Category: Advise and Assist

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President Trump Responds to the Water War . . . But

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just days after I posted on our current water war with Mexico, President Trump responded decisively by cutting American water to Tijuana. This is a very strange development because the Mexicans have not met their 1948 treaty obligations since 1948. Once a year or so, Texas politicians issue a hysterical la proclamación threatening to withhold building permits until Mexico coughs up some of the water we are owed. In the past, this allowed the captured media to portray the matter in whatever light their democratic overlords told them. These days, it allows sharp bloggers to bring up yet another indecency we decent Americans are facing, thanks to progressive globalists. But that’s where the issue is supposed to end – expecting Washington, DC, to do something about it would be like pulling a diamond out of a goat’s ass.

Yet here it is, as explained in this statement from the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs:

“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture — particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley Valley” the bureau said. “As a result, today, for the first time, the U.S. will deny Mexico’s non-treaty request for a special delivery channel for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana.”

I had never heard of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, but I had to correct their statement. They had the valley in Rio Grande Valley in lowercase and were missing a comma. Not bad for government work, but I’d love to see DOGE go to work on their books for one reason. Whatever the mission of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs was when it was formed, it is not its mission now. Bureaucracies, by their nature, grow and expand, losing focus over time, but they aren’t of nature, so they have no predators to keep their numbers down and personnel in fighting trim. To be healthy, federal bureaucracies should periodically be ruthlessly scoured by DOGE autodidacts who test low for the empathy character trait.

It is also worth noting that the attached story credits Senator Cruz for alerting the President to this sorry situation and not the Free Range International Blog. This is probably true, but the timing is suspect, given my last post. Still, I’m amazed that the President acted on something that the federal government has studiously ignored for 78 years. It’s morning in America again! What could possibly go wrong now that we have an awesome president getting things done? And then I saw this:

The 6th generation F-47 can expect cost overruns, production delays, and fatal performance glitches that will be worked out after it has been fielded—just like every other modern jet fighter we have built in my lifetime.

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragging about the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform, which is designated the F-47. There is no better example of Pentagon gold plating inefficiency than acquiring next-generation military aircraft. I thought President Trump, with the able assistance of Secretary Hegseth, was going to trim down and toughen up our military. Their counterrevolution against the pathology of wokeness and political correctness in the military has been impressive. But another massive investment in a “next-generation” manned fighter is a depressing signal that the status quo with our military-industrial complex will continue unimpeded by logic or fiscal responsibility.

The F-47 is the replacement for the F-22 Raptor, which was supposed to replace the F-15 platform. However, we still have lots of F-15s because the F-22 was a nightmare for the Air Force. Only 186 of the 750 F-22s anticipated by the Air Force were delivered, and only 130 of those aircraft were operational. The number of F-22s in service today is classified but suspected to be in the double digits.

Why are these people being trusted to build a sixth-generation air dominance fighter?

We cannot build F-22s anymore because much of that industry was retooled to produce the F-35, another super high-speed ‘next-generation’ jet plagued by reliability, maintainability, and availability problems. The cost of the F-35 program has soared past 2 Trillion Dollars. It is a flying computer that requires periodic updates and modernization that significantly reduces sortie rates. Additionally, the F-35’s current engine and thermal management systems must be fixed. But the Department of Defense hasn’t figured out how these repairs will be accomplished. So we don’t know how much this will add to the 1.6 trillion dollar projected sustainability costs.  

It’s hard to believe that the F-47 program won’t face the same challenges, but for what benefit? To have the best air dominance platform in the world? We already possess that capability with our few dozen remaining F-22 Raptors. No hostile Air Force in the world can”dominate” the F-15EX, which the F-22 was supposed to replace. Israel could give the Air Force fits on its home turf, but they are friends, not foes.

Speaking of Israel, its F-35 fleet performed flawlessly against Iran’s sophisticated air defense systems. And speaking of F-35s, the Marine Corps paired theirs with Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned drones under the “loyal wingman” concept. We currently have the stealth capability married to drones that can defeat any air defense system in the world. The question isn’t why we need a new-generation jet fighter but why we would invest Trillions in developing a new manned air dominance fighter.

I’m not sure these are the people we want building passenger planes, let alone stealth fighters

There may be a logical explanation for the F-47, but we won’t know what it could be until somebody tells us what it is designed to do. Online speculation about its size, shape, and capabilities is all over the map but can be summed up as more lethality, speed, greater range, and additional (undefined) weapons. Every new “air dominance higher” is supposedly more lethal and faster, with longer legs and increased sortie rates due to decreased maintenance cycles. Yet, the exact opposite always proves to be the case.

And we are now supposed to believe that Boeing will deliver this plane on time, on budget, and without a long list of expensive, nearly insolvable problems? Boeing? Are you joking me? What are the chances this plane will be in production and operational by the end of President Trump’s term as currently planned? I say zero. What are the chances that Boeing will deliver this aircraft on budget? Who knows? The price and capabilities of this plane remain classified; we’ll never know how much the program will cost over budget.

Do you believe Boeing will build the F-47 in under four years?

The plane has been designated the F-47 to honor our 47th President, Donald J. Trump, and that’s the kind of bullshit that should have caused instant program termination. Hegseth and Musk are supposed to protect Trump from swamp creatures adept at appealing to the great man’s vanity. Elon Musk called the F-35 design “shit” and derided the “idiots” making the fifth-generation stealth fighter. He met with SecDef Hegseth just before the F-47 announcement and has remained mum on the topic. The SecDef had the appropriate level of gravitas for the situation, but comfort with this new unfunded liability was hard to read.

Gravitas is a word that became common during Bill Clinton’s administration. The paid corporate media used it to describe Clinton when he got that deer-in-the-headlights look while telling what we now know to be bald-faced lies. It is obvious that Secretary Hegseth and his public relations shop will need some serious gravitas to navigate the disaster they unleashed by greenlighting a program they did not have the time to review or understand. The future suddenly does not look so bright, and getting a few more hundred thousand acre-feet of water from Mexico will not change that.

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Suddenly the CIA is Competent?

This morning America awoke to the news that the CIA had run down and arrested the man responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing. The new CIA director said he called Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and told them a man named Mohammad Sharifullah (aka Jabar) was inside the Northwest Frontier or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or hanging out near Chitral – somewhere on the border that Pakistan barely controls. He claimed Jabar was the man behind the Abbey Gate bombing, so the ISI and CIA launched a raid, captured him and brought him back to the USA to face justice.

ISIS terrorist Mohammad Sharifullah arriving in the USA last night. ISISK is turning into a problem for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it is a safe bet that this dude deserves everything he has coming. But it is hard to believe he set up the Abbey Gate attack having just been released from the Bagram jail

The chances that this story is true are not high for the following reasons:

  1. The last time the CIA went after the “man responsible for Abbey Gate” they killed a Kabul-based NGO worker along with a carload of women and children. At the time the morbidly obese Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said it was a “righteous strike” before being forced to admit they killed ten innocent civilians.
  2. The ability of the CIA to gather accurate intelligence inside of Pakistan or Afghanistan was compromised by the ISI, who took our money, gave it to the Taliban, and forced-fed target lists to the CIA, which benefited Pakistan – not America
  3. The ISI is and always has been an enemy and they proved that with 20 years of interference and lying.
  4. The CIA was so incompetent that the military started their own private spy network, which identified dozens of lucrative targets in Pakistan that the military serviced with their drones. That enraged the Pakistan ISI who threatened to throw the CIA out of the country if we didn’t stop hitting targets they had not been nominated or approved.
  5. The military private spy ring identified OBL’s Abbottabad compound in 2008 and even sent the architectural drawings to their boss, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge. I know that’s a fact because I sent the drawings through our secure DARPA funded internet connection from the Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
  6. One of the most proficient CIA analysts with a proven regional counter terrorism track record, Sarah Adams, said the Abbey Gate attack had two organizers, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Sanaullah Ghafari: two men who had the means, intelligence, motivation, and a long history of attacking Americans. Sarah was on the Shawn Ryan Show and some other podcasts I listen to and she’s impressive.
  7. It is impossible to believe that some low-level jail bird had the ability to organize, arm and execute a suicide bombing mission so quickly, having been locked up in Bagram until mid-August. The bombers needed the assistance of a senior terrorist experienced in launching suicide attacks in Kabul. The Taliban leadership had one man who fit that bill, Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Interior Minister of Afghanistan.
The first attempt to exact retribution for the Abbey Gate bombing killed an innocent family.

Like most Americans, I have been thrilled to see President Trump dominate the deep state. If it is humanly possible to turn the CIA from a renegade political opposition operation into a functional organization that subordinates itself to the Executive Branch and is actually capable of doing spy work, I believe President Trump will do it. However, Trump is not a superhuman, and it is going to take a Herculean effort to clean out the Augean Stables of the CIA. It would be easier, safer, cheaper, and more efficient to dismantle the CIA and let Eric Prince of General Michael Flynn build a new organization using the Office of Strategic Services model.

