 So, good morning and welcome to the 28th Military Rider Symposium in Northfield, Vermont. We are thrilled that you are here and for those of you that are joining us online, wherever you are in the globe, welcome and we're very glad that you're able to join us. My name is Dr. Travis Morris and I have the honor and privilege of being the director for the Peace and War Center and also the executive director for the Military Rider Symposium. We've had an amazing day and a half. We've looked at the intersection between artificial intelligence and robotics and we had an amazing panel last night. My guess is many of you were there and were exposed to just how important and critical the subject is. And one of the takeaways that we hope all students, faculty and staff leave for these two days is that when we're talking about the intersection between AI and robotics that it does apply to you. It certainly applies to all of us. Most importantly for the students that are in the room, those are going to be carrying the mantle of making decisions in areas involving security and defense and policy. You are our future. And this is why we're having the Military Rider Symposium theme focused on this critical important subject. So over the past 28 years, the Military Rider Symposium has focused on issues and topics that are of national and global concern from security to cultural issues also to science and to psychology. We're given this charge to focus on these events because we want our entire campus community whether you're an engineer, criminal justice, whether you're biology, you're a studies and warm peace major of political science or history or nursing, that there are some subjects that transcend disciplines. We pick subjects and themes that are important to all citizens. And as I just said, our esteemed guests and colleagues over the past day and a half have really advanced our understanding on these topics and we are very grateful. Another unique aspect of the Military Rider Symposium is something called the COBE Award. For a quick Google search, we've been awarding this award for the past 28 years and if you were to type that into Google and you're to look at some of the authors that have won this over the years, they have raised to national recognition. The award is given to an author who's published a first time book on security, military issues, intelligence. The book goes underneath a very scrutinizing review process, ultimately makes it to the COBE selection committee and of all the books that are published over the fiscal year on military subjects, one book is selected each year. We bring them to Norwich and our charge is to amplify their career, highlight their work, connect them with other authors that are well published and well recognized in the field and just to help them succeed as best as possible. And we are thrilled this year that Wesley Morgan, the 2022 COBE Award recipient is with us today. You can see the title of his book on the screen and we just suggest that while you're here, his book is for sale in the bookstore, you can buy a copy and I'm sure he would be glad to sign it or you could buy two or three copies and he'd be glad to sign those too. So this event, the Military Rider Symposium and the COBE Award is in direct partnership with the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago. Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago has supported this award and the symposium for many years and it's because of their generosity financially and also just their support that we're able to continue the symposium but also have this award each and every year. So today we have a special lineup and the way in which we're going to talk about the hardest place will be a combination of our faculty, Dr. Nick Roberts and a student, Gokshan, who will provide sort of a mixture of commentary between some readings and the book but without further ado, it's my pleasure to turn it over to one of Norwich's most dynamic faculty members, Dr. Nick Roberts, the floor is yours. Thank you to Travis Morris and everyone for being here especially those who helped plan the event, Megan Liptak and Yang Moku and our guests from the foundation who makes this all possible. I have a very simple job here today which is really just to facilitate space for Ms. Farhad to engage with Mr. Morgan. So to do that what we'll do today is after a few brief remarks by me, very brief, we'll turn the floor over to Mr. Morgan who will read a selected passage as a platform for Dr. Gokshan to engage in with her commentary before turning it back to Mr. Morgan for a response to her and then opening the floor to everyone in the audience for a group discussion session. So before that let me introduce Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan has won the 2022 William E. Colby Award for his book, The Hardest Place. Morgan has covered the U.S. military and its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2007 when he began embedding with combat units as a 19-year-old freelancer. From 2017 to 2020 he covered the Pentagon for Politico and his reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and other outlets. He's a native of Boston and a graduate of Princeton University. I want to preface some things by just reiterating what you're going to hear from Dr. Gokshan which is how grateful I am and we are too Mr. Morgan for having written this book. As a professional historian it's basically my job to criticize books, to find gaps in things and I would really struggle to do so with this one. Perhaps its greatest strength is that it's not just of immediate use to all of us but I think will continue to be of use to us for years to come because he's really put together an extraordinary archive of sources for people to continue drawing from. I support without reservation everything Dr. Gokshan is about to say and I now turn the floor over to Mr. Morgan. All right, so I'm going to read a passage from this book that Dr. Roberts here selected and just to provide some context for it, it's from about halfway through the book and about two years before I myself first visited the Pesh Valley in eastern Afghanistan and I'll explain a little bit more about why I wrote the book and everything after that. But in July 2008 there was a battle in a tributary valley called the Waigal at a village called Wants in which nine American paratroopers were killed and that's what this passage is about the sort of the acrimonious aftermath of the battle of Wants. Two weeks after that Bill Osland and the paratroopers of 2503 Infantry's Abel Battle, Chosen and Destined Companies were on their way home to Italy. Collectively they had been in more than a thousand firefights. 