 Thank you for joining us. I'm David Sturman, Senior Policy Analyst here at New America with the International Security Program. We're here today to talk about this new book from Wesley Morgan, who's the author. And the book is The Hardest Place, the American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pesh Valley. And to discuss the book with him, we have Emma Skye, who is a senior fellow with the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Also author of In a Time of Monsters Traveling in the Middle East in Revolt. And with that, I turn it over for a discussion. We'll take your questions via the Q&A box at the bottom a bit later in the bet. Thank you both for doing this. Thank you, David. So, Wes, congratulations on your book. It's really a superb piece of writing. And in years to come, people will look at the woman in Afghanistan and wonder how it was that US troops were sent to remote forsaken places, rotation after rotation, achieving so little yet at great cost in terms of blood and treasure. And it would look no further than your detailed and deeply researched account of American troops in the Pesh. Now I first met you in Iraq, when you were a 20 year old freelancer and you looked about 15, and I wondered, you know, what is this child doing in a war zone. So what made you want to be a war reporter? And I remember our meeting very vividly in the green zone, I think in 2008. I was always interested in these wars. I was a military history nerd growing up. And then September 11 happened when I was in eighth grade and kind of made it all current and real. So from then on, kind of my goal was get over and see these conflicts. And the obvious path would have been to go into the military. I started ROTC when I got to college. But then, thanks to an opportunity presented by General David Petraeus, was able to start going to Iraq, and then quickly shift to Afghanistan as a freelancer during my summers and during some time off of college. And this was both, you know, a much more immediate way to see the wars during this critical phase, the Iraqi and Afghan surges. And it also I think wound up being much more when I was interested in doing trying to sort of figure out and get to the bottom of what was going on in these conflicts. So you've been reporting on Afghanistan since 2009. And when did you decide you wanted to write a book, and that it would take the form of a longitudinal study of a specific valley, the patch through every rotation of US forces. So I had the idea of doing a longitudinal study of some part of the country, coming out of a trip that I took in 2010. In the summer of 2010 it was the it was the summer of the surge that President Obama had announced at West Point in December 2009. And I spent that summer bouncing around the country just visiting different infantry battalions that were involved in really tough fighting. You know what were the what were the toughest places that the that this surge was coming up against. And one of those visits was to the patch others were to sanguine where British troops were engaged in very difficult fighting to Jari and Argendob, another place where US troops were. But the patch was the one that really stuck with me. I wound up going back to my senior year of college and writing a senior thesis about which doesn't really hold up very well I mean it was. It seemed like there was kind of a nice ending to the patch story in 2011 with US forces pulling out but later in that same year they wound up being sucked back in. And that began kind of one of these new chapters that I'm that the rest of the story is taken up with. Yeah, in 2012 I pitched the book to Random House as, let's look at this war in microcosm let's look at a place that represents many of the threads that run through the broader war, although not all of them. And try and just do this in detail from track, you know rewind to the very first outposts being established, try and get as close to we can, as we can to talking to the guys who established those outposts, and then up through up as far as we can into the present. When I was reading your book, what really came over was the dedication of the US military to the mission and to each other. And you know you really describe the harsh conditions they worked under the incredible sacrifices they made. The book is a testament to the dedication of American soldiers to a hopeless cause. And yet you dedicate the book to the interpreters. Why to them. So Afghanistan is a place where I think the US military and intelligence community have often found themselves lost. I mean this is one of the major themes of the early part of the book is the military trying to find its ground and who are trying to find who to trust, and really having a very, very difficult time. Now this was the case throughout Afghanistan. But in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, where the Pesh Valley runs, there's the additional problem of it being an extremely linguistically diverse area. You've got on the Pesh Valley floor, people speak Pashto, many of the security forces speak Dari, but then in the smaller tributary valleys that flow down into the patch, the Wigol Valley, the these are valleys that have their own languages. And in some cases have tiny little pockets of other languages, Gambiri, Tregami other languages, that it was almost impossible for us forces to penetrate. And they became incredibly reliant on on these interpreters, these interpreters often served there for years and years at a time, you know, working for one commander after another. So they wound up being very valuable sources for me as well the Afghan interpreters and in some cases in the Afghan American interpreters, but they also in many ways I mean they kept these they kept these soldiers alive and very, very great responsibility for what success. These units did have as short lived as it may have been. Now you quote Lieutenant Colonel Joe Ryan in 2010, asking the question. Where we here. Are we building a nation. Are we chasing terrorists. Is it counter insurgency coin or counter terrorism CT. There was coin by day CT by night. What special forces are undermining the work of conventional forces. Do you feel when writing this book, you discovered the answer to Ryan's question, why we here. I think what I discovered is that the reasons that us forces were in the patch very quickly were lost and swallowed up in new logic and ever evolving logic of what they were doing there. So, when Carl Ryan was a battalion commander there in 2010, the first time that I visited the patch. He was kind of, he was living at the moment where it really just wasn't clear anymore both of these threads, the counter terrorism thread and the counter insurgency or nation building thread had been evolving for so long. And both continued to be emphasized that it was very difficult to tell and in that moment in 2010, his own chain of command had very different points of emphasis on this matter. And when Obama at that period, he'd made clear that the reason he wanted to stay in Afghanistan and do these surges was to prevent al-Qaeda from having a safe haven, which is the counter terrorism thread, but the actual surges themselves, the strategy that they embraced was the much broader based strategy of counter insurgency against the Taliban. In many parts of the country, you would only be encountering one of those threads at a time in Jari district in Kandahar and sanguine district in Helmand, you were just fighting local Taliban. In the patch, it was always both, because there was always an al-Qaeda presence up there, small numbers of Arab trainers essentially, who were working alongside local fighters, and who remained just a source of persistent interest for the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. So all along the way, the counter terrorism thread is wound up with the counter insurgency thread in the patch at a very granular low district level that it often, where it was often not wound up that way in many, many other districts. So another character that you focus on in the book is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Osland, who at the time was the command of the 173rd Airborne's 2nd of the 503rd the Rock. And you describe him as an optimist who believed in believing and he's always telling the Afghans that they have to pick a side they've got to choose between the government and the insurgents. And yes, at some point there seems to be a realization that the population and insurgency can't be separated because they've become one and the same. So when you look at the experience of US forces in the Petch Valley. Do you think coin doctrine is flawed and really not suitable for countries such as Afghanistan. Well, let me put a pin in the basic question there about coin doctrine and rewind a little bit just to this, this kind of the question of how these battalions were actually operating. So a succession of battalions really were doing what we came to know as the counter insurgency doctrine in Iraq, before such a doctrine existed. The 132 infantry battalion from the 10th Mountain Division was out there building outposts and paving roads and living among the population. In 2006, when simply because it's commanders Chris Cavoli and McNicholson had decided that this was the way to go they'd read deeply about it, and it seemed like the appropriate strategy to them. And when Osland comes in and replaces them, he continues the same strategy although in a somewhat more ambitious way. And by that time, he is indeed working off of field