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.
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On the line, I got Peter Van Buren, and he used to work for the U.S. State Department, but I like him now.
He wrote all these great books.
One of them is called We Meant Well, about the war in Iraq, and then The Ghosts of Tom Jode about being broke in the American crash, and then, of course, Hooper's War, a novel about World War II Japan, but, you know, it's kind of sort of also about you and me, I think.
And his blog is called We Meant Well, and he writes mostly at TAC, as its friends call it.
It's a private magazine, and the reason I'm talking so slowly is because I'm looking for the right tab in my giant pile of tabs here, and I can't find it.
But anyway, he wrote a thing for TAC, and it was all about the blame for the Afghan War.
Whose fault is it?
What a great question.
Hi, Peter.
Welcome to the show.
Scott, thanks for having me again.
I appreciate you talking slow.
I'm getting a little older these days, and it's just that much easier when things move more slowly than normal.
So appreciate the nod toward diversity there.
Cool, man.
Yeah, you know, I just turned 45, and I'm starting to feel it.
Yeah, it's kicking in now.
It might be psychosomatic, but I don't think so.
No, I don't think so.
I think there are days when I feel even older, and that's a transitional device, because in fact, it was almost 10 years ago to the day that the book I wrote about the failure of nation-building in Iraq came out.
And that's called We Meant Well, and the title by now, I think, is familiar to people that it was sarcastic.
And having participated in the failed reconstruction program in Iraq, the failed nation-building program, and watched the military and the State Department up close over two administrations, this has been a tough week for me.
I've been walking around telling random people, and actually, I'm mostly speaking to dogs now, because most of the people shun me, and saying, I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.
And it's difficult to have watched this all happen in Afghanistan, knowing where and how it was going to end 10 years ago.
Yeah, I think that too, man.
It does really suck.
And the reason I'm excited to talk with you today, and I may even give you a chance in a moment, but is not only because the therapist doesn't pick up anymore, but because you have followed me on this journey, as you've taken the journey yourself.
You've written, I think, two books now on the collapse in Afghanistan.
And today, of course, I pick up, I go to the National Spectator website, and there's a guy who thinks he's discovered the phrase, fool's errand, to describe the adventures in Afghanistan.
When, of course, you stumbled onto that a long time ago, and wrote a whole book.
Who was it that said that?
It was on the, it's called the American Spectator.
And it's a guy named Daniel J. Flynn.
And his subtitle of his article is, Nation Building, Attempting to Change Another's Cultures and Customs as a Fool's Errand.
And it's all about Afghanistan.
And he doesn't really give you any credit in here.
I gotta say, it's a pretty obvious cliche to apply to this situation, you know?
Well, sure.
I mean, but justice where it's due.
One of the things that made me so sad is the Special Inspector General for the Afghan Reconstruction, which is a congressionally-created organization that was supposed to oversee the nation building, particularly the spending of all the trillions of dollars.
There was one in Iraq.
But in their report, sort of summarizing the last 20 years of failure, they said something along the lines of, the only thing less useful than what we did in Afghanistan would have been to simply set fire to the pile of money and walk away.
And the line came directly out of my book, We Meant Well, talking about Iraq 10 years ago.
I said in there, you know, the only thing, the reason we did all this is because we couldn't find a match to set fire to all the money.
And I just was left wondering, did they steal my line?
Or is it just so obvious at this point how horrible this is that the same images come to people's minds?
Yeah.
It happens.
You know, great minds think alike and things like that.
But yeah, also there's joke-stealing plagiarism, too.
So you never really know for sure.
I like to think it's now finally become so obvious to everyone what we've been saying for at least the last 10 years, that now they've kind of met us here.
They've come from far away.
And we've been standing at this crossroads saying, guys, take a look at what this is.
And they finally arrived at our crossroads.
And having observed it again, have come to the conclusions we did some years ago.
Yeah.
So, listen, I've been doing a lot of interviews about this, having written a book on it and all of that kind of thing lately.
And I'm always not exactly sure what to say to the kind of broad, open question of just how could this have happened, right?
Like on the notion of, you know, building a government that is just not accepted by the majority of the population.
Didn't they know that they wouldn't be able to get the majority of the population to support the thing?
Or did they think that, you know, it just doesn't matter, screw it, I'll be, you know, it'll be somebody else's problem and I'll be home by then when it all falls apart?
Or was there any reason to do this other than making money that anybody ever had?
Or just, you know, it's such a, it's such a kind of a letdown to such a large project.
You know, people feel like there should be something more meaningful to be gleaned from it all at the end, you know?
