Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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.
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, I'd like to introduce you to Robert Gaines.
You might recognize that name.
He's recently been co-authoring articles with me.
Actually, he gets most of the credit for some articles, a series we've written, three of them for Breitbart.
I think it was three of them, right, for Breitbart and one of them for The National Interest.
The latest was at The National Interest.
America cannot save Afghanistan.
And he's an IT professional and a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard.
He served with U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan as an embedded liaison for ground combat operations.
That actually sounds like a pretty lengthy euphemism for helped call in airstrikes for the infantry.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Robert?
Hey, I'm great.
Thank you for having me on here.
It's an honor.
Yeah, man.
Well, very happy to have you on the show.
And I am really proud of the number of anti-war veterans that I have that listen to the show and feel at home around here.
I don't suck up to anybody or pander to anybody, but I try to give the truth without favor.
And so enough for you guys like it, that that's meaningful to me.
So I appreciate that.
And I can't tell you honestly, man, how much I appreciate your effort in in writing these articles and trying to get them out along the lines of the Horton rule.
That's what Michael Bolden calls it.
You got to attack the right from the right and the left from the left.
And you know what?
Those articles at Breitbart, which is about as right as you can get in American politics when it comes inside, at least just barely inside mainstream politics or what have you.
We got nothing but a positive response and thousands of comments on those articles and virtually all of them in agreement that we got to end this war.
So, you know, I don't know if we generated much talk on any of the talk radio stations or anything like that.
I never really heard of that.
But and I don't know if we really influenced anybody over there with those.
But we certainly reminded them what they think, I guess, at least.
And and after all, we're taking the side of the president who really does want out of Afghanistan.
And that's the subject of this article, which you wrote.
Ninety nine percent of this one.
I barely helped at all on this last one.
I'll take credit for the Osama bin Laden.
I did like maybe a third or a half of that one.
The rest of these are really your articles in this one, especially America cannot save Afghanistan.
And you're really, in a sense, you're taking the president's side here, Robert.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's encouraging to finally hear somebody in the executive branch saying this.
Unfortunately, I fear that his his advisers and his cabinet may win out in the long run.
But if we can sway popular opinion here and perhaps remind him that the American people are behind him, I think that's going to be positive.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm not sure what kind of readership the national interest has.
I think it must be much lower numbers than Breitbart, but possibly more meaningful ones.
They run a lot of good stuff there and a lot of bad stuff, too.
So I guess that's the good part is, you know, maybe get some fresh eyeballs on on these things.
And it is a quirk of history in a way, maybe, that this current situation actually puts us on the side of the president in this circumstance.
Sort of the same way that Donald Trump, our current president, found himself on the same side as Barack Obama, when Obama actually finally did stand up to the generals when it came to ending the surge on the timeline that he'd been promised.
Instead of the new one, they were trying to force him into accepting and Trump backed him.
So but that's a pretty good angle on let's get out of Afghanistan.
The president's right.
Let's get out of Afghanistan.
It helps.
So and now there's real work being done.
So catch us up about Khalilzad and the effort, the negotiations going on in Qatar.
There's certainly the most serious ones that have taken place this whole war long, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
From what I can tell, there's been some mention of a potential ceasefire eventually.
And both sides are, I believe, moving towards an eventual discussion with the national unity government for better or for worse.
I know they've had some offsets in Qatar recently, but I know there have also been some talks with Russia and China concerning a commitment to withdraw on the part of the US.
So I think that's a positive.
And from what I can tell from a representative of Khalilzad's Twitter feed, I believe they're going back to the table here in the next couple of months or so.
Yeah.
So I guess a couple of things, but you start with what broke down the last time.
Yeah, I think they didn't want to have any discussion with the national unity government.
I think they, you know, they understood our emphasis on counterterrorism and, you know, keeping, say, a kind of al Qaeda or ISIS presence out of Afghanistan or the tribal areas.
But, yeah, I think they've been opposed to talking to the national unity government and for good cause.
I mean, it's full of some pretty bad characters, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Well, so now part of the story was when they actually they didn't have the talks, but they were preparing for them.