manual 324 has been published. And that's now the orthodoxy in the US military by 2007 2008 when that unit is in the Petch Valley. And the point was that the patches such a complex place that any kind of cookie cutter template for it was always going to run into into into huge problems. So for example, you know, the idea that the insurgency in the population became inseparable. That was very much the case in the Cornwall Valley, one of the side valleys where both Chris Cavoli is one of his companies became really bogged down and entangled and suffered heavy casualties. And subsequent units after them. It became fairly clear, although it often was something that each unit had to relearn again in its own time and its own cost in lives, that the insurgency in the Cornwall was a native insurgency that had additional help with what it had there. There were al-Qaeda figures present. There were Taliban fighters present certainly. And the coring all the coring allies themselves had assumed a place in the Taliban hierarchy. But it was it was a native insurgency and often the the elders you were talking to in the Shura had a nephew or two nephews or a nephew and a son up in the mountains fighting it. So the Petch Valley floor itself, it was a little more complicated. It often was, it often was the case that the fighters that you were, you were duking it out with in the patch were people who were from the patch. There's a guy named Mula Dauron who's a character I tracked throughout the book, who was a wealthy resident of the town of sunday and fought Americans roughly around his hometown for years and years and years. But that's not to say that in the patch itself, the villages were always hostile. We're not in the American in the American experience in the patch. Many of the villagers on the valley floor were very receptive to American health, and we're excited about it and in fact we're willing to forgive and forget a lot of American mistakes. But as things moved along. They're just the population turned cold is the way that a lot of guys would put it just be accumulated scar tissue of so many deaths from both sides, just being stuck in the middle. He eventually left the population really unwilling to help either side much to stick its neck out much for either side. That made the jobs of guys like Colonel Osland, who really felt like he had to get to move this population and particular it's it's civilian officials this district governors he had to ensure that they were on the right side that made his job very frustrating and I would say very futile. I mean, he's dealing with people who are going to be there long after he leaves, and who simply aren't going to pick a side in the way that he had to pick a side. So that the, the, the war of rotations and the sheer complexity of the environment, I think, made that counterinsurgency approach, very, very difficult in the patch. And then also, I mean, it's probably a more foundational problem with it in the patch was that the end state of it always was going to have to be handing this over to Afghan government forces. And the Afghan government that the United States was working with up in the Pesh was not a government that many people they're viewed as legitimate or even if they viewed it as legitimate, they often still viewed it as predatory and extractive, and not something that they trusted or wanted to have much to do with. So, I think that was kind of the foundational flaw of it up in this part of the country is that the US was trying, often kind of half heartedly to hand things off to military and police forces that it was not making its main effort to stand up, and which the population themselves viewed with great distrust and suspicion. You spoke to many Afghans during your time covering the war. Did you get a sense of the general view that people had of Americans. Did they think that Americans had come to Afghanistan to help, or did they think they were evil stupid. The view of Americans there probably as many views of Americans as there are Afghans, and it's a there's a tremendous range of the way that people perceive the American presence. I did. I tried to speak to district governors interpreters, you know local businessmen people who had had persistent relationships not just with one American unit, but who had seen many American units come and go, and had had had relationships with many American officers, whether it was a lieutenant that they were, you know series of lieutenants that they worked with, or a series of kernels that they worked with. One thing that comes to mind is, there's, there's a, there was an old man that I interviewed at one point from the patch about the American experience, and he almost he prefaced his whole, his whole talk with me. By essentially comparing the Americans positively to the Soviets, by saying, look, the Soviets, you know, in 1978 1979 is that even before the Soviet involvement kicked off when they were just Soviet advisors here they were involved in massacres true massacres killing hundreds of civilians. The United States never did anything like that. It was almost like he was sort of establishing to me that he did not. He was not anti American. Before he then began, you know, fairly detailed critique of the whole experience, the whole American involvement that he had, that he had seen. Well, there's another guy he appears early in the book. There's another elderly man from the Whitehall Valley, north of the patch, who I end the book with the nearly end the book with some of his comments, who makes kind of a different comparison to the Soviets, he says, the Soviets were wrong about everything the Soviets were godless, you're terrible people, but they built things that lasted longer, and the roads and things that the Americans have built. You know, they didn't finish building them, the ones that they did finish don't last. What have they left us with, except for the Taliban and dice Shindelkaya. So, I think a dynamic that definitely exists in Kunar and Nuristan, and, you know, less so in other parts of the country is that the Taliban presence in the in Kunar and Nuristan was very weak before 2001 this was not the Taliban territory, or this is not the Taliban heartland. And it was as a result of US involvement that the Taliban became strong in the province and was brought in kind of to help to help a local insurgency fight the Americans. So in some ways it really is, you know, there are places in the Whitehall Valley that have not seen a Taliban presence at all pre 2001 that now are governed by the Taliban. And there are there are also decreasingly but there are still some pockets south of the patch in areas like the Koringall that are governed by the Islamic State which is a group that didn't exist. You know, before, before American involvement. So there's I think there's quite a great deal of bitterness about, you know, Americans coming with good intentions but not fulfilling their promises and in some cases leaving things worse than they then they started. Or COVID has led to the deaths of half a million Americans. And so it certainly caused us to look at national security in a different light. How much of a threat do terrorist groups in Afghanistan really pose to the US. It's a difficult question to answer and I think the long and short of it is that the United States is going to have to make that decision without really knowing the answer. And that's always been the case all along the way. These are these are closed organizations that don't want us to know what they're up to, and do a very good job of preventing us from knowing what they're really up to. So it becomes, you know, the decision that policymakers in general have to contend with is, what's our best guess about the threat that ISIS in the Koringall Valley poses, or that such and such al-Qaeda leader in the YGAL Valley poses. And this is a question that we've grappled with all along the way. In the case in the early years, there was a figure that US forces were hunting from essentially from 2002, until they finally caught him in late 2010, named Abu Eqlas, who was an Egyptian militant, who had been in Qunar since the 80s. He had kind of, he had never left after this after the Soviet jihad against the Soviets. He just worked himself into the fabric of Qunari society. But at some point, after the US intervention, after the first US troops arrived in Qunar, he became a key figure in establishing the anti-American and anti-government insurgency in the province. And he became, he was an Egyptian, he had links to al-Qaeda. And he was essentially the al-Qaeda liaison to the local insurgency in the valley. Now, because al-Qaeda figures were few and far between in Afghanistan, and because Abu Eqlas himself had a high profile because he was a well known local figure, he became a flashing light that US forces pursued for years. But the reality is, we know in retrospect, at no point was he an international terrorist figure who was involved in plotting external operations. He knew people like that. There was an Abu Abedah, also an Egyptian figure who was running around the province some of the same time, who indeed was involved in plotting external operations in the early 2000s. But he was operating without the military knowing about it. He kept a lower profile, and we became distracted by this other al-Qaeda figure who was not really what we believed him to be or feared that he was. This whole dynamic played out again in the late Obama administration centered on an al-Qaeda figure named Furuq al-Qatani. This is a cutlery