9/3/17 Peter van Buren interviews Scott about Fool’s Errand

For Pacifica Radio, August 27th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I'm the author of the new book, Fool's Errand, and I'm the editor of AntiWar.com.
And today we're going to do something a little bit different.
Peter Van Buren is going to interview me.
And you guys all know Peter Van Buren.
He, of course, was the State Department whistleblower during Iraq War II.
He wrote the book, We Meant Well, The Ghosts of Tom Jode, and the brand new one, Hooper's War, a novel about World War II Japan.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Well, I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thank you for having me back, and I'm very much looking forward to this role reversal that we're about to do.
Yeah, well, I wrote a book for a change.
How do you like that?
Well, I like it a lot, actually.
I had a chance to read Fool's Errand when it was still in pre-publication form, and I blurbed the book, and I thought it was just terrific.
So a quick warning, number one, anyone who's expecting a tell-all interview or me to shred Scott for all the falsehoods in his book, this is going to be very disappointing because I did read the book.
I think it's terrific, and I think it's got a lot of important things to say, and then my goal is to tease out some of those important things from you.
So we'll have to save the slam job for when you appear on, I don't know, where are you going to be, on the Matt Au show next week?
Yeah, I'm sure my publicist is getting right on that.
Okay, good, good.
So we'll start in with a very general question.
The title of the book is Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
For readers who haven't figured out from the subtitle what your basic theme is, kind of walk us through, what is the book about?
Well, basically the war never needed to be fought in the first place, but even if you accept the idea that the military, the CIA, et cetera, absolutely had to go in to get the al-Qaeda guys after September 11th, that they certainly did not need to try to create a new government in Kabul, and even then, I argue, that they could have made peace with the Taliban and included them in the new government all along, the Taliban actually recognized the new government in Kabul as Islamic and legitimate in their place, and they were willing to cooperate with it, and surrender was not good enough for the U.S., and so they hounded these guys right back into insurgency again, and they ended up picking a fight that now they can't win, and they want to try to defeat what's primarily a Pashtun-based insurgency by hiring, really, the old Northern Alliance and the ethnic minority groups from the north of the country to come and try to lord it over them, and it just hasn't worked, and it cannot work, and it seems like one of the most frustrating things about the whole story is no one will ever even discuss it in those terms, occasionally you hear anecdotes about the American soldiers frustrated because the Iraqi National Army troops with them don't speak the language of the people whose village they're in, and the Americans are confused, aren't you guys all Afghans, and yet these guys are from the far north of the country, it's really an entire different society, far different even than Yankees and Southerners, and so they're just foreigners, and they cannot win the war, they've proven that, we're 16 years in now.
Now wait, this sounds like this is almost a more complicated situation than what three presidents have presented us to, and before I kind of tackle that complexity, I wanna double check, you're saying that America's war really started in October of 2001, or in fact, does that history go back a little longer in Fool's Errand, your book?
Well sure, and really I think that's the ultimate point, is that the reason that America began intervening back in 1979.
Wait, stop, 1979, tell us about that.
Well it was the Jimmy Carter years, and on July the 3rd, 1979, Jimmy Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to begin backing the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan, who were fighting against the Soviet Union-backed communist government in Kabul, and they brag, and I don't know if they really caused it or not, they brag that they did this in order to lure the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in the first place, and when the Soviets finally did, at the end of 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, at least later claimed that he sent a memo to the boss saying, now we can give them their own Vietnam.
That, in other words, instead of containing the Soviet Union, they had decided to bait it into expansion, overexpansion, and self-destruction, and it worked, and the real rub of the matter is, though, that the Arab-Afghan Mujahideen, people like Osama bin Laden, who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight for Ronald Reagan, who picked up the war, of course, beginning in 1981, and increased it, was that they learned the same lesson.
A superpower, a world empire like the Soviet Union, that you can basically drive them into the ground and destroy them, bleed them to bankruptcy, as Osama bin Laden put it, and then all through the 90s, as proto-Al-Qaeda started coming together and attacked the United States, they said all along that what they were trying to do was bait the United States into invading Afghanistan to stay, to try to fight and defeat them.
