The Team House - Eagle Down: The Last Special Forces Fighting the Forever War with Jessica Donati, Ep. 94

Episode Date: May 16, 2021

War correspondent Jessica Donati embedded with Afghan commando units and began coming into contact with U.S. Special Forces. She ended up writing Eagle Down: The Last Special Forces Fighting the Forever War which details how backwards policies out of Washington D.C. left Green Berets in Afghanistan high and dry, and often fighting for their lives only to be punished for surviving. Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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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. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey folks, this is the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park. We're live here on, what is this, episode 94. Our guest today is Jessica Donati. She's the author of Eagle Down. She's also a correspondent with a Wall Street Journal currently covering the State Department. Correct. And this book is all about her reporting that she did from Afghanistan, sort of in the tail end of the war, largely covering Special Forces missions. And Jessica, the first question we always ask our guests is what their origin story is.

So we'd like first off like to start hearing a little bit about you, where you're from, how you found your way into journalism and eventually to Afghanistan. So I'm from Italy. I came from an unusual family. My mom was my dad's third wife, and so I'm one of eight kids. And so people say that sometimes, you know, you end up in these places because you want to escape from something. something, so I don't know if that was me or not, but I always was interested in journalism. And when I got to university, it was something that I tried to get into. I studied economics because my father didn't want me to do journalism.

And I ended up at Bloomberg. You get a real job. I ended up at Bloomberg because they promised me a job on the newsroom floor eventually, but ended up being an analyst, and it was very miserable. And the only reason I applied there in the first place was because the application process was just uploading your CV and everything else took a long time and my grades weren't good enough. Why didn't your dad want you to be a journalist? He thought it wasn't a real job. He was born in the 20s.

And so he was in his mid-60s by the time he had me. And he came from a sort of poor, hardworking background where the only thing that was worthwhile was medicine or law. Right. And I wasn't interested in either of those. things, nor would I have probably succeeded in either of those things. And so I ended up doing economics because I was okay at maths, and he didn't really know what that was, and it sounded plausible enough. But as soon as I could, I went straight into journalism. And coming from Italy, I had some advantage working with international newspapers there, speaking the language of being

from there. So I started out working as a news assistant at the New York Times, where I basically make calls and do interviews and then send them to the real correspondence and I would get like a tag in the paper but I wasn't making any money and I was still I was living with my dad which wasn't great because he was bad-tempered and you know well into his 80s by then and I had a brother who I hope he probably will watch this at some point I'm not going to say anything about him he's a little crazy but anyway I put that on Patreon for later to me I'm kind of a while he had just between us through no one else is ever going to see this indeed so so I went back to the UK and then I got a really exciting job at a magazine called Argus Media which you've never heard

of and my job was covering British gas and prices and it was like a trade magazine and my boss hated me the day I started I don't know why and so for six months I wasn't allowed to write anything and I was sure I would be fired except that I was rescued by the power team because I spoke French, which I had learned at school in Italy. It's very close to Italian. And so my job was to call French nuclear power stations. And I would, there's like 17 of them, if I remember, with different anyway, you would call, you'd listen to the recorded message. If one was off, you'd be able to calculate what the amount of nuclear power was available. You'd write a story saying there's this much, you know, like a 200-word story. It was super, super boring. And, and that would be your story.

and so that's what I did. And you did that? So did you do that every day? Did you call them all every day? That's what I did every day. That was my only job. Wow. But I also actually, I covered German power too, which involved like, well, no, I stood in

doing German power. That was covering like wind farms. So sometimes I got into like how windy it was in Germany. Yeah. And that was like a hundred word story. I had like a big break where I got to interview like an Italian oil trader. And I think I got to go to Milan for that. was like exciting but that was basically my life for a year.

Reuters were looking for a gasoline and not the reporter which very, again, very dry. And my boss was offered the job and he declined it because I don't think they were paying him enough money. And so I got the job instead. And that was the beginning of 2011. And that was when the Arab Spring started and I was just covering, you know, gasoline. but being from Italy, Libya was a huge deal for Italy. They were getting a quarter of their electricity needs from Libya.

And Italian oil companies were heavily invested. And so I was able to start, you know, speaking to the Italian oil companies, and because you're Italian, they trust you or they, you know, they want to tell you what's going on. And so they were like doing deals with Gaddafi, which they weren't supposed to do. It was actually sanctioned. And so...

No, come on. That was the Italians. And so at a certain point, Reuters were like, we need people to help us cover Libya. All of our world correspondents have burned out. Does anybody want to join? And I was so insignificant at Reuters. They didn't even get the email,

but somebody else told me about it. And so I put up my hand. And they said, okay, well, sure, like, you know, we'll send you through hostile environment training and, you know, off you go to Libya. and I had never thought of doing any kind of war journalism. I thought it was insane. I had no interest in war reporting at all.

But I had been covering Libya super closely because as an Italian, you feel close to the country. Like, our president's always doing, like, deals with Gaddafi. And so it was something that I felt invested in just personally. And so they gave me $5,000 and a ticket to Tunisia, which is not Libya and some vague instructions to meet up with so and so

and then get across the border so from being like an idiot like 26 year old with like zero war reporting experience or understanding I found myself you know like in a in a car where one Libyan gang was going to sort of smuggle

as over into Libya where the war was sort of full like full blast and Gaddafi, Tripoli had just fallen and so that was my into war reporting. Wow. And what did you make of it when you you show up in Tunisia? You were the people you blink up with other journalists? There were other Reuters journalists.

And then somebody had already established this connection with this. Oh yeah. Yeah, it was I mean it was a well-established route which a lot of media organizations were using. The problem was the Libyan gangs that were managing this were it, um, battled amongst each other because they were competing for our business. And so we got stuck, like in Jerba, I think, on the way because one of the gangs beat up, the other taxi driver. And my only clue that this was going to, that Libya was going to be really bad, was that the hotel was really nice. And it was the nicest hotel I'd ever stayed at.

And the buffets were in unlimited. And I was like, wow, if they're putting us up here, like, it must be really bad. Yeah, I was right. Was it kind of surreal for you? like going, and I don't know how much you had traveled, like, when you were younger and whatnot, but, I mean, going from, you know, the Western world and then crossing the border and driving into living, especially in the sense of what it was, was that, what was that like for you? It was really mind-blowing, because, well, I had not, I had not really been anywhere much.

I mean, I grew up in Rome, which is a very quiet city where, you know, I'd walk home every night, you know, as a 16, 17, 18-year-old girl, nothing ever happened. and it was just a very easy place to grow up. And then I went to university in the UK. And I hadn't traveled that, no. So it was, yeah, it was insane. Like, I remember driving through and we saw, like, this car that had been, like, shot up, and there were these buildings that were bombed out.

And it was just, yeah, and I was really scared because it had never been in an environment like that, no, had I thought much about it in advance. And so, you know, the first day you get there to the hotel and you meet up with the Kowintra Hotel where all the journalists were on one floor, just working out of like tables in the cafe. And there's one guy who's in charge of everybody. And it's like, there was no security. They were like, okay, just go to the square.

There's this protest. And so you go there and there's like all these kids with AKs walking around and like firing in the air. And it's super scary if you've never been like, I never, I think I'd ever really even seen a gun before. Yeah. And I had no preparation. The fact that I wasn't killed during that or kidnapped during that entire rotation

is really just luck because I was really. I took a lot of risks because obviously I wanted to succeed and I was just lucky really. When you were taking those risks, did you know how much of a risk they were at the time or was that, were you just kind of naive to it all? I think I was pretty naive and I think also like at a certain point, especially because Libya was so crazy, you know, you would be like, there would be firing into the night like all the time and you would walk out in the streets and there'd be like bullet casings in the streets and they'd be landing on the back. And so at a certain point, you just had to abandon any fear because you couldn't function if you always thought about what would happen to you. And also, I was like younger. I didn't have any dependence. And so it was, you know, it was just myself.

And I would call my horrified then boyfriend and it'd be like all this firing in the background. And he'd be like, oh, my God. Like, what are you doing? And it's like, oh, it's fine. It's like they're not shooting at us. Yeah. You know, it's outgoing. And sort of...

What did your dad think about this when? Oh, well, he was really old by then. He was well into his 80s. And so his only concern really throughout my entire time in Libya and Afghanistan was that I wasn't having children. And this was his real concern. And he had all these theories because he was a psychiatrist about why I was in Afghanistan to avoid having children.

And the one thing that you would ask is he had eight kids. And some of my sisters have like five kids. Who we never sees? He doesn't even know the names of. So, like, why bother me with having children? Right. But anyway, that was really his only concern at that point. Fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like such a typical thing, like a psychologist would come to there. Like, maybe, like, you need to analyze yourself a little bit on that one. You're doing this because you don't want to face your real fears, right? Something like that. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

So how did, I mean, you wise up fairly quickly in that type environment, right? And are there like people around that are kind of taking you under their wing who are old hands? Or is it more dog-y-dog? I mean, Reuters at the time, I mean, I guess Libya was quite a collegial place to be because everybody was sort of in this life or death situation together. But it wasn't super collegial. A lot of the time, I mean, I can tell you one example of how, like, it just wasn't that was where I had to go meet a source at a different hotel and it was night time and I called

the security advisor that we had one for all of all of Tripoli and I said I need to go meet this guy. He's like getting a taxi. It'll be fine. It was not fine. I got into the taxi and then like in the very limited Arabic like I told him I had three kids and whatever to make it sound like more, you know, like that I was more important and anyway he still decided to like make off with me down a highway. And I just had this like terrified feeling in my stomach and and in my hostile environment training they had told us, you know, get out before they take you where you're supposed to, where you're supposed to be. So we're supposed to be kidnapped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where they're supposed to help. Where they're supposed to hold you. So, so like I kind of wrestled him for the wheel and we crashed into

the side of the highway and I got an iceway got out of the car and I sort of escaped into the darkness and the security guy came and found me. What I didn't know that in time, time was that he had told Reuters officially that I had gone off without saying anything, which was not true. And he had luckily said that in the presence of the guy who was in charge of the operation. But he didn't tell me, and he didn't tell like anybody else of Reuters, nor did anybody tell my boss then that I had, that I was missing. So he had absolutely no idea of what was going on. And, you know, when I got back, he only told me sort of on the last day, like weeks afterwards, he was like, oh, by the way, you should clear this up with

Voidus because they think you went off on your own, which is not like the best thing to hear at the end of like a long assignment. For sure. Where, by the way, I calculated that I was being paid less than some of the drivers. Yeah. Yeah. Like got a huge pay raise when they came back and I was like, maybe I'm being underpaid because I just got a 30% pay rise.

What, I mean, at what point? Because here's the thing that a lot of people don't know is when you wind up in a situation like that. For a lot of people there's a sense of like denial that they go through where it's like, I'm making a big deal out of nothing. And to actually make a move for the wheel, it's more than just you like fighting for your life.

It's you also overcoming the doubts of, am I overreacting to this situation? Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was like the first turning and I was like, okay, we just missed the first turning. And it's like, the second turning. It's like, I think, you know, I'm just going to, you know, it's fine.

And then, you know, when he took the highway, like, going off, like, way out of the city. I was like, oh, no. What's he telling you? Like, oh, this is the shortcut. Don't worry about it. Oh, he was just ignoring me. I was like, you miss the turning and he was just like, you know. No, I understand.

I was in a similar situation in Morocco. And, like, the whole time I was, I was like, am I going to do this? Because, like, am I just overreacting to this? Am I just making things up with my brain? How did it end? Yeah. I was I got out of the taxi well yeah I got out of taxi

I took me more I went out of it again I've thankfully I've never experienced that despite some of the dumb things I did but I had a friend of mine had something like that happen in her bill where three guys one of them with a pistol they started like taking them off and he actually grabbed one of them

pulled the knife on the guy's throat and was like hey that's what I did I mean you know and that's the thing is that you know this is before 9 9-11 you know you carried spider codes everywhere you went you know

you could fly with him you know those spider coat folding knives and just always had one and then yeah

taxi was I was trying to go to the intercon or whatever and he went a completely different way and

guys that you know down at this end of the street and this like I'm like this is not right and you go

like there's a lot of doubt there's a lot to him like am I just being a drama queen right now

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because you're fighting for the wheel. Like you're doing something that would be, you know, criminal in a way. Or a normal situation, right? Or a huge risk to you. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, there's that, hmm.

