For Pacifica Radio, July 18th, 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 I'm the 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, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
All right, today's guest is Ron Ensweiler.
He is a Harvard MBA and MIT graduate, U.S. Air Force veteran, and also worked for USAID and the State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan in the late Bush and early Obama era, I guess it's fair to say.
He wrote the book, When Will We Ever Learn?
What Our National Security State Got Wrong in Its Wars of Choice and How to Deconstruct the War State.
And he's got this great new article at antiwar.com, Iraq and Afghan Wars, Requiem for America's Ineffectual War State.
Welcome back to the show, Ron.
How are you doing, sir?
Hey, Scott, great to be back on your program.
And great talking with you every time.
So let's get started.
All right.
Well, so you did have a front row seat for the Iraq and Afghan wars.
But can you describe it?
What exactly was your job or different jobs that you had in these wars and your experience here?
Well, in both cases, I was a field level civilian advisor, really spending taxpayer money doing what we of course now call nation building.
And in most cases, I lived and worked on military bases with the military.
I did live three years in a guesthouse in Kabul when I was in Afghanistan.
And at that point in a contractor role, I ran a program that got me out and about more.
But my reflection back on these wars, Scott, and as I cover in my book, I actually was in the military at the end of the Vietnam War.
So I have a little bit of experience in history.
I never went to Vietnam, but I went to Guam and we bombed North Vietnam in December of 72.
So I think the most, you know, memorable moment I can think of, Scott, was one day I was at in Kandor Airfield, in the dormitory there where the State Department advisors live.
We're pretty close to the runway where the planes were taking off.
So I heard an F-16 take off on a bombing run.
I remember thinking to myself, wow, I was doing this 42 years ago.
We were flying bombing missions in, you know, on countries in Asia, trying to involve ourselves in their civil affairs, you might say.
And we just haven't learned anything, which was kind of the impetus for my book.
And again, the, you know, I got to observe the military in operation at the field level.
I was not a career person, so I wasn't really trying to, you know, play any games there.
And I just, in both wars, in the article you referred to, I just document as a, if I were a management consultant trying to tell the Army and the Navy, excuse me, the Army and the Air Force, what they should be doing going forward in the national policy establishment.
It's definitely get out of these land wars and interventions and quit bombing people and adopt a much less interventionist foreign policy, which, of course, your book covers that in terms of the war on terror.
But this goes back, Scott, the other aspect of my life that I do cover in my book is the fact that I also served on an ICM base in South Dakota.
And I also was a soldier in NATO for two years.
And those are also, you know, money being spent from things that just don't make America any safer and need to reduce our federal deficit by taking a big whack at the defense budget, which is what I cover in my book.
Yeah.
Well, those Minuteman missiles, that'll have to be a different interview, but it is such an important subject.
We have talked about that on the show recently with some experts about how unnecessary and dangerous those are, those missile silos.
But so now on Iraq and Afghanistan, I mean, I guess sort of the frame of the article here, Ron, is that the Afghan war is over, or at least the American war to try to prop up and keep the government in Kabul and its army is over.
And, you know, I think they still want to have a limited what they call counterterrorism mission there.
So it's not completely over yet.
Although that kind of smacks to me of a future, or maybe even present and continuing alliance with the Taliban against ISIS, Khorasan, something like that, which I'm opposed to, but at least it's a much smaller writ than propping up the government of Kabul.
But so that war is not quite over yet, but it sort of is.
And then the Iraq war is also not quite over yet.
And I guess it's been a few weeks since I read that troops had still gone out, you know, had gone out on missions against ISIS.
But I think it was just a few weeks ago, maybe six weeks ago or something, at least that they were still going out on missions against, you know, the remnants of the Sunni insurgency there, basically, while they're also in danger of getting into a real fight with the Shiite militias that they installed in power there in the war that you observed, as you write about here.
And so neither of these wars is really over.
We're in Iraq war three and a half now, I guess, after the ISIS war and one big Afghanistan disaster that's just now wrapping up.
But so you want to pick one or the other first?
Let's talk about Iraq first.
Everybody knows that Iraq was bad.
And yeah, we shouldn't have done that.
And it didn't work out so well.
But what exactly happened?
You write about it in this article and really explain who's who and why it mattered so much, I think.
Well, you know, the strategic mistake, of course, was not recognizing in advance that Saddam, being the dictator and strongman he was, was held the factions in that country together, the Shiites, the Shiite and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds in the north.
And, you know, once you took that out, Scott, it was just going to be a free fall for, you know, retribution for 24 years of brutal rule.
