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 fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Jared Labor from Young Voices and from Defense Priorities, and he's written a ton of stuff for RealClearDefense.com, especially about Afghanistan, and so welcome to the show.
Jared, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here.
So, what did you think about the big Afghanistan papers leak?
Well, I mean, it's sort of- Or story.
I guess it wasn't a leak.
It was a FOIA request.
Yeah.
I mean, it wasn't a surprise.
I mean, this is something that, I mean, it's good that it's sort of out there in the open and now there's definitive proof that things have not been going great and that the government has known about it.
But for anybody who's been observing this war in any sort of detail or regularity over the last many years has known this.
I mean, it's been spelled out in various government documents over the last, the special inspector general reports over the last five or so years.
I mean, this has been available to anybody who wants it, but at least now we know definitively that behind the scenes, the people in charge are at least admitting that it's not going well.
Yeah.
Well, I sure didn't take any kind of satisfaction in being vindicated on the facts, but I guess I was happy to see that I didn't really miss anything either, pretty much, over there.
Yeah.
What I wrote in my book two and a half years ago.
And what I learned from real experts all along, I mean, all along from the very beginning, what plenty of people have known, one of the main things in there seemed like was, yeah, it really is true that we could have made peace with the Taliban in the first few years there.
Yeah.
And that's a huge part of the story that's never talked about is the missed chances for peace when Mullah Omar had given his entire cabinet, essentially all of his ministers permission to surrender and recognize the new American-style government as legitimate and to go and participate in the thing.
After all, it's run by a Popolzai Pashtun from Kandahar.
So what the hell, let's make a deal.
And America refused to accept peace from these guys.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the same thing that happened in Iraq, too, with sort of the de-Baathification of the army and the various, of the Iraqi army and other various ministries and organizations in Iraq.
Yeah.
I mean, the Afghanistan war could have, it could have ended a long time ago.
It could still end today and things would be totally fine, but it definitely could have ended a long time ago.
But the U.S. government mission creep is a real thing, and people, the sort of foreign policy mantra over the last, you know, 30 years is sort of American-led primacy, liberal international order, you know, bringing human rights and democracy to places that previously didn't have it.
I mean, it just all set it up in a way that it didn't have to go the way it did, but unfortunately it has.
Yeah.
I think, seems like there's a pretty big conflict between means and ends there that the people with the power, I guess you can't expect them to figure it out themselves.
But invading and occupying a country and killing people daily in a giant war is not a very good way to create a stable, limited republic with a bill of rights and private property and all of these things.
You couldn't possibly use a war to achieve those ends.
That's not how it works.
A defensive one, maybe, but invade somebody else's country to inflict republicanism on them?
Come on.
Yeah.
I mean, it just goes to show that state building, even under the best of circumstances, state building is super hard.
And it's something that really should be measured in terms of centuries, you know, 100 years, as opposed to a single decade, because we have to remember that the United States really didn't start engaging in nation building proper in Afghanistan until the late Bush years, 2006, 2007.
I mean, previously, in the early years, where it was much just sort of like a limited counterterrorism mission, it wasn't until the late Bush years and then into Obama that nation building proper really started to ramp up and aid money and everything just started to flood in, like the floodgates would just open and all of a sudden there's billions of dollars just floating around.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's been, so it really has only been about 10 years as far as trying to build a state.
And yeah, I mean, it's really hard under even the best of circumstances, and it's not something that should be measured in a decade, but it's something that takes, something that takes, you know, multiple decades, if not more than centuries.
And it's, and then the fact that it's external people trying to do it, it's external actors trying to do it, as opposed to sort of endogenously happening from within, I mean, it's a recipe for disaster from the start.
Yeah.
Well, but then again, I mean, these are all pretexts anyway, and there's a certain amount of belief in their own propaganda, I guess, but what this really is, is a make work program for government employees.
Yeah, yeah, of a certain kind.
Yeah, it definitely is.