Yeah. This is really happening. There was definitely that. Yeah. And then how long, like, did you call the security guy? How did you? Yeah, I called him. I didn't really know where I was.

Couldn't read any Arabic at the time. So I just, you know, he was like, find a landmark. So I did. And I just like went down to the sea and I waited by like some specific building. And eventually he came by and found me. Were you worried about the taxi driver like doubling back around and trying to find me? No, because there was a lot of traffic coming out. And so he just kind of thing and the door swung.

And it was just one guy. And I think it was probably just like a crime of opportunity where he was like, oh, there's a girl in my cab. Like I can probably get away with this. And so he just made off with me. And then what I was more worried about was that there were all these truckloads of rebel fighters from all these different groups driving around. And so like me wandering on my own on the highway, like one group like stopped. And I didn't stop to find out if they were like waiting coming to help me or like make my problem even worse. So I just like ran.

We're fighting the revolution here, Jessica. Yeah. So I just ran. I just stayed in the dark shadows and just like ran until I could like, you know, hit until like I could see the guy. and he was, you know, like, you know, a tall white security dude. So he was, you know, he came out looking for me and I was there and that was it. But no, nobody told me that I had, like, got myself into trouble because they thought I had gone off on my own, which I would never have done, even though I did a lot of stupid things.

Right. And how did, did that have any kind of effect? Like, were you nervous about going, going to your next meeting at the next hotel or anything like that? I mean, I was, I think, just like a little bit in denial afterwards. Like, I went to my meeting as planned a little bit late, and I was like, you know. No big deal. like an hour late or so and I was like hey this just happened the guy was like you should go home like I said no no I'm totally fine yeah and then um you know months later I was in a in a taxi

with my still then boyfriend uh despite everything I was putting him through and uh I just it was dark and it was a kind of um you know country road and I got really scared I just like had a panic attack because because of you know taxi and even though it was totally illogical and then I started to have issues getting into cabs to people that I didn't know. Yeah. And I have to say to this day, like, even with Uber as I'm like, you know, looking at the map and like looking at the person and like trying to figure

out like what I would do and if like, God forbid they locked all of the doors like oh, broad pressure like that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So the rest of time so you went to that meeting but you didn't you just kind of like

shoved it down like all like all good operational people do. You just shove it down so you can keep doing your job. But, like, meetings after that, like, maybe a little bit of nervousness, but you still kind of... Yeah, I mean, I got through. I mean, I just kind of really just pretty much forgot about it. You know, it was just like this crazy story. A lot of people from the Western world kind of shut down and go, send me home.

I mean, that was the thing. Like, I mean, I think Libya was like a test for a lot of journalists that went across. There were a lot of people who had never before aspired to be more correspondence or war correspondence as you were saying. So there was one guy in particular who was just so horrified by everything that he saw that I don't think he ever recovered from his Libya experience and nor did he care to repeat it. But when I came back from Libya, I was really, I mean going back to my really boring job speaking to like gasoline and naphther traders about the prices of barges in Rotterdam. I was like, this is really dull. Yeah, right. You'd had your big break if there's no turning back.

I wanted to do more. And so I asked to go to Iraq and I was already doing more like, bigger picture stuff on like Iraq and the oil war and they were like oh well you know we don't need anyone in Iraq but you could go to Afghanistan instead we need people there and I had I was like is the war still going on in Afghanistan because like I remember the invasion in high school but I think that's the last time I thought about it pretty much yeah and what year was this about um this would have been 2012 okay so about 10 years yeah yeah nearly 10 years ago yeah nearly 10 years ago um how long did you spend in Libya um I was there for two months And then I went to Afghanistan in 2012.

Okay. And then I came back again to Libya in 2013 because the Bureau chief was getting married. And so I went in to run the Bureau for a while. And what was your trip like to Afghanistan? How did it, how was it the same as Libya? And then how did it differ from Libya? I mean, I was much more afraid of going to Afghanistan than going to Libya for some reason. I think just the fact that it was such an organized war in my head and that I had seen once I was,

I obviously started reading about it. It seemed really awful. I was really scared, and I had like a last dinner with my friends, like goodbye forever, a kind of thing, you know. And Kabul was the opposite. Like, I mean, a lot of the, like, more seasoned war correspondents, they were, like, beware of the parties in Kabul. The parties are really wild, don't drink too much, kind of thing.

And so, but I didn't take them seriously. And then, obviously, when I got to Kabul, like, it was just party town in 2012. Like, there were these, like, huge wild parties at embassies. And, you know, there was a bit of everything. Like, there was, like, it was a bit of war, but there was also, like, a lot of fun, so to speak. And you didn't feel in danger the same way, because in Tripoli, like, and in Mizrata, like, where I went as well,

like, you could never, you never knew where the, like, lines were. You never knew who was who. They were changing all the time. There was, it wasn't organized. Whereas, like, Afghanistan, 2012, it was super organized. Like, you knew, like, you had, and it was mind-blowing. Like, you had the Italians in Herat. You had the Germans in Mazar.

You had every nationality in a different, part. It was like a theater and so, um, and all choreographed. And so you never felt so, um, you didn't feel afraid in the same way. Although they had these like random suicide attacks, just even back then, like they were not as often as they then became. Right. It was close. Obviously like it changed really fast once the US had drawn down. When you were, and you speak to Libya a little bit, but when you're in Afghanistan, like how did you generate stories? Did somebody, would somebody tell you, hey, these are the things that we have leadership? on or would you develop your own name?

Oh no, yeah. You were totally sort of independent, pretty much. Like, you were left to do whatever you wanted in terms of, like, the features and stuff. Obviously, if there was a breaking news story, like, I don't know, like an explosion or something, or, you know, Mueller-O-Mai is revealed to be dead. Those stories were sort of the bigger stories that then everyone would get involved in, and then people higher up would have an opinion about what we should focus on, you know, that would happen with your features where you do a feature about, like, something happening in Bamian,

and someone would say, oh, but I remember the Buddhas, this should be about the Buddhas, and it's like, it's got nothing to do with the Buddhas. Yeah, yeah. And that actually leads me into something else I wanted to ask you about was, it's not necessarily in your book so much, but we had talked before about how you had wanted to do embeds with different military units, and you just kept getting denied and getting denied.

They wouldn't let you do that. So you ended up embedding with Afghan units. Yeah. And you shared some of those pictures with me. Oh, yeah. wearing a burq ride around the back of a pickup truck. I was, I was just wondering if you could tell us about that experience, how you got into that. Oh, well, I mean, that was just trying to, I mean, the war really changed.

And so from, from things being sort of all organized under a certain international force, it was all kind of, you had no other way to find out what was going on with the Afghans. And so I can't remember which was the first one that we did, but we really wanted to find out what was going on in a certain area. I mean, I don't know, one example would be, say, like, Shindand. And so the only way to get there was to just rely on the, on the Afghans. And so we had, it was all down to, obviously, like, the Afghan journalist that we worked with. We had a guy, Habib, and he was amazing. Like, he knew the M.O.D. really well.

He had the spokesman, like, you know, whose buddies with the guy. The guy would, like, come drink vodka with us, you know, because it's a good old from the Russian times. Right. And so, and we would get our embed papers. And then you would basically, like, just figure out how to get to that Afghan base. So the bases were often really far flung. So, in the cases of Shindan, like, we flew to Harat on an Afghan flight. And then, because I had got a tip from someone in the intel agency in Kabul,

that the Afghan intel agency was paying the Taliban, a splinter Taliban group to, like, fight the main group. And this was part of, like, this, bizarre plan where they would fund one faction of the Taliban to fight the other not thinking about what happens when that faction decides that they like them after all. So this was our like story

and these two like Afghan commanders just came to the airport to pick us up and they were like you know we had no idea that they were really who they said they were they just appeared in like a beat up corolla and we drove through like from Herat down to Shindan which is like a super dangerous

district in Herat which is mostly Taliban controlled and we just like drove their breakneck speed. And when we would go through these marshy areas, the guys would, like, just sit down and have their, like, you know, pistol, wherever it was, like, hanging outside the window. You know, we stopped to check on this one group of Afghan commanders that were stationed in some other, like, Godforsaken district,

where they were living in really miserable conditions, you know, like in this one little fort where, you know, they were like, these guys could come under attack any time, and they were telling, they would tell these guys about the tips that they'd received, about how they were going to come under attack. and then you would just like basically hang out with them and it was possible because my my my um the afghan jonas that i worked with was really great like he he he i knew that he would look after me and that like nothing bad would happen to me while he was around and he was this i mean when we would

be traveling around we would get stopped by the police because they would think he was taliban he's the guy in the photos one of the photos that he's oh yeah he looks like a big mean wahhabi looking guy he's got like long hair and like the thing and that picture that we took was funny because we know we were like pretending that we were traveling along as like a very kind of conservative Afghan couple so so so he was I mean he was really great and he was not conservative at all I mean now he's since left the Wall Street Journal and he runs a bar in Kabul that's and a steak restaurant now when you would travel outside you know when you would travel like in this would you wear like a hijad or would you oh Burka for sure yeah

When we were leaving, I mean, in Kabul, as soon as you leave out towards Nangahar, like, I mean, you don't have to, or even down to a logar. Oh, I'm not thinking about this, like, any direction outside of Kabul. Like, it's very, it gets kind of pockets of Taliban, and especially, I mean, now it's, like, completely surrounded, but, yeah, it would not be safe to go out in anything less than a burqa, because no woman is uncovered there. Right. But the burqa's also, I mean, it's a blessing in disguise for a foreign journalist,

because you can just sit under it, and you can drive anywhere pretty much. No one's going to bother you. They might bother your driver. Right. But I don't think that I ever got bothered. There was one time in Kandahar where I was traveling, but with an American journalist. So he was clearly not Afghan. And we got stopped at a police checkpoint.

And it was like, you know, a very sketchy police checkpoint. And it was pouring with rain. And the guy would not let us go. And we were in like big trouble. And he made me take off my burger, which felt like the most insane by, violation and he would not let us leave until until like

someone very high up at the journal had called like the MOD to like filtered down to like this guy and be like don't kill those reporters or don't you know it wasn't it was really scary did he have you removed to see if you're a Westerner and like it's like I don't think so I think it was just like

it was basically like you know like if like a Western man like told you to like take your top off or something because like the way that he looked at me I just felt like a you know, like a little sheep with like a big wolf. Yeah. You know, like it was really, it was really unpleasant. But apart from that, like, I never really had any issues with the, with the burqa.

And the police truck photo is, we were driving from the base, because in the kundus, they had the actual base where the commanders were was sort of at the top. Then you had to drive a while to get to the end of the base to get out. So the police truck was giving us a lift to our corolla, which was waiting to just drivers in town where we were going to do our own. thing in the city for the day. So, I mean, I was, yeah, I was in the Berka just as a joke before we really got into the Corolla. So then how did you start, as you're doing this, these undercover reporting trips in Burka, start coming into contact with U.S. Special Forces

and started to lead you into what became the genesis for this book. 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. 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. I mean, it was, it was, I mean, hard to say, back in 2015, when I was still at Reuters, somebody in Special Forces thought it would be a good idea to take me around, to see all the ODAs, to see the handoff. between ODAs and commanders, and it was supposed to show how they were being trained and stuff.

So I got to meet a lot of ODAs around the country. And one of the guys in Helmand, when we were, like, in the back of this truck, he, like, gave me his email address. And it was the team that ended up having a lot of problems, and they're in the book. And so I think that he wanted, like, some kind of, like, life insurance. If something happened, he, like, wanted to know a journalist. and, you know, talking to him and like in, so that was one trip really in Helmand, like, hearing about the crazy stuff because I was in touch with him and he would talk about, like, the things that had happened, but not in like full detail.

