just by being experienced, smart, creative guys. And so that was what brought this contractor up into the patch in 2004 was the patch was one of the first places that IEDs were showing up in Afghanistan. It was, that's where Jay Blessing was killed in November 14th, 2003 by an IED at the mouth of the Coringal Valley. And then by 2005, early 2006, there are pretty regular occurrence. And, you know, like many places in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Petch Valley becomes known as IED Road.

And it's got different parts that are IED cliff and IED this and that. And so they start, they kind of provide an ad hoc, like, weapons intelligence, you know, IEDE exploitation capacity, where they can take photos of stuff, take samples of stuff, send it back to, send it back to AWG headquarters, and kind of do some of the stuff that eventually the EOD community winds up doing it a much larger scale. But in those early years of the war, that was a void that they were filling. And then another example is in 2008 or so in the Koringal, the Koringal, sometimes was a place where the enemy would test weapons, it seemed like.

there was a there was an a gs 17 like sort of soviet block automatic grenade launcher that showed up into coringol and then later after we pulled out of the coringal it started hitting cop michigan as well there was a some kind of very large very precise rifle that was either either some type of anti-material type rifle maybe homemade in one of these places in pakistan where they make where they make you know unique weapons or perhaps some kind of large caliber machine gun that had been adapted to fire kind of single shots and stuff like that. But they also had between that and just kind of a dish gut problem that they had up on these mountains, there were AWG guys in the Coringal who sort of helped provide solutions to that, to help figure out where this very precise fire was coming from at very long ranges and figure out ways to kind of have a system in place to react quickly to it with your mortars and your air weapons team and whatever. when you

being that they were testing these weapons there and you mentioned the anti-material weapon which you know sounds a bit like a 50 caliber like sniper weapon and you know something that the Americans would use was there much evidence of foreign fighters in

in the Pesh or Chechens and what? Yeah the mythical Chechens yeah okay I mean yes there was evidence of foreign fighters in the patch always I mean there were guys like um you know of named specific ones Ablau Klaus al-Masri was the guy who was there for years.

I mean, he was a funny case because he was foreign and he wasn't foreign. He was an Egyptian national who had come to Afghanistan to fight in the jihad in the late 80s, and it never left. Now, at some point in the late 90s, or perhaps after 2001, he signs on with al-Qaeda, and he kind of becomes the conduit from, you know, al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the conduit for them to send, you know, material and money and weapons. to support local fighters in Kunar and Nuristan in particular because he had lived in Kunar all these years. I mean, he was essentially, people saw him as Kunari,

although he was Egyptian. So he was always the kind of the bright flashing light in terms of a foreign fighter up there. But there were other ones too. I mean, they would sort of, they would come in and be blooded and leave and things like that. But we're talking, you know, Arabs here, essentially.

Also, there are tons of Pakistani fighters who, you know, from a Korn Gali perspective or a Kunari perspective, they're foreign, but they're not kind of, from the counterterrorism task forces perspective, they're not foreign. The Chechen thing is an interesting one. You know, I don't think anyone can disprove

that there were Chechen fighters in Afghanistan at some point. I mean, that would be very difficult thing to disprove. But zooming in on the Pech Valley and its tributaries, you know, there are many, many cases, you know, where I was told or you can see in documents kind of reports of Chechens. and there's never anything sort of substantial to it. There's a guy named Christian Bluer who has done a really good analysis of kind of how this, you know, the sort of the Chechen meme spread.

And I think it comes from a few things. I mean, it comes, one, it comes from the very early days of the Afghan war from Operation Anaconda in March of 2002. U.S. forces encountered a really nasty kind of contention of Uzbek fighters during the battle during Operation Anaconda who it seems were kind of mistaken for being Chechens and you see this thing this thing start this ball start rolling where

any evidence of Russian speaking people of Russian language materials, documents any evidence of sort of fair-haired, fair-skinned fighters, that all gets interpreted as Chechens. It often gets interpreted as Chechens by Afghan interpreters working for the Americans who just use it as kind of a shorthand that they know the Americans will kind of understand that Chechens is a word that kind of makes sense to them and gets their attention.

It also becomes a good way, if you want Americans to come somewhere, you tell them about Cheshins. So for instance, in 2006, when the governor of Nuristan, Tamim Nuristan, is trying very hard to get the 10th Mountain Division to commit to building roads and outposts up into his incredibly remote province. He, of course, stresses to the commanders that he sits down with. He stresses that there are Arabs and Chechens up there because he understands very well that they are doing this kind of counterterrorism through counterinsurgency and that they intend to use their outposts as kind of these intelligence collection platform. and that the idea of Arabs and Chechens is something that's going to be that's going to catch their attention.

There's, you know, I'll give an example. I mean, I talked about this once with a Soviet veteran of the Petch who had been there with an aerosol battalion that would go and do big operations into the Petch. And he said that their equivalent of Chechens, the thing that was just kind of like catniff for their, for their intelligence and commanders, was reports of Stinger missiles.

and he gave an example of there's a battle that happens actually on the northern slopes of the patch in in 1985 that almost is as much of a scandal for the 40th Army the Soviet Army in Afghanistan as the Battle of Wannat wound up being for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan to the extent that there are charges of dereliction of duty, there's a big investigation.

But basically a company commander follows a tip about a Stinger missile cash and goes up and the company gets slaughtered. It's just a disaster. I mean, it was sort of very severe casualties at the point that it was shocking

to 48th Army leadership. And it turns out to have been a false tip, which you can tell, in fact, by the date of it, in 1985, there were no Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. But there were reports of Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. And these were already, you know, whether this was, they were totally false, whether this was a shorthand for other types of mandathing,

pads that the CIA was already sort of farming into Afghanistan, like strellas and blowpipes and so on, these reports of Stinger missiles, even before there physically were Stinger missiles, were a thing that just got Soviet commanders excited and could be used to lure them to places for various purposes. And I think the Chechen thing falls into a similar category in Afghanistan. I think it's important to note, I mean, Chechens are not mythical. I mean, there have been tons and tons and tons of Chechen fighters in Syria. I'm not, you know, but Syria and Afghanistan are different countries. Yeah, for, I mean, I have had conversations with so many people over the years who are like,

oh, yeah, you know, our fob got hit, they were throwing grenades at us and stuff. They got right on top of us. They were Chechens, man. These Chechens were all over us or any sort of halfway competent marksman in Afghanistan gets charred up as a Chechen sniper. Right. So that's kind of the other, that's the other logical fallacy that comes into play. And I've seen this myself in, in Pactica once in 2010, where I was visiting another, there's a 101st company that was dealing with a sniper. They call it a sniper. I mean, I don't know if he was, I don't know if he would meet any sort of American definition of a sniper, but they were dealing with a man with a bolt action rifle who was taking precise shots at them. And it was, and they were precise enough and scary enough that besides sending out, you know, a team. from the scout, you know, from the battalion scout platoon, actually the nearby, the deltsal force from their from their outstation at Sharana not too far away, sent a couple of their snipers out to sort of help deal with them. And people would just refer to this, these reflexively as a Chechen, because there was this conflation of we have encountered greater than usual competence. Chechens are known to be competent to a greater degree than we expect. Therefore, somebody who is unusually competent. is a Chechen.

