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I'm Scott Horton.
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Thanks.
On the line, I've got retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, and he famously blew the whistle at the tail end of Barack Obama and General David Petraeus' surge in Afghanistan in 2012.
Matthew Ho warned us it's not going to work.
Daniel Davis came up a couple of years later and said, yeah, it didn't.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks a lot.
Very happy to have you here.
So, big news, of course, from the Afghan war.
They don't, I guess, they're not saying the exact number, but all the trial balloons are that Mattis, Nicholson, and McMaster will be asking for between 3,000 and 5,000 troops.
In fact, the Army Times already reported they're sending 3,500 to Bagram a week before all this came out, so there you have it.
They had already sent another 300 Marines down to the Helmand province, and they're escalating attacks and reducing the restrictions on the use of air power against supposed Islamic State targets in Nangarhar province in the east.
And one more thing, they keep saying, Danny, and I think this will be my first question for you, the Russians are backing the Taliban.
No wonder we've got such problems over there.
Is that true?
Well, everything is the Russians' fault.
If you understand that going in, I mean, it's cloudy here in Washington today, and it's clearly the Russians' fault.
So yeah, I mean, I think that's what we need to know.
I mean, the Russians are probably engaged in there.
They have their own geopolitical interest, and I think that they say that their activities and engagement is to try to bring peace and an end to the conflict or whatever among their groups or whatever.
But then the other side is saying, no, actually, you're stirring up trouble and whatever, and who knows, maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I'm not sure, but it's not surprising.
I kind of doubt that either.
Yeah, I'm thinking the truth is probably way more toward the false side.
Well, here's my problem with it, and I admit I haven't done all the research in the world.
I guess I really need to catch up on this final point.
But it started with basically rumors, right?
They started saying, well, you know, we're hearing things that perhaps the Russians are arming the Taliban.
It seemed at the time that they were just mad that the Russians were holding some peace talks and had invited the Taliban to them.
But then it just started to be repeated a few times, and already I can tell, I'm seeing on Twitter, this is how it works now.
Now it's just gospel.
Now it's the premise to the rest of whatever other arguments that people want to start off.
Hey, now that we know that the Russians are arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, what are we going to do about it?
Just like, what are we going to do about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?
Attack him now?
Yeah.
Or soon?
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't know if anybody's demonstrated the truth of it at all.
Yeah, because, I mean, I obviously have no firsthand knowledge of that.
All I know is, you know, the things that I've read here and there, and it just, it's clearly not something that's been, you know, confirmed one way or the other.
And I think you hit it square on the head that it's, it just gets repeated so many times and now all of a sudden, oh yeah, it is.
And of course the imagination runs wild that it must be big support and all this kind of thing.
And that's the reason why, no, it's not.
It's not the reason why they're surging.
I mean, it's, in my view, it's nothing but a big smokescreen to divert attention away from where it really lies, which is that our strategy is fatally flawed.
Yeah.
Well, so let's talk about that.
What's the strategy?
That's one of my biggest concerns with this whole, you know, mini-surge that they're talking about here is that there isn't one.
I mean, we didn't have one before, that's clear enough.
But now then, they're talking about nothing but tactical activity, tactical actions of do more tactical stuff, but there's not even the pretense of explaining how does this accomplish American national security objectives.
You know, I mean, it's not, you could say if you're like a brigade commander or if you're a division commander, then you can direct tactical activity to try to change your goals.
But when you're at the national level, everything you do has to go back in one way or another to a strategic objective.
It can't be tactical.
And Scott, I mean, just consider this.
In 2011-12, when I was there, we had at the height in the 2011, in the summer especially, we had over 100,000 American troops and 40,000 NATO, 140,000 on the ground there.
And I traveled extensively at the tactical level to see.
And we could not defeat the Taliban then.
And there was vast tracts of the country that we didn't even have influence over, much less control of.
And so how laughable is it that now then you're gonna bump the number up to like 12 or 13,000, most of which won't be combat troops, and somehow that's gonna make a difference over where we are now.
And it's gonna succeed where 100,000 didn't work.
It is absurd on the face.
Well, so here's the thing of it.
I mean, they say, I mean, never even mind defeating the Taliban.
Back then in 2009 and 2010, they said that the goal is not to defeat the Taliban.
The goal is just to basically beat on them so bad for a year and a half that by July 2011, they will come and negotiate with us on our terms because they'll be so sick of getting hit all the time.