You know, the thing is, having spent 24 years in the State Department and watched an awful lot of this unfold from the inside in Washington, from talking to colleagues who were in even more senior positions who had a better glimpse of the policymaking, of course, reading what we know, thanks to WikiLeaks and things like that, and of course, spending my year in Iraq literally doing it, you know, the answer is kind of a little bit of all of the above.
An awful lot of what happened in Afghanistan started with some version of, we'll be generous and say a good intention, at least hoping for a particular outcome that they felt was actually achievable at some point.
And what happens is that as failures accumulate, people start finding ways to cover up their portion of the failure.
We have a political system that constantly refreshes who's in charge, not only at the presidential level, but also at all the levels from the next person all the way down to the bottom where I fed for most of my career.
And so people are constantly coming and going.
And in the government, we called it the EER syndrome.
EER was the name of our performance reports, you know, the once a year thing your boss had to write to say how you're doing.
And the idea was you had to have something to put on there to just say, you know, Scott did his radio program every day for a year and, you know, it sounded okay.
It's never enough.
You have to have something special.
You know, Scott scored in a special interview with this guy or Scott uncovered this particular malfeasance or whatever.
You know, you have to kind of have something on there to talk about.
And so everybody shows up with the desire to accomplish something where others have failed.
Everybody shows up dumb as a rock on day one and spends part of their time figuring out what happened before they got there.
And everyone at some point in their period of time, whether it's a year in Iraq or it's eight years as president for Bush and Obama, realizes it's a failure and they better start to dissociate themselves from it and just start planning on how at least they can walk away if not the United States.
At the same time, you're surrounded by people who have vested interests in telling you that the success is just around the corner.
Some of them are as crude as the people in the military industrial complex who simply want to keep the money flowing.
And we should never disregard that as a driver of all this, but we should never see it as a singular driver.
The same way people said, oh, it's all blood for oil.
Sure, there was that calculus in there, but it was never just that.
So you've got people in the military industrial complex who want to keep this going because they're getting very, very rich off of it.
You've got politicians who want to keep it going either because they don't want it to fail during their first term or they want to be the guy to claim, hey, the other guy's not doing it.
You'll let me in.
I'll fix it for you.
There's all sorts of players here on the American side, and we haven't even gotten to the rest of the world, but who have various reasons for wanting this thing to continue and to pretend it isn't failing or to be ignorant of its failure.
And all of that is completely independent of what's happening out there in the wilds of Afghanistan, the people that are dying, the suffering that's being caused, the political BS that's accumulating.
Most of this is attributable to individual failures that compound themselves.
More than that, almost play off of each other to create something bigger than a single failure, bigger than the whole, if you will.
And the fact that in America, we can do these things.
The Afghan adventure, of course, is only the most recent one.
Your listeners are pretty astute in their history, and we can walk it back through how many interventions, large and small, overt and covert, and things like that.
We can get away with this at almost no cost.
And I say that in understanding the words.
The idea is that we can find ways to justify the loss of life.
Certainly, we in America don't seem to care at all about the loss of foreign life.
The loss of the American lives is always justified by our brave men and women in uniform support the troops, build another monument.
Joe Biden yesterday actually said that the troops at the Kabul airport who were killed in the suicide bombing died fighting for liberty.
Now, if you can pull that out of your ass after 20 years in Afghanistan, when soldiers and Marines were killed in a suicide bombing during what was essentially our final retreat, if you can call that defending liberty and get away with it, which he did, there's no cost in terms of lives.
Money-wise, America seems to always find money for these adventures.
We can always talk about the greater economic impact, but at the end of the day, we seem to always have enough money to finance these things without the peasants storming the Bastille.
So the answer is that we do it because we can, because there's no cost to it.
No one's going to lose their job over anything that's happened in Afghanistan.
The only person who's been vaguely punished is Donald Rumsfeld, who's dead.
And hopefully the fates have resigned him to cleaning truck stop toilets in hell.
But the rest of these people are fine.
George Bush, who kicked off the most recent round in Afghanistan, has been recreated as a cuddly old man, goofy guy.
Barack Obama, who continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan irresponsibly, is a rock star.
He's practically a deity in the Democratic Party.
Somebody called Hillary Clinton for her role in this to task, though she lost the elections and faded on her own.
And people like Susan Rice, who was an architect of the violence across the Middle East, is in a new job in the Biden administration, as is Anthony Blinken and all these other people.
So there's never a cost to it, either personal or national.
So we keep doing it.
And I don't want to be too cynical, but of course we're going to do it again.
