All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I got Kelly Vlahos on the line.
She's a Washington DC based freelance writer, longtime political reporter for foxnews.com and contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
She's a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today Magazine and writes for antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com/Vlahos.
V-L-A-H-O-S.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you.
Okay.
So I want to ask you about the politics of the Afghanistan Pakistan war there in Washington, DC.
You've been keeping such a close eye on, I guess what we could call like the neoliberal centrist so-called, I guess they would fit at the realist's table or whatever, but they're basically the Clintonites at the, the democratic PNAC over there, the center for a new American security.
And it's Michelle Flournoy, one of the founders there is in Doug Feith's spot over at the Pentagon.
And these are the people who have pushed this counter insurgency strategy to, you know, David Petraeus saved the day in Iraq, and now he's going to repeat that success in Afghanistan.
And so now Obama has been in office for almost two years and a whole lot of people have died.
And I wonder whether, you know, the, the way people are thinking in DC, are they over this yet, or they still think that they're on a winning path here that David Petraeus can somehow pull this out or are they basically over it yet?
Well, I wrote about this goodness.
It must've been several months ago, you know, nearly a year ago about how the, the counter insurgency, the count, the, the coined Anistas, you know, the, the think tankers that you just mentioned, pushing counter insurgency as the new modern American strategy.
And I talked about how they were fading fast because of realities on the ground.
And I know that you and I had talked about this too, and it's accelerated quite a bit here in Washington.
And I'm going to be writing about this for my next week's column.
I really sense that general David Petraeus, who was sort of the king coined Anisa himself has read the tea leaves that, you know, he's out there now, I've taken the place of, of general McChrystal, he sees what's going on.
And we're getting a sense from him that he's abandoning this counter insurgency quite quickly.
What's happened in happening in Kandahar and in other places in Helmand province where they have not been able to, um, liquidate the, the Taliban, um, on one hand and bring services and, uh, the government, uh, the, you know, the, the sort of to the people and protect the people, it's not happening.
So what we're seeing is massive firepower coming down from the skies, just like they did in Baghdad, um, during the search, basically they've, they've fallen back on old, you know, uh, army, you know, army tactics, operational tactics of massive firepower and weaponry engaging conventional warfare against the Taliban, um, while talking up this bit about, uh, engaging in, um, fresh negotiations or at least facilitating them with the Taliban.
So we're really getting a sense here that counterinsurgency is old news and it's, it's just interesting to see it happen because Obama was sort of dragged along, um, to, to do, you know, at, at, at Petraeus's bidding for the last year and a half.
And now Petraeus is abandoning his own strategy.
Yeah.
And, you know, even at the start of that, the deal was, yeah, they know they're going to have to deal with the Taliban, but what they want to do is kill the Taliban really good for a year and a half and get themselves in a stronger position to negotiate.
Right.
And yet, I guess you're telling me they've already realized that the more they fight the weaker their position, they might as well deal with the Taliban now.
And that's not just the, the political Democrat types up there.
That's the generals to Petraeus himself is saying, all right, let's go ahead and talk.
And that, and I think that's what I'm reading between the lines and the, and the last week or so, I mean, I'm sure you've noticed that the news, the mainstream news has been saturated with these headlines about talks with the Taliban.
NATO is protecting the Taliban leaders who are coming to Kabul.
You know, I've read another in another lesser known publications off the beaten track.
You know, there's talk about how a lot of this is mainstream, you know, spin and hoo-ha that, you know, the, the talks have been going on in Saudi Arabia between Afghanistan and, and, and, and facilitators in the Middle East for some time now.
Uh, it seems as though, um, what we're doing is, is trying to put a gloss on a pretty ugly situation.
And what I'm reading is that there's, there's really no proof that real negotiations are even going on, that the key people like the Haqqani network, that would, would, would be key and critical to actually moving forward to any resolve here that those talks aren't, aren't happening.
So I think we need to take some time to sift through some of the spin here, but it's obvious to me, at least, and to a lot of other people that Petraeus has seen, has seen the writing on the wall.
You bring up a good point.
Are we even in the right position to start negotiations?
We're supposed to be in a better position at this point.
And we're not.
No, we're the Reds in this civil war here.
That's been going on, that the Northern Alliance has been losing for 30 years.
Right.
We're backing the losers.
Yeah.
So it's not going to work.
Yeah.
With this, yeah, we're, but you know, it's not like this, this wasn't predicted, you know, it's just, it's just funny, not funny, but it's, it's just, it's just interesting to note that a lot of this, you know, coin, the, the, the coin mythology has been basically shredded over the last six months, the, the, the mythology of David Petraeus himself coming in over the summer and being able to turn things around like he did in the surge, you know, that's, that's, that's fallen by the wayside.
Um, so it is interesting.
I have sensed this, a shift in Washington and in the blogs that I usually sort of like skim to, to see what the, the, the coin, the coin community is talking about.