The idea that the CIA suddenly became a functional, nonpartisan intelligence agency during the FJB era is hard to believe. As is the claim, that “Jafar” has confessed to his crimes. Confessions by Hill Pashtuns under the tender ministrations of the ISI are meaningless. American jails are full of men who have “confessed” after very little pressure to crimes that DNA proved they never committed.

Confessions, absent hard, solid, SIGINT complimented by human intelligence are meaningless. The CIA has a 20-plus-year record of failure generating accurate human intelligence in Afghanistan or Pakistan. There is a show on Netflix that proves the point. They think they are depicting a competent human intelligence operation. What they show is two old Warlords taking the agency to the cleaners over fabricated bullshit. My assessment of that amusing spectacle is here.

CENTCOM Commander Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., USMC is responsible for the disaster in Kabul and should have been held accountable.

Accountability for the disastrous Kabul NEO mission should start at the top because it was preordained the day we abandoned the Bagram Airfield. On this episode of All Marine Radio, I predicted exactly what would happen the month before Abbey Gate, making me one of maybe 10,000 people who recognized that fact at the time. The CENTCOM commander, Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. should have never allowed Biden to give up Bagram. The Pentagon had already perfected thwarting presidential directives under Trump, so why, suddenly, did their attitudes change with Biden? I suspect they thought the 2020 election marked the ascendancy of the deep state apparatus. So McKenzie played ball knowing he would be handsomely compensated upon retirement while never held accountable for the fiasco he created.

My generation’s senior Marine Corps general officers are not proficient in reading historical trends. I know most of them and once respected and admired them more than any other group of men on the face of the planet. With age comes wisdom as well as the disappointment of seeing your heroes exposed by fate and circumstance as being petty, vindictive shits because all the cool kids in DC thought that the Bad Orange Man was a kook. They thought wrong, but it’s going to take more than six short weeks to repair the damage done by their long march through our institutions.

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USAID Was a Racket: It Deserves to DEI

The United States spent 54 Billion dollars on economic development and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The reconstruction effort was a comprehensive, across-the-board failure characterized by shoddy workmanship from shady contractors invariably connected to powerful national or provincial government leaders. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the lead agency in these efforts, and they are responsible for the failure of the reconstruction battle. You will be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that nobody at USAID was ever held accountable. In fact, the concept of accountability is foreign to USAID. Accountability is organic to organizations with meritocratic competence hierarchies. But meritocratic advancements, like trigonometry, two-parent households, and high standardized test scores (according to the FJB era zeitgeist), were all signs of white racism and, therefore, never considered relevant at USAID.

I was the project manager for the first US Embassy Kabul security guard contract in 2005, which included the USAID compound across the street from the Embassy. The USAID staff lived and worked in a small, tightly packed compound that was connected to the embassy by a tunnel under Masood Road. They worked long hours in tight quarters, and they had unlimited access to inexpensive, top-shelf booze. Thursday evening is the start of the weekend in Islamic lands, and Kabul provided a heady brew of wartime danger in an exotic land far from home. I got an unusually intimate look at USAID officers operating in the wild. and was not impressed. They drank too much, which is saying something coming from a retired infantry Marine.

Wheat for sale in the Qala-e-Naw Bazaar in December 2006. I was inventorying wheat stocks for USAID, and every one of those 50lb bags said, “Gift from the People of Canada to the People of Iran.” No idea what USAID thought about that, as my report was received without comment. Qala-e-Maw is the Capital of Badghis Province.

I should be grateful to USAID for funding some of the greatest adventures of my life. The 2006 Winter Emergency Food Assessment of Western Afghanistan jumps immediately to mind, as does the refurbishment of the Nimroz Province irrigation systems from 2010 – 2012. But the truth is I was working with such nominal sums (5 – 15 million annually) that our USAID supervisor was an Afghan employee. He was a good man, high in trait conscientiousness and impeccable honesty, but he refused to leave Kabul to inspect our operations. He gave us everything we asked for (in additional funding) because we finished every project on time and on budget.

Critics of international aid observe that it takes money from the poor residents of rich countries and gives it to the wealthy residents of poor countries. That certainly happened in Afghanistan, but internal corruption doesn’t explain why the billions of aid dollars spent to build infrastructure and governmental capacity produced such limited results. The failure of aid programs in Afghanistan started with money flooding into the country faster than it could be absorbed and ended with the lack of oversight in project implementation.

Every large USAID implementation partner working in Afghanistan’s countryside followed the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS). These mandated enhanced security measures included hardened compounds with RPG screens on top of massive exterior compound walls, a hardened safe room with radio communications to regional UN security offices, armored SUVs, and personal security details provided by approved international professional military companies PMCs.

Typical CADG cash for work project targeting the central canal in Kandahar City – not the most pleasant work, but it paid well

Brand new armored SUVs drew unwanted attention and were bullet magnets in most of the country. The PMCs providing protection details knew this and limited trips outside the compound walls accordingly. Nobody expected international project managers working in places like Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, or Jalalalabad to inspect any of their multiple projects. I was working for Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a Singapore-based company owned by an American couple. They had direct implementation contracts that allowed us the freedom to ignore UNMOSS rules and travel into any area we felt had adequate security.

We found that wearing a local dress driving beat-up Toyotas, living in nondescript local compounds, and minimizing the use of English when out and about gave us the ability to safely move around contested districts. CADG Provincial managers closely supervised all projects, most of which were simple cash-for-work public works projects. We were working in highly kinetic districts in Kandahar, Helmand, Paktia, Khost, Nimroz, and Uzgon Provinces, so we traveled armed.

Panjwayi Tim (on the left and cropped out on his request) rapping some of our Gaardez workers in Pashto. Notice how the Afghan men in this completely Taliban-dominated town reacted to us when we showed up to inspect projects or pay our workers. Panjwayi Tim was out of Kandahar, and also my boss in 2009 and always happy to help out on paydays (which were dangerous).

Our projects were manpower intensive, so paydays involved Retrieving between $70,000 to $100,000 in American dollars from a local bank, driving it to a company compound, and converting it into low-denomination Afghani. Transporting suitcases full of Afghani to the payday site, which was normally the city mayor’s compound. Then, holding a pay call for 5,000 Afghan laborers. Moving large sums of money around Jalalabad, Lashka Ghar, or Kandahar was inherently dangerous. Moving large amounts out into rural projects or deep into the Dasht-e Margo (Desert of Death, which was an intensely cool place to visit) was even more dangerous.

Our USAID manager in Kabul steadily increased our annual budgets and approved every project we submitted. I was moved down to Lashkar Gah in 2010 to be the Southwest Regional Manager for the USAID-funded Community Development Program. There was a USAID officer stationed with the British PRT there who immediately reprimanded me for carrying a pistol. He then explained to me how project approvals were now going to work because the British Aid Agency was in charge, and they had different protocols for project approval. The next day, I flew out to Camp Leatherneck to talk to the Marines. I was sent to the G9 and told him I had 20 million in USAID Community Development funds and planned to spend all of it in Nimroz Province, where the Brits and USAID had no say in what I did.

The only way to earn a seat at this table is consistent, competent performance over a span of years, not months. The idea of leaving a protected firm base to participate in culturally enriching events like the gladiator fights that dedicated this fine stadium my team and I built was inconceivable to USAID managers.
We didn’t really see gladiator fights but impressive Taekwondo demonstrations from the local youth clubs.

I was a big fan of the governor of Nimroz, Abdul Karim Brahui. Governor Brahui was a graduate of the Kabul military academy who founded and commanded the Jabha-e Nimruz (Nimroz Front) as part of the Mujahedeen Southern Alliance against both the Soviet army and the Taliban. He was a lead-from-the-front commander and the rare Afghan politician who concerned himself more with the people’s problems than accumulating additional power and wealth.

Explaining my understanding of how USAID works to the Governor of Nimroz Province

Governor Brahui was as close to an honest politician as one could be in Zaranj, given that the local economy revolved around plastic jerry cans. They were used to smuggle petrol or heroin across the border or to haul water from various sources for sale to one of the two municipal water treatment plants. Teenage boys selling petrol or diesel out of 5-gallon jerry cans dotted every major road in the city. The only way to generate income in Nimroz was to fix their massive, district-level irrigation systems.

We built a large main irrigation canal in Charborjak district that extended 56 kilometers and services every farming hamlet in the district. We were going to do 60 kilometers but ran into a minefield at the tail end of the canal and could not find a way around it.

The easiest and fastest project was the Chakhansor district because the Khashrod River, which fed the irrigation system, was dry for most of the year. Using 1,500 local laborers, we rehabilitated 300 kilometers of canals and rebuilt a 170-meter reinforced concrete check dam to capture the spring run-off. The Chakhansor irrigation system served 7,200 farms, and the first post-project wheat and melon harvests yielded outputs three times greater than pre-project averages. The Baloch of Nimroz no longer had to import melons from Kandahar, and if you knew how much Afghans love melons (which are excellent), you would understand the significance of that accomplishment, and we weren’t even getting started.