I mean, you know, the Defense Department, there's a lot of that going around in the Pentagon and various, you know, various sectors of the national security realm.
Yeah, you got to keep busy doing something.
In 2010, David Petraeus came out and said, oh my God, everybody, there's a trillion dollars worth of minerals under Afghanistan.
If only we can complete our mission in pacifying this country, why, then we could steal all that wealth.
Well, what a joke.
First of all, stealing is wrong.
Secondly, not in a hundred years is there going to be a security situation in Afghanistan that's going to be conducive to billion dollar mining projects to get this lithium to market and whatever kind of thing.
Oh, you're going to build a big railroad, are you?
General Petraeus.
Hey, he knew he was lying.
He's just trying to come up with, almost like Donald Trump, right, just come up with something for everyone.
Doesn't matter whether it's true or not, but just say enough things that, you know, women's rights here and minerals theft there, and don't let our boys' sacrifices be in vain over here, and just as many arguments as you can come up with to keep the thing going.
That's all.
Yeah.
Now, one of the striking things, you know, reading through some of this, and I haven't read all of the papers in their entirety because it's a lot to read, but, you know, all of this, just some of the specific examples, like, you know, the army, you know, instead of, you know, listening to the locals on like where to put a well, because, you know, you'd think that the local population would know pretty good about, you know, like the water system in the area and everything.
Instead of listening to them about where to build a well, they sort of arbitrarily put wells in between two sort of neighboring villages, sort of at a halfway point, because they thought that that would, like, encourage cooperation between the villages, and it didn't.
It did none of that.
And then it's also useless for, you know, gathering water then, too, because it's not in a great spot.
I mean, there's all these examples of just this sort of blunt ignorance of the sort of the local context, you know, throughout these papers, and it's just, it's sort of mind-boggling to read it all.
I mean, I guess it's one of those things, like you said at the beginning, it's like not necessarily surprising, but it's still sort of infuriating in a certain sense to read all this.
Yeah.
You know, it does bother me a little bit that, like you were saying, that we've all known this this whole time.
I mean, my show happens to be one record of this, but you look at all the great critics from the dawn of Obama's surge, for example, and during that time, 2009, 2010, 2011, around saying, oh, look at these guys, oh, look, the number of violent attacks by the Taliban against American forces has gone up.
That means that we've been pressuring them, and they're reacting in their desperation in their last throes of the insurgency.
And then when the numbers go down, ah-ha, see, the numbers are going down because what a great job we're doing.
But I mean, it was like watching Pee-wee's Playhouse, nobody believed that.
Only damn fools and ABC News reporters and whoever believed and regurgitated that.
But for anyone who was critical at all listening to that, they knew that was garbage.
They knew that they were, come on, oh, you guys are remaking the Helmand province into a whole new place, are you?
You know, come on.
That was over before McChrystal was even cashiered.
He'd already given up on Marja before Hastings got him fired in 2010.
Well, yeah, the thing about the example of increased Taliban attacks being like a marker of sort of progress and everything, it's like, well, what did you think was going to happen when all of a sudden 100,000 troops just showed up?
It's like, did you think they were going to just stand by and just watch and just sort of chat nicely from the sidelines?
No, I mean, when you throw a bunch of troops into a mix, they're going to be met with a reaction.
And then when the troops go away, of course, you're going to see a corresponding level of decline because there's fewer troops for people to attack.
It's like, it's common sense.
It's like, yeah, if 100,000 people show up and they've all got guns, the insurgency is going to react in an inappropriate manner.
And in fact, if anything, it's a show of their strength that they didn't just turn tail and run next door to Kandahar.
They said, hey, let's fight.
Afghanistan's a good place as any to take a stand.
So yeah, it sure sounds like they weren't afraid even back then.
Well, no, I mean, the Taliban has been sort of consistent from the start.
I mean, they're not going to rest.
They're not going to rest until every single foreign fighter is out of their country.
I mean, that's, I don't see why we don't take them at their word for that.
