Category: Jalalabad

If I needed a sign to confirm my plan to return to Afghanistan was a sound one, I need look no further than the coverage of yesterday’s MOAB bombing. It is clear that the usual ‘experts’ who comment on these types of events are clueless, and that makes me wonder (yet again) how much of the news we digest is factually correct.

The only Fox News show I’ll watch (occasionally) is Tucker Carlson. Still, yesterday he struck out when he interviewed an “army veteran” who claimed these tunnels were the same ones used by Osama bin Laden to escape in 2001. He then added some nonsense about the Haqqani group using them too before saying the MOAB was intended to “make ISIS fighters think twice about using such tunnels.” Everything the guy said was demonstrably wrong, as is most of the reporting out today following up on this story.

Osama bin Laden was trapped in the Tora Bora Complex in Khogyani district, not the tunnel complex in Achin district, which is at the head of the Mamand valley and the terminus for supply runs from across the border. It is also a training complex and a command and control node. ISIS has used this complex from day one because it is remote, easy to defend, fortified from back in the Mujaheddin days and is a direct link (via donkey train) to the ISIS-K Pakistani homeland.

The MOAB will have a psychological impact on ISIS, but that impact may or may not strengthen their resolve; it’s hard to say. What we do know is that militants in Afghanistan have been on the receiving end of unbelievable amounts of firepower for 16 years now, and it does not appear to have affected their ability to replace casualties, motivate their fighters, or stay in the fight.  ISIS can now claim that not even the “Mother of all Bombs” can hurt them and use the attack to drive recruiting through the roof. I don’t know how they’ll react, and I also know that nobody in the media does either.

We do know that the Islamic State of Khorasan (ISIS-K) is comprised mainly of former Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP) militants from various tribal districts on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. We also know Salafis have joined them from Kunar, Nuristan, Nangarhar and several other provinces.  What we don’t know (not that it matters) is how many militants were killed in the strike. The Independent Journal Review says over 100 people were killed based on a source who appears bogus to me, the Guardian says 36 were killed but doesn’t explain where that number comes from and the BBC is reporting dozens killed. All of these reports carry speculation about the number of civilians killed in the strike, too, which is something the press never speculated on when Obama was president, but I digress.

The truth is, we’ll never know how many were killed because their bodies are sealed inside the cave complex. That’s what 18,700 pounds of H6 (a mixture of RDX (Cyclotrimethylene trinitramine), TNT, and aluminum) delivered in an air-burst ordnance is designed to do. Were there noncombatants present in the caves? There had to be many boys and old men who do the cooking, goat herding, water humping, firewood gathering and other housekeeping chores. But I wouldn’t call them noncombatants; young males and old men will always be co-located with Islamic terrorist fighters in the bush.

Weaponeering is determining the quantity of a specific type of lethal or nonlethal weapons required to achieve a particular level of damage to a given target, considering target vulnerability, weapon effect, munitions delivery accuracy, damage criteria, probability of kill, and weapon reliability. The use of the GBU-43 MOAB yesterday was a weaponeering decision; nothing more. It may have sent a message to other potential antagonists. Still, it was used because we wanted to destroy several metric tons of weapons and ammunition stored inside a cave complex.

There will be unintended consequences from using this weapon, and one of them is this: the world just became a much safer place. I just finished a fascinating book titled The Upcoming War With Russia, written by General Sir Richard Shirreff, the recently retired Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (NATO). The book is an urgent warning from a senior commander about an impending conflict with Russia, which takes place from May through July of 2017. It starts when the Russians seize the Baltic states because they are convinced NATO lacks the will and combat power to stop them. General Shirreff cities the problems we are currently facing regarding aircraft and combat unit readiness (they are at the worst levels of my lifetime and damn near as bad as 1949) as well as the attitudes of our current political leaders as the precipitating factor in Russia’s decision to initiate hostilities.

