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, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Daniel L. Davis.
Now he was in Iraq War I and Iraq War II and Afghanistan and, extremely importantly, in 2012, he broke ranks and he went public and he told the Congress and he told the people that David Petraeus is lying about the war in Afghanistan.
And it was a huge deal and he has been a great proponent of restraint, so to speak, ever since then.
He's at Defense Priorities and he's been writing important stuff here.
First of all, in Business Insider, a deal between Iran and China shows that getting tough doesn't solve the U.S.'s problems.
And then there's America's military should not be used as an auxiliary force to defend Berlin.
But I'm going to first ask about Afghanistan, of course.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing really well, Scott, always a pleasure to be here.
Good.
Happy to have you on.
Now, this whole Russia bounties for American scalps thing, you tell me what you think of that.
Well, you know, I'll tell you, it's plausible because, you know, it could be a number of things that they've got going on.
It could be retribution for what we did to the Soviets back in the 80s when they were in Afghanistan.
It could have been retribution for the whatever, 200 some odd Russian mercenaries, which were killed in Syria in 2018 by some of our troops.
I mean, there's any number of things it could be, but we don't have any corroborated evidence so far.
Many of the intel agencies are saying it's not.
So I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't.
But one thing I do know for absolute certainty, if our troops weren't in Syria, this wouldn't even be an issue.
And I'm sorry, if they weren't in Afghanistan, this wouldn't even be an issue because we've been calling for so many years for our troops to be withdrawn precisely for this kind of situation to where all we do is sit there, whether it's Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, put targets on our back that allows people the proximity to even do these kinds of things.
And so whether it's, whether they get a bounty to some Taliban, we do have people trying to kill us and some succeed, you know, on a daily basis, we need to get these troops out of there so that we don't have any more of these possibilities.
Yeah.
Good way to put it.
It is something though, isn't it, when you have accusations so huge come out in the Times, the Post and the Wall Street Journal all at once and a full court push.
And then, as you said, it turns out actually the CIA only gives it medium confidence and they're out in front.
No one else will stand by the accusation.
No other federal agency, not the military, not the DIA or the NSA or CENTCOM or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the general in charge of the war in Afghanistan.
Did I leave out anybody?
And, you know, and you can throw in there, I mean, we have a pretty checkered record anyway of when the intelligence community does say something of being inaccurate or partially inaccurate.
Right.
So especially when they're in this direction, that should really make people go, oh, hang on just a second.
But there doesn't seem to be a lot of that.
Yeah, exactly.
I should have like a sound clip here of me trying to play a horn or something, but no, nope, nope.
This ain't gonna go.
I don't know nothing about music.
But, you know, you know, a good portion of that, I think, Scott, is that, you know, some people, a lot of people don't want us to ever leave Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq or anywhere else that we have troops.
And so they throw these things out there to make it sound like, oh, my gosh, we have to get tougher.
We have to use more aggressive measures.
We got to keep our troops there.
And now we got to start pushing Russia, too, and take action and all that.
And everything is always in the direction of more confrontation, potentially more military operations.
And it just makes peace and stability even further and further away from us, which raises the risk of someday even an accidental war.
And it's foolish.
Yeah.
And the reaction to the whole story is so emotional and childish and crazy.
Like, OK, so there's a story in The Times.
Let's begin discussing it.
That's all you got right now.
You got a newspaper story.
You know, you don't have anything.
And instead, you know, they come immediately without thinking.
I mean, some of them, I guess, Liz Cheney knows how cynical she is, but a whole lot of people just react this way, sort of, you know, by instinct or by training that, well, if the Russians are paying Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, then that's why we have to stay.
And they won't finish the sentence so that they'll have more Americans to kill.
But that's kind of pretty much what they're saying, isn't it?
Instead, it's more just like a matter of pride.
We can't leave if the Russians are kicking us in the ass on the way out the door.
That's, you know, a humiliation after 20 years of victory over there.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's even worse than that.
I mean, it's not bad enough, but they're also not finishing the sentence of saying we need to stay because it is well, there's no there's no way you can finish that because it's not in our national interest.
