About the Report

This report focuses on U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan’s 

Pech valley between 2002 and 2013. The research, which the 

United States Institute of Peace (USIP) helped fund, is based on 

recorded interviews with approximately three hundred Americans 

and Afghans with experience of the Pech, including general 

officers, unit commanders, members of parliament, provincial 

and district governors, Afghan interpreters to U.S. forces, and 

U.S. and Afghan combat veterans. Interviews were conducted by 

phone or in person in the United States, Kabul, and at military 

bases in the Pech and other areas of eastern Afghanistan. 

About the Author

Wesley Morgan, a 2011 graduate of Princeton University’s 

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has 

reported on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq 

since 2007, writing for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign 

Policy, Al Jazeera America, and the Long War Journal, and was 

the principal researcher on Michael R. Gordon and Bernard 

Trainor’s The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, 

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama (2012). His own book on 

the Pech valley is scheduled for publication in 2016.

2301 Constitution Ave., NW • Washington, DC 20037 • 202.457.1700 • fax 202.429.6063

Special Report 382 September 2015

© 2015 by the United States Institute of Peace. 

All rights reserved.

Contents

Introduction 2

A Rocky Introduction: 8

Missteps Entering Kunar, 2002–04 2

A War of Rotations: 8

Problems in Counterinsurgency, 2004–11 5

“Putting an Afghan Face on It”: 8

Too Little, Too Late 8

Conclusion and Recommendations 9

Wesley Morgan

UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE www.usip.org

SPECIAL REPORT

Summary

• From 2002 until their withdrawal in 2013, U.S. conventional and special operations forces 

were involved in combat operations in Afghanistan’s Pech valley system. Today, Afghan government security forces hold the Pech and a tributary valley, the Waygal, where U.S. special 

operations forces continue to mount an aerial campaign against isolated but potentially 

threatening al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan elements.

• U.S. efforts in the Pech have been hampered by separate chains of command and sometimes 

by conflicting missions of special operations forces engaged in counterterrorism and conventional forces conducting counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and security force assistance.

• Among the early U.S. missteps was to rely overmuch on a few former mujahideen commanders 

for manpower and intelligence, one of many ways in which the parallel U.S. military efforts 

got in each other’s way.

• The enemy that U.S. units fought in the Pech is not the enemy that counterterrorism forces 

went there to find, but instead a diverse generation of fighters who have thrived in the region. 

The al-Qaeda presence there now, though only a small part of the array of insurgent groups, 

is larger than when U.S. counterterrorism forces arrived in 2002.

• The U.S. military’s unit rotation system, to the detriment of U.S. efforts, hindered the development of institutional knowledge about areas such as the Pech.

• U.S. forces have only sometimes worked with Afghan forces in the Pech in the ways most 

beneficial to both nationalities of troops, have pursued scattershot and often underresourced 

approaches to advising Afghan forces in the field, and have at times left Afghan officials out 

of key decisions.

• Militant groups are likely to challenge Afghan forces in the Pech in some of the same ways 

they challenged U.S. forces. Concrete steps could be taken to prepare Afghan troops for this 

and enhance their counterterrorism capability, but would require time.

Ten Years in Afghanistan’s 

Pech Valley
2 USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382

Introduction

In the U.S. and NATO military campaign in Afghanistan, few areas have proved as costly and 

complex for Western troops to operate in as the Pech valley system, which straddles the provinces of Kunar and Nuristan. Ferocious fighting in the steep mountains above the Pech River 

and its tributaries (the Korengal, Waygal, Shuryak, and Watapur) has produced a years-long 

stream of fatalities and much publicized acts of heroism. Media portrayals of the Pech have 

included award-winning articles, documentaries, and even a feature film.1

What the vivid media depictions of the Pech and grim statistics—such as the 120 American 

lives lost there and four Medals of Honor earned—do not capture are the basic dysfunctions 

of the U.S. campaign that have played out in the valley since 2002. Controversial battles, such 

as the 2008 firefight at Wanat village that cost nine American lives, have been investigated 

and reinvestigated, but in pursuit of the tactical lessons learned for the next unit deploying 

there, not strategic or political ones.2

The Pech valley region is in many ways highly atypical of Afghanistan. The area’s relatively sparse population (just one-seventh of 1 percent of the national population) includes 

a far more diverse mixture of linguistic groups than most areas of the country where Western 

troops have been involved. Much of the Pech economy is based on trade in timber, a resource 

not only absent from most of Afghanistan but also illegal to traffic.3 Many of the difficulties 

U.S. forces encountered in the Pech, however, have also plagued the broader Western military efforts across the country (and in other combat theaters), including scarcity of military 

resources, unit rotation, and loss of continuity of effort.

