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.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Matthew Ho.
He was a decorated captain in the Marine Corps in Iraq War II, and then he went to work for the State Department on a provincial reconstruction team and blew the whistle in the summer of 2009, tried to stop Barack Obama from launching the surge, the doubling, tripling of the Afghan war that Matthew knew was going to fail, and get a bunch of guys killed on their side and our side for nothing.
He did everything he could to try to stop them, and really gave Obama all that he needed to back down.
But, of course, we know that history played out different.
But anyway, he's now at the Center for International Policy and says great antiwar stuff all the time.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Matthew?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Great to talk to you again, my friend.
So listen, we got bad news on this Afghanistan thing.
The best thing to come out of the Trump years was he hired Zalmay Khalilzad to make a peace deal with the Taliban.
Well, a withdrawal deal with the Taliban.
But Biden's already canceled it.
We didn't have to leave till 2021, and they're already saying, oh, conditions aren't met and we can't go after all.
Yeah.
You know, I guess it was what we expected, you know, I mean, certainly with the election of Biden that this was going to happen.
This is the idea of the American empire retreating from anywhere is just anathema.
The idea that, you know, this goes back 70 years, right?
This goes back to the whole who lost China, right?
It does.
I mean, if people aren't familiar with this, read David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and you know, or now I'm blanking on another great book on it.
But you know, I mean, that explains how we get into Vietnam, right?
This idea that you can't look soft, you can't if it's got almost nothing to do with what the rest of the world is doing and everything to do with what your opponents on Capitol Hill or on the, you know, on election advertisements on television are going to say, right?
You know, as well, then, too, if you look at like, you know, I think, you know, talking about this Afghanistan study group, this congressionally appointed, you know, organ, you know, a panel that was put together to justify remaining in Afghanistan.
I mean, you look at the people who are put on this panel, all prominent, all establishment warriors, you know, all of them have not been correct about anything in the last two decades in their public pronouncements.
I mean, and I think you can go and look at this Afghanistan study group, look at their website.
You know, it's on the it's based out of the, you know, all the organizations in the U.S. government.
The most Orwellian is the U.S. Institute for Peace.
You know, that's quite a thing to say, right?
You know, the most Orwellian.
But it is, I think, USIP is the most Orwellian.
And you know, you get you get this organization, this Afghan study group that is every single one of those people, with the exception maybe of Barney Rubin, who was on it, is, you know, has been wrong about not just Afghanistan, but about almost everything else the U.S. has done militarily, diplomatically, politically for the last two decades.
You know, I mean, I imagine I shouldn't say that because a lot of them supported, like, say, the JCPOA with Iran and things like that.
So occasionally they do get something right.
But the, you know, so this this idea that Afghanistan was going to be a success story for those of us who wanted to see a war end, and more importantly, was going to be an end to the 40 year old, you know, more than 40 year nightmare of the Afghan people, because it's the Afghan people are going to continue to suffer.
You know, there'll be some American families who will lose kids because of this, which is which is tragic and awful.
There'll be some American families that will be devastated because their spouses will come home with PTSD and traumatic brain injury and moral injury.
It'll ruin their lives and their families lives forever, you know, but compared to who's really going to suffer or continue to suffer because of this, it's the Afghans.
But you know, it's it's just, you know, it's one more example why you should not allow your children to ever enlist in the military.
And if you yourself are thinking about it or, you know, there's something like this should dissuade you, because these are the type of people that you or your children will be dying for, becoming psychologically maimed for or killing for, which if you are a normal person and you participate in killing, you will most likely pay severe psychological and spiritual consequences later in your life.
And these are the type of people that you'll be doing it for.
This is a prime example of of of the charade of any type of intellectual or moral courage that exists in Washington, D.C.
Yeah, man.
So forget Afghanistan for a minute.
Well, kind of.
But let's talk about that specifically.
Right.
I mean, for me, I was just lucky.
Bill Clinton was the president when I was getting out of high school and it wasn't even really a question of whether I was going to join the army or not.
You know?
Yeah.
So I was really lucky there.
