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New book on Afghanistan by Gary Schroen, former CIA guy. I received my copy yesterday after pre-ordering it, but will not read until I finish Ghost Wars. On the back cover, there are extremely positive comments about the book from both Milt Bearden and Steve Coll, so I am optimistic.

Anyone read it yet or have any thoughts?

Sir, I am halfway through the book and have been enjoying it. The book serves as a nice compliment to Woodward’s Bush at War and Coll’s Ghost Wars, Schroen was interviewed extensively for these two (he is referenced only by his first name in Bush at War). My few thoughts so far on the book do not warrant mention. But, some small stories he has mentioned so far that I have gotten a kick out of include:

• Cofer Black telling him “I want bin Ladin’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Ladin’s head to the president. I promised him I would do that”
• Schroen and a fellow teammate spending thousands of dollars in northern Virginia REI store a few days before they deploy to A’stan
• The problems that come with carrying around $3 million cash
• While repainting the teams helicopter in the NA pattern the team adds the tail number 91101
• The Air Force’s initial supply drop of humanitarian rations from 27,000 ft without parachutes

I will post more when I finish the book.

For some reason this brought to mind an anecdote that Milt Bearden relates in his book. He was running an operation supplying arms and supplies to the muj in Afghanistan, as the operation grew in scope, they faced a shortage of mules and were unable to procure enough locally to meet increased demand and offset losses and so were forced to buy some from China. Bearden cabled Langley that they needed, IIRC, 300 mules that were healthy, used to heavy loads, at least two years old, and "stump broke."

He and his colleague were delighted with themselves imagining some bureaucrat trying to figure out what a "stump broke" mule was. In this case the paper pushers got the last laugh, cabling back that the only agency personnel qualified in stump breaking mules were already in Islamabad. :D

Wow, I almost finished the whole thing on one flight. Have about 100 pages to go. Very well written and entertaining.

But this seems to me to be a controversial book from the SF perspective. LOTS of criticism of Pentagon REMFs and policymakers who delayed the insertion of ODAs into Afghanistan. Even some of COL Mulholland (name off the top of my head), who was running TF Dagger. There are some specific passages I will quote in this thread later to see what you guys think.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book so far.

To add to RL's post above, I've been doing catch-up reading of US News & World Reports, and there was a short Q&A piece with Schroen that caught my attention.

Q: Was America prepared for the war on terrorism?

A: The CIA was ready. We knew what to do. The U.S. military, and I'm not denigrating their activities on the ground, but they were not ready. The Pentagon did nto have a plan on how to go into Afghanistan and fight the kind of war it was going to take--a special operations war to defeat the Taliban.

Hmmm, seems from my outsider point of view that we did pretty damned well 'without a plan to fight a special operations war'.

In the book, he criticizes DOD's alleged refusal to provide an SOF liaison guy for the team he brought in, alleged delays in sending in ODAs despite his requests, and alleged refusal to target Taliban front lines early on. There is a page I marked for the purpose of typing a chunk of it into this thread, but I don't have the book at the office. Will try to remember later.

I recall that he speculated that interservice rivalries played a role in the conduct he alleges to have taken place.

Here's that quote, page 159:

I just finished. I liked it.

In the Afterword, he says that we need more SF guys in Afghanistan and that we should not have diverted them to Iraq (implying we should not have gone into Iraq in the first place). He also says we are not giving enough monetary aid to Afghan regime, which needs to build a sufficiently large central army to control the regional militias which dominate the country. Also says we need to provide more support to Musharraf, like releasing F-16s, because Musharraf needs something to show for the CT support they're providing along the border.

Certainly would be interested in thoughts anyone may have on these political issues, subject to OPSEC and PERSEC concerns of course.

That is happening and India was not overly pleased, but didn't cry loud enough publicly for it to be heard for any greater length of time.

I'm 47 pages into it and debating whether I want to read anymore.

I am appaled that it took them so long to get their shit and get on the road.

