Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it 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 retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis.
He's from Defense Priorities, and he writes oftentimes for the National Interest and for the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Always good to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
And of course, I should have said in the first place too, you're the famous and great whistleblower from the end of the Afghan surge in 2012.
And in fact, I guess I could say it might not have been the end of the surge if it hadn't have been for you coming out and telling us what we thought we knew, which was that Petraeus was not telling the truth about what was going on in the war.
And that was right when the Pentagon was pushing to extend the timeline of the surge and push back against Obama's insistence that they live up to their side of the deal and leave when they said they would.
And then you came out and famously, I guess we should go over this whole history for the newcomers around here a little bit.
You famously had a job that put you all over Afghanistan, passing out weapons, I guess, right?
Dealing with different American Army units, arming them up.
But that gave you access to all different parts of the military, Marines and whoever else, as well as Army, and put you in all different regions of the country and just really helped to give you this perspective.
And then, well, tell the story.
You were home on leave and saw Petraeus testify before the Senate, something like that, right?
Well, I was actually tracking all this while I was still in Afghanistan, which is one of the reasons why it made me so upset and angry, because I can see the dramatic contradiction between what's being said publicly and what I observe with my eyeballs on a daily basis.
And then when you start seeing men die because of it and unnecessarily be killed in combat actions that don't have anything to do with American national security or our defense, it just became too much to bear and I had to go public with it.
And then so, and people can check the footnotes, of course, there's a section on this in my book, but there's a report that you published in, I guess it was a, there's a classified version that you sent to Congress, went, just step right outside of the chain of command, went straight to your congressional representatives and then wrote a declassified version for the Armed Forces Journal, I believe it was.
And then also, was it the Washington Post?
Well, actually, they did a story about it.
It was covered by Mike Hastings before he passed away in the Rolling Stone and some other places where the full 84 page unclassified version was published.
And then I specifically myself wrote something in the Armed Forces Journal where I laid out the key factors that were involved.
So yeah, it was more than one place.
Well, you know what?
I don't think I knew that Hastings published the full version in Rolling Stone.
Yeah, he did.
He was a, he was a good man.
We lost a real one when he passed away.
Yeah, you got that right.
I used to talk to him all the time from Iraq, World War II and Afghanistan, which, you know, looking back on it, I wish he hadn't gone to Afghanistan because anyway.
Yeah.
So, yeah, man, I'm sorry.
Yeah, no, I didn't know that part.
I'll have to go back and read that whole thing then.
But it's such important history and it's still going on.
And so here's this very important piece in the American Conservative Magazine.
McMaster uses worn Vietnam trope to accuse Americans of defeatism.
And H.R. McMaster, that is one of Petraeus' protégés, I guess.
And in the Afghan war surge, he was in charge of fighting corruption in Kabul.
I'm pretty sure he won that war outright before rotating home.
But then famously, he was Trump's second national security advisor and worked with Secretary of Defense James Mattis to essentially coerce Donald Trump into expanding the war by 10,000 troops and more air power back in 2017.
And but now he's out of power and he's at, I'm a little bit surprised he's at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies rather than the Council on Foreign Relations or something a little bit more prestigious.
But I guess that's where the power is at.
So now he's at FDD and he's accusing the American people of not wanting to finish this mission that him and his boss said they were going to finish back now, seven years ago.
Yeah.
And I'll just tell you, it's a bit of a double negative for me because I worked for H.R. McMaster.
He was a good friend of mine for many years.
We fought in Desert Storm together and I had nothing but the highest in respect and even admiration for him.
So to see how things have deteriorated in the last like 10 years or so has been really discouraging.
But, you know, the things he's saying right now simply just don't stand up to observed reality, geopolitical or militarily.
Hang on just one second.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Oh, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at ScottHorton.org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
All right.
So let's talk about Vietnam.
The war was going bad because Westmoreland was so bad.
In fact, I just read a thing maybe even at the American Conservative a week or two ago about just what a bomb Westmoreland was.
He was such a dum-dum.
How would you put a guy like that in charge of a war like that?