And then that never happened.
So...
And that's, again, the state.
That's what's been reported.
That's why they're doing this, you know, bumping up the tactical activity to bring the Taliban to the realization that they can only win on negotiating table.
And here's the thing.
Look, the Taliban have to be just laughing out loud and just in disgust of like, how pathetic is that?
When we couldn't do it, they didn't bow at 100,000.
What in God's name makes anyone think that they're gonna be scared and come to the negotiating table because of 13,000?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so and you're right that they're saying this.
I mean, I'm trying to update the last chapter of my book here as it's going to more or less go into print right at the end.
And you know, I got all these quotes from Dunford, you know, basically saying, yeah, exactly the same refrain again.
Well, we have to outlast them.
He said actually the quote was, if the Taliban thinks that we'll leave after one year, well, then they'll wait us out.
But if not, then that's different.
Right.
But he didn't really say, if we make it clear that we are definitely staying for 50 years with 500,000 men and that none of them will ever be safe in their home villages ever again until they come on our terms, something at least as horrible as that would sound that on the face of it, I guess, would at least make sense to a military man on tactical terms.
That's what all the counterinsurgency guys say.
You'd need at least 300,000 or 500,000 men to occupy Pashtunistan.
But yeah, with a few thousand waiting, we're not going to wait one year, but maybe two or maybe three.
And but the Taliban are sure to give in before three years is up.
Is that really your argument?
Let's back up just a little bit more and back up at the higher level, because there's a fundamental question that's not even being asked because the debate is like we are talking about there with numbers and here they are, you know, wait them out, wait them not.
But here's the thing.
What do we want to accomplish, even if we had 500,000?
The stated aim has always been and remains, we have to prevent Afghanistan from being a staging area where insurgents can again or terrorists can plot and attack the United States.
Consider this.
There was an article last week in the Daily Beast by Ali Zulfan, former FBI agent, brilliant man.
And he says, look, people are losing track of something here.
He said on 9-11, there were probably several hundred members of al Qaeda.
And he said today they have exploded worldwide.
So he went through and ticked off where the major was.
He said there's like 7,000 in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
There's up to 20,000 among the former al Nusra and allied people there.
And he gets a number of several thousand in North Africa and Somalia, et cetera, and several others in various other countries.
So the Taliban or the threat that we claimed happened because we didn't own the ground in Afghanistan has now metastasized and exploded all over the world, i.e., it doesn't make any difference whatsoever if you own the territory in Afghanistan or not.
The fact is we don't and never have owned it anyway.
Even with 100,000, it was impossible to prevent vast tracts of the country to be completely under their control.
So you will not, I specify, I say again, you will not ever prevent Afghanistan from being a training ground for anything, but it's not even useful.
Even if you did, if we garrisoned with 10,000 or 100,000, 15,000 troops, whatever, we would not accomplish that goal because they would just go elsewhere, as they are.
And so now that we were all up in arms about several hundred al Qaeda in 2001, and now then there's tens of thousands of them all over the world.
We can't go in and do that.
So we have to have a different strategy, but we're pursuing something that can't be done and wouldn't accomplish our goals even if it did.
Yep.
Well, you are going to like my book because that's exactly what it says.
And for the record, everybody, I wrote all of that before Ali Soufan wrote his thing in The Beast.
However, I do quote Ali Soufan in the book from The Black Banner saying that, and on this exact question of the safe haven myth.
And I invoke a quote of him to prove my point when he says, once the few hundred al Qaeda that were allowed to escape to Pakistan did, virtually all of them took off.
Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri, they stayed behind and hid, and a few, there were only like 180 or so, less than 200 that made it across the border there and that weren't captured.
And that most of them went back to Yemen, went back to Libya, went back to Egypt, went back to wherever they were from or wherever they could go, Central Asia, whatever it was, right away.
So, you know, the whole idea of the safe haven myth from the beginning, that if we don't hold this ground, they're going to come back from Pakistan.
There wasn't even anybody left in Pakistan to come back, even at that point.
They had turned around and they had become, they had changed their jobs from operators to chief motivators, is what Soufan says, even in early 2002.
And by the way, on September 11th, they didn't even have a single plane of their own.
They had to steal all our planes to even have anything to crash into anything.
And they did it.not from Afghanistan, but from Boston and from New Jersey.
And training in places like Germany and Florida and elsewhere in the United States, the training and all that took place there.