143 of their comrades had been wounded and 26 had been killed. A death toll that only one other American battalion in Afghanistan would ever surpass. The Rock as the battalion was known had been the most at everything during its 15 months in Kunar and Nuristan provinces. Of all the units in Afghanistan at the time it had called in the most strikes from jets and helicopters, nearly 4,000 and the most artillery and mortar fire missions, more than 5,000, spent the most development money, 80% of the brigade's development budget, even handed out the most beanie babies, more than 10,000. The awards its paratroopers earned during the deployment would make the Rock the most heavily decorated army battalion since Vietnam, a presidential unit citation nearly 100 bronze stars for combat valor, 28 silver stars, and two distinguished service crosses. After years of review, three Rock paratroopers would be awarded the Medal of Honor, Sal Janta of Battle Company and Kyle White and Ryan Pitts of Chosen Company, each of whom had battled insurgents alone when everyone around him was dead or wounded. But once, both the fight itself and the decision to leave rather than keep building up the base cast a shadow over the deployment. Two in-depth investigations followed the battle, a routine one called an Article 156 inquiry that sought to piece together what had happened on July 13th, 2008. And then, more than a year later, a SENTCOM inquiry that delved into the lead-up to the fight. The questions the SENTCOM investigatory team asked were wide-ranging. Why had the Rock sent soldiers to want at all? Why had it taken so long to start building the outpost? What intelligence indicators had there been of a coming attack? Why hadn't a drone been overhead? Had the soldiers there had enough water, enough construction equipment? Had observation post-topside been appropriately sighted? The basic implied question was this. Whose fault was it that scraggly, lightly armed guerrillas had been able to kill nine American paratroopers in the middle of nowhere? The investigation's final report, which Oslin's old mentor David Petraeus approved, blamed Battalion Commander Oslin and Company Commander Meyer for insufficient oversight of the base's opening days of construction. Oslin should have visited the site personally, it found. Meyer should have gotten there earlier, and the soldiers at the outpost should have been patrolling into the mountains in search of the enemy, instead of relying on devices like thermal sites to scan for suspicious activity. Both officers, through a report recommended, should be court-martialed. This put Matt Meyer in the odd position of earning both a silver star and a formal allegation of dereliction of duty for the same battle, the former for his actions during the fight, and the latter essentially for failing to prevent it from happening in the first place. To some of the family members of the dead, including platoon leader John Brostrom's father, the SENTCOM investigation's findings seemed like a necessary check on arrogant commanders who had thrown away their loved ones' lives. To Oslin, they were infuriating, unreasonable, and sometimes contradictory, and he fought back against them hard. He was not alone. To Division Commander Schlosser, the SENTCOM investigation seemed like a kangaroo court. This is not a ship running aground, he objected in frustration to the Marine General in charge of the inquiry. This is a thinking, living, flexible enemy that knows the area better than we do. The Army, in yet a third investigation in 2010, would side with Schlosser and overturn the SENTCOM findings, sparing Meyer, Oslin, and Brigade Commander Preissler from formal punishment. It is critical that we not mechanically equate U.S. casualties with professional error or misconduct, the Army report warned. In battle, casualties are inevitable. Regrettably, they are often the price of victory. Watt had been a victory in a narrow sense. Paratroopers, Marines, and Afghan National Army soldiers had repulsed a larger attacking force while inflicting much greater losses than they suffered. The enemy had never even penetrated the main outpost's perimeter as they had at the ranch house outpost. This much the investigation firmly established. None of the investigations evaluated how the battle fit into the larger picture of the war in Afghanistan or America's involvement in Kunar-Nuristan, however. If they had, they might have placed some of the blame for want with the 10th Mountain Division commanders whose 2006 plunge into the Waigal had left the rock with the ranch house and Bella outposts, and some of it with the whole way the American-led campaign in Afghanistan was set up. A catalog of the deeper failings of the war effort had helped bring the fight about and affected its course. The frequent shuffling of top generals in Kabul had made Nuristan a high priority one year and a low one the next. This, in turn, exacerbated the problems of a unit rotation system that both locked incoming units into the footprints of outgoing ones and limited the ability of newly arrived commanders to understand the nuances of their predecessors' approaches. Chronic under-resourcing of the Afghan theater had created a situation where most of the time, just two Apache attack helicopters were aloft over a violent mountainous three-province region the size of New Jersey. In Baghdad, meanwhile, four or more Paches often flew at once over the 15 square mile district of Sotir City. And the inadvertent killings of local civilians by American aircraft, an issue that top U.S. commanders had been trying and failing to address for years, but also contributed. Even though the assaults on the new WANT base had been in the works long before the July 4th Apache strike near Bella, Weigal residents later explained to me, the veteran militants who planned and commanded the attack took the opportunity to swell their forces' ranks with angry local men they recruited at the emotional funeral for the victims of the Bosch helicopter strike. Viewed in this larger context, WANT was no victory. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Professor Roberts. Good morning, Mr. Morgan. Thank you so much for coming to this event, especially students who have their midterms and also FTX. So I really appreciate you all showing up here and thank you for your time. I would like to begin with a few prefatory remarks that came from a series of discussions Professor Roberts and I have had on this book and more. To be very clear, what I'm about to say could be taken in two ways. I'm about to criticize the United States military and its war in Afghanistan. Some listeners might choose to shrug this off, chalking it up to the just another angry person from military from Middle East, angry at the West, or angry at being humiliated, or angry at American Empire. Or this could be taken as a critical academic reading of an absolutely brilliant text, which I'm genuinely grateful to Mr. Morgan for having written. I might have particular insights as an Afghan, like the language and cultural practices, but this is a reading and commentary that I hope can be taken as a response from any person schooled in history and international affairs. We asked Mr. Morgan to read this passage because it highlights some of the central paradoxes inherent in why or how the US military was adrift in Afghanistan. What I would like to do here now in about 10 minutes is unpack a bit using his book, How the Americans Were So Adrift. On page 159, Morgan has finished describing a brutal ambush of US soldiers in which several were killed and more wounded. Shaken by the experience, the lieutenant whose soldiers had been ambushed, a quote bookish looking university of Pennsylvania graduate, Ponder, I think that things were going on beneath the surface that we weren't fully aware of at the time. From our privilege of hindsight and historical inquiry, we can easily conclude that this young lieutenant was spot on. There were, in fact, many things going on beneath the surface of events that the Americans did not ever come to understand, and we will talk about some of those things here. On the other hand, though, the young