All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Danny Sherson, Danny Davis, and Matthew Ho.
Danny Sherson was an Army Major, fought in Iraq War II and Afghanistan, both surges.
Matthew Ho was a Marine Captain, he fought in Iraq War II, and then was in Afghanistan working for the State Department.
And then Danny Davis actually was in Iraq War I, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan, and was a Lieutenant Colonel there, running the resupply mission for troops all across Afghanistan in the early part of this decade.
Now, Matthew Ho, of course, was the famous whistleblower from the summer of 2009, who tried to stop Obama from launching the Afghan surge, and did his level best at that.
Danny Davis, of course, was the whistleblower at the end of the Afghan surge three years later, who said that Petraeus was not telling the truth about what was going on in the war at the time.
And then Danny, of course, has, Danny Sherson, of course, has emerged as one of our country's greatest anti-war activists and writers, even while he was still active duty in the US Army, writing a book about his time in Iraq, called Ghostwriters of Baghdad, and hundreds of articles a year for the last two or three years about all things surrounding American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East here.
So, and I guess you could say is a whistleblower in his own right, about his time in the Afghan surge as well.
So with that, I'd like to welcome you all to the show and essentially turn the floor over to you guys to discuss the Afghanistan papers, essentially the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post got their hands on formerly classified background interviews and source materials for a report that had been compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko.
And his office has really done a great job over the last few years, serving as sort of as an IG over the Afghan war, and, and its progress and failures in so many ways here.
But the new scoop by the Washington Post essentially goes to reveal the worst parts of that lessons learned investigation by the SIGAR office had been redacted.
And they've got it all now.
And it goes to show, as the Washington Post puts it, that they lied to us all along about the progress being made in the war.
So with that, I don't know, should I call somebody's name first, Danny Davis, why don't you go ahead and tell us about your original initial reaction to the Post and what you learned reading the Post's investigation yesterday?
Yeah, well, I was gonna say that first off the bat, instead of Afghan papers, it should probably more accurately be called Afghan papers, too.
Because there has been quite a bit of information out there flooding the, you know, the airwaves and the written word for anyone who's been willing to look, you know, all the way back to Matt's, you know, big letter, famous letter that, you know, exploded on the scene in 2009.
You know, and the stuff I wrote and then the stuff that Danny has flooded the market with, as you just pointed out.
So this stuff has been out there for anybody willing to see.
And I found it a little interesting that the Post somehow neglected to talk to any of us as though that the information hadn't been out there.
But of course, it just graphically and extensively validates everything that we've all been saying for years.
And of course, got to add you to that list with your book, you know, and on all your radio stuff.
So, you know, this is a pretty, pretty weighty group right here.
But yeah, you know, I'm just interested, especially in Matt's, since he was kind of the first, you know, to what you thought of all this, you know, going back all the way to 2009.
You know, the same, you know, that there's not been any paucity or scarcity of information, as well as, too, is that I don't think it should be called the Afghan papers.
I think it should be called, you know, just another example how war is all made of lies, you know.
And there has been plenty of people.
I mean, David Swanson wrote a book called War is a Lie.
You know, I mean, like this, you know, the context of it, I think, is important to remember that these are the same people that brought us Vietnam.
These are the same people that brought us Iraq and Libya and Syria.
You know, my initial reaction seeing it in The Post was kind of the same that you just said, Danny, is like, how come, you know, what is this going to be, their big Pulitzer submission?
I mean, like, you know, I mean, and now that they're going to, there's been no one who has done less adversarial journalism in regards to these wars than The Washington Post.
But I am happy it's out there.
You know, these papers show clearly or demonstrate clearly that what many officials in the Bush and the Obama administration especially were saying was untrue, that they were perjuring themselves as they were testifying in Congress, that they were lying to the media.
You know, so I think it's important because this is the smoking gun, if you will, that they knew this war was unwinnable.
They knew this war wasn't worth it.
They knew that the Karzai government and then the Ghani government were kleptocracies and were predatory and corrupt.
So you know, I'm happy it's out there, but I think it's just context for the larger issue.
And then, you know, I mean, the news I woke up to this morning was that the Congress has agreed on basically kind of a skinny NDAA, a skinny National Defense Authorization Act, where they're just going to vote kind of up or down on a stripped down Pentagon authorization.
And you know, they all act outraged about this, but they're going to turn around and hand over to the same people who've been lying about this war, who lied about the Iraq war, who lied about the Libyan war, who lied about Syria, you know, going back to Vietnam, etc.
They're just going to turn around and hand them, what, $735 billion or $750 billion.
So I think that's where I'm at with it, frustrated by it, but also pleased that it is out there.
You know, I think, Danny, the reason that they didn't come talk to any of the three of us is because clearly we're not high ranking enough.
And you know, if you think about it, it can almost be embarrassing for the powers that be that mid range and even lower range officers and NCOs were able to see the strategic failure better than most of the four stars.
And that's just been obvious.
But, you know, I actually think, you know, not only were the generals and the U.S. officials lying to us, they were lying to themselves, to one another.
You know, I really can't help but believe that after careers spent and promotions gotten through these, you know, defining wars for the majority of these general officers' careers, I don't even know if they know what the truth is anymore.
And I really do get the sense that they lie to themselves just as much as us.
And that's the absurdity of the inertia of war.
I felt a little bit vindicated for a moment.
It was a little guilty pleasure of mine when I first read the Post report yesterday morning.
But then I realized I'm just sad, truthfully, because it's, as Bacevich wrote to me in his terse fashion in an email yesterday, he wrote, I read the papers and I was one, astonished, and two, completely unsurprised.
And I think that really, I think that, you know, I'm known for my verbosity.
He's not.
We are two sides of the same coin.
But I think he nailed it.
And last point in my initial here is, you know, last week I published an article at Anti-War called Potemkin Patrols.
