03/25/15 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

In America today, teachers, cops, judges, and other so-called public servants make far more than the average taxpayer.
And their pensions?
Well, if the people knew, they'd join us.
That's where you come in.
Taxpayers United of America is embarking on a great new project to train activists how to take on the parasites in your communities.
The entire process, from prying loose the facts to disseminating the truth to the people.
The next of these great workshops is Saturday, April 11th in Las Vegas.
It's just $15.
For more information, go to taxpayersunited.org slash govpensions.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest today is the great Kelly B. Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks, Scott.
Great, great.
Happy to talk to you again and always enjoy reading your work here.
This one is called America's Warlords in Afghanistan, about the second war David Petraeus lost.
What?
The second war that David Petraeus extended and then lost.
And, well, I guess his big strategy was, hey, we'll stand down when they stand up.
And so what he did was he stood up a bunch of war criminals.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's about the size of it.
I mean, part of his strategy was, you know, and he had gotten this within his own research and within his own writing about Vietnam, he felt, and probably to a fault, that by standing up local militias in Vietnam and working with local police in Vietnam would have helped to win the counterinsurgency there, which we know that didn't work for a whole host of reasons.
Well, he carried that over to his counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
So while we were putting billions of dollars into the national police and the national army, he was standing up local police community, quote unquote, community watches in these districts.
So he turned local citizens, in other words.
Right.
Now, in practical terms, the local elders were supposed to nominate the commanders or the police chiefs of these Afghan local police, which is the official name for them.
But what happened was, since they were under the auspices of U.S. special forces, sometimes the special forces, the U.S. military on the ground, would pressure the local leaders to select certain members that they felt were friendly to their interests on the ground over sometimes the objections of the locals there.
And what happened was that local commanders came from a relationship that they already had with special forces because they were fighting the Taliban.
And so the military felt that somehow that would translate into them being good police officers from there on in for these districts.
Well, it turned out that these local commanders were warlords, strongmen, former mujahideen, who had already had their own agenda going on.
So what happened is that a lot of these guys became stronger, wealthier, and ended up terrorizing, to this day, local communities in which they have taken the power and the authority that the U.S., under Karzai, was able to bestow on them, and have made it a very profitable enterprise at the detriment of the people.
And so they have, in essence, extended and exacerbated an already corrupt society in Afghanistan, not only corrupt but volatile, because while you have the terror of the Taliban, now you have the terror of the warlords going back to pre-Taliban days.
So nothing much has changed except that we helped to make it happen.
And that's what I was writing about.
Well, and it sounds like we're also, with this strategy, it helps in the destabilization.
It separates all the different anti-Taliban factions from each other as well and hinders their ability to resist the return of the Taliban.
Right.
I mean, and like I said, a lot of these guys were integral in getting the Taliban out of their communities, but that didn't mean that they were good guys, and it didn't mean that they had the interest of the community at heart.
It really meant that they wanted to seize power for themselves.
And I go into great detail about how they're terrorizing these poor people.
They're doing everything from property theft to raping women, raping boys, killing people that they see as potential rivals, or even people that they suspect of being potential rivals who might just be a guy farming his land, burning down houses, abducting people.
I mean, it's like Dark Ages.
And the sad thing is that our taxpayer dollars helped to fund this mess, and it doesn't, from the Afghans that I talk to, that this is one of the key reasons why they can't move forward.
I mean, there's many reasons why this country cannot move forward that range from the corruption to the violence, but this is definitely a key reason why these communities have not been able to fend for themselves, to move forward economically, because they're being run by the same warlords who ran the show before the Taliban.
So it's just an endless cycle.
Well, and of course, from an economics point of view, like you mentioned there, it's impossible to save or to even choose to try to save for future investment in advancement if you know that the local warlord is just going to take it all from you.
You might as well just spend it all on tonight's dinner.
Correct.
And now that the United States is withdrawing from that country, the money is starting to peter out, and what they're doing is these local police constabularies are now, in order to keep funding themselves, I mean, apparently when I got a statement from the Pentagon that we are still funding these police officers throughout the country, I'm not sure.
They range more than about $20,000 at this point.
But from what I understand from the Human Rights Watch report was that they are illegally taxing the citizens, which is happening all over Afghanistan by a whole host of bad actors, but they are illegally taxing the community.
So you're right.
They can make all the money.
They can try to make their way, but they end up paying basically extortion money to these guys so they can keep arming themselves and living in some amount of luxury while everybody else is dirt poor.
