07/13/10 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This here is Anti-War Radio, and our first guest on the show today is Kelly B. Vlejos.
She writes for us at antiwar.com.
That would be original.antiwar.com, slash Vlejos, V-L-A-H-O-S, geez, I hope I'm saying that right.
I think I am.
She is a Washington, D.C.
-based freelance writer, is a long-time political reporter for foxnews.com, and a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's amconmag.com.
She's also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
And you did say my name right, so that's not bad.
Oh, good.
I'm terrible at that, so I don't give myself the benefit of the doubt.
All right, so let's talk about Exum's challenge.
Game on.
That's your article from last time.
You have a brand-new one up on the site, and I want to talk about that later on.
We'll have a little bit of time, but first of all, tell us who Exum is and what's his challenge.
Well, Andrew Exum is a former Army Ranger who is now retired.
He now works as a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, which is a Washington think tank that had been established by Michelle Flournoy, a Democrat, a former supporter of Hillary Clinton, who decided that her and her fellow liberal interventionists in Washington had come up with a great way to not only tap into the defense community in Washington, but give the Democratic Party the muscle it feels that it didn't have, and have been very big supporters of counterinsurgency, which really dovetails nicely with the liberal interventionist view that the American military can be used for humanitarian purposes and for good in the world.
So he has, like I said, retired, and he's a fellow there, and he's been a strong supporter of counterinsurgency, or COIN, or the Petraeus Doctrine, as we call it, as well.
And so he's been a fervent disciple of that, and recently he had written on his blog, in response to the Rolling Stone article that had led to McChrystal's ouster, that he was surprised that there was, by the author, Michael Hastings, a suggestion that COIN wasn't worth working, and he made a comment like, well, what is the alternative to COIN?
Complete withdrawal from Afghanistan?
You know, the horror.
And he made this suggestion that nobody is really talking about the benefits and costs of full withdrawal, that there are a lot of critics of COIN, but nobody who's really stood up and talked about what the cost-benefit is.
And I thought I might take up that challenge a bit by interviewing people like Andrew Bacevich and Douglas MacGregor and others who have been arguing about withdrawal, and have made really smart and intelligent analyses about this.
And so that's what I wrote about last week for Antiwar.com.
Well, and for the record, we invited him to debate you on this show, and got no response other than, I think, a little bit of runaround from his people.
Yeah.
He's afraid of you, apparently.
Well, yeah.
And they, you know, sadly, this defense community, these defense analysts don't take, they don't typically take non-defense people very seriously.
They assume that they have the right knowledge, they're the best equipped to talk about military strategy, pros and cons and whatnot, and unless you are part of their clique, you know, you're not taken seriously.
I think the last time they actually addressed something that we wrote about them was last year when we did, and I did a review of their annual conference back in June 2009, and we got Thomas Ricks pretty steamed, Thomas Ricks being the former Washington Post columnist who is now working for the Center for New American Security as part of that Coindeniza crowd, and we got them really riled up.
And the great thing about that, Scott, was they said some mean things about us, and there was a ton of responses, not only, I mean, I couldn't say if they were all antiwar.com readers, but a lot of people responded, and they said, you know, back off.
You know, these people have some great ideas just because they don't jive with your interventionist, you know, philosophies, but, you know, you should take these people more seriously.
They're not a bunch of clowns, and I was really heartened to see that, that there were a lot of people who jumped in in defense of antiwar.com, because there seemed to be some misnomers out there that, oh, antiwar.com were just a bunch of flaming hippies, pinko, as they were calling us.
People are like, why don't you go on the site and check out what they have to say?
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the thing, too.
It just goes to show, well, a couple of things there.
That part of it just goes to show how lazy they are.
It's just like when I wrote my article, Finding Ways to Stay in Iraq, after Obama's Camp Lejeune speech, that military intelligence wrote it up like the other Scott Horton had written it, even though all you got to do is Google Scott Horton for about 15 seconds, and you can tell that there's two of us, and one interviews the other all the time, and it's right there on Wikipedia.