The purpose of his book was to alert the reader to a real, no shit, existential threat and he was spot on with one exception. He anticipated that Hillary Clinton would win the election and American foreign policy would remain as fickle as it had been under Obama. The sales of his book will now plummet because, in one bold move, President Trump removed the greatest enticement to World War III and thus the purpose of the book.  America has returned as a legitimate counterweight to any nation seeking to overthrow the current status quo. We are leading from the front again and tolerating no shenanigans.

But just because we are great again doesn’t mean things will go smoothly from this point forward. We are in a real sticky situation in Afghanistan, and if we do not radically change the approach we are taking there, we’ll never leave, never make the place better, never stop the fighting, and never stop the dying.

Last Sunday (April 9th) CNN published a report of another American soldier killed in action while fighting in Afghanistan. The operator; Staff Sgt. Mark R. De Alencar, 37 from Edgewood, Maryland, a member of the 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne); was killed in while battling with  Khorashan in the Nangarhar province. Today the pentagon announced it had dropped the “mother of all bombs”, a GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria-Khorasan province, or ISIS-K.

Readers who have followed our combat efforts overseas will remember the Khorashan Group as a fake news story  floated to justify the use of American tac air in Syria. During the summer of 2014, James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence for the Obama administration, released a dire warning about a new threat emanating from Syria called the Khorashan Group. A collection of 50 experienced, hard core former Taliban leaders in Syria specifically to develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations targeting the USA and Europe.

The Khorashan Group story was instantly outed on the internet. I was confused to see the ISIS group in Nangarhar province called  Khorashan; they have been there for years and I had never seen them called Khorashan before so I started looking into the ISIS problem in Nangarhar and found a hell of a strange story.

The current ISIS-K is not related to the former Khorashan group and probably got that name from the excellent Afghanistan Analysis Network (AAN). In July, 2016 Boris Osman of AAN published a report titled The Islamic State in ‘Khorasan’: How it began and where it stands now in Nangarhar. Boris explains in detail where ISIS came from, how they gained a foothold, why they remain and also why they are not spreading outside of Nangarhar province.  He also get’s the credit (as best I can tell) for the adding Khorashan to ISIS when referring to the ISIS movement in Nangarhar. The Afghan’s, like the Arabs, call them Daesh which seems easier to me but conflict analysts seem to like more specificity.

The ISIS-K designation makes sense when divorced from the bogus Khorashan Group of 2014. The definition of Khorashan (from the article linked above) is pasted below:

Khorasan is a historical term for areas populated by peoples speaking Iranian languages in northeastern Iran, the Transoxania part of Central Asia (Mawr-un-Nahr) and Afghanistan, mainly north of the Hindu Kush Mountains. In IS propaganda, it now comprises all of Afghanistan, most of Pakistan as well as Central Asia. Its reaches are felt as north as Kazakhstan and in eastern Turkistan.

That definition encompasses a wide range of tribes and peoples including Tajiks, Uzbecks, and the Hazara who do not normally cooperate with the largely Pashtun Taliban. Four main themes resonate throughout its propaganda: the duty of violent jihad, ISIS’s own legitimacy in fronting this cause, the trans-nationalism of its movement, and the discrediting of the “deviance” of its jihadi rivals. The propaganda is sophisticated and designed to affirm its legitimacy, and therefore “ownership” of the Afghan jihad.

The most important road in Afghanistan runs from the Torkham border crossing in Jalalabad province to Kabul. Over eighty percent of Afghanistan’s trade comes across that border which is a direct link to Pakistan’s ports. In 2010 Pakistani Taliban, mainly from Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP) started to settle in  Achin, Nazian, Kot, Deh Bala, Rodat and Ghanikhel districts. They invoked  Melmastia from the local communities saying it was their moral obligation to help their Pashtun brothers escape the Pakistani army which was mounting operations targeting the TTP in the Northwest Frontier.