And a lot of them are backpedaling fast and furiously.
Yeah.
I told him this wasn't going to work.
And I told him that wasn't going to work.
No, that's not what they were saying a year, two years ago.
Um, so, well, you know, the American people apparently are over it.
I saw this.
It's amazing to me that, well, a couple of things.
First of all, the numbers say that 37% of Americans favor the war.
So you're talking the most diehard Obama lovers and the most diehard genocidal Jacksonian types, and that's it.
There's nobody left.
The rest of the American population has abandoned this war.
52% say the war in Afghanistan has turned into a Vietnam.
Now, the most remarkable thing about this to me is it's still the least important thing.
Apparently, you know, the, the war has no support, but nobody's really that against it either, which we're talking about killing people.
And so this whole thing just, it blows my mind and the money being wasted and everything else is just, I don't know.
But here's the thing that I was going to say was that if this is a Vietnam and people are finally realizing that, well, when did they realize that Vietnam was a Vietnam in 1967 or something?
And then it took until 1974 before the damn thing ended.
So maybe everybody realizing this thing is a lost cause doesn't mean anything.
You know what I mean?
Right, exactly.
And you know, to, to, to, to make a, uh, uh, analogy to Vietnam, if, if Petraeus is indeed, and we're seeing evidence, um, all over the place in the headlines this week, if he's indeed shifting over to a war of increased firepower, drone strikes, you know, dropping bombs on Taliban targets.
I mean, basically full out, um, that is very similar to the, the sort of an increase in firepower, the bombings after Nixon took office.
I mean, it was the last hurrah.
It was the last, you know, um, ditch effort to win that war is just to bomb the crap out of them.
And if that's what we're doing, we're, we're hardly going to leave this war.
I mean, we might leave this war.
We might even get out in 2011.
I don't, I'm not sure about that, but we're definitely not going to do a rap in glory.
So we're basically just going to kill, you know, thousands of more people, um, before we finally get out of there and just leave a big crater behind.
Well, I guess, you know, that's better than not leaving a crater.
We get to feel tough on the way out from losing a war.
Uh, don't you feel tough?
Everybody turning people into craters.
We'll be back.
Kelly Vallejos on the show.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Kelly Vallejos on the show today.
She writes for antiwar.com original.
Dot antiwar.com/Vallejos.
And, uh, we're talking about how the Democrats are over their nifty new strategy of counterinsurgency, which I think is kind of funny to even say like, yeah, counterinsurgency is our doctrine because that just implies, doesn't it?
That all our wars are colonial wars of occupation and conquering civilians and forcing them to submit to our rule.
You know, we didn't fight a counterinsurgency doctrine against the Nazis.
That was a war against a giant mechanized state military force.
Counterinsurgency is for killing civilians, Kelly.
Right.
And, you know, you can't, it becomes no surprise because during the 2008, uh, election, and even before that you had, um, you know, you had people like Peter Beiner, um, who were, you know, a Democrat, a writer with a new Republic.
I think he's at the council of foreign relations now representing this sort of moderate Democrat, the muscular foreign policy Democrat, that Clinton-esque Democrat who basically saw that military, our military could be used as a quote, forced for good, spreading democracy, changing societies, bringing food and liberty and freedom to suppressed, uh, countries across the globe.
Uh, so, I mean, they, this was predictable that when the Obama administration came in, you know, this is after he populated it with Clinton, you know, all over, stuck his anti-war, you know, supporters in places, you know, like the UN and, and, and, and hiding away somewhere in the state department, you know, it became as no surprise that they would support this counter insurgency strategy, which seemed to fit with their idea that they could be the, you know, they could be interventionist, but for, for good, for light, you know, and, and it's not working, but that was also predicted.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I guess to a great degree, I've always thought that like, you know, the war machine obviously is not liberal interventionist, uh, types, you know, they have to come up with these fig leaves to convince the new republic writers of the world.
Obviously the publishers know what they're doing, but in order to get these kind of, you know, Clinton love and Democrat types on board for this thing, they've got to, you know, dress it up as the United Nations or dress it up as humanitarian aid or doing good for people in whatever ways.
Otherwise, these are people who would tend to be anti-war.
But if you can say like, look, you know, stop stalling.
We've got to invade Sudan to save the people of Darfur now before it's too late, then, you know, create the outrage for a lack of war.
When, when the, the kind of underlying, but unproven premise is that American intervention in Sudan would be a good thing and would help anybody, you know?
Right.
Well, I'll tell you what I'm a little bit afraid of.
I mean, we looked at, you look at the surge in Iraq in 2007, and basically that was won by two things.
One, paying off the Sunni insurgents to help fight and get rid of the Al-Qaeda.
And two, the massive firepower that I spoke of before.
I mean, I sat there at one of these CNAS annual meetings where David Petraeus got up and he explained detail for detail how they just bombed the crap out of Baghdad.