And I really wish I would have held it until this report, because in the article I'm talking about all the ways that towards the end of my tour, I just got so frustrated and wanted to protect my soldiers that I would put on a dog and pony show for the generals that started visiting me a lot.
And you know, in a sense, at the micro level, I was complicit in this.
And it was meant to be an absurdist article, as I've been writing a lot of lately.
But I mean, it just shows that from top to bottom, you know, the generals didn't want to hear the truth.
You know, the senior colonels, for nine months when they would visit, I would tell them, this is unwinnable.
This isn't working.
This strategy is bad.
And no one ever wanted to hear that.
And my boss would just fume as I told the truth to these generals.
And so by the end of it, I said, you know what, if they want to, if they want to show, I'll give them a show, you know, and I'll fill an empty village with happy Afghans when they come visit.
And I'll create a fake Potemkin village patrol of sorts, so they can feel like they got their knees dirty.
And the whole thing goes from top to bottom.
It's a poison to the culture, and it runs straight to the White House.
Yeah.
And then, you know, adding right on top of that, I mean, following on with your with your observations there, you know, there's lots of, you know, solid reporting and documentaries that have been done over the years that have, you know, graphically illustrated that.
You know, Mike Hastings was when he was alive, he was he was one of the first ones that was, you know, willing to take the risks to do a lot of this stuff.
I remember in a number of congressional delegation visits, you know, they would do some of this same stuff.
And of course, the generals probably after having vetted through, you know, operations like the one you're talking about, which were safe, you know, not not security safe, but safe from people telling the right story, they would take them out there.
And then these guys would go back and they would say, wow, you know, this this stuff is really working.
It's doing all this stuff because they were shown precisely what the generals wanted them to believe.
And then maybe the congressman, as a result, would go back and they they actually honestly say what they thought was the truth.
And you know, and just keep on following the fiction.
But you know, at some point, any kind of caveat that, you know, any benefit of the doubt has to evaporate when you're like going, OK, you know, if this was like the fourth or fifth or maybe even seventh year, maybe you could say, OK, but we just need a little bit more time to turn around.
But but once we got into the 10th, 12th, 13th, 18th year, that has to completely go away.
And you have to say, I don't care what you're telling me.
It is blatantly, unequivocally clear that the war is not being won.
It can never be won.
And then when you see people like, you know, us at the lower levels, unfortunately, maybe we don't have the, you know, the stick necessary to to get people's attention at the higher levels.
But we have the best views.
So we ought to be list.
They ought to be listening to people, you know, who's who were on the ground, spent years in some cases, you know, going through all this stuff out there on patrol, talking with the Afghan, working with the Afghan people, seeing up front and dramatically clear why it won't work and then articulating it.
And that's, you know, there's something that I hope you still this last piece out there right now is that I read also in The Post this morning that I think Senator Hawley and some others are actually talking about doing some hearings on this.
I hope that's not just, you know, something they say right now that doesn't materialize.
And if it does, I hope it results in something.
But at least I want to make sure that it gets out there and doesn't just die because it gets buried under impeachment hearings.
Well, you know, that's another thing, you know, tying this into the impeachment hearings is what it should do, these papers, the context of it.
And you know, with regards to the inquiries, I think it's important to note that the British Parliament has done, too.
The British Parliament has done official inquiries into the Iraq war and into the Libyan war.
You know, and both times they found, you know, the British Parliament found in its investigation of those wars, you know, systemic and intentional lying by the United States, by the UK, by other NATO members to allow that war, those wars to occur.
You know, again, nothing that's surprising to anyone listening to this or to any of us, but it's important for, you know, as we try to change things or try to reform things or try to make things better or maybe just end one of these wars.
But we've had no investigations.
I did see Senator Gillibrand and Senator Blumenthal were calling for investigations and hearings.
But I believe it was Blumenthal who said we need to get Secretary Esper in here and have him talk about this.
I mean, so they just keep, it's just the same cyclical motion.
You know, and I think everybody who's listening, who's familiar with the film Casablanca, is, you know, remembering the police chief coming into the casino saying, I'm shocked there's gambling going on.
And then, oh, here are your winnings, sir.
You know, I mean, like, so it's the same type of thing.
The fake outrage, the dereliction of responsibility, the lack of any kind of due diligence or adherence to the oath of any offices.
But, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on this, as well as, you know, what you're hearing from colleagues who are still in, who are still on active duty, if things like this change their minds or their perceptions anymore.
Well, you know, I got a whole bunch of texts yesterday from my buddies who are on active duty, many of whom are, you know, coming up on Lieutenant Colonel.
And so that's kind of where they're at, my peers and even guys who worked for me.
No one was really surprised.
I mean, a lot of people were upset.
Some people were like, I told you so.
But I think what struck me about it was just, to some extent, the apathy or actually resignation is a better word in our field grade ranks, because that's who I was mostly talking to.
These guys didn't believe that there was anything nearing victory in their future.
You know, it got to the point, talking to my buddies, guys I taught with, et cetera, where they would say, look, I'm in Afghanistan, because some of them are right now.
And it's like, I'm just here to do a job.
I don't expect victory.
I don't even really know what we're doing.
It's, you know, get in, do your nine months, get out, be a professional.
And that's like really dangerous.
But you know what else I think is really dangerous is that American officials accepted the lying from the generals, and the American people accepted it so blindly.
And I think it comes down to those polls that, for decades now, have shown us that the only public institution the American people still have faith in is the military.
That's it.
Of course, not the press, not the courts, not the Congress, and rightfully so.
But it's really dangerous when we put military officers, especially generals with all their fruit salad, when we put them on a pedestal to such an extent that everything that they say becomes gospel, when the reality is they don't necessarily know much more than you, you know, Joe Smith, right, John Q. Public.
And they've proven it time and again.
I mean, Kennedy, after Bay of Pigs, and then again after Cuban Missile Crisis, said that his lesson was never again to, you know, take what the generals say at face value.
Because of course, their advice would have led to nuclear war, potentially in both instances.
