Jason Ditz, news editor for Antiwar.com, discusses why a few thousand more US troops in Afghanistan won’t stop the steady loss of ground to the Taliban; President Trump’s deployment of troops all over the Middle East/North Africa to fight ISIS; and the official understatement of civilian casualties from US air strikes in Iraq and Syria.
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All right, so introducing our friend Jason Ditz.
He's the managing news editor of antiwar.com.
That is, his domain is news.antiwar.com, where he's keeping track of all the worst, most important stuff for you every day.
Hey, Jason, how are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing not so bad, man, except that I'm really sorry that's been so long since we've spoken.
I'm happy to have the opportunity to ask you questions today.
All kinds of stuff going on.
Let's forget Russia and China and all this for a minute, or, well, for this interview.
Let's just focus on the Middle East.
There's enough there.
And I guess, let's throw in Central Asia.
Want to start with Afghanistan?
There's General John Nicholson, and I'm sorry, is it Votel is the name of the commander of Central Command?
Yeah.
Nicholson in charge of the war in Afghanistan, and they're both calling for troops on the eve of Mattis's report.
Is there any rumors?
Do you know, at least, when the Mattis report is supposed to come out?
Anything like that?
Just soon.
It's probably going to be in the next few weeks, and the expectation is, at least according to the two generals we've talked about, Votel and Nicholson, a few thousand more troops headed to Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm interested in what that means, assuming that that's what they push.
Because what good is a few thousand going to do, unless they're really in a state of panic right now, that something really bad is going to happen, the army is going to completely fall apart, or the Taliban are going to walk right into Kabul, or whatever.
Because otherwise, what difference is a few thousand more troops going to make when they've got, what, 8,000-something now, plus drones?
Right.
And...
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we need a real escalation, I'm just saying I wonder what it is they're thinking, you know?
The big problem is that a couple of years ago, all of the NATO countries, including the United States, made rules to very strictly limit how much contact they have with the Afghan military anyway, because of all the insider attacks in which Afghan troops ended up shooting NATO troops.
So that's not going to change, so all this talk that a few thousand more troops is going to help bolster the Afghan military is just nonsense.
And if they did get rid of that rule, they're just opening themselves up for a huge increase in the number of casualties in Afghanistan, because the insider attacks haven't stopped, they just stopped happening to NATO troops because they weren't around.
So really the training and the embedding of white officers with the local militia forces and all that, all that's been ground to a halt, even with the 10,000 troops that are there now.
It's very, very limited and under very strict rules now.
So what's motivating the Afghan army to go outside and do their job at all, anything?
I mean, in terms of the Tajiks going south and messing with the Pashtuns.
Yeah, there's not a lot, and they're certainly not well paid by military standards.
It's one of the worst paying jobs in Afghanistan, which is already a poor country.
So really the only reason people join the military at all is either to steal weapons or because they're like the idiot fifth son of some farmer and it's the only job they can get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Boots and a rifle.
That's the thing, right?
Give me some shoes.
Get me the hell out of here, man.
You can keep my name on the rolls and keep my money if you want, commanding officer.
I just came for the shoes.
Right.
And that's been a problem for over a decade with the Afghan military, is that they have a huge number of recruits because it's a very large army for not that populous a country, but they don't keep the guys.
A lot of them get through to their first paycheck or last until training is over and they're just gone.
There's a funny bit in, God help anyone who puts themselves through the torture of reading this book, but Obama's Wars by Woodward.
There's a scene in there where Holbrook says to Petraeus, yeah, but I mean, if the key to the whole thing is building up the army, that's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it, man, because they all just take their boots and rifle and go, you know, they don't stay to do the job.
And Petraeus says, or maybe it's McChrystal, whatever, says, well, you know, that's an issue and we're going to have to work on that.
Whatever.
Anyway, even though this is premise one of their entire mission to go and do this giant surge is that we're going to transfer all of our gains over to this Afghan army that we built.
But meanwhile, oh, the fact that there really isn't one to transfer it to, well, yeah, you know, but we're going to, we're going to look at that too, don't, yeah, anyway, here we are now, seven, eight years later after the end of the surge and the end of the failure.