Hey, y'all check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone, but this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
You can find them all at LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
Hey, you guys may know I'm involved in some Libertarian Party politics this year, but you can't hear or read about that at the Libertarian Institute due to 501c3 rules and such.
So make sure to sign up for the interviews feed at ScottHorton.org and keep an eye on my blog at ScottHorton.org slash stress.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at ScottHorton.org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Well, so let's talk about that, the peace negotiations here.
Trump appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, who is obviously a very powerful neoconservative policymender in there, helped write the defense plan and guidance in 92 and studied under Leo Strauss with Wolfowitz and Perl and them back in the 60s and 70s.
And he's the guy that picked Hamid Karzai to be the first sock puppet president of the country after the war in 2001 and 2002.
So he was over there negotiating with the Taliban for, what, better than a year, I think, and had a deal, and then the deal fell apart at the last minute.
What happened with that?
Well, these peace negotiations have been very opaque.
So we've always heard that it's like, oh, we were on the precipice of a deal, we were on the precipice of a deal.
We didn't have a lot of details about what the deal actually said.
We were given some basic overview, like the Taliban would not allow al-Qaeda and ISIS and all these other groups to sort of take refuge.
I mean, I'm not a believer in the safe haven myth, so I don't, or the safe haven theory, I think it's a myth anyways.
And then there was other things like there would be the start of intra-Afghan negotiations.
I mean, I'm not convinced that anyone really had any, I'm not convinced that we were actually that close to a deal.
I know that they were invited, President Trump invited people to come to Camp David, and then that was called off at the last second because of a Taliban attack and all that.
But it was so opaque, it was hard to really tell.
And now we're officially back on in negotiations, and they're talking, President Trump, of course, on his trip to Afghanistan over the holiday, he made mention of a ceasefire.
But of course, the Taliban has never agreed to a ceasefire, particularly with the Afghan forces.
And that's been a sticking point of the whole time, was how do we get, how are we able to get them to agree to some sort of reduction in violence so that we can start to leave?
And the fact of the matter is, is you're really not going to.
I mean, there's no incentive for the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire with the Afghan government For one thing, like you said, they see them as a puppet, which is not, I mean, it's not an unreasonable position.
And they know that they have all, they know that the army is weak.
The army is, to call it an army is to, well, it's not really an army.
It's a collection of people that have been given some guns and some training, and some minor training, but are really not, it's not like a cohesive force in the way you think of a sort of traditional military.
And the Taliban know that.
So what is their incentive to actually agree to a reduction in violence?
I mean, I think the whole thing has been a, I think the whole thing, I mean, this might be the cynic in me.
I think the whole thing has been a charade from the beginning.
Yeah.
Well, so I wonder if I had I Dream of Jeannie here to do me a favor and just get all American troops and civilians and dollars and everything out of the place and just let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah.
How good or bad do you think it'd be over there?
Well, it would get worse in the interim.
Definitely violence would probably go up, you know, right away as the Taliban started to basically consolidate their control in the way they did in the mid 90s.
But, you know, but eventually I think it would start to, things would start to get gradually better, better at being in quotation marks because, you know, it's never going to be a great situation from our point of view.
But you know, but at this point, and you saw this in the Asia Foundation just released like their annual sort of survey, Afghan survey.
And you saw, I don't, I'm trying to remember the specific questions that they asked, but you saw like people are, people are sort of like gearing themselves, or like preparing themselves for Taliban rule because at the very least that, at the very least there'll be some law and order, so to speak, law and order.
And, you know, there might, you know, there would eventually be the violence will stop, you know, it might not be the greatest sort of political situation, but at the very least they don't have to worry about being caught in the conflict anymore.
So yeah, I think, I think in the short term it would get a lot worse.
The Afghan government would collapse, which I think is inevitable.
And but then hopefully over the long term you would start to see a return to the conditions of the 90s and early 2000s where, I mean, that was how the Taliban were able to, you know, they promised at least a modicum of stability after, you know, and nonviolence after 30 years of civil war, 20 years I guess at that point of civil war.
