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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Adam Winchey.
He was a sergeant in the Afghan war and now he is at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and he's got this one from about 10 days ago, Survey Finds Afghans Want U.S.
Troops to Leave.
And then, hey, it turns out the Afghan papers, the Afghanistan papers have been released by the Washington Post in the meantime, essentially making the case for, I guess, unmaking every case for the Americans staying there.
So anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Adam?
Great.
Thanks for having me again.
So let's talk about the Afghans opinion here first, because half the time we're willing to sacrifice every single one of our boys just to help these poor people that we love so much.
And on the other hand, also, it's okay to kill as many of them as you want, as long as it's a means to an end that we're working on here and they kind of don't really matter at all.
So, but they matter to me and they matter to themselves and that's all that matters.
And so what is it that the Afghan people think of the American occupation of their country?
Yeah.
So this survey that was released, they've been doing this survey since around, I believe, 2004.
So they've been doing an annual survey of the Afghan people for a really long time.
And one of the interesting things that came out in the sort of last iteration, the 2019 version of this report is that the sort of the foreign troop presence or the American troop presence in Afghanistan is like one of the top things, the top thing that Afghans are willing to give up for any peace deal or any kind of negotiated deal with the Taliban.
So it's becoming more and more clear that, you know, the Taliban, I mean, the Afghan people are very, very interested and very optimistic about peace.
And they, they're essentially seeing the troop presence in Afghanistan with the Americans as one of the top things that's sort of impeding that.
All right.
So here's my problem is I'm for getting out of the Afghan war and always have been even since before it started.
And so it's really against my interest to have optimistic and even Pollyannish type expectations for what might happen if only American troops withdraw.
I expect the worst because why the hell not?
This is Earth, right?
And we're talking about the Taliban who look at them.
They're butchers of innocent civilians.
They're just horrible.
They're about as bad as Al Qaeda now when you look at the way they attack civilians and all this stuff.
So I expect that, you know, the Dostum factions and whoever else, all the Tajiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras in the north and in the center of the country to fight like hell to prevent the Taliban from taking over.
And I expect the Taliban to attempt to bite off far more than they can chew and to replicate the 1990s.
And it's terrible.
And I still think we should leave, but kind of wonder if maybe that's really wrong.
And that actually, if the Afghan people in such large numbers are optimistic about some kind of peaceful resolution to this crisis, possibly if only the Americans would get out of the way, maybe it really might not be so bad.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the interesting things that was also coming out about this is sort of the opinions that Afghans have about other things.
And I think you're you're sort of point about the Taliban probably biting off more, more than they can chew.
I think that's absolutely right.
The world that the Taliban would sort of be facing now without the American presence there is nothing like what it was when they were sort of in control in the 1990s.
And so, yeah, I think you're right.
I think that any sort of situation that comes after a U.S. troop withdrawal is not going to be as it's going to be a very different situation than what it was back in the 1990s.
I fully expect the Taliban to attempt, but I don't I do not expect them to be successful in sort of taking over control of the country or at least governing the people in a peaceful way.
So, yeah, optimism, optimism may be a little misplaced, but I think you're right that U.S. troops standing in the way is very much an important factor here.
You know, I'm pretty sure it was C.J. Chivers from the New York Times who I quote in the book actually quoting a local Afghan saying, once you guys leave, you just wait.
The Taliban are going to take Kandahar and Helmand and Mohammed Atta, not the pilot hijacker, but the Afghan warlord.
He's going to run off with, I forgot what, and, you know, Dostum is going to run off with this province and these warlords are going to run off and essentially describing the country just breaking up into, you know, 10 or 15 little fiefdoms.
And he says, if that doesn't happen, you can burn my bones when I die.
In other words, it's guaranteed that that's what's going to take place, you know, at some point.
You could interpret that optimistically, right, that like, hey, even to the Taliban, guys, why try to take the capital city and what a horrible fight it's going to cost you to win it.
And then what's it going to be worth anyway?
You know, that kind of thing.
Maybe, maybe it'd be better if everybody could agree to secede like that or to have, you know, very strong autonomy within something still called Afghanistan, you know?
Yeah, I think that's an absolutely important point.
And I don't think that that is a bold statement or a bold prediction on his part.
Afghanistan has always been decentralized.
It has never been a centralized, powerful state.
And whenever someone has attempted, always throughout history, it's always been bloody.
It's never been sustainable and it's never been worth the cost of trying to centralize power in Afghanistan.
