Jalalabad - Free Range International

October 25, 2024October 25, 2024

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 The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran.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 29^th 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 30^th 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 6^th 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.

October 15, 2024October 19, 2024

Let Me Tell You About Martha Raddatz

Ever since our ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, I wake up every morning angry. I habitually read the regime media over morning coffee, and my anger is magnified. I should ignore the media, but I can’t. My Dad and I sat together reading the morning paper daily when I was young, and I can’t seem to break the habit. As President Trump gains fraud-proof levels of voter engagement, the gaslighting from the corporate media is reaching unprecedented levels.

The gaslighting starts with fraudulent polling that inflates the support for Kamala and ends with the White House spokesbiped accusing the media of “disinformation” for reporting on their grossly incompetent response to Hurricanes Helena and Milton. Propaganda aims to demoralize its targeted audience, which is exactly what our national polling organizations and regime media are trying to do today. But it’s not working. Every morning, I laugh out loud as great Americans like JD Vance wreak havoc on them.

So, let me tell you a story about Martha Raddatz. In 2009, she showed up at the Taj to interview Dr. Dave Warner about his work supporting the super-effective LaJolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club (Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities) and maybe his beer for data scheme, too. It was a long time ago, and my memory may not be accurate. What he didn’t talk about was his work on DARPA’s More Eyes program developing the PULSE platform, which would become the backbone of DARPA’s Memex censorship program. More about that below.

Martha took the time to interview me, allowing me to explain the stupidity behind Obama’s mini-surge with an end-date plan. She and Obama were friends during their days at Harvard, and I could tell I was pissing her off. She had problems with armed contractors, too, and did not believe me when I explained that if I ever shot someone in Afghanistan, no matter what the circumstances, I’d be fired and flown home immediately. I ended up driving her downtown to the governor’s compound because I had some intel about nefarious activity that way, and as we parked, three technicals full of armed Talliban-looking dudes pulled in next to us. Her producer was freaking out, Martha looked uncomfortable, too, but she had an effective poker face, so it was hard to tell what she was feeling.

I pointed at the gunmen next to us and said, “What did I tell you?” She asked if the armed men were Taliban, and I said no, they were speaking Pashayi, so they were from Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), which was headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. She countered that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Taliban, and I again said no, he may be part of the Taliban Peshawar Shura, but his boys have been fighting the Taliban outsiders squatting on their turf recently. I speculated that was why one of his emissaries was here talking with the governor, Gul Agha Sherzai. Governor Sherzai, like Hekmatyar, was a powerful warlord, so they were doing warlord shit, not conducting official government business. The HIG fighters pretended we weren’t standing next to them the entire time, confirming my earlier intelligence about unusual activity at the Governor’s compound.

The report she filed after that trip featured Dr. Dave visiting several recently built schools that the LaJolla Rotarians funded. He explained that the brand-new desks were piled on the roofs because class sizes were so big there was only enough room for the kids to sit on the floor. Dr. Dave then took her to see Osama bin Ladin’s bombed-out Jalalabad compound. That is the only time you can see me in the broadcast as I was driving; the “armed security team” she referenced was me, and all I had was a pistol.

I remember President Obama commenting on his efforts to eliminate tax breaks for charitable donations because they benefited the wealthy, saying something snarky like, “I thought it’s supposed to be about charity, not a tax break.” I remember that because it irritated me then, but you can’t find that remark on today’s internet search engines, which is interesting.

The Rotarians are precisely the kind of Americans who would continue to fund their Afghan projects with or without tax breaks. Dr Dave’s Synergy Strike Force unintentionally (in my opinion) helped develop the concepts and software now being sold to foreign governments and used domestically to throttle inconvenient stories that deviate from accepted corporate/government narratives. Things like that unfortunate quip by Obama have the habit of disappearing in today’s politicized, controlled internet. You can read all about it in this excellent Jack Poulson article, Mai Tais, More Eyes, and Mercenaries.

Martha Raddatz listened to everything Dave Warner had to say because he is a dual PhD/MD. She ignored everything I told her because I was an armed contractor, which she found distasteful, except when she needed protection on her ill-advised drive around Bin Ladins’ compound. She treated me the same way she did J.D. Vance in the interview above. But I’m no J.D. Vance. I told her what I had to say, tried to show her that I knew what I was talking about, and then made myself scarce. I’m not as capable of shutting down media spin as Senator Vance.

I did not enjoy being treated in a condescending manner by an opinionated media clown. She should have reported everything I told her because all of it was proven correct in the ensuing years. But getting the facts straight is not what the American media does; it gaslights, it lies by omission, and it is heading towards the dustbin of history because nobody believes much of what those smug elitists say these days. They hate normal Americans like me, and I hate them right back, even though I unhesitatingly protected them (for free) when they did stupid shit. That’s how us ‘bitter clingers” roll: insult us all you want, and we’ll still have your back because you’re a fellow American, and that means something to us. I wish it did to them too.

September 30, 2024October 3, 2024

Remembering Baba Ken Kraushaar

Baba Ken Kraushaar passed away in the Washington, D.C. Veterans Administration Hospital this past weekend. He was one of the founders of the Free Range International Blog and a good friend who stayed in touch after our return home. He and his partner Ginny frequently hosted me at their waterfront home in Nanjemoy Creek, Maryland. I’m going to miss him.

Dr Dave and Baba Ken showed up at the Taj one night and told me, “Don’t worry about a thing, Tim san…we’re about to have the times of our lives .” They were absolutely correct in that prediction.