Fast forward to 2014; the muhajerin (refugees) from Pakistan have continued to settle in Nangarhar, but then the Pakistani army starts operation Khyber II, and militants from the Pakistani tribal agencies flood across the border to get away from them. Mule trains full of weapons and ammo, some of them 50 animals long, arrive daily in the Mamand valley in the Achin district along with hundreds of militants. Suddenly, the mujahideen declare they are now ISIS and evict the Taliban from the districts they control, but leave the Afghan security forces alone. The locals are happy because trade is moving, Taliban and government roadblocks are down, and nobody is shooting at anybody.

But then the Taliban attacked ISIS in Nazim district, and all hell broke loose with ISIS battling back hard and taking control of five districts by June of 2015. Then the Taliban call in their “elite forces” from Loya Paktia and Loy Kandahar, and these guys infiltrate the Mamand valley (in Achin district) one night during Ramadan, and (from the linked AAN article):

……. on 3 July 2015, local men (including those not usually sympathetic to the Taleban) and Taleban rose up together against ISKP, with calls by the Taleban via the mosque’s loud-speakers for all men of fighting age to come out and participate, or face seeing their homes burnt down. Taken by surprise, the ISKP fighters retreated from most of Mamand valley by the end of that day.

Could you imagine that? Every mosque in the valley telling the locals to fight the Daesh (which is what they call ISIS-K) or else? I would have loved to have seen that, and now, at the head of that same valley, we dropped a MOAB on the caves where those donkey train loads of weapons were stashed. But how the hell does the Taliban shift elite forces around the country? I have some experience moving truckloads of armed men around Afghanistan, and even when it was legal, it was hard to pull off. It’s impossible now (for us foreigners), but the Taliban did it.  Where were the Afghan Security Forces and Resolute Support in all this?  They have been targeting ISIS-K with drones in the past, have fought them before, and are fighting them now.

Afghanistan, a country I honestly love, is a weird damn place where the most improbable things like the population of an entire valley; reinforced by elite Taliban units from Kandahar and Paktia, stage an uprising and drive out a powerful foe in one day; happen as a matter of routine. Amazing.

Task Force Southwest (the 300-man Marine Corps unit deploying to the Helmand province this spring) had a Full Mission Rehearsal exercise at Camp Lejeune, N.C., from February 27th to March 3rd. I attended the first two days of the exercise (as an embedded reporter) with the Afghanistan National Police (ANP) training team, who will be working out of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. It was time well spent with a diverse crew of experienced Marines.

By diverse, I mean they are from a variety of military occupational specialties (MOSs) and they are volunteers. As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the rules for embedded journalists is not to use the name, age, and hometown of Marines in our reports. This is a force protection measure designed to prevent cyber stalking and/or cyberbullying of Marines and their families. That’s a legitimate concern these days so I won’t be focusing on individuals in this or future posts.

The ANP training team will work with the ANP 505th Zone National Police in Lashkar Gah. The ANP team is heavy on officers, most of whom are experienced captains or majors who have deployed to Afghanistan. Even the Physician Assistant attached to the team has over 12 months of experience working with Afghan Security Forces (ASF) in Tarin Kot, capital of Uruzgan province, which was a serious Indian Country.

Extensive pre-deployment exercises for Marine Corps units are designed to make the various subordinate headquarters work through their standard operating procedures (SOPs) for contingencies they anticipate encountering while deployed. They do this using the communication equipment they are deploying with and under the control of their higher headquarters (BGen Roger Turner’s command group), which will be located at Camp Shorabak (30 miles away). This exercise can be boring if the exercise control group is off its game, but that no longer seems to be a problem.

The exercise control folks are now contractors who run exercises for a living. They were excellent at keeping the problem running smoothly and inserting serious events (like a VBIED blowing up at their front gate) when least expected. Contractors are a significant improvement for designing and running exercises of this type because there is no military occupational specialty (MOS) for conducting training exercises. However, you still need experts to do it correctly.

Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said “everything in war is simple. But the simplest thing is difficult”.

