For Pacifica Radio, July 11th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now for you.
Going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
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All right, now introducing today's guest, it's a regular contributor at antiwar.com and retired army major veteran of the surges in both Iraq War II and Afghanistan.
It's Danny Sherson, and he's also the author of the books Ghost Riders of Baghdad, his memoir of his time in Iraq War II and then last year's Patriotic Dissent, America in the Age of Endless War, and the brand new one, A True History of the United States.
Did I mention that Danny taught history at West Point?
Well, here's this new one, A True History of the United States, indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, hyper capitalism, militarist imperialism, and other overlooked aspects of American exceptionalism.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, very happy to have you on here.
So, uh, tell me about this new book to start here.
Obviously we got to talk about the Afghan and Iraq wars and things today, but, uh, just judging a book by its cover here, sounds like this is along the lines of a people's history on a Howard Zinn sort of a format.
Is that right?
Well, you know, in a way it is, uh, in the sense that it definitely takes a look at sort of, you know, uh, alternative takes that are, you know, popular out in the university and academia, and then trying to sort of translate that critical history to something that's more readable for like a public audience.
I think that one of the differences or what I was trying to do with the book, uh, and it was a grandiose idea, you know, and I'm sure I came a little short, but, you know, Zinn, uh, and purposefully and usefully, uh, does kind of this bottom up history, but in the process he sort of, you know, eschews a standard sequence and standard narrative.
Um, and he was trying his book as a corrective, but here I try to, I stay on track, you know, I mean, it's built on like a history one-on-one course that I sort of taught at West Point.
And so I still try to tell, uh, sequentially the main events, the key players at the top, uh, but also bridge that with kind of the dissenting voices, whether they're at the bottom or just in like alternative spaces.
So, you know, in a way I was trying to talk about, uh, ambitious, right.
I was trying to, uh, bridge Howard Zinn with, you know, the more standard American histories, hoping that in the process, you know, something would come out of it that may, um, you know, get an audience to look at both, whereas they, they may not normally do that.
Yeah.
Well, um, and now is it based in part or at all on your truth dig series that you did about American history there?
It is, that's really how it started.
Um, the 38 chapters are pretty similar to the 38 essays that I wrote for truth dig that they're updated, they're fleshed out, there's some new ones, and there's also some, you know, just kind of transitions because it's a different style, but like the truth digger series, which, you know, Bob Shear kind of put me up to when I ran my mouth about, Hey, I bet what I taught at West Point would sort of surprise some people if they ever knew, you know, Bob's you're being Bob Shear, he said, uh, we'll then write them for us.
And, uh, so, you know, every two weeks for like a year and a half I did.
And, uh, I mean, it was, it was really a labor, you know, I guess a labor of love.
It was, it was a lot, but I'm glad I took on the, uh, the, the challenge only because I had all this material both in my head and, you know, on paper and on my computers for my time teaching.
And, uh, it would have been kind of a waste to let it go.
And so I'm glad, I'm glad that I did it.
And hopefully, you know, add something to the corpus of work on American history.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, I'm not surprised that, um, you're able to churn out another book in such a, at such a rapid pace here.
You're one of the most prolific writers in the anti-war movement, and I've been doing nothing but read anti-war stuff for 20 years here or 25.
So there are very few, I think you and Doug Bondo could maybe, uh, have a race and see, you know, if we had to total it up, your rate of articles that you guys publish is, you know, he's your only competition, that's for sure.
But anyway, so, and everybody can find, uh, what Danny writes at anti-war.com, all of his regular articles as well.
It's original.anti-war.com slash Danny underscore Sherson.
Uh, the latest here, spare us an Afghan threequel, Joe, don't get pulled back in.
And, um, so, uh, can I take it for granted that you saw or read the president's statement yesterday about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Danny?
I did.
And it's interesting.
Uh, some folks around here in Lawrence, Kansas, it was kind of college town, but there's a lot of locals too.
Uh, you know, people, excuse me, people had seen the speech, uh, or read about it.
And then everybody wants to ask me about it, you know, last night.
And believe it or not, a lot of times after like five, 6 PM, I don't want to talk politics or foreign policy because it's all I do, you know, starting about four or five in the morning.
Um, but everyone was kind of, it was interesting to see people's responses to the speech.
Uh, I thought overall, and I've been highly critical of Biden over the years that, you know, he made some good points.
Uh, what was interesting, and I think this will resonate with you, um, you know, because of your own background and kind of just own, you know, vague political inflection, the two narratives that I was hearing about the speech were either the sort of, uh, hawkish classic Republican, right?
Not so much libertarian, but like more old school, you know, national security hawk, and it's, you know, he is a defeatist and this is a disaster and we're weak, but then, you know, this is a liberal town, right?
The more like establishment left, if you want to even call them left, but like the democratic party types, you know, the sorts who know who's running for, you know, a city council and the democratic machine here.
And there's a lot of that.
They also were sort of critical of, and they were like, Oh, you know, he, we're afraid he'll look weak and, you know, this could hurt him politically.
And like, in other words, these two opposing factions are both uncomfortable with Gerald from Afghanistan.
