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.
Okay, guys, I got Danny Sherston on the line.
He was a major in the US Army and was in both surges in Iraq War Two and in Afghanistan.
And now he writes regularly for us at antiwar.com.
Thank goodness for that.
And here he is.
It's not the latest.
He writes so much.
It's not the latest anymore.
But it's Happy Afghanistan Surrender Day.
Welcome back.
How you doing?
Hey, thanks, Scott.
I'm glad to be here always.
Cool.
Happy to have you here.
So well, I like the whole idea of signing a thing that means that we're going.
But then again, I also don't like believing in stuff very much.
What's your take on this deal?
Well, you know, the the title was meant to be somewhat flippant, you know, you think a little?
Yeah.
Which, you know, but but satire was totally lost on the internet, as I've found out many times.
Yeah.
But, you know, the genesis of it, as the article kind of starts with is, I was actually on like a mass text with all the lieutenants who served me in Afghanistan, because I'm working on this other article on like military demographics.
And so I had to send them a text anyway, asking for some information.
And I'm sitting in my son's basketball game, literally.
And I sent like, hey, happy Afghan War Surrender Day, just kind of as a joke.
You know, because I've thought for a long time that this war has been over, that we could have made if this even qualifies as a deal, we could have made some a weak deal like this 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and maybe even had a stronger hand at the time because Taliban wasn't quite as strong.
And so, you know, I support the concept of getting out.
Now, I don't necessarily think that this thing is either completely sincere or going to work out or or even means that we really intend to leave in terms of sincerity, because there's all these annexes and we're going to continue to bomb the CIA militias.
But what was interesting is when I sent that sort of flippant text, you know, these guys who all of them are to the right of me, you know, these are not hippies.
Most of the guys on that text, there's three out of nine of them, probably six of them had guys killed under their direct command.
So if you'd expect anybody to be like upset about it, you know, oh, this is a betrayal of or the loss of our guys, sunken cost fallacy or, you know, any of that, you'd expect it from these folks.
Right.
No way.
I mean, every response I got, I mean, I got a lot of sarcastic responses like joking back, but everybody pretty much said, hey, we got to go.
We got to go.
We should have gone now.
I mean, there's a lot of disagreement about the quality of this deal or whether it qualifies as peace.
And I think we can dig into that.
But my general take is I support conceptually the idea of calling it a day over there.
And I don't really care how we do it.
Hey, man, do you ever hear these guys say that, listen, you know, all we went through over there and we're throwing in the towel to these guys, we're going to surrender these guys.
We're going to lose to these guys.
No way.
Sunk cost fallacy and died in vain and all of that.
You know, I used to hear more of that.
And don't get me wrong, like on the Internet, on social media, I get some of that.
But what's remarkable to me.
And from veterans, not just the peanut gallery.
And from veterans sometimes.
But that's that's kind of my point.
I think what's remarkable is how rare it is any longer for the veterans that I know or the veterans that follow my work, again, 95 percent of whom are are more conservative than me.
Right.
These aren't left wing hippies.
How few of them feel that way anymore?
I mean, they're still out there, but not like they were even five years ago when I really started writing.
I mean, if you know, and the polls demonstrate this, you know, bring our troops home that U.S. publicizes these polls all the time and and I've seen them all over the place that in many cases, a larger percentage of combat veterans think that these wars are, quote, you know, not worth fighting than the civil populace at large.
And so we've reached a tipping point.
And I think it's important for Americans to realize, look, you know, obviously, anecdotally, a minority of veterans probably still feel that sunken cost pull.
And I get it.
Like, I get it.
You know, it's a difficult thing to lose people in a war and then have to accept that said war was unwinnable from the start and probably, you know, definitely ill-advised from the start.
But I'm struck every day by the amount of basic support, general conceptual support of getting out of Afghanistan from the combat veterans who lost people there.
And I think America ought to start paying attention to that.
Because of course, the narrative for years and years was we're not finished winning yet.
You want to cut and run and quit and right in the middle and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
And then all of these guys who, yeah, did get maimed and killed over there, that then it would be for nothing because of your Lyndon Johnson-esque micromanaging or your Walter Cronkite-esque, you know, will only to quit, or these kinds of narratives.
They've been dominant for about a generation now.
But you're saying, yeah, no, those days are over.
Yeah, I mean, that it's interesting.
That narrative is still out there.
But I find that it's in two places.
To some extent, it's there among civilians who've never been near a shot fired.
And I don't mean that as like a negative.
I don't think that being military, having been in combat gives you some sort of special position.
But I do find that that idea of like, oh, we can't cut and run is more prevalent among the civil population.
But it's particularly prevalent among another class.