But once they brought in Abrams, he was breaking out Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy and everything was going just fine until that traitor Walter Cronkite and every liberal Democrat in Washington, D.C. especially in the Congress and the media, stabbed the American army in the back and made them lose that war that they were about to win.
Danny, how about that?
Well, that's certainly one version, a rather entertaining, fictitious version, but that's one version.
Yeah, sure.
All right.
Well, so tell me, what's the truth?
I wasn't born till two years after it was over.
Yeah, well, the truth is the war was never winnable.
I mean because when you had one side that had committed that they were going to fight this existential struggle, the North Vietnamese, and then you had on the South side substantial, extraordinary levels of corruption and incapacity, that was never going to be won militarily.
The only chance they ever had was to come up with some political accommodation or workarounds, but that just wouldn't happen because we could never just come up with a political negotiated settlement.
We had to try to win, and it was never, ever going to happen.
And so finally, at least for one of the good things he did, Nixon recognized that and said, all right, we're going to shut this deal down.
And then that's exactly what happened.
But it wasn't because anybody got stabbed in the back.
It wasn't because of Cronkite or anything else.
It was because at least enough people finally recognized that this was unwinnable.
And it's also useful to point out that the men who fought there also recognized it was unwinnable.
And that's why at the time there was so much political unrest in the United States and people were protesting because there were – they still had the draft at that time.
And so lots of people across the – just the regular public of the United States had firsthand experience with people coming back and telling them how disastrous it was.
And so you had lots of people that knew it was unwinnable, that knew that stuff Westmoreland and some of these other leaders were saying was just a bunch of hooey.
And so finally you just had enough political power in the United States, and the tables turned, and we accepted the reality that it was on the ground.
So now what's that got to do with Afghanistan?
So the problem with Afghanistan is that you have just as much disaster on the ground.
You have just as many people – I'm certainly not the only one who served there that recognized the reality that the military – the mission cannot be won militarily.
But the problem is it's not public knowledge.
It doesn't make it very much at all into the mainstream media, and because there's no draft, the people that are related to the relatively small number of American troops that have been over there are isolated in various pockets of the country and not in the mainstream.
So we don't have this obvious recognition among widespread parts of the population that the war is unwinnable, even though the fundamentals couldn't be any stronger that it can never, never be won militarily.
And unless we just finally accede to this reality and shut this thing down in the least damaging way we can, we're going to continue perpetually failing and causing more blood and treasure to be spilled.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a pretty important headline, right, when last week the guy or one of the two or three guys who claimed that they got the kill shot on Osama bin Laden was asked, what's the solution in Afghanistan?
And said there is no military solution, which is a nice way of saying essentially, right, that the war has been against the men of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are not Martian invaders from another planet.
They're from the neighborhoods where they're fighting.
And that's who we're fighting is not the enemies of the Afghan people.
It's the Afghan people.
And so the military solution is to kill all of them.
But that kind of goes against the whole narrative that all we're trying to do is set them free.
So it seems like the only compromise there is to just leave them alone.
And of course, you've got senior military leaders in the last, I guess it's about 10 days, talking about how actually, you know what, ISIS is now starting to expand their foothold there.
And I think it was just three days ago.
Al Qaeda is making a comeback.
So they're using all these what some call dog whistle words, scary words that we're all afraid of and saying, oh, my gosh, look, they're all over Afghanistan.
Of course we can't leave now because all this threat to the American.
Well, look, that's there's nothing new about that.
That's been the case for many, many years that there's been some of those.
And, you know, ISIS is just a new permutation.
There's been others before that.
There's plenty of Islamic radicals over there.
But the fact is, they're not going to threaten us from over there.
And having troops on the ground there in whatever numbers, whether it was 140,000 NATO or 15,000 as the case is today, you cannot stop them or prevent them from doing anything.
So to leave would not, quote, add to the security risk of America because you're not diminishing it right now.
So there would be no change in the threat.
And we would still have the same requirement to defend our borders from terrorist attraction no matter where they emanate in the world, whether it's the huge territories of Pakistan where we have no troops or Yemen or Sudan or elsewhere in Africa where we don't have troops.