The first night I met Ken Kraushaar, I thought he was a spook. He was waiting for me at the Tiki Bar at the Taj Guesthouse in Jalalabad with Dr. Dave Warner, and they introduced themselves as the advance party of the Synergy Strike Force (SSF). They explained that the SSF had rules, like Fight Club, one of which was mandatory attendance at the annual Burning Man festival. Then they said, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help,” which they could barely say they were laughing so hard.

Ken’s GATR system was lighting fast while it lasted.

Baba Ken was partnered with Synergy Strike Force but not always funded by SSF on his many multi-month-long visits to Jalalabad. Baba Ken had won a testing contract for the GATR Satellite Internet System, which required frequent fine-tuning due to the high winds swirling around the Hindu Kush. Ken started and mentored the Jalalabad Geek Squad, a collection of Nangarhar University students who learned to install and repair networks, routers, and laptops. And it was Baba Ken who donated a water well to Little Barabad Village after learning the district government refused to install one.

Baba Ken and me hanging out with a young Matthew Van Dyke, who was transiting Central Asia on a motorcycle.

Ken’s most important contribution to the overall success of the many projects spun out of the Taj was his commitment to being there. You had to live at the Taj year-round to witness the difference in the effectiveness of ex-pats who invested serious time in Afghanistan. Shem and I were the only people who lived in Afghanistan full-time; thus, we were uniquely positioned to judge Baba Ken’s enhanced effectiveness as he worked patiently to develop the Afghan human capital.

With a heavy heart, we here at Free Range International wish Ken fair winds and following seas. He will be dearly missed.

February 19, 2024February 19, 2024

The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places – Route 1 The Torkham Border to Jalalabad Highway

Early in the 2010 fighting season the vital Torkham – Jalalabad road corridor was suddenly beset with frequent rioting that closed it for days at a time. The Provincial government blamed insurgent attacks for the instability which seemed dubious as insurgent attacks don’t generate large scale rioting. JSOC night raids could cause a few days of agitated rock throwing but there had been none reported astride Route 1 between Jalalabad and Torkham. There was enough confusion about what was happening on the ground that one of our guests at the Taj thought we should go explore the situation. She convinced my Afghan buddy JD and I to escort her down Route 1 to the village of Amanullah Khan to witness a peace shura between the Provincial government and the rioting villagers.

This is a 2010 photograph of the land title storage room in the Nangarhar Provincial Agriculture Department. Some of these papers date back hundreds of years and fall apart if you touch them. They are not cataloged or organized.

The road between the Torkham border and Jalalabad is flat farmland dotted with a series of villages and towns. Attacks along that road were rare and confined to random IED strikes targeting ISAF vehicles around Jalalabad. Insurgent operations were not possible without the tacit support of local civic leaders and those living along Route 1 were interested in commerce. The only useful service the Taliban provided back then was fair and impartial land deed adjudication. That was shrewd on their part because land was always the source of friction between the people and provincial authorities.

This is township of Amanullah Khan in Rodat district – the smoke is from the homes that have been set on fire by the Afghan National Police (ANP). The ANP vehicles in the valley have just arrived in response to intermittent rifle fire from the hills to the left.

The riots along Route 1 erupted after Gul Agha Sherzai, the Nangarhar Provincial Governor, dispatched a construction company to build a village to be named in his honor astride route 1 in Rodat district. The Governor liked to build things named in his honor and had a special “reconstruction tax” levied at the Torkham border to fund those projects. Before the governor could start building his village he had to eject the current residents who he claimed were squatting on government land. The rioting froze hundreds of trucks in place causing a big kink in ISAF logistics so a shura was called to settle the matter.

A member of the Provincial Council and ANP escort work the crowd to try and prevent rioting. As this picture was taken heavy firing broke out in the valley below

The crowd turned hostile as the shooting started to pick up in volume and intensity resulting in the local councilman and his escort beating a hasty retreat

Hard to tell from this photo but there was a bunch of firing going on – most of it coming from the ANP shooting towards the hills to the left.

Rioting here can get out of hand quickly and the crowd at the gas station shura went high order fast.

This incident was an illustration of why our efforts in Afghanistan were doomed from the start. Conventional wisdom at the time was the US State Department was actively supporting the central government, while the US military and American intelligence services were actively supporting local warlords who supplanted central government influence. President Karzai and the UN bitched about this dynamic constantly. But it was President Karzai who put warlords like Sherzai in positions of influence. In Sherzai’s case he was given the lucrative province of Nangarhar governor specifically to remove him as a competitor to Karzai’s empire of graft and thievery in Kandahar.

Once the local officials fled the scene the shooters in the crowd turned their attention to us and started to pepper the hill with small arms fire causing us to scramble for our truck and bolt. To my right is Engineer Sun from MIT (her Afghan name) who had a knack for sniffing out dangerous trips and then conning me or JD or Baba Ken into to taking her on them.

Gul Agha Sherzai was a major Kandahri warlord who was the Governor of Kandahar Province before the Taliban took over and he was the first warlord to return (with an American Army Special Forces team) to Kandahar in 2001. President Karzai gave Sherzai the governorship of Nangarhar province knowing full well he would usurp land, initiate illegal taxation, and amass a personal fortune from American reconstruction funds because that was exactly what his brother was doing in Kandahar.

On our way home the locals massing behind the police lines insisted on telling us about getting screwed over by their governor.