Right. And I think that's something that you certainly saw. I mean, you know, I would deconstruct this sometimes in interviews with, with guys who talked about it up in Kunar. You'd say, well, first, Sergeant, you say you were fighting Chechens up there. He said, yeah, well, they'd get in real close. There were good shots. You know, we heard that's, so they're Chechens.

And then that would kind of be, but was there, was there sort of supporting evidence? No. Or, well, we heard, we heard Cheshon on the Icom shatter. You know, the, the interpreter said that it was, Chechen. Does the interpreter speak Chechen? Certainly not. He's a, he's from Nongalam. So yeah, it's definitely one of those interesting, interesting threads to, to pull on. Yeah. Very interesting. So then let's get into, we've, we've been going for a little while here. I'd really like to hear about some of the more significant, um, operations that you cover in the,

in the rest of the book. Um, be they special operations missions or conventional army missions, Some of the more interesting ones that you came across in your, you know, a lot of, I mean, years of research. How many years did you spend research in this book, Wes? I first went to the Pesch in 2010 and kind of got hooked on it then. So on and off a decade. I got the book deal in 2012. So, yeah, a long time ago. So tell us about some of the more significant or interesting special operations or conventional military operations that are detailed in the book.

So on the conventional side, you can. kind of get this drumbeat that happens of battalions come in, battalions want to do big air assault operations. And there are a lot of them. There's some battalions that kind of resist the urge and they don't do it, or they would, but they don't have the resources. They can't kind of tap into the helicopters at the right time. But a lot of the battalions that fight up there do these big air assault operations. And these air assault operations, I think it's pretty clear, tend to be a pretty dubious and at least fleeting value in terms of what they actually accomplish. You know, maybe it's kind of the high end, like maybe you kill 100 enemy fighters on one of

these operations. But what does that mean? Now, some battalions were kind of much more, I think, thoughtful about this than others. So, you know, when the 173rd was up there, they did a lot of these operations. They were able to really tap into it every few months to do kind of a battalion scale aerosalt. There was a big one in the fall of 2007 called Operation Rock Avalanche. They did a bunch more of them over the course of their deployment.

And I think there was a combination in that battalion of, I think the sort of the most practical, almost cynical view of these aerosolts operations was, look, there is a system by which resources are allocated in this theater and in this division

task force. And everybody knows that the way that system works, you don't get helicopters and ISR except for named operations. So you do named operations, not because you think it's going to be so important to kill 100 bad guys, but because it's the only way you're ever going to be able to get to certain places. Now, it would be, you know, ideally, you'd have helicopters on call and you'd be able to go to Yakashina the moment that an informant or some other piece of intelligence says that, you know, something of interest is happening there. But this isn't the Vietnam War.

It's the Afghanistan War with kind of this essentially located and essentially allocated and centrally located aviation resources. So it winds up being the only way you can get to Yakashina, the village way back in the Coringal Valley, is if you plan a big air assault mission there a month ahead of time. And there probably is, I mean, there's some value to these operations. in the sense that you know, you get to somewhere that you weren't able to get to before. But so I'll use Operation Rock Avalanche as an example.

I mean, this is kind of a famous one. It happens in the way back at the Coringal Valley. And it results in several American soldiers, parachopers being killed, probably a whole bunch of enemy fighters being killed. And it results in Salgenta, one of the survivors in Battle Company from one of these really terrible sort of close ambushes on the mountain during the operation. He is awarded the Medal of Honor. And I believe he was the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor from these wars at the time that he received it, although it could be forgetting one person. But so this was, you know, Rock Avalanche became famous because of that and because there were several embedded reporters who took really striking, I mean, incredible photos and coverage, you know, kind of reconstructing this operation.

But afterward, kind of the question was, well, what did it accomplish? And it was very difficult to measure what it accomplished because, so enemy activity quieted down for sure. It's also the case that it happened at the end of October, just as the cold weather is setting in. So it's kind of impossible to tease out the difference between enemy activity quieted down because they took serious losses and they're kind of licking their wounds. And enemy activity quieted down because there's just kind of a natural cycle that occurs, wherein the kind of itinerant outside fighters who come for the summer leave for the winter. There's a there was at the time there was an AWG advisor in the patch named George Sterling who went on to become a, I think he wound up being deputy commander a third group, but he was a he was a green beret officer,

interesting guy. And he was separately, you know, from much earlier in his career, really good friends with Bill Oslin, the battalion commander who happened to be the senior American in the valley at the time. So they were just, I mean, these guys were attached at the hip. And they, and they went through Rock Avalanche together. But they had quite divergent takes on it when I interviewed them for the book. You know, Colonel Osland really came away with it thinking, look, we created white

space over the winter for battle company. Keep pushing that Coringall Road. Sterling kind of was like, he said, look, this is where, this is something Bill and I, Billy and I don't see eye to eye on. I mean, I just don't think those operations accomplished much. and the other the AWG contractor who I keep referring to, he also participated in this, in Rock Avalanche. And he had a very striking way of describing how little he thought these operations accomplished.

I mean, he's sort of a lifelong hunter. And the way he put it was, you know, these operations, the ideas, you're going to push wild game this way and that way. And these insurgents are wild game and they're not going to cooperate with that. They're not going to be pushed the way you want to be pushed. It just doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work in that kind of terrain where everything that you do is observed by the enemy. You know, the moment your helicopters take off from wherever or pick up the, you know, the helicopters come in and pick up the guys from blessing or wherever it is, everything is observed.

Everything is audible. All helicopter movements are audible. They just don't work was the way he put it. But that doesn't stop subsequent battalions from doing them over and over and over and over and over again. In part, I think, because, you know, we have, there's sort of an inability to love. lessons in the way we've rotated these units through, and in part because the same system that drove 2503 to do these operations where it couldn't get helicopters and drones otherwise continues to drive other units to do them.

