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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Andrew Coburn.
He is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
And he's also the author of the great books, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, which you guys hear me bring up all the time because of all the important stuff in there.
Boy, it's all coming flooding back to me now, too.
The nuclear war exercises and everything.
You've got to read this book, Rumsfeld, guys.
It's so good.
And then Kill Chain about the drone wars and the rest of it in the Obama years and all the secrecy and all the craziness there.
Really great stuff.
And yes, you're wondering if you don't know, then yes, he's the brother of the world's greatest war reporter, Patrick Coburn.
Also a regular guest on this show all the time.
Welcome back, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
I'm fine.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here and very happy to see this great article in Harper's Magazine.
It's called Mobbed Up, How America Boosts the Afghan Opium Trade.
And as you may know, I wrote this book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I would have had you review it, but I already had Patrick review it.
So I can't have two Coburn blurbs.
But anyway, people are asking me all the time, give me the lowdown on the heroin.
And I do have a chapter in there about the drug war.
But I admit that I basically ran up against everything that Andrew McCoy knows, and that was the best I could do.
But you've really developed this story a lot about the state of the opium trade and heroin trade in Afghanistan and the role that it plays in the war and all of this stuff.
It's just a really great piece.
I hope people go look at it.
So, yeah, let's talk about that.
And did I say welcome to the show?
How are you?
You did.
I'm fine.
Glad to be with you.
Good, good.
Okay.
I want to make sure I had a chance to just say hi, because I know I was kind of going on and on about that.
So, first of all, your article starts out importantly and correctly, I guess, with Trump's escalation.
Mattis and McMaster, they pushed, and Bannon was the only thing standing between them and the escalation, and then he got gone.
And then Trump did give in to them, gave them at least 4,000, maybe 5,000 troops since then, and expanded authority to fight.
And particularly, I guess we should mention Nangarhar against so-called ISIS there, but also in the Helmand province, again.
And mostly in the name of the war on drugs.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Well, one of the crucial things he did was to basically let the Air Force off the leash.
I don't know how much they paid attention to it, but there'd been this sort of rule of engagement that they could only use air power in support of US or Afghan troops on the ground.
And what he did crucially was to let them, in his speech when he sort of announced that he'd caved into the generals, that the Air Force could now sort of roam at will over Afghanistan and pick its own target.
He didn't put it in quite those words, but that's what it meant.
And that was really important because the Air Force has been sort of wanting to do this.
The Air Force always wants to do this.
They hate, they have this sort of vision, this doctrine, their religious faith is that they can win wars on their own.
And so now they're proposing to, you know, they have the go ahead to pacify Afghanistan from 20,000 feet, which is obviously a perfectly silly idea.
But the specific target, it turned out, that they had in mind was or is Afghan, what they call a counter threat revenue.
And translating to English, what that means is they were going to go after the Taliban's drug business.
I mean, they operate under this, well, I consider it certainly a nice layout in the article, this illusion that the Taliban is entirely or largely sustained by its control of the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and exports from Afghanistan, which is not true.
But the article of faith they cling to.
And so they said about bombing the Afghan narcotics infrastructure, Taliban's narcotics infrastructure.
At meaning just some drug labs in some huts in some backyards.
Exactly.
I mean, this is a.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I mean, it's a meme that goes around, right, that using a hundred million dollar airplane to drop a twenty five thousand dollar bomb on a ten dollar hut.
You know, something like this.
And literally they even reduce.
One thing, not a hundred million dollar airplane, a four hundred million dollar airplane.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Well, because and you write about this, the F-22s, that they're using these to attack literally civilian homes where allegedly drugs are being produced in Afghanistan.
Exactly.
And by the way, those planes have to fly all the way from Qatar.
God knows how long that takes and how many times they have to be refueled all to bomb, you know, at most a house and actually a hut.
Yeah.
And I guess they must have had some expensive reconfiguring or something going on to even accomplish that, because I seem to remember that Robert Gates campaigned hard as secretary of defense to shut down the F-22 program because everybody knows that all of America's wars are against unarmed peasants on the ground and that the F-22 is really designed for dogfights with other jet fighters.
