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.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote my last post about Beirut the day before Jack Carr released his book on Targeted: Beirut. I had pre-ordered the book, so I immediately read it for his opinion on the debacle. My assessment that: “Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut” was spot on. My assessment may have been a bit wordy and awkward, but I’m no Jack Carr.
Targeted: Beirut was excellent reading, and it transported me back to the moment I first heard about the barracks bombing. I was driving into the Newport Naval Hospital, where I would be standing duty in the medical laboratory for the next 24 hours. It was a beautiful fall morning, and as passed Easton’s Beach I heard the news on NPR. I don’t remember much else about the day other than I was upset and angry at the attack on our Marines.
I was the Leading Petty Officer of the hospital’s Mobile Medical Augmentation Readiness Team (MMART), a collateral duty that allowed me to wear Marine Corps camouflage utilities once a month, which I thought was cool. We were mobilized after Grenada to augment Mobile Surgical Team 11 from Norfolk after they were overwhelmed by casualties from the Ranger contingent of that invasion. My other distinct memory of that time was the Personnelmen processing us before we deployed (who were women; the Personnelmen rating was changed to Personnel Specialist in 2005) were in tears. They thought we were heading into harm’s way, which wasn’t the case, as we would spend the deployment on the USS Guam LPH 9.
Our contribution to the Beirut story was a minor part of Targeted: Beirut, which focused on the Marine Amphibious Unit that was attacked on October 23, 1983. Carr weaves the book around the stories of several Marines and sailors as they endure their deployment ashore. Some of those men made it home, the others did not, and you don’t know who the lucky ones were as his face paced narrative unfolds. It is a masterful display of storytelling that will interest anyone curious about how the war on terror started.
Having been a participant, I knew most of the story but was unprepared for the one thing that immediately caught my attention. The difference in how the military and our government handled combat deployments in the 80s. There was severe tension between the State Department and the Pentagon; putting the Marines ashore in Beirut, where they were sitting ducks, was unpopular. The Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t want the Marines ashore; the National Security Council and State Department thought it a splendid idea, and that played out in the press.
President Regan sent the Marines in, and he made repeated primetime addresses to the nation explaining his rationale. The Marine position at Beirut International Airport was flooded daily with American press and TV crews from National, regional, and even local media. The media environment was so different 40 years ago that reading about it today was jarring.
Something I did not know was that Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger ignored a Presidential finding that ordered him to retaliate for the Beirut Barracks bombing. Our intelligence agencies had intercepted message traffic that pinpointed precisely who had ordered and carried out the attack. President Reagan then ordered the navy to retaliate, but at the last moment, Weinberger ordered them to stand down, explaining, “I just don’t think it was the right thing to do.”
In one of many speeches after the Beirut bombing, President Regan said:
“Let no terrorist question our will, no tyrant doubt our resolve. Americans have courage and determination, and we must not and will not be intimidated by anyone anywhere.”
Cap Weinberger didn’t have the courage or determination to do a damn thing. His unilateral action undermined the President, and the ensuing 40 years of terrorist attacks have revealed him to be a petty, naïve, Ivy League fool. We have a surplus of over-credentialed nitwits in our country who have sacrificed the lives of thousands of servicemen by declaring preposterous concepts like “proportional response” or “courageous restraint” viable military strategies.
When we were in Beirut with the 22nd MAU there was no proportional response. The gloves were off and the Marines responded to every provocation, no matter how small, with overwhelming force. My friend Mike Ettore and his platoon were assigned to the University Library where the local Amal Militia commander would taunt them by having dinner every evening across the street from them. After his militia attacked the Marines one too many times Mike got permission to take him out. He called in a sniper team to shoot the fool in the face when he sat down for dinner. Mike if I have that story wrong don’t correct me, its too good to retract.
President Regan and the faction supporting the deployment of the Marines were dead wrong. That was made clear by Carr when he explained how we ended up with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, a feckless alcoholic with a libido problem worse than Bill Clinton’s. Amin replaced his capable brother Bashir Gemayel as President after a car bomb killed Bashir.
New York Times reporter Milton Freedman wrote that Bashir was “something of an expert in gangland murders.” That may have been true; the New York Times was considered a legitimate news organization back then. What was also true was Bashir had the respect and cooperation of the other ethnic minorities in Lebanon. His drunk-ass playboy brother had no support among the Shia, Druze, or Sunni minorities. Treating him like a legitimate partner for peace was a fool’s errand, just as it was with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan. Believing that a battalion of Marines could accomplish anything was likewise ridiculous. However, in 1983, that controversy played out in the press, allowing the American people to have an informed opinion.
Compare that to last week’s deployment of the 101st Airborne to the Middle East. Do you see any discussion about placing American troops in harm’s way to accomplish an undefined mission in today’s gaslighting media? No. What does the Pentagon think about this deployment? Who knows? These days, everything the Pentagon does is classified. Do you know where those troops are? What they are doing? Why they are there? Nope, all we know is they were deployed “out of an abundance of caution.” Weasel words that mean nothing describing a deployment that will accomplish nothing, ordered by an unknown member of a failed administration.
I’ve salted this post with pictures from Beirut and the few images I found of last week’s deployment of troops into the Middle East. Have you noticed the difference between the two? Forty years of “diversity is our strength,” DEI mandates, witch hunts for nonexistent white racists, and race crime hoaxes have resulted in the tip of the spear being lily white. How the hell did that happen? I liked it better when the infantry was multi racial.
But that isn’t the worst of it. Today, Our military is less capable by orders of magnitude than in 1983. We don’t have a fleet oiler to refuel our Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Red Sea ships. We don’t have the amphibious ship lift to move more than a puny Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the smallest Marine formations once available for crisis response. Today’s Marine Corps MEU lacks enablers like tanks, engineers, medium-lift assault helicopters, Armored Amphibious Tractors, snipers, or organic mortars. Marine infantry battalions are 41% smaller than they were in 1983. And those infantry battalions are saddled with the dead wood of female infantry, inflicted on them by yellow generals who believe that the difference between men and women is a mere social construct.
As you read Jack Carr’s excellent historical account, you will frequently see quotes from parents and generals expressing the hope that the Marines did not “die in vain.” Likewise, you will see a standard trope: “Where do we get such men?” when reflecting on the sacrifice of the Marines in 1983. Yet those men died in vain, as has every service-member lost during the war on terror. We may well have a handful of “such men” serving in today’s hollow force, but not many, and they will be chased out by the DEI mandarins who despise competency because it threatens the bankrupt concept of equity. When you cannot do what is important, the unimportant becomes important. That sums up our broken, hollow, woke military today; it’s a national disgrace somebody’s children will pay dearly for in the near future.
But don’t let my glum assessment of today’s armed forces be the last word. Buy Jack Carr’s new book and enjoy an excellent read about a day gone by. I promise you’ll enjoy every minute spent with this page turner.
The desperation of the deep state has been exposed by the latest assassination attempt on President Trump. Our esteemed guardians of democracy have decided the slow grind of the justice system isn’t quite cutting it when it comes to stopping the Orange Menace. In a move that would make the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover crack a smile, we’ve witnessed another half-assed attempt to remove Donald J. Trump permanently from the political chessboard. Let’s dive into this cesspool of incompetence and desperation.
First off, let’s address the elephant in the room – or should I say the donkey? The timing of this “assassination attempt” hits with all the subtlety of a freight train crashing through your living room at 3 AM. With the 2024 election looming and Trump leading in polls despite our illustrious DOJ’s best efforts to bury him under a mountain of indictments, the powers that be seem to have decided to take a page out of a bad spy novel. They found a radical old coot with an annual income of only $32,000 who could somehow travel internationally to garden spots like Ukraine.
Without any visible means of support, the hyper partisan stooge traveled to Miami. There he acquired a car, body armor, a go-pro camera, food, lodging, and a crappy old SKS rifle with some type of optic. How did he know which golf course President Trump would play? Who told him when President Trump would hit the links so he could set up 12 hours before the President arrived? These are questions the media will never ask. The FBI might if they had professionals investigating the attempt, but they don’t have any of those. Instead, Jeffrey Veltri, the FBI senior agent in charge of the Miami office is a certified never-partisan hack. I wouldn’t believe a word he has to say about the incident. FBI agents, like four-star general officers, “respect the office, not the man” only when Democrats hold the White House.
I’ve seen my share of covert operations during my time with the Marine Corps and later dealings with our alphabet soup agencies. I’ve even felt their ire when our little “private spy ring” in Afghanistan out performed their multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus. The alleged shooter’s status as a patsy, given inside information along with the funds to act on that information, couldn’t be more obvious.
This amateur-hour operation exemplifies what we’ve come to expect from our intelligence agencies. They can’t conduct meaningful work like the Israeli Stuxnet computer virus or their impressive mass pager bomb operation. Israeli intelligence targets the enemies of Israel; our intelligence agencies target domestic opposition to the Regime. Our 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban attests to that.