So I think you're right, trying to, you know, if this, if these negotiations, if they're successful at all, the only way they're going to be successful is if they adopt a decentralized sort of power sharing agreement.
And, you know, that doesn't mean that, you know, the Taliban aren't going to see that and recognize that and be rational and try to, you know, not bite off more than they can chew.
But that's certainly what needs to happen.
And it's the exact opposite of what we've been trying in Afghanistan for 18 years now.
So there was a different poll and, you know, I never know what to make of these polls.
How can anybody really pull Afghans in any real way when the security situation across the country is such a nightmare?
It would make sense that some so-called groups, right, ethnic groups or tribal groups would strongly favor America stay in because they have everything to lose.
And I wonder, you know, if there's any kind of real breakdown as to who is answering these questions, which way?
Between you're saying, how are they sort of answering these questions between different groups?
Yeah, like for keeping American troops there for the time being or for supporting peace talks or whatever it is.
Is there much of a breakdown about, you know, regionally or ethnically who's supporting which positions?
Yeah.
So it's kind of difficult to get into ethnic groups because there's no real because of political sensitivities, there's no real good count on who belongs to which group.
I don't think they've done an ethnically distinguished census since, I think, 1979.
But what we can sort of get from this survey is that, you know, and it's not super surprising, right?
So sympathy for the Taliban and Pashtun regions down the South is obviously a lot higher.
And I think a lot of it just confirms sort of what we've known about Afghanistan for a long time, is that it's very much a country of regions.
And so I think it goes back to your point that any sort of political arrangement after U.S. troop withdrawals is definitely, it must be sort of a decentralized structure.
All right, so which years were you over there?
I went twice between 2007 and 2008.
Okay.
And then can you tell us where were you in the country and what was your fight about there?
Yeah, so I was mainly based out of Bagram Air Base, but my job was to sort of bring support to teams around the country.
And so I would fly and drive around to a bunch of different fire bases and sort of got to see a lot of the country that way.
So that's really interesting.
That was something that was unique about Daniel Davis as well, was that he was going all over the place.
And so he was saying, boy, it ain't just bad in Nangarhar, it's also bad in Helmand and it's also bad way out in Herat and Coast and wherever you got.
Yeah.
And so was that what you were seeing too in 2007 and 2008?
You were saying, I don't know, did you support Obama's surge when he said, hey, all we're going to do, we're going to send Petraeus in there to save the day?
It's interesting about my sort of experience with Afghanistan is that being enlisted like I was, the strategic picture was never super important to me.
It's never something that I considered or thought a whole lot about.
It wasn't until after the fact that I started studying Afghanistan and military strategy that I got sort of the strategic picture.
That makes sense.
I mean, you're a sergeant on the ground, you have more important parochial concerns.
Yeah, yeah.
My job is to, you know, follow orders.
That's pretty much the extent of my thought process on that.
But one of the interesting things I found from doing research on this, this like survey over the years is that I sort of broke down between two provinces of Kandahar and Helmand.
And so during that surge, Helmand sort of bore the brunt of that surge, right?
So a lot of forces went there rather than Kandahar.
And what we can see is when that surge happened, legitimacy for pretty much every sort of governing structure, right?
Legitimacy for international forces, legitimacy for the Afghan government takes a substantial dive in Helmand rather than other places.
So what we can see is that, you know, the troop surge and the troop presence that we think is going to do good things, ultimately, you know, sacrifice of strategic gains because you're undermining, you know, government legitimacy.
So as much as we want to think that we're getting success from having troops in all these countries, we need to think that we might be undermining our goals anyways.
Yeah.
Alright, so I know the Quincy Institute isn't exactly the heart of the think tank world there in DC, but I wonder if you have your thumb on the pulse at all of the reaction in the imperial capital there to the Washington Post publication of these Afghanistan papers that essentially say that all the critics were right all along.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's two things that I see.
One is if you don't work on Afghanistan, you're not paying attention to this at all, right?
So for everybody outside of working on Afghanistan or foreign policy, you're focused on one thing and that's impeachment.
And that's what everybody is focused on.
But we think about the Pentagon papers came out, Ellsberg's big leak to the times on the post there and then nobody even cared.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, but within, so within the like sort of community of Afghan experts in DC, one of the things that's being consistently said is that that nobody should be surprised by what this is, right?
That we've known this all along.
We've been saying this all along.
The report itself comes from the SIGAR, you know, the inspector general's report on lessons learned and that those reports are like publicly available, right?
