7/17/19 Jason Ditz on Iran, Yemen, and Afghanistan

by | Jul 21, 2019 | Interviews

Jason Ditz updates Scott on the news from the Middle East. Recently, a missing Emirati tanker that some claimed had been seized by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz was revealed to have simply been towed there voluntarily for repairs. In other news, the UAE has announced the withdrawal of its troops from Yemen, probably realizing it can’t win a ground war there, at least not without stretching itself too thinly and becoming exposed at home. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, seems content to keep fighting the war, since they want to ensure that the entire country is ruled by a friendly regime, or even a puppet ruler.

Discussed on the show:

Jason Ditz is the news editor of Antiwar.com. Read all of his work at news.antiwar.com and follow him on Twitter @jasonditz.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs, by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and LibertyStickers.com.

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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
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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 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.
Hey, you guys on the line.
I got the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
And I know so much because I read you all day.
You have so much stuff here, I almost don't know where to begin.
Actually, yeah, I do.
This is kind of a little thing.
It came and it went.
But it's one of those things that it makes a real impression on people.
And usually they don't get to hear the retraction later.
But missing oil tanker was towed to Iran for repairs, says you at news.antiwar.com.
Tell us about this, please.
Yeah, that was an interesting one because, of course, there's been all these reports about Iran posing a threat to oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
And starting on Monday evening and going into early Tuesday morning, there were reports that, oh, there's this one really small oil tanker that is missing, that somehow vanished out of the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.
Nobody knows what happened to it.
We think Iran might have captured it, which didn't make a lot of sense in the first place because it's a very small tanker based out of the United Arab Emirates, but it's a privately owned tanker.
It's not in any way affiliated with the UAE government.
And, I mean, the idea that that tanker, they said there were no signals for help or anything, no, they just turned off their transponder at some point and they vanished, which in that really narrow strait doesn't make a lot of sense.
I mean, that nobody would have seen anything or heard anything out of this ship, especially if it was being captured militarily by the Revolutionary Guard.
Yeah, but the top of the hour news said Iran steals boat.
Right, they were kind of whipping it up into a frenzy where like, oh, there's a missing boat, that it was like the U.S. is deeply suspicious that Iran might have captured this boat.
Then the Iranian foreign ministry issued a statement late Tuesday saying the boat's fine, it's not being held or anything, it was having some sort of technical problem.
It signaled one of the Coast Guard boats off the coast of Iran as it was about to enter the strait.
They sent out a tugboat, brought it in and they were repairing it for them.
It wasn't captured or anything, it just kind of broke down for a minute.
Hey, that's aggression.
That counts.
Yeah, and now that boat's probably forever cursed under some sort of financial sanction for having been whipped up by Iran.
Oh, I thought you were going to say Iranian black magic.
Oh, okay, go ahead, I'm sorry.
Well, I mean, now it's like, oh, it's got Iranian parts in it, so it's tantamount to an Iranian ship.
Same thing.
Terrible.
Well, hopefully the oil gets where it was going.
We won't mourn for it.
I'm not even sure where the oil was supposed to be going except through the Strait of Hormuz.
Yeah.
Oh, so I shouldn't wish the oil well.
It might have been going to one of America's enemies.
Yeah, I mean, it was going through the Strait of Hormuz, so that just narrows it down to pretty much anybody.
Right.
Well, and I like the whole thing about, you know, this is Iran picking a fight with the UAE right now, when haven't I been reading you reporting that the UAE has decided to back off of their anti-Iranian stance and leave the Saudis sticking their neck out here?
Yeah, somewhat.
Seems like a bad time for Iran to punish them for that.
Yeah, I mean, the UAE has been withdrawing some of its troops from Yemen, bringing them back to the UAE specifically because of all the tensions in the Persian Gulf, and they don't want to suddenly find a regional war erupting while almost their entire military is hanging out in Yemen.
Doing God knows what.
So they're bringing them home, they're saying their involvement in Yemen is mostly going to be militias that they've been funding or arming, which is something like 80,000 fighters by itself.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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So yeah, just like with the Japanese prime minister sitting down to meet with Ayatollah, it seemed like a pretty inopportune moment for Iranian foreign policy to be what America says it is.