And if we're going to have a next generation plane that can actually hit ground targets, that's supposed to be at least the F-35.
So they must have.
Don't tell me how much money they spent reconfiguring the F-22 where it can launch at least some ground air to ground bombs since the F-35 is worthless still.
Right.
Well, yeah, I can drop a few.
But the excuse for using this $400 million plane against some huts and, you know, civilian houses and supposed drug labs, well, some of them were drug labs, in Afghanistan was that only the F-22 can carry the small diameter bomb.
Which is, they sell that on the basis that it's kind of a good, kind, gentle bomb.
A surgical strike.
Yeah, it just kills, you know, one bad person, not his wife and family, which is, again, not true.
But that was a lie anyway, because lots of planes can carry that bomb.
It was a sort of shabby excuse for deploying this plane, which had been around for, you know, 12 years, not doing anything.
Because there's nothing for it to do.
And they can't do that, even that very well.
It costs a lot to maintain.
So they wanted to drag it in and, you know, made up a few lies to justify it.
Yeah, man, I don't know what's wrong with my brain these days.
I'm just losing track of my footnotes.
But I just read a thing the other day about how a big part of even the Iraq War, the second Iraq War was that the East Coast Marines got to participate in Afghanistan, but the West Coast Marines didn't really get to, and they had to do something.
There's just so much of that, like busy work in American militarism.
It's crazy.
Right.
Well, I, you know, the thing, the point about what I talk about in the article is that you've got to understand the Afghan war in terms of, you know, why those people engage in it, why they're doing what they're doing.
And it's clear that in on the Afghan side, there's lots of people, you know, particularly in Helmand, and I was drawing on the experiences, both of people I know who, you know, have been military officers who've served there, multiple tours, some of them, and also a brilliant book by a British former officer there, Mike Martin, who wrote a fantastic book called An Intimate War, an oral history of the war in Helmand.
And it's basically all these people on the ground, they're doing things for their own reasons, you know, like, well, you'll have a lot to do with the drug trade in Helmand.
And so some guy, some drug lord, you know, one day it suits his purpose to be on the government side, and the next day it suits his purpose to be Taliban.
And, you know, so he's, you know, he's fighting on the Taliban label.
And it's, you know, has much more to do with what's happening locally, than all these, you know, some idea that there's a coherent, streamlined, Taliban command structure, that's, you know, pulling every string from far away and from over the border in Pakistan.
And much the same with the Americans, right?
Is that here, we have some F-22 pilots, and they need something to do.
And, you know, where they do it, you know, the ultimate supposed mission in Afghanistan to pacify it, or defeat the Taliban, or whatever, is kind of just an excuse.
You know, it's, it's their own, everyone's acting in their own self interest.
And they pull in these labels like war on terror, resolute support, or, you know, or whatever, or, you know, hey-ho for Islam.
That's just the cover.
I find time and time again.
So that's, that's how I'm trying to explain what's going on.
You know, keeping the war going in general, bomb sales, and this kind of thing.
But what about all that drug money?
Is the CIA running it all?
It sounds like the bottom line of your argument is...
At the same time, he was on the, he was on the CIA payroll.
I mean, the CIA was delivering him wads of cash at regular intervals, you know, wrapped in tinfoil, so one observer put it.
In the article, I talk about another guy called Sherzai, Golaga Sherzai, who was the absolute pinup for the American authorities, because he was governor of Nangarhar from 2005 to 2011.
I may have got the precise dates wrong, I think that's right.
And he eliminated, allegedly, opium, opium harvest in his province.
So they all, they gave him bonuses, they gave him an award called the Good Performer Award.
You know, everyone came to see him and they, and even candidate Obama in 2008, came to see him and invited him to his inauguration.
Meanwhile, what this guy had done was he still controlled a lot of opium production in his home province of Kandahar.
