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All right, you guys.
Introducing our friend Reese Ehrlich, the foreign correspondent.
And we republish him almost every time at antiwar.com.
He's the author of Inside Syria, the backstory of their civil war and what the world can expect.
And what's the new one again, the revised?
Yeah, the new book will be out in September, next month.
The Iran Agenda Today.
The Iran Agenda, yes.
Inside, the real story of inside Iran and what's wrong with U.S. policy.
Great.
I already know what it's going to say.
Okay, mostly.
Well, you might be surprised.
Well, I can't wait to take a look at that.
I hear about Sean Penn and Iran and other exciting things.
Read my book.
Oh, yeah, that sounds really exciting.
You just sold another one.
All right.
The Iran Agenda Today, coming out in about a month and a half or so.
Okay.
All right.
So Afghanistan has become Trump's failed narco state, reads the headline at antiwar.com.
So let's start with the latest and greatest failure there.
Am I too hyperbolic to compare the attack on Ghazni province and Ghazni city the other day, the last few days, as sort of a junior Tet offensive here, making a pretty big statement on the part of the Taliban?
I don't know if it's exactly a Tet offensive as what occurred in Vietnam, but it certainly was a major blow to the U.S. and to the Afghan government.
For your listeners who may not have been following it in detail, about a week ago the Taliban attacked Ghazni city, which is a key city partway between Kabul, the capital, and Helmand province, and seized it, took over government buildings, took over a police station, killed a lot of soldiers and police.
Some of the Afghan soldiers just gave up en masse.
And then after wrecking all this damage, pulled back.
And they've done that in a number of other cities around the country.
And militarily it's a sign of how bad a shape the U.S. and its allies are in Afghanistan these days.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I was talking with a friend of mine who's a former Marine who was saying, you know, in the Tet offensive they lost all over the place.
But it was just the fact that they had tried it.
It was such an audacious attack in so many different points at the same time.
And it was a huge public relations win in the U.S.
Here the Taliban actually made many more tactical gains on the ground there.
Or I don't know, strategic or how you bring it down.
They seized the city, like you say, long enough to say, ha, we seized it, hoist the flag, and then turn around and leave again because they don't want to face the B1s head on from fixed positions.
That's no good.
But they didn't get their PR win because nobody cares, Reese, except you and me.
Well, people do care.
You know, it's very hard to write history while it's happening.
Having been a journalist and a book author now for a while, I think the U.S. has been losing the war in Afghanistan or has lost the war for quite some time.
And what we're seeing now in the battles like in Ghazni is one more example of that.
The U.S. has now about somewhere around 14,000 troops or so officially acknowledged in Afghanistan.
And it's simply not enough to take on the Taliban, who have been growing in both support and in terms of military weaponry and so on.
And if Obama couldn't win the war with 100,000 troops when he was in power, there's no way Trump is going to win with 14,000 troops.
And we're going to see continued death of American soldiers.
Over a trillion dollars now has been spent just in Afghanistan.
That's not counting Iraq and these other wars that are going on.
You know, that's our money, our taxpayer money that could be used for productive things inside the U.S. if we're just wasting it in these wars abroad.
And, of course, the needless loss of lives of American soldiers and Afghan civilians.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a headline the other day from Votel.
I guess we haven't heard too much from the new general taking over the war for Nicholson.
I forgot his name, Scott something or something, Scott or something.
Anyway, but Votel, who's the general in charge of Central Command, his over boss there, said, oh, yeah, no, we don't see any reason to change tactics or strategy or anything.
We know what we're doing.
We just got to hang in there.
And this same kind of thing 17 years into this thing where, you know, pretty much everybody, I don't know, everyone who's not inside the political culture and class in D.C., I guess, is over it and wants to come home from this thing.
And their attitude is, yeah, we're just going to keep fighting.
We're going to try to hold on to the status quo for as long as we can.
And then what?
I don't know.
Nothing.
Collect another star for his shirt.