And they probably throw my sorry ass out right away anyway.
But anyway, you know, I got lucky like that.
But I think there are a lot of people who, hey, they came of age right during George W. Bush times and he's an American patriot and all that stuff.
Plenty to believe in there if in your neighborhood they believe in it.
You know what I mean?
Back in those days.
But it's always seemed to me ever since I was a kid, even, you know, I grew up.
I'm I think we're right around the same age.
I'm 44.
How old are you?
I'm 47.
Oh, 47.
OK.
So, yeah, you probably even more so than me, even actually by a little bit there.
But, you know, growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War and all of the consequences of that and all the homeless guys on the side of the road in their army flak jackets still and all this kind of thing, you know, that atmosphere, I I just kind of was I had the Vietnam syndrome.
I was raised with the Vietnam syndrome basically kind of all along.
I feel real lucky for that.
But a lot of people have not had that.
And at the same time that I grew up with that, I also grew up with the kind of inculcation that.
You know, as we all do, you're talking about fighting not for politicians.
Would you just say about Joe Biden and Tony Blinken and and whoever?
No, no, no.
It's fighting for your country.
And the enemy is always Hitler.
It's always World War Two.
And we're not fighting, you know, I don't know.
Men from the neighborhood resisting our occupation of their neighborhood.
We're meeting the Wehrmacht out in the field.
These guys.
Yeah, you might kill them, but you won't feel bad about it because they're serving the Nazis and they deserve to die.
Screw them.
And it's on.
And but then that's not the wars that our guys are sent to fight.
They don't get to meet the Wehrmacht.
They in fact are patrolling some posh town village in the middle of nowhere where they have no business and where their enemy is simply screaming, get the hell off my lawn.
You know, where they have no business in the first place.
And and yet after even through 20 years of this, isn't it the case that the actual wars and what you'll actually be doing over there is almost like an entirely separate question from whether it's still the right thing to join the army and be a patriot and serve your country and fight for your country and all those things.
Nobody can know that the wars are corrupt and B.S. and wrong.
And yet at the same time, everybody knows it's still the right thing to sign your son up for this stuff.
This is how a boy finishes becoming a man is he goes and he joins the army.
So it is to be an American patriot, right?
Yeah, we have we the U.S. military is a religious institution in the United States.
You know, I used to say that, you know, generals, people like General Petraeus or Stan McChrystal or, you know, whoever you want to name, even though they never won anything in terms of decisive victory, their biggest achievements were overseeing, you know, withdrawals, basically retreats in a lot of ways or setting the stage for retreats.
You know, I used to say that they were that they were treated like as quasi clerical.
And I don't say that anymore.
They're treated as clerics.
They're treated as, you know, as religious figures.
You know, the military itself is deified.
You can't question it.
It's a ritual obligation in the United States to thank someone for their service.
It's unquestioning.
There's a blind faith, a fanaticism to it that allows for this to occur.
And so, you know, get back to what we're talking about with Afghanistan and this Afghanistan study group that comes out, this congressionally mandated, you know, so it's got the veneer of our democratic process behind this.
Right.
I mean, it's got the blessing of the, you know, the shrine of democracy or whatever, you know, this as long as you ignore all the bribes and the legal corruption that occurs, you know, on a daily basis on behalf of the oligarchs, sure, it's a shrine or a temple of democracy, you know.
And then, you know, there's this Afghan study group with these impaneled panels, these experts, you know, who all have impressive titles and or, you know, come across, you know.
But if you know anything about them, again, they've been wrong.
I mean, you look and look at the people and I encourage people to go to their website and look at them.
It's, you know, guys like Michael Hanlon and Fred Kagan, you know, I mean, people who have just been consistently wrong and willing, though, to jeopardize the lives of other kids and people who live in other countries on a massive level to curry favor, to gain power, to see their names in print, to be wrong continuously, you know.
And so you have this, what they say then, this Afghan study group says, if we pull out, we risk, you know, terror.
We risk being attacked.
You know, if we're, that's that whole trope, if we're not over there, we're going to fight them here.