But I could tell that something was really wrong. And how there's a team had got fired and, like, who would ever heard of an idea getting fired? And like, unless they had committed some kind of, like, mass murder there, which we hadn't heard about. It was like something really weird was going on. and going up to Kunduz where like it was just the state of things where we embedded with the commanders in Kunduz and we got there and we arrived me and Habib the Taliban looking like guy and the photographer and we like you know walk into this office and no one is very happy to see us there's like the head the Afghan commander head who we give our embed papers to he did not want us staying there and he was super corrupt and the you know the ODA captains like looking at us like how did you even get here because like you know Kunduz had just fallen and we had like, you know, driven, driven into Kunduz from Badakshan. So we had driven through like a whole bunch of Taliban areas to get there. And they were like, couldn't believe that we'd made it.

And the ODA guy was like, you know, you want to stay on the Afghan base. He's like, I don't think that's a good idea. Like come and stay on our base. And we're like, sure, this is much better. Like, why would we stay on the Afghan base where there's like no food, barely any running water? And I really couldn't walk around the base on my own at all because it just, wasn't safe. And so they invited us. And we have ribbits. You had really more than that just like that's where I had my first, um, that they have like this sort of hot dog thing on

a stick. I never even seen it. Like a corn dog. Yeah. Like neither me nor any of them had seen it. We're like, what is this thing? And it's like all this like weird American food and we had like hot showers. It was the best. A single tear rolls down your cheek. You start humming the national anthem. They didn't last though. For our viewers and listeners who aren't super with military terminology and ODA is an operational team. Detachment alpha. Detachment alpha. They're green beret, special forces.

So, yeah. So we had gone there because the whole idea that had formed at that point that we knew, that it was clear to us was that Afghan cities were falling. They would send in green berets attached to Afghan commanders to recapture the city, and then they would say the Afghan city themselves. And like this just seemed to be horribly, like destructive line of thinking because you're it's just you're just making it look like the Afghans are standing on their own and it's just it oh man you just shot down the entire idea of

special forces like one sentence just killed it well I mean if you could it was just the way that like back in DC you know the no one is the policies were just insane because they're like oh well you know the Afghans and you're like the only reason the country has completely collapses because you're sending in um we're believing our own propaganda yeah and And the Green Berets were as disillusioned, if not more disillusioned than we were about it, because they're going in and they're seeing their guys die in the same places, year after year, they're fighting for the same places, and they're dealing with the same problems. So the ODA and Kunduz, who had to recapture the city the second time,

they dusted off the first guy's plans and they're like, okay, we're going to go back into the city. They had all the same problems that the first guys had because no one had fixed them. they had the trucks, didn't still have the right amount of trucks. They, you know, they didn't have maps. Like, it was just, you know, really, really messy. And so I think that was one of the reasons they eventually got to, you know, speak to so many people and put the book together was because there were a lot of guys that felt that there was something seriously wrong with the policy.

And so... Was the captain, the first sort of Special Forces guy you came across, or was it the guy that you were telling us about earlier who... So, well, he wasn't the only one, because I did meet a bunch of other ODAs. And so there were a couple of people that, like, of guys that I met and that I kept in touch with, who were, you know, who would occasionally show up in Kabul, who were involved in, like, there was, I mean, there were a lot, there were a few. Well, I'm curious about, like, your initial contact with them.

Like, what did you think? I mean, you see these bearded guys, you know, barrel-chested freedom players. Exactly. Bearded, barrel-chested freedom fighters. You know, I mean, I imagine that you probably don't know who they are or what they're doing. Yeah, I don't think I really had much of an idea other than, you know, I mean, there's always like a certain amount of fascination with like the special forces, guys, especially if you spend a lot of times with Afghans, like American special forces,

like, you know, mystical sort of thing. And so, I mean, meeting them as well, because as a journalist, it was so hard to do. It was always quite exciting to be able to, like, actually talk to someone and ask, you know, what do you really think about it? Yeah. But that time in Kunduz, we only really got to spend one night on the base because then they obviously reported that these journalists had showed up in Kunduz and they had like saved them from the Afghan base and the guys in Kabul were like hell no like get those journalists out so we were like

evicted from the base the next day the ODA captain was super apologetic and it was like I'm sorry as I think you do and I talked to like the general back in in Kabul and I was like you know like so many bad things could happen to me on this base he could be raped blah and I was like you know really dramatic about what could happen and he was like I mean I care, it's not my problem and so we like went and said on the Afghan base but the ODA was nice enough to let us continue to eat on that side that didn't

prevent me from getting like the worst food poisoning has happened on every trip and so I spent most of my time like vomiting in between you know interviews and stuff it wasn't the best so I mean and talking to them obviously you're like how like they have they see the same problems that we do

I remember like one of the guys that we asked when we were there and like what do think about, you know, how is it working with the Afghans? And one of them, like, they're even more stupid than the Iraqis. And I was like, oh, God. It was off the record, so they never made it into a story. But, like, that was the kind of, like, feeling that you had. And then there was another guy that I met there, uh, who had a very dramatic life story. And his theory was that the Americans were keeping the Afghan war going because they want to have a place for green berets to practice in for the real war. You know, this is how, like, insane.

things looked from the ground. They couldn't believe that anyone could actually have put them there to do the mission that they were told to do. They thought, you know, so when you had these conspiracy theories at that level, it wasn't so hard to start to piece it together. For me, I guess what really led me to write the book was meeting Hutch, who was the guy when the, when the Kunduz's hospital was bombed the first time. I always wondered, like, the guy that, like, called in that airstrike, like, how does he live with himself? I want to get into that because a significant portion of your book is about the Kunduz Mission invasion, essentially, and the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders Hospital. Before we get into that, I was wondering if you could lay out, talk a little bit about kind of that policy insanity that came out of D.C. that you mentioned to sort of contextualize what we're going to talk about, what was going on during the Obama administration during this time frame in regards to Afghanistan. Yeah, so in 2015, the Obama administration has said the war is going to be ending in two years. We're just training, advising and assisting the Afghans were not in combat anymore, and that was like the mission.

And in the early months, it was pretty much true. There wasn't a lot of that anyone really did. But things got bad really fast because without air support, the Afghans were fucked. And so it got to sort of September. and the Taliban toppled the city of Kunduz, which was one of the, I think it was like the sixth biggest city, it delivered a huge shock to everybody, not just in Kabul, but also in D.C.

They're like, what, the Taliban have taken, like, an entire city. And it wasn't just the city, because as soon as the Afghans in neighboring districts, provinces were like, what Kunduz has fallen, they were like, hell no, we're not fighting. And so they started to look at the possibility that the entire northeast would collapse just in a matter of days. And so they had this choice.

Do we, you know, let it fall and just, you know, give up and leave because there's nothing we can do? Or do we stand and try and, like, make something of this? And so the argument in the Obama administration at that time won out. And so they ended up, they ended up sending in these green berets in. The green berets go in that, like, we've got it. And, you know, why are we going to fix this? And they did. And it would have gone well.

And no one would have known anything really about the U.S. role, except that on the fourth of the fifth night of the mission, they ended up calling in an airstrike on doctors without borders hospital. And they ended up killing 42 people, mostly doctors and patients. And it was a terrible disaster. And I mean, at the time in the press, I mean, this was a huge deal. People are saying this is a war crime. And there are all sorts of different, I mean, it certainly doesn't help when the United

States government changes their story a bunch of times. Could you talk to us a little bit about what really happened? Because you interviewed a lot of people that both in the hospital and the SF team on the ground. And you really did a lot of work piecing together how this happened. I mean, I think it was investigated afterwards and they published a heavily redacted report. And I think that even with all that and everything that I was able to uncover, I think the full story is still not entirely known because there's no, what happens? happened was the Afghan commanders were part of the American integral defense, so they could

call in air support to protect themselves, because obviously if they didn't have air support, then the Taliban threat would go onto the team inside. And so they were out. They called for, they, Hatch, who was the commander on the ground, they hear gunfire, they think it's the Afghans who are calling for help. They talk to the interpreter, the interpreter can't get through to them and they're like are our guys under fire and then after a bit the interpreters like they're calling for air support so hutch you know through his comms guy like speaks to the aircraft and they're like you're good to like fire on the building and on the people who are escaping from the building and he had no idea obviously that the that the AC 130 had locked onto the hospital

and it had locked onto the wrong target so the GPS coordinates that he had given for the first attack for the first of two missions that the commanders were doing was not the hospital, but a relatively nearby intelligence agency building. And so when the AC 130 plotted the GPS coordinates, it didn't plot to the building, it plotted to an empty field because there had been an air to surface to air missile fired that night for like the first in years. And so it had thrown them off course, they were flying higher. All of their protocols were kind of out the window. And so they look down, they don't see anything just an empty field, and they saw a T-shaped building, which had been given to them as a physical description of their target.

Now, the intelligence agency building was hexagonal shape, not T-shaped. So one question that has never been answered, and I was unable to answer, really, is why did the Afghan commanders pass along the description of the T-shaped building? One possibility is that they actually planned to attack the hospital that night after, the NDS building because it was well known, the Afghan government hated the hospital because they treated Taliban there and they had previously raided it,

so not implausible, given that many of them believed that Taliban were inside, that the hospital was a legitimate target. But the GPS coordinates effectively were not the ones of the hospital, so who knows? Real quick, was the call for fire, who had eyes on the objective

and called out the grid? Was it the Afghans, and they passed that on to the ODA, and the ODA called me an air strike? Did the ODA have eyes on at all? They didn't, no. And that was one thing that wasn't known at the time, because according to the official line from the U.S. government, the Americans were only using airstrikes to deliver life-saving support to troops under fire. But it was actually a lot fuzzier than that, and the definition of Endanger was really much more extensive. they could be in danger if Afghans

who were protecting them or, you know, outside were in danger. So it was basically they just kind of, it was Washington spin really to convince journalists in D.C. that they were really not helping the Afghans and they weren't in combat anymore and that Obama had delivered on his promise to end the war.

Right. Because the whole thing was about President Obama had said, the war's going to, war's going to end, I'm against forever wars, and he gave this grand speech at the end of 2014, saying this is how modern wars end. You know, no peace agreements, but, you know, just training. And so that was the whole thing.

And so this whole effort over the two years up until the 2016 election was to make it look like they weren't fighting. Right, right. This fiction that we have no troops in combat. No troops in conduct, yeah. And then so a lot of the rules of engagement that they had were handed down as that they weren't really in combat, which was problematic because what they actually were doing

were like dropping in teams to, you know, into the middle of a Taliban-controlled village to capture, or kill some guy, which was what they've been doing all along, or going into a Taliban-controlled city and recapturing that city. And so, of course, they were in combat, but the rules didn't match that reality on the ground. What happened when the Trump administration came in was that the rules were loosened because there was no need to preserve the fiction that were not in combat anymore. Even though they continued to repeat it, it didn't become so existential to have to pretend

that that's what they were doing. I mean, the whole thing is wild, and you write a lot about the aftermath of this, when this Special Forces officer Hutch, I mean, they really, like, persecuted this guy. And, I mean, after, like, assured him, hey, everything's good, everything's cool. And, like, the stuff they put him through, like, I would have lost my mind. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I can believe it, but it's still outrageous. Yeah, I mean, I always, I was always, because when I covered this,

when I was covering the events at the time, I obviously had no knowledge of Hutch or even his name initially. And I always wondered, you know, who's the guy that I called this in? And, like, how does he live with himself? And, like, what does he think about it? Because even then, like, it was clear that there was a lot, there was a lot more problematic than just the guy on the ground made a bad judgment call. Like, the whole thing was insane that you let this city fall because you weren't invested in it. And then you send in a bunch of guys to, like, fix it. fix it with no no vehicles with like no no no no not enough water like not enough batteries like

it was just they didn't have enough time to plan anything and so when things went wrong and it which they are likely to do if you send in you know an oDA to the middle of a heavily populated city like you know and you start bombing it like things are going to something bad's going to happen right and he was blamed for it and yeah did you have like a uh uh sort of a predisposed belief or thought about U.S. military involvement there, about special operations. Were there things that you learned or you changed your mind about or things that just reinforced what you already felt? I think I became more sympathetic because I came at it from, you know, I was talking to the

hospital every day because I was in Kabul and the city fell and you wanted to find out what was going on. And so the Afghan journalist would call Afghan contacts and we would call internationals who were there, which was the MSF hospital, which I had been to, just the previous year. And so it was very personal because, you know, I talked to everyone at the hospital. I remember being there, meeting all the patients, all the doctors. And so it was a big shock. And, you know, I woke up in the morning and somebody from Kunduz sent me a text message,

an Afghan guy saying, you know, they bombed the hospital. And I looked online and there was nothing. And it was because the news didn't come out immediately. And I was like, it's not possible. They couldn't have bombed the hospital. And they did. the story changed and it was just really frustrating and angering to watch

and most of my time as a journalist in Afghanistan was covering Afghan civilian casualties which most of the time media organizations don't even want to cover because there's so many of them you know at Reuters and not just Reuters but I think any news organization especially now like if there was only three people dead in an IED attack

it wasn't worth writing about it had to be like at least 10 this was this was a while back and a lot of the time you'd be covering like you know, these women were collecting firewood and, you know, U.S. drone mistook them for insurgents. And so they were all killed. And, you know, you have these protests and all these poor Afghan villagers are like parading their bodies in the street. And the American military is like, we have no evidence of civilian casualties. And so I was very, I was very bitter about that.