And that is the mainstream media's talking heads from the top, from the top of the civil and military national defense state.
So that kind of language tends to be more prominent among senior generals and among former Pentagon or intelligence officials, which I find sort of fascinating.
So like these guys are still a little more invested in their war, right, the war that made their careers, than the people who did the real fighting.
Because, you know, if you're a four star general who served in Afghanistan in 2010, you were way too old to have ever seen any real combat, even in the beginning of the war.
So these guys are way more connected to that old school narrative, you know, and it permeates the political system.
And I think that the Democratic Party establishment is like, totally in the tank still, in some ways for that narrative.
I mean, guys like Joe Biden might at this point, start saying the right things or what they think the right things are about tacit withdrawal.
But for the most part, these folks all equivocated.
They all hedged on the question of pulling all the troops out of Afghanistan for the most part.
You know, they all started that whole, oh, well, maybe we'll pull the combat troops, but we're gonna have to leave some people.
And it's like, that narrative is so just obsolete at this point.
And no one even who can believe at this point, that Joe Biden or any of these folks really can tell us the difference between combat and non combat troops anymore.
I mean, that's so easily twisted, I mean, is a special forces guy who stands behind a CIA backed militia?
Is he a combat soldier?
Well, a lot of times they sell it to us that he's not Oh, no, he's an advisor.
It's like, no, he's a Green Beret.
No, he is a combat soldier, and he's using these proxy forces that he trained and armed, you know.
So I just, I think that it's really ironic that we're in a place where the higher ups, more civilians, and the Democratic Party of all places is the final home.
It's like the last home of that narrative of we can't cut and run.
Yeah, man, I saw a thing yesterday at politics USA, which is a pretty prominent liberal website, citing Liz Cheney says that, you know, the the reckless Donald Trump is lying to justify getting out of this war and the Taliban aren't ever going to live up to any of their promises.
Trump just likes bad guys, and he's selling out our country.
And Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Advisor wrote a thing in the New York Times talking about how reckless this is.
It's a precipitous withdrawal.
But you know what, Danny?
So obviously, look, I'm the guy from antiwar.com.
Everybody knows my position.
I sort of wrote a book about quitting Afghanistan.
But let me play Liz Cheney's advocate here for a minute, if I could, that, you know what?
Never mind your feelings, son.
I'm sorry you had a rough time over there.
And never mind the calendar.
Because what?
You're sick of it or something like that?
You're tired of it?
You're over it?
National security doesn't run on the clock of your feelings, pal.
The reality is the terrorist safe haven thing is going to come back and crash planes into our things if we don't stay there and prevent that from happening.
They really believe that?
That's not just a line of crap.
I know you don't buy it, but why not?
Well, I mean, it's a.
I think you're right.
I think some of them might actually believe this nonsense.
I think it's really interesting how they, you know, Susan Rice used the word precipitous or whatever.
Right.
I think, I mean, they've twisted the English language so much.
If 19 years of losing, of failing, of quagmire, if if leaving after that is, you know, hasty as some of the generals called it a year ago or precipitous, then we have twisted those words so far beyond their original meaning that I don't even know that it's worth having dictionaries anymore.
We should burn them at like in Nuremberg because the English language no longer has any value.
It's so full of euphemism and twisted soft language that it really someone needs to explain to me what wouldn't be a hasty withdrawal, because I'm starting to believe that they must mean forever.
You know, and I think portray is called a generational war, which I think is some Orwellian crap.
Right.
But it's but it's accurate to the way a lot of these folks think.
And I think it's interesting that you have like a Liz Cheney on one end and a Susan Rice on the other end who we are led to believe are so different.
Right.
They have such different values.
They're, you know, Democrats and Republicans.
And the reality is on this issue, they're completely in line with one another.
Yeah.
Well, but so.
All right.
I buy it that it's not precipitous in the sense that it's been many years, but maybe it is precipitous if you zoom in to the year 2020 and you say we've been losing, but maybe we really do just need a better general and more troops and maybe some lasers or something and figure out a way to save the Kabul government that Bush and Obama created here.
Yeah, I mean, there are people who are arguing that.
And what I would like to say to them is, you know, doing the same thing over and over again.
I know it's a platitude, but expecting a different result.
That's insanity.
And when I was in Afghanistan in 2011, really from 2012 to about 2013, you know, we had a hundred thousand soldiers there and we weren't really able to achieve anything more than like a stasis, you know, like basically, you know, a quagmire, a draw.
Someone needs to explain to me what 14000 soldiers are going to do to alter to alter the outcome.
And I am increasingly persuaded that whether America leaves tomorrow or 10 years from now or 20 years from now, we will not meaningfully alter the outcome.