And the national unity government had submitted a list of people that they wanted to attend the talks and the Taliban balked at that.
I wondered whether was there any reporting or indication or popular kind of chatter about whether that was possibly even deliberate sabotage by the national unity government or that was really the Taliban being in transit?
Not that I'm aware of.
I mean, I wouldn't put anything past the NUG, but yeah, I can't comment definitively.
I mean, because it does not seem to be in their interest to help facilitate these talks at all is the only reason I really ask not to be too much of a truther about it.
But just they're the odd man out big time here when they've the Americans and they have always agreed that America won't talk to the Taliban without them.
And now we are.
And so they're scared to death that we really mean it and are going to leave.
And so they got to prevent that or they're screwed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I fear that's the case.
They're reluctant to release power.
Although, I mean, in this particular case, that doesn't mean that they really were were being intransigent in that.
I just don't know enough about, I guess, but seemed like a question.
But so now talk about the Russia, China headline there.
That was a big one.
Khalilzad went to Moscow and they agreed on what exactly?
Because I know despite whatever hype people hear that the Russians have not switched sides in this war like America has.
And they have always backed the same government that we now back and have always feared an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, that they would have to deal with the Pashtun tribesmen now if we weren't.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm also aware of the specifics of this deal, but I do believe that all parties agree to some some kind of framework on withdrawal and counterterrorism strategies.
But, yeah, I get again, don't have any specifics.
I mean, that's really amazing because I can't, you know, I don't know.
There's always kind of the discrepancy right between the the level that they negotiate on with whatever false premises versus the actual reality of the situation there.
Right.
So they could say, yeah, we're we're going to still have this counterterrorism strategy, which what implies continuing to back the national unity government and its special operations teams for X amount of time.
But does Russia really believe that that means anything without support for and the war continuing on behalf of the by America, on behalf of the Afghan government at all?
They surely must know that if the war ends, there are no counterterrorism option other than bribing the Taliban to keep Al-Qaeda and ISIS out, not the national unity government who have interest in doing that anyway.
Such power as they do have.
Yeah.
So they're going to have to talk to the Taliban as well.
I think that's the only way forward.
We're going to have to acknowledge their power.
Now, I wonder if that's what Khalilzad and Lavrov talked about the like.
Yeah.
Was it Lavrov that he met with Dino?
I'm sorry.
I'm assuming that.
But I'm not certain.
I just wonder how much realism is injected in these discussions and how much of it is still just blowing smoke.
You know, I don't know.
So tell me about this, then.
The commander of Central Command was insubordinate a couple of months ago saying, well, we're just we can't leave yet.
The circumstances there are not on the ground where essentially he's talking around the talks.
Forget the talks.
The strategic this and that says that we must stay forever.
And I know a colonel, I bet you could guess which one who was saying that this guy ought to absolutely resign or be fired immediately for that level of insubordination.
And but that seems to indicate that, you know, major factions inside at least the army or I don't know what, who are determined to stay there even despite Trump's effort to negotiate an exit even at this late day.
What do you think?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe if this was a crystal, you know, the guy would have gotten the axe.
I mean, that was the case in the Crystal's case.
He got the axe for being insubordinate.
But for some odd reason, it's kosher now.
But, yeah, I think it's very strange that he has this fixation with staying there.
And his his strategy, I think, has a great deal of holes in it.
You know, this idea that we can support human rights and the advancement of women's rights by staying in Afghanistan, I think, is pretty absurd.
You know, I think there's been some additional reporting from the UN recently indicating that many detainees have been tortured by the Afghan government.
And, you know, I don't see how we're going to make any advances in other areas while that's still ongoing.
You know, the people can't really trust the government when they're being taken away to secret prisons and tortured.
Yes, I think it's it's unfortunate.
It's pretty unsettling that a general could be insubordinate to that point.
And there's no serious backlash against him.
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All right, well, now, so do you really agree with me that the National Union government cannot stand without American support and are how comfortable are you with turning the country over to another civil war with the Taliban?
