Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their 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 Danny Davis, retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and veteran of both Iraq War II and Afghanistan.
And of course, you know him because he endorsed my book, Fool's Errand, about the war in Afghanistan.
And here's his great article.
Well, and he's in the book.
There's basically a whole chapter about him almost in the book or a subchapter there.
And here's the new article that he wrote at TAC, the American conservative dot com is the Web site there.
Time to talk to the Taliban.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How you doing?
Always glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
And boy, you know, this is in the book.
It was really big news.
Basically, you and Matthew Ho are kind of bookends for the Obama surge.
Matthew Ho was the guy who he was a former Marine captain and he resigned.
He was working for the State Department at the time, but he resigned in order to pass the word up the chain and to the media.
And the American people don't do this.
The surge will not work.
All we're going to do is kill a bunch of people for nothing and accomplish nothing.
And of course, he was ignored and they did the surge anyway.
And then you came out in 2012 and said, yep, you should have listened to Matthew, because here we are.
We did the surge.
We accomplished nothing except killed a bunch of people and and changed really nothing on the ground in terms of, you know, accomplishing American goals there in the war.
So it's a real important part of the story.
And in fact, let me ask you a little bit about that, because you were in a real important position there.
It was the Rapid Equipping Force.
Is that what it's called?
That's correct.
Yeah.
And so your job then was to travel all around Afghanistan.
You weren't just part of one unit somewhere down in Kandahar province or in Nangarhar or something.
You were traveling all over the country with the job of making sure that each little unit, Army, Marines or whoever, had everything they needed to basically get around radar and clinger and hold up at I Corps and get the equipment to the men who need at the time.
But that really gave you, as a lieutenant colonel, this really special kind of unique point of view about what was going on in the war at the time.
So can you tell us just a little bit about that and what it was that that really solidified your view that it was time to go ahead and break ranks and tell the American people what was really going on?
Yeah, it was really a unique organization by itself because it was created on the fly because the normal acquisition process was so slow that by the time anybody got a request up, they were already rotated back before they ever got their stuff.
And then my particular role within that organization was also very unique in that I had a requirement, actually, as you say, to travel all over the country into the most critical parts of the east, kind of southeast, and then also the south with Kandahar, where the three or the four biggest areas to American interest were.
I traveled, I think, over 9000 miles of total distance in between all my visits.
And as such, had to go – I talked to the regional commanders, which is like a division command, the two-star general brigade commands, which is a full colonel battalion captains, and then all the way down to lieutenants and sergeants and troops on the line.
I mean, I literally covered every aspect of the tactical spectrum there and so got a view that I think actually nobody else in the Afghan theater had.
Because I was high enough in rank that people are going to talk to me, no matter what their rank, and give me credibility about it.
I wasn't so high in rank that the lower people would be intimidated by me or whatever.
And because I wasn't part of a particular unit, like I wasn't the commander of this or that, they didn't have any problem telling me because I was just an isolated lieutenant colonel going around doing business.
And I think they just kind of related to me well anyway because I used to be an enlisted guy.
But I really did get to see stuff that nobody else got to see.
And yeah, that's interesting, right?
If you'd been a general, they would have just said, yes, sir, general, everything's great, whatever you want to hear, right?
They wouldn't have dared contradict you.
They would have told you exactly.
But as lieutenant colonel, they're like, hey, listen, let me take you into my confidence here and give you the lowdown, what's really going on.
Now, I mean, it's got to be confusing, I think, for people to see that here we have, as Bush and Obama and Trump and everybody would say, the most powerful, the most well-trained, the most well-equipped, the most advanced, greatest army in the history of the world here.
And they can't seem to whoop some peasants with AKs.
They've never lost a battle, although they've come close a couple of times there in Afghanistan.
They've never really outright lost a battle against the Taliban.
And yet they just can't beat them.
And that doesn't seem to really make sense on the face of it.
Danny, what's the problem over there that the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps can't just take the fight to these guys and do like Petraeus said, bring them with a bloody nose to the table to surrender on our terms in 18 months?
Man, that sounds so rousing and patriotic.
I almost want to stand up and salute your words there.
I don't believe it.
I'm just BSing.
No, I know.