So you wind up with 101st Airborne does a big one up in the Waterpour Valley in the fall of 2010 called Operation Bulldog Bite. In that one, it's kind of interesting because what it's supposed to be creating kind of space in time for, as they would put it. In that instance, it's not creating space and time for like, oh, we're going to build the road further. We're going to make more progress. In that instance, it's part of the withdrawal, the 101st is putting together.

And basically the idea of that one is we're going to bloody the enemy so that even though we know the effects of this are going to be pretty fleeting, in that fleeting period, that can help us with our withdrawal. You know, that can help, that can kind of help keep the enemy off our ass while we're getting this withdrawal together. And so Bulldog bite winds up being one of the big ones. You know, they believe they kill something like 100 enemy way up in the top of the Waterport Valley. And that one actually culminates with a special operations mission by a Ranger element called Team Darby, which flew, you know, basically when the 101st company that was doing this mission sort of hit its limit and couldn't go any further.

I mean, just had taken too many casualties, was too low on everything, everybody's exhausted. the battalion commander I guess it wasn't the battalion commander so much but he was a the battalion commander was a former 175 guy and Tony Thomas was the task force commander overall in Afghanistan at the time another former 175 guy was the ranger regimental deputy

commander who was heading the kind of the 06 task force and essentially the task force volunteers like look we can help you push a little further than you guys are able to push and so they insert this two platoon Ranger element way, way up in what's called the Gambier jungle, this thick forest way deep in the Waterpore Valley, where the enemy had kind of retreated to, which they, you know, or they believe the enemy had treated two based

kind of the signals intelligence that was being picked up and, you know, where it was coming from. And so this two-platoon Ranger element goes up there. And, you know, within a couple hours of being on the ground, they get into a big fight, the kind of the lead platoon, the lead squad of the lead platoon takes off running as like a chase element with its dog after some squatters that an overhead ISR platform has identified as their clearing compounds. And as this chase team kind of proceeds into the forest down some cliffs,

the squad leader is cut down by a machine gun. A guy who was a sort of a really charismatic, popular figure in 175 named Staff Sergeant Kevin Poppy. And so, you know, the rest of the operation at that point is kind of trying to extract poppy. Two additional guys are wounded, a sniper and an interpreter in the course of this. So it winds up being a pretty intense fight in the sense that, you know, they stay past dawn. Two AC130s stay out past dawn covering them, which is, you know, very unusual event. And then they hole up for the subsequent day and just just call in air strikes all over the place as the enemy kind of reacts around them.

And what it seems like probably happened is that they, although they didn't, there was not a specific individual or specific cell phone or specific cave or anything that they were going after. I mean, this was not like a, you know, precision raid of the type that you often, you know,

these ranger strike forces often do. This was much more of a like, well, we know the rough area where the enemies were treated to, let's go and fight him. It seems like probably they, they landed right on top of where this little enemy command post that had been C-2ing this whole endeavor.

in the waterpour was. And that perhaps, perhaps, the platoon leader's view was that perhaps what Poppy himself stumbled on was the enemy command post, this little cave that they wound up defending kind of tooth and nail. And what was like the final result of that particular battle, not just with the initial conventional force that went in, but also with the Rangers once everybody was extracted? Did they have a firm battlefield or battle damage assessment on that? They had a battle damage assessment.

I wouldn't say that any battle damage assessment in Kunar is ever firm. I mean, these are things that they're basing on SIGA, they're basing on people, you know, reading lists of the numbers of people who've been killed or wounded. So I think they're very susceptible to enemy misinformation and disinformation. And they're also very susceptible to kind of, you know, just natural kind of padding of numbers. But yeah, I mean, they thought they killed like 100, 120 plus.

enemy up in this up in this fight you know the I think the battalion commander was pretty was pretty realistic about how important that was in the sense that you know

this is all of these guys are replaceable and it won't take them long to replace them either but it's not immediate and that was kind of the point from his perspective was it's not immediate and we need we have a pretty short window during which we're trying to start executing this Pesh withdrawal operation to close down these outposts, and this will help kind of allow that to happen without being sort of as fiercely contested

as it might have otherwise. And indeed, the withdrawal operation does go down over that winter without being kind of fiercely contested. I think it's impossible to know whether that was because the enemy couldn't contest it or whether it was because the enemy opted not to contest it. And there's the kinds of things that we just don't know. One guy, in the battalion, he kind of made the remark that was like, look, we had all this ISR up over that valley. We were obliterating the place. But once we left, once we pulled back, once the operation ended and we're back on our little outposts again, you know, we have no idea what's going on up in that valley. I mean, they could have had a massive funeral for all the martyrs, like in the middle of the, you know, totally out in the open and daylight in Gambier and we wouldn't have known.

Which I think sort of goes to illustrate, you know, how hard it is to know what these operations ever, ever accomplish. Right. I mean, for all the technology and everything the United States have, they don't have enough to go around and really the special operations community gets the lion's share of that. And so these conventional forces are, especially when you mention, you know, that they create these named operations in a way just to project force, just to show we can get to this village, you know, even if we don't accomplish anything while we're there. right so this all um the year app so so this hundred and first battalion they wind up pulling out in early 2011 it's a big accomplishment it's kind of a big ordeal kind of has to be litigated up at isaf headquarters

with general petraeus and general nicholson there are a lot of questions about you know do we really want to leave this place um and it kind of um it doesn't go it does not go perfectly in the sense that it is not coordinated well with the afghan government um so and essentially hummed karsai his foot down and says, well, you guys may be leaving the Pesh Valley, but we're not leaving the Petch Valley. Which, you know, from the Karsley government's perspective, this is a place that has three district centers in it and a lot of voters. And they, Afghan troops have not been bearing the brunt of the fight out there up until this point, right? American troops have. So I think it's pretty easy for the Afghan government to say, well, look, you know, you guys may be done, but we're not done. And we're going to

stay. But what that translates into is when the 101st Battalion leaves, there's a very, very ill-prepared Afghan Army battalion that's left behind up there, which I went up going and embedding with that Afghan battalion in their next place, a different part in Koonar that they wound up being in a couple of years later, just to kind of debrief the, you know, the battalion commander or Sergeant Major, X-O, and so on about kind of what it had been like out there at this base in the in the weeks and months after the American departure. It's a pretty fascinating episode. Military Times actually ran kind of that chunk of the book as a little 2000 word excerpt recently. You know, sort of what was it like for this Kandak on its own when the 101st left?

And really they, it's very, it's hard to, again, it's one of these things that it's hard to know. So the Americans, the subsequent American unit that rotates into Kunar and kind of it has this great gift that it's been given of not having the Pesh bases to worry about, right? Right, but it does have this Afghan battalion out there to worry about. And this Afghan battalion, you know, it's got a commander who's crying bloody murder who's saying, look, we're about to be overrun, we're about to be this, we're about to be that. You know, maybe the U.S. Battalion will gin up some ISR and go look at it, and it doesn't look like it's about to be overrun.