The appointment of Sherzai to governor sidelined the Arsala Family and other provincial powerbrokers but Sherzai was generous enough to ensure the old families were financially rewarded. The Arsalas had governed Nangarhar Province last two decades with Haji Qader Arsalas , in the position of governor before the Taliban regime, and his elder brother Haji Din Mohammad, appointed governor under the Karzai government, a position he held until 2004. Haji Din Mohammad is the only survivor of the once powerful clan. His younger brother Abdul Haq was killed fighting the Taliban in 2001 and his other younger brother Haji Abdul Qader was murdered in Kabul by a gunmen in 2002, while serving as a minister in the interim government.

Governor Sharzai’s attempt to expel the villagers of Amanullah Khan during the summer of 2010 failed. In 2013 he approved the sale of more than 1000 jeribs (around 500 acres) of pasture land in Rodat district long used by local Mohmand tribesmen to Logar Province ‘businessman’ Ghulam Mohammad Charkhi. That pissed the locals off but the straw that broke the camels back for Governor Sherzai were the shenanigans of the Arsalas clan.

Governor Sherzai and I talking business back in the early days when he was adapt at ‘trimming the tree’ with local powerbrokers and popular with the voters.

Zahir Qadeer, a Member of Parliament and the son of Haji Abdul Qader, sold hundreds of acres of government land in Sorkhrud district to various families who were enraged to find out they had been bilked into buying government land they could never develop. He told the investors they would receive land plots in a residential project he was developing near Jalalabad called Zaher Qader Township. A move that seem to make the situation worse. The ensuing 2013 riots cut every route into Jalalabad City and by October of that year Gul Agha Sherzai was forced out of office.

Now that the Taliban are back in charge Route 1 is no longer dangerous. Land grabs require money and the Tsunami of money that flooded into Afghanistan for the past 20 years has dried up. Land adjudication is done in Taliban courts according to Sharia law, a harsh code that tolerates zero arguments once a decision has been made. The people may not be happy under the Taliban but at least their main highways are safe, something we could never accomplished in a thousand years.

May 12, 2020May 13, 2020

The John Paul Vann of Afghanistan Speaks

In the book The Operators by Michael Hastings there is a quote from Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall comparing General Stan McChrystal to John Paul Vann. John Paul Vann was a former army officer who went to Vietnam as a soldier and stayed on working as a Provincial aid advisor. He was famous for his ability to drive around and live in contested districts (alone) and was a tireless advocate for the Vietnamese people. He was also a compulsive womanizer, an alcoholic, and a shameless self promoter. Remove those negative traits, replace them with a typical all-American Midwest kid raised in a stable two parent household where he developed a strong sense of commitment, a bias for action combined with the ability to thrive while taking calculated risks, and you have Chris Corsten. He was the John Paul Vann of Afghanistan

Our two-decade long involvement in Afghanistan has been a fiasco. Every aspect of our performance had major issues, none more so than the herculean efforts at re-building and rehabilitating the war-torn infrastructure. Yet buried deep inside the legacy of failure are stories of remarkable success. Carter Malkasain described one example of competent development leading directly to local prosperity (briefly) in the book The War Comes to Garmser.

Another example has just been published by my friend Chris Corsten detailing his decade in Afghanistan working both as a soldier and heavily armed humanitarian. The book is 3000 Days in Afghanistan, but I need to reveal something that you will not glean from Chris’s writing. In the world of outside the wire contractors, men (and a few women) who worked in contested districts infested with Taliban, who lived in local compounds, drove local cars, rarely spoke English outside their compound, wore local clothes and lived off the local economy to deliver massive aid projects on time and on budget, Chris Corsten was the best there ever was.

Chris Corsten

Chris stayed the longest, he had the most impact, he did, by orders of magnitude, the most projects and he was a shura ninja when it came to working through problems with tribal elders. Chris Corsten is a legend – to those of us who knew what accomplished and also to thousands of Afghans who became self-sufficient as hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland became productive again thanks to his irrigation programs.

The book is a clear reflection of Chris and if you know him the two personality traits that stand are conscientious and integrity. Those two traits were combined with an attitude that was the common denominator among all of us working outside the wire; zero tolerance for wasted efforts, make work stupidity, and excuses. Add to this mix the fact that Chris is a modest man who is not prone to exaggeration, routinely attributed all success to his subordinates, and loathes the idea of self-promotion and you have a writer who is going to lay out the facts. Which he does in a manner that is almost business like.

As you get towards the end of this remarkable story Chris lists the spectacular amount of work accomplished during the 2010-2011 surge, and if you know what was going on then in Afghanistan, it is easy to get confused. It seems impossible that Expats (mostly American, British, South African and Australian) were living and working in local Afghan communities while supervising massive irrigation projects in districts where the military was sustaining casualties on a regular basis.

If you don’t know much about Afghanistan, you can read through what Chris accomplished and miss what he accomplished. If you don’t know what was happening in provinces like Khost, Kandahar, Paktia, Kunar, Helmand, Farah, Nangarhar, Herat etc… in 2010 it is hard to appreciate the feat of finishing every project you started with supervision by expats who were out and about in Taliban contested areas daily.

What Chris and his crew proved was aid in contested areas can be delivered effectively, but it has to be done by guys who know what they are doing and have skin in the game. And, at least in Afghanistan, they needed to be armed.

Let me explain the weapons. Our model was if you can’t be safe be hard to kill. The threat to outside the wire contractors took many forms. The biggest was getting kidnapped, the other major problem was we had to store, transport, and distribute large amounts of cash. You are not safe when you are living in a local Afghan compound that contains a safe with over a million dollars in cash. You are not safe when you go to the local branch of the Kabul Bank and withdraw $700,000 for your monthly project payroll. You have to know what you are doing to convert $700,000 in Benjamins into small denomination Afghani’s.