No matter how many locals died, bin Laden, at least, had decided it would be worth it in order to bankrupt the American empire and drive us out of the Middle East, especially, and, of course, Central Asia, as well, for good, and so then, as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit put it, invading Iraq, and never mind Libya and Syria and Yemen and all the other terror wars that America's engaged in since then, that this is the hoped-for but unexpected gift to Osama bin Laden, that this is what he always wanted, was for the Americans to bog ourselves down while destroying his enemies, the secular regimes of the region, and he would love to see us get, his corpse would love to see us get the Ayatollah in Iran yet, but anyway, so that's what we're doing in Afghanistan, is this is at least, at least this part of it, never even mind the rest, just this part of it is exactly what Osama bin Laden was trying to get us to do with the September 11th attack, provoke the United States into a permanent war that it cannot win, that will ultimately, eventually break our bank and force a real withdrawal.
This is what's so critical, I think, about your book, Fool's Errand, is the perspective that it brings.
I dare say that there's a lot of listeners and a lot of people who are gonna read your book who were born into this war, the war in Afghanistan, the current phase of the war in Afghanistan, American phase, has been going on for 16 some years, and so when you add a few years for people to have been in diapers and things like that, there are many folks who have not known a world where the United States has not had ground troops in Afghanistan, but what is so critical to understanding why the war is unwinnable is to understand its roots, and those roots go back into the 1970s and involve an almost comic repetition of the mistakes that the old Soviet Union made in Afghanistan, almost a comic repetition of those same mistakes by the more modern United States.
Along the way, American intervention in Afghanistan had the unexpected consequences of essentially creating Al-Qaeda, empowering Osama bin Laden, let it be emphasized that America's anti-Soviet actions in Afghanistan resulted in Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda becoming a powerful global anti-Western force.
They were our pit bull at the time, funded, trained, and equipped by the CIA and by our so-called allies in Pakistan, but like any other pit bull, if you don't train them right and you don't discipline them right, sometimes they get off the leash, and the result of that was 9-11, probably the most exquisite example of blowback in modern history.
So you've walked us up to the year 2001, 9-11 happens, George W. Bush, the president of the United States at the time, takes the bait, he sends the United States into Afghanistan with the specific goal of pushing the Taliban out of power and to find Osama bin Laden, and let me hand the story back to you there, it's now October of 2001, Scott.
Well, and you said that just right, and in that order, to knock off the Taliban government that had not attacked us as the first priority before focusing on what should have been the only real question, where is Osama bin Laden and his few hundred friends, and that's all there were, right around 400 of them in Afghanistan at the time.
There was another segment of Arabs who were just foot soldiers in the country fighting for the Taliban, but they were not legit members of Al-Qaeda and they all died initially in the war anyway.
There were just really these 400 guys, and America spent, what, two and a half months basically just screwing around in the north of the country helping General Rashid Dostum seize Mazar-e-Sharif, and basically letting Al-Qaeda, almost letting them go, but then the CIA and the Delta Force and the U.S. Air Force did have them cornered at Tora Bora, and this story's been told many times, but I try to synthesize the best different sources I can to try to explain what I think is the most important aspect of this, and really what happened was, for whatever reasons, and it's too complicated to just say Bush definitely decided to let him escape, but it is absolutely clear that Bush refused to dispatch the resources that would make sure to prevent his escape, and whether that's just because, well, gee, we already decided that we hired Hekmatyar to do it, and so don't worry about it, or because they really didn't want to try that hard, I guess is up to the reader.
I believe personally that they let him go, because for two and a half weeks, the CIA and the Special Operations Forces there were begging for Rangers and Marines who were all in range.
The Rangers were already there at the Bagram Air Base, and I don't know where the Marines were.
They were a little bit further south, but it was General Mattis, our current Secretary of Defense, had 4,000 Marines ready to forward march, and they just wouldn't give them, and never mind the paratroopers who were way down in Kandahar, and everybody who was doing everything except go after bin Laden and Zawahiri, and then I think maybe this is just hindsight.