The next person that says never again within reach of me is going to walk away with a broken nose.
Yeah, it's so easy for some people to ignore which costs and which kind of tradeoffs.
I'm sure, you know, you must have seen Marianne Williamson, the former Democratic presidential potential candidate there, saying that, you know, at the very last minute, like as cobbles already fallen, she says, you're right, Bill Kristol, we should keep troops there to fight for women's rights.
Yeah, I see those things and it's absolutely stunning.
And it's like, lady, at this point, if you haven't figured out the scam, then I feel so sorry for you because, of course, women's rights were never important to anyone.
But the propagandists who wanted to throw a little bone out to the leftists and the progressives about why we're fighting there, and it gave Hillary a chance to accumulate some B-roll for her many unsuccessful runs for the presidency.
And you know, the media could could dig out Malala every once in a while.
I feel bad for Malala.
I mean, there there was a brand that was golden just a few years ago, and now she plays second fiddle to Greta, the climate change girl.
Yes, because she attacked Obama for the drone strikes to his face.
And I'm not sure if it was in the Oval Office or not, but I think it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, on Instagram, that's called, you know, really wrecking a brand.
Yeah.
Not supposed to ever do that.
No, no, no.
And so, you know, this is all part and parcel.
You know, you see it playing out right right now.
This this this sort of, you know, it was all about women's rights stuff.
I accidentally on the radio ended up listening to Fresh Air and Terry Gross, who was interviewing the CNN reporter, Clarissa Ward.
You know, I tried to send her fool's errand, but she didn't bite.
Well, it's funny, because when my first book came out, we meant, well, I was on Fresh Air.
I didn't even sort of ask for it.
The book had created enough controversy in Washington that they had me on.
And there we go.
And it was a successful show.
They seem to be worth listening to.
And then when my next books came out, which were not directly in line with the progressive Mein Kampf, you know, I couldn't get a phone call or an email returned.
And that's been the story of, you know, things, you know, when when you say something that fits with what they already want to say, then they're all over you and happy to have you.
And if you had written a book praising whatever they were happy about at that moment, the gains of women's rights in Afghanistan, you know, I read a column recently by some complete knucklehead explaining that, you know, even though the Taliban is back in charge, we've done we've set change in motion in Afghanistan and it can't be stopped.
So if you write something like that, I can get I can assure you Fresh Air will reach out to you and find you.
Um, if you don't, well, you know, you know, let me ask you something here about the media, because I think it's still sort of I got a pretty good sort of mosaic kind of a picture about how the way things work around here.
And yet I still always fall a little bit short in my own mind of being able to explain the just absolute abject hawkishness of every single person in the media, with just such few exceptions.
You know, if Geraldo says, listen, I'm a Zionist Jew.
I just think that, golly, we've got to cut these Palestinians a little bit of slack sometimes.
It's a total crisis because he's the only one who ever said that in the last seven years.
Right.
There's just and you know what?
I know that Israel policy has a lot to do with it and Zionism does have a lot to do with it.
But I know it's not just that.
Like if you watch the press corps, the way that they scream and holler and yell and get so upset when we're talking about a withdrawal from anywhere, how can you leave the Kurds in this lurch?
How can you leave the women of Afghanistan?
And in fact, I got a Segway, so it's a double part question here.
One of the questions being shouted at Blinken was no, no, no.
Pardon me.
Sullivan, national security adviser, was, yeah, but how can we leave a country where we have bases right there adjacent to Iran and Russia and China?
And then he made the mistake, the question made this mistake of throwing in Tajikistan.
And Sullivan says, we're not going to continue a war just so we can have a presence near Tajikistan.
Next question.
Right.
But which is fine.
It's probably Sullivan's best day.
But but so so two things.
What exactly is this media cult that makes them so militarist and just absolutely at the expense from any other point of view and to such a degree where they're on one mind about war more than probably any other thing, even like Trump and Russia or whatever kind of thing at its height.
And then also, what about that?
How important is obviously I know you don't buy it as good enough for you, but how important is the policy of having military forces there near Iran and Russia and China?
How important do you think that is to the overall policy in the background here?
Because usually they don't say that.
They only seem to come up with that when they're the most desperate.
But that either means it's total BS or it means that that was sort of the secret real reason that they weren't talking about this whole time, but that was what they really meant this whole time.
You know, there's a lot there.
I mean, the media, I would I've given up on them so long, so long ago.
The thing about the media is they can't really decide whether their role is to pimp partisan politics or whether their role is just to provide the bread and circuses.
And while they kind of bounce between the two, in fact, it ends up mostly in the same place, which is advocating for war.
