Hey y'all, Scott here.
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All right, you guys, introducing Ann Jones.
She's the author of the book, most recently, They Were Soldiers, How the Wounded Return from America's Wars, The Untold Story.
She's got a very important one here at TomDispatch.com that ran last week.
Afghanistan again.
Welcome back to the show, Ann.
How are you doing?
All right, thanks.
I think my tone in that title, my pronunciation of that title was right.
Wasn't it the wariness in there?
Afghanistan again.
Yes, it has a big question mark at the end of that title.
Right.
But there's also that sort of, I don't want to say impatience, but it's clear that you're tired of this and that you, well, you seem to be quite aware that the Afghans are tired of this and would like to see an end to this, whereas the Americans continue to push on demanding not victory, but at least what they call success.
But as you say here, I mean, it really is again, isn't it?
It's almost one word per president.
They really are just starting over almost from the beginning.
Is that it?
Well, not from the beginning, but they are repeating what they've done before.
We always get to a point where they announce that things are at what they've taken to calling in recent years, a stalemate.
And so we just need a little bit of a push to get past that point.
And that will require more troops, more weapons, you know, the whole, the whole works.
And so everything starts all over again.
When you, when you consider how many American businesses are making big money off these wars and how many private contractors in the field are, are also making, raking in big bucks, it's not surprising that there's a lot of pressure to keep the war going and to, you know, not simply announce that we're done and leave.
So here we go again.
And there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.
Yeah.
Well, so let me ask you this.
How come it's a stalemate or worse?
How come the U.S.
Marine Corps, the greatest military force in the whole wide world ever, ever, and the U.S.
Army, I didn't mean to leave them out.
How come they can't win against a bunch of basically peasant civilian militiamen?
Well, in the, in the past few years, you know, we've spent enormous amounts of money, something over $70 billion training an Afghan army because for years the policy was, well, we'll just train the Afghans to defend themselves.
And so we had this massive program to change, to train an army of, the estimates varied.
They wanted three, 350,000 people.
You know, the biggest Afghan army in history was about 10,000, but here we were going to train these people to take over and defend themselves.
And we have trained a lot of soldiers.
We've had, we have trained many of them again and again and again, because they come in and get trained and then they go home again and then they come back and enlist under another name so they can make some more money and get some more guns and things like that.
So it's been a kind of scandalous merry-go-round for years and years.
And the training has been done, some of it by our military.
And I have to say, I have seen some good training going on there, but a lot of it has been done by private contractors, American contractors, and they hired to do the training, you know, guys who once were small town sheriffs in the West or the South and are very gung-ho, but do not have the military skills needed to train an army.
So those folks go home with a lot of money too.
And the army does not seem to progress very, very far.
I have to say in the defense of the Afghan military though, that although we've trained them, we haven't provided for them or encouraged the country itself, enabled the country itself to provide for them the medical services that were responsible for saving American lives during our active participation in the conflict.
So the Afghan military has been taking casualties at the rate of 20,000 a year.
And it simply can't go on like that.
You know, we train them, the Taliban shoots them, and then we need more and more and more.
And at this rate, it's just become a kind of killing machine.
It would be criminal if you thought about it in those terms.
All right.
Now, so for all the talk about all the ghost soldiers, and as you say, the same soldier coming back over and over again for the boots and the rifle and a little bit more money and that kind of thing.
And still, it sounds like, well, and even with the 350,000 being way overblown, they do have an army of how many?
Well, a couple hundred thousand at least, right?
Or not?
Nobody knows at this time, or they may have some figures, but I've never trusted the figures.
When I embedded with the military, I watched the Afghans being trained at the base, and I heard all the reports on this ever-growing army for Afghanistan.
But it's hard to find them.
So I never trusted those numbers.
And often, when there has been a big push on the part of the Taliban, and the army has been required to respond, they haven't been there.
So who knows?
Who knows?
So in other words, you could have ghost divisions.
You could have an entire, like at the end of World War II, where Hitler's ordering divisions into battle that don't exist anymore, and this kind of thing, right?
This is who we have fighting for, sir.
You could have that.
But also, what we've never taken fully into consideration is that the Taliban are Afghan citizens also.
