10/20/09 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show is Kelly B. Vlejos.
She's a Washington, D.C.
-based freelance writer and political reporter for Fox News, a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today Magazine, and of course writes for us at Antiwar.com quite often and great stuff.
Original.antiwar.com slash Vlejos.
That's V-L-A-H-O-S.
Welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
Hey, where does the Taliban get all their money from?
Well, you know, that's a good question.
And I had written a little story on this for American Conservative last month, and it would seem that the conventional wisdom is that the Taliban is getting most of their money from drug sales from the opium-slash-heroin industry in Afghanistan.
But as stories like mine have emerged, I've indicated that they are getting a lot of their money from a very elaborate protection racket throughout the country, meaning that the Taliban has been shaking down, whether its own residents, its own Afghan people, but also private contractors who are working for the American government, for NATO countries, and for the U.S. military.
So the checkpoints all across the country have stopped private contractors who are basically staffing convoys that are bringing shipments of material, food, supplies, to reconstruction projects throughout the country, whether they be private or USAID.
And what I wrote about, there are many, many instances where we have found that they're shaking down contractors bringing supplies to our troops on these forward-operating bases.
So in essence, the Taliban is getting its money from the U.S. taxpayer, if you want to really boil it down to that.
Well, so that seems like probably a good strategy to keep going forward with, right?
I know!
Well, I mean, I'm obviously not the first one to talk about this, but I found there had been some stories out there, and I think that you had done some interviewing on this as well.
Yeah, I talked with Jean McKenzie, who I saw you cited from the Global Post.
Exactly!
She had a great report where she had talked to Afghans who had been shaken down for some time, and really came up with some figures in terms of how much they have to build in to their invoices, so to speak, to do their jobs, whether it be a USAID contract or whatever.
And I had done some interviewing myself and found this interesting nugget that, you know, it's not just private contractors working for humanitarian aid programs or reconstruction projects, but also these convoys that are snaking their way through these really difficult passes, these communication lines down from Uzbekistan and then through Pakistan as well, that are being stopped at any given point and being forced to pay security money so they can get through.
And a lot of them do get through, and our troops get their supplies, and NATO troops get their supplies, and other ones are blown up.
But there's enough getting through so that these guys are making a nice tidy sum, that they can go and buy weapons and, you know, fund their fighters.
So it's a really creepy situation.
Yeah, well, it sounds like a really great way to run stuff, too.
I mean, I guess if we sort of start with the premise that that's the whole point of this thing anyway, is just perpetual war for perpetual war's sake.
It's good for the guys in the Pentagon and for the military industries that they procure their equipment from, for the Dianne Feinstein's husband's company or Dick Cheney's old company that gets to follow the military around building all the bases and whatever.
If the whole point of this thing is just to take all our money away or whatever, then this is just sort of the cherry on top or the icing on the cake or whatever, right?
Right, it's perpetual war, literally a cyclical, you know, thing.
And everything you just said is completely accurate, and it really does jibe with the whole scheme of the perpetual war feeding this war machine.
But at some point the American public, and maybe this is why we don't hear about this too often, the American public's going to wake up and say, oh my God, you know, we can't give this little old lady down the street health care, but I'm supposed to believe that my tax money is going to a good cause.
You're telling me that it's finding its way into Taliban pockets, and they're just basically bleeding us dry over there?
You know, and maybe I'm giving the American public too much credit, but I was very surprised, Scott, that there weren't more people interested in talking about this subject when I had made some phone calls to the Foreign Relations Committee, the Armed Services Committee.
I made a few calls to congressmen's offices who had recently been to Afghanistan, thinking that this is something they might want to talk about.
And I'm talking about Democrat and Republican lawmakers who might want to raise a red flag about where our money is going, and nobody wanted to talk about this.
You know, I can understand the military not wanting to talk about this.
Yeah, we're getting shaken down by the Taliban, but there seems to be a real hesitancy for the American people to really hear the true story about where their tax money is going.
I mean, it's easy to talk about the drug money, because that's something we can all understand, and it's supposedly going on over there.