And, of course, the other sort of, of course, I was involved in this too, you know, tried to put in a democracy, which, okay, that made kind of what our foreign policy objectives were.
But when the Shiites, which are the ones that are aligned with Iran, or 60% of the population, and Iran wants you out of there, you know, right away, we obviously set up a situation where the government we put in was the real beneficiary to Iran.
And, you know, then they basically wanted the US soldiers out as soon as possible, which is why they left as soon as this so-called surge was over.
And, you know, then there was bound to be a civil war against the warring factions.
And that kind of, you know, morphed into ISIS on the Sunni side.
And as you mentioned, the Shiite militias on the Iranian side.
So, you know, we just made a big mess of the whole place.
And, again, when I wrote my book, you know, in the article, I kind of, you know, I lived that thing every day for two years, read every article, you know, stayed really involved.
And I just knew that this idea that the surge was working was not true.
I was in, I think it was Ramadi or Fallujah when McCain came through and claimed that, you know, it was all a safe place, and you can walk down the street with no body armor.
Of course, what they didn't show you was the snipers on the roof and the Apache helicopter gunships flying around to take out anybody that might resist that.
So there was just the fraud that was perpetuated on the public.
The fact that the outcome was never going to be favorable to the U.S. And then, of course, they had the, you know, then they started, when Obama did come in and took out, they stayed with the Status for Forces Agreement that had been negotiated by the Bush administration.
And I make a real point in my article of saying what the neocons forget about that agreement was that it really was the Shiite cleric who was the most respected person in the country, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sitani, that really approved that deal and got the Shiite population to go for it, and the prime minister and the political enemies there.
So any idea that they could change that agreement without going back, without turning it into basically a holy war to get the U.S. soldiers out of their sacred lands was exactly what was going to happen.
So Obama did the right thing in getting out of there.
Now, yes, we had to go back a couple of years later and help quell ISIS.
And that's kind of interesting, Scott, because our enemy, the Iranians, and as you mentioned, they're Shiite-backed militias, all of a sudden became our allies.
Matter of fact, Soleimani was, you know, kind of running that war, basically.
So that kind of is interesting now, you know, got strange bedfellows there.
But so, you know, Scott, you said it right.
It's never going to be, it's a never-ending religious feud conflict that has no strategic interest to the United States whatsoever.
And as soon as someone gets elected to office or Congress finally wakes up and realizes our presence in the Middle East, particularly Iraq and that area, is what's causing all the violence and turbulence and other things that are just so unsettling.
And, you know, the only answer is just to get out of there.
And I'm glad to see some foreign policy thinkers are starting to put that position out there.
Not much support yet in the Congress.
And, you know, Biden, I got to give him credit, by the way, because he actually did oppose the surge in Iraq.
So he kind of had the right idea that those were three separate entities in there.
And he kind of, maybe a more Federalist approach to that might have worked out better back in 07, 08, instead of sending another 100,000 soldiers in.
But that didn't happen.
So maybe there's some hope with this administration that eventually, and of course, Hillary Clinton's gone and Robert Gates is gone.
They were the big war hawks that got the surges in both those countries pushed through, that maybe something will happen there.
So, you know, we're still at the Al-Assad airbase.
So that's, I think someday they're going to want, al-Satan is going to want us out of there.
So hopefully that's coming up pretty soon.
Yeah, that's interesting, because I guess, you know, the Iraqi parliament has voted to kick us out, although the Americans have negotiated their stay.
And I don't know if you saw this, but on Twitter yesterday, a BBC reporter said, Oh, the Americans are leaving, according to my Iraqi sources.
And then a few minutes later, Oh, yeah, no, the Americans say no, they're not.
Yeah, this is kind of an ongoing thing.
And, but you know, there's this really powerful narrative, and which has helped to keep us in Afghanistan and everywhere else too, which is, and you know, for the likes of Marco Rubio, or whichever hawks in DC, with their little talking points, you know, Sean Hannity on Fox, whatever, we say, Well, yeah, but when we left Iraq, when Obama got us out of Iraq, that was the worst thing he ever did was remove troops from anywhere.
Because then that is what led to the rise of ISIS and the creation of the Islamic Caliphate.
But they always leave out the part, almost always leave out the part where Obama backed Al-Qaeda in Syria for three years before, you know, the ISIS split off from Al-Qaeda and seized the eastern part of the country.
And then another year before, I mean, still essentially backing the same effort for another year before they rolled into Western Iraq.