As a matter of fact, I don't know if you saw, but the the SIGAR released their latest report this morning.
I just got it.
Yeah.
It's even worse than some of the others have been.
But it's completely reinforces that there is no way it's systemically, systematically across the board, negative and staying down.
And there's nothing militarily you can do to fix that.
It just can't be fixed with military.
So why would you keep throwing American lives away for something that can't succeed?
Yeah.
Good question.
And instead, the whole frame is Trump continues to do nothing about it.
He talked to Putin on the phone and he refused to say anything about it.
And, you know, we should be this was some of the talk on the TV news.
I read the quotes where I forget which talking head was saying, you know, right now we need to be sending Russians home in body bags.
That's how they'll get the message.
Yeah.
And, you know, that just really underscores the problem that we have across the board, because, you know, you've even had some Republicans that have been pushing back on some of this and Republicans been pushing back on the idea of even reducing the number of troops in Germany, for example.
So this is kind of across the board.
But there's just this reflexive resistance to any troops coming home anywhere and a reflexive agreement with, hey, let's look the first thing.
What can we do militarily against somebody or what threats can we pose or whatever?
But look, you do that kind of thing.
You take whatever you perceive to be a bad situation now and you drive it into potentially much, much worse for our interests.
So it just baffles my mind how people can continually advocate for actions that have a good chance of harming our interests and zero chance of improving our situation.
Right.
And seriously, on the political front, what's worse, Liz Cheney teaming up with Nancy Pelosi or Nancy Pelosi teaming up with Liz Cheney to stop this?
That's that's just not right.
It's man, it's the ugliest thing in the world.
And of course, they have no authority as a Congress to tell the president where he can't remove troops from.
I say that, right.
They can't do that.
That's the one thing he can do no matter what.
Yeah.
Obama can start a war whenever he wants.
Trump can continue the war in Yemen that there's no pretense of authorization for America's participation in that war whatsoever.
And that's fine.
Oh, but he wants to pull some troops out.
Not if we can help it.
And they start tacking on amendments to the NDA.
And by the way, if anybody looks at those, it's saying we can't leave until we have total victory there.
And they list all of the arguments for the war that have been invoked over the last 20 years.
Little girl schools and the rest.
Until we're done winning, Danny, that's when the war in Afghanistan will be over.
Yeah, which guarantees there never will be a win.
There never will be even a pretense of success.
You're just guaranteeing that we'll never achieve our objectives and perpetually still bleed out with troops and billions of dollars thrown down the drain.
That's what we're guaranteeing.
Man.
All right.
So can you tell me, did you already look at the whole thing this morning, the CIGAR report?
Or how far did you get?
I went through the key points email.
Yeah.
Can you talk to me about a little bit of that?
And let me remind the audience, CIGAR with an S, that's the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
And it's a guy named John Sopko and his staff.
And they do a pretty bang up job.
You know, can't vouch for every single word in there, but they do a pretty bang up job of being the Inspector General of the Afghan war.
It's amazing that Congress ever created such a thing.
But they really do some insider work on what we need to know.
So what'd you learn today?
Yeah.
Here's just a couple of the bigger ones that kind of jumped out at me.
One of them says implementation of the U.S. Taliban agreement, contested presidential election results, tensions between the U.S. and Iran, prisoner release discussions, war, and COVID-19 had a major impact this quarter, making it, and this is the big quote, perhaps the most complex and challenging period in the last two decades for Afghanistan's security forces, according to United States forces in there.
So as bad as it's been, because of now all these other things, COVID-19 being one, but definitely not the only one, it's the worst situation it is right now that it's been in the entire 20 years almost of actions.
The Afghan military, the other thing is that they have suffered more casualties in this past week.
They said this was the deadliest week in 19 years.
You know, they just cannot continue this, you know, getting bled out like this in these high numbers for a long time.
And there's nothing that will ever say anything about, you know, how we're succeeding or anything that's going good.
Things are all really, really bad.