Not all of us carried firearms either – Jeff “Raybo” Radan, a former Marine infantry officer and Ranger School graduate (thus the Raybo call sign), worked a year in the Helmand and never carried a weapon. He did projects in contested towns like Now Zad but being a former Marine he knew how to get a ride on Marine air and thus was able to travel safely. But most of us were armed, and all of us had weapons, including belt fed machine guns (in some provinces), inside our living compounds. Our arming authority came from the Provincial governors and if we ever used our weapons, we were accountable to them as well as the US Embassy.

Chris explains why former, experienced, military men, who have already acquired knowledge of local atmospherics and a solid understanding of local culture, are the best option for staffing aid programs in conflict zones. All the men mentioned in Chris’s book (he uses assumed names) were prior military and all of us had years on the ground before we were able to transition into what I term “Free Range” contracting.

3000 Days in Afghanistan should be required reading at both US AID and the Department of State as they sift through 20 years of lessons learned in Afghanistan. This week a senior USAID executive, who had extensive Afghanistan time, released a paper titled USAID Afghanistan: What Have We Learned. He concludes his assessment with four lessons;

do not try to do everything
stick to proven development principals
flexibility and adaptability are key, and
expect and plan for high levels of oversight.

All four of these lessons are addressed in detail by Chris as he explains how he avoided graft, corruption, security services shake downs, how he dealt (effectively) with theft, and delivered aid that was meaningful while injecting cash directly into local economies. The added benefit of taking Taliban off the battlefield by exchanging a couple months of hard labor for a decent amount of pay was something we discovered early in the program but had not anticipated.

Chris throws no stones as he explains what we were doing and why we felt we should do more. He describes his disappointment at not getting traction with USAID and the State Department and then moves on. The program he was running got plenty of attention in the press at the time. There were NPR radio interviews, 60 minutes segments, multiple magazine articles including this classic account in the Toronto Star about our team in Kandahar. The FRI blog was booming back then as I documented our massive infrastructure projects in Nimroz province. In the end none of that mattered, it turns out being successful where everyone else is failing can be problematic.

As William Hammink admits in his review of USAID in Afghanistan, we threw too much money into a country that could not absorb it. What is now obvious is that Chris Cortsen showed USAID exactly how to do Afghanistan aid. Spend a few years and a few million dollars to get all the irrigation systems back up and running, build a few schools, pave a few roads, bring in engineers with some commercial demo to blast rock and build runways in remote mountain-top towns, and you have done about all that should be done to get the country heading towards self-sufficiency. Then you can leave.

3000 Days in Afghanistan is an easy read about a remarkable guy who sticks to the facts to make a case on how sustainable development in conflict zones should be done. Buried behind the facts and the business-like narrative are the stories that someday will emerge from this program as historians start to comb through the records in the search of what really happened in Afghanistan. They will find plenty about Chris, hopefully telling his story in rich detail. There is a lot there and although Chris may not be seeking recognition for what he accomplished he certainly has earned it.

February 9, 2020March 24, 2020

American Green Berets Gunned Down during a KLE Meeting in Sherzad District; What’s Going On There?

I just re-posted two stories about doing Key Leadership Engagement (KLE) in the Sherzad district of Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. Yesterday, two Green Berets were killed and six wounded while (reportedly) conducting a key KLE in Sherzad district. This is disturbing on several levels.

First, it appears the dead and wounded (including the Afghan SF troops with the Americans) came at the hands of Afghan National Army soldiers. From the article linked above:

Additionally, at least six more American troops were also wounded. The high number of casualties (17 as of this reporting) is attributed to the ODA/Afghan combined force coming under fire from a DShK, a Russian designed heavy machine gun which fires a 12.7mm bullet. The wounded have been evacuated to the appropriate field hospitals.

The source explained to Connecting Vets that it is suspected that the Afghan National Army (ANA) was behind the attack, although details are still developing.

From what I can determine they were attacked by a lone gunman with a heavy machine-gun. It is safe to assume (if this proves true) that the lone gunman was Taliban. They got an assassin into the governor of Kandahar’s security force who was able to gun the irreplaceable Gen Raziq. As I wrote the time and will continue to write this is going to happen again. It is obvious that the screening methods in use are not working and, given my experiences in Afghanistan, I suspect will never work.

Second, one is forced to ask why, at this late stage in the game, are we still conducting KLE’s out in the badlands? What did the SF guys believe would be accomplished? I can’t imagine a good answer to that question and I have over eight years of doing KLE’s in Afghanistan and many of them right there in Sherzad district.

It is difficult to get a sense of what is really happening on the ground in Afghanistan in general and Nangarhar province specifically. Nangarhar Province has gone from one of the more safe-ish provinces in the country to the most deadly one for American forces. The army had been losing soldiers over the past four plus years in Nangarhar Province fighting an outbreak of ISIS along the border with Pakistan.

The Taliban got sick and tired of ISIS deprivations before and rolled into Nangarhar and kicked their asses hard in 2015. Last fall the multiple Taliban units returned to Nangarhar (probably from Loya Paktia via the parrots beak which is that finger of Pakistan land jutting into Afghanistan at the bottom of the district map below) and beat ISIS like a drum. ISIS was surrendering to the Afghan government last time I checked and are longer a threat.