We have to defend ourselves against all of those.
So it is a complete fabrication and just flat out wrong to say that if we withdraw from Afghanistan, the threat to America goes up because it doesn't.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder, is it true at all that there are al-Qaeda there?
I mean, I haven't seen a picture of an Arab in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Taliban anywhere.
I don't know.
Maybe not ever, but I haven't.
I mean, there's plenty of people from, you know, not just Arabs that consider themselves al-Qaeda.
But the fact is shortly after 2002, we had decimated al-Qaeda.
So there was only a handful of people as there never was more than I think 50 is the number that I used to see a lot from the CIA just smattered around through there.
So they pose no strategic threat because they exist in Afghanistan.
It just doesn't.
I just, you know, I agree with you.
I don't like the overly broad definition of these groups.
I mean, at the time of the 9-11 attack, there were 400 al-Qaeda guys in Afghanistan and maybe another four or five hundred throughout the world as part of their network.
But that was it.
And the vast majority of them escaped or were either killed or escaped to Pakistan or Iran where they were captured at that time.
And it seemed like even the note that there's 50 of these guys around Afghanistan, say back 12 or 15 years ago, it seemed like just hype then.
Show me.
I mean, if they're al-Qaeda, then show me they're Chechens or show me they're Egyptians or Saudis.
Because if al-Qaeda just means, you know, we were attacked by four Pashtuns and we're pretending one of them is an al-Qaeda guy, I'm not impressed by that.
It sounds like a bunch of hype.
And when I read General Miller, this quote that, oh, there's al-Qaeda all across Afghanistan, that there was a piece about this in the Washington Examiner or the, pardon me, the Washington Free Beacon.
Where then they quote Bill Roggio from the Long War Journal at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies saying, well, since we know that's true, since General Miller just said that, then that can only mean one thing.
The Taliban are tolerating their presence and are allied with them.
And so what's the conclusion from that?
We can't trust or deal with the Taliban.
And certainly we can't trust or deal with them to get rid of these guys for us.
So I guess we just have to stay forever.
Forever.
There's no other conclusion.
So I want, yeah, like show me pictures of an Egyptian.
I want to see proof of any Egyptians in Afghanistan with a rifle within a mile of the Taliban anywhere.
Or otherwise, I just don't believe it.
Otherwise, I think that General Miller is essentially insubordinate and he's trying to, you know, disrupt the president's mandate to Zalman Khalilzad to strike a deal with the Taliban by trying to throw this monkey wrench in the works.
Well, see, I'll go you one better.
I don't even care if they can produce a picture of an Egyptian or anybody else.
Their presence there, if true, and that's a big if, doesn't matter to our national security.
And our troops there simply do not impact that.
Even if they exist, we can't run them out of there.
We've been trying for 18 years and have failed just miserably.
And we will, if we're there another 18 years, we'll continue to fail miserably.
So I even try because that's not necessary to keep us safe here.
I can't reiterate that enough.
Yeah, no, I agree with you about that, too.
But I just, I dispute their premise in the first place.
And of course, as we've seen with ISIS, where, you know, Afghan ISIS, where they're just Pakistani Taliban guys, the Tariki Taliban, refugees from Obama and the Pakistani army's war against them in the Swat Valley in 2010.
Then the CIA and the Kabul government tried to recruit to use against the Taliban.
And at least the Afghan government, I don't know if the CIA was in on this, to use against the Pakistani government as retribution for them giving safe haven to the Afghan Taliban.
We'll use the Pakistani Taliban, give them safe haven and use them in a tit for tat thing.
And that was where that came from in the first place.
In other words, still, they're just local tribesmen.
Don't give me this crap about their ISIS, which implies that they're Arabs and from or near the Levant somehow, you know, with access to the West or something like that.
There's this whole other level of implication that they never spell out.
But that's what they're trying to say when in fact, no, it's just another group of ex-Taliban guys, really.
Yeah.
And really, even the bigger question is or an additional point to that is that the longer we stay there, the longer we do this, we just keep acting like a magnet because a lot of these guys are just young guys who not that they're dead enders, that they're just mentality.