And I think we have to get back to that scrutiny of even top military commanders.
That doesn't mean, you know, throwing stuff at soldiers or hating the military.
It means we need to bring back a healthy skepticism.
Because where we're at now is this over-hyper-adulation of anything that looks remotely military.
And I think part of the result is that we're not really taking a critical eye at what they're telling us.
Even when it's so clear after 18 years that every time they said, oh, we turned a corner, we didn't.
We turned three corners and got right back where we started.
And that's just to underscore that.
So yesterday, I was interviewed by USA Today and gave some comments just like what you would expect from me.
That article ended with retired Admiral Stavridis basically, actually not basically, directly saying there's nothing here.
I don't know what you're talking about.
This, you know, everything's going fine.
So here's a four-star salad dressing wearing, you know, former official.
And then, of course, you had David Petraeus also said, I stand by everything I said and just repeated all of his absurd claims.
But because these guys are former four-star generals, you know, the commander of NATO, former CIA director, people still just can't look at the physical reality and find, you know, a problem with what they're saying.
And I just don't know how we get past that.
I just don't know how.
Yeah, I'm reminded of my favorite quote from Dwight Eisenhower, which, and I'll paraphrase it because I always mangle it, but he basically said he's standing in the Oval Office and he looks at this chair behind his desk and he says, I pity this nation when the man who sits in this chair hasn't served in the military, you know, meaning that, you know, unless you've been in the military, you're going to get snowed by these generals.
They're going to come in and they're going to lie to you.
And you're going to go along with it because, as you both were saying, the public weight of opinion is behind the military, regardless of, you know, the lost wars, the lost trillions of dollars, you know, the incredibly high rate of sexual assault, you know, I mean, whatever you want to point out to say these guys aren't trustworthy, you know, they're going to come into the Oval Office and they're going to lie.
And as Eisenhower said, if someone doesn't have the wherewithal and the background to understand that and to recognize it and to stand up to it, they're going to get rolled over.
So, yeah, I mean, it is, you get to this point where you get, you know, you get dismayed, I guess, at what's going to happen.
But you know, I mean, you know, and if Scott wants to chime in as well, too, because maybe his perspective, he's been doing this for so long, but, you know, there is value.
I mean, none of us, I think, won't want to be saying, hey, I told you so.
But there is value in attempting to say, hey, look, these guys continue to lie and there needs to be something done about it.
And you know, I noticed whenever I watch any congressional hearings in the House Armed Services Committee or Senate Armed Services Committee, every senator and every congress member, it's like watching a gallery of bobblehead dolls.
All they do is nod in agreement with whatever the general or the admiral says, you know.
And that's, I think, how you get to this point where, I mean, because I think the point with the papers, too, one of the things, you know, I've spoken to a few people about with the papers is that this, you know, that the post-release, this just wasn't a handful of guys.
This wasn't like five or 10 or 15 men and women.
This is between 350 and 400 different people who the Post, as they went through this process over years of looking at these papers, delineated, you know, that these people were lying.
And I get frustrated, too, with the Post and other media because they can't even bring themselves to use the word lying.
They say the Post title, I think, was failure to tell the truth, you know, or they'll say things like, you know, didn't, I mean, like, they can't even bring themselves to use the actual word because I think they're so afraid, you know, to Danny S.'s point of going against this military that has, you know, not just been put up on a pedestal, but deified, you know.
So it's, yeah.
One of the biggest assailants, if that's not too strong of a word that you can use, is that the reason why most of those members of Congress have been unwilling to do anything, and Matt, you touched on part of this, that, you know, they don't have the personal experience to really know whether the general's telling them the truth or not.
Then you have people like Lindsey Graham, H.R. McMaster in this current administration were both, you know, the ringleaders on this.
They were telling anyone who would listen, but most assuredly President Trump, both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes, that if you pull people out of Afghanistan prematurely, as the phrase was commonly used, then you're going to get a new 9-11.
Then that's it.
It's going to be on your watch.
And so it scares everybody.
It scares the members of Congress.
They don't want to vote for that and then have something happen.
And then they'll go, it was your fault.
And then they'll, quote, lose their election, which is their primary concern.
But it's such a spacious argument, and it's not based on any kind of practical reality.
And anybody who knows what actually did happen on 9-11, where the threat actually came from, it was, Afghanistan was incidental to the process.
It wasn't fundamental.
But people like Petraeus have just for years said, you know, we'll have a new 9-11 if we don't get out of here.
And then you have Lindsey Graham.
And so it terrifies all these people, and they're all paralyzed into inaction.
And that's another one.
I'm old ears.
If you guys have any ideas, I don't know how to overcome that.
Well, you know, what's interesting about what you said is, I don't know if you guys remember the Ron Susskind book, The 1% Doctrine.
What you're describing from Petraeus is almost like an inversion of that, where, you know, from a political calculus, you know, if there's even a 1% chance that a 9-11 type event might happen under your watch, it behooves you to maintain U.S. forces, not only in Afghanistan, but across the region, so that if it does happen, no one can say, oh, it happened because, you know, misunderstanding, causation, and correlation, of course, but it happened because you pulled out of Afghanistan or because you reduced troops in Syria.
So it becomes inertia, again, for the war.
And I just want to say one thing about Petraeus.
Sometimes I think it's good to have a little bit of levity when we talk about this and also to humanize people.
But I saw Petraeus a week ago today in LaGuardia Airport.
And there was a long line, because it was after Thanksgiving, a long line waiting for stalls in the bathroom, and Petraeus comes in, and he gets in line.
And well, anyway, I recognized him.
No one else seemed to, which was interesting, but I recognized him, and I said, hello.
I said, hello, General.
I said, of course, you don't remember, but we met briefly in 2007, because I had given like a little brief at my combat outpost to him.
And so he shakes my hand, and he's very cordial, and then he looks down at my shirt.
And I didn't realize it, I really didn't, but I was wearing an Iraq veterans against the war shirt.