But that's the point.
That gets to the point because that's exactly what that rhetoric is supposed to entice and result in people who don't really understand because it sounds so patriotic and tough American stuff and whatever.
And that is a big part of the problem because it's supposed to make people think that.
The problem is what people are supposed to think and what actually happens are radically different.
And the fact is what we're trying to do with this extraordinary, most powerful military is it's something like saying, hey, I've got a buzzsaw and a pair of pliers and I want to go conduct brain surgery.
Look, those are great tools for some things, but you're not going to fix anybody's brain with those tools.
Or you have to have a surgeon's tools.
You have to have a different set of tools.
We are trying to solve a political problem with military force, and it's the same thing as trying to do brain surgery with a hacksaw and a pair of pliers.
You cannot do it.
And it doesn't matter how big the pliers, how many pliers, you can do anything that you want and you will never solve a political problem with military force.
And that is the absolute heart of the matter.
And as long as our military leaders and our civilian leaders don't accept that, then we are doomed to forever keep going down this path without success.
All right.
Well, and we know that Donald Trump, quite unlike most Republicans, I mean, basically all Republicans attacked Obama over the surge.
Michelle Bachman, for example, said, well, yeah, sure, he surged down into Kandahar and into Helmand provinces, but he neglected Nangarhar in the east.
And so, sure, you whoop up on the Taliban, but you ignore the Haqqani network.
No wonder it didn't work.
But Trump, on the other hand, said, no, you shouldn't surge at all.
He agreed with Matthew Ho.
He said, this is ridiculous.
We should be out of there.
We should be spending this money making America great again.
And he tweeted dozens and dozens and dozens of times all through the Obama years that he shouldn't have done the escalation at all.
And then, in fact, in 2012 or 2011 and 12, when the generals were trying to resist the drawdown on the schedule that they had promised Obama, Trump, who obviously absolutely hated Obama and had this personal vendetta against him, took Obama's side.
And on Twitter, told the generals, said they should shut up and obey the commander in chief because he's right on this.
It's time to wind this thing down.
So we know that he knows better.
Maybe he doesn't know everything about, you know, the Tajiks this and the Pashtuns that.
But he knows that this is a war in a landlocked country full of mountains and deserts.
And it's been going on for so long.
And the fact we haven't won yet is proof that we're not going to.
And it's time to go ahead and end this thing.
We know he feels that way about it.
And we know that last year, basically, McMaster and Mattis rolled him and forced him after he kicked the can down the road for what, eight months.
They finally forced him into this escalation.
But now, as MSNBC put it this morning, I don't know if you saw this.
They attacked him and said Trump's impatience with the war in Afghanistan is making him want to negotiate with the Taliban.
And so it looks like the McMaster, you know, McMaster's fired.
And his plan that, well, let's just keep fighting for another four years and then see about talking with the Taliban then is apparently canceled.
And Trump has apparently won some interagency conflict in the White House there and has said, no, we want to move forward, talks with the Taliban.
We know just last week, one of his representatives met with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar.
And they're beginning talks and in fact, even saying that the Kabul government has to stay out of it.
We're going to go ahead and talk with the Taliban and come to some kind of resolution.
So that's clearly what you're supporting in your article intact here.
Do you think it'll work?
Do you think I mean, the Taliban have said we won't even talk to you until you leave.
But apparently that's not true.
They're willing to talk now.
But so what kind of progress do you really think can be made here in terms of negotiating?
Here's what has to be understood.
You say, will it work?
There is nothing that is going to work in terms of an outcome we want.
We cannot do that.
So the first understanding is that we can't make anything come out according to our hand.
What we have to do, though, is we have to say what is in the best interest of the United States.
How can we accomplish, given the circumstances and the situation and all the history you just went through?
What can we do right now to to make things as good as we can for the United States?
That has to be the operative.
And with that objective, you can do something to succeed.
And that is, as I said in that article, to withdraw.
Now, the first charge that's going to make with anybody is you can't just hand it back to the Taliban.
You can't surrender and all this kind of stuff.
OK, here's something that has to be understood.
And unfortunately, the only way to prove this is to do it.
Before 9-11, before we came in there, we were there.
These Afghans were in the middle of a civil war where they had been fighting since the Soviets left.