Quite possibly coming out on top, dominating the whole country again.
Yeah, I don't want that.
I don't think anybody wants that.
I mean, they're savages and they're a bad group of guys.
But the unfortunate reality is that they are the government in the tribal areas.
You know, they had shadow governors and they had an entire network in place.
Well, you know, U.S. forces were on the ground there.
So they've been the de facto government for quite some time.
And so, you know, I don't want to see them come out on top.
You know, but I fear that's just, you know, how part of the country is going to go.
And that's kind of how it is already.
You know, you've got the past, you say, half or more of the country that is pretty much under Taliban control for the most part.
And I, you know, from my experiences with the Afghan army and the Ministry of Defense, I believe it's quite corrupt and incompetent and there's no serious feeling of nationalism.
And I don't believe that the rank and file of the M.O.D. really have any interest in defending the country.
I think the military adventures undertaken by the national government are more of a jobs program that pays better than subsistence farming.
But I don't believe that many of the people associated with that end of things are committed to a unified Afghanistan.
Some of them may.
But I think we're just offsetting the inevitable, unfortunately.
And I don't want to see any more bloodshed, any more than the next person.
But I don't have any faith in the national unity government due to corruption and incompetence.
Yeah.
You know, it is a tougher one in terms of public relations where at least it's a fact that in eastern Syria, the Islamic State does not exist.
And whatever groups of ISIS fighters number in the tens and are on the run badly and have no power and and no influence and none coming either.
Right.
Whereas here, it's not like that.
You cannot declare victory and leave Afghanistan.
We're not with a straight face.
You can't.
There's some hell to pay still.
I don't know exactly how bad.
You know, I will mention something that Matthew Ho had said.
Another antiwar Afghan veteran of the famous whistleblower who said, you know, in the 1990s, it was American and Saudi and Pakistani policy to back the Taliban in a complete victory.
Then the Americans objected, the Clinton administration objected to the idea that the Taliban would negotiate with the Masood Northern Alliance faction and make a peace.
They wanted a true monopoly state there and wanted to support the Taliban, that total victory, at least for the first few years until they changed their mind about that, I guess, and backed off.
But Matthew Ho's point being that without Pakistan to say, that's right.
We're here to do whatever it takes to help you take Kabul and to conquer the rest of the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, you know, majority areas and stuff like that, then they would have much less ability to do it and much less faith in themselves that they could do it and therefore much less motive to try it.
That it took knowing that they had USA, Saudi and Pakistan in their corner and the actual reality of that power and money and effort behind them to help them do it.
So maybe they really could.
I mean, this is the ultimate hope, right?
That they could sort of just call stalemate right where it's at and just draw the lines in light pencil.
Right.
Not like hard borders to fight over, but just everybody.
Basically, the Taliban rules the land they've more or less already taken and everybody kind of just stop fighting there.
But I just don't know.
I'm way too far away, of course, to know.
I don't know if you have an opinion of about whether I mean, and you know what?
I guess the Taliban have said that they don't want to settle for that.
But I guess that's only part of the reality.
There's the other part of the reality is how much ability do they have to accomplish something like that without the foreign support?
You know?
Yeah, I think that'd be almost an ideal outcome if we could have almost a two state solution, if you will.
Yeah.
Afghanistan.
Yeah.
And, you know, like we have Texas and Oklahoma.
We don't fight over stuff because they have their business and we have ours.
And there's we don't have any problem being in the same country with them at all.
Never have, you know.
And so it seems like we ought to be able to have some sort of.
It's funny, though, that as obvious as that seems to me, especially looking at the map, here's where the different ethnic factions are and here's where the Taliban rules.
It's a perfect sketch layover thing.
Like this is the powers are already separated, essentially where they have popular sovereignty.
I'm being very loose with my language here.
You understand.
But still, it seems like that makes sense.
And yet no one talks about it that way.
Everybody talks about the national government in Kabul that will rule them all.
You know?
Yeah, I think we're just trying to impose American ideals and concepts on a nation that really is incompatible with them.
