01/02/15 – Frank Ledwidge – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future of Freedom, featuring founder and president Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Frank Ledwidge, and he was British military intelligence in every war since the Balkans in 1996, and was even part of the Iraq Survey Group hunting for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And he's written, I think, a book or two about Afghanistan.
And all I know is I read a review in the London Review of Books of four different books.
You might have heard me mention this to Eric Margulies on the show last week.
Four different books about Britain's role in the Afghan war by James Meek, who's not James Gordon Meek, our investigative reporter friend.
He's a different James Meek.
And this is called Worse Than a Defeat.
Worse Than a Defeat.
It's a review of these four books.
And Frank's book is called Investment in Blood, The True Cost of Britain's Afghan War.
Welcome to the show, Frank.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's a privilege to be with you.
Happy New Year to you.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And so I guess, first of all, can you tell us about exactly your role in the Afghan war as a government official and as a journalist there?
Well, in 2007, I was recruited.
They contacted me and said, we're looking for somebody to advise on the justice system.
Now, in my military career as a reservist, in my real life, I was what I suppose you might call an international human rights lawyer, although there's many thousands of thousands of those around.
And they really couldn't find anybody else with a relevant combination of experience.
I've done some work in the former Soviet Union.
I've been in Iraq as a military officer, as you mentioned.
So I got hauled into this what turned out to be a completely misconceived mission in the south of Afghanistan, in Helmand, as the justice advisor to the provincial reconstruction team there, with the brief to provide a better deal, I quote, a better deal for the people of Helmand than the Taliban could offer, which was, of course, as most people know, a hiding to nothing.
And nothing is, of course, what we achieved there.
I was only there for about six months or so.
And out of that, it was fairly clear which direction things were going.
And so I guess, really, Britain's we're talking about mostly or all post Obama and then the McChrystal-Petraeus surge into Afghanistan, correct?
Yeah.
And so the British role there was virtually all in Helmand province or more than that?
Pretty much pretty much Helmand, 95 percent or so.
There were some special forces knocking around the country doing the death squad stuff with JSOC, I think.
I don't know anything about that from my own knowledge of this, you know, read the excellent work Jeremy Scahill and whatnot on that.
But no, 95 percent of our of our effort was Helmand.
And in the end, what happened?
The British found they were essentially beaten by the Taliban, found themselves discomfited out of sorts and had to call in the U.S. Marines to to bail them out in 2009, which, of course, had very limited effect overall, but at least had the effect, had the had the initial effect of relieving the pressure and the embarrassment on the British army.
Now, as I mentioned, this review draws from your work as well as three other books, and it's all kind of the same story mixed up here the way it's told.
But I think a big part of nothing surprising in here, but something that I learned in here was just kind of the unreality of the mission, as stated, versus the tactics and the strategy.
The counterinsurgency doctrine, as it played out, it sounds like, well, they had this idea of what to do and then but they didn't even really try to do it.
Not that it would have worked anyway, but it seems like actually doing the counterinsurgency doctrine that they described was an entirely different thing than what they even attempted to implement on the ground there.
Am I right about that?
Yeah.
You know, one thing that it's worth your listeners and indeed anybody else who's thinking about getting themselves involved in invading other countries is that you should really have some idea of what's going on in the country outside the wires in which you're going to live.
And the trouble with the military who dominated this campaign, you know, at all levels, I mean, they always talk of civilian surge from, you know, 2010 onwards, McChrystal, and then later, of course, Petraeus and all that nonsense.
You know, the whole thing was a military dominating the problem with the military, your military, our military, any Western armies, is that basically they live at home, they live very cosseted lives within extremely confined circumstances, extremely secure, self-referential, self-selecting lives.
And that world is then transmuted to environments which are obviously outside the wire, entirely but not too much changes inside the wires.
So it's very easy for people like that, you know, with the best will in the world, and they're excellent at resisting the third Soviet shock army or, you know, destroying a Republican guard in a few weeks.
But when it comes to understanding what people outside the wire, even in their own country, let alone in a place which could not be more different like Afghanistan, you know, they're at sea really.
And so what they do is they impose their own reality, which they call counterinsurgency, which to me is a bit like, you know, one of these sort of orthodoxies, a bit like the Catholic orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.
Everyone was required to accept this, and if you didn't, you were a heretic.
There are holy texts which one should read, and you know, you've discussed these before on your program.
And they're to be accepted, there are prophets, the likes of John Nagel, or the sort of great messiah himself, Petraeus.
All this is recited constantly, the British experience in Malaya, until of course it all went south in Iraq, and then in Helmand, where I was involved in both of those, of course.
And unfortunately, none of that bears any relevance whatsoever to what people think outside those wires.
Yeah, well now, so I wonder about that, I mean, is it just like Catch-22?
And I don't mean THE Catch-22, but I mean, in the book, where the entire structure of the military is just so stupid, where no one who tells the guy above him anything succeeds in actually teaching the guy above him anything, that it's just, the whole thing is that absurd?