I mean, I really believe that it just it appears from 20 years of evidence, like actual empirical evidence, experiential stuff that the United States military, the U.S. aid that we provide, it can do very little more than maintain Kabul's survival at best.
So I guess if one values and this is important, if what one values is the survival of a rump state in Kabul and some of the other bigger cities, if someone believes and can articulate to me that that is a vital American national security interest, then I suppose we would have to stay forever on some level.
But I just don't see that to be the case, because I did not find that the Taliban right through both study and anecdotal experience that the Taliban presented.
And I know you've talked about this in your work, that the Taliban presented any sort of direct or, of course, existential threat to the United States.
These people want to create an Islamic Republic in Afghanistan, you know, not the world over per se.
I mean, their goals are fairly circumscribed to rural Afghanistan or to that country that's landlocked in Central Asia.
And so unless someone can demonstrate to me that it is a vital national security interest to have a rump state in Kabul, then I see that we have only two options.
We can either send in the entire army, you know, and destroy the joint.
Right.
And in the process, probably take a bunch of land back in the Taliban, at least temporarily.
Or we can maintain 14 or eight or 9000 soldiers indefinitely, lose a few a year, kill, you know, hundreds of thousands of Afghans a year.
And what will the output be?
What will the you know, the risk reward?
What will the cost benefit analysis be?
Well, we'll have a moderately, you know, a moderately legitimate government in Kabul that's pretty corrupt, that has problematic elections.
And, you know, they'll hold on to the big cities and the Taliban will contest about 60 percent of the country indefinitely.
I don't know.
To me, that sounds like a really bad investment for what the outcomes are.
Yeah.
Well, so speaking of which there, man, how do you sign a deal with the Taliban based on their promise to negotiate with the government in Kabul, which itself may be splitting in half right now after the last bad election, as you just referred to, which would be the fourth bad election in a row for president there?
Yeah.
Have they ever had an election president that wasn't bad?
No.
Oh, for they rigged the whole thing for Karzai.
Oh, nine cars.
I rigged the whole thing for himself.
And then in 2014, they had this disaster that led to this co-presidency of Ghani and Abdullah.
Here they are fighting over it again.
I mean, last time, I think it was Abdullah tried to kill Ghani, or maybe it was the other way around.
Instead of a truck bomb on a bridge.
These guys are nuts, man.
You can't make it up.
It's one of those.
You know, I think that an author better than me, I hope, is going to figure out a way to write a Catch-22, Joseph Heller-style book about the Afghan war.
It could be you.
And you know what?
We were talking about how you don't really feel like writing about Afghanistan.
Maybe this is how you could, is go ahead and make it about Yossarian over there, you know?
You know, I think I'm going to have to try, because I am trying to branch out a little in 2020 stylistically.
But you know, this war has a level of absurdity in what you're describing in these presidential elections and the inherent violence and corruption.
Yeah, hiring the Taliban to provide security for your convoys.
Right.
And like, whose brother is like the warlord down in Kandahar, and then he gets killed with a turban bomb?
I mean, it's really wild.
And I think that a rational mind, if it really listens to this truth that's stranger than fiction and the conglomeration of all of it, has to ask, it begs the question, what kind of arrogant and, you know, obtuse government, the United States government, could really believe that we have any ability to change that place, to meaningfully alter the outcome in the long term?
I mean, this is insane.
And look, in Vietnam, and there are different places, but in Vietnam, it turned out, you know, when you read all the captured Viet Cong reports and looked at the Pentagon Papers, and that was one of the most important parts of the Pentagon Papers, what you found is that the National Liberation Front, the NLF, the Viet Cong's political front, actually just out-organized and out-legitimacied, right, the government in Saigon.
They did.
It wasn't all that they were paying people off.
It wasn't all that they were torturing guys who wouldn't join the Viet Cong.
The evidence now we know is that while that stuff was going on, for the most part, they were just seen as more legitimate and they were better organizers.
And I'm telling you, the shadow provincial governors, the shadow governments at the district level and the sub-district level that the Taliban is putting in place, looks to a lot of especially rural Afghans more legitimate than this government in Kabul.
And why is that?
Well, because we've had four bad presidential elections, because there's the drug issue, because there's prisoner abuse, because they're a different ethnic group and speak a different language in many cases.
I mean, this is just, there is very little legitimacy in Kabul.
Right.
And you know, David Petraeus himself admitted that.
It's quote in Fool's Errand, where he goes, well, you know what it is, is our court system that we've developed for these people, they don't like it.
Turns out they would rather have the same kind of court system that they've had for 5,000 years or whatever it is, you know?