And so we're training an Afghan army to fight Afghan citizens, who all my Afghan informants now tell me really just want to go home.
We never give them a chance to surrender.
And we undermine, we did undermine all of Karzai's attempts to reach peace negotiations, because we wanted to surge in more soldiers and keep the war going so that we could win this big victory.
So we have been really not on the side of an Afghan peace.
We've done everything we possibly could to prevent that reconciliation.
And Afghans know that.
So how would you feel if you were in the Afghan army and you were supposed to kill these Taliban who are coming after you?
But, you know, they're Afghans too.
And you knew the rate at which your own, the members of your army were being shot and killed.
You might be inclined to just turn around and go home yourself, right?
So there are reasons, and some of them are good reasons, why at times the members of the Afghan security forces just disappear.
Well, and as you said, especially when they know that they're basically part of the Vichy government that's been installed by a foreign power, and that, as you said, they at least probably know has refused to make peace when they could have.
Yes.
And, you know, historically, Afghans have have been invaded many times and they have always succeeded in repelling the invader, because Afghans do fight among themselves a lot when when left to themselves.
But the minute somebody invades their country, they all rally together to try to get rid of the invader.
And that worked pretty well for them.
They won three wars against Great Britain as long as the invader wasn't too strong for them to expel.
And we're in a situation now where they can't get rid of us.
They can't expel us.
They don't have the strength to do that.
So they have tried to go along with us.
But the Taliban has tried many times to say, you know, we'll talk, but not until the Americans leave the country.
And the Americans refused to leave the country.
So we can't expect a reconciliation and negotiated end to the conflict until we leave ourselves.
And we won't do that.
Now, I guess this is all very oversimplified.
But, you know, I try to get as, you know, as much wide and varied sourcing as I can.
I know I'm mostly right, but I was wondering if you could add some nuance.
I make the, you know, my book is out now and I make the argument in there that to oversimplify it, obviously, but that for the most part, what we're talking about here is trying to foist a Tajik and Uzbek and Hazara, but I guess mostly Tajik and Uzbek army onto the Pashtun population.
These are small minorities and we're trying to foist their power onto the plurality of the population, the Pashtuns, who are about 40 something percent.
And then I further make the case that, yeah, there are Pashtuns in the government, but the Pashtuns in the government don't represent the Pashtun people at all.
Anyway, maybe only some very narrow factions and they just use their power to lord it over everybody else.
And so, therefore, the Pashtun population instead prefer the Taliban or the Haqqani network to be their security force compared to what the Americans have attempted to create there.
But so I wonder if you think that's partially wrong or wholly wrong or wrong at all, or could you clarify or add some more detail to that at all?
I think that those differences in ethnicity and language and so on certainly play a part in it.
And it's certainly true that the Afghan army that the United States and NATO tried to create was principally Tajik in the beginning.
I think that those concerns may not be the primary ones any longer, because I think everybody's just so tired of the fighting.
You know, people just want to go home and get it over with.
And the Afghans have always lived as a rural people.
I mean, it's primarily a country of villages and farmers with a few small to medium size and now a couple of large cities.
So I think if people could just go back to their homes, if we'd let them quit fighting and let them go home, they would kind of sort themselves out, you know, because they have lived in different parts of the country historically.
So they're fine with that.
But it doesn't work when we try to resolve all those differences.
In other words, the different ethnicities are fine in living with each other, like there are Pashtuns that live up near Kunduz and all that up in the north.
But the question is just whether they're being given the authority by foreigners to push each other around.
That's what causes all the conflict.
I think it is.
I think you're right in emphasizing that.
And we saw that in Iraq too, right?
There were lots of Sunni and Shia Arabs who were intermarried and families that crossed lines and all that.
But then the Americans come in and they side with the power factions and then all the lines change and all that.
Yes, I think that's true.
And, you know, a little more evidence for that is that you mentioned the Pashtuns who live in the north in Kunduz province.
Those Pashtuns were transferred to the north by the last king, by Zahir Shah, who wanted to try integrating the different ethnic groups to more unify the country.
And when their own king tried that, it worked.
And Pashtuns moved north and they lived happily up there with the northern people.