And I'm not saying they're opposed to democracy.
But the idea of a national state is kind of absurd to people that may spend their entire lives in one village.
And they you know, we were mistaken for Russians on a number of occasions.
So, you know, they're not really in touch with what's going on in Kabul.
And so it's kind of odd to extend this national government to all the far corners of Afghanistan.
Tell me about that being mistaken for Russians.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was a one area where the people I don't believe they'd encountered any foreigners since 2004.
This is a in a particular province in Bermal, I believe.
And, yeah, they.
In what year?
I'm sorry.
This was a 2011.
OK.
And they asked the interpreter if we were Russians.
And he, of course, you know, replied in the negative.
But still, you know, there was some confusion there as to whether or not the Russians were still in the country, which I found to be shocking.
And you know what?
I mean, I've heard that story numerous times.
Matthew Ho has said the same thing in my book in the chapter on the Korengal Valley.
There are sources in there that I quote where they say the same thing when they arrived, that the Korengal Valley was its own little nation.
They weren't really part of Afghanistan other than they were surrounded by it, their own little dialect, their own little economy, their own little kind of subsistence way of life.
And that when the Americans came, they thought that the Soviets had never left because they hadn't even heard that the Soviet war was over.
That's how isolated they were after 20 years.
They're like, oh, look, some Russians.
And or, oh, no, Russians or whichever it was.
But still, I was really just amazed.
It goes to show I'm not making fun of them for being primitive.
It goes to show how innocent they are in messing with us.
How can they be our enemy?
These people who think that you're a Russian because they know nothing.
They probably don't even know where the new world is.
They may have never even heard of the new world.
Yeah, that's very possible.
Many of the Afghan soldiers couldn't understand.
Some of our soldiers were African of America.
I'm sorry.
Pardon me.
They were of African-American descent and many of the soldiers couldn't.
They couldn't reconcile that.
They thought they were Hazaras.
And so they would call many of them Hazaras.
They had no concept of, say, Africa or maybe even parts of the U.S.
So, yeah, they had a pretty narrow scope on their understanding of the world.
So it's very difficult to say that these people are a formidable opponent or they could really pose any serious harm to the U.S. homeland.
Well, of course, we're not there fighting them.
We're there to save them and help them.
So that's why we're not we're not picking.
Of course, they're innocent.
That's why we're there.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess that's the idea is that we're saving them from some kind of mythical Al Qaeda menace or ISIS, neither of which really seems to exert that much influence.
Tell us about ISIS in Afghanistan, Robert, please.
So their emergence came after my departure from the country.
I had my final tour in 2012.
But, you know, post 2014, it appears as though the TTP, from what I heard, had a splintered from or splintered within itself.
And some of the factions had taken up calling themselves ISIS.
Wait, this means the Pakistani Taliban, the Tariki Taliban.
Correct.
My understanding, yeah, that they had different factions within the TTP that had taken up the banner of ISIS Khorasan.
But it was still essentially, you know, the TTP under the hood.
So the problem is when you say ISIS, it sounds like Arabs near the Mediterranean Sea cutting off white Americans heads.
Of course.
Yeah, no, these guys were Pashtuns as far as I can tell.
From what I heard from guys that were over there, they said that they were pretty much the Pashtun insurgency.
You know, I read this thing the other day by Cliff May from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
And he says, oh, Trump, you're so war weary, but you've got to look at this war through Al Qaeda's eyes.
What is it going to say if we give up and leave the field?
They're going to declare victory.
They defeated us.
And they're going to build on that victory and attack us further and destroy us and et cetera like that.
So what do you say to that, Robert?
I think it's absurd.
I mean, you know, there was hardly ever any mention of Al Qaeda when I was over there.
I heard the mention on one occasion, but there was nothing tangible afterwards.
You know, if we're concerned about Al Qaeda, we shouldn't have emboldened them elsewhere in the world.
You know, if that was a genuine concern.
So I think it's an empty pretext for extending the occupation of Afghanistan.