OK, so we interrupted a civil war with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance fighting there.
That basically has never stopped.
So those those sides have continued to fight even after we have come in there.
And if we do withdraw, it's going to go back to again, basically, you know, those sides having to figure this stuff out.
But now with another almost two decades of time.
But as we've seen in recent days, within the last two months, there has been a couple of really hopeful, positive signs within the Afghan people and within the warring parties that they are really sick of, not the fighting since 2011, but the fighting since 1989.
They are sick and tired of all this stuff.
And they they they had a truce which went way beyond what anybody expected, where the actual troops on either side, both the Taliban and the government troops, were taking selfies together.
They were visiting areas within each's control that they hadn't been in for for many, many years.
And they were safely able to go and come back.
And you saw that they they actually said, you know, we're kind of sick of war.
Now, that made the leaders on both sides really nervous.
And when that truce ended, they've gone back to fighting again.
But it has shown that in the right circumstances, they themselves can figure out some way to coexist and to come together.
We can't get in the way of that.
We've stopped that from happening by artificially propping up the Afghan government.
So they don't have to make the kind of hard decisions and negotiations with the Taliban because they know that they have the power to continue to resist.
Once we remove that and now then they are on their own to figure this out when their life is on the line and then their future is at stake and it has to be done, something that they can handle.
Then they'll come to an accommodation and an agreement.
That has to happen for them.
But for us, we have to stop the bleeding of American troops and stop the bleeding of American taxpayer dollars and to shut this thing down and to use our ISR and all these other things to make sure that no attacks emanate from there to come to the United States.
But you are never, never going to stop that by having troops on the ground.
ISR?
Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, basically all the government power, whether it's the satellites, whether it's ground intelligence or even partner cooperation with some of our regional allies, all those things together to prevent and to observe anything that may be forming, as we did prior to our entry there.
We were actually able to track Osama bin Laden and had him in our crosshairs one day and we could have taken him out long before 9-11 had we decided to pull that trigger.
So we have the ability to do that then and the same way we keep ourselves safe from threats that emanate all over the rest of the world.
So that doesn't change and there's nothing special about the dirt and the sands and the mountains in Afghanistan as opposed to those in the millions of square miles in that part of the world.
Yeah, I mean, if anything, this is as far as you could ever get from the United States of America.
They act as though there's some magic porthole from Nangarhar province to Boston Logan Airport.
Right.
But it's exactly the opposite case.
And the Taliban have said forever, right, that they've already promised, not even as part of a negotiation, but even in advance of any negotiations, that they would never let al-Qaeda come back.
And even just for their own interest, to keep them from getting bombed back off the face of the earth again.
And that makes total sense from their own perspective, not from right and wrong, not from what we're forcing them, because they weren't part of the 9-11 conspiracy.
They were – they just allowed bin Laden to stay on their territory.
Well, they've paid a horrific price for that decision, and they would never want to do that because that drew them into something, a fight they didn't have.
They didn't want to fight the United States.
They were just trying to control the territory where they live.
That's all they've ever wanted.
They never have any transnational interest.
They don't now, and they have no hesitation to tell people that because it's true and it's in their interest.
Why would they want to go outside?
They just want to live in their territory.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if you saw this report by the Overseas Development Institute or something, this nonprofit NGO-type thing that came out a couple of months ago about the Taliban shadow government that basically rules all of Pashtunistan as it exists now.
They have their own court systems, their own police, their own everything.
They already – they call it the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The Taliban really already control everything but the provincial capitals in the predominantly Pashtun areas of the country.
And it seems like there's kind of debate.
Ghani, the president, has said that, well, maybe we'll just recognize the Taliban as a political party and welcome them on into Kabul and into the parliament.
It seemed like maybe a better idea would be to just call off the fight against them and recognize their autonomy in the predominantly Pashtun regions rather than invite them into Kabul, which is – might really create the circumstances for further conflict and a battle over who controls the central government there.
Maybe just go ahead and let them take the predominantly Pashtun regions.
They don't have to necessarily have full independence, but they could have real federalism and autonomy and just let the fight die out right then and there.
Yeah, and you may be exactly right.
