All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, famous whistleblower of the Afghan war from the year 2012, and in fact, I typed in Daniel Davis, 2012, to look up some old stuff here.
Here's the New York Times, an Afghan war officer becomes a whistleblower, and although the way I remember it, wasn't it the Washington Post that got the first big story, Daniel?
No, it was the New York Times.
Oh, it was the New York Times.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, I screwed that up.
Well, that was the big one, and he's been telling the truth about the wars ever since then.
Now, Danny was in the big tank battle of Iraq War I.
He also was in Iraq War II and Afghanistan, and in 2012, if I remember right, I don't remember the exact title, but you're basically a resupply officer in charge of traveling up and down and back and forth across the length and breadth of Afghanistan, making sure everybody has enough grenades and this kind of thing was the role that you were in at that time.
Is that correct?
Close enough.
Bottom line is it required me to travel throughout the country to talk to all the combat troops all the way through.
And including Army and Marines and whoever around, huh?
Mainly just Army.
Mainly Army.
Okay.
So at that time, there was Army and Helmand too, not just Marines, right?
At the time, actually, there was only Marines in Helmand.
I never actually went to Helmand because there were no Army troops there at the time.
Oh, okay.
I guess I don't know when they pulled them out then.
Anyway, I'm an idiot.
Nevermind.
But okay, so you went everywhere but Helmand.
That's right.
And so then the point of it was, as I remember it, that David Petraeus said, listen, we've made some progress.
Now it's fragile and reversible, but boy, is it progress.
And were you risking getting in trouble breaking ranks the way you did?
Or you got enough privilege as an officer to come outside of the chain of command the way you did and go public?
I risked all kinds of trouble because I had seen a whole list of people who'd done something similar that I had done and gotten in a lot of trouble and, man, it don't matter what any regulations say, you know, when you start getting into the bailiwicks of general officers and the war policy and making the news, it could go south in a hurry.
I just honestly got kind of lucky I had a lot of people helping me out and trying to keep the heat off.
And so I was really lucky in that I didn't get in any real trouble.
So it worked out all right.
It's a hell of a message though, right?
Because what you were saying was, I'm hearing something from David Petraeus.
I'm seeing David Petraeus testify under oath before American lawmakers.
And I know what's going on in Afghanistan.
And I'm here to tell you that that ain't true.
And he owes you the truth, right?
That was the bottom line of it.
If it was just one guy, if it was like just David Petraeus, it might not have been as big a deal because maybe others were telling the truth.
But unfortunately, he was just like the lead cheerleader and everybody followed his lead.
And so there was lying up and down the line, senior department of defense officials, undersecretaries of defense for various other departments, everybody was telling the same story.
And I mean, it wasn't like, well, they're just being optimistic.
I'm telling you, it was night and day different what was actually going on the ground and what they were reporting.
And so that's part of that.
That's really, I think you can say the genesis of the disintegration of the Afghan forces right now.
Because if we had told the truth back then, we would have had a chance to maybe change our strategy or to maybe say, you know what, this is not going to work.
We're going to conduct a phased withdrawal over a very predictable period of time, get everybody to get a chance to wrap their heads around it, coordinated, professionally conducted withdrawal, and it's going to come down, which by the way, I actually argued in 2017.
If we had done that, we could have gotten that a long time ago.
Now they still may have ended up kind of like this, but it wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad as we're seeing right now.
But because we kept the fiction all the way through.
And now then you see people like Mike Pompeo, you see John Allen just in the news today are both, you know, now pointing all the fingers of blame at Joe Biden and not any of it on themselves and the things that they did to absolutely dig this hole.
And that's what, as you can probably tell, kind of aggravates me a little bit.
Yeah.
And I love that joke.
Mike Pompeo, who was Donald Trump's secretary of state and the boss of Zalmay Khalilzad, who negotiated the withdrawal deal.
And then he wants to attack and say, you know, essentially what a bad move this is for Biden to carry out that deal that was signed under his own auspices personally.
And let me just throw one more thing out there, because these deserve some credit here for something, is that they negotiated this in February 2020.
We still had 14 months to execute that.
And if the State Department and the Department of Defense had held the feet of the Pentagon to the fire and said, hey, this is a withdrawal, start moving, then this could have been done a whole lot better.
And the Afghan government and military would have had time to prepare mentally for this and physically.
Instead, nobody did anything.
So Pompeo helped negotiate this deal and then did not lift a finger to make sure it was actually implemented and in fact, turned a blind eye to the fact that it wasn't being implemented.