But this is, again, it's one of these things where it's really hard to know. I mean, how seriously do you take the kind of the fears of the man on the ground versus, well, our high-tech ISR can't really see, can't confirm. what he's talking about, but we also know the limitations of our ISR in this kind of terrain. And this sort of this tough question where, you know, one, you know, the departing American commander had kind of given the new guy the advice like, hey, look, do not throw them a life preserver. Like, we are out. That was really hard to get done, getting out. Like, don't go back in. But because it's this war of rotations, not only has the U.S. battalion switched out, the U.S.

division headquarters has switched out. And the new division headquarters is much more bullish on like it doesn't get why we pulled out. It's really concerned about the idea of an Afghan unit collapsing. And basically it directs this 25th ID battalion to get back out of the patch. If it had told them, you know, get back out there on a small scale and set up an advisor team, you know, it did tell them that and they did do that. And that actually helped. But the division headquarters also directed them, get back up into those side valleys on air assault missions, too, and put the hurt on the enemy. And so not too long after this, you know, the mission I was talking about in the fall of

2010, you've got these 25th, this 25th ID battalion swarming the same valley, losing guys in the same place, and, you know, accomplishing what? And that was one of the ones that wound up, I think, leaving kind of the sourest taste in a lot of the mouths of guys who participated in it. In particular, there was one of the planners on that mission who sort of, I think, planned it very reluctantly, was a guy who had previously been a platoon leader in Kunar. It was back on his second Koonar deployment and really just was super frustrated by this kind of this impulse of the machine. It just, it wants to lash out and do these air assault missions because it's what it knows how to do.

Right. Interesting. You want to take some questions? Yeah, we have a few more questions here. I think that Isaacs is the first of the bunch. So, Isaac, ask, and thank you for the donation, how much nuclear unaccounted for material is on the black market and what has kept terrorists from getting them? That might be a little bit out of your wheelhouse. That's not one that I know anything about. Yeah, sorry about that, Isaac.

I don't think any of us really have. I mean, I've heard anecdotally stories of stuff getting brought out of Russia that we interdict in various ways, small pieces of, you know, vis-a-o-minteching. very no. Tebar, thank you very much. Does Wes have any anecdotes on QZR, Kari Rothen? That guy was a buzzword bad guy for a long time.

Yeah. So QZR is a guy who, he was a local Solofi commander, but affiliated with Al-Qaeda, who started showing up in a big way in, not so much in the patch, but in east of Visatabad, on the east side of the Kuna River in like 2009, 2010.

And, you know, I'm stretching to my memory here because I don't, I don't really wind up writing about QZR much because it is. He was outside the patch. But he wound up being, because of his, you know, this connection to Al Qaeda that he supposedly had, he wound up being a guy that the task force targeted. The sister battalion, the sister 101st battalion during that same deployment that was in eastern Kunar, you know, went after him hard a lot in a lot of the same, you know, villages in like the Marawara Valley where the Soviets had had some real, some real. Some trouble. Now, so I, you know, and that's kind of a different story than the one that I tell in my book. But where QZR returns to the picture for me, which I think is interesting, is in 2018, 2019, you know, which is the period that sort of really is at the very end of the book, ISIS pops up in Kunaar. You know, ISIS Khorasan, the Afghan affiliate of ISIS kind of launches in 2015. Nagarha becomes its main stronghold, but Kunar becomes kind of its backup stronghold. And after it's really pushed out of Nagarar in 2017, 2018, Kunaar becomes like the kind of the last stand.

And it really digs in deep in some of these same little valleys where Americans had fought over the years, Khoringal, Shuriyak, Chaukeh. Not in the sense of there being, you know, foreign ISIS fighters, you know, from Syria or Iraq or anywhere who are digging in in these valleys. but in the sense that the same local commanders, local Salafi commanders who had hosted the Taliban in these valleys when they were fighting the Americans together, they now host these Afghan and Pakistani ISIS Khorasan fighters

in these same valleys. So like the Khoragal and the Shariak become kind of a little complex that is ISIS controlled as ISIS seeks to monopolize that same timber trade that we were talking about earlier as kind of a revenue collection scheme. And the Taliban, the Taliban reacts to this. I mean, you know, the Afghan government fights back also, but really it becomes in the mountains of Kunar a war in 2017, 18, 19,

between ISIS and the Taliban, meaning between Taliban commanders and often other previous Taliban commanders whom they know personally, who now are ISIS commanders. And they fight really hard in some of the same old haunts that, you know, that U.S. troops had fought in. And Karziyah Rahman plays a big role in this. He winds up being the Taliban sends in two forces, one from the east, one from the west. The one that comes in from the west comes over the mountains from Lagman and kind of attacks the Khorangal and Chhawadara from one direction. And Karsia Rahman is kind of put in charge of the force that's

coming in from the east to try and attack the Kornagal and the Shariak from the other direction. And so there's a lot of Taliban propaganda shots and photos and video and stuff from like 2018, 2019 that talk about Karziyah Rahman is kind of like the big hero who's fighting against the Islamic State and the Koryngal and who had kind of these Taliban red units. They're sort of smaller, more disciplined and offensive units were put at his disposal. And you'd see photos of the red units under his command. One of the interesting stories from this period is there's a guy named Steve Frye who I believe, is now in one of the S-Fabs, but he had been a junior soldier in 13-2 infantry and 10th Mountain in the Coringal on his first deployment back in 2006, you know, 16-month deployment that made a real impression on him, stayed with 13-2 for, you know, deployment after deployment to one place

after another in Afghanistan. And in 2019, he was back in eastern Afghanistan, like in Wardak, with one of the S-Fabs, the Army's new advisor brigades. And he, you know, he kind of, the way he describes And he had joined the S-FAD because he thought this might be the way to kind of get back into the fight, do battlefield advising, that stuff like that. Didn't turn out that way. It wound up being a, for him in particular, kind of a boring deployment. I mean, he's just sort of stuck on a fob watching ISR coverage of, you know, of Afghan government forces, kind of keep track of them. And at one point, just kind of out of boredom and curiosity, he's got a lot of nostalgia for that Korngal deployment.

He goes and taps into, you know, he looks at one of the feeds of one of the ISR platforms that another part of the military, military, probably the task force has over the Coringal. And he sees, you know, firefighters underway back, you know, in the land of Galdra, the same old place that he used to patrol, you know, in 2006 as a young private or specialist. But it's not government troops involved. It's like it just looks like it's like red on red. It's, it's, it's ISIS and the Taliban fighting each other in this, in the same old place. And he winds up like, he can't, he can't like pose about that on Facebook. But what he does is he goes on one of these like live map sites, like one of these, you know, that geolocates kind of ISIS and Taliban press releases and photos and stuff and ties it to geography.