Because it seems to me from here, that Petraeus and McChrystal and some of these guys, when no one's around, they've got to be whispering to each other, that they know they're lying.
I mean, come on, they're not fighting the Taliban, as it says in here.
They're fighting whatever local Pashtuns in the Helmand district dare to resist them.
That's all they're fighting, and they've got to know that.
And so, how in the hell are they protecting these people from themselves, when themselves are the ones that they're killing?
You know?
It makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah, we were there under this under this shibboleth of protecting the people.
Now, against whom we were protecting the people wasn't entirely clear, but certainly the people themselves regarded us as the major threat, or a major threat, and with some very, very good cause.
You know, in Helmand alone, the British and American forces killed way over a thousand civilians, very few of whom were reported in the international or the state medias of the relevant countries.
Way over a thousand people who weren't involved in the campaign, and thousands and thousands of people who we called Taliban, and as you correctly state there, were actually just local lads who were, you know, trying to defend themselves.
Now, there were some efforts to make senior commander understand this.
I do think that a lot of the more astute people, and I'd count McChrystal amongst that, in fairness, were probably aware of that, but, you know, the dominant story was we were there to fight the Taliban, who were somehow connected to Al-Qaeda, and somehow that would all keep us safe.
And to try and roll that back, was really, if you're going to try and roll that back from a fairly low level, like the kind, sort of level of me, or Matthew Ho, or other British folk like Michael Martin, who's one of the heroic people who wrote, I wouldn't call it a whistle-blowing book, a truth-telling book, reviewed in the James Meek article.
You know, if you're going to try that from our level, it wasn't going to work.
All right, well, we've got to stop here for the break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more with Frank Ledwidge.
He's the author of this book, Investment in Blood, The True Cost of Britain's Afghan War.
It's reviewed by James Meek in the London Review of Books, if you want to check that out.
We'll be right back.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself, WallStreetWindow.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Again, Happy New Year to everybody, especially if you're just tuning in and didn't get to hear me say that earlier.
I'm talking with Frank Ledwidge.
He's a former, lots of things, well, he's a lawyer and military intelligence officer reservist there in the British Army and was part of the Iraq Survey Group, not finding warehouses full of VX gas in Iraq.
He's written this book about the war in Afghanistan, Investment in Blood, the True Cost of Britain's Afghan War.
Frank Ledwidge, again, is his name.
The book is reviewed by James Meek here in the London Review of Books, Worse Than a Defeat is the title there at lrb.co.uk.
We're talking about the unreality of the counterinsurgency doctrine as proposed in the halls of power compared to how it's implemented on the ground.
The thing of it is that everybody knew it was a giant joke.
Everybody knew that the surge in Iraq was just a PR stunt rather than anything that actually so-called worked there, helping the majority finish taking the capital city from the minority.
Yeah, a great big accomplishment.
You didn't need a counterinsurgency doctrine to accomplish that.
That's just helping one side win a civil war is all.
Clear hold and build, nothing.
It's the bottom brigade doing the holding and the building, not the American Army there.
To replicate that in Afghanistan, a lot of people said it was a joke at the time.
Michael Hastings was certainly reporting in Rolling Stone and talking about on this show how all the Army soldiers at the time, they thought the whole thing was a joke.
Morale was absolutely at the lowest.
They were told to stand around and act like traffic cops, getting sniped at, as though we're officer friendly here to protect you while the Delta Force and the Navy SEALs come to kill you in the middle of the night, which is completely just the whole thing.
There's a question.
The question, Frank, is weren't they just lying?
Wasn't the whole game just making money and collecting ribbons for their little green shirts and acting like important people and cashing in on opium trades?
Gotta have something to do with intelligence agencies and military officers occupying this country for 15 years with the most black market drugs coming out of there, as have come out of any place ever in world history.
Weren't they just scamming us, adding time to the Washington clock, to the London clock, as they call it, forcing, tricking, conniving the politicians and the people into letting them stay longer so they can lose later?
A lot of people did believe in this nonsense.
Not only actually in the military, the medium, lower levels, people will tend in the military to believe what they're told.
They don't have any evidence to the contrary.
If evidence in the form of snipers or IEDs comes their way, then they'll rationalize that as the kind of resistance they were told they were going to have in this mission that somebody else knows what they're doing.
There's this constant idea in the military that somebody else knows what they're doing.
I saw this in Bosnia.
I thought, well, somebody must know what it's about.
There things went all right.
When we got to Iraq, I remember a close friend of mine who spoke Arabic saying, you know, somebody must know what's going on.
I said, yeah, somebody should.
We were sitting by the Shatt al-Arab in Iraq at the time.
And he said, most people think we're the guys that should know what's going on, Frank.
And I said, yeah, but we don't have a clue, do we, Frank?
We have no clue what's going on here, no.
When I got to Afghanistan, I was one of those people that should have known what was going on.
I was one of these civilian advisors at the highest, you know, fairly, pretty much at the highest levels with access to the top people.
