All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is the managing news editor at Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz.
The address is news.antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
Afghanistan.
NATO chief.
No alternative to long-term occupation of Afghanistan.
Says Iraq should be used as a blueprint for war.
Oh, good.
Go ahead and elaborate.
What's going on here, man?
Who's this kook, and what's he talking about?
Well, he's not really saying anything that he hasn't said before, although the Iraq thing was sort of a new twist on it.
NATO's Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has been really an enthusiastic supporter of the Afghan war for years and years.
Every time one of these summits comes up in which all the NATO member nations are going to be talking about Afghanistan policy, and there's one Friday in Lisbon, he insists that the debate is between the option of staying in Afghanistan basically forever or staying in Afghanistan basically forever.
There isn't a second choice.
Yeah, well, I guess that's why they call it the long war, huh?
Yeah.
All right, now here's my problem.
You have Richard Holbrook, Hillary Clinton Jr. over there, and now, man, am I putting my eggs in his basket?
What's going on there?
Well, I think he may have misspoke, or at least wasn't informed of not so much policy change as rhetoric change in the administration.
Right.
Because two days ago, on Sunday, he told a whole bunch of reporters that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was going to begin in July and that all the combat troops would be out by 2014, the end of 2014.
Wow.
Which, when we say combat troops, we have to remember that that's the same rhetoric they used in Iraq, even though there are still 50,000 troops going on combat missions there.
Right.
But that was quite a different story from what most administration officials have been saying, particularly since the election, which is that the July date's just not going to happen, and nothing's really going to happen then, and that the transition's really only going to be starting in earnest in 2014, not completed by then.
Right.
So he just got his talking points muddled, kind of.
Right.
And he semi-corrected it in some comments yesterday, insisting that there is no exit strategy in place and that there's simply a transition strategy going on.
Crazy.
You know, one thing that gets me about all this, too, is that even the presumed realistic voices who say, nah, you know, we've got to get out of there sooner, might as well be sooner instead of later since it's going to be the same difference anyway, they all seem to accept that, well, we've got to negotiate our exit with all the neighboring countries.
And it seems to me like, I mean, really, I just wish they'd just pack up everybody and go and not say or do anything else at all that they can avoid, but why not make a deal with the neighboring countries that they're not allowed to interfere there, that everybody agrees to just let the Afghans work their own problems out without having to negotiate it with Iran and with Russia and with Pakistan?
Well, I think short of Pakistan, you probably wouldn't need to make those deals with much of anybody because I don't think most of them really want to get involved in that sort of a quagmire.
Pakistan's had some long-standing security interests in Afghanistan, so their spy agency is undoubtedly going to be continuing to be involved in there for years after this war presumably comes to an end.
Well, it just seems like if we can threaten them with, you better wage a civil war or else we'll bomb you, then we can threaten them with stay out of Afghanistan or we'll bomb you.
Why not?
Well, we probably could, but I don't think Pakistan's military intelligence, the ISI necessarily listens to what their own government says, let alone what the U.S. says, so I think they're probably going to be doing what they're going to do anyway.
Well, I'm a dreamer.
It seems like the poor Afghans, they're always getting bombed by somebody.
They always have, even if they have a government, it's a proxy government of a foreign power of one kind or another, and it seems like a, I don't know, pretty unfortunate thing to happen to be born there.
Especially, you know, the news this morning, this one was in Pakistan, but still drone strikes everywhere, airstrikes everywhere, and this is something that you've been covering.
I guess there was a new study that came out about airstrikes in Afghanistan, and, I mean, the word airstrikes right there automatically is shorthand for collateral damage, dead, innocent civilians everywhere, huh?
Oh, absolutely.
The airstrikes in Afghanistan, well, and Pakistan as well, although those aren't really conducted by the military, they're conducted by the CIA, have been just disastrous as far as killing enormous numbers of civilians and killing very few meaningful militant leaders.
And it seems, especially in Afghanistan, when there's some sort of unexpected combat where they get ambushed by Taliban troops, the default give-up reaction, when they don't think they can overrun them with ground troops, is to just call in an airstrike and consequences be damned.