Saudi guy who wound up ensconced up in the mountains north of the patch in the years after bin Laden's death. And because of the documents found in Abu Abedah by the seals in May 2011 when they killed bin Laden, we knew that Furuq al-Qatani was a person who bin Laden himself had known about and whom bin Laden himself had sort of seen great things for and had given orders to establish a new al-Qaeda sanctuary in the mountains north of the patch in Qunar in Nuristan. So he became a figure of great, great interest for the US intelligence community and the Joint Special Operations Command, which ran a years long drone campaign trying to get him. But as far as how much of a threat he really posed, that was always essentially an impossible question to answer. There would be pieces of information that would come in suggesting, okay, he's been he's been linked to bringing in Pakistani nationals who have British passports and clean records and training them for something that suggests international terrorism, but how I mean how much was he able to do with them and then. So on the other end of the spectrum, if indeed he's just stuck up there just hunkered down, trying to survive trying to avoid the drone campaign. Does that mean that the drone campaign then needs to persist indefinitely to maintain that state of affairs. If you're not going to, in the case of Furuq al-Qatani they did eventually kill him. It took five years of concerted effort. So this becomes the question with these, with these little pockets is how much, I mean, how much resources, how many drones, how many, you know troops at the staging bases are appropriate for, you know, keeping the lid on, you know, a guy, a couple of guys, a group of guys surrounding a guy. So as a result of the Islamic State in Kunar. The question becomes more complicated because of the Islamic State's whole MO of virtually inspiring attacks rather than necessarily directly plotting them. So you start to wonder, I mean, okay, so maybe in the Corungal they have a sanctuary where they can have a guy on a laptop, but that's true in Nigeria and Mozambique and northern Somalia and places in Syria and Iraq that this has been clear out of over control of. So then what are you, you know, how much effort and how much, how many resources are you willing to commit against that kind of problem. So over 2000 Americans lost their lives in Afghanistan and over 20,000 wounded. And now here we are after almost two decades in which well over 100,000 Afghans met violent death. This government is seeking to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan with the fig leaf of an agreement with the Taliban. How do US veterans that you know, feel about this. I encounter as complicated of feelings about the war in Afghanistan among US veterans as I do among Afghans. And again, I think it's, it's an incredibly personal thing that runs the gamut of about just about every possible take on the war that we imagine. But as with Afghans, I think I encounter a lot of bitterness. I certainly know American veterans who have come away from this experience, frustrated at the idea that the United States will leave Afghanistan who come away, feeling like if we had tried harder. If we had continued at key moments, we wouldn't be where we are today that we owe Afghans are sticking around that we owe them continued military support. To prevent the country from following and to follow through on the many, many, many promises that we spent 19 years years making. So that's certainly a perspective that I hear often. I also often hear the perspective that this is all just been a waste. It's a it's a sunk cost. Just be done with it. We've seen we've seen we've thrown everything against the wall it hasn't stuck you know nothing has stuck. Why should we expect better results now when we're at the the smallest, the smallest military commitment that we've had since the opening weeks of the war in late 2001, early 2002. So what's the point. There was a, there's a part of the epilogue of the book that describes how in a particular part of Kunar province over the past couple years and in the especially in the six months leading up to the Doa agreement last year. The special operations task force in Afghanistan was actually using drone strikes in a way to support the Taliban against ISIS, is the Taliban and ISIS were fighting each other in the same old valleys like the Koring all where American troops used to fight. There's a sergeant first class senior NCO who I know who had fought in the Koring all as a young man, and was back in eastern Afghanistan in 2019 and happened to stumble across he was perusing a drone feed happened to see ISIS and Taliban fighters duking it out in essentially this on a hillside that he used to spend a lot of time on. He kind of he shared he shared this news on Facebook, like look, you know ISIS in the Taliban or both are killing each other up on our old hunting grounds. Um, and basically his take was he felt nostalgia for it. He thought, man I wish I could be back there wish I could be back there taking the fight to both of these sides at once. And in the little Facebook thread that resulted a lot of his platoon mates also expressed nostalgia for this for this period in their lives that objectively was pretty miserable I mean they spent 16 months in the Koring all in 2006 and 2007, living on absolute shoestring logistics. Um, but they they really dealt to a nostalgia for for this war. Now when the same NCO, you learned later in the year that the special operations task force was sort of trying to tip the scales in that part of the country. You know, even as it's continuing to bombard the Taliban everywhere else in the country here it's sort of trying to figure out, how can we help the Taliban by hitting this ISIS machine gun position, or, you know this ISIS mortar position how can we help the ISIS that elicited some much more complicated feelings from him. And I think the idea that we that we are helping now, or in partnership now with the group that has killed so many Americans, certainly is frustrating to a lot of people. And I understand why but as one of these special operations veterans, or, well, current special operations guys in the task force was telling me when I was writing this passage. I mean, actually, look, we all want to be out there fighting the war still. But we've also been doing it for so long that we understand something different is needed. And I think that's a fairly common view also among guys who are still, who are still at it. Yeah. So I've got one last question for you, before we start taking questions on the audience so audience members start shooting in your questions. In the article this weekend, I read an article that Dexter Philkins wrote in the New Yorker and reading that it seemed that the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan really don't want to share power. And Ashraf Ghani says he was democratically elected. Why would he give up that for power sharing with the Taliban. It made me wonder. And I want to ask you this, do you think a return to civil war in Afghanistan is really inevitable. I mean, I think, you know, we can say return to civil war but there's a there's a civil war going on in Afghanistan right now, a very, very bloody one. It's whether whether some kind of piece can come out of either the Doha process or the new process that the Biden administration is attempting to impose upon top of that. I don't know. I do know that in Kunar, the Afghan government and the Taliban have found ways of accommodating each other. In 2018 and 2019. There were a series of local ceasefires between arranged by the Afghan National Army but coordinated with the governor and the police chief and so on, ceasefires with the Taliban. During which actually the these forces opposing forces bond up cooperating with each other in some fairly concrete ways. US advisors who were in Kunar at the time would see the DNA bring in kind of essentially bearded militants who clearly were Taliban to their aid stations who've been wounded and say hey can you help this guy who's our scout without acknowledging that he was, you know, a using as a bird dog. Now, why that was possible in Kunar was because of the crisis of the Islamic State at the time. The Islamic State was controlled a significant amount of territory and some of the some of the valleys between the patch in the Kunar rivers. And so I think there was kind of this emergency that the two sides could could set aside their differences around. And they even went so far as to as was reported in in the, you know, a couple of years ago, the Taliban actually provided security in some villages way out in the western Pesh Valley provided security for the election of the Afghan government, which is almost, you know, hard to believe and that you read that and you think okay, I mean maybe maybe some maybe there is this, there is cooperation that's possible. But the missing ingredient there is that I mean, everybody was united against ISIS in that moment. And that's not a that's not an ingredient that exists in the rest of the country. So congratulations again for a really, really excellent book and I highly recommend to everybody to read it. It is very detailed it is very well researched, but it really raises the big questions. So David over to you. Absolutely. Thank you both. We have a bunch of questions already coming in. So we'll jump right into them. The first question we have is, do you think the failure of us forces into Pesh Valley was inevitable, or is