Then they blame somebody else for having lost the war.
They blame the politicians or they blame the media or they find somebody to blame.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
If their solution is to have a permanent occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. is still a very powerful military power.
And it has air and missile superiority and drones and so on.
And it can cause a lot of damage in Afghanistan.
But the people of the U.S. and certainly the people of Afghanistan aren't going to stand for it.
And that's where I think the Tet analogy is accurate, which is that at a certain point, people already the U.S. popular opinion, opinion polls show the U.S. people overwhelmingly oppose the war in Afghanistan.
And what kind of a democracy we have when people overwhelmingly share a view and there's nobody in Washington willing to carry it through.
That's what that's what happened with the Vietnam War.
So what's happened with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's only one senator who's willing to harp on Afghanistan all the time.
That's Rand Paul.
And, you know, I hate to say, but we can't really count on him.
But at least, you know, he seems to be consistent on this.
But there's no one else who's cut the stones to just stand up there and say, hey, yeah.
And you know what?
So here.
What about the cynicism of these generals and these politicians?
When, you know, just one of the soldiers killed the other day, I think it was one of the Green Berets, was shot in the back in a green on blue attack, as they call it, where the Afghan National Army or police or whichever group that they're training up there end up killing our guys.
You know, there was a piece in The New York Times, I guess, a year or something ago, where they talked about the Marines back down in Helmand province.
And there's one guy on duty at all time.
His job is to be the guardian angel.
In other words, his job is to sit there on a tower or on a rooftop with a sniper rifle, holding it on, you know, his crosshairs on the heads of all the guys our guys are training in order to protect the guys who are training them.
I mean, what in the world?
And then, you know, this keeps not working.
You know, I mean, the fact that they would even have that as a setup at all and not just call that defeat at that point, but then it doesn't even work.
And then these guys are shot in the back anyway.
What the hell is that?
Yeah, it tells you that when you can't even trust your own allies that you've been training, how far, how long you have lost this war.
You know, that was at one time one of Donald Trump's specific complaints, if you go back and check his Afghanistan tweets, was he was saying green on blue attacks, the guys we train shoot our guys in the back.
This is madness.
He's the president now.
Yeah.
And he could bring the troops home tomorrow if he wanted to.
But as we know, he made one set of promises when he was running for office and carried out a whole other set of policies once he's gotten in.
And it's most obvious in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, various wars in the Middle East.
He left the impression that he was some kind of isolationist or some kind of person who would be changing radically these wars abroad.
And in fact, he's in every single case, he's escalated.
There are more troops now in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq today than there were under Obama.
Not a little detail that he ever cares to go into to justify.
He even sent infantry into Somalia, where before it had at least only been special operations forces.
Not that that's really better, but just that this is qualitatively worse.
Yeah, exactly.
Man.
So, and you know what?
So back to your point about what you said about he could end it.
Because people are going to argue, I don't know, for whatever partisan reason or whatever wrong bet they made, that, yeah, no, because, you know, he has to compromise and he's got to do like Nixon and increase airstrikes as he pulls the troops out.
He's got to he's playing third or fourth dimensional chess like Barack Obama.
And so somehow he really is going to end it.
But you just got to wait till the day comes.
I'm not sure Trump could play checkers, let alone three dimensional chess.
At the same time, though, he really doesn't even have to write it down.
He actually could just belch out, you know, that I want all the troops home by September the 25th.
That's it.
Everybody out of Afghanistan now move.
And they would have to do it.
Right.
Or what?
Or do it.
That would be interesting.
First of all, I don't think he's going to do it because he made it.
I don't either.
I'm just talking about the contrast between what he's not doing and what actually is possible.
But is it the president ordered in troops without a congressional approval so he can order out troops without congressional approval?
I think what would happen in practice is that some Republicans would object and the Democrats would try to outflank Trump from the right.
They say, aha, Trump, the Republican is weak on national security.
It's the same thing we see happening with Russia and their attacks on the right from Trump on that issue.
