Category: Long War

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I Spy: How Human Intelligence is Supposed to Work

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

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 The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About fucking time,” was my curt response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The IDF: Modeling Competence over Equity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Targeted: Beirut

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

Beirut October 1983

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

101st Airborne arriving in Cyprus September 2024

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

Marine wounded in Beirut October 1983

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

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

101st Airborne arriving in an undisclosed location September 2024

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

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

Beirut October 1983

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

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

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

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

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024

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

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

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

Beirut October 1983

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

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024.

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

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

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

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America’s Monster in Afghanistan

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

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

General Abdul Raziq

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

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

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

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

Canadian Army moving through Kandahar summer of 2009

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

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

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

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

American Army convoy heading towards Spin Boldak

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

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


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

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

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

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The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places – The Helmand Province

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.

Was there a better time to be an American than the 1950’s? This is a photo of the Lashkar Gah housing area for the Morrison-Knudsen firm circa 1958.

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.

in the 1950’s Lashkar Gah had the only coed pool in Afghanistan
In 2008 my happy home – The Taj in Jalalabad had the only coed pool in the country. I don’t think there will be another anytime soon.

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.

Living outside the wire in the south forces one to adapt to the situation as it is. Adding three feet to the exterior walls and topping them with concertina is not practical because it costs money we didn’t have and drew attention we didn’t need.
This part of the Jeff Cooper compound defense plan failed when Tor Spay (Black Dog in Pashto) chose to hide under my bed whenever fighting drew close to our quarters. He was great at keeping strangers out of our sleeping area though – the only Afghan who could get near him without getting mauled was my Terp Zaki.

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.

Jeff “Raybo” Radan and I heading out to the far reaches of Helmand Province on an old Marine Corps CH 53D that leaked hydraulic fluid all over us. We returned in an Osprey that didn’t leak a drop of fluid which was caused old grunts like us undue concern.
This was the main street of Naw Zad bazaar in 2009
Naw Zad bazaar in 2010 – this was the only project of mine that took longer than planned. It still came in on budget though because we did no subcontracting.

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, the Commanding Officer of RCT 2 in his Ops center

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.

LtCol Sean Riordan, (one of our IOC students in the early 90′) Col Dave Furness and me after a 5 hour foot patrol. – We’re hurting too but it was an interesting experience.

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.

When you’re hanging out with a good friend commanding a Marine Corps Regiment in combat its a good idea to go out of your way not to be a dick around the enlisted Marines. But the first time I got into Dave’s MRAP I couldn’t help myself when his MK 19 gunner briefed me on what to do if he opened fire with his grenade launcher. When he finished I said “I bet I can shoot that MK 19 better than you can” (and took this picture). Is his expression priceless or what? He said “Sir, let me try this again; when the big dog starts to bark you unstrap the ammo cans. Then you sit and wait for me to yell for ammo, only then do you break the seal and hand the can up. Then you sit right back down until I tell you to do something different or that I need more ammo. Got it”? His expression never changed so maybe I wasn’t so damn funny after all.

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.

Yukking it up with the workers at one of our road building projects. Dressing in local garb didn’t fool anyone once they saw your walking gait but the Afghans seemed to appreciate the effort.

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.

These two Marines taught the daughters of a local teacher in Naw Zad how to read and write English. I’m not sure we did the girls any favors in the long run but this is what Marines or soldier did when given the chance. They were unquestionable the good guys while they were in the Helmand.

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.

I’ll let the Base Mickey have the last word.

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The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places – The Salang Pass

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 Salang Pass tunnel entrance in 2005

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.

The Salang Tunnel entrance in 2012

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.

Typical minor traffic jam in the tunnel

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.

Dragging a fuel tanker full of fuel was an obvious fire hazard

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.

The Salang tunnel is one of the few places in Afghanistan where the American Army cannot force all traffic away from their convoys. The open air ventilation to the right is blocked by avalanche rubble for 10 months of the year.