inevitable. Yeah. Over to you. Um, you know, it's tempting to say no that it wasn't inevitable. There are, there are parts of the book. There's where things seem like they were going very well. I mean, an example that I'll give is in 2004 the first green beret team to live out in the patch. The parent blessing had been established. There's a green beret team from the 19th special forces group out of Utah. They were largely Mormons, they're older guys then then a lot of active duty green berets, and they had a phenomenal relationship with the people in the valley. People still remember them there they remember commander Ron was the you know what they called the A teams captain. They remember them as being just really some of the some of the best partners American partners that they remember working with. Toward the end of that ODA for that a team's deployment. The captain himself mistakenly shot a local man and killed him. And essentially it was a ricochet after the captain had had to shoot a wild dog that was coming at him, and the round went through the dog ricochet hit the man and killed the man. And this was a tragic event that the captain was very concerned would just blow up his relationship with the town. But in fact, the strength of the relationship that they had built in the town was such that the sort of the local built in governance structures handled the problem. And the people that had been a good faith mistake by someone they personally knew. So that team left things in a good place. A new, a new special forces team came in right after them, and made a lot of fairly hand fisted decisions and took a very different approach I mean they were. They really, their idea was let's gather, get out into the Koring all let's find the enemy let's fight let's get in fights. It seems to seems fairly clear that that contributed to the escalation of violence in the Koring all that wound up sucking in American forces, and being just one of the toughest nuts that just like that, tough stuff to crack and really dragged Americans down in the province that and crippled their efforts in the process. So it's tempting to say oh well look if that if that if that second a team hadn't taken that approach and had just continued the approach of the first day team. Then things could have, things could have gone better. But I don't know if that's true. And of course we don't know if it's true because it didn't happen. But it's also the case that that first day team was operating in a window kind of a grace period. When that captain killed that local man. That was the first time the town had experienced an event like that, but events like that are inevitable. No matter how culturally astute or well meaning the unit and its commander are its war. And there, there are going to be civilians killed in the crossfire inevitably. And that's it's towns are only going to put up with that for so long and are only willing only going to be willing to write it off as good faith mistakes for so long before they get really really fed up. So, I mean, whether American efforts were doomed in the patch. I mean I think the answer would have to be if there was a way for them to have achieved success quickly, perhaps then it would not they would not have been doomed. But if the if the course was always going to be a long, long involvement to very slowly get an Afghan get an Afghan force on its feet. Then yes I would say probably was was doomed. Great. And I'll throw you a question here while we wait for more people to fill in questions. One of the things I think it's very valuable about your book is you begin at the beginning which is now some 20 years almost ago. Today, there's a lot of discussion of endlessness in our wars or the forever wars. And often that's linked to for the sense that the US was chasing something that was so expansive destruction of various groups across the Middle East. Yet, at least in my reading, what happens in this particular valley is the US is gets drawn in precisely because it is pursuing a rather narrow objective in some ways. And then catch bin Laden, can you talk a bit about the expansiveness of objectives, and the way that even these seemingly smaller more tactical aims, end up drawing the US further into other objectives or broader conflicts. Sure. So, the way the Afghan war is run now on the US side and was run, you know during the second term of the Obama administration and during the during the Trump administration is a very high level way I mean every decision is being made in in Kabul in Washington, every decision of great consequence on the American side. But that's not the way it was in the early years and the early years in these rural districts were kind of when the tone was set. The mission was defined, and often they were defined by much lower level commanders, then it seems reasonable to us now to have been making those decisions, but that's how it was there were there were small teams, you know Green Beret teams Green Beret companies, infantry battalions infantry brigades, they were responsible for huge chunks of the country, and their commanders had to make the decisions about how to proceed. And very often what we can now in retrospect see as incremental steps in a long, long escalation. We're not decisions made in it by a national government in a capital, but decisions made by a major or lieutenant colonel or a colonel. Often very quickly on the battlefield, I just in this in the course of the course of a deployment. I had the idea that we went in there and just looking for al-Qaeda, but wound up looking for a wide variety of other people and fighting an array of militants that included everything from Lashkar Etaiba to genuine Taliban militants to simply angry local Salafis. What happened, not no one on the American side made made the decision for that to happen. But in the course of its initial, essentially fruitless hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in Kunar in 2002 and 2003 US forces made enough enemies that just through through self defense and through meeting to needing to keep their safe, they wound up fighting a broader array of enemies than they intended to be. And then also through making mistakes through doing things like getting involved in the Kourangal timber business without meaning to the conflict brought it. And all of that was, you know, that was stuff that was happening at a provincial and district level in just moment by moment. And building on that, we have a question about to what extent the war that you've traced over those almost two decades changed with administrations. How much did it change across administrations but not because of different administration policies and with them. What's driving the biggest strategic or shifts and the character of the war. Sure, so in the fairly narrow area that I looked at the Pesh Valley. You can go for years without there seeming to be kind of the strong hand of the US administration, directing that the way the war is going there, but then at certain moments it really does. I mean, the, the Bush administration was George Bush personally made the decision to, he wanted to get Osama bin Laden, and then, even though the initial time air campaign against the Taliban was not focused purely on on getting Osama bin Laden. It was that was a priority of his and then in the fall of 2003, it was a priority of his again was to pick the trail back up of bin Laden. So that was a presidential decision that was then carried out through Secretary Rumsfeld and CIA director tenant that directly led to the influx of US troops into the Pesh Valley in 2003. Hundreds of us troops flowed into the patch for an operation called winter strike. That was a direct response to this to this tasking from Washington, and that operation left behind a small patrol base. The patrol base then became the scene of incremental changes in strategy and tactics that were not mandated by Washington or something that anybody, you know these at those high levels and in the White House or in the Pentagon, we're probably aware of simply because an outpost had been left behind, and a green beret team had been left behind at the outpost, and their job was to figure out how to fight the war there. You see in the Obama administration as as the ground role leaves as US forces on the ground leave Kunar, and it becomes a drone campaign. You see, you see the Obama administration involved in some fairly involved at a high level in some decisions like you know when does a certain forward operating base close. The forward operating base in Assadabad was also a CIA base and when exactly to close it in 2014 was a subject of serious and extended debate within the Obama administration. But the operation haymaker drone campaign that special operations forces were carrying on up there at the same time was not marked by any of the kind of, you know, White House micromanaging they hear complaints about for other drone campaigns outside of you know the task force had a fairly free hand, and it was not it was not having to comply with the 2013 presidential policy guidance on drone strikes for instance. So, you kind of you see you see, you see the effects trickle down, and sometimes you see the effects directly, but it's rarely kind of a massive shift because the new administration has come in. And from the other side, we have a question about, to what extent was the war driven by officers, desiring to get into the fight. And I'll add on to this question, does that change over time you trace a couple of instances of people seeking combat. Did