And if you could have seen, if you could have seen the speed, the speed with which he put his head down and exited the bathroom, even though he had been in line, and just politely said goodbye, I mean, it was great.
What it gets me is though, so that's the human side of all these people, right?
They're just like us at root, but they're not treated just like us, because Danny, you've probably got the best chance of the three of us, but I mean, if any of the three of us wanted maximum space on order in the New York Times editorial section, we would have to fight for our lives to get that once or twice a year.
But Petraeus will have that space.
It seems for as long as he lives, no matter how many times he's been wrong, if he wants a thousand words in the Washington Post, he's going to get it.
And how do you fight against that?
And I hate to be left in the same sort of place of just hopelessness, but I think Danny has mentioned it a few times.
I don't know what we do about that.
It doesn't matter how many times they've been wrong, they always have this public space and power that we can only dream of.
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And you know what?
I want to point out here real quick, as long as we're talking about Petraeus, it's really important that he is lying in response to this scoop by the Post here.
And well, I don't want to give the Post too much credit, this story and saying, well, you know what?
Obama just sprang this timeline on me two days before the West Point speech.
And we know that that's not true.
I write about it in my book, Fool's Aaron, but it's really Bob Woodward who goes through essentially day by day by day through the decision making process on the Afghan surge in 2009 in his book, Obama's Wars, which is really just about this one war.
And it's also Jonathan Alter in his book, The Promise has, you know, quote, I don't know if he was in the room or he had a recording or what, but he has quote by quote by quote by quote the entire discussion.
And it includes Petraeus and Gates both saying, absolutely, yes, sir.
I promise that July 2011, we will have them at the table with a bloody nose agreeing to our terms by then and we'll be able to draw down then.
And Obama says, and you're not going to change your mind and try to say blah, blah, blah later.
And Petraeus says, no, sir, ditto Roger and every other thing he's supposed to say right there.
And then he wants to pretend now that, gee, him and Gates, they had never said anything about they could accomplish what they said they could accomplish in 18 months.
It must have been Barack Obama himself who made up that artificial deadline and imposed it on them.
And he's just as much a liar as he is a loser of two wars.
Yeah, I mean, but then I'll go one step further with that.
Even if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, which the facts don't allow.
But then I'm saying, look, you're a four-star general.
You're supposed to be the subject matter expert on this.
You should have told the president, no, sir, this won't work.
Whether you want it to politically or not, it's not going to.
And here's the reason why.
But instead, he said, yes, sir.
So you put your name, your reputation, your credibility on the line there, and you're claiming it wasn't valid.
Well, then you're not.
You have no integrity.
I mean, he just exposed himself.
But he, you know, what he is is an expert in media opportunities, in selling things and being a showman.
I remember, so when I was in Iraq in 2004, 2005, I remember I was astonished because I'd never heard generals speak before.
But whenever I go to like some type of commander's conference and Petraeus would show up, the other generals who were there would just be badmouthing the guy.
And they would say things like, make sure there's an extra row of chairs because Petraeus is coming and he's going to have all those journalists with him.
Or make sure he lands at the large LZ because he's going to have the extra helicopters full of journalists.
But so his contemporaries and his peers, and this is when he was in charge of the training command, you know, that famously lost in Iraq.
And when he was in charge of the training command, what was called Minstiki, you know, he lost hundreds of thousands of weapons, hundreds of thousands of weapons.
And literally, I remember when I was a kid, they called Ronald Reagan the Teflon president because nothing ever stepped to him.
Right.
I mean, he is literally the Teflon general, but he also knows what he's doing.
And I don't think it's a mistake for us to be talking so much about Petraeus because I think without Petraeus, you don't have the continuation of these wars.
I think the wars needed Petraeus.
And of course, Petraeus needed the war.
But if you go and you look at like what Petraeus writes in his Ph.
D.dissertation about the Vietnam War when he was at Princeton, he writes about this relationship between the military and the media and how the military has to have a positive relationship with the media.
And they did that.
They, you know, the military started doing that as soon as, you know, after, soon after September 11th, they started doing it.
They did it, you know, with embedding journalists and sending them to like journalist boot camp before the Iraq war.
I mean, they did all these things.
And Petraeus was the best at it.
And I think Jim Mattis also is another person who is responsible so much for these wars.
And he was really good at manufacturing an image, you know, as this warrior monk, you know, and he's got all these memes and everything on Facebook about him.
And the guy is the guy is just as much a politician as Petraeus.
But he's better because he's not as vainglorious, you know, he's not he he hasn't brought about his own downfall like so many of these other generals, you know, whether it be Petraeus, McChrystal, Allen, you know, whoever who have because of their own vanity have brought themselves down.
But, you know, so I don't think it's a mistake or it's an error for us to be talking about Petraeus because I think he's so crucial to this because what he builds with these wars, you know, I think it was already was there already within the institution, the military and the U.S. government.
That line is how you show your loyalty and loyalty is how you advance.
But I think Petraeus really takes that and and and makes it into the machine that drive these wars and that connects it to the media, allowing that synergy, you know, because I took to what Danny said about us not getting in the papers, you know.
So in 2009, the Washington Post runs this like three thousand word front page above the fold profile on me, you know, and in the last 10 years, no one from the Post has ever contacted me about anything.
And the same with the New York Times, you know, I mean, so it's crazy how, you know, we're not making this stuff up, that there is this relationship between the media and the military and the Pentagon that actively works to support one another in terms of what they want and what they need.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it'd be interesting if we could somehow change that dynamic.
But again, back to the point, I'm not sure how you go about changing that.
All right.
Wait, I want to change back to the war and the violence and what you guys are doing here in the first place.
Matt Ho and Danny Davis, especially, you guys broke ranks to tell the truth directly to the American public about this war.
There must have been a real good reason for that.
Matt, can you go first, please, and talk about, you know, you don't have to tell stories about, you know, individual people that got killed or something like that necessarily.