We hadn't a clue what we were doing, not a damn one of us.
We lived our own little life there in the fort in Lashkar Gah, which is quite rightly the civilian part of it, known by the soldiers quite amusingly, I thought, as Lash Vegas, because we lived a completely different life from the soldiers.
There were believers in this.
But, of course, ultimately, as you say, the whole thing was a complete scam because it was found misfounded intellectually.
Now, whether people were scamming this or, you know, getting getting a shedloads of money on the opium trade, I don't know.
I think probably there were.
I didn't know anybody who were.
Those may have been more on the sort of private security side, but the whole thing was a complete nonsense.
And I think we'll look back at it as a just a sort of hand-wringing, tragic mistake.
And now, I guess part of that, and that's told in this review here, too, is the slightest reminder of Britain's history in Afghanistan.
You know, the Americans look at the Brits like, hey, junior partner, special relationship, come and help us.
Unlike Israel, at least you come and fight wars with us when we need you to, you know, as far as being our special relationship, world's best ally and all that kind of thing.
But the Americans had no idea that this is a giant albatross around our neck.
If we're really trying to get the people of Afghanistan to like us, bringing the Brits with us is the worst PR in the history of that you could possibly think of.
Right.
Yeah, totally.
I remember a good friend of mine called Gene McKenzie, who's a well-known journalist who's working there for years.
She came to visit us in the in the PRT once.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
She's a great woman and a good friend.
Anyway, she came in and we had a coffee there in the little canteen.
And I said, what do people think of us out there?
And she said, oh, they hate you.
No, I said, that can't be true, because I've drunk this ridiculous Kool-Aid.
That can't be true.
Why do they hate us?
Well, she said, you need to know a few basics.
First of all, the only place on the planet where you would be less welcome, where the British army would be less welcome, is the Bogside in Londonderry.
You have a history here of four wars, this being the fourth.
In each case, you were seen as rapacious invaders coming here for your own benefit.
And furthermore, she said, this not a hundred miles from here is where your worst defeat in Afghanistan took place.
You could not have come to a more hostile environment and a more and a more anti-British environment on the planet than Helmand.
Now, did anybody know that when we went in there?
No, because nobody bothered to look at the history of the place.
And of course, we the British, you see, we're really good.
One thing we can do, not like those Americans, is counterinsurgency.
We can teach them what that's all about, and this is a perfect opportunity to show those Americans what we're about.
And meanwhile, you're just as welcome as if you were invading South Carolina again.
Yeah.
Well, at least in South Carolina, you'd have people speaking the same language, and they could tell you they hated you to your face.
Nobody needless to say amongst us spoke the local languages, and we had to rely on interpreters who were, let's say, of varying quality.
I used to find myself speaking my rubbish Russian to people, because of course, the one thing the Soviets had left was a legacy of education and a load of people who spoke Russian.
Because for us, when we used to select people to go on the little two-week courses, rubbishy little courses we'd run for policemen or lawyers or whatever in Kabul, the Soviets would say, �Right.
We're going to select you.
We're going to take you to Kiev or Murmansk or Samarkand, and you're going to stay there, or Moscow.
You'll stay there for three years.
We'll teach you Russian, and we'll qualify you professionally.
� And they did it to tens and tens of thousands of people.
It was pathetic, the sort of nonsense that we were promulgating there.
All right.
Well, now, so we're about out of time.
In fact, we'll have to go overtime into the break a little bit here, but I've got to ask you what you think is happening now, because I guess all the Brits have left now or are leaving, but the Americans are staying, and they can't call it a defeat as long as they're still there.
That's the lesson that they've taken from the Iraq War, I guess.
But so what do you think is going to happen?
Is it just going to be the status quo, or do you see the Taliban coming back to prominence?
And I mean the actual Taliban, not anybody who would dare resist definition.
What do you think?
Yeah, well, you know, insofar as my view is informed, it looks to me the way that the South is going is the way it was before we got there, you know, the negotiations between what they call the Asli Taliban, which is the Mullah Omar real Taliban, drugs gangs, local tribal groups, you know, that sort of melange of rivalries and hostilities and mini-wars that have been going on there for certainly the last 40 years, and actually for hundreds of years beyond that.
And that's the way it is.
And right now, with the government just being one of these little gangs, will the Taliban come back to power, Asli Taliban?
Unlikely.
But, you know, what will happen certainly is that their constituency will be adopted into the government in one form or another, as it should be.
They represent, whether we like it or not, a considerable body of opinion in the country, and that opinion should be allowed for, whether we like it or not.
And it will be in due course.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for coming on the show, Frank.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Real pleasure.
All right.
So that's Frank Ledwich and his book, Investment in Blood, The True Cost of Britain's Afghan War.
Well, it's in my Amazon cart now, and it's reviewed by James Meek here at LRB.co.uk.
And the article is called Worse Than a Defeat.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik?
Live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and, well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out ScottHorton.org slash speeches for some examples and email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org for more information.
See you there.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts & Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts & Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.