But to think that our money is going directly into Taliban pockets just to get our food and supply and material out to our troops, and that could get cut off at any time, that's a sensitive subject.
But I think it could bring the whole thing down if enough people were outraged about it.
I mean, again, maybe I'm giving the situation too much credit, but I think it's an explosive story.
Yeah, well, obviously, but it's one of those stories that's too big to break.
You could see why congresspeople would be, oh, well, you know, this would get me in the headlines, but it doesn't really seem like something I actually want to pursue in real life, so I think maybe I'll just leave that one alone.
Right, and then you saw the story about how the Italians supposedly had been paying the Taliban protection money for years, and they lost one guy in one year in this particular area of operation.
And they didn't tell the French, who were basically taking over for them in August, and the French didn't know anything about payments or shakedowns or anything.
Yeah, you didn't tell us who we had to bribe.
Yeah, and they get ambushed.
It was a terrible situation.
And so it just came out this week that the Italians had been paying off the Taliban all this time.
Now, they deny it, but there were numerous sources that had confirmed that this had been going on.
But you wonder how widespread is this practice of paying off local warlords, local fighters for protection money, and you're thinking, why the hell are we over there?
Well, you know, this is the thing, too.
I was watching a deal on CNN this morning where the guy's interviewing college kids about what they think about Afghanistan.
And basically, it was just a contest for who can sound most like the people on TV by regurgitating their talking points.
And I guess one of the girls there, they said she was special forces, which, you know, I don't know.
She didn't look like a Delta guy to me.
But anyway, and basically, they all just, you know, did the minor bird impression and said something to the effect that, well, you know, we are responsible and we have to nation build.
And yes, well, you know, most successful counterinsurgencies take 30 years.
That was what the special forces girl said with a shrug, you know, and and then all the rest of these kids are basically no one was brave enough to put up their hand.
When he asked if anyone was against the war or even against the escalation, I think.
And and really out of the whole group, the college students and the CNN guy, it was the CNN guy from the controlled corporate Pentagon media who was saying, geez, are you guys kidding me?
Was that really the deal after September 11th was generations upon generations of occupying and remaking this place?
And here's what I'm really getting to by telling you this whole story is that it reminds me it reminds me of what my friend Lewis is always saying, oftentimes about conservatives in a different context.
But it's the same kind of thing.
Paraphrasing Carl Sagan, talking about people grasping in the dark, they they have no grounding in real knowledge.
And so basically anything that comes shooting at them is basically, you know, up for grabs might as well be true until they hear something different next or whatever.
But they don't have any real context.
They don't understand, you know, what it is that they're actually even talking about at all.
They say things like, you know, they invoke the Pottery Barn rule or whatever.
Right.
None of this and none of this says, well, listen, we're paying our enemy that we're fighting, that we can't cross into our neighboring allied state Pakistan to finish them off.
And in order to do so would take our entire Marine Corps and tens of thousands of casualties, probably to try to invade and occupy the Hindu Kush mountains.
And all we're doing is creating more enemies.
And these people didn't even do us wrong anyway.
They were our they were on our payroll.
It was the Al-Qaeda who did it.
And they're all dead other than bin Laden and Zawahiri, who we can't get to.
And so, you know, all these things that I'm sure you have a great many other things to say about what to take into account about counterinsurgency strategy and and what the land in Afghanistan is like and the different factions there and all these things.
But none of the conversation there about whether we need to escalate or not, whether we need to commit to 30 years worth of sending kids to go kill and die over there had anything to do really with the reality of the war.
It was all just a sloganeering thing.
These people are lost in the dark.
So I was wondering if maybe you could sort of illuminate their path a little bit and help explain what what is in Afghanistan anyway?
What is this place?
How are we going to conquer it?
How is the counterinsurgency doctrine going to fix all of our terrible problems there, Kelly?
Well, I just for a second, I just like to address the kids that you had were kids or the students that you had, you know, had mentioned.
You know, it seems to me that there's two things going on here.
One is that you have, you know, less than half of a percent of the American population is in the armed forces.
You have a real tiny all volunteer force that's doing it's doing all the fighting.