You know, I wonder if he's ever even heard, maybe he's heard a crank like me, but maybe he's never heard a legit, you know, professional, maybe Pentagon credentialed or CIA credentialed expert say that, hey, you know, really, they were trying to get us to invade Afghanistan.
That's what they wanted to happen was to fight a war of attrition against us on their own soil because they don't have any weapons that can shoot further than a rifle, man.
So that was the whole thing was to get us there, to bog us down.
As Lenin said, you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
And so however many Afghan civilians have to die in the American war, that's OK for Osama bin Laden.
I mean, you know, to bin Laden, they're a bunch of posh tune old hillbillies anyway.
He didn't care about that.
They're poor white trash to him.
Right.
So however many of them have to die in order to break the American empire on the rocks of Afghanistan and bog us down in the sands of Afghanistan, then that's just the way it has to be.
And I wonder, can he really is it possible he really doesn't know that, that he only ever heard that?
You know, Ron Paul said that, so it can't be true or you know what I mean?
Because all you got to do is know anything about Al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
And you know that Osama bin Laden explained that over and over and over and over again as he's attacking us, before he attacked us, after he attacked us over and over again.
Yeah, yeah.
There's ample evidence out there.
I think people just have a very strong bias, you know, or maybe other interests, perhaps.
I mean, he would even say to recreate the war against the Russians, to do the same thing to you that you helped us do to them.
I mean, how freaking obvious can you be?
Sorry.
Yeah, it's on the West Point website.
I mean, you can read all the fatwas for yourself.
I mean, even though he didn't have authority, according to Mullah Omar, of course, but still, you know, the man put out his statements and his strategy was pretty, pretty apparent.
Yeah.
All right.
So you know what?
I still feel a little bit optimistic about this thing, I guess, Robert, because it seems like if Khalilzad is even trying this hard, it must be because he has severe assurances from Donald Trump that he will back him.
I've read enough books about these backstabbing crooks, you know, running the government here.
For example, Paul Bremer in Iraq War II.
Does he answer to the Secretary of State?
Does he answer to the Secretary of Defense?
Or does he answer to the National Security Advisor?
Or does he answer to the President of the United States?
This is a real conversation, and we need to have it.
And it came out not very clear, and that was part of the story, right?
But in other words, I'm just pretending to be a fly in the room here, where Khalilzad must have insisted to Trump that, like, I work directly for you, and you have my back 100%.
Otherwise, there's no point in going through this, right, if this is going to amount to some charade down the chain of command at the State Department somewhere, where it never gets through the process and never gets done.
You know what I mean?
He has to have been deputized by the President himself in a very severe fashion to even be working at this.
And so then, like, you know what, there's really not that many issues left standing, right?
There's the issue of whether keeping Bagram at all, and there's the issue of how severely the Taliban will promise to keep al-Qaeda out.
And what else is on the table that really has to be hashed out here, Robert?
I think the resulting political structure is going to be one of the most challenging points.
It's going to be hard to either figure out how to reintegrate the Taliban or to develop some system of government that acknowledges their sway over the Pashtun area.
And that has to be part of the deal, you think, or they're just going to maybe, hopefully, leave that to the Afghans to figure out for themselves in their own negotiations?
I would hope they would give that to them.
It's really not our business.
Ultimately, it's going to come down to Afghan politics.
But yeah, I can see them trying to give some kind of a vague framework for we do pull out our forces.
But I think the timeline is going to be another big issue.
You know, I think one year is more than realistic.
But, you know, you hear calls for, say, five years or something.
So I think that'll be another issue.
Yeah.
I mean, if that isn't the clearest sabotage in the world, five years, and everybody place your bets on the Democrat winning the next election so that five years can be another 15 and what have you, and kick that can down the road further.
But, you know, I guess I really need to be paying more attention to the details of the reports of these negotiations.
Because if they were, if it was a real effort to bring the national government in to the talks, and that's a big new step, which I guess in this case, it got short circuited.
But the Taliban had at least at that point agreed in principle to talk to the Afghan government that thus far they had refused to talk to all along, right?