And the generals, the war industries and a certain sector of the powerful folks in Washington would say, aha, he's going to lose.
Trump is responsible for losing Afghanistan and the Taliban terrorists are going to come to power.
And once the terrorists are in power, that's going to threaten the American people.
So they would try and do a job on him if somehow he ever did decide to pull out.
And it would take some political consistency and principle to proceed to pull out.
Look what happened when Obama was pulling the troops out of Iraq in the end of 2011.
That was a signed agreement between the U.S. and the Iraqi government that was signed by President Bush to pull out the troops.
So there was actually a framework, a legal framework for pulling troops out, for closing the bases, et cetera, et cetera.
And Obama got tremendous flack from the right wing in the United States and even from some of his own Democratic Party people for simply living up to an agreement.
So Trump would have problems trying to pull out.
There's no question about that.
That's not a reason to not do it.
I mean, he should do it.
But you've got to be realistic.
The folks in the pro-war folks in Washington are still quite powerful.
Yeah.
Except when it goes to just what a poor president this guy is, because he actually probably can't see that where he has this huge advantage that Obama didn't have.
I mean, all this Russiagate stuff notwithstanding that, well, and even including it and whatever, withstanding or not, that just, oh, yeah, Nancy Pelosi says we have to stay in the war.
Well, I say we don't.
And, you know, you want to say the war has failed?
Yeah, of course it's failed because stupid Bush and weak Obama failed.
I'm just and you know what?
I gave McMaster's plan a chance for a year and the war's lost.
Just like I told you it was lost 10 years ago.
He was right 10 years ago when he said it over and over and over again.
That's all he has to go back on.
And just and the politics of, yeah, right.
A bunch of Democrats want to stay in the war, huh?
You go fight Nancy Pelosi and whatever and just make a joke out of that.
They wouldn't get anywhere with that.
And you know what?
I still think the same thing about Obama.
I think Obama should have asked for Petraeus and Gates resignation and just said, that's it.
We're not doing this.
I don't care what you say.
And to John McCain, I beat you by 10 points because the American people wanted me to decide this, not you.
So go and scream, you know, go to your little ranch that you got from your wife and and cry about it.
Senator, I'm the president, not you.
And it would have been great.
It would have been a huge political victory.
Instead, he rolled over and he didn't really lose for it because all the all his fans were looking the other way and the Republicans were placated.
But I think he could have made a great victory out of the same thing.
But certainly Donald Trump could be in a Republican.
He's in a much better position to do it.
And having not voted for any of this, haven't been, you know, a businessman before this, not a senator.
So, no, I agree.
But he doesn't have the vision to see that he could do that and that he could actually win and that it would be good politics to do so.
You know, yeah, I think just similar with North Korea and some of these other crises, if he was actually serious about trying to resolve the issues by pulling the troops home, that'd be great.
He'd have popular support.
Right.
And as a Republican, he could do it probably more easily than a Democrat.
You know, the problems.
I'm glad we've all agreed on that.
And I presume you're going to send this program to Trump.
Yeah.
So he listens to me, of course.
No.
Yeah.
No, I mean, that's just the whole irony of this thing.
Right.
Is the reason why people love him is because they believe all his nonsense about the good things he's going to do that he never quite ever gets around to.
And then but it's the same reason that the war party hates him.
It's the same reason the entire political center is at war against the elected president right now because they took him at his word, too.
He said NATO's obsolete.
I mean, he never said he was going to get out of NATO, but he called it obsolete and just pure panic.
He said he wants to be even handed in Palestine, even handed.
Oh, no.
And so they just go into full panic mode about him and they didn't notice that he just talks out of both sides of his mouth.
He's just trying to get power, just like everybody else lies in that same position.
You know, I don't know.
They didn't notice that he's bestest friends with Sheldon Adelson and Benjamin Netanyahu.
They really thought, oh, no, he's going to be even handed.