And so the rest of the population is sort of almost vaguely aware of what is going on.
And if they don't inform themselves, they don't keep an open mind.
Like you said, they're allowing themselves to be sort of spoon fed information from these really biased agenda driven sources.
Second of all, I remember when I was in college in the early 90s during the whole Balkans fiasco, there was a lot of kids, a lot of students who sort of had been weaned on the stories of Vietnam and the peace protests and the anti-war movement who were pretty much itching to get involved.
And in terms of either informing themselves about what was going on, what the Clinton administration was doing and fight it, you know.
But there was this funny thing that the Clinton administration invoked this sort of humanitarian mission.
And that sort of that veneer had been placed over the whole thing.
So I saw a lot of people who were sort of like struggling to understand what exactly was going on over there, but were being force fed this notion that we were going over there to save these people at the butt of a gun.
And I see that happening now.
The Obama administration comes in and makes, you know, declares this sort of grandiose Afghanistan strategy back in March, which is sort of a hodgepodge of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, these vague notions of replacing corrupt governments and institutions with clean and forward-thinking ones and helping those people and liberating women.
And it's really hard for people who don't have a strong point of view or aren't informing themselves to stand up and say, wait a minute, are we making things worse by going in there and trying to impose our values on other people at the butt of a gun?
And it's this whole humanitarian edge, this sort of, you know, whatever you want to call these Democrats who believe that we can go and spread democracy and, you know, it's all about using the military force for good, who have sort of created this illusion and have sort of crafted a debate their way.
So you have these college students or you have people who aren't involved in the military going, well, you know, I think we're doing it for a good reason.
And if we leave, we're going to be leaving a hellhole behind.
A Taliban is going to come over and it's going to put women in burkas.
And, you know, and I see this from people, you know, twice, three times their age say the same thing.
Well, what if we leave?
What's going to happen?
You know, so you're right.
There's this real one side of myopic debate going on.
And unless we inform ourselves, it's just it's really depressing.
It's really depressing.
I know that didn't answer your question.
No, it's OK, because it was a really long question.
So I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to say that.
Now tell them about Afghanistan, because this whole I've read your articles and I know that, you know, very well.
And you explain very well how.
Well, at least maybe if I can help get you started here.
To do a counter insurgency implies that you are an empire occupying someone else's country.
And you're trying to figure out a way to get them to finally just give up and lay prone and accept your domination of their society.
That's what it means.
Right.
So that's all it's a euphemism for in the first place.
Right.
It really is.
It is basically, you know, you're going in and convincing the indigenous population of a place that they have to support a, quote, centralized, you know, legitimate government that you are in there to help.
So if we would take Afghanistan, supposedly the counter insurgency that we are engaging in would involve a centralized government, you know, i.e. the Karzai government.
We go out and prop up that government by convincing, you know, the population of Afghanistan that they need to support this government and sort of eschew all of these other insurgent elements.
And to do this, they would have to go in and they would both have to sort of, quote, win hearts and minds of the people while while fighting the insurgents and taking them down, reducing their numbers, yada, yada, yada.
That's I mean, I am not a counter insurgency expert.
And there's lots of theorists out there that would probably have better explanations.
But I mean, if you really wanted to do counter insurgency right, you would basically have to really sort of, you know, raise some of these villages.
I mean, just obliterate them of insurgents.
You'd have to go door to door.
And I mean, you'd basically have to put in tens of thousands more troops than they're even talking about now.
I think somebody threw around a figure of like 250,000 counter insurgents, whether that's a hodgepodge of Afghan, NATO and U.S. forces, but at least 250,000.
I think that's the ballpark to actually fan out into the country that large and start getting it getting into villages and doing doing your thing.
Now, I don't think the American people, you know, for all of their patience and of all of their sort of like vague notions of what this is all about is going to support something that big.
Well, and of course, the whole thing is counterintuitive, too.
And it's, again, one of these circular things where, you know, we all know, right, that if we had a million troops there to do their thing and help people that Afghanistan, the people of that country are not going to accept our occupation forever just because there's lots of us.