And he takes some screenshots from that, you know, a screenshot of the Taliban press release about this firefight, screenshot of the ISIS press release about this firefight. And puts them on Facebook, like to, you know, to, you know, tags in a bunch of the guys from his old platoon. And he just writes like, man, like what I would give. He just kind of taps into this weird nostalgia that I think a lot of guys felt for that deployment, even though I think they hated it pretty thoroughly at the time. I mean, living at the Korngal outpost in 2006 was a pretty miserable experience. But, you know, there kind of was a real nostalgia for it later on. And what he didn't know, what he didn't know when he was looking at those feeds is that just a few months later, actually,

the J-Soc Task Force that the Rangers were running out of Bagram, it actually starts to do this weird, this weird dance in late 2019, early 2020 in the months leading up to the Doha Agreement where it actually uses its air support, it uses kinetic strikes to

support the Taliban against ISIS in these valleys. And the joke within the task force was that Team East, the particular targeting team within the task force headquarters that did this stuff. The joke was that it was they called it the Taliban Air Force jokingly.

Because, you know, even though everywhere else in the country, there's this massive air campaign going, hammering the Taliban, trying to bring them to negotiating table in Doha. In Qunar, they're using the same old SIGAN tools on the Taliban, not to figure out where to hit them,

but to figure out where it will be most useful for them if we hit ISIS. Like, you know, okay, so Commander X is going up the hill in the Chaukeh, tomorrow morning at zero, whatever. seems like maybe there's a particular machine gun position that it sounds like he's worried about from ISIS

let's whack that machine gun position right at the same time that he's crossing the line of departure which is a really interesting and kind of like creative thing to see the task force doing on this same old battlefield that you know Rangers have been involved on since 2002 and one that I think elisted a lot of like mixed emotions

from you know guys involved in it and guys who heard about it You know, everything from just being really frustrated to hear that we're now, in some sense, helping the same guys who, the same guys who we fought for all those years and the American blood on their hands. But, you know, one special operation NCO who was in the task force at the time basically told it to me is, and he's like, look, the other stuff hasn't been working. I don't see why we shouldn't try something different. Right. Right. It's a madness sometimes. Ron says Loving the Guppy

Killer Whale painting hanging on the wall Oh that's Tintin You don't know Tintin Ron? It's a Tintin cover Oh no kidding Oh it's Tintin Nice

Is that like an original art cover? Oh no I mean it's just It's a print that I have of the cover of a Tintin comic Yeah nice Nice Jim G Thank you very much. Is there any conceivable benefit to the U.S. having troops in Afghanistan in 2021?

What is the current mission and why are we still there? Good one. Yeah. I mean, that's a good one and it's a tough one. And it's one that, I mean, you know, the president and his advisors are grappling with right now, just as three presidents before him have. I mean, I think what it comes down to is whether there is a credible international terrorism threat emanating from Afghanistan, right? I mean, that's what took us there in 2001 was the Taliban wouldn't hand over bin Laden after bin Laden did 9-11. And so, you know, that brought us into Afghanistan to get bin Laden and to unseat that regime from power that had been giving him safe haven. And it's kind of an unanswerable question is, so al-Qaeda is still in Afghanistan. We know that.

There was a fairly senior al-Qaeda media figure was killed in an Afghan Special Forces raid back in the fall in eastern Afghanistan. He was embedded with the Taliban at the time. So we have a pretty strong idea that just as they have all along, the Taliban hosts al-Qaeda. I mean, in some sense, I think you could probably make a pretty decent guess that the Taliban-Al-Qaeda relationship is stronger today than it was 20 years ago. I mean, they have been fighting in the trenches together for 20 years now, really helping each other, helping each other survive. Sometimes al-Qaeda being the one that helps the Taliban survive, sometimes vice versa. and you know part of the Doha agreement says that the public part of the Doha agreement says that the Taliban must prevent al-Qaeda from launching attacks, you know, on the West, basically. It doesn't say the Taliban must renounce al-Qaeda.

It doesn't say the Taliban must break ties with al-Qaeda or kick al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan. But it says it must prevent them from, you know, being an international threat. I think that the key question that this all comes down to in terms of whether we stay or go is if we leave, what is our ability to monitor the degree to which the Taliban is complying with that and the degree to which al-Qaeda poses a threat from the country and keep a lid on that threat? And I think it's a really, really, really hard question that has been puzzling the U.S. intelligence agencies for years. and, you know, one of the things that makes it hard is that, again, one of these kind of like logical, like, catch-22s where it's like, okay, so for a long time there, from 2012 up to 2016, the main al-Qaeda figure that we were hunting in Afghanistan, the J-Sach was hunting, was a guy named Faruk al-Katani, who was a Saudi-Kutari guy, who was known to be a pretty serious al-Qaeda figure. I mean, he was mentioned by bin Laden and bin Laden's deputies personally in the correspondence.

that was pulled out of the Abbottabad compound in 2011. You know, basically bin Laden was giving orders for this guy Farouk to set up kind of a backup safe haven in the mountains north of the Petch where Al-Qaeda senior leaders could go if the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan became too much and they couldn't handle it there anymore. So the CIA and J-SAC wound up applying a lot of resources to trying to kill Farouk, eventually kill him after five years. But in the meantime, you know, they didn't know if they ever were really. going to kill him. But Operation Haymaker, the big kind of J-Soc air campaign run by the Ranger Regiment out of Bogram, to kind of keep a lid on this guy and keep pressure on him, it winds up being kind of the ideal point of it is we kill Farouk. But the day-to-day point of it becomes, we want to make life difficult enough for him up there that even though he's alive,

he's not posing an international threat. He's not, you know, he's busy surviving. He's too busy staying alive and avoiding detection to be, you know, hosting, you know, hosting people that he's going to train to go blow up a train somewhere or something like that. So the question in his situation like that becomes, okay, so the guy, we're not seeing any evidence of external threats coming out of him. Now, is that just because of the pressure we're putting on him? and if so, does that mean that the pressure has to be maintained perpetually at the same level of resourcing, right?

