The hardest place The American military adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley

Wesley Morgan

Book - 2021

"When we think of the war in Afghanistan, chances are we're thinking of a small, remote corner of the country where American military action has been concentrated: the Pech and its tributary valleys in Kunar and Nuristan provinces. The rugged, steep terrain and thick forests made the region a natural hiding spot for targets in the American war on terror, from Osama bin Laden to the Islamic State, and it has been the site of constant U.S. military activity for nearly two decades. Even as the U.S. presence in Afghanistan transitions to a drone war, the Pech has remained at the center of it, a testbed for a new method of remote warfare. Wesley Morgan, who grew up with the war, observing it closely, first visited the Pech in 2010, whi...le he was still a college student embedding with military units as a freelancer. By then, the Pech and its infamous tributary the Korengal had become emblematic of the war, but Morgan found that few of the troops fighting there could explain how or when their remote outposts had been built. In The Hardest Place, he unravels the history those troops didn't know, captures the culture and reality of the war through both American and Afghan eyes, and reports on the snowballing American missteps that made each unit's job harder than the last as storied outfits like Marines, paratroopers, Rangers, Green Berets, and SEALs all took their turn... As the war drags on through its third presidential administration, Morgan concludes that we've created a status quo that could last forever in the Pech, always in search of the next target"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Wesley Morgan (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxvi, 644 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [519]-620) and index.
ISBN
9780812995060
  • Recurring Characters
  • Prologue: 2010
  • Part I. Into the Mountains, 2002-2005
  • Chapter 1. America Comes to Kunar, 2002-2003
  • Chapter 2. Winter Strike, 2003
  • Chapter 3. The A-Camp, 2004
  • Chapter 4. Red Wings, 2005
  • Part II. The Pech Bubble, 2006-2010
  • Chapter 5. The Plunge, 2006
  • Chapter 6. Where the Road Ends...,2006-2007
  • Chapter 7. Rock Avalanche, 2007
  • Chapter 8. A Valley Too Far, 2007-2008
  • Chapter 9. Stuck in the Valley of Death, 2008-2009
  • Part III. The Long Goodbye, 2010-2013
  • Chapter 10. The Cul-de-Sac, 2010
  • Chapter 11. Realignment, 2010-2011
  • Chapter 12. Redux, 2011
  • Chapter 13. Afghanization, 2011-2013
  • Part IV. The New Counterterrorism, 2011-2017
  • Chapter 14. Haymaker, 2011-2013
  • Chapter 15. The War That Never Ends, 2014-2017
  • Epilogue: 2018-2020
  • Acknowledgments
  • Glossary
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Morgan debuts with an exhaustive and deeply reported history of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan's Pech river valley and its tributary valleys, Korengal and Waygal. Since the start of the war against the Taliban in 2001, Morgan writes, resistance in this northeastern corner of the country has been relentless. American troops built bridges, roads, and networks of translators and informants, and navigated local rivalries over control of the logging and gemstone trades, but persistent "friendly fire" incidents and the mistreatment and even murder of detainees poisoned local relations. Morgan details the counterinsurgency theories driving U.S. strategy under top commanders such as Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and reveals how frequent rotations and redeployments undermined the institutional knowledge of frontline troops. He chronicles firefights and drone strikes against Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda operatives, tracks troop surges and withdrawals, profiles U.S. special forces soldiers who have deployed to the region multiple times, documents the emergence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, and describes the mixed reactions of Pech valley veterans who are now seeing American forces coordinate with the Taliban in their fight against ISIS. Morgan enriches his impressive research and insightful analysis with vivid writing and deft character sketches. The result is a definitive portrait of the epicenter of America's longest war. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The ongoing war in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001, has lasted longer than any other war in U.S. history. Journalist Morgan, who has reported on the U.S. military for the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post, has created a superbly researched and smoothly written account of America's decadelong involvement in the remote Pech valley. Beginning with the arrival of U.S. troops in Kunar Province in 2002, Morgan proceeds to give a year-by-year accounting of what happened on the ground, and what daily life was like for U.S. soldiers, Taliban forces, and Afghan civilians. His stellar reporting explains how numerous rotations of American troops spent time seeking at first to find Osama Bin-Laden, and then, later, trying to establish a base of operations that could be used to improve the area's infrastructure and stability. Morgan's narrative, buttressed by countless interviews and over 100 pages of endnotes, describes the endlessly frustrating military experience of an American command, too often unclear as to their mission or their enemy. VERDICT. Although this is a lengthy book, it reads easily and, within its accessible pages, readers can gain a better understanding of an ongoing, yet often forgotten war. An essential, thoroughly reported work.