So you could blame Bush for creating a government, a Shiite government in Baghdad that had no real interest in dominating the Sunni regions out west, but just kind of cut them loose, which was a huge error, but that was that part of it.
But the rise of the Islamic Caliphate in that space could never have happened if it wasn't for American and Saudi and Qatari and Israeli and Jordanian and Turkish support for the terrorists in the Syrian dirty war there.
And for them to leave that out, and I say almost always leave that out, because Donald Trump, when he was running for president, because he had Mike Flynn as an advisor who had been head of the DIA, which the guy's completely crazy, but he was right about this, that, you know, it's because Obama backed the Al-Qaeda guys in Libya and then in Syria.
And also he had pulled the troops out of Iraq.
And it was those three policies together that helped to lead to the rise of the Islamic State.
But once Flynn was gone, he always would leave out those first two parts and say, well, the lesson of ISIS is you can never leave anywhere.
But the reality is now there's, what, dozens, maybe, scores of what's left of ISIS, of, you know, individual men fighting for what's left of, you know, old Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And if the U.S. left now, there's no caliphate coming, not without another dirty war in Syria.
There's not, right?
Well, Iran would remember they're their archenemy.
So the Iranian militias would take care of them and Iran would support that.
And, you know, as I, so that's kind of, kind of interesting.
I remember in my article, I do critique the army's self-assessment report on the Iraq war.
But one thing they did get right, Scott, they admitted that their only, their winner in the Iraq war was Iran.
I mean, we basically gave them a green light to go, you know, take more control of the Middle East, take more control over basically most of Iraq and have more influence in the region and whatever other issues we have with Iran.
We certainly created, you know, created a vacuum that they filled and that kind of shows the fallacy of thinking you're going to go in and do something constructive in any of these interventions because the politics and the history and the culture was just too complicated.
We don't understand it.
We don't understand Islam.
That was one of my big takeaways from living in both countries for eight years is we don't anything about that.
We think like, we think like Americans and that's just not the mentality and the way they react and think to things.
Yeah.
Never even mind the doctrines of the religion as much as just even who's who, right?
We're like, you know, Danny Sherston and his group went to East Baghdad and Danny was smart enough to tell his commanding officer, I mean, he's a major and he's telling his colonel, Hey, these are the guys we're fighting for.
So we don't have to be mean to them and we don't have to lord it over them.
This is kind of our, you know, this is the group that we're putting in power.
And his colonel's like, I don't care about that.
I want to go out there and get some, come on boys, saddle up.
And they go out there and pick a fight with the slaughterists having no idea about which faction is what or whatever.
This guy's a Muslim who looked at me funny.
That's bad enough, you know?
Well, that was characteristic in both wars.
The commanders, even field level commanders, certainly the four stars and three stars, but the field level commanders would come in on a nine month tour basically and need to do something to look good and have a good officer evaluation report.
And it didn't matter if it made any sense in the larger picture, they didn't understand because they didn't have enough background, not enough continuity.
So both wars were just poorly executed at the field level, the operational level, because of the way they ran their rotations, these big massive bases that everyone lived on that were heavy footprints and caused all sorts of logistical and security problems.
I mentioned how we had to employ thousands of these third country Asian workers in what were basically almost like slave labor conditions on base.
So, because you couldn't trust the locals to come work on the base and do the menial jobs.
So that was the whole thing was just a poorly executed plan.
And again, if there's going to be a takeaway lesson, it's just don't get involved in any more major land and air warfare.
And that was kind of the bigger takeaway of my article was that I didn't like it that the army denied they lost the Iraq war.
I mean, to me, I didn't really care about that in terms of their own institutional pride or whatever, but the fact that it kind of leads the American public and the Congress to think that we could do another one of these big wars.
And that was the same with Afghanistan, because they had all sorts of excuses why we didn't win in Afghanistan.
Remember, they blamed Pakistan and all this stuff.
If they don't, if someone doesn't fess up and some accountability and responsibility for the fact that this intervention, this foreign policy has put us on track to another, and we maintain this massive military base structure and force structure.
We have 10 army combat divisions ready to go.
I mean, I'm not having any idea what armor and infantry divisions are going to be doing any point in the future.
So I mean, it's just the fact that no one is fessing up to the missteps, the failed policies, the mismanagement.
No real political officer had their careers ruined or set back.
You could argue maybe McChrystal in Afghanistan, but it's only because he publicly criticized Obama.
But everyone else got just skated through, got promoted.
And it just doesn't look good in terms of trying to avoid a fifth major land war in Asia in my lifetime.