Yeah, that's my understanding.
Yeah, they're starting to come around to the idea of conversing with them.
I think that's positive.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe the Taliban can just be a political party in the parliament and share power in the national government.
I don't believe that as I say it.
I don't know.
Nobody's ever talking about federalism at all, though, Robert, right?
Nobody agrees with the Horton Gaines plan for just leave everything as it stands.
Everybody's talking about what the new national government will look like after this negotiation, that kind of thing.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, that seems to be the main point of interest.
But I think there's just, you know, they're not sufficiently educated on the inner workings of Afghanistan and how Kabul is its own little microcosm.
And if you talk to people in the countryside, they either have contempt for Kabul or they have no interest in the affairs of the national government.
You know, we're talking about a nation full of subsistence farmers for the most part, and politics is really a secondary or tertiary consideration for many of them.
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Hey, did you see that article at the Institute's site by Graham Alderman about ancient Afghanistan?
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
I haven't read that yet, no.
Oh, it's really great.
It's called Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires?
With a question mark there, because it goes through the ancient history of how, hey, lots of empires have lasted in Afghanistan for a very long time.
And of course, Tamerlane and his empire was launched out of Afghanistan.
But he says, what changed is the modern era of the nation-state, and this kind of presumption, as he puts it, on the idea of the Westphalian model of the nation-state.
But he says, more accurately, the post-French Revolution idea of the nation-state in Europe is sort of the basis that the British and everybody else going through there, the Soviets after them, try to come in, where they don't understand that the reason the ancient empires were successful there is because they didn't believe in a centralized nation-state.
They cared about ruling the major cities and the major population centers and economic centers.
But, like you keep mentioning, out in the countryside, where everybody's just a subsistence farmer, what's even the point of trying to create a government over them?
If you believe your own BS about teaching them to read or whatever, then I guess you have something.
But if you're being honest and the purpose of your government is to extort people, well, they don't have anything to take.
So you could just leave them alone, and you could rule the capital.
You just can't rule the country.
But that's the part that the British, the Russians, the Americans can't get through their head.
And so then that is why they fail, because they just can't leave Helmand Province alone and just be happy taking Kandahar City or whatever it is.
Yeah, I agree.
The Mughal dynasty extended into India and I think up through Afghanistan, central and northwestern Afghanistan.
And yeah, they didn't really seem to have that idea of a central state.
It's just they had general control of the area, but the people were probably mostly autonomous.
All right, well, so is there anything more you want to tell us about your time over there or about your fellow veterans?
You talk with many of them.
Do they agree with you?
You talk about this?
Yeah, sadly, no.
No, I think there's still kind of an ideological commitment to the war, and it's often viewed as a clash of civilizations.
And some people will just acknowledge the futility of the whole endeavor, saying that basically the Afghans can't be trained.
And that we should pull out and devote our efforts elsewhere.
There's not really that much insistence on that pulling out part.
But most veterans that have been over there and have encountered the Afghan National Army or anybody under the MOD, they will acknowledge that they are pretty incompetent for the most part.
And, yeah, the other side, you know, that kind of views it in the Huntington way of the clash of civilizations.
I think this is an extension of some kind of Great Holy War, unfortunately, which I think is very short-sighted.
So, yeah, I've really not had a great deal of success in talking to other veterans, unfortunately.
And it's a very sensitive topic as well, you know, since so many people have either been injured seriously or perished over there.
So it's definitely heresy to talk about the whole futility of the endeavor, because I think a lot of people, you know, they want to see an overwhelming victory on the part of the U.S.
So that's disappointing, unfortunately.
But hopefully, you know, more people will come around as time progresses.
Yeah.
It's such an unfortunate contradiction and paradox, right?
Like, hey, can't have a bunch of anti-war talk around here.
You're going to hurt the feelings of people who lost their very best friend in the whole world over there in the most horrible of circumstances.
And so we're going to continue to have more guys lose more of their best friends in the whole world over there in the most horrible of circumstances.
Because we just can't say that that's why we have to stop the damn war, you know?