So let's start with that and then we can go forward.
Right.
Because their plan was to roll Joe Biden and make him cancel the withdrawal and escalate instead.
I think that was what they were trying to do.
It could have been.
Yeah.
Well, seen it over and over again, hadn't we?
And so something should be said here for, you know, in a way, I think it's pretty obvious that it's not just all of the people crowing in the media, but that there must be real pressure on him from the Pentagon now and for the last few months and since he was inaugurated to not do this.
And he seems to really be holding firm against that.
And I know there are caveats.
He wants to leave CIA and JSOC and keep bombing them from Diego Garcia or Qatar or whatever it is.
But I don't think all that's going to last too long into the future.
But yeah, I'm insisting on there's no doubt about it.
I mean, you saw both retired generals, active generals, you know, given testimony before Congress and various committees from the time of the inauguration all the way up until the time he made his decision.
They were all saying, you know, we need to either keep what we got or maybe even add a few more, which some were actually saying.
So they put a lot of pressure on him.
And now, of course, there's even more pressure put on him.
Look, I think that this was conducted in a really bad way.
The way we did this, like I said, it was not done to give the people of Afghanistan a chance to not coordinate very well with our allies.
This should have been done a lot better.
But it was absolutely the right thing to do, should have been done a long time ago.
And I got to say that, at least on that regard, Biden deserves some credit for not giving into the pressure so far.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
OK, hang on just one second.
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All right, now, so listen, I think you probably knew this anyway, even if you've forgotten that the title of my book, Fool's Error, comes from a discussion with you on the show.
I think I kind of proposed the question that if we had better generals, not the great American fraud David Petraeus and the war criminal torturer Stanley McChrystal, but somebody competent at their job, and if they had, I don't know, an extra couple of hundred thousand men to work with there, could it have been done right?
Was there a path to victory somewhere that Petraeus had just missed or was the whole damn thing just a fool's error and all along?
And you chose the latter there and said that no, even the best general with the most troops still couldn't do it.
So please explain why that is, if I remember that anecdote right, which I'm pretty sure I do because I named my book after that conversation.
Tell me, what's the problem?
Why didn't it work?
Because the US Army can do anything.
Yeah, because the fundamentals were just not in place for anything to be solved with military power.
When George Bush first went in there, he gave a militarily accomplishable mission, damaged the Taliban and disrupted the Al Qaeda's ability to conduct international terrorism.
Those were absolutely accomplished by March of 2002.
In fact, there was no more fighting from March 2002 really until the early part of 2004, I suppose, is when you really look at the charts, because there was no enemy left to fight.
We didn't just defeat the Taliban.
We annihilated them.
They were not even, they were no longer an entity that existed in any form.
So that's when we should have left.
Instead, Bush changed the mission officially to a nation-building mission.
And now then he gave the military unattainable objectives, things that couldn't even be accomplished with the military.
They were aspirations that maybe a State Department organization might have followed, but not military.
So you baked in tactical failure.
There's no way that the military could have accomplished the missions that they were given.
We probably could have done a less bad job than we had done, but that's neither here nor there, because this was going to end badly.
And let me give you just a real quick recent caveat or a snapshot of the same kind of situation.
Some people asked me yesterday if we had kept these 2,500 in, if Biden had listened to the generals and not pulled them out, would we have been able to go on forever?
And I think the answer is no, because the Taliban over the last five years has been progressively taking territory, and they've been setting the stage for a big offensive operations that they're doing right now.
They just accelerated it.
Even if we had stayed here, this was still going to happen, because the core of the Afghan government and their military is rotten, as can possibly be, so there's nothing to build it on.
That's why they have exploded in all this territory.
Let me just point this out real quick.
It's not that there's this big Taliban army that's washing over this country, and they're defeating the ANDSF in battles.
Most of these places, there's not even a fight.
They just hand it over.
They walk in.
They take it.
They negotiate a surrender, or they just run.
That's why this is collapsing so fast, because they're not even fighting, because the institution is so corrupt inside that they're not willing to die for something that they don't think is going to succeed.
That's really the biggest condemnation of everything we've been doing, is that after 20 years, they don't think that the government is worth fighting for, and that they don't feel like their military has been designed and built to actually engage in combat.
Yeah, well, and yeah, that's the other thing we're not seeing, right, is a giant wave of 300,000 men in the Afghan National Army to take care of this problem, because they don't exist.
They're all ghost soldiers.
To hear Biden and his people keep repeating that number, well, don't worry.