Right.
There's this Vice documentary.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It came out, I guess, about a year ago or so called This Is What Victory Looks Like.
Have you seen that?
No.
It's ugly.
Boy, that's victory, I've got to tell you.
Wow.
And I guess the way he explains it is that up in more or less the north and northwest where it's the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and the Hazaras and the remnants of the communists and the Northern Alliance and all that, that's basically the land of the National Army.
And then down in Pashtunistan in the south and then up in the east all the way up the Duran line on the Pakistan border there in Pashtunistan, that's where they have the National Police, which is a kind of different organization.
But he goes to show that in either case, these guys are just, and I think especially among the Pashtun police forces, all they do is just sit around raping little boys all day.
That's all they do.
And they have interviews with these soldiers.
The local sergeant, I guess, in charge has got tears in his eyes saying, this is my job is backing these guys, protecting these guys' power.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I was surprised, maybe I shouldn't have been, but in the Human Rights Watch report that several of their examples of these warlords were in the north and northwest, and they were Tajiks and Hazaras who had been installed through the relationships of the United States as these local commanders.
So it's not just a Pashtun issue.
It is just definitely very widespread.
And all that said, not all of these local police departments are evil.
It's just there's enough of them to be creating a really detrimental effect on the progress of Afghanistan right now.
Yeah, they're making American cops look like peace officers, for crying out loud, which is incredible.
But hold it right there, Kelly.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Kelly B. Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine.
The article is America's Warlords in Afghanistan.
So you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
We're talking police abuse, Afghanistan style here, with Kelly B. Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine.
The local police, not the National Police Force.
Well, I mean, them too, but the local police forces built up by St. David Petraeus, who can do no wrong, no matter how much wrong he does or how badly he fails.
He succeeded at his primary mission, Kelly, didn't he, which was adding time to the Washington clock, as he puts it.
Let me fight the war longer.
It doesn't matter if he wins or loses.
Right.
I think what I tried to do in the piece was make the point, and I don't know if I made it strong enough, was that when he went to Congress in 2011 to promote this Afghan local police force as a key part of his counterinsurgency strategy, he was out the door within a year.
And you could say the same for his sons of Iraq.
In Iraq at the time, he had stood up this U.S. paid militia to fight the U.S.'s enemies and the Shiite Prime Minister Maliki's enemies in Iraq, but he left there too.
And what I see as a pattern here in the story of David Petraeus is that he has a lot of great ideas that he has culled from his own mythology about how Vietnam could have been won.
He planted them in both Iraq and in Afghanistan, and then went on with his life.
And I'm not privy to who made all the decisions about where his commands were and when they ended, but all I know is that he's given a lot of credit for the surge, which we see the results of now unfolding as we speak in Iraq.
And then we look to Afghanistan and see all the unfinished business there, and all the crumbling of all of our efforts there.
And it's hard for me to see him as anything but a guy who left unfinished business.
But still, he gets all this credit for winning wars.
He's a master of public relations, is what he's a master of, not counterinsurgency.
A master of public relations.
So he sat there in front of Congress and talked about this local police force as a quote-unquote community watch, and said that it was going to be key to standing up these local communities against the Taliban.
Well, they might have gotten rid of the Taliban, but what he helped to do was install the most vicious, evil people in many of these districts.
And I'll say, that's not every district, but in enough where Human Rights Watch has had to do multiple reports on this over the years.
This isn't the first time I've written about it.
Right.
Of course not.
In fact, well, to go back, I mean, people can just check the archives, and there's me interviewing you in 2008 and 2009, before the Afghan surge, talking about how this is never going to work because it's based on the false premise that the Iraq surge worked, which isn't true.
And then they come in with these promises that, you know, where's the top hat and the rabbit when they're talking about the magic wand, when they're saying we're going to change entire societies.
We're going to descend our army and Marine Corps troops on these Afghans, and we're going to give them a government in a box.
And we're going to hire these technocrats who are going to come, and they're going to turn Afghanistan into a Western European Westphalian nation state by, you know, well, as in the promise, by July 2011.
That was what they said they were going to do.
And then when Obama was hesitant to do it, they rolled him, you know, right out in the open.
Petraeus and his deputy McChrystal criticized Obama and said he wasn't doing enough, and we could only win this thing if the president wasn't tying our hands.
And, I mean, it's Obama's fault.
I don't mean to excuse him, but they went and just completely attacked the president and demanded that they get the length on their leash to go ahead and do this surge, and then it's been nothing but a catastrophe.