And I think you would probably have a return to a similar situation there.
You know, one thing that Matthew Ho pointed out on the show before was that, you know, in the 1990s, the Pakistanis with American support were supporting the Taliban and it in fact was the Clinton government's policy that they wanted to see not a peace deal, but a total victory for the Taliban in the war so that they would have the stability to build their oil pipeline from Tajikistan across Pakistan to the port of Karachi there.
And that this time, that's just not the case.
Presumably, the Americans would be leaning really hard on the Pakistanis to lean on the Taliban to stay out of Kabul.
You have all of Pashtunistan.
There's no point in trying to sack the capital city where all these people are going to die.
It's not going to buy you control over the rest of the country anyway.
They call time out.
You know, I don't know.
But so he is thinking, you know, maybe they won't take Kabul.
Maybe.
In fact, I interviewed an Afghan journalist not long ago who said, you know, essentially he thinks a deal can be made to merge the two governments together, sort of, you know, to participate in the parliament and to not fight, to have an agreement over the future of Kabul rather than a war if America would only get out of the way.
You know, I mean, it's certainly possible.
I mean, I'm skeptical, but I think it's certainly possible.
The Pakistan issue is tough.
I mean, that's sort of the talking point that people often point is like, well, we just put more pressure on Pakistan, you know, this and that, and things would be better.
And this, I mean, like, what, what incentive, like, again, like, what incentive does Pakistan have to not support the Taliban?
And I think Barnett Rubin tweeted about this the other day.
He's like, you know, we all, you know, because he worked, he's worked in various capacities over the year in Afghanistan.
And he's like, you know, to, to get, to get the Pakistani Taliban to then crack down on the Afghan Taliban would even, would, would therefore increase the war.
I mean, it would require them to increase the scope of the war to really, you know, bring them under any type of control.
So I'm not, I'm not skeptical that the Pakistan angle is sort of the panacea that many people like Lindsey Graham and others, you know, people in Washington often think it is as far as solving the issue.
Well, I mean, the Pakistanis certainly have a priority, I guess, quite a few different priorities in terms of why to keep the Taliban in play and why to back them and why to make sure that they don't lose.
But well, yeah, but they could just withhold the support necessary to try to sack the capital city and say, look, guys, we'll support you all day long.
Just don't take the capital.
Seems like maybe they could at least don't take it violently, walk right in and run for parliament and win.
They're the plurality of the country anyway.
They stand a pretty good chance if, and if it's the Taliban holding the election, they can get the countryside to vote for a change.
So I don't know.
Another, of course, another angle, I guess, is my understanding of this has always been the Pakistan also sort of India plays into this as well.
And the fact that don't, they don't, you know, obviously Pakistan and India have longstanding tensions.
And they're the one of the reasons that they've been so supportive of the Taliban over the years is they don't want another potential.
They don't want another state that particularly like a U.S.-backed state to be to ally with India and then have basically two, two enemies, you know, right on their borders.
So that I think, I think the India plays a role in that as well.
Well, of course, a good step forward there be for America to stop demanding that the Indians come in to help prop up the Kabul government at the very least.
Yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, that, that would, that would be a good step, but yeah, that's crazy libertarians.
All we want to do is stop doing things that don't seem to be working well.
All right.
Well, so tell us a little bit about defense priorities.
I mentioned Daniel Davis or was that the previous interview?
No, that was the previous interview.
Yeah.
The great Daniel Davis I know is there with you and Chuck Pena and a couple others.
Can you talk to us about that?
Yes.
Yeah.
Dan, Dan, Dan is a, is a colleague.
He, and of course he wrote like a whistle, like a report back and he was sort of one of the original, one of the OGs on this, blowing this whistle back in 2012 as far as like, you know, that the, the brass were lying to us about or misleading us about how things were going.
But yeah.
So yes, defense priorities, you know, we, we call ourselves, I hope that I, I get all this right.
I'm not, I'm not the best at brand and messaging, but you know, it's sort of the hub of realism and restraint in Washington.