We can get out of there, because we're leaving a 300,000-man-strong army behind.
Yeah.
No, we're not.
Yeah, but look, it's probably 225,000, so it's still a decent number.
This is, I think, what's right now, anyway, the core issue for me in terms of, let's continue this withdrawal.
If these guys are not even going to fight for their own country, then why in God's name do I want to risk American lives to fight for their country?
If they can't fight for their country, we shouldn't either.
If that's the case, then the Taliban's going to rule them.
It's all a matter of will.
Who wants it worse?
Right now, without any question, it's the Taliban.
Yeah, well, and it's the Taliban's country, too.
This whole time, they've talked like the Taliban are foreign invaders from beyond the moon or whatever, but no, we're the foreign invaders.
They're the ones who are from there, not from all parts of the country, but they even have a stronghold up near Kunduz.
There's a strong Pashtun population there where they had been relocated back in the 1920s and have this separate sort of beachhead up there beyond the lines or whatever.
I'll tell you what, though, I think the fall of the Afghan government and its military forces and the rest is obviously imminent here.
I don't know exactly how long it's going to take for Kabul to fall and what that's going to look like, but I was talking to Patrick Coburn the other day and he was saying, oh, I was telling him about this video I saw where the Taliban had taken over this Hazara district and he's reading the riot act to all the local Hazara elders and telling them, welcome to the new world order, boys, you know, and all this kind of thing.
And I was mentioning that to Patrick and he said, yeah, that that may be in that one circumstance, but there's still five million Hazaras.
And so there may still be some very bitter fighting for the center of that country.
And and for and, you know, they're there, they were having brunch.
I don't know if you saw this, the Taliban guys all drinking from fancy teacups and stuff having brunch in Dostum's Palace up near, I forgot, Mazar-e-Sharif or somewhere up there in the north.
But I mean, there must be some places where, well, I don't know.
I mean, they said the major warlord of Herat just gave up, handed over his AK and said, OK, let's be friends after all.
And so maybe they'll take over the north and all the rest of it with, you know, the whole thing as a big coup de main and and not even really have to fight for Kabul.
I have kind of been joking around over the past few years about they might just walk right back into Kabul rather than sacking it or besieging it.
They might just kind of send a few guys at a time up the road and just.
Well, that's what they've done.
And that's what they did in Herat.
It was Ismail Khan who they negotiated his surrender.
And then he handed it over along with the district governor.
You know, and that was a big warlord and the official, the senior government official, they just handed it over.
So, you know, if it comes down to it, I mean, who knows?
It's entirely possible.
But let me also point this out, though, that this idea that the Taliban have swept over all this and they like own everything now and then they take Kabul and suddenly they're going to have, you know, peace in our time for themselves.
No, this is all going to fall apart again for them.
They're going to have ankle biter stuff and they're going to be the ones who are suffering from, you know, insurgents, people going against them because there's so many people with so many weapons.
There is no way they're just going to passively live under Taliban rule again, which they despise.
So this is going to continue being a civil war for a long time to come, most likely.
Yeah.
You know, so I was wondering, I don't know, you probably don't remember, but in the book I had a little subsection about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from Hizbi Islami, who had been the CIA's favorite back in the 1980s.
And then it helped Osama bin Laden escape and laughed about it and led the insurgency against the U.S. in alliance with the Haqqanis and Taliban for all those years there.
But then he made a deal in 2016.
And, you know, moved to Kabul in peace and they let his militia out of jail.
Yeah.
And I wonder whether he's just kind of a Trojan horse just sitting there, biding his time, waiting to welcome the Taliban back into the city.
And I saw an interview of him.
I was wondering about that, put his name in Google News and saw an interview of him from like two weeks ago and, you know, very beginning of August.
And he's talking real nice about, oh, geez, you know, all sides need to recognize that peace is the way and we should negotiate and not fight.
He's being very general.
And, you know, I'm not a master of diplomatic language or anything, but sounds like he really did want to help usher the Taliban in and and spare their enemies, too, in a way.
You know, if what he could if what he was saying could be taken at face value at all, that like he was actually saying, like, hey, Taliban, I can help grease the skids for you on this and and make it easier for everybody.
Kind of a thing like that.
You know, that was my interpretation.
And plus, you know, you've got you've got the U.S. of government officially with what's his name, Khalilzad negotiating with Taliban right now saying, hey, if you take over Kabul, we're asking you to keep our our compound in the embassy compound off limits as well as, you know, these other Western whatever.