Who would have thunk that?
And why not?
Why would that surprise us?
You know, I don't understand why that would surprise us either.
The idea that we're going to change these models is actually against, and that's why Petraeus said that, I think, because theoretically, if you buy all this Coin Denise, the counterinsurgency manual stuff, a lot of the theorizing on this is that, you know, you really, you don't want to change local customs too much.
You want to sort of work within the local system and not alienate people.
And yet, much of U.S. policy, no matter who is in charge, even when the McChrystals and the Petraeuses of the world were in charge and they were supposedly enlightened, you know, for the most part, we did like try to impose these foreign and, you know, inorganic to them systems of government, of, you know, justice, and it's just not taken.
It's just not taken.
And I was in, you know, well, you know, the country very well.
You know, I was in Zahri district of Kandahar province, right?
Where the village of Sangsar is, where Mullah Omar is from, you know.
I used to tell my boss, you know, my colonel, he was pretty, he was a sociopath, and I don't know if you ever talked to an Afghan, but he, you know, I would tell him, sir, you know, the people here are pretty positive towards the Taliban.
And he would always say, no, no, no, no, Danny, you don't get it.
You know, they, they're scared of the Taliban, but they want to be on our side.
They do.
They, you know, deep down, they want to be, I don't know where he got this from.
But I would say, well, sir, we're the New York Mets and we just came into Philadelphia.
Okay.
We are on the Taliban's home turf, home turf.
I told him that Mullah Omar was from our district and he didn't know.
And you know, I just think I was in basically the Appalachia of Afghanistan.
And the idea that we're going to somehow dislodge the legitimacy of the Taliban with our own, or by bringing in these Afghan soldiers, many of whom, by the way, were rapists and drug addicts and war criminals, but who are from the North, even the good ones from the North speak Dari.
And they're mostly either Dari or they're also either Tajik or Uzbek, sometimes Hazara.
They need interpreters to talk to the Pashtuns down South, as well as I do.
And my boss would say, oh, put an Afghan in front of the problem, always put an Afghan between you and the problem, and then that'll show legitimacy.
And I was like, well, what if that Afghan doesn't even speak the same language as the other Afghan?
So the whole thing is just, I think it's based on a whole lot of lies, a whole lot of obfuscation.
And it's a total misunderstanding of A, what we can reasonably accomplish and B, whether what we're trying to accomplish, even if it were effective, the whole idea that's in our interest in any vital way is ludicrous at this point, I think.
Yeah.
And by the way, just so no one misunderstands the way you phrased it there, that I know it well.
I know the subject well, but I've never been to Afghanistan and I'm not a veteran.
I'm not a reporter who went and covered the war from there.
I stayed home and wrote a book about it.
Yeah.
So I have some level of knowledge, but I don't want anyone to think that I'm trying to misrepresent my level of expertise about it at all.
No, I get that.
I understand.
I just meant that I knew that you knew the provinces, you know, the map and the location.
Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I just, you know, not everybody listening is familiar and I just want to make sure that they didn't misunderstand.
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Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about what's in this deal that Zalmay Khalilzad cut with the Taliban here, and the promise and the pitfalls and what you really think of it.
Well, here's the here's the deal.
So if conceptually, I'm in favor of some sort of withdrawal, that's great.
But what the deal actually has is, I think, 135 days, we dropped down to about 9000 from 14,000 troops, and then, you know, whatever it is, 14 months, we're supposed to mostly get out.
But of course, you know, there's all these caveats about, you know, there probably will still be ability to do bombing, some counterterrorism, some special forces, the CIA backed militias.
I mean, there's, there's a lot of caveats of ways that we're still able to stay involved.
There's also an elephant in the room that we've already seen problems with, right?
The first snags in this deal came within what, 24 to 36 hours, if that.
The Afghan government, the supposedly sovereign Afghan government in Kabul was not really at the signing, right?
The President Ghani wasn't there.
And they didn't really support this.
I mean, for years, the Afghan government was like, no, we're not we don't want to talk to the Taliban unless they completely cease violence as a precursor, right as a precondition.
Yeah.
And for years, Bush and Obama said, well, we won't talk with you unless you include the Kabul government in the talks.
And they just said, well, forget it, then we rather fight.
They're your puppets.
They're not even somebody to talk to.
So bye.
So here's my, like, here's my get myself in trouble with my friends, not cheering, but giving credit to Trump.
I think Trump for all his flaws, and I question his sincerity, and I question a lot of things about him.
But he did something remarkable in 2018.
And most people just missed it because they don't understand the Afghan war.
They don't understand the context.
And they're so stuck with Trump derangement syndrome that they're going to, for example, they're going to make this deal all about him.