The same is true of the mistakes U.S. forces have made, starting with a fundamental one 

that has pervaded each phase of the mission in the Pech. As with Afghanistan more broadly, 

U.S. special operations forces came to the Pech with a narrow counterterrorism missionthe 

pursuit of Arab al-Qaeda leaders and the Afghans suspected of harboring them. As the years 

passed, new units deployed with the different, more ambitious tasks of improving regional 

security, jump-starting international development with U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, 

and strengthening the provincial and district governments and the Afghan National Security 

Forces (ANSF). The U.S. military’s labels for this later, larger project have included counterinsurgency and security force assistance.4 Yet the counterterrorism mission never went away, 

even as the counterinsurgency mission faltered and retracted into more limited security force 

assistance—a transition that did not go smoothly and required reinserting U.S. forces into 

bases they had just recently turned over to ANSF and that quickly all but collapsed. Today, 

although all U.S. ground forces in the Pech have been replaced by ANSF, the U.S. military’s 

counterterrorism units continue to routinely strike targets in the area that they describe as 

camps or command posts of al-Qaeda and allied international terrorist organizations, such as 

Lashkar-e-Taiba and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.5 The result is that, for more than a decade, the 

military and other U.S. government agencies have been conducting two parallel campaigns 

in the Pechsometimes in mutually supportive ways and sometimes in conflict with one 

another, the focus and effectiveness of each campaign continually changing.

Behind the scenes during the war in the Pech, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies have 

played critical but largely opaque roles. This report focuses on the involvement of U.S. forces 

about which more information is available: infantry units, provincial reconstruction teams, 

ANSF adviser teams, and counterterrorism forces (a subset of special operations forces). 

A Rocky Introduction: Missteps Entering Kunar, 2002–04

The first American special operations forces (SOF) arrived in Kunar in pursuit of senior alQaeda targets in the spring of 2002, setting up a base just south of the provincial capital, 

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily 

reflect the views of the United States Institute of Peace, 

which does not advocate specific policy positions.

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Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent conflicts, 

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Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, Washington, DC • Eric Edelman, Hertog Distinguished Practitioner 

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United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting)
USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382 3

Asadabad.6 A year and a half later, in the fall of 2003, U.S. forces pushed west into the 

Pech and its capillaries in a major counterterrorist operation called Operation Winter Strike/

Mountain Resolve, leaving behind the first American base in the valley: Camp Blessing, 

located outside the district capital of Manogai and named after the first U.S. soldier to be 

killed in the Pech.7

Through 2004, the U.S. mission in the Pech was led by SOF and its purpose was counterterrorism. By the end of that year, when the Pech mission was turned over to conventional 

forces whose task was described as counterinsurgency rather than counterterrorism, the SOF 

counterterrorism goals remained unmet.8 No senior al-Qaeda operatives had been found, yet 

the populations of Kunar and the Pech had become acquainted with some of the central 

tools of post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism strategy: drone strikes, night raids, and detention 

at Bagram Airfield and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Because few U.S. lives were lost during 

these years and media coverage was less than it was later, the 2002 to 2004 period in the 

Pech is little known to U.S. audiences. In interviews with Afghans who lived in Kunar at the 

time, however, the missteps of these early days are often described as the most memorable 

and consequential actions U.S. forces took, setting the tone for what came later.9

Hunting the Wrong Enemies, Making the Wrong Friends

With hindsight, one of the largest mistakes U.S. forces made in the first two years in Kunar 

was their willingness to ally themselves with whichever Afghans were the first or most 

convincing in offering their help. This phenomenon took place at both low and high levels, 

had consequences both great and small, and was compounded by a general lack of detailed 

information going in—U.S. forces routinely used Russian-language maps in those years, for 

example, simply because they were the most detailed maps available.10

The Kunar-Nuristan region is diverse, especially the more remote valleys feeding the Pech 

that U.S. SOF suspected, by virtue of their physical isolation, were harboring al-Qaeda remnants. “It is the most difficult HUMINT [human intelligence] environment I’ve ever seen,” a 

retired senior military intelligence official with experience of Kunar and Nuristan spanning 

a decade said in an interview.11 Some of the Pech’s tributary valleys, such as the Korengal, 

which proved the deadliest to U.S. forces over the years, speak dialects of Pashai as the 

primary language. Others, such as the Waygal valley, speak one of the several Nuristani 

languages. Yet because their bases and routes of access were in Kunar’s lowlands, populated 

by Pashtuns, U.S. special operations forces mainly turned to nearby Pashtun populations 

for assistance in understanding the region and finding the militants they sought. In some 

Nuristani areas, U.S. forces never learned the true names of the towns they were operating 

in, only the Pashtun ones. 

Too often U.S. forces failed to build the necessary relationships and understanding 

needed to separate good intelligence from bad, needlessly creating new enemies. Between 

2002 and 2004, lacking other (or at least easier) ways to come by manpower and intelligence, U.S. SOF often bypassed the fledgling provincial government in Asadabad and allied 

themselves with a group of former mujahideen commanders and commercial strongmen 

who had irregular armed forces available. These provincial power brokerschief among 

them Malik Zarin of northern Kunar, Haji Jan Dad Safi of southern Kunar, and Matiullah 

Khan Safi of the Pech valleysometimes held quasi-governmental posts that gave them 

the appearance of legitimacy and were ready with suggestions of whom U.S. SOF should 

target. The problem was differentiating between targets who might be genuine enemies 

and those who might simply be political, economic, or familial rivals of local partners. One 

of the most prominent and controversial detentions in the first year in Kunarthat of the 

notable Pech valley resident and anti-Taliban commander Haji Ruhullah Wakil and his militia 

Between 2002 and 2004...U.S. 