And then we'll help you financially afterwards.
So, I mean, we're already telling them this.
This is really a done deal.
And we are just waiting for the you know, how it's going to happen.
The Taliban has stayed in Doha.
They have continued to say they were willing to negotiate an end.
But they're saying that Ghani has to resign.
And I bet there's going to be an increasing pressure in the coming days along the same lines as with Joestam and with Ismail Khan for him to just step aside.
And then, you know, all of a sudden it may not be a march on Kabul, but it may be, as you just said, maybe a walk into the front door.
Yeah.
And that's something, you know, and right now, whatever is going to not kill Afghan civilians, I'm for right now.
Yeah, seriously.
And now you really think that the the ANA is a couple of hundred thousand, I was thinking maybe it was quite a bit less than that.
Altogether, I mean, you have the ANA, the ANP and this various other government formally militias, whatever the total the total Afghan National Defense Forces are expected to be or believed to be about two hundred and twenty five thousand real bodies.
But, you know, most of them aren't fighting.
So it almost doesn't matter what the actual number is.
Yeah.
I guess it was just like this in 94, right?
When they first came to power, the whole country was basically a rout up to a point.
And then they had, you know, a lot of a stalemate there for a while until America intervened on the Northern Alliance side.
And who were a lot of these guys that were in charge back then that were getting routed by the Taliban?
The same ones that are in charge still today, the same ones we placed in charge when we, you know, routed the Taliban.
But now then the same reason they were losing to the Taliban before, they couldn't hang on to it now.
That's I think historians are going to look back and say one of the biggest mistakes we made is that we put the guys who were losing the war in charge and they just continued to lose afterwards.
They didn't change their stripes.
Right.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of things to be said about how bad this was, but I think you're totally right that they just bit off more than they could chew from the very beginning.
It'd be like having a foreign power come and try to remake Texas while all the Texans are still here, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you're just going to get shot at.
I mean, what do you think is going to happen?
That's ridiculous.
You're right.
Yeah.
I don't know how anybody believed in that, man.
I, you know, not to brag about it, but I was right about this from the fall of 01, from the very beginning that what a fool's errand this is.
In fact, I argue with at the time this guy was probably one of the most important guys in Austin media, Bob Cole, from the he did the morning show on the country station KVET.
And, you know, he had a lot of sway.
You know, people really listen to him a lot.
And I had him in my cab and I was like, this is ridiculous.
This country's the size of Texas.
It's in the middle of Asia, behind mountains.
And the people there have rifles and like fighting.
And this just doesn't make any sense at all.
They can't be tamed.
Everybody knows they can't be tamed.
Watch Rambo three.
I don't know if I mentioned Rambo three to him or not, but basically that same rant makes the story better.
Yeah, it does.
But and I won the argument with him, but he still wouldn't admit it.
That's the way I remember it.
Anyway, that was a long time ago now, 20 years ago now.
But that was still that would have been, you know, in September, October, November of 01, you know.
Before Christmas, for sure.
But anyways, I'll tell you what, I'm sorry I kept you so long here, but thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for putting it on the line as you did back in 2012 to tell the truth about this war.
And you're right that if they listen to you then just as especially if they listen to Matthew Ho three years before when he tried to stop the surge.
But if they listen to you then, then certainly the resolution, you know, the power balance was much more on the side of those that America had been backing at that point.
And the Taliban would have had a hell of a lot more incentive to negotiate and come to more equitable resolution rather than just sweeping over the whole country and trying to force their way on everybody else at gunpoint this way, which, as you pointed out, just means that we're only at the beginning of the next chapter of insurgency, only against them now.
You know, me and Matt actually wrote a piece together in Defense News in 2010.
I can't remember which month it was.
And we came to that same conclusion.
We said, look, from a position of strength right now, the Taliban are willing to negotiate.
We don't have to do the surge.
They're willing to negotiate and we can end this right now from a position of strength.
We had that possibility.
They were willing to entertain it at the time.
But we said, no, we want to compel them to come to the table, the negotiating table, hat in hand after being defeated.
And of course, that was the fatal mistake.
Right.
And which, of course, which Dave Petraeus had promised, of course, would happen by July of 2011 and never happened.
Yep.
That was the promise.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know I kept you over, but thank you so much for doing the show and for all the all your great work that you do here.
You bet.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That's retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L.
Davis.
And you can read his piece from a couple of weeks ago here in Fox News.
20 years is enough.
Biden is right to plan a firm end to the war.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