It's, again, up to your perspective, but it's pretty clear to see how convenient it was for them that Osama bin Laden escaped, because really, who would have cared that Saddam was in league with Osama, even though that never was true, but who would have cared if that was true if Osama was already dead, if al-Qaeda was already destroyed, and bin Laden served America's government's purpose better free as the Emanuel Goldstein hate character to be the symbol of the surviving danger that the people must be protected from, and then they could go ahead and conflate the al-Qaeda group with, just count them, you know, four, five, six countries that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda whatsoever, and nothing to do with the attack on the United States.
Now, I think it's important to emphasize, because Scott's point about bin Laden not being killed in Tora Bora is a critical turning point in America's history in Afghanistan, and far too many other writers get tangled up at this point in history, trying to sort out the so-called theories, conspiracy theories, or whatever word you wanna put on it, about whether bin Laden was allowed to escape, whether it was American ineptitude, whether it was a purposeful decision to allow him to escape.
Those are fine things to look into, and each of them is worthy of a book of its own.
I think what's so important here that Scott touches on in his own book and here in this interview is that the result was that bin Laden did escape, and it was at that point, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the United States pivoted to a very different purpose in Afghanistan, away from the initial goal, which was passed to the American public as defeat, get rid of Osama bin Laden in return for September 11th.
America pivoted to a new goal in Afghanistan, and that goal was regime change, nation building, the words that you wanna put on it.
Am I correct in that assumption, Scott?
Yeah, and then the real tragedy is, because, and I think a lot of this is, you know, we meant well-intentioned kind of a thing, that the Americans think that where GIs go, good things follow, or they believe this.
So, you know, there's a great article right now on The Intercept by Ryan Grim, where he's quoting heavily from a source that I quote heavily as well, Anand Gopal, the author of the book No Good Men Among the Living, and who I cite quite a bit from his interviews on my show and the book, talking about how Haqqani, I mean, we know the Haqqani network, if people have ever heard of that, they know it as second only to the Afghan Taliban, and allies with the Afghan Taliban in their common insurgency against the United States and the government we put in power there.
Well, he is just one of many examples of Taliban and allied former Mujahideen leaders who virtually begged to be allowed to come in from the cold and not fight, and who were basically forced to fight by the United States, and that goes for him and really the entire leadership of the former Taliban government.
They had a letter, as Gopal has reported, they had a letter from Mullah Omar that was permission, full political and religious authority permission from him to surrender to the new government.
Karzai was seen by them as legitimate enough and better than continuing civil war forever.
They didn't want that, and so the Americans, in fact, I quote in the book Rory Fanning, who is an army ranger, no high-level officer or anything, just a ranger doing his job out there at the Bagram Air Base or whatever, and he says, well, our job was to find enemies to fight.
What are we supposed to do, just sit around?
I mean, these guys are soldiers, right?
So then what they do is they ask whoever they're working with, well, who should we fight?
And they go, oh, yeah, well, there's some Taliban over the hill.
And so you're talking about a society where people are desperately poor.
They've lived in a state of total, not necessarily total, but yeah, pretty much total warfare and disruption and destabilization and occupation for 40 years, and it is a desperate society.
So will even just the average person use a GI against his enemy or for a little bit of his own gain, if he can get a little bit of that provincial reconstruction money or this or that?
Yes, these are the choices that people are left to make in extreme circumstances.
And when you are the American military and you lend your firepower available, what are they gonna do, not use it?
And so you end up having American soldiers attacking people who are not enemies at all, attacking people who are really just the mayor from last year.
But this brigade just got here and they don't know that he was the elected mayor last year and now he's out and now the new mayor has sent them to kill him or take him off to Guantanamo Bay or something.
They have no idea what they're doing.
And I don't mean to say, oh, they're innocent babes in this, they're not.
But the point is that, what do you expect?
They're 19 year olds with fully automatic rifles in Afghanistan of all places.
What are they supposed to do?
Memorize the most powerful man in each neighborhood, in each county, in each district and province in the country and figure out how it all works together and how it should?
There is a lot to unpack there.