So unless they're going to occupy, you know, Germany and Florida and Maine, we don't want to rethink our strategy.
Ask Ali Soufan all about the big meeting in Malaysia that the CIA didn't tell him about until the afternoon of September 11th.
Yeah, well, that's pretty far from Afghanistan, isn't it?
In fact, I'll go ahead and mention this just because I think it's hilarious.
Lindsey Graham was on the Tucker program and they got in a big argument and Lindsey Graham got all flustered and Tucker hadn't even brought up blowback or the occupation of anything causing terrorism or anything like that.
It was Lindsey Graham's guilty conscience exploding, I guess.
And he says, well, look, we were attacked on September 11th and we didn't have any troops in Afghanistan then.
So don't tell me that that's why they attack us because we have troops there.
So now he's gone.
He's abandoned the safe haven myth.
And now he's defending himself from the charge that actually keeping troops in these places makes matters worse, not better.
But then the best he can do is resort to the straw man that anyone ever said it was the American occupation of Afghanistan that caused 9-11 when it was the occupation of Saudi.
And it was a bunch of Saudis hiding in Afghanistan who were behind it is all.
And anybody could tell you that, but I just thought that was funny that he's actually getting pretty desperate there when he's abandoned the safe haven myth to kind of feeling like he's on the defensive from the blowback theory that all of this makes matters worse, not better.
So maybe we're making some progress.
Or if nothing else, we're exposing the claims that they have been making as being unsustainable.
So that's progress.
Yeah.
All right.
So now 300 Marines holding on to Lashkar Gah down there in the Helmand province.
And I guess now we're going to have as many as, say, you know, 15,000 or so, including the mercs and the spies and special operations forces at the Bagram airbase there.
But then that's pretty much it, right?
There's an article in the New York Times saying, man, the military is way distracted on this wrong target.
And he doesn't say this, but it makes sense that as long as any local group of tribal Pashtun fighters are calling themselves the Islamic State, that the military is going to try to really exploit that and say, see, we got to attack them and we got to escalate in this and that.
But this New York Times or this writer, it's a guy from Afghan Analysts, wrote this thing in the New York Times.
He said, boy, are you guys diverted?
Because while you're bombing this tiny group of fighters in Nangarhar province calling themselves ISIS, the Taliban's taking over the rest of the country right under your nose.
So I guess I wonder, I guess if I'm going to try to come up with a question here, Danny, it would be, do they really risk a fall of Saigon type moment and some kind of crazy final assault by the Taliban on the Bagram base?
Do they have enough for force protection in the event of a worst case scenario like that?
Oh, yeah.
I was stationed on Bagram for a year.
And absolutely.
I mean, there's there's it's a virtual impossibility.
In fact, I would go as far as say it is an impossibility for them to ever take a military base.
There was the two big there was two big, I guess, opportunities where Taliban attacked actually American positions.
And they were in the, you know, the most isolated hills that you could up in the northeast Afghanistan.
And there was it was that they were attacking while the base was being established.
And there was about a company's worth of Americans there.
And there was it was actually one of the bigger firefights we've ever had.
And even then, when all the advantages were to the enemy, they were you know, they had the high ground and all that kind of stuff.
They inflicted a number of casualties on us, but were obliterated.
Now, something like Bagram, which is, you know, got all the force defense measures.
It's got, you know, great perimeter security.
And of course, we've got all the airfield there with all the attack helicopters and everything else.
It is impossible for dudes, you know, with sandals and machine guns to to defeat that.
So it's an absolute impossibility.
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Even though, well, the numbers seem like they could be, you know, the ratios of attackers to defenders could, you know, change drastically.
Right.
Like, I mean, at some point, it seems like what you're saying makes sense for the first how many hours, but then how long can they sustain a defense of that base, assuming that the Taliban could come up with.
You know, more infantry than you might have guessed, I guess, to to do their attack.
You would have to have somewhere along the lines of 30 or 40 thousand Taliban thousand to even have a chance to have a periodic, you know, for a temporary takeover of Bagram because they just I mean, literally, we have so many weapons that can just slaughter and obliterate, you know, infantrymen, which is the same thing that happened in World War One.
Right.
I mean, the whole that's why there was such high casualties, because, you know, the machine gun and all that stuff.
Well, that would be coming into play again because we have all the protection.
We have the armored firepower.
I mean, literally, all they could do was die in large numbers.
They can't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
All right.
Well, how about walking right into Kabul?
