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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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 the great Jason Ditz.
He is managing news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Keeping track of all the bad news in the whole wide world for us over there, unparalleled.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good, man.
I appreciate you joining us again here.
Listen, there's so much to talk about.
Can we start with Afghanistan?
Sure.
First of all, the giant suicide attack.
The Taliban, this is their negotiation strategy, I guess, is to drive the hardest bargain they can, but there were double digits killed in this thing, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it got up to 20 when all was said and done.
And that was in Kabul, or what was the target there?
It was in Kabul.
The Taliban said it was a recruitment center that was the main target, although it was a truck bomb that blew out the glass on a bunch of other buildings.
There were about 150 people wounded that basically were civilians that were just in sort of the general vicinity.
Now, I read a thing, too, about this report on the ghost soldiers where, okay, we had inflated our numbers by about 40,000 infantry.
What does that say about the strength of the overall Afghan National Army?
Honestly, I think that's probably a good sign if it's accurate.
We've known about the ghost soldiers for years that this has been a tactic for sort of lower level commanders, some little bit higher level commanders that, you know, if some soldier just disappears, which is not uncommon in Afghanistan, you had a lot of people go through the basic training, take the gun and leave.
They just left them on the books because, one, it makes it look like they are making their quotas for how many people they had to recruit, and, two, those guys are getting paid, at least on paper, and since they're not around to collect their checks, that money could get into the pocket of their commander because, generally, it's not like you get checks and have to go to the bank in Afghanistan.
Generally, they just give them cash.
So, you know, if you're giving a commanding officer cash to pay for all these soldiers and some of them don't actually exist, he gets to pocket some of it, but, you know, 40,000 being taken off the books in an attempt to kind of get that in line with reality, if that's all it is, I think I would be very surprised.
I'd always expected it to be even more gold soldiers than what they're saying, and it's, I mean, clearly they had to do this at some point, but if they managed to do it and only lost 40,000 soldiers on paper, that's probably not that bad.
Yeah, well, you're right that, hey, at least it shows they hired a new guy to come in and do some accounting and figure out exactly how many soldiers they do have and that kind of thing, but it's an all-important question because, as you're reporting there, it looks like they really are ready to announce a deal with the Taliban, and the major question remaining is what's going to be the future relationship between the Taliban in the South and the East and the West, and the government, so-called the Kabul government in the North?
Right, and I mean, obviously this had to happen, but it was something that, you know, despite ghost soldiers being a fairly common theme in reporting, especially U.S. Special Inspector General's reports for years, it was something the Afghan government just sort of shrugged off.
They never really addressed it, and now with the peace deal seemingly potentially just days away and a power-sharing negotiation between Kabul and the Taliban expected pretty much immediately after that, I guess they're trying to get their house at least a little in order.
Yeah, and now, so tell us about this deal.
Is it really true they're going to announce this thing soon?
That's what they're saying, although the last couple of times that they've had talks in Doha between the U.S. and the Taliban, they've said, well, this could end with an official announcement of a deal, and the last couple of times it hasn't ended with the announcement of a deal, so I guess there's always a possibility that they might put it off another time, but it seems like, you know, the basic structure of the deal has been understood for months now.
It's all been basically agreed to.
It's just a question of everyone going, okay, let's sign on the dotted line and move forward on things like a permanent ceasefire, the process of getting U.S. troops out, and getting to the table with the Afghan government, because the Taliban has been sort of, at times, they've been willing to sit at the table with the Afghan government.
Of course, Russia organized a meeting like that.
It didn't accomplish an awful lot, but they did actually get them to the table, and other times they've said, well, there's really no point until we get the U.S. pullout deal, because until the U.S. leaves or is known that they're definitely going to leave, the Afghan government doesn't really have any sway anyway.
Ultimately, it seems like that's going to happen, and the Afghan government, for all its grousing about how it's unfair that the future of Afghanistan is being decided at talks between the Taliban and the U.S., is going to have to come to the table and start negotiating, or else the U.S. and NATO just flat-out be gone, and them having a war still going on that they weren't winning in the first place.
Hang on, just one second.
Hey, guys, did I ever tell you about LibertyStickers.com?
It's just nothing but anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
I invented most of them, the good ones, anyway.
Anti-war propaganda.
Now, what do you think is, how would you compare, I mean, from what you can tell, the relative strength between the Taliban and this Islamic State Khorasan group now?
I would guess the Taliban is a little bit stronger than the U.S.
I would guess the Taliban is certainly a lot larger.
They're certainly a lot more entrenched in most of Afghanistan.
