8/17/21 Matthew Hoh on the Systemic Failures Behind America’s Loss in Afghanistan

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, 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 Matthew Ho, and he was the heroic whistleblower from the Afghan war, and of course, just the other day I talked to Danny Davis.
He was the whistleblower of 2012 from the end of the Afghan surge, but Matthew Ho was the whistleblower from the start of the Afghan surge.
He had been a captain in the Marine Corps, decorated hero from Iraq War II, and that's for saving guys in the war, and then went to work for the State Department as part of a provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan, and for those of you who don't remember, or to remind those who do, in the year 2009 was a massive public relations campaign by the Pentagon to force Obama, that succeeded in forcing Obama into escalating the war by 70,000 troops and a massive air campaign and all the rest of it, known as the surge under Generals David Petraeus and McChrystal, and Matthew came out in, I forgot what month, late summer of 2009, and said, scratch the needle, off the record, hold it right there, don't do this.
It's not going to work.
And he even got his boss, the ambassador at the time, who had previously been a general in charge of the war, General Eikenberry, to support him as well, and Obama of course took the coward's way out and rolled over and escalated the war, and then now here we are 12 years later and lost anyway.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Matthew?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm real sorry that everybody didn't listen to you back then.
I listened to you back then.
I was one of the ones who did, and you know what, a lot of people did, but it wasn't enough.
But so take us back to then, if you could, to 2009 and what you were doing in Afghanistan and what you were hearing on the radio and what it was that made you decide to do what you did.
So I was a political officer in Afghanistan.
I got there in April of 09.
I resigned five months later in protest over the escalation.
So I was there because of the American escalation of the war, the pivot from Iraq to Afghanistan that begins in 2008, basically.
And you know, Barack Obama comes in and the war is greatly escalated and counterinsurgency strategy, which, you know, had won the war in Iraq, remember?
Remember that?
Had won the war in Iraq, yeah, you know, I mean, had, was, you know, General Petraeus had taken over central command.
And yeah, there was this belief that if we did what we did in Iraq, that Afghanistan would be another W, you know, another, another check in the win column for the Pentagon and the White House.
And then, you know, the State Department, CIA and everything else.
And so, yeah, Barack Obama comes into office and there's about 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, about a third or half that many NATO troops, about an equivalent number of contractors.
And you know, as we, as we know, within, within a year, year and a half, that's grown to 100,000 American troops, 40,000 NATO troops, and more than 100,000 contractors.
So you're talking about the United States puts a quarter million man army into Afghanistan.
You know, I mean, these ideas circulating around now that we didn't do enough, we never had enough troops.
We had a quarter million man army in Afghanistan.
I mean, there's no getting around that, spending $120 billion a year on the war.
You know, I mean, like, so, but anyway, so the, I, what I saw though, was I had been in the Iraq war twice, I had been, worked on Iraq issues at the Pentagon and the State Department.
And, you know, what I saw was that the, the Afghan war was fundamentally no different than the Iraq war, that anything that had been said, and at that point, I was a pretty solid counterinsurgent, counterinsurgency guy.
You know, I was committing myself to being an officer of the empire.
And I thought this was a way to help benefit the United States, the countries we were occupying, and you know, the international world order and fate of humanity or whatever, you know, I mean, I'll take that on myself because I did believe that to a degree.
I thought that what we were doing in Afghanistan would be similar to what we had done in Iraq, starting in 2006, 2007, 2008, listening to the grievances of the Sunnis in Iraq, right?
Allowing the Sunnis to regain control of their own cities and towns, putting the Sunnis in charge of the security forces in their areas, bringing the Sunnis back into the government, allowing the Sunnis to get a cut of the government revenue, right?
I thought that's what we would be doing in Afghanistan with the Pashtuns.
And, you know, I base this on things I knew, people I knew.
General Petraeus basically says this in the fall of 2008 when he takes over central command.
So I guess I was really quite naive.
I mean, certainly I understood what had happened with the US over the course of its history, in terms of its empire, its colonialism, its imperialism, you know, whatever words you want to describe it.
But I failed to, you know, see that line of continuity that connected all that events, that made whatever we were going to do in Afghanistan no different than what we had done in the past.
And so, yeah, in spite of all these things being said about what we were going to do, how we were going to end the war there, we were going to bring the Pashtuns into the government, we were going to address the grievances that caused so many people to join and support the Taliban, just as so many people had joined a Sunni insurgency in Iraq and insurgency I fought against because of grievances that they had, legitimate grievances.
Yeah, but, you know, as soon as I was there, it was pretty apparent that that's not what's going to happen.
That's not what it ever was going to be.
That reduction in violence with the Sunnis in Iraq was an aberration, a temporary event, really something that just kind of happened because the United States was out of any other options in Iraq.
So at least maybe we'll start talking to these people who are fighting, you know, and it turns out, hey, if we listen to them, they'll turn on al Qaeda quicker than anything else and they'll work with us, you know, which is what happened in Iraq for a period of time until, right, until, as everyone knows, the Sunnis were pushed aside, preyed upon, right, made, you know, put in a position where they had to fight once again to protect themselves and their communities from predation by, you know, the government in Baghdad.
So the same thing in Afghanistan, right?
I thought this is what we would do with the Pashtuns.
I was very naive, very silly, lying to my, I shouldn't say naive, Scott, lying to myself is probably a better way to describe it, excusing myself for all of it.
So, you know, being there and seeing that the war was fundamentally no different, that the White House was chiefly concerned with winning the war for the glory of the president, just as the White House had been concerned about that with the Bush administration in Iraq, you know, so seeing that there was no other real driving factor behind it, that we were going to win this war militarily because that is what is best for domestic political reasons for the United States.
Seeing the corruption, the fraud, seeing the, you know, I was there for the presidential elections in 2009.
I was on an Afghan army base that day at one point, and just seeing these soldiers stuffing ballots, you know, for Karzai, you know, right in front of me, you know, I mean, like, hey, come on, guys, I'm a State Department political officer.
Shouldn't you guys at least do this in a different room?
You know, like that kind of thing?
Nah, you know, there's no need for that.
You know, that's the way this thing is rolling.
You know, I mean, so and, you know, the fact that, yeah, as we've seen the evidence and the reality this past week with the Taliban winning the war, at least or I should say winning this phase of the war, because I don't think it's done, but winning this phase of the war.
Yeah, there is, you know, I resigned in protest because it was going to be the escalation of the war was counterproductive.
It was just going to make the war worse.
It was going to push more people to join the insurgency.
It was unwinnable, you know, and futile and counterproductive.
It was also incredibly immoral because the people we were supporting were warlords.
They were the ones who were controlling the drug trade.
They, yeah, maybe they weren't as theatrical in their misogyny as the Taliban was, but they pretty much oppressed women about as much as anyone else in the world is going to do.
Maybe they didn't shoot women in the back of the head or stone them in the middle of stadiums.
But more or less, the misogyny was as brutal there as anyone anywhere else in the world under the, you know, the Karzai and the Ghani government.
You know, and so, yeah, at that point, I was intellectually and morally broken.
So, yeah, by September of 2009, I had resigned in protest over the escalation of the war through a bunch of Forrest Gump like events.
I ended up talking to the Washington Post in October.
And at the end of that month, the Post wrote a quite large biopic on me, a front page, above the fold, you know, 3,000 word.
And I think— I linked to that today in my antiwar.com piece, by the way, everybody, so check that out.
Oh, thank you, yeah.
And, you know, I think the point to that, to what you had brought about in the beginning, Scott, here, this talk right now just a few minutes ago, was that, you know, no one listened to me.
And the thing that's—it's not that, Scott.
It's the fact that lots of other people believed it, but didn't do anything or went along with it.
I mean, so when I write my resignation letter, I send it around to my counterparts in Afghanistan.
And I was a political officer, so I was the State Department's officer for a province in southern Afghanistan, in Zabul province, next to Kandahar.
So I send it to my counterparts in Kandahar, Helmand, Orozgan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Nuristan.
And I know all those people.
And if anyone knows what those names represent, those names represent the most violent provinces in Afghanistan, with the exception of—leaving out Ghazni and Pateka and a couple others, in 2009, 2010, you know, real strongholds of the insurgency, if you will.
And not one of those people say to me, you're wrong.
You got it all wrong.
In fact, they say, absolutely right.
Good on you.