Yeah, because Donald Trump cares so much about Palestinians that he's going to be even handed, which would mean, of course, telling the Israelis to stop with the settlements and get out of the West Bank, etc.
Right.
He had no intention of doing that ever.
And yet people believe in him and people are terrified of him over nonsense.
Why do you think you're in touch with some Trump supporters?
I presume people call on your show.
And so why do you think people believe him despite the record?
Well, because he's literally he's not one of them.
Right.
Literally.
He stomped Jeb and Hillary both.
And we'd all been told these are going to be your choices.
That's it.
It's either, you know, Bill Clinton's wife or George Bush's brother.
And you're just stuck with it.
This is the center.
This is American democracy.
And you're going to like it or lump it.
And, you know, he was an outsider who was capable of stopping them.
And so there's so much value in that.
You know, you got to admit he stopped Jeb and Hillary Clinton.
That's borderline heroic.
Except then it's just the irony of who he actually is, you know, compared to what we really need.
So, you know, there's there's a lot to appreciate about him, you know, denouncing really running against the legacy of the entire post Cold War regime of, you know, the Clinton Bush Obama regime and the way that they ran things.
And people have a right to be mad about it.
You know, all of it is basically horrible.
The financial crash and the all of wars and all of the rest of this.
So, you know, not that he ever really know, you know, knew how to make America great again or any of that or set America on a path of what anyone could agree it ought to be instead of this.
But, you know, I don't know.
And then look at what he's up against.
The entire consensus is for the status quo in terms of what the media says and what, you know, all of the arguments against him.
You know, the worst thing that he could do would be to ratchet down the Cold War with Russia.
Yeah.
No, I mean, that's my point, too, is it's all just based around everybody's hopes and fears rather than anything realistic.
You know, it's the same thing with Obama.
People loved Obama for what they imagined he was not for all the people he was killing.
You know, that's a big part of it, too, is all the worst stuff that Trump has done is in continuing all of Obama's wars.
That's all the real worst stuff.
And so the partisans on the Republican side, they don't really want to criticize, you know, the Obama and the center for that, because Trump's continuing it.
And the liberals don't want to attack him.
They can't slink back to the anti-war movement because all Trump's doing is escalating the wars that he got from Obama.
And so they don't either want to be a hypocrite or call out their guy.
And so they stay silent.
You see, especially in Yemen, you know, we're just they just won't cover it.
MSNBC won't cover it.
They could be beating Donald Trump over the head all day with war crimes in Yemen, but they can't.
Because they supported it under Obama.
Yeah, or at least they refuse to say a word about it under him, refuse to criticize it.
And of course, if we made him talk about it, they would just say Iran is behind the Houthis or some nonsense and make it worse.
You know, anyway, we're screwed.
Anyway, let's talk more about the situation in Afghanistan.
Tell me about General Dostum and his triumphant return.
Yes, General Dostum is the first vice president of Afghanistan.
He fled the country in the middle of the night over a year ago under charges that he had beaten, tortured and raped one of his main critics.
He has a long history as a drug runner, as a narco trafficker, as a human rights violator.
And he was one of the warlords prior to the Taliban taking power.
And then after the U.S. invasion, he and his base among the Uzbek minority within Afghanistan became very powerful warlord.
And like many of these other politicians in Afghanistan, made their money off the heroin trade.
And that's how they fund their militias that exist outside the standing army.
And so he fled the country.
Recently, some of his supporters in the Uzbek minority were demonstrating and causing a lot of trouble in a number of cities.
He was allowed to come back in from exile in Turkey.
And now it's all kissy kissy makeup time.
He's back in the good graces with the president Ashraf Ghani and with other members of the cabinet.
And all is forgiven, apparently, at a time when the military situation is deteriorating.
And you wonder why the government of Afghanistan doesn't have any popular support among the Afghan people.
And you look at guys like Dostum and you see why.
These are the elected politicians.
They're corrupt.
They're hated.
They're human rights abusers.