Opening ceremonies for the Charborjak irrigation system.

The Chakhansor district project was completed by Mullah John while I was still in Jalalabad. With the large fiscal year 2010 budget, we could do both Charborjak and Kang districts simultaneously, which would mitigate some of the heavy equipment costs. That year, we built 400 miles of irrigation canals, turning 25,000 acres of the Dasht-e Margo into highly productive farmland, allowing the Baloch to get in on the poppy boom. We hired over 18,000 workers to dig these canals in the middle of the desert where the temperature could hit 120° daily.

Opening the Kang district irrigation system.

The key to completing these so quickly was we were replacing systems, not building new ones, and we hired as many of the engineers who had built the original weirs and dams as we could find. The only problem with this massive project was the USAID stipulation that no material originating from Iran could be used in the construction. Instead of using high-quality Iranian concrete at $5.00 per 50lb bag, we were supposed to import low-quality concrete from Pakistan, which the State Department insisted was our ally. We worked around that somehow, I don’t remember the details, and finished on time and on budget. But we had a problem: the Helmand River was low due to maintenance at the Kajaki Dam, so our new intake check dam dammed the damn river.

We arrive at the ceremony site – you can see dust trails from the escorts who have been working the flanks and are just now crossing the Helmand. Which is dry downstream. Because we built a check dam that is apparently checking the entire river at the moment.

Only after I inadvertently dammed the Helmand River did USAID and the Brits in Lashkar Gah find out I had built two regional irrigation systems, and they were furious. But I had been working for the Marines, and the Colonel running the G9 shop ran cover for me because that’s what Marines do. He also attacked USAID for not doing anything in Nimroz Province except cancel the one Women Empowerment Program that actually worked. The Baloch people dominated Nimroz Province, and they had different cultural expectations for their women who wore the Iranian Chador, not the Afghan Burqa

One of our Zaranj students in our USAID-sponsored rug weaving class. We ran several training programs for women that were ended by USAID, who wanted us to stop training women in order to “build capacity,” whatever that meant.
This takes arrogance and hubris to new levels, revealing exactly how reckless USAID officials were in producing propaganda that enraged local Afghans. Rather than spend a few thousand dollars setting up Afghan women to run their own beauty shops or rug-weaving companies, we spent millions on a handful of elite young women to participate in a meaningless feel-good competition that placed their families and everyone associated with the effort in mortal danger when we cut and ran.
I’m all about providing technical training to Afghan kids of both genders, but you have to do this from the ground up, not the top down. Jalalabad kids in the MIT-sponsored FabLab. August 2008
This little girl would have never received a minute of academic instruction if it were not for the MIT grad students who ran the FabLab. She damn sure would have never received the opportunity to be on a USAID-sponsored computer team, although she developed skills that could have got her a spot; her parents were dirt poor farmers, not connected Kabul elites.

USAID did a great job taking money from the poor residents of America and giving it to the wealthy residents of Afghanistan. They spent 20 years inside a little Kabul compound from which they never ventured and created an alternative reality for themselves where workshops on women’s rights and protections for the LGBTQ community made perfect sense. They endangered the lives of the elite children they showcased in international events like the robotic competitions while ignoring the needs of the rest of the children in Afghanistan. USAID will disappear from the international stage without a whimper; they will not be missed, and hopefully, most of them will find their way into 12-step programs. Fat, drunk, and stupid is not a recipe for the good life, and there are thousands of swamp creatures about to find that out.

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A Bittersweet Veterans Day

Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.

Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.

Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.

Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.

Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.

The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.

There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.

Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.

General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province

However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.

I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.

Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.

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I Spy: How Human Intelligence is Supposed to Work

Once again, highly classified American intelligence documents have been published on the Internet. This was not a massive leak by some low-level enlisted soldier or disgruntled contractor but a focused leak of two intelligence products regarding Israel’s current preparations to strike Iran. The documents are revealing for several reasons. The first is that they reveal our intelligence community’s sources and methods, which is bad. Second, Israel no longer trusts the Biden-Harris administration and isn’t telling them anything about its current or future operations, which is good.

An excellent summary of the situation can be found on John Schindler’s Top Secret Umbra substack. It is worth reading to understand how serious the leak is and who inside the Biden-Harris most likely leaked the material. The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran. During that investigation, he was caught lying to the FBI, so guess what happened to him? Not one damn thing because Rob Malley was the architect of Obama’s 2015 Iran deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Laws in Obama-Biden-Harris America only apply to the little people or associates of President Trump.

President Trump demonstrated geostrategic common sense by placing the interests of the American people over the “legacy” of Obama when he canceled the JCPOA. President Biden demonstrated partisanship over common sense and complete disinterest in the safety and security of America by trying to resurrect the JCPOA but ended up with a spy scandal centered on Malley instead.

Note the difference between the treatment of General Michael Flynn, who was tricked into a supposed lie by nefarious FBI shenanigans, and Rob Malley, who was and is a straight-up traitor. The rule of law in America today is non-existent if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a patriot who served this country with distinction for 35 years in uniform and a Trump supporter, you will be prosecuted and financially ruined for the most trivial offenses.

General Flynn was instrumental in setting up the Eclipse Group, a private spy network providing desperately needed human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. The Eclipse Group was created by a former CIA legend, Dewey Clarridge, who knew the CIA could not deliver HUMINT for several reasons, including institutional risk aversion. You can see that for yourself by watching the CIA get taken to the cleaners in a bogus HUMINT operation on the NETFLIX series Spy Ops. My post explaining that ludicrous operation (the segment is titled Taliban Spies) is here.

Eclipse started operations after my recruiter, Willi 1, and I (Willi 4) met with some senior CENTCOM staffers in Dubai in July 2009. Not long after we started, Kabul’s CIA station chief sent cables to Langley, complaining vociferously about our activities. Nobody in the Pentagon or CENTCOM gave a shit what the CIA had to say about us because they sucked and weren’t providing anything useful to the military. The CIA then turned to their favorite New York Times reporters Matt Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, who wrote several articles full of half-truths, outright lies, and innuendo. The articles referred to my friend Willi 1 and me  (my source code was Willi 4) as “commercial Jason Bourne’s,” which we found amusing.

After driving the Khyber Pass from Jalalabad, the Commercial Jason Bournes Chilling in Peshawar, Pakistan.

But this post isn’t about that I want to explain what a legitimate HUMINT operation looks like by lifting some material from my unpublished book Free Ranging Afghanistan. On the morning of September 26, 2010, I received a panicked call from the senior Afghan official who ran my spy ring in Regional Command East, comprised of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman provinces. He told me he was on his way to my guesthouse with bad news about the kidnapping of an aid worker. He had been told one of the women working for DAI, a large American aid implementor, had been kidnapped on the Asadabad to Jalalabad highway. That was incorrect as I knew DAI personnel would never be allowed to drive that highway and, being a USAID implementor, would have had an armed ex-pat personal security detail. But I knew exactly who would be on the road without an armed escort, and that was one of the girls working for the Idea New program, and there was only one of those: Linda Norgrave.

In 2010 I was working as a heavily armed humanitarian for the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), doing massive irrigation and cash-for-work projects in the cities of Jalalabad, Asadabad, and Gardez. CADG was a “direct implementation” outfit, which meant we did not have ex-pat security teams, B6 armored SUVs, or UN Minimum Occupational Security Standard (UNMOSS) rated living compounds. Idea New was also a direct implementation outfit that was associated with DAI, and they lived and worked out of the DAI Jalalabad compound.

I was at my guesthouse, The Taj, which contained a Tiki Bar that we opened every Thursday evening for the international community (mostly aid workers) that was then thriving in Jalalabad. Like every other international working in Nangarhar province, the British ex-pats working for Idea New came over with the DAI crew every Thursday evening for happy hour. One night, my Aussie wingman Ski and I listened to their program manager explain their modus operandi, explicitly mentioning his belief that being armed was ridiculous, but we said nothing. He went on to challenge us on the wisdom of an armed westerner trying to fight his way out of a Taliban ambush, and we still said nothing. We never thought we could fight off a Taliban ambush on our own, but Linda was not taken in an ambush. She was kidnapped by Taliban associates on a main road, something that would never happen to us. Gun-wielding Westerners introduced a lot of friction into a kidnapping equation, which was the point of being armed.

I immediately emailed Willi 1 and Dewey to explain that Linda Norgrove was a British national working for the American USAID contractor DAI on the Idea New program. Idea New duplicated our (CADG) technique of low-profile unarmored cars, singleton international program managers, wearing local dress, attempting to blend in with the locals as much as possible, etc…, but they were not armed. Dewey called me on Skype which he (incorrectly) thought the NSA couldn’t hack to ask what we had, which wasn’t much. He told me to stand by to support one of Willi 3’s assets, which was inbound and might need comms, guns, or money.