Now, let’s talk about the reaction. At first the mainstream media outlets ignored it. They didn’t interrupt their sports ball broadcasts because assassination attempts directed at Trump are no longer news. Then they ran identical stories about the dangers of “MAGA extremism”. Within hours the media and Biden White House were back on the “Trump is a threat to our democracy” bandwagon placing the blame for this attempt on his shoulders, not theirs.
But here’s where the Regime media’s narrative derails faster than a drunk conductor. They peddle this laughable idea that if Trump gets back in the Oval Office, he’ll unleash the dogs of war on his political enemies. Talk about projection, folks. It serves up the ultimate red pill on a silver platter of hypocrisy.
Trump is as welcomed in D.C. as a skunk at a garden party. He’s got 99% of the federal bureaucracy gunning for him, the big banks treating him like radioactive waste, and Silicon Valley tech bros breaking out in hives at the mere mention of his name. His few powerful allies? They face treatment like they’ve contracted the political equivalent of leprosy. Just look at Elon Musk and RFK Jr. – suddenly, they’ve become persona non grata in the corridors of power.
And speaking of RFK Jr., doesn’t it seem just a tad convenient that the moment he throws his support behind Trump, some two-decade-old whale skull story resurfaces? Suddenly, the National Marine Fisheries Service got all hot and bothered, launching a formal investigation. Why aren’t they investigating all the dead whales washing up on shores adjacent to useless wind farms? We already know why. The Regime media doesn’t report news; it produces propaganda.
The idea that Trump would increase the state’s power stretches credibility. He plans to do the exact opposite. Every three-letter agency you can name and a few you can’t have put the man through the wringer. If – and it’s a big if given the deep state’s determination to keep him out – he survives this election season you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll take a wrecking ball to the bloated bureaucracy faster than you can say “drain the swamp.”
Picture this: thousands of useless, overpaid paper pushers from the federal managerial class suddenly find themselves out of a cushy government job. No more work-from-home in your pajamas or bloated salaries for pushing pixels. They’ll face the real world, having to show up at an actual office, doing actual work, for a fraction of the pay and none of the gold-plated federal perks. It’ll look like watching a herd of pampered house cats suddenly dropped in the middle of the Serengeti.
Now, my friends, that’s what I call making America great again.
I started the Apocalypse Not series with this post on March 18, 2020 because I suspected the COVID 19 pandemic was total bullshit. The lack of bodies was the clue. If the disease had the IFR (infection fatality rate) that our “experts” said it had then our number one problem would have been the disposal of bodies, just like every other pandemic in history. Instead the homeless populations on the west coast were thriving while the main stream media focused on horror stories concocted byTony Fauci and Deborah Birx. My reward for alerting people to the COVID fraud was to loose friends, members of my family, and a book agent (I have yet to find another). I then doubled down and went on writing to point out the measures instituted to mitigate this non threat were in fact the threat. That resulted in the loss of more friends and family but I got to be this guy for a few months.
I’m re-posting the first post in preparation for revisiting the issue and the lessons learned from the disastrously incompetent reaction to the COVID 19 virus. My guess at the end of this post that there would be hell to pay when the public discovered they were duped has not happened yet but inshallah some day somebody will be held to account.
There is something about the current Wuhan virus response that is not adding up. The first case appeared in America on 17th of January, we then stopped direct flights from China on the 31st of January. From the time this pathogen surfaced in China last November until the end of January, there were daily flights from the Wuhan area to Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York and Toledo, Ohio. This flu strain is unusually virulent and if that is true (which is not in doubt), by the time it surfaced in America it had already spread across the land.
Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840, states that epidemics, develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve. This happens with or without human intervention. Farr’s Law undoubtedly is in play for the Wuhan virus.
Last Christmas my wife and several neighbors had a horrible flu bug that mimicked the Wuhan virus symptoms exactly. She was miserable and did not respond to a Z-pack or a course of Levaquin our family doctor prescribed. The bug she had was no joke, and when she mentioned my theory that the Wuhan had already washed through the population last Christmas her friends saw it immediately. She started hearing other stories about the Christmas bug that ravaged the Rio Grande Valley for a good four weeks. The stories all matched up to the symptoms for Wuhan virus.
The President’s early attempts to calm the situation were ridiculed as was his suspension of air travel to China. Then the narrative changed on a dime and the cancelations started with the Ivy League Universities cancelling their basketball seasons. Once they did that every other major sports league (with the exception of the UFC) did the same.
The Ivy League’s role in starting the current chain reaction of closing public venues is not a coincidence. The experts managing this crisis had just attended a Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Virtual Exercise Called Event 201 described as:
“a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic”.
The pathogen used for the exercise was a COVID virus with properties similar to COVID-19. The exercise predicted that the virus would overwhelm the medical systems in North America resulting in catastrophic loss of life. Tabletop exercises like Event 201 happen all the time, the fact that this one was played out a month before COVID-19 surfaced in Wuhan China is not that significant. What is significant is how different the current crisis is playing out compared to the one our experts war-gamed.
There were a seven recommendations made following the exercise (they can be found here). Every recommendation focused on the need for international cooperation with the free flow of information and people across national borders which is consistent with the ethos and vision of globalists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major donors, like Open Philanthropy .
But our response to the Wuhan virus has been the exact opposite of the “viruses know no borders” narrative of Event 201. Instead we (and the rest of the world) have closed the borders, rebuffed international offers of help and turned to the private sector to fight the virus ourselves.
The Centers for Disease Control was not up to the task of testing for or tracking the Wuhan virus and they were rapidly sidelined by the President. This was the exact opposite of Event 201 in which the CDC and every other similar international organization performed flawlessly. The ‘experts” may have been surprised the CDC failed so spectacularly but this is expected from those of us who know and understand government bureaucracies.
When the CDC failed the President went straight to the private sector, suspended regulations inhibiting the development and production of test kits and protective wear, and solved the testing problem rapidly. He then held a press conference with these Titans of industry and did a good job of calming frayed nerves. After his poor start briefing the nation last Wednesday night watching him get back into the grove was gratifying.
This is not playing out as the experts who ran Event 201 thought. Then, in another move a blatant dishonesty, on the same day that China launches an IO campaign to deflect criticism from them our legacy media decides the Wuhan virus is now to be called COVID-19. Any mention of the word Wuhan was now racist and news anchors were getting apoplectic about this new muh racism.
As events across the land started to close. Governors and DC mandarins ran to the TV cameras to announce the draconian measures they were going to take. These pronouncements have to moldy scent of Virtue Signalling. The men and women making these decisions have themselves, no skin in the game. Regardless of how long this lasts or how bad it gets the people running Ivy League institutions, the federal legislatures, state governors and the media infotainment complex insiders – all of them will weather the storm just fine. In fact, most of them will make millions off low interest rates while buying blue chip stock at a significant markdown.
You and your family? Not so much.
“I don’t claim to know what’s motivating the media, but, my God, their reporting is absolutely reprehensible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a panic that is far worse than the viral outbreak. The bottom line, everybody, is to listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC [Centers of Disease Control and Prevention]. Do what he tells you, and go about your business.… Stop listening to journalists! They don’t know what they are talking about!” Dr. Drew Pinsky commenting on the media yesterday (17 March 2020)
An anonymous source quoted in The Spectator points out the only salient (and obvious) fact now which is: “We know the numerator (the number of deaths), but we don’t know the denominator, which is the number of people who have been infected by COVID-19. And without the denominator, we have no way of estimating either the spread or the fatality rate of COVID-19.”
That bothers me and it should bother you too, but at the moment there is nothing to be done except hunker down, avoid panic shopping, and wait to see what happens. How long Americans will tolerate these measures will be interesting to see.
There is no reason to think that this time the experts warnings about a catastrophic event are correct. They have a perfect record of being wrong with every prediction in the past because their models are incapable of predicting complex events reliably.
When the people discover that once again, they were manipulated by a partisan press, compromised academic shills, and virtue signalling politicians there is going to be hell to pay. When the dust settles maybe we will de-couple science from politics and even dismantle the narrative driving legacy media.
It is time to keep your head down, and your powder dry. Courage and cowardice are contagions and few of our elected leaders seem to operate with an abundance of courage. Their default is finger pointing, name calling, and blame shifting. The rest of us should refrain from that behavior and focus on helping, not panicking our neighbors. When this emergency passes we may be able to hold incompetents to account but for now all we can do is what we do best; refuse to panic.
The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: Delaram District, Afghanistan
During the summer of 2011 a unique opportunity presented itself to Abdul Karim Brahui, the governor of Afghanistan’s Nimroz Province, during a meeting with the new Marine Corps RCT commander in Delaram II, Colonel Eric Smith, USMC. Colonel Smith had replaced my good friend Paul Kennedy and although I knew Eric, Paul had given me a warning (in infantry officer code) about dropping in on him saying “he still irons his skivvies Timmy, don’t waste your time with him”.