So all the critiques about this deal.
One of the ways this is going to be covered, I fear, and it's already happening, is they're going to make it in a referendum on Trump.
And of course, everyone hates Trump on a certain side of the political aisle.
So they'll say this is a bad Trump deal.
But what they won't notice is that I think Trump showed a degree of realism and in the sense political courage in 2018 when he agreed to do talks, you know, without the Afghan government.
Right.
So there was a sort of this pivot.
And I think in a sense, that's why I joked about Afghan Surrender Day.
I think that that was a realization or an admission tacitly by the U.S. government, by this administration, that everything that had been done could be done, that we lost, that we hold a weak hand and that we really don't have any choice but to blow off the Afghan government and say, you know what, guys, like if we play this game where the Taliban, we won't talk to them until they include you, while the Taliban's hand gets stronger and stronger militarily, then we're never getting out of here.
And so and while all along the Kabul government had made it clear that they don't want America to make peace with the Taliban.
They want America to stay and protect them from the Taliban from now on, of course.
And that, of course, raises, you know, I don't think it's conspiratorial, but it raises some questions moving forward about.
Does the Afghan government I mean, doesn't the Afghan government have every motivation to try to spike this deal to try?
They already tried.
I mean, the first thing Donnie said was, I'm not releasing your prisoners, but Donald Trump can change that pretty quickly with a little bit of implication.
I can cut you off now instead of then, if you prefer, Mr. Ghani, and that'll fix his wagon.
I mean, assuming the Americans would dare to do that to him.
Right.
And I would almost appreciate it in a sense.
I mean, that the thing that I do like about Trump is that, you know, occasionally he has like an earthy moment of sense, you know, where, you know, I think a President Clinton would probably have allowed this thing to just drag on and held to the idea to the to the, you know, to the fantasy that the Kabul government is co-equal with us and the Taliban.
But a rational observer who's not, you know, afraid to call a spade a spade must realize the following, which is that every day the Taliban holds a stronger military hand.
Every day that we wait, the Taliban has more leverage in any further negotiation.
And eventually a tipping point comes, if it hasn't come already, where the Taliban no longer has any motivation to negotiate at all.
And so you want to how long should we wait before we leave?
How long should we wait before we agree to talk to the Taliban unilaterally or bilaterally?
I mean, to me, it made sense that we engaged in this over the last couple of years, because four years from now, who's to say and this could still happen because the deal could completely break apart.
But who's to say that four years from now, the Taliban wouldn't tell us, you know, to screw?
Because why would we even negotiate at all?
We don't have any.
We have no reason to do that.
We're winning.
And a point's going to come where Ashraf Ghani is the new Najibullah, right?
The Soviet puppet left behind, who hides in an embassy and he holds out for a couple of years and he gets hung in the streets.
I mean, that may not happen immediately, just like, you know, a lot of people said that after the Soviets left Najibullah, who they left behind, you know, the communist puppet or whatever.
A lot of people predicted in America and in the Soviet Union that he's going to the government's going to fall immediately.
And actually, they held out from like, what, January of 89 until I think 92, you know, with Soviet aid militarily and, you know, all that.
But so I don't know that the Kabul-backed government's going to drop, you know, is going to fall tomorrow.
That probably won't happen.
But it wouldn't surprise me if the longer we wait to make this deal, the Taliban gets so strong that, yeah, pretty soon after we finally do give in and accept the reality that we should have accepted 10 years ago that, yeah, the Ghani government doesn't survive.
Now, hopefully he doesn't.
I don't think he'll get hung.
I think he'll probably take a plane to Western Europe or America and get a position, you know, at Stanford at the Hoover Institution or something.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder about, you know, what's going to happen with that as far, you know, it's certainly a lot of different players from back then.
I can't imagine the current guys are as ruthless as Hekmatyar was back in his prime.
You know, he's kind of old and retired and made his peace with the Kabul government now.
And I wonder if there's room for real compromise or whether the Taliban are going to insist on trying to conquer the whole country.
You know, Matthew Hope pointed out that in the 90s, America, Saudi and Pakistan supported the Taliban and not just supported them, but supported their attempt to take over the whole country.
You know, the Clintons discouraged the Taliban from negotiating with the Northern Alliance.
They wanted to see the Taliban destroy the Northern Alliance and create a real monopoly on force, a total victory, so then they could have their pipeline.
But that whole dynamic is not in play here.
And maybe, you know, the Pakistanis, of course, have continued to back them to keep them in play and to prevent the Kabul government from creating that monopoly on force.
Presumably, America would be able to lean on Saudi and Pakistan to not finance the Taliban so well that they would really be able to try it or would feel confident.