I mean that may be the best course of action, but what I keep going back to over and over, that's what they have to figure out.
And as long as we keep our troops there basically protecting Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar and a couple of other major cities, which you may have seen in the press the other day that apparently U.S. military forces and diplomatic forces have said, all right, let's kind of consolidate and let's just keep these main places.
As long as we do that and Ghani and all those others know that Kabul itself is not going to fall, although it may be subject to suicide attacks here and there, it's not going to fall.
Then they know they don't have to go and make those kinds of decisions because there's a big dispute when Ghani says stuff like that because there's a whole other constituency over there that howls about, no, that's going to say they don't have to be responsible for all the terrible things they've done in the past.
And we'll never – all that, OK, that's not resolvable as long as we stay there to keep that propped up.
But as long as – as soon as we remove that and now that they have to come to some kind of an accommodation, they will.
But it will be their accommodation.
It will be their way, and they will live with the results, and that is what has a shot at succeeding, nothing that we're going to impose from the outside.
Yeah, well, and you know, too, if you go back to the 1990s, it was Bill Clinton's government in agreement with the Saudis and the Pakistanis that said that we don't want a compromise.
We want the Taliban to win outright and destroy the Northern Alliance and consolidate power over the entire country.
That way only they can guarantee the security of the pipeline they wanted to build from Tajikistan down to the port of Karachi.
And so without the U.S. taking that position back in the 1990s, they may well have settled the civil war with the Taliban controlling, you know, basically the predominantly Pashtun areas and let the Northern Alliance control the rest.
It was American intervention in the first place that said that, no, you have to keep on fighting until you're done winning, the policy that then George Bush turned around and reversed.
Yeah, it was good until it wasn't.
And then, yeah, that's that just underscores the futility of trying to impose our will inside the country or inside the politics of any other country.
It's never, never worked more than just periodic tactical successes.
But then it always comes back to biting the butt like you just described.
Yeah.
And by the way, anybody doubts that I got the quotes in the book from the Bill Clinton administration officials testifying before Congress, talking directly to The New York Times, et cetera, that this is what we're going for.
We want the Taliban to win outright.
So as crazy as that sounds, you know, now going back.
Right.
And now.
So here's the real problem, though, Danny, is that this isn't about the Taliban.
This isn't even about Afghanistan.
This is about Russia and China.
And this is about the middle part of North America being the world empire, the dominant force in Asia, in Central Asia.
And if the Chinese want to build their new Belt Road Initiative from Shanghai to Lisbon, we have to prevent that.
And we have to stay in Afghanistan to keep the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians out.
Right.
And that really exposes another extraordinary futility that we try to do of thinking that our military presence there actually does inflect those things.
And it doesn't.
The same exact concept is on display right now in Syria, where there is people that are doing everything in their power to make sure that Trump doesn't return those 2,000 troops that were there to help take Raqqa.
After Raqqa was taken, their utility there was finished and they should have been withdrawn.
But people now say when you ask, press them off record, oh, well, that's because we have to keep an eye on Iran.
And so if we ever do anything Iran, we need to have that.
No, we're not going to influence Iran.
Those troops on the ground there don't do anything but defend themselves.
You can't use them as a force to do anything.
So it's a fool's errand to think that you can actually influence Iran from a handful of people on the dirt in Syria, just like it's a fiction that you can do anything to Russia or Iran or China by keeping troops, a handful of troops there in Afghanistan.
It just all it does is just suck down money and it fools people into thinking that they have an influence when they don't.
And then we fail to do what we want to do anyway.
It's absolutely crazy.
All right, you guys, Tom Woods has been trying to get me to do this forever on Facebook, but I hate Facebook.
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Thanks.
Yeah, well, it seems like it really could be a trip wire for further conflict where we don't need to have one.
So, yeah, that it could do.
It could it could draw us further in.
That's a fact.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Look, the let's say the Iranians decide they want to go and, quote, protect Herod in the West.
Right.
And so then, no, we can't allow that.
Now we're going to bomb Tehran over an encroachment in Afghanistan where we don't belong in the first place and where the American people don't even know where Herod is and don't give a damn anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
We take so much strategic risk by doing that with not even the possibility of gaining anything for the country.