I remember one of my counterparts, a guy who was a political officer in Kandahar, said, you know what, Matt, if I were you, if I didn't have two kids going to college soon, I'd do exactly what you would have done.
Goes to the embassy, same thing.
All throughout the embassy, the people in my office, the Provincial Affairs Office, you know, we were the office that had people out in the provinces, you know, embedded with the military on provincial reconstruction teams, et cetera, working with the governors.
You know, same thing, too.
All those people there, supportive, with the exception of a lady who just taking it over, who General Petraeus had put in charge over there.
She was just a complete flunky, you know, a complete, like, you know, I mean, people who groupies for rock bands were less enamored than this lady was of General Petraeus and General McChrystal and all the Coindonistas.
Remember that time, the Coindonistas?
Oh, yeah.
You know, yeah.
So, like, yeah, I mean, but it goes on.
I mean, I relate this to say that there were lots of people who agree with my assessment.
The deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, a guy named Richard Adoni, who became Turkey's who have been the ambassador of Turkey and in other places.
He says to me, you know, Matt, I've got two middle-aged children.
I completely agree with you.
There's no way.
Or I've got two military-aged children.
Completely agree with you.
No way I am letting my children fight in a war, in this war.
Carl Eikenberry, of course, agrees with me.
His cables are leaked about it.
Then, of course, a month or two after his cables are leaked, Eikenberry testifies for Congress and says, oh, I totally agree with the strategy.
Meanwhile, in cables, this is in writing, he is clear that this will not work.
Month later, two months later, in front of Congress, he says, oh, no, I'm completely on board.
I mean, this goes up the whole, you know, I knew the guy who was the political advisor to the, at that point, it was a German general who was in charge of NATO, the four-star general.
And this is in Brussels.
And Jack tells me afterwards, he said, you know what, Matt, when General McChrystal's plan in summer 2009 went around Brussels, you know, went around NATO headquarters to, you know, it was passed around, everybody disagreed with it.
Nobody said it would work.
But you know what, when the routing sheet came through to check off your name, to whether or not you agree with it or not, everybody checked off, you know.
And so you get to the point of all this, you know, so I'm sure people at this point are like, Jesus Christ, stop talking about how smart you were, Matt.
And however, you know, let's give this guy a gold watch and a parade, you know, I mean, that's not the point.
You know, when I get to, after my story is published in The Post, I say to Karen DeYoung, who wrote the story, who had been Colin Powell's biographer, traveled with Secretary Clinton, you know, associate editor at The Post, you know, a big deal, like not some kid who just joined The Post staff that they, you know, assigned this story to, I said, Karen, why did you give me so much space?
Why did you put so much capital, right, into this, such, you know, the weight of The Washington Post into telling my story?
And she said, you know what, Matt, everyone I asked at the NASA Security Council, the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, et cetera, everyone I asked what they thought about what you said, all of them agreed with you.
But none of them will go on record to say that.
I mean, so I think, you know, long way, Scott, a long-winded way, but I think I want just to show people, to tell people that it wasn't just a few people who agreed with me.
Nearly everyone I knew agreed with me.
And no one did anything about it.
Hardly any people did.
This is what drove Danny Davis crazy.
You know, I mean, Danny, when Danny was in Afghanistan for his second time, and the position he had there in Afghanistan, and Danny had a position in Afghanistan for a year where he was responsible for helping to find equipment for soldiers to fight the war.
And in that job, he had to go all throughout the country and talk to soldiers of all ranks, from specialists up to three-star generals, all throughout Afghanistan, you know.
And so Danny had, I don't know if anyone had a better perspective on what was occurring in 2011 in Afghanistan than Danny Davis did.
And, you know, I knew him well at that point.
And what he went through, in the sense of talking to people who would agree, who would say this war is completely jacked up, we're losing, there's no way we're going to win, this makes no difference, there's no way the Afghan security forces will ever be able to win this war, on and on and on.
And then when time comes, when they're in front of a one-star, two-star, three-star general, they say, everything's going great, sir.
You know, everything's going great, ma'am.
No problems.
I, that really, that really hurt Danny.
And the way it hurt me, and the way, same thing with Danny Surgison and others, you see people that just won't stand up, not just for themselves, but for the people that they are supposedly taking oath to protect.
And I'm not talking here about the American people, but I'm talking about their soldiers, their Marines, you know, their subordinates.
Yeah, man.
Okay, hang on just one second.
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You know, in the 1990s, Colonel David Hackworth was a big deal on AM Talk Radio, and I did a lot of driving and I love radio.
So I heard a lot of him, man, and I'm sure you're probably aware, but for people who aren't aware, he's the most decorated officer from the Vietnam War.
By the time I ever—and he ran the website Soldiers for the Truth, which, for example, published Karen Katowski's pseudonym anonymous articles from the Pentagon in the run up to REC work, too.
But anyway, to hear him tell it always, I mean, my overall impression, if I had to sum up whatever I, you know, what I learned from Hackworth during that era, you know, about him anyway, I think the best way to characterize him was he was fighting a class war for the soldiers against the officers.
And he considered the enlisted guys to be the American people, and he considered the officers to be the government, the enemy, which perfectly comports with my point of view about certainly the officers and the government.
And the way he characterized the soldiers as the American people, to me, you know, is much more fair.
And for him, that's whose side he was on.
He was there to speak up for the guys who were being essentially used and abused and neglected in this way, and sent to go off and fight a fool's errand, you know?
I just said, that's the workers versus the capitalist class, man.
Something like that, you know?
But hey, no, Hackworth, for those who aren't familiar with him, his book about face is the best book on leadership I have ever read.
When I read that book as a captain in the Marine Corps, not knowing anything about David Hackworth's descent over the Vietnam War and what had occurred to him at the end of his career.
And certainly, I don't even think I knew at that point when I was reading that book that he wasn't in favor of the Iraq War or whatnot.
Oh, he was great on Iraq War II, man.
Yeah, he was.
By the way, he died of bladder cancer from the Agent Blue that they sprayed him with.
That's right.
That's right.
But his book, one of the best books on leadership I have ever read.
I remember reading that as a captain, as a company commander in 29 Palms, sitting in the desert, getting ready to bring my Marines and sailors to Iraq and thinking to myself, I wish I had read this book when I was a second lieutenant earlier.
And that is the book about face by David Hackworth, that if somebody tells me they're joining the military, they're about to get commissioned, you know, whatever, that is the book I give them.
So what do you mean?
It's about leadership, but it's about his story, or what?
It's about his story.
And it's about, just as you described, the way you just articulated his role of standing up for his soldiers was exactly what the entire book's about.
It's a huge book.
I mean, it's a big book.
Well, I'm glad I remembered all that right from 25 years ago then.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
And I think Scott, it'd be worth your time to read as well, because what he talks about being in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War and the examples he gives, the stories he tells and, you know, the lying that occurred.
One thing in my head, I remember he talks about being in a briefing one time and the general is going on to a senior general to, I don't know, maybe the Secretary of Defense or somebody about how this program has doubled in size, right?
It's doubled in size.
It's going so well, it's doubled in size.
And Hackworth realizes that doubled in size means it went from two people to four people, right?
You know, that total, no context whatsoever on its face of it.
Yes, that's true.
It did double, but that means nothing, you know?
And so that is a very deliberate and effective way of lying, right?
You know, it's kind of like Joe Biden the other day saying that he opposed the surge in Afghanistan, which is complete, which is not true.
If it was up to Joe Biden, Joe Biden's counterterrorism plan for Afghanistan in 2009, rather than that 250,000 man army the U.S. would have had in Afghanistan, following Joe Biden's plan, there would have been 240,000 people, U.S.
NATO and contractors in Afghanistan.
But I guess if, you know, I mean, that is...
Well, wait, wait, wait, go back because I'm pretty sure at the height, it was 140,000.
140,000 U.S. troops, U.S. and NATO troops.
Right.
But 140,000, not 240,000.
Well, no, you have to add in 100,000 contractors.
Oh, yeah.
See, you got me on the mercenaries, man.
I forgot about them for a minute.
And nothing, I mean, all of that work in the Vietnam War would have been done by men and women in uniform.
Now, wait a minute, was Biden's position not that, hey, we should surge from like 30,000 to 40,000 men or maybe 60 and focus on finding Arabs that aren't there?
But in other words, changing the strategy from fighting the Taliban and protecting the Kabul government from the Taliban to not doing that.
And to me, that seemed like just a not so slow motion, but maybe a somewhat slow motion way out the door.