As was typical for Willi 3’s network, his guy found the kidnappers by the 29th of September and passed on their names, some fuzzy cell phone pictures, their chain of command, and a working theory for the kidnapping. The crew that had grabbed Linda had been identified in my order of battle reporting a month prior when they arrived from Pakistan, and that report was added to our targeting package. Willi’s access agent linked up with us, and he was exhausted. We let him sleep for a day, fed and refitted him with serious walking around money before he returned to Kunar.

Dewey passed our reporting onto both MI6 and the American DIA; the Brits read everything we wrote, and the Americans ignored everything we sent. President Obama talked the British Prime Minister into allowing the American military to take over the case because the Regional Command (RC East) was 100% American. On the 30th of September, the American military took over the kidnapping case. On the 1st of October, I received a call from the RC East Human Terrain Team asking me to come in to “talk with a friend.”

“About fucking time,” was my curt response.

Thirty minutes later, I was introduced to a DIA agent in the Human Terrain Team office. He looked like every other DIA agent I had met: bearded, in his mid-30s, slim, fit, and wary. I was taken to a separate office so we could talk alone, and the first question he asked was if I knew Linda Norgrove. I was stunned and looked at him hard to see if he was jerking my chain. I then asked a question I hated asking: “Do you know who I am”? He did not; he claimed to have never heard of the Eclipse Group, Dewey Clarridge, or the Pentagon private spy ring. It appeared he was telling the truth, not that I cared, so I asked what they had so far, and he said the grid where her car was found. I didn’t believe that for a second but didn’t care because I came bearing gifts.

Instead of trying to explain the mountain of information we had on the kidnapping – primarily via Willie 3’s excellent network, we walked down to the Human Terrain Team office, where my friend Kerry Patton lent us his desktop computer. I pulled up our AfPakrp.org website and scrolled to report #825, which was a summation of reports 820, 823, and 824, and cross-referenced report 621a, which was when the Taliban kidnap team leader, Mawlvi Baseer, first popped up on my network. Dewey had resorted to putting our products on a password-protected internet site after the New York Times hit pieces successfully ended our original contract. With the loss of the contract, we lost our man in Kabul, who had been placed there specifically to feed our intel products into the ISAF intelligence flow.

Ski and I jocked up for a trip into Kunar Province. Do we look like dudes you can kidnap during the day?

The DIA agent was stunned; Kerry said, “I told you, man, you should have listened to us sooner; these guys are the shit.” I told him to call me if he had any additional questions, knowing he had a lot to digest and would want to hustle over to the CIA building on the other side of the airfield. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me, so I requested a case of German sparkling mineral water. I had heard through the grapevine that the CIA had flown in hundreds of cases..

On October 3rd, I asked for another meeting to inform my DIA contact our guy was at the outer cordon in the upper Dewagal Valley and about to slip into the village of Dineshga, where he thought Mawlvi Baseer was keeping Linda. I gave him our agent’s Thuraya sat phone number and the three cell numbers he had recently reported for the head kidnapper, Baseer. On the 6th of October, our spy was back outside the cordon, having located Linda. The DIA called me in because they had intercepted his sat phone calls and now knew where Linda was. When I arrived at FOB Fenty, the DIA agent was almost giddy with excitement and gave me a case of German sparkling mineral water from the CIA stash.

He asked if we could send our access agent back inside Dineshga to identify Linda’s exact location. Willi 3 had anticipated this and already agreed to send his man back. I asked how the SEALs would ID our guy as friend, not foe, and was told I’d be briefed on exactly how to do that when the time came. I knew that was bullshit, as did Willi 3. Our man went back, made an innocuous sat phone call from just outside the building housing Linda, and then rapidly exited the scene. A few hours later, the SEALS launched and raided the compound we had identified as containing Linda. In the ensuing melee, one of the SEALs accidentally killed her with a fragmentation grenade when he mistook her for an armed combatant.

At that time, I had been living in Afghanistan for four years. Willi 3 had lived there off and on for over thirty years. Human Intelligence operators working in a country like Afghanistan needed to have years of time on deck before they could become remotely proficient at gathering legitimate intelligence. Without that deep knowledge and relationships forged over years and years, any attempt at creating a spy ring would result in getting taken to the cleaners by willy Afghans, as demonstrated by the ridiculous Netflix show, or taken out back and shot in the head.

With four years of continuous service in the country, I qualified as a trusted liaison with ISAF and to outfit and harbor an access agent. I could have never found Linda with my assets, which were considerable back when the Pentagon paid us regularly. Willi 3 was the only Eclipse operative I knew (and I knew only four of the dozens in Eclipse) who had the ability to conduct human intelligence operations at that level. He was fluent in Dari and Pashto and had spent enough time developing the relationships required to run legitimate HUMINT spy rings.

Our intelligence agencies are incapable of duplicating the Eclipse Group because they refuse to put in the time on the ground or accept the risk that comes with living and working with the Afghans. The night we lost Linda, I was stopped and detained by Unit 02 – the CIA-sponsored Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team for Nangarhar Province. But that’s a story another time – if you want to hear it, hit me up in the comments section.

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The IDF: Modeling Competence over Equity

I join the freedom-loving peoples of the world in congratulating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  for eliminating the genocidal bastard Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar was the head of Hamas and claimed that when the time came, he would stand and fight, dying as a martyr. When the time came, he was running away with a fake ID and a pocket of donor dollars, hoping to go to the ground in Rafa. You remember Rafa, the town the spinless cowards running the United States, United Kingdom,  France, Canada, and Egypt told the Israelis to avoid. Cackling Kamala even warned Israel about Rafa, saying, “She had studied the maps,” whatever that meant.

Yahya Shin-was after playing a game of FAFO with a competent military.

Israel is modeling the consequences of valuing competence over diversity in national leadership, intelligence organizations, and a hard-fighting army. They are not constrained by ridiculous rules of engagement from on high. Compare and contrast what we have watched the IDF do over the past year to how we handled fighting terrorists embedded inside Afghan communities. This conversation between Shawn Ryan and Nick “The Reaper” Irving is most informative on that exact topic. You should watch all five hours of this podcast to understand the quality of the human capital wasted by our feckless national leaders and their yellow generals.

There are enough warning signs about our hollow military and its morally bankrupt leadership for a hundred blog posts. From drone swarms loitering over our military bases. unmolested, the Pentagon killing hundreds with an experimental drug treating a virus that was not a threat to servicemen, to an army helicopter rotor washing civilian hurricane relief supplies, the signs that our military is broken cannot be ignored. But I want to focus on the one area I find the most upsetting: women in our combat arms.

West Point and the Naval Academy will roll into the weekend with undefeated football teams. If you look at those teams, you will notice they resemble Israeli combat formations in that they are all male. Our military leadership insists that there are no differences between men and women in mental capacity or physical strength despite several millennia of human experiences and our own lying eyes.

Men and women are born with dramatically different capabilities, which can be seen every time a woman’s national soccer team is beaten by an under-15 boys’ squad. It’s not polite to mention that fact, which most of us find merely amusing. But when women are inserted into ground combat units, the delusions of our elites are no longer funny. One of the many reasons our military faces a recruiting and retention crisis is this callous disregard for the lives of enlisted men who are saddled with females in combat zones.

The boys who thumped the women’s team were Texans which might explain it maybe. . .

Let me tell you about women in combat. On a warm summer day, I witnessed a Marine Corps patrol walking through the Nawa Bazaar in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. I could see the point man was furious, as were the men behind him, and stopped to watch. Then I saw why; the men were carrying the weapons and body armor of their female “Lioness” Marines. The women were stumbling in a gap-mouthed stupor, hanging onto the body armor of the man in front of them. The locals crowding the bazaar were laughing and openly mocking the Marines. It was such a sad spectacle that I couldn’t take a picture of it; I was too embarrassed

What’s the current perception of the Marine Corps Lioness program? A quick Google search reveals dozens of articles about the trailblazing female Marines or the Special Ops: Lionesses TV show. That TV show stars Zoe Saldaña, who is 45, Nicole Kidman, who is 56, and Morgan Freeman, who is still kicking at 86. Can you imagine people that old on the battlefield? It’s a joke, insulting to our intelligence, but it’s a reality for too many of the idiots comprising our elite managerial class.

So, how is the recent deployment of paratroopers into the Middle East going? Unlike my deployment to Beirut in 1983, the current mission is not the subject of informed debate in the regime media. We have no idea where these troops are or what they are doing. Everything the Pentagon does now is top secret. Whatever these troops are doing, it does not impact the conflict that allegedly caused their deployment. One more display of gross incompetence at the national command level.

The Marine Corps Lioness program paid dividends only because our generals were incapable of the tactical adaptation of warning residents in targeted areas to get out before we came in. No military in history has done more to prevent civilian collateral damage than the Israelis. But once warned by them, the civilians who stay risk becoming collateral damage because the Israelis prioritized winning battles and preserving their troops over rules of engagement designed to appease their political masters.