Colonel Smith had come to Zaranj to complain to the provincial governor about the Khash Rod district governor who was an ineffective crook. Governor Brahui had nothing to do with the appointment of district governors, Karzai’s government appointed them but recognizing opportunity Governor Brahui turned to one of his trusted aids, Engineer Khodaidad and told him to accompany the Colonel back to Delaram and then move to assume the duties of the district governor. Col Smith, being new to the game, didn’t think twice about accepting the governors kind offer. He forgot or didn’t know those appointments were made in Kabul. The Colonels apparent complicity in this unusual arrangement stayed Karzai’s hand thus preventing Khodaidad’s immediate removal by the heavy handed Kabul Government.
My provincial manager in Nimroz was an Afghan national from Kabul named Bashir. Well educated Kabuli’s able to speak and write English fluently are normally connected to powerful people in the government making their utility in remote, sparsely populated areas of Afghanistan about zero. The tribes on the fringes of the Dasht-e Margo (desert of death) were more likely to shoot Kabul elites than cooperate with them. Bashir was well educated, a fluent English speaker who was from Kabul but not connected to anyone in the Kabul government. He was, without question the most honest, competent Afghan I knew, and I knew more than a few good men in Afghanistan. He and Governor Brahui became good friends over the years Bashir and his family lived in Zaranj.
When Governor Brahui told Engineer Khodaidad to go to Delaram, Bashir turned to his assistant provincial manager, Boris, and told him to accompany Engineer Khodaidad to Delaram II. Engineer Khodaidad left with Col Smith with just the clothes on his back but Boris, a Russian Jew who was raised in New York City and a former Army Signal Intelligence operator, had the presence of mind to get his overnight bag and a change of clothes before departing for Delaram II. Boris had learned about working the Nimroz Province from the FRI blog and had contacted me asking if he could work out of Zaranj. He had an intense interest in Central Asian history and was all about supervising projects among the ruins of the Ghurid Sultanate. He turned out to be a hard worker, fluent Dari speaker, and the best field supervisor I ever had.
Engineer Khodaidad spoke fluent Russian having received his engineer training in a Russian school in Mazar-i-Sharif in the 1960’s. Like Governor Brahui he was a respected former Nimroz Front Mujahidin leader who had fought out of the Kang District during the Soviet War. Boris and Engineer Khodaidad became instant friends which was fortunate because Boris had to go to the Delaram II base exchange to by Engineer Khodaidad the various sundries and the bedding he would need to live out of the DAC. That would have normally caused embarrassed resentment from an Afghan leader who had limited dealing with Americans, but Boris and the Engineer has remarkably similar opinions about politicians and senior military officers, so it was no problem.
Boris got Engineer Khodaidad a ride to the DAC and helped him move in and I sent him some mini split air conditioners from our stash in Lashkar Gah to make the office and living spaces tolerable. I then called to the country manager in Jalalabad to see if he could shake loose some additional funding to start repairing the streets and drainage ditches in Delaram which turned out to be easy because USAID had developed a sudden interest in seeing projects started there. We turned up a couple million started to pave the streets of Delaram while also rehabilitating the bazar in the old Taliban designated district administrative center of Ghurghuri which was not too far from Delaram.
There was a small Marine Corps Civil Affairs attachment co-located with Engineer Khodaidad at the District Administrative Center and they took over getting him established in his new home. I don’t remember who owned those Marines by they were living like the grunts down south with no fresh food, no showers, and no A/C (until we hooked them up). At least one of them ( the team Gunny) had already been shot once while patrolling the area but that didn’t stop them from continuing to patrol. The DAC detachment also had a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel from the Afghan Hands program assigned to it, but he had little to do except tease me because I couldn’t speak Pashto. He was a good man in a hard spot, but his assignment said all you needed to know about the Afghan Hands Program (it was a loser track for officers) which sucked because I saw serious talent in the Hands program every time I ran into one. There was also an American SF team located in Ghurghuri but I never saw them and have no idea what they were up to or why they were there.
That sets the table for an interesting tale because when Boris and Engineer Khodaidad showed up the security situation in Delaram wasn’t good but not that bad in the big scheme of things. But not a week after they showed up the Karzai administration struck by appointing a new district police chief named Asif, a Pashtun of the Helalzai subtribe of the Nurzai tribe. The Helalzai fought on the Soviet side of the war and Asif’s father, acting as the Soviet district security chief back then had executed 28 civilians in the Delaram Bazar for supporting the Nimroz Front Mujaheddin.
Commander Asif and Engineer Khodaidad were mortal enemies and he, the local tribal leaders, and the Afghan Hands LtCol told anybody who would listen that Asif’s appointment was a terrible idea, but that didn’t matter because there was nothing any American could do about it. When Asif showed up a significant proportion of the local police force immediately quit, partially motivated by his appointment and partially by the fact that they had not received their pay in months. Asif immediately brought several of his own trusted men onto the Delaram police payroll.
This was the interesting dynamic from the Afghan perspective because when Col Smith returned from his meeting in Zaranj with Engineer Khodaidad and installed him as the new district governor it was assumed he was under the protection of the Colonel who would support him both morally and materially as he consolidated his position. They expected Col Smith would derail the appointment of Commander Asif after they explained who he was and why his appointment would degrade the district’s security.
But Eric Smith had no intention of doing that, his focus was on the Northern Helmand Province where his maneuver battalions were still having major problems in Sangin, Musa Qala, and the Kajaki Dam. He didn’t give a damn about Delaram, neither did Paul Kennedy when he was there, nor would have I had I been in their shoes. But Paul knew how provincial and district governors were appointed and wouldn’t have short circuited that process – that was an unforced error. The appointment of Commander Asif was uncontested by the Colonel Smith because he had no say in the matter. Even worse Smith was forced to ignore the obvious reason for the decline in district security while acting like the new district police chief was a legit player in the regional security hierarchy.
The shit hit the fan days after Asif took over when a small convoy of Afghan security contractors were ambushed by the Taliban approximately 40 km west of Delaram. These were fuel tanker escorts as I recall, and they tended to roll with lots of guns and a ton of ready ammunition. In the ensuing 90-minute firefight, the contractors drove the Taliban from the field and captured a vehicle containing 12 IEDs. The contractors then called the Afghan Highway Police, the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army, and the Marines looking for somebody who would take custody of the Taliban IED’s. Nobody came out to help them and nobody wanted the IED’s except for the Taliban who returned in force to recapture their vehicle and IED’s. The contractors retreated to Delaram DAC with three of the IED’s and reported to the incident to Engineer Khodaidad.
Within days carloads of armed men started to show up at our project sites to threaten our workers which was not unusual and Boris, who had the advantage of being tall, fit, disagreeable and a Dari speaker, had no problem running them off. Then IEDs began to detonate in the town several times a week, at first they targeted Asif’s Afghan National Police (ANP) checkpoints, then a few targeted our project site. The escalation continued with two of our Delaram project day laborers were kidnapped and decapitated by the local Taliban when they went to their home village (Tut) for the weekend.
The IED fiasco and sudden eruption of IED blasts brought the RCT-8 commander to the DAC with an entourage including his Sergeant Major, for a security shura. Boris blended in with the Afghans at the meeting and was able to observe from the back of the room. He said the District Governor was not mollified by being patronized by Col Smith with a pat on the back, and the promise “you and I will go out there with pistols and shoot the Taliban”.
Boris thought Engineer Khodaidad had seen a fair number of Americans in uniform making extravagant promises and talking tough, then failing to deliver before they redeployed back home. The Governor walked out of the security shura frustrated at the inability of the participants to agree on any concrete plan of action for security incidents like the IED capture. He later told Boris: “why should I even be here, if none of you listen to me?”. It was time to face a decision I never wanted to make and that was to cancel a project without finishing it, something none of my colleagues and I had done over the years of working contested districts, so I flew into Delaram to talk with the district governor.
Delaram had grown considerably since my first visit as had the staffs of the Regimental Combat Teams. The RCT 8 CO now had a State Department Contractor assigned to him who was in some way responsible for aid in Nimroz Province. The State guy was a retired Army Colonel who seemed nice enough, but I was unable to figure out his role in the “hold and build” phase of the Marine Corps Southwestern campaign. He didn’t have any funds to spend, he was not part of the approval process for my projects, and he couldn’t leave the Delaram base, so it was hard to see what role he played in the big scheme of things. He picked me up when I flew in making it a point to ask that I not go directly to the Marine CO with information that should have gone through him. I told him that would not be problem without explaining why and asked if I could use his vehicle to drive out to the DAC.
The vehicle in question, a beat-up old Toyota SUV with bad brakes and no working A/C, did not belong to him. He and a few other contractors rented it (for $1000 a month!) to get around the base and it wasn’t allowed off base according to the rental contract. You could have gone down the ring road to Herat and purchased a vehicle in similar shape for less than a thousand U.S. dollars, but I don’t remember mentioning that to him.