But admitting that, in other words, you're right that he did want an escalation.
Definitely.
But I don't know that it's completely false, especially when you compare it to what Gates and them were pushing for with the counterinsurgency doctrine.
Because, see, I want to go back to what you were saying before, man.
I should have interrupted you at some point to rehash some of, to go back over what you're saying to clarify some of that.
Because I think it's so important about when they made the parallel between the Iraq surge and the Afghan surge, right, where on one hand in Iraq, they were fighting for the super majority against the minority.
So at the end of the day, that was going to work out.
And also the super majority who are friends with the Iranians next door.
So at the end of the day, they were going to be able to hold the line once we were finished winning the civil war for them.
And then all those promises to the Sunni tribes never really did come true.
But you're right that they bribed them off with that and said, just focus on killing the foreigners, right?
Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians kill them and or, you know, Libyans send them back home to where they're from for the next war.
But get them the hell out of here.
And so but important, they're essentially befriending the Sunni tribes, befriending the broad base of the Sunni insurgency, asking them to only marginalize the very margin of them.
Whereas in Afghanistan, first of all, they're fighting against the plurality of the country.
And there is no super majority to support.
But also, they're not even trying to peel away as the Obama people talked about this sometimes good, bad, good Taliban from bad Taliban.
If there had been any al-Qaeda in the country other than in the propaganda, they could have said or maybe if they're smart enough, they could have said, OK, if we're and this is what you were saying.
If we're do if we're trying to replicate the Iraq surge as best we can, that would include now befriending essentially the Taliban, allying with them against any Arabs who might be running around having previously helped them that now we demand they marginalize.
And then at least they would have had that.
That was one of the things that you could see you said was not happening and made you understand why, you know, if the Iraq surge didn't really work, this is sure as hell not going to work.
You know, if that's the way that they're handling it, because that really is the the the amount of separation between the Taliban and any foreign fighters who are there.
But anyway, so that would have been I don't know if Biden wanted to.
I don't think Biden wanted to ally with the Taliban, but didn't he want to neglect them and just focus on, you know, trying to find any air?
Were there any Arab terrorists in Afghanistan in 2009 and 10 anyway at all?
One of my favorite things about foreign fighters is I don't know if it's a true story or not.
I heard it when I was in Iraq.
My second time went around on on our email, you know, or something like that.
Don't know if it's true or not.
But a Marine patrol somewhere near Ramadi came across came went to a field, asked the guy in the field, have you seen any foreign fighters?
And the guy said flat faced.
Yeah, you.
So I mean, like I could tell you just so to reinforce Scott's point about what happened with the Sunnis in Iraq when the Sons of Iraq happened, the Sunni awakening, you know, all that kind of stuff happening.
We saw violence drop overnight.
We went from having more.
We used to have a metric called ticks, troops in contact.
And that could be anything from I mean, that's really anything.
But any interaction with the enemy is a tick, a troop in contact, varying levels of how serious it is, how big it is.
But anyway, we go from having, you know, around if I remember right, between 100 and 150 ticks every day in my regiment's AO to having less than 10 a day, literally overnight when we sent in when the when the tier one guys went in, the SEALs and the Delta, you know, when our own marine recon raiders, you know, our own marine in-house commando teams went in because the Sunnis turned on the Al-Qaeda people very quickly.
And what we were finding was that in cities that were decent sized cities in I was in Anbar, so in the Euphrates River Valley, so about cities like Haditha, Barwana, Hakonea, you know, places like that.
You're talking about an Al-Qaeda presence that numbered in the single digits.
I mean, that's how small the terrorists and I just use air quotes for terrorists, the terrorists were in Iraq.
The Sunni insurgency was 98 percent, 99 percent composed of Sunni men who were fighting us because we are occupying them.
We had usurped their place in their society.
We had put in power over them Shia forces or Kurdish forces to some degree that were preying on them, which you could see.
I mean, like when I was in Iraq with my marines in 2006, 2007, the Anbaris were okay with an American marine going into their house, but were terrified of an Iraqi soldier or policeman who were Shia going into their house.
I mean, it was really crazy how, you know, you could see how we had created this proxy force that was just preying on and brutalizing the population that way because we were using a divide and conquer strategy, you know.
And so we're getting to Biden.
I never saw an order of battle in terms of what it would have looked like.
I don't think the Biden people ever put it to that level.
I don't know if they had anyone who could even think that level or probably I would seriously doubt they even had anyone who knew what order of battle meant.
I met with Tony Blinken and other members of the vice president's staff in September and October 2009 after I resigned.
And yeah, I mean, their understanding of what was occurring there was very superficial.
So the idea being was that, again, comes into office, right away he sends 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, or not right away, over the course of six, seven months, sends 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, American troops.
And then there's this surge debate, right?
Remember August 2009, General McChrystal writes his letter, we're losing this war, you know, and then so then becomes the great surge debate.
And the options that the president is given are, it's something like the Pentagon offers him three options, like 100,000, 70,000 or 40,000 troop increase, you know, and Obama says that's no, and he's actually, to Obama's credit, he actually stood up a little bit to the Pentagon and kicked that back to them.
And this is in October of 2009, says, give me something or, you know, and a good source for all this is Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, where, you know, it catalogs Obama saying to the generals, to the people who are cheerleading for counterinsurgency and for escalating the war in Iraq, show me in Afghanistan, one place where we've been successful, show me one district or one city that has been a success story for us.
And he says, you can't, you know, and he says, this won't work.
But still, he goes along with it, right?
He politically, he knows this is what he must do, I guess.
But Biden's plan then, so Obama's looking at the 40,000 troop increase, that's the smallest from the Pentagon is offering.
Biden offers 20,000.
And then Obama, just like I think most people would agree, his presidency, he splits the difference, right?
And he goes with 30,000.
But from what I could gather, from what, because Jesus, Scott, I tell you what, I know that this comes from like all those vampire films, the hashtag team whoever, right?
I'm team, you know, Britney.
I guess that's a thing or, you know, whatever, like that kids say about who their favorite actor is or something.
Honest to God, that was the level of sophistication and maturity that was going into the discussions within the White House, National Security Council, the think tanks, et cetera, about the war in Afghanistan.
Are you team counterterrorism or are you team counterinsurgency?
And so what you see with the counterinsurgency that goes with General McChrystal into Afghanistan is that we're going to win hearts and minds.
We're going to connect the Afghans to the people, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
We're going to put in these rules of engagement that are restrictive so that we don't actually kill Afghans because we don't want to upset them.
You know, I mean, things like that, right?
The absurdity that somehow, very similar to like, you're telling me that if you went into a town in rural Alabama and told them that you would build them a new school, they would automatically become pro-choice or that they would vote for Barack Obama or vice versa.
That you went in, if you went into, you know, Manhattan and told of those voters there that if they voted to, you know, whatever, you know, if you built them a new school, they would change their minds on something or that they would vote for Donald Trump.
Right.
Or whoever.
I mean, let me ask you this.
When you're in the war there, I already know the answer to this, I guess, but it's just so ridiculous.
But something that's always kind of confounded me is the way that they talk about the Taliban like they're all from the far side of Pakistan somewhere or something rather than these are the men of the Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
Right.
Which is different.
But I wonder, you know, how thick is that BS when you're actually deployed there?
I think there's a lot of it.
A lot of the soldiers, they hear that.
It trickles down.
Look, when I got to Iraq in 06, something like 80 percent, I just looked up this poll the other day, something like 80 percent of men and women who were in Iraq with the U.S. military believed that we were in Iraq because Saddam was involved with 9-11.
That was three years after the invasion.
You still had a super majority, right, of service members thinking that it had to do with 9-11.
I mean, most guys and gals who are over there are not invested in educating themselves about what's occurring.
They're doing what they need to do to take care of each other, and that's above the proverbial pay grade.
I can tell you that we have what we call CCIRs, Commander's Critical Information Requirements.
This is basically anything a senior officer thinks is necessary that always should be brought to his attention, to put it kind of simply.
And one of those things was that if he ever came across anyone with a passport that showed that they were not from Afghanistan, and I can tell you that happened very rarely, very rarely.
And when it did, it was big news.
Holy shit, we found a guy with a Yemeni passport.
Holy shit, right?
I mean, that kind of excitement, like, wow, we got one.
Al-Qaeda is here, you know, and who knows why that guy had a Yemeni passport, right?