But I guess so.
Do you think maybe I'm right that they really are in a panic?
That's why they need a few more.
I mean, he said it's to break the stalemate.
But is that code for we're afraid that Hizbi Islami is going to seize the parliament or something?
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, this whole stalemate claim is also nonsense, because if you look at the reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, it regularly shows, oh, the Taliban over the last six to nine months took a little more territory, a little more territory.
And the most recent ones are like they have half the country now.
The Taliban has more land now than at any time since the 2001 invasion.
I mean, that's not a stalemate.
That's steadily losing.
Yeah.
I mean, they sent we talk.
I talked with the reporter for Military Times dot com about the sending of the 300 Marines back to the Helmand province.
That wasn't sent them from up in Kabul or from Bagram Air Base.
That was 300 fresh troops from the U.S. sent to, I guess, prevent last ditch effort to prevent the fall of the capital of Lashkar Gah down in the Helmand province.
So, man.
So.
But then that, I guess, do they not have the courage to say or maybe they're just getting us warmed up for Mattis is going to say, forget a few thousand if we're going to do this right, we're going to have to send another 50.
Or did they think that maybe the people will object and they're afraid to ask for a whole other surge?
I hope that that's true.
But I mean, I don't know.
It just seems like all a few thousand more is going to do.
They give them 10,000 more.
That's just going to buy them, you know, a little bit more time before the fall of Saigon.
But otherwise, it's not going to change the dynamic on the ground at all.
Right.
Afghanistan's been a losing effort for.
Fifteen years now.
I mean, they have not.
Been making progress despite years and years of Pentagon reports saying that, well, there's not visible progress on the ground, but we're just about to turn the corner and something huge is going to happen to the Taliban where they're just going to be defeated.
They've been predicting that for years and it just doesn't happen.
I don't think that 100,000 troops is going to make Afghanistan and the insurgency.
It's just a pipe dream.
And I think from the Pentagon's perspective, the best they can hope for is to have a few hundred troops here and there in the big cities and keep those from falling and then say, well, at least we control all the big population centers in a mostly rural country.
Yeah.
Got to just keep adding time to that Washington clock.
That's the best they can do.
Right.
Really.
Right.
As long as they stay.
They haven't ever truly lost.
Right.
You can't call it a total defeat.
There's really nobody with the power, apparently, to run them completely out of the country.
At least all else fails that could run up to, you know, Dostum territory or whatever in the north.
But in other words, as long as they stay, they can never lose, you know, completely.
So they just keep staying and staying.
Oh, right.
And that's I guess that was their lesson from Vietnam was that.
The defeat, the fall of Saigon was the moment where the Vietnam War was lost.
And that everything else was just a stalemate.
No matter how much ground they lost and how obvious it was that that's what the end result was going to be.
It was only that moment where everyone's fleeing in helicopters.
Yep.
I mean, hey, you you do a good job of looking at it from their point of view.
I think that pretty much sums it up, you know, whatever whatever is the best self justification you could come up with.
That's pretty much the official history as it gets written.
All right.
So other catastrophes in the world.
James Gordon Meek.
I know you had your own write up of this.
James Gordon Meek at ABC News had a big thing a few handful of days ago about major escalation all across Yemen, Syria, Iraq, North Africa.
Somalia is in there, too, I'm 90 percent sure.
Yeah.
You want to take it from there and give us a rundown of what we're really looking at?
Yeah, the.
The reports out of the Pentagon are that there have been a lot of very quiet deployments of special forces across the Middle East, across northern Africa.
They didn't really say where Yemen was heavily implied.
Somalia was heavily implied.
We can probably assume that places like Libya are also involved.
And the stories in ABC News also suggested that special forces commanders kind of have the administration's ear on how best to fight groups in these remote areas and that all the troops that are being deployed to all these, you know, windblown empty pieces of desert are being told to prepare for serious deployments with a lot of fighting.
So it seems like there are going to be a lot of little wars breaking out all around the region.
Hmm.