SOF often bypassed the fledgling 

provincial government in 

Asadabad and allied themselves 

with a group of former 

mujahideen commanders and 

commercial strongmen who had 

irregular armed forces available.
4 USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382

commander Sabar Lal Melma, who were sent to Guantanamo and released years later for lack 

of evidencefits this pattern. Whether or not the original allegations against Ruhullah and 

Sabar Lal were true, a list of Ruhullah’s rivals and a list of the commanders on whom U.S. 

special operations forces were relying for intelligence, as many interview subjects pointed 

out, would be virtually identical.12

An interview subject who deployed twice to Kunar in 2002–03 as an SOF intelligence 

specialist and worked closely especially with Malik Zarin described the problem this way: 

These guys were the power back then. Malik Zarin realized we were willing to give him 

all the guns and money he wanted, and he saw a great opportunity to use American 

forces as surrogates, risk fewer of his own people, and enrich himself, all by giving us 

information. It tended to be accurate, but I’m sure he was also using me to eliminate 

competition. If that competition was shooting at me, I was willing to help.13

These factors help explain the lack of success of the largest U.S. counterterrorist mission 

during this period, Operation Winter Strike in November and December of 2003. The theory 

behind the operation, according to interviewees and contemporary press reports, was that 

by targeting commanders loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) 

group in the Pech’s remote tributaries, U.S. SOF might locate and capture or kill senior alQaeda figures such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden’s correspondence 

and the accounts of his wives reportedly show that by this time he was already in Pakistan, 

and whether he ever passed through Kunar or Nuristan at all remains an open question.14

Most interview subjects now acknowledge that the theory linking bin Laden to Hekmatyar’s organization, which drove Winter Strike, may have been overplayed, a product of the 

fuzzy understanding that U.S. forces had of their environment in Kunar and the motives of 

their intelligence sources during those early years. Yet the operation left behind a major base 

that would house U.S. troops for another nine years and resulted in the deaths of civilians 

in at least one air strike in the Waygal. Afghan interviewees often cited civilian deaths due 

to strikes based on misleading—and sometimes altogether bogus—intelligence as a major 

initial misstep on the part of U.S. forces.

Fighting Two Wars in Parallel

In 2004, in the aftermath of the Winter Strike counterterrorism operation, the U.S. military 

mission in Kunar took a new turn with the establishment of the provincial reconstruction 

team (PRT) in Asadabad. Like U.S. and NATO PRTs elsewhere in Afghanistan, PRT Asadabad’s 

mission was not counterterrorism but instead bolstering the Kunar provincial government 

through reconstruction projects and mentoring government officials. (In the Pech, as in 

many other parts of Afghanistan, the most prominent of the U.S.-funded reconstruction 

projects were multiyear road-paving projects.) As conventional U.S. infantry units took over 

the Pech mission in late 2004 and into 2005, they complemented the PRT’s governance and 

reconstruction mission with efforts to introduce Afghan National Army (ANA) and police 

forces to the area.

The earlier SOF counterterrorism efforts, though, never went away altogether and sometimes conflicted with these new U.S. military tasks. The allies that U.S. SOF had found 

in 2002–03 kept militias and often flouted the provincial government that the PRT and 

other U.S. forcesincluding special operations forceswere tasked to support, especially 

economically, when the commanders’ financial interests lay with the banned commerce of 

timber and gems. Additionally, in pursuing terrorist targets, U.S. special operations forces 

had created, trained, and paid irregular military forces (dubbed Afghan Militia Forces) that 

competed with Afghan government forces in recruitment, and that U.S. conventional forces 

were later charged with the delicate task of disbanding.15
USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382 5

The command structures under which different U.S. military forces operated compounded 

these disconnects. U.S. military doctrine calls for “unity of effort” if not “unity of command,” but in far-flung areas of Afghanistan, neither condition was typically present until 

the late stages of the war. Instead, U.S. conventional forces and SOF answered to complex, 

parallel chains of command that converged only in Tampa, the headquarters of U.S. Central 

Command. During the 2002 to 2004 period, U.S. conventional forces in Afghanistan fell 

under one chain of command, headed by a three-star U.S. general in Kabul; U.S. special operations units, meanwhile, answered to two separate chains of command headed by two-star 

generals located outside of Afghanistan.16 The only common superior the three commanding 

generals had was the four-star commander in Tampa. Many interviewees, including a former 

commander of the overall U.S. force in Afghanistan, cited these command arrangements as 

detrimental to the goal of unity of effort and to both day-to-day operations in Kunar and 

the broader coordination of counterterrorism with other U.S. tasks in the country.17

Creating a New Generation of Opponents

U.S. forces came to Kunar between 2002 and 2004 with a list of militant targets they saw 

as opponents. At the top of the list were foreign terrorist leaders, such as bin Laden and 

Zawahiri, who turned out not to be there. Further down were former mujahideen commanders suspected of harboring them or otherwise opposing the new Afghan government, such as 

Hekmatyar and his Kunar- and Nuristan-based subordinates Haji Ghafor and Kashmir Khan. 

By the time U.S. conventional forces took over the Pech mission in late 2004, however, 

they were targeting militant commanders on a new and growing list of Kunaris who had 

taken up arms against U.S. troops and the Afghan government, one in which aging figures 

such as Hekmatyar, Haji Ghafor, and Kashmir Khan did not figure. The new figures, with 

whom U.S. troops would fight for years as the Pech emerged as a stage for a troop-heavy 

counterinsurgency campaign, had often opposed the pre-2001 Taliban regime. They fought 

instead for religious or economic reasons—opposing the government and by extension U.S. 

forces, for example, because of the government’s ban on, and illegal exploitation of, the 

thriving Kunar timber trade. Rarely in the years ahead would U.S. forces fight any of the 

former mujahideen commanders whom U.S. SOF had initially seen as their main enemies in 

the Pech.