Congressional cowards reacting to protestors who are not from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or unhinged women shrieking at conservative Supreme Court nominees.

The IDF is delivering a master class on intelligence operations and conducting ground combat operations. There are no women at the pointy end of their spear, just as there are no women from Ukraine or Russia slugging it out in the trenches of Ukraine.

There shouldn’t have been any American women at the pointy end of our spear during the 20 years we spent replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. But our senior generals aren’t as competent as Isleali generals, so they came up with workarounds that made female congresspeople swoon while leaving our best warriors like Nick Irving alone, exposed, and unable to call in the fire support they needed to survive. A military organization that places winning collegiate football games over the lives of its soldiers and Marines is not worthy of our support or admiration. They have earned nothing but our contempt.

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Targeted: Beirut

I wrote my last post about Beirut the day before Jack Carr released his book on Targeted: Beirut. I had pre-ordered the book, so I immediately read it for his opinion on the debacle. My assessment that: “Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut” was spot on. My assessment may have been a bit wordy and awkward, but  I’m no Jack Carr.

Beirut October 1983

Targeted: Beirut was excellent reading, and it transported me back to the moment I first heard about the barracks bombing. I was driving into the Newport Naval Hospital, where I would be standing duty in the medical laboratory for the next 24 hours. It was a beautiful fall morning, and as passed Easton’s Beach I heard the news on NPR. I don’t remember much else about the day other than I was upset and angry at the attack on our Marines.

101st Airborne arriving in Cyprus September 2024

I was the Leading Petty Officer of the hospital’s Mobile Medical Augmentation Readiness Team (MMART), a collateral duty that allowed me to wear Marine Corps camouflage utilities once a month, which I thought was cool. We were mobilized after Grenada to augment Mobile Surgical Team 11 from Norfolk after they were overwhelmed by casualties from the Ranger contingent of that invasion. My other distinct memory of that time was the Personnelmen processing us before we deployed (who were women; the Personnelmen rating was changed to Personnel Specialist in 2005) were in tears. They thought we were heading into harm’s way, which wasn’t the case, as we would spend the deployment on the USS Guam LPH 9.

Marine wounded in Beirut October 1983

Our contribution to the Beirut story was a minor part of Targeted: Beirut, which focused on the Marine Amphibious Unit that was attacked on October 23, 1983. Carr weaves the book around the stories of several Marines and sailors as they endure their deployment ashore. Some of those men made it home, the others did not, and you don’t know who the lucky ones were as his face paced narrative unfolds. It is a masterful display of storytelling that will interest anyone curious about how the war on terror started.

Having been a participant, I knew most of the story but was unprepared for the one thing that immediately caught my attention. The difference in how the military and our government handled combat deployments in the 80s. There was severe tension between the State Department and the Pentagon; putting the Marines ashore in Beirut, where they were sitting ducks, was unpopular. The Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t want the Marines ashore; the National Security Council and State Department thought it a splendid idea, and that played out in the press.

101st Airborne arriving in an undisclosed location September 2024

President Regan sent the Marines in, and he made repeated primetime addresses to the nation explaining his rationale. The Marine position at Beirut International Airport was flooded daily with American press and TV crews from National, regional, and even local media. The media environment was so different 40 years ago that reading about it today was jarring.

Something I did not know was that Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger ignored a Presidential finding that ordered him to retaliate for the Beirut Barracks bombing. Our intelligence agencies had intercepted message traffic that pinpointed precisely who had ordered and carried out the attack. President Reagan then ordered the navy to retaliate, but at the last moment, Weinberger ordered them to stand down, explaining, “I just don’t think it was the right thing to do.”

Beirut October 1983

In one of many speeches after the Beirut bombing, President Regan said:

“Let no terrorist question our will, no tyrant doubt our resolve. Americans have courage and determination, and we must not and will not be intimidated by anyone anywhere.”

Cap Weinberger didn’t have the courage or determination to do a damn thing. His unilateral action undermined the President, and the ensuing 40 years of terrorist attacks have revealed him to be a petty, naïve, Ivy League fool. We have a surplus of over-credentialed nitwits in our country who have sacrificed the lives of thousands of servicemen by declaring preposterous concepts like “proportional response” or “courageous restraint” viable military strategies.

When we were in Beirut with the 22nd MAU there was no proportional response. The gloves were off and the Marines responded to every provocation, no matter how small, with overwhelming force. My friend Mike Ettore and his platoon were assigned to the University Library where the local Amal Militia commander would taunt them by having dinner every evening across the street from them. After his militia attacked the Marines one too many times Mike got permission to take him out. He called in a sniper team to shoot the fool in the face when he sat down for dinner. Mike if I have that story wrong don’t correct me, its too good to retract.

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024

President Regan and the faction supporting the deployment of the Marines were dead wrong. That was made clear by Carr when he explained how we ended up with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, a feckless alcoholic with a libido problem worse than Bill Clinton’s. Amin replaced his capable brother Bashir Gemayel as President after a car bomb killed Bashir.  

New York Times reporter Milton Freedman wrote that Bashir was “something of an expert in gangland murders.” That may have been true; the New York Times was considered a legitimate news organization back then. What was also true was Bashir had the respect and cooperation of the other ethnic minorities in Lebanon. His drunk-ass playboy brother had no support among the Shia, Druze, or Sunni minorities. Treating him like a legitimate partner for peace was a fool’s errand, just as it was with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan. Believing that a battalion of Marines could accomplish anything was likewise ridiculous. However, in 1983, that controversy played out in the press, allowing the American people to have an informed opinion.

Compare that to last week’s deployment of the 101st Airborne to the Middle East. Do you see any discussion about placing American troops in harm’s way to accomplish an undefined mission in today’s gaslighting media? No. What does the Pentagon think about this deployment? Who knows? These days, everything the Pentagon does is classified. Do you know where those troops are? What they are doing? Why they are there? Nope, all we know is they were deployed “out of an abundance of caution.” Weasel words that mean nothing describing a deployment that will accomplish nothing, ordered by an unknown member of a failed administration.

Beirut October 1983

I’ve salted this post with pictures from Beirut and the few images I found of last week’s deployment of troops into the Middle East. Have you noticed the difference between the two? Forty years of “diversity is our strength,” DEI mandates, witch hunts for nonexistent white racists, and race crime hoaxes have resulted in the tip of the spear being lily white. How the hell did that happen? I liked it better when the infantry was multi racial.

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Today, Our military is less capable by orders of magnitude than in 1983. We don’t have a fleet oiler to refuel our Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Red Sea ships. We don’t have the amphibious ship lift to move more than a puny Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the smallest Marine formations once available for crisis response. Today’s Marine Corps MEU lacks enablers like tanks, engineers, medium-lift assault helicopters, Armored  Amphibious Tractors, snipers, or organic mortars. Marine infantry battalions are 41% smaller than they were in 1983. And those infantry battalions are saddled with the dead wood of female infantry, inflicted on them by yellow generals who believe that the difference between men and women is a mere social construct.

As you read Jack Carr’s excellent historical account, you will frequently see quotes from parents and generals expressing the hope that the Marines did not “die in vain.” Likewise, you will see a standard trope: “Where do we get such men?” when reflecting on the sacrifice of the Marines in 1983. Yet those men died in vain, as has every service-member lost during the war on terror. We may well have a handful of “such men” serving in today’s hollow force, but not many, and they will be chased out by the DEI mandarins who despise competency because it threatens the bankrupt concept of equity. When you cannot do what is important, the unimportant becomes important. That sums up our broken, hollow, woke military today; it’s a national disgrace somebody’s children will pay dearly for in the near future.

But don’t let my glum assessment of today’s armed forces be the last word. Buy Jack Carr’s new book and enjoy an excellent read about a day gone by. I promise you’ll enjoy every minute spent with this page turner.

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The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: The United States of America

The United States has never been weaker, or more vulnerable in my lifetime. The President is clearly incapacitated, yet he refuses to step down, our DEI centric military lacks the manpower, weapons, or leadership to be a credible deterrent. I enlisted in the navy in 1978, during the days of the low morale, high drug use, “hollow force”. Back then we had (literally) twice the number of ships, tanks, artillery pieces, amphibious vehicles, and infantry battalions but the units were undermanned and poorly led. Marine officers carried loaded sidearms while on duty and had every expectation of needing them.

Ole Doc Lynch pulling liberty on Saint Patricks Day, 1984, in Haifa, Israel. Brawling in shady bars was an expectation back then but the Israelis were so damn nice to us that I don’t think anyone got into a ruckus. Hard men aren’t necessarily violent, just violent when necessary.