You know, which is just, you know, such nonsense, right?
It's just it there's there's no evidence to prove it.
You know, if you look at I mean, you know this better than anyone else, Scott.
And, you know, certainly if people haven't read your new book enough already, you know, as well as if you're interested in the Afghan war itself, Scott's book, A Fool's Errand, you know, both those books are such good primers, such, you know, what you did, Scott, was just laid out so clearly that these wars of the last 20 years have been more than folly, more than the mistakes, you know, more than failures.
They've been crimes, you know, and how can you call something a failure if you have 20 some odd people in Washington, D.C. who have, who are former generals, you know, lead think tanks, you know, are key members on the boards of very important Fortune 500 companies, you know, et cetera?
How can you call this war a failure when these people continue to urge it going on?
It's not a failure.
It's a criminal enterprise at that point.
Yeah, I mean, so it's but but this idea, yeah, that these you're going to recruit these kids and that they're going to go over there and they're going to I mean, and what you said about the Vietnam syndrome, man, that that I clearly remember I was a senior in high school when when the Gulf, the first Gulf War, the first Iraq War took place 1990, 1991.
And I clearly remember George Bush saying, you know, by God, we we we we we've gotten rid of the Vietnam syndrome.
Yeah, right.
You know, I mean, I clearly remember him saying that, you know, and, you know, that had a big influence on me because I, of course, you know, was in the Marines and it was part of it for for for way too long.
But, you know, I think a lot of it for me when I see this with with peers of mine who are still in the military or still trying to come to grips with it, who've gotten out of it, you know, this idea that these are one off mistakes.
And I had a very incorrect, very poor reading of American history.
I thought the Vietnam War was a one off mistake.
I didn't connect, you know, what we did in Vietnam to what had occurred in, you know, you name it.
Right.
The list is as long as my arm of places that the U.S. had invaded, occupied, gotten itself involved in, staged coups in, you know, whatever.
You know, I thought Vietnam was a one off mistake.
And I think that's how a lot of people view these wars here, is that they somehow justify even though it's an incredible dissonance, you know, particularly at this point, 20 years in and the wars aren't only taking place in one or two countries, they're taking place in nearly every country right from Western Africa all the way to Pakistan.
But people still, I think, want to justify it as it's a mistake that we won't make again in the future, which is completely a complete misreading of U.S. history.
You know, it's if the the only mistake would be in American history is if we weren't involved someplace, if we didn't have young men and now young women killing other people to maintain the primacy of the United States.
Yeah.
You know, for me, it's still I think all goes back to fifth grade social studies, you know, where essentially the syllogism goes that it's a democracy, which means the adults talked about it and decided, yeah, and they're good people.
It's a good country.
It's your parents and their friends and neighbors.
And so what are you saying?
They all did the wrong thing.
They'll decide the wrong thing.
Of course not.
It's the right thing by definition, because it was whatever it was that we did, whether it's dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese or whatever it is, it's the people chosen by the democracy who made the very best decisions they could at the time or they wouldn't have made them.
And it comes with just such a presumption of legitimacy, which, yes, you can tell I went to government school in fifth grade where they give you a good old dose of you have to believe in this system.
You do this idea and you see that you'd see that in the military, I think quite a bit.
You know, you hear phrases like, well, it's above my pay grade, you know, as a way to relieve yourself of the responsibility of questioning what is occurring.
Right.
Because you do, you want to believe you've been taught right through civics classes and everything else, that we have a system that arrives at a just and fair conclusion, it's a democratic system.
You might not like what was resolved, what was decided.
However, the process itself was fair.
And that is completely untrue, of course.
I mean, there's, you know, how many studies now at this point show that, you know, we do not have a democratic system.
We have a system that's controlled by money, by the wealthy, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, and let alone, you know, again, if you look at if you, you know, again, look at a book like what you just wrote, Scott, you know, I mean, like in the sense that you put all these pieces together and you see that these are not separate pieces, that this is not a, you know, these are not isolated events, that you very well could call this World War III.
I mean, because it is one main effort by one nation, the United States, across how many countries at this point?