I mean, they might realize that.
I mean, I guess if we put millions of soldiers and they had absolutely no way to fight back without getting shot in five minutes or something, then we might be able to keep them from fighting back for some limited amount of time or something.
But this can't go on permanently.
It only creates, as everybody says, even Petraeus said, right, that the more troops we put in there, the more resistance there is.
The more guys we have shooting at them, the more people join them to shoot back at our guys.
So the whole thing just continues to justify itself.
They say that we're clearing and holding and building and doing all these things.
But really what they're doing is creating more enemies for them to continue to clear, hold and build against.
Right, exactly.
And they constantly compare this to Iraq.
And I know you and I have talked about this before.
There seems to be this resignation on the part of the media and members of Congress that Iraq was somehow a success, a model to be held up.
Yeah, don't tell the million dead people about that.
They can't hear you anyway, so it's convenient.
These guys are saying, well, we went in there, we enjoined, meaning we paid off the Sunnis to help us fight al-Qaeda and the sort of rag-tag insurgents to support Maliki's government.
We're giving Maliki a chance to get a foothold and to basically stabilize his government.
And the story goes on from there.
And they think they're going to replicate this in Afghanistan, and they've been saying that from the beginning.
Now, as you can see, they're not doing that, and they're having more and more difficulties explaining why they haven't gone into these villages and made all of these allies among the warlords and the tribal leaders and the villagers, and why they're still struggling against Taliban attacks at these outposts.
Because there is not a viable comparison between the two countries.
And, second of all, Iraq was a... we can debate whether that was a successful counter-insurgency to begin with.
So, I think that there is...
Well, I would say that, no, there's not a debate.
The people who memorized the slogan, the search for it, did a great job of slogan memorization.
But the truth is, as Patrick Coburn, who's the authority on this, and who, obviously, what he says happens to coincide with all the other actual information out of that country, is that America helped one side win a civil war against the other side, and almost entirely pushed the Shiite militias, almost entirely pushed the Sunni population out of Baghdad, and then finally accepted an offer that the leaders of the Sunni insurgency had made in 2003 and 2004 and 2005, and they finally accepted it in 2006, which was, listen, just pay us, let us police our own communities, and we'll fight the suicide bomber guys with you.
And so they finally accepted that, oh, yeah, yeah, counter-insurgency genius, and General Petraeus, and whatever.
The simple facts of the case are simple facts.
It's not all even that complicated to refute that line.
It's just that nobody ever had a chance to do so on TV, and so it never got done, I guess.
Right, right.
But, yeah, so, you know, I'm reading Tom Hayden, and I think he's going to be on the show tomorrow.
The next day he wrote this thing, another great piece for The Nation about the long war, as they call it.
And he's quoting in there a guy named Kill Cullen in his book, The Accidental Guerrilla, I believe it is.
And apparently the core theoreticians of long war, new coin theory here, apparently completely accept the Hortonian, Greenwaldian, Scheuerian, Lawrence Wrightian, James Bamfordian thesis that they hate us because our empire occupies their countries and supports their dictatorships and kills them, and not because we are free and wonderful.
And yet, and they really do accept that.
They say, yeah, of course, that's why they're fighting us.
So that simply means that we have to be very careful in exactly how we occupy to try to kill as many of them as resist us as possible without generating too many more new ones.
And then the kind of unsaid thesis there is, and then we can occupy and dominate Central Asia forever.
I mean, that's basically what they're talking about.
I mean, they accept Michael Scheuer's thesis that they hate us for what we've done and list the reasons and all that.
It's right there in Hayden's article at The Nation.
Quite remarkable to me.
I would have thought that they would stick with the whole, no, they hate us because we're good, and that's why we have to fight them over there and all that.
But they're really conceding the entire argument to me.
Kelly, what if George Bush had said, what if Barack Obama said, listen, 3,000 of you civilians are going to have to die every once in a while in these kinds of terrorist attacks, but that's the price we pay for having an empire, so get used to it.
We wouldn't have got used to it.
We just said no.
They had to lie to us to get us to go for all this.