I met Boris on the Delaram FOB where the State Department liaison had found some racks for us in transient berthing area. The next morning, we walked to the gate where they screened local workers entering the base, exchanging our ball caps and sunglasses for shalwar kameez tunic’s and pakols and walked off the base to the district administrative center. The gate guards were contractors, not Marines and they were not sure we were allowed to just walk off base. I told them to check with my good friend Colonel Smith if they didn’t believe we could leave. Thankfully that did the trick because I think Eric might have really detained me for being armed, or the bogus Synergy Strike Force CAC card identifying me as DB Cooper CAC card (it even scanned in the DFACS!) , or using an expired SWAMP pass to bullshit my way off base, the number of infractions he could have gotten shitty with me about were alarming when I think about it.
The walk was about three miles as I remember, and we witnessed a group of boys cut and then steal an electrical transmission cable that connected an ANP checkpoint with an ANA base across the road. The kids were quick too, laughing hysterically from the back of motorcycles as the ANP troops boiled out of their checkpoint in hot pursuit. Being an ANP officer in Delaram while commander Asif was in charge sucked. When we arrived at the DAC Engineer Khodaidad was meeting with a local farmer discussing a vexing problem in Dari because the Engineer wouldn’t speak Pashto.
We had arrived hot and sweating profusely because it was a good 110 outside but were being ignored so Boris started interpreting for me.
“He’s asking the Engineer to send the Marines to run off the Taliban near his farm because they are raping his livestock at night. Engineer K just told him the big Foriengee (foreigner) understands Dari so maybe they should discuss this another time”
The farmer then turned to us and asked could we tell the Marines the Taliban are at his farm every night molesting his sheep and they can come and kill them no problem and he’d give them a sheep for their trouble too. Boris translated that for me before saying simply “No”.
Boris then asked Engineer Khodaidad for guidance in Russian and I said to the farmer “Ma dorost dari yad nadaraom” (I can’t speak dari well) but I said it perfectly which made him look at me with narrowing eyes before asking why there were Russians in the DAC. He then launched into a long story about how everything has gone to hell since the Marines showed up and built a forward operating base because Marines attract livestock raping Taliban and now there is an old Baloch Muj commander running the district but he doesn’t have his Muj army with him just two Russians and a handful of Marines which wasn’t enough fighters … the farmer had the pacing and timing of a stand-up comedian and in no time we were laughing so hard it was silly . After the farmer left Engineer Khodaidad told us he wanted the projects to continue but would understand if we pulled out. We stayed and finished the projects without additional losses.
Engineer Khodaidad and Commander Asif did not survive their appointments to the Kashrud district government. Asif was smoke checked after a few months in command which immediately brought the incident rates down and allowed us to finish our projects. Engineer Khodaidad was killed in a targeted assassination outside his home village a year after his appointment to district governor. The Engineer was a brave man who personally found and ran off a two man hit team sent to kill Boris, but he didn’t tell us about it, he told Governor Brahui who then called Bashir and told him to bring Boris back to Zaranj immediately.
I decided to go get Boris with our Baluch interpreter Zabi and drive him back to Zaranj because he had bitching about not being able to free range the province with me. We took all day to make the drive to Zaranj stopping to examine some of the old walled cities in the desert that were being used by the Taliban to move in and out of the Helmand. We found melon rinds, goat scat and fire pits in them which we assumed came from the Taliban because the Desert of Death in no place to herd goats.
Boris the Russian Jew is now Boris the Israeli Kibbutz farmer He and his growing family live the spartan life in the Negav Desert. Zabi and Bashir are now both American citizens and doing well. Governor Brahui returned to his home in Char Burjak district which had experienced an economic revival after we repaired the irrigation system. I have no idea how he is getting along with the Taliban government but suspect he’s reached accommodations with them because what else can he do?
When you have spent a good bit of your adult life living near international boundaries you develop a sense for dangerous places along a border. History, geography, and population distribution are key indicators so finding a remote bend in the Rio Grande River, that was apparently an ancient ford . . . Apparently? The Spanish mapped the Rio Grande Valley in great detail to include the old fords long used by indigenous tribes. Apparently historical commissions can’t write well but who cares? The Los Ebanos Ferry Crossing is now home to El Chalan, the only hand drawn international ferry in the hemisphere, which apparently makes it a place worth exploring.
The pull cable for El Chalan is wrapped around a centuries old ebony tree in the hamlet of Los Ebanos, population 1,030, named after the ebony tress that grow along the riverbank. The 44 foot long boat is hauled by 6 ruffians across the 40 foot stretch of the Rio Grande and has been owned and operated (since 1950) by the Reyna family on the Texas side and the Armando Garza clan on the Mexican side. El Chalan (horse dealer) has been shortened from El Chalan De San Miguel, the former name of the Mexican town that is now Ciudad Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Apparently the vaqueros of old San Miguel town were known to be proficient horse dealers.
Mexico is experiencing some serious political unrest this weekend which has something to do with mail-in voting during presidential elections which the public believes promotes blatant electoral fraud. Add to this civic unrest the fact that our border with Mexico is controlled by narcos who demand payment from every illegal they allow to cross and it is obvious why Los Ebanos should be a modern day war zone .
Before risking a personal reconnaissance of this potential pirates den I consulted crime-grade.org for its expert analysis of crime trends in Los Ebanos and guess what? Los Ebanos gets a D-; it’s just dangerous as hell apparently, because internet says it is and the net knows stuff. Being a savvy investigator of dangerous places I went early Sunday morning the day after St Patrick’s Day. Local customs and cultural mores concerning bars with holiday drinking specials guaranteed most of the adult population would not be out and about until the afternoon.
Getting to the ferry proved to be easy, it’s just 2 miles off Highway 83 which is the main east/west route in the Rio Grande Valley. When I drove the road Sunday morning I saw one Border Patrol truck and two Texas State Trooper vehicles on the way in and one State Trooper on the way out. There is always a heavy State Trooper/Border Patrol presence on Highway 83 that increases the further west you travel from McAllen.
Los Ebanos village is typical for the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) consisting of 300 or so single family homes, all with fences (mostly chain linked or barbed wire) tightly clustered around a outdoor community softball/soccer field sporting park and with an impressive old church and large, well tended cemetery. The community is 99% Hispanic and they are home owners, not renters who were born and raised inside the RGV. The chances of strangers moving through the residential areas undetected or unchallenged are zero. The town is on a peninsula of land with the Rio Grande River wrapping around the village on three sides so the border wall is a mile behind it. There are old articles on the net with local residents bitching about being behind the border wall but the political winds in the RGV have shifted over the last seven years as was noted on one of my favorite blogs this morning:
Inside the village of Los Ebanos the residential streets narrow forcing traffic to slow as it follows the ‘Texas Historical Marker’ signs to the ferry crossing. The crossing suddenly appears out of the ebony scrub a few hundred meters after the last house. It’s now an expensive, well paved, fenced off, high security area of the post 9/11 federal agency design. Before 9/11 there was a quaint blue shack with a little wall unit air conditioner manned by one of the ferry owners at exactly zero cost to the federal government. How many federal employees do you think are on the table of organization for the Los Ebanos border crossing now? Keep in mind stormy weather or Mexico discharging water upstream (which they do often), or the Coast Guard getting shitty with the ferry owners will close the ferry for days at a time but federal employees get paid regardless of hours on the job. Isn’t it strange that when the Los Ebanos border crossing was regulated out of a shack illegal immigration wasn’t a problem, but now that we’re spending millions to man the Los Ebanos official port of entry illegal immigration is out of control?
A few years ago some of the inherent dangers associated with travel aboard a hand drawn ferry were mitigated by the United States Coast Guard. In the summer of 2022 the Coast Guard closed the ferry for two months of inspections and crew training. They even pulled the boat from the water and hauled it off somewhere and who knows what that was all about but one suspects the ongoing disagreement between Gov Abbot and FJB about the lack of border integrity had something to do with it. Look at the Library of congress photo below and note the lack of floatation devices or hard hats among the river ruffians who pull El Chalan back and forth all day.
I’d wager a weeks pay that after the two week Coast Guard stand down everybody on the ferry has to wear big orange kapoc life vests and the crew hard hats in addition to the vests. Safetyism ruins everything it touches and trying to dodge OSHA mandates is a fools game. It’s possible the minute you took off a helmet or ditched the kapok vest you’d be hear the buzz of a little drone like a Russian conscript trapped in a shallow, muddy, Ukrainian trench. I know OSHA inspectors have drones these days too, and they are congenitally sneaky bastards, so how often do you think they sneak up on worksites or ferry crossings?
It’s a safe bet the high crime reported on criminal activity aggregator sites is driven by the illegal immigrant apprehensions and drug seizures that occur daily along our porous southern border. Los Ebanos was once located on a remote river bend but with Highway 83 just 2 miles away it’s no longer isolated and a poor choice for border jumpers who want to get into the interior undetected. For illegals who want to be caught and processed there are several places nearby where you can walk across the river using a tow rope to get through the chest high rapids. Apparently plenty of illegals still make the swim at the Los Ebanos ford judging from the multiple Border Patrol trucks in the area on a quiet Sunday morning.