This is the Nangahar province of Afghanistan. Sherzad district is in the east of the Province and the ISIS threat was centered in Achin district well to the west. Back in the day Sherzad was HIG land (not Taliban) but Heckmyter Chu-Hoi’d to the government side a few years back and it is now a Taliban stronghold.

Despite ISIS being routed (reported here in the Military Times three months ago) ISIS-K is still being used to justify our continued involvement in Afghanistan. That is ridiculous – ISIS-K was a collection of Pakistani Taliban who were trying to carve out their own little Jihadi paradise in an area that contains the largest talc powder deposit in the world. Threat to the US Homeland? Hardly. al Qaeda is the same – they have gone to ground and remain unmolested in Pakistan for 18 years now and have no need to use Afghan soil for anything. The airport in Peshawar is 10 times better than Kabul International so why would any decent Jihadi move from his decades long home in Pakistan?

ISIS-K is gone, the Taliban now control of most of the countryside in Nangarhar Province where we have troops at the Jalalabad airfield. Those troops would be mostly avation and avation support but there are two different SF compounds there too which are obviously still the home of one or more army ODA teams. I understand the need to be active outside the wire of a firm base like Jalalabad to keep the bad guys at arms reach but I’m not sure what possible use a key leader engagement would be at this stage in the game.

This is exactly the kind of senseless loss that is driving President Trump to wind down our involvement in Afghanistan. How do you justify losing 8 Americans and unknown number of Afghan Commando’s on a chin wagging mission with a bunch of local elders?

As an aside the only main stream outlet to write about this is Fox and their take is focused on the perfidy of Green on Blue attacks. They have (as usual) completely missed the the obvious and the comments section is so clueless it’s depressing. The other outlets are (I suspect) waiting to see what President Trump is going to say so they can say the exact opposite. Watch and see.

Maybe there are great reasons for the mission to Sherzad that we will never know, but I do know there are better ways to conduct KLE’s. It is always better to risk one contractor than it is to risk a dozen highly trained special operators. The counterintuitive thing about that is an experienced contractor traveling alone into Sherzad district, wearing local clothes, and in a local vehicle is much safer than 20 soldiers rolling around in four MRAP’s. That is a lesson we refuse to learn and I think the President, for one, is getting tired of it.

December 24, 2019December 24, 2019

The Taliban has Destroyed ISIS-K in Nangarhar Province: Now They Plan to Focus on US

I have no idea why the destruction of ISIS-K by the Taliban in Nangarhar Province has remained virtually uncovered in the legacy media. That has changed with an excellent interview of the Taliban leadership in Nangarhar Province by The Washington Post. The Taliban were celebrating their recent crushing of ISIS-K (or the F’ing Daesh in local lingo). They gave an interview in Khogyani district, which is close to Jalalabad and was once solidly under government control.

This picture is from the back of a UN road building contractors armored vehicle in the Khogyani district center back in 2008.

The Taliban were direct and to the point regarding continued military operations. Check out this quote from one of the Taliban commanders:

Mullah Nik Muhammad Rahbar, 28, a Taliban commander responsible for Kabul province, pointed to the resources freed up by the conclusion of the fight against the Islamic State in Nangahar, saying the Taliban would be able to shift back to conducting more high-profile attacks in Kabul and elsewhere.

“Thank God you saw what we achieved against Bagram today,” he said. “We launch attacks in Kabul because there are many foreigners there, many targets for us.”

The Taliban went on to claim that they are not targeting Afghan civilians (the UN attributes 922 civilians killed and 2,901 wounded just this year by the Taliban) and that they will now shift their attention to the Government and ‘foreigners.’

Taliban fighters showing their weapons to the press in Khogyani. Photo by Lorenzo Tugnoli for the Washington Post

This is not good news because there are bunch of ‘foreigners’ stationed at the Jalalabad Airfield and with ISIS-K gone they have little to do except support the Afghanistan National Army trainers at the nearby whatever the former Camp Gamberi is now called. Khogyani is not far from J-bad and back in the day the Muj would pick off Soviet Hinds on the approach to the J-bad airfield on an alarmingly regular basis (when they had the Stingers).

The United States cannot afford to throw a bunch of soldiers inside an Airbase without some kind of active patrolling to keep the Jihadis from getting too comfortable squatting within mortar or man packed anti-air missile range. Patrolling like that takes boots on the ground which are in short supply.

Anybody who thinks the Taliban will fail to take a shot at inflicting serious casualties on an American military formation doesn’t understand Afghans. This is what they do and they will pay a steep price if they think they can generate some serious casualties and destroy some aircraft in the process.

The United States Military is not agile enough to withdraw resources from the eastern provinces while maintaining the relentless air campaign that has dropped more air-delivered ordinance this year than any prior year in the Afghan War. Throwing around 1000 pounders will result in collateral damage and we now know that the generals running this war know that collateral damage incurred while blasting Taliban creates more Taliban and is a losing strategy.

But it is all they have for now; the Generals and senior government Mandarins have no problem stringing this out for years to come. The President isn’t happy with the status quo, I’m not sure what the Democrats position is on Afghanistan as they seem to have lost their minds with the sham impeachment they inflicted on us. I have said before, and will say again, this is not going to end well.

April 29, 2018April 30, 2018

Free Range Starts Podcasting

As Afghanistan fades into the rear view mirror interests in the conflict wanes as does the desire to learn lesson’s that were paid for by the lives of both combatants and innocents. In an attempt to highlight some of the observations I’ve made over the years I’m venturing into the world of podcasting in an effort to determine if I can mimic the success of the masters. Dan Carlin, Daniele Bolelli, Darryl Cooper, Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink and Dave Rubin have excellent podcasts some focused on history some on current events and they are consistently interesting.