And I have my own bio on the antiwar.com page where the article was printed that makes it clear that I'm not a professor at Columbia University.
But yeah, why not go ahead and attack Kelly Vlahos from Fox News and call her a pinko commie?
It's easier than actually looking at the facts.
And of course, here we are a year later, and you were right, and they were wrong, and their war is a big failure, and a bunch of people died for nothing at their hands.
And Michelle Flournoy is now in Doug Feith's chair as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, actually killing people, rather than just writing about how wouldn't it be great if we were killing people.
And that's why Andrew Exum was scared to come on the show, because he knows that when y'all went through this a year ago, you were right and he was wrong.
And here, when you write, all right, here's your challenge, what might it look like if we leave Afghanistan, you go ahead and take him on.
And he doesn't apparently have anything to say to you, Kelly.
Correct.
And I noted that, and it might just be a coincidence, but on his blog a day later, he came out with a posting called The Real Afghan Debate, and threw up an op-ed by David Barno, who is another fellow at the Center for American Security, who had an op-ed which was pretty lame-brained, you know, boilerplate support for never-ending war in Afghanistan, and again, reasserted that only isolationists and idiots would be talking about full withdrawal.
So I assume that that was a backhanded commentary on our peace, which he said he wasn't going to give us the satisfaction of naming us outright.
Right.
Yeah.
That's funny.
As they run and cowardly tear from your argument, they get to dismiss you without even naming you.
Yeah.
That's fun.
But it also goes to what you were saying before about how, and I think this probably applies to government people across the board, I certainly read this in Dan Ellsberg's book, Secrets, that once you're part of the executive branch, or at least, you know how it is with the security military industrial complex, they might as well all be the Pentagon anyway, you know, whether they're at the think tanks or not.
And they all have this view that, look, we know what's going on.
We have access to classified information and secrets that you can't possibly know.
So there's no reason we would listen to you, because we know you couldn't possibly know what we know.
And the thing is that it's, well, like the way Robert Gates criticized the Apache collateral murder video.
It's war through a soda straw.
Yeah, they have access to all this classified information, but they don't have any wisdom at all.
They don't have the ability to step back and look at what they're doing and see that it's not working.
For example, they just continue on.
Right.
Well, and the sad thing, which I tried to bring up in the piece, was that not only do you have the Andrew Exum and Barnos and Flournoys of the world managing the message within their community, within the defense establishment, but they manage the message to the media.
And in terms of how the media is covering this war and the debate over withdrawal and staying and and so the media has accepted this trope that the only alternative to staying in Afghanistan indefinitely is the quote unquote lighter footprint solution, which is some amalgam of the sort of Biden plan, where we would be putting in special forces to go after terrorists.
You know, the media can't even concede that full withdrawal is a viable option.
All right.
Well, we're going to talk about we're going to talk about your answers to Exum's challenge here when we get back from this break.
Everybody, it's Kelly Vlahos from Antiwar.com.
Hang tight.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, any time, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
All right, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly Vlahos from Antiwar.com and from the American Conservative magazine.
Now, Kelly, we were talking about big tough guy Andrew Exum's cowardice and his fear of debating you on the topic that he challenged people to debate, which is that we ought to get out of Afghanistan.
He says that if we do, it'll be terrible and that's why we have to stay forever, as according to his, you know, counterinsurgency strategy theory.
And then you wrote this article saying, fine, you want a detailed response on what Afghanistan might look like or why it is that we need to leave anyway or what have you.
Here it is.
And we haven't heard from him since, but so let's go ahead and go through this.
What do you think Afghanistan would look like if I was to have my way and we just got all the troops out of there yesterday?
Well, I think, you know, on one hand, you know, one of the tropes we hear is that the Taliban would likely take over the country.
Something similar to what we saw, you know, just before 9-11, they would take over Kabul and have a tight grip with the Sharia law.