You know, I mean, what's the number of troops we have?
You know, commandos in Africa, what, in 22 nations?
You think those guys are just sitting around, you know, playing cards?
You know, I mean, so the, yeah, this notion that somehow by who we are justifies what we are doing overseas is something that's very effective and it continues to work, you know, and the suffering goes.
And you could say things, you know, I mean, and, you know, there's so many points we can get into this, you know, we could look at, say, you know, look at the New York Times piece the other day that, you know, that announced this Afghanistan Study Group's report.
And it's, you know, I mean, Thomas Gibbons Neff and he shared a byline with someone else, I can't remember who.
Barnes, Julian Barnes.
Yeah.
Okay.
And Neff, by the way, everybody, he's a veteran and probably the best war reporter at the Times.
Yeah.
But however, you know, in this case, this article, there's no dissenting opinion in the article.
There's no historical context in the article.
Everything that is said is taken for granted.
Right.
I mean, I mean, they even cite Kelly Ayotte and go, well, Kelly Ayotte said this, but isn't she known as the Joe Lieberman replacement with the three amigos of Graham and McCain and the worst hawks in the Senate who never even spoke for the Republican Party, much less the entire Senate or the entire country?
Yeah.
She had faded into the recesses of my memory and was like, you know, horribly brought forward, you know, when this thing came about, when I had to read about this thing.
Right.
Like, oh, my God, Kelly, I have put her into a dark corner of my brain and just forgotten her, you know.
And but yeah, I mean, so so you can have things like that.
You could have any anyone, you know, Gibbons definitely knows who these people are.
He doesn't make the point that, you know, all these people are neoconservatives.
All these people have always been in favor of escalation, you know, and intervention, not just in Afghanistan, but literally everywhere else.
You know, everybody, everyone on that panel thinks that the best way to solve a problem is to shoot somebody, basically, when you come down to it.
And you know, you can then also have these these, you know, it's Orwellian again, these crazy things like in that that that, you know, one of the comments that's being circulated is from, you know, retired Marine Corps General Joe Dunford, who Dunford, you know, you see this all the time, this idea that a precipitous withdrawal.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Right.
After, you know, U.S. forces being there for 20 years, let alone that, let alone the fact that the U.S. has been involved in Afghanistan militarily since the late 1970s.
Right.
I mean, in a sense, or at least through the CIA and everything else that is so we've been there in Afghanistan fighting over those people for more than 40 years now.
And you know, you could say have someone say precipitous withdrawal.
And the New York Times can write that with a straight face, you know, and not have anybody.
The worst part, not have anybody question that, not have, you know, any dissenting opinions, not the reporters didn't even know.
You know, I mean, I mean, and this is a world, too, by the way, is because this war has gone on for so long that we they don't have to come to the guy from antiwar dot com.
They could ask you or Danny Davis or Colonel McGregor or any number of prominent people who are military officers, enlisted former spies, whoever who can dissent against this.
Well, I mean, Davis is a good point.
Right.
Why didn't they ask Davis about this?
He's at a he's at a Republican based think tank.
Right.
He writes for the national interest.
He has, you know, I mean, he is he's got his own stars, you know, and in the end and in January of 2012 or February 2012, whichever it was, the Times had him on their front page.
Scott Shane had a front page article on Danny Davis bringing a report to Congress saying how the generals are lying about the war in Afghanistan.
And everything Danny said about that was absolutely true.
Yep.
Everything he wrote about that was absolutely.
And he's also on TV from time to time on and so forth on different questions.
So it's not like they don't know who he is.
And again, we're talking about Thomas Neff here.
We know what he knows.
Yeah.
But he's got editors, too.
I mean, we can't put all the blame on him, but yeah, that's exactly right.
And I mean, but just the way that the media goes along with this storyline that, OK, Congress in its, you know, democratic virtue, you know, in a in a way representing the people, you know, you can hear like the music behind this.
Right.
And they put together this panel of experts and this panel of experts said this, you know, and in the media, you know, The Times, others.