the importance of that or the level of people's desire to see combat shift over the course of the war you're tracing. I guess I would frame it not exactly as you know officers desiring to see combat, I mean, because I think, especially after 2007 or so, all these units that are rotating in are commanded by veterans of extensive combat experience in these wars already. But what you do see is, as units rotate through the approach changes. And so a unit that has decided to disengage from a certain valley is replaced by a unit that decides to be very aggressive in that valley. It's kind of schizophrenic approach just bouncing back and forth between disengagement and going more aggressively and train the ANA versus we're going to focus on us only operations is something that played out over and over again. You know there's a period in 2011 after the 101st Airborne Division has pulled out of the patch. And when the first cavalry division takes the reins at Bagram as the division headquarters for the East, and one of the generals there is very concerned about essentially a security vacuum. And so without wanting to kind of go back in and reestablish all the foot all the bases that Americans had just left you didn't want to do that. So we had to continue to hurt the enemy up in these areas and launched a, you know, a series of big operations of, I would say of dubious value, but that often came across to soldiers beneath him as this is this is commanders seeking combat doing aerosols for aerosols sake. I don't think it was ever quite as simple as that, but you certainly do see lessons having to be relearned over and over and over again, or not being learned at all. And we have a number of questions for you both about what you see as the future of Afghanistan, the impact of potential us withdrawals, whether those are going to happen and one in particular about if the US were to leave Afghanistan. What would the impact on women in the country be who is that a question for. It's a group of questions for you both you should. Why don't you start us off with one. All right, I mean I think that the bigger the bigger question of, you know, what will become of human rights and women's rights in Afghanistan is not one that I tackle in the book and the book ends in in 2020. It ends with US forces, still in the country, but in a in a vastly scaled back capacity. What I can talk about is what the state of play was in the district surrounding the patch at that point. And you know what I what I heard from from speaking with Afghans who would come down and visit me from these districts often on a pass from the from the Taliban to visit their parliamentarian or something like that. And they were living they were living in Taliban governed districts, often under very harsh and stringent conditions, but under conditions that varied quite a bit from from place to place in the country, in terms of, you know, whether the Taliban allowed schools or clinics to stay open, whether it allowed government employees to continue staffing those schools and clinics and so on. And that was like something that really was a kind of a patchwork of decisions, accommodations reached between local governments and local Taliban governments. I think there is a real risk of Afghanistan going back into civil war. If all US troops withdraw. And that will have an impact on refugee outflows and will have an impact on US allies. And it will also damage even further the reputation of the US the model that the US promotes or democracy. And so it will undermine the US as it tries to pivot to great power competition with China. So I think the hope of this administration is that both Iraq and Afghanistan just be kept as calm as possible. So not to cause more difficulties with neighboring countries with regions, and not to undermine the US even further, as it really takes on the great strategic challenge, which is great power competition with China. One thing that sort of runs through the book and of course discussions of the war is the sense of endlessness, the length, tell us a bit about whether you get that sense. Not only from Americans you talked to and the broader societal discussion. Is there a discussion that's similar or talks about endlessness or the long war on the Afghan side and in particular, among those in this particular area. Yeah, I mean, what I would often hear talked about was not endless war but people would remind me that the war has been going on for 40 years for them. What we think of as the Afghan war is different from what Afghans think of as the Afghan war for us it begins in 2001. For them, we're a participant in a much, much longer conflict that that was in existence before we arrived and will be, unless there's some, unless this peace process results in genuine peace, a conflict that will be there after we leave. So I think Afghans live a forever war in a in a far more real way than, you know, then then Americans than the way that the Americans use the phrase. And we have a question here about how you see the book putting into the genre of quote deep dive and quote looks at conflict including such examples as war comes to cancer and an intimate war. And also tell us what other words if not those two or that genre play into what you view this book as fitting into or that you found particularly powerful while writing it. I mean, war comes to Garms there and an intimate war, especially taken together. If you read them side by side, our phenomenal books, and our, you know, two of the books that I absolutely recommend to people reading about Afghanistan. I think, you know, in some ways, I mean obviously there are differences between those accounts and mine. Carter Malkasian was a direct participant in on a side in the conflict that he was writing about he has kind of a level of direct and granular knowledge that my account simply isn't informed by mine also I mean I think I tried to I tried to draw it out a little more. So despite focusing on this individual, you know, small place I tried to especially at the beginning and end of the book. This fits a little bit into the bigger picture of the conflict and into, you know, successive administrations deliberations over the conflict. But to hear the idea of hearing my book mentioned in the same breath with either of those books is, you know, very makes me very happy I hope that it can I hope that it can live up to anything like their example. I mean, there is a, you know, one of the things that I was dealing with in writing this book is that there's already a tremendous amount that's been written about events that happened in this in the Petch Valley and its tributaries. There was Operation Red Wings in 2005 is the subject of extensive writing. Many, many fellow journalists spent time embedded in these valleys and produced very vivid and detailed writing from them. There are quite a large number of memoirs, either by guys who fought up there did deployments up there, or bits and pieces of memoirs, you know, several memoirs include pieces that are set in Kunar. So there's a lot that's out there on this region specifically. A lot of it is within the context of individual deployments. So what I tried to do was mine that material. Find the best most telling stuff in it and sort of try to tie it into this bigger context of, well, how did that units deployment compared to the previous units and the next units, and what were kind of the slight and subtle differences between these units that were not really visible to people who just saw the one unit. To that end, I mean, people like Carter Malkasian, who had spent a lot of time in the province over the course of seeing many units come and go became tremendous sources there's a there was an asymmetric warfare group contractor who was kind of legendary among troops in the patch, who played that role for me almost as kind of a chorus chiming in periodically describing the way things had changed over the years that he kept going back there. So we're really the interpreters, or we're often people who could sort of help put those the snapshots that we've gotten from the many phenomenal accounts of other individual periods of the war there to help tie them together. We have a series of questions about the impact of short rotation times whether a longer rotation would have made a difference. What's the differences between rotations were, can you talk a bit about that. Yeah, and that's a great question and it's something that in the course of reporting this book I heard so many different kind of proposals and theories of, look, we did it this way but this other way might have been better. The formal ways were kind of applied in the patch I mean there were there were green beret teams and marine units that did six months deployments up there, there were army units that did 12 and 15 and even 16 months deployments up there. There were in some cases, the cases of one through two infantry and two 503 infantry, there were units that actually rotated back to the same province, which is something that the army floated for a while but broadly was not really able to go through on in the context of conventional forces. But I think all of these, all of these models are kind of undermined by at least on the conventional military side, all of these models are undermined by the fact that there's just such great personnel turnover in the units themselves. I mean, you know you bring a battalion back to Kunar two years later. Yes, there are people who are still there from the previous deployment. But if you do it again a third