There'd be a lot of killings.
There'd be the subjugation, you know, subjugation of women, every nightmare that we've heard about.
The experts that I have talked to say that that is completely up for debate as to the extent of that scenario.
Right now, the Taliban is gaining strength with us there.
The key is do we know whether they are gaining strength because we are there, because we are fueling this defense, this stream of defense and aid that's going into the country.
The Taliban is actually making money off of it, you know, with their elaborate shakedown, you know, rackets.
They're making money off of the war.
They're making money off of the drug smuggling.
They are gaining confidence.
They're gaining strength in the local communities and they're pushing out from the south and the east where they are, where their bedrock is, and actually gaining influence in other parts of the country.
So that's happening with us there.
Now, what will happen if we just left?
Some experts tell me that yes, there will be some strength to this insurgency after we leave for all obvious reasons.
But they are not as organized and they're not as strong in terms of what they could do from there.
They would still have to push through all of those non-push-toon areas in the north and fight amazing battles against warlords there who do not like the Taliban.
The people do not like the Taliban up there.
So they would have to fight to gain any more territory.
And likely, as some people have suggested to me, they would probably rather make some deals with Kabul, with the Karzai administration to get more political traction, more legitimacy so that they are directly involved in the governing.
Will they topple the Karzai government?
We don't know.
Some people have suggested to me that the Karzai government will probably implode anyway over time because of its massive corruption and the fact that it's not legitimate with the people outside of Kabul.
So the whole case for staying there based on the Taliban taking over like a wave is up for a debate.
And I think there are some smart people on both sides that say that.
So I think that was the biggest takeaway.
I mean, there's others, but I don't know how much time we have.
But I think that is a key argument and it's not being debated in the mainstream media right now.
Yeah.
Well, now, it is the case that the Taliban were on the verge of winning the civil war when America intervened.
And you're right that the government we propped up there doesn't seem to have much authority beyond Kabul.
And I tend to probably, you know, I'm just guessing.
It seems to me like maybe the war party argument that the Taliban would take over, they would take Kabul and they would at least end up waging a civil war in order to consolidate their power over the north to, you know, rewind the situation back to the summer of 2001 or whatever.
I think that that probably is the more likely scenario because the Pashtuns are the majority and the Taliban are the only political representation they have.
Not that the Taliban are really of them.
They're more like a transplant from Pakistani intelligence and whatever.
But they certainly have seemed to have more legitimacy than, you know, Dostum and Karzai and the Northern Alliance warlords that have been assembled.
My thing is, though, I don't care.
I mean, big deal.
So what if the Taliban takes over again?
We're not talking about taking over part of America.
We're talking about them taking over Afghanistan.
Why should that bother me?
Well, that and that's and that's the whole other that the whole other aspect of this is is that part I mean, is that the mission?
Well, Obama has said that the key of the mission is to destroy Al-Qaeda and the objectives like under that mission is to destabilize or reduce the influence of Taliban so it doesn't take over the Karzai government again.
Now, I don't know if this is part of the Obama, you know, shuffle.
We don't know how key that is to our staying there or whether it you know, he vacillates between this being an Al-Qaeda thing and a Taliban thing and a nation building thing.
The other key argument being, well, if we leave, Al-Qaeda will regain a foothold in Afghanistan.
And that is that is the other debate that I brought up with some experts who, again, say that the influence of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is has been greatly reduced.
And not only because we're picking them off with special forces, because of the political relationship with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
And there is not much evidence that Al-Qaeda would be welcomed back by a Taliban run Afghan government if that's what would happen.
Will there be, you know, vacuums of space in Afghanistan on the border without us there patrolling without us, our drones patrolling?
Yeah, probably.
But will they be able to establish the camp and have the influence they had in 1999?
That there's no certainty of that.
And that's another trope that seems to be just widely accepted by the mainstream media.
Yeah.