The interviews aren't available, but like the lessons learned sort of are.
And so all of this information that the war was unwinnable was available.
But for me, that doesn't really take away from the value of the Pentagon papers because what it shows is that even though we knew it, we were still sort of trying to sell the American public on this.
We were still misleading the public on this.
And even if, you know, our policy leaders thought that they could win, if only they had support, I think is also problematic because it was very clear that that was not what was needed in Afghanistan.
What was needed was a complete rethought of what strategy was going to be.
Yeah.
But not that there was a strategy to adopt that would work as your colleague Andrew Bacevich pointed out on the show.
They tried every different thing as far as counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and nation building and State Department focused stuff and drug wars and, you know, this, that and every other thing in the world.
And none of it worked.
And that's the real rub here.
And this is something that was obvious from 2001 for anyone who cared was that Afghanistan is the size of Texas.
It's landlocked behind mountains.
It's got deserts and mountains and people who like to fight and have guns.
And so that's it.
You can't win that any more than any other force could ever take the state of Colorado or the state of Texas from the people who live here now.
It's just not ever going to happen.
It could never happen.
I think, yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
The Quincy Institute and me in particular, we're working very, very diligently on a sort of a withdrawal plan from Afghanistan.
And part of that is what is, you know, what is our, you know, our counterterrorism strategy right now is to try to sort of remake Afghan society.
And that's never going to work.
It was never going to work.
And so now what we're sort of thinking is how do we sort of adapt a counterterrorism strategy so we can sort of mitigate risks without sort of trying the impossible in Afghanistan.
So what we're trying to do is we're playing with a couple of different ideas.
One of them is sort of a containment strategy where you essentially let Afghanistan be Afghanistan and let the Afghans sort of determine their own sort of future.
And then make sure that we work, you know, with partners, local partners in the area to make sure that sort of terrorism threats are contained within that region.
Because I think, like you said, you're never going to remake Afghan society.
You're never going to be able to take that country we tried for 18 years and just didn't happen.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I think all we got to do is stop backing Al-Qaeda against Iran and their friends and stop backing the Uyghur jihadists against the Chinese and let them handle it.
If Arab suicide jihadists decide to try to create some terrorist base in Afghanistan, I'm sure the Quds Force has plenty of interest in quashing such a thing.
And they don't have to travel all the way around the other side of the planet to get there either.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think within D.C. there's this sort of cult that we have, this cult of action, right, that we have to do something about everything, not realizing that.
There's a lot of situations where we can just let sort of events play out and it doesn't necessarily end up not in our favor.
And by the way, too, and I only know this because I wrote a book about it and I read other people's books, the real experts like Kuhn and Lin Shakoan, I'm sorry, I forgot these guys' names, that wrote An Enemy We Created about the Taliban.
And they just, it's the most thorough thing in the world.
And they just talk about how much Mullah Omar always hated Osama bin Laden and he was stuck with him.
And, you know, the Army War College actually had a great study about this, too, about how bin Laden had always refused to swear loyalty to Omar, despite what you may have heard 10,000 times.
And, you know, these guys just have vastly different interests in terms of, you know, I mean, just the Taliban, they are the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
They don't want to give that up.
And here al-Qaeda was doing nothing but get them in trouble with the American superpower, cost them everything.
Why would they want to replicate that?
When after all, once they actually establish positions on the ground, they're carpet bombable.
You know, it's only an insurgency that makes, their insurgency that makes them safe, really.
But once they establish themselves as a force in a major part of the country permanently like that, then they're available for revenge.
And so they don't have no interest whatsoever in letting international terrorists attack Western targets based out of their country, which how the hell are they supposed to get to the West from there anyway?
Mohamed Atta was a Egyptian engineering student in Germany.
He wasn't an Afghan, you know?
Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
I think that's why, you know, sort of a containment mentality on counterterrorism in the area is far superior.
One, I don't think they, you know, a lot of these organizations don't actually want to leave their countries.
They don't have an interest in fighting the West like, you know, some of the core members do.
But, you know, adopting a containment counterterrorism strategy allows you to focus on those that actually do want to leave that area and focusing your energies makes you much more effective.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time again on the show.
And I see now, I'm sorry, I had missed it, but brand new out, you have the real lesson from the Afghanistan papers, pull the US military out of the state building business.
So I'll be sure to review that for Antiwar.com too.
Really appreciate it, Adam.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
All right, y'all, that is Adam Winchey from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