This first episode is on the Lone Survivor incident which was an easy one to do because virtually everything people remember about it is false. Once a put up a few more of these my. plan is to your an audio podcast service to get them on iTunes and Goggleplay to see if I can carve out a niche. Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/egZyvEOi_1Q?t=1s

September 1, 2017February 16, 2018

Mattis is No Good? A Look Into Task Force Violent

The morning news brought an article critical of Secretary Mattis that immediately caught my eye. There are aspects of his tenure I’m finding troubling; the slow walking of the Presidents decree on transgender service persons being one of them. It is hard for me to imagine Secretary Mattis needs a formal study to determine if transgendered service folks are or are not a hindrance to good order and discipline or a positive contribution to unit cohesion and combat power. Women in the infantry is another liberal delusion that should have been done away with by now – he already has a comprehensive study on that from the Marine Corps; the results are unambiguous regarding the folly of placing women in the infantry.

The author of the American Thinker post sites three reasons why Mattis is “no good”. The first is his testimony regarding global warming to the senate where he stated “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.” The second was his attempt to nominate former ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson to the post of undersecretary of defense for policy. The third was his “support” of LtGen John Nicholson who now heads the Afghanistan effort. Back in 2007 he was a Brigade Commander in the 10th Mountain division who was responsible for RC East. During his tenure the Marine Corp’s first special operations company, Fox company, which had named itself Task Force Violent, was involved in a incident that resulted in them being ejected from the country. Apparently supporting the commander in Afghanistan (who was there before Mattis was nominated as Secretary for Defense) is a strike against him.

The article was silly. The statement regarding global climate change can be viewed as a solid answer to avoid democratic hysteria over “deniers”. Mattis is well read and I doubt he believes in the politically correct nonsense regarding humans ability to speed up or slow down the climatic changes that have existed since the birth of this planet. I have no opinion on the qualification of former ambassador Patterson. If he wanted her in the department he should have got her. Tarring him with the fallout surrounding the ambush in Bati Kot district of TF Violent is ridiculous; Mattis had nothing to do with that incident or the assignment of Gen Nicholson to head up our Afghanistan efforts.

But the article forced me to look into an incident I have avoided since before I started this blog; the firefight in Bati Kot between the MARSOC Marines and unknown assailants. The story is not a pretty one and has always been of interest to me because I was there that day escorting a group of senior Japanese diplomats to Islamabad via the Khyber Pass.

Or so I thought; the MARSOC fight happened on a Sunday the 4th of March 2007. I had driven the same route the Marines took the day before on the 3rd of March. I had to check my old notes to figure that out because over the years I could have sworn this incident happened the same day we drove from Jalalabad to Islamabad via the Khyber Pass.

Going through the Khyber with VIP’s is nice. The Torkham border with Afghanistan is behind us

Doing a low budget trip through the Khyber is interesting too but the chow can be risky

This is what I mean by risky. The meal was pretty good believe it or not.

In 2015 Military Times published a five part series on the Bati Kot incident titled Task Force Violent: The unforgiven. Only the first three articles from that series would load for me today but reading those gave me a good sense of what happened. The article paints a picture of the Marines not being set up for success. The way they were deployed (they didn’t even know which country they were going to when they left CONUS on naval shipping), their task organization, their lack of support once on the ground and the way they were shoe horned into the Afghanistan SOCOM chain of command indicate significant failure by their chain of command. I know some of the people in that chain of command and find the story, as written, suspect. Regardless, my overall view of their performance at Bati Kot remains unchanged. They over reacted and without question shot unarmed people.

The series on TF Violent contained important factual errors. Bati Kot and the adjacent Torkham border crossing were not a “a nefarious transfer point for suicide bombers and other extremists entering the country from Pakistan”. Taliban fighters and supplies went trough the mountain passes into the districts of Achin, Khogyani and Dih Bala which are not near the Torkham border crossing or the district of Bati Kot. The mountains that the Marines were interested are not the Tora Bora – they are the Spin Ghar mountains; Tora Bora is a cave complex inside the Spin Ghar range. Those errors are not minor to the story line of the Military Times articles

On the 4th of March the Marines had planned to go to the Torkham border to coordinated with the US Army MP company stationed there and then head to the Spin Ghar mountains to look at some trail heads their intelligence specialist thought might make good reconnaissance targets before heading back to Bati Kot district for a shura with some elders. They were in a six uparmored Humvee convoy containing 30 Marines from their direct action platoon. Most (if not all) of these Marines were combat veterans from Iraq which could explain their reaction after being hit by what they felt to be a VBIED (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device).

Typical result of a VBIED targeting ISAF vehicles. There were no soldiers injured in this attack which occurred on the Beshood bridge outside Jalalabad in 2010 but look at the damage to the MRAP.

In a cool interactive map embedded in the third part of the series we see the route the convoy took which appears to not have deviated too far off Hwy 1 – the Jalalabad to Torkham road. I’m not sure what trail heads they could have looked at but regardless they were heading back to Jalalabad when they were hit. While approaching the Spin Pol bridge that leads into the main bazaar of Bati Kot (Markoh bazaar) a van loaded with fuel and explosive detonated between the first and second vehicles. The turret gunner in the second vehicle was knocked down, possibly knocked out and when he recovered he reports seeing four men shooting at them from the south. The convoy stops and other Marines report contact from both sides.