In the late 1970’s the military fell on hard times when full of hard men who, when they had their sailors at sea, or their Marines out in the field, established good order and discipline the old fashioned way; with their fists. I did it myself because it was only one way to get your peers to stop blasting music after 2300 in the Bethesda Naval Hospital enlisted barracks. The modern military may still have a few hard men, but they would never receive tacit support or encouragement from their chain of command to use traditional old school discipline to establish and maintain good order and discipline.

We live in soft times, more disconnected from nature than ever before, with a military full of soft men/women/undecided who are uninterested in and unfamiliar with interpersonal violence. The current military is incapable of repeating the miraculous transformation into a highly competent, well funded, and drug free force, that occurred during President Regan’s military revitalization in the early 80’s. Public confidence in the military, extraordinarily high since the mid 1980’s is trending back down to where it was after Vietnam. Confidence in all the institutions that matter, the press, congress, the legal system, academia, “The scienceTM”, and Medicine are at historic lows. It’s so bad regional law enforcement agencies will no longer share information with an FBI they do not trust.

Proving the FBI has IFF (identify friend or foe) issues two FBI agents paid a visit to a friend of mine yesterday who is the hardest Marine Corps infantry officer I ever knew. Asad Khan was a legend in the Marine Corps known for an impressive work ethic, exacting standards, and tactical savvy. I was huge fan and when suddenly bumped up to the 1/8 operations officer while still a young captain then Major Khan graciously gave me a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) saving me untold of hours of tedious staff work. He wasn’t a dick about it either despite knowing that I knew he would never take another battalion’s SOP knowing he could write a better one.

That’s as close to a smile as you’ll get from Asad when he’s wearing the uniform. Not that he smiles much on his podcast now that I think about it. . . .

Asad led the first Marines into Afghanistan landing in Bagram where they boarded rented buses to drive to Kabul and re-claim the American embassy. On the way there they ran into a one tank roadblock in a wadi crossing with a sign demanding payment to pass. LtCol Khan, a fluent Pashto speaker, walked over to the tank, knocked on the crew hatch and asked the lone occupant inside what he needed, the old man said shoes. Khan gave him chow and water and told him to wait there until he returned with shoes and in the meantime to put the main gun in neutral position and let the Americans coming behind him pass unmolested. The old man agreed and was inside the tank days later with Asad returned with shoes, clothes, a coat and some money. Khan was both hard and smart – I don’t think any other Marine officer of our generation could have navigated that situation so well back in 2001.

I ran into Asad several times in Afghanistan, in fact I met his son in Kabul when he showed up with then Colonel (now retired LtGen) Dave Furness who was working in the congressional liaison office at the time. Asad hosts the Sentinel podcast on Youtube and you should listen to a few episodes to get a feel for what the FBI considers “anti-American” these days. You can listen to him describe the FBI visit here and when you’re done you tell me if you’d like to see Asad investigated by the Feds or moving into the house next door.

Some pictures are truly worth a thousand words

We are watching the government/media/academia axis of evil employs brute digital force to whitewash the disastrous incompetence of the Biden regime and it’s new leader Kamala Harris in real time. Already the allegedly non partisan GovTrack has deleted her ranking as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. Axios spent years calling Kamala the Border Czar now insist that they never said that and she was never really the border czar. Amazon has suddenly banned an unflattering book on Kamala as the media’s Soviet style airbrushing of the most unpopular Vice President in history continues.

The Orange and Velvet revolutions foisted on various countries by the U.S. Department of State targeted regime legitimacy through incremental non-violent means to generate a preference cascade leading to regime collapse. It is useful to remember this when reviewing the mountain of disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories we have had to endure since Donald J Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015. A trendy acronym from the recent pass explains the ramifications of gaslighting American citizens: POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. If the ends pursued by the Regime are functionally identical to the ends of warfare, then the Regime is waging war. Ask LtCol Asad Khan USMC (Ret) about it, I’m sure he has an interesting take.

The purpose of regime media propoganda is to demoralize to opposition

Years ago progressive America declared war on biology with their refusal to accept the reality that gender is not a social construct and men and women are not interchangeable. Biology in this context is a synonym for nature and it’s Mother Nature who determined woman would never be as physically capable as men because they are designed and built differently . The difference between the sexes emotionally was just demonstrated during the FBI/Secret Service congressional hearings. US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle took such a beating that she resigned the next day, but she lost her job not because she’s a woman, but as a woman she never had to learn how to fight at the apex predator level. Showing poor tactical awareness she allowed herself to be ambushed at the Republican convention when she arrogantly strode the floor, assuming she had the juice to do so unmolested. When confronted by her ridiculous prior statements concerning roof slopes she was clearly embarrassed. When attacked by both sides of the isle she was unable to mask her emotions.

Mother Nature is tough on the small, the weak, the stupid, and the defenseless.

FBI Director Christopher Wray strode into the capitol and not only obfuscated shamelessly he smirkingly added this poison pill to his testimony:

“I think with respect to former President Trump there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear.” 

Utter rubbish concocted out of thin air that was walked back the next day but it wasn’t meant to be taken literally. That was Wray sending congress a two word message, first word starts with F and the second is You. He was telling congress they didn’t intimidate him and he would counterattack anyone who crossed him. That kind of naked bureaucratic power can only be wielded effectively by men who fought their way to the top of a meritocratic system. Women reach the top of federal agencies by other methods, not by consistently outperforming their male peers every step of the way for decades on end.

Regardless of who is in charge of our massive federal bureaucracies they are not going to allow the Trump/Vance ticket to gain landslide sized momentum unmolested. Their bizarre attempts to stop him have already surpassed the surreal, but have only made him stronger. The next four months are at the very least going to be weird, but I’m afraid the progressive establishment will reach for the last tool they have; political violence. Our country is leaderless, the people adrift in uncharted waters with DEI hires at the helm and FBI agents at the door; this can’t possibly end well.

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America’s Monster in Afghanistan

The New York Times Introduces Agitprop as History just in time for Memorial Day

Last week New York Times foreign correspondent Matthieu Aikins released a two part series that examined the career of Afghan Lieutenant General Abdul Raziq. The Times spent over a year tracking down hundreds of Afghans who had family members “disappeared under Raziq, the police chief responsible for security across Kandahar Province”. Aikins interviewed only one of the eighteen four star generals who commanded in Afghanistan, Marine General John R. Allen who commanded from 2011 – 2013 and claimed;  “it was a mistake to “keep a really bad criminal because he was helpful in fighting worse criminals”.

General Abdul Raziq

I corresponded with Mattieu Aikins when he arrived in Afghanistan in 09, and I respect and admire his work because he is one of the few Americans who knew the country better than I do. I worked for John Allen when he oversaw the infantry officer course, so I know him well, and respect him immensely. As the three star deputy commandeer of CENTCOM General Allen played a pivotal role in sheltering me from fallout from a New York Times series of hit pieces on the Eclipse Group. I am not happy to find myself harshly criticizing men I honestly admire but these two articles: How the U.S. Backed Kidnapping, Torture and Murder in Afghanistan and Who was Abdul Raziq? are so ridiculously wrong that I am mystified. Nobody who cares about honest reporting believes the New York Times but what was it trying to accomplish with articles pinning our many and manifest failures in Afghanistan on the back of one man?

Kandahar district 3 in 2024 photograph from Bryan Denton of the NYT
Kandahar’s district 3 in 2009

The articles claim Raziq was behind the disappearances of thousands of Afghans in and around Kandahar while he was the police chief, and before that when he headed the Border Police in Spin Boldak on the border with Pakistan. There is only one sentence aboutTaliban war crimes: “The Taliban committed countless atrocities of their own against civilians, including suicide attacks, assassinations and kidnappings for ransom.” which directly contradicts this earlier sentence “What is clear, however, is who was responsible: Only the American-backed government consistently engaged in forced disappearances in Kandahar, former officials, combatants, and families of the victims said”.

Let’s start with the obvious; people routinely disappeared in Taliban IED and VBIED attacks. Afghans do not the ability to forensically identify every charred lump of meat found inside the blast radius of a large explosive attack and accurate reports of who was near the explosion from eye witnesses are always unreliable. Not every kidnapping victim of the Taliban was released, especially if the ransom was unpaid, everybody knows this. But that’s not the point, both Matthieu Aikins and General Allen (but not you unless you’re a former Intel weenie) know about other organizations like the Destagiri Group, who were guilty of ‘disappearing’ people and they were mostly government-connected Noorzai. Raziq was from the Achakzai tribe; the Noorzai and Achakzai are the Hatfields and McCoys of Kandahar and have been fighting for generations.