So he was getting his still growing opium there, which he was processing into heroin in Nangarhar.
So this guy who was meant to be the poster child for, you know, good things happening in Afghanistan, was a major heroin processor.
And actually, when I asked him for comment on this allegation, he sent a whole sort of folder of letters from senior American officials saying what a terrific fellow he was.
So it's the kind of, it shows how ridiculous, you know, the entire endeavor has been.
Well, and you know, David Petraeus' favorite warlord in Kandahar, in southern Kandahar province, was this guy Razak, who there were quite a few different reports about him.
And of course, he was a heroin dealer.
In fact, even the New York Times version of this, Andrew, is that the whole country really is awash in heroin money and that it funds the Taliban and other insurgencies.
But it's also virtually all the governors and all the politicians and anybody who has any real power, that's sort of where they derive it from at this point.
There's not much other wealth to be had in the country.
But at the same time, it sounds like your article is sort of saying that all that is overblown and that the ability of the Taliban or anybody to... go ahead.
What I say is overblown is this whole concept that the Taliban depends absolutely on opium profits, that it's a narco insurgency.
I mean, in fact, I mean, the Taliban gets and has always gotten a huge chunk of its revenues from our good allies in the Persian Gulf, the Saudis and the, you know, the other oil kingdoms there.
And they also, what areas they control, they tax everything, they tax opium, they tax, you know, tractor sales, they tax truck traffic and so on.
What I really go into in the piece is how the different cost estimates, the Americans say, for example, the initial raids on the drug lab on the November 19th and 20th last year, that cost the Taliban $16 million in lost revenue.
Because, you know, that they that they destroyed, you know, umpteen heroin and opium on which the Taliban, you know, tax revenue would have been $16 million.
But according to people who are actually on the ground who've done a lot of research on this, people I trust, including a very brilliant British researcher called David Mansfield, actually was way less than that.
I mean, these cost estimates are way overblown.
In other words, you know, our entire strategy now in Afghanistan is based on completely erroneous estimates of how much money the Taliban are getting from opium and also of how to what degree they control the opium trade.
I mean, they say as an article of faith, the U.S. military, including this fellow who's directing this new strategy, this Air Force General Lance Bunch, sounds like a made up name, but it's not.
He says that the Taliban tax opium at 20 percent.
You know, if you're a farmer growing opium, you have to hand over 20 percent of your revenue to the Taliban.
Well, that doesn't seem to be the case.
At most, at most, it's three percent.
I mean, according to people who spent years looking into this, you know, their estimates for the price of a kilo heroin at the market are wildly overblown.
So that, you know, when we go and bomb a drug bazaar and kill a bunch of civilians, which we certainly did on the night of November 20th, no, 19th, sorry.
You know, we think, you know, that's advertised as dealing a mortal blow to Taliban revenue, but it's nothing of the kind.
I imagine them really believing that that makes a difference with all the experience of all the drug wars around the world and all this time where the basic economics of it say that if you destroy a bunch of it, then all you do is drive up the price of the rest of it and incentivize that much more production down the road.
And every time that they really do crack down, what they really, all they do is they drive up the price of a bribe, which ends up discrediting the government more and driving more farmers into the arms of the insurgency anyway.
And to show how ineffective this was, after those initial drug raids, as you said, usually you'd expect the price to go up.
The price didn't go up.
So they didn't even deal that much of a blow.
In other words, the place is so awash in heroin, it didn't even make a blip, those actual bombing raids.
And imagine, and you know, we talked about the F-22s, but what about the B-52s?
Using B-52s to bomb shacks on private property?
Exactly.
But the other aspect to it is a bit of a story that I found really sort of telling was how we managed to, as you mentioned in the beginning, how we managed to drive up Afghan opium production.
I mean, we had a program which was meant to really cut it significantly, and instead pretty much doubled it.
All the irrigation projects and so forth you're talking about?
Well, that was back in the 50s.
We had an irrigation project in Helmand, which is, you know, to fertilize Helmand, which actually had all, it led to all sorts of land disputes, which are a lot to do with all the problems that have been there since.