lieutenant was also incorrect. There were blatant, easily observable, elementary level ignorance and arrogance. There were elementary level things going on that the Americans did not understand for various reasons. Arrogance and ignorance, the inefficiency inherent in any large military operation no matter how streamlined, strategic miscalculations like diverting funds and material to Iraq, and more. What were some of the surface level things that the Americans got wrong that can be interpreted as symbolizing the entire failure of the war. And yes, before we go further, we should put this out there. By every objective the Americans set out for, the Americans lost. Even though Bin Laden and now Zahidi are dead, note what I just said, Bin Laden. Morgan uses the name Bin Laden throughout the book, and rightfully so, he was the person why the Americans went to Afghanistan as they should have. But to be absolutely clear, there never in all history has been a person named Bin Laden. Calling someone Bin Laden is an egregious grammatical mistake in the Arabic language. It would be laughably wrong even to a school child. He was Osama Bin Laden. Bin only being the word used when following the first name and proceeding the last name as opposed to Ibn Laden when the first name is dropped. This is not to get into the nitty gritty of semantics. This matters. It symbolizes just how ignorant the United States was of what it was getting into. It did not even understand the grammatical construction of the person they were starting a trillion-dollar war to find and kill. Throughout the book, Morgan points out how the Americans went into places not only to kill people, but also to win their hearts and minds without anyone who could even speak the language. In fact, even when they did sometimes bring Afghans with them as translators, those Afghans they chose to bring didn't speak the correct language or dialect. How does one win hearts and minds without being able to say hello? Perhaps it might be argued the United States did not bother to understand these nitty gritty to learn languages or send translators because they thought they did not need to. Why? The Americans had overwhelming technological superiority, so superior that to even say that is an understatement. In one instance that Morgan describes in his usual lyrical prose, the Americans using AC-130 Spectre gunships, A-10s, and other machines of war unparalleled in the savagery of their destruction, the Americans demolished several buildings in a mountain village. The American barrage destroyed a mosque and at least eight civilians. One young woman was found dead running for her life from an AC-130 gunship loading its pickup truck-sized cannon on her. A baby was found ripped apart at the mouth of a cave where its mother had been trying to shield it. What did the Americans find in that village? One single old man with a bold action rifle. This incredibly lopsided asymmetry of power is a major theme of Morgan's work. As Morgan puts it on page 133, for all the U.S. military's technological prowess, the grinding day-to-day combat would be more like something out of Korea than the higher tech war that the American public and many American troops expected. But in another way, the asymmetry can be flipped. The Afghans fighting the Americans, some of whom, but not all were Taliban, did not really need technology. They had the ultimate power. They were on their own turf fighting a war for their own homeland. In fact, some Taliban or Taliban-affiliated fighters used to taunt Americans saying to them in a basic translation, quote, you have the watches, but we have the time end quote. What this means is the Taliban did not have to win on any battlefield with the Americans. All they had to do was not lose and not losing meant just waiting the Americans out. Many of these people had waited enemies out before. Some of the figures Morgan traces throughout the work like Gulbuddin Rabani or Gulbuddin Hikmatiar had fought the Soviets, by the way, as American allies in the 80s and just waited them out. Now they were doing the same, using much of the training and weapons the Americans had given them in the first place by waiting out their old allies. This then brings up another very important issue Morgan raises throughout the work, the nature of the Taliban and how the Taliban changed over time. We can argue that the Americans in their grinding decades long war turned the Taliban into something they had not been in the first place and exactly what they dreaded the most. By the end of the war, the Taliban were a far more centralized card carrying bureaucratic state-based organization than they had been in 2001 when the Americans went in. But just as much as the Taliban became more centralized throughout the war, this does not mean that all those who fought the Americans necessarily were a Taliban like we might be registered as Democrats or Republicans here in the USA or that just because in one year they fought with the Taliban they always did from then on out. Many Afghans who fought against the United States fell along a spectrum of accommodations, whether they were accommodating the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Pakistan, ISIS, Afghan nationalist groups or just simply defending their homes. In one very shrewd insight, Morgan notes how Afghan government officials, the government backed by the United States, began referring to some fighters as Naraz Wuruna, meaning the sad brothers or disgruntled brothers. In fact, I remember sitting in my home watching former President Hamid Karzai on the news when he first used the phrase describing for us as Afghans what was obvious for them, but for Americans seemed entirely impossible. Some Afghans who fought the USA were not Taliban and even people who were Taliban disagreed with other Taliban. To bring my comments here to a close, I want to bring up something that kept coming to my mind as I read Morgan's work. At first, I kept wanting to hear more of the Afghan voice in the work. Granted, this is a book about the US military and its failings in Afghanistan, but to what extent can one talk about the US military in Afghanistan without including the Afghan side of things? As I thought about the book more having completed it, I realized that perhaps the strongest trade of Morgan's book is how when diving beneath the surface of the book, it is profoundly sympathetic to the experience of everyday Afghans during the American occupation. In the post-World War era and especially the post-Vietnam era, it can be a common assumption that contemporary wars have been less violent or less destructive. After all, we have drones now, we have precision strikes and laser guided bombs. Any idea of war being less violent or less destructive comes exclusively from a perspective of American privilege. Make no mistakes. The American war ravaged Afghanistan. There are entire generations of Afghan children, young adults and adults who will forever be marred with psychological trauma. To be clear, the American military and government went further than probably any other government would in trying to avoid civilian casualties. And that is honorable and respectable, but it only takes one mistake to feed into the kind of messaging of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda and one mistake to leave entire generations marred with trauma. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, especially from the Afghan perspective, we might end with a quote from Thucydides who might be considered the father of military history. Of all the manifestations of power, none are more impressive than restraint. Thank you. I'll take the mic back now for a few minutes. What I'm going to do is describe how I came to write this book and then very briefly, you know, walk you through kind of what it covers, just a quick outline. And in doing so, I think I'm going to try and hit some of Druchan's points, you know, describe a little further some of the things that she's talking about, which I think were, you know, great examples to pull from the book that I'm really gratified that she picked up on. So the Pesh Valley is a place about 100 miles northeast of Kabul, relatively near the Pakistani border in incredibly rugged terrain, steep jagged mountains, big pine cedar fur forests that you don't see in other parts of the country where it makes surveillance with drones and landing helicopters really, really difficult compared to, you know, flatter or less vegetated areas of the country. And I first went there in 2010 on what was my fourth warzone trip embedded with U.S. forces and my second to Afghanistan. And I spent, I spent the summer of 2010, which was the summer of President Obama's surge, bouncing around the country, embedding with different U.S. and British infantry battalions in different parts of Afghanistan, you know, British battalion in Sangin district in Helmand, American battalion in the Argendab Valley, American battalion in Pactika, and then sort of almost by accident, because another embed was canceled, I wound up in the Pesh and I just became totally fascinated and fixated and have remained so for, you know, more than a decade since then and really have been working on the story of the Pesh, whether just sort of keeping an eye on it on the back burner or actively working on the book ever since then, starting with a senior thesis that I wrote when I went back to Princeton for my senior year after that trip. The reasons that I got so fascinated with the Pesh lead into the reasons why I thought it would be a good place to write a book about. One, the difficulties that U.S. forces faced in Afghanistan, which were many, were magnified in the Pesh, many of them. It just seemed like everything was harder there. That's why I called the book the hardest place. For one, the terrain was just unbelievable. Getting, getting anywhere required either helicopter aerosols using very scarce assets or required grueling hikes up into the mountains. Similarly, the, you know, the trees prevented, the trees prevented, as I said, a lot of surveillance from working successfully, limited the number of helicopter landing zones, brought a lot of helicopters, actually brought more helicopters down than enemy fire did in the course of the war. You know, just helicopters clipping their blades, clipping trees as they were coming into landing zones and so forth. And finally, the other difficulty that was really magnified is sort of the intelligence difficulty, the difficulty of understanding what's going on around you, because the passionate tributaries are an incredibly ethnolinguistically diverse area. You know, you can imagine everywhere that U.S. forces went in Afghanistan, they're juggling two languages, neither of which they spoke and had to rely on interpreters for, right, Pashto and Dari. Sometimes they're dealing with different regional dialects of Pashto as well. In the passionate tributaries, they're dealing with security forces that speak Dari, valley floor populations that speak Pashto, and then tributary valley populations that speak about seven other mutually unintelligible languages that have no written form, Waigali, Gambiri, Tragami, Kourangali, a bunch of other ones that often get lumped together as Nur-Astani, but actually are completely distinct languages. And you've got an interpreter for one of them, he's not going to be able to help you with the next one over. So this, as you can probably imagine, magnified the difficulties in, you know, trying to run sources, trying to understand the motivations of people who are feeding you intelligence, trying to understand the motivations of your local partners, trying to understand, you know, when they might be playing you, when they might be using you as their proxy, rather than vice versa. All of these things were harder up there, which is not to dismiss, you know, any other AO in Afghanistan. You could write a similar book about Sangen or the Argandad or any number of other places and equally use it to serve as kind of a microcosm of the war. I think, you know, each district, any district that you choose to serve as a microcosm will sort of have some of the major threads of the war and not others. You know, if you were to write a book about Sangen, you would get the sort of the flavor of NATO coalition war fighting, you know, British and Australians and Marines switching off. You don't get that in the Pesh where it's all Americans. But the Pesh for me seemed like the perfect place to write about because the two threads that are always present there and often in tension with one another are the broader counterinsurgency and nation building strategy and the counterterrorism strategy that supposedly the counterinsurgency and nation building strategy was in service of. But what you see in the course of the war in the Pesh is that very often these two approaches were in tension, often really stepping on each other's toes as different organizations that did not enjoy unity of effort or unity of command worked at cross purposes with one another. Counterterrorism organizations made mistakes in the service of their goals that then made more difficult the counterinsurgency mission and so on. I'll provide one quick anecdote also about, you know, visiting the Pesh and what made it so interesting, you know, relative to other fascinating AOs that I was visiting at that time in 2010. The battalion commander in the Pesh Valley in the summer of 2010 was a guy named Joe Ryan who now commands the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii. And he winds up being a recurring character in this book because just basically by the luck of the draw and how long the United States spent involved in Northeastern Afghanistan, Joe kept going back there. He had gone up to the Pesh as a major in the first Ranger Battalion in 2003 back when the story was all about light footprint counterterrorism, trying to figure out where bin Laden had gone after Toribora. He returned in 2010 as an infantry battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division. He returned later as the commander of the JSOC task force back to kind of the counterterrorism mission doing the manhunting. He returned yet again in 2018 to the Northeast as the senior advisor to the Afghan National Army Corps in Northeastern Afghanistan. And he returned yet again in 2020 into 2021 as the operations, the second to last operations officer of the overall U.S. effort in Afghanistan working for the four star general. And that's not because he was sort of, you know, volunteering for tours and trying to get back to the same exact place over and over again, but it was just, it was the luck of the draw and like a number of other people, he wound up being a really valuable character who kind of contrast these different tours and see the place evolve over time. But what was fascinating to me