The only the danger in Kabul now, I've had a chat with a friend of mine who is one of the in the upper house of the Afghan parliament.
And I asked you that kind of offhandedly about six months ago, because I thought the answer was going to be, well, no, of course, they can't you know, they couldn't actually take over Kabul.
But he said for the first time in his life, he actually has some concerns that they might be able to not because they could storm it, you know, like in the way that I described, but because there could be enough insiders that would cooperate with them, that the place could end up falling.
And that's that's an actual danger.
Right.
Yeah.
So that was what I was gonna say.
I keep ruining the book and telling everybody what's in it before it comes out.
But I got a part in there about maybe Heckmachar is a Trojan horse kind of game right now.
The Hizbi Islami group has already had guys in parliament for a while.
But Heckmachar and you know, on the face of it, it makes sense.
Like, hey, here's a sometimes ally of the Taliban, old Mujahideen fighter.
We want to bring him in from the cold instead of fighting him anymore.
But now the problem is they brought him in from the cold.
So he's back in Afghanistan.
And I read a thing that his first day he's back in Kabul, I mean, and his first day back, he held a giant rally of thousands of people denouncing not just Ghani and Abdullah, the co-presidents, but the entire form of the so-called national unity government and all of that.
And I and you know, I think the deal I don't know if this part of it actually was fulfilled yet or not.
But the deal they agreed to was that he would be able to bring back all of his fighters from Pakistan.
20,000 fighters would be able to come back and all of his guys who are in prison would be released from prison.
And seems like this guy could basically do a coup.
He could take over.
He could.
He basically it looks to me like maybe he's trying to race the Taliban and beat them to the punch and take over Kabul before they get there.
I didn't hear that part of it.
Yeah, well, I'm speculating a bit and I don't know how much real power he has compared to, you know, his rivals.
You know, what's the ratio of his men to Dostum's or anybody else's who would try to stop him?
But it just seems like this is a guy who likes to skin people alive for fun.
So, you know, throw acid in the faces of young women.
Yeah, interesting.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with old Hekmat Shah now.
All right.
So now check this out.
I don't know if you saw this, but and I don't know how important it is, but it could be In Breitbart News, Danny, they had a thing last night that said there's another option that it's not just the surge option.
There's another option and it's called the less kinetic option for an internal defense.
And this is the the fourth choice that Obama had really the way too cold where you don't even really escalate at all in troop numbers.
And you simply focus on training up the Afghan army, which, of course, that can't really work anyway.
It doesn't seem like.
But at least it seems to be based on the acknowledgement that there's no point in the Americans taking territory for the Afghan National Army that then they can't hold.
This is what you wrote about back in 2012, American soldiers dying to take the I forgot the name of it Valley, the Marwani Valley, and then they give it over to A.N.A. and then they turn and run.
Right.
So it makes no sense to to take territory for the A.N.A.
But it does make sense, I guess, that they should only be asked not that they necessarily could, but they should only ever be asked to hold territory that that that they can actually take for themselves.
I mean, never mind.
It's all on America's dime and with American Air Support and Coordination or whatever.
But still, I wonder, though, what they're saying is that this is a fight in the White House and that apparently it's Bannon and Miller, the civilian advisers who are saying, don't listen to McMaster and Mattis and don't do this next surge.
We don't.
The quote was, we don't fight other people's wars for them.
In other words, this is never mind the safe haven myth.
This is a local matter.
So I wonder what you think of that.
And I wonder whether you think that maybe anybody in the military community really at this point in halfway through 2017 is ready to go ahead and agree with that, at least the more the most minimalist type mission that they can come up with.
Well, I mean, certainly if if you have to choose between the options that are being presented, that's that's the best one.
If it's the least involvement, the trouble with that is that you're basically institutionalizing permanent war in Afghanistan because there's no conditions that you're even working towards that you would say are once we get to this point that we have success and we can move out.
That's not even on the table.
They're not even there's nothing even identified that would actually indicate a successful mission.
Ergo, you're just there forever and you'll fight forever.
And so I'm certainly against that.
But somehow we're going to have to come up with with some kind of justification that they have to tell the people whatever choice they make, what the objectives are, what the national security threat to the United States, to the United States, not to Afghanistan, not to Kabul, that they're sending American men and women to potentially bleed and die for Afghanistan.
But it better be something for the United States.
And if it's not, then, you know, we need to relook the whole thing, of course we do.
But that's that's what has to happen.