And this has been proving, too, not just by what we knew because of who we were fighting—look, every time I went out to a small outpost, which I did fairly often, or as often as I could, both in the east of Afghanistan and the south, because I had also been in the east of Afghanistan, in Nangarhar, Loghman, Kunar, and Nuristan province.
I was the acting political officer up there for a couple of months before I became the senior civilian representative for Zabul province, or whatever my title was, you know.
But whenever I got out to these local outposts where there'd be, you know, an army lieutenant or captain, I'd ask that guy, you know, I'd say—and a guy, a kid, really, if they were lieutenants, they were 23, 24 years old, you know, what—describe to me the insurgency.
And they would describe a very localized insurgency, you know, that was spread throughout the district that this lieutenant was responsible for, this captain was responsible for, or this set of valleys or whatever.
And, you know, okay, well, did they ever work together?
You know, you're talking about insurgent groups that were just a few kilometers away from each other.
Oh, no.
So these guys weren't even working with each other one or two valleys away, you know, so we were expecting that they really were this marauding army that came from Pakistan.
But the narrative—I did a debate, an Oxford Union debate last year, right?
A big, right, a whole—I guess if we didn't have COVID, maybe they would have brought me to Britain.
I would have had, like, some, you know, black tie kind of tales kind of thing.
That's that debate, right, where they argue in tuxedos about stuff, right?
But Carlotta Gall was one of the people who was debating me.
And this Carlotta Gall was the New York Times senior correspondent for Afghanistan for many, many years.
And honest to God, she could do nothing other than repeat the talking points that came from the U.S. military.
I mean, nothing—her whole thing was—if you listen to Carlotta Gall describe the insurgency in southern Afghanistan in particular, because that was something we had gotten talking about, it was as if Pakistan, the ISI, had sent men into Afghan villages with rifles to force the Afghans to fight for them.
I am not—that's not a figurative statement.
That is nearly literally the way she described the war.
So this mania, the hysteria about Pakistan—I'm not saying Pakistan wasn't involved, but it just was completely belied, was just not true.
It was undone by any evidence of who we actually were fighting.
We were fighting Afghans.
You know, as the late, you know, Jacob George, you know, Iraq war veteran turned anti-war activist, and, you know, we lost Jacob, you know, in, oh gosh, 2013, 2014 now.
We lost him to suicide.
But as Jacob said, you know, we're sending the sons and daughters of farmers from America to fight the sons of farmers in Afghanistan.
I mean, that's what we were doing.
But just to get back to finish up on the whole Biden thing, so the counterinsurgency under McChrystal fails, and then General Petraeus comes in, and he brings in the counterterrorism strategy.
And the counterterrorism strategy is the airstrikes.
The counterterrorism strategy is the night raids, right?
And we all know what that did.
That just simply drove more people to the Taliban, just made the Taliban more powerful.
You know, meanwhile, Petraeus and all his sycophants and the media are cheerleading because we're launching 25 commando raids a night in Afghanistan to villages.
And it's like, you know, you really just put 25 more villages right on the side of the Taliban.
You know, I remember one time being in a village.
They called it McChrystal.
I forgot exactly who it was.
I think it was McChrystal called an industrial grade killing machine.
They did.
That's what they did.
I was on.
I was on a PBS Frontline special about it.
And John Nagel, if people remember that guy.
Yeah.
Who was a cheerleader from Center for New American Security.
Exactly.
And him being on it and like and don't think that didn't have an effect.
You know, it had a serious effect.
That year in 2012, I believe, I went in to meet with the senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Maybe it was before 2012.
It had to be in 2011.
I'm sorry, because Kerry was still in the Senate.
This was Kerry's guy.
This was the guy.
I can't remember his name, but if I did, if I said it, a lot of people would recognize it.
He's a flunky for Kerry and he's terrible on, you know, very pro-Israel, all kinds of really awful stuff, not being not in pro-Israel, meaning being a Zionist and, you know, favoring open air prisons like Gaza and things like that.
But being in there with him again, the senior staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the excitement he had him telling me, he's saying, basically, I wish I could tell you about what they're telling me about, you know, these night raids, how successful they are.
You know, and I don't know if he used, Scott, the words industrial grade killing, but the excitement, he literally, he nearly came out of his chair.
Like he nearly, he was so excited about this and he believed it.
He absolutely believed it.
And many other people in Washington, D.C. believed it, that this industrial grade killing machine was, oh man, we are hammering the Taliban.
We are, right?
And then it's like, well, how come every four, every three months, the Department of Defense puts out a report and the Taliban have gotten stronger by any method, by any metric, assessment, numbers, the Taliban.
We got to say here too, it was obviously, you know, or not obviously, but unsurprisingly, the great Gareth Porter who crunched through all the numbers and showed how flawed their strategy and tactics were for their intelligence, for choosing who to target.
And Mike Flynn's the head of intelligence for McChrystal and for Jay Sockter and all this.
I mean, come on, this idiot who thinks Hezbollah did Benghazi and all this, whatever Michael Ledeen told him to think, kind of.
Well, I could go on about him, but anyway.
But yeah, I mean, I think, Scott, that's a really great point to make though, is as we get to this point where this phase of the war in Afghanistan is over, it's clear the United States overtly lost the war.
I mean, we definitely could talk about the CIA and what this war means and what's going to happen next with all the warlords.
Amirullah Saleh, you know, is up in the province of Panjshir declaring that he is the legitimate president of Afghanistan.
There are plenty of people who will rally around him.
Dostum and Adhanur certainly are not just going to sit back and say, oh, you know, we lost, you know what I mean?
This is not over.
But in terms of accountability, Flynn's like, how does a guy like that become the three star general in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency?
It wasn't like after he left the military, something struck him on the head and all of a sudden he became a crazy person.
All of a sudden he became an idiot.
He is an actual idiot.
You know, I mean, like this, you know, people have seen video of him like pledging allegiance to Q or whatnot.
This was the man who was in charge of the Pentagon's intelligence agency.
And just to finish that thought real quick, even then the CIA.
Yeah.
Gareth proved that they were targeting innocent people that, you know, basically they're using this link analysis intelligence for, you know, your SIM card.
Talk to my SIM card.
Talk to, you know, cousin Johnny's former best friend SIM card.
And so now everybody gets killed in a in a drone strike.
And it was based on essentially nothing.
And Flynn, of course, was the one complaining that intelligence around here is terrible.
That's why we need a big surge.
So we'd have more guys on the ground who can collect better intelligence.
So then we know who to bomb.
And then.
But the whole thing was a total bust the whole time.
He was right.
They had no good intelligence on the ground for who to bomb.
But boy, was he wrong.
That surgeon, a bunch of troops is going to make a difference there.
Just make that much worse.
Yeah.
Right.
And the thing about that is not only the intelligence was wrong and we were kicking in the doors and shooting people who, you know, might have even been on our side.
I remember in Iraq.
And for me, it's really tough to separate these two wars.
The same things happened.
I remember being in Iraq and this sheik up near al-Qaim, which is on the far west on the Syrian border.
At one point, al-Qaida had taken it and had declared an Islamic republic there, you know, and then the Marines launched Operation Matador in 2005, I believe, took it back.
But anyway, there's a sheik who worked with the United States the entire time from the invasion on.
One of our best allies, Seals, came in one night and shot the guy right in front of his house.
So not only did we even know we killed civilians, our intelligence was so bad, we killed our own allies a lot of times.
But to the point beyond that, which you can say, OK, that's excusable, fog of war, friction, whatever.
I mean, go ahead and make your excuses for it.
But when it comes down to it, what we also knew was that when our strike forces would come through, a task force would come through.
Because when I was there in 2009, there was—and I can't remember the numbers, the task forces always had numbers after their names, like 373 stands in my head and everything.
I can't remember the one task force that came through Zabal.
I remember working with these guys, Delta guys.
They come down, they kind of—and they're getting ready to come to your province and kill a lot of people, right?
And they'll come with more aircraft, more drones, but they also come with their strike forces, the commandos.
And so they do.
They come to Zabal.
I want to say we had, there was 24 targets on their hit list.
They executed all those targets, killed, captured some, killed most of them, right?
And at that point, Zabal was like the fifth most violent province in Afghanistan, based upon number of IEDs, insurgent attacks, mortar attacks, et cetera, et cetera.
Three months or four months after the task force had come through, Delta had come through, whatever, had come through and killed all these guys, killed all these people, did all these raids, right?
Zabal was the fourth most violent province in Afghanistan.