Yeah, we're just extending the trauma and the dysfunction in the families that are torn apart on both sides.
And, yeah, I don't understand how more people can't see that, you know, that far.
It's disappointing.
Yeah, and seriously, you know, when I was a kid, it was the 1980s.
Reagan years were essentially peacetime, right?
Grenada.
Don't get me wrong, CIA death squads in El Salvador and what have you.
But in terms of real wars, we didn't have any.
Bush Sr. had his Iraq War I that, according to TV anyway, was over in 100 hours and didn't amount to a thing.
And was essentially peacetime as far as, you know, again, TV would have it through the 90s.
America was bombing Iraq most of that time and that kind of thing.
But it seemed essentially like peacetime.
So it would make sense to me.
I knew better even then.
But it would make sense to me how people growing up in my same era would think that, yeah, as far as I know, you join the service.
You serve your country.
You do the right thing.
Because the democracy would only ever have you do the right thing.
Everybody knows that.
And it's kind of ignorant, but I can see that.
But after 20 years of the terror war, the veterans of the wars aren't saying, hey, kid, keep out.
Be warned.
We know better.
This is not what you think it is.
And learn our lesson.
We learn the hard way, the easy way by listening well.
And we don't get that.
They're not being warned by the last generation to not believe in going along with this in this generation.
What wars have they been living through?
If they're not the same ones that I've been covering this whole time.
Robert?
Yeah.
I think people just have an ideological commitment to the whole thing.
And they want to tell themselves it's the good war because it helps them justify staying in the service when they get back.
And if they have a fight to look towards, they can better justify preparing or staying in uniform or something.
I think it's a weird myth that some people create for themselves to justify what is otherwise just a government job, perhaps.
I guess I'm just lucky that so many of my anti-war influences when I was a kid were American military combat veterans who were Vietnam War veterans and stuff like that.
Anything that they had to say about the Army or the military or the government was 100% negative, always.
And so, if you got it from the toughest guy, toughest old Marine you ever met, then you're kind of inoculated after that.
You know what I mean?
They can sing their songs and say how necessary it is that we go save the Bosnians or whatever.
And that's just not going to work.
It didn't work on me.
But that was what saved me, essentially, was guys like you only back then saying, hey, kid, when they say things, those things are not right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe the propaganda has gotten better.
The military is just too good of a job for some people.
And that's a big part of it, right, is it doesn't have much to do with foreign policy.
It has much more to do with family politics and neighborhood politics and local economics in your town and kind of vague slogans about red, white and blue and freedom.
But not that much.
Right.
It's really more about you and your your life choices and what you're going to do.
Go to learn your martial skills or go straight to school or these kinds of questions.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And overseas, there's no mention of foreign policy.
You'll hear the troops grumble, you know, the Afghans are incompetent or the war sucks or the mission's pointless.
But at the end of the day, everybody's getting health care and benefits and they've got a retirement to look towards at the end.
And so I think that's enough of an incentive for some people to stay in, not to talk out.
You know, well, I think they need to be like you and learn to code.
Yeah.
I don't know if I'm permitted to say that.
But, yeah, sure.
Why not?
All you government employees quit and get a real job.
Robert, thank you so much, man.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate coming on the show.
And also, obviously, more than that, helping me with these articles on on Afghanistan and the larger terror war.
And I'd like to continue doing it.
I probably have even some things I've written that are laying around somewhere that maybe I could.
Let's talk about what we can do next, if you want to.
Yeah, I know.
Thank you for having me on here.
It's been great talking to you.
And I really enjoyed working with you and writing these articles.
It's a real honor.
Thank you, man.
Wow.
All right, you guys, that's Robert Gaines.
He was embedded liaison with the army, but working for the Air Force in Iraq, World War Two and in Afghanistan.
And you can find he and I in our articles at his and my articles at Breitbart dot com.
There are three or four of them there.
And now we have this new one at the national interest.
It's national interest dot org.
It's called America cannot save Afghanistan.
Thanks again, Robert.
Oh, thank you.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
