WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan

Jordan Schneider (0:00)

War Talk, 25 years since 9-11, 25 years of GWOT, 25 years of chaos in the Middle East, which still has not ended as of today, and probably not for the foreseeable future. CENTCOM has consumed all things. In order to mark 25 years of the global war on terror, we thought there was no one better to invite on the show than Wesley Morgan, who is the author of The Hardest Place, which is basically the story of a microcosm of the war.

Wesley, am I missing you on anything?

Wesley Morgan (0:35)

No, that's great. Yeah, it's a book about the war in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, which I kind of use as a microcosm for the broader conflict.

Jordan Schneider (0:44)

Cool. With us today, as usual, is Justin Jordan. Brian, Jordan is being an excellent father right now, so the rest of us will run the show while he sits in the background.

Wesley Morgan (0:58)

Awesome.

Jordan Schneider (0:59)

So, I guess the best way to start is, Wes, why did this become your– I mean, the book is an incredibly detailed account of commanders, of individual actions on the ground.

Why did you get after this? Yeah.

Wesley Morgan (1:18)

So, I was– when I was in my early 20s, I was spending a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan as a freelance journalist. And this was on my fourth trip into the war zones and second to Afghanistan, after two to Iraq. I was in Afghanistan for the summer of 2010, which was kind of the peak summer of President Obama's surge, all the surge trips were arriving in theater. And what I would do is I would just bounce around to different battalions. I would– if it was a three-month trip, which this trip, this one was, I would sort of split it up between four battalions in different places. And I wound up going to a battalion in the Pech, sort of by happenstance, because an embed somewhere else got canceled. And somebody said, oh, well, last minute, maybe you should go to this one, to this, you know, the good battalion commander there. So I went out there not really knowing much about it, other than that it was where the Korengal was. Because the Korengal was very famous at that time and was sort of emblematic as America was returning its attention to Afghanistan after the Iraq surge. The Korengal had become kind of emblematic in popular media of the war.

And so I got to the Pech, this was July 2010, and US forces had left the Korengal about three months earlier and had essentially retreated to, they now manned just a string of outposts along the Pech Valley floor. And if you can imagine kind of looking at a leaf and like the veins of a leaf, you might say the Pech is sort of that main, that spine, and then there are these little smaller valleys running off of it, which included the Korengal, and then less famously, the Weigal, the Shuriak, the Waterpour, which were all places that had claimed American lives in the preceding nine years at that point.

And I got to this place, Forward Operating Base Blessing, down the Pech, and then from there, Combat Outposts Michigan, which was the one at the mouth of the Korengal. And I was just really taken aback by everything I saw. It was very different from everything else I'd seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I mean, there was just vastly more ordinance being expended by both sides than I'd ever seen, for one thing.

This outpost is sucking down recoilless rifle rounds, AGS-17, kind of Russian version of a Mark 19 grenade launcher would be dumping rounds into this place. And then, of course, mortars and rockets all the time. And it was just like clockwork. You arrive and the company commander tells you, well, yeah, you should expect one around 7 p.m. We get two or three of these a day. You know, just sort of like weather.

So I was very struck by that. I was also struck by the terrain. It's just a very crazy looking place. It's much greener than other parts of Afghanistan. And instead of sort of, you know, big plateaus, it's very sharp, jagged mountains that rise right up from the valley floor. So very difficult terrain for fighting, as you can imagine, very especially very difficult for helicopters.

And then, one thing that was very striking to me was, you know, in these engagements at the Combat Outpost Michigan at the mouth of the Korengal, although there was this huge amount of ordnance being expended and it was very intense in a certain way, it also was very routine. And it was very, you know, there were American soldiers who were hurt, you know, during my stay at Michigan, but it was a heavily fortified place at this point. And it was, you know, basically, there was all this concrete everywhere. And, you know, the soldiers treated this, treated these barrages like weather. I mean, and so for the most part, it was like a relatively safe place to be, combat outpost Michigan, despite the, you know, torrential downpour of incoming fire that was hitting it all the time. And likewise, the enemy up in the hills, you got the pretty strong sense that they weren't taking many casualties either, because, you know, they had it down perfectly as well. I mean, they knew exactly how many minutes it would take before the 81-millimeter mortars started hitting after they initiated a contact, and how many more minutes until the howitzers from Fobb Blessing started hitting, and how many more minutes they could expect until, you know, fast air showed up on station and started dropping JDAMs. And they would just, you know, scurry away back into the caves before that happened. So what it felt like was not too many people were getting, you know, hurt or killed on either side, but who was stuck in the middle was the villages outside of the US outposts. And, you know, I knew because of kind of counterinsurgency doctrine and the broader strategy of the war, that these US outposts, they were intended to serve, they were supposed to be serving as providing security for these villages from the Taliban. And instead, they really seemed like, you know, rather than being security bubbles, they were kind of bubbles of danger. They were drawing in conflict into these villages in a way that it just, you know, it did not seem like it was endearing the American presence to them, which was also, you know, certainly borne out on patrols. People were over it. They really, really over it. And then finally, the battalion commander in the Pech at the time was a guy who was just very frank about all this. You know, everywhere else I went in Afghanistan that summer, you know, the battalion commander would be saying, oh, we're going to, you know, we're going to build this many more combat outposts. We're going to pave this many more kilometers of roads. We're going to spend this amount of SERP money. And, you know, we're going to push the ball this much farther down the field by the time the next guy gets here. And this battalion commander in the Pech was very frank about, you know, I've been here before in this AO. Things have gotten a lot worse by virtue of our presence, and I'm trying to sell a pullout. And that was just, you know, interesting and bracing to hear from a battalion commander. At that time of the Afghan surge, when all the incentives were telling him, no, no, this is the time for expansion and coin and outposts and roads. Sorry, go ahead.