Uh, if for slightly different reasons, which tells me that there's like a bipartisan consensus for just low level, slow boiling forever war.
Yeah.
Well, it's the liberals.
That's who you mean, not the left.
And, uh, well, that's right.
Exactly.
Liberals.
Yeah.
And look, they are Truman Democrats.
They always have been Hawks and they still are.
And this goes for every single one of the 30 something year old members of the Washington press corps yesterday who just couldn't stand it and are screaming at Biden the whole time.
But what if something bad happens?
Do you promise you're going to go back then?
Which at least they didn't call him a pro Russian trader or some crazy nonsense, but they still couldn't stand it.
They couldn't stand it.
No, absolutely.
And I'm, I'm more angry, you know, and I think you probably get this too.
I'm more angry with like the liberals who do it because, you know, I expect it from, you know, like the Michael Waltz, you know, Republican vets of Afghanistan who use this imperialist talk about how could we give away Afghanistan as if it was ours to give, right?
Um, although I guess in some ways he's right, but there was really no engagement with what should we do?
Um, everyone likes airstrikes.
That's like the one thing liberals love airstrikes for some reason.
They think that if you drop the bomb from Las Vegas or from 30,000 feet that like, it's not really killing.
Um, especially if you also drop some like leaflets or like, you know, uh, frosted flakes or something.
But let's look at airstrikes in 2019 evil Donald Trump, right?
Their nemesis drops 7,423 bombs, which is, you know, eight times more than Obama did in 2015 and here we are with the Taliban at the gates.
In other words, like the air power isn't really going to do anything.
The Kabul government is wildly corrupt according to even official estimates.
And I thought Biden made a decent point, you know, in his own kind of earthy way, you know, as he does like folksy, but when he said, Hey, look, here's what I want to say to the people who are criticizing me, how many more thousands of Americans are you willing to either, you know, have killed or risk being killed, uh, and for how long someone needs to explain that to me, it's actually amazing that the max boots of the world and sort of the, you know, liberal interventionist types, although they have something in common sort of, but that they can agree that Biden is wrong to get out.
Um, and I really hate when it's a political calculus, when they, you know, when liberals will say, Oh, like we're so afraid of looking weak.
That's that Truman, you know, hawk Democrat.
And, uh, Hey, look, it's instructive that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor to Joe Biden, who I sort of, you know, I've criticized wildly for his record and positions, uh, you know, he didn't win out on this one, but he said in his time, 30 under 30 or whatever it was profile back when he was in the Obama administration that they asked him, who is the historical figure you most admire?
He could have picked Gandhi or he could have picked Julius Caesar.
You know what I mean?
Or Martin Luther King, he picked Harry Truman.
I think that's instructive.
Yeah.
The butcher of Asia.
That's what Zora Neale Hurston called him correctly.
Um, anyway, but yeah, what a tough guy.
Nobody ever called him a wimp, did they?
And that's the most important thing in democratic politics is you can't let a Republican call you a wimp because liberal Democrats are all wimps.
And so they're terrified of being called one.
If they were tough guys, then they wouldn't care if people call them a wimp, would they?
And this goes for Donald Trump too.
This is why he caved in just like Obama and escalated a war that he opposed just like Obama in 2017, the way that Obama had in 2009, they were afraid that they would be called weak.
So they rolled over for their inferiors, for these men who are merely generals when they are the president, right?
The, the, the credibility crisis, the masculinity crisis to a certain extent, the toughness trap that Democrats have been caught in, um, is actually kind of very interesting because it reflects human nature.
You know, most of the time are, are sort of words they reveal us and we think we're getting away with it.
What I mean is most of the things that we say, especially when we're making like a tax, verbal attacks, it's really built on insecurity.
And we're talking about ourselves.
And I think that that's what you're getting at.
That's really important is the Democrats are terrified of being painted as weak, probably because on some level, many of them think they're weak.
And, and are wildly insecure about it.
Of course, the problem is it creates this like bipartisan push for war.
And in many cases, many, many cases, it's been sort of democratic presidents who've pulled us into quagmires in the first place and or done a large amounts of killing, uh, worldwide and including of American soldiers.
Yeah.
And then Donald Trump famously would scream in his general's faces and call them loser and all this kind of thing.
And then still turn around and roll over and do whatever they wanted anyway.
And as you mentioned, massively escalated the air war, their drones and planes for what, two and a half, three years until Khalilzad started negotiating.
So they killed thousands of people and accomplished nothing for it.
And in 2018 and 19 or 17 and 18, or maybe all three, at least two of those years, uh, the Afghan security forces for the first time, the Afghan security forces and the U S military killed more civilians than the Taliban.
Um, this is a complicated thing because every time I hear that the problem with America leaving, and it's so disingenuous when folks say this, because this is not why we went, that's not why we stayed.
But when they say, oh, it's women's rights.
It's this democracy built, you know, there's been these important gains that we can't give up.
You know, that implies that the United States is value added in this fight and that our absence is, is an inherent negative, but against that, I would offer that with small numbers of troops on the ground, like we had, there were really only two major combat things we could do, which was major night raids with our limited special forces, direct action folks, and lots and lots of airstrikes, and we tried both of those.