So that's why one of the reasons, frankly, I was I'll just be honest.
I voted for Trump because he was saying no more dumb wars, no more regime change.
And we're not going to do this overseas stuff anymore.
And that was his his instincts are right.
And I just discourages me that there's always enough powerful people around him from the status quo Washington establishment that have, you know, talked him out of these things.
But his he's right.
I mean, that's the that gives you a shot at building up American strength by reducing our strategic risk, lowering our cost and allowing us to actually do things that can improve our country.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, you know, at the same time, he said enough of overthrowing these secular dictators.
He also said we're going to completely take the gloves off when it comes to the terrorists, which could mean anything from Al Qaeda to ISIS to the Taliban or anyone who resists us.
And so we saw it was in the Pentagon press release that they put out through Voice of America the other day that said that in the last year, there have been more airstrikes in Afghanistan, even than during the height of the war in 2011.
That's true.
And what has it done for us?
Nothing.
Has it lowered the Taliban numbers?
No, they've exploded.
They're up allegedly up around 70,000, according to Afghan intelligence.
And and the casualties to the to the Afghan people are at a record high.
So that's not something to brag about.
But yet that's the way it ends up getting past is that we're being strong when in fact, it shows that we're producing the opposite for our country.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, when Trump came in, he could have just said, you know what, this is all stupid Bush and weakling Obama's fault, and it ain't my fault.
And I'm just going to call this thing off.
But now he's kind of taken ownership of the war.
And now, you know, and especially with the way that the liberal media has just been so twisted over this Russia stuff.
Like I said earlier, MSNBC this morning is attacking Trump for wanting to get out of Afghanistan.
This is a sign of weakness, a sign of his childlike impatience with the situation that he wants to get out of here.
And politically speaking, that could be a real problem for Donald Trump if they're going to attack him for ending the war.
But they won't say a damn word if he keeps the war going on, then maybe politically the best decision is to just leave things where they are on autopilot and just keep going at least until the next election.
And here's the reality.
That is probably the case if it follows that path.
But the reality is if he just said, you know what, forget it, screw all this, screw MSNBC, screw what anybody says.
My instincts are this is right.
If he does it, there will be an upfront price that things will turn chaotic.
There will no doubt be a change of situations over there as because of our military power, maybe the Taliban makes some gains.
That's a fact.
But it's not what happens immediately.
It's what happens over time.
And the stasis will return that existed before 9-11 where it's going to be those forces in the country trying to figure it out.
And nobody's going to gain ascendancy over another.
And if they finally do come to an accommodation, then it's going to become stable.
And in any case, we're going to be outside of that and we're no longer going to be subject to it.
And the fact is it will disappear because it will no longer be hitting American media radar and we'll move on as though we were never there.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this isn't that popular, but I think they should just take all of the staff of the Center for a New American Security and carpet bomb Kandahar province with them.
We'll start with Victoria Newland and Michelle Flournoy and John Nagel and we'll see how they like it.
Yeah, exactly.
And then, you know, for all those people who say we should stay there, let me let me see them send their sons and daughters there.
Let me see them risk their family members to tell me that's actually a good thing for the country.
If you're willing to to risk your own family members, then I'll say, OK, then, wow, that's legitimate.
You really do.
But unfortunately, they're only willing to resist or expose our family members, the American troops, the people who don't have political power.
And that's one of the big problems I got with all that.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, there's been I guess 10 guys have died in the last year, something like that.
So that numbers I mean, Americans, American GIs over there, mostly Green Berets fighting in Nangarhar province.
And, you know, as a libertarian, I'm an individualist.
So that number might sound low to a lot of people.
People like to measure, you know, in comparisons and in proportions and this kind of thing.
But if that's your boy and he died over there fighting the CIA's old friend, Jalal ad-Din Haqqani and his men in Nangarhar, and you know that it was for nothing.
You know that your boy signed up thinking, well, I'm going to go defend the country, fight for freedom, and that he trusts the adults to decide whether and when to send him off.
It sure seems like a hell of a betrayal to me.
Yeah, I could not more strongly agree with you.
That's one of the things that irks me to no end when they hear there's only been 10 people killed this year.
Well, that's because we have fewer troops over there, but one person killed for a mission that doesn't help our country is one way too many.