It boggles the mind, and someone like David Kilcullen is very savvy because he had been part of David Petraeus' so-called brain trust during Iraq.
He was right there at the beginning, middle, and end of the surge.
He was in full support of COIN, the whole doctrine that Petraeus had developed, all the way through until the Obama administration took over.
And I'm not saying that he's taken back anything that he supported, but with the accidental guerrilla and subsequent things that he's written and talked about, I think that he, between the lines, is basically saying that the war is lost over there in Afghanistan, that the longer that we carry out this mission of dropping predator drone strikes on Pakistan and over into Afghanistan and killing people, that we are going to create more insurgents than we had ever planned for.
So he kind of wants it both ways.
He doesn't want to lose all his friends in the counterinsurgency crowd.
So he still supports counterinsurgency.
He was part of a big report put forth by the Center for New America Security on Afghanistan and Pakistan and the way forward and putting in more troops.
He's totally for putting more troops in and carrying out the counterinsurgency mission.
But on the other hand, he's quoted pretty liberally, talking about how we are basically cutting off our noses by our face when we go into these places and engage in violent behavior and the predator drone strikes.
So I think that there's a lot of people out there like Hill Cullen who basically talk out of both sides of their mouth about what we should be doing there, and it confuses the whole issue.
And then we wake up and we realize and we're being told that we have two options.
Either we put 50,000 more troops into Afghanistan and carry out this McChrystal-style counterinsurgency, or we start paying off Taliban like we did in Iraq to get out of there.
I don't think either of those options are very attractive, but it seems like we don't really have a lot of options right now.
There was at least a purported Taliban spokesman, I think in the London Independent the other day, that said, hey, listen, we're willing to make a deal and turn over the Arabs you're looking for if you'll just leave us alone, right?
Yeah.
I mean, which was the deal they gave us in the first place that George Bush wouldn't accept.
Because we had to let people fly kites again and stuff.
Exactly.
Now, I don't know where that leaves us, Scott.
I don't know if we start paying off Taliban and we start parsing out, well, this is good Taliban and this is bad Taliban and these are our friends and these are our foes.
I don't know where that leaves us, because does it leave us more vulnerable?
I've read people have talked about this and they've said, well, we can make all the deals we want with these guys, but who's going to say they're going to keep them?
They don't have a great track record.
On the other hand, we start paying them off.
What does that say to the rest of the world?
We dumped all this money, all these resources, all these lives into Afghanistan for the past eight years and now we're going to just start paying them off so we can leave?
On the other hand, we don't want to put tens of thousands of more troops in there, at least.
I don't think that's the right way to do it, but it doesn't seem like we have a lot of options out there.
I think this goes all the way back to the initial strategy during the Bush administration.
Why were they there in the first place?
I think it questions all that, undergirds all of that.
Right.
I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's all about trying to control the Caspian Basin and all those oil flows and to check Russia.
We won the Cold War and so we get to kick them while they're down and all that kind of thing.
If I was Vladimir Putin, I would be laughing.
I think all the access that he's giving us to use former Soviet invasion routes into Afghanistan is proof that he's laughing at us and saying, oh yeah, how about we'll give you your own Afghanistan just like you gave us our own Vietnam in Afghanistan.
We'll just replay the same thing again.
Go to it.
You need invasion routes?
Come on in.
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this announcement today that Karzai is going to accept a runoff situation.
I don't know what the finer details of that are.
I forgot to ask you about the completely bogus government that we're supposedly supporting there, which after all was one with threats that will burn your house down if you don't vote Karzai in the first place back in 2004.
Right.
Right.
We knew that this guy was crooked as a dog's hind leg to begin with.
We knew this election was already bought by the time Obama got into office.
We let it go.
We played it down.
Then it turns out, okay, we knew this was going to happen, a million votes or whatever fraudulent, and now we're going to turn around and say we'll have a runoff.
I can't wrap my brain around what deals were made.
I can't.
I haven't read anything yet, but it seems like some deal was hatched.
I don't know what it might be and whether or not Karzai will even go through with this.
And will he win again?
What happens when he wins again?