The Khorasan group has, you know, Nangarhar province, they have small presences elsewhere, especially in the north.
But they haven't really shown any ability to fight the Taliban when they're fighting over territory.
The Taliban has tended to win fairly readily in serious battles.
And, I mean, for ISIS to just, say, go into Nangarhar and wipe them out, I think would be a tall order, because the U.S. and Afghan government have said they've done that half a dozen times, and the group persists.
But I don't think this ISIS affiliate is going to last as a large force in through the peace deal, because there really isn't going to be a lot of recruitment to be done in Afghanistan, I wouldn't think, once the war is over and the Taliban is back in at least partial power, it wouldn't make a lot of sense that they would be stripping away disaffected Taliban figures as they had been in the past.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, and we certainly know that the more that the Green Berets have fought Yeah, that's true.
Well, and we certainly know that the more that the Green Berets have fought them, and SOCOM has bombed them, the stronger they've gotten in Nangarhar since 2015-16.
So, you know, the logic would dictate that, hey, at least quit doing that and see what happens.
Anyway, I saw Andrew McCarthy in the National Review saying, well, I don't know, that was something else.
It was something in the Washington Post, I guess, saying that, well, those who are more determined to keep fighting are joining ISIS because they resent that the Taliban wants to win.
And yeah, you know, I mean, which I guess there is a split in the doctrine there, you know, it's too soon to create your caliphate, wait till the Americans are gone.
But that's exactly what the Taliban's negotiating is America leaving.
So, it just seemed like, you know, trying to transpose old arguments onto the new situation without really taking into account who's who there.
It seems like, if anybody can defeat ISIS in Nangarhar province, it's the Taliban.
As you said, hey, the Americans and the Afghan National Army haven't been able to do it.
Right.
And the Taliban share their same constituency.
So, if they can just come in and defeat them and replace them, then they're pretty much good, you know, which is different than having a bunch of Uzbeks.
It becomes an ideological battle there.
The Taliban can at least outrecruit them by saying, hey, we're semi-official or we're going to be officially part of the government.
And the reality is that I think a lot of this talk of, oh, it's too soon, is just transposing the sense from some US military brass onto the Taliban.
I don't know that I buy that there's a lot of Taliban who've been fighting for the last 18 years who are saying, oh, it's too soon for this war to be over.
This war clearly has legs.
I mean, for one thing, people in Afghanistan don't have the longest life expectancy.
You've got a lot of people in that country that were born into this war.
And they're, you know, coming up to where your next generation of fighters has been born under the occupation and doesn't really know anything else.
I think clearly that's a bad thing for all involved.
And the Taliban probably would just as soon get this over as soon as possible.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I think a lot depends on, you know, their relative strength between them and the Afghan government after the US leaves.
And I don't know if they think they're going to try to keep CIA drones as some kind of loophole or something.
It seems like combat forces are going to have to go.
And to whatever degree, America will still probably keep financing the Afghan national government there, the Kabul government there.
But it seems like if the Taliban think that they can do it easily enough, they might say, yeah, peace after this one last major push to conquer the rest of the country, which would be an absolute humanitarian disaster for everybody who's been on, you know, the side backed by the US this whole time.
But, you know, Matthew Ho tells me that, hey, in the 90s, they had Bill Clinton and King Abdullah, and I don't know, Benazir Bhutto or whoever in Pakistan, America, Saudi and Pakistan were helping back the Taliban in the 90s and encouraging them.
This is in my book, the Bill Clinton government encouraging them to take the whole country, not to negotiate a peace, but to finish winning the war outright.
That way we can have stability for our pipeline from Turkmenistan.
And but this time, they don't have that.
This time, presumably, the Imran Khan government, and the Barack Obama government, and I don't know about MBS there.
But did I say Obama, I meant Trump, same difference.
They all look alike to me.
Yeah, they, these guys have, they certainly are not going to be backing the Taliban, other than maybe a little bit there against ISIS, but not against the Afghan national government there.
So possibly it's, you know, from Matthew Ho's point of view, he says, maybe it's more like you're saying that the Taliban basically, they've conquered all the parts of the country where they have a natural constituency.
And that, you know, maybe trying to bite off the rest of the country is more than they can chew.
And maybe they're wiser than to try it.
But maybe not.
I mean, they're also brutal suicide bombing butchers, like we talked about at the top of the show here too.
So you know, they're mean enough to do something stupid and keep the war going in the worst way after we go.
That's no reason to stay not by my lights.
But I think it's, it's going to be pretty hard to declare victory as we pull out of this one here, you know?