And we should not sacrifice one more drop of American blood for something that doesn't benefit our country.
Well, and you know, the other thing, too, is the actual enemy over there, they're civilians, too, right?
Just because a guy from the neighborhood picks up an AK-47, that doesn't make him a soldier.
That just makes him a local Nangarhar province patriot defending his country from foreign invasion.
But so their lives are all forfeit as hell, right?
Even, you know, their women and their children, too, if they're, quote, collateral damage.
But, you know, for one thing, when they dropped that Moab bomb, it was revenge, really.
Everybody said they were sending a signal to Korea.
But I think, actually, the decision to drop that Moab had been delegated all the way down the chain of command.
And it was the Special Operations Command that decided to drop that Moab bomb.
They killed all these people.
And then the experts came out immediately and said, a local expert wrote in the New York Times, that this was the best thing that ever happened to the Islamic State in Nangarhar province.
They went right on their radio station and said, you see how seriously the Americans take us?
That's because we're the best.
That's because we're the baddest.
Join up today.
And it's not that these guys want to get killed by a Moab bomb.
It's that they want to fight anyone who would dare to drop a Moab bomb on them.
So all those men that were killed only served to be a better recruitment for future enemies over there.
It accomplished absolutely nothing.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And when the people have gone in there with the camera crews afterwards, you see it didn't even have that much physical damage.
It just killed a few people, as you've said several times.
But the strategic impact was absolutely zero.
Well, actually, it was negative, as you pointed out there also, because it does help to reinforce all these negative stereotypes that are thrown out there.
So we did not benefit in the least.
We were harmed by our own missile, our bomb.
Yeah.
All right.
So tell me, man, politically speaking in Washington, D.C., I know you're with defense priorities now.
What kind of action is taking place in terms of lobbying, in terms of briefing members of Congress, in terms of making any kind of push inside the beltway to get these people to go ahead and admit that – to decide that it'd be better now, even for them politically, to call this thing off rather than keep it going?
Well, our organization actually is doing quite a bit of that, and we have been doing a bunch.
We have events on the Hill for both members, usually in a private meeting, but also for staff on a larger meeting.
We've been publishing op-eds like crazy.
Almost all of us have been writing stuff on that a lot.
I actually – and I can't say anything out public right now, but I was actually invited by a certain senator here in a couple of weeks to come talk to him about the Afghans, and that certainly has excited us because maybe they're taking more of an interest in this because this was at their initiative, not ours.
So maybe there's more of an interest in that right now, and I think that Trump, with this announcement, that they're pulling the troops back into a smaller number of places, I mean that could be setting the stage for withdrawal.
So we want to do everything we can to reinforce the president's instincts that this is the best for the United States.
And the whole politics thing, the longer it goes without resolution, I think more people are willing to say, wait a minute.
You know what?
You've been telling me this stuff for 17, 18 years, and it's no different today than it was five, six years ago.
Enough is enough.
So hopefully we can get that out there and more radio shows like this where more people get to hear just common sense and go, wait a minute.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Then maybe the politics can catch up to the American people and say, you know what?
No more sacrificing, no more loss of blood, no more loss of treasure for something that's only going to harm us more.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there were reports that General Mattis is on his way out as secretary of defense.
And in fact, I think the first big report of that came just after he announced that we're not leaving Afghanistan.
We're not going anywhere.
Forget about that.
And I don't know if this is part of that or not.
But I think that, you know, it's clear that this is part of what Trump hated about.
McMaster was the way that they pushed so hard for the escalation a year ago.
And with these recent announcements, I mean, this is just Kremlin ology trying to read the tea leaves and figure out what's really going on up there.
But it makes me wonder, for example, what's Bolton's position on Afghanistan?
And maybe he just doesn't give a damn about Afghanistan.
I'd settle for that.
Huh?
Right.
Yeah, I do.
Whether you're reading of the tea leaves is right or not, whether that was causality involved, who knows?
But the fact that that Secretary Mattis has been so outspoken on, you know, emphatically saying we're not leaving and all this kind of thing that I you never know what may come after that.
But at least there would be a shot for something to be less emphatic.
