Wesley Morgan first visited the Pech in 2010, as a college student embedded with U.S. military units as a freelance journalist. His meticulously researched book,The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley, functions as both a first-hand account of a rugged battlespace and a detailed history of the interactions between the Pech River Valley’s residents and the foreign soldiers, terrorist groups, and Taliban that passed through. The Hardest Place documents a mission that came to epitomize the dysfunction, unclear objectives, and mission creep of America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan.

Join a discussion with the author that delves into the experiences of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. He will be joined by Dan Berschinski who served as a U.S. Army officer in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley in Kandahar province. The conversation will be moderated by QI’s Adam Weinstein who served as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. 

President Biden’s announcement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan brings an end to one part of the two-decade-long Global War on Terror. But the 40 War on Terror detainees still held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, many of whom were tortured and face legal impediments to challenging their detainment despite never being charged with any crimes, pose an ongoing legal and political challenge for the Biden administration. 

The Quincy Institute will host a discussion on how the Biden administration can close Guantanamo and bring an end to indefinite military detentions and the War on Terror’s erosion of the rule of law. Headlining the panel is Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose book Guantanamo Diary is the basis for the Oscar-nominated film, The Mauritanian, which details his 15-year imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and his attorneys’ fight for his release. He will be joined by Senior Counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee Rita Siemion and ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi. Aziz Rana, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and professor of constitutional law at Cornell University, will moderate.