And then, of course, the last thing was in terms of, you know, how you want your population to support a government, probably not the best thing to find out that it's being reported that there is a, quote, Afghan government policy or pattern of sexual slavery in government compounds where they basically have the use of child soldiers and for soldiers and sex, according to the State Department.
So that's what we want to support.
I mean, come on, man.
We're not holding anybody accountable for anything over there except we're never leaving no matter what happens over there.
And that's that's just not the kind of thing that America should be supporting.
Some good news, the government is the so-called government, I guess the Kabul government is talking to the Taliban now, right?
Yeah, look, I'm the first one.
I mean, they've been they should have been doing that for for many, many, many years.
And I'm for that.
So I don't I don't demean that at all.
But what I absolutely adamant about is that that needs to happen independent of us.
There doesn't need to be an agreement between the Afghans and the Taliban, between the United States and the Taliban.
They got to figure that out on their own, on whatever timetable they want, because it's going to be years.
Guarantee that we need to withdraw our troops now because it makes sense right now.
And if you predicate that on them reaching some agreement again, you're basically saying we're never going to leave.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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Let me ask you something, man.
What is it about that Bogomir base that's so damn special?
Don't say it's keeping Al-Qaeda down, because I know that's just an excuse.
But I guess, okay, so I can imagine that if somehow they killed every last Afghan and therefore the place was pacified in, you know, military speak, that then they could host a big air base there with B-2s and nuclear bombs.
But since we're talking about Afghanistan, this doesn't give them any advantage whatsoever.
I mean, what planes do they have there, C-130s?
This gives them no advantage whatsoever for war against Iran, Russia, or China.
What good is it?
They're kind of a roadblock for the Chinese who want to build a highway through here someday, maybe.
Is that all we're getting out of this thing?
It could be used, because it's a pretty modern airfield, and it does have substantial capacity.
I mean, even all the way up to, I believe, C-5s, I think, can come in there.
So you could use it for quite a number of things, which is bad.
I don't want us to have a base over there to use as potential platform to attack Iran or to do anything against China, because look, you've got to know that thing is just sitting out in the middle of the open there, and it's an inviting target that modern ballistic missiles can just wipe out if they can't tell them they don't have that.
So that's why all they can do is just lob inaccurate rockets in there.
I mean, it's not like they fly U-2s out of there or anything, right?
They don't right now.
They could.
They don't keep it just for the purpose of what they could do later on.
They just want it as a just-in-case kind of a thing.
It's ridiculous.
It's like a decoration on a desk or something, you know?
No real strategic purpose for this thing whatsoever, other than you never know.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
Other than that, yeah.
And some people think that's a really big thing, but I think it's a bad, bad use of our money, and it just encourages people to think, yeah, you know, we could use that to No, no, that's not what we need to do.
Yeah.
And as far as the criminality of the Afghan government, as you say there, and it's been like this all along, the governors, the police chiefs, all the politicians in the government, the American support, I don't know, all of them, whatever.
Some great proportion of them are mass child rapists among the other kinds of crimes that they commit.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know how widespread it is.
I mean, certainly I've got some friends in the Afghan government.
I think that they're wonderful, upstanding people, and I wish them nothing but the best and success for the future.
But there's too many things like this, because there's, I mean, this thing has been out there in the open, I mean, on some really big documentaries.
There's more stories about it than you could read, and those are the ones that are covered, you know?
I mean, how often do you have a Western reporter who gets out to the countryside to interview the victim of anybody, you know?
But even from the ones, from what we do know, it's absolutely out of control.
Yeah, and the fact that it happens on compounds, on government compounds, I mean, that's the biggest red flag.
Some of them, where American troops are, and we have to observe this and yet still support these people.
That's really a problem.
And remember, three Marines were shot and killed by the local police chief's sex slave boy, who grabbed an AK-47 and killed them while they were lifting weights at a base there in, what, 2011, whatever it is.
You imagine that?
That's how your son dies in Afghanistan?
Well, he was shot in the back by a child sex slave of the local police chief we're supporting.
Yeah, that's not the way you want to go out.
How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for that?
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, we shouldn't ask anyone else to die at all.