A War of Rotations: Problems in Counterinsurgency, 2004–11

In November 2004, a platoon of U.S. conventional forces took the reins at Camp Blessing, 

then the only U.S. base in the Pech, and began to conduct what they termed counterinsurgency operations. The goal of these operations was not to locate high-level al-Qaeda operatives but to complement PRT Asadabad’s reconstruction and governance projects in one of 

two ways: improving security around populated areas or dispersing the local militants who 

were contesting the government’s control in and around the Pech.18

Over the next six years, the U.S. presence in the Pech grew from a small contingent of 

about eighty Marines into something much larger. The peak force in 2010 comprised a full 

battalion of more than eight hundred infantrymen and their support troops, spread out 

into as many as ten outposts, from which U.S. platoons conducted daily counterinsurgency 

operations. The growth came in incrementstypically when one unit was ending its six-, 

twelve-, or fifteen-month deployment and a new one was arriving. In all, between 2004 

and 2012, no fewer than thirteen U.S. units held responsibility for Camp Blessing and 

the Pech.19

Between 2004 and 2012, no 

fewer than thirteen U.S. units 

held responsibility for Camp 

Blessing and the Pech.
6 USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382

During its previous counterinsurgency, Vietnam, the U.S. military had rotated personnel 

in and out of the theater of war, not unitsa unit would “plant the flag” on Vietnamese soil 

and stay for a period of years, new troops coming and going constantly on one-year assignments. Critics of this system charged that it lessened unit cohesion and led to indiscipline, 

so in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military adopted a unit rotation system that it and other 

Western militaries had grown accustomed to in the Balkans. Units trained together in the 

United States, deployed together to a region of Afghanistan, and returned home together 

at the end of six or twelve months (or longer during the peak years of the war, from 2006 

to 2008). This coming and going of units came to be as detrimental a feature of the U.S. 

campaign in the Pech and other regions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the coming and going 

of individual soldiers had been in Vietnam, despite various military efforts to mitigate the 

inevitable loss of institutional knowledge that accompanied each rotation.

The effects of frequent rotation at senior levels, too, radiated from Kabul outward to U.S. 

units across the country. When the scope of U.S. involvement in the Pech increased threefold in 

2006, it was in part because the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, Lieutenant 

General Karl Eikenberry, advocated long-term U.S.-funded reconstruction efforts in Nuristan 

north of the Pech, and lower-level commanders judged the Pech to be the best access route 

from which to approach that task.20 Later senior U.S. officers in Kabul, especially International 

Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander General Stanley McChrystal, took the opposing 

view that U.S. forces should be divesting themselves of responsibilities in Nuristan.21

Who Is the Enemy?

The rotation approach made it difficult for unit after U.S. unit to answer a question that 

might seem like it should only have needed asking once, at the outset: “Who is the enemy?”

The Korengal valley, which joins the Pech from the south and eventually became home to 

five U.S. outposts, is a stark example. The first SOF team to occupy Camp Blessing in 2004 

learned early on that going into the Korengal was a good way to get into a firefight but 

concluded that it was so because of a built-in commercial conflict between the Korengali 

people, whose valley housed some of the only good timber in the Pech region available for 

commercial exploitation, and the Pashtuns on the Pech itself, with whom the SOF team was 

allied and from whom the team recruited irregular troops and informants. The informants, 

the SOF team judged, were goading the team to attack commercial rivals in the Korengal by 

claiming they were harboring wanted militants.22 But the next SOF team to rotate in reached 

the opposite conclusion, assessing that the Korengal was indeed a safe haven for insurgents 

who were fomenting trouble elsewhere in the Pech and in Kunar.23

Over the years, one U.S. infantry unit after another developed its own theories about 

the Korengal. When one unit established the first three Korengal outposts in 2006, it did 

so because its commanders believed outside militants were coercing the Korengalis into 

supporting the insurgency. By the end of its sixteen-month tour, though, the same unit 

had come to the conclusion that it was the Korengalis themselves who were running the 

insurgency there, protecting their commercial timber interest from the U.S. and government 

forces that had encroached first with raids and then with outposts.24 Under that interpretation, what the U.S. unit was doing in the Korengal was not counterinsurgency as the U.S. 

military conceived of itthat is, separating insurgents from a civilian population by standing between themand it raised the question, which division-level headquarters would 

debate for three years, of whether to even stay in the Korengal.

After a hasty transition, the next unitwhich had been training for Iraq until its 

destination changed three months before deploymentrelearned the same lesson, losing 

soldiers as it did so.25 Two more infantry companies followed in the Korengal before the 
USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382 7

final one came full circle to the first U.S. SOF team’s view that the valley was best left alone. 