And so I think it was really meeting those guys gave me a really different perspective about how it looked from the other side, about how little information they often had, and also like how much they had been through and how many of them really were invested. I mean, especially, for example, Hatch, he spent so much of his adult life

invested in Afghanistan and really being out with Afghans that, you know, he was emotionally attached to the country in a way that I hadn't really understood for American soldiers initially. Yeah, interesting. So, how, how, How did you, so you start investigating this because your source reaches out and says they bond, you know, the MSF, the doctor without quarters, but the sans-saintiffure, but how did you make your way down to that area to meet the people or were you already sort of close to it? I mean, I only, I heard about Hatchez's name just through another like character who was at the cigar club at IRS that I would occasionally go to just because.

it was an entertaining place to be. And, you know, and the view in sort of amongst these kind of contractor types, the type, you know, who've been, you know, contracting in Afghanistan forever and they're like super grizzled. And they were like, oh, this guy got his scapegoat. He was a great, very promising young officer. And they screwed him. And that was how I first heard about him. But I first reached, so someone gave me his email address, but didn't reach out right away.

When I did reach out, it was about a different. story where he had been involved in raising this particular contract. He was a former Green Baray and he'd been involved in raising militia in the east to fight Islamic State. And he was trying to get support from American Special Operations, which was his background, to get some air support from them. And he was like, we could do something like the old days where we partner with you guys, we go kill people out in the field and you just give us air support. And that thing went really wrong when the militia he was helping to raise, ended up decapitating. a bunch of people and putting their heads on sticks.

I understand. Were they ISIS members that they decapitated? I mean, you know, allegedly, but like what is even ISIS and Afghanistan? I'm not saying that as though it justifies. Maybe it would. Well, yeah, and that's the thing is, you know.

It was actually a tit for tat thing because they had, ISIS had done something very nasty to the militia and so the militia had responded by chopping their heads off, putting them on the road as a warning. And so this guy who is an American former Green Beret linked to this militia that had done this atrocity, the US embassy, and they're all like, oh my God, let's get away from this guy. So they canceled all of his contracts.

They like erased his badge. He was wiped out. And so he came to me with like, you know, a journalist, because I had been begging him for like, you know, a year, a couple of years to like let me tell his story because I thought he was a fascinating profile. And so he only really came to me when he was in trouble himself. and so that's how I heard about Hutch, who was one of the Special Forces guys, who had been involved with this contractor. And so I emailed Hutch and I was like,

hey, how's it going? I heard that you were supporting a militia that decapitated a bunch of people. Any comments for this story, you know, the Wall Street Journal. And so I think for him, it was like another potential media disaster. which obviously the US military didn't want to talk about, but he went and he got some permission from his PAO

to sort of explain what had really happened that he hadn't actually endorsed this militia, so that's how I met him. And it was for this other story that I ended up doing about the guy, this contractor who had been, it was just like an amazing sort of war story. But for me, like meeting Hutch, like it was more I wanted to know about Kunduz

and how he felt about it and how he lived with it, and it was just getting to know him, and eventually all these, and along the way, a lot of the other guys, that I had a critical mass of people who were willing to sort of tell their story and had some permission at some level from their PAOs to tell, to like, to tell the story,

and that's how it all came together. And the PAO is the public affairs office, who a lot of times they'll have to, like, clear these guys to talk to you or what they're allowed to say and stuff. Yeah. I didn't get any interviews with high-level people, because, so I don't know how the decisions were made, but, you know, when you were going to, like, at the lower levels that you go directly to, sort of the guys in upwards, you would get clearance,

but if you went and asked for an interview with, say, like, General Swindal, like, that would not happen. Right. And you were actually, it sounds like you're becoming pretty entrenched with that community, though, and you probably started, you started to know the lingo, like you, like, there were, like, there's an understanding, right, that starts to happen at a certain point where you're a civilian, but you're not just a civilian anymore, you're getting insight into the community, into their own thoughts about how things are going. A little bit, but not that much. Was there still sort of an arms?

I mean, were people nervous talking about, like, what you would print and, you know, like... I mean, there were a lot of people, obviously, who didn't talk to me. I mean, much more people that didn't talk to me than people that did. And a lot of the times, people that did talk to me were out of uniform or were moving jobs. and so they or you know or whatever reason felt that they didn't have anything much to lose. I don't know that many people were won over by my argument. But what did happen after the book was published that like some people reached out and said, oh, I'm sorry that I didn't talk to you.

I had this idea that you would be telling the story in this way. But, you know, I see that now I regret that I didn't speak to you because, you know, you were just trying to, you know, do an accurate job. Was that a challenge? I mean, was that a challenge for you? is there like in these communities, is there a basic distrust of journalists and how they might, what their mode is?

Really? I've never found that. I mean, yeah, there's definitely a huge amount of distrust. I think like over time you just, you know, especially if you get to know, there's a lot of the people that are in the book. I mean, I knew them for years. And so we had sort of an established kind of friendship before, you know, they agreed to go on the record

or we had established some trust. So, for example, with Hutch, I mean, for all the things that we discussed during the interviews that I did when I went to Fort Bragg, you know, there's like one line in the Wall Street Journal story exactly as we agreed. And I think he saw from that that I wasn't going to, you know, I wasn't going to deceive him. Twist his words.

And other people did too. Like the Hellman team, you know, like I knew what was going on there and I never wrote about it because for the, for a newspaper because I was never, it was never agreed. Yeah. So is that an important point for you then is to very specifically, like, denote this is on the record, this isn't on the record? Because I'm sure that as people are telling your stories, sometimes are like, well, I want to tell you this, but you can't print this just so you have context or whatever. I mean, it's different doing like, working for like a newspaper where it's for an article versus for a book.

But generally the agreement that I had with, that I usually have with people who are sensitive is that it's all off the record. unless we agree that it's on. Okay. And so that way you have like the fullest picture possible before, you know, and then they may agree to let you use whatever. But I feel more comfortable knowing that I have as much information as possible myself. So that if I'm using part of it, I have the context. Because if somebody is only telling you what's on the record,

you may miss some really useful context off record, then you could end up looking stupid or you may not know. you know so that yes i mean obviously there were i mean all the main characters got to read the book beforehand and point out any mistakes um and you know anything that they weren't comfortable with and so if if there was some sort of reason that reasonable reason to take it out then obviously i did whether it was with the book or just general news articles were there things that people told you like as a friend or in confidence that you're like oh i really wish I could write an article about this.

I mean, yeah. There were a lot, and there were a lot of really, you know, I mean, just, I mean, some things that, like, stick out in my mind, which were even long before that, but just going back to Libya where we had, like, a really embattled security contractor who worked for us, and he was tormented because the unit that he'd been with in Iraq had, like, tortured and killed prisoners in front of him, and so he was really haunted by it and the things that he had done. and so, you know, you get like a lot of, you know, you're like, you do get a lot of stories, but, yeah, I mean, you only, I mean, for me, like with the book, initially it was, you know, you're going from person to person trying to get more information, trying to get them to speak on the record. But then at the end of it, it was just really, you know, I wish I had been able to include all of the stories that I heard and that I was able to publish. I mean, there was one ODA that I taught to quite a bit and they didn't even get into the book because the publisher, felt that like there were just too many stories trans and it was too difficult to follow all the

different lines and so they wanted to like keep a narrow focus and so those guys were like you know one paragraph um you know and it happened a lot so maybe we'd talk about that for the bonus thing yeah for sure yeah uh i wanted to also talk about the kind of whiplash from the um the backlash from the uh bombing of doctors without borders hospital when we get to the eagle down chapter in your book and how the ROE had not changed per se, but commanders were being even more cautious with airstrikes, to the point of absurdity. And if you could walk us through that operation

where McClintock was killed. Yeah, they, so they were a team that had been swapped in for the team that got fired, because the team that got fired were resisting going out on these operations because they didn't have air support and they were being told to go into very dangerous areas. And they weren't being supported by their battalion. They had a very bad relationship with the commandos.

We were in their sort of second or third day on the ground. The commandos, there was an insider attack that killed two of their support guys. So they did not have a good relationship with the commanders. They didn't trust them out. And they had the air support rules were insane, where they had to go through this whole long checklist, while they were under fire, to like say, well, we've tried this and we've tried that, you know, and we've tried the mortars and that

hasn't went all the while, you know. So they were resisting going out on these operations. They had this new sort of relatively aggressive team came in. And those guys, they, after in a few weeks, they started to realize that the rules of engagement were really insane. And the captain, Andy, started to feel a little bit hesitant. And he had a very strong team, team sergeant as well. They started to feel really hesitant about going out on these operations. They were being pushed from the top and they would, you know, they would hear from their major, you know, it comes from the top, you need to go out and do this. And so they resisted this major operation to go kill or capture some guy who, they thought, sort of mid-level and sergeant commander who may or may not be there. They didn't

feel the intelligence was particularly strong. But eventually they ran out of excuses and they end up going out on this mission. And they get there and they're immediately sort of, the cloud cover comes along so they don't have any air support. They huddle up onto the command and control center and then they come under attack from all sides. And it ended up, so within sort of the first hour or so, one of their guys gets shot in the thigh.

or they're worried that it might be like an arterial thing. So he's left with the tourniquet and they try to medevac him out. The first medevac helicopters come and they sort of try to land and it's all under an incredible amount of fire because this is a Taliban-controlled village in the middle of Marja basically and the helicopter sort of misses its landing and it ends up crashing onto the commandant. center, which is basically like a little mud hut compound surrounded.

And so this crashed Blackhawk obviously attracts insurgents from all over the province where they all come under attack. And they couldn't get air support to basically fight them off. And they were afraid of getting overrun, the Afghan commanders that they were with. And their commander is like fight the fight, just, whatever organic assets you have, just fight and just leave them hanging, basically. Yeah, they were left. Yeah, in the words of the captain flapping.

Out there flapping. Yeah. Now, could they not get air support because of the cloud cover or because of the room of the engagement? The cloud cover had, it was generally like bad sort of, the whole thing was just sort of bad from the outset. Right. And so everything was running late because they couldn't start the clearance operation because of the lack of cloud cover, because of the cloud cover, so they had to wait for it to clear up. And as soon as they went out, they came under, they came under fire.

And so there's one medevac helicopter crashed, and then they try and send in another one, and that doesn't work. And the third one gets like, there's a female pilot, actually, and she gets shot in the thigh or something while she's trying to fly in, and so they all get turned out,

and they're like, so they have no medevac. The captain starts to try and, like, call in airstrikes on the buildings, but the pilots won't fire because they can't see a weapon or whatever. this. And it was very, very strict. And so while they're saying, look, we're all going to die. Right. They're like, we can't see anyone to shoot. And because of, and because of the strict rules after the

MSF, the hospital bombing, like every airstrike had to be approved from like a four-star general who's a million miles away from them and from the approval chain. So they're just like stuck there. And I also wanted to point out what you had written in the book is that, you know, at this point, because of the technologies we have and drones overhead that you have these commanders back in some mega headquarters watching and micromanaging in real time.

