All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, everybody, check it out.
It's Kelly Bokar Vlejos from Responsible Statecraft, which is the online publication of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
How are you, Scott?
I'm great.
Happy to have you here.
Tell me all about the Quincy Institute and Responsible Statecraft, which I believe you're the editor of it, right?
Right.
So I am running with a team, the Responsible Statecraft, which is, I call it an online magazine because I like to think of it not as a think tank, aparatchik, or a house organ, but sort of a magazine for people like us who believe in restraint, believe in non-interventionism and foreign policy, skeptical and questioning and challenging of U.S. foreign policy over the last 50, 60, 70 years.
And it's a platform so that people like you, like me, like folks who haven't been able to be published anywhere else because of the mainstream blob gatekeepers, will have this arena with which to sort of voice their views, do a little reporting and analysis, but within that sort of restraint frame.
And I think it's been pretty successful.
We've only been around for a couple of years.
The Quincy Institute has only been around for two years now.
So it's relatively young, but to me, that makes it great because it's like a startup.
The Quincy Institute, for people that don't know about it, is a think tank which Trita Parsi had co-founded and likes to call an action tank because it doesn't want to be your typical beltway institution that just generates pieces of paper and hobnobs and rubs elbows with other blobbies, but actually is trying to make a difference in changing the foreign policy towards engagement of the world through diplomacy and not constant war.
And so we've been challenging the blob and I think we're doing a pretty good job of it.
I mean, it doesn't hurt that the last 20 years of failed war policy has really exposed itself and people are now looking around and going, why are we listening to all these a-holes in Washington for 20 years telling us things were great on the ground in Afghanistan and we have to lead this liberal interventionist order.
If the U.S. doesn't do it, the whole thing will fall apart.
People are looking around and going, hmm, yeah, we're thinking that those people did not have our best interests in mind, things that you and I, Scott, have known for forever.
But I think that the prevailing wins are with change and so I'm happy to be part of an organization that's trying to do that and in a transpartisan way, which is why I was brought on to the project in part, not only to do the editing of the magazine, but also to build some bridges with the right side of the dial.
Because as you know, that there's a lot of common ground between left and right, progressives, libertarians, conservatives on the war policy issue.
It's just that there are no organizations out there that have specifically tried to bring those sides together.
It's not very easy, I can tell you that.
But that's my job and my challenge.
But, you know, we're trying to keep it real in that sense where we're not just a functionary of one of the political parties in Washington, like most places are.
Well, I do see the Hawks get mad at you and blame, oh, it's Quincy-ism, which is this terrible thing that apparently is responsible for all our failures because America's been under severe influence for the last generation, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to take all the slings and arrows because, you know, I mean, I get I really get the sense and very keenly over the last several months or so that we've actually touched a nerve.
And that's that's a good feeling, because if we were still being ignored by all the big shots in Washington, the neoconservatives, the liberal internationalists and the rest of the Beltway blobosphere, then we wouldn't really be doing our job.
But I think, like I said, that our brand of restraint, our strategy to insinuate and and insert ourselves into the conversation is actually working because people are getting pissed off.
Right.
Yeah, I think that that's true.
I mean, I think.
You know, there's only so many of these think tanks and groups and whatever, and as you said, they've all been in agreement about everything wrong for the last 20 years.
And so, you know, in a way you could say, right, that like at the core of this publication is Jim Loeb's blog, which is just a nice way of saying the people that you and I have been reading all along that now everybody's gotten a promotion up to, you know, you know, a higher level of visibility and in a way that the people with actual power and influence have to grapple with.
And especially a major part of that, too, is all the new people, right, who they've grown up during this time of all these failed policies.
And if they're interested in foreign policy, well, they got to be against what the hell is going on now.
Take Giorgio Caffiero, for example, what he's going to grow up to be a hawk.
After all of this, you know, of course he writes for you and not them.
Yeah, I mean, you yeah, you put your finger on it.
We're seeing a whole new generation of of kids coming up and they're not necessarily coming up through the progressive ranks, although some are many are.
But I'm seeing a lot of kids coming up through like the like the realist ranks on the right.
I don't know if you're if you're familiar with John Allen Gay and the John Quincy Adams Society.
But I mean, these are kids who have decided to go into international relations and security studies.
And, you know, they're pretty smart and eggheadish.
And but they are they want to come to Washington and work for places like Quincy.
They don't want to come to Washington and work for Brookings or Rand because they are tired of the same old foreign policy orthodoxies.