But more, the story I like is that in 2008, the US and Britain decided, right, we're going to really, we got this great program to eliminate opium production in Helmand province, which is the major, it's the opium basket of Afghanistan, where not all the heroin and opium in Afghanistan has grown, but it's the major producer.
Okay, so what they were going to do, what they did do, was to say to the farmers, okay, we want you to grow wheat, and we're going to give you wheat seeds, we're going to help you get it to market, we're going to give you fertilizer, and you're going to, you know, but you have to stop growing opium.
And any opium we come across, the growing, we're going to immediately rip it up or plow it under, you know, and be, and it kind of worked, in one sense, in that opium production in the area they targeted, which was, you know, the fertile bit of Helmand, went down, it plummeted, it went down by 75% in two years.
So big, you know, big success, big, you know, big claims of victory.
But what they hadn't thought about was the fact that it's, whereas opium, to grow opium, you need a lot of people, you need people to weed the fields, you need, particularly you need people, you know, the way you get the opium out of the poppy bulb is you have to sort of scar the poppy bulb, and then the actual opium sort of oozes out of the bulb, and you have to scrape that off and collect it.
It's a very labor-intensive process.
With wheat, you don't do that.
You just sort of plant the wheat, and then you need, you know, a tractor or a combine harvester, rather, to come along and collect it, and then you, you know, so just the farmer and his family can do that.
He doesn't need all the labor, the sharecroppers and day laborers that he needed to grow opium.
So what happened to all those people?
Well, they all knew they had to make a living, so they all left town, so to speak, and moved into the desert out of the previously irrigated area, and they drilled wells and started to, you know, irrigated the land and started to grow plant opium.
And this was quite cheap for them to do because, one, the land was cheap out there, you know, it was desert or semi-desert.
No one had farmed there before.
And, two, the wonders of alternative or, you know, renewable energy that happened to come on the market, cheap, reliable Chinese solar-powered pumps.
So before, you know, to pump a well, you needed to have a diesel pump, expensive, and burnt down all the time, and you had to buy a diesel fuel.
Now these solar pumps, you know, once you had them, they were free to run.
Let's hear it for, Al Gore should have been pleased, let's hear it for renewable energy.
All right, you guys, here's who supports this show.
First of all, the great Mike Swanson.
He wrote this incredible book called The War State, about the rise of the permanent military-industrial complex and the new right after World War II.
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I think you'll really like it.
It's The War State.
It's on Amazon.com and thewarstate.com.
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What you do is go to expanddesigns.com and you'll save $500.
Man, all right, so now you talk about Helmand.
Now, as I understand it, basically Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of the province there, is under the control of at least allies of the government in Kabul to some degree, what have you.
But then am I right that virtually the entire rest of the province is in the hands of the Taliban?
And so I don't know about total dollar figures or even how much it adds up in terms of percentages of the Taliban's overall revenue, but in terms of their dominance of Helmand and therefore the country's opium market, what percentage do they have, their cartel versus, say, the more government-allied factions?
Well, as far as I understand it, they don't own—they're not the business.
They tax it like they tax everything else.
For instance, they get huge revenue from all the goods that have moved through the country from Iran to Pakistan.
A lot of routes are down from Central Asia.
And they tax the Americans who bring their trucks in from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass.
So what you have are the local drug lords, like very powerful families like the Akinsada family, who have been the dominant power in Helmand for years.
And they're very heavily involved in opium and heroin.
In fact, it was Nassim Akinsada back in the 70s and 80s who really got opium going in Helmand.
Proud of that.
It wasn't too big a deal.
And then his nephew, Sheikh Mohammed Akinsada, who made his name as a gallant anti-Soviet resistance fighter in the 80s, and like the rest of his family, like his uncle, then when we come in and displace the Taliban in 2001, those guys, particularly this guy, Sheikh Mohammed Akinsada, those warlords slash drug lords slash warlords, they were back in business, having been repressed under the Taliban.