After lengthy deliberations at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, the outposts were shut down 

in 2010. As one Korengali elder put it to a researcher after U.S. troops had been gone for 

several years, “The Americans were a tool, used by the Safis in the Pech to rid them of their 

competition in the timber trade.” 26

Another example concerns the involvement of the Afghan Taliban in Kunar: Rotation 

has a way of masking the fluidity of the ever-changing balance of insurgent groups. When 

U.S. forces entered Kunar in 2002, the presence of the Taliban proper in the province was 

minimal. As the years of conflict in the Pech wore on, however, local militants who had initially either operated independently, as in the Korengal, or as part of Kunar-specific militant 

groups with roots in the 1980s jihad, gradually declared allegiance to the Afghan Taliban 

to benefit from the larger insurgency’s funding, arms, and manpower. The Taliban in turn 

benefited in various ways, for example by exploiting local insurgent successes against U.S. 

forces in Kunar for propaganda value.27 To U.S. units deploying in 2010 or 2011, it was obvious neither that the Taliban’s prominent role in Kunar was a relatively recent development, 

nor that it was brought on in part by the U.S. presence. 

Why Did We Come and What Happens After We Leave?

Just as critically, unit rotation created a situation in which U.S. units in the Pech rarely 

understood much about what fellow U.S. units that preceded them had achieved—or failed 

to achieve—or why. A platoon occupying a given outpost or securing the paving of a certain 

stretch of road was likely to have a distorted, inaccurate view of the original reasons for that 

outpost or road project, more so the longer it had been active.

The Waygal valley, where U.S. units in 2006 established a pair of outposts at Aranas in 

Bella and initiated a road project intended to connect Aranas to the larger town of Nangalam on the Pech, is a good example. According to interviewees who made the decision 

to establish the outposts, the perceived value of the Aranas outpost was as a platform for 

intelligence collection in an area where a number of militant leaders had been reported over 

the previous year, and the perceived value of the Bella outpost was mainly to support the 

Aranas outpost with 120mm mortar fire.28 The battalion that established the outposts also 

cooperated with PRT Asadabad and the Army Corps of Engineers to begin paving a road up 

the Waygal valley to the outposts, so that when air transport was not available because 

of weather, military convoys could resupply the two bases without fear of roadside bombs, 

which are much more difficult to plant on paved rather than unpaved roads.

The next battalion in the Pech closed the Aranas outpost early on, in partagain according to interviews, both from the units and for the U.S. Central Command investigation into 

events in the valleybecause officers in the new unit did not understand the previous 

unit’s rationale for building it. The second outpost, Bella, was left open for an additional 

nine months, even though the sister base it had been built to support no longer existed. The 

Waygal road project remained on the books for even longer, taking on a new reconstruction 

purpose much different from its original resupply role.

U.S. units have also often overestimated both what they can achieve during a set deployment period and the permanence of the actions they take: For example, it is much harder 

to close an outpost in the Pech’s formidable terrain than it is to build one. A string of bases 

were built along the Pech road in 2006 to keep infantry platoons near the road while it was 

being paved. The idea was that once the paving was complete the platoons could be shifted 

elsewhere and the bases closed or transferred to ANSF troops. Instead, either in their original locations or in new, consolidated ones nearby, the bases stayed in place long after the 

paving was completed in 2008, some of them until 2011 and the last until 2013.

U.S. units have also often 

overestimated both what they can 

achieve during a set deployment 

period and the permanence of the 

actions they take.
8 USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382

“Putting an Afghan Face on It”: Too Little, Too Late

Another way in which U.S. units in the Pech differed over the years was in their willingness 

to engage with ANSF partner forces. Every U.S. infantry unit worked with the ANA and police 

in the Pech, without exception, but it is clear that cultural and command factors within the 

units led some to do so more wholeheartedly than others.

This difference touches on what has perhaps been the greatest of all U.S. failures in the 

Pech, as in many other regions of Afghanistan: a persistent unwillingness, until the very 

late years of the war, to treat Afghan forces, commanders, and officials as equals, in spite 

of much lip service paid to that very notion through programs with names like “embedded 

partnership.” Many interviewees cited the practice of “putting an Afghan face on” missions, 

in which a U.S. unit—to satisfy a requirement from higher headquarters—might bring a 

handful of ANA troops along on a U.S. patrol but would not jointly plan patrols or permit 

the ANA to fill important unit-level roles on them.29

One reason for this persistent problem is a lack of understanding of the capabilities of 

ANSF partner units, or perhaps a lack of empathy for them. To a U.S. soldier on a one-year 

deployment, it is all too easy to dismiss a ragtag-looking ANA soldier as poorly disciplined 

or badly motivated, without considering that the ANA soldier in question goes home only 

rarely, faces extreme danger when he does so, is paid poorly and often led poorly, and so on. 

A second reason has to do with well-founded fears about operational security: Many U.S. 

units have incorporated ANSF partners into the planning of an operation, only to see the 

plans apparently leaked and the operation compromised.30

A third reason is the haphazard, seesaw approach the U.S. military has taken to providing 

ANSF units with American combat advisers over the years in comparison with some other ISAF 

members, such as the United Kingdom, or to the more serious U.S. advisory efforts in Vietnam. 