Like down to the individual soldier. Like not in this particular battle necessarily but in general like hey this soldier should go there. Like they're moving around chest pieces or something and what was designed to be real time intelligence support for the guys on the ground has become

real time oversight from somebody hundreds of miles away trying to dictate to that team what they're supposed to, what they think they should be doing. And what you're saying in this case, well, we can't see, we can't see back at the headquarters gunfire because these guys are inside a home. They're shooting through the windows. And like, how insane is that where you have Americans on the ground?

They're like, no, that house right there, we're taking fire. We can see the muzzle flashes. And some idiot watching a drone feed is like, no, you're not. We can't see it. Yeah. So they are stuck basically. They can't get any air support. they're under attack from all these different buildings.

And so they decide, you know, they have to get their friend out who's potentially bleeding to death with this artillery's had a tourniquet on all morning, so that's not good. And so they decide to go out and they tried to clear a building in one direction. That didn't work. And so they decide to go out in a different direction. And then they end up being in this field where they're sort of going through a drainage ditch and they're just under heavy fire.

And as they're walking through, Matt McClintock is shot in this. the head. And he's not killed immediately and they end up having to drag him back. And they still don't get any air support because he's still alive. And it was only when they said that he was killed. And Andy sends this extremely desperate message up to headquarters along the lines of like, we're all going to die unless you guys come and help us. I want to read part of what Andy wrote, what he wrote on his map and read this over the radio. He said, we're pinned down by sniper firemen. machine gun fire and incoming mortar fire from all sides and unable to maneuver. We're running out of ammunition.

The aircraft won't fire on buildings because they can't see anyone shooting because combatants are firing from inside-roofed structures through murder holes in the walls. When they move between positions, they are leaving the weapons in place knowing we will not fire on unarmed combatants. The commandos won't fight. We have one KIA, one WIA, and no quick reaction force coming. And when I read this, I mean, what I thought about that was that, this captain, Andy, he wrote a dear John letter, and he wrote a dear John letter to America and to the U.S. Army.

That's what that actually was. He was saying goodbye. Yeah. That's insane. It's insane to me. Yeah, it was. And it was really horrifying to hear all of the stories that these guys had. And it was one of the parts of writing the book that felt like a tremendous responsibility

because, like, who am I? Like, I'm not a soldier. I am not American. and I have like no background and you're hearing these like horrendous stories and you want to do them justice and you want to tell the story in a way that like is going to make sense and be useful

you know in the future so that this mistake isn't made again and yeah I mean it was a desperate pitch and I think and for him it was like well you know if we do all die they won't be able to say that we didn't warn them right and but in the end

like that message somehow got all the way to the top and they ended up getting air support but obviously it was too late because they had already lost Matt and it was yeah and they made him reread that letter each time he called

in an airstrike which I think is probably the reason he ended up leaving the leaving the R-rate because he was like this is kind of the most insane bureaucratic bullshit I've ever heard why did they they made him re-read it so they had the legal basis to drop on. See for every single

strike with which they did a lot by that point. We've talked about ROEs, which are rules of engagement, and I think that what a lot of people don't understand is it, they in a situation like Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever, they can change week to week based on politics. So who you can shoot, why you can shoot,

what kind of investigation is done after you shoot, the air support that you can or cannot get you know, like it changes rapidly based on politics. So basically they'd shut these guys out. Yeah, But they were, I mean, what was insane was that as the rules had tightened up, at the same time, because the U.S. had the Obama administration had decided that they were not going to leave after all,

because initially the plan was to draw down to like 5,500 after one year and then everybody out by the second year. So they were preparing from General Campbell's perspective. They were deciding, like, do we close Kandahar because we need to go down to 5,000 or do we not? And as soon as they're like, we're going to keep the troops steady, we're going to keep the south, he's like, okay, well, we're actually, you know, and keep fighting then for the south. And so these guys from being told, okay, you've got to stay, you know, quiet, just don't do anything outside of the, you know, out of the base.

They're suddenly being told, okay, you have to get out there and, like, stop this place from collapsing. Right, right. They're trying to turn the jobs down. They're like, we don't have enough support to do this. Yeah, they didn't have, they didn't have the right sort of, the lack of, all the hour and all of that. The lack of leadership in the unethical, immoral positions that those soldiers were put in, is just reprehensible.

that and also that we could maintain that fiction, so Washington, D.C. could main that fiction, that the country is not falling apart, everything's okay. And so you're pulling troops back, you're pulling resources back, and all you're doing is putting the entire burden of all of that on, you know, 12 guys. These guys, I mean, one of the things that they were coming up against, for example, in Hellman, was that all of the intelligence history that they were supposed to be able to access had gone

because they were, the U.S. was leaving, so they had no need for those computers, and the guys who operated them, whatever. So they were just, they didn't have any way of, like, looking up, you know, the record, you know, for, like, one particular route or another. So, and they would, but because the Obama administration had decided it was staying after all, they were sent out to go fight while the rules were still really, really tight. And to me, and I think to everybody in Afghanistan at the time,

was that it was insane to have these rules, which are supposedly to help the Afghans maintain themselves, when you have a very visibly deteriorating situation of gansom where like the army is getting worse, the police force is getting worse, the government's getting worse. Like it's not trending better. So, you know, this whole fiction is just never going to work because at some point you're either going to have to send more troops or you're going to have to let somewhere fall. Right.

What was sort of the attitude in the perspective of the rest of the press corps? I mean, did they sort of kind of align with you in this, seeing the, that the U.S., the soldiers on the ground were sort of being painted in these no-win situations, or was there still sort of, well, the U.S. is waging this war on foreigners and they don't care? I mean, I think, I mean, there was really almost no press corps really in Afghanistan by that time, because after 2014, all of the big broadcast media left. And so it was really just the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, AP and AFP, and Reuters were the only international presence, and that wasn't very many people.

So there wasn't really so much of a press court. I think generally, I mean, for journalists in Afghanistan, it's really hard to not see the US military in an incredibly negative light because of the civilian casualties. And because, you know, when you do these kind of operations, even the Marjor one, which was so bad for that ODA, but you can only imagine that when, you know, eventually they got the air support and they end up sort of bombing everything, you know, what were the repercussions there for the civilians and that's, you know, the case in Kunduz, I think when you see, like, the reporting when you're at the hospital,

the hospital's being flooded with children and women and all sorts of things that are happening, because if you do drop a bomb in the middle of a heavily populated city, you might be targeting this one, but you can't see, you know, everybody else who's inside. Right. And it's really frustrating as a journalist to hear, you know, Washington say, well, you know, we're helping the Afghan stand on their own

and, you know, train advice and support, and it's just all a lie. Yeah. And so you don't have a lot of sympathy for the source, soldiers who are out there until you meet the soldiers and you're like wow like they came out to afghanistan with very similar reasons that i did you know like they want to make the world a better place or you know maybe not in every case but you know they have they're idealistic and they believe in the cause then many of them end up being quite disillusioned with what they see um but there isn't a lot of access for journalists there anyway so you they don't you don't get much chance to

interact it's also challenging in a place like afghanistan where the the opposition uh is driven by a religion that, you know, honors like martyrs. And so if they choose their fighting positions in an area that there are women and children, it's a propaganda win for them when. And they see it as, well, these women and children just martyrs for the cause, you know, along with our soldiers, you know. So it's really challenging sort of fighting that propaganda war, I think. I think, yeah, I think there's a mix. I mean, a lot of times, you know, these raids that, that commandos and special operations do, they go and raid the guy in his house, in his village, right? And they are, in the end, fighting a civil war and they're an insurgency. And so obviously, when you go to, like, arrest this guy, he's going to have his family around or his neighbors are going to have families. There's so many, like, terrible stories of, like, Afghans who, you know, are just sitting at home and, you know, an insurgent runs in because they're escaping.

a drone and the drone sees them run into the house, they don't have any idea who's still in the house, and so they end up wiping out an entire family. Imagine how many more insolence you create from that. And as a journalist, you're always covering this side. This is what you hear about all of the time, and you report very little of it

because it's so common. Thousands and thousands of civilians are killed every year, and so you only really report the extraordinary situations where maybe an international is killed or a hospital is gone. But generally, there's not a lot of sympathy. One of the concerns that I had about the book, my first concern was negative

repercussions for the soldiers who were in it, whether they were still active duty or not. I was worried that for whatever reason, even though they had all been cleared, I thought what happens if somebody gets upset and they end up getting in trouble? The other thing I was worried about was sort of Afghans saying, like, what about the Afghans? Like, this is way too sympathetic to the soldiers. Right, right. Because these guys, at the end of the day, like foreign journalists, like you're in the war for a little while, and then you can just leave. Whereas most of the people that you're working with are covering, they don't have the option to just eject and go any day.

And, you know, part of the reason I wanted to write the book was I wanted to make people see the war in a personal light, and I wanted them to care. Because nobody cared, and that's why the war was able to keep going the way that it was so horribly mismanaged. And a lot of the time the Afghan commander stories were like, you know, million times worse. They had like the Afghan commanders, they'd be serving year after year. They had barely any breaks. They had no promotions.

Very little guarantee of what would happen if they got injured or what their families get, you know, they'd nothing. The number of times they'd be left out there with no air support and like much worse, Calvians inflicted on their units. So, you know, I mean, you have a lot of sympathy for those guys. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's not like a VA system or anything set up for them. and a lot of time there's not even like enough connection to the Afghani government

where the Afghani government is taking care of those guys. No, they have nothing. And so, you know, I was worried that people would say, you know, why are not telling the Afghan commanders stories? Because we met so many, like, incredible guys. And initially I did want to have one of the commanders in, but just logistically and for the purposes of the book and the, you know, the more sort of narrow message that they had to have.

It didn't quite fit. but, you know, that was one worry that I had that I would be seen as too sympathetic to the U.S. military. Yeah, yeah. What changed when Trump came into office in regards to Afghanistan? What were you seeing? What were the differences with the Trump team coming in, the policy changes, and how did that affect things on the ground? I mean, you had, you started out with McMaster, who came in, and his view was that you could win the war in Afghanistan. And so he convinced Trump, whose main instinct was to get out.

And he hated the war so much that he had even done like a 10-minute video about how much he hated the war. But anyway, he's convinced by his generals to do this mini-surge, and they would turn things around, and then from a position of strength they would negotiate. And they basically killed this secret negotiation that was already underway during the Obama administration, which is in the book. And that didn't work. And so eventually McMaster was fired. They brought in, they managed to bring in Zal, his focus was, you know, get a deal and get us out of Afghanistan as soon as, you know, as soon as possible. And so he was on a very tight deadline to negotiate this deal and which would put the US on track to leaving in a way that was responsible because President Trump for whatever reason, he wanted to, he didn't want to, I guess, just leave Afghanistan like that, which everyone was afraid of like the tweet of doom where he would see.

something on Fox News and then he'd be like we're still there and then you know eject like pick everybody out so they ended up negotiating this deal and they were on track to withdraw and while

just to go back to original question why the what changed I mean with McMaster in and with them winning the war they had more troops the rules of engagement were loosened quite a bit and so there was a massive surge in airstrikes the Afghan government was very happy about it because they were getting suddenly all the air support that they needed,

and they were sort of, you know, they were very optimistic, but that obviously didn't last. And you talk about General Scotty Miller coming into the scene, and, you know, from what I've been told, he really took the gloves off in a lot of ways. But you write in the book also that, you know, it's very much plays out like that film War Machine, where he's just the next general coming in, stomping his boots.

I'm going to turn, we're going to win this thing now. And you write this whole thing about how he's like, doing this like, you know, killer PT session. It does. With all these NATO generals and stuff. And he has this, you know, the staff of glassy-eyed, you know, people who, you know, it's like they're talking about the Ayatollah in 1979. He's like, whoa, what the fuck is going on here?