And that concerns me quite a bit.
And as I said, I think we need more accountability for these wars.
We need to recognize that it's just not in US strategic interest anymore to maintain a big military.
And I mean, besides the budgetary negative impacts, it just creates this idea that we have this instrument we can use and apply to resolve problems or deal with our own self-made foreign affairs issues.
And it doesn't look good going down the road if they think that someday we're going to have another major air and land war using the army and military.
The advice I give the foreign policy establishment, someone's got to step up and start deconstructing this whole thing, because it's just it's just putting us on a freight train to World War III.
And I kind of, you know, I hate to see that for my children and grandchildren.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder.
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Well, OK, so let's talk about the buildup against the major powers maybe in a minute, but let's switch to Afghanistan for now.
What do you think about all the statements about, well, we have to leave some CIA and some contractors and special operators and air power and something because the safe haven myth and the bad guys could come back?
And what if the Taliban decided to let them?
And then what?
What do you think?
That's all, you know, spin by the Defense Department justifying you and I talked about this Scott before, you know, justifying keeping Bagram Air Base as a strategic asset, which is what finally, you know, Trump couldn't get that taken away from the military.
But I give Biden credit for following through and actually getting out to the point where, you know, Bagram is gone now.
So that's that Scott basically is a point in a return in terms of having any major military presence in the country.
So I do think they will have covert operators and probably some CIA presence.
But we have that all over the your book points out.
Yeah, that was in 80 countries around the world.
So hopefully it's no more than that.
I mean, honestly, and this is what people don't understand.
The Taliban are fundamentalist Sunnis.
You know, there's sect that comes from the Wahhabism out of Saudi Arabia.
They don't like these.
They're not jihadist.
That's a different version of the Islam.
So they're not they don't like Arabs in their country.
And so there's no pretty good track record of Taliban pushing ISIS people out just because they don't want them in their country.
They're very anti foreigner, no matter who that person is.
So I think that's a self police, self policing situation without Taliban now more in control of things.
So that's doesn't know that that's never going to be any reason why you need to go back in there.
I don't think.
I think it's so important that I want that out.
Ron, I saw a thing.
Someone sent me a thing from conservative HQ, which is, I guess, Richard Vickery's group.
And it was Biden surrenders to Sharia law.
And it's about how everybody knows.
And he doesn't elaborate at all, but just everybody knows that the Taliban are bent on world conquest.
And apparently, you know, next stop after Kabul is Berlin.
I don't know.
And so we you know, we got to head them off that pass.
And so but I just know that that ain't right.
But can you talk a little bit more about the differences in the in the ideology between the bin Ladenites and the Taliban?
Certainly.
And by the way, I wrote this is a big emphasis in my article in my book that we call the Taliban terrorist.
They aren't terrorists.
They are people that live in the Pashtun Wali Honor Code and lived in that part of the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan for centuries.
They're not.
Most of them are illiterate.
Most of them don't have electricity, no access to major media.
They're fighting to keep their way of life the way they've always had it.
That's only been their ever interesting concern.
They let the Al Qaeda come in with Osama to drive out the Soviets.
That was the only and we supported that, too, of course.
So and then, you know, they don't hang around, which is a mistake.
But that was just, you know, the way their culture worked.
So there's no idea.
I mean, this idea that we want it, we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them over here.
Guess what, Scott?
No, I have no idea where over here is.
It is just so fraudulent to put them up to some sort of international organization with any sort of military capability.
They just run around in their pickup trucks with their AK-47s.
I mean, it's not it's not anything.
The warlords are over there doing the same thing.
So it's just that's the culture.
It makes no sense.
It didn't make for 10.
We could.
Everyone knows I've heard some people say this recently.
If we had left after 04, 05, you know, after we drove out the Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, put in the first Karzai government and just left, it would have been that would have been a good military mission and the right geopolitical situation.
But our military got too ambitious.
They wanted another big land war.
They wanted a big military bases, just like they did in Iraq.
They built five big air bases there.
They built two big ones in Afghanistan and they built them to stay.
And that's kind of what someone had to finally stop.
So there's no reality.
Ideologically, they're not they're not anything opposed to American culture or our way of life or anything.
They have no idea they want to change us or have any involvement with us.
They just want us out of their lands.
And that's why there is you're never going to negotiate a peace agreement.
The peace agreement was you guys leave our country and then we'll work out our own problems.
And I might mention that I just got I still have some friends over there from when I worked there six or eight years ago.