When they advocate for war with an administration that they like, it's in that partisan politics thing.
When you were listing the groups that we had to go to war to save, you did forget my favorite, the Yazidis in Iraq, which was Obama's excuse to restart the war in whatever it was, 2012, 14, 14.
Sorry.
You remember when when we reentered Iraq, it was originally supposed to be a rescue mission to save the Yazidis.
Right.
And it ended up being us fighting ISIS alongside our allies, the Iranians.
So in that case, the media was all about partisan politics and pimping Obama's policy.
And there you go.
When they're not quite sure what to do, if Trump's in office who they hate or they're not quite sure about Biden, then they just kind of shift over to the other focus they have, which is bread and circuses.
Wars are good for business in the media, the same as they're good for business in the armaments industry.
People tune in to watch.
It gets clicks.
There's pundits have plenty to write about.
And you can do what the media wants to do, which is essentially bring eyes to whatever their their media product is.
And along with that, advertisements.
So war is good for business across the board, and it's also good for the media's business.
And I think that drives a lot of what you were talking about.
As far as the American fetish about having bases everywhere, this obviously grew out of World War Two, where the strategic decision was made after the war to be the world's imperialist power, to to to literally control the world with our military by physically being everywhere all the time.
That was obviously much more of a necessity with the technology of 1945 than it is with the technology of today.
But it does provide a lot of convenience if you're going to still try to pretend to be an imperial power.
If you've got to fly everything in from far away, it gets expensive.
It gets complicated.
You've got to sneak in and out all the time.
If you've got a base inside the country, then you can just kind of walk out and go to war.
We did that quite literally during the first Bush, the first George Bush administration with Panama.
We launched the invasion of Panama from the bases that we had inside of Panama.
We literally drove outside the gate to have the war.
And that's that's quite, quite convenient and quite powerful in a lot of the countries where we have pseudo bases like across Africa, that physical presence kind of tracks with the state of the art of the local people's worldview.
You know, they don't necessarily may not be as sophisticated about things.
And the idea that there's an American physical presence sitting literally in their capital kind of reminds them that we're around, even if in the end of the day we decide to fly bombers from Nebraska to drop bombs on them, just knowing that we're there.
And especially as the United States continues to expand its so-called special operations, at what point, at some point, the special operators are going to outnumber the regular troops.
I don't know what we're going to call them.
We're going to have to have like very special operators, you know, things like that.
But as long as we'd like to keep doing business that way, where we have some deniability or the or the way that we can kind of sneak in, do something naughty and sneak out, you know, that that is much, much easier if you've got bases there.
Sometimes, you know, you can use an embassy to do that.
But, you know, these guys who think they blend in oftentimes since they're, you know, six foot three with roided out muscles and shaved heads.
And, you know, they may not be immediately blending right in with the pasty faced diplomats all the time.
So having their own little hidey hole is often very, very convenient for America's imperial interests.
The bigger questions, of course, that beg are what are our imperial interests anymore?
And are we even if you say those are legitimate interests to pursue?
I mean, can we do it?
Are we any good at it?
We haven't really won a war for a pretty long time.
You can arguably walk it all the way back to 1945.
I mean, you could, you know, don't include throwaways like our invasion of Grenada or something like that.
But focus on the big ones.
Korea, at best, a tie.
Vietnam, big loss there.
Iraq, big loss there.
Afghanistan, you know, major loss there.
You know, you're going to have to argue what are we even capable of doing, what we think we're doing.
And could we please stop saying the greatest military in history kind of thing?
Because you got to win one once in a while, boys, if you want the title.
Well, we do have a lot of H-bombs.
So there.
There you go.
Yeah.
We could win a submarine battle probably with somebody if anybody else had any for us to fight against, you know?
Well, yeah, I mean, this is this is like, you know, when I was in I went to school at Ohio State and we had a sports team for everything.
I mean, if it involved a ball, a bat or running in some direction, Ohio State had a varsity team to the point where they were kind of looking around for others to play in some of these things, because there just wasn't in at that time in the Midwest, there just wasn't a big women's lacrosse presence.
And so, you know, they'd have to go pretty far out to find a varsity women's lacrosse team to that was any good to compete against.
And that's it.
I mean, we got all these great weapons.
And if the other side were willing to meet us under a well spelled out set of rules, I bet our guys would win.
But since the other teams seem to have their own version of rules and we just the greatest military on Earth just got chased out of Afghanistan by a bunch of guys whose image of technology is, you know, an expresso machine.