But then it's when the outsiders try to do the same kind of thing in other parts of the country that it doesn't work at all.
It's that they won't allow outsiders to push them around if they can help it.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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You know, I just read this piece.
I interviewed the lady, too, Sarah Young, who wrote this piece about a Hazara warlord in, I guess, Ghazni province who was just going around massacring Pashtuns and getting away with it.
And the only reason, according to her, that she knew about it was because he had massacred some people who were the second cousin or something of a parliamentarian.
And so because of the connections there, he ended up getting in trouble.
Although the warlord himself is on the run and is fine.
He had been directly backed by the United States.
And so they're getting, you know, I guess, really not justice, but at least a little bit of attention to their plight there.
But the way she put it was this just goes on unendingly all across the country all the time.
It's not necessarily always Hazara on Pashtun, but it's American-backed warlords who come into a place where they're not from, where they're not welcome, and commit God knows what atrocities and fuel the insurgency in this very same way that the Marines do when they show up.
Well, the other thing that has been talked about now since I wrote my piece last week is that the military also wants to set up a kind of national guard, little local police forces in different areas to protect their communities.
This is also an idea that they did, that they tried years ago.
And that meant, for example, trying to, going into a Pashtun area and trying to set up a little local protection unit that would shoot Pashtuns.
To fend off the Taliban, yeah.
And that absolutely does not work.
So we tried that before.
Now we want to try it again.
And I think that the chief point I try to make in my piece is that we're really into a kind of repetition compulsion, especially since Trump is allowing these three generals to, who are right there in his office, to kind of decide troop levels and what the troops are supposed to be doing and all of that.
And all of them are veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.
So of course they have previous experience, but they also have previous commitments, previous ideas of what should be done.
And here they are retooling the same old things over and over and over again.
And there is no reasonable expectation that any of this is going to work at all, especially when Afghans want the conflict to end.
Yeah.
Well now, so yeah, you really emphasize that a lot in the article and you've mentioned it a few times here that I guess even when I was saying about, well, the Americans are trying to foist this Tajik army on the Pashtuns and they refuse to accept that, your answer to that even wasn't so much that I got the ethnicities wrong as much as they really don't want to fight anymore.
If we would just back off with the foisting of this army, they would be fine.
The fight would more or less dry up pretty quick.
It sounds like you're saying.
I believe that's true.
And that's what some of the Afghan politicians are saying now.
I talked not long ago with Shukia Barksai, who was one of the women elected to the very first parliament in Afghanistan.
And she was in the parliament for 10 years.
She's now the ambassador to Norway.
But she, of all people, has every reason to oppose the Taliban.
She was hit by a suicide bomber in 2014 and almost lost her life.
And many people lost their lives in that bombing, of which she was the principal target.
But she said to me, you know, the Taliban are so over.
And she said it just like that.
She said they just want to go home, but you Americans will not let them.
OK, so now let me ask you about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
He's known as the Butcher of Kabul and is blamed for as many as 50,000 deaths during the Civil War of the 1990s when he just shelled that city and reduced it to rubble.
His bi-Islami group, at least part of it, has been, I gather, you know, more or less kind of a junior partner with the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network in terms of waging the insurgency all this time.
In fact, I remember you telling me a few years ago that, hey, his bi-Islami's sitting in the parliament right now.
The war's already over.
The Taliban won.
But now Hekmatyar's come back with the rest of them and they made a big deal to allow Hekmatyar to come back to Kabul.
He dropped the Taliban's condition that the Americans have to leave first.
He came in.
He made a real sweetheart deal where he got to keep all his militiamen and he got to keep them armed and he got to bring them into the capital city.
And then the first thing he did was hold a big rally denouncing the central government and the Hazaras, especially.
And I just thought, oh, man, I don't know what's going to happen here.
In fact, the Washington Post quoted some very, you know, already second thought having Kabul politicians saying, oh, man, you know, we thought he surrendered to the Kabul government.
He sure seems to be acting like we surrendered to him.
And I just wonder what you think is going to happen with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and whether that's going to be a Trojan horse that could destroy the U.S. created state there.
It's hard to say.
And he's been gone for 20 years, but he's always been a kind of madman.