And in 2005, a squad of an anti-narcotic squad, which was trained by the British, raided his office and found nine tons of heroin in his office.
My wife, Leslie, actually made a film about it, went to see him in 60 Minutes at that time, and he showed it to her.
Yeah.
Now, speaking of which, she also wrote the book Out of Control, which was, I think, my first real big 300-something page political book that I read in high school after Orwell and stuff.
That is a really great book.
I remember so many things out of it to this day that I learned in that thing.
Out of Control about Iran-Contra.
Great journalism there, as long as we're at it.
And as long as we're talking about drugs.
Hey, Scott, can I give a shout-out for Leslie?
She is currently running for Congress in Virginia.
Oh, really?
Virginia 5th District.
Oh, man.
That's really great.
And you know what?
I bet not all of our politics align, but I am pro-Coburn.
Absolutely.
Your daughter's great in TV and movies, too.
Olivia Wilde, everybody, is his famous movie star daughter.
And probably more, too, but I don't know.
And you know what?
As long as we're talking about your family, the great Alexander Coburn from Counterpunch, the, I don't know exactly what all you call him, a left-wing radical propagandist for many years here in the United States, who just died a few years ago.
Also another great one.
So anyway, now listen, about that heroin money.
Oh, no, I know what I wanted to ask you was about what you, you quote this guy Mike Martin talking about what General Mike Flynn calls anti-insurgency.
That's him mocking the strategy of just going around trying to find bad guys and killing them.
Because under Michael Flynn's reasoning, along with McChrystal, is this insurgent math that knowing you kill people, and especially when you more or less blindly kill people and you don't know who you're killing, then you are only creating the resistance against you when you're trying to win these people over, ultimately.
Now, counterinsurgency, of course, the idea that we really can win these people over is completely stupid and bankrupt.
And yet, the pro-coin guys' criticism of this mere anti-insurgency as being absolutely stupid and wrong and counterproductive on its best day seems pretty apt.
And so a lot of what we're talking about, we're focusing on the drugs here, but we're talking about killing people.
And what result that that's going to have overall in the war, the consequences that it has had overall in the war.
And I want to get back to these tribes in a minute.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we all, of course, we all have, you know, General Flynn is now, you know, probably going to go to jail and everyone hates him and all the rest.
But actually, I thought what he had to say about, you know, what you just quoted was pretty smart.
I mean, he, well, it should be obvious, but he did, you know, he and I guess McChrystal did realize.
And also, you know, when McChrystal took over in Afghanistan, I have to say that he cut back sharply on the use of air power.
He, you know, did the Kurdish, which, again, should be pretty obvious.
This was a great way to make enemies.
Now, you know, with the current strategy in Afghanistan, as I said earlier, just a minute ago, you know, it's really sort of air power centered.
I mean, for example, I hope I'm not digressing too much now.
We're sending all these advisors.
You know, you hear we're sending most of these troops that are being sent off now under Trump's, you know, re-escalation are going to be advising Afghan units down to the battalion level.
Well, that all sounds very good.
And you think of them, you know, they're meant to grow beards and live like Afghans.
I don't think so.
I mean, that's what's sort of presented to us.
And they'll be advising them on the right tactics.
Actually, what it is, is these are mostly ordinary soldiers and Marines who have been told, hey, soldier, hey, Marine, you are now an advisor.
And there's a new patch on their shoulder or whatever.
So these kids or young men are going to find themselves surrounded by a bunch of Afghan soldiers who they have, of whom they'll have a strong suspicion that they might be shooting them in the back sooner or later, which I hope is unfounded, but is possible.
And they're going to be scared.
And, you know, they'll be engaged with the Taliban.
What they will have, they'll have a weapon, which is basically US air power and specifically drones.
Because we didn't mention this and I didn't mention this in the piece, but this, you know, we're really jacking up the number of drones deployed to Afghanistan.
So this kid will have, you know, he'll have comes under attack.
Someone snipes at them or any kind of situation, call in a drone.