Well, geez, it's not like the president didn't warn us.
He is going to knock the hell out of ISIS.
Well, Obama spread ISIS all over the damn region.
So going to knock the hell out of them depends on exactly what you mean by that.
But I always interpreted that to mean we're sending in the Marines.
And that means not just the Special Operations Command and those guys, but the infantry, too.
And we're already seeing that in Syria.
Correct.
And in Kuwait.
Right.
Isn't that the story from last night?
Right.
And that's quite a big escalation, right?
You know, ratio wise to how many troops are already on the ground in Iraq right now?
Yeah.
We don't know the exact number of troops on the ground in Iraq because the Pentagon has been deliberately falsifying their troop figures in Iraq to try to keep them.
Well, for a long time, it was to try to keep them under the control of ISIS.
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Man, all right.
And now Patrick Coburn was saying that the Battle of Mosul is almost wrapped up here.
I mean, there's only however many couple of low thousands worth of fighters, Islamic State fighters there to resist the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga and the U.S. Air Force, et cetera, American Special Forces guys.
So does that sound right to you, or can you put some kind of ballpark on how many fighters you think are left there from all the different sources you're reading?
Yeah, I don't think anyone really knows the number of fighters that ISIS had in the first place, let alone how many they have now.
So many times we've seen estimates where it's like, oh, ISIS has a total of 10,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria or 15,000 fighters.
And then the U.S. will say, well, we just killed 12,000 ISIS fighters and ISIS still has 15,000 fighters.
So yeah, they somehow they're able to replace them.
And more recently, British officials have said they're not killing them or they're killing them faster than ISIS can replace them in Mosul.
But I think that's at best what they hope is happening.
Right.
Well, they certainly had the power of conscription.
I mean, at one point I remember Patrick Coburn telling me that he had talked to a Kurdish leader who was estimating 200,000 fighters.
And Coburn was saying, well, you know, that sounds like that's probably a stretch.
But then again, now that I think about it, the fighting and winning in Tikrit and Ramadi and Fallujah, they own Mosul and Raqqa outright.
They're fighting here in Deir ez-Zor and in Palmyra and he's kind of ticking it off on his fingers.
Mitchell Prothero, the same thing.
This would have been, you know, I don't know, late 2014 or sometime in early 2015.
You know, it's controlled this much territory and be whooping this many different asses at the same time in all these different places.
They must have had at least 100,000 at some point.
But then again, you know, I don't know how willing people really were to be conscripted by them.
And we haven't heard many reports of, you know, their numbers of AWOL, this kind of thing.
So who knows?
I mean, how many people are committed to dying for those guys just because they were forced at one point to join them, you know?
Right.
And of course, there have been defections when it's obvious the city is going to fall.
Although in the case of Mosul, you've got Chia militias surrounding what territory the military isn't already attacking.
So you don't really have a way out.
And from the basically from the moment the invasion started, they've made it very clear they're not going to let anybody that's ISIS related get away.
So I think in that case, everybody's got the sense that this is a fight to the death.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I did see a thing about the UN was trying to set up one more refugee camp there.
But the entire narrative there is that they're way, way behind.
Nobody really is prepared to take all these civilian refugees.
So they're just pinned in.
Innocent bystanders stuck in the middle of this urban battlefield.
And then, yeah, like you're saying, anybody tries to run, they got to be vetted by the local bottom brigade division or whatever.
So not a lot of fun for them either way.
I'm surprised as many people have gotten out of the city as have because when the invasion started, Iraqi officials made announcements to Mosul, don't try to flee.
Basically anyone trying to flee might be mistaken for ISIS and bombed by the U.S. or killed by the militias.
So don't try to flee, especially don't try to flee into Syria.
And you know, we've seen hundreds of thousands of people come out of Mosul.
Is it that many?
Successfully.
Yeah.
Oh, OK.
The camps south of the city have been overrun.
I mean, they were gearing up for about 10,000 displaced villagers from the outskirts and they got far more than that.
Yeah.
Man.
All right.