But just what was it that made you decide, man, I have to do something different here?
Well, you know, to Danny's point about, you know, when you're over there, you're doing a job.
And particularly if you're an officer or you're a non-commissioned officer and you have men and women that you're responsible for, that's your only priority.
And you don't ever really think about the bigger picture.
But when I went over to Afghanistan as a State Department official, as a political officer, I didn't have that.
I had nobody who worked for me.
I mean, even the translators I utilized on the Provincial Reconstruction team I was on, they actually belonged to the military commander.
You know, so I mean, I had other civilians that technically reported to me and that belonged to me.
But it wasn't like I was a company commander again and had, you know, if something happened, I would be the one who had to go and explain to the wife and to the mom why their husband and son was dead.
But what happens by the time I'm a few months into my time in Afghanistan in 2009 and after being in Iraq twice, and as well, too, you know, I was involved with the wars in Washington, D.C., both at the Pentagon and at the State Department.
So I was always heavily involved.
I was involved with, really, it starts off for me with the Iraq invasion, where I'm working for the secretary of the Navy and I'm responsible to contact all the casualty officers for all the Marines killed in Iraq in 2003, and I end up becoming heavily involved with a lot of those families.
And so it always was personal for me.
So by the time I get to 2009, I am just, you know, like I've said to other people and other people have said this as well, you know, before I went to Afghanistan, my thoughts were, look, I can either die here in the States or I can die over there.
So I might as well go over there and do it.
And so I was broken inside.
But, you know, there was actually, it's when Robert McNamara dies, the secretary of defense in World War, during the Vietnam War, who famously, you know, in the years before his death, you know, issued a mea culpa and tried to repent for what he had done.
And his death and a column that Bob Herbert wrote really struck me.
And that kind of gave me the confidence and the inspiration to like, look, you're morally broken.
You're being intellectually dishonest about this.
You know, this is you can't go home and explain to anybody back there that their son or their husband or their daughter or their wife died for any type of reason, let alone a good one.
Yeah.
And so that was it.
I was basically broken.
And then this essay popped up in front of me and it was kind of like, this is what I have to do.
And that's kind of how it happened.
I didn't have any intention of going public with it.
It just it ended up kind of being a just something that I ended up sitting at a bar next to a Washington Post editor a few months later and telling him my story because we were drunk.
And the next day, I mean, literally that that's how it happened.
I mean, like I had no intent, you know, and when I called the Post, I just wanted to write an op-ed.
I wasn't expecting like this profile and then to be on a Today show and all that other stuff.
So, yeah, I mean, it was it was it was like but to get back to your point, Scott, why I did it was because I was broken and I could no longer go along with it.
And this was the last thing I was going to do, write this resignation letter and leave.
And then, you know, fate, I guess, had other other other plans.
Danny Davis, your story was almost exactly the same, wasn't it?
It was very similar because when I first got to Afghanistan, I had been writing previous to that some reports and other things in the summer, late, late summer of 2009, that we should not surge in Afghanistan.
And I laid out a lot of the reasons why we we shouldn't.
I gave some alternative suggestions and said, but if we do go big, as the phrase I used, you know, these are the likely consequences, which nearly all of them came to pass.
But when I started here in Petraeus, when I came down on orders for Afghanistan, talk about how things were turning around, making a difference.
We're on the right azimuth and all that.
I thought, well, I mean, he did do that in Iraq in 2007.
I mean, there was a lot of compelling or competing reasons as to why that was.
But, you know, his was a part of the reason.
I'd actually also written extensively on that.
And so he did deserve some credit for that.
And I thought, well, maybe he's doing it here, too.
And man, anything, it would be good because the casualty rate for the U.S. at that time was really high.
And it was just as I know that both Danny and Matt know, anyone who's ever worn a uniform, you take it personally when anyone dies in a conflict, it's like your family member, brother, sister thing.
We just view it that way.
And anything that's going to either slow the casualty rate down or turn it around is applauded.
So I went over there and I think I first landed in December of 2010, hoping to see on the ground the evidence of what Petraeus had been saying in public.
And instead, I saw the exact opposite of that.
And my job required me, sort of like Matt's, is that I didn't have any troops over there.
So I had an independent ability to travel all over the country in the hottest zones in both the east and the south, you know, to go down on individual foot patrols, talking with the privates that conduct the patrols, the company commanders, platoon leaders, then up to battalion commanders and then a brigade and even division commanders.
I was required to get the scoop from all of them on what the war looked like from their perspective.
And it was abundantly clear that nothing approaching what Petraeus was telling American people was true.
So I started getting upset about it just because I was observing it wasn't true.
But then in the spring of 2011, there was this big operation in the eastern part of the country in which it was one of the largest casualty producers for the United States of the war.
I think the third highest, as it turned out, it was in the Marawar Valley in Kunar province.
We lost a bunch of people.
I don't remember six or six or eight were killed and another twenty something were wounded.
And the the division commander, the commander of RC East Regional Command East, as it was called at the time, you know, went and made these big public announcements about how tragic it was that we lost this.
But my goodness, it was such an important operation.
And, you know, America is safer because of it.
And it was an egregious loss to the Taliban and all this kind of thing.
Well, as it turned out, I was in RC East.
I was actually my headquarters was right across the street from from RC East headquarters.
And I've got access to all the classified information.
And so I know what really did happen.
And I started getting even more angry about it.
And then somehow something about one of those soldiers just really grabbed hold of me.
And I'd never met the man before, but he was from what I read in the papers, he was a great soldier, a great friend, a tremendous husband and a great father to his kid.
And it just I'm thinking this beautiful young man, his life was thrown away and destroyed the lives of so many other around him.
And for what the operation had no even tactical value.
Forget about strategic.
And so we threw all those men's lives away for absolutely nothing.
And I'm already thinking, so I'm barely four months into my deployment and I'm already thinking this, somebody's got to know this stuff.
But, you know, who's going to listen to me?