I mean, this this was, you know, Associated Press.
You know, I mean, all the major media picked up on this Afghanistan study group recommendation, you know, and the way they did, they presented it as a neutral report, as a report, you know, unbiased from independent experts who, you know, that's right.
These people probably met on Zoom twice, you know, talked about the last time they saw each other and then just said, whatever you guys want to say is fine with me, because, you know, probably with the exception of Barney Rubin, you know, you know, because they all agree on what they're going to do.
I know a lot of these people.
I've been in I've debated them at panels.
I've been in different meetings with them.
Like I know who these people are and they this they are and their records are clear on these on Afghanistan and on the other wars.
But, you know, so the The Times and other media, by going along with it, you know, just adds like this seal of authenticity to it, you know, that, you know, no one is questioning this.
Anyone who is questioning this just doesn't have the facts.
Right.
Anyone who's questioning this just doesn't must have some kind of agenda.
Right.
Any you know, I mean, like so it just it just one more piece of this of the machine that allowed these wars to just continue to churn up lives.
You know, you can even see things, too, in this in their report, the Afghan study group lauds the Afghan government.
You know, the it says something along the lines.
One of the reasons we need to be there is to continue to support the Afghan government as it as it, you know, governs by its values.
Literally, this report came out the same day that the United Nations put out another report because they put out a report.
Right.
I mean, literally, the Afghan study group report came out the same day as the United Nations said at least one third of all Afghan prisoners are tortured, which is something we've known for forever at this point.
Yeah.
And which means that even though we haven't heard of it in a few years, it's been like this the entire time.
Exactly.
Well, you know, and nothing has changed.
Right.
I mean, so you've known, say, with the torture, we've known the Afghan government has tortured as like systematically as a matter of routine.
Right.
For quite a while now, the United Nations has been putting out reports about this every couple of years for, you know, and nothing has changed.
Right.
So in 2017, when the U.N. said the Afghan security forces and the NDS and the Afghan police and, you know, we're torturing their prisoners en masse, you know, it's like a matter of routine.
Right.
I don't even know if the U.S. responded to that, but if they did, I'm sure they said we're taking steps to change that.
And so nothing has changed.
You know, I mean, another thing in this report from this Afghan study group that just they talk about the need to strengthen the Afghan government to combat illicit narcotics and to tackle the drug trade and everything.
You know, I mean, so just again, going along with this farce that the Afghan government is somehow anti-narcotic, somehow anti-drug trade, when like the biggest players in the drug trade for the last two decades have been the Afghan government.
You know, I mean, that's changed over the last few years because the Taliban have taken so much territory, you know, particularly in the south where they have possession of the poppy fields now.
But, you know, for the most part, the people who are integral to the running of the drug trade, that industry, you know, particularly regarding the finance and the logistics and the international transit of it and everything else, are either members of the Afghan government, family members of the Afghan government, you know, warlords who are supportive of the Afghan government, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
So you get these views of the war in Afghanistan that are just so dissonant, so disparate, so in opposition to the reality of what's happening there and what has been happening.
And it is, you know, I'd be remiss to say, you know, if I didn't bring up, you know, one of the first things I did after I resigned in protest is with a couple other people, started an Afghanistan study group in 2010.
And we had, you know, a large number of former government officials, academics, think tank people, you know, we had, you know, Paul Polar, we had Stephen Walt.
We had quite a few people involved who have not just been correct on this issue, but correct a number of issues, but who also came into that process in 2010 with kind of clear eyes about it.
And several of them changed their opinions about it because of the process we had.
But this whole idea of like having a study group, you know, the purpose of that is to bring in people, for the most part, who are not familiar with the issue, but have some degree of expertise, have some, you know, and don't have conflicts of interest, right?
I mean, literally almost everyone, you look at this Afghanistan study group that was mandated by Congress, and then you read in the press, you read in the, you know, and I went and I looked at all different media reports, as many as I can find print media about what the recommendations were.
And none of them, you know, not just the Times, but, you know, whether it be the Hill or in U.S. News and World Report or the AP or wherever, none of them write any dissenting voices, right?