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.

This was the preferred method for traversing the tunnel – hauling ass on an empty road but by 2006 finding the tunnel empty like this was not going to happen.

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.

I’ve done many reckless things in my life but eating Salang Pass crabs is not one of them.
I was partial to the fresh trout served al fresco and I got a discount by providing the frag grenade used to harvest the fish.

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.

Old Soviet combat outpost on the plains north of the Salang Pass
In the early days of our Afghan adventure there were still many abandoned Soviet bases north of the Salang Pass. with all sorts of interesting Soviet army messaging directed at both their soldiers and the Afghan Army. These propoganda paintings were long gone by 2007.

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).

This new restaurant was a great place to stop in 2005.
By 2007 the restaurant was destroyed by raging flood waters.
This gas station lasted about two years before the BTR’s became unstable and it started to wash away. Now the Afghans have HUMVEE’s, MRAP’s and M1 tanks to use as river weirs, maybe they’ll work better.

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 .

And there he is Baba D photo bombing me during an interview with ABC news. Ms. Raddatz taped an hour or so of Baba Tim explaining in detail why we were losing the war and never aired a second of it.

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.

The northern side of the Salang Pass and yes that herd of goats was heading up and over the pass but I’m not sure how because they weren’t allowed on the roadway inside the tunnel.

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.

Get some Army! This is how you fix recruiting woes

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.

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The John Paul Vann of Afghanistan Speaks

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

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

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

Chris Corsten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Assessing Trust in The Afghan Peace Deal

Editor’s Note: Chim Chim is back with a post on FRI. It has been over a decade since we last heard from him  He is a friend of mine with years of experience in Afghanistan at the higher levels of the U.S. Intelligence community. It is fitting that he once again reaches out to Free Range International to weigh in with some thoughts on the Afghanistan peace deal.

 

Trust. It’s a mysterious term and rarely understood. Per its definition, key attributes exist such as reliability, truth, ability, and strength. Contrary to popular belief, trust is not earned but rather obtained through a leap of faith. It is natural and can easily be broken. When it comes to the Afghan Peace Deal, trust is non-existent amongst the three players involved—The US Government, the Afghan Government, and the Taliban.

But should one look closely at the situation from an historical perspective, how can trust exist? More importantly, who can be trusted most? Better yet, who SHOULD be trusted most?

During the Russian-Afghan War, the United States was heavily involved in supporting multiple Afghan militias fighting against our greatest adversary. We gave and gave and gave but then, once the Russians were defeated, we put on the brakes. It was arguably one of the most devastating moments in US National Security that would inevitably come back and bite us hard.

We made countless promises to the Afghans and never came through with any of those promises which led to a major civil war between dozens of local tribes and militias. This civil war allowed the Taliban to blossom into a major organization which ruled Afghanistan for many years.

Immediately following 9-11, the United States went into a reactionary mode and was quick to invade Afghanistan on the logic that the Taliban were harboring Al Qaeda. Few realize during this time several nation states were providing safe haven to Al Qaeda during this time as Al Qaeda cells were spread across the globe. Another point of contention is the fact that the Taliban were in talks with Al Qaeda in an attempt to push them out of country instead forcing them into safe-haven in western Pakistan.

Our decision was made and teams of special operators infiltrated Afghanistan initiating America’s longest war. We did this with virtually zero ground truth, meaning, we had no sources or assets for intelligence on the ground prior to our invasion. Many whom we initially engaged in combat operations were nothing more than localized militias whom had little if anything to do with the Taliban (Central) meaning we were fighting tribesmen who would later turn to the Taliban due to our own actions.

Immediately following 9-11, Russia became an American strategic partner. We actually relied on Russia’s past to procure our initial network on the ground in Afghanistan.  The one country Afghans despise most, we became strategic partners with.

As time unfolded and upon immediate successes in achieving two goals set forth from US SOF elements (eliminate Al Qaeda’s safe-haven and rid Taliban of government control), a new force was inserted shortly after—the US Conventional military and State Department.