And everybody in Afghanistan knows it.
Yet the U.S. continues to work with these guys and has from the very, very beginning of 2001 in October when the U.S. troops first arrived.
You know, another one of these is.
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Some from the hispy Islami group Googled in Hekmatyar, who was a former CIA guy and at least claimed at one point that he took the CIA's money and then still helped Osama bin Laden escape anyway back in 2001, which I don't know if that was really true, but he was laughing about it.
So maybe.
But they had to make a deal with him to let him in because, well, it's either that or keep fighting him.
But then they let him in and now he's back in.
And so that's a problem, too, you know?
Yeah, well, that's another good example.
He was the main CIA supported warlord in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that started in the late 70s and into the 80s.
And he was had the largest, most, most religiously reactionary, most human rights abusing of all the Mujahideen groups at that time.
And the CIA backed him because he was the most anti-communist and appeared to have the most popular support.
And when the Soviet Union was forced to withdraw, he became one of the warlords of the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban.
And then when the U.S. invaded, he fought the U.S.
He was had flipped and went from pro-CIA, pro-U.S. to being part of the insurgency that allied with the Taliban.
So, you know, these guys, it's incredible their history and who the U.S. is willing to kind of deal with.
And then more recently, the U.S. and the Afghan government kind of deal with Hekmatyar to let him come in from the cold.
And he's now living in Kabul, as far as I know, allegedly allied with the current government.
But he's no apologies, no reckoning for all the things that he did previously.
And yet one more narco warlord in the pro-U.S. camp.
Yeah.
Well, and Ray, like, what's the alternative to negotiating with him was keep fighting and that's no solution.
But it's just that these are the guys who they're left to deal with, guys like Hekmatyar.
And at least part of the original deal, I'm not exactly sure how this worked out, was that he was going to be able to keep all of his armed militia with him.
And they would, you know, still be their own armed independent force separate from the ANA or any official police function.
But just, yeah, these are my guys, like bad guys on the A-team or something, you know.
Yeah.
And now that you think, how do you support a militia?
You've got thousands of guys under arms.
You're paying them salaries.
You're arming them, you're providing them with weapons and ammunition, places to live.
Where do you come up with the money?
You either siphon it off from the government through corrupt government contracts or you deal heroin.
And that's the untold secret of Afghanistan, which is from the very beginning, the U.S. allied with the warlords who had been supporting themselves with the heroin trade.
And within a matter of months after the U.S. invasion and occupation that started in October of 2001, Afghanistan went from having no heroin trade under the Taliban to having the world's largest heroin trade.
And it's not mainly benefiting the Taliban, although they make some money off of it.
It's mainly the U.S. allied warlords in the cabinet and the government who then had a free hand to, as government ministers and so on, to grow the opium, buy it, process it into heroin and ship it out of the country.
And that's how these guys like Dostum and Hekmatyar and others finance and pay for their militias.
It's not simply for personal wealth, although they are personally wealthy.
It's for political power and buying and paying for militias.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing is people are always looking for the secret CIA conspiracy to smuggle the drugs here.
And in that, you know, like it was in during Vietnam or with cocaine in the 1980s with Nicaragua and all that.
But no, instead, this is all just the open conspiracy hiding in plain sight here.
The entire every governor, every mayor of any importance, every police chief, they're all in on it.
This is how people make their money.
It's like half the Afghan economy is opium.
And when I interviewed both U.N. officials and military officials in Afghanistan in my reporting, I said, you know, you're helping fund the deadly heroin epidemic.
What I guess is now called the opioid epidemic, since white people are acknowledged now to have problems as well.
Before it was was mostly black people.
It was called the heroin epidemic.
And the argument was, well, the heroin is going to Europe, not the United States.
Not our problem.
I mean, talk about an incredible argument.
First of all, who was it that told you that?
Well, I had that from the military sources in the United States.
Political.
I'm sorry.
U.S. military sources that I interviewed in Afghanistan because I was asking them at that.