Right.
And I don't think you'd see the US or Pakistan publicly backing the Taliban to take the whole thing.
Certainly not immediately upon a deal this time, but you might see it a few years down the road because this sort of centralization mantra has been common in US thinking.
You know, not just in the 90s, but continuing the insistence that, oh, we're going to insist that Iraq have a strong central government.
We're not going to support autonomy.
Syria, we're, we're going to resist the idea of a federalized Syrian government because we think Syria needs to have a strong central state, even though we're furious at the Syrian central state and barely recognize its existence at all.
No, we just need Jelani to run it and then it'll be great.
Right.
It's just, but I mean, yeah, we see consistently that, you know, countries like Russia will say, well, maybe Syria would be more efficient if we had some sort of limited autonomy in parts of the country.
Yeah, there's certainly Hamiltonians.
I mean, they believe in it and they won't let that go.
You're right about that.
Hey, by the way, so still in Afghanistan for a second here, I see some reports from time to time where the Pentagon says, oh, they killed some Al-Qaeda guys and you know, I'm pretty cynical and I see that as just public relations, but then I wonder, have you seen any evidence of any dead Egyptians or Saudis or friends of Osama in Afghanistan lately at all, or just claims?
Just claims like usual and really like through most of the war after about 2003, you really don't hear a lot of active Al-Qaeda operations inside Afghanistan.
I think they fled to Pakistan long ago.
Yeah.
I see that, you know, from time to time.
And I wonder, you know what, if that's true, why don't you show me, you know, and how can these reporters, stenographers just go, oh no, really?
You found some Al-Qaeda guys, huh?
I even saw one.
I found one in the New York times.
It was actually a couple of years ago, a couple of years old.
Um, and it was by Thomas Gibbons Neff, who does really good stuff a lot of the times and saying, oh, well they found this big Al-Qaeda training camp in this area of the Helmand province where no one had been for a long, or maybe it was in Kandahar province, where no one had been for a very long time out there, kind of way out in the wilderness there.
And they'd had this giant camp and they ended up doing all these massive airstrikes against it, whatever.
But no place in the article does it really say why I should believe these were Al-Qaeda fighters that they were attacking there.
Who says they're Al-Qaeda?
What makes them Al-Qaeda?
They have Zawahiri's phone number?
Tell me something, but they don't tell me anything.
So as far as I'm concerned, no, they're just local posh tunes and the CIA slash Pentagon are just lying.
And I don't know why Neff would print that without having it demonstrated to him in a way that he could demonstrate to you and me.
But anyway, do respect that guy for a New York times reporter.
He's a real reporter, you know, if it's the Pentagon's narrative, certainly to be like, oh, there's still some Al-Qaeda kicking around in here.
Yeah.
Which on the one hand, they can push that as like, well, this just proves that we can't make peace yet because we haven't achieved our military mission.
But on the other hand, it's 18 years in man, you guys have supposedly been looking for these guys the whole time.
If they're still having huge training camps that you're just stumbling across, not doing very good.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, did you see this thing?
I can't get off my mind.
I don't want to put the effort into refuting it because it's just too much.
I almost don't know where to begin.
But Andrew McCarthy wrote this thing for the National Review about how it's just too bad that we tried this democracy project to teach these crazy Sharia law people to be free.
What a massive wasted effort.
And now the American people have lost the will to fight the real war that we have to fight to defeat the Taliban.
And can you believe the USA global superpower is surrendering to the Taliban, defeated by the Taliban?
We can't beat the Taliban.
And now they're going to let ISIS and Al Qaeda attack us because that's all they want to do.
And it's going to be the same horrible thing all over again.
And I love the way he says, and I've been, by the way, criticizing democracy promotion ever since 2004.
And anyway, and writing in the National Review, whose slogan is every 10 years, you need to pick up some small, weak little country and slam it against the wall just to show we mean business.
The Ledeen Doctrine.
Yeah, that's a lot of spreading liberty and democracy promotion.
Baghdad to Linda Est sounds just like spreading democracy and liberty to the people.
What a wasted effort to be so generous to these backwards barbarians that we killed a couple of million of.
But anyway.
But his point is largely correct in the sense that that's right, we're surrendering to the Taliban.
George Bush and Barack Obama couldn't beat them.
All of David Petraeus' biggest promises didn't come true.
McChrystal and Petraeus together, the two greatest generals in American history, as far as anyone around here knows, failed to pull it off.
So what are we supposed to do now?
Start the war all over again?
Just carpet bomb them?