His sentence on page 37 ("Simply put, it was our job, and we were setting out to accomplish that job without a lot of worry or introspection") made me laugh because almost all of the previous 36 pages were filled with worry (should I bring the saltine crackers) and introspection (coming up with a good way to explain his motivations for wanting to go on the mission).

Think about this for a second, SOF does not work for the CIA.

We don't usually send one man into enemy territory, unarmed, to baby-sit the CIA.

While the CIA may have a “cover” story about who they are and where they work what should you do for the “SOF liaison” guy? It would look real good if they got rolled up and six were cookie salesmen from Denmark and one SOF soldier.

We don’t take placing men deep behind enemy lines without some sort of plan lightly.

A little CIA secret I’ll share with you, their job is to gather intelligence that SOF can act on and when the job of gathering intelligence is extremely dangerous, such as sending small SOF teams into the A-Stan mountains to search out armed and dangerous terrorists, the job falls on the shoulders of SOF.

I don’t need to read the book to realize this guy is nothing but a whiner.

Team Sergeant

A couple of notes:

1. He does not appear to understand Afghanistan. The regional militias are a manifestation of the tribal nature of Afghan society. A centralized government will never eliminate them, it can only seek to co-opt or induce them into joining the system. Building up a large centralized Army to exercise control over the entire country will fail for several reasons: Among these, first, loyalties to tribe always trump loyalties to nation. So the only way to build a large army reliably under the control of the central government would be basically to make it the central government's militia, loyal to the factions that make up the Kabul leadership, not the nation as a whole. Second, building up a large centralized army will cause a backlash among regional leaders, who will want to build up their forces to prevent the Kabul factions from dominating them. Better to seek to integrate the militias into the national army as a National Guard, to give them a common national identity without directly threatening their regional identity.

Iraq faces a similar problem. The Kurdish peshmerga have effectively been integrated into the new Iraqi Army as self-contained brigades, maintaining their existing command and control (and loyalties). The Shi'ite militias, however (those of SCIRI and Sadr's Mahdi Army) have remained outside of the new structure (though they have lost members who joined the army as individuals).
2. Does he document this diversion? The "Iraq has diverted attention from Afghanistan" trope has become common, but details are often lacking. The differing natures of the conflict indicate differing approaches. Afghanistan is more of a special operations conflict than Iraq, as borne out by casualty statistics - there have been more than 3 times as many SOF casualties in Afghanistan than in Iraq, despite the larger overall force in Iraq, and SOF casualties in Afghanistan are close to half of all casualties. 10th Group wasn't "diverted" when it went to Iraq, since it wasn't in Afghanistan to a significant degree. Arguably, moving 5th Group assets to Iraq caused problems, since 5th has most of the Arabic speakers/SMEs, but in terms of how many SF guys were there, 1st, 3rd, 7th, 19th and 20th have all deployed forces to Afghanistan (also, Arab SMEs are important for hunting AQ remnants, but less for building the Afghan forces and hunting the Taliban, who are not Arabs). And overall SOF in Afghanistan includes contributions from other services and from a lot of other countries, including several who are not in Iraq at all, such as New Zealand, France and Germany.

That said, we need more SF guys in Afghanistan. We also need more SF guys in Iraq. We also need more SF guys in the Sahel. More SF guys in South America, Yemen, the Philippines, the Caucasus, etc. would also be helpful. Is there a place you go or a point you reach where it is prudent to say, "no thanks, we've got more than enough SF guys."?

No, but I have read the same thing in other books like Naylor's on Anaconda.

Let me enlighten you, its quite obvious this CIA shit for brains does not seem to know that:

MREs are designed to withstand harsh military transportation requirements, including airdrop with and without parachutes and storage at -60oF (-51oC) up to 120oF (49oC).

WOW isn’t that some cool news, we’ve been dropping these for years without parachutes and the CIA didn’t know????? Someone didn’t get the memo……

Read more, don’t believe everything you hear, especially from those trained to spread “disinformation”.

Team Sergeant

So TS, you are a big fan of the CIA, eh? :D