None of them post any information to contradict, you know, or even, you know, anything that, you know, one of the things the report says is that a drawdown of U.S. forces will cause al Qaeda to reconstitute and reattack the United States.
We're down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan from a high of, what, 100,000 American troops, 40,000 NATO troops, and more than 100,000 contractors there.
And we're down to 2,500, and there haven't been any al Qaeda attacks on the U.S., let alone any attacks that you would point to and say, oh, this is because we withdrew from Afghanistan.
We drew down from Afghanistan.
I mean, so, you know, none of this is brought up and is spoken of.
And this is a real concern, you know, and it has been a very real concern.
It's been a concern, you know, for most of my life, most of your life, right?
I mean, it has gotten worse and worse.
It begins with, we can go back, we were talking a little bit about the first Iraq war, you know, and I remember clearly the New York Times warning about Saddam moving into the Saudi oil fields next.
And, you know, I think, as you point out in your new book, or, you know, other people certainly have pointed out, like, that was never, that was never a threat.
You know, that was never, right?
I mean, like, but we went a little, and it was never corrected, you know, and, you know, on and on, you go through all this.
And so there's a real danger we have here, where the propaganda and the lie machine has just become so thoroughly ingrained in how our society function, how our government defends the decisions it makes, how voices of dissent or even, not even dissent, but just opposing information are just completely left out of the narrative, you know.
So this report, while I think a lot of people can look at it and say, you know, just shrug it off, just let it go, you have to look at it and understand it in the larger context of what it represents and why it's such a great, it's such a great article to examine, you know, such a great little group to examine, because it explains the larger context of American foreign policy, American militarism, you know, these wars against, these wars that are, you know, go from Western Africa to Pakistan.
You know, I think all that can be summarized quite nicely by looking at this last week and what this Afghanistan study group has said, how it was created, how the media covered it, the people who were selected for it, you know, etc., etc.
Yeah.
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Well, you know, so I just talked with Betta Dam, and she says that when she talks to the Taliban, she has a lot of Taliban sources there, lived there for years, and she says they have such swagger and confidence now.
They know that they have all the momentum with them.
They're in a stronger position than they have been in a long time, and they don't feel like compromising with anybody.
They don't see why they should have to, and bad times are coming here, because we've been propping up this thing that cannot stand, and as you said, we only got 2,500 guys there now, and now that Obama, same difference, now that Biden's breaking the deal, at least, I mean, the Taliban might try to keep talking for a little while, but if Biden is really staying, they're going to go back to war, and then I've been assured, I guess Daniel Davis told me, don't worry, there's enough firepower at Bagram that our guys are not going to get completely Tet Offensive-ed there or anything like that, but they don't have the firepower to turn the tide of the war in any sense if the Taliban goes for a major push against the Afghan government and try to sack Kabul, and so you can't really prevent that anyway.
It seems like if we're breaking the deal, we're more likely to provoke it.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
I mean, and Danny's correct.
They're not going to overrun Bagram, but any time an American convoy leaves a base now, it's going to be attacked.
You know, that's been one thing.
The Taliban, that's what's so ugly about all this, is the lies that go along with it.
You know, the Taliban are not keeping to their agreement, is what this Afghanistan study group said, the U.S. government is saying, as the Pentagon said it the other day, Jake Sullivan and, you know, I mean, the Biden administration is saying the Taliban is not keeping its agreements.
They never point out what that is.
They say, well, they're not renouncing al-Qaida.
They've been renouncing al-Qaida since 2001, and no one has brought any evidence to say, look, here is that linkage between Taliban and the al-Qaida to prove that they are engaging in ongoing operations.
It's all just, you know, they just say it and we're expected to believe it.
They claim the violence.
You know, the United States, the Taliban just said this the other day, that the United States is in violation of the agreement as well.
They keep bombing us.
That's in violation of the agreement.
You know, the Taliban agreed not to attack American forces, and they have not attacked American forces in Afghanistan.
No part of that agreement, I just reread the agreement yesterday again, because maybe I thought, maybe I missed something.