He'll have the ability to summon a drone, summon a drone strike.
Well, imagine that's what's going to happen next, which is, you know, inevitably, they're going to hit a lot of civilians.
Inevitably, that'll, you know, further inflame the population against them.
And, you know, things can only get worse.
Well, and so many of the members of the Afghan National Army are from a thousand miles away or whatever, a few hundred miles away.
Anyway, it would be like me leading a brigade into takeover parts of, you know, Virginia or something where I don't know.
I'm from Texas.
Well, that's right.
Or even if they aren't, they know that the Taliban know who they, you know, where their families are.
You know, there's a lot of that goes on that they, you know, you better not come after us too strenuously or we'll get your, you know, get your, get your family.
We know, we know where you live.
Yeah.
And you're saying if they are actually Pashtuns from the area, then they're blackmailed that way.
And then if they're, but if they're Tajiks from the north, then they're deaf, blind and stupid as bad as the Americans.
They don't know what, which way's up anymore than the Americans do.
That's right.
You mentioned the green on blue, so-called attacks as they call the insider attacks.
They keep changing the name to figure out which one is least objectionable to people in the focus group.
But this is when the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police guys that the Americans are training, murder them, shoot them in the back or, you know, open fire on a whole group of trainees and this kind of thing.
And this is now some major proportion of the actual deployment in Helmand province, I was reading, was these, they call them the guardian angels, where all day long, American snipers have to watch the back live in real time of all of their comrades on the ground training up this army.
That these are the guys that we're trying to train up.
Again, these Tajiks from the north that we're trying to train up to conquer these Pashtuns of the south, which isn't going to work anyway.
But then, you know, they don't really know who they're dealing with.
And so they have American snipers on full patrol all the time, watching and making sure, full alert, whatever, watching the back, preparing to shoot all these Afghan army guys if they make a wrong move.
Think about how that affects them, too.
You know, like this whole thing is insane.
It is kind of crazy, isn't it?
I know, you know, every angle you look at it from, it's not viable.
And I'm sorry, because that's not much of an interview question.
Isn't this insane?
Yes, it is.
It's the Afghan war.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, good question.
It's a great question.
And the answer is yes.
It's insane.
Oh, man.
All right.
So, well, let's see.
What else was I going to ask you here?
Oh, yes.
So you mentioned this Akanzada tribe, and you write about it in the article, and you're just talking about the different guys in charge of the fight there.
And importantly, you talk about how, you know, it's not so much the Taliban as maybe these people who used to be part of it, but it's sort of gone.
And now it's basically these warring drug cartels make up most of what we call the Taliban insurgency at this point anyway, kind of thing.
And yet, I had been reading about when Mullah Mansoor was killed in the drone strike, which was supposed to weaken the Taliban.
At least one good take that I read on it said that actually, if that's what you're trying to do, it really backfired, because waiting in the wings was Mullah Haibatullah Akanzada.
And he actually had a lot more street credibility than Mansoor ever had, because Mansoor served only his tribe.
But Akanzada had actually previously been a mentor to Mullah Omar.
And so he had all this kind of OG credibility to reunite the Taliban.
But then, so I wonder how you square that with what you're saying about how, nah, not so much.
Well, it's not clear.
I mean, although some of them, it's not clear that he's a relative.
He's not actually a relative of the drug lord Akanzada.
Oh, I see.
OK, this is a different branch of the tribe anyway.
If I didn't, I'd have forgotten where his name came from.
But you're right.
I mean, you know, you're talking about Mullah Mansoor, how stupid this whole policy of assassination is.
Which, by the way, which we've doubled down on recently.
And now there's a great story in BuzzFeed, actually, by Aram Rothen about how the CIA has really gone big into the assassination business in Afghanistan.
You know, when you get rid of, you know, the guy you think, you know, the critical guy, you know, the enemy leader and you go and kill him.
And, you know, someone even more threatening, dangerous pops up.
Inevitably, it always happens.