And, uh, what we found out is that when you wage war from afar and in a kinetic kind of raid sense where your intelligence is kind of lowered, although it's never that good, that you do kill a lot of civilians in the process.
This is the nature of distance war.
Uh, you may not take as many casualties, but you do a lot of killing.
And so I, I reject the idea that the United States was value added in this war.
And one of the things I lament most of all is that because we're leaving back in the exact same situation, essentially where it's a Northern Alliance versus the Taliban, or it will be soon likely, uh, someone has to tell me what it was all for in the middle, all that killing, uh, of ours and especially of Afghans, which of course was exponentially worse.
I I'll be honest.
I have a hard time swallowing this 20 years later.
You know, I read this thing in Politico by a guy who's got a new history of the Afghan war.
And he just says, listen, I mean, it's not like the anti-war people were right all along or anything like that.
It, you know, we can't be blamed, um, for not getting out when we, it was only just possible recently for us to realize that it wasn't going to work.
And so it's not like it was ever wrong or anybody's fault.
And I'm going, come on.
I was doing a pirate radio show in Austin, Texas in 2001 and 2002 saying this is never going to work.
In fact, I saw someone quoted me on Twitter.
They quoted from my book of me quoting Rambo three, where Colonel Trotman says to the KGB officer, if you read your history, you'd know these people would rather die than be slaves to an invading army.
They like to fight the Pashtuns and they got the mountaintops and you don't, and that's it.
I could have told you that Danny years before you ever showed up there.
And now you got, even the people who are calling it quits are saying, Hey, not that it's anybody's fault or anything.
Cause how could anyone have known that we're not going to be able to pacify this land of tribal warriors, the size of Texas in the middle of Eurasia on the other side of the earth from North America, where we're from.
How could anyone have believed in this for a minute?
I think that what's most interesting about it is that the American adventure in Afghanistan is far more absurd and unlikely, well, impossible to achieve than the Russian was.
I mean, because Russia is part of Eurasia and it was still a farce for them to think that they could achieve what they could achieve, but they were pretty close by, right?
When they were the Soviet Union, they were right across, you know, they bordered Afghanistan.
And this is ludicrous, even this age of technology, because as much as we brag about our airlift capacity and our tech, we've got the top generals there.
And at CENTCOM saying, look, it's going to be really hard to do air support, uh, from the Persian Gulf or from aircraft carriers or bases on the Gulf because, you know, Afghanistan's far away.
And I'm thinking, yeah, it always has been.
I remember when Petraeus took over, uh, or McChrystal or both, one of them was given an interview where he talked about how at his bedside table, as he was getting ready to take over, they love talking about their books.
Like they read these books, they say, but they don't learn anything from them.
I think it was Petraeus said that he had Churchill's book about fighting against like the Mad Mullah or whatever it was called in 1919, the 1919 to 1920 war in Afghanistan, the third Afghan war between the third Anglo-Afghan war, which was more of like a counterinsurgency up in the Hills, right.
Uh, up in the Eastern part of the country, right on the border of Pakistan and, uh, and like Kunar province and Nuristan, which is also where the movie, the man who would be King was takes place.
But anyway, he says, this is what he has by his bedside.
And I'm thinking, I read that.
Uh, and I also read the history surrounding it, you know, to kind of flesh out what Churchill is saying as a young Lieutenant, and I'm thinking, how do you read this and then say, but here's what we'll do population centric counterinsurgency.
I want to say, are you reading the same book as I am?
I don't, I don't understand because this is, it's so apparent we have not learned anything.
Which really brings us right back to the current question here, because, um, there's a lot of factors in play now, the worst of the Hawks maintain that there's an Al Qaeda presence that necessitates or will necessitate a continuing CIA presence.
And as you mentioned, you know, over the horizon from somewhere air power being brought in.
I don't know.
I mean, it sounds like if you, if you believe what the president said yesterday, which I think I do this to this degree, as of now, they've decided they're not going to continue to back up the Kabul government.
If the Kabul government and the Afghan national army and security forces can't hold together, they can't hold it together.
And that's tough, but they say they still want to keep a presence there.
They're going to have hundreds of Marines and soldiers at the, uh, embassy.
And, uh, they want to keep a CIA presence.
So, but you know what, six months ago, when we talked about this too, six months ago, the post and the times both said that JSOC is embedded with the Taliban fighting ISIS.
So in their own little kind of mini awakening type movement thing here.
So I wonder if you think that's the plan that they're going to actually go ahead and ally with Haqqanzada and the Taliban, as long as they'll keep the, you know, Afghan ISIS down the, which are nothing but Pakistanis anyway, but what do you think about that?
You know, I, I think that most likely we'll do whatever is necessary to avoid any sort of, you know, a sense that Al Qaeda is growing because if that story keeps breaking, cause they'll try, right?
Like there'll be people within the government who will leak it.
And the media trying to say that because Biden got out, you know, if there's an attack or even if there's rumblings of an attack, they'll try to like pin it on us withdrawing.