And it hasn't happened in, I don't know, 17 years, 15 years.
Right.
All right.
Now, so we're at the hard part, which is that you and I both know the answer is just quit.
The thing is stupid.
And, you know, maybe at some point they could have pretended and called it a victory and pulled out of there.
Now they can only characterize it as a defeat.
It's nothing but and they can't possibly win and staying one more year or 10 more years or 30 more years is just more of the same.
And there is no point.
And yet, you know, we're right up at can't you hear it right now, Lyndon Johnson in your ear go, I'm not going to be the first president to lose a war or this is how these people think McMaster and Mattis.
This is their war.
This is their failure.
They've owned it for years now for a decade.
So for more, I mean, Mattis let Osama escape in the first place.
So I mean, what can be done when the only answer is just quit?
I mean, the most, as you said, the most minimalist choice actually means you're dedicated to staying even longer, which that's how they put it in the Breitbart article, too.
So here's here's what I think you could do.
I would not advocate for literally just going waking up in the morning going, you know what?
Yeah.
I just bring everybody home, get the next flight out and we're just abandon them.
Because we have perpetuated that, whether for right or wrong, we have enabled a lot of this stuff.
But so here's what I would say is, all right, we're going to leave and we're going to do it on this timetable.
We're going to give you pick the number three, maybe five years talking about the government in Kabul.
You have that much time to get your house in order.
We'll help you do a number of things here.
But here's some benchmarks, even along the way during this three to five years that you have to meet.
And they're going to be firm that, I mean, major corruption and fixing problems kind of thing.
But if we don't meet these benchmarks, then we will leave and make it clear to them that this is no bluff.
This is no threat.
This is just a statement of policy that if you accomplish these things on this time schedule, then we'll help you up through this point.
And at that point, you're going to have to do it on your own because we literally cannot be there forever.
And then we can help them in whatever diplomatic or even humanitarian ways we can.
But there is a fixed time where we're going to leave.
It's not conditions based.
It's like you have this much time to get your house in order, but we can no longer stay here.
Right.
Well, of course, the problem is, I mean, they can't even afford their civilian government, much less their military.
None of this happens without the people of Texas going to work in the morning.
Well, I mean, if it's money, we maybe we can, you know, we being the you know, the West or whatever, can talk about continuing to support with economic means or whatever.
But it's going to have to be done by them.
And this that can focus and actually correct some of the infighting and some of the corruption because they're not going to do it because it's the right thing.
They're going to do it because they go, holy crap, if America leaves, I mean, then I could be killed.
I could lose power.
And so then they'll be forced to do it.
Or that's exactly what will happen.
And if it does, then that's something that they have to deal with internally.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry.
I know you got to go.
Let me ask you one more thing.
There's a group of fighters in Nangarhar province who call themselves the Islamic State.
And there's a few hundred of them.
And something's got to be done about that, at least talk about the safe haven myth.
Never mind Al Qaeda and Zawahiri hiding out.
What about the Islamic State in Nangarhar?
OK, I can strip that away in about 60 seconds.
So in I believe it was February, General Nicholson was on Capitol Hill and the House Armed Services Committee hearing, I believe it was.
And he was making the case for, you know, he needs more troops or whatever.
In his presentation, he makes the point that, you know, there are over there, I think it was 68 terror groups the United States has designated worldwide and 20 of them are operating in Afghanistan.
So, my God, we can't leave.
No, no, no, no, no.
Back up a little bit.
Consider when we before we went in there, there was one Al Qaeda, a few hundred.
And now then after 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Americans, 35,000 casualties we've suffered and killed and wounded, and now it's gone from one to 20.
And so there's the whole myth just is exposed that the evidence is unmistakable and undeniable.
All of your military activities have have radically increased the terror threat, not reduced it.
And so you cannot say the prescription that has caused this is we're going to actually do more of it to try to fix it.
It's irrational.
It's illogical.
And we have to change.
All right.
Thank you very much, Danny.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right.
So that is retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis.
Back in 2012, he wrote an unclassified report to Congress called Dereliction of Duty to senior military leaders, loss of integrity, wounds, Afghan war effort.
He also wrote Truth, Lies and Afghanistan for the Armed Forces Journal back then.
It's February 2012.
And of course, he's written on a ton of things since then, mostly for the national interest.
In fact, he wrote one for the Libertarian Institute as well.
How do you like that?
The great Daniel Davis.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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