This is very early on that U.S. controlled the airplanes, the airports and so on in various cities around Afghanistan.
And they were not searching the planes for drugs.
They were looking for arms.
But if somebody had a duffel bag full of heroin, they would let it on the plane.
I said, how can you possibly do that?
I mean, that's heroin, man.
What's going on?
But as long as it was being done by U.S. allies, U.S. allied forces, they looked the other way because they said, well, the heroin is going to Europe, not to the United States.
Yeah.
You know, Eddie Griffin, the comedian, had a bit where he's saying, don't you see, man, it's all there.
A lot of this is going to China to keep all the Buddhist stone and down so that China doesn't rise up.
I was like, you know what?
Conspiracy theorists from the neighborhood got a good point.
A lot of the time, you've sort of got to admit.
And that's the whole thing.
It's not just Europe.
It's Russia and it is China, as well.
And then, hey, heroin is a fungible commodity, so that all has an effect on opium prices here.
And, of course, governments everywhere keep the markets black and criminal.
And so that means that the people participating in it are more likely to have real problems.
And that's why they're willing to go to criminal lengths in order to sustain their habit and that kind of thing.
And then it's just criminals getting rich and increasing violence and corruption all over the place.
All the secondary and third order effects of the drug wars, especially on the international level.
It's just horrible.
I talk about this in the book.
In Turkey and in India, they just legalized it and started exporting opium for medicinal purposes.
There's seven billion people in the world.
There's plenty of legitimate uses in medicine for opium products.
And you could just do that.
But they won't.
They keep it black market.
I mean, hell, the president's half-brother, Wally Karzai, who was the king of Kandahar province, he was the biggest heroin dealer in the country.
At one point, I guess it was the military was outing him on the front pages of the New York Times and trying to get the CIA to stop supporting him.
But they wouldn't until finally somebody killed him.
Yeah.
You know, I've had this discussion with people and debated with mainstream journalists and former government officials and so on.
And the argument is, well, why would the U.S. knowingly support heroin dealers and drug traffickers when we know the consequences that drug dealing has for the people of the world and for the U.S.?
And the argument, and of course, there is arguments between the DEA and the CIA, for example, the arguments going on in South America and Afghanistan and elsewhere, because the DEA's task is to reduce, at least in theory, is supposed to reduce drug trafficking.
The CIA takes a very pragmatic look.
They look at warlords, drug dealing warlords, as one more constituency in the complicated politics of Afghanistan.
And if aligning with the drug lords helps you defeat the enemy of the day, and what's going on these days, it's the Taliban and to a lesser extent, the Islamic State.
Well, then you simply align with them, that you're being pragmatic and you look the other way when it comes to what the consequences are.
And you're right.
The heroin not only comes into Europe and the U.S. and the Western countries, but to China, to Russia and helps.
China at one time had no drug problem.
Today, it's a big problem.
And Iran, it's a big problem, neighboring Afghanistan.
So all the countries surrounding Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China and so on, all have drug problems as a direct result.
And the CIA is happy about that.
As long as you're on the enemy list, as long as the U.S. doesn't like you, fine.
No problem having a heroin problem in your country.
And I did some extensive reporting on the impact of the drug wars on Pakistan.
And there was no serious heroin problem in Afghanistan, sorry, in Pakistan until the U.S. and Pakistani governments were trying to overthrow the Soviet pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the late 70s and 80s.
And then heroin became a major problem in Pakistan as they were shipping the heroin out from Afghanistan through Pakistan in order to fund the war.
Then some of it dropped off the back of the truck and at every place where the heroin was being exported, you could see the growth of drug addiction in Pakistan.
And like you say, that was Hekmatyar, who was the CIA's favorite guy at the time doing this and spending a lot more time doing that and making money for himself than any fighting with the Mujahideen against the Soviets.
And then, you know, Eric Margulies points out that their other favorite, Massoud, was actually a KGB agent who was just playing the Americans all along anyway, which he found in the Soviet archives when the wall came down.