Yeah, we got the prime minister here for the first time in however long, I mean, it must be decades at least.
And then we're going to either fire a missile at or somehow covertly sneak a landmine onto a side of a boat that belongs to a Japanese company.
Not to sink it even, just to like kind of damage it a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it was funny.
I talked with Elijah Magnier about that.
And he wouldn't go so far as to say that, yes, Iran did it.
But he said that they're happy to let you think that they did because there's a message in that that they could have.
And it wouldn't have cost them very much to cost you a whole lot, which is kind of interesting way to phrase it.
But he said he had sources at the pretty high levels of the Iranian government saying that, well, you can go ahead and take that as an example of what we might do anyway or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, those mines.
That's what they mean by deniable, I guess.
Those magnetic mines that they supposedly use, the limpet mines.
I mean, those have been around since basically World War I. They're not expensive.
Even though the administration said only Iran could have done this, really, almost any actor in the region could have gotten mines like that.
And it really wouldn't have cost very much.
So, yeah, it's absolutely something they could have done.
It just doesn't make sense for them to have actually done it.
Yeah.
As you said, everybody already knows that they could close the straits with a couple artillery tubes.
Yeah, right.
I mean, it's a very narrow passage of water.
It's like saying that the United States could close passage through the Mississippi River if they wanted to without having boats.
I mean, you could just get some guys with machine guns on either side of the river firing at anything that floats by.
I mean, you're going to close the river.
All right.
So now, speaking of the UAE in Yemen, what about the UAE in Yemen?
Well, the UAE in recent years has kind of imagined itself taking its vast oil revenue and turning itself into something of a regional power, which would be quite a feat because it's not a very big country.
Their military is not huge, although it does have a lot of very expensive U.S.-made equipment.
And Yemen's kind of a test case for that because, while the UAE originally did commit a good chunk of its military to Yemen, their long-term goal has been to kind of prop up UAE-friendly groups.
That's why we see, while the Saudis are backing the former ousted Yemen government, the Hadi government, the UAE has more been backing the southern separatist movements.
And you can kind of see why, because from the UAE's perspective, Yemen's value is basically its coastline.
And that coastline would almost entirely be in South Yemen if South Yemen reemerged.
So if they can sort of fund the South Yemen separatists enough to make that happen and have them in their pocket, that would be a very good situation for the UAE.
It's also why the UAE committed a fair number of forces to the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen during the war, even though literally not a single battle has been fought on that island.
And there was no sign that the war was even going to impact that island.
But it's strategically valuable to the UAE Navy.
So it was very important for them to just sort of roll in with some troops and seize that island.
And now, so what of the militia forces that you've talked about, how, well, they're going to kind of pull out, but not quite?
How would you characterize that?
The UAE itself is pulling its own military personnel out at least somewhat and trying to replace them with the militias that they've been backing, which this has been something of a controversy in the U.S.
So it doesn't get as much attention as you'd think because the UAE has been arming Islamist groups.
Some of them are al Qaeda linked to fight alongside them against the Shiites in Yemen.
And sort of the idea now is to see what that's achieved over the last almost five years of war.
And as the UAE starts to sort of withdraw itself directly from these regions, they want to see if these militias and proxies can take over those regions themselves and just sort of rule parts of the country on their own without the UAE having to permanently commit troops, which is very important to the UAE because it's not a very big country.
And even the limited empire building that a regional power would be expected to have, they can't really do it with long-term deployments overseas.
They just don't have the troops to do it.
And now the part of this that gets the least coverage all along has been the southern separatists, you know, based out of Aden.
And so they've sort of been, or to a great degree, allied with the UAE this whole time.
And is there really a Saudi force on the ground at all there?
Or it's all just been the UAE providing the ground forces, including a lot of mercenaries, including a lot of child soldiers from Sudan and so forth, of course.
Right.
And there are Saudi forces in southern Yemen too.
And Saudi forces in Aden.
Aden is supposedly the temporary capital city of Yemen, at least until they occupy the actual capital city of Yemen, which is taking a lot longer than they expected.
But yeah, I mean, the Saudi forces are there.
They sometimes end up clashing with the UAE forces.
You'll see their various proxies fighting over control of the Aden airport, for instance.