There's nothing in the agreement that calls for the Taliban not to attack the Afghan government.
And then the U.S. plays along with this whole thing, too, where whatever it does is defensive, right, that we're not engaging in offensive strikes.
We're engaging in defensive strikes.
So anytime we drop bombs on the Taliban, even if that Taliban is 20 miles away from the nearest Afghan government position, we're calling it defensive.
And then, of course, anything the CIA and its paramilitary forces do is completely not included.
That's just not part of reality.
That doesn't occur.
That is not even acknowledged.
So the CIA can do whatever they want.
So the Taliban are saying, look, you keep attacking us.
We're only attacking the Afghan government, which is not something we're not supposed to do in an agreement.
But you're absolutely right.
You know, and again, this report says, you know, that it says the U.S. has leverage, while the U.S. maintains leverage.
The United States has not had leverage in Afghanistan since it escalated the war in 2009 and failed miserably.
We blew any leverage we had at that point.
We went all in.
It didn't work.
And since then, we've been losing there, only being able to maintain a presence because we have unlimited resources, basically, and we have the firepower to keep the Taliban from massing.
But they control so much of the territory, so much of the ground.
They control all of the Pashtun parts, with the exception of parts of the cities.
So what, I mean, and I remember taking part in a 2011-2012, a very well done war game run by the Marine Corps.
And, you know, there was about 100 people in that, all very serious.
And I think 99 out of us all agreed in 2011 that the Taliban had all the leverage.
Nothing has changed in 10 years.
But we have people here in D.C. who are going to say that we maintain leverage in Afghanistan when we haven't had leverage in more than 10 years now.
We have media that's going to report that without, you know, citing these experts.
And people are going to believe this as they send their kids to continue to die and to be killed, you know, let alone members of Congress who go along with it, you know, and on and on.
You know, and members of Congress go along with it, in my opinion, primarily because it's easiest.
It's easiest for them politically.
Most members of Congress don't receive huge amounts of money from the military-industrial complex.
They receive some, but unless you're on the Armed Services Committee, you're not receiving money that's really going to make or break your campaign.
But it's easier for them to go along politically with the wars than to dissent.
I used to have this conversation with the late Walter Jones all the time.
He used to talk about it all the time, about how many members of his party, the Republican Party, were going along with the wars because it was easier.
And then I think you and Gareth Porter had a great conversation about Iran, you know, in the last week or so.
And you guys both spoke about this, the reason why you have people like Blinking and Jake Sullivan and others and why the media goes along with it, you have these people in think tanks who go along with it, is because they want power.
You know, they like the feel of it.
They want power.
None of these people are, you know, tens of millionaires or hundreds of millionaires or billionaires.
Yeah, sure, they're doing well.
They're doing probably much better than you and I, Scott, and most of the people listening to this.
But, you know, for the most part, they're doing it because they like the power.
They want the power.
They want the proximity of power.
They want to be in control.
And they want to feel like they're mattering to history.
Right.
Also, like you were saying at the beginning of this thing, too, they're all terrified, too, that somebody is going to call them weak because they are weak.
And so in order to act strong, they escalate the wars where somebody else has to go and actually be tough.
Absolutely.
You know, and that includes most of these generals who, you know, who were already generals or colonels when these wars began.
So they haven't been, you know, and you see in the new Woodward book, he says they had the strategy and he's quoting.
I mean, Woodward is quoting the principles, right?
He's talking about Tillerson and McMaster and Mattis.
They had a strategy that they called scaring the out of the president.
And what it was was they would say to him, if you do this, quote, again, you will look weak like Obama.
And then that was it.
That's all they had to do.
And he would go for whatever they said.
That's exactly right.
I mean, that goes back again.
I mean, that's what that's what LBJ said about the Vietnam War.
You know, I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about Halberstam writes about this and the best and the brightest, you know, and Logevall writes about it in was it embers of embers of ashes of I forget what Frederick Logevall's great book on how the United States got involved in Vietnam.
You know, he writes about that as well and writes about it so clearly and so well documented.
