Ep 28: Wesley Morgan on AfghanistanWesley Morgan, journalist and author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, joins the show to discuss his experiences in the Pech Valley, one of Afghanistan’s most contested battlegrounds, and to talk about the U.S. counterinsurgency’s successes and failures. This episode is part 1 of 2.Times
02:52 Introduction
04:28 From Princeton to The Pech
07:25 The Age Dynamic
09:46 Fighting Styles In Helmand Province
12:42 The Episodic Nature Of Fighting In Afghanistan
13:42 The Terrain Of The Pech Valley
17:11 Seeking Bin Laden In Kunar
18:43 Kafiristan - Daniel Dravot’s Dream
20:27 Special Forces - A Tool For Every Task
24:21 The Role Of Seal Team Six and Delta Force
29:36 Seeking The Enemy
31:23 Who Was The Enemy In The Pech?
33:58 The Timber Mafia
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...