Right.
And what's doubly outrageous for me is that it wasn't as though that the special forces, you know, installed these commanders and then walked off the job.
They continuously worked with them.
And when confronted with evidence from the community that they were, that these commanders were abusing locals, you know, nine times out of ten, according to the Human Rights Watch here, that they excused or dismissed the allegations as unprovable.
So, I mean, it is not as though that they haven't been warned that many of these people have been a problem.
Now, some of them have, you know, were ALP and left.
You know, there was one guy that I highlighted that has an arrest warrant out for him for murder, and he's a former ALP guy, but the United States will not acknowledge that he was ever ALP.
And the mysterious thing is that this guy is just operating under the noses of everybody while he has his arrest warrant for murder.
So, you know, it's complicity and unaccountability and impunity, and it's got a lot of Afghans upset, and we should be upset because we're part of this.
This is our problem.
Well, now, let me ask you this.
If we ever could get that withdrawal they keep promising us, including the dollars, too, would any of these guys, do any of them have enough either grassroots power or power, you know, handed to them by Americans in terms of money and weapons in the past to hang around, or they all basically are just puppets on America's strings who would all have to turn and run from their arrest warrants as soon as we left?
Well, it sounds like to me that they have enough power to stay right where they are.
They have, you know, there's General Razik in Kandahar who, I mean, he still enjoys our support, but his network is so intense and is so strong that nothing happens in Kandahar without his consent.
So whether we're there supporting, you know, or fueling him or not, he already has enough of a power base to exist.
And as I said earlier, that many of these commanders are just, they're just taxing and bleeding the locals dry for their own sustenance.
So that's a sad thing.
I mean, I've never been so sad, I don't think, about the withdrawal as I am now, because it does, it looks like the place is near implosion.
And I guess from what the President said yesterday was that he's going to leave 10,000 troops behind now.
That's a certainty.
Because, you know, he senses, the new President Ghani senses that this place could fall apart as soon as we leave.
I don't know what 10,000 additional troops left there is going to actually do, but I think that is a powerful symbol of the failure of the war, that we cannot leave because of this.
Well, and they signed a deal back a couple of years ago to stay until 2024.
So, you know, I'd be amazed if Obama or Jeb or whoever's next would get them out before then.
But it seems like really, as sad as it is to say, if it is just the American presence that's propping the current system up, the sooner we leave and the sooner it collapses in whatever mess it collapses into, the better.
Because America, well, like you're talking about, we've distorted the power.
We've given so much power to these guys who never could have gained it themselves.
Those things have to shake out.
We've got to figure out the people of Afghanistan have got to be able to, you know, one way or the other, figure out who they're supporting and, you know, how they can ever have security again.
It's just like in 1996 when they said, OK, we'll take the Taliban because it's better than General Dostum, who, by the way, is America's secretary of defense over there right now.
Right.
Right.
So they said, look, the Taliban, they're horrible.
They throw women down the well for adultery and whatever, but they don't steal and they're not corrupt.
And, you know, they're authoritarian.
They're even totalitarian, but they're not corrupt.
They mean what they say and they're not here just to rape you and loot you.
And and so we prefer them.
And that was why the Taliban was on the eve of complete defeat, complete victory.
I mean, complete defeat of the Northern Alliance when America invaded in 2001.
It wasn't because they were good guys or really anybody liked them.
It was just because they were better than what they'd been putting up with in the years of warlords and civil war and and rape and murder and theft that had taken place since the fall of the communists.
Yeah.
You know, it's awful.
One of the Afghans that I spoke to for the story, you know, said that, you know, that there was never a culture, a cultural shift in all of these years post Taliban, and that there was never you know, the rule of law was never asserted and that the U.S. never helped or pushed for that rule of law to be asserted.
So you have a culture of impunity now over the last, you know, 14 years that has just been festering.
There was there was never a there was never a chance or a space to give rise to real pure democracy the way that we see it.
But also the rule of law.
So what we're looking at is is just, you know, a culture in which women are still being stoned right there on the streets of Kabul and burned alive.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
We've got to go.
But great work as always, Kelly.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's the great Kelly Vallejo.
She's at the American conservative magazine.
America's warlords in Afghanistan.
The American conservative dot com.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police, state founders, quote, central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom.
The monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF dot 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 Hornberger, 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 dot org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Hey, I'm 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 and 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 and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi dot co.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm 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.