Ironically, the southern separatists being based in Aden probably could be fairly easily co-opted into a government like the one the Saudis are backing, because President Hadi, the former president of Yemen and would-be president of Saudi-occupied Yemen, is from Aden.
And he's kind of the first major leader.
Well, really the only major leader that Yemen has had since the Yemeni war, that is from the south.
So he would kind of make sense as a leader for the separatist movement.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, when I talked with Nasser Arabi, he was telling me that there are a lot of people in the south and who have power and influence in the south, who, in the event of a disengagement by the US, the UAE and the Saudis, would be in charge of and would be able to reintegrate the south and that the country wouldn't have to split.
That, yeah, there are separatists, but there are a lot of southerners who want to keep the country together, too.
But do you have any indication of that?
Or is there much coverage of those questions, really?
There really isn't a lot of coverage of those questions.
I mean, mostly the talking points are that the Saudis aren't going to give up.
The Saudis are determined they're going to take the whole country.
And it's very important for the Saudis to take the whole country because being bordered with Yemen, they have a vested interest in seeing who controls the northern half of Yemen, too.
And they want it to be someone that they are basically in charge of.
So while the UAE's interests are really more in the south of Yemen because of the coastline and the naval implications of it, the Saudi interests are really more in the north where they haven't had a lot of success militarily.
And we don't really hear, other than the separatists saying, hey, we're still a significant force in the south, who else is a force in the south or anywhere else in the country?
It's just that, oh, the Houthis are still in the north, there's a separatist group in the south, the Saudis and, say, the Houthis have to go.
So that's the depth of what we hear for the most part.
Well, and I guess the status quo previously had been, and I don't know how far previously, maybe before Saleh had really started attacking them in the Obama years.
I mean, I know there were problems before, but I guess from what I understand, the status quo was the Saudis paid the Houthis to not be a problem.
That had kind of been the tradition before.
But after the Saudis finished losing this war, it's going to be difficult for them to go back to that, just bribing these guys who are still on their borders and are not far from the holy cities either, right?
Right.
I mean, historically, that part of Yemen has been, was a sort of Shiite kingdom or Shiite emirate.
It's sort of an odd situation, because they're a type of Shiite that is not common throughout much of the rest of the Muslim world.
They're sort of a different sect of Shiism.
The Zaydis.
Right.
And they've held quite well in that part of Yemen for hundreds of years.
And trying to unseat them has never really been very effective, which is why Saleh sort of tried to keep them placated.
He would offer them political positions and things like that, which is how the Houthi movement got started in the first place, because he offered Houthi a political position and then reneged on the promise.
And that started some political protests, and he quickly declared them terrorists, and that turned them into an outlaw movement.
And, you know, really up into the Arab Spring, the Houthis started to become a big deal again.
And Saleh's answer before he was being unseated was not to try to make a deal with them.
It was to try to start positioning some Sunni Islamist groups, you know, Wahhabist sects in the same region, figuring he could kind of weaken their influence over northern Yemen by just having a counterforce in the same region, which didn't work very well.
It just led to a lot more fighting.
And then Saleh was ousted during the Arab Spring and replaced with Hadi, who never really had control of the country.
I mean, for his whole, his nominal two-year interim term in office, which he's now, what is he now, six and a half years into his two-year term?
Still insisting he's the rightful president?
He's sitting in a hotel room in Riyadh.
Right.
And, you know, two years were up.
They didn't have a constitution ready.
So he says, well, I'll just take another year while they finish up the constitution.
Then it was, well, no, I'm just going to stay president.
And then that's when the fighting really started.
He got chased out of the north and he got chased out of the south and into Riyadh.
And that's when the Saudis decided they needed to reinstall him, even though his claim to be the rightful president had lapsed long ago.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't know, you know, honestly, how well Nasser Arabi speaks for other Yemenis or whatever.
He's my go-to guy for Yemen.
I've interviewed him for years.
He's a former New York Times reporter before they forsook him for being a victim in our war, I guess, I don't know.
But he used to cover like the early part of the war against AQAP for the Times and that kind of thing.
But he explained to me that the way he sees it and the way essentially all different factions see it is that, yeah, the Houthis are the ones in power now and that that's okay.
It was these guys, now it's those guys.
Nobody thinks that everyone has to become a Houthi now or this kind of thing, right?