That's the same old game.
We have shown a willingness to work with the Taliban.
I mean, as like the Taliban's air support, right?
Air spotters, RSF guys, you know, there was those interesting articles we talked about.
I'll tell you what else I think we're going to do.
Talk about back to the warlord war criminal future.
Um, Masood's son, who's like 31 has just coalesced like a new alliance, right?
Call it a Northern alliance, even of, of a different militias.
Uh, and he's leading them.
And then the Hazaras are forming their militias more than ever.
They usually didn't have as many, the Uzbeks, Dostum, the, you know, child rapist and, you know, all the allegations about that and torturer.
Um, that general, he he's also got hit.
In other words, the militias are rising again.
The warlords are rising and the Afghan government now is saying, look, we're going to pull you under our wing because Ghani's desperate, uh, what I think this means is that we are literally going back to the days where the U S we'll probably work through militias as much as through the Afghan government.
And heck, if it comes to battling, suppose that Al Qaeda or ISIS, maybe even working with elements within the Taliban surreptitiously, but we're going back to fracture.
Yeah.
I do worry about this though.
The last thing on this, uh, there's an inertia of inevitability that picks up.
Uh, and also people get tired of war and chaos and anarchy and memories of the 1990s anarchy and civil war, when all those former Mujahideen elements kind of destroyed the country together.
And that civil war is what brought the Taliban on in many ways.
And the people would rather, uh, a Pax Taliban us than the anarchy of this civil war and as these militias form and the government, you know, poisons the well by supporting them, you know, you end up that that's going to, that's going to blow back on the Afghan government's legitimacy.
I'm afraid that in many, many districts of Afghanistan, given the choice between the, the kind of feuding warlords and the wave of Taliban offensive coming, they're going to say, look, I'm just sick of the war.
I don't want to go back to the 1990s.
I'll keep my head down, deal with the Taliban's rules, see what comes.
I'll bet on the peace of the Taliban over the anarchy of the militias.
And I think that's what maybe is coming.
Yeah.
And Hey, if they have a reputation at all, it's law and order to the nth degree.
But, um, you know, in fact, I got criticized, I think for one place in the book, I say, well, they weren't corrupt, but I just meant the local policeman is not allowed to demand bribes from regular citizens all day long and that kind of thing, his job is actually preventing other people from treating people that way and that kind of deal.
So all the corruption, I didn't mean to say they weren't corrupt, you know, in their own way, um, you know, selling drugs for one and obviously, you know, the harshness of their punishments and all of that, but it's the system is fairly distributed in its violence.
It's not, uh, it's not just biased and it's not just a kleptocracy like the government that the U S has created there that, that has no legitimacy at all.
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You know, I wonder too, cause I mean, if you look at the battle map, I don't know if you're following bill Roggio on Twitter, he's just panicking all day long, the guy from the long war journal.
They're like, look, the Taliban are just walking into district after district after district, and they're not taking the provincial capitals because they don't want Biden to change his mind.
They want to wait until, you know, we're all the way gone first, but they've seized the border crossings in the very North of the country.
They've seized almost all of Kunduz.
I guess they seized the city of Kunduz for a little while and then they backed off again.
It seems like they're kind of, you know, on the map, they're heading off the Northern alliance at the pass and going ahead and consolidating a lot of this Northern territory already.
So I wonder when it comes down to Dostum and look, you got Hekmatyar, who's the ally of the Taliban.
He's already sitting right in Kabul already.
Um, but anyway, as far as, as Dostum and the Hazars, whatever, I don't know.
I sent you that video where the Taliban guy's reading the riot act to the Hazars and he's going, listen, a lot of you guys are trying to form malicious against us, well, that didn't do you any good when you had all the American, uh, power to back you up.
What good do you think it's going to do you now?
You better just lay your guns down and accept the new order.
Seem pretty persuasive because the Marines aren't going to be there to help the Hazars anymore, you know, or I guess it was army there, but right.
One of the ways that they're taking these, uh, outlying districts, one of the things Taliban appears to be doing is twofold a it's a Northern offensive, which I think, like you mentioned is meant to cut, to cut off this idea of a North South divide to kind of avoid that.
Like, so they, they know they can consolidate the South later.
So that's why they haven't like taken over Kandahar city just yet.
You know, um, their focus seems to be the North and their other game is a ground game.
It's like the Koch brothers, right?
Didn't they throw a lot of money into like legislatures at the state level and stuff?
The Taliban is going after districts rather than provinces, right?
District centers rather than province centers.
So as a level down, that's ground game.
One of the ways they're taking these district centers, uh, which are usually pretty well armed.
They're kind of like little fortified strategic Hamlet's is they send elders from the area who are fairly respected to walk up to the gate and they do this hundreds of times they've done it.
Uh, or at least dozens and scores of successful times they walk up, they talk to the police commander and they say, here's the deal.
Um, we'll give you safe passage if you hand over your guns and take a video telling us your name, where you're from, whatever your ID card number, uh, and promising not to fight again, like some old school surrender stuff from like the French and Indian war, uh, and we'll let you go otherwise we're slaughtering all of you and, oh, by the way, you're not gonna have the support you need.