And he's always been the most violent of.
Well, maybe not the all time most violent, but during his time, he was the most violent and the most favored by, you know, the Pakistani ISI.
He got the lion's share of the American and Saudi money that that went to to those anti-Soviet fighters during the during the proxy war.
And he continued then to shell Kabul during the civil wars that erupted afterwards.
And so he was the most hated of all the warlords because of what he had done to the capital.
Afghans historically have a long tradition of not fighting in their cities.
They always took their battles out into the countryside.
But Hekmatyar actually shelled Kabul for years and was responsible for, as you said, tens of thousands of deaths of of people living in the capital and the destruction of large areas of the capital.
So he's he's hated by everyone.
And the notion that the government would make a deal with him to come back and then to welcome him and they were all there.
You know, the old president Karzai and the new president Ghani marching proudly with him along and near the palace grounds.
It's absurd.
But all his old atrocities are forgiven.
And you can't do that without recognizing a kind of general forgiveness for all these old warlords.
And it means that Afghan citizens who suffered all these long years will never have anything that amounts to justice or restitution for what they've suffered during the war.
So this can't be a popular move.
The Ghani government is not popular anyway.
And yet here we are supporting all of this again by sending more troops to keep this nonsense going.
Well, OK, but so.
I'm not sure what's the alternative then.
So if Hekmatyar has this militia and he's been part of the insurgency and he says, I want a deal and they kind of have to make a deal.
Right.
And that's what we want.
We want them to deal with the Ghani.
We want them to deal with the Taliban, as many different factions as possible and to come to some kind of agreement.
And I guess that that does.
It's a double edged sword because it means forgiving people who are guilty of horrible war crimes.
But if we don't make a deal with Hekmatyar, then he stays a militia leader, right?
He does.
But he's he hasn't been really particularly active in a long time.
And he always was famous as the warlord who did the least actual fighting.
He got the most money, but he sold the most drugs.
Yeah, he was busy with his drug business.
But no, you're quite right that it's a double edged sword.
But here's the thing.
If you look back at the history, you see that once the Afghans united would unite to throw out the invader, then they could go back to trying to work things out or fight among themselves.
And the difference here is that if we had just taken ourselves out of the picture, then it's up to them to to do what they will with Hekmatyar.
And chances are they will make a deal with him and he would have come back, but they would be working it out for themselves.
And if they chose to continue to fight, it would be on them, not us.
Whereas as long as we're there, as long as we're there, they cannot negotiate.
Settlements.
All right now, so if America left after all, Donald Trump's a president, he could, you know, sleep funny and wake up in the morning with a bad back and change his mind and decide, hey, you know what?
My back hurts.
Let's get out of Afghanistan.
If that happened, two questions.
First of all, would the government in Kabul just completely evaporate?
And then second question, would the Taliban then march on Kabul and take it again and attempt to take the whole country as they were in the middle of almost succeeding at doing at the time America invaded in 2001?
The opinion of most of the Afghan political leaders that I've spoken to recently is that the Taliban would not take a chance of bringing the Americans down on them again, so that they, you know, they haven't attacked Taliban until the last several years.
They didn't haven't attacked the capital until the last several years.
They stayed away from that.
But most of the political people I talk to say that they they would.
Take over there, they already hold probably at least a third of the country, and they might try to take on some of the provincial, smaller provincial cities.
But there's no nobody expects them to try to put themselves back into power in Kabul, because that would they know that would just bring the Americans back on them again.
And in the villages, actually, Taliban have enforced.
A kind of law and order that is a rough justice.
It's certainly a rough justice on women.
But.
Many people in those villages say that it's better than having no order at all.
So what Afghans would go back to if we removed ourselves may not be a pretty picture.
But we've been there now 16 years.
And it's past time to get out.
It's really past time to get out.
All right, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time coming back on the show to talk about this with us.
It's a very important article here at Tom Dispatch.
When will they ever learn Afghanistan again?
And the books are Kabul in winter, life without peace in Afghanistan.
And most recently, they were soldiers.
How the wounded return from America's wars.
The untold story.
Thank you very much again for your time.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
It was good to talk with you.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Finally, Fool's Errand.
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