He described friction as it relates to military operations, and that was the goal of the mission rehearsal: to gum up the works with serious problems and see how the various command groups handled solving them. It’s not the most exciting evolution to watch, and it is also not that fun for the Marines working through the problems, but it’s essential to do. Operations centers need to remain calm and focused when under stress, and the only way to get them there is to stress them during their pre-mission training.

Experienced military professionals can tell how good a unit it is within minutes of watching their tactical operations control (TOC) in action.  But as a member of the press I wasn’t allowed inside TOC’s so I watched the problems play out from the medical spaces. I saw what I expected to see: a group of experienced Marines working through issues in real time. Friction makes that hard to do when all the communication nets are involved (and some go down when the exercise controllers want to add stress), and I’ve seen command groups melt down with helmet fires under similar stress.  The ANP training team did fine; they didn’t get too excited and never got far behind the event horizon by failing to maintain good situational awareness with their higher headquarters.

I found a corner on the second floor above medical that had not been claimed by Marines and slept there too. I knew to roll up my sleeping bag and mat and to keep my ruck packed during the day (so I didn’t stand out like a pouge), and it wasn’t long before I was making friends and chatting with the team.  I liked them too – a good crew with a positive attitude and great stories from their prior deployments to Afghanistan. Plus I slept like a baby in my little corner on the second deck. I’m always awake before dawn and had a rental car staged at the airfield so I skipped out every morning for coffee and an egg sandwich. Talk about living the high life!

My best guess (and this is just a guess) is that Task Force Southwest will head into Helmand to help with the training and coordination but will remain confined to the bases from which they will be working. The 215th Corps of the Afghanistan National Army and the 205 Zone of the Afghan National Police are taking a severe beating while not getting their share of combat enablers like Tac Air (Afghans use the A-29 Super Tucano which is a good ground attack platform) which it seems are being concentrated in the east to battle an out break of The Daesh (ISIS) in Nangarhar province (where we lost another special operator last night).  It appears (again to me) that the 215th Corps and 205th Zone are fighting a holding action designed to keep the Taliban focused on Helmand. At the same time, the central government in Kabul tries to consolidate its control of the strategically critical eastern provinces.

If my guess is true, then this deployment will involve a lot of risk and some potentially long-term gain, making it one of the more unique deployments in the history of the United States Marine Corps.

I was in the nations capitol to see my good friend Eric Mellinger retire after a distinguished 30 year career as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps.  I wasn’t the only one making a long trip for a short ceremony; men who had served with Eric came from all over the country to pay their respects to a Marine we admire and love like a brother. Which is not like a man loves a woman; we might be modern-day Spartans, but we’re not lifestyle Spartans. People worldwide read this blog, and I don’t want to cause any confusion.

Eric is not your average Marine Corps Colonel; as a field grade officer, he has bounced between commanding (multiple times) at the battalion and regimental level and running the operations for senior Fleet Marine Force commands. He’s been a player for his entire career. Like many senior officers in the Corps today, he got on the fast track when he was selected to serve as an instructor at the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Virginia. I knew a healthy percentage of the Marine Corps fighting generals would make it a point to attend his retirement. I wanted to get their take on the upcoming deployment of the 300-man Task Force Southwest to the Helmand province in Afghanistan.

I was not disappointed; there were a couple of dozen general officers and senior colonels at Eric’s retirement ceremony, which was held at the Marine Corps Barracks in Washington, DC. My friends Dave Furness,  Paul Kennedy,  Mike Killian, Brad Schumaker (who I hadn’t seen in 25 years), and  Larry Nicholson were all there. Long time FRI readers will be familiar with these Marines (except  Brad) and for those of you who aren’t hit the hyperlinks on their names to read posts about them during their tours in Afghanistan. The reaction I got about the upcoming deployment of the Marine task force was unanimously less than enthusiastic.