And you know, the Afghan government is not able to provide the airlift, et cetera, and it's working.
So they don't always have to fight either to take these areas.
And I think that's the momentum that it picks up.
One quick note about the North.
They're controlling the, one of the key bridge crossings that America built, uh, to Tajikistan.
They've been so successful so far North that over a thousand Afghan troops fled into Tajikistan and Tajikistan, which is the poorest country in central Asia, um, has mobilized 30,000 of their own troops to like go to the border and maybe be prepared for like a refugee flow.
But also presumably, I don't think Taliban would do this to be able to like stop Taliban from coming in.
Uh, this is striking that the Afghan army is retreating across an international border to get away from the Taliban.
Yeah, man.
You know, if they wanted their decent interval, they should've got out a few years ago, Danny, back when I told them to, um, because yeah, they're not going to have, you know, Biden insisted in his talk that this is not the fall of Saigon.
You're not having guys, you know, fleeing from the roof.
No, no, no.
This is six or eight months before that.
That's all this is the parallel to Viet, to the fall of South Vietnam and seems almost perfect.
Really?
And it's not out of the question that could still happen.
I mean, we, we were leaving 650 soldiers.
I read at the embassy, that's an infantry battalions worth of embassy guards, usually an indicator that things aren't going so well in a country when you need that kind of, you know, uh, that kind of support, but you know, what happens when Kabul comes under siege?
If it does, I think that we have to think seriously about, I don't care about the optics very much, but a lot of people do, right?
They're terrified of this fall of Saigon moment.
Um, I look at the fall of Saigon and it's a tragic, you know, scene with the people desperately trying to follow us out and, you know, before whatever they get sent to reeducation camps, everything's going to happen, but the reality is we should've never been in Vietnam and the reality is we should've never stayed in Afghanistan or been in Afghanistan.
So, uh, I mean, the optics don't bother me so much, but if you're worried about that and like everyone is, that could still happen by the way.
And, uh, and there isn't going to be a decent interval Nixon style.
Uh, you know, he got what, two years or so, two years and four months from January of 73 with the Paris accords.
This thing's looking a lot uglier.
A hundred district centers taken in a hundred days.
Um, that's not great.
All right, look, we're all out of time for the KPFK show.
We're going to keep recording, but, uh, and have a long version at scotthorton.org for everybody.
But, uh, this has been anti-war radio for this morning.
That's, uh, the great Danny Sherson, a major and veteran of Iraq war two and Afghanistan.
And he's got this great new piece at antiwar.com.
Spare us an Afghan threequel.
Joe don't get pulled back in is his latest there.
And I'm Scott Horton and you find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton show.
And I host anti-war radio here every Sunday morning from eight 30 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
All right.
Sorry for that interruption, Danny.
Oh, no worries.
So yeah, now there's just so much to this.
You're really at peace with this loss.
Doesn't sound like, you know, you're very regretful there.
What do you think about the rest of the guys that fought over there and how they feel about this now?
I know you cite some polls, but you mentioned that Congressman too, and he's not alone.
You can't ever leave anywhere.
Cause then you lose, man.
Does that not matter to you?
Uh, so it doesn't to me.
I mean, I really am at a point where I look at this whole thing with a bit more sort of like sorrow, confusion and fatalism, uh, I'm at peace with just getting out, I don't spend a whole lot of time anymore and haven't for a long time, really worrying about what the sacrifice was for in terms of my soldiers.
I mean, I worry about it cause I don't think it was for anything.
I think it really was in vain.
And you know, that, that upsets people.
When you say that, that doesn't, I don't think take away from like the bravery of my kids who like literally saddled up every day and never refused.
No matter how bad it got, you know, I will love, love them forever.
Uh, one could call them my blind spot in fact, but I just reject, I think it actually is a bit, um, it's an insult.
I see it.
It's just an opinion personally.
Not everyone agrees with me, by the way, maybe most don't.
I think it's a bit of an insult to like feel that you have to sanitize, uh, what they did or say, well, look, we, we, it has to have been for something.
You can't say it was in vain.
And you know, isn't this horrible what they, you know, what they fought for is being, you know, thrown to, you know, to hell here with the Taliban taking over.
I honestly, I just don't want anyone else to die.
You know, I, I don't want the next bunch of, you know, veterans to be made of a war.
Why?
It's sunken cost fallacy.
Like the idea that because we gave a lot of blood, the only way to wash away that wasted blood is with more expended, hopeless blood.
I mean, that's, that's illogical.
I will say that talking to my Afghan vet buddies, the last few weeks, especially, especially the last few days, uh, most fallen one of two categories, uh, that you've kind of described it's either, um, some of them are very much upset.
Like this is ridiculous.
The places we used to tramp around are now under the control of the Taliban and Biden's cutting and running.
And like, we put so much effort into that.
We made it a little bit better for a little while.
And this is awful.
Um, some of them are like that.
I, I reject that for the obvious sort of, uh, just rational reasons about, you know, uh, and the logical fallacies of it.