I mean, are we stuck with Abdullah Abdul, which I don't have a lot of confidence.
He's much different than Karzai.
So I'm trying to figure out where all the pieces are.
Speaking of similarities with Iraq and all that, if they're going to stick with their propaganda that, no, really, we're creating a democracy here, if they really try to do that, then, of course, the people who take power are going to be people who want us out of the country.
That's why the election is not fair at all.
They didn't let all the Pashtun tribesmen vote in the thing.
All the Taliban and all those guys, they didn't get to have their say.
I mean, the Sunnis deliberately boycotted the elections in Iraq at least the first time, but not the second and whatever.
So that analogy doesn't hold.
But the idea that America can invade and mass murder a bunch of people and then create a popular government there that's going to invite us to stay forever seems pretty contradictory on its face.
It does.
And from what I'm reading today is that the military doesn't want to wait to see who's in office, who wins this election.
I mean, they've got the full-court press on the Obama administration to go ahead with an escalation of troops.
And, you know, you and I have both witnessed the sort of military PR campaign over the last several weeks to push Obama's hand on this.
And I think Gates, you know, Secretary of Defense Gates, had been quoted as suggesting that, you know, they can't wait for a runoff or to see who is the next president of Afghanistan.
So you've got that happening too.
So I'm not sure.
You know, I go back and forth.
On one hand, it looks like the Obama administration is going to cave to McChrystal and company.
On the other hand, you know, he seems to be staying pretty resolute on his, you know, on his idea that he needs to, you know, gauge and, you know, assess the situation more.
On the other hand, there's a lot of people out there pushing, pushing, pushing.
You know, are you man enough?
Do you have the stomach enough to go through with this?
You know, and then, you know, there are others in the media who are, you know, pressuring the president not to put in more troops.
You have these conflicting forces.
So I don't know which way it's going to go.
But I do know that the military is resolved at pushing this thing.
And it's extraordinary the sort of authority and swagger, you know, that the military and their surrogates have.
You know, why isn't he listening to his commanders on the ground?
You know, how dare he try to make an independent decision on this?
I mean, it's appalling, really.
But I just don't know which way it's going to go at this point.
I don't really have a gut on it.
Well, you know, it's been a long time coming in terms of the Pentagon becoming the predominant power in the country and in the empire overall.
But I think maybe this is partially some of the signs of it.
You know, it was camouflaged in a way or it had a different spin on it when it was under George Bush.
We all saw this revolution going on within the form of the executive branch and all that kind of thing.
And now that it's a president that apparently these military guys don't respect so much, now we can see kind of in contrast how much authority they really at least think that they have gained.
Right, and again, it's like it is so their respect is very conditional and fickle, whereas when you had George Bush in there, he's a Republican, he's a man's man.
There was sort of like this hand-in-glove situation.
I was reading in the New York Times today, had a piece about how the military has been getting restless and demoralized because Obama hasn't made a move on his strategy.
Now, I think one could probably make the argument that if Obama came in in March and said, I have a strategy for Afghanistan, there should have been some serious decisions already made already and for him not to be engaging in these further assessments that seem to go on forever.
But on the other hand, for an entire article to be written about how the military is losing its respect for its commander-in-chief because he's not moving fast enough for them, I find that very strange and interesting.
Well, it depends too, and maybe I'm just suffering a bit of confirmation bias here, but I love it when Aaron Watata says, no, I will not go serve in an illegal war.
I don't care what you say, I don't want to go to prison, but I'd rather go to prison than lead men into committing war crimes and all that kind of thing.
And I like it when Admiral Fallon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell George Bush, no, dude, we're not bombing Iran.
Bad idea, trust us on this one.
On the other hand, when the president seems like he's reluctant to escalate and they're threatening to resign over not escalating, then all of a sudden I'm yelling insubordination and whatever.
So I don't know, maybe there's really a qualitative difference there other than point of view, but I haven't quite nailed it down.
Trying to justify myself better for the future, you know?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, that's not really the same thing, is it?
Trying to stop a war and trying to start one?
Right, exactly.
The massive politicization of this war by the military is extraordinary, and nobody even talks about it.