I wanna emphasize for listeners the work of Anand Gopal, who's got cited several times in that and whose name appears in full there in a number of places.
Anand is an extraordinary journalist, spent an extraordinary amount of time traveling around Afghanistan on a motorcycle, befriending people, getting to know the situation on the ground.
And I would recommend his works as well.
But the critical element that is in this is that, and I put the year and jump in here, Scott, I put the year around 2005, the United States went looking for a new war in Afghanistan.
Is that an accurate turning point or would you put the different year, give or take?
Yeah, no, that sounds right.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the phase one or phase two or whichever kind of, they had different programs at different times, but you look at the British when they brought NATO in and sent the British down to Helmand province.
And that was just a preview of the later disaster to come during the Obama years.
And then, I don't know, anywhere that they went, the violence followed.
I'm not sure exactly, 2006 and seven were, as far as I can tell, I mean, I give those years probably short shrift in the book was basically a steadily worsening problem.
And this was every time that things got worse, they would order more troops, maybe five or 10,000 at a time, Donald Rumsfeld.
But of course they were mostly distracted completely by Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld himself wanted out of Afghanistan actually from the beginning.
And so he was happy to try to turn it over to NATO and make it somebody else's problem since he knew he couldn't win the thing.
I guess he was gone by 06.
But then by the time that George Bush was leaving at the end of 2008, his advisors were telling him that you better hurry up and pass this baton, pal, because the government in Kabul is about to unravel.
There's basically nothing holding it up.
Now, don't blow on it.
And that brings us to Barack Obama, America's Nobel Peace Prize winning president.
He came into office explaining that Iraq was the wrong war, that Afghanistan was the right war, and that he took the advice of his generals, the same advice that Bush had been given in Iraq, which is we just needed more soldiers.
And Obama launched his own surge in Afghanistan.
And the purpose of that surge was?
Just to keep fighting longer, to add time to the Washington clock, as they put it then.
I mean, they on one hand claim that, oh yeah, no, we have this magic formula now, this counterinsurgency strategy, where they claimed that they had won the Iraq war and then that proved that wherever we send the American army infantry, that local populations like them better than their own sons and husbands and fathers and brothers.
And so they decided that that's all we have to do is we'll escalate the number of American Marines and army soldiers in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan, and we'll separate the wheat from the chaff somehow, isolate and identify the bad guys through cell phone, basically bogus link analysis technology, and then we'll befriend everyone else and they'll love us to death and they'll love us so much that they'll choose us over the Taliban.
That was what they called it.
And yet in unguarded moments, they admitted that they knew that they couldn't win.
David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and Robert Gates, they wanted to add time to the Washington clock.
Just don't make us lose yet.
Just don't make us lose until it's somebody else's job and isn't gonna look like our fault.
And so really they escalated the war up to, as you say, up to 100,000 guys, 40,000 more from NATO, and then they killed tens of thousands of more Afghans died in the thing, and then they lost anyway.
And the whole thing was a complete bust.
They fought for about a year and a half.
They abandoned the counterinsurgency strategy after about a year because it was going absolutely nowhere.
And yet they then resorted back to, but then of course they've resorted back to the old policy, which is just what they call counterterrorism, meaning hunting down high value targets.
Anyone who resists us, you just find them and kill them.
And yet as the generals themselves admit, in fact, Mike Flynn, Donald Trump's first national security advisor, he was Stanley McChrystal's right-hand man, and he had written a thing back in 2010 about the poor quality of intelligence there and why we need the surge and to do coin was his argument.
But one thing that he absolutely got right in there was in his argument for counterinsurgency was in debunking what he called anti-insurgency, useless or counterproductive anti-insurgency.
And he said it's just like the Soviet Union found that they had more Mujahideen enemies when they left than they had at the beginning.
And the more people that they killed, the more enemies they created.
This is what Stanley McChrystal called insurgent math.
So once they, and that was their argument for coin was, well, we got to do hearts and minds and win all the people over.
Well, when that didn't work, they just went right back to so-called anti-insurgency and making things worse.