I think we have to kind of revisit some of these broad claims to fame.
I'd say so.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Scott here.
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Now, listen, a guy was just interviewing me and he reminded me of this thing that I wrote about in Fool's Errand about how Sabina Brzezinski, who was so responsible for getting us into this mess.
I'm sorry.
I just giggled at his.
Oh, yeah.
Memory.
Yeah.
You know, he's so responsible for getting into getting us into all this mess in the first place and everything.
But so by 1997, this is when the Bill Clinton government was still supporting the Taliban and its rise, along with the Saudis and the Pakistanis there to replace Haqqani and Hekmatyar, who they used to support, and and Massoud, who was the double agent who worked for the Soviets all along.
But anyway.
So Brzezinski writes in his book, The Grand Chessboard, he says, listen, we have to support the Taliban, Pakistan, China axis in Afghanistan in order to keep the Iranians, the Russians and the Indians out.
Right.
But then America invades in 2001.
And for the last 20 years, we've been supporting the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazaras, who are allied with exactly those three countries, Iran.
You know, the Hazaras are backed by Iran and the Tajiks backed by the Russians and the Uzbeks backed by Uzbeks backed by the Indians.
Maybe the Indians and the Russians both backed the Tajiks and the Uzbeks.
Anyway, so does it make a damn or what is the deal?
You know, it doesn't matter what the policy is as long as there's a policy and they can pursue it.
Well, first, of course, it would be fun to go to Washington and see how many senior policymakers could actually explain Brzezinski's sentence, that they actually understood what he was writing about, that places like Afghanistan are a spiderweb of alliances.
And we have to realize that whoever we're supporting also has other patrons and things like that.
I would be interested to see how many of the people in the senior ranks of the Biden administration could actually explain and dissect that sentence.
My guess would be not too many.
I think the thing that is missing from the calculus, when I went to Iran about two years ago and I met, this was just after Trump had pulled us out of the nuclear agreement and moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.
And I was there on a trip that was sponsored by an NGO that was affiliated with the Iranian government, yada, yada, yada.
If somebody wants to buy me, it's cheaper than that.
I'll just put it out that, you know, a case of beer will get you the op-ed of your choice.
I'm easy.
So nobody's buying me off or anything.
But anyway, we were sat down with a number of different groups within Iran, some clerics and some students and some policymakers and things like that.
The thing that was consistently wrong with their understanding of the United States, I felt, was that they failed to understand how significant domestic politics is in American foreign politics.
It's the driver of American foreign politics, at least the overt side of it, I'll say.
The idea would be that the Iranian foreign ministry people were looking at foreign affairs the way you look at foreign affairs.
You know, how does how does the world play games with each other?
In the United States, we look at our presidents tend to look at foreign affairs from with a domestic lens that explains an awful lot about policy towards Israel, for example.
But it also explains an awful lot about what the Bush administration did in 2001 when they sent the CIA in to begin the war there.
The CIA people who went in in 2001 were either veterans of the campaign against the Russians or were, you know, the intellectual sons of the people who did that.
They were not stupid people.
I can say the handful that I knew personally were extremely well briefed and understood what the rules were in Afghanistan.
And they could roar through these who's in charge of this splinter group and that they knew their business and they had had years of experience with this.
But.
Their orders were different, their orders were to sort of ignore everything and focus on killing the Taliban as the Washington wanted to define them.
And I won't even begin to insult you by saying, of course, there's not a single entity called the Taliban or the Northern Alliance.
I mean, we all know how fractured these organizations are.
But I mean, the idea would be that oftentimes smart people are told to enact policy that's dumb from a foreign policy perspective because it meets a domestic policy perspective, which is what's clearly the case in we're going to go over and tear Afghanistan into small pieces because of 9-11.
Sorry, but they are going to be the whipping boy for what we should have been doing to Saudis.
Yeah, you know, this is something that keeps coming up, too, right, is especially over 20 years of war, you know, in the Korengal and Petch Valley and down in Helmand Province and all these places.
There's a lot of Afghans who've been through a lot of war.
And, you know, I hear the statistics.
They sound very conservative to me as to how many Afghans must have been killed in this thing so far.
Certainly in the low hundreds of thousands, maybe more.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Nobody.
Nobody has a clue.
I mean, any number you see is a guess.
But the thing is.
You know, and everybody knows, I hope I've heard about right, because this is the kind of thing that even gets around at the water cooler in high school and everything where, like, everybody knows this, that 92 percent of Afghans, as of like 10 or 15 years ago, even had never even heard of 9-11.
They had no idea what it was.