And one of the reasons I understood this recently, it happens in Afghanistan is that usually if a guy, if a sort of, you know, Taliban leader or local leader is killed by us or killed by anyone, it's the duty of the next in line in his family to step up.
So you get the you're up against the same family.
Now you have a younger brother in charge who not only, you know, is signed on to carry on the struggle, but has got an extra beat because you killed his brother.
Well, and it's a very stupid policy.
I mean, even with the killing of bin Laden, which people might argue that, yeah, oh, well, you're going to have to do that if you have the chance to.
But even with his killing, I mean, isn't it doubtful at least?
Certainly, it's questionable whether Baghdadi would ever have broken with Osama bin Laden the way he told Ayman al-Zawahiri to go to hell.
I don't care what you say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not clear.
I mean, it's hard to do the counterfactual for sure, but it seems like a case where when, you know, bin Laden and Zawahiri tried to sort of tamp down the worst impulses of the al-Qaeda guys, particularly in the Syria war, telling them to, you know, not be as wild as Zarqawi's men had been in Iraq war two.
But then Baghdadi ended up doing things his own way.
And that was much worse.
Exactly.
You know, it's, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but it's, you know, be careful what you wish for.
You want to get rid of so-and-so and you get someone worse.
And again, this is a whole chapter and a theme in your book Kill Chain, too, about the decapitation strikes and how they inevitably backfire and all that.
People, it's really good to read.
Exactly.
Makes you think what would happen if Trump gets impeached.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, things could be a lot worse.
Imagine that.
As crazy as it sounds, don't make me start imagining because it could be worse than I can imagine.
I can imagine quite a bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So, well, what the hell is to be done here?
The government, the Ghani government in Kabul is trying to negotiate with the Taliban.
The Taliban are saying to the Americans, you might as well go.
The Americans are saying we're escalating for at least another four years and then we'll see what happens.
And so, I mean, do you have a recommendation other than just cut and run, good old fashioned, forget about it?
Or what's the deal?
I mean, I think if our presence there is making things worse, which seems to me it is, then I think we should leave.
I mean, I think it's completely silly to, you know, why are we still there?
I mean, we're there because it's a money stream for the services.
They don't want to admit they lost again.
There's no real, you know, it shows how bankrupt the whole policy is when the best they can come up with is, you know, is sending $400 million planes to knock off, you know, a hut with a barrel and a gas stove inside.
It shows we're really out of ideas.
I mean, I don't know how well, I mean, God, I mean, they, the Afghan government have just made another peace proposal, which was a ceasefire proposal, which is maybe sensible.
Would, you know, would we let that happen?
I don't know.
But it seems to me I can't see what good is being accomplished by our presence there.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder, it seemed like actually a mistake, which, you know, what the hell do I know about it really?
But it seemed like asking the Taliban to sort of become a political party and join in the government in Kabul is conceding way too much and in the wrong direction.
Where what they really should do is just kind of recognize Taliban autonomy and, you know, more or less sovereignty and a kind of wink nudge Iraqi Kurdistan kind of away from here on out and ask them in return to not try to take control of Kabul and that, you know, to go ahead and not necessarily split the country up, but obviously creating a central government ain't working.
But why have guys fight about who rules the wannabe central government, at least in perpetuity, when we can just let the South and East go?
How about that?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I can't see any good, good outcome.
Whatever happens.
But, I mean, the fact is, I don't see us making things better, which is, you know, I mean, you know, there's all sorts of problems.
There was some John Stopko, the the special inspector general who's been, you know, documenting the incredible corrupt, you know, waste of money for years in Afghanistan.
I mean, a truly great public servant.
He said to me once, he said, you know, the trouble is, we've created a government, a $10 billion a year government.
That's what it costs currently to run the Afghan government, you know, as financed by us.
And where their own sources, you know, their sources of revenue are only $2 billion.
So we've created something that, you know, completely artificial.
And I don't know how we get out of that.
I mean, it's easy to get out, but not quite sure what the consequences are.
I mean, this has been such a disaster from the beginning.