So now tell me about all this craziness about, well, first of all, there is no actual assault on Raqqa as of yet or they're shelling it from the outskirts or we have the YPG with U.S. special forces now, as I think we mentioned earlier, Marine Corps infantry on the ground in Syria to back up the special forces backing up the YPG there.
But we also got the Syrian State Army and we've also got the Syrian Arab Army, they call it, and the Army of Damascus.
And then we have the Turks.
So break it down.
What's going on there?
Well, for the Syrian army, they do have a southern route towards Raqqa right now.
Coming around the south of the dams and the reservoirs in that area, they can move up into the area around Raqqa.
So far, they've been a little bit tentative on that.
He also kind of wants to go to Raqqa, although they seem more interested in fighting the Kurds right now than fighting ISIS.
And with U.S. troops embedded, we have however many Marine infantry and Marine artillery positioned around Raqqa.
We have U.S. Army Rangers deployed in Manbij, which is a Kurdish held city.
That really has complicated Turkey's advance.
On top of that, in Manbij, the Kurds came up with a brilliant deal, Russia negotiated it with the Syrian government where they handed over a bunch of relatively low value villages that ring the city of Manbij to the Syrian government and said, you can have these villages, you just have to have troops there.
And the idea was that that most recent Turkey-Iran-Russia ceasefire is still going on.
So theoretically, Turkey is not supposed to attack Syrian troops in the course of their invasion of Syria.
So this sort of created a ring around the Kurdish held city where Syrian troops were in the way, although yesterday we got reports that Turkey started shelling some of the Syrian troops in those villages.
So that may not ultimately be enough to keep them at bay.
Man, holy crap.
You know, yeah, I was reading a thing where they were saying, my God, isn't it strange?
American forces are now on the same side as the Russians.
But actually, America and Russia have both been back in the YPG versus the Islamic State ever since 2014, when the whole thing blew up right in their face.
And I don't think they wanted the Islamic State to get that big, you know.
So once it did and they went to war with it at that point, America and Russia have been back in the YPG all this time.
But now, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying, kind of.
I hope this isn't too slippery slope, but it sounds like what you're saying is the Turks might bomb and kill some Americans embedded with these YPG guys that they hate so much, or get into a war with the Syrian state trying to stand between them, which is either way is a holy crap.
Yeah, either way seems at least possible.
I think the deployment of the U.S. Army Rangers was a gamble that Turkey's not going to go that far, that they're not going to actually kill U.S. troops, because they're both NATO members and that would be a really unprecedented- Yeah, and just to be clear, I didn't mean to say that they would target them, but just that that's who they're bombing is people that Americans are embedded with, or that's who they'd like to fight anyway.
Right.
But even if they're not deliberately targeting American troops, if they start killing American troops in any sort of numbers, that's a huge game changer.
And I think the bet is that Turkey won't risk that.
Yeah.
At the same time, Turkey really has a thing about wanting to get the Kurds.
Yeah.
I mean, do I read it right?
Is the situation that the Russians really drew this line and they drew it with the Syrian army because the Russians told the Syrian Kurds, here's the deal you're going to do.
We're going to put the Syrian army between you and the Turks.
And as far as Erdogan's concerned, this is harsh intervention against him and his interest by the Russians, basically heading him off at the pass here.
Do I read it right?
That's definitely part of it.
And Erdogan's insisted that this isn't going to stop him from going after Manbij.
Manbij is important to Turkey for two reasons.
One, Turkey announced a couple of years ago that no Kurds are allowed west of the Euphrates River in Syria.
And Manbij is on the western shore of the river.
So they're violating Turkey's red line there.
But also, it's the straight shot towards Raqqa.
So Turkey's insistence that they want to play a role in taking Raqqa was sort of predicated on them being able to overrun Manbij and use that as their staging area.
Hey, Jason, tell me this.
Wither Al-Qaeda.
I haven't seen hardly anything about them, just a couple of reports since they lost East Aleppo.
Well, they they're still in Idlib province, they've been fighting other rebels in Idlib province.
We've got three, three different rebel factions fighting each other now.
It started out with.