It's sort of like, you know, geez, they didn't really want Ronald Reagan to win, but then he did.
And then how big of a difference did it really make?
You know what I mean?
Same thing with Trump, right?
You know, we're all still Americans and he's the president.
And as we saw with George W. Bush, somebody attacks us, the approval rating goes way, way up.
And so we're all Houthis now is the way that those people look at it as they're under assault.
And so, you know, in a way it's always kind of portrayed like they're this alien force who came down from the north or whatever.
But like you're saying, no, they've been a part of this society for a very long time.
And so, you know, no, they didn't win a big election.
That's not how they do things around there most of the time, I'm afraid.
But yeah, but that doesn't mean that they're like enforcing a totalitarian dictatorship in order to maintain their position either.
And especially when they're under attack, people say, okay, well, whatever.
He's my president this week anyway, you know?
Right.
That's really true of Yemen historically because the central government in Yemen has almost never had any sort of major sway over the rest of the country.
I mean, even in the best of times, Saleh controlled maybe Sana'a and the outskirts of Sana'a.
He maybe could have, if he wanted to mobilize the military, pushed into one city at a time and enforced something.
But the reality of Yemen is you've got all these tribal groups that are all heavily armed.
They're at least as well armed as the Yemen military ever was.
And during the Arab Spring, we saw even nominal attempts to try to, you know, stop some tribe from protesting led fairly quickly to that tribe just routing the military and chasing them out of the area and just made things worse.
I mean, there really is no reason for people in a lot of Yemen to worry about who's actually in charge in Sana'a because it doesn't affect them all that much.
They're local tribal leaders and local other groups are still going to be the real power on the ground where they live.
And the central government doesn't matter that much.
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Hey man, tell me some news about Afghanistan these days.
I know I see a lot of bad news coming out of there, but.
Yeah, I mean, there's peace talks going on, of course, in Qatar and there's a lot of hope for those peace talks, but in the meantime, Afghanistan's just going very poorly.
It's a war that is in the process of being lost by the U.S.
And after roughly 17, 18 years of claiming that the war that's slowly being lost is actually secretly going really well, the Pentagon has sort of gotten to their last rope where they've decided, well, this isn't the right metric for judging success.
This is, now they're pretty much out of metrics and their new position is, well, we're in the process of peace talks anyway, so the day-to-day fighting really doesn't matter all that much.
We're just sort of running the clock out while we wait for Khalilzad to make a deal with the Taliban.
But in practice, the war is going as bad as it ever was.
The Taliban's still attacking places with impunity.
You see almost daily incidents of, oh, well, a Taliban overran two or three police outposts in this province, looted a whole ton of weapons from it and left.
And that's really how the Taliban has been operating this war from the start, is finding sparsely guarded police outposts and the like and looting them, which is why I would hazard a guess that for the history of warfare, this has got to be one of those wars in which both sides are very comparably armed, not only with similar levels of weapons, but with largely the same weapons that they got from the same place.
Because whatever weapons the Taliban had at the start of this war are long since gone, and they're basically just using whatever they've looted.
Yeah, whatever they bought with American protection money that they were paid to protect American fuel shipments across the country and stuff like that.
Right.
You can buy it on the black market.
You can loot it from a police station.
And then they're buying it with greenbacks.
That's the joke.
Yeah.
So they're quite well-armed, and at least as well-armed as the military and seemingly enforce a lot better discipline and better training than the Afghan military ever has.
They're just relentless, as you say.
You know, the reports every day.
I get that Google News alert for Afghanistan.
I check your work, of course, all the time.
And as you say, they just blow up this, they blow up that, looting weapons.
But attacking civilian targets, too, at least some of the time, certainly making their presence known.
And, you know, yeah, I don't know how it's going to be when the Americans finally quit.
Just what a deal with the North is going to look like.
But I'm not going to bet that it's going to be anything that anybody in the North is going to be willing to accept.
So the war after the Americans leave is going to be a whole other chapter, I'm afraid.
Right.
That's the odd part of this, is how unwilling the Ghani government has been to try to negotiate with the Taliban while the U.S. is still there.
They've sort of viewed it like, oh, well, America's looking like they could abandon us if there's a deal on the table.
So we're just going to try to stonewall the whole process by refusing to meet with the Taliban.