Afghan police officers stand around the vehicle allegedly shot by US Marines after they were targeted by a suicide attacker. One thing that is immediatly obvious is these Marines were good shooters (AP Photo/Rahamt Gul)

The Marines responded to the contact from both directions with controlled bursts; Military Times picks up the story from there:

The ride back to Jalalabad was tense. As the Marines hustled to get free of the danger, they hurled rocks and fired disabling shots at a few oncoming cars, a common warzone practice meant to keep the convoy moving and avoid being pinned in and attacked. Warning shots were fired to disperse a crowd and clear a path for the humvees — all in accordance with protocol, the court determined. …Afghan journalists arrived at the attack site instantly, followed by soldiers from the Army’s 66th Military Police Company who were instructed to cordon off the area and treat it like a crime scene.

Battle damage to the Marine convoy consisted of four bullet holes to vehicle 2 – the same one targeted by the VBIED, Photo by Fred Galvin

The Marine Corps investigation of the incident concluded between 5 to 7 people were killed and 24 to 28 wounded by the Marines that day. Two problems with the story are obvious. The first is the amount of battle damage to vehicle 2 which is pictured above; compare that with the MRAP damage pictured earlier in the post. The MRAP was hit by a real VBIED; the humvee pictured above does not look like it was hit by anything. The second is that the area where the ambush occurred was benign enough to allow a handful of American MP’s to cordon it off and treat it as a crime scene.

A quick story about special operators to illustrate a point. The year prior to this incident I was heading up the effort of the first contractor awarded the American Embassy guard contract. I had already stood up the bridge contractor guards at the embassy and found myself heading this forlorn effort due to circumstances beyond my control. The company I worked for had hired another outfit to do the weapons training and they consisted of a dozen guys who were former SEALs, SF and Marines. They were a good crew with lots of trigger time in Iraq. The first thing they asked me for was armored SUV’s but we had none and gave them four beat up SUV’s instead. On the first morning of training they left early from Camp Sullivan, just outside the Kabul airport, to drive to the ranges at the military training complex just outside the city; a ten mile trip down the Kabul to Jalalabad road.

They exited the camp and drove through what we called hooterville, a narrow road with compounds on either side that was a good short cut to the Jbad road. After leaving my guards in one the towers alerted me to a problem and I ran up the ladder to observe the four vehicles reversing out of the ville, doing impressive J turns on the goat path the fed into the ville and hauling ass back to camp. When they got back I asked what was up and their team leader told me they were rolling into an ambush because they had observed local kids on the roof tops waving white flags as they approached. I took him up to the tower and with bino’s pointed out the dozen of kids waving flags from their compound roof tops to get their pigeons back into the family roosts. He turned to me and much to his credit said “don’t I feel like an asshole”. But I understood where he was coming from having been Iraq myself and just said “brother this isn’t Iraq – stay away from military convoys and armored SUV’s on the Jbad road and you won’t have problems”.

I also added he had some shit hot drivers – not dumping one of those SUV’s off the little trail and into the massive drainage ditches took some real talent. But talent alone didn’t work in Afghanistan; you needed to understand the environment and that was hard to do when you lived on a FOB and impossible if you had just arrived in country. What was a reliable pre-incident indicator in Iraq was not one in Afghanistan.

Which brings us to the days following the ambush of TF Violent. They apparently went on another mission to recover a truck and rolled both the truck and the recovery vehicle into a ditch. There were some shenanigans going on to get this mission out of the gate to include some nonsense about them fearing the Taliban were going to come into the wire and get them. That part of the story is in the third installment of the Military Times articles and is so bizarre that I don’t know what to say. Believing the Taliban could come into the Jalalabad air field which was home to a SEAL tier one outfit, a large CIA base, a brigade headquarters from the 10 Mountain Division and several aircraft squadrons was ridiculous.

The reason this incident upset me when it happened was the prospect of being on the road when the Marines were heading back to base. I had a trail vehicle full of heavily armed Tajiks from our preferred local sub contractor and these men had been with me for years. I was very fond of them and I too was armed and having been shot at before by the military while driving I was sensitive to the threat. My father and I exchanged some bitter emails on the topic as I insisted from day one the Marines had over reacted and had I been on that road at that time I could have been lit up.

When you look at the battle damage and contemplate the folly of a handful of Afghans taking on a six vehicle convoy from the side of a road it is hard to believe the Marines were facing a legitimate threat. Taking fire is not the same as taking effective fire. Knowing how the Taliban in that area conducted ambushes (they used terrain to mask SAF attacks and used road side IED’s not VBIED’s) could have allowed the Marines to recognize and apply the rule of opposites which is the most effective tool us contractors had in Afghanistan. VBIED’s didn’t show up in Nangarhar province until two years after this incident and if memory serves the UN did not classify this as a VBIED attack.

Here is a guess at what happened. A van filled with leaky fuel containers, which is how stolen diesel is transported in Afghanistan, lost control and swerved into the Marine convoy. The Marines, fearing it was a VBIED, lit it up with their turret mounted machineguns which have tracers in their links. The tracers ignite the fuel fumes and up goes the van. That would explain the lack of blast damage. The fireball alerts the rest of the Marines in the convoy to a possible ambush and because they are new in country and don’t know how different Afghanistan was compared to Iraq they spot armed males and start shooting. That’s a guess but an educated one, it is hard to explain the lack of battle damage to the Marine humvee’s any other way. The four bullet holes in vehicle #2 could have come from anywhere – Afghans have lots of guns; but were I to hazard a guess I’d say the ANP checkpoints near the bridge probably threw some rounds their way out of disgust.