They want to fight.
They want to scrap.
You know, they can actually get to places and fight Americans on the battlefield, and that's going to be in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, you know, wherever.
But if you take the troops out of there, they don't have anywhere to go.
They may want to fight Americans.
They may want to scrap.
But if we're not there, they can't come to, you know, the United States.
They can't get here because we have provisions in place to prevent that.
That's why we've had so few attacks over the years, because we have a pretty robust, you know, national security situation to keep terrorists from coming to the United States.
They've been trying for a long time.
And, you know, nothing's ever foolproof.
And periodically some slip through and some probably will in the future.
But by and large, that is our best defense, not trying to go over there to kill them when all we do is draw them to us.
Right.
You know, it's funny.
I saw a clip of Lindsey Graham saying, in fact, it was unbidden to nobody even brought up blowback.
He just started kind of blurting out these non sequiturs trying to answer for it and saying, well, we didn't have troops in Afghanistan and we were attacked on September 11th.
So they weren't motivated by our occupation of Afghanistan.
It's like, yeah, but it was we were attacked by Arabs hiding in Afghanistan.
They were from Egypt and Saudi.
And we were occupying Saudi.
And of course, you know, propping up the dictatorship in Egypt and all of that.
And then, as you say there, it wasn't people based out of Afghanistan, really, that attacked us at all.
It was a bunch of graduate students from Cairo studying in Germany who had access to the United States through their whatever, tourist or student visas.
And, you know, these other they were all Egyptians, Saudis, I think one guy from Lebanon and one guy from Yemen, something like that.
No Afghans and no one based out of Afghanistan.
No Pashtuns, as well as no Iranians, Iraqis or Syrians either.
How irrationally illogical is that argument anyway?
Because we were attacked at one point without maybe you can make some argument that there was it wasn't a result of blowback.
But so you're going to compound that by making sure that there is dramatic blowback by having tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands at some point troops over there.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Right.
I mean, this was something where Ron Paul made fun of Paul Wolfowitz in one of these debates where Ron goes, yes, it was blowback.
They attacked us because of our bases in Saudi Arabia.
Paul Wolfowitz is here, right?
Hi, Paul Wolfowitz.
You can ask him.
He'll explain to you.
This is one of the reasons he said we had to attack Iraq so we could get our bases out of Saudi Arabia.
Isn't that right, Paul Wolfowitz?
And Wolfowitz starts biting his thumbnail and sinking down in his chair like a scene out of a sitcom.
Oh, wow.
That was one of his avowed motivations for invading Iraq is we've got to get our bases out of Saudi.
We'll just invade Iraq and move them a few hundred miles north.
And then I'm sure everybody would be totally cool with that.
So that's a pretty official confirmation, even though he got completely the wrong conclusion out of it.
As you said, he just went and compounded the same problem that he acknowledged was the problem, at least, you know.
Look, here's the bottom line.
We need to remove all of our troops from Syria and Iraq first.
That's the first things we need to do and start to reduce our footprint there.
They don't help us keep us safe there.
They do draw potential attacks that give us enormous satellites with strategic risk across the board because of all bad things that could happen with even state-sponsored forces in that area.
And then we need to just defend our borders, and that'll protect our troops.
That'll keep us from wasting money, and it'll reduce the terrorist threat.
I mean, this is immensely, enormously rational and logical.
We just have to break with this paradigm that's been inflicting us since 9-11 that somehow we think if we have troops over there, we're safe here.
We're not, and we need to start fixing this.
Yeah, well, I mean, you're a military guy.
You know how it is.
This is all a black and white thing.
We're either victorious or we were defeated.
Well, in fact, let me go ahead and make a distinction.
As Trump put it the other day, the Islamic State is gone.
ISIS as a group is just al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They're not going anywhere forever.
I mean, there will always be 10 of them left with rifles doing something.
As Trump said, he wasn't claiming that he killed every last one of them.
That's, of course, impossible, but the Islamic State itself is gone.
And that's a circumstance where we can essentially declare victory.