Yeah.
That works real great until it stops working.
Right.
The U.S. will organize these big meetings and then the Afghan government just won't show up.
And...
Well, now they had some talks in Moscow, right?
Right.
They did have some talks in Moscow.
But the reality of the situation is the Afghan government probably is in a better bargaining position now for a power-sharing deal than they're ever going to be again.
Yeah, I get that.
I mean, if the U.S. flat out leaves under a deal with the Taliban, then, I mean, they might as well start packing up and fleeing the country themselves because they're not going to win.
I mean, they're just going to lose and lose and lose like they have been and even faster because there's not going to be U.S. and NATO troops helping them out.
Yeah.
So, by the way, I mean, and speaking of which, because this part of it is pretty important, you know, that Khalilzad is still at this.
He clearly works directly for the president, not for the Secretary of State or anything like that.
And he clearly has been told to see this through hell or high water or the whole thing would have fallen apart a long time ago.
Right?
We haven't seen the slightest hint that America is willing to walk away from the table on this.
We want a deal.
And the fact that it's Khalilzad negotiating it makes it all just ironic and interesting and I don't know what.
But it seems like, if I understand it right, Jason, that you get leaks from both sides, but everybody seems to agree and confirm that the tenets of the deal will be that America will go and all combat troops will be out of there.
And I don't know if that includes trainers, too, and all military and hand over the Bagram Air Base to I don't know who or what, or if they're going to mention that part of it or not.
But that then the only condition to make this possible, the only condition isn't peace with, isn't a new negotiation and a peace deal with Kabul.
Forget that.
That's already off the table.
We're already going around that.
The only condition is, Taliban, keep ISIS down and keep Al-Qaeda out.
And am I right that when the Taliban say that that's now the Americans' only condition and don't worry because that's what we've been promising to do all this time, that the Americans really confirmed that that's about it?
They're working only on the details now?
Or what am I missing?
Right.
I mean, they've always said that it was a four term deal.
The deal was foreign troops all withdraw, the Taliban fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda, some sort of power sharing agreement between the Taliban and the Kabul government and permanent ceasefire between the Taliban and the Afghan military.
Oh, OK.
So I left those last two conditions out.
And those two are major conditions of the negotiations in Qatar this whole time.
They're presented sometimes as major conditions.
Sometimes they're not mentioned at all.
So I think they're very much an afterthought.
The Taliban has confirmed that they're not looking to immediately take control of the entire country.
They're willing to negotiate a power sharing deal.
They're willing to have a ceasefire on the condition of the foreign troops withdrawal.
Yeah.
But for them, the big thing is we want all the troops out.
And the U.S. seems to be willing to deliver that.
And for the U.S., the big deal is we want ISIS and Al-Qaeda taken care of and the Taliban is willing to do that.
So everything else really is just kind of, you know, the fine print of the agreement.
Anything else that gets agreed to along the way.
Yeah.
You know, I wouldn't trust the Taliban to not try to take Kabul.
But at the same time, Matthew Ho pointed out on the show that the last time the Taliban attempted, never even succeeded, finally, but the last time they attempted to really conquer the entire country, they had the support of the Americans, the Saudis and the Pakistanis in the Bill Clinton administration years.
And so, but without the Pakistanis there to say, yes, we have your back and our money and our weapons and our logistical support in order to win outright a full-scale civil war against the current sitting government.
Without that, which they would not have in this case, that the Taliban wouldn't really have any hope of trying to sack Kabul or certainly not, hopefully not Kabul.
Maybe they'd try it.
But Matthew was saying he thinks they probably wouldn't even go for Kabul, but they certainly wouldn't try to conquer the rest of the North because they just wouldn't have it in them without that kind of foreign support.
And there is no power willing to support them in that at this point.
So that's a little bit hopeful.
You know, you don't have to rely on their goodwill or anything or their honest word because they are war criminal, horrible bastards as bad as anybody fighting over there.
And while they've managed to keep their war weariness a lot more in check than, say, the Afghan military has because the Afghan military runs its first sign of trouble in a lot of parts of the country, the Taliban have got to be getting sick of fighting too.
And after, well, what are we, 18 years into a war now, they probably, a lot of their fighters probably don't have an appetite for a second war, even if it's one they think they can win immediately upon ending this one.