And so then the idea is, well, it's kind of unfair that we're punishing them for something that they don't even they never even heard of, much less did to us.
But then the answer to that riddle is that we're not punishing them at all.
We're just here to help them.
We're here to reward them for formerly being victims of those who would have harbored those who attacked us or something like that.
And so now we're building a democracy for them where everything's going to be great.
And we got to kill a few of them to get from here to there.
Of course, you know, that's a thing.
But it's all for their own good means that it's OK to kill half a million of them.
Right.
I guess.
Well, this was where our dear friend Terry Gross was going the other day on Fresh Air interviewing a CNN reporter.
And basically, you know, Terry, who it's hard to imagine a person who sounds so, so nice being more and more ignorant in reality.
But I guess there must be a school for them or something.
But the idea is, is she was basically saying, you know, why didn't the Afghan women rise up and seize the seize the day?
And, you know, why didn't the Afghans fight back for their freedoms against the Taliban?
It's like, why were those dumb, ignorant country hicks not playing along with all the goodness America was attempting to to bring to them?
And it was the classic imperialist thing.
I mean, you could imagine some British dude with a handlebar mustache saying it at the bar in Singapore one hundred and fifty years ago.
Why won't the darkies, you know, let us save them and make their lives better?
Freaking heathens.
And it was basically the same idea there.
The other thing, though, is, is we can never leave aside the amazing ability of people to not know what happened before yesterday.
I was speaking with a group of college students and they were smart kids at a good school and all that happy stuff.
And I realized these people were in elementary school.
Some of them weren't even born when the this current Afghan war started.
Most of them were in elementary school through.
Yeah, the guy that just interviewed me started the show with I was in first grade when we invaded.
Right.
And.
I mean, I like to think I'm a pretty well read guy, but trust me, when I was in elementary school and the Vietnam War was raging, I did not know what was going on.
Neither did anybody else.
So so the idea that when we have these generational wars like this, if we don't make some effort somewhere in the media educational cycle somewhere to kind of educate people, then, you know, we pay the price of that.
One of the things I liked about your book, and this is not a butt kissing session, but it's a good it's a good thing is, you know, how early in the game you started when you were going to kind of lay out the history of the Afghan war.
Pretty much everything I read in the mainstream media starts with September 11th.
And it's like, guys, guys, guys, no, we have been actively involved in the war in Afghanistan since at least 1979.
You can back it up further if you want to.
But I mean, that's the minimum starting point was the decision by Brzezinski and Carter to use the indigenous forces in Afghanistan to destroy the Red Army, which in one breath created the Islamic warrior movement, which later blossomed into Al-Qaeda, which brought us to 9-11, which brought us into a full invasion of Afghanistan in the neocon plan to redo the entire Middle East, which brought us into Iraq.
And God help us almost sent us down the rabbit hole in Syria, but didn't really.
So good for us.
Yeah, well, that was more than one breath, but pretty close, though.
It was more of a guy, you know, I think, to be fair, it was more of a gasp than a breath.
It was a gasp.
It was a small gasp, but a gasp is a kind of a breath, I think it is.
But it was more of a sense of I can't believe all of what I'm saying is actually true.
It's a lot of words to fit in just a little bit, you know.
But the idea would be that when I see these these articles and it just causes me physical pain, usually something to do with either constipation or diarrhea.
I can't really come down on it one way or the other.
You know, who's to blame for Afghanistan?
And and, you know, people saying, well, it's probably Trump or it's probably Biden.
And it's like, well, you know, of course, there's so much blame to go around.
But you really don't know, do you?
You really don't see the breadth of history here.
You don't you don't hear Mikhail Gorbachev chuckling in the background.
You don't hear the Jimmy Carter keeping his mouth shut about his role in all this.
You know, I sent him my book.
I made I made Twitter friends with his assistant lady who runs the Carter Center.
Yeah.
And I sent her the book and I warned her.
I come down pretty hard on old Jimmy in here.
And she said, that's OK.
He won't mind at all.
I'll make sure he takes a look at it.
So and then you guys sat down and went through it.
Oh, yeah.
Not yet.
I'm waiting to hear back.
In fact, well, there was a delay.
I had sent it to her, but there was a delay in her getting to the mailing address there.
So I think the idea was he should be getting his hands on it sometime right around soon here now, you know, or maybe in the last week or so.
Yeah.
Don't let me hold you up if if you've got to go do that.
Wouldn't that be great if I could even get a quote, especially if I got a funny quote like, well, you know, I kind of agree with some of this stuff or something like that.
I'd put that right at the top of the book where Ron Paul's name is now.