This phenomenon is worthy of its own report, but it has reared its head at key times in 

the Pech, especially leading up to the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. forces from all but one of 

their Pech bases, which had to be partly reversed soon afterward. According to interviewees, 

ANSF leaders were largely excluded from the planning of the withdrawal operation, in part 

for both fear that an already cumbersome approval process would be further delayed and 

because ANA officers in the Pech made it clear that they wanted to leave as badly as any U.S. 

officers did.31 When it came time for senior ISAF leadership to brief the Pech “realignment” 

to senior Afghan civilian officials, however, the Afghan Ministry of Defense balked, refusing 

to approve the withdrawal of ANA forces alongside U.S. forces.32

The result was a late-in-the-game adjustment that left an ANA unit in a tenuous situation, alone in the Pech when its U.S. partners had intended for it to leave with them. Interviewees from the ANA unit in question felt that the U.S.-only withdrawal was tantamount 

to abandonment.33 Within four months, U.S. advisers had resumed short-duration visits 

to the Pech bases that the previous U.S. unit had left. Within six months, a U.S. company 

reoccupied Camp Blessing, paving the way for a longer, slower “re-departure” of U.S. forces 

during 2012 and 2013.34

The direction ANSF have taken in the Pech as U.S. units have stepped back again beginning in 2012 suggests that the Afghan government has had a more consistent view than 

the U.S. military all along. Now planning and executing operations with little U.S. support 

besides overhead surveillance and occasional air strikes, the ANA have reestablished outposts in areas (such as the Waygal) that U.S. troops had left, and in other areas (such as 

Chapa Dara) where the United States never established bases. The ANSF’s ability to incorporate artillery and specialized troops like the ANA Commandos and the Afghan National Civil 

Order Police impressed interviewees who saw the Chapa Dara operation, though U.S. support 

still included surveillance and attack aircraft.35 So far no reports have emerged of any of 
USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382 9

the twenty-plus ANSF positions in the Pech and the Waygal being overrun, but such attacks 

have occurred elsewhere in Kunar.36

Yet these operations entail serious risknot least that local populations will tire of a 

heavy-handed ANSF presence in the same way they tired of the presence of U.S. forcesand 

have been undertaken for reasons sometimes opaque to U.S. commanders and advisers (who 

advised against the June 2013 Waygal operation).37 Provincial and national political considerations, which did not always figure into the calculus of U.S. units in the Pech, appear 

to drive the Afghan government’s desire for these operations. “Optics” that may appear 

unimportant to U.S. military advisers or even their ANA counterparts, such as whether 

government forces are able to reach a particular remote district center on short notice even 

if they are not able to stay there, may be very important indeed to legislators, provincial 

governors, or national policymakers in Kabul.

Conclusion and Recommendations

That U.S. SOF are reported to remain actively engaged in counterterrorism operations in the 

Pech and points north, albeit mostly by air strike now, gives the present situation there a 

back-to-the-future quality. The ANA are in the Pech on their bases, for their own reasons 

(which have little to do with counterterrorism), and the road there is paved (though how 

long it will continue to be maintained against seasonal damage is impossible to say). These 

Afghan forces are engaged in regular combat with many of the same local insurgents and 

Afghan Taliban forces that U.S. forces tangled with in the past. 

But transnational militants from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and al-Qaeda are in the Pech 

too, if in small numbers, in high tributary valleys where they are inaccessible to ANSF and pose 

a vexing counterterrorism problem. In the aftermath of the withdrawal of U.S. conventional 

forces from the Pech, al-Qaeda leaders carved out an enclave in some of the same remote valleys where U.S. counterterrorism forces sought them in vain between 2002 and 2004. 

The small al-Qaeda element led by Qatari militant Farouq al-Qahtani, which has provoked 

concern in some quarters of the U.S. military and intelligence community, is reportedly 

located in the same Nuristani valleys north of the Pech where U.S. counterterrorism forces 

searched in vain for al-Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. Declassified correspondence between Osama 

bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda managerial figure Atiyah Abd al-Rahman reveals that shortly 

before bin Laden’s death in 2011, al-Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan was considering 

sending some of its cadres from Waziristan to join Qatari al-Qaeda operative Farouq alQahtani in the tributaries north of the Pech in Nuristan.38 Little is known about the scope or 

reach of this al-Qaeda enclave, or about the stature of Farouq al-Qahtani within al-Qaeda. A 

recent memoir by a former CIA deputy director, however, took a strikingly apprehensive tone, 

referring to Qahtani as a “counterterrorism expert’s worst nightmare” and even suggesting 

that he could eventually eclipse Ayman al-Zawahiri as al-Qaeda’s post-bin Laden leader.39 It 

is difficult not to view the presence of this al-Qaeda branch in Nuristan as a legacy of U.S. 

military actions in the region.

The U.S. military experience in the Pech provides lessons applicable to the future role of 

both ANSF and U.S. forces in the region as long as counterterrorism and advising activities 

continue:

• Find better ways for military units to store institutional knowledge of an area.

The U.S. military’s unit rotation system will be used in one form or another in any 

long-term overseas operation, and as described has plenty of drawbacks—not all of 

which are inevitable. With each passing year, the military has made a greater effort to 

prepare units for the areas of Afghanistan to which they will be deployed, and in some 
10 USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382

cases has tried to send units on repeat deployments to the same area. Other interviewee 

suggestions included deploying division or brigade headquarters units for longer periods 

than combat battalions to provide continuity; retaining outgoing unit leaders as ANSF 

advisers, PRT officers, or in some other capacity; and creating region-specific secure 

web forums on which leaders who served in a particular area could share knowledge 

and lessons, both before and during deployments.