Wouldn't that be something if the Americans left and then peace just broke out and the whole thing was over and everyone agreed that, see, you could have listened to Jason and Scott back in 2000 and whichever, and you could have achieved the same thing a long time ago.
They won't say that.
But it would be interesting to see.
And I don't want to sound the worst just so I don't seem naive, but I guess there's room to be a little bit hopeful.
Yeah, there's a deal to be had there.
Whether it's a good deal for the long term or not is another matter.
Whether it's going to be an enduring peace or not in Afghanistan is always a shot in the dark because when has Afghanistan ever had an enduring peace?
But the current war sure isn't accomplishing anything.
I don't want to get that over with.
Yeah.
All right, so one last caveat here.
You have this one from the second.
Trump would leave intel officers in Afghanistan.
And this is, I guess, from his interview with Chuck Todd, right, where he was saying, oh, was it the Chuck Todd one where, geez, the generals tell me that if I pull out, then something bad might happen.
Safe haven myth.
Right.
That's basically it.
Yeah.
We're basically saying, oh, well, the CIA's got to stay.
I mean, that's just too important.
Which is sort of like his, well, we're in Iraq now.
We might as well use that to keep an eye on Iran.
Just the idea that, because he knows there's going to be pushback from any end to any American war.
Just because these wars have gone on for so long that people sort of see them as the status quo.
And, but the reality of the situation is if you take the U.S. military and the rest of NATO out of the equation, how much CIA can you realistically have in Afghanistan?
Right.
Yeah, that's a good question.
You can have some operating out of the embassy, of course, like you do in pretty much every country.
But, you know, the CIA is mostly operating off of military bases.
And without those military bases, they're not going to be able to just say, oh, this is a CIA base now.
That's not going to fool anybody.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the elephant in the room is Bagram.
They really going to give that up?
And that's been mentioned from time to time in the talks as the military is saying, well, I don't know what's going on in Qatar, but I know I'm not giving up on my base.
You know, the new nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I guess he didn't think it mattered in terms of sucking up to the boss or he was directly rebuking him.
But he said it would be a strategic mistake for America to pull out of Afghanistan.
In other words, we have to stay there forever, no matter what, because of Russia, China and Iran.
And at the expense of the Afghans, screw them.
And that's the guy applying for the job.
You know, that Trump could rescind the offer.
And you know what?
As long as I'm ranting about this, the current general over there, Miller, and his predecessor, Nicholson, and then also the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his predecessor as well, Dunford and Votel, they have all said, no, we can't leave.
It would be a huge mistake, essentially directly countermanding the orders of the president to Khalilzad to see this through.
I mean, when they say strategic mistake, this is just like in the Bob Woodward book that James Mattis told Donald Trump, if you pull out of Afghanistan, anything bad that happens there, I'm going to blame it on you.
And I'm going to say that I warned you not to do it and you did it.
And you're going to look just like Barack Obama.
So you can't.
And that's how he made him do the escalation in 2017, was based on that.
So anyway, I mean, that's really something.
So often we see the military, like in Iran, Dunford personally actually acting as the brake on what's happening.
But on Afghanistan, they're the ones stepping on the gas.
They're the ones who refuse to, you know, essentially what?
Admit that it's not worth it after all this time?
Is that the problem?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if it's that or that they just don't want to admit that.
You know, how many high ranking military brass have gone on the record as saying that they see progress in Afghanistan and that there's going to be really visible progress just around the corner for the last 20 years.
I mean.
Everybody that's been involved directly in Afghanistan has seen their career basically ruined by the end of it.
All these other high ranking officials who even comment on Afghanistan have always been way too upbeat.
So I suspect that a lot of them are going to look really foolish what the reality is.
Oh, well, we got to leave because we basically lost this war.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, I'll let you go.
I know you got a busy afternoon, but I sure appreciate your time Yeah, man.
All right, you guys, that's the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
And I mean, seriously, look at this.
Go to news.antiwar.com right there and then page down and then hit more and then more and just look at the last few pages and just see what you get there day in and day out.
Every day, the real news about what's going on in the news to be explicitly and terribly redundant.
News.antiwar.com All right, y'all.
I'll see you next time.

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