And then I think most though, most of my buddies enlisted in an officer, uh, they're out, there's a lot of apathy about it.
There is a lot of like apathy and fatalism.
It's not apathy.
Like they don't care.
It's just resignation as a better word, frustration, alienation.
Like we, we did all this and what was it all for?
And nobody really cared and nobody cares.
Now I cite a poll from last, uh, end of last year, 12% of civilian, non-veteran Americans are, uh, closely say they're closely following Afghan war related news.
I'm surprised.
I'll frankly, I don't even know.
I'm surprised it's that high, which is crazy, but I think there is like an alienation and frustration among our veterans to keep an eye on because, you know, you get rid of the draft and, uh, you make this Praetorian guard, the people don't really care what's going on over there.
The whole thing's a fruitless failure.
Now we're getting out and everyone's arguing the politics of it.
And, uh, there is a certain sense I've gotten from among my, uh, former soldiers and colleagues where it was like, I guess they just feel like I, they don't even want to hear people talking about it.
They, that's, that's one really big subsection.
I'd say maybe 50% feel that way.
Yeah.
You know, um, one of the things that, uh, you mentioned this representative Waltz, which I wasn't familiar with him, but, uh, you say, uh, he was a Green Beret in the war and then he says the quiet part out loud here in, I guess, a fit of desperation that, uh, quote, as our only base sandwiched between China, Russia, and Iran, Afghanistan is a huge strategic asset.
Why are we just giving it away?
You mentioned that earlier that it didn't ours to give away and all that, but the motive there, um, and I know that it's a conspiracy of a million little interests involved, you don't hear this too often, but it comes up from time to time.
If you, especially if you read foreign policy and foreign affairs that, yeah, you know, the real reason we need Bagram is because of Iran, Russia, and China.
But I must be missing something because assuming they could keep Bagram, it's not like they're ever going to station nuclear weapons there or anything like that, that that gives them any kind of advantage against Russia or China in the event of a major war with them.
So what am I missing?
What good does it do the Pentagon from the Pentagon's point of view to have an occupation of Afghanistan adjacent to Iran, Russia, and China in this way?
I mean, he called it, it's our one strategic base between those three countries, right?
Russia, China, and Iran.
And I was thinking, well, if the guy was really thinking, uh, I'd like to substitute, it's our one strategic liability between those three countries.
I mean, someone needs to explain to me, I mean, military thinkers, you know, a salient, you know, from the trench line, like when you, one, one part of your front, like kind of gets some gains, but it's like this little blip that's now surrounded on three sides because nowhere else did that's considered that can be considered like a liability strategically because it can get cut off, et cetera, Afghanistan's an island salient.
Um, I don't understand how having us troops there is actually an asset rather than a life and specifically, uh, specifically with the way that weapons work now, you know, the nuclear weapons being fired from South Dakota, uh, nuclear submarines anywhere.
A lot of this strikes me as old thinking, uh, the military and politicians who run the military policy makers, civilians, they, there are, there's a lot of archaic thing that goes on.
There's a lot of chessboard thinking.
There's a lot of like 19th century, let's move the troops around.
Let's color the map with all our bases, like color our colonies, red thinking.
Um, and that doesn't really cohere with the realities technologically, uh, communications wise, transportation wise.
Uh, I think this is madness.
What representative Waltz said about giving it away and about the base between Russia, China, et cetera, that would have sounded perfectly fine coming out of the mouth of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, one of the great, like high age imperialists that it really would have made sense.
Yeah, this is amazing.
How they're not even embarrassed that this is the land of independence from Great Britain as you know, our foundational event and all of that.
And yet, I mean, go around acting like the British empire in their stead and even with them acting as our junior partners and all these things, and there's no irony or shame or anything embarrassing about it at all.
Just of course, this is how we do business.
I know what we'll do.
We'll send the Brits to Helmand province.
I think we have reason to believe they'll be welcome there.
I don't know.
Right, right.
I mean, I, there was the city and the district of Maywand, which is, uh, the most Western, most district in Kandahar touches, uh, Kelman.
And, uh, there was a big famous battle in, in 1880, uh, the battle of Maywand, uh, where, you know, British Calvary are charging Afghan, you know, riflemen.
And they also had cannons and stuff and there's high casualties.
It was big, dramatic moment.
Like tons of British units have like a battle streamer for the battle of Maywand and Indian units, because a lot of them were fighting for the British.
And I'm thinking like the British were right across.
So as soon as you crossed the border from Western Maywand, which is the end of Kandahar province into Helmand, that's the Brits, you know, for a time for many years, and I was thinking, man, if they know their own history, they know this was like a tortured area, you know, for them, there was also a battle of Kandahar, which, uh, which was another one, uh, that was, that was kind of famous, but yeah, it's, it's, it's actually insane.
The way that we like to sort of repeat these cycles, you know, history doesn't exactly repeat, everything is unique, but there's enough like rhyming and inflection that you almost wonder sometimes, does anyone else see irony, do our policymakers and generals utterly lack the capacity for like nuance and irony, because these are not particularly creative people, it seems because they would have to almost laugh dark, tragicomically laugh at the way that we sort of replay these scripts of failure.