Illegals who make into the village of Los Ebanos have to deal with dogs and shotguns because this is South Texas and that’s how we roll down here. There is an unknown number of people trafficking drugs across the border and they will, naturally, go to ground in one of the houses in Los Ebanos because that’s how drug trafficking works. The local residents who are not part of the narcotics smuggling trade have been forced to deal with people being trafficked through their neighborhoods and are not amused by it. This is the major drive behind the increasing support for the Bad Orange Man in the Rio Grande Valley.
The President, like any other officer of the United States, has an obligation to vigorously defend the interests of the United States. That is basic stewardship, and it is impossible to explain how allowing millions of undocumented people to flood into our country is in the interests of the United States. But there is a darker side to allowing systematic human trafficking by violent cartels; slavery. Joshua Treviño and Melissa Ford Maldonado from the Texas Public Policy Foundation pointed this out on a recent episodeof their Hard Country podcast titled The Modern Slave Trade and More. They were discussing several recent American media reports of illegal immigrants who were enslaved and subjected to horrible abuse when Joshua made this prescient observation:
“From a historical standpoint this is all predictable in one sense because you know the nature of humanity and when you have a flood of people who are off the books, not part of a legal structure, not citizens, and they have no recourse to authority or protection, they don’t know the culture they’re going to be vulnerable to being exploited and they’re going to be enslaved. “
Let’s hope we get an administration in Washington DC that takes its stewardship obligations seriously and puts an end to cartel sponsored human trafficking. It’s a humanitarian crisis that is facilitating some amount of modern day slavery. I don’t know the number of unfortunates who have found themselves isolated and trapped inside the home of an abusive sociopath, one hopes it’s not many, but how many are too many?
As mentioned in the last post I spent much of 2011 – 2012 in Zaranj, the Capitol of Nimroz Province. Nimroz is in southwestern Afghanistan bordersing Iran to the west, Baluchistan in the south, Helmand province in the east, and Farah province in the north. The province is divided geographically and demographically with the four southwestern districts; Kang, Charborjak, Zaranj and Chakansor comprised of flat desert terrain inhabited mostly by Baluch people and the mountainous Northwestern district of Khashrud which has a majority Pashtun population. Nimroz is the only province in Afghanistan where the minority Baloch make up most of the population, and the capital, Zaranj is one of the few cities in Afghanistan where the women wear the Persian black chador instead of the blue Afghan burqa.
Zaranj was essentially isolated from the rest of the country by the Dash-e Margo (Desert of Death) until the Indian government paved a high-speed highway connecting Zaranj to the ring road at Delaram in 2009. Known as route 606 the road connected to the deep-water port of Chabahar, Iran which the Marines and Afghans hoped would stimulate more economic growth, but that growth needed to be juiced with reconstruction money. In 2009 the Boss sent Mullah Jack Binns who was now working with us to Zaranj to find a guesthouse and to get some projects started. Jack had managed the Jalalabad Afghanistan NGO Security Office (ANSO) the year prior and deployed to Afghanistan with the Canadian Army prior to that. We would be the only USAID implementor to work in Nimroz province for the remainder of the war.
Due to its desert terrain and agricultural economy, Nimroz province was completely dependent on large-scale irrigation from rivers. With it, the soil is highly productive and can sustain a large population and large hydraulic civilizations had thrived in the area thousand years ago until Genghis Khan showed up to prove you can win a counterinsurgency by killing people, something today’s military leaders say is impossible to do.
Desert canals require regular large-scale centrally coordinated maintenance efforts; otherwise they fill in with silt from the constant dust storms and canal-bank erosion. A positive feedback loop forms, as the topsoil of newly fallow land is blown into the neighboring canals and blocks them. Over the last thirty years of war and weak government, blocked canals and lack of irrigation led to the depopulation of the province. Our plan was to rebuild the irrigation systems in the Baloch dominated districts while ignoring the Pashtuns in Khashrud district because, being the only people working in Nimroz we could get away with that kind of thing.
I was a big fan of the governor of Nimroz, Abdul Karim Brahui. Governor Brahui was a graduate of the Kabul military academy who founded and commanded the Jabha-e Nimruz (Nimroz Front) as part of the Mujahedeen Southern Alliance against both the Soviet army and Taliban. He was a lead-from-the-front commander and the rare Afghan politician who concerned himself more with the people’s problems than accumulating additional power and wealth.
Governor Brahui was as close to an honest politician as one could be in Zaranj given that the local economy revolved around plastic jerry cans. They were used to smuggle petrol or heroin across the border or to haul water from various sources for sale to one of the two municipal water treatment plants. Teenage boys selling petrol or diesel out of 5-gallon jerry cans dotted every major road in the city. There was very little industry and as the population swelled with refugees returning from Iran, drinking water became a huge issue.
In 2010 I routed my fiscal year plans through the Marines in Leatherneck because Nimroz was the one province in the country without a PRT. I told the Marines that we were going to completely rehabilitate the irrigation systems in Charborjak, Kang, and Chakhansor districts they did not believe we could do it in just one year. The were technically correct because Miullah John had started work on the Chakhansor district system with FY 2009 funds but we finished the rest on time which was still impressive given the size, scope and distances involved.
The easiest and fastest project was the Chakhansor district system because the Khashrod River which fed the irrigation system was dry for most of the year. Using 1,500 local laborers we rehabilitated 300 kilometers of canals and re-built a 170 meter, reinforced concrete check-dam to capture the spring run-off. The Chakhansor irrigation system served 7,200 farms and the first post project wheat and melon harvests yielded outputs three times greater than pre-project averages. The Baloch of Nimroz no longer had to import melons from Kandahar and if you knew how much Afghans love their local melons (which are excellent) you would understand the significance of that accomplishment, and we weren’t even getting started.
The Chakhansor district project was completed by Mullah John while I was still in Jalalabad. With the large fiscal year 2010 budget we could do both Charborjak and Kang districts simultaneously which would mitigate some of the heavy equipment costs. That year we built 400 miles of irrigation canals turning 25,000 acres of the Dasht-e Margo into highly productive farmland allowing the Baloch to get in on the poppy boom. We hired over 18,000 workers to dig these canals in the middle of the desert where the temperature could hit 120° daily.
The key to completing these so quickly was we were replacing systems, not building new ones, and we hired as many of the engineers who had built the original weirs and dams as we could find. The only problem with this massive project was the USAID stipulation that no material originating from Iran could be used in the construction. Instead of using high quality Iranian concrete at $5.00 per 50lb bag we were supposed to import low quality concrete from Pakistan who the State Department insisted was our ally. We worked around that somehow, I don’t remember the details, and finished every project on time and on budget. You can read about those in more detail as well as the Taliban attempt to ambush us here, here and here.
From the time of my first visit to Zaranj in 2010 until I departed the city in 2012 I would tell anyone who asked the city was perfectly safe. I once even lectured the G9 about the requirement to drive around the city in unarmored trucks like the Afghans did because the Baloch held the city and they were not down with the Pashtun dominated Taliban. I often walked around the city of Zaranj alone to inspect our road and stadium building projects because I knew I was safe, protected by locals who respected me because I lived like them, ate with them, and really liked them. It did not take long before I saw the Marines riding around in the back of ANP trucks which I thought a splendid idea.
April 28th, 2012 a four vehicle patrol of ANP trucks with Marines and a Wall Street Journal reporter in the back were hit by a suicide bomber in downtown Zaranj. The attacked killed 38 year old MSgt Scott Pruitt, a 38 year old father of two from Gautier, Mississippi. As described in the linked account that explosion was followed by a small arms attack from multiple attackers staged in several different buildings fronting the kill zone. We had not only paved the street they were driving on when attacked we had installed the lane dividers that pinned MSgt Pruitt in the from passenger seat following the blast. According to my understanding of local security issues this attack could not happen because the Baloch were too proficient at recognizing and dealing with Taliban. The attack proved something I didn’t want to admit and that was I never as well informed as I thought I was during my years living in Afghanistan.
My company, CADG, pulled out of Zaranj after we completed the district irrigation projects but not before the Governor talked us into doing some work in Delaram which I’ll cover in a separate post because it was an interesting problem that involved a regimental commander who is now the Commandant of the Marine Corps. There was a big ceremony where excellent provincial manager, Bashir Ahmad Sediqi, and my company and USAID and the Marine Corps were all recognized with plaques and proclamations for delivering so much valuable aid to the province. I was the senior representative for my company, USAID and the Marines so I got a bunch of really cool swag which I had to surrender when I got back to Lashkar Gah. When we arrived at our compound that evening there was a case of Red Horse Beer waiting for us, an anonymous donation from the city fathers that was both unexpected and appreciated, but not a surprise given porous border just a mile away.
The Helmand Province was the scene of the heaviest fighting of the Afghanistan war for both the United States Marine Corps and British Army. Yet my experience in the Helmand was different, in fact the first time I was there the Helmand was quiet. In 2005 Sher Muhammad Akhundzada was the governor and his vast militia was designated the 93rd Division of the Afghanistan National Army. When I drove through Grishk on my way to Herat in 2005 the ANA troops manning the checkpoints looked like Taliban because they were wearing shalwar kameez (local man jams) and turbans but they kept commerce flowing and security incidents down on the vital ring road.