But anyway, yeah, what a mess that was.
And, you know, Alfred McCoy, the author of The Politics of Heroin about the Vietnam era, he talked about how, you know, after the Soviets withdrew or after the Americans withdrew, they kept fighting against the communists in Kabul and then that regime fell and then all the civil wars broke out.
And during all this time, really starting with CIA support for Hekmatyar, from there, reliance on opium as a crop grew and grew and grew.
It wasn't really the case in Afghanistan that their whole economy was based on opium like this.
It all really started with that chaos.
And just because the poppies are that much easier to take care of in the field and for whatever reason, easier to grow and harvest and the rest compared to growing fruits and vegetables for lower prices in an emergency, you know, so time preferences increase and this kind of thing.
And how the way he called it was heroin and heroin was the sword that could cut the Gordian knot that was just preventing, you know, people were going hungry and worse and they had to do something.
Heroin was not a problem in Afghanistan prior to the intervention by the U.S. to try and overthrow the government there in the 80s.
People smoked opium, but the processing of opium into heroin basically didn't exist.
And one of the sources, we're going back a few years now when I was interviewing people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and one of the drug dealing sources I spoke to in Pakistan actually said that the CIA showed the mujahideen how to process opium into heroin in order to help them fund the war.
It's not a complicated process.
You don't need a sophisticated lab with test tubes and some of the equipment.
Basically, you heat up the opium sap in a pot and turn it into a tar like substance and that's heroin and you can transport it much easier.
Now, of course, the CIA always denied that they did anything like that, but the sources I had indicated that, in fact, that went on and the profits were absolutely spectacular because you can check the spot price of a kilo of pure heroin at the Afghan-Pakistan border.
This was some years ago, but at that time it was $800 for a kilo and that same kilo was selling in New York for $100,000.
So you get an idea of the kinds of profits that were involved and why there would be people getting involved and taking the risks involved in growing, processing and exporting that drug.
Profits were phenomenal.
Well, and then as you mentioned, and I'm sorry, I'm keeping you over time, but is that all right?
Sure.
We should kind of wrap it up soon.
Okay.
Well, so I wanted to mention, as you talked about, the Taliban outlawed heroin and they enforced a totalitarian state in order to prevent it from being grown.
It was ruthless.
And I actually read one thing, it was a quote from a State Department guy saying, you know what, there was just a glut and they were just ramping up prices and they had a ton of heroin still in the warehouses they were waiting to get rid of and that kind of thing.
That it was just, you know, like James Madison outlawing the importation of slaves just to protect his own prices.
One of those kinds of things.
But anyway, since the Americans overthrew the Taliban, as you said, it just, you know, completely opened this up.
But so, I mean, I guess some people would say that that's a huge part of the reason for the war in the first place is all this liquid money that comes from the drug trade.
And it's at least part, a huge part of what keeps it going, even from the point of view of the Americans and the NATO powers.
Well, the way I look at it, I don't think the heroin trade was driving, was the motivating force for the war.
I think the U.S. had geopolitical reasons for invading and occupying Afghanistan.
At first it was to get rid of, you know, to combat the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War competition.
And heroin proved to be a convenient means to help finance the war once the decision was made.
If somehow or another you couldn't grow opium in Afghanistan, they still would have waged that war and tried to finance it through some other means.
But once it got going, it became an integral part of the process because basically Afghanistan doesn't have any domestic industry to speak of.
It needs a lot of imports to the extent it makes any money at all.
It's from trading and from heroin now.
So it's grown into a major component of the economy of the country.
But it wasn't the original motivating factor.
Right.
And now, so can you talk about maybe just a couple of possible futures here if the Americans quit or if the Americans have some real negotiations with the Taliban and say, listen, we want to come to an agreement so we can get out of here?
What do you think that might look like?
Well, the best scenario would be a political settlement where the Taliban was forced to make some concessions, some compromises where the Islamic State was eliminated as a political force.