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A searching history of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida in a remote district of Afghanistan. The Pech Valley, writes journalist Morgan in his impressive debut, is a mountainous region that drew the attention of the U.S. military shortly after 9/11, with soldiers "on the trail of Osama bin Laden." Establishing a series of forward operating bases, American troops attempted to bring something like order to the region. However, with villages isolated by steep mountains and almost no passable roads, movement was difficult--it could take an entire day for a small unit to move a couple of miles, even without opposition. Insurgents who learned their tactics from the fight against the Soviet army in the 1980s now turned against the U.S. forces, using improvised explosive devices and well-coordinated ambushes. The locals who seemed to be cooperative to U.S. soldiers were clearly working with the insurgents--their family members and neighbors--when the Americans inevitably went away. While large assaults into the narrow side valleys and high mountain clearings could lead to significant enemy casualties, they too often led to unacceptable civilian deaths, further alienating the population. Furthermore, as Morgan vividly shows, the enemy proved skillful in overcoming the Americans' apparent technological superiority, downing helicopters and overrunning small bases on several occasions. Ultimately, the U.S. turned over its outposts to the Afghan military, providing a few advisers who rarely accompanied the locals into combat. By 2015, the U.S. was conducting operations with drones and the occasional crewed aircraft. The author, who spent a good deal of time in the region, interviewed many of the soldiers who served in the Pech as well as a number of Afghan locals. The result is a sobering look at how the same mistakes were repeated by subsequent deployments, with predictable results. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the war in Afghanistan. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 America Comes to Kunar 2002-2003 In Search of the Sheikh American troops set up their first base in Kunar Province as the snow melted in the mountains in early 2002, the spring after the September 11 attacks and the ensuing autumn air war. They came trying to pick up a trail that had gone cold the previous December at the battle of Tora Bora, in another Afghan mountain range fifty miles to Kunar's south--the trail of Osama bin Laden. I interviewed more than two hundred American veterans of Kunar before I found someone who knew firsthand how, why, and when U.S. troops entered the mountainous, nineteen-hundred-square-mile province and established the first of what would become a network of over a dozen remote outposts there. Tom Greer was a wiry former member of the Army's premier counterterrorist unit, Delta Force. In the spring of 2002, after leading the Delta team that came tantalizingly close to bin Laden at Tora Bora, he had been a major overseeing three small reconnaissance teams that paired some of the most highly trained commandos in the U.S. military with CIA officers and specialists in electronic eavesdropping. Wearing beards and local clothes and driving around in the Toyota Hilux pickup trucks that are ubiquitous in Afghanistan, the operators of these Advanced Force Operations teams were fanning out across the country's east, picking sites for little encampments. No one meant for these sites to become permanent, as most of them eventually did; they were just meant to be lily pads, places to set up radio relay points and get a good night's sleep in between reconnaissance forays into the mountains in Hiluxes or on all-terrain vehicles. The team that Tom Greer sent bouncing up Kunar's rocky, gravel-surfaced main road in a couple of pickup trucks sometime in the spring of 2002 was "SEAL heavy," he told me more than a decade later--made up mostly of operators from Delta Force's Navy equivalent, SEAL Team 6. The SEALs and other personnel who accompanied them were entering a province of some 500,000 people "and an equal number of goats," as the author of a U.S. diplomatic cable a few years later would joke, where ribbons of green between the brown mountains housed fields of corn and wheat and groves of walnut trees, whose fruit the province is famous for. Kunar was a conservative, rural place, where women were seldom seen outside except when working in the fields by their villages. The qualities that made it different from other eastern conservative, rural provinces--its historically complex relationship with the central government, the role of the timber trade in its economy, the Saudi-inspired brand of Islam that had become popular there during the war against the Soviets--were not obvious to special operators just starting to get the feel of the country many of them would come back to over and over again. A couple of Delta Force operators had already visited Kunar during the fall air campaign, working in conjunction with the CIA, but they hadn't stayed. This time the reconnaissance team stopped when it reached a dusty, rectangular compound a mile south of Asadabad, the provincial seat where the Pech River empties into the larger Kunar River, the province's spine. A site where there was already a fort of sorts was ideal, so that was where the SEALs made camp. Greer went up to visit the team once it was settled in. A Delta Force operator on a different recon team had recently named another new outpost Camelot. The SEALs had the honor of picking a nickname for the Asadabad camp, and they