Five years later I moved to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, to take over the USAID Community Development Program for the southwest region. The Marines had locked down the southern and central regions of the province and I could drive from Lashkar Gah to Marjah or the district center in Nawa without a problem. Just three years before that my friend Cody Elmore was working out of Lash and witnessed a truck full of his Afghan Boost demonstration farm workers vaporized by a Taliban IED. Of course when the Marines pulled out at the end of the Obama surge the Taliban eventually re-gained the ground they lost, but during the time Marines sustained an unsustainable deployment tempo into the province it was sort of safe.
The Helmand wasn’t dangerous because there was a war on between two uniformed combatants as defined by Clausewitz, it was dangerous because an infidel military was trying to force a corrupt, worthless, central government down the throats of the Afghan people. Which was the height of irony because the only thing the people of Afghanistan expected the central government to do was to protect them from foreign soldiers especially if they were infidels. I had lived in Afghanistan for five years before moving to Lashkar Gah but had not figured this out yet because effective redevelopment program managers were treated well by local Afghans, especially if they lived embedded inside their communities.
Before the 1940’s Lashkar Gah was a desert fort, Lashkar means soldier in Pashto and Gah translates as home so Lashkar Gah was home to the soldiers before the development of the Helmand Green Zone. In 1949 King Mohammed Zahir Shah hired the American Morrison-Knudsen firm to turn the desert into agricultural oasis with electricity Lashkar Gah was the headquarters for the Americans thus Lashkar Gah became known as Little America from the late 1940’s until the early 1970’s . Morrison-Knudsen had built the Hoover Dam and San Francisco Bridge, but they failed in the Helmand because they never addressed the fundamental problem of salty soil that drained poorly. That problem was mitigated by the American government and the Helmand green zone finally reached its potential just as the Soviet invasion ended our involvement there in the 1970’s.
I had lived in Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, and Jalalabad when those cities had been full of westerners living and working outside the wire. Mazar and Kabul had several bars and restaurants that catered to westerners and Jalalabad had the Taj Guesthouse and Tiki Bar where the international aid community gathered weekly on Thursday evenings. That was not the case in Lashkar Gah where the few westerners living in town kept a low profile. There were no weekly gatherings, booze was hard to find, and the internationals rarely mingled outside their secure compounds.
I did not live like the other USAID implementors in Lash who followed the UN Minimum Occupational Security Standards (UN MOSS) which mandated enhanced outer RPG screens, hard rooms, 24/7 communication capability with the regional UN headquarters, B7 Armored SUV’s, and international personal security details. We used local vehicles, wore local clothes, and I lived in a regular compound using the Jeff Cooper rules for compound security that mandated concertina wire inside (not on top of) the outer walls, the use of dogs, turning bedrooms into barricaded fighting positions, and not arming local guards with AK’’s that could be turned against us. We armed our guards with shotguns and they were instructed to fire them and run if attacked, the resident expats would take over at that point.
I had inherited some projects from my good friend Jeff “Raybo” Radan, the only Marine officer I ever met who thought attending Ranger School was a good deal thus the call sign “Raybo”. Raybo had turned hippy on me but was also a fan of the FRI blog which is how he got hired to go to Lash in 2009. I wanted to stay in Jalalabad but my boss wanted a former Marine officer in the Helmand and Raybo was all about experiencing the outside the wire lifestyle. Being an energetic optimist Raybo had moved into the northern portion of the province to rebuild the Naw Zad bazaar. His first two attempts to get a convoy loaded with building material failed and ended up in the hands of the Taliban. By the time I arrived he had gotten enough material to start work so he passed the project off to me.
Reconstruction projects in the Helmand Province were supposed to be coordinated through the British PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team which included American, Danish and Estonian government representatives). In practice that meant every project needed to be approved by a trilateral commission consisting of DFID (British Department for International Development), DANIDA (the Danish Governments development agency), and USAID. How long do you think project proposal took to work their way through that sausage machine? I wouldn’t know because I refused work through them after the USAID rep gave me shit about carrying a pistol on base and the PRT SgtMaj refused to let me drive my vehicle on post because he thought it might have a bomb attached to it.
I believe the Taliban attached a bomb to a parked vehicle in a targeted attack exactly never during the 20 year conflict but the reality of outside the wire living could not be understood by soldiers or civilians who never left the wire. My company had run out of experienced Afghan hands and hired an NGO worker from New York City to manage the Helmand projects. He was unarmed and restricted to doing project in Lashkar Gah but he also finished the Naw Zad bazaar which I appreciated. That left me with 10 million dollars to burn and I knew exactly who to ask about where to burn it, the Marine Corps G9 (Civil Affairs) shop at Camp Leatherneck. They wanted me to dump it all in Nimroz province because they could not deploy Marines there due to the capital, Zaranj, being on the border with Iran and having armed Marines on the border of Iran was bad according to the genius’s in Foggy Bottom.
I had a fantastic Afghan provincial manager in Zaranj so although I spent a lot of time in the Nimroz I had plenty of time to burn hanging out with the two Marine Corps Regimental Combat Team commanders currently working the Helmand. The three of us had been Infantry Officer Course instructors, then went to the Amphibious Warfare School together, and we then commanded the three most successful Marine Corps recruiting stations (in the late 90’s) even though we were assigned to stations that had not been previous powerhouses. I was in Salt Lake City, Dave Furness next to me in Sacramento, and Paul Kennedy next to Dave at RS San Francisco and none of us ever missed mission.
Colonel Paul Kennedy had just moved into the Delaram 2 firm base and was responsible for the northern districts in the Helmand. He did not have much time left in country and the air strip on his new base wasn’t open yet but that was no obstacle for the South Africans who flew our company 12 seat turboprops. All they need was a bottle of scotch each and I was on my way to see Paul. The pilots kicked me out of the plane and hauled ass after landing because the control tower was giving them a hard time. A pair of MP’s pulled up to ask me who I was and why I was there and you should have seen their faces when I told them I was the Regimental Commanders best friend. They looked both dubious and annoyed which I expected, when they raised Paul on the radio he ordered them to arrest me and bring me directly to him. They knew better than to really yoke me up but they didn’t find the situation nearly as amusing as I did. My visit with Paul was brief – he got me on a helicopter out the next day because they were heavily engaged with the Taliban and he had better things to do then entertain me.
But not Dave Furness who commanded RCT 1 out of Camp Dwyer down in the south. He was still taking casualties and doing some hooking and jabbing with the Taliban but for the most part (by Marine Corps standards) his area was quiet. I was able to fly into Dwyer and link up with Dave several times which I blogged about here, here, and here.
The only problem I had in the Helmand was when I foolishly agreed to inspect a road building project in Grishk, a large town on the Ring Road that was inside the British Army zone by 2011. When we arrived at the project site there was no paved roads and no people as all the local businesses appeared to be abandoned. That is a pre-incident indicator for an ambush and I didn’t”t hesitate to order my crew to immediately head back home and we almost made it out without incident. Almost.
My time in the dangerous Helmand province wasn’t that bad because I spent most of it in Nimroz province or with the Marines. I was never comfortable in Lash although I was treated well by local Afghans who thought of me as a direct link to the Marines controlling the province, which wasn’t always the case. After Paul Kennedy and Dave Furness headed home they were replaced by Colonels I knew well, but avoided like the plague. Now security in the Helmand province is like it was before 9/11 – safer than any major city in America. There is lesson in there somewhere but it eludes me for now because all I feel now about Afghanistan is humiliation over our dreadful performance there.
But I got to see the pointy end of the stick at the small unit level where junior Marine interacted daily with Afghans who saw their tiny spartan combat outposts as a legitimate source of protection from both the Taliban and Afghan Security Forces. It was no mystery to me who the good guys were when we had boots on the ground. Yet in the end all the good intentions in the world can’t compensate for foreign policy based on path-dependent groupthink that results in George Floyd murals and gay pride flags painted on the Kabul embassy walls.
In May of 2012 my team of Afghan cut throats and I were dispatched to investigate persistent rumors concerning ISAF vehicle convoys transiting the Salang Pass. The complaint was that ISAF units would close the pass causing Afghans to wait up to 24 hours in the freezing cold before they could get through. The international community was up in arms about that and wanted a boots on the ground report which meant me, or my boss (call sign Bot) would have to go, and I was up. This would be my 10th and final trip through the Salang and I was not happy about going, the pass scared me.
The dangers from being trapped inside the Salang Tunnel were obvious. The lights inside the tunnel didn’t work, nor did the closed-circuit TV cameras that were installed to warn of problems. The tunnel roof leaked massive amounts of water turning the pot-holed roadbed into a mixture of icy mud, broken concrete, and pieces of asphalt. Ventilator fans in most of the tunnel were broken resulting in such high levels of carbon monoxide that the Afghan government was reportedly exploring ways to pump oxygen into the tunnel.