And after all, if you're the Taliban, why conquer all of the Hazara and Tajik and Uzbek areas of the country when that was such a pain in the ass last time?
Right?
Like, why not?
Yeah.
Why not be happy with what they've got?
But I don't know.
I mean, if they're rational actors, right, or at least if the more rational actors, because there are rational actors in the Taliban, it's important to remember that, like, they're not...
Yeah.
I mean, they're ruthless, but that doesn't mean they're insane.
You know?
Right.
Exactly.
But, I mean, I think if the more rational actors are in charge or have the most influence in the Taliban structure and the Qatar Shura, then if I were them or I would think some of them would say, you know what, we'll be happy with the half of Afghanistan that's posh too.
We'll be happy with controlling this portion of the country because, like you said, you know, the Taliban never conquered all of Afghanistan.
I mean, they conquered the vast majority, like, what, 90% of it, but they still had to deal with the Northern Alliance.
They were in a state of permanent war, which isn't necessarily good for business.
I mean, it might be good for keeping your zealots in your ranks busy, but, you know, it would be a pain in the ass.
They might face an insurgency of Tajiks or whatever, and they may have to face another sort of rump Northern Alliance that maybe India funds or, you know, I mean, there's a lot of dynamics here that could replay.
And I think that if the Taliban were to learn any lessons from the 1990s civil war and warlordism and then Northern Alliance civil war, they might just say, you know what, like, maybe we'll, maybe there's a few more key areas that with minerals or population centers that we want to take.
But once we've got that, then we just settle on a Pashtustan, you know, obviously it won't include Pakistan exactly, at least not officially, but, you know, we'll, we'll take control of a state that looks like the facts on the ground and the facts on the ground are that, you know, the posture or I don't know, plurality or the highest ethnic majority, and they control a certain part of the country.
And probably Afghanistan in some ways is a, you know, an artificial state in terms of lack of homogeneity.
And so they take what they've got and they're happy with it.
And then here's the thing.
If the Taliban were to accept that, and if the Kabul based government, because they had no other choice, were to hold on to what they held on to, who is hurting that?
I mean, and I mean, yeah, like the women living under Taliban rule are, but that's happening anyway.
That was happening when I was there, you know, but the United States national security, I mean, is Los Angeles threatened by that state of affairs on the ground, 10,000 miles away?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
That's irrational thinking.
Well, and that brings me to my next question, Danny, which is about al-Qaeda there.
And I keep reading in the papers, mostly just kind of as a sides, you know, half an assertion in part of a sentence, but with no real explanation or evidence provided that the Taliban are still best friends with Ayman al-Zawahiri's guys in al-Qaeda.
And that, don't you know, we killed a couple al-Qaeda guys out there in the Herat province.
And oh, by the way, actually over here in Kandahar, there was this whole valley full of al-Qaeda guys that somebody stumbled upon and clusterbond.
In fact, that was even Thomas Gibbons Neff, who writes for the New York Times, but who I respect anyway, because he does good journalism a lot of the time, had a story like that.
But it never satisfies me.
You know, whenever I see this, I never see anyone say like, yeah, no, we found this guy's driver's license and he was from Cairo and we know that his big brother was best friends with Ayman al-Zawahiri back in the day, or something.
We tied him to the switchboard house in Aden, something, but it's never that.
So I wonder whether maybe you think that there's really anything to that at all, or it's really just hype, or what is the deal?
I think it is almost exclusively hype because of what you said.
Okay.
The government likes to classify lots of stuff, right?
We like to say, oh, we can't tell you because if we told you this stuff, sources and methods would be, you know, would be at danger.
But I don't buy that for a second because the government is opportunistic when it comes to just about anything.
And so if the CIA or special forces groups or the Afghan government stumbled upon real evidence, like you said, a driver's license or just a smoking gun, that we really had a bunch of al-Qaeda back in the Arghandab Valley of Kandahar, you know, they would make that unclassified in two seconds in order to, like, fulfill their narrative and get what they want, which is continued war.
You know what I mean?
If they had the evidence, they'd show us the evidence.
They only hide the evidence when it's, when it doesn't suit their goals or makes them look bad or doesn't, or, you know, obviates their narrative or whatever, or goes against their narrative.
If they really had that much, like real hard evidence that there was a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, I truly believe they would show us.
Even if it was minor, they would exaggerate it.
I think a lot of this is, it's like all smoke, no fire.
And I've never been of the opinion that the Taliban was as close to al-Qaeda as it was made out in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
Well, when you were there fighting at the height of the surge in Kandahar province, you ever see any Arabs?
Not one time.
And this is- Chechens?
Not one time.