Because he's not tall General Meadow, is he? He's kind of like small and compact. And so I really had the vision of like, you know, the movie War Machine, where he's like running along in the base. And, yeah, his idea, he came in. and he viewed, as my own understood it, like R.S., the headquarters had sort of gone astray. There was alcohol. There was too much parties.

There was, so he kind of put an end to the fun on the base, the salsa classes, and instead he instituted this killer early morning PT session, which if you've ever been to Kabul in the summer, like the air is terrible. And in fact, it's terrible in the winter too because of all the burning heaters. So, yeah, the air is really bad. And I think, like, I did one of those sessions, and I think I felt like I had smoked, I don't know, like two packets of cigarettes.

After it was, I couldn't breathe for a week. It was a really killer PT session. And, yeah, and you would have, he would obviously be leading it, and there'd be all these, like, super fit guys competing to, like, be the most athletic and doing all these amazing moves on the bars. And then you'd have, like, the crusty old European generals who were, like, just there for, like, you know, getting through their wine supply in the evening

and just hoping the war end soon. And, you know, they appear. they're like in their t-shirts and then they vanish for most of the session then appear at the end you know like all sweaty did you really do anything because i didn't see you running out there but uh yeah you had you know we're improving our deadlifts while the country falls the fuck apart right yeah so yeah and you had everybody i mean it was to be fair it was quite a sort of good bonding exercise on a on a base where there were so many nationalities and jobs everybody was kind of in it together for this pt session yeah What was your sort of impression?

Because you have a very, I think, unique view having, you know, you see the civilian casualties and what happens there. You see what the military is going through based on politics. You also know the Afghan government wants to achieve something like they don't want the Taliban rolling up the towns and, you know, instituting sort of this, you know, fundamental, you know, sort of offshoot of it, Islamic belief or whatever. but from your perspective did your opinions about the war how it should be changed or waged if we should be there at all did all that change through this process for you

I mean through the I mean through the writing process I don't know I mean just personally it's very difficult to to look at this situation of Afghanistan now and like knowing that the US is leaving which they have to leave

but at the same time worrying about what will happen to everybody that you know in Kabul and everybody that you care about and just there's very, it's very hard to see a scenario where it doesn't end at least in the near term in a horrible civil war. I think for me, I became more sympathetic to, as I said,

the soldiers and to some of the decision makers just a little bit because I could understand what they were trying to achieve when they explained that, what sounded to me like insane policies. So I think that when I set out to write the book and I was really angry after, you know, I lived in Afghanistan for more than for over four years.

Was that year round for you or just... Yeah, year round. I just lived there. I had a house. We worked in the... We had like a house that we shared with the Washington Post and we had our offices kind of in the garden and sort of the shed like area in the garden. And we just worked there. and you would take vacations,

but like we had no security, you were just there on your own. And especially in the later years, because the embassies were so locked down, you'd just hang out mostly with sort of the wealthy, westernized Afghan Afghans around and other journalists and aid workers and stuff. And what was, I mean,

I knew you were hanging around sort of the wealthy westernized Afghans, but sort of what was their take on the whole, on not just US, but international involvement in Afghanistan and... I mean, I think it's difficult because so many of them were dependent on, I mean, and are dependent on the Western system, whether they were working in the government or whether they ran companies that were contracting to the embassies, whether they were journalists working for international organizations. I mean, everybody had a stake in it.

But I don't think anyone, unless they were at that moment serving in a government role, would have been optimistic or about the way things were going or even not critical about how things were run because corruption was just rampant and a lot of the time internationals were aware of it you know and they would I mean there was

one story that I did while I was at Reuters with the UN bearing a report that they had about how horrendously corrupt the police was that the guy that they had hired to investigate corruption was using corruption claims to get money and they knew this they had a report about this and then they buried it and they never published the report

you know and like there was just such a huge amount of cynicism that you know I think everybody saw how bad things were going yeah it's interesting I want to just remind everyone who is watching tonight

or watches you know the recording of this we're talking to Jessica Donati she's the author of Eagle Down please make sure you go and take a look I read this book it's actually a real page Turner, I sat down, think I was going to read like 10 pages of it, like 60 pages later. I mean, it really is a fascinating insight and very unique view into the war in Afghanistan. Like reading the news and there are reporters writing about Afghanistan,

but like reading a small self-contained article, you just don't get the kind of context and feel for the conflict that you do from reading a book like this. And please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. We have T-shirts. We have coffee mugs, all these great things. Yeah, subscribe to the channel. I hit the like button. I hit the reminder of the bell notification.

Yes. Also, join our Patreon. Bellarmouth. We're going to, I'm sure that you have some very... Gordon has a question, and actually it was something else that I wanted to bring up to. He's asking if you had any exposure to anti-ISCops in late 2018. And that's the whole thing that is running parallel to this conversation, but intrinsically connected to it as well.

is the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. And I think that you're probably the first writer I've read who actually understands what that is and what it isn't. And I would love to hear you expound on that. Sure. Well, the first that we heard of ISIS when we were in reporters in Kabul, was the U.S. was leaving.

And this group of former Taliban declared that they were ISIS. and we would start to hear reports from around the country, these fighters in black clothing, and, you know, these scary flags had showed up, and they were in such remote places. It was really difficult to verify who they actually were. And, of course, the government was really keen to play up the ISIS thing, and the American officials who were invested in keeping troops there

were also keen to promote the idea that ISIS was spreading because if you looked at what was happening in, Iraq and Syria, you know, with ISIS taking over for the Obama administration, they were being told, well, that the same thing could happen if you pull out in Afghanistan as planned. But just to give you an example, we decided that we would go and investigate this report about a training camp where there had been foreigners, you know, were detected there, and it was in Farah province. And I think it was, Farras is an extremely remote province. There's nothing there, pretty much. It's on the border with Iran, and we managed to get out there on, like, one of the weekly

UN flights because there's no way that you'd be able to drive out there. And, you know, we started trying to, and the province was just, like, it ended up being a mess. Like, you get there and you find out that the governor is not really the governor because the new governor hasn't been allowed to move in. The old governor is refusing to quit. And, you know, we ended up speaking to, like, all of these farmers, at least they told us that they were farmers who had, you know, their field was like near ISIS, and everybody knew exactly who ISIS were.

there were some group of Taliban guys that had fallen out with the main group. They had rebranded as ISIS and, you know, no one had, when you actually got there, no one had ever heard anyone speaking in Arabic or in English or in French as we'd heard. Like, it was all just this kind of story that had been blown out of proportion by all these self-interested factions that wanted to promote the idea that ISIS was surging in Afghanistan. It's like that the world over in a lot of ways that, you know, you have a terrorist group and they rebrand as ISIS and it's a way to get a, like foreign funding

for your organization and to get America to come fight you. I mean, I heard, I mean, even when I'm now working in D.C., what amazed me a couple of years ago was I heard that some guy from the DRC was in Washington to tell Congress about how

Islamic State had like showed up there. And I was like, wow, like that is kind of ambitious. But then, you know, hearing about it again a few years later, no, like there is a rebel group there like, you know, now much more organized about their claims to be an ISIS at the point that now they're on whatever security reports go around.

So, I mean, ISIS in Afghanistan it's really difficult to know who they are and what they want. There was a spokesman and he was killed by a drone strike, you know, like February 2015 or 16 or something. And no one has heard from Islamic State

since then. So like no one has talked to them for five years. Well, he shouldn't have doesn't pay to be the spokesman. Who was? well I mean no but they changed the head and you know the US military every few months they put out a statement saying we killed the head of ISIS in Afghanistan and people are like really like who's this guy

and has anyone ever heard of him and you Google the name no one's ever heard of him but apparently he's a new head right um so so the Islamic state ended up being this sort of group that concentrated along the border with Pakistan because they were disgruntled Pakistani Taliban who had split off

and they recruited some of the disgruntled Taliban and they ended up encroaching on some of the Taliban areas and so you had this infighting between Islamic State and the Taliban you ended up having the US and the Afghans organized these massive operations

to clear the to clear ISIS out of these areas. One of the things that people would remember was the mother of all bombs that dropped early on in the Trump administration which was seen as like you know like the Trump administration like it's on now. It's all now.

It's on, like it's changed. And so we went out when this bomb dropped, you know, it was in an extremely remote area of Achen province. It was really difficult to get any information out of it. So in the end, I got in a car with a colleague at The Guardian and the photographer from Kunduz and we're like, okay, let's put ourselves in disguise and we'll drive out to the site and see what's actually happening there to get a sense of it.

And what was amazing to me at that point was that as we were getting there, we drove through all of these Afghan villages that had clearly been abandoned for years. And I had never seen that in Afghanistan. And that's when you're like, wow, like all the things that you hear. But until you see them, you're not sure whether to believe them, right? Because you hear, oh, ISIS moved in and all the terrified Afghan villages like left and such a remote area that you would never be able to go check because, you know, that you wouldn't get the kind of resources or the investment from the paper.

because this was such a big story, the very high risk reporting was, you know, signed off at the highest level, so we were able to go out. And yeah, you could see, like, the shops had, like, eroded and the mud huts had eroded, and it was a village that had been, you know, abandoned for years, and you can see the remnants of ISIS there. So clearly, like, ISIS were a real thing,

but what did they actually want? It was really hard to say. And when we got there to the valley where this big bomb had been dropped, we just kind of drove into a group of commanders and an ODA who again were like, what are you doing here? We were like afraid that we were going to get shot. In fact, I told somebody who was at RS, I was like, you know, we're going to be driving out.

And at that point, we had a system where we would obviously, I'd be in a burqa, the local guys would be, you know, in Afghan clothes with hats and all that thing. And it's like, you know, we're going in corollas, you know, maybe two corollas in case we, at that point, I think we had three, because if one broke down, you wanted a way out. And I was like, we don't want to get killed in a drone strike

because the Americans think we're coming to attack. So I told, you know, whoever I knew at IRS, like, by the way, like, you know, we're going to be in the area, please don't kill us. And we just drove into this team that was out there, and they were calling in air strikes. And it was clear that the mother of all bombs hadn't really achieved anything because they were still stuck in the same point in the valley. And they'd been told, you know, pull back, bomb drop, they get there.

and they hadn't really advanced very much. You know, it's interesting you mentioned like driving three cars because you look like a tactical convoy with three cars. Oh, but very, very spaced out. Oh, no, not together. To an ISR cost. No, no, no.

We would be like, you know, one car would be like, you know, five, ten minutes ahead, if not more. So you did, yeah. It was more a case of like, as it happened once to me on the road before I wizened up to planning where I went out and I was still with Reuters, and we were driving to Nangahar towards the Pakistani border from Kabul and we drove

into an ambush in the Surabee Valley I don't know if you have been there familiar with the geography but it's the most incredible sort of valley with these huge cliffs and you're down on a little road and we were driving along in our unarmored vehicle but a police truck

a police convoy had stopped and we drove past and they didn't tell us anything and a truck sort of came by overtook us and then they opened fire on the truck but we were you know initially we thought we were being we were the target and so you know there were like these like heavy machine gun fire like zipping down and I knew like at that moment I just was like okay

we're gonna die because there was no way there was just a wall of fire and it was like hail right in front of the car and it was like there's no way we'll live it was just impossible and so the driver Afghan driver was like less resigned to his fate and he like slammed the brakes and we turned around and we had I think like maybe three bullets that had ricocheted from the cliff like in our car and so our car broke down in the Sorobi valley in the middle of it of it like a Taliban attack it wasn't great and so we ended up like limping off to this local garage and the Sorobi valley and I'm like sitting there under my burqa really really scared and the Afghan reporter like I remember like it's the car skidded around in a hole so then we realized that we weren't being

shot at and the poor guy got out and he like vomited because he had like two small kids at home and nobody was going to help him out if he died. And so we're just sitting there in this garage and he's like chatting away to me in English. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, you know, he felt safe enough at that point, but I certainly didn't. Yeah. And yeah, so that experience taught me travel with more than one vehicle because there's something happens to your first one. You're going to want a second one.