History is always a good guide to potential problems and the history of the Salang Tunnel had some grim milestones. On the 3rd of November 1982 two Soviet military convoys collided inside the Salang tunnel causing a massive traffic jam. A fuel tanker in one of the convoys exploded inside the tunnel, unleashing a chain reaction of fiery explosions and death. The cause of the explosion remains in doubt, the Russians claim it was an accident, and the Mujahedeen claimed it resulted from a successful attack. Drivers of cars, trucks and buses evidently continued to enter the tunnel after the explosion. Soviet troops, fearing that the explosion might have been a rebel attack, then closed off both ends with tanks, trapping many inside. Some burned to death; others were killed by smoke or by carbon monoxide poisoning. Although records from the era are suspect up to 700 Soviet troops and 2,000 Afghan soldiers and civilians may have died in the 1983 tunnel fire.
What we found in 2012 was ISAF had indeed started to use the Salang Pass for logistic convoys. We did not find any Afghan worker who remembered ISAF closing the tunnel to civilian traffic and suspected that reporting in local media was rumor mongering. We did determine that ISAF convoys routinely hit civilian traffic in the tunnel and did not stop or acknowledge the accidents. The tunnel was only 16 feet high (at the centerline) with a sloping, concave roof over a two lane roadbed and it was routine for overburdened trucks, MRAP’s, and fuel tankers to get pinned to the tunnel wall when trying to pass each other.
It was also routine for tankers to tip over inside the tunnel due to the poor roadbed condition. When this happened a giant Soviet Era bulldozer was sent in to drag the truck out.
During the trip we interviewed The Director of Maintenance and Protection of Salang Pass, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Rajab, who claimed that overloaded trucks were destroying the tunnel adding that less than 5% of those trucks were civilians – the rest belong to ISAF. Judging from the traffic we observed in the tunnel that statement was questionable, nobody overloads Jingo Trucks better than Afghans.
Attempts to interview or even talk to any of the American soldiers transiting the pass were unsuccessful. As usual we found the soldiers to be agitated and aggressive, and completely freaked out when a fellow American in civilian attire walked up to chat with them. The refusal to interact with American citizens in Afghanistan was something new for me, when I was on active duty we did the exact opposite no matter where we were in the world.
The Salang Pass was a dangerous transit for well maintained vehicles which was a problem in a country famous for its inability to maintain vehicles. Mechanical failures were routine inside the tunnel which cause long delays stranding motorists in subzero temperatures for hours at a time. In response the Salang Pass Department of Maintenance and Protection of the Salang Pass Route constructed a purpose built shelter that provided assistance to 6,700 people during the 2011 -2012 winter. When Gen Rajab told me that it surprised me, Afghans can be incredibly altruistic at the individual level, especially with us foreigners, but at the government level we were conditioned to look for a catch and we detected none.
The Salang Pass Department of Maintenance and Protection of the Salang Pass Route (its official title) had taken the initiative to provide life saving aid for thousands of Afghans because it was the right thing to do. The few locals we talked with confirmed that graft in the pass was a thing of the past. That pithy explanation was met with laughter by the diplomats who funded the trip which was gratifying. It’s not easy to be pithy when working for foreigners.
In 2019 the Russian film Battle for Afghanistan was released and is now available on Amazon Prime. The movie is reportedly based on true events surrounding the withdrawal of the Soviet Army through the one chokepoint they could not force – the Salang Pass. It’s a good film that captures the craziness of Afghanistan and well worth a watch. You can’t help but notice how Soviet troops frequented local bazaars and Afghan restaurants while off duty. That never happened with ISAF units who were restricted to their FOB’s (forward operating bases). Only a small percentage of the troops deployed to Afghanistan ever got outside the wire, for most perceptions of the land and its people were distorted through the prism of electronic warfare collection, boredom induced gossip, and questionable media reporting.
The force protection mentality of ISAF was made possible by their (American taxpayer funded) unlimited budgets which they used to completely isolate their troops from the local population. In a country famous for its melons every bit of fruit consumed by ISAF soldiers was flown in at enormous expense. Something the Soviets and every other nation on the earth would be unable and unwilling to do. The only reason the pass was being used in 2012 was the number of American units operating north of the Salang Pass after the Obama surge. That forced ISAF into running a lot of logistical convoys over the pass for a couple of years. I don’t think the logisticians in Kabul liked the pass any more than I did but I wonder what the soldiers who made those runs thought about the experience.
In the early days of the Afghanistan conflict it was easy to see that the money pouring into the country was being used to start business’s like restaurants or to buy used vehicles to be used as taxi’s for another income stream. But Afghanistan is a wild place with wild rivers that often overflow their banks and when they destroy a new business there is no insurance money to collect thus the common refrain Inshallah (if God wills it).
The biggest surprise I found in Afghanistan over the years was their high regard for Russians. If you could speak Russian you could talk with most Afghans in any part of the country. If you asked about the difference between the Soviet military and ISAF you got the same answer in every part of the country. The Soviets were brave and supported the local people but the ISAF soldiers are cowards who hide on their bases and never interact with local people when off duty. The Afghans never understood that and it infuriated me to hear it because I knew cowards among American infantry were astonishingly rare. I’m a retired grunt myself and know. our infantry well.
The number of American soldiers who could speak Dari or Pashto numbered less than 100 for most of the war. The number of American soldiers who spent enough time to learn the country, its people, and the limitations of its central government cannot be counted because there were none. Check that, there was one – Commander Baba D turned special contractor Baba D who worked directly for the ISAF commanders for several years in RC East .
It is impossible to gauge the consequences of our humiliating retreat from Kabul. The military/political leadership responsible for that fiasco remains in charge of our depleted military to this day. The only military leader held to account over the Kabul evacuation fiasco was a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel who was thrown out for pointing out the disgraceful lack of accountability of our flag officers (generals and admirals) responsible for the mess.
After spending 20 years floundering about in Afghanistan what is the senior leadership of the uniformed military concerned with now? Fixing the force? You wish . . . the real emergency our country faces is climate change according to the Army War College.
Watching a great power implode is unpleasant because there are bills that will come due. There is a price to pay for rampaging around the world sending “carefully calibrated messages” with killer drones just as there will be a leveling for the folly of introducing women into the combat arms. The military/government duopoly used brute digital force to try and alter reality in Afghanistan to construct a reasonable narrative. Here’s what that looked like:
It’s important to note that I supported our approach throughout most of my time in Afghanistan. I once battled the media contention that Marjha was a bleeding ulcer by driving to Marjah and blogging about it. I was not an impartial observer but a retired Marine and my friends were the running the show in the Helmand Province allowing me to embed with their units and write really cool blog posts.
In time the average Afghan correctly deduced that the Kabul government was installed and maintained at the point of infidel bayonets. And that was all most Afghans ever knew or needed to know. They hadn’t heard of 9/11, they had no idea why we showed up and spanked the Taliban in 2001. The Afghans supported us at first because we appeared to be the strong horse but any chance of maintaining that perception ended with the invasion of Iraq.
What I learned in Afghanistan (besides don’t drive over the Salang Pass if you can avoid it) was our senior military and government leadership have lost sight of the stewardship function integral to their posts. That was reflected by their inability to define a coherent military mission or articulate a reasonable end state. They were incapable of vigorously defending the interests of the United States because those interests were never adequately defined. When unable to determine or accomplish what is important the unimportant becomes important. A lesson the smartest kids in the room never learned while supervising a war we could not lose . . . or win.
There are three ways to tour the Khyber Pass; you can apply for permit and if granted then pay for a soldier to escort you through the pass, If you’re a VIP there are no fees and you get lots of escorts, special presentations at the forts, and lunch at the Khyber Rifles Officer Club, and if you’re really clever (or stupid) you can sneak through the pass dressed like a local and hope none of the roadblocks spot you. I’ve traversed the pass a half dozen times using all three methods. The VIP tour was the most enjoyable, the food on my non VIP tour with a bunch of Afridi “businessmen” was the best, and trying to sneak back through the Pass unescorted the most exciting.
My first trip through the Khyber Pass was in 2006 when my friend Yahya Sayeed and I flew into Islamabad, got a cheap hotel and spent the afternoon shopping for shalwar kameez (local clothes) and booze for our hosts before taking a taxi to Peshawar the next day. Alcohol may be frowned upon by Islam but that has not stopped Pakistan from producing Vat 69 scotch in Rawalpindi and Cossack Vodka in Quetta, but both are vile. When we arrived in Peshawar we got a room in a modest motel across the street from a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop before a couple of stout, serious looking men showed up to take me on a tour of the world famous Qissa Khawani Bazaar.