I saw, I'll tell you this, I fought against and, and, and, you know, laid hands upon far more, far more, exponentially more, well, unlimited more because zero.
But in Iraq, there were Chechens, right?
And there were folks from, I mean, it was exaggerated there too, but there were folks from throughout the Arab world, foreign fighters.
In Afghanistan, the place that we ostensibly went to because it was this haven for the foreign fighters who put America at existential threat.
I never saw one.
And I was in the homeland of the Taliban.
So my mother, I talked to her on the phone the day after bin Laden was killed.
It just happened to be.
And she was so excited.
You know, she's, she's, she's, she's a smart woman.
And you were there in Kandahar at the time?
I was in Kandahar.
It's May of 2011.
And my mother is a smart woman, but she's not really up on politics, but, but she's earthy and gets it.
So she says, Hey, like, Danny, what does this mean for you?
Bin Laden is dead.
This is great.
Like, what does this mean?
Do you come home soon?
Or does this change things for you?
And I was like in a bad mood and I really wasn't particularly nice to her.
I was like, mom, you don't get it like, no, that means nothing to me.
Like it, that, that what just happened in Pakistan, the killing of bin Laden is irrelevant to me.
I said, there is no Al Qaeda here.
I fight farm boys with guns.
You know, I fight kids who can't sign their name.
And I pay them to work on the canals and then they fight for the Taliban at night.
Like that's who I'm fighting.
There was, there was zero foreign fighter captures my squadron in a year of pretty serious combat didn't capture a single foreign or not even a Pakistani.
Okay.
And there was always talk that there were like ISI cadres, you know, which is like the Pakistani CIA, but even more powerful in, you know, cause we were pretty close if you go through the reg desert, we were pretty close to Pakistan and KEDA and all that.
But, and I'm sure that there was some very limited, you know, actual Pakistani like operatives on the ground, but we never captured an Arab.
We never captured an Al Qaeda figure.
We never really even had credible intelligence, not even once of Al Qaeda influence in our Valley or in the entire province.
And I read every intelligence report, like I was obsessed with it.
Yeah.
The whole thing was, it was a farce, was a charade.
I was fighting Taliban sympathizers who were largely in their teens in the homeland of said movement.
And it was completely disjointed from nine 11.
And the final point on this, a Reuters journalist named C. Bryson Hall, who does, who does pretty good work.
He went to like Ken or airfield and asked to be embedded for a couple of days with a unit with an, with an American unit.
And what he asked at the headquarters, he asked the general in charge there, I think he's the general, he was general banister.
He was the 10th bound division commander.
He said, Hey, do you have any New Yorkers?
Do you have any like officers in command of the unit who are from New York city?
Because I want to do a special on September 11th, 10th anniversary.
It was like September 9th of 2011.
And I was there.
And so they found me, right.
I was the, you know, I was the only New York city in command of a troop.
So they sent them to me for like two days and kind of like profiled me.
And there's an article about it.
It's pretty short.
He like profiled me and a Taliban guy juxtaposed us.
But he asked me like, okay, so like, what's, what do you, you know, you were from New York, you were there, your neighborhood was full of dead cops and firemen.
What's the connection?
And I was frustrated.
And then I told him straight up and you guys can Google the article.
I said, there is no connection.
I said, this, this has nothing to do with, with the towers.
This has nothing to do, you know, with, with, with the people and friends of mine, like Marty Egan, you know, who died on nine 11 in the fire department.
This has nothing to do with that.
This is completely disjointed.
And I said that, and boy, did my chain of command get upset with me?
I mean, they couldn't do anything.
Cause I didn't like say anything illegal or, or classified, but I got pulled to the carpet and given a talking to like, how dare you say the truth, basically you're going to demoralize the soldiers.
And I was like, first of all, I was like, you weren't even really giving your opinion.
You're just stating a fact.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and they were like, oh, you're going to demoralize your own soldiers.
I was like, if you think my soldiers are reading Reuters, like no offense, but they're reading Maxim and just trying to like survive.
Like they're, they're not, I'm not demoralizing anybody.
And they agree by the way.
You know, they, they know.
Yeah.
And that would be an excuse to lie to them and make them believe that they're avenging the dead of the world trade center by fighting farm boys in Kandahar.
That's not fair.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I was really frustrated with that.
Um, when they, when they, when they yelled at me or whatever, but it didn't even matter just like anything else, the story passed.
But you know, I think that those two points are instructive.
So my mother's response to the Bin Laden killing and then the Reuters story about nine 11, um, demonstrate, I think once and for all that this whole idea, whether it's then or now that Al Qaeda is, is truly like to the Taliban is, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a canard.