And this is now brings us of course to the last few years straight and now Donald Trump's new strategy, which is we're going to go hunting and killing terrorists.
It's the Joe Biden plan.
Forget coin, just hunt and kill terrorists.
Except there are no terrorists.
All there are are local Pashtun tribesmen fighting because our guys are on their front lawn.
It's as simple as that.
You've got a situation here where the echoes of history are absolutely terrifying because the situation you're describing in Afghanistan and the so-called strategies of counterinsurgency, of befriending the good guys while you're trying to kill off the bad guys is exactly the story of the failure of America in the Iraq war.
And if you want to take it back another evolution, the exactly the failure of the United States in the Vietnam war, that expression winning the people's hearts and minds originated in America's nascent counterinsurgency experiments in the Vietnam war during our fathers or our grandfathers conflicts.
What, when I was in Iraq and I wrote a book, my book, We Meant Well, about the failures of Iraq and predicting it at the end of the Bush era, really in the Obama era, that we were going to fight there for a very long time.
I often in interviews would say, well, you know, somebody someday is going to write a similar book, a companion book about Afghanistan.
And that's what you have done here with Fool's Errand is essentially handed us the next book in a series of here's America's current showcase war.
Here's why what you're being told out of Washington is wrong.
Here's why this war is destined to continue infinitely into sort of steps to failure without ever actually reaching a failure to the point where we can call it a day and at least come home.
And I guess at this point, what I'm left in this discussion with is speculating who's going to write the book.
Now that you've written the one about Afghanistan, who's going to write the one that repeats all of these same stories for Syria?
Because it seems as if we're marching in the very straight line.
Well, we've learned better than use the words nation building and hearts and minds and things like that.
But essentially we're repeating these errors once again, where we're trying to defend some groups while we kill these so-called terrorists without any real strategy, without any real connections to the local people.
With that in mind, if you were speaking to some future historian about his or her book on Syria, what lessons would you pull out of either Afghanistan or more specifically the conclusions you reach in Fool's Errand that you'd be sharing with that author a couple of years from now?
Hmm, yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I guess what's always the most puzzling to me, what I would ask that historian to answer for me is how could anybody be so blind?
You know, fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban insurgency that once upon a time was friends with Osama and them or something, at least on the face of it, it makes sense.
Just not in practice, right?
On the face of it, it is what it is.
But American Syria policy, where America has been fighting on the side of the jihadists against another secular dictator in the Middle East, what is the incentive structure behind that, right?
After Ronald Reagan's Mujahideen already blew back on us all through the 1990s and then even September 11th, and then after our guys fought al-Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq War II, they were the primary enemy with the Sunni-based insurgency there.
And then for the Obama government to take their side, Ansar al-Sharia, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Islamic State in Iraq and the Al-Nusra Front in these wars, starting in 2011, how in the world could that possibly happen?
And how could it be that they all got away with it?
It's not even a problem.
It's not even a scandal.
That's the thing that I'll never understand.
I mean, everybody at least understood that George Bush really shouldn't have done that.
Well, why aren't we hearing that about Syria?
Yep.
The book is called Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by Scott Horton.
And it is both a look back at the mess of Afghanistan, how we got into it over a longer view than just merely 16 years worth of mistakes.
And as we found out here in the last little segment of our interview, it's essentially a warning to look forward that we've got many of the same mistakes that have been repeated over literally decades teed up to be repeated again in Syria.
Fool's Errand is the name of the book.
Scott Horton, thank you for joining me today.
I'm gonna throw the segment back over to you and my thanks for letting me be a guest interviewer today.
It's a lot different on this side of the desk.
Yeah, well, thanks a lot for doing it.
I really appreciate it.
And that's anti-war radio for this morning, guys.
Thanks very much.
That's our friend Peter Van Buren.
He wrote the book, We Meant Well.
He was a State Department whistleblower in Iraq War II.
And that's his website as well, We Meant Well.
That's also his Twitter handle, by the way.
And I'm Scott Horton.
The book I just published is called Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
My website where I keep all my interview archives, 4,500 interview archives, going back to 2003 there at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much, guys.
See you next week.
Bye-bye.