And I just got a bag room, one bag room.
They vacated a bag room, Scott, in the last couple of weeks, I guess it was one of my guys over there that worked in that part in Panjshir, which is that part of Afghanistan.
He told me how thrilled they were.
Matter of fact, they are staging a peace march.
So, again, there's a core of Afghan people that aren't extremist and they're reasonably well educated and etc.
And I trained, I worked with some of them when I was a mentor over there for four years.
So they can they're going to work out something, you know, and it's best that we're not there trying to dictate something because that creates the wrong result.
But I have confidence that they'll structure this thing correctly.
There won't be a safe haven for terrorists.
There'll be the drug trade.
There'll be all sorts of activities going on involved with that.
But they have no military capability and no international ideas about anything.
So I just hope that we recognize our mistake for going in there and staying and don't have some idea that all that money spent and all the lives lost and all the destruction of that country, someone has to reflect back on that and realize we got to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Yeah.
Well, and for listeners who are old enough, remember back to how even in the very first weeks after the attack, they were so happy.
Our government was so happy to conflate Al-Qaeda with the Taliban.
And actually, I don't know how long it took me to finally figure this out, that was a big reason for the 9-11 Truth or Movement is it just didn't make sense that these illiterate hillbillies from the town of Bedrock on the far side of the world would attack us because they hate that we're free and all this stuff.
It just the whole thing was so absurd that people were ready to believe that it must have just been Dick Cheney remote controlling the planes in there.
Correct.
And by the way, the truth is only two of the hijackers, Mohammed Ada and one other one, I can't remember his name, actually went to Tarnak Farms in Kandahar there and met with Obama there.
That was his headquarters.
And they did their I mean, and that's kind of the only time any of the hijackers ever was in Afghanistan was just a couple of weeks at that period of time.
And of course, the interesting side story on that this is all, you know, we have we have surveillance on this shows you how we have so much surveillance, we can take care of things without being there.
We knew they were there.
We knew Osama was going to meet with the governor at the governor's palace a couple of days later.
They had a hit on them ready to go.
And someone got cold feet and pulled it off.
So I mean, a lot of this, a lot of these wars is just complete intelligence failures that let things happen that got out of control.
But you're totally correct.
There was never there's never a great affinity between the Afghans who are not Arabs, and the Sunni jihadist.
Yes, they share Sunni Islam, but it's different versions of it.
And the Taliban one is sort of called the quietest version.
They're more methodical.
They're very devout.
They don't really, you know, have any idea they're going to proselytize other people to convert to their religion, that sort of thing.
So it's just it's just you're a complete phony narrative that they somehow or another were a threat in any way, shape or form to America that we had to launch this war and stay there for 20 years.
I'm sorry, it's Ron Enzweiler.
We're almost out of time here.
But I just want to point out real quick that about half a year ago, the New York Times and the Washington Post covered the fact that JSOC was working with the Taliban.
They even had a plaque in their office, Taliban Air Force, as they were flying air cover for the Taliban fighting against ISIS.
So that goes to show the separation in those movements kind of right there.
But just at the very end here, if you could comment on, you know, Dostum and, you know, the different leaders of the warlords of the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Hazars, are they really going to be able to sit down under a tree and shake hands and make a deal with the Taliban?
Or are we looking at a return to the late 90s civil war here?
Or how bad do you think?
I think it's more of a ladder that there'll be warring factions in Afghanistan.
It's really territorial-based domination that the warlords have and to some extent the Taliban.
I see, you know, the idea of Kabul almost not, there's no going to be, there's going to be no central government in Kabul.
The country will devolve into territories run by different ethnic and tribal leaders.
And, you know, they'll have their battles back and forth, but it's nothing.
And there'll be maybe hopefully some modernization of their society and that sort of thing.
But, you know, they got to do that their own way, their own time.
So I, and I don't, there's no international concern about that.
I mean, it's just the way they've always lived.
I mean, it's never really been a unified country.
So they're very proudful about keeping foreigners out, but they, so I don't, I think that's, we'll end up, Scott, we'll, there'll be some, you know, Taliban will have some nominal control over some things, but they don't, they don't, they can't run a government.
They're not really that type of people.
All right, you guys, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
Gotta run.
But it's Ron Ensweiler.
He's got this, well, first of all, he's the author of the book, When Will We Ever Learn About the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
And then check out this great piece at Antiwar.com that he wrote for us last week, Iraq and Afghan Wars, Requiem for America's Ineffectual War State.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
I've got 5,500 interviews for you at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