Donald Trump said, I guess I could just nuke them.
You want me to just kill them all with H-bombs?
I guess I could do that.
Otherwise, we have to go.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, I mean, that's the realistic reality of Afghanistan, is that it's a lost war.
And it's getting more lost by the minute.
I mean, this time last year, you would see, oh, the Taliban attacked three sites at once in different offensives.
The Afghan government managed to send reinforcements to two of them and chase them away.
But one of the posts fell that got attacked or something, and the Taliban looted a bunch of weapons.
Now it's like, in recent months, it's been like, well, the Taliban attacked two or three places.
They all fell.
Maybe one of them got some reinforcements, but it didn't really help.
I mean, it's at the point now where the Afghan security services are just getting routed in the field whenever a battle happens.
And apart from committing US and NATO troops to every single battle, there's just not going to be any stopping continued territory growth for the Taliban.
I mean, and that's for the past several years, we've been reporting, oh, the Taliban controls more land now than any time during the war.
And that's still true.
And it's just a bigger portion of land every time.
Yeah.
You know, politically, the Trump people need to start memorizing their talking points about how this is all Bush and Obama's fault.
They built a government that cannot stand.
David Petraeus, who you all claim is greater than Ike Eisenhower or General Washington or anybody else in American history, went in there and fell flat on his face.
And, you know, again, the kind of violence that would be necessary to truly defeat the Taliban would, you know, be absolutely merciless war against a civilian population.
When after all, the Taliban didn't attack us or really do anything to us.
They're the locals, not the international Arab terrorists like Zawahiri and bin Laden, who were the ones who waged their war against us.
Admittedly, yes, from there, but still, even then, that's a real stretch from there.
I mean, what did they do?
They met with Mohammed Atta and they said, yeah, you're hired.
See what you can do.
And then he went back to Germany and Spain and the USA and plotted his attack from here.
As James Bamford reports, that one of the 9-11 hijackers had one of their last big meetings at a hotel right down the street from NSA headquarters.
And they were making phone calls, buying their airline tickets and stuff from the payphone at the Safeway on a Saturday afternoon, right there where every customer in that store must have been an NSA officer or the wife of one in their shop in that day.
So some safe haven as far as all that goes.
But anyways, you know, I don't know, but see, here's the deal, right?
They don't want to admit that the Taliban are the men of the neighborhood.
That's who they are.
They're the people of Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribesmen anyway, or at least they're the only armed political faction with any strength for these people to join in order to throw off foreign rule.
And they don't have any other options.
There's not any other political competition for their allegiance.
But our government acts like they're aliens from another country.
Like the Taliban themselves are the foreign fighters.
But no, we are, you know, I don't know.
That's why for so long, there was the push about, you know, the cadet Shura and the factions that were coming out of Waziristan to try to portray the Taliban as some sort of invading force out of Pakistan's tribal areas.
When they've been they were the government all along and in parts of Afghanistan, there's still a government.
Yeah.
And the strongest areas are Kandahar and Helmand.
Right?
Not up from the northeast of the country up there near Pakistan's northwest frontier.
But anyway, you know what?
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
But I had so much other stuff I wanted to ask you about.
You know what?
Actually, give me a few minutes here.
I'll be late for my next guy.
Tell me about what's going on in the Idlib province right now.
That's the territory in northwestern Syria right at the Lebanon border and the Turkish border there, which is controlled by al Qaeda, not not the Islamic State, but Tahrir al-Sham, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, aka al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria.
Right, aka Obama and John Brennan's boys.
Right, it's kind of a complicated history there of becoming al Qaeda in Syria for Jabhat al-Nusra, because at one point, ISIS was trying to absorb them, which didn't really work.
And they tried, they got a few fighters absorbed.
Al Qaeda disavowed ISIS over that effort.
And I mean, it's really, there's a lot of wrangling for who gets to be the official al Qaeda franchise for the country.
But yeah, I mean, there's been fighting for months on the Idlib border into Hama province and into Aleppo.
Syrian military controls both of those provinces for the most part, although Turkish rebels control the northern part of Aleppo province.
And Turkey was very concerned to see all this fighting breaking out near where they're the last of their rebels kind of are.
So they got in these negotiations and they said, well, we'll have a we'll have a ceasefire.
And the deal was, everybody stopped firing.
Everybody withdraw out of that buffer zone we created a couple years ago in Idlib province.
And we'll just kind of go from there.
And al Qaeda's, you know, Jabhat al-Nusra said, well, we'll stop fighting, but we're not going to withdraw from that 20 kilometer buffer zone.