time. No, there's not going to be that many of them left there anymore. The way it's did it in Kunar was two year deployments, you know I could see an argument for two year deployments being or three year deployments being more effective somehow. But to think about the told that that would exact on the military. It's hard to imagine it really being a, you know, a practical solution. I've heard lots of other kind of really creative proposed solutions. A guy proposing that, you know, when a when an infantry battalion goes home, it's company commanders stay behind and stay attached to the next unit. As advisors to the Afghan National Army, the idea being that this would put both some expertise and some authority in the Afghan National Army training mission that wasn't really there otherwise. It's a transition to kind of providing an overlap of knowledge between the outgoing and incoming units, but that the tension in all of these models is the tension between the health of the army and and the importance of, you know, succeeding in the war, whatever that may need. And I think, you know throughout I mean you can tell that for the US army. The US army was always the was going to be a very, very big consideration and it did not do not want to break the army over the war in Afghanistan. We have a question. I think for you both. What's the scalable lessons of the particular values for, I think, the war in Afghanistan more broadly, but also for America's other counterterrorism wars, and the broader sort of practice of the military that are most tasked with these types of wars. I'm going to give a, I'm going to give a very unsatisfying answer to that one. There's a guy named David cats who appears in the book, who is a foreign service officer who spent time working up in on the provincial reconstruction team in during the peak period of the war, but who also had he coincidentally had been a PhD student who did his PhD fieldwork in the Wigol Valley of North Sun in the late 70s. And he wound up being just one of the people who I really leaned on for their, for their perspective about the place and the effects that the US military had on the place. And to him this was all an extremely frustrating experience because he was in the middle of a dynamic where the military always needs to act it doesn't have time to deliberate and deliberate and deliberate over the decisions that it's making it needs to act. But from David's perspective, one way that he put it I'm paraphrasing him here was, the more you know about some of these valleys, some of these villages, the societies the year that you're working in. The less you understand about what the consequences of any your actions are going to be. It just it becomes overwhelming you realize that there are just so many potential second and third and fourth order effects that it's never possible to predict it. And so, you know, you could come away from that just taking the lesson will just don't do anything not anything that we do up there will backfire. And I think that's, you know, true to some extent, but it's not always possible not to do anything. Yeah, I would say a lesson is simply. Yeah, be aware of how many more layers there there typically are to whatever whatever situation you're you're you're waiting into whether it's with a, you know, a strike or an advisory mission or what have you. The world is changing, and it's changing very rapidly. And so the bigger question is really how important is counter terrorism to the US today. And you can think of how for 20 years we got sucked into these wars. All our energy was spent on these wars. And that came at a cost to not pay more attention to the rise of China, more attention to the disinformation activities of the Russians, the Russia may have a weak hand of cards, but it plays them well. And China's got really different ideas about, you know, the way the world works and about world order. I was recently listening to an Indian diplomat, who said for the last decade, we've watched America fighting and not winning. And we've watched China winning and not fighting. Now you can question whether whether that's true or not. But I think we got really sucked into these counter terrorism wars. And the amount of blood and treasure we spent on them was immense and you can look at the outcomes and it's really not satisfactory. So it's about not letting the tactical be the enemy of the strategic and how to put things in the right perspective. And just a little more on to my answer on that one. I mean, I think a comparison to make a place to look at is Somalia, where over the past several years, the US military scaled up I mean it remained small but but fairly substantially scaled up the counter terrorism mission and combat advising mission that it was doing there, and now has largely ended it. And to see a lot of parallels between you know you would hear about a civilian casualty incident somewhere in Somalia where a team of seals or Marine Raiders had been working with a local partner force and had been fed faulty intelligence and it wound up killing some people who they were in the middle of a tribal conflict that they hadn't really been aware of and those sounded, they just sounded like such sad echoes of especially the early years in Afghanistan that I just thought, I mean, I hope, I hope we understand kind of what the what the risks of this kind of terrorism are here, but at the end of the last administration you know President Trump largely pulled the plug on Somalia so I guess we're going to see. It's that's going to be an example of we're going to see whether the cost of leaving versus the is too high, whether El Shabaab indeed poses the kind of the kind of international threat that a lid can be kept on without a significant presence in the country. So we have a question about the sort of different frames of counter terrorism versus counterinsurgency, how they played out whether they were in competition or made each other more difficult into touch valley. Whether these were meaningfully distinct in the first place, how they got sort of operationalized in the actual activity. They were distinct. They're also a shorthand often what we refer to as counter terrorism in the context of Afghanistan isn't pure counter terrorism in the sense of just going after al-Qaeda leaders. But they were, you know the activities of the conventional military were often intention with the activities of special operations forces and the intelligence community I mean that's a thread that persists through much of the story. But it's, you see it, you see the relationship change from a very, a very standoffish one in the early years where nobody's talking to anybody about what they're doing. And the operation red wings fiasco in 2005 becomes a pretty vivid example of both the operation and the long, long and dangerous recovery operation that followed the helicopter shoot down become a pretty vivid example of how important it is for these governments to talk to each other and deconflict what they're doing, rather than kind of pursuing these parallel wars that can really, it can really create serious consequences on the American side. Later in the war I mean you see a lot more cooperation between the special operations mission and the end of conventional mission. There's a period in 2009 and 2010, when the joint special operations command task force in Afghanistan, run broadly by the Rangers, but run more by the seals and this particular part of the country that we're talking about really shifted everything that they were doing so that the kind of targets they were hitting were small time local militants, who the conventional troops in the valley were fighting. So at that point I mean, you might still refer to what the, what the seals and the and the Rangers were doing as counterterrorism in the sense that they were continuing to do the same kind of direct action raids that they've been doing. But really they were participating in the counterinsurgency at that point they were just participating they were participating in a, in a direct action way. You also mean there are there are times when essentially the counterinsurgency mission was used in service of the counterterrorism that's on. It happened in 2006 with the, the big push into Kunar and Nuristan to build all the outposts beyond the initial couple that had been built in 2002 and 2003. It happened in large part because the CIA, the CIA was encouraging the US military to expand its activity in Kunar and Nuristan, so that in itself could do more intelligence collection there. And this could help it figure out, you know, develop sources who could then work across the border into adjacent areas of Pakistan, figure out where bin Laden and Zawakhry had gone. So that I mean that was a kind of a hidden, not very well hidden always but a hidden motivating factor in the launch of the counterinsurgency strategy in Kunar and Nuristan in 2006 was this kind of counterinsurgency in pursuit of counterterrorism approach so they've always been, they've always been blended together in ways where sometimes they support each other. And sometimes they really, you know, have stepped on each other's toes, but that's not the only tension I mean on the on the US or the Allied side, I mean on the conventional side. You know the the conventional force battalions going out in the field and patrolling and fighting that mission was often in great tension with the efforts to train and advise Afghan security forces. And I would say that tension was often just as great and there was