I mean, it was just a matter of using our weapons, conventional weapons to, to, to, to basically break the insurgency there.
I'm afraid when I look and I read this week that all the embeds have been canceled for the big operation that they're doing outside of Kandahar, the big operation in which we will be dropping bombs, we will be using our massive firepower.
They have taken the embeds out.
So we don't have reporters, or at least the ones that, you know, we don't have the mainstream quote unquote reporters, the ones that are actually, you know, able to get out there to tell us what's really going on.
So I'm afraid that they're just going to basically bomb them into submission and then turn around and say, Petraeus did it again.
You know, we got rid of the Taliban.
Let's get out of here.
And then when everything hits the fan 10 months later, nobody's paying attention.
Yeah.
But the thing is, I mean, look at what they did to Fallujah.
They decimated Fallujah.
They didn't pacify it.
Right.
They never pacified Fallujah until finally they accepted the offer that the Sunni based insurgency had been giving all along, which is just let us patrol our own neighborhoods and we'll stop fighting you, you know, and so they can bomb Kandahar all they want.
The Pashtun tribesmen are going to do anything except get revenge until all the foreign occupiers are gone.
That's the history of Asia right there.
Pashtun tribesmen killing whoever was trying to occupy their land.
Right.
It's been going on for 2000 years.
It's the crossroads of every empire in the world.
Hey, we're the Russians.
Hey, we're the Macedonians.
Hey, we're the Brits and whoever come to occupy this land.
And the Pashtun tribesmen say, oh, you think so, huh?
And they always win and the invader always loses.
Right.
I'm saying that I'm looking for Petraeus to create some space, some some public relations, some tactical space where they could say that they've done their job or at least enough to to bring, quote unquote, security to that region.
Yeah.
Get out.
It's like what you said about Nixon.
Right.
That's what you said about Nixon earlier, making the Vietnam comparisons.
Yeah.
We just carpet bomb them.
They've got to, you know, give in to our demands at some point.
Right.
Now, how much carpet bombing can you take?
Right.
And what will our demands be?
They might not even be very I mean, we might not even be demanding much at that point.
We might just want to get out.
I mean, look what's going on in Iraq right now.
I mean, that is hardly the picture of democracy that we supposedly went over there to bring or at least at least to facilitate.
But we don't care.
At this point, we don't care.
Nobody cares.
You know, I wonder in the future history coming up, how many generations are we going to have to deal with the consequences of this?
You know, I mean, this is a history of the world right now.
I can sit here and talk for the rest of the show by myself about how everything horrible that's happened since then is Woodrow Wilson's fault for him and Colonel House negotiating America's entry into World War one on the side of Russia and Britain and France there.
And so you think about, well, what George Bush and Barack Obama have done?
I mean, we're going to continue to have terrorist attacks.
You think about the the amount of killing that Americans have done as revenge for one day worth of attacks on September 11th, 10 years ago, almost now.
And think about all the different September 11th that America has brought to people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia.
You know, we see Somalis leaving America to go fight on the side of Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
But how long before somebody blows himself up here over it, you know?
Right.
I think all that matters to the military at this point is that they get out of Afghanistan with with the least amount of blame, you know, as possible so that they can continue fighting in other areas, like you mentioned Yemen and Somalia, without this hanging over their head.
So I would expect a massive spin coming down, which will help will be facilitated and assisted by the Obama administration, because you have the 2012 elections coming up.
They have to put the best spin on this, too.
So expect them to be working hand in glove, doing whatever Petraeus says to do.
And that's very hopeful.
I mean, I really like that.
You think the because I guess I was reading the politics of it more the other way, where Petraeus wants to run for president against Obama.
He's got to make it Obama's fault and not agree with him that it's time to end the war.
Well, you know, I had I had had that theory and I wrote about it, you know, within the last, you know, several months, I think it was May.
I wrote about that.
I've been talking to people just on my own curiosity, talking to Republicans here in Washington who, you know, who probably would be called upon to do fundraising and all that and feathering feathering the path.
And, you know, they they honestly don't think that Petraeus is going to run this time.
That might change.
They might not know what they're talking about, but I'm not I'm not I'm not seeing any movement in that area.
But I could be wrong.
That's it.
That is definitely a theory that that I've had and I find interesting.
I do see the politics already gelling after Woodward's book came out, which, of course, the right wingers have seized upon some comments that Obama made about, you know, politically, you know, he needed to get out of the war, anything to get out of the war.
So they're already using that against him.
So I would imagine there's going to be you know, this is going to be made a political issue that Obama didn't have the stomach for.
He put politics over over the over national security.
And if he hadn't set that 2011 deadline, that maybe they'd be doing better in the field.
So I would expect to see a lot of blaming put on Obama right now.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Well, and you know how the Democrats are.
They'll never just stand up and say, no, your policy is what's destructive and we're doing the right thing.
They just slither away.
Oh, well, same story, different day.
Thank you very much, Kelly.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