about Colonel, then Lieutenant Colonel Ryan in the summer of 2010 was how different the way he talked about the Pesh Valley was from how other battalion commanders I was visiting talked about their AOs. And basically the difference was in these other AOs that I was visiting, they were places where U.S. forces had relatively recently started fanning out into many outposts and doing counterinsurgency work. Even though the United States had been in Afghanistan since 2001 in the Argandab Valley, that's a place where, you know, U.S. forces really were arriving there in strength in 2010 and getting to work. Similarly in Paktika, you know, more forces were flowing in for the surge, a province that had one outpost, you know, now was going to have 10. And so all of these commanders that I was talking to in these other districts, they were ambitious, they were optimistic. And these were not disingenuous things they were telling me. They believed what they were telling me and they believed it with reason. They were telling me about the kilometers of road that they were paving, the new outpost that they were building, the, you know, the ratings of effectiveness of their ANA and how many of their patrols were accompanied by the ANA and basically how much farther they were going to push the counterinsurgency ball forward by the time they handed things off to their successor, you know, in a few months or next year. In the Pesh, Joe Ryan had a very different, just a different tenor to his comments. I mean, he was, he was very blunt. I'm going to, I'm just going to pull up a comment really quickly here. I mean, I remember one thing that he said, and you know, this is, this was very blunt for it to speaking to an embedded reporter coming through was I came in here looking for a counterinsurgency victory and here there is no such thing, meaning specifically the Pesh Valley, not Afghanistan. He wasn't sort of speaking outside his, you know, his lane as a battalion commander, but that was what he was, that was what he was seeing. And the argument that he was making to his superiors at that time was that basically US forces had run out of track in the Pesh Valley because they'd been at it so much longer there and the window of opportunity had closed. Sort of the attitudes of the people had hardened. And, you know, the, the sort of, you know, my observation, this is not his observation, but my observation is that by 2010 outposts that had been built to provide, you know, kind of the nucleus of bubbles of security for the people, you know, built in your villages in order to protect those villages from the Taliban. These outposts had instead become bubbles of insecurity and bubbles of danger because the war had come down from the hills where it had been a couple of years earlier and now it was right, it was right in the villages and on the road that the US forces had built, you know, to facilitate their access to the valley. And so people had basically clamped up people who two or three years earlier had had great relationships with US troops and had been telling them where IEDs were and all this kind of stuff. They now were just backing off, keeping quiet. And it was, it was very clear that they just, they were trying to, they were trying to stay alive in the middle of this very brutal fight that you could hear the numbers of ordnance that I described in that, in that passage. And I've never seen so much artillery fired, probably in all the other embeds I've ever done combined as I, as I saw in the Pesh Valley in 2010. And they're just trying to, trying to live their lives without, without sort of being pinned to one side or the other, not knowing which side was going to win, the government or the Taliban, but knowing that the Americans were not going to be there forever. There's an episode that Ms. Farhad alluded to that I want to talk a little bit about. You know, the way I wrote this book was I took as my jumping off point my personal experience trips that I took to the Pesh embedded with US forces, trips that I took to the Pesh embedded with Afghan national army forces after US forces had drawn down. But from there I also, I went and interviewed Afghan civilians in these villages or, or bringing them down to Kabul once I couldn't get to the villages anymore because ISIS had moved in about their experiences. And back here in the United States, I interviewed about 400 American veterans of this, of this valley, everybody from, you know, privates and corporals up to Kami Saps and CIA base chiefs and so on to sort of, to just try and understand this from as many sides as possible. And one of the episodes that I always knew it had happened, but it took a really, really long time to get to the bottom of, to the extent that I was able to get to the bottom of it, is an episode in the Waigal Valley in 2003. And this is, it's a, this is a perfect illustration, both of the disunity of command problem, disunity of command and disunity of effort. And it's a perfect illustration of the intelligence problem that was posed by trying to do counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in this incredibly complex place. Basically, in the fall of 2003, the Bush administration sent the word out to the CIA and JSOC via SENTCOM that they needed to pick bin Laden's trail back up. You know, JSOC and the CIA had shifted their efforts over to Iraq in the earlier part of the year, but now they needed to refocus in Afghanistan and they needed to pick bin Laden's trail back up. And so both JSOC and the CIA surged assets up into this very remote part of northeastern Afghanistan. The range, you know, half the Ranger regiment went up there on an operation called Winter Strike, spread out into these incredibly remote valleys where they mostly didn't find anything and they didn't yet have contract interpreters. They were relying on CIA surrogate paramilitaries who were not from those valleys and did not speak the relevant languages. And the CIA for its part, its role in this operation was it received a piece of intelligence. I have learned subsequently where that piece of intelligence came from. It came from two members of the CIA-backed Afghan intelligence service, National Director of Security, who were actually from the Waigal Valley and spoke the language of that valley and therefore the CIA was completely reliant on them because it had no other people like that. There was no one else for them to turn to. And these two informants told the CIA that Gobodin Hikmachiar, who at the time was thought to be the man harboring Bin Laden, which was not totally wrong. He had been doing that a little earlier in the war, was at a certain compound way up in the northern part of the Waigal Valley. The military declined to action the target. Stan McChrystal, who had just come into Bagram to oversee this JSOC surge, said his troops weren't ready yet and he wasn't confident in the intelligence without his own, you know, DIA informants going up there and confirming it. But the pressure was so great to produce results that George Tenet signed off on a strike anyway, a military strike under, you know, under CIA command that used an AC-130 followed by, well, there was also, there was a B-1 bomber involved. B-1 was, you know, many platforms involved to come and basically level this compound on the mountainside in a way that had it been a military pure strike rather than one directed, you know, at the highest levels from, you