You can see how that kind of becomes a rationale for just a literally endless counterterrorism operation. You know, the kind of the other argument would be, hey, look, if a guy like Faruq al-Katani is up in the Weigal Valley, like let him be up in the Weigal Valley. There are also

serious Al-Qaeda branches in Idlib, you know, and if you're al-Qaeda, so I think Yeah, sort of it's, I'm by no means, someone who studies Syria, but I think the context of how worried you want to be about the al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan is something that changes as al-Qaeda's fortunes change outside of Afghanistan, right? Like, if Afghanistan is al-Qaeda's main safe haven, then these, you know, a pocket of al-Qaeda fighters in the Weigal may mean one thing. if al-Qaeda controls a large chunk of a Syrian city, not too far from the Mediterranean, then a pocket of al-Qaeda fighters up in the Wigal may mean another thing, right?

And so I think those are the kind of judgments that the intelligence community tries really hard to make, but by nature are almost impossible to make based on any kind of hard evidence, because these are groups of people who try very hard not to be detected and try very hard not to let anybody know what their intentions or activities are. And as much as, you know, I want to say, like, we should have been out of Afghanistan 10 years ago. I have to think the fear on everyone's mind is, you know, in Iraq, that we pulled out of Iraq, we uprooted everything, shut down everything, and left. And then we were right back there, like, not at, what, a year and a half, two years later.

Right. And so I think, you know, I think the Biden administration doesn't want to be in that, position, right? The position of having to go back in and salvage something after a collapse. But, you know, I mean, to take it to that event, I mean, the question is, okay, so say there is a collapse. Say Afghanistan two years from now after a U.S. pullout looks really, really different, and the Taliban controls much more of the country. What is al-Qaeda doing in those parts of the country that the Taliban controls? And what does the Taliban know that they're doing? Because, you know, the Taliban can make promises. The Taliban can, if it wants to, it can enforce all kinds of

measures against its al-Qaeda guests. But Al-Qaeda also can give them plausible deniability. It can, it can limit what its hosts know about it. I mean, we, all of the, you know, open-source evidence that, you know, that academics who read sort of al-Qaeda primary source documents, Anne Stenerson wrote an incredible book about sort of al-Qaeda's pre-9-11 activities in Afghanistan. it all suggests very, very strongly that al-Qaeda deliberately compartmented the 9-11 planning from its Taliban host because it knew that that that operation would be objectionable to them. So, you know, in a situation like that, I mean, how important is any pledge that the Taliban can make? Right, right.

No, it's definitely a tough question. And the question, you know, and then if you decide to keep, like you mentioned, the ranger strike force, so do you just keep a couple strike forces on hand? Do you keep conventional forces spread throughout the country? Like, if you have one soldier, one airman or whatever on the ground, you put 15,000 on the ground. Like, what's the right answer to that? And I don't think. And this all occurs in the context of the Afghan peace process, right? Where the deal that the Trump administration agreed to that, you know, the Biden administration is bound by unless it decides to abrogate it is a pullout deal. that says there will be no more U.S. troops in the country, not 50, not 100, not, you know, 500, but none.

And the, it's, you know, it's hard to imagine kind of the Afghan, the Afghan peace process that has sprung out of the Doha agreement, proceeding much further if, if, in fact, the U.S. does choose to keep it, whether it's 2,500 or 3,500 or whatever it is, if it does choose to keep that force beyond the May 1st deadline, right? Interesting. Jim B, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Morgan. Did you ever find that different echelons of the military

had conflicting perspectives of the historic events you covered? Absolutely, always, I would say. And any event that I was looking into was people's perceptions of it as dictated by what they were looking at, right? So my task was to sort of try. and talk to as many people up and down these echelons from, you know, from from guys in the fire teams at the, you know, at the very, very front of the fight, all the way up, you know, through various headquarters and so on and try to reconcile these to the degree possible. And it's not

always possible to reconcile them. I mean, even sometimes the biggest discrepancies can be between two guys, you know, not that many feet from each other on the battlefield. Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a battle, maybe something that only a few people really see. You know, I mean, a position gets overrun and it's sort of not, it's not even really noticed by most people, you know, on the outpost at the time. So yeah, I mean, there's sort of the fog of war is super, super real. And that, and that translates into all the contemporary documents that you may be reviewing, right? Like any, any after action report, any kind of declassified, you know, summaries of the battle that you're looking at. You have to remember that all of that is based on

the same real-time information that was emanating upward, either from the people on the battlefield or pilots or people watching ISR or whatever, and always kind of have a, yeah, an eye toward balancing all these different accounts without, you know, without ignoring any of them. You mentioned like AARs or After Action Reports and unclassified documents, during the course of writing this book, did you have to submit many FOIAs yourself? Did you have to seek for declassification of anything? Or was the biggest way that I benefited from FOIA was actually there are several things that Centcom proactively declassified under FOIA that are huge resources. One in particular is all the documents related to the Sentcom investigation into the Battle of Wannot, which is

thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of, you know, PowerPoints, and more importantly, thousands and thousands of pages of interviews with participants in the battle and people in the chain of command, you know, surrounding the battle, that were done much closer to the time of the event than any interview that I would do, right? So, I mean, that's, and there's some other, there's some other things. If you go to, like, the Centcom FOIA reading room, there's, you can read every one of those documents related to the Battle of Wannot. You can also read every one of the documents related to the Linda Norgrove,

SEAL Team 6 attempted hostage rescue mission that failed when they mistakenly killed the hostage in the fall of 2010. I mean, that's one where that includes, you know, long, long interviews with task force commanders, task force staff officers, with the, you know, with the troop commander, the troop chief, with lots of operators who were on the strike force. And besides, besides, you know, helping reconstruct the actual event, it also proves tons of just sort of interesting insight into just how, these guys viewed operating up in Koonar, because they talk a lot about that. And that's one, I talk about a little bit in one of the Operation Haymaker chapters, because General Votel, who was the J-Soc commander in 2011, 2012, who sort of authorized and launched this big drone

campaign up in Kunaar and Nuristan, basically, he was the investigating officer for the Norgrove investigation. And these remarks that the seals made to him, which are recorded for posterity and available in this declassified document, made. a big impression on him. Basically, in terms of just how hard operating on the ground in Kunar is. And in guiding, you know, in his next job, when he was the J-Soc commander,

guiding how he decided to sort of, you know, authorize a campaign that was going to be no ground raids. It was going to be, it was going to be kinetic strike pure. And you can kind of, you can read in the order of investigation, you can read some of the, you know, the things that Seals said to him that helped him reach that conclusion.

Interesting. Um, let's see here. And then, uh, Stuart Fox, thanks very much. I was the SF detachment commander that reinforced one not with my ODA and Afghan CDOs. How much did our SF team's account differ from what Austen said? Um, how much did the account differ? I would say, not, not significantly because you were kind of looking at different, I mean, you were, you were, you were looking at different. I mean, you were looking at different things, right?