My new bodyguards were the advance party of the Afridi clan and were there to look after me given that this was Peshawar, home to the Peshawar Taliban Shura. The famous bazaar was large and looked to me like a large Afghan bazaar with the gold souk from Dubai attached. It had plenty of big buildings built on narrow pockmarked streets with narrow brown water drainage ditches on both sides. I was as little taller than my escorts and deeply tanned at the time, but easily recognizable to the merchants who would greet me in English or Russian. I had not yet learned how easily a western gait was spotted in Central Asia. I guess if one were supple enough to squat comfortably on their heels they’re gait wouldn’t be so distinctive but I can’t do that so I stuck out like a sore thumb whenever I was on foot.
A few hours after we returned from the bazar the main body of the Afridi’s showed up heavily armed, but friendly. I thought Yahya had told them I was a retired Marine and interested in touring famous battlefields, to explain our interest in the pass but I was wrong. The Afridi’s didn’t know anything about the American military, and they had never heard of the United States Marine Corps. They were hoping I could help them out with a business problem but first had to determine if I could be trusted. They asked why I was spending my leave time in Pakistan instead of going back home, so I explained that I had to spend 11 out of 12 months outside the USA to get an overseas tax exemption, and that my second wife was a total bitch, so I had no desire to rush home.
Avoiding taxes and having an unpleasant wife who made hanging out in the family compound a misery were problems Afridi’s understood. They spent the next hour extolling the virtues of tax avoidance and discussing effective methods for dealing with nagging wives. They then shared a business problem they needed help with; would it be possible for me to sell some beer on their behalf? Apparently a truck load Heineken had mysteriously showed up and they needed to monetize it. This was the start of my lucrative side gig as a rumrunner.
My new business partners (from the much-respected Adam Khel clan) were, with one exception, carrying bizarrely modified rifles built from AK-47 platforms. The senior guy had a legit Russian AKS 74U identical to the one carried by Osama bin Laden, but the others had custom furniture or parts added to make them look like MP-5’s or M4 rifles. Only the 74U had sights on it so I got the impression these rifles were for show. The Afridi’s, who have been living in the Khyber Pass area for centuries, are allowed (and expected) to be armed even when visiting Peshawar which is a nice, clean, modern city.
Once we had our four-car convoy organized we took off for the Northwest Frontier border at a rather high rate of speed. I looked at Yahya who smiled serenely and said something like “these guys are crazy so get used to it”. Approaching the Bab-e-Khyber gate our convoy barely slowed as the guards waved us through without inspection. We then pulled off the main road onto a dirt track for a few hundred meters and stopped in front of some small, ugly, square cinderblock rooms that functioned as Pashtun roadhouses. They served only Vat 69 Scotch, which tasted like shit. We had three toasts, including one to President Bush, the Afridi’s test fired their guns, because they could (I guess), and we were off into the Khyber.
The pass climbs for several miles until reaching the Shagai Fort, built by the British in 1927 and currently home to the Khyber Rifles. It’s massive but closed to the public so after taking pictures we moved on traveling next to the old, abandoned Khyber railroad as the pass narrowed when approaching the Ali Masjid fort. That too is not open to the public, so we pushed on through the town of Landi Kotel, to the Michni Post, a fort that looks over the valley leading into Afghanistan at the Torkham border. After taking pictures and looking around we doubled back to Landi Kotel for lunch. We pulled up to a dodgy looking place amid the bazaar and there was a teen aged boy out front squeezing the contents out of the guts of a goat he just butchered. I looked at Yahya with trepidation, but he assured me the food would be excellent. We sat on a cushioned, raised platform inside a small filthy hovel and the food, goat kabab and Kabuli Palau. The food was delicious and caused no abdominal distress which, at the time, I thought a miracle.
My only disappointment with the first trip was not stopping in the town of Darra Adam Khel a one-road town inside the Khyber Agency that is lined with gunsmiths and famous for fixing, making, and selling military grade rifles, pistols and machineguns. The Afridi’s told us that showing up there with an American would be a problem.
The difference between experiencing the Khyber Pass with the low rent, but beer rich Afridi’s and the upper caste Afridi elite was night and day. My next trip through the Khyber was in 2007 when I escorted the head of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (the USAID of Japan) through the pass to Islamabad. The head of mission had senior diplomatic status, so he received the VIP Khyber tour which was spectacular. That trip started on the Afghan side of the border, we had driven to the Torkham gate from Kabul escorted by my usual team of gunmen from the Panjshir.
Once we reached the Torkham gate I coordinated with the American army Military Policemen (MP’s) stationed there to get the JICA SUV expedited across the border. before surrendering my weapons to my Afghan crew and finished the trip unarmed. On the Pakistan side of the border we were taken into the VIP area which had a large buffet of food that the Japanese wisely ignored. We picked up an escort with motorcycle outriders and three pickup trucks full of riflemen. The lead truck had a machinegun attached over the cab with bungee cords and the gunner was wearing a motorcycle helmet which looked peculiar but was not doubt effective at keeping the wind out of his eyes.
With sirens wailing we drove up to the Michni Post for our first VIP event, a lecture about the history of the Khyber Pass by the Khyber Rifles a.k.a “Guardians of the Khyber”. The presentation room had glass walls allowing an impressive unobstructed view of the Afghanistan border. There four prominent mountain peaks marking the Afghanistan border have large white numbers (1 through 4) painted on them and are used as target reference points during the presentation. The major from the Khyber Rifles had an impeccable upper-class British accent, and had gone to university in the United Kingdom. He gave a brief history of the pass and explained the extensive counter battery battle they had fought back when the Soviet Union was warring in Afghanistan. There were many missile and artillery shrapnel pieces (all painted blue) and a few captured soviet artillery pieces on display just outside the fort to augment the presentation.
On on either side of the glass walls were pictures of famous people who had toured the fort in the past. Princess Di, Jackie Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, Margaret Thatcher, the former Shah of Iran, and Princess Ann were there along with dozens of famous people from other countries. I noted a table full of sweets and fruits was set up at the Post just as it had been at the border so after the presentation, I munched on finger food and took pictures. We then headed for the home of a Pakistani physician/diplomat Dr. Afridi (a common last name in the Khyber Agency) who had served on the Pakistan’s delegation to Tokyo. We had lunch with Dr Afridi which my JICA clients barely touched before heading to the Ali Masjid fort, home of the Khyber Rifles Officer’s Club for another official presentation and buffet.
The Khyber Rifles Officer Club has a treasure trove of fascinating military artifacts. Outside the club there is an ancient tree that was placed in chains back in 1898. The tree was arrested one Saturday evening by Captain James Quid who after stumbling out of the O Club noticed the tree was moving wildly and he suspected it was trying to leave the post without orders. He ordered the mess sergeant to arrest the tree and place it in chains so it could not escape, which the sergeant did. The chains remain in place to this day, protected by fencing and with a plaque explaining its history in English.
Being a diplomat is difficult because everywhere you go people prepare local delicacies, they expect you to sample. Three lunches in one day were more than anyone can handle which was why my Japanese clients were adept at sampling a lot but consuming very little. Diplomats need to know that kind of stuff and I sure wished one of them had told me because I was slow to catch on and uncomfortably full by the time we left the pass.
My last trip through the Khyber was to take a physician from Jalalabad to Peshawar where he was scheduled to attend a medial conference. This was in 2010 when the area between Shagai Fort and Landi Kotal was experiencing serious feuding between the beer drinking Afridi’s and Jihadi inclined Shinwaris and both sides were battling the Pakistani army too.
We went on a Friday because if there was one day you could sneak around and not get caught because it was Islam’s day off. It is also the day the faithful swarm popular mosques for the weekly Juma mid-morning prayer and the mosque in Landi Kotel was so popular hundreds of the faithful, many armed to the teeth, were blocking the road as they bowed in supplication.
Our taxi driver was freaking out as we stopped well short of the crowd and waited for the Juma prayers to end. We made no more stops, but I took lots of pictures of battle damaged compounds. Every large compound had armed men stationed outside in sangers and from casual observation it appeared the arms dealers in Darra Adam Khel were having an RPG clearance sale. Hundreds had been fired at some of the compounds and that takes some time to do.
We got to Peshawar and I dropped off my colleague and then attempted to go right back through the Khyber without a tribal pass which would take a day to obtain. I sat in the back of the little Toyota cab and made it all the way to Landi Kotal before a sharp-eyed sentry manning a roadblock spotted me and yelled “Foriengee” before raising his rifle to stop the taxi and inviting me to parlay. The sentry was not interested in trying to decipher my crude attempts at Dari, a language he probably didn’t understand anyway, so he jumped into the cab, and we drove back to Peshawar.
We arrived at the tribal police headquarters where I explained to the officer of the day, who spoke English, that I was unaware I needed a different permit to travel back to Afghanistan. I was released and told to report back in the morning for a proper permit. I stepped out into the teaming streets of Peshawar, switched the sim cards to my Pakistan cell number and summoned aid before walking to the City View motel to go to ground for the night. It was a long night but in the end I made it back through without further delay. When I first traversed the pass I found it enchanting; it was easy to imagine what it looked like when Tammerlane was invading the subcontinent, but after a few trips the pass lost its charm but it would be cool to again some day . . . inshallah.