And it seems like quite often that airstrike ends up taking out a village or taking out somebody's home at the very least and killing enormous numbers of civilians.
Yeah, well, and this goes to the heart of what is almost like a Terry Gilliam-esque kind of dark comedy sort of debate going on inside Washington, D.C., halls of power about whether we should have a search-and-destroy policy or a clear-hold-and-build counterinsurgency, this, that, and the other thing.
And I see here that you have this article about General Petraeus is supposedly furious about Hamid Karzai, the American puppet, calling on the Americans to scale back the night raids.
And yet the night raids are part and parcel of this whole thing.
That's the coin strategy is you have the Delta Force go out and do night raids, and you have, I guess, drone strikes everywhere, and then the rest of the soldiers are supposed to stand around like they believe they're welcome and kind of be traffic cops and build.
That's the third part of the clear-hold-and-build.
We're going to give you a government-in-a-box, and we're going to be your friends, all that stuff.
So what's Petraeus to do now?
I guess he got pretty angry about that, huh?
Well, yeah, and there were reports, although diplomats that were apparently present later denied it, that Petraeus even threatened to resign if Karzai didn't stop criticizing the night raids.
But the night raids issue has been a long-standing one, and General McChrystal, for all his problems, really saw that those night raids were causing a lot more trouble than they were fixing, and he more or less banned them.
I mean, his first ban didn't really take because it didn't apply to the special forces.
It only applied to the troops that really weren't doing many night raids to begin with.
But he'd gotten it down to the point where night raids were a pretty rare thing by the time he was forced out.
And he'd also reduced the number of airstrikes and put a lot of restrictions in place to keep them from launching them in villages or too close to civilian homes.
But since Petraeus has taken over, a lot of that's getting rolled back, supposedly for morale reasons, but largely because they figure, well, what McChrystal was doing wasn't working because the war was still being lost, so they might as well just get rid of it.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's like William S. Lynn used to write years ago.
These generals are still fighting like it's World War I with these army forces against guerrillas.
They march into Kandahar, and they encounter mild resistance, but mostly the guerrillas fade away, and then they claim a giant victory and go, look, we took Kandahar!
Like, yeah, congratulations, man, you're fighting guerrillas.
All they've got to do is walk away.
That's what they do.
But they're still there.
They're just somewhere else.
All right, anyway, hold tight, because I want to talk about Dick Armitage and the Council on Foreign Relations report with you too.
It's Jason Ditz, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's news editor at Antiwar.com.
The guy does nothing but read every paper in the world all day long so that you can just go one-stop shop at Antiwar.com and find what's most important.
And not only that, he writes up these great news summaries with the links to all the most important news stories about what's breaking and a little bit of context and a little bit of sarcasm to go with it too, which is always good.
So tell me, Jason, about this Council on Foreign Relations report.
I think there used to be a time, or at least there used to be a time where I believed that whatever the CFR says goes.
In this case, we have not quite an all-star panel, but some star panel.
Dick Armitage, Sandy Berger, Chuck Robb, of course, he's on every panel.
But there's John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, the former viceroy of Iraq.
John Nagel from the Center for New American Security, who's the counterinsurgency strategy guy sitting on this panel.
And I don't know if Steve Cole's on here.
That's interesting.
I don't know if Nagel wrote the dissent here or what or if there is one, but basically Armitage and Sandy Berger are saying, don't wait until July 2011 to start bugging out of here.
Never mind putting off the beginning of bugging out until 2014.
Let's go ahead and bug out now.
Cut and run, as General William Odom said about Iraq.
Well, they're a little short of that.
They're not really calling for a full withdrawal.
They're just calling for a major scale back.
From what I took out of the report, it sounds like they're arguing to go back to the Bush administration's policy of having 20,000, 30,000 troops there that aren't really accomplishing anything but just kind of hang out in Kabul and a couple other cities and sort of pretend to be occupying the country.
The argument they're making is there's going to be a review in December for the Obama administration.