All right.
Well, I think we agree.
I says in my book that look, you say it gives you an advantage against these countries, but I don't see the advantage where you can bomb the belt and road initiative from there.
I mean, the Chinese are not going to build through Afghanistan anyway.
They're going to go north of that.
Uh, if they're allowed to buy the stands to build their highway through there, and then America can bomb it from Missouri anyway, if it comes down a bomb in the damn highway or bomb it from the Indian ocean or whatever it is.
Uh, from Qatar.
Um, but, uh, it just looks like a trip wire for war to me.
I'm like, well, geez, here we are adjacent to Iran, which not that we've had much cross border problems with Iran from Afghanistan this whole time or anything like that, but what the hell is now it's within the realm of possibility.
And in that, I forgot the name of the province there, that skinny little bit that sticks way out to the Northeast and actually borders China.
There, um, you know, to the north of Pakistan, uh, you know, they have, you know, competing interests there, I guess there's potential, uh, problems that could come from, uh, having America in Afghanistan or having, you know, that province under the control of the United States while we're there can use the Uyghurs that the CIA used in Syria and turn them around and use them against China.
So I'm like, so tripwires for war, as you say, strategic liability.
I mean, if you think that that that's an asset, I mean, that's the thing, right?
It's a self-licking ice cream cone.
A strategic liability is a strategic asset.
That's what makes it an asset.
This is something that we could use to get in a fight with, you know?
Well, to avoid one.
Yeah.
You're talking about a body Sean province, which is that weird one that kind of juts North and then cuts really skinny East.
You know, it's touches Tajikistan, Pakistan and China, you know?
Um, I have this bit of a theory.
It's a working one that if you do nothing, you actually end up in a, in a situation like this, do nothing as America do no involvement and you have a better better chance of a positive strategic outcome, which is to say, let Iran and Russia and India and Pakistan, let them all and China, let them all fool around in Afghanistan, let them do the meddling, let them do the worrying about it.
Let them get pulled in in whatever way.
And I promise you, it's probably not going to turn out great for them.
I think as much as they want to maybe, maybe bleed us a little there, maybe see us get kind of like a, you know, a black eye to our like dignity and credibility.
I don't, obviously I don't think they're paying bounties and stuff, but as much as these countries might like, enjoy us spinning our wheels and wasting a little blood and plenty of treasure, um, I don't think they really want to be in charge.
Like, I don't, I think it will turn out poorly for them.
So let's let them do it.
Give them the region, give them Afghanistan and let's see what happens.
I, I will stake everything, but my firstborn son, um, on that, not turning out very, uh, positively for Russia, Iran, China, it's a messy spot.
Let them have it.
Let them have it.
Please.
Um, who thinks China is going to send the red army into occupy Afghanistan and give themselves their own Vietnam right after we've done it to ourselves, you know, in our own way, repeating the lesson we deliberately helped to inflict on the Russians back in the eighties, you know?
And in fact, look, I don't know about China in this, but Iran and Russia have been accused of backing the Taliban, but it's just like we talked about before.
Only for the exact same reason that the Americans started back in the Taliban too, is everybody could tell that America lost and the government that we built there won't be able to stand up.
And so who's going to protect us from the real crazies and the people who are willing to cross borders and set off suicide bombs amongst civilians?
I guess it's going to have to be the Taliban.
So they're doing their awakening.
The Iranians are talking to Taliban.
The Russians are talking to the Taliban.
The Americans are talking to the Taliban, telling them just keep ISIS and al Qaeda down.
It's the universal chorus from all of them.
That's the only reason.
So in what way does that imply that Iran or Russia, uh, much less China have a reason to try to go, you know, send their forces in there when the Taliban won and that's the side that they're already compromising with?
You know, the Taliban and no one really ever likes to admit this because it sounds like you're a Taliban apologist, but traditionally their interest has always been making Afghanistan Islamic, not making the world Islamic.
I mean, the Taliban has always had a very insular kind of view and a generally insular set of goals.
So while on savory and I wouldn't particularly like to live under the Taliban, um, they are, it is, you can deal with them.
I mean, on certain issues, I mean, they want to control Afghanistan.
I I'd rather them not be in charge, of course, but in a world where it's clear they're winning, um, it's been proven even in the past that, you know, they can be dealt with on certain issues.
And it may not be in their interest to be perceived as like a terrorist training camp of a country, because then they're going to get bombed a lot and there might be another intervention.
And even though they know they could probably stick it out and win over the course of another 20 years or wherever long, that's a, that's an ordeal.
That's exhausting, right?
They'd rather, I don't think they really particularly want to deal with that.
And so unless we understand what the Taliban's goals have long been generally, uh, we, we don't know how to, you know, speak intelligently about what's possible in terms of negotiating with them.
Uh, I think that they're a little bit more manageable than people think.
Yeah, seriously.
You know, this is the whole point of that book.
It's a great book, uh, by Kuhn and Lin Shoten, An Enemy We Created, The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan.
And it's all about how bin Laden is like this Leninist who wants to burn the whole damn world down, right?
Uh, and overthrow everything.