At least they don't talk about it in the mainstream.
Why a general is out there pushing his case for a policy change?
And all he gets is a mild sort of slap on the hand by Gates after he's making speeches, basically saying that any ideas that Joe Biden has for de-escalating this war are stupid.
I mean, those weren't his exact words, but that's what the message was.
So to have him and Petraeus and all their surrogates who are everywhere in the media fighting for their cause, which is a direct conflict with what the White House is doing, it's just unbelievable to me.
Well, you know who's keeping his fingerprints off of this as much as possible anyway is Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense.
Now, he's the civilian commander of the military between the president and these generals.
Is this not a threat to his own ambition?
Isn't this making him look like he's losing control of his people, not just the president?
And shouldn't he have the incentive to tell them to, hey, you shut up and do your complaining through me?
I guess he did that a little bit, but only a little.
Yeah, he did that a little bit.
And he seems to have, and I don't really have as much skepticism or animus towards him as I had some other people.
Oh, you need to read some Robert Perry then.
I'm sure if I did my reading I would.
But he seems to emerge a little bit more unscathed, let's just say, than the others in the current debate because he isn't putting himself out there.
And I like what he did in terms of sending out that dictate that the coffins can be photographed.
I know that is a small gift that he gave, but he does seem to have some pragmatic impulses that I'm sure I would be disabused of thinking if I did read Robert Perry.
But I really don't know what's up with him.
I don't think I'm qualified to really talk too much about where his motivations lie.
So it will be interesting in the coming weeks.
One question I did have is I still can't figure out what the whole Galbraith firing was about and why nobody sort of leaped to his defense from the administration.
Was it because they knew that this Karzai fraudulent vote runoff thing was going to happen and he was sort of the fall guy?
I know you're supposed to be interviewing me, but I don't know where he fits into all this.
The whole Brooke Clinton team seems so sneaky to me that I just don't.
On the surface, the Peter Galbraith thing was that he was kind of the heroic whistleblower sort of guy who said, I just cannot countenance this fraud without telling the truth about it in the Washington Post.
Right?
Exactly.
Who quit for good reasons.
It seemed as though he quit for good reasons.
Now, Hillary Clinton, supposedly a friend of his, Richard Holbrook, another good friend of his, they were completely mum on the issue that their friend had been sacked in such a way by the UN.
Sacked because he told the truth, you know, allegedly about these fraudulent votes.
He said, you know, the UN is trying to cover this up.
It's not about whether there's fraudulent votes.
It's about whether they should even address it.
Nobody came to his defense.
I just don't.
It's hard to gauge, you know, what this administration, what their next move is.
But it is interesting that two weeks later they're able to cut some deal with Karzai over these fraudulent votes.
That we, you know, that this guy was fired over two weeks ago.
I just, I don't know.
Well, you know, John Bolton's spin on it aside and all that kind of thing, it does seem strange, doesn't it?
That the president keeps, there's all these little leaks here and there about this many thousands of troops are going to go or not or whatever.
And then you have British papers and this and that.
And yet this procrastination, just not necessarily whether it indicates good or bad, because I always just assume the worst anyway.
But it is kind of strange in and of itself, isn't it?
That they're basically going weeks and weeks debating this thing all in the media and the Joe Biden position and everybody's doing their selective leaking.
What is with this guy Obama, man?
Anyway, what is going on there?
Well, I think if you want to take the most cynical view of it, I think, you know, and this came to me today, you know, it seems as though he's just perpetually putting his finger up to the wind.
I don't, you know, unless he's got a broader and grander scheme, you know, that he's holding back from us.
I just think that he doesn't really know what to do.
And he's putting his finger up to the wind, trying to gauge what public opinion is on this.
It's probably the best thing for us, because we don't want to see escalation there, that he hasn't made some rash decision and wasn't bullied outright by McChrystal and company to go charging into Afghanistan with 40,000 more troops.
But it does make one wonder, you know, like you said, all these little trial balloons that seem to be going out.
And it doesn't help that each side has all their surrogates, and they're out there on talk radio and television and talking about, you know, making their case.