And so I think that's really heartening because, I mean, let's face it, the problem all the way up till now has been, you know, kids have spent gobs of money and in college and they want to they want to get involved in foreign policy and national security.
And all the money, all the energy, all the resources were with the blobby status quo.
And so if you wanted to get ahead, you were going to be in that realm that you are going to talk the talk and and sort of kneel to the dogma.
And so they came here and then they go, oh, well, all the good jobs are at Brookings and and Rand and CSIS and going to work for a congressperson who, you know, just spouts the talking points.
And, you know, it was all rigged.
And it still is to a major extent.
It's just that places like Quincy and the John Quincy Adams Society and Cato and the stuff that the Koch is, you know, whatever you want to think about Charles Koch, the Charles Koch Institute and their foundation is putting a ton of money into universities and places like Quincy, American Conservative, Atlantic Council, Defense Priorities, Carnegie, because they're kind of they're hedging.
They're going, OK, we're going to put it into new places like Defense Priorities and Quincy.
Hey, if the neocons can do it, you know, yeah, right.
The hawks can do it.
That's it.
You know, it wasn't fair when it was just the Council on Foreign Relations.
So the neocons made 20 new think tanks of their own.
So that's all we got to do is have 20 new of ours.
We'll have our own massive echo chamber of people who are not wrong about everything.
Unlike them.
Well, that's exactly what they're trying to do.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, speaking of which, yeah, but now speaking of which, Kelly, you had neoconservative policy advisor Zalmay Khalilzad as a guest there over at your thing.
And so did you all pull his pants down and laugh at him or what happened?
Well, it wasn't our thing, but it was it was one of our family members stand together, which is a Koch funded organization decided at the last minute Khalilzad was available, have him have him drop in.
It was a one on one interview with him and Will Ruger.
And it was funny.
No, nobody nobody had him drop his pants and laughed at him.
But it was interesting that Khalilzad, true to form, sort of became a changeling on the stage and was talking, you know, and mouthing all of the words of restraint, which with which the audience, I don't want to say they gobbled it up because, you know, this audience was full of skeptics that are used to hearing blobby people talk.
But he did try to read the room, so to speak, and was speaking quite forthrightly about the loss and the failures of the war in Afghanistan and how it was not there was there was no way there would be a military solution to that war and that we didn't know the enemy and all this stuff.
So it was very interesting whether it was worthwhile.
I don't know, Scott, because it was one of those things where somebody talks, they say what you want to hear and then they leave the stage.
But it was interesting, to say the least.
Hey, I'll check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean, and no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians and Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr.
Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Yeah, man.
Well, so were there any particular points that he say, did he concede anything personal, for example, that like, yeah, we really should not have done a regime change in Kabul back in 2001, which I took part in or any of that kind of stuff?
I saw where I think you, you quote him just blaming everything on Ghani, right?
Well, yeah, he blamed a lot on Ghani and to take his words at face value, it was as if that he was completely disconnected from all the major decisions that had been made, and I'm sure to a certain extent that's true, but he was still part and parcel of the US policy in Afghanistan since the very beginning, and he was best buds with Karzai, and so to say, to act as though that he was sort of on the fringes and that all of this, all of the negative stuff was happening despite all of his efforts, it seemed disingenuous to me, but I just don't think I expected any different because I didn't expect somebody to come on stage, I didn't expect him to come on stage with anything but a sort of self-serving version of events, which is what he delivered.
Yeah, you know, I don't know if anybody picked up on this, but oh, go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say that's Washington.
Yeah, these these Washington creatures, you know, will suddenly distance themselves from all the failures, and then jump on the bandwagon when things go, when things go.
Oh, right, you know, to take credit for them.
It's like clockwork.
Especially him, right?
I think it seems, this is just kind of a running gag in the book, Enough Already, my latest one, where I don't know if anybody noticed this, but I just call him, no matter what his job was at any given time, I just always call him neoconservative policy advisors, Zalmay Khalilzad, and he's just there from 1979, thinking, you know, forgot if he helped to encourage the Iranian revolution, I think he did, certainly supported backing the Mujahideen in the 80s and backing Saddam against Iran, and then supported Iraq War One, and then supported the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, and then supported regime change against them in 2001, and then supported Stalin, Maliki in power in 2008, and before that, 2005, and all the way through.
He's just, it's him all the time, all the way through, and then here his last act is, and I gotta say, I never believed it would happen.
I just didn't.
I couldn't, I still don't, even though it's in the past now, that he literally negotiated a deal for an exit, and not just shining the president on and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll see about that like the generals did in Syria or anything like that.