But Mullah Omar, well, he already took the capital city.
That means he's a conservative now and he wants revolution in one country like Thomas Jefferson and Joe Stalin.
We got, we pulled it off and we're going to husband our resources.
You know, I read a thing one time about Thomas Paine.
So come on guys, let's take the revolution to Europe.
And Jefferson was like, no, revolution in one country, you know, just like Stalin and Trotsky.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to go ahead and, and destroy ourselves trying to take over the rest of the world when we got what we wanted here, where we're from, you know, pretty easy.
No, I mean, that's, that's the thing.
Bin Laden and Mullah Omar may have, you know, pledged fealty and all that, or, or bin Laden actually pledged fealty to him, uh, at one point, but they were very far apart in their experience, their life experience, in their, uh, in their goals, uh, in their level of success in terms of worldly things.
Like you said, uh, Mullah Omar took the capital.
I mean, I've been in his village.
It ain't much.
You want to talk about Abe Lincoln and his, you know, log cabin, you know, that like the whole rags to riches story, I'm going to get in trouble for making that analogy, but I mean, but I, but I mean, I'm not saying they're the same guy, but this idea of a man who comes from the dusty forgotten corner of his country, right, that like, I mean, this guy reached the zenith of worldly power in his world of Afghanistan.
You know, bin Laden's this transnational professional revolutionary, right.
He's like, uh, you know, like Thomas Paine, right.
Who like he, when the American revolution's over, Thomas Paine doesn't know what to do with himself.
He's like, oh, I guess I gotta go to France and get involved over there.
He ends up in their legislature, you know, the revolutionary, uh, uh, you know, whatever it was called.
They, they're, they're assembly.
Uh, and almost gets his head cut off by the way, when Rose fear comes in.
But, um, you know, they're two very different guys.
Yeah.
He was in prisons for a while, like up in one of the towers, you know, like the old school King ones.
And like, he was like maybe going to be killed and, uh, can't remember how he was saved.
There was some intervention, someone intervened, but the, uh, you know, they were very different guys.
And I think it's very important to understand that when one looks at the Taliban, um, the Taliban are conservatives for sure.
And I don't mean in terms of, you know, they like to cut heads off conservative.
I mean, they're conservative in the sense that they, uh, they have a degree of discipline.
Sure.
They're a hybrid outfit.
Sure.
They're multifaceted.
That's no doubt about that.
It, what we call Taliban with a big T is not always the reality on the ground.
In my experience, especially in the local area where it's like a coalition of people.
But they do have discipline.
They do have a rank structure.
They do have a diplomatic element, um, and they want to survive and they want to thrive and they want their experiment to be possible and they want that experiment to endure and it's limited to, you know, revolution in one country.
All of what we're talking about right now is to say that of course Russia would deal with them because we lost.
Of course, Iran will deal with them.
Of course, China will deal with them.
And of course the United States will, as well as India and Pakistan, no matter how much they love them or hate them respectively, because the realities on the ground are that the Taliban will be a factor, their resiliency and their popularity, right, popularity, not everybody who supports the Taliban supports Taliban because they believe in everything they do, but a lot, a lot of rural Afghans, and I talked to thousands of them in, yeah, just one province, but they may not even like the violence.
They may not even be, they may be kind of tired of the war.
A lot of civilians I talked to, but they would basically say, well, their worldview basically coheres with ours, like socially, religiously, culturally, surely more than yours does.
And guess what?
More than those Uzbek and Tajik soldiers that don't even speak our language that walk around with you do.
And I got colonels telling me that the solution to this problem is to put Afghan soldiers, put an Afghan soldier between you and the problem, put an Afghan face on it.
They would say this out loud.
And I'd say, what do you mean by Afghan?
You mean this Hazara kid who looks like a Mongol next to me, who is as foreign to these people, these Pashtuns in the South, almost as foreign as I am.
Right.
And the idea that an Afghan is an Afghan is an Afghan.
No, not true.
The Taliban is popular.
Not everywhere and not always a hundred percent, but no one ever likes to talk about that.
Everyone wants to act like, well, there's 30,000 Taliban fighters.
There's a hundred thousand, whatever the number is.
And it's like, they're like the anomaly and everybody else is just gets conquered.
No, I guess we have no choice.
And isn't it a shame America couldn't save them from conquest?
And I want to say, yeah, you know, like huge swaths of the Afghan population will always support something similar.
To what the Taliban is, whatever it's called.
And that means here in the real world, we're gonna have to grapple with something like them and all the states in the region.
Yep.
All right.
Well, man, we're all out of time.
I wanted to ask you all about Iraq and Syria and all these things, but we'll just have to do another interview maybe next week if you're available.
Yeah, absolutely.
I got to talk about there cause it ain't over yet.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's another one.
The, uh, the rocket magnet of a mission.
We'll have to talk about that next week for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, everybody, it's Danny Sherson, regular writer at antiwar.com.
Spare us an Afghan three equal Joe.
Don't get pulled back in is his latest and his latest book, a true history of the United States.
Thanks very much, Danny.
Thanks for having me.
Talk soon.