During this time, the United States threw billions of dollars into Afghanistan. It was during this period which continues even today, the United States implementation of a “quantifiable” approach to warfighting which completely overshadows anything qualitative.

America spent billions on programs that had virtually zero oversight. One example is based on school text books in which the United States and our coalition threw an estimated $30 million into the contract however it is estimated less than $1 million worth of product ever entered the country. HeraldExtra.com shows just a portion of the issue in their article titled, Textbooks not arriving in Afghan school.

The vast majority of funds displaced were not displaced. They were handed to local warlords, provincial governors, tribal leaders, etc. But if people want to see who the vast majority of individuals pocketed these funds, just walk down “Millionaire Row” in Kabul where you will find Afghan mansions vacant—vacant because those whom had such homes built have now fled the nation in fear of a Taliban takeover.

Prior to leaving, these local Afghans milked every last penny they could from the United States. It was the easiest way for anyone to get rich fast and rich as in millionaire rich. Simply put, the Afghan power-players created a racket and the United States didn’t care. More interesting is why we did not care.

We did not care about the misappropriations of funds because of the quantifiable war which we created. Those who held the money needed to get rid of it. And they did. And in doing so, they wrote their own tickets of success be it military personnel boasting numbers on OPER’s/EPR’s or State Department, NGO’s, etc fluffing resumes for permanent hire needs upon completion of their time in country.

What the United States did in Afghanistan does not demonstrate reliability, truth, ability, and strength hence, our inept methods in Afghanistan demonstrate how untrustworthy we are in our Afghan mission.

As bad as we were, the locals and politicians also demonstrated a lack of trust.

Afghan leaders saw how much money was going into Afghanistan. They witnessed their pockets flood with cash. They were empowered on a level most Americans should be jealous of. And as crazy as this sounds, many of these Afghans were closely aligned with Russia and Iran.

The Afghan Government was and continues to be incredibly corrupt.

In 2008, an Afghan warlord once said, “You expect us to believe in your own Rule of Law? You want us to trust the newly established Afghan Government’s Rule of Law which you, the Americans implemented? Do you not see how corrupt your own nation is? Look at the case of OJ Simpson.”

Think about this sentiment for a moment. Reflect on what this warlord was saying. You do not need to agree with what was said but think of the perception held. Perception is reality.

Another warlord once explained why the United States tactical intelligence was flawed. He explained that we would hand out cash to “walk-ins” for information about potential Taliban. We would take that information and execute a mission to kill or capture that individual. But what we seldom knew was the “walk-in” was merely in a tribal dispute with the target. And oftentimes, the “walk-in” was actually the one more aligned with the Taliban than the target itself.

The Afghans manipulated the United States every waking chance they could. And, they succeeded in doing what they wished on individual levels as well as within different political parties. Simply put, the Afghan politicians as well as local leaders demonstrated virtually zero reliability or truth which showcases why they were and remain untrustworthy.

The United States knew the Taliban were our enemy in Afghanistan. The Taliban ensured we were never to forget this. Through video’s published online, a plethora of kidnappings, to constantly attacking our assets, the Taliban and the array of Anti-Afghan Forces never led up.

If early warnings existed pertaining a potential attack, the Taliban came through with it. If the Taliban claimed they would allow for a temporary ceasefire, that ceasefire pretty much always happened. If a break of the ceasefire was sent through the air waves, expect the attack. They TOLD us pretty much every single move they were going to make. Their information was reliable, it was constantly set in truth, and they demonstrated over and over again their ability to do what they said. And, their strength came from not just their numbers but rather the constant support they obtained through the Pakistani ISI, Iranian assets, and the Kremlin itself.

If you watch the evening news and see a report on a serial murderer then take a walk in the woods and come across that serial murderer, do you trust the serial murderer’s potential? You would be a fool not to. The point is, trust in an entity you do not like does not mean trust should not exist. Bad people and bad organizations should be trusted to do bad things.