We kind of like that.
That's like a strong part of our defense.
So we're going to keep that.
And the ceasefire held for a few days.
And I guess the Syrian government was trying to give the other rebels a chance to talk al Qaeda into it for withdrawing from that buffer zone, but it never happened.
And then they just kind of said, well, the heck with it, we're going to go into that buffer zone and clear them out anyway.
So fighting has been going ever since.
And slowly but surely, they're kind of chipping away at what al Qaeda controls, which is basically the Idlib province.
I mean, for all the, for all the other rebel factions that got sent into Idlib over the past few years, very few of them have any autonomous regions anymore.
Al Qaeda pretty much dominates them all.
Yeah, man.
Good estimates on numbers there, you think?
I've heard anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 fighters all told, rebels included.
I don't know how accurate that is.
That seems high, although there was a lot of evacuation from the Lebanese border elsewhere from the far south.
And, you know, years of war, some of these people probably got sick and left.
They just, especially the ones that were from formerly US-backed rebel factions, that the US stopped backing.
You know, some of them maybe found some new groups to join from Turkey to, you know, keep the flow of money and weapons going, but a lot of them probably just flat out gave up at this point.
So I would suspect that it's a lot smaller than what they say it is.
Yeah, I sure hope so.
It's too damn many, I know that.
And I know you had written about this State Department report saying there's more Al Qaeda than ever.
And isn't it interesting how, and boy, you know, during a presidential election, this is the, they think, the media thinks, and I guess so far it's sort of working, that the best line of attack against Tulsi Gabbard is that she knows who's who in Syria, and she hates Al Qaeda more than she hates Assad.
And so they keep attacking her for that.
But it seems like they're opening up the opportunity for her to really knock the crap out of them and say, explain why she prefers Assad to Al Qaeda.
And explain that it's Al Qaeda that's on the other side of this thing.
Get it?
These are Obama's moderate rebels.
You know, I don't know if she, well, she's got her problems, but it seems she definitely knows enough.
I mean, she challenged Obama when he was still in office.
She was trying to push this Stop Arming Terrorists Act, you know, in defiance of his policy.
So it seems like she better, she keeps saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just a smear.
But she should be saying, nope, you're on the side of the suicide bombers.
Let's talk about that, right, and go back after them and hit them hard on it.
And then maybe we could make a little bit of progress on the, the understanding about who's who over there.
Which is not to justify every civilian death in Assad's war against these guys.
But it's a pretty hard hitting reality, if you can get it across to people that yeah, no, really, just this soon after, these groups had committed such a massive attack against the American state back here at home, and against innocent civilians, and were the worst part of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4000 out of the 4500 guys, Americans that were killed in Iraq war two, that Obama and Brennan took their side, and created this crisis and made it that way.
It's such a huge truth.
And it's so far from the official narrative, that if she or somebody else could really drive that home, it could really think change a lot of the way people approach this stuff.
You know, it's, it's a giant opportunity just still sitting there waiting to be exploited by somebody with a loud enough voice to get it done, I guess what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, it could be although I think I think it's going to take a little more convincing than just a State Department report to convince most Americans that Al Qaeda is as strong as they've ever been.
Yeah, because I mean, once again, that's, that's an outrageous statement to make, even if it's true.
Because we've been fighting Al Qaeda for 18 years.
Yeah, I think it probably is true.
Right?
I mean, I don't know if I it might well be.
But if we've been fighting Al Qaeda for 18 years, and they're as strong as they've ever been.
That's, that's about the most damning thing you could say about this war.
And to the point that I'm shocked the State Department even even as willing to go there, even if they think, well, this will convince people that the wars need to continue.
Right?
Hey, it's 2020.
I thought you guys were gonna take care of this for us.
What happened?
I named a moderate rebels.
That's like, you know, in the 1950s, the State Department was like, you know, Nazi Germany is just as powerful and as dangerous as it's ever been.
And we've been fighting wars with them for decades, and we just haven't made any progress.
I mean, it's certainly warrants some soul searching, if that's even close to true.
And and like you say, it may well be right.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's the whole thing of it, too, is right.
It's the same thing with that Andrew McCarthy piece.
It's like the fact that you're writing this in 2020 ought to mean something to you, you know, but I guess not.
All right.
Anyway, I've taken up too much of your time.
But we got to catch up again soon because I had so much other stuff I wanted to ask you about.
But good times.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Jason Ditz.
He is news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
It's the most important page on the internet.
That's what I'm telling you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthorton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, timed and the war in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
