Panjshir Valley

So

basically, after 9-11, Jawbreaker went into the Panjshir Valley, I think September 26.

Team Alpha, which was David Tyson's team with Mike Tyson, with Mike Spence.

It was an eight-man team that was the first behind enemy lines, went in October, the 9th of October, 16th, 17th, from K2 in Uzbekistan, in the Dariusu Valley, south of Mazar-e-Sharif.

I know that we have passed through many villages.

I remember that Dashterewat is the first village in the Panjshir valley.

Panjshir, five, Shir, Leon, so the valley of the five lions.

And that's where the Somali people gave the money to the Rassoud camp, who also came to visit us.

The place was still there.

The Panjshir Valley, where Massoud had his base of support and so forth, it was still there, and we still had many contacts.

And what did your family make of your decision to go into Afghanistan?

Since I'd been to Afghanistan before and I'd been on so-called trips before, you know, related to missile retrieval and so forth.

I mean, you could see the stress melt away when they were on the rope and the joy that they found that they couldn't find in their homes, they couldn't find in their schools.

And then we went out to Panjshir Valley and we did a hiking out there outside the Hindu Kush and we just had an incredible experience and seeing their eyes just beaming.

It was a transformative moment in my life.

So that way I went back to DOJ and rededicated myself to the law and the rule of law.

He has a staff around him.

Uh, there's, uh, some very, uh, good elements in that plan, but think about what it took to be Ahmed Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan and withstand the Taliban for all those years, and of course we had very close communications with him.

And when we went in, uh, it was the nucleus that he had established, the so-called Northern Alliance, that was what we enabled to topple the Taliban with our air power, uh, and footlockers of cash.

Um, is there a figure like that? I'm not aware of it.

I'm not aware of a Panjshir Valley that is not, uh, that, that hasn't been dominated by these regime forces who blanketed the country, uh, during the most recent demonstrations.

Keep in mind, the besieged militia alone have a national headquarters, a headquarters for each province, each district, each municipality, and sizable forces that they can turn out on the streets, uh, to swing pipes or, if, if necessary, shoot, uh, the people who are demonstrating against the regime.

It begs me to-

I knew and worked with every single one of these men, every single one of them.

The seven man CIA team there's six of them here, codenamed Jawbreaker, landed in the Panjshir Valley on September 26, 2001, just 15 days after the attacks, carrying millions of dollars in cash intended to help enlist and equip Afghan allies.

There was a joke at the CIA that you cannot buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one.

And that's exactly what we did.

Their mission was to gather intelligence and to prepare the ground for the looming U.S. campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, including by shoring up ties with the Northern Alliance, whose military leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives just two days before 9-11.

On October 17th, less than three weeks after Jawbreaker arrived in the Panjshir Valley, the Alpha team were inserted.

into a different part of northern Afghanistan, becoming the first Americans sent behind Taliban lines.

Their mission was to work with forces commanded by Uzbek leader Abd al-Rashid Dostum.

arrayed across Afghanistan, but sort of staging out of Peshawar.

And initially, my initial hope was to go to spend time with the legendary Ahmed Shamasud in the Panjshir Valley, who had received such play in the West.

There had been books written about him, documentary films.

He was the stuff of legend in Afghanistan.

So

I did try to...

I explored the possibility of getting to the Panjshir Valley, which in those days involved a sort of six-week trek through the mountains.

And I was waiting in Peshawar.

Afghanistan was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet illusion.

The myth of the invincible Red Army bled to death in the Panjshir Valley.

When you stack it all up, the ghost trends of the cotton affair bankrupting the economy, Chernobyl proving the state would casually poison its own people, and Afghanistan proving the military was fundamentally broken Well, you see, the empire simply reached a structural limit.

Soviet Union did not collapse because of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program.