• Learn from insurgents’ past behavior. Militant groups in the Pech are likely to use tactics 

against ANSF similar to those that proved effective against U.S. units: close-in ambushes 

aimed at capturing ANSF members; massed attacks on vulnerable outposts or observation 

posts; IED strikes on one-way-in, one-way-out roads; and attacks on helicopters. Tactics 

that yield dramatic propaganda footage or cause military forces to leave long-term 

positions achieve insurgent goals, whether against U.S. forces or ANSF. How ANSF react 

to such events is important, and they should build the capability to quickly fly or drive 

commando-like quick-reaction units to the scene, a capability not currently supported by 

the ANSF’s small helicopter force.

• Keeping a lid on international terrorist elements requires both intelligence and 

airpower. As long as the U.S. military is at Bagram (and even afterward, using longerrange platforms), it will be able to regularly fly drones and other surveillance and strike 

aircraft over Kunar and Nuristan. U.S. military interview subjects were bullish about the 

ability of counterterrorism forces to continue to locate and strike al-Qaeda targets in 

valleys inaccessible to ANSF. But the continuing presence of Farouq al-Qahtani suggests 

the limitations of this capability—especially of the all-important intelligence aspect of 

it. Inevitably, as U.S. forces have come out of the Pech and then out of Kunar altogether, 

intelligence has suffered. Ways must be found to retain a strong intelligence and strike 

capability in a region where intelligence has always been an American weak point, 

whether by retaining U.S. counterterrorism elements dedicated to Kunar-Nuristan or by 

training Afghan personnel on sensitive intelligence and strike equipment and techniques.

• Study what has happened. Throughout the war in Afghanistan, the military has dutifully 

conducted detailed investigations into everything from criminal activity to commanders’ 

dereliction of duty to the loss of expensive equipment. It should put similar effort into 

understanding from a historical perspective what has happened in each region where 

U.S. units consistently operated over the years. As the 2011 withdrawal from the Pech 

makes clear, leaving is one thing, but staying away can be another, especially given the 

large capability gaps between the U.S. counterterrorism forces still targeting al-Qaeda in 

Kunar-Nuristan and ANSF.

The military...should put similar 

effort into understanding from a 

historical perspective what has 

happened in each region where 

U.S. units consistently operated 

over the years.
USIP.ORG • SPECIAL REPORT 382 11

Notes

1. See Ed Darack, Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers (New York: Penguin, 2009); Sebastian Junger, War 

(New York: Twelve, 2010); Elizabeth Rubin, “Battle Company Is Out There,” New York Times Magazine, February 

24, 2008; Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s documentary Restrepo; and the fictionalized 2014 movie 

Lone Survivor.

2. See, for example, the declassified U.S. Central Command investigation into Wanat and its annexes, www2.

centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210/Forms/AllItems.aspx. 

3. The illegal timber economy in Kunar and Nuristan is a complex subject prone to outside misunderstanding. 

For a primer, see Harry R. Bader, Clint Hanna, Clint Douglas, and John D. Fox, “Illegal Timber Exploitation and 

Counterinsurgency Operations in Kunar Province of Afghanistan: A Case Study Describing the Nexus Among 

Insurgents, Criminal Cartels, and Communities Within the Forest Sector,” Journal of Sustainable Forestry 32, no. 

4 (2013): 329–53.

4. The U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan have often overlapped, and the 

security force assistance mission has gone by many names, including, currently, “train, advise, assist.” For 

a useful discussion of the terms counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in the context of Afghanistan by an 

officer who commanded a battalion on the counterinsurgency mission in the Pech and later commanded 

counterterrorism forces, see William Ostlund, “Irregular Warfare: Counterterrorism Forces in Support of 

Counterinsurgency Operations,” The Land Warfare Papers no. 91 (2012), www.ausa.org/publications/ilw/

ilw_pubs/landwarfarepapers/Documents/LWP_91_web.pdf. 

5. Press releases by the ISAF Joint Command through the spring of 2013, and continuing coverage by Khaama Press 

and the Long War Journal, detail the drumbeat of counterterrorism strikes in the mountains north of the Pech.

6. Interview with former SOF detachment commander, November 2014. “Anything related to UBL and chasing 

his ghost” was how the subject described the objective of the original counterterrorism forces who occupied 

Asadabad in the spring of 2002. “Any old fart that was rumored to be associated with UBL or an old acquaintance 

was on the target deck.”

7. Operations Mountain Resolve and Winter Strike were conducted simultaneously by conventional U.S. Army units 

and U.S. SOF, with the conventional forces’ supporting efforts dubbed Mountain Resolve and the SOF mission 

Winter Strike. 

8. The primary targets of Winter Strike, according to interviewees, were HIG commanders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 

Haji Ghafor, and Kashmir Khan, all of whom remain free men to this day. The main Arab commander U.S. special 

operations forces became familiar with in 2004, the Egyptian national known by the nom de guerre Abu Ikhlas 

al-Masri, was not apprehended until 2010, at the tail end of the U.S. counterinsurgency mission in the Pech.

9. Interviews with former and current Afghan national and provincial government officials, February–March 2013.

10. Interviews with former Ranger company commanders, February 2014.

11. Interview with former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, March 2015.

12. For the story of Haji Ruhullah and the grimmer tale of his associate Sabar Lal Melma, who was killed by U.S. 

special operations forces four years after his release, see Nancy Youssef, “Where’s Pentagon ‘Terrorism Suspect’? 

Talking to Karzai,” McClatchy Newspapers, July 7, 2009, www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/07/71434/wherespentagon-terrorism-suspect.html, and Ray Rivera, “Anger After a Raid Kills a Wealthy Afghan With a Murky Past,” 

New York Times, September 4, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/asia/05insurgent.html.