What is difficult to swallow is when we possess trust in something we cherish and realize that which we cherish most should be the least trusted. In the case of the Afghan Peace Deal, maybe, just maybe, it is not the Taliban who should NOT be trusted. Rather, maybe we should be skeptical over the amount of trust we place in the Afghan Government and that of our own.

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Peace in Afghanistan Inshallah

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Qatar’s capital city, Doha today for the signing of a peace deal with the Taliban. In a rare demonstration of presenting both sides of a contentious deal the Washington Post opinion section featured dueling pieces that capture this unique moment in time. The peace deal is a clear win for both the Trump administration and the Afghan people. As usual the devil is in the details but it appears we are on the way out of Afghanistan.

Barnett Rubin who is a senior fellow and associate director of the Center on International Cooperation of New York University and non-resident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, outlines the agreement in his WaPo OpEd.

The agreement provides a timetable for troop withdrawal, counterterrorism guarantees, a path to a cease-fire and a process for political settlement. Implementation would also require dismantling Taliban infrastructure in neighboring Pakistan and assurances by external powers that none will use Afghanistan against others.

Mr. Rubin has considerable time on the ground in the region and his take on the peace deal (which is it is a good deal)  is identical to mine.

Max Boot, who is a Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, took the opposite view. In his WaPo OpEd he outlines three different scenarios for the near future in Afghanistan. He then goes onto to predict the worst case scenario (the Taliban rolling into Kabul and taking over the country) as the most likely. I can tell you unequivocally that is the least likely scenario.

Many of our foreign policy experts and more than a few of my friends caution that the Taliban is not a cohesive monolithic organization, and that negotiators are only speaking for the Quetta, Peshawar, and Miranshaw Shura’s. This is a fact that is true, but means nothing now. The Taliban were able to enforce the peace during last years Eid celebration across the country and I believe they can do so again. Regardless of what I and my friends believe the only thing that counts is how the Afghans feel about the deal.

Taliban fighters taking selfies with Afghan army troops during the Eid ceasefire last year.

The Senior Vice President-elect of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, published his opinion on the Time website. I Fought the Taliban. Now I’m Ready to Meet Them at the Ballot Box is the title of his piece and that’s a strong endorsement of the process. Amrullah Saleh is the former head of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), a former Interior Minister and he survived a serious assault on his election headquarters last July. That assault started with a car bomb and was continued by suicide vest equipped assault teams. Amrullah Saleh survived by jumping off the roof of his four story headquarters onto the roof of a neighboring building.

It is reasonable to assume Mr. Saleh had engaged in a running gun battle before escaping to safety, he is that kind of guy.

In another fascinating development the Military Times published an article today with the headline ISIS taking a beating in Afghanistan setting  the stage for a potential a U.S. troop withdrawal.  Buried deep in the article is this:

The recent campaign in Nangarhar is one example. Effective operations by US/Coalition & Afghan security forces, as well as the Taliban, led to ISIS-K losing territory & fighters. Hundreds surrendered. ISIS-K hasn’t been eliminated but this is real progress,” Khalilzad tweeted Tuesday

Remember a few posts back I highlighted this article in the Washington Post about the defeat of ISIS because it failed to mention the Taliban’s direct role? It seem like the first draft of history is up for grabs regarding the defeat of ISIS-K in Eastern Afghanistan.  There is little to gain but much to lose in suppression of the truth. I doubt an experienced reporter would have not known about the Taliban’s role in fighting ISIS-K so it is hard to figure out why the WaPo would print such obviously fake news.

Regardless, ISIS is now gone in Eastern Afghanistan and the remaining pockets in the north now the problem of the Taliban. Who seem to be very efficient at rooting them out.