just as much counterproductive activity in that in that balance of tasks, as it as there was between conventional and soft. What, what issues do you wish you could have covered in this book but either didn't have space to or the nature of the reporting you were doing. That would allow you to access the sources that you'd like to see other people right on to expand the story of what happened and the patch valley. Sure. By far the biggest one is the other side. I mean I had great access to the American military I had, you know, some access that I decent access to Afghan military units that bought up there. I was able to talk to a lot of a lot of local people, but the degree which I was able to gain insight into into the opposing side to the Taliban and the other militant groups that were fighting up there was quite limited. You know I was able to talk to some low level Taliban fighters or former Taliban fighters. There were documents that I could use that you know intelligence summaries from interrogations and things like that. I could ask local people about militant leaders whom they knew. But, you know, I was not able to sit down and talk to I've with plus who I believe is in an NDS prison somewhere in Kabul and you know, would have loved to talk to that guy, because he, he, he has as much kind of long term institutional knowledge of the war and it's not going to hurt anybody. So, to the extent that it's possible I hope that someone will be able to, you know, get get the, get the opposing side of the opposing force, sometime in the years ahead. One of the things that's just really impressive about the book is the number of characters and people you meet along the way, being actually there who are fighting and whose stories come through. Can you tell us a bit about what you've seen about how the war has impacted people. Once they leave the war. How people reacted to the war itself the impact of sexual fighting on them, and your experience of being there. Yeah, certainly I mean this is a, the intensity of the fighting up in places like the corn goal has been crushing for some people. I mean there's a there's a soldier who I returned to a couple of times in the book, who was a he was a young soldier private in the corn gall Valley in 2006 with one unit. He hated it, it was, it was a miserable experience. He redeployed home. The army at the time was offering an option where if you re enlisted, you could choose your next duty station. So he did that, and he chose the next duty station with the eyes with an eye toward I don't want to go back to that kind of place. So he chose the duty station, Fort Hood, Texas, that, you know at the time wasn't really sending troops to Afghanistan was sending troops to Iraq for a very different kind of war, but then the Afghan surge happened. And the army stood up a new unit at Fort Hood that wound up going right back to that same valley and he wound up right in the corn gall Valley 15 months after he left. And for him this was a this was a devastating experience I mean he, his presence was helpful to soldiers in his unit because he didn't have quite the same learning curve that they did he'd been there before. But it was horrible. I mean he he wound up being on a helicopter out for his mid tour leave on that second deployment that was shot down, and he survived the shoot down. And essentially, during his mid tour leave the army judged him unfit to go back. And the, the, the intervening years for him have been a lot of, you know a lot of ups and a very serious downs as he's as he struggled with the things that he went through in the valley and as he struggled with, you know substance abuse and, and all kinds of things. And now he's a fairly unique story just in the intensity of the experience of those two deployments, but I think the war has certainly damaged a lot of lives. Very seriously. Now there also are guys who, who loved it. You know I mean there's, I talk about this a bit in the in the prologue of the book. There are, there are a number of characters who found their way back to Kunar, not through some kind of unfortunate circumstance like the soldier I just described, but through their own the dint of their own efforts. There are soldiers who tried to return there, because they've been fascinated by it by either the place, or by the type of fighting, which was so different from fighting that they encountered in southern Afghanistan or Iraq. You know there were guys who kind of got hooked on the thrill of it. There were guys who just got really interested by the local people and wanted to just wanted to keep going back. And there's another guy who, you know who wound up finagling away back to the same place, basically because he thought he could help he thought that the way his unit had fought the first time had been flawed, and that if he could wind up in this next unit going there, he could impart some of the lessons that he learned and you know help them help him do a better job which I think he did he was he wound up being the perfect kind of guy to be advising the Afghan National Army always company commander when he was doing it. Yeah, I mean it's, I think, I think I'm biased because I've studied the patch and cunar and understand much more deeply and talk to farm far more veterans of those places. Then I have two veterans of other tough districts around the country. But the patch and cunar are a hard place to forget for a lot of reasons that go from just the just the terrain just what the place looks like. It's just incredibly striking it's so jagged the forest the vegetation, the vegetation. This doesn't look like many other places that you see in Afghanistan. And then, you know, as a result of that the type of fighting there is quite different it's everything it's long distance firefights huge amounts of ordinance and firepower. I mean, the amount of artillery that was used in the years in those mountains was enormous. Almost almost. Yeah, very distinct thing from the kind of the war of sort of patrolling and stepping on IDs is kind of the dread that you'd have all the time patrolling in places like Helmand or Kandahar never seen your enemy, but always knowing that the next step might might be your last one. There's a series of questions about demographics of officers or others, making decisions, educational level, and also various leadership qualities. Who was actually fighting the war and which qualities seem to be associated if any with success. Yeah, I mean the hard part about that question is, what is success. I mean, you know, units that had seemed to have had a successful tour may not really have contributed to any, you know, larger success in the valley but but I'll try to, I'll try to answer it in the context of what seemed like success at the time, what when these units were deploying. Okay, and I'll answer it. I'm thinking about the company and battalion commanders here, because those are kind of that's the level of leadership that I focus on the most in the book. The characters who rotate through in those roles in some ways are all very much the same. They've gone to the same resources of commissioning ROTC West Point Officer candidate school. Infantry officers they've all been to Ranger school they've all been to the same kinds of court often they've crossed paths in many different units, they spent time in the Ranger battalions. The resumes are very similar many of them have, many of them have gone to a civilian graduate school. We had, you know, two battalion commanders in a row who had, I believe, an Ivy League master's degree followed by a by a Tufts master's degree. I mean, it's, there's there's a lot, there's a lot of these resumes of these commanders that is that is common to each other. And yet they wind up behaving in very different ways, and especially interacting with Afghans in very different ways. And this is something that you'd come out that would come out both in my conversations with the commanders themselves, and also come out in my conversations with their interpreters and and district governors you'd work with them and so on. I mean, I think the biggest, the biggest quality that that these commanders needed was being comfortable with ambiguity and with understanding how understanding the limits of their knowledge and the limits of how much they could affect the situation. And that was some that was something that some commanders grasped intuitively. It was something that some commanders learned over the course of multiple deployments. It was something that some commanders, it just wasn't in their nature. And, you know, how the army could select or train for that I have a, I wouldn't venture a guess as to that that's a that's a pretty thorny problem that I mean I know the army has certainly been been grappling with for some time, you know, especially in recent years as it stood up its new security force assistance brigades. I talked a bit about from both of you the sense of needing to define what success is the changing overall US interests or, if not changing interest, changing ranking of US interests. This is your sense of what the various US enemies understanding of their interests and, in particular, in this part of Afghanistan was, did they see themselves as having succeeded. Are they, is there sort of a parallel conversation to, of course, not being a superpower but similar questioning of the end goals on that side of the conflict. I am not privy to whatever conversations may be may have been had been, you know, an al-Qaeda ranks about the success or failures of their efforts