Military Affairs Reporter Wes Morgan on U.S. Military Involvement in Afghanistan's Pech Valley
Intelligence Matters
CBS News
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2021
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Intelligence Matters, Wes Morgan, military affairs reporter and author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley joins Michael Morell to discuss his time as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. Morgan describes the Pech as a microcosm representing the overall war in Afghanistan, and explains why a lack of information-sharing led to repeated mistakes. Morgan details the tensions between the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions as well as the challenges posed by the Afghan terrain.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell. |
| 0:06.5 | Brought to you by Lockheed Martin. |
| 0:08.6 | Your mission is ours. |
| 0:10.6 | In 2010, I found myself in the Pesh Valley and it really just got me hooked. |
| 0:18.9 | It felt very different from other places in Afghanistan that I'd been. |
| 0:22.1 | And that was just sort of the original root of my interest was this place seems so different. |
| 0:26.8 | It's so beautiful. |
| 0:27.8 | There are these forests. |
| 0:29.4 | And yet it's also, it seems like it's settled into this stalemate. |
| 0:32.7 | US forces in the Taliban, they've been here forever. |
| 0:36.4 | They're duking it out with just unbelievable amounts of ordinance. |
| 0:39.0 | I mean, I've never seen so much artillery fired and probably all of the other embeds I've |
| 0:42.6 | ever done. |
| 0:44.8 | Why did we stay for as long as we did? |
| 0:47.7 | A lot of what you see is not so much a big decision being made in Washington or Kabul that |
| 0:53.7 | decides the course of, oh, we're going to be in the sally, suing this mission until |
| 0:57.9 | it's done. |
| 0:58.9 | But you see different units rotating through and different tribes of the US military taking |
| 1:04.5 | responsibility for it in succession. |
| 1:06.8 | And each one of them kind of using it for their own purposes, trying to accomplish different |
| 1:11.4 | things there eventually being pulled out and then some other unit being left, left behind, |
| 1:16.1 | left holding the bag. |
... |
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