It simply didn't work.
I mean, the idea that somehow that you're going to go, I mean, the idea that somehow you're going to win this attrition warfare, basically, by using commando raids against a population that had unlimited resources in terms of manpower, when you really look at it, you're talking about how many military aged males in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, millions and millions, right?
I mean, let alone coming from a culture that had their grandfathers had, well, at this point in Afghanistan, when I was in Afghanistan, their fathers had defeated the Soviet Union, right?
Their great, great grandfathers had beat the British.
You think that by coming in with your commandos, shooting a couple of people in the middle of the night, that you're going to win this war?
How long does it take to teach somebody to build an IED?
And to top it all off, I don't know if you saw this, but if you want to have an aneurysm, Scott, or if anybody else needs an excuse to drink this afternoon, or maybe even do something heavier, because at this point, I think dealing with the catastrophe of this war, anything would be excusable to try and mitigate, you know, the emotions and everything we're feeling over this, our anger over this.
I don't know if you saw on Political a month or so ago, Carter Malkasian had an essay?
No.
Okay, so Carter Malkasian, he was in Afghanistan the same time I was.
At that point, younger guy, was attached as a political officer, civilian advisor to the US military in Helmand.
And he's written a number of books and always been a cheerleader for the surge and a cheerleader for counterinsurgency and everything else.
And he's in his latest book, which portions of which were published by a political either beginning of this month or end of last month.
Malkasian discusses how he is now aware of how important will is in terms of warfare, how that he didn't realize until recently, how the Taliban were fighting for something.
I mean, like this is the level, and Malkasian had become the senior political advisor to General Cartwright, I believe it was Cartwright, or no, General Dunford, I believe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This is the guy, right?
I mean, the senior civilian advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn't understand until recently that the Taliban were fighting for something.
I mean, so the same type of misunderstanding through ignorance and arrogance that say occurred in say, Vietnam, where, oh, it's all about communism.
It's all about the domino theory.
Well, maybe it's about these people not wanting to be occupied.
Maybe we're the third occupiers in a span of like 25 years, right?
You mean like, maybe it's about that.
But that's the type of people who, you know, this inability to think critically, but also to be honest, you know, just for lack of a better word, the dumbness.
Again, the fact that you could look at something and say, hey, we launched these operations, right?
And the result is the Taliban got stronger.
The result is the Taliban is, you know, use one metric, the Taliban is putting more IEDs in the road than they did previously.
You know, okay, it didn't work.
But somehow these people can contort themselves to believe it did work.
It's tremendous.
And what you had is what I said earlier, there are so many people who knew it wasn't going to work, who didn't believe it was working, knew it was wrong, and didn't say anything.
But the problem is they are counterbalanced by these individuals who believe it is working, and who will do anything, you know, who because they believe it's working, that puts them in a better spot when it comes to these celebrity generals, right?
When it comes to these politicians, they want yes men, they want can do people, they want hard nose realists, you know, all this, all these, these, you know, this is how you get it.
This is how you can have, you can, you can talk to veterans, you know, who knew that the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, etc, was completely effed, and there was no, you know, no purpose in it, no way we were going to win, etc.
You know, and those are the guys who retired as lieutenant colonels.
Those are the Danny Davis's and the Danny Sergeants.
I mean, they're, I mean, Danny, the two Danny's are unique, because they spoke out about it and put their careers on the line and put their necks on the line and everything else.
But their opinions were not that different than so many of their fellow officers.
You know, like I described with my the reaction I got from my counterparts when I resigned, you know, you know, the problem is, is that you did have people who believed in it.
And those people were the ones who rose to the top, because I think that's institutionally, that's how it's incentivized.
You know, it's, it's the same way, too, you can see with our media, why does someone like Max Boot have a column in the Washington Post?
Yeah, the guy has, right, the guy, pretty obvious.
Yeah, right.
So one note guy on war, and it's the note they're dancing to, you know, it's a dancer, and he's been wrong about it over and over again, right?
So you would, you would say, okay, the Washington Post would select somebody who is, oh, yeah, he was right about this, he was right about that.
Oh, man, that was really prescient.
This guy's got a crystal ball, you know, Max Boot, complete opposite.
But exactly, he's their guy, he's going to say what they agree with, he's going to help.
And that's what you get when you, when you have a, when you have a war launched, like the Iraq War, for political purposes, the political generals are going to rise.
A guy like General Petraeus totally lies about what's happening in Mosul, right?
I mean, when 82nd Airborne, which, or 101st, I can't remember now, whichever Mosul, whichever Petraeus had when he was in command of Mosul in the first year or two of the war, when they leave, and the unit comes in to take over from them, everything that Petraeus and his people were saying about Mosul was not true.
You know, they were fudging the numbers.
Petraeus then goes down to what we call Minstiky, and I won't try and remember what the acronym stood for, multinational something training command in Iraq or something like that.
But he's in charge of training all the forces, right?
All the Iraqi army, Iraqi police forces, this same time that the Iraqi civil war really picks up speed and becomes genocidal, basically.
And, you know, Petraeus is the one who is arming these units that are committing and carrying out that genocide.
You know, not to mention- And when you talk about the guys in Mosul, those are- 300,000 weapons?
Yeah, the guys in Mosul, those are all the Sunnis that when you say then it all failed, that means they all went and joined the insurgency with all the weapons that he gave them.
Then he went to train, when you're talking about he went to train the Shiite army, that's the other side of the civil war.
He went from training one side to the other without skipping a beat.
Yeah, and he lost what?
I mean, please remind me, probably knows better than I do.
He lost what, 300,000 rifles and pistols or 400,000 rifles and pistols?
I don't know exactly, but it was a massive debacle for sure in Mosul, yeah.
And he gets promoted because he's willing to write an op-ed in the, was it Times or the Washington Post on the eve of the presidential election in 2004 saying about how important the Iraq war.
He's willing to write an op-ed in one of the two largest newspapers in the United States as a general in the United States army, basically supporting one presidential candidate over another and he gets promoted for it.
So that's how this works from the very top.
And you can imagine below it's the same thing, just on lower degrees, lesser degrees, right?
There's a lot of reasons why we're here, why these wars continue the way they do, why they have been catastrophes for the people who have been subjected to them, but also too, why the United States can't seem to achieve any of its objectives.
I mean, you could say the objectives for the United States in some of these wars have been clear, right?
The defeat and degradation of the Taliban in order to the point that they are forced to negotiate.
Clearly the United States did not meet that goal.
That was the goal of the American policy, military victory.
And how come it was allowed to continue like that for not years, but decades?
And you can point to the fact that, well, I mean, hey, look, we've got political generals and they rise to power because they're political generals and they want to become not just political generals, they want to be celebrity generals.
But then everyone underneath them is going to mirror that.
And getting back to Danny Davis, that's a lot of what Danny Davis witnessed and went to Congress to talk about.
Yeah.
Well, and just think about the lack of accountability now and forever for these people.
I mean, they can spin it all.
They're spinning it all now as, well, the problem is Trump negotiated our way out of there and then Biden followed through on it.
And that's bad, but that's all you need to know about anything that's bad.
Other than that, it was great or it was going to be great or it should have been great or it's nobody's fault or somebody else's fault that it wasn't great or some kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's like they're going to stay with that.
Nobody's in trouble.
People believe that the reason why this collapse in Afghanistan happened was because Joe Biden pulled 2,500 troops out of a country the size of Texas.
Does that make sense?
Right.
I mean, what were these 2,500 troops all spread throughout the country and they were the one that was a thin red line between Afghanistan and the Taliban?
Come on.
You know, I mean, like, you know, to paraphrase Malcolm X, if you know nothing, you'll believe anything about, you know, some narrative and who knows anything about the Afghan war?
You know what I mean?
Other than people like you and me who have this very particular interest in it, the American people don't know who's who or what's been going on over there.
Nobody's told them.
And certainly, you know, and this is the only thing unique about me, but people say that what I say is smart or whatever, but I know that's not true.
I read people who write really smart stuff about Afghanistan.
The only thing unique about me is just I've been doing this for so long in a row and I have a somewhat good memory.
So I remember the things that happen, but it's not necessarily brilliant analysis or anything.
It's just look at it, man.
This has been going on forever.
We were reaching all these conclusions a decade ago.
There ain't no reason we should be having this conversation in 2021, man.