Like, I'm trying to remember back now into the whole, into, into, into, into, into, but, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but, I think I'm pretty sure I interviewed, Steve Fox here, but, yeah, I mean, the commandos were inserted sort of after the main phase of the battle ended, but then continued to fight as they sort of pushed up, you know, farther out and just plugging the computer. in here, continued to encounter resistance, you know, as they kind of pushed up into the hills. But so, yeah, I mean, I think what the Battle of Wanat is differs based on your perspective, right?

So not talking about Oslin, but talking about, you know, the platoon that was there for the morning that lost all the guys. I think to them, the Battle of Wanat is essentially the event that they went through. And everything else is kind of, you know, subsidiary skirmishing. Now, the immediate QRF platoon that got up there on the ground and reinforced them and didn't lose anybody, but drove through a, I mean, essentially drove through town and turned back an enemy counterattack. I mean, I think for them, that's a pretty key part of the Battle of Wanat as well. So just depending, and for the SF guys who came in and kind of, you know, maybe didn't see as much combat, but wound up actually, you know, going into the district. center and uncovering a lot of the key information that then led to the departure from WANOT, right? Like learning learning that it had been, that the police had been, had been in

cahoots with the enemy. So I tried to treat WANOT broadly as an event. The part that I really reconstruct is kind of the, you know, in the town part of the fighting. And then although I had, you know, more information about both, you know, there were disputes about what to do afterward, basically. There were disputes about, you know, can we pursue the enemy with the commandos who were on the ground? There were General Millie, who was the one star at Boggroom with the 101st. He wanted to do more than that. I mean, he wanted J-Soc to go and, you know, chase the enemy into adjacent valleys and, you know, kill the guys responsible. And none of that, none of that happened.

So, I mean, in an event like Wana, there are kind of, there's endless threads you can pull and endless fascinating, you know, what ifs and things. that you can uncover. But it's, you know, as part of a, as part of a book that covers 20 years, I had to distill it down into kind of a fairly short account that focused less on kind of, you know, every little thing, everything that happened during the battle. And more on what then was the significance of the battle and what did it lead to? Right. And I going back, because I went back to look for some of Steve's previous stuff that wasn't highlighted. And he said that you did interview him back in 2014-2015. Yeah, I remember, yeah, okay, yeah.

So, I thought he said, Stuf, I remember Steve Foxwell. I misheard the name for a moment there. Yeah, sorry, I slur sometimes. Too many. He's got, basses to the head. That guy, Steve has an incredible photo of either, either himself or one of the members of his ODA, like, just looking up at one of the, at the, sort of the biggest, sharpest mountain that overlooks one-on.

And it's a stunning photo. It's really one that I hope he puts out into the world someday. And we'd be happy to get that photo out to the world. Graham, thank you very much. Absolutely encyclopedic knowledge. Thanks for your contribution to the historic record. Looking forward to reading the book. And once again, for those of you who haven't seen it yet or just joining us,

the book is the hardest place. The hardest place. And it's on Amazon now. It was just recently released, correct? Yeah, it came out last week, March 9th, and yeah, now it's wherever you want. If you've got a local bookstore or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop.org, wherever you want to buy it.

Are there still local bookshops? There are some. Nice. And you can help keep it that way. Stuart Oliver, thank you very much. He says, Dave, what are you drinking? Is that Basil Hayden? No, it's misguided spirits.

misguided spirits in honor of Jack and myself. And that is that is it for the highlighted question. And I've got some High West here that my childhood friend sent me as congratulations for this book. Very nice. High West?

Is it a rye or what is it? Let's see what am I looking at here. I know they make a rye. This is a, yeah, Okay, High West Campfire, Straight Rye Whiskey, oh, it's a blend. It's a blend. Yeah, I haven't had this before. Wes, this has been awesome just to try to wrap it up a little bit here,

which is like almost impossible to do with a subject this big. What are some of the, and this is almost an unfair question to ask somebody, as good a journalist and as a researcher that you are, not being a military man per se but i i am really interested as you know sometimes an outsider can come in and have a very have a lot of perspective to add that you know the guys who are there too wrapped up in it to really see but from your your from where you sit what were some of the main lessons learned what do you think were some of the main failures that the united states military made in their campaign in the pesh valley and things that we should probably think about as a

Americans as we go forward into future conflict, be it in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Yeah, so the ones I'm going to highlight are ones where I think they may not have been avoidable at the time. So I don't want to come across like I'm saying, you know, this guy fucked up in 2002. But there are definitely things we can learn from for future conflicts and for conflicts that we're currently participating in. one of them I'd say is understanding how much harder it is to undo the things than it is to do them, right? Just understanding like when you build a little outpost,

you really are setting something in motion that you have no idea where it's going to go or how far it's going to go. So I think something that was always missing along the way was kind of almost an auditing process of, okay, we're a year in, two years in, three years in to this outpost or this battalion agent, existence, let's compare what we're looking at here to what sent the previous unit three units

ago in, you know, to do that. You know, I mean, there are, there are sort of, I don't know how that would be done. You know, we have kind of auditing organizations for the military that look at stuff like how the money has been wasted. I mean, there's this organization, Cigar, whose whole job is just looking at just the unbelievable monetary waste that comes out of the Afghan war and documenting it. but you know we need to especially in wars of rotations where units kind of units come and go and come and go and come and go there needs to be more of a long view that compares the moment we're at and what we're achieving now to you know two years ago three years ago and that actually shuts things down when they're not when they're not accomplishing it anymore and that's something I think is broadly applicable I mean um you know some reporting that I did for Politico a few years ago was about totally separate from the war in Afghanistan was about what were called the 1208 or 127 echo programs in Africa, little special operations programs that allowed a team of Green Berets or Raiders or SEALs to have not just a force that they advised,

but a force over which they had kind of statutory control and which the host government had actually given this force to them and said, you know, you guys tell this force what to do. And this is a tool that, you know, it sounds not very different from just what Green Berets have always done everywhere, but in the context of kind of host nation sensitivities and the different kinds of training programs that are run in Africa, these 1208-127 echo programs actually were a really, really useful tool that allowed U.S. forces to go after counterterrorism targets without having to, you know, bring in a J-S.-Srike force from somewhere.