And in terms of driving into like Achen, which was previously Taliban controlled and ISIS had moved in. and, you know, when we drove out to the valley where this bomb had been dropped, there was no government at all on the road, like nothing, there were no police checkpoints. We just drove up to the thing. So, you know, you didn't know what you were going to encounter. We wanted, as we thought three vehicles was a good sort of starting number. One of the problems that we had was that one of our poor drivers,

he didn't want to leave on his own, right, because we ended up having the three, you know, the three cars eventually got to where we were. We spent a few hours, like, you know, at the bottom of the hill where the ODA captain was like, you know, you guys must leave, but he was nice enough not to kick us out after all that effort we had gone to to get there. And so the Afghans gave us a tour and showed us, you know, body parts that were in the field and where, you know, some, where one of these different battles had taken place.

But so we tried to send, you know, when the drivers were like, okay, you know, now please, you know, leave. And like, we come back and we find that he's, like, hiding because he didn't want to leave without us. And we're like, no, we're like, it's so much more danger. not just from an American drone strike, but like any, you know, Taliban or whatever watch is going to see

like these two cars passed together. And we had also, we were also going to change car. So there'd be like four of us in this one like white car on the way in and then we'd be spread out in different cars on the way back. So you wouldn't be able to necessarily spot a pattern of people coming and going.

So he didn't want to leap anyway. Yeah. I don't know how we got to that. So I think, you know, reading your book, reading West Morgan's book, we had him on the show a while back,

the question that inevitably you have to ask yourself is just quite simply, what are we doing here? What are we doing? And why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we putting ourselves through this, if nothing else? I mean, what were the conclusions

you came to? I mean, I think the current administration has concluded, you know, there's no reason why we're doing this, so we're leaving. I don't know. I think that people feel at the top that they've invested

so much that they don't want to be the ones to let go, I think, at the very top, like, there's this warning on every president that, you know, if you leave, there could be a terrible attack, and then you'll be blamed for it, and really the Afghan war is very low cost for the US,

because it's not a lot of money, it's not a lot in terms of soldiers' lives, the public doesn't care, so what's the cost? There's not people out in the streets, and that's what often you would from policymakers where you're like, why? And they're like, well, you know, it's not like you're under pressure.

Like, nobody even knows the war is going on. So for us, it's a lot less costly to just keep the war going, the status quo, and have somebody else, you know, take responsibility for that. I got a little irritated the other day when the Biden administration made this announcement, like, hey, by September, we're out. And one of these guys who's former, you know, senior staff at CIA, like, you know, we pay small, reasonable costs staying in Afghanistan. When you read your book about the reasonable costs, quote unquote, that some of these widows pay,

it doesn't seem so small or so reasonable. That was the whole reason that I wanted to write the book was because you were hearing about sustainable rate of casualties, and it's like, and you would hear, you know, like, oh, it's only 10 or 20 soldiers a year, so it's fine. And it's like, well, it's only fine if you don't know who they are. If you're not paying the cost yourself, it's okay. But I think generally, like, they just don't even know their stories. And for me, it was like somebody's mother-in-law who wrote to me saying,

after we had covered this whole Kunduz story about what had really happened when the city fell the second time and the team went in, and she wrote to me saying, you know, thanks for, you know, drawing attention to the story that, you know, I wish American leaders basically would consider the real cost. and the people who are really genuinely good people really want to do good, and they end up paying, like, this price because they're put into situations that they should never have been put in. So, I mean, I think if that's your takeaway, that's good, because for me it was just like,

how do you make people care about the war and about the losses? And, you know, even if it's relatively few, it's still not worth it. And, I mean, it's definitely gotten to the point where it's so political now, too, that if your president, whoever that might be, makes a decision on it, then that's the right decision. And if that's not your president, like no matter what Obama was going to say,

no matter what Trump was going to say, no matter what Biden says, the people who don't like Obama, don't like Trump, don't like Biden, are a lot of times going to say the exact opposite, even if that flips their position from what it was, you know, eight months ago. I felt that you saw that a lot with the Trump administration, when they were like, you know,

we're leaving Afghanistan. and the deal was like signed or whatever like there was so much outcry especially in like liberal voices where it's like what suddenly you suddenly you want the war you know like I thought the war was a bad idea but if it's Trump idea to leave it then you know it's bad there were articles there were articles coming out in major publications about why feminism is why we should stay because we have to protect the women which was never ever a reason why we were in Afghanistan if that's our if that's our metric then there are a lot of

countries we need to invade you know so Which is what Afghans say. I mean, if you talk to Afghans about like American policy, they're like, well, look at Saudi Arabia. You know, or like I remember I went to, I was shadowing the African president for, you know, a day. And he had this meeting planned with all of the heads of all of the ambassadors, basically. And it was like him at the table with a bunch of dudes. There was only one woman there. And she was the deputy who was standing in for like the male UN rep that wasn't there.

But all of the ambassadors were male. you know, so the Afghans are hearing this message about we need to elevate women, but they see that the Americans don't do it themselves that much. They don't have any sort of percentage. And, you know, Saudi, like women, especially sort of a couple of years ago, now they have a little bit more freedom with being able to drive and stuff. But like back then, right? Back then, like, you know, Saudi women can't do anything.

So they're like, well, why does Saudi Arabia get away with it, but we don't? So they just see it a lot of the times as like, you know, elements that the U.S. uses to control Afghan society. They don't really believe in it a lot of the time. Right. You know, that's very interesting. I mean, I know that with Trump, that the, you know, a lot of people involved with Syria were actually lying to him about the number of troops on the ground, you know, and the effects. Allegedly. Well, I think someone would come out and admitted that they were. There was, you know, whether you believe him or not. Fair enough. But did, did you find that there was, regardless Trump or Obama or, you know, what's going down with Biden, I don't know,

but did you find that there was disinformation being passed up, like, into, that people in Washington, oft times weren't even aware of what the ground truth was, because somewhere in the middle? I mean, I don't know. I don't have a view of, like, the entire snaps of the world, but there definitely was a deliberate effort to fudge the numbers from the top, where they would say, okay, we have, you know, 9,800 troops because the Obama administration wanted to say fewer than 10,000.

And that was the entire logic for that number. But they would bring in troops on sort of temporary deployments. And so they would only be in the country for three months. And so they wouldn't count towards the final number. Then also you would be able to bring in certain air support from contractors. And so the numbers were a very squishy thing. But that was a very deliberate effort. I mean, I don't know if you were looking right at the top, whether they would have cared as long as the numbers on paper stood the ground.

And then you'd be like, hey, but, well, you know, We've got 10% more people than we thought we did. And if anyone has any questions for Jessica, please get them in now. Gordon also said, Yala taxi driver. How much? Okay, so how much for a giraffe on the black market? What do you think a giraffe goes for on the black market? In your worldly travels, if you had ever wanted to procure a giraffe?

Yes. Where? I mean, is it a country where there's a lot of giraffes? I would imagine, I mean, in Afghanistan, you could get probably anything for. or not a lot of money. I remember doing one interview in Cars District of Kandahar and sitting there interviewing this Afghan warlord or official, depending on how you look at it.

And like you're sitting there and then this lion, like you hear a lion's roar. And I'm sitting there like 20 meters away, there's a lion with a big mane and it's roaring. And I'm like, am I imagining this? And like, B, am I going to be eaten by a lion? Is this how I'm going to be eaten by a lion? Is this how I'm going to die in Afghanistan?

Because, like, that's not fun at all. And he had, like, a whole exotic zoo, because having exotic pets was a thing of influence. So I would think getting a giraffe there is probably, you know, if you can get a lion, you can probably get a giraffe too. But I don't know. There you go. And Gordon also said,

enjoying the stream from a hotel in quarantine. He's traveling from his job in the Middle East to back home. And so he's Australian. So they make you hide out in a hotel for like three weeks or something before you're allowed to go back to wherever you live. Sounds fine. Oh, okay, here we go. Ellison says, do you or Speckops guys know about the Russian bounties before the world did? Okay, so that whole subject about the Russian bounties.

I can go on about that. What do you got? What do you got? Well, Russian bounties. So I was on maternity leave when that story broke, like really early on. And I was getting calls saying, you know, I know you're on maternity leave, but can you help with this story? Because, and just hearing the outline of it, it seemed to be impossible.

And I thought it was huge, I mean, it had to be hyped up because the number of times that in Afghanistan you would hear about Russian bounties and Russian this and Russian that, and you would get really specific information. Like, this guy gave this march to this commander to do this in exchange for this bridge and that you could really pin it down but at the end of the day like the plausible deniability from the russian side was it really you know was it a russian government person or was it a russian contractor did they really have you know it was just really never enough to put as a as a story so when they came out saying you know russians have paid this much for

this troops it just seemed to me to be really far-fetched especially knowing um often how limited the information that the government did have on what was going on. And now that they've also released information saying that on the presidential daily brief, they rated it from low to moderate. Which is in Afghanistan, you know, that's not a good level of confidence. Low basically means, you know, it's like a rumor. And I thought, I'll be just totally honest here.

I think Michael Morel speaking to the New York Times and saying low to moderate means that analysts agree that the assessment is right. They just disagree with the sourcing of the information may not be great. And those are some weasel words you're using right there. Yeah. Yeah, I found the story, I mean, I could be wrong,

but just the amount of times that we've tried to investigate this stuff and that you hear about it and that you hear about it from people in Afghanistan are also all looking at it. You never heard anything really plausible, like really 100% solid. And so the way was kind of, and then it

became obviously every story about Russia was like, by the way, are we not going to sanction Russia for these bounties? Right, right. Yeah. There's definitely that hysteria around it. And again, I mean, the politics, sort of what you were referencing earlier, Dave. I mean, when Trump was in office, this Russian bounties thing was a huge scandal. When Biden comes in and he announces we're pulling out of Afghanistan, suddenly the Daily Beast runs this huge feature piece about, actually, that whole report was nonsense. Don't worry about it.

And it's like, I can see what you're doing here, guys. I can see what you're doing. Like, it's not funny anymore. Like, there's too many, there's two, the stakes are too high to be playing these stupid games. There was another one where, like, two weeks before the Obama administration announced that they weren't going to leave Afghanistan after all. The U.S. military announced that they had found the biggest archa camp ever in Afghanistan. And they had found it in Kandahar. And, you know, it was, and they put out a press release, which only the one,

Washington Post picked up, and they did like a story basically based off that one press release saying U.S. found nobody else. In Afghanistan, we're like, that doesn't seem right. Right. Yeah. It's interesting, these scenarios that you're talking like way out in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, especially in the Syrian Civil War, especially early on, it was like a black hole that the entire Western world projected their own fears and insecurities into. And still do you?

I mean, now the discussion is if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, what it's China going to do, what's Russia going to do, and if we stay, what does it look like? You know, I mean, that was the thing about Afghanistan that was fascinating early on, was that it was such a world stage where all these different players and powers were involved. Here's a good question from what, Jim. He asks, does she think Afghanistan will be significantly different in 2024 than it was in 1994?