And, you know, and basically because of a, I mean, I quote an officer who served, American officer who served multiple tours in Afghanistan.
And he said, I mean, the basic problem is no one ever made an effort to understand it.
And he said, he, you know, he would be there and he would, he would get, you know, understand after a bit what was going on and what the local politics were in the area where he was stationed.
And then he would brief, you know, he'd try and brief his replacement, but half the time they weren't interested.
And when he came back, there was no briefing to him about, you know, there was no effort, in other words, to build up any kind of institutional memory.
So I quote, you know, the thing people say about Afghanistan is America hasn't been in Afghanistan for 16 years.
It's been in Afghanistan one year, 16 times.
So we really still don't understand the place.
Yeah.
Well, and so instead of trying to understand it, we just bomb it.
Yeah.
Well, and so the distortions of power, as you say, are so vast where the, where they're so heavily dependent on outside money, nevermind military power to maintain the status quo that pretty much no matter what happens, it's going to be a wreck.
Now the politics, I'm sorry, I'll let you go.
I'm keeping you on so long here, but the politics here have, you know, we saw, you know, Donald Trump actually got this right earlier in the campaign.
He would say, Obama created ISIS.
And people were like, gasp.
And then he would say, yeah, because he backed the jihadists in Libya and then in Syria.
And that's what ended up re-energizing the thing and leading to the Islam, and it was like, hey, that's a really good answer.
And then, of course, he would add in and he pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So when ISIS came rolling into Iraq to seize the West, the Americans weren't there anymore, which was true in and of itself in a way that like, yeah, maybe the Marines could have stopped if they'd had a bunch of helicopters or whatever in country at the moment.
But, you know, at least he got the first part right.
But then by the time he became president, he by the time he became president, he had fully bought into the more, you know, Washington Post narrative, which was just the part about leaving Iraq and never mind the part about re-energizing the insurgency.
That's your brother's term, by the way, re-energizing in real time, he said from 2011 and 12 on re-energizing the insurgency in Iraq by supporting the insurgency in Syria.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, by the way, Patrick would be the first to tell you, they didn't have much option about leaving Iraq because the Iraqis told them to go.
Yeah.
But anyway, I'm sorry, because I'm spacing out on the on the important part of the Iraq war three.
But the thing I'm getting to is just the politics of saying that the problem is we ever left, never mind what happened in Syria, we ever left.
And then Trump invoked that exact thing in his Afghanistan escalation speech that you saw what happened when we left Iraq.
Bad things.
And so now that's it.
Anything bad that happens in Afghanistan, if he leaves, will be all his fault for leaving.
Never mind all the bad things that happened while we're there.
That's despite our best efforts.
So it's all forgivable.
But so and also he's just at the very beginning of his presidency.
So he's going to get out and, you know, quite possibly do eight years in there and then sit there for eight years with every catastrophe in Afghanistan being blamed on him for leaving by the warmonger guys.
The politics of that are very difficult.
And in the book Fire and Fury, his aide, Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser, says, look, leaving Afghanistan means Trump loses a war and Trump can't lose a war.
And so we have to stay.
That's it.
But now, so I think that he's Trump and he could just say, know what?
This is all Bush and Obama and McMaster's fault.
And I don't care.
And I want to leave and I don't give a damn.
And I think the American people would support him on that.
But I guess he doesn't have it in him to do that.
No, the guy who cheated golf in order to win the game.
Yeah, you could have finished that sentence a lot of ways, but that was one of them for sure.
Yeah, no.
All right.
Well, so on it goes.
But listen, I really appreciate your time on the show and this great work.
I hope everyone will read this article at Harper's magazine.
It's called Mobbed Up, the subtitle.
How America boosts the Afghan opium trade by the great Andrew Coburn.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Great to be with you.
And then YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show for all my shows there.
Fool's errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
That's at foolserend.us.
My book and the audio book is now available to you guys.
And then antiwar.com and libertarianinstitute.org for things I want you to read.
And then follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Okay, thanks.