Well, and after all, the reason that September 11th happened wasn't because Osama had a base in Afghanistan.
It was because he found some recruits who were graduate students in Germany and could actually have access to the West and get the job done.
He was in exile and way the hell out there in Afghanistan.
That's why they exiled him out there in the first place.
So he couldn't cause trouble from there.
Right.
I don't know.
Exactly.
The whole argument is based on a bunch of nonsense.
Well, look, this guy, Andrew Exum, and his coin crew are saying that our other choice is to stay for generations and build a Western European state in the heart of Central Asia.
Right.
That's the funny thing.
It seems as though, in their desperation to hold on to whatever influence they have, there seems to be some massaging of the message now, where they're erring more on the lighter footprint theory or approach that you and I were talking about before.
So you see them redefining coin day by day to accommodate the new situation on the ground.
Oh, that's funny.
Hey, stay on, because we're still on chaos anyway, even though we're going out to LRN break here.
Well, that's interesting.
So they're basically just rewriting coin to mean whatever they want, as long as they can try to make it look like some sort of victory in the end.
They just need to come up with a surge work type slogan and go with that.
Right.
I mean, this column I was talking to you about that Andrew Exum had written, which seemed to be in response to mine, you know, basically said, oh, well, it's not it's not about either staying indefinitely or getting out like the isolationists would have us do.
You know, there are gradations and those being the lighter footprint model.
So there seems to be he seems to be bringing that into the into the into the discussion more and more, which would be the Biden plan, which would be to have special forces that would be inserted into the country or be stationed there.
So when there are terrorists, they can go after them when there's emergencies, they can help, which the experts that I spoke to who who believe that the full withdrawal is the better approach, said, you know what, you're still going to have American troops on foreign soil.
They're still going to be irritant.
They're still going to be seen as occupiers.
They're still going to be dropping bombs.
They're still going to be knocking down doors, dragging off husbands and brothers.
You know, all of the elements that are causing the insurgency now that are flaming the insurgency would still be there if you had this, quote, unquote, lighter footprint that Joe Biden has been, you know, supporting.
So I don't buy that either.
I don't see that.
I mean, I think that there is room to have a debate about three full withdrawal, the special forces stuff and the the counterinsurgency, you know, more boots on the ground, nation building that Petraeus has been, you know, pursuing.
If nothing else, these coin guys deserve credit for, you know, these neoliberal types for being as slippery as the neoconservatives when it comes to redefining what it was they want so that they can still claim to be the one who thought of it.
Right.
So this is really like, you know, weekly standard type stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Now the Biden plan is our idea to whatever.
Anyway.
Yeah.
You know, I agree with you, of course, that both of them are just as counterproductive toward actual American interests.
That's sort of beside the point, though, isn't it?
Yeah.
And, you know, I was listening to I was listening to, you know, talk radio yesterday where there was a I didn't get his name because I jumped in it during the interview, but it was obviously a coined anista.
And he was, you know, perpetuating these myths, these myths that one being that we are actually having an impact on the Taliban and reducing its influence and that we just need more time and that the Obama, the timeline of July 2001 that Obama had set is is is counterproductive and we need to get rid of it.
We just got to be there for as long as it takes, because if not, the worst case scenario is that place is just going to go up in flames.
The Taliban is going to take over.
Al-Qaeda is going to move in over the border from Pakistan, you know, and the guy interviewing him put up a little bit of a fight and said, you know what?
The people I interviewed say that the Taliban is getting stronger, you know, but on the most part, the full withdrawal, you know, option wasn't even spoken of.
Yeah.
In other words, we're basically where we are in the argument, where we were in Iraq in about 2005.
You know.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're at the time.
Well, I got to get Jeremy Sapienza on the phone and play some EPMD for the good people.
Thank you so much for your time, Kelly.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody.
That's Kelly Vallejo.
She writes an antiwar dot com original dot antiwar dot com slash Vallejo's.
And Andrew Exum is frightened of her.