There was a time when the Marines, after many months of hard fighting, had the province locked down. In 2011, I could travel from Lashkar Gah to Khanishin without drama. North of Gereshk was too risky for our crew. Still, local commerce flowed without too many problems, and the big towns of Naw Zad, Musa Quala, and Sangin (not shown in the map below) were solidly under ISAF /Afghan Security Forces (ASF) control.

The Marines gave the Afghans the security space they needed by beating the Taliban like a drum and driving them out of the province—those who remained ditched their weapons and went along with the program. There were always pockets of resistance, but they were small and the level of violence manageable. The commanders I spoke with felt they had done what was asked of them. They gave the Afghans the security space they needed to sort themselves out. The Afghans blew it because they were selfish, greedy, stubborn,n and refused to cooperate among themselves. The Marines I talked to feel no obligation to return and try again; the Afghans had their chance already and can now enjoy the bitter harvest of their failure to do what they said they would do.

When I asked my friends their thoughts about my planned embed with Task Force Southwest (the Marine unit heading back to the Helmand province) their reactions were mixed. Most supported the idea, but my closest friends were strongly opposed. They felt the risk was too significant for a story nobody cares about, and it was time for me to move on to other things.

My experiences in Afghanistan were different from those of my Marine Corps buddies. I was there a long time and made some really good friends, but more importantly, my team and I saw the results of our efforts at formal dedication ceremonies of the district irrigation systems, municipal stadiums, and roads, schools, and bazaars we built. We had a hell of a run. We knew we had helped and received the gratification of having Afghans tell us how much they appreciated what we had done.

I guess I’m a bit stubborn because I think there is a story in the Marines returning to Afghanistan, and I invested too much into the place to walk away. But I will not be able to embed to cover this story without the generous support of people who, like me, feel it a travesty to abandon the Afghans to fate.

The American military was welcomed by a vast majority of the Afghan population when it entered the country in 2001. We helped rid the country of an unpopular, dysfunctional government and seemed to have set the conditions for sustained peace in a country that has known war for a generation.

We should have finished our mission to Afghanistan in December 2001 when we had Osama bin Laden (OBL) trapped, but instead, we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Frantic requests from the special operators in Tora Bora for American troops to seal the escape routes into Pakistan were ignored by CENTCOM.  Reportedly because the generals feared a “meat grinder” or “another Mogadishu” or “offending our Afghan allies”. When OBL slipped away into a dark Pakistani night, our mission to Afghanistan expanded and expanded. Sixteen years later, there is no end in sight.

Potential losses in risky operations should be evaluated against the mission. Confusing the importance of killing bin Laden with a mission involving the arrests of  Somali warlords is a failure (in my humble opinion) at the highest levels of command. But when CENTCOM went to the White House seeking guidance from on high, killing bin Laden took a back seat when former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld handed them back their Iraq war plan and said he wanted a new one in five days. Unbelievable.

When bin Laden escaped, we decided to stay, and despite near-universal acceptance by the Afghan people at the start of our effort, we have, to date, failed. The warm welcome both aid workers and the military patrols received from 2002 through 2006 in rural Afghanistan is long gone. Kabul is now a dangerous place for internationals because the Afghans are frustrated, bitter, and angry at what some see as incompetence and others see as deliberate sabotage of Afghanistan and her people.

A good example of our bad start would be America’s initial efforts in Helmand province.  In late 2002, a U.S. Special Forces A Team arrived in the capital, Laskar Gah, and immediately offered bounties for “former members of the Taliban”. Mike Martin describes what happened next in  An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, (p. 125)

Early in January 2003, for example, Abdul Kadus, a seventeen-year-old orphan from Nad-e Ali, was arrested by Mir Wali’s forces in what appears, from the Guantanamo documents, to be a ‘sting’ in order to gain the bounty offered. In an almost exact copy of this modus operandi, Mohammad Ismail, a sixteen-year-old, was arrested, also in Gereshk. They share consecutive Guantanamo inmate numbers, although the records are unclear about their exact date of arrest.