I mean, it's got it's like the equivalent of like, you know, throwing, you know, cups of kerosene or lighter fluid or whatever on the fire and being belittled or why the fire is not being put out.
You know, I mean, like, let's keep trying.
Let's keep doing it.
I mean, like that is the it's a cliche.
But the you know, the fuel on the fire is exactly what the United States was doing in Afghanistan.
And it was apparent.
I mean, how could you not?
But that wasn't convenient, you know, in terms of and I will say you are unique because you've written two of the best books on these wars.
And I would say in particularly the best books in terms of detailing how we got to this point in these wars, why it looks like this.
Why did you know, if I think for folks out there, if you are struggling to understand why the people of Afghanistan have chosen the Taliban, which is, I think, an argument that can be made because, well, the choices they were given were the Taliban and this this this Afghan government that is composed of warlords and drug lords is corrupt, is predatory.
It is an amazing kleptocracy, you know, because one of the things that's happened that I don't think enough people are talking about right now is the fact that the Taliban succeeded very well in provinces that are non-Pashtun.
So for most of right, you go back a couple of years, Scott, you and I talk about this.
The Taliban are 95, 96 percent Pashtun, primarily a Pashtun army, certainly Pashtun leadership, you know, and not the case anymore.
Lots of non-Pashtuns joined the Taliban this year.
You know, certainly it would not have been possible what they did without non-Pashtun support.
Which also meant they were hiring, too, which is interesting.
Yeah, they were hiring, yeah.
But the alternative to the Taliban was worse than the Taliban.
And I mean, and so how that's what that's what the United States created.
You talk about accountability.
And then one final thing, you know, about accountability that I definitely want to get off my chest here.
I feel like I'm in therapy, man.
When I come on your show, it's great.
Like, I get to vent, you know.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Knowing my family, my dogs don't want to hear about it.
I'm here for it, dude.
Right.
Thank you, Scott.
Absolutely.
So, Afghan papers, everyone's familiar or should be familiar with the Afghan papers.
December 2019, Greg Whitlock and the Washington Post published documents that for three years they have been in court trying to get from the U.S. government.
And these documents come from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.
The Washington Post gets their hands on those.
They get hands on 400 of the interviews, very candid interviews, because the people who were interviewed never thought that what they were talking about would be made public.
Shows that, you know, the war was it was never going to be won.
And that lying dominated the entire war.
The war was one big lie.
Washington Post, Greg Whitlock, this month has a book out on the Afghan papers.
I'm sure it's going to be a terrific book.
Wonderful resource.
Right.
All this information in there.
Yeah.
I already got.
OK, when you get the book.
Flip it over, check out the dust jacket and see who's blurbing it.
The people who are blurbing that book are the Pentagon correspondents, guys like Tom Bowman from NPR, women like Barbara Starr from CNN.
These people who have done nothing but stenographers for the Pentagon for the last couple decades.
Yep.
They are the ones who are saying what a great job the Post did.
What a great job Whitlock did.
This book is so important, exposing the lies of the war when these were the very people who were passing along those lies.
Either they were too dumb or they were in on it.
How can you sit when I bet Barbara Starr had been in the Pentagon forever when I was in the Pentagon in 2002.
You know, I mean, like she had been there for Redford at that time.
She's still there.
How can someone like that sit in these briefings day in and day out, hear the same things over again and then witness what's occurring in these wars and see that they don't match up?
You know, again, either they're too dumb or they're in on it to, you know, make a casino movie reference.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, what courage for them to come forward and say, oh, yeah, no, I stand by my friends reporting here.
It's great.
In fact, like they don't, I'm sure, even recognize the irony of what you're saying at all.
Wow.
What role have I played in, you know, pushing this narrative on in any critical way, you know?
And, you know, Danny Davis and Kelly Vlahos have written about this a bit.
Kelly, you know, over at the Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft.
Yeah.
Thanks for mentioning her, because you know what?
She's been absolutely great on Afghanistan for so long.
And certainly at the end of the Bush years and beginning of Obama, she was writing for us at Antiwar.com, you know, once or twice a week.
Absolutely killing it.
You talk about the Condonistas.
She's the number one best person in this country on that subject of all of that whole social class of war party goons in the Democratic Party side in the Obama years there and all that.
Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to get.
Oh, no, no, no.
You know, with Kelly, Kelly's fantastic.
And but she's been, you know, you know, commenting on what The Post and The Times and others have been saying about the war, the mistakes, as they call it, and accountability.
And The Post quotes Michelle Flournoy, who was the president or the director of whatever her title was at the Center for New American Security, CNAS, which was arguably the most important voice in Washington, D.C. in 2009, 2010, in terms of advocating for the escalation of the war.
Flournoy went into the Obama administration.
She became the undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three person at the Defense Department.
And then she, of course, was was expected to be Joe Biden's secretary of defense.
And, you know, her comments to The Post in the last couple of days, to paraphrase Flournoy, she says, well, I knew all along.
I mean, I and by by, you know, at some point in 2010, I knew that this was rotten and it was corrupt and it wasn't going to work and it was counterproductive.
Like that at some point in 2010.
Yeah.
Thanks a lot for nothing, lady.
But even then, that was before she was even.
But that's a complete lie, because then she becomes undersecretary of defense for policy under Obama.
And how many times, how many countless times did she testify to Congress over oath before the Haskin Assass, the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee under oath, where she said things were going well in Afghanistan.
We're making progress.
You know, victory is just around the corner.
How many times did she say that?
And the point that Kelly is making, of course, is that not so much that Flournoy is lying, lying and covering for herself and, you know, whatever, but that The Post doesn't point any of that out.
The Post doesn't say, hey, you were in charge of CNAS.
You were the undersecretary of defense for policy.
What do you mean you knew this?
Well, why didn't you do anything about it?
You weren't some mid-ranking officer who no one was going to you weren't Chelsea Manning, you know, a private first class that people are going to say, hey, shut up private and get back to work.
No, you were you were you were in the room when these decisions were being made.
You were an important voice.
The Post doesn't say anything about that.
They don't say, well, how come then when you testified to Congress under oath, you didn't say this.
You said things were going well.
We're going to win.
You mean so it's like the accountability.
Of course they do it.
So when Joe Biden.
H.R. McMaster, too, on that same issue, you know, is saying, you know, he was in charge of abolishing corruption in Kabul under the Petraeus search.
That was his job.
And now he's up there going, oh, yeah, no, everything was fine until Trump started negotiating.
That's right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, the and this is why Joe Biden, you know, it's so important.
Hey, you may be saying, hey, Matt, you're nitpicking about what Biden said about his opposition to the surge and, you know, 10,000 troops less and everything else.
But no, the point is that the the issue is, is that the president of the United States has the complete confidence to get on the television, address the American public about an issue that has destroyed millions of lives.
And so just easily lies about it, just says, well, I'm just going to say I opposed it, you know, I mean, and no, and he gets away with it.
It's OK.
And knowing he would get away with it.
I mean, he knows he didn't oppose it unless he's that senile, which I don't think he is.
You know, I mean, but I mean, like he knows he didn't oppose it.
He knows what his strategy was.
He knows what he should know, what the counterterrorism strategy is advocating for look like.
It was what as we discussed, it was what Petraeus did in Afghanistan with the night raids and the airstrikes.
That's what the counterterrorism strategy was.
You know, just counterterrorism just meant and we still kept doing all the coin stuff when we switched over to counterterror.
Just meant we were just killing them.
You know, you know, we were just killing them as much as we were trying to hand out money to them.
Yeah.
So it's it's this this the fact, you know, so if anyone thinks that this is the end of the era, right, that we lost, we're going to go home, we're going to change.
You know, the United States is going to be much better about this.
You know, I don't know if you've got that, man.
What's that?
I don't think anybody thinks that it's just they got licked in this one.
And what are they going to do?
Send another 30,000 guys back or more?
Oh, man, it's got me.
I'm getting triggered by so much stuff.
I remember being listen to this trio.
I used to be on MSNBC a lot.
No, 9, 10, 11.
And at one point I was with these two other guys all the time.
One with Tony Schaefer, who I don't know if folks remember Tony Schaefer.
He was a DIA officer who went to Congress saying, look, the DIA and the CIA and the US Intelligence Committee had a lot more information about the 9-11 hijackers than they're letting on.
So Schaefer was good about that.
And when I knew Schaefer, he was really great in the Afghan war.
Now he's a Trump.
He's a Trumpist.
You know, I mean, like this.