know, from the CIA director, probably wouldn't have gone down the way that it did. But the result is that, hey, come on, Sierra was never there. A family is destroyed. The numbers are either seven or eight civilians killed, largely women and children. U.S. forces learn this when they kind of hike up the valley, 10th Mountain Division guys hike up the valley to sort of try and figure out what happened, do some sensitive site exploitation. And they find that, well, impossible for them to confirm whether Hekbanatu was there or not. He's certainly not dead as a result of the strike. But what you kind of, what I pieced together subsequently was that basically this was an example, well, first of this disunity of command where the CIA strike really created huge difficulties for subsequent military forces who had to live and do counterinsurgency in the Waigal Valley with very little knowledge of the secret operation. And two, it was an example of the CIA being played by sources who had other motives, which was an incredibly common experience, especially in the early years of Afghanistan, as various sources and proxies tried to harness U.S. military power and trick or con or nudge, otherwise get the U.S. military to take out rivals of theirs, people that they had grudges against, people that they had familial disputes with, territorial disputes with, disputes over water rights, all kinds of things. And this was an instance where actually these two informants, they in the 1980s, had worked as part of the communists, the KGB trained communist intelligence service in Afghanistan. And their portfolio at the time, because they were from this valley, had included both hunting the same guy, Hekmatyar, who, mind you, at the time was backed by the United States in kind of an uneasy partnership, but also a guy named Ghulam Rabani, who had been a major Mujahideen commander in the province at the time. And they had never caught Ghulam Rabani. And he was sort of their, their opposite number in the Waigal Valley. They were the communist officials for the Waigal Valley. And Ghulam Rabani was the chief Mujahideen commander for the Waigal Valley. Now, come 2003, when this strike happens, Ghulam Rabani has nothing to do with any insurgency. He has since been the provincial governor of Nuristan. And he's really, he's sort of a, he's known as kind of a provincial peacemaker. He's a person who, he was allied with the Afghan government and really would have been, in subsequent years, a perfect person for U.S. counterinsurgency troops going into Nuristan to have had a relationship with. But this was all destroyed because essentially these NDS sources, whether they deliberately misled the CIA and they knew that Hekmatyar was not there, or whether they thought Hekmatyar might have been there. And that was a good enough reason to, you know, also help finish off this other old enemy of theirs. Like they probably saw no distinction from their end between Rabani and Hekmatyar. These were the reasons that resulted in this strike. I mean, they overrepresented to the CIA how confident they were in the intelligence. The CIA station chief actually advised against the strike. And yet the director caused it to go forward. So that's the, that's the strike that Drashan is talking about there. One more point that I'll add. I mean, there's one of the great ironies of the story of U.S. involvement in, in Qunar province, in Nuristan province, the areas that the Pesh Valley spans is that unlike Kandahar or Helmand, which are the Taliban heartland, Qunar was not the Taliban heartland. Qunar is Salafi territory, a different Islamic doctrine that is pretty incompatible with the Taliban. And it is really only the arrival of United States forces. And I'm talking here not about young paratroopers, but about CIA paramilitaries and green berets who are, you know, better attuned than most to the problems of working with sources and of being played. It was, it was mistakes by these guys that were enough to essentially spark an insurgency, which the Taliban then moved into the province and co-opted. There's a, there's a fascinating dynamic to this involving the timber trade that the book describes. And I, you know, talk about some other time. But the arc that you see is basically various enemies follow the United States into this province, even as the United States is following its initial enemies into the province. The CIA and Jaisak go up to Qunar trying to find bin Laden. They actually are right about that. We know in retrospect from Jihadi sources that Qunar is where bin Laden went after Torah Bora, but they were always just a few months behind, you know, hitting a place that he had been at a month before, things like that. And then by 2003 he was no longer in Afghanistan, but the momentum was already there. Jaisak turned things over to green beret teams, green beret teams turned things over to Marines, Marines turned things over to conventional army infantry. And over time, things just snowballed as each of these, each of these, you know, sort of tribes of the US military without the benefit of the knowledge of sort of what the original purpose had been, embrace more and more expansive versions of the mission as encouraged to do so by a succession of, you know, ISAF commanders and US presidential administrations. Until you get to this point that I saw in 2010 where it was just this incredibly violent stalemate up there. And, you know, by the end, you have a bureaucratized, heavily entrenched Taliban insurgency in two provinces where the Taliban had had only the most limited light footprint before 2001. As a result of that, you also get al-Qaeda advisors coming in to support the Taliban, bringing an al-Qaeda presence to the province that was not there before 2001, including a figure named Faruq al-Katani who is not well known, you know, among academics who study al-Qaeda, but who in the second term of the Obama administration was seen as one of the top three al-Qaeda figures that they were trying to kill anywhere in the world, because he was seen as a potential heir to the whole al-Qaeda enterprise. And basically he was a guy who had moved up to the mountains in the Pesh just to gain combat experience, to go fight there with his Taliban brothers. But over time, received directions from bin Laden before bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, before Osama bin Laden's death to establish a backup sanctuary in the mountains north of the Pesh that U.S. forces had just withdrawn from in case al-Qaeda senior leadership needed to move from Pakistan as they were sort of being punished there by the CIA drone campaign. So you see this irony again of, you know, the final years of the war after U.S. troops have withdrawn, JSOC is doing this aerial manhunting campaign, going after this figure who came up there because U.S. troops were there, and who became entrenched there because U.S. troops left. And then, you know, kind of the final irony is that no sooner than does JSOC kill Farooq al-Qatani in the final weeks of the Obama administration in October 2016, then ISIS appears in the province. And in fact, many of the the Salafi groups that had fought against the Taliban before 2001, then aligned with the Taliban against the United States as an alliance of convenience. Because of the rise of ISIS, these local Salafi groups now join ISIS, which is a better ideological fit for them. And so the war continues. And I end one of the chapters of the book with a quote from a guy who did two tours up in the Pesh Silver Star recipient. He was first as a platoon leader then as a company commander. And when I told him that JSOC was still hitting targets up in the Waterport Valley where he'd done air assaults in 2011, he was just, I'll read you his response. Basically, he said, for as long as the soldiers, intelligence officers, and contractors charged with America's counterterrorism went looking for people to kill in the Waterport, that is, they would keep on finding them. There will always be dragons to slay up there, he said. And of course, that's over now. But it's actually not over quite in the Pesh Valley and its environs because that's where ISIS is still at. The war is not over in the Pesh, the war between the Taliban and ISIS. And actually that's the exact same place that I was just talking about the Waterport continues to have drone strikes in it, not US drone strikes, but Pakistani drone strikes. So I'll leave it there. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Mr. Farhad and Mr. Morgan. We have a few minutes here for questions. I'm sure there'll be quite a few if we'll make the most of our time. If you can keep your questions as concise as possible, just come here to either side. We'll alternate between the sides. Hello. Did you take into consideration Afghan security forces failures and attacking coalition forces and different tribes and no conception of nationalism? With all the critique of US policy, do you think Afghanistan is better now? The Taliban engages in general mutilation. You think that's the same as Republicans and Democrats? How does one valley determine the outcome or? I'm not quite sure I got all of that, but I'll start with, I mean, the role of the Afghan security forces is obviously a key one throughout the book. The dynamic that I described basically in the hardest place is one where US forces early on, especially Green Berets were very invested in the development of Afghan security forces, but they quickly had the rug pulled out from under them because the particular Afghan security forces that they were developing were not seen as part of the future Afghan National Army. And then for many subsequent years, you have Afghan National Army battalions in the Pesh that US Army battalions really just use as kind of auxiliaries rather than partners. They drag them along on missions in a token way to check a box because headquarters requires them to have Afghans on missions. You've got Marine advisors with these Afghan troops who are sort of screaming into the wind saying, look, this is not the way to handle these Afghan troops. If you want them to ever be able to do anything on their own, but nevertheless, that is the dynamic for many years in the Pesh and in many other areas of eastern Afghanistan. And this results in in 2011 when the US first withdraws from the Pesh in the Afghan Army battalion that's left behind there, essentially collapsing on itself and forcing the United States to reinsert itself into the district, you know, just six months after leaving to sort of try to do it better this time and finally do kind of the, you know, small low level small scale advising that arguably they should have been doing the entire time. You know, as far as the enemy, I think this is probably the book's biggest weakness is that it doesn't contain much of the enemy perspective. It contains as much as I could get. You know, I interviewed low level Taliban fighters, you know, people who were from communities who had taken up arms because a brother had been killed by American troops, things like that. I was not able to interview, you know, senior Taliban leaders or even mid-level Taliban leaders other than, you know, I was able to use some, you know, declassified or leaked interrogation reports, things like that, especially from a key figure named Abu Baklas, who was an Egyptian al-Qaeda figure who was up there for a long time. But I certainly hope to be able to learn more about that in the future, you know, returning to Afghanistan and talking to the Taliban who are generally in a more talkative mood now that they've won. Thank you. It is 11.50, so anyone who does have to go feel free, although the three of us can stay right until noon, so please. Adam, can I ask you to spell your name just so I know it? It's D-R-U-K-H. My last name or first name, sorry. How do you pronounce your name so I don't mistake? He just wants to get it right. Okay, it's a torture. D-R-U-K-H, I go by D for my first name because it's hard to say that the K voice here and in the core, I go by Fahad, my last name. I'll be very quick. I am the chairman of the selection committee for the Colby Award. I had never imagined that I would have this experience being a part of that board. I wanted to say that everybody in this room should be incredibly proud of this institution. You could wear the uniform that you're wearing in the oldest private military college in the United States and have the strength and the articulacy and the passion to say what you said is a wonderful, wonderful thing. We should welcome that. It's a great credit to this institution. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. It definitely is a privilege and even though I'm from Afghanistan, I haven't seen my family for three years. I don't even know when the next time I will be able to see them, but I'm still privileged because I'm here and I'm sitting here and so many people are not able to do that. The only thing I hope that this institution and students who are commissioning, who are part of the military, is to not turn a blind eye to what happened and what's going to happen. Because as human beings, I can give the benefit of the doubt to every single American or every single person in the military because as human beings, we have our insecurities. We have ego. We have our own pride, which can be hurt and nobody loves to be criticized. But at the same time, as Americans, you hold a lot of power and privileges that a lot of people do not have the chance to entertain. With that power should come a lot of responsibilities to make sure that this doesn't happen again, which honestly I don't know at this point what to feel like. But as students, as intellectuals, as someone who are like futures of this nation and this nation who makes a lot of decisions, we need to hold our panelists at this level as they like this symposium level. Those who keep talking about China, Russia and America, we need to speak to them and raise a question that these products, these intelligence robots that you're creating, are they going to be used in these lands or they're going to be used in another country like Afghanistan, like Iran in Pakistan and all these third world countries that they were not even part of a panel for creation of them when they're so excited about the intelligence of all these EIs and how much they are like making lives of human beings easy or the war easy for us. How do you talk to a veteran and ask them how easy it is for them to carry the burden of killing innocent civilians? How easy was it? Very much. Within seconds they were able to demolish a whole village. Are they able to carry that burden right now? Are they able to be a better father, a better husband, a better member of the society? Is the government right now who is investing millions of dollars into EI right now, have they even been able to go to that veteran and