Were I on active duty and sent with a team of commandos to Lashkar Gah in  2003, I would have done the same thing; I knew nothing about Afghanistan back then. The SF team in Lashkar Gah did what they were told to do, and pointing out the flaw in their plan isn’t to illustrate malfeasance because there was none. In 2017, this story is important only in how the Afghans saw and interpreted those events and our subsequent actions

I believe that the Afghans saw us as both seriously dangerous and naively stupid. Their elites played us for years to settle scores, steal land, or collect a king’s ransom by turning over illiterate orphans to SF teams. The average Afghan was (in my experience) baffled by our incompetence but willing to participate with us in the reconstruction effort.

Contributing to both poor program management and alienation from the Afghans (we were supposed to be helping) were unnecessarily restrictive security rules. B6-level armored SUVs, armed, high-end western mobile security teams, hardened compounds, and lavish life support were mandated for westerners working USAID or State Department contracts. That crippled our reconstruction efforts from the start and in the ensuing years we not only accomplished little but lost track of 70 Billion dollars.

By 2009, USAID was experimenting with alternative implementation profiles, including using former soldiers in direct implementation projects, thus eliminating the need for armored vehicles, security escorts, specialized compounds, etc. That was how Ghost Team started, and despite delivering massive projects on time and budget, it turned out to be too little and too late.

Here is another cultural dynamic in which we are tone deaf (due to political correctness) and need to wise up: our fascination with female empowerment. Here’s why: if your tribe lives in a society of scarce resources and makes an equal investment in educating and training both boys and girls, your tribe is going to starve.

In rural Afghanistan, women spend most of their adult lives producing and raising children regardless of their level of education. Efficient allocation of scarce resources would dictate investing those resources in family members who will use them for the benefit of the family.  Most Afghans I met have no issue with sending their daughters to school when they are young, but investing the resources to train a daughter to become a lawyer would be as foolish as training a son to be a midwife. In rural Afghanistan a female lawyer will spend her life inside the compound of her husband’s family just like her illiterate neighbors. Every penny spent educating her would have been wasted, and rural Afghans don’t have the disposable income to waste.

The Afghans may see more benefit in allowing all their children access to higher education in time, but probably not before they have electricity, running water, paved roads, plumbing inside their homes, and security.

America and the 41 other countries contributing to Resolute Support will stay in Afghanistan, intending to see things through to an acceptable end-state. That is going to take time, and it is going to generate more casualties; the loss of talented, experienced combat soldiers will continue. The countries that lost those soldiers did not want to continue. America has already made it clear we’re not interested in continuing now, and we have much more to endure before anything gets remotely better.

During the dark days ahead, it is essential to understand how our misguided efforts contributed to this mess and the impact that they have had on a civilian population that wants to be left alone in peace.

 

 

Since launching my campaign to embed in Afghanistan I’ve received a lot of push back from my American friends who spent time outside the wire in Jalalabad with me. They are concerned that I’m placing myself in grave danger to cover a story that will end in dismal failure. They have little confidence in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) or the American military when it comes to solving the true problems driving the fighting country-wide. They also believe the military is incapable of telling the truth about the effectiveness of their efforts nor able to develop the tactical models required to deal with what is now a general insurgency.

One of them shared this observation in a group email a few days ago:

I remember something Sitting Bull said to Jim when Jim spoke of coming back and marrying into the tribe.  His response, “you’re not Muslim”.. So if ANYONE had a level of rapport with any Afghan who lives in the countryside, Jim did.  And for his counterpart to make that distinction after all they had been through, THAT means something.

He’s talking about Jim Gant who I consider the most remarkable soldier of our generation and a man I admire greatly. Jim was cursed by being successful where all others failed miserably and got the shaft for it but that’s another story for another post.