I mean, I've been advocating this for so many years, it just anguishes me every time I hear one, and I want that to be the last one, but there seems to always be a next in line, and that just is horrible.
And I can hear the liberals and the conservatives now.
Well, that's why we got to stay to make it right.
But these are the people that we're supporting, not the ones we're trying to save the Afghans from.
These are, quote, our guys, George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump's government's guys.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, as though, again, that weren't enough, and it is, you also have the fact that militarily it is a physical impossibility to ever accomplish any of the things that they say they want to.
It cannot be done.
So it's a double loss for us.
Well, what do you mean by that?
Just because of geography and that kind of thing?
Well, because of the nature of the fight.
That's why 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops couldn't do anything in 2011 when I was there, and the reason why even a tiny little fraction of that right now can't do anything either, because it's the nature of the problem.
It's not a foreign, you know, a clearly defined army that you can have a battle with and defeat them and take Stalingrad or whatever.
This is, the guy's a farmer by the day, and maybe the farmer's a Taliban by night, or maybe he's a farmer by night.
You have no way of knowing, and unless you kill everybody just to make sure, which of course is Hitler-like, and we would never do that, then you can't, can't, can't ever win.
Yep, that's pretty much it.
I was going to have a line in my book that's short of H-bombs, but then I thought, nah, because, you know, I don't want to encourage them.
It's not an option.
Killing them all is not an option.
I just finished interviewing Greg Mitchell about nuking the Japanese.
No, we're not doing that.
We can't do that.
So that's it.
So we can just give them their country back and hope that they can figure it out.
And it sucks too, because, and I know that you know this, and we agree on this, that when America leaves, there's going to be problems in Afghanistan.
Nobody's saying America leaving is the solution to their problems.
We're saying that's the beginning of them having a hope of figuring it out for themselves, or at least under the influence of local neighbors, India, Pakistan, Iran, and the Russians and the Chinese and whoever else are going to put their weight in there.
It's their so-called near abroad, not ours.
Right.
Their backyard.
Yeah.
And so even, not that they have the right, but I'm just saying whatever happens without us is more likely to lead to some kind of stable conclusion, you know?
Right.
That's the key thing there.
Our presence right now, and this is hard for some people to grasp, but the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive.
Our presence prevents an outcome, a resolution to this, because we keep the Kabul people backed militarily so that, you know, the Taliban can never rise and take them over.
And they know that, so they know they don't have to make the compromises necessary to get things done because they don't have to.
They can keep going on into perpetuity because they know that somebody's always got their back.
Right.
You take that out, now then they have to negotiate because their life will depend on it, as they have done for thousands or hundreds of years in that part of the world, and they'll do it.
But as long as we're there, it's never going to happen.
Well, and of course, that's why, Danny, the story about the Russians, the Russians, paying the Taliban to kill Americans came from the Afghan government in the first place.
They made that up so they can keep us because what are they going to do without us?
And it is too bad for them because, as you said, some of them are perfectly decent people.
But at some point, and it's better sooner than later, they are no longer our responsibility.
Yeah, I mean, we passed that point a long, long time ago and we've just been unwilling to admit it.
But yeah, I don't disagree with that.
Yeah.
I haven't heard the story yet, but, you know, the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer and professor at Columbia and all that, he is actually a paid consultant to the Ghani government over there.
And I haven't talked to him yet, but he did tell me in an email.
He said, ask me one day about the time I showed up at work over there in Kabul and Ghani greets me with a copy of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by Scott Horton.
That's nice.
I thought that was funny.
So I'm sure that I mean, it's already funny.
I can't wait to hear the actual story.
I should find an excuse to interview him again now that Russiagate is over.
Dude, you need to go interview Ghani.
I think that I'd like to.
I'd pay money to hear that.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
You know what?
Maybe I should.
You hear that, Ed?
We're going to have to work on that.
OK, now.
So here's the thing.
We have very little time, only four minutes.
Hard break for this one.
But I do want to hear what you have to say about pulling troops out of Germany.
How serious is it?
How big of a deal is it?
How meaningful is it?