And plus, I'm not authorized to say this stuff anyway.
But I'm starting to think, well, maybe I'm maybe I'm just going to get out.
I may just be sick of it.
I think sort of like what Danny eventually did.
I'm like, I'm just going to get out.
I don't care how close to retirement I'm just I just can't even be a part of this.
Well, in the summer, I met another group of people in the let's see, it was in the Kunar, not the Kunar, was that one down the south, the big one there, Kandahar, sorry, in the Kandahar province in one of the hotter places at the time.
I went down on another patrol with the with the platoon down there.
I believe it was the hundred and first airborne or maybe it was the 82nd.
And and I got to know several of the people.
And there was these two particular soldiers that their staff sergeant had was really praising and telling me, you know, what great guys these were.
One of them came from, you know, a bad background and had made some big mistakes early in his career, but had, you know, was showing great character and overcoming them.
And he was doing a terrific job in all this.
And about three weeks later, I see a headline in the Stars and Stripes at my headquarters in Bagram that the headline was like, you know, two inch letters.
They're all dead.
And I read in there that one of the MRAP vehicles in that area had struck a mine and all five men were killed inside.
Two of whom were the two men that I had met.
And now that it's really personal, I mean, really personal.
And again, those those men died for absolutely nothing.
And I knew that the operation they were doing down there was basically just driving down the road, hoping, you know, get blown up.
Well, they finally did.
That's not helping America.
And at that point, something snapped inside of me.
And I said, I have a moral obligation to do something.
If these guys are willing to risk their lives and lose their lives for something that's fraudulent, then how dare I keep my mouth closed just because it would cause me some personal problems?
And I assure you, I actually I'll just tell you, Matt Hull was one of my biggest supporters and somebody I leaned on heavily.
He was helping me a ton behind the scenes.
And he actually said, are you sure you want to do this?
Because probably it's not going to result in any change.
It's not going to change.
But you're going to cause it's going to cost you a lot.
You know, when coming from him that that really made me pause.
But something had snapped and I didn't have the the moral permission to remain silent.
So I just said, I'm going to throw it out there and whatever happens, happens.
And and to be honest, you know, for some of the some of our other mutual friends like Tom, what's his last name?
Tom Drake.
Yeah, you know, he suffered just horrifically for his whistleblowing with the NSA and some other stuff, and I didn't suffer anywhere near that much.
I mean, there was some things that were pretty personally unpleasant, but, you know, the whistleblower protection stuff really helped me out a lot.
But but that's that's what caused it.
And I just had no alternative but to say no.
And now we are where we are.
Danny Sherson, you want to talk about that, too?
Yeah, sure.
My courage slash, if you want to even call it whistleblowing, was a little bit a more slow boiling and and that that bothers me.
I mean, I've got a lot of regrets about the moments when I should have probably done a little more because I was against the Iraq war by early 2007.
I mean, I was only a few months in and I'd made the you know, I read probably I read probably 50 books like a lunatic.
I was in like a manic phase and just seeing what I was seeing on the ground every day and burying a lot of kids at that time.
And like I was already against it.
Right.
And so I was against the Afghan war before I even got there.
You know, I didn't go into the Afghanistan war believing in anything.
At least when I went to Iraq, like I had a semblance of belief that we might be doing something good.
But, you know, I mean, I don't know.
It's hard to pick out turning points.
One that got me a little bit was towards the end of the tour in Afghanistan.
We had a lot of replacements coming in, even though only only I mean, still a lot.
But even though only three were killed in combat under my command, we had about 30 wounded.
Actually, our troop casualty rate was just a bit over 40 percent for the tour.
But so there's a lot of new kids, a lot of young guys.
And one of them, great kid that I had heard glowing reports about, right, was killed a couple of days earlier.
And the day of his memorial ceremony were, of course, I have to give one of the, you know, one of the four speeches.
It's usually two friends, the lieutenant colonel and then and then the captain commanding.
I was in the middle of this like rant.
I was typing like furiously, like in a manic zone, this long letter to my scout, my squadron commander, who was a sociopath, and trying to try to explain to him why his next air assault into an empty village full of mines was not only a bad idea, but actually against counterinsurgency, population centric doctrine.
So I know he's not going to listen to it, but I'm I'm literally insane at this point.
OK, this is like I was not healthy mentally, which I didn't figure really, really figure out until I got back and stopped white knuckling it.
Well, my lieutenant, the lieutenant, the platoon leader of this of this kid who was killed and he really was a kid comes in.
He's like, sir, you've got to give a speech in like 30 minutes.
What are you doing?
And I was like, what speech?
He was like, uh, for Rio's memorial.
And I was like, oh, right.
Like I was so I mean, I was so in the zone and just angry.
And then I was like, oh, my God.
So then I'm sitting there with a pen and an index card.
And I'm like, what do I really know about this young guy, you know, who just gave his life?
Not very much.
Right.
He was a private.
I was the captain.
He was new.
He was young.
All this.
I mean, a better officer might have known more.
I knew almost nothing.
And it was horrifying.
That was a big one.
I realized I would never and I still haven't, by the way.
Speaking of cowardice, I realized I would never really be able to explain to his mother just what he had been killed for.
And I say that all the time.
And that was it.
I mean, I went back, my mental health fell apart within a month of being home.
I had no idea I was sick until I didn't have things to do every day.
And then I was in grad school.
Boom.
Two months later, you know, I'm in grad school on my way to West Point.
So it was like I got all this free time on my hands because compared to Afghanistan, grad school is easy and I'm reading all the best history and the most cutting edge stuff on all these topics.
And I'm like, OK, so now I have an experiential reason to be against these wars.
And more than ever now, I have like an academic, you know, reason for being against them, like a scholarly reason.
And then I was like, all right, well, pen to paper, I guess.
And that's how the book started.
And the book got a little bit of attention, but it slipped past the censors at West Point pretty quickly because they were just over overburdened.
