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By Root 1356 0

” Drew Priddy told Tom Wood shortly after Wood’s arrival. “As soon as a single Marine enters the valley—or even passes by its mouth—every bad guy knows what’s going on, all the way up to the highest reaches of the Korangal. And then they just scatter, just vanish, probably back into Pakistan—and the intel hits die.” Tom quickly grasped the operational situation in the region once he was in-country, being thoroughly briefed by Priddy on the most effective methods of developing missions. Stars was out as a formal operation, but the quick-thinking and determined operations officer resolved to formulate a new mission—⅔’s first battalion-level op—that would use the Stars shell as a foundation. The battalion just needed specific intel on the whos, the wheres, and the whens to snap the plan into shape and merge the Marines of ⅔ into the fluid, uninterrupted op cycle Cooling and 3/3 had established and that MacMannis looked to have ⅔ seamlessly maintain.

That job fell squarely on Westerfield’s shoulders. Having absorbed the intel that 3/3 had been feeding him in the months prior to ⅔’s arrival, the boyishly enthusiastic intel officer knew that determining even the most basic targeting attribute—the who—had proven to be more complex than any that the United States had ever faced. The enemy throughout Afghanistan—in particular in the Pech, Korangal, and surrounding valleys—couldn’t be defined in monolithic terms like the Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or even Saddam Hussein’s forces. Westerfield knew the enemy of the region not as broad-based and cohesive, but as an amorphous patchwork of “bad guys”—leftover Taliban, Taliban aspirants, al-Qaeda foreign fighters, a multitude of flavors of independent Islamic extremists (primarily foreign, but some domestic), and even some semiorganized criminals. All, however, shared two common threads: pursuit of regional instability for their own gain, and extremist Islamic beliefs—beliefs, Westerfield understood, that the bad guys could use to manipulate the deeply pious local populace in such places as the Korangal, coercing villagers to join their ranks, or at the very least, provide a base of support for their insurgent and terrorist efforts. But to know this enemy required that Westerfield not just glean everything relevant from classified intel reports, but see that intel through the lens of Afghanistan’s history, in particular, through those historical elements most relevant to ⅔’s fight: the Soviet-Afghan War and its aftermath, which shaped contemporary Afghanistan and the enemy that American forces would face head-on during the invasion of 2001 and subsequent years.

Destitute, depopulated in many places—crushed throughout—Afghanistan could hardly be called a country by the time the last Soviet military convoy rumbled across the Amu Darya. The greatest losers of the war, of course, weren’t the Soviets, but the Afghan people, many of whom weren’t even living in Afghanistan anymore, but in squalid refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan’s mosaic of humanity had been shattered, not just by the inhumane Soviets, but after the war by those factions that had beaten the Russian Bear into retreat. Ever-more-extreme waves of influence ebbed, flowed, and sometimes crashed upon the region as the country spiraled into civil war—and Westerfield knew that these external forces influenced the Kunar perhaps more than any other part of Afghanistan, because of the province’s location along the Pakistani border near Peshawar—an influence that sustained the insurgent stronghold of the Korangal and surrounding valleys that the Marines faced.

The ISI had waged a masterpiece of a shadow war in the 1980s, coordinating the seven mujahideen parties to achieve the strategic short-term aims of Pakistan, the Saudi Arabian government, and the United States without allowing restive party leaders and their power-hungry commanders on the ground to tear at one another’s throat (not too much, at least). But as tight a lasso as the ISI held around the mujahideen, the Pakistanis didn’t command a total monopoly on