Trump somehow made this guy swear a blood oath that he was really going to make a deal with the Taliban to get us the hell out of there, which I won't say it's redemption for his previous career of, you know, absolute horribleness on everything, but I don't know.
It's a positive at the end anyway, you know, if it is the end.
No, and I agree with you.
That's why I didn't really want to get too, like, snarky about it in my little article, you know, because I felt like, okay, so he, at the end of the day, he was on the stage defending the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which everybody in the room supported, and he wanted, you know, I think part of his whatever kind of tour he's been making lately with the media in this run-up to a book that he's supposedly writing a tell-all book about his time in Washington is to say, hey, listen, I'm defending this withdrawal plan because his name is on it.
Like you said, this Doha agreement was negotiated by Khalilzad and the Taliban, or Khalilzad being the sort of the spear tip of the Washington negotiation, you know, so and he's been taking a lot of slings and arrows for it in the withdrawal overall, politically, because a lot of people in this town think that it was premature, that Trump, you know, just wanted to rip us out of there and didn't, and negotiated a bad deal, what gave the Taliban too much, we forfeited too much, and so he's defending, you know, his name on that, you know, on that score, so I totally get that, and it just happens to be a deal that I personally support, and so does Quincy and a lot of other people.
We needed to get out of there.
Yeah, absolutely, and all credit to him for that.
I mean, did you think he was going to do that?
I mean, how good of a promise could a guy like Trump get from a guy like Khalilzad that, no, really, seriously, boss, I'm really, really, really gonna do it, and then he actually does it.
It seems unlikely.
I mean, I know that, hey, the Taliban was winning.
There was a real problem.
They would have had to really escalate the war again if they were gonna try to hold them off.
I mean, the momentum was clearly with the insurgency, so they had to do something, but the fact that he went so far to do that, to make a deal to get out of there, I guess I fear that the rationalization was, yeah, so we can ratchet things up against China instead or something like that, but I don't know.
It's still pretty incredible.
Yeah, I don't want to try to get into his mind, and I'm sure it'll all come out in the book, but maybe he just saw the writing on the wall.
I mean, for as much as we like to make fun of Zhao, you know, he probably was the closest on the ground and in the situation there, and probably saw what, you know, most of our own intelligence wasn't seeing, that this was an unwinnable war.
The Taliban was, I mean, we could take over the minute Kabul fell, that Ghani was ineffectual and incompetent and barely holding things together, and this was the best deal that we could possibly make, so it might just be that he believed in it enough to own it.
Yeah.
And Trump was the president that was going to deliver it, and all power to Trump.
I mean, unfortunately, he wasn't able to assure the withdrawal, but, I mean, he wanted to get out by the end of his term in January, but the, you know, the, frankly, the Doha agreement spelled out we'd be out by May 1st, and Biden protracted that just by a few months, so you could say Trump didn't succeed in getting us out of the war, but, you know, he laid the groundwork for it, as much as people like to hate him, you know, and we are out.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, and this is another thing that he emphasized, that the state of Afghanistan is in a death spiral right now, and something needs to be done.
Now, one could say, well, we've finished dumping all sorts of taxpayer money into that country, they're gonna have to take care of themselves, but, you know, there are millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars worth of aid that is just frozen right now, that had already been promised, and at least nine billion dollars in Afghan assets that aren't ours, that are frozen right now.
We have to make a decision.
Are we going to deal with the Taliban, release that money, keep that economy on life support, or are we gonna stand around talking about it, you know, and saying, well, we can't possibly deal with the Taliban, they're so bad, and then just watch a bunch of people starve over the winter, which is gonna happen.
Yeah, it is pretty bad, although, yeah, I mean, I did say on Twitter the other day, I do support, you know, humanitarian aid, bags of grain and chickens, you know, whatever, keep it simple, but make sure it's a lot of it, and work, especially with, you know, countries in the region to do it, although I really hate to ask the U.S. government to do anything at all.
It seems like the neighbors all have the resources.
Iran and Russia and China and Pakistan all have the resources to come in and help, and, you know, maybe they could give some cash toward that, but with the Americans, it always comes with such strings, but you're right that, you know, it is just like, you know, I had a paragraph like this in Fool's Erin, and everybody made me cut it out because they said it was confusing, but it was about the Austrian business cycle theory of power in Kabul and how, literally, pumped up with paper money, there's essentially a bubble in power in the hands of people who don't naturally have it, and they have essentially an artificially high price on their authority, or artificially high value on their authority, and without the American paper money system there to continually prop it up, and the U.S. Army, also funded by that same paper money system, there to prop it up, they're surely facing a massive correction, and their entire economy with it, too.