Canadian Army moving through Kandahar summer of 2009

Off the top of my head I could think of dozens of documentaries depicting Afghan security forces in other provinces kidnapping civilians and holding them in horrendous conditions. This one, This is What Winning Looks Like from Vice media shows a patrol of Marines at an Afghan National Police checkpoint holding illegal prisoners training the Afghans on how to use toilet paper (I’m not making this up) while the head cop threatens to shoot the Marines is they try to free his prisoners. The Times contends “The culture of lawlessness and impunity he (Raziq) created flew in the face of endless promises by American presidents, generals and ambassadors to uphold human rights and build a better Afghanistan. And it helps explain why the United States lost the war ‘. But Raziq did not create that culture, it was organic to Afghanistan, it was the war lord culture that we solidified with Special Forces teams in 2001.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad with some tier 1 dudes in 2005 – I’m guessing from the hair these are Dev Group SEALs

The Times is correct that the more Afghans were exposed to the incompetent, bribe demanding, thugs from the Karzai government the more they hated America for inflicting that loser on them. This had nothing to do with Raziq and everything to do with President Karzai and American Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad the man responsible for inflicting Karzai on the Afghans as well as saddling them with the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) electoral system that guarantees corruption and fragmented political parties. It was Mattieu Aikins who broke the story about Khalizad’s behind-the-scene machinations for the SNTV system and it was he who explained its significance. So why is he now focused on Raziq? I have a theory.

If Afghanistan had produced 20 more Afghan patriots like Abdul Raziq Achakzai there would be no Taliban today. He was the most effective counter insurgent fighter since Ahmad Shah Massoud. General Allen might have thought him a criminal but he, with a little help from his American friends, locked down Kandahar during Obama’s troop surge and that saved an unknown but significant number of American lives. For that reason alone he deserves a little respect especially from our senior military leaders but instead they sully his name in the name of their peculiar interpretation of honor.

American Army convoy heading towards Spin Boldak

There was a time when America produced military leaders who understood the purpose of war was to win. Winning requires the total defeat of your enemy which requires killing enough of them that you break their will to fight. You know when your effective at this when you are sitting in the heartland of your enemy, safe and sound, while every province around you explodes in violence as the Taliban sortie out to meet the American invaders. Raziq accomplished that at a time when most Afghans hated the government in Kabul and the Americans who were propping it up. That was a remarkable achievement.

Abdul Raziq was obviously an accomplished killer and that made some of our senior generals uncomfortable. Our military commanders believe that the process they use to nominate and prosecute targets immunizes them against repercussions when they target and kill innocent women and children. Here’s a footnote from the upcoming best seller Free Ranging Afghanistan that highlights the downside of drone warfare.


“The first targeted assassination in Afghanistan by ISAF was on 31 October 2003 using a B-1 bomber and AC 130 gunship to attack a cluster of buildings on the side of the Waygil valley in Kunar province known as Aranas. The CIA was certain the compounds contained Taliban leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but it was the home of a wealthy clan headed by Zabiullah Rabbani. The number of women and children killed in this attack is unknown.  The last targeted assassination was the drone strike in Kabul during the cut and run NEO that killed an NGO worker and his family. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Miley swore it was a “righteous strike” that killed an ISIS suicide bomber adding that the military had followed the same iron tight process they always used when targeting bad Afghans. That might be the only true statement made by that obese incompetent during our chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan”.

For the record nobody ever accused Abdul Raziq of killing women or children. We killed plenty as did the Taliban, but Raziq used dirt naps as a tool while successfully exercising armed governance over a hostile population in the midst of a Civil War. There is a logic to the violence in Civil Wars; indiscriminate violence, like collateral damage from drone strikes, is counterproductive, but targeted violence against individuals can be very productive as Raziq proved in Kandahar. Mattieu Aikins does an excellent job explaining exactly how that worked in Panjai district in his second article and it was there I found the article linked above on the logic of violence. Aikins is a phenomenally good foreign correspondent who always has great links in his articles so why he’s declared a jihad on Raziq is a mystery.

Memorial Day is the perfect day to reflect on the cost of our 20 year long beef with Afghanistan. There would be dozens if not hundreds more soldiers interned in our national cemeteries had it not been for the effectiveness of one ( some would say ruthless, others motivated) Afghan in his fight against the Taliban. He deserves our thanks, not a New York Times hit piece.

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The Sorry Story of the Delaram DAC

The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: Delaram District, Afghanistan

During the summer of 2011 a unique opportunity presented itself to Abdul Karim Brahui, the governor of Afghanistan’s Nimroz Province, during a meeting with the new Marine Corps RCT commander in Delaram II, Colonel Eric Smith, USMC. Colonel Smith had replaced my good friend Paul Kennedy and although I knew Eric, Paul had given me a warning (in infantry officer code) about dropping in on him saying “he still irons his skivvies Timmy, don’t waste your time with him”.

Colonel Smith had come to Zaranj to complain to the provincial governor about the Khash Rod district governor who was an ineffective crook. Governor Brahui had nothing to do with the appointment of district governors, Karzai’s government appointed them but recognizing opportunity Governor Brahui turned to one of his trusted aids, Engineer Khodaidad and told him to accompany the Colonel back to Delaram and then move to assume the duties of the district governor. Col Smith, being new to the game, didn’t think twice about accepting the governors kind offer. He forgot or didn’t know those appointments were made in Kabul. The Colonels apparent complicity in this unusual arrangement stayed Karzai’s hand thus preventing Khodaidad’s immediate removal by the heavy handed Kabul Government.

Coming in for a morning meeting in Zaranj

My provincial manager in Nimroz was an Afghan national from Kabul named Bashir. Well educated Kabuli’s able to speak and write English fluently are normally connected to powerful people in the government making their utility in remote, sparsely populated areas of Afghanistan about zero. The tribes on the fringes of the Dasht-e Margo (desert of death) were more likely to shoot Kabul elites than cooperate with them. Bashir was well educated, a fluent English speaker who was from Kabul but not connected to anyone in the Kabul government. He was, without question the most honest, competent Afghan I knew, and I knew more than a few good men in Afghanistan. He and Governor Brahui became good friends over the years Bashir and his family lived in Zaranj.

 When Governor Brahui told Engineer Khodaidad to go to Delaram, Bashir turned to his assistant provincial manager, Boris, and told him to accompany Engineer Khodaidad to Delaram II. Engineer Khodaidad left with Col Smith with just the clothes on his back but Boris, a Russian Jew who was raised in New York City and a former Army Signal Intelligence operator, had the presence of mind to get his overnight bag and a change of clothes before departing for Delaram II. Boris had learned about working the Nimroz Province from the FRI blog and had contacted me asking if he could work out of Zaranj. He had an intense interest in Central Asian history and was all about supervising projects among the ruins of the Ghurid Sultanate. He turned out to be a hard worker, fluent Dari speaker, and the best field supervisor I ever had.

Bashir is to my left amd Governor Brahui to my right in this picture from on of our project openings

Engineer Khodaidad spoke fluent Russian having received his engineer training in a Russian school in Mazar-i-Sharif in the 1960’s. Like Governor Brahui he was a respected former Nimroz Front Mujahidin leader who had fought out of the Kang District during the Soviet War. Boris and Engineer Khodaidad became instant friends which was fortunate because Boris had to go to the Delaram II base exchange to by Engineer Khodaidad the various sundries and the bedding he would need to live out of the DAC. That would have normally caused embarrassed resentment from an Afghan leader who had limited dealing with Americans, but Boris and the Engineer has remarkably similar opinions about politicians and senior military officers, so it was no problem.

Boris got Engineer Khodaidad a ride to the DAC and helped him move in and I sent him some mini split air conditioners from our stash in Lashkar Gah to make the office and living spaces tolerable. I then called to the country manager in Jalalabad to see if he could shake loose some additional funding to start repairing the streets and drainage ditches in Delaram which turned out to be easy because USAID had developed a sudden interest in seeing projects started there. We turned up a couple million started to pave the streets of Delaram while also rehabilitating the bazar in the old Taliban designated district administrative center of Ghurghuri which was not too far from Delaram.

Boris sporting an M3A1 grease gun in one of the abandoned walled forts

There was a small Marine Corps Civil Affairs attachment co-located with Engineer Khodaidad at the District Administrative Center and they took over getting him established in his new home. I don’t remember who owned those Marines by they were living like the grunts down south with no fresh food, no showers, and no A/C (until we hooked them up).  At least one of them ( the team Gunny) had already been shot once while patrolling the area but that didn’t stop them from continuing to patrol. The DAC detachment also had a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel from the Afghan Hands program assigned to it, but he had little to do except tease me because I couldn’t speak Pashto. He was a good man in a hard spot, but his assignment said all you needed to know about the Afghan Hands Program (it was a loser track for officers) which sucked because I saw serious talent in the Hands program every time I ran into one. There was also an American SF team located in Ghurghuri but I never saw them and have no idea what they were up to or why they were there.

That sets the table for an interesting tale because when Boris and Engineer Khodaidad showed up the security situation in Delaram wasn’t good but not that bad in the big scheme of things. But not a week after they showed up the Karzai administration struck by appointing a new district police chief named Asif, a Pashtun of the Helalzai subtribe of the Nurzai tribe. The Helalzai fought on the Soviet side of the war and Asif’s father, acting as the Soviet district security chief back then had executed 28 civilians in the Delaram Bazar for supporting the Nimroz Front Mujaheddin.

