Boots on the Ground

[*bfine32*]

(05-24-2015, 07:25 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I don't understand.  Is your knowledge of the history of the region based on what your superiors told you or on what the locals told you.  Up until this point you claimed it was all from what you saw with your own eyes.  Now you claim it came from your superiors.  

Which is it?

Prior to going into the region my knowledge came from the intelligence officers (not my superiors). That's a little more than reading about it and quite a bit less than experiencing it. Once I arrived in the area and interacted with the populace I was able to augment that intelligence.

I will say reminiscing about operations I conducted back in 2004 in the Ghor province got me interested in recent developments in the region. So I went to wiki to see if there are any updates and ran across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghor_Province

Quote:On June 17, 2004, hundreds of troops of Abdul Salaam Khan, who had rejected the Afghan government's plan to disarm regional militias, attacked Chaghcharan and took over the city in an afternoon-long siege. Eighteen people were killed or wounded in the fighting and province governor Mohammed Ibrahim fled. Three days later the Afghan government announced that it would not retake Chaghcharan. Khan and Ibrahim began negotiations soon after, but reached no agreements. Khan's troops left Chaghcharan on June 23, a day ahead of the arrival of an Afghan National Army battalion, led by Lieutenant-General Aminullah Paktiyanai, arrived with the support of about twenty U.S. soldiers.

You might be able to read about this part of afghan history and know more than me. All I did was lead 20 US Soldiers (4 vehicles x 5 Soldiers each) in the region. We were not the same 20 that reacted to the attacks, but we were the ones that went to talk to the Northern Alliance Leader that returned to the mountains.