chose a less high-minded one: Puchi Ghar, because they were under the mistaken impression that puchi ghar meant "dog-shit mountain" in Pashto, and that was the vibe they got from the place. (In fact, the phrase meant something like "crass mountain" and sounded nonsensical to Afghan ears.) The compound didn't look like much, it was true--some broken-down mud-brick walls and buildings centered on a courtyard about five hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide, separated from the wide Kunar River by a road and some stands of trees. Locals called the compound Topchi Base because topchi was the Pashto word for "artillery," and the Soviets had based howitzers there. More recently, Taliban fighters had used the site as a barracks, although their government had held little sway in Kunar outside Asadabad. No one imagined at the time that U.S. troops and CIA officers would occupy this base--eventually renamed Forward Operating Base Asadabad and then FOB Wright, after a Green Beret killed nearby in 2005, but often just called A-Bad--for twelve and a half years and continue to visit it even after that. Of the seven thousand troops the United States had on the ground in Afghanistan that spring, when debris was still being cleared from the grounds of the World Trade Center, only a handful were directly involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. For the SEAL-led team that established FOB Asadabad, as for the other recon teams working in the east, picking up bin Laden's scent was priority number one. A top CIA official at Langley had recently stopped sending out a daily memo about progress on the bin Laden hunt, because there wasn't any, and CIA officers working out of an abandoned hotel in Kabul--their new station--were eager to use the military teams to get back on track. The Asadabad team was "looking for anything related to UBL, chasing his ghost up there," Greer recalled, using the government acronym for Usama bin Laden, then forty-five. "Any old fart that was rumored to be associated with UBL or an old acquaintance was on the target deck." On May 6, within days of the special operations team's arrival, the CIA fired the first shot in America's war in Kunar, using one of its newly armed Predator drones to launch a Hellfire missile just outside a village in the Shigal valley northeast of Asadabad. The agency suspected that a pair of bin Laden's old Afghan allies from the 1980s, including the notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were harboring him. To avoid tipping their hand, officials in Washington told reporters only that they had been targeting Hekmatyar, not bin Laden. Questioned about the strike during an exchange with reporters, President George W. Bush was cryptic about whom the intelligence agency had been trying to kill in Kunar: "I can assure you, when we go after individuals in the theater of war, it's because they intend to do some harm to America." When asked at a press conference less than a week after the September 11 attacks whether he wanted bin Laden killed, Bush had answered with the bellicosity of a gunfighter: "I want justice. And there's an old poster out west as I recall that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' " The president did not mention bin Laden the next month when he announced the beginning of the U.S.-led aerial bombardment of Afghanistan, however. The military air campaign focused not on finding and striking individual al-Qaida leaders but on driving the Taliban regime from power and thereby removing the sanctuary from which al-Qaida had planned its attacks. For the first week or so after the attacks on New York and Washington, the CIA had had a good grasp on where bin Laden was, maybe better than his Taliban hosts did. According to the agency's station chief in Pakistan at the time, a CIA informant within al-Qaida made contact the Monday after the attacks to describe a town hall meeting the terrorist chief had just held with his followers near Jalalabad, the nearest big city to Kunar's south, straddling the highway from Kabul to Pakistan. Untouched by the air campaign, bin Laden next surfaced at Tora Bora in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad in early December 2001. There, the U.S. military's early unwillingness to commit ground troops beyond a handful of special operators to call in air strikes allowed bin Laden to slip away. As part of the meager American force sent to Tora Bora, Greer, the Delta Force major who later sent the SEALs to Kunar, had been there to hear the final, regretful radio broadcast bin Laden made to his followers in mid-December as the bombs fell in the mountains: "O youth of the nation. Crave death and life will be given to you." Then bin Laden was gone, along with his Egyptian deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. The way the U.S. government divvied up counterterrorism duties after the Taliban's ouster, the hunt for al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan fell to the CIA, whose clandestine activities were more acceptable to Pakistan's leaders than a uniformed presence. The hunt inside Afghanistan would become one of the many responsibilities of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had been named (and would remain named for thirteen years). The hunters would come from Fort Bragg, North Carolina's Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC--the headquarters responsible for overseeing Delta, Team 6, and other top-tier, top secret military counterterrorism units. Excerpted from The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley by Wesley Morgan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.