What I cannot determine is how many troops will stay and what those troops will be doing. If the plan is to leave the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force – Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) in place to hunt down ISIS and al Qaida that is not going to work. ISIS doesn’t need to be serviced by us any longer and separating al Qaida trainers from Taliban students is impossible.

If Amrullah Saleh is willing to give the Taliban a chance, and they reach an agreement, men like Sirajuddin Haqqani, who have been at the top of the JPEL for years, will be allowed to go in peace. The JPEL is the Joint Prioritized Effects List which is essentially a lethal version of the FBI’s most wanted. Allowing the men on that list to walk free, get passports and travel  is going to be a bitter blow to the people who have been hunting them. But that may be the price of peace.

I have to add that CJSOTF-A is not going to be able to operate behind the back of the Senior VP. Mr. Saleh has decades of experience working with the CIA and CJSTOF and he will have a say on what the Americans can and cannot do if they leave CJSTOF-A in Afghanistan.

This deal with the Taliban is how it ends. It is the only way it can end. The only question in Afghanistan was when, not if, we were leaving. The Taliban cannot beat the Kabul government in battle. The Kabul government cannot beat the Taliban in battle. The continued presence of American SF teams, tactical aircraft and trainers brought the Taliban to the negotiating table which is the best they could do.  It is up to the Afghans to decide what happens next. It is also time for us to leave.

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Brookings Institute Fires a Broadside at Haqqani and Misses

General John Allen, USMC (ret) who is the president of the Brookings Institute, lashed out at the New York Times for publishing an  Op-Ed  Sirajuddin Haqqani. His article, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Terrorist was an unfortunate response that reinforces a growing narrative regarding incompetence in the elite, ruling class.

The most glaring mistake in General Allen’s  attack on the New York Times was repeating the thoroughly debunked “very fine people on both sides” hoax. That hoax was spread by the legacy media despite the fact that President Trump was talking about people protesting the removal of Confederate battle monuments.  He specifically condemned the white supremest’s if you listen to the whole quote.  General Allen is the direct descendant  of a Confederate Cavalry officer (I forget his name but remember he fought at Culpepper), for which is he justifiably proud and I suspect he , too was not happy about the removal of confederate battle monuments.  I know General Allen, he was my boss at the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course, I respect and admire him greatly so it is disturbing  to see him trafficking in hoaxes.

Worse was his endorsement of Forever War by implying we should renege on our Peace Agreement with the Taliban. This is his discussion of the Haqqani group:

This organization was and continues to be a central component of the Taliban, a major connecting file into al-Qaida, and a darling of Pakistan’s ISI. The Haqqanis, the Taliban, and al-Qaida endorse a radical interpretation of sharia that deprives women of any meaningful rights, to include the right to an education, and the freedom to pursue their own wants and interests, such as, for example, the legal profession. Countless lives were lost – and many, many more were wounded and otherwise terrorized – at the hands of this group and its peer terrorist entities, and had they not been formally designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, we would have had little means to diminish their influence and stop their violent activities. And at the very center of this violence was Sirajuddin Haqqani, operational commander of the Haqqani network as well as the #2 of the Taliban.

All of that is true and every bit of it irrelevant if we intend to sign a peace deal with the Taliban. It is none of our business if the Afghans decide to reconcile withTaliban leaders including Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is a bad man, so is Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who reconciled years ago, and ran in the recent Presidential election. The notorious warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has been a member of the Kabul government when he wasn’t in exile dodging human rights tribunals, is a bad man. He was nominally on our side, so he’s a good, bad man, but to the Afghans he’s little better than Haqqani.

What the Afghans do to reconcile the rift in their civil society is their business. If they want to reconcile with and guarantee the freedom of warlords like Haqqani it is their right to do so. There are reasons to doubt Taliban commitment to a more inclusive civil process, but again, it is no longer our concern.

It is important to acknowledge the reality on the ground and that reality is the Taliban cannot win militarily and the same holds true for the Central Government. Given that context I believe it is time to let the Afghans work this out for themselves.

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