You're talking about tens of billions of dollars a year, and then they just turn the spigot off, and so, you know, I don't know, I don't know if they have a stock market at all, but whatever, the prices of everything in that country must have all just plummeted, you know, in the last few months, and so, yeah, something's got to be done so that people don't starve by, you know, at all.
Yeah, and I do agree with you, that the neighbors, and they are meeting, and that's the thing, I mean, whether with or without us, I mean, their neighbors are meeting, and that's including Russia and China, and there was a meeting even involving the United States recently in Pakistan with, you know, leaders from China and Russia to talk about this.
I'm tired of the talking though, because I feel like, you know, every time I open my news in the morning, there's another meeting being held about what to do about Afghanistan.
Well, people literally are starving, women can't, you know, deliver their babies in hospitals because they're shut down, you know, something's got to be done, and I and I agree with you, I don't want to see the United States go parachuting back in there and try to rebuild their economy and their civil society again, because obviously we didn't do a very good job of that in the last 20 years, but I'm thinking, release the funds, open a consulate if we can in Kabul, you know, open up relations with the Taliban as much as that we are loath to do it, but I think having an open channel of communication, a diplomatic channel, is going to be far better than just standing in the sidelines and sniping and wringing our hands, because we can't collectively punish the Afghan people for the Taliban.
Yeah, seriously, I mean, there's a whole sore loser aspect to this, that, you know, we should all insist that our government be better than.
You know what, we're gonna let innocent people suffer because we're too prideful to say, here Taliban, give some wheat to that starving baby for us, give me a break, you know?
Anyway, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time here, and I meant to do this the other day, I should have given you a whole half hour just on this, but could you please give us a few words about our late great friend Mark Perry?
Mark, I have to say, I'm sad every day for losing such a good friend, and I don't, I wish I had known him longer, Scott, because I can't remember when we met, but I think it was somewhere in 2017 or 18, and I can't remember because it was somebody in our orbit that sent him over to me at the American Conservative and said, you know, would you like to start publishing?
This guy's a great journalist and an author, he's been around the block for years, and he turned out to be one of the best writers on US war policy, military, military history, the Middle East, Israel, I mean, he's, and he just had this real doggedly analytical but also skeptical view that he, it was really, it was really informing his writing.
So he, he just was the best mix of reporter, analyst, activist, all around a great person, and he passed away recently, and I can't remember the exact date now, so excuse me.
It was in August.
And nobody saw it coming.
Yeah, he had, yeah, he had, he had cancer, but he didn't tell anybody, except obviously his closest family and friends.
And so it was, it was a shock to everybody who was working for Quincy.
So we went from being colleagues at the American Conservative, and then Quincy hired him as a, as a military analyst, and he just blew everybody away.
Because here was a guy who was skeptical of US foreign policy, he was for restraint, so non interventionist, but he had incredible sources inside the Pentagon, inside the military, writ large, the activist community, the Middle East, he made many trips and lived in Lebanon for a long time.
So he had a deep history and appreciation of all of the dynamics there.
And he just brought that to bear for our side.
And I went to a memorial service for him in Washington, and I was just like floored how many people had he had touched in.
And it's particularly in the world of journalism, activism.
He just he had a long reach.
And it's just, yeah, I miss him because he was a fun, he was a fun guy.
And he, you know, he had this bullshit radar, like that was so like, keen.
And it was just, you know, he just didn't truck with hypocrisy, or blowhards, or bloviators.
And, you know, I love those kind of people.
And so we, you know, we definitely had a kinship in that regard.
But and he obviously helped me.
So my writing and my understanding, so I couldn't say enough.
Yeah, well, I totally agree with you.
And I didn't know him as well as you do.
But I sure did interview him quite a few times and learned a hell of a lot.
And I still have his book, The Pentagon's Wars, his latest book on my shelf here that one of these days I'm going to get to when I can pause the world and catch up on books.
It's coming soon that yeah, I think but he really was a great guy.
And I'm really sad that he's gone too.
So I really appreciate you saying that about him.
And sorry, that hadn't taken the time to ask you about that on the show.
You know, since then, but I'm happy I got a chance to now.
But now I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Kelly, you're great.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Kelly B. Vallejos.
She is the editor over there at Responsible Statecraft.
That is the publication of the Quincy Institute.
And it's Responsible Statecraft dot org.
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.