And, you know, in reporting on these activities, one thing that came up was that there really wasn't an off-switch for them. So you have these programs. They might have a spurt of being really, really useful, producing a lot of what they were meant to produce. But then maybe that particular program just kind of outlives its usefulness or some condition in the country changes that makes it no longer useful. And that it was not easy to kind of, there was not really a great mechanism. Although I think it's better now, a mechanism for sort of evaluating, okay, when is a program that did yield results? when do we pull the plug on it because it's outlived its usefulness? So I think that's a kind of lesson that's probably applicable

wherever we're fighting our wars, right? Or participating in other people's wars is just trying to, how do you know when you've done enough? Another one, okay, so another one would just be, and this is something that, again, you see everywhere that we operate in conflict zones, whether it's Yemen or whether it's Somalia is, yeah, understanding, trying to understand or being really careful to understand the degree to which you're being

played in local conflicts, right? The degree to which you are being somebody's muscle. You know, I mean, this is something that you would hear about. You know, U.S. forces have largely pulled out of Somalia now in recent months, but even a couple of years ago when you would hear about a SIF-CAS incident where, you know, some seals had been out on an objective with their, you know, with their Donab partners in Somalia, you would hear about, oh, well, it turns out that they had been led to the target by this tribe, but the target was in the adjacent tribes territory. And that's the kind of stuff that's really, really, really hard to understand when you're kind of doing sort of remote counterterrorism with small numbers of people from, you know, hubs rather than being sort of out in the countryside. So I guess that's maybe more of a cautionary tale than kind of an actionable lesson.

I mean, I don't think it's the case that, you know, our practitioners are just ignoring this and don't understand that they're, that they're, that they're, you know, being used at times, but certainly the Pesh is a cautionary tale about how badly things can go wrong. And also, I mean, information sharing. I mean, I understand, you know, the importance of history, I think, is a lesson that I learned. I mean, so often, you know, U.S. unit would go into a village, encounter some kind of trouble there, and learn that, you know, I'm thinking of a particular example, a village where the CIA did a very poorly conducted strike in 2003 that killed a lot of innocent people. but because it was a CIA operation,

then when a 10th Mountain Division platoon showed up in town and started living there in 2006, they didn't know anything about this, except for what locals told them, which they didn't know how much of that to believe or what. And essentially this was kind of like a booby trap that had been lying in wait for American forces since 2003 when the CIA did this thing.

So, yeah, I mean, I think, especially in countries that we've been operating in for so long, which at this point is all the countries that we're operating in, right? The importance of kind of like understanding how we got to where we are. Because I think it can be really easy to forget that, especially in kind of action-oriented military organizations that are interested in the here and now and the future. Yeah, I think, you know, the importance of knowing what your predecessors did

and what predecessors from other organizations did in the place that you're dealing with. Wesley, I'm sorry to be so sorry. cynical, I guess, with this comment. But you do, you bring it up in your book as well. There, I mean, after, after after Vietnam, after other conflicts, Rand Corporation and other astute studied, you know, veterans went out there and they wrote their memoirs, they wrote their accounts, they did these in-depth studies of the war. Now there are people like you doing a lot of good work on Afghanistan. I mean, do you ever get the feeling that it's like we study all of our mistakes and detail?

so that we can repeat them with absolute precision in the next conflict. Yes, I absolutely do get that feeling. And I'm going to give you the cynical answer, too, which is that I don't have high hopes that my book or any book will lead to, you know, the incorporation of lessons or lead to things being different in the future. I mean, my, you know, my highest hope for this book is that it helps people who fought there understand the war that they fought in, not that it has some change on the. the future. And that may sound kind of like, I don't know, a type of surrender, but that really is like, you know, when I get, you know, when I get a comment saying like, oh, look, the book is being read in the, in the office in the Pentagon where they, where they are dealing with Afghanistan stuff, I think that's great. I mean, I also question to what degree they're really going to be able to,

you know, in the kind of any, in the moment, in any situation that our policymakers and our generals and colonels and so on or in. There's so many constraints on that and make it so hard to, you know, to actually implement and they do anything different, you know? So, you know, I get a comment like that. I think it's great, but it's not as exciting to me as when I get a comment from somebody saying, look, I sent a copy of this to my dad because I think I read it and I think it helps explain the war that I was in and the war that's affected my life. And to me, that's really the gratifying thing is hearing from guys who either are able to see their own service in a new light to understand differently what they were doing there, how they had gotten there,

why things happened around them while they were there, or who are passing on the book to other people in their lives who they think will help understand their service. That's awesome. We have one last donation from Jay Scott R. 0-007. Thank you, Scott. And he says, in memory of PFC Tony Simmons,

KIA, 8 July 2010, 2nd Battalion, 327th Infra Regiment, COP Monty. So, yes, that's that was the no slack battalion, 2,327.

Those guys were on the other side of Kunar, well, Bulldog, 1327 were in the patch. So do PFC? Thank you. Guys, the book It's the hardest place by Wesley Morgan.

It's outstanding. I've got to finish reading it. I'm about a quarter of the way into it. It is, I've never really read anything quite like this. It is a very in-depth, exhaustively researched history book, but I mean, guys don't get intimidated thinking it's like some boring dry history book. It's a narrative account based on interviews with the people who are there. Really, I mean, it's an enthralling book. It's really well done. People I know who were there have said it was very good. And those people, if they thought your work was shit, Wesley, they'd say your shit. But they told me it was very good and there was very well researched. So I think this is worth your time, guys, going out there and picking up. And thank you so much for spending, you know, two and a half hours with us on your Friday evening here, Wesley. It's been awesome.

And, Wes, what can we expect from you next? Like, what's on your horizon or, you know, what's... I've got some other, some not book length, but other stories that I'm working on that kind of come out of the book research, things that didn't fit into the book or weren't really relevant to the book, but that have to do with the war in Afghanistan and kind of the, you know, the legacy of American involvement there. I'm sorry to be cryptic about it, but I don't want to jinx anything. No, we understand. for the people who also want to keep up, not just order the book, but want to keep up on your current writings and the articles you publish and things like that, where can they find your latest and greatest?

Sure, yeah. So I'm on Twitter at it's Wesley S. Morgan. That's my Twitter handle. And then I also have a substack that's pretty new. I've just been using it to kind of compile news and reviews and so on about the book and share stuff that people have been saying about the book. And that's the hardest place. is the title of the substack. Okay, great. And Substack is a great resource for independent journalists, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm just starting to learn about it, but it certainly is the platform of the moment, it seems like, besides Onlyfans. Fantastic. You'll be able to find me on there soon enough.

No, guys, next Friday, we'll be back, episode 86, with a master breacher from a special mission unit. So we're going to hear about his career. We're going to hear all about demolitions. It's going to be pretty sweet. You don't want to say what special missions, you know? We'll see what he's willing to say when we get him on here. Yeah.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, Wes. We really appreciate your time. And we'll see you for the bonus segment. And please like and subscribe, guys. And join our Patreon. One dollar month will keep Jack and I in misguided spirits.