And so like our goal is basically to in, is to basically introduce the ideas of restraint into the foreign policy discussion.
It's, you know, it's very sort of public facing, you know, we do a lot of, you know, we do a lot of op-ed writing.
We have a, we have a small policy team that, you know, that puts out reports and you know, liaison with people on the Hill and various places to try to just introduce, cause you know, the, the, the, as you know, I mean the, the, the DC community is not, you know, restraint is not exactly well represented in DC and there's more now than there have been in the past.
I mean, obviously with the introduction of the, the brand new, the Quincy Institute and of course Cato, the Cato foreign policy team has long been on the restraint side, but it's, it's, yeah, our, our goal is to just be, is to, you know, to, to introduce these ideas into the foreign policy debate in the hopes that, you know, some, you know, the hopes that they, they, they catch on and they resonate to try to offer an alternative to the status quo because the status quo is unnecessary.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I mean, I think it's probably even more important than you realize it is and maybe you do realize, but it's, I'm just saying no matter how well you realize it, it's even more important than that, right?
Because the groups that you're talking about here it is a small number, but it's just enough to start to really change the narrative about the point of view of the right.
And I'm not calling you a conservative necessarily, but libertarians are generally lumped in with the right.
We're certainly not leftists and I don't even know exactly if you're a libertarian.
I think so.
I don't know if that's a libertarian thing.
Defense priorities is Koch brothers stuff.
I mean, defense priorities is, I mean, of course, obviously we don't really, not really, we don't, you know, we don't take a, you know, we don't really have opinions on other policy areas.
So, I mean, to be quite honest, I mean, I'm not really sure of the sort of the, the politics of many of my colleagues on other issues, because it's just not really something that we ever, it's not something that comes up obviously when we're talking about, you know, defense priorities business.
Well, from the outside, I mean, it's pretty clear Chuck Pena and Daniel Davis.
And from what I've read of your stuff, that there are no hippies on the thing.
It's not, it's not like Jane Fonda's family up here saying, give peace a chance.
These are essentially realist and libertarian and conservative anti-war voices.
And that's the most important thing of all is to attack the right from the right, to deny the fake reality that the hawks have a monopoly on opinion on the right about what our foreign policy should be.
After all, you know, it's kind of overdue.
They've been long since discredited.
It's just, there were, haven't been enough people really to take their place in the narrative, you know, and, and, and to push a better one.
And so no, no offense to the left, I'm just saying they're not really part of this discussion.
It's a discussion of, of how things look on the outside about the foreign policy community on the right, you know, in the halls of power and that kind of thing.
And you guys are really doing a lot to disrupt that narrative just by continuing to write the kind of things that you're writing here and being who you are.
So yeah, no, I mean, we're, you know, day in and day out, we give it our all.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well for some reason, Google would not fetch me your most recent piece at Real Clear Defense.
I know there was one just last month about Afghanistan, but you got about, you know, eight or 10 here and plus Syria and lots of other things.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, I've written, I've written pretty extensively about over the last year and a half, well, more than year and a half, but written pretty extensively about Afghanistan as well as some other areas as well, but yeah.
And then where else can we find you other than Defense Priorities and Real Clear Defense here?
Yeah.
So, I mean, I've been published in Defense One, The Independent, which is a British publication, you can find stuff in The Hill, The Orange County Register.
I know you're out in California.
I've been in several of the papers out there.
I'm on the radio in California.
I'm actually in Austin.
Oh, you're on the radio, but you're in Austin.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Orange County Register and some of the other, you know, like Los Angeles Daily News and places like that.
But yeah, actually, I have a website, you know, jaredalabor.com.
I have a lot of my writing posted there, you know, on various, not just Afghanistan, but you know, the sort of Syria and other places as well.
Great.
All right.
And that's J-E-R-R-O-D-A-Labor and it's L-A-B-E-R.
Yeah.
All right.
Dot com.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you again very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah.
No, thank you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