Yeah, well, this is sort of right.
I mean, a little bit Carter's comment would be something along the lines of you bastard.
They're just kind of reforming my reputation.
And look at you go ahead and bring up all this stuff.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I really wonder what he'll say, if he'll say anything at all.
I you know, the lady is a really nice lady.
We went back and forth in the Twitter DMs there for a little bit.
And she seems like a very nice lady and a very open minded lady willing to read a book about how Jimmy Carter screwed up everything, you know.
So that's pretty good to start.
I predict I predict one day in the mail you're going to get a signed copy of one of his books to Scott, my my good friend or something like that.
And that'll be that'll be the the most you'll get out of it.
We'll see.
Wouldn't that be something else?
Well, my parents voted for him.
I know that.
There you go.
The thing is, is this never again stuff.
And this is what I would like to to to kind of probe a little bit, at least have an internal dialogue on, because, you know, we've done this never again thing over and over and over again.
Never again.
Well, explain, you mean from the slogan from after the Holocaust in World War Two?
Well, yeah, that one, too.
I mean, we the word genocide today means everything from a failed Instagram campaign to to, you know, multiple murders.
But, you know, never mind the genocide thing.
I'm talking about the idea that of we're going to not do another Vietnam and then we sort of do it again over.
Now, that's a different never again.
The first never again is we must have a war because we promised never again will we not have a war.
And so everyone you're talking about the man that was terrible.
Let's not do that again.
The more Vietnam syndrome type.
OK, well, so we'll go with let's not do that again.
And in fact, we just keep doing that again.
And somewhere there's a need for something.
You know, I recently started to reread David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.
No, I always wanted to read that.
I have it.
Go ahead.
Tell me about it.
So I highly, highly recommend it with with the caveat that it was written during the Vietnam era, just after somewhere in connection with the Vietnam War.
And it reads like a like an old book.
You got to spend time with it.
It meanders.
It doesn't have a lot of surprise conclusions and stuff like that.
It's and it was attempt to explain how the people around Kennedy were so committed to something that was so obviously a bad idea.
And it talks about them in this concept of the best and the brightest.
They were they were the brightest people, the smartest people of their generation.
They came into government with with great ambitions and with great humility at the power at their hands.
And they proceeded to screw it up every single step of the way.
And the more they screwed it up, the more they it's like it's like when you send money off to a Nigerian cyber scammer and your answer to getting ripped off is I'll send him some more money.
Maybe I can make my my losses back here.
And everyone around you is saying that's not a good idea.
And maybe even your brain is saying that's not a good idea.
One of the things that Habelstrom did not have access to, and it's worth looking at in this context, were the inner thoughts of Robert McNamara.
Robert McNamara was the secretary of defense.
He's the guy that commissioned the Pentagon Papers, the actual true secret history of the war, which revealed the lies and were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, of course.
But McNamara in his later years before he died, found redemption, if you will, by coming clean.
And he made public all sorts of information that showed while he was enlarging the Vietnam War, surging the Vietnam War and encouraging others in the Kennedy and Johnson administration to do so, he privately understood it to be a ridiculously bad thing.
And he knew he was doing wrong, but he did it anyway.
And these were contemporary documents.
This wasn't an attempt to whitewash history.
These were notes and memos and things that he wrote at the time he was making these ridiculous decisions.
And we need to really do something like that for the last 20 years of American history.
You know, you get people who knew better.
George Bush, I'll give him credit for being completely stupid and being buffaloed by the neocons, Dick Cheney and others around him.
But nobody's going to get away with calling Barack Obama stupid.
But yet he did it anyway.
He surged into Iraq.
He wouldn't withdraw from Afghanistan.
He waited till the last minute for a half-assed deal with China.
I mean, he's not a stupid man, but he did stupid things on a very large scale.
And someone has to help us understand how that happens, because it's the answer to the question of why do we keep doing this?
That's what I was trying to do with Enough Already, really, was to give like a survey of all of these wars.
And, you know, really, I don't think you have to go further than I hate to say this, but Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, it's really not about that.
It's the Pentagon's plot to force Obama to do the Afghan surge.
It's the real title of that book.
And it's kind of all in there, right down to, ah, hell, what if they do all resign?
What do I care?
I'll just go with the minimal option and screw them.
I'm the president, not them.
And then, no, you can't do that, Mr.
President.
You know that they resign.
You're going to look real.
You can't do it.
John McCain's going to make fun of you.
OK, I guess I'll give it like right down to I mean, they they go through conversation by conversation.