Has anything changed long term? I mean, it's hard to say. this is the question of what the Taliban have they really changed and what they actually want when they think of themselves as putting together a state. I mean, one of the things that you don't really see in the media about Afghanistan, which you don't write because you don't want to invite attacks on westernized areas, but in Kabul there's like an entire sort of shopping district where there's like cafes which are a bit like Starbucks and there's men and women like hanging out together, which in most parts

of Afghanistan's insane because if you go into like any Afghan restaurant, you know, there's like a men's area and then upstairs or at the back behind a curtain you have the family area where the women are. You'd never see them from the street. And yet here you have men and women sitting together ordering like a cappuccino or something. And there's loads of these places. There's there, you know, there's a nightclub that my former colleague runs, you know, and it's all Afghans there. So has it changed? I mean, it's changed a lot in cities, whether it's Kabul or places in the north. But whether that can survive the Taliban coming in, I think it's pretty unlikely if they

do come to power. And even if they don't, and they end up sort of controlling parts of the south and maybe around Kabul, like the amount of conflict and insecurity probably is going to cause these places to have to close and their patrons are going to leave and they could come under attack. But I mean, the Taliban say that they have changed. and, you know, in some Taliban areas, when you go, people are allowed to watch TV, you know, girls go to school and some of those areas,

maybe not like university, but, you know, there's high schools open, very limited, but so, I mean, I think the chances are, no, they have not changed that much, and no, like, nothing of this would survive if the Taliban were in control. Right. But for the average, average Afghan,

not talking about like, you know, the westernized, wealthier, educated, but the average Afghan probably just cares for peace. And if you ask, you know, if you're sitting like, I was in a polling center in Kandaharjun at the 2014 election, and you just asked, you know, people coming in, what do you want? And the answer was always the same. Like, we just want an end to the fighting, want peace. And then, you know, they'd tell you which particular family member they had lost when

or how many sons they had lost. You know, it was like, it was very sad. And nobody really cared who won the election. They just wanted to be left alone. Right, right. And it's challenging, too, because, I mean, I remember, like, when it first kicked off and talking to a lot of the Afghan and the Afghan-Americans who had left,

you know, like life under the Taliban was horrible with the vice and virtue, patrols, and, you know, just. And so you go from this, we didn't live with this and we want this, which is completely understandable. I mean, nobody, you know, their life is chaos a lot of times. And then the alternative is potentially Taliban rule, which for a lot of them who don't remember whatever what that was like, yeah, it's a very complicated situation. I mean, it depends also on the area because there's a lot of like Pashtun rural areas in the south and southeast where, you know, life hasn't changed much before, before, during, after the Taliban. Like it's, I mean, the Taliban approach and their whole, like, it comes from something native, which is the Pashtun tribal code where women are not allowed to go out in a Berk and it's nothing to do with the Taliban.

It's just local custom. Right. And a lot of those things are just native. So it's in the cities where the Taliban rule is so horrifying because it's this kind of the countryside basically coming in and telling you how to live your life. But for people in those areas, they look at the way the cities are run and they're horrified because. because it's so immoral. So you have a real, like, a ideological divide as well. As you do, I mean, to a certain extent, in any country between, you know, the city and the countryside,

but in Afghanistan it's just very, very polarized, also because of the amount of foreign aid and influence that has poured into the cities, not so much to the countryside. Before you went to Afghanistan your first time, how much did you know about Afghanistan, about the current situation, the history of it? embarrassingly little. I mean, as I said, for me, like the first thing was when Waters were like, well, you know, we actually could use some help in Afghanistan.

I mean, to me, first of all, it was like the war is still going on there because I had, you know, heard about Iraq and that kind of filtered through. But, I mean, I grew up in, I was in Italy when the war broke out. It was, you know, it was very, very, like, remote. It wasn't much in the news. And the Iraq War was to a certain extent. But Afghanistan wasn't. And it just seemed very, very far away.

obviously as soon as I was told that I was going to go out there I then read you know everything that I could whether it was you know books or government reports cigar reports which are much hated by everybody which journalists quite enjoy it were really really good back in the day at the beginning when they had just when they had just sort of started to get you know sort of spicy and so you know I read everything and and you know you learned a lot about it in practice but also just living there and you know it was amazing that you could be living you could have lived there for you know four or five years and you would still you know be missing like very basic customs where you're like oh my god all this time i've been like committing this like offense by like

sitting in the wrong place around you know i mean there were just so many of them or that you know these words that you hadn't fully understood the expression it's obviously so i mean a lot of the experience that you get is only by living there what are some things that you feel that you feel that the media in general and I'm just going to say the media because they're always going to be dissenting voices but got right got wrong about Afghanistan I mean was there a lot of misreporting or was most of what you saw accurate I mean I mean generally I feel that the media's done a really bad job of covering just especially the latter years of the war which I followed we've just not been

very good at telling what American the American military has really been doing like how flawed the whole like war effort is why it has gone so badly which I think is what you see in the book where you see like the reality on the ground for the soldiers day to day and then the policy making in Washington and how it's completely divorced and you know and I think that even that myself as a journalist we could never cover that because we didn't have any access and the access that you did have the guys would like never let you do write about it in a news story and so and there's a lot of oversimplice in the media. I mean, people, there's often, you know, like the Taliban are going to come and bring darkness to, like, all of Afghanistan when half of Afghanistan, like, actually agrees with, you know, that even if we find it apparent in the West, like, there's a lot of places in Afghanistan that don't. And I think there's a lot of oversimplification that way. But generally, I just think not done a good job, not done a good job of portraying the motives that that American leaders have had for wanting to remain engaged.

And what about, I know your book probably focused mostly on the United Space Special Forces, but what about foreign troops? Are they still active there? Are foreign governments still active? Do they receive the same type of scrutiny in their operations? I mean, the Australians have come under quite a lot of scrutiny for the special operations, things that happened in the past. And definitely on a lot of the missions, like, for example, the Kunduz mission, they had British advisors with them and they had Romanians. So I've often wondered, you know, like, you know, these poor American soldiers that nobody cares about, what about the Romanian soldiers who were, like, there through the same battles and, like, really nobody cares about those guys. And, you know, I don't doubt the Romanian, anyone in Romania knows that Romanian soldiers are there. So, I mean, yeah, they are level. But generally, I mean, the U.S. is the main player. They're the ones who really decide the rules. Their decisions in D.C., you know, condition the war, you know, determine life or death on a huge scale. from there, which is very obvious, and no other country really has staking it,

which is very obvious now when the US is leaving, and they're like in, together, out together. Well, that was not true, because, you know, for four years previously, everyone was worried that Trump would just eject, and then, you know, that would be it. And even now, like, the Americans are leaving. They have planned to be out on July 4th, and apparently the Europeans are like, well, hang on, we can't get out by July 4th. We need more time. So can you please wait so that we're not, like,

abandoned here pretty much. And so, I mean, the U.S. is the main player in town. Anything else that, you know, we've covered a lot here, I think, in this interview. Is there anything else that you wanted to bring up that you didn't have the chance to? No, no, I think it just, thanks for having me here. Yeah. I'm really glad to had a chance to talk to you. Likewise, thank you for coming in studio and doing this tonight, and thanks for writing the book. And again, the book is Eagle Down and find it on Amazon. Is there an audio book? People always want to know. There is an audio book. They can get it on Kindle.

Yeah. Foreign language additions. Is it in Polish yet? No. People always ask. Isaac's asking, what is or might be China and Russia's plan? And yeah. Russia, I think, probably very worried.

I mean, probably both of them, Russia and China, very worried that Afghanistan is going to collapse. Because as much as they want the U.S. to look bad and fail in Afghanistan, and they also do not have an interest in chaos. Because China shares a border with Afghanistan and they're very worried about the Muslim separatists and activists being trained in Afghanistan. And obviously the Russians don't want it spilling over into Central Asia. In fact, you saw that it was one of,

especially earlier on more in the Obama administration, for the US and Russian, China, they were cooperating on a lot of things with Afghanistan because they all broadly had the same interest was, you know, not total chaos. Did you, because you were there later, like I left in 2010 and things were still, you know, what they were. But because you were there later, did you see a lot of Chinese involvement, like investment? Were they trying to build the infrastructure there? I mean, they were, but they were encountering a lot of problems by the time that I was sort of around.

I mean, they had bought, they had invested the biggest, into the biggest copper mine, the Indian had some conglomerates into the biggest I might, but basically they had invested a lot, none of it was going well. They were encountering the same problems that any American contractor who was trying to do business there, which was kind of corruption,

and if you didn't have the agreement of everybody locally, you would have a lot of local insurgents. And so the mines would be rocketed. They just had a lot of infrastructure problems. So they never really got off the ground. You know, they had this big oil project, oil and gas project in the north, and that never went anywhere. So I think that that was probably, I mean, China did see an opportunity, maybe, as they also invests a lot in Africa and other nations, but they didn't get very far. Yeah.

How much do you think that for the United States policy in particular, do we get it wrong? because we don't understand a place like Afghanistan where it's so family, village, tribal-based, you know, the whole idea of the national identity is very hard to push in some of those areas. I mean, I think that you just can't build a country in your own image.

And obviously, I mean, every country has taken, it has its own, like, specific history and evolution. And you can't come from the U.S. into Afghanistan, which is an extremely complicated country that has, you know, thousands of years of history and decide, okay, this is how you're going to do your, you know, your judicial system. This is how we're going to bring in, you know, 25-year-old lawyers to tell you how to do when they have, you know, ancient, ancient sort of practices and systems for dealing with disputes. Right. You know, to me, that one of the things that was mind-blowing was that

the Italians were put in charge of the justice system. And like, being from Italy, I can say this, the Italian justice system does not do well. And so you brought them in to, like, build the Afghan justice system, it blew my mind. Yeah. It must, I mean, it must have been fascinating for you. Because, I mean, you had insight that either Jack nor I had, you know, because you were seeing so many different elements and, you know, getting so many different perspectives.

Yeah. All right, guys. So next episode, we're going to have a guy who is Army counterintelligence on, talking about, you know, looking, ferreting out spies around, U.S. military bases. He spent some time in Afghanistan too. Anyway, we'll get into it with him. Then, and then the next four episodes after that, going into the summer here,

is some people returning to the show. Mike Edwards on the 28th is going, he was in the regimental reconnaissance company. Then Caleb Phillips on June 4th, he was my friend from Fifth Special Forces Group, talk about his time in SF. On the 11th, Mark Polymeropolis, C. CIA. He's coming on for a second time. June 18th, Danny Colson, who's FBI H.R.T. founder. He's going to come on. We are going to talk about Rico and Ruby Ridge. It'll be part two for Danny. Well, part two for all these good. But yeah. And then that leads into June 25th, our big episode 100th party. And we have a bunch of people

laid on coming in studio. So that'll be fun. Yeah. So if you guys are, Back in New York for that time, you'll have to come in and... Thank you. We'll bring the baby. Yeah. Run. Run for babies. All right, guys.

Thank you. And we'll see you on Friday. Oh, also our Instagram at the team house. Or they dot team dot house. Make sure you join us over too. Oh, actually, yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Dave. Because I wanted to give a shout out to a veteran, small veteran-owned business. They're not a sponsor or anything, but the omega project.

It's the-dash-omega project. And they make journals for your personal training and your nutrition and sleep and it helps you track everything. It's a personal journal instead of just having a blank notebook. And I just want to give them a shout out because they're soft veterans running a small business like ours. Jessica, thank you so much for your time, first off. With everything you've done and everything you've learned, do you have another book in the works? Do you have like your next project on the horizon? No, not yet.

No, I mean, I think maybe, initially I said I would never write another book, because it's just a really difficult soul-destroying process. But now I think something kind of leading on from that, maybe like, you know, taking some of the stories forward, but I don't know, yeah. Just out of curiosity, I know we need in the end, but what was, in particular about this book, what did you feel was soul crushing? I mean, it's just, it's like quite a long, lonely process writing.

writing and, you know, nothing you write is ever, ever as good as you want it to be. Somebody told me books are never finished. They're abandoned, which is kind of how it feels. You know, there's a lot of stories. I wanted to tell a lot more stories in it than I did, as I mentioned. And then obviously, promotion, as you know, is like super difficult and miserable, and you was trying to promote yourself, and that's kind of embarrassing. Yeah.

Publishing is a harsh mistress. It's really, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and was there at every point in time, whether it was with U.S., whether it was with the soldiers themselves or family members or even Afghanis, that you felt like you were picking up a shield, like that you were, that you felt that like somebody has to feel to tell the story. I felt that with a lot of the soldiers stories where I felt like a responsibility because a lot of those stories had never been, you know, had never been told before and they were putting a lot of trust, you know, in telling the story, you know, faith. faithfully and even if you don't want to make, you know, even if you're really trying to do your best, you could still, you know, make a bad mistake or, you know, upset somebody or be insensitive or miss something. And so I felt a lot of responsibility. And I really hope that I did the stories justice and that at least most of them felt like I did. All right. I think that's an episode. Thank you.