And the government, the folks doing good work in Kabul and other cities, for example, the civil society folks doing humanitarian work and education work were allowed to continue doing what they're doing, their positive work, without repression or arrest by the Taliban.
That would be the best scenario.
And it would take a lot of pressure on the Taliban because they want to come to power and rule everything and reimpose the kind of dictatorship they had previously.
Religious based allegedly on the principles of Islam, but mainly using Islam to keep themselves in power.
But that would be the best solution.
The second possible solution would be the Taliban simply takes power and the U.S. pulls out, the Afghan government falls, and you have some version of what the Taliban's rule was previously.
But at least the situation would be the war would stop and the Taliban would have to focus on domestic politics, consolidating their power and would not be involved in exporting terrorism or engaging in nefarious activities outside of Afghanistan.
I think that's the most likely outcome.
But the U.S. has lost the war and it's a matter of how much time it's going to take to get the political situation resolved and how many lives are going to be lost in the meantime.
The war has to stop.
The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the war and there's nothing militarily the U.S. can do to change that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when I heard Ghani talking about just make the Taliban a political party, it seems like, you know, they'd be a pretty powerful political party if you could get them to even cooperate with that and sit in the parliament.
They would have a lot of seats at that point.
Why not just, you know, more or less let them secede from the union or at least, you know, create a severe autonomy so that there's not a real fight over where the new border is or anything like that necessarily.
But just, you know, more or less let them go and try to keep them out of Kabul that way.
And, you know, let them patrol their own neighborhoods.
What's it to you anyway, right?
Well, that's conceivable.
But that assumes that the U.S. and the Kabul government are powerful enough to enforce that.
And right now it doesn't look that way.
You think the Taliban would sack Kabul if they could?
Because that seems like biting off a lot, maybe more than they could chew.
I don't know.
I think they would come in and try and take it over.
I don't think they would like burn it to the ground or something like that.
But I think they would come in and the Taliban's goal is to have exercise control over the entire country, including Kabul.
That's that's their goal.
And militarily, the Kabul government is quite weak right now to prevent that.
Well, that certainly is the case.
There's no security in the capital city at all.
Doesn't seem like.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I kept you so long, Rhys.
I promised I wouldn't.
And then I did anyway.
But I like talking with you and yelling at you, too.
It's fun.
Sorry for the long harangues.
I want Trump and his minions to hear this conversation and change their policies.
You know what?
One thing.
This just came in here.
NBC News.
Some officials are worried that Trump is going to turn to the Eric Prince plan to just pull out the army and send in the mercenaries.
What do you think of that?
Well, it's not going to work.
It has the patina, the surface of being not having American soldiers killed, having mercenaries killed instead.
But, you know, the mercenaries don't have a full air force, a full missile system, aircraft carriers off the shore.
They don't have the capability of militarily defeating the Taliban.
They have to bring troops in on the ground and fight door to door.
And the mercenaries are going to be no more successful at doing that than the U.S. Army is or any of the various U.S. military branches.
So and of course, it's going to cost 10 times as much because you pay the salaries of the mercs far more than what you pay the army grunts.
So it's it's a myth.
It has the appearance of maybe it would have a solution, but it ain't going to work.
Yeah, I was thinking that, you know, because Madison, all those guys have made it clear all along there.
Yeah, right.
They're not going to let that happen at all.
But then it seemed like maybe it could just be cover for withdrawal that like, well, we're going to try this other thing and then go ahead and call that off, too.
And it'll be easier to call that off.
You know, and it'd be easier to call the army occupation off with something else in place.
And then it'll be easier to call this off second, you know, but.
Well, if it gets to that, have me back on the show.
We'll talk about it.
Yep.
All right.
Thanks again, Reese.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's Reese Ehrlich.
Find him at Antiwar.com.
Afghanistan has become Trump's failed narco state.
More in Afghanistan at foolserend.us.