They all rat on each other to Woodward, you know, and who knows how much of this stuff he makes up to.
But it seemed pretty clear, though, that it was, you know, they also trash Hillary there that she's the secretary of state.
She's supposed to say, well, I don't know.
What if we did a more minimal thing?
But instead, she's like, I think you better do whatever the general says, Mr.
President.
And how then even Gates and Petraeus, who she was backing up, they resented her for it just because she was so shallow and such a backstabber that they expected her to play her role as secretary of state, to be the diplomat.
And when she sided with them, they all rolled their eyes at her like, God, this lady's horrible, you know, to box Obama in in that way, is the way they put it, you know?
Well, that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this idea that American foreign policy is nearly completely controlled by American domestic policy.
And so Obama doesn't want to go into the political arena and get picked on by John McCain, or he doesn't want to have to explain to the media why his generals have resigned.
And he knows that whatever happens afterwards, he gets blamed for anyway.
So he you know, his domestic position said it's easier to go over there and have American troops killed and have lots of Afghans killed than to face up to the domestic issues associated with pulling out.
And, you know, I have to give a half smidgen of respect to Joe Biden for being willing to take the bullet on this one, not literally because Joe isn't in the line of fire per se.
But I mean, the idea would be that Trump volunteered to do it.
He volunteered to take the bullet for getting us out of Afghanistan, knowing, of course, that it was going to fall apart when we left.
And Trump was willing to do it, but he got buffaloed by the media.
You remember that stuff?
The Russians were paying bounties to the Taliban and, you know, he just kind of gave up on the idea.
So I give a smidgen of respect to Biden for saying, you know, it's just got to get done.
I'm a one term president.
Who cares?
You know, my legacy is what it is.
Yada, yada, yada.
And so, you know, the tactical side of this, the actual on the ground role thing in Kabul has been a complete disaster and could have been so much cleaner and better.
But that's just details, really.
It's it's all going to be over in a couple of more days for better or worse.
But that willingness to take the domestic punch and maybe bring Kamala down with him strikes a little bit counter to what we've been talking about, where domestic politics have so controlled foreign policy in the last 20 years or so.
Yeah.
All right.
So, you know, how about we wrap up with this suicide attack at the Kabul airport on the way out the door here?
It just, you know, it looks so bad.
I got a friend over there, you know, an Internet friend who's a fan of the show, who's in the army, presumably on the ground at the Kabul airport right now.
I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure that's where he.
Yeah, I know that's where he was headed sooner or later.
And I think that was a while ago.
So he must be there now.
And he just had what I think they said it was 12 Marines and a Navy corpsman killed yesterday.
So what all do you think of that?
And there's a lot of different subjects under that heading.
Yeah.
You know, in a way, it's sort of I don't mean to be disrespectful to the loss of lives because we're we're looking now at hundreds of Afghans also dead in this attack.
And there's absolutely nothing to suggest this was going to be a one off and there won't be another attack and things like that.
But, you know, when you when you take when you have 20 years of bad decisions and 20 years of atrocities, choose your you know, the one that you want to focus on as the most symbolic.
I mean, I've written a lot about the death, the only death of a real State Department employee in Afghanistan and Smedinghoff, who was blown up by the Taliban while she was conducting a propaganda mission that should never have been approved.
You know, pick one and let that be the symbol, the focal point, the kind of literary device that lets you talk about the whole thing, because trying to take one bite and summarize 20 years of horror is too much for any mind to get a grip on, particularly when people are used to kind of shallow views of things.
So, you know, if this this terrible tragedy with the suicide bomber is going to be the media event that everyone seizes on to focus so that we because we can't or won't take the long view and understand the history and understand how the suicide bombing is just one of how many then fine, let's let's let's focus on that the same way.
Like I said, I focus often on the death of the one State Department employee.
Someone else could choose to focus on one of the wedding part, Afghan wedding parties.
We blew up in it by accident in a drone strike or or the torture or or the good we failed to do in things.
There's so many touch points.
But if you can only handle one, if you can only wrap your head around one, if that's what's necessary for you, for you, the collective you to understand what's been going on for 20 years while you were not paying attention, well, then do that, please.
But we grieve all the dead, the someone someone will be the last American to die for a bad idea in Afghanistan.
And I hope that it's we've seen that already.
It's it's it's a shame.
Very well said.
Speaking for me, that's for sure.
All right.
Thank you so much, Peter.
It's great to talk to you again.
It's been too long.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's Peter Van Buren.
Find him at TheAmericanConservative.com.
This one's called Who's to Blame for Afghanistan?
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.