And why should everybody shut up about it?
And then if you do have time, you could also address this Iran-China article that you wrote at Business Insider as well.
Yeah, this is a big deal, and it's kind of along the lines of some other things.
And I hope that it has a different outcome.
You remember in three times over an 18 month period, Trump said, we're going to get out of Syria conclusively, authoritatively.
It never happened.
Somebody always walked it back.
Now he's saying that we're going to get troops out of Germany.
And now then, recently, he's actually up the number from 9,500 to something close to 12,000.
And by all understandings that I have from talking to people who claim to have some direct knowledge at the highest levels in the administration, he actually means it this time.
And he's going to give the orders and make it happen.
But look, this isn't the lefties against him.
This is everybody in the, what do you call it, the whole establishment, foreign policy establishment are pressing hard against this.
I mean, name Republicans.
Of course, the Democrats, that goes without saying, just because it's Trump said it.
But this is something that's long overdue and something we need to do, because our interests are not served by basically perpetually providing the security for Germany so that they, this rich country, doesn't have to spend more money on their own security than we do.
Because that's why four different governors in Germany wrote a letter to the United States Congress basically asking them to don't let Trump do what he said, which I thought was pretty amazing on its own, that they're interfering with our legislative matters.
But this has got to be in America's interest, not in Germany's interest.
I mean, they're our friend, and they're going to continue to be our friend.
We have trade partners.
They're a wonderful group of people.
I've loved everybody that I've met when I've lived over there all these years.
But it is time to change, because the circumstances from today are radically different than they were during the Cold War, even in the latter stages of the Cold War, and it's no longer appropriate or necessary for us to keep troops there.
Well, it seems like if there was a reason to keep them there at all, I mean, all other things being equal with America's military establishment and all of that, it seems like it would be to keep Russia and Germany from fighting again, right, since that's the worst thing that ever happened, twice.
And so instead what we'll do is, I guess the theory goes, right, we're so big and powerful that if the Russians mess with the Germans, they mess with us, so they're not messing with anybody, and then that means that the Germans have no reason to fear and militarize in response to the Russians, and so here we are keeping the peace, and yet it seems like Germany's total lack of enthusiasm for militarism at this point would indicate that this is just really not necessary at all, that Russia and Germany and any kind of conceivable medium-term future have no desire whatsoever to rearm and fight each other like what happened before.
Absolutely.
And look, here's some numbers to back that up.
In the height of the Cold War, I think in the 70s or something, when there was a genuine, legitimate, no kidding threat from the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact, Germany spent 3.1 percent of their GDP on defense, which was not as high as you might think, but still a pretty robust number.
Now then, it's 1.1 or sometimes 0.9, depending on when you're making the measurements, and they're engaging in a Nord Stream Pipeline, and now Nord Stream 2 Pipeline they want to do, which directly brings Russian gas in there, which would make them potentially vulnerable.
You don't do those kinds of things unless you think there's not really a military threat from these guys.
You would never put yourself at risk like that if you thought, hey, they might actually turn against us one day.
So whether we think they are or not, Germans do not tangibly, by where they put their money and where they're putting their economic infrastructure, they don't regard Russia as a genuine military threat.
So why should we spend our American taxpayer dollars and put our troops at risk there so that they don't have to?
That's just not right.
Right.
And how insane is it to think, no matter what American oil company interest exists anywhere in the world or what they want, that the U.S. government would try to get between Germany and Russia when they're trying to work a pipeline deal like this?
Absolutely.
When that is the greatest invention in the history of peace.
Are you kidding me?
As much trade between those two states as could possibly exist, the better.
Right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
If both sides have mutual benefit and continue an economic engagement, then where's the incentive for war?
I mean, it goes very, very low.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry that we're out of time because I love talking with you and we didn't get a chance to talk about China.
But this whole China-Iran peace is a great one, too.
So Business Insider for the Iran and China peace and Military.com for America's military should not be used as an auxiliary force to defend Berlin.
Thank you again.
Appreciate it.
It's always my pleasure, Scott.
Talk to you later.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