And you really don't get a clear view from the White House what they actually want.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, you got Hillary Clinton, as you mentioned, in there.
And she could, you know, if I was Barack Obama, I wouldn't trust her at all, man.
I wouldn't know what she was really doing, because she's certainly doing something other than just what he told her.
I mean, just because she's her.
I mean, I don't know anything exactly how she's undermining him, but I'm sure she is.
Well, and I mean, in her own history, her whole pedigree is intervention for peace.
So it wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, she's not come out outright and said, I'm for pursuing this counterinsurgency in Afghanistan with more boots on the ground.
But I wouldn't doubt that that's what she's lobbying for behind the scenes, her and Richard Holbrook.
But she's been pretty savvy about, you know, not making any waves with the White House about that.
But I wouldn't be surprised if she's lobbying pretty hard.
I mean, he basically helped populate the State Department with all of these ex-Clinton types, and they've all packed their bags, moved right back in.
So it's not surprising when you have this sort of tug and pull going on about what to do next.
I went back and I read his, you know, basically the reports and some of his text from when he announced back in March about his Afghan strategy.
And it was, it was so vague that anybody could have taken from that many different things.
But two key things were that he was for counterinsurgency and nation-building, and he was also for a sort of more narrow focus on the al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda types that remain there.
And those are two conflicting missions.
So it's not surprising that we have all this conflict going on now about what he means, you know, what he meant then, what does he mean now, why isn't he acting what he said he was going to do, and is that what he really said he was going to do?
Because it was like it was deliberately vague.
It said nothing.
Well, maybe it would be a brand new interview here, but it makes me think that they're all trying to work the escalation in Afghanistan in their calendar in with the war against Iran.
You know, that's the part of the strategizing that we're leaving out here, really, is, you know, well, maybe we should nuke Iran first, or, you know, at least bomb the hell out of them with giant conventional weapons that might as well be nukes, and then escalate, because we don't want to just drop a bunch of guys within missile range of Iran and leave them defenseless right before we pick a fight with them.
Right.
But the funny thing is not that funny, is that Iran was helping us after 2001.
You know, they were helping go after terrorists for us.
They have interest in Afghanistan.
They have as much interest in Afghanistan as we do.
And if we had just reached out, we being, you know, the White House, had just reached out and started really talking to them about how we could all work together to make Afghanistan a more stable place so we can get out of there, I think we would make much more, there would be much more traction there instead of this sort of constant, you know, chafing with them on one hand and the escalation of the troops on the other.
I mean, it just seems that we're working against our own interests.
Well, and instead of working with the Iranians, as they started to do up until the axis of evil speech and all that after September 11th, instead they're bringing the Indians in.
And Karzai has this alliance with the Indians.
And this, of course, only puts more pressure on the government of Pakistan to continue backing the Taliban to prevent the Karzai government from ever attaining any kind of monopoly on force because then they'll be surrounded by their perceived enemies in India.
And so, boy, I guess that's why they called it strategery because it doesn't make any sense really at all.
It isn't.
And I don't want to come on your show and act as though that I'm a geopolitical whiz or a counter-terrorism expert.
You know, I basically look at the media and the Washington culture and how it's sort of absorbing all of these messages and how they're manipulating in return messages that go out to the public.
And what I'm getting is that there are a lot of cross-interests here in Washington and none of them seem to be in our best interest as taxpayers and as citizens.
And it is.
It is very scary when you have the media.
And I had written in a couple of columns about their surrogates here in Washington, Kimberly Cake being one of them.
I think it's up to us as citizens and taxpayers to look at these messages.
Who's giving them?
What does it mean?
What's the agenda?
Because I think that just you and I trying to hammer this out, it does sound very confusing.
And I think because it is very confusing, nobody knows what our interests are and how these competing missions and proposals will really shake out in terms of making us safer or getting us out of these hotbeds any sooner.
So, I don't know.
Everybody, that's Kelly Vallejos.
She writes for foxnews.com.
She's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, Washington correspondent for Homeland Security today, and again, original.antiwar.com slash Vallejos.