What’s ironic about that comment is (unknown by my friends) I’ve been asked to convert, marry into a tribe and stay in Afghanistan on four different occasions. Unlike Jim I was not talking with a tribal leader who loved me like a son; these men hardly knew me. They were trying to get another connected, educated, competent guy to join the tribe for the obvious benefits that would bring to the community. It is a typically Afghan thing to do in rural districts and I spent months at a time in remote districts accompanied by only an interpreter (Zaki or JD) and a driver. None of my friends (with the notable exception of Jim Gant and fellow Ghost Team members) have remotely similar experiences.

My colleagues from Ghost Team and I (along with a handful of westerners sprinkled throughout the country by marriage or business) are the only westerners who embedded inside local communities and directly supervised large projects that were completed on time and on budget. Consistent performance at that level required detailed knowledge of how local communities functioned. Projects had to be vetted correctly the first time, every time, to avoid the perception of favoritism of one tribe over another.

I knew the tribes where we worked trusting them to protect our little team on nothing more than a hand shake. Free Ranging requires a high tolerance for risk, unshakable confidence in your ability to get through any situation along with the application of reason and logic to local atmospherics. Reason and logic allowed us to be comfortable operating in areas where everyone else was uncomfortable.  Reason and logic is why I’m comfortable going back. What is uncomfortable is being lectured by friends who don’t really know what I know. Which provides a perfect opportunity to discuss the realities of Free Ranging in contested lands.

Rule #1 is you will not be able to talk your way through every checkpoint. I was detained in Afghanistan, Dubai and the Northwest frontier of Pakistan during the years I spent Free Ranging. When pinched in Pakistan I was being driven through the town of Landi Kotal and was about 5 miles from the border. I was taken back to Peshawar (a policeman jumped in my cab to escort me and I had to pay for the ride back) where a magistrate released me on my own recognizance minus my cash, passport, and expensive (recently purchased) wristwatch. But I had my cell phone and called my friend (and manager of the Taj)  Mehrab who arrived (in the middle of the night) with enough cash to pay for a permit and escort to  get me through the Khyber Pass. I spent the intervening hours keeping a low profile in a crappy tea house and let me assure you I was terrified. Anyone who says they can handle that much risk and not be scared to death is delusional. But I kept my cool, remained calm and waited patiently.

If you ever found yourself alone, broke, tired and hungry in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the middle of the night, you might be a Free Ranger.

Mehrab like many Afghans who worked with the international community was killed outside his house by Taliban gunmen in 2012. He was a good man who believed that the international community would bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan. He also was a typical Afghan who would do anything to include transiting the Khyber Pass at night in the middle of the 2009 Khyber Pass offensive to help a friend in need. Meharb and the many Afghans I met who are just like him are the reason I want to go back.

The Free Range threat matrix, developed over a decade ago, is interesting reading for those unfamiliar with the realities on the ground in Afghanistan. It’s been updated for the embed this summer.

Free Range International Threat Matrix 2007

1. Afghan Security Forces
2. Motor Vehicle Accident
3. Running into American or British army convoys while driving (high probability of getting shot even in Kabul and even in brand new up-armored SUV with diplomatic plates)
4. Taliban ambush
5. Serious disease or sudden illness

Free Range International Threat Matrix 2017

1. Afghan Security Forces
2. Motor Vehicle Accident
3. Taliban ambush
4. Serious disease or sudden illness

See the difference? Only the threat presented by ISAF road movements has been eliminated. Afghanistan is a scary place because the country is falling apart as a direct result of repeated failures by the international community to develop strategies that actually help the Afghan people.

Sixteen years down the road the Marines are going back because America has decided that we will, for the first time in my lifetime, actually see one of the debacles we created in a foreign land through to some sort of acceptable end state.

This story needs to be told honestly by a reporter who understands the Marines, the environment they are operating in and the degree of difficulty they will encounter as they balance force protection against mission effectiveness. Please take the  time to donate on my Go Fund Me page to enable honest, professional reporting on a story that will have a significant impact on your children’s future. Your kids may not be interested in war but war is interested in them. And if we cannot develop effective strategies to combat radical Islam war is going to find them.