Commander Asif and Engineer Khodaidad were mortal enemies and he, the  local tribal leaders, and the Afghan Hands LtCol told anybody who would listen that Asif’s appointment was a terrible idea, but that didn’t matter because there was nothing any American could do about it. When Asif showed up a significant proportion of the local police force immediately quit, partially motivated by his appointment and partially by the fact that they had not received their pay in months. Asif immediately brought several of his own trusted men onto the Delaram police payroll.

This was the interesting dynamic from the Afghan perspective because when Col Smith returned from his meeting in Zaranj with Engineer Khodaidad and installed him as the new district governor it was assumed he was under the protection of the Colonel who would support him both morally and materially as he consolidated his position. They expected Col Smith would derail the appointment of Commander Asif after they explained who he was and why his appointment would degrade the district’s security.

But Eric Smith had no intention of doing that, his focus was on the Northern Helmand Province where his maneuver battalions were still having major problems in Sangin, Musa Qala, and the Kajaki Dam. He didn’t give a damn about Delaram, neither did Paul Kennedy when he was there, nor would have I had I been in their shoes. But Paul knew how provincial and district governors were appointed and wouldn’t have short circuited that process – that was an unforced error. The appointment of Commander Asif was uncontested by the Colonel Smith because he had no say in the matter. Even worse Smith was forced to ignore the obvious reason for the decline in district security while acting like the new district police chief was a legit player in the regional security hierarchy.

The shit hit the fan days after Asif took over when a small convoy of Afghan security contractors were ambushed by the Taliban approximately 40 km west of Delaram. These were fuel tanker escorts as I recall, and they tended to roll with lots of guns and  a ton of ready ammunition. In the ensuing 90-minute firefight, the contractors drove the Taliban from the field and captured a vehicle containing 12 IEDs. The contractors then called the Afghan Highway Police, the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army, and the Marines looking for somebody who would take custody of the Taliban IED’s. Nobody came out to help them and nobody wanted the IED’s except for the Taliban who returned in force to recapture their vehicle and IED’s.  The contractors retreated to Delaram DAC with three of the IED’s and reported to the incident to Engineer Khodaidad.

These are the three large IED’s with pressure plates captured by the contractors

Within days carloads of armed men started to show up at our project sites to threaten our workers which was not unusual and Boris, who had the advantage of being tall, fit, disagreeable and a Dari speaker, had no problem running them off. Then IEDs began to detonate in the town several times a week, at first they targeted Asif’s Afghan National Police (ANP) checkpoints, then a few targeted our project site. The escalation continued with two of our Delaram project day laborers were kidnapped and decapitated by the local Taliban when they went to their home village (Tut) for the weekend.

The IED fiasco and sudden eruption of IED blasts brought the RCT-8 commander to the DAC with an entourage including his Sergeant Major, for a security shura. Boris blended in with the Afghans at the meeting and was able to observe from the back of the room. He said the District Governor was not mollified by being patronized by Col Smith with a pat on the back, and the promise “you and I will go out there with pistols and shoot the Taliban”.

Boris thought Engineer Khodaidad had seen a fair number of Americans in uniform making extravagant promises and talking tough, then failing to deliver before they redeployed back home. The Governor walked out of the security shura frustrated at the inability of the participants to agree on any concrete plan of action for security incidents like the IED capture. He later told Boris: “why should I even be here, if none of you listen to me?”. It was time to face a decision I never wanted to make and that was to cancel a project without finishing it, something none of my colleagues and I had done over the years of working contested districts, so I flew into Delaram to talk with the district governor.

This is what high grade home made explosive (HME) looks like

Delaram had grown considerably since my first visit as had the staffs of the Regimental Combat Teams. The RCT 8 CO now had a State Department Contractor assigned to him who was in some way responsible for aid in Nimroz Province. The State guy was a retired Army Colonel who seemed nice enough, but I was unable to figure out his role in the “hold and build” phase of the Marine Corps Southwestern campaign. He didn’t have any funds to spend, he was not part of the approval process for my projects, and he couldn’t leave the Delaram base, so it was hard to see what role he played in the big scheme of things.  He picked me up when I flew in making it a point to ask that I not go directly to the Marine CO with information that should have gone through him. I told him that would not be problem without explaining why and asked if I could use his vehicle to drive out to the DAC.

The vehicle in question, a beat-up old Toyota SUV with bad brakes and no working A/C, did not belong to him. He and a few other contractors rented it (for $1000 a month!) to get around the base and it wasn’t allowed off base according to the rental contract. You could have gone down the ring road to Herat and purchased a vehicle in similar shape for less than a thousand U.S. dollars, but I don’t remember mentioning that to him.

The IED’s still had the blasting cap inside attached which amazed me – imagine bouncing around the pitted dirt roads of Afghanistan with 5 gallons of HME with a blasting cap embedded in it.

I met Boris on the Delaram FOB where the State Department liaison had found some racks for us in transient berthing area. The next morning, we walked to the gate where they screened local workers entering the base, exchanging our ball caps and sunglasses for shalwar kameez tunic’s and pakols and walked off the base to the district administrative center. The gate guards were contractors, not Marines and they were not sure we were allowed to just walk off base. I told them to check with my good friend Colonel Smith if they didn’t believe we could leave. Thankfully that did the trick because I think Eric might have really detained me for being armed, or the bogus Synergy Strike Force CAC card identifying me as DB Cooper CAC card (it even scanned in the DFACS!) , or using an expired SWAMP pass to bullshit my way off base, the number of infractions he could have gotten shitty with me about were alarming when I think about it.

Laying out the main drag of the Delaram Bazaar

The walk was about three miles as I remember, and we witnessed a group of boys cut and then steal an electrical transmission cable that connected an ANP checkpoint with an ANA base across the road. The kids were quick too, laughing hysterically from the back of motorcycles as the ANP troops boiled out of their checkpoint in hot pursuit. Being an ANP officer in Delaram while commander Asif was in charge sucked. When we arrived at the DAC Engineer Khodaidad was meeting with a local farmer discussing a vexing problem in Dari because the Engineer wouldn’t speak Pashto.

We had arrived hot and sweating profusely because it was a good 110 outside but were being ignored so Boris started interpreting for me.

 “He’s asking the Engineer to send the Marines to run off the Taliban near his farm because they are raping his livestock at night. Engineer K just told him the big Foriengee (foreigner) understands Dari so maybe they should discuss this another time”

The farmer then turned to us and asked could we tell the Marines the Taliban are at his farm every night molesting his sheep and they can come and kill them no problem and he’d give them a sheep for their trouble too. Boris translated that for me before saying simply “No”.

There are hundreds of these old walled forts scattered throughout the desert in Nimroz province

Boris then asked Engineer Khodaidad for guidance in Russian and I said to the farmer “Ma dorost dari yad nadaraom” (I can’t speak dari well) but I said it perfectly which made him look at me with narrowing eyes before asking why there were Russians in the DAC. He then launched into a long story about how everything has gone to hell since the Marines showed up and built a forward operating base because Marines attract  livestock raping Taliban and now there is an old Baloch Muj commander running the district but he doesn’t have his Muj army with him just two Russians and a handful of Marines which wasn’t enough fighters … the farmer had the pacing and timing of a stand-up comedian and in no time we were laughing so hard it was silly . After the farmer left Engineer Khodaidad told us he wanted the projects to continue but would understand if we pulled out. We stayed and finished the projects without additional losses.

Most of the old forts are eroding back into the desert, the amount of interesting archeological history being lost to history is a crime.

Engineer Khodaidad and Commander Asif did not survive their appointments to the Kashrud district government. Asif was smoke checked after a few months in command which immediately brought the incident rates down and allowed us to finish our projects. Engineer Khodaidad was killed in a targeted assassination outside his home village a year after his appointment to district governor. The Engineer was a brave man who personally found and ran off a two man hit team sent to kill Boris, but he didn’t tell us about it, he told Governor Brahui who then called Bashir and told him to bring Boris back to Zaranj immediately.

I decided to go get Boris with our Baluch interpreter Zabi and drive him back to Zaranj because he had bitching about not being able to free range the province with me. We took all day to make the drive to Zaranj stopping to examine some of the old walled cities in the desert that were being used by the Taliban to move in and out of the Helmand. We found melon rinds, goat scat and fire pits in them which we assumed came from the Taliban because the Desert of Death in no place to herd goats.

Boris and Zabi during our walled city day trip

Boris the Russian Jew is now Boris the Israeli Kibbutz farmer He and his growing family live the spartan life in the Negav Desert. Zabi and Bashir are now both American citizens and doing well. Governor Brahui returned to his home in Char Burjak district which had experienced an economic revival after we repaired the irrigation system. I have no idea how he is getting along with the Taliban government but suspect he’s reached accommodations with them because what else can he do?

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