Having said all the above I do not believe the Marines who participated in this event deserved the negative attention they received. Lot’s of military units in Afghanistan shot lots of civilians who they thought to be a threat to their convoys. I wrote about that repeatedly while I was there. That is why I’m so sympathetic to the men of Raven 23 who are in jail to this day for doing exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. It is also the reason why I support the PMC industry strongly. Had a contractor patrol done what the Marines did it is inconceivable that they would have escaped long stints in the Poli Charki prison. The legacy media contention that we were cowboys shooting up the countryside is as false as fake news can be.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest back the morning article on Secretary Mattis – it’s complete crap written by a guy who has not one clue what he is talking about. He probably is getting paid for that swill…..I wonder how that works? I’d like to get a paying gig like that too….inshallah.

June 12, 2017June 12, 2017

Green on Blue Is Back And The Perfect Storm Is On The Horizon

Three US soldiers, from the 101st Airborne were killed and another wounded Saturday on a Green on Blue attack in Nangarhar province. This latest attacked occurred in Achin district, the same district where two Rangers were killed in action last April. Yesterday a joint American/Afghan patrol was hit by a roadside bomb in the Shergar area in Khoghyani district. They reportedly received small arms fire and when responding killed three civilians (a father and his two young sons) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When dealing with news out of Afghanistan we must start with what we know to be true before speculating on the remainder in an effort to understand what happened. The soldiers were killed in Achin district where the Afghans with American Special Forces units in direct support, have been battling ISIS-K. I suspect the soldiers were in the field operating with Afghan soldiers when this unfortunate incident occurred. That would explain how four them were hit by a loan assailant. That also means the units assigned to the ‘advise and assist’ mission are engaging in direct combat. They have to do that to gain even a shred of credibility with the Afghan army but I bet they won’t be out and about much longer.

What additional troops were doing rolling around in Khogyani district requires speculation.

There was (and still may be) a good hard top road running from Jalalabad through Khogyani and into Achin district

I suspect they were moving from the base at Jalalabad (FOB Fenty) into Achin district using the back roads to avoid the exposure of the Jalalabad – Torkham main road. Regardless of circumstances the killing of a car load of locals, something that was all too common when there were large numbers of NATO forces moving on the roads, is bad.

It appears the Taliban are trying to force Kabul to the negotiating table by inflicting massive casualties that the population can no longer endure while driving a wedge between the NATO advise and assist troops and their Afghan colleagues via green on blue attacks. That is a sound strategy. When those same American troops, while moving through a countryside they know to be hostile, kill civilians who happen to be too close to them when an IED goes off…..that’s a perfect storm. NATO doesn’t trust the forces they mentor to not kill them, the forces they mentor risk being shot every time they are getting mentored. The people are getting hammered by the Taliban and by NATO if they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s a storm alright (a s–t storm) and one for which NATO, the UN and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan have no answer.

When the problem of Green on Blue attacks reached a crisis stage in 2012 the response by NATO was to separate themselves (even more) from the Afghans they were supposed to mentor. Then they instituted a ‘guardian angel’ program to protect themselves from the Afghans they were there to help. Here are the Green on Blue numbers (hat tip Long War Journal)

Total number of attacks per year:

2017 – 2 2012 – 44
2016 – 2 2011 – 16
2015 – 2 2010 – 5
2014 – 4 2009 – 5
2013 – 13 2008 – 2

And here is how the program was described back in 2012

US military commanders in Afghanistan have assigned “guardian angels” to watch over troops as they sleep, among a series of other increased security measures, in the wake of rogue Afghan soldiers targeting Nato forces.

The so-called guardian angels provide an extra layer of security, watching over the troops as they sleep, when they are exercising, and going about their day.

Among the new measures introduced, Americans are now allowed to carry weapons in several Afghan ministries. They have also been told to rearrange their office desks so they face the door.

Now the Guardian Angels will have to be standing, at the ready, prepared to shoot any Afghan who makes a move for his gun too fast during every interaction between Afghans and NATO. How that will work out in field operations is obvious – it won’t and thus we are going to suffer more of them.

The issue is trust and trust is something that can only be built over long periods of time in Afghanistan. Governments in the West have been proving, for years now, they are incapable of taking the steps needed to protect their citizens from Jihadist terrorism. Sovereign citizens have little reason to trust their ruling elite who are more concerned with inclusion, diversity, various ‘phobias’ and not being perceived as racists then they are with protecting the population. Afghans have no reason to trust their ruling elites and the question is when you can’t trust the government who do you trust?

Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club has an answer:

Tribes and clans are still used when information security and omerta are paramount. No technical solution yet devised can beat treachery. Only loyalty can do that — and we have made loyalty, to nation at least, a bad word.

The Afghans who are committing these Green on Blue (and Green on Green) attacks are trusting the Taliban to take care of their clans when the dust settles. That is probably a solid bet. The Americans and other NATO troops in Afghanistan are not able to build trust networks during their seven month tours so they have to trust their fellow soldiers to have an OODA loop quick enough to protect them. That is not a solid bet – being that quick on the trigger will result in Blue of Green deaths that were unnecessary and further divide allies who are supposed to be fighting together.

The Perfect Storm is building and it is obvious that it will break soon. When that happens we can be certain of one thing. The elites who masterminded this fiasco will ignore it and continue taking us down the path of multi culti madness. It is too late to save Afghanistan the only question now is do we have the intestinal fortitude in the West to save ourselves?