I know him only as a hawk.
I didn't realize there was some nuance there.
But he's a crazy, he's a crazy person now.
He's he's all into you know, I don't know if he's into QAnon, but he's he read his Twitter.
He's a nut.
I remember one time I did Judge Napolitano show and I only did a show twice.
So once was against the war in Libya and the other was in defense of Manning and oh, this was the one.
It was in defense of Manning and Assange when the when the WikiLeaks were first breaking or when that not not the WikiLeaks because the war the war cables came first.
It was when the State Department cables came out.
And the first thing that was my wife found in there were the Israelis who were like blackmailing us into you're threatening to attack Iran if we don't do what they want and whatever stuff.
Yeah.
And I and I ended with that.
And then he was on right after me.
And I was like, hey, welcome to.
And he's like, boy, I don't know about all that.
But it was right there in the WikiLeaks is great.
But I just remember getting that reaction out of him.
He didn't think he was going to hear that on Fox News that day.
But I said anyway.
But but Schaefer was great.
We'd be in the we used to take the train to New York together, you know, I mean, like, you know, and then he just started to get this Twitter following and he became a contributor to Fox.
And I think he realized that he was becoming a celebrity.
And so he just fed that he fed the Twitter crowd and the Fox crowd what they wanted, you know, gave them red meat, so to speak.
But my point wasn't about Schaefer.
My point was the third person in this trio was Brett McGurk.
Right.
Brett McGurk.
People don't know Brett McGurk.
Brett McGurk was a senior official in the Bush White House.
He became I can't remember what their titles are, but he became basically the senior civilian in Obama's war against ISIS.
Right.
So very involved in Syria and Iraq.
He is back in he is back in that role to a degree with Biden.
He is.
But the point being is that when we would be on like Dylan Radigan's show on MSNBC or something like that, or I'm with Tamron Hall or whoever, you know, the McGurk in 2009, 2010 would say stuff like, you know what, we've learned our lessons.
We've got the generals who learned from the Iraq war.
They're going to be the ones leading this war in Afghanistan.
We know what we're doing now because what we're doing is based upon what we learned, the lessons learned in Iraq, you know.
And so here's a guy who say these kinds of things, who said those kinds of things.
And by, you know, being again, being a cheerleader, being a yes man, having that can do attitude and, you know, also to promoting himself as a hard nose realist, you know, and I use that phrase because that's the phrase that David Halberstam used in The Best and The Brightest, which I still think, along with Scott's books, is one of the best books you can read to understand these wars, even though it was about Vietnam.
You know, because he's a loyal guy, he says these things that are completely false, they're never going to happen and turn out to have been completely incorrect.
He continues to get promoted and he gets lionized by the media.
He's a respected figure.
He is an authority on the subject.
You know, they're not going to quote, you know, Danny Davis or Scott Horton or anyone.
They're certainly going to quote Brett McGurk, even though how long, how long will you have to be on Google for looking to find a quote by Brett McGurk that was ever accurate or came true or had like a shred of honesty towards it?
But, you know, I mean, again, another reason why is people struggle to understand why these wars occurred, how they are playing out, what the future holds for the people of these countries, as well for the U.S. and its military and what as a society we're going to do.
I think it's important to look at these individuals, because even though they're just individuals, they represent the institutions very well.
And how these individuals carry themselves, what they say, what they do is a pretty good indication of what the institutions themselves will do.
So in a case like Brett McGurk, yeah, I'm going to lie about the war and we're going to do it.
And if it doesn't work out, well, oh, well, I'm going to be OK.
You mean that that's the reality of it?
Yep.
And yeah, and that's the reality for all them, right?
There's no price for being wrong at all.
I don't know if you remember when John McCain died, they reported.
I forgot if they reported after he died or right before he died that, oh, John McCain says he was wrong about Iraq after all.
Oh, man, really?
You know, even then they make it sound like, OK, he was wrong for voting for it or something like that.
And he was the biggest hawk on waging it and staying there the whole time, you know, and oh, he gets to say sorry on his deathbed in his 80s or something.
Yeah, cry me a river, man.
No, exactly.
I mean, yeah, there's and I think, you know, I mean, to get into, I think, you know, and we probably should be wrapping up.
I know we're making people's ears bleed here.
But, you know, this is a lot of what I'm seeing from my veteran friends, the betrayal, you know, the fact that nobody is being held responsible that this war, obviously, the United States lost this war.
Well, how come the generals aren't being, you know, you know, not guillotined or hung?
But why isn't even anyone?
Why are they?
Why is John Bolton doing appearances on NPR and on CNN?
You know, I mean, like what these people have been wrong over and over again, demonstrably wrong.
It doesn't, you know, but that's what we have as a system.
And so unless we not just reform the system, but replace this system, it's going to continue to happen.
You know, and I think that's what you guys on, you know, libertarian side, me and my lefty socialist friends, you know, that's what we believe, you know, I mean, because otherwise, incrementalism, any type of reform just by OK, maybe this guy is going to be better about it.
This woman's going to be no, no, the whole system.
This is what the system is meant to be doing.
This is what the system does.
This is how it this is how it lives.
It survives, you know.
Yeah.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Yeah, you're right.
And listen, I mean, I wanted to ask you at the end here to wrap up about, you know, if you have a word for the veterans out there, because there are a lot of veterans that listen to this show, a lot of active duty guys or I don't know how many is a lot, but certainly some active duty guys listen to the thing.
And.
You know, there's a piece of defense news here that's, you know, I don't know if they're just spinning for their own point of view or they're just trying to have an honest take on it here.
They say Afghanistan veterans struggling with news of the Taliban takeover.
And God, I imagine a lot of guys they gave a lot over there.
And so I wonder what you would say to them as they watch all of it clearly prove out in almost a mathematical form here to have been for nothing.
Or I mean, that's my characterization of it.
You don't have to buy that.
I don't know.
Obviously, a lot of guys over there, they fought for each other, which is a different matter.
But still, I mean, they were told that there was some good reason that they were doing it.
Absolutely.
And I think that's what you get when you have Joe Biden coming out and saying this war wasn't about nation building.
I mean, how does that strike these?
You know, there's been two point seven million men and women who fought in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
Two point seven.
I don't know how many fought in Afghanistan, how many fought in Iraq.
But at this point, it's all intertwined.
And, you know, say that it's almost three million people who are just listening to the president of the United States blatantly lie about something that they took part in.
What do you mean it wasn't about nation building?
This is what we killed and what we were killed for.
This is what we were told.
This is what we saw with our own eyes, what we did with our own hands.
What do you mean it's not nation?
We were told specifically if we build this school, if we train these police.
Right.
And I'm told that, well, my friend, you know, he can't walk anymore.
Him and his wife can't have kids because his testicles got blown off.
You know, that was because he's helping this nation stand up on its own.
He's giving future generations of Iraq and Afghanistan a chance that they didn't have without him.
I mean, all that it's all lies, all lies.
You know, I mean, so it's understandable the anger, you know, I would say to guys out there and guys, guys and gals out there who are going through this right now, you're not alone in it and talk about it.
Find people to talk about it.
I'm on, you know, you can contact me.
I know Scott is a great guy.
Contact Scott, you know, you know, get hold of me through my website or, you know, talk to your friends.
I'm on Twitter now again.
God help me.
You know, that's something, Scott, you know, with my mental health issues, my substance abuse problems, my traumatic brain injury.
Yeah.
Twitter is probably the best thing for me.
Right.
You know, but like a masochist, I jump back into that.
Listen, I got your back.
But the right thing probably would be to sign back off, man, to tell you the honest truth.
Yeah.
And as far as substance abuse, I hope you just smoke weed, man.
That's the obvious thing to do now.
We can get it.
And I'm not just selling it.
You know, I mean, yeah, no, I'm I'm a complete proponent of marijuana.
I am.
But you could also, you know, lay off the hard stuff if you can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's yeah.
But no, I do.
I mean, just, you know, I belong to a I get substance abuse help from the V.A., you know, I mean, because I'm an alcoholic and I have issues with alcohol.
And, you know, and the V.A. has gotten me to the point where something like this in previous years, I would be, you know, I would be drinking my way through it.
The alcohol would be my medication.
It would be a way for me to deal with this, to numb that to me before on the show, that the V.A. really has been very helpful for you, which I guess is maybe not the meta narrative out there in the world, but maybe it should be or at least sometimes it is.