see how they're doing? I want every single one of you to ask these questions. As an Afghan, this is not just my responsibility to bring these questions and ask these hard questions because injustices, they're like snowballs. They will get bigger and they will lead to other injustices. Injustices in terms of Afghanistan, in terms of all these other countries that have no voice, those are injustices that you can relate to them even in the United States. It's not a matter of who is the subject. It's the practice. Once you get used to it, you will continue to practice that and you will continue to use it in different scenarios with different people because you're used to it because you don't know what is the alternative because you don't know when it's the time to step up and say the right thing. In the military, we're always told to do as we are told to. We're supposed to take orders. Is it easy to stand up and say I'm not going to do it because it's wrong? It's absolutely horrifying. It's so annoying because I do it every single time to my chain of command because I'm part of the international section. Do they welcome it with open arms? No. It takes three or four more extra conversations with them because I have to set them down because I have the patience and I hate to give up and I'm stubborn enough that even though they think it's annoying as hell and they want to like rip me apart in that moment but I have to set them down. I have to talk to them with compassion, with love, with all the kindness in my heart that I can find and tell them that I'm not going to do it and here's why and if they ask of me something they need to tell me why because I need to know the reason and if they don't have it they need to go find it for me. If I could add just one brief thing to Kit at Farhad's really powerful remarks there. She asked the question of what is it like for people who have been involved in the inadvertent killings of innocent civilians. After writing this book I was contacted a few months ago by the weapons officer on the B-1 that dropped those bombs on that particular village and for him it was hard to read this book but he also it was not the first that he heard about it. Essentially when he got back to Al-Udair or Diego Garcia, I forget which it was, the squadron commander was waiting with champagne for the B-1 crew because the mission was assumed to have been a success. They had struck the target and it was only a week later that he learned from the Wall Street Journal that they had in fact only killed civilians and it really was a really crushing experience for him and the end of his military career because he made clear to his squadron before their next rotation that he was not going to be willing to drop on residential targets and so they said well then you know you're not coming because that's not how it works and that was the end of his Air Force career and it's something that has haunted him to this day and you know from the last time I talked to him it certainly still haunts him. He was carrying out legal orders in pursuit of a top national mission and the result was just unmitigated tragedy with no no upside to it and that really has weighed on him for a long time. Good afternoon my name is John Walsh. Mr. Morgan I have a question for you. You talked briefly about the difference between counter insurgency and terrorism. What is the difference between in your opinion between an insurgent and a terrorist and how do we fight both threats? Well in the context of Afghanistan what I'm talking about is by terrorist groups I mean international terrorist organizations that commit terrorist attacks overseas in this context meaning al-Qaeda and by insurgent organizations I mean the Taliban although the Taliban also uses terrorist tactics within the context of Afghanistan to go after you know to launch high-profile attacks in Kabul or obviously doesn't do that now but did during the course of the war and you know where it gets messy is where these two groups are closely affiliated and there's a lot of crossover between them you know for instance there are there are certainly you know the insurgent the insurgent organization the Taliban certainly contains terrorists right like say Haqqani bomb makers Haqqani suicide sell suicide best guys they're terrorists. Similarly you know al-Qaeda although it is we think of it as an international terrorist organization and it is it also contains people who are not involved in international terrorism and who instead are essentially the jihadi equivalent of green berets and spend their lives advising local jihadis in the pursuit of local aims and you actually you can see this you can see one of the difficulties inherent in this in the story of the Pesh you know for years the U.S. military chased a guy around eastern Afghanistan called Abu Baklas an Egyptian guy who was you know he was a bona fide card carrying member of al-Qaeda but he was not involved in international terrorism he was essentially a red herring he was he was more visible to the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence than peers who were involved in international terrorism because of the nature of his relationship with local insurgent groups and his presence therefore distracted from you know other other figures who probably would have been a lot more worthwhile to go after in counterterrorism terms. You see this you know play out again later in the war with the case of Faruq al-Qaqani who I talked about where you kind of had indicators that he was a really serious international terrorist but then other people who because of the Abu Baklas experience are skeptical and say well how sure are we that this guy is really up to anything when he's you know hemmed him in in the far mountains of Nuristan what how how bad could anything he's really up to be which then the question becomes well so how long do you have to keep hemming him in with drone strikes is this is this sort of a a permanent condition that has to be maintained how do you know when you've how do you know when you've succeeded or failed you know and that's when you're dealing with covert organizations that deliberately hide their aims from you and deliberately disguise the importance of their leaders and so on that's a really really hard question and it's it's one that I think is going to be especially hard going forward in Afghanistan you know as the U.S. intelligence community has lost many of its key sources of intelligence on the ground kind of it's the the surrogate units that the sea paramilitary surrogate units that the CIA used to gather intelligence about al-qaeda battlefield advisors by capturing them interrogating them those units are all gone so you know we're sort of back to this question of even if you know that a terrorist is in the country you know your successor to Zwhaqir or whoever it may be how will you ever know what they're doing there is there any such thing as a retired al-qaeda operative um Abu Baklas may be retired now I don't know seems plausible to me other people think no once he's once you're al-qaeda you're sort of died in the wool forever and uh you should sort of always remain a focus of efforts to try and capture and capture or kill him so it's a really tough intelligence question and it's a one it's one that is tougher now thank you we can conclude there with another round of thanks uh Bessie don't worry you can come up here and ask your question thank you