in Qunar-Naristan. I would love it if I were. You gain little bits and pieces of insight into that based on things like detainee interrogation reports or information about what a certain fighter was believed to be doing at the time of his death. And for al-Qaeda, you know, which really had ensconced itself in Qunar-Naristan the whole time, even as its presence kind of ebbed and flowed in other provinces. I think he was always doing two things it was it was always sort of trying to making itself essential to the local militants fighting in the area. You know, at the turn it was, you know, creating a space for itself, where it could where it could have a safe haven of some sort. And that's something that you learn from the Abadabad documents from bin Laden, telling Atiyah is, is, you know, his number three that he should that Faruq al-Qatani should establish a kind of a sanctuary for potential sanctuary for more senior leaders to relocate to that sanctuary. I think that's the you know that's the question that probably the intelligence agencies have the best idea about that and theirs is probably imperfect as well. As far as the idea of a place like the Waikal Valley or the Helgal Valley being, you know, a platform for launching international attacks. I certainly understand the skepticism of that the idea that well, what are they getting out of that place that they're not getting out of a safe house in Peshawar that they're not getting out of, you know, the fairly large territory that's controlled by al-Qaeda franchises that live in Syria. So I think that that's a question where, you know, what what is this place to the enemy, when we're talking about the international terrorist enemy al-Qaeda that was the persistent, you know, kind of main target of us forces up there. So the answer to that question has a lot to do with the bigger international context of what's going on with al-Qaeda. You know, when al-Qaeda has the city of Idlib in Syria, in the hands of its affiliates, the significance of a place like the Peshawar maybe much different than it was in 2010 and 2011 when al-Qaeda was being hammered in Waziristan and then looking for other nearby rugged places that it could hold up. And I think that the Taliban feel that they just have to wait out the Americans, that they have won. And you see that around the negotiations in Doha, you hear of this sort of sense of triumphalism. You know, if you could imagine back to 2001, 20 or years ago, if you had said that within 20 years America will be doing a deal with the Taliban and the Taliban would be coming back into power, you thought that would be impossible. And it's extraordinary that that might be the way things end. And the governments of Afghanistan that we spent so long trying to big up and prop up has proven disappointing to say the least, and not very capable. You can see the presence of Afghanistan is very, very concerned. And I think the general perception really is the Taliban have won by not losing by now being in the position where they're coming back into power in some shape or other. We're coming towards the end of our time so let me throw out some concluding questions for you both to riff on and allow you to have some time to make any concluding remarks. But if we gathered again, say 10 years from now, what do you think would be the most optimistic discussion of Afghanistan and the state of the war, the impact on people. What do you think would be the most pessimistic. And then, as the second question. What's the thing about this war this war in this particular valley over the two decades you've traced it that you think people don't know and need to know, or would be most interesting for people to know. I'm going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to venture a guess on the first one. I mean, my experience of Afghanistan has been that venturing to make predictions is is is dangerous and in a place like Kunar and our stand the place is just so complicated that because I don't have to. I'm not going to. Many other people don't have that luxury people in government who are who have to deal with these deal with these problems rather than merely understand and describe them as for you know what's something that I hope people learn. It's not that's not widely understood. I guess I would say I think it's the the role of the role of a generation of officers and NCOs, the guys who are being these companies and Italians essentially kind of the middle management of these units that we're fighting out there I think because of embedded reporting and memoirs and the role that generals play in public life. I think there's a fairly good understanding in the American public in some ways about what a a junior soldier does during their deployment, at least in some places in some ways. And I think there's a, you know, understanding of what what it is that top generals do. But there is this, there is this generation of officers who, you know, served as company commanders and battalion operations officers and executive officers and then battalion commanders who have made hugely consequential decisions. Probably far more strategically consequential than most Americans understand people at that pay grade to have been making. I think that that's something that readers the book will come away appreciating is just the gravity and enormity of the job that these guys had at this kind of, you know, middle level of leadership that isn't as isn't always as as easy to cover as you know the platoons in the field. Oh, do you have any concluding comments. Sorry me. No, whether I'm as any concluding comments. Well just to say once again how much I really did enjoy reading this book. It's a big book. And it's one that I couldn't put down I read it from page to page. I found it absolutely fascinating. And I think you really do well in describing all the characters as they see themselves. With what they believed what they hoped what they thought they were doing. And so in a way it's an ethnography of the US military in this very long war, and you've done exceptionally well in really describing that. The questions asks, did we not send good people were they not educated enough I mean, you know you're talking about people who are really well educated, who were totally committed to the mission that they were sent on. And the question is was the mission doable. And when you're reading this book, you know you think after a while. You think it's going to be sunk costs. Where is the failure in leadership. We always have this thing of leaders must be optimistic, but when does optimism become delusion and constantly telling soldiers you know you're fighting over here in Afghanistan, in order to keep America safe, and everybody keeps repeating that you know we're keeping Americans safe with stopping them from coming here that failure is not an option. Well failure is an option. And really people in Kuna where they're ever going to come to America. So I think that's a question I often ask, but the incentives are always there to be optimistic. And in the more recent years during the war, you've had commanders say no we're putting the men first and the mission second, because after 20 years, they know they're not going to win whatever winning now means. So I could add on to what Emma just said. I mean first of all thank you very much for the kind words about the book that I really appreciate it. But I think you're really onto something with the idea of, you know, the military pushing optimism, and the idea of in more recent years commanders being disillusioned and being more interested in kind of protecting their men than in their mission. And that's a dynamic that you see in the arc of battalion commanders who serve in the patch. You have two battalion commanders who are from this cookie cutter mold elite educations, kind of, you know, on the path to be on the path to be general officers, and who have very high aims in the patch they they they aim for the same for the stars I mean they think they can build roads over the backs of the valleys. The officer who kind of calls bullshit on this and says this stuff isn't possible. In fact is a lieutenant colonel who's not from this mold. There's a retired now retired colonel named Brett Jenkins and who he was a guy who he was on the alternates list for battalion command he only commanded a battalion because the army happened to create some more battalions. There's not this kind of like, you know, faded for general stars type of a list officer. But it was he who took looked at the Koringall Valley and saw it for, I believe, for what it was, which was a sunk cost. And definitely something to think about is, you know, who were the officers who were able to, who were able to make these kinds of tough calls in the moment, versus the ones who are able to kind of reach these conclusions much later but who at the time. We're so invested in getting done what they've been told to get done, but they couldn't recognize or wouldn't recognize when they should say to their chain of command. This isn't something that should get done or could or can get done. With that we're pretty much out of time. Thank you both for this great conversation. I highly recommend that says to happen, pick up the book which is now out today. I may not have tempted Wesley into answering a prediction of 10 years out but it does cover the previous 20 years and details that I think many of those who were even there or at least have been following it. So you'll find a lot that may have been forgotten. And with that, thank you.