You know, this fear of being called weak, of having the other side being able to.
And this goes back.
You know, I mean, this goes back to the Civil War or after the Civil War, you know, the whole waving of the bloody shirt or waving of the bloody flag, whichever one you want to use.
You know, the idea that you're going to shame the other side because they are forgetting about the losses, you know, and so you have it with, you know, you certainly have it with with, you know, you read this report and it's just the specter of 9-11 hangs all over it.
Right.
You know, I mean, this idea that if who or what are you, you're silly, you're forgetting about this.
Have you forgotten?
You know, how dare you not remember?
Obviously, you must have some type of reason why you are so feckless and it must be to, you know, whatever, whatever.
So, yeah, but but this drives our foreign policy, you know, and you see it's even more insane is how far reaching it goes and how it all becomes entangled.
So you have at the very end of 2020, you have, you know, Robert O'Sullivan, who was well, O'Sullivan or O'Brien, whoever Trump's now security advisor was, I'm already forgetting all these.
O'Sullivan, yeah.
Yeah, I'm already forgetting all these people, thankfully.
But, you know, he's he's, you know, he's talking to Politico about how the Chinese were paying for bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
So we're going to entangle all this.
We're going to bring the Chinese into it.
And this way, this justifies our aircraft carriers and our new, you know, 500 million dollar a piece bombers and these hypersonic missiles and all this.
You know, I mean, it is it's an organism that just wants to continue to grow.
And, you know, I mean, a lot of people know that the foreign policy culture, the foreign policy establishment in D.C. is referred to as the blob.
And, you know, you think back to that 1950s movie, and that's how it kind of actually is.
Everything it touches, it absorbs and uses for its own purposes.
So it's, you know, where we go from here, you know, even everything you look at with the announcement that Biden made the other day about Yemen, you know, everything was qualified, you know, offensive weapons relative to the conflict.
You know, he's going to cancel arms sales that are only needed for Yemen.
But the weapons that Saudi Arabia needs to defend itself from Iran, you know, and Iranian based Iranian backed proxies, you know, I mean, so every even like this conversation about something that most people in the United States at least are agreed upon.
I mean, my God, the House and the Senate actually, you know, agreed to stop your support for that war.
And, you know, the Biden administration can't even do that.
They're going to, you know, and we'll see what they actually do.
Hopefully they prove me wrong.
But, you know, evidence and past history and common sense and also their own words say that whatever they do in Yemen in terms of stopping their assistance for the Saudi genocide there is going to be extremely limited.
And you guarantee that, you know, that their own best interests in terms of the Biden administration, as well as their, you know, their supporters are going to be what's undertaken first, as opposed to the best interests of the Yemeni people or for any other reason like that.
You know, the other thing, too, Scott, you keep seeing is like this return with Biden, this return, you know, America's back, they keep saying, and all our allies are happy and glad about that.
And I don't know about you, but like, you know, most of the Europeans I talk to who are, you know, in the defense ministry in Denmark or not in the, you know, the UK foreign ministry or whatever, but, you know, normal average Europeans are not happy to see this reemergence of a belligerent American empire.
You know, it's just going to go around and quash societies and as a result, create tens of millions of refugees.
You know, but so they say these things about how our allies are so psyched that Biden are back.
And when they refer to that, they refer to, yeah, the people at NATO, right?
I mean, like the conservative parties, the right wing political parties in Europe are happy about this.
You know, I mean, you talk to regular normal Europeans or Europeans who have, who are part of international affairs, but are not, you know, compromised or beholden to the United States in some way.
They're not too excited about this return that America is back in the way that the Biden administration keeps saying it.
Yeah.
I'll tell you what, I'm with them.
I mean, I'm sorry, I got to go.
I could keep talking with you all afternoon, but I have to run to my next interview.
But thank you so much for doing the show again, Matthew.
It's been great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks, Scott.
You be well, man.
All right.
You too, buddy.
All right, you guys.
That is Matthew Ho.
He is at the Center for International Policy and of course, is one of the great heroes of the war in Afghanistan.