And maybe someone else would come in and say, you know, I'm taking a fresh look at this and this makes no sense.
We're shutting this down and actually going to pay attention to things that matter to our defense.
That's my hope.
Yeah.
And, you know, I always thought this about Obama, too, that if Obama had said, if you don't like it, Gates, Petraeus, McChrystal, you're fired.
I'm not doing this, that that would have been a politically winning strategy.
The American people were over the Afghan war by 2009 already anyway.
And Obama could have just said, look, Bush already lost this thing.
It's already an unwinnable conflict.
And I'm not going to, as Matthew Ho warned and as you showed later, I'm not going to throw these lives away for nothing when this battle can't be won.
You know how I know?
Because I looked at a map because I know better.
And and that if he'd done that, that that would have been just as advantageous politically as giving in to them.
And it seems like the same thing with Trump, too.
He could be Trump the great for a day if he would just tell Mattis, you're fired.
Anybody wants to be my secretary of defense?
Your first priority is getting the hell out of Afghanistan, that the American people would support that over MSNBC's dead body.
Yeah, I think I think that's a fact.
But the reason why that didn't happen is because Obama came in and for all the good things many people want to say about him.
He had absolutely no personal understanding of military affairs or of foreign affairs to any degree.
And you had McChrystal with the famous leaked story telling that, you know, everything's going to be over and we're going to lose if we don't get these troops.
And then in the debates you had from Jonathan Alter's book and some personal experiences I've had of people who were part of the meetings, told me that you had Gates, Petraeus and Clinton all locked arms telling the president, no, you've got to go here.
And then on the other side, you had Biden and there was a three star general and a couple of other people who were not of the same stature as those other.
And he could not Obama could not didn't have the courage and the self-confidence to say these lower ranking guys are right.
And all these famous people on the left side of this argument are wrong.
And so he just went with them into disastrous effects.
The hope is that for all the bad things that Trump does and a lot of the horrible things that he says, you know, in many cases, he also has a penchant to to not care what people say.
And maybe he's got the he's the one guy who could have the chutzpah to say exactly what you just did.
All right.
You know what?
Screw all of you.
I don't care what you say.
This is dumb.
We're going to shut it down.
That's almost my only hope.
Yeah, I think so, too, and especially because he's a Republican.
And I mean, you know, all this stuff about him being a pro-Russia traitor and all that is really undermining the the political, you know, so-called calculus there where his right flank is covered.
You know, he's he's a rich Republican capitalist from New York.
He's not some, you know, wimpy Obama community activist or whatever the hell.
He's a red, white and blue patriot, maybe to a fault.
But if he wants to get out of Afghanistan, no one's going to be able to spin that like, oh, it's just because he's so weak.
He's, you know, this kind of thing.
Here's the here's the here's what he has in his pocket.
That's even better is that his base is going to follow him whatever.
And if he tells his base, look, I've done some calculations and assessment.
This is stupid.
We're getting out.
That base will support him.
So you can count.
I mean, if Trump comes and says, hey, by the way, the sun came up this morning.
The left would say, oh, he's lying again.
And all this, you know, they would be opposed to him even on something, no matter what it is.
But he has the ability to get his base behind him.
And other people, even though they might not like it, can see the wisdom of that and see the futility of doing the opposite.
So he could make this happen if he just if he makes that bold move.
He will have support among his supporters.
Yeah.
And after all, I mean, it's 2018.
In the comments under that MSNBC tweet this morning of that, you know, Trump's childlike impatience or whatever, how they phrased it.
The people were saying, look, I hate Trump, but this war in Afghanistan has got to end.
I mean, these were these are MSNBC's people saying, what the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan?
Are you kidding me?
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, that's that's even that even further underscores that possibility.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all that you've done to try to stop this war and including coming on my show to talk about it today.
I really do appreciate a lot.
Danny Scott's always my pleasure.
I'm very grateful for what you do and that you never, never give up the fight.
I've always admired you for that.
Thanks very much, man.
Appreciate that.
All right, you guys, that is the great Daniel L. Davis, former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and author of this great article at the American conservative dot com.
Time to talk to the Taliban.
All right, Joe, that's it for the show.
Check me out at Libertarian Institute dot org.
Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com.
Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