Well, and listen, if people want a real specialist take on this, the book is called, uh, an enemy we created by Kuhn and Lynn Shoten.
And it's man, it's got all you need, I promise, uh, to explain the real nature of the relationship between the two there.
Um, uh, you'll see, I cite them heavily in fool's errand.
Now, uh, we keep getting distracted on all these interesting topics, but I want to get back to the deal itself here that, as you said, it brings us down to, um, 2017 levels when Trump came into power, 85,000 guys within five months.
And then the idea is the rest of the combat forces, slippery definition, but combat forces out by, um, next, what may something like that.
And then, um, but so what does that mean for training and for special operations forces and for CIA and, and what does it mean just that we have to wait more than a year and so many things are going to blow up between now and then, and serve as kind of variables in this equation that could screw up the thing.
And does it really mean the end of the war or maybe it really is just a PR stunt for the election and then he can pull a hope and change on us and change his mind next year.
You know, that's a tough call actually.
I don't think it means the end of the war, but I don't necessarily blame Trump, you know, and like bring on the hate mail, but I don't necessarily blame Trump per se for that.
He's not, I don't think he's the reason that this doesn't end the war.
Um, I think that this will drag on in some form involving intelligence bombing and special ops and proxy militias.
Look, I just don't think we're giving up the mineral resources, potentially the geo strategic position that we're convinced is so important in that one belt, one road, Eurasia stuff, you know, the, the, the fight for the world Island.
I just think that the national security state, right, whether, you know, and it's, it's not as simple as the military industrial complex, but it's, it's more complicated than that.
The whole deal, right.
The military congressional media complex, the elites are not giving up Afghanistan completely to what they would perceive as Soviet and Chinese on Soviet, Russian and Chinese and Pakistani influence.
I, I just don't see it happening, but I don't think it's because Trump doesn't in his heart basically think that this is a waste.
You know, when Trump was mostly a private citizen, I think he meant what he said in those tweets in, you know, 2015, 2014 when he was criticizing Obama, I think the guy meant it, you know?
And so does he really believe that he's ending the war?
Does he, or is this as much about, you know, getting support before the election and, you know, using this as a political tool?
I don't know, probably somewhere in the middle, but the truth of the matter is, and the reason I say I don't blame Trump is because if this deal isn't a deal at all or isn't meant to do what it really says and, and is just, I think it's more of a shift in the war.
I think it's more of a reframing of said war than it is an end of the war.
And what I mean by that is like, this might spell the end of conventional us army brigades going there, meaning like infantry armor, you know, it might spell the end of the major, you know, advise and assist brigades being over there.
So it may re reframe or change the face of said war, but I don't think it means that America stops having violent effect in Afghanistan.
But again, finally, that would have probably been the case regardless of who was president.
And so I don't think this is a cynical Trump move.
I think this is just a cynical US government, national security elite move, because I think whoever negotiated a piece, and I'm not even sure that other administrations like the Hillary Clinton administration, I don't even think she would assign this deal in its form or at this time.
But if someone did, I don't, I don't think it would have been all that different.
So this, this isn't a Trump problem.
There are plenty of things that are, but there's plenty more that aren't.
And I think this goes in the category of, of not his, this is not a Trump issue.
This is, this is bigger than that.
But no, I, yeah.
So I don't think it's, I don't think it's the end of the war now, now.
So, and I, and I got a lot of pushback on the title, you know, cause satire falls flat on the internet, like I said.
So I've had so many comments on social media, like, Oh, like you don't get it.
We didn't surrender.
We're going to keep bombing forever.
And I was like, dude, like read the rest of the article, you know what I mean?
Like read below the title, you know, I said that I recognize that this is a satire.
It's just flip it.
But yeah, no, I don't think it's the end of the war.
Well, speaking of satire, I really do hope that you'll write that book because there's so much that's so ironic and crazy about the Afghan war.
And you're such a great writer and have such a great perspective of right at the height of the McChrystal Petraeus garbage of 2010 and 11 there and all that I'd kill to read that thing, man.
I hope you do.
Well, I'll stand by cause I might just do it because sometimes when I get a, when I get the bug, you know, I just lock myself in a room and who knows what comes out on the other end.
So hopefully I'll do it.
Cool, man.
Somebody hand that man a keyboard.
Thank you again.
I'll let you enjoy the rest of your Friday afternoon.
Appreciate it, Danny.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
We'll talk again soon.
All right.
You guys, that is Danny Sherson, retired us army, major veteran of Iraq war two and Afghanistan.
This one is called happy Afghanistan surrender day at antiwar.com.
The Scott Horton show antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APS radio.com antiwar.comscotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