I mean, look, everything we know about it, one of the problems with it, with the discussion about the V.A. is that, yeah, the V.A. up until about 10 years ago was was my opinion was not very good.
When I first started going to the V.A., it was like it was like a live performance of a bad son, a live skit, you know, like just this just, you know, it was it was not good.
And but I think because it's been resourced more properly, attention has been given to it.
People have been fired that it has gotten better.
And what you see from polling by groups like Veterans of Foreign Wars and others is that most veterans are happy with their V.A. care.
And I can tell you from the suicide data, veterans who are enrolled in veterans health care have a much lower chance of death by suicide than those who are not.
And actually, what we've seen with veterans suicides over the last decade, say, is that among veterans who are not enrolled in veterans health care or through the V.A., suicide rates continue to climb.
Meanwhile, among veterans who are enrolled with the V.A., suicide rates are relatively stable.
They're still much higher than civilian rates.
Don't get me wrong.
It's still much, much higher.
But there are at least have stabilized and are not climbing the rates.
So the V.A. and the problem with the V.A. is one of the ways it was pros and cons of it.
Right.
But when the V.A. is reestablished, when they kind of rebuild the V.A. after World War Two, they created so that every V.A. is basically its own little fiefdom, like the V.A. like ship captains and V.A. hospital directors are the last kings in the world kind of thing.
You know, I mean, so if you've been to one V.A., you've been to one V.A.
That is the truth.
And I've experienced that.
Many other people know that.
People can tell you, yeah, I went to the V.A., you know, X place and it was terrible.
But then I went to the one in Y and it was fantastic.
You know, so the V.A. health care, you have to be in it.
You've got to be persisted.
They're still under-resourced.
Something like about the V.A. has a staff of about 350,000.
And last I saw between 40 and 50,000 of those positions were vacant.
I mean, so they're still understaffed.
They're still under-resourced.
But, you know, the point about this anger that a lot of guys are going through, the despondency that, you know, some men and women are going through who've taken part in this, the hopelessness, the what was it for, you know, the sense of betrayal.
It's common.
It occurs to us.
You're not alone with that.
You know, reach out and talk to people about it.
Just get it off your chest.
That's the first step.
You know, but if you are having issues that are serious issues, you know, particularly if you're doing something with regards to your mental health or emotional health that someone makes a comment to you about, it's serious and it's time to get help.
Right.
I mean, that's I think a basic level of someone or if there is something you can look at in your life and you say, man, I really effed that up because of the way I'm acting, because of emotions, you know, I am having relating to my military or any anything really.
It's time to get help.
And you have to reach out.
You have to be persistent.
I'm a big believer in advocates.
You know, only about 10 percent of veterans are women.
So I tend to say guys a lot, a lot of women out there who serve a lot of women who are dealing with trauma, whether it be from the war, whether it be from military sexual trauma, you know, assault and rape.
But yeah, advocates are important.
Bring your wife, bring your daughter, bring your sister.
And I say women because women tend to advocate much better, particularly in health care situations than men do.
I mean, for the most part, we're troglodytes.
Most guys, you know, I mean, like we don't want I mean, women seem to be more in tune with this stuff.
And women also tend to stand up for their loved ones better than men do.
And I want to make that a general, you know, that's not a blanket statement, but that's what I've seen in terms of health care.
So an advocate bring someone with you, enlist somebody, get somebody, you know, you would never have done anything in Iraq and Afghanistan on your own.
You never would have.
You're part of a team always.
And why?
Why then is life outside the military so individualized?
We can do you need to do things as a team.
I mean, so there's all these different things.
But, you know, I mean, the thing to do is to accept what you're going through.
And, you know, OK, do something about it.
You know, and there are a lot of people who are going through this as well.
Again, this anger, this sense of betrayal, you know, the despondency, the what was it for?
That's not unique to you.
Yes, of course, the feelings, your emotions, the strength, what it's doing to you is unique to you.
And I don't want to diminish that at all.
But there are millions of other people.
The other thing, too, I think it's important for people to to understand about what combat veterans are going through is that combat veterans, unlike many other recipients of trauma, are perpetrators.
And there's an actual diagnosis for this.
It's called perpetrator induced traumatic syndrome or traumatic stress.
PITS, P-I-T-S.
Because what you many times come back with from the war is that you did things right that you're now uncomfortable with, you feel guilty about, you have shame over, you have regret over.
Maybe you didn't do things.
Maybe you didn't.
Hey, I mean, I'll tell a story just to let people know how bad it can be.
I had my friend's kid asked me why he didn't save his dad.
His dad died with me.
And his son, his boy, said to me, why didn't you do more to save my dad?
So you can be a perpetrator just because you didn't do enough or you think you didn't do enough.
The reality in Trane's case was there's nothing could have been done.
Hard to hard to accept that, though.
It took me years and years of therapy to accept that.
So you have to, I think, also to accept what you're struggling with.
And what you're doing as a veteran, what you're struggling with, most people aren't going to identify with it.
That doesn't mean they won't understand.
It doesn't mean they won't help out.
I mean, that's another thing, too, is let your guard down.
Just because someone didn't carry a rifle doesn't mean that they're somehow unable to understand you or talk with you.
I get this a lot, too.
Like if because someone didn't carry a rifle, they have no right to talk about this stuff, which is, you know, obviously you're, you know, listeners, you know, guys who are guys and gals are in the military don't agree with that, you know, but there is that segment out there, you know.
So but yeah, no, I mean, I think the thing is that the main point is, yeah, get help.
If you think you might need help, then you do need help, I think, is a good good way to go through it.
Well, and look, if you're mad, be mad at PNAC and CNAS.
They're the ones what did it to you, you know, so know your enemy and focus on that.
And I'm not saying anybody hurt anybody, obviously, but you know what I mean?
Hey, anger, anger can be a great motivating factor.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Neither Scott or I are saying, you know, go out and violence or anything like that as much as you know, and I think a lot a lot of the problems is is that there is no justice, right?
The people who are profiting from this again, a guy like John Bolton keeps showing up on CNN and NPR.
Brett McGurk keeps getting appointed to new positions in the, you know, in the White House.
Right?
Joe Biden can go on television, be incredible.
I mean, all kinds of you've had all kinds of shows talking about Joe Biden's role in these wars.
Yeah, right.
And look, Michelle Flournoy may still become the secretary of defense.
Oh, I have no doubt about that.
I have no doubt about that.
Lloyd Austin at some point is going to say enough's enough.
I don't want to deal with this anymore.
I want to go and make millions of dollars again from being on the boards of Raytheon and defense corporations and things like that.
And yeah, Flournoy will slide right in.
Yeah, absolutely.
Sick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, listen, you're right.
We should wrap this up.
So people want to listen to it when they see how long it is before they even hit play.
But to anybody who made it this long, congratulations.
And congratulations to me, because, you know, I'm very lucky that I get to have all you guys come on the show and talk about all what you know about this.
I don't know if you saw on Twitter, Sam Harris, the atheist guy, was asked, who should I talk to about Afghanistan?
And a bunch of people said me.
And then he didn't even bite on that at all, as far as I could tell.
So I went ahead and answered, which I should have done right away.
They're like, actually, you should talk to.
And then I mentioned you, Danny Sherson and Danny Davis, of course, and said, these are the guys you want to talk to the Afghan war whistleblowers, you know, the former Marine and the Army major and the Army lieutenant colonel, for God's sake.
Yeah, thank you.
I saw that.
I really appreciate that, Scott.
And I'm wondering, maybe I know, I probably don't want to know who he ended up having on to talk about it, you know.
But I probably don't need to do that to myself.
But, but yeah, hey, man, I appreciate you.
I'm, I feel we're lucky to have you, you know, this show, the people that you bring on the show, the information you provide the, you know, it helps so many people, including a lot of veterans who try and understand what they've been through.
What was it for?
Why does it keep happening like this?
Why isn't, you know, you know, why is nobody held accountable?
Why is it going to happen again?
You know, I mean, this is the type of stuff, the service you do for guys like me is, you know, hey, okay, you're helping, we live in an unjust world.
Here's a guy, Scott Horton, who gets that and he's trying to do something about it.
You know, trying to do something about this unjust world we live in.
At least call the score.
I don't know if I can.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
I really appreciate that a lot, man.
All right.
You bet, Scott.
You bet, Scott.
See you, man.
All right.
Bye-bye.
All right.
That's Matthew Ho, guys.
The Scott Horton Show and Anti-War Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.