13. Interview with former SOF detachment intelligence chief, May 2014.

14. For bin Laden’s wives’ accounts of the timeline of his movements, see Bruce Riedel, “Bin Laden’s Wives’ Stories 

of Post-9/11 Life Casts More Suspicion on Pakistan,” Daily Beast, March 8, 2012, www.thedailybeast.com/

articles/2012/03/08/osama-s-wives-stories-of-post-9-11-life-casts-more-suspicion-on-pakistan.html. 

15. Interviews with former SOF detachment members, June 2013, November 2013, and May 2014; interview with 

former Marine company executive officer, December 2013.

16. The arrangement is described in United States Special Operations Command History and Research Office, USSOCOM 

History (Tampa: 2007), pp. 106–11, www.socom.mil/Documents/history6thedition.pdf. 

17. Interview with former Combined Forces Command Afghanistan commanding general, March 2014.

18. Interviews with former Marine battalion commander and company executive officer, December 2012 and 

December 2013.

19. In chronological order, the units were Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 936; Special Forces 

Operational Detachment Alpha 361; K Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines; I Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd 

Marines; E Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines; C Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines; 1st Battalion, 32nd 

Infantry; 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry; 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry; 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry; 1st Battalion, 

327th Infantry; D Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry; and D Company, 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry (the only 

unit to serve twice in the Pech).

20. Interviews with former brigade commander of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, and former battalion 

commander of 1-32 Infantry, 2013 and 2014.

21. For an account of the competing concerns that led ISAF under General McChrystal to delay pulling out of the 

Korengal, Kamdesh, Barg-e Matal, and other remote areas in 2009 and 2010, see Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An 

Untold Story of American Valor (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 431–56.

22. Interview with former SOF detachment commander, June 2013.

23. Interview with former SOF detachment senior noncommissioned officer, November 2013.

24. Interviews with former battalion commander and staff and company commander, 1-32 Infantry, 2013 and 2014.

25. Interviews with former battalion commander and staff and company commander, 2-503 Infantry, 2013 and 2014.

26. Haji Zalwar Khan, quoted in Matt Trevithick and Daniel Seckman, “Heart of Darkness: Into Afghanistan’s Taliban 

Valley,” Daily Beast, November 15, 2014, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/15/heart-of-darkness-intoafghanistan-s-korengal.html. 

27. For a description of how one Kunari Salafi group gradually embraced the Taliban, see Thomas Ruttig, “On 

Kunar’s Salafi Insurgents,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, January 14, 2010, www.afghanistan-analysts.org/

on-kunars-salafi-insurgents.
28. Interview with former 1-32 Infantry battalion commander, December 2012.

29. Interviews with former embedded training team advisers to the Afghan National Army, January 2011, August 

2013, October 2013, and March 2014.

30. For an instance of this on Operation Rock Penetrator, see Drew Brown, “U.S.: Insurgents Knew of Kunar Operation,” 

Stars and Stripes, May 23, 2008, www.stripes.com/news/u-s-insurgents-knew-of-kunar-operation-1.79181. 

31. Interviews with former brigade commander of 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division and former 1-327 Infantry 

battalion commander, July 2014 and October 2013.

32. Interviews with former ISAF commanding general and deputy chief of staff for operations, April 2013 and 

February 2014.

33. Interviews with battalion commander, operations officer, and sergeant major, 2-2-201 ANA battalion, March 2013.

34. See Michael Phillips, “Afghan Base Tests U.S. Exit Plans,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2011, www.wsj.com/

articles/SB10001424052970203658804576639071125306378. 

35. Interviews with squadron commander and operations officer, 3-89 Cavalry, April 2014 and May 2014.

36. See Niamatullah Karyab and Rod Nordland, “Taliban Raid Afghan Army Base, Killing Soldiers in Their Sleep,” New 

York Times, February 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/world/asia/taliban-attack-afghan-army-basekilling-soldiers-in-their-sleep.html. 

37. Interviews with former ISAF Joint Command commanding general and political adviser, February 2015 and 

September 2013.

38. See correspondence between bin Laden and Atiyah dated July 17, 2010, and October 2010: www.dni.gov/

files/documents/ubl/english2/Letter%20to%20Shaykh%20Abu%20Abdallah%20dtd%2017%20July%202010.

pdf and www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-sidelined. 

39. Michael Morell with Bill Harlow, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism from al Qa’ida to ISIS 

(New York: Twelve, 2015), 312–13.

Of Related Interest

• Managing Conflict in a World Adrift edited by Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and 

Pamela Aall (USIP Press, 2015)

• Getting It Right in Afghanistan edited by Moeed Yusuf, Scott Smith, and Colin Cookman (USIP 

Press, 2013)

• Understanding and Countering Violent Extremism in Afghanistan by Reza Fazli, Casey Johnson, 

and Peyton Cooke (Special Report, September 2015)

• Building a Sustainable Afghanistan by Trent Ruder (Special Report, September 2015)

• Insurgent Alliances in Afghanistan by Mallory Sutika Sipus (Peace Brief, June 2015)

eISBN: 978-1-60127-311-6

An online edition of this and related 

reports can be found on our website 

(www.usip.org), together with additional 

information on the subject.

United States 

Institute of Peace

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