And then, you know, when the article started flowing, you remember, Scott, first it was like one a week and then I don't know what happened.
It just became like a million a day.
And the army and I then had our first real falling out.
And so, I mean, look, I mean, in a sense, I took the easy way out and early retirement that I think was offered to me, partly because it was earned through what the doctors said.
But also, I think it was a mutual breakup.
I mean, I think to a certain extent it was better for the army for me to quietly go bye bye.
And, you know, so I did that.
So I get a lot of flack from some of the more more lefties in particular on the Internet about, you know, staying in as long as I did.
And I never answer it because a 98 percent of people on the Internet are monsters.
But B, because I really do feel insecure about it, you know, so I don't know if I could even put myself in the same category as these two other gentlemen.
I like to say that my career now is penance, but maybe that's just because I was raised Catholic.
Yeah, well, it's definitely not earned, dude, because you have nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about and then screw anybody who says anything to the contrary because of they have no clue what you've suffered and countless thousands, tens of thousands of others have in silence.
And, you know, almost all of that is due to these absurd, pointless, unnecessary, counterproductive wars that we just can't get out of.
And that, I think, is the driving motivation for all of us as to why we have to keep fighting this fight right now.
So you guys, I forgot who it was earlier that mentioned the safe haven myth and the political, you know, cowardice that anything that happens after we leave is going to be blamed on us if we leave and this kind of thing.
But another major facet of this, too, is that we're helping these people.
And it sucks that your guys got killed, Danny, but that was their job was to fight and die to do the right thing.
And we're over there trying to help these people and save them from these backwards Taliban who want to institute this horrible authoritarian government over them all.
And that, you know, ultimately, look at all the people that you were helping.
And wouldn't it be horrible?
Never mind the safe haven for terrorists to attack us.
Wouldn't it be horrible if the Taliban took back over that country?
And what about maybe it's not a sunk cost fallacy.
Maybe it does really matter how many guys gave their lives who would be really disappointed to find out that America ended up giving up and not fulfilling the mission, completing it.
Something, you know, it's a devil's advocate position, but there's got to be something to that.
Who wants to answer that?
Well, you know, one of the one of the things that I thought I definitely want that one.
Yeah.
You know, one, just to make a point about, you know, regrets, you know, Danny is, I mean, that Danny was talking about.
Yeah.
I mean, I can go back through all the times where I knew I didn't believe in what we were doing and I kept doing it.
I mean, I I was on the when I came back for my first time in Iraq in May of 05, I then went to work on the Iraq desk at the State Department.
And one of my jobs was to do this thing called the Weekly Status Report.
And it was a collection, you know, it's about 40 or 50 PowerPoint slides because the government loves PowerPoint.
And but and it went to the White House, it went to the desk of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and it went to the media and went to members of Congress.
And it was a collection of lies.
I mean, it was just I mean, every week I had to call people and find different good news stories about what was happening in Iraq.
And this is, you know, this is summer, fall of 05, winter of 06.
And I mean, like, you know, so I actively took part in the lying, you know, and you did it because I think like to Danny's point, we were all sick.
And I think you don't realize that you're sick and you're having these problems, you know, that you're morally broken, but also your mental health is completely shattered until you actually leave the service or till you get a place, as Danny said, where you don't have anything to do all day long.
And I think that's why, you know, the whole other aspect of it is why you see such high rates of veteran suicide.
But, you know, with these myths, though, absolutely.
You know, Scott, just, you know, make it quick.
The one I'm concerned about right now in relation to these papers is that, you know, you don't see in these papers that the Post released a lot of Trump era officials, mainly Bush and Obama people.
And that's what I'm expecting to hear from the Trump administration is that, well, you know what?
A Bush didn't didn't pay attention to it.
And Obama was too weak.
Obama didn't let us really fight over there.
But Trump came in and he dropped the hammer and he's fighting and killing them.
And that's the difference.
And that's why the Taliban are at the peace table, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so that's the myth that I expect to be seeing is that Trump did things differently than Obama and Bush.
And that's why he's winning in Afghanistan now.
And these papers are proof of that, how Trump is a better commander in chief than the other two.
You know, it's just more of the same, really.
Yeah, and what I would pile on top of that is that that that line of thinking that you discussed, Scott, just has a ring of plausibility to somebody over here.
It seems like, well, yeah, I mean, that you don't want to have their sacrifice of all the people who've already died to be in vain.
And yeah.
And, you know, we're helping those people and all this kind of stuff.
You have to understand, number one, that in terms of what's actually going on on the ground, as Matt just alluded to with these with these PowerPoint slides and was graphically demonstrated in the Afghan papers, is that most of these things are just made up, i.e. you're not really helping anyone, not anything that's going to last.
And that's one of the other big aspects that John Sopko's cigar reports routinely show is that the things that we're doing aren't sustainable.
I mean, nothing that can can survive our withdrawal.
And we've made it systematically that way.
The corruption hasn't changed at all.
They are just as corrupt, according to The World.
I can't remember the exact organization that does this, but they rank all the 178 countries of the world in order of corruption.
And they have never risen more than one or two spots above third from the bottom or second in one particular case.
It never changes.
The needle doesn't move.
Bottom line is in graphically depicted, we have never changed the culture there.
We have never changed the corruption.
All these things we've done, all these sacrifices we've made have never made a difference.
And now that you see, since the surge, the violence is at the highest level.
It is the civilians are dying at the highest levels.
The Afghan military continues to be minimally capable.
And those things are just on a like a flat line.
They're not improving.
They're not on a ride.
Asthma.
They're not doing anything except just laying on the ground.
And it will never, never be any different.
So you have to say, why should we spend one more American body, one more drop of American blood, one more dollar of taxpayer money to perpetuate a dead situation that can't improve?
Is there there will be some chaos when we leave?
There already is a civil war going on.
I don't understand why people don't.
Well, I kind of do understand.
They don't really understand the nature of the fight that's going on there.