Never mind how Obama's policy helped create the Islamic State in the first place or any of that.
We'll just say, hey, look, there was an Islamic State.
We defeated it.
Have a little parade.
Hooray.
However, as you and I both know, in Afghanistan, the story's not the same.
We leave the government in Afghanistan high and dry.
It's going to fall.
And maybe or maybe the Taliban won't invade and conquer Kabul.
As Matthew Ho pointed out on the show, the last time they did, they had the support of America, Saudi and Pakistan, who wanted them to take over the whole country back in the 1990s.
Whereas this time, presumably, the Pakistanis, with the Americans leaning on them, would not support the Taliban in an effort to seize the capital city.
But still, at the very least, the whole project is going to fall apart completely.
America's picking up two thirds of the tab, everything that government does and its whole army and everything, as you know.
So nobody can spin that.
Not even Fox News can spin that as a victory.
When we leave Afghanistan, at least half the country we just essentially admit is the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban.
That's ugly.
You're asking people to go ahead and say, oh, well, I mean, I guess we lost that one, but that's OK.
But that's the real problem, isn't it?
If you can't spin it as a victory, you can't leave yet.
You've got to figure out to do it in a way that you can claim it's great, or you can't get anybody to go along, because it'll be somebody's fault.
Trump could have done this his first day in office and blamed it all on Bush and Obama.
But now it's kind of his fault, too.
And so, you know what I mean?
All those political incentives kick in.
Your comment there a second ago about the way we like to see things in black and white terms is more nefarious, I think, than it even appears on the surface, because everybody is either a good guy or they're a bad guy.
I mean, we see this in Afghanistan where somehow we view the Kabul government as the good guy and the Taliban as the bad guy.
And the fact is that they're both Afghan people and they both have.
Well, I won't go so far as to say the Taliban have any good side, but I will go so far as to say that the Afghan government doesn't have all good by any stretch of the imagination.
They do things we would not like in any sort of this in any capacity.
And then you see the same thing happening in the Middle East right now where we're ready to go to war with Iran and we're talking about how they're the 100 percent bad and somehow the Saudi Arabia is good.
I mean, with their terrorism, their beheading of sometimes 17-year-old kids because they were on Twitter in the wrong way.
I mean, there's not good guys and bad guys over there.
There's just one group or another group, and they have various interests.
And our job is to make sure we protect American interests in all cases and not pick winners and losers over there and not get involved in everything that can never be solved and satisfied.
So we need to just pull ourselves out of that, recognize the reality, the objective reality that we are not succeeding there and never will militarily.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, it was al-Qaeda that attacked us, not the Taliban.
And I see it framed more and more that way, too, that we won the war then.
We should have declared victory then instead of trying.
This is exactly what I say in my book, too, instead of which actually.
Well, I also say we should have negotiated in the first place.
But anyway, if you think we had to have a war against al-Qaeda, we still didn't have to have a war against the Taliban.
And even if you think we had to have a war against the Taliban, at least some kind of punitive air campaign against them or what have you for allowing al-Qaeda to base out of their country for so long leading up to the attack and what have you, we still didn't have to create a new government in Kabul and then declare it our sworn duty forever to prop it up against all its enemies and this kind of thing.
And so if you frame it that way, that, you know what, it's not really losing because it's something that George Bush and Barack Obama should have never really had us doing, trying to take over the whole country anyway.
So we can just call that off.
That's a pretty good take.
And I'm seeing that more and more from just regular mainstream people.
Maybe they did read the book.
I don't know.
Well, let's hope so.
If they didn't, let's get, let's get a copy in their hand, but we need to just finally just take action on these, you know, more people are starting to recognize it.
People who've been there have known it all along.
It's time to take action on this and shut it down.
Cool.
Well, Hey, listen, man, I really appreciate all the great work that you're doing, Daniel, and all your great writing.
So thanks again for coming on the show.
Always my pleasure.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, that's Danny Davis.
He's at Defense Priorities, former Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and a famous whistleblower.
And here he is at the American Conservative Magazine.
McMaster uses worn Vietnam trope to accuse Americans of defeatism.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