Well, the peace talks in Kazakhstan, in Astana, invited some of the moderate rebels, you know, sort of moderate Islamist rebels, and the first day of the talks, Al-Qaeda forces attacked.
Those moderate rebels on the ground in Idlib and just really wiped some of the groups completely out to the point where, you know, the negotiators in Astana are.
A lot of what's left of those groups.
And they started to sort of band together, they created a coalition against Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda created a coalition of its own of more serious Islamist groups.
Ironically, both of those coalitions have U.S. armed factions in them that that the CIA was smuggling arms to because the Free Syrian Army is in the moderate group and Nur al-Din al-Zinki is in the Al-Qaeda group.
And they kept fighting, Al-Qaeda seemed to have an advantage, then all of a sudden this Tahrir al-Sham, which is an ISIS linked rebel group, showed up and they started attacking both sides.
And they took a bunch of territory in southern Idlib, so it's really a mess.
I mean, for a long time, Idlib province was.
Kind of a convenience for Syria and Russia because they would negotiate these.
Negotiate these withdrawals from.
Damascus suburbs or that last district in a big city that the rebels still had, whereas like, oh, we'll just send a bunch of buses and send you guys all to Idlib.
But now Idlib is such a terrible war zone, it's not really an option.
Man, so and then now where's the Syrian army in that fight?
The Syrian army was pushing north towards Idlib from the Hama province.
They sort of stalled at the.
You know, they got north of the city of Hama.
They sort of they recovered some Christian and Alawite villages.
But then they sort of stalled because there were a lot of rebels resisting them in the immediate area around the provincial border.
And since all the infighting started, they've kind of just stayed out of it and figured, well, you know, this will keep them busy, at least while the Syrian army focuses on taking territory back from ISIS elsewhere.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, Jason, I wanted to ask you one more thing, too, which is whether the CIA program to back the mythical moderates and their al-Qaeda allies there in the Idlib province and what's left of them now, you know, it was reported in The Post for what it's worth, of course, last fall that after the election, Obama really turned and and, you know, started implementing Trump's strategy, which is back off of the Syrian army.
Which is back off of, well, I won't say that.
He's he set JSOC loose and said target al-Qaeda.
And so I just wonder, they never really said then whether he had also called off the CIA's support for al-Qaeda at the time.
And I just wonder, I haven't really heard anything, I don't think, since then about what exactly is the CIA's role still in terms of Timber, Sycamore and all this crap?
As far as I know, they haven't completely canceled the program yet.
That may have happened quietly, but they never announced that they canceled the program anyway.
That although there were reports from Trump that they might.
So they have addressed it since he's been inaugurated and they've said that they were considering maybe calling that off or something?
No, it was in between the election and the inauguration.
In between the election and the inauguration, there were reports that he was considering ending the program.
But of course, he said that during the campaign, too, that we have no idea who these weapons are actually going to.
Which is a real nice way of saying, yeah, we do.
It's al-Qaeda.
You know, he's being very polite to say, geez, it's a mystery.
It might be bad people, you know?
Right.
Of course, we know who a lot of these groups are.
And some of them are the so-called moderate Islamists, which are the ones that don't like al-Qaeda.
And then there's the less moderate Islamists that do like al-Qaeda, and they're getting weapons, too.
But we don't really know if the program is canceled yet.
There haven't been a lot of reports out of Syria of anybody other than the Kurds getting any new major U.S. equipment.
So it may well be that it's just being conducted a little more quietly now.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry to take up so much of your time today.
I really appreciate it.
And I want everybody to understand just how important this is.
You just bookmark news.antiwar.com, and Jason is just on top of everything here.
And I can never keep up, and you can never keep up.
None of us can ever keep up.
But that's why Jason's here.
He takes care of all of this for you.
And just look at go down the page and page two and page three and just scan and look at news.antiwar.com and see the value there, man.
You got to.
Well, I absolutely rely on you, Jason.
So thank you very much, as always.
Well, thank you for having me.
All right, y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's the thing.scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, and twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
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All right.
Thanks, guys.
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Hey, y'all.
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