It's basically the same civil war that we interrupted in 2001.
It's still going on.
Our presence there is not stopping it.
Ergo, our departure won't change that dynamic either.
But what it will do is it will finally, finally stop the pointless bloodshed and the pointless expenditure of us fighting for something that cannot be won with military force.
Hey, I'll just let you know that we're doing a big end of the year fund drive at the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate.
We've got some great projects in mind for the new year, including the publication of my next book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Sheldon Richman, Pete Quinonez and I also plan on bringing on more writers, hosting an event or two and some other big ideas we're working on as well.
So help the Libertarian Institute make the new year a huge one for the advancement of freedom at Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate.
And thanks.
All right, Matthew or Danny Sherson, you guys have closing thoughts here.
Yeah, you know, I totally agree with what Danny was saying, just the futility of this entire endeavor.
When I eventually give in to my publisher and write the what they call the Afghanistan version of Ghost Riders of Baghdad, I want to title it Spinning Our Wheels because that's what I did for 18 hours a day in Kandahar.
And where is Pashmul district of Zari district of Kandahar today?
It's basically where I found it probably a little worse because there's less Americans holding the ground temporarily.
So the whole thing said and my final comments about the Afghan report or the Afghan papers is, you know, I said earlier that I think they're lying to themselves in addition to lying to us.
And it's gotten so absurd.
And I think everyone here on the pod knows this, but all the listeners might not.
You know, when inconvenient data crept up, I'll give you two specific examples.
We used to measure the percentage of districts in Afghanistan that were contested or controlled by the Taliban.
That was one thing.
And the other thing we used to count was the number of Afghan security forces, the ones we trained and armed, supposedly the future, right?
Supposedly the future of the war.
We used to count how many of them were killed every year.
Well, over the course of several years, those numbers got alarmingly high.
OK, the Taliban had more of the country they were contesting than ever.
And Afghan security forces were actually being killed at a higher rate than they could be recruited, both of which are really, really bad indicators.
Right.
But what we did, what the command, the senior command in Afghanistan did is it just stopped counting.
Yeah, these are just it just stopped publicly displaying it.
I mean, that was their answer.
And so that's the level of self-delusion we're at.
And so I want to take it further.
Yes, they're lying to us.
They're also lying to themselves.
I don't even know if the culture of the post 9-11 military senior ranks is capable of anything but these sort of lies, which really should be troubling and staggering for most Americans.
But if in fact these are the Pentagon papers of our generation, and I think in a sense they are, what I'm not so sure about is whether Americans are going to care half as much as they did back in 1971.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I was up to three in the morning.
I sent you all after after we all saw Petraeus's comments about how when he was in Afghanistan, Taliban attacks went down, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, he's he's, you know, continuing with the lies as he's being asked about these papers.
And I was up, so after I sent you guys that last email, I was up to three in the morning on the, you know, Internet archives, Wayback Machine, finding all these old reports, you know, and you could see how they pieced together.
You know, I'll write more.
I'll write about this.
But in the years that Petraeus was there, what he claims as success is really the fact that as U.S. forces draw down, there's less forces to attack.
So you see a drop in enemy attacks.
But then what they don't count in is the increase in attacks against the Afghan security forces.
So to Danny's point, to Danny Surgeon's point, you know, in the years that Petraeus is there, as U.S. forces are coming down, one year attacks against the Afghan security forces go up one hundred and twenty five percent and the next year they go up ninety five percent.
You know, but that doesn't that doesn't make it you know, it's so manipulated.
And this brings me to my final point, is that whenever I'm asked by people about what books to read to understand these wars, the three books I always give are about Vietnam.
It's David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Neil Shaheen's Bright Shining Lie and David Hackworth's About Face.
And those are because I said, if you read those, you'll understand these wars, even though they are written at this point 50 years ago.
And I think the thing that always stood out for me from Shaheen, that Neil Shaheen said about the Pentagon Papers, which I think is true about these papers and to your all points about this and particularly about the point about these people lying to themselves, is that Shaheen said about the Pentagon Papers, what I learned is that the U.S. government doesn't classify things and hide things to protect the American people from its enemies.
It does it to protect the American people from its own government, to protect them from the humiliation, the embarrassment, the knowledge of corruption, the knowledge of lies, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think that's what you see here.
There's nothing in these papers that would give any support to the Taliban, nothing in them at all.
There's nothing you can say if you were a Taliban military or political commander in this that you could be like, oh, look, this is going to help us in our fight against the Americans.
There's not one thing in those 2,000 pages that were classified and they had to sue to get.
But there's a sure a hell of a lot of embarrassment, humiliation and, you know, acknowledgement of, you know, a criminal and moral wrongdoing.
So, yeah, I mean, it's you know, like I said, but those three books that if you read those, you'll understand these wars.
All right, you guys, well, listen, I think we should go ahead and wrap it up there.
I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this stuff.
I know that people need to hear it and you guys know that.
That's why you continue on, you know, doing your anti-war work that you do.
And so let me say real quick, Danny Sherson, formerly Major Sherson, writes for Antiwar.com for Truth Dig, wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad.
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L.
Davis, he writes kind of all over the place, but he's at Defense Priorities is his headquarters there.
You can find him in the Hill and well, anything he writes, we link to from Antiwar.com, that's for sure.
And Matthew Ho, I always forget the name of the think tank you work at, my friend.
Center for International Policy.
There you go.
CIP there.
And and where can people find your articles most often?
I know you have a brand new one that was at Counterpunch that we reprinted at Antiwar.com yesterday.
Yeah, I primarily I primarily publish at Counterpunch because, you know, just to get back to the point earlier, it's just I just don't want to deal with the hassle of submitting these things to places and then getting fact checked out the wazoo.
So, you know, Counterpunch is a good publication for me.
And yeah, that that's where you can find most of my writings now or or on my blog, which is Matthew Ho.com.
Great.
All right.
Well, thank you all three again for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks.
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to do it.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