It sounds like officials are trying to put together claims that there might be some minor progress, but it's pretty clear that that's going to be a tough sell in and of itself, let alone that there's any major progress.
And they're saying, you know what, unless something major changes in this report that's not what everyone expected, we shouldn't wait until July.
We should just start a major transition of troops out and scaling back the war effort now.
Well, you know, in a way it reminds me of the Iraq war in the sense that they'll announce some deadline and say, well, we're going to achieve all these goals with the policy that we're doing.
And then when the review comes, all those things that they promised were going to happen don't happen, but then they still say it's great.
So they debuted the COIN strategy a year ago, basically.
They went in there and they did Marjah and Kandahar, which are supposed to be our big test cases for the John Nagel counterinsurgency strategy there.
And as far as I can tell, I'm sure you could confirm or deny, Jason, whether both of those have been, you know, not just, well, they've been tragedies and farces, basically, and neither of them have been successful.
But now they're just going to ignore that, right?
They're going to do this review, or Petraeus is going to want to do this review and just say, hey, it's hard work, but we're making progress, like George Bush, never mind all the things that they said they were going to do, like clear hold and build Marjah.
Well, right, and there's already been some talk from some fairly high-ranking military officials that they don't think it's fair to judge the results of Kandahar in December.
They think you can't really make a fair judgment of how the Kandahar offensive went until next summer, which, of course, will be too late to have any effect on withdrawing any troops in 2011.
But it seems pretty clear.
Marjah's just been a fiasco.
When they marched in, they made it sound like that battle was going to be over in a matter of hours.
They launched a raid early in the evening and told the Marjah residents to stay in their homes so that they would awake to a new future in the morning.
And here we are over nine months later now, and the situation's gotten worse, if anything.
There are daily attacks now in Marjah, and the troops are still there, which they were supposed to have handed over this city to the local Afghan officials and appointed Karzai governor within days of the invasion.
And they're still there, and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.
Well, you know, they got it all wrong, but it seems like Sandy Berger, of all people, and Dick Armitage are basically seeing the light on this, just from an amoral, imperialist kind of point of view, that really the George Bush policy, as you call it, Jason, was right, which is occupy with a few people and piss off as few people as you can.
And McChrystal had it right when he says every time we kill somebody, we create ten new enemies.
Petraeus and John Nagel and these guys have got it all wrong.
What we need is this massive surge of troops.
That's what creates a massive surge of insurgency against you.
When they just had a few security guards and rapists and drug dealers hanging around Kabul, then the whole country wasn't in rebellion.
The more towns they invade, the more rebels they got on their hands.
It seems like at least somebody at the CFR recognizes this.
Whether it will actually change the policy is, I guess, a different question.
But they probably could go on for years and years if they brought the troop level down to 20,000 or 30,000.
Of course, that would make it politically a lot easier here in the United States as well.
Well, absolutely.
And their argument is that the current policy isn't going to work and costs way too much.
And I guess you could say, well, that policy isn't going to work either, but at least it's not going to cost nearly as much and it's not going to get nearly as many people killed.
It seems like somewhere along the line someone ought to consider just not keeping troops there at all, but certainly getting it back from the 100,000 U.S. troops and 50,000 NATO troops and God only knows how many contractors' disaster that it is now to the Bush administration's sort of minor war there where it was a few dozen troops that get killed every year and it wasn't really a huge expense or a huge war.
It probably is a step up.
Yeah.
Well, am I right that the casualties this year are worse than any time during the Bush years for the American or NATO forces?
Oh, absolutely.
The casualties since President Obama took over are far more than the casualties during Bush's entire administration in Afghanistan.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
And now that's not because he's a Democrat and he doesn't know how to lead troops right.
That's because he's put so many more in there and put them to work.
Right.
He keeps sending more troops in and launching more aggressive attacks and he's basically just hitting a hornet's nest.
Yeah.
Well, and as we've seen, Faisal Shahzad, everybody can go read what he told the judge.
Simple as plain truth, black and white, right in front of your eyes.
Thanks very much, Jason.
Sure, thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
