All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Robert Naaman.
He is policy director at Just Foreign Policy.
That's JustForeignPolicy.org.
He edits their daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at the Huffington Post.
He has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
Great new piece at Truthout by Robert Naaman is called Washington Smackdown, Petraeus vs.
Substantial Drawdown.
Welcome back to the show, Robert.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you.
Yeah, it's been a while since I had you on here.
It's good.
I love this piece.
I can't wait to let you tell everybody all about it.
So David Petraeus went and said something to somebody.
Take it from there.
So Petraeus has been testifying in Congress this week.
This is kind of delayed from the end of last year when, remember, that President Obama, when he announced the last surge in Afghanistan, said, okay, well, a year from now we're going to review.
Then, so that was December, and then they didn't want to talk about their review because they didn't have anything good to report, so they tried to bury it.
And members in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, said no, no, no, no, no, no.
Petraeus has to come to testify about this review.
And so that's finally happening this week.
And, of course, what Petraeus is doing, what he always does, what the military always does when they're forced to call to account is saying, well, we're making progress.
So stay in the court.
Don't pull out troops.
Keep funding us to do what we're doing.
Of course, as some of the press has pointed out, like Los Angeles Times, to their credit, Petraeus' progress story is completely contradicted by the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, which has said in its assessment and has said in its recent congressional testimony, okay, yeah, you're right, we're killing a bunch of Taliban.
So what?
It's not changing the balance of forces on the ground.
The insurgency has increased.
It's more civilian kills than the year before.
We're not winning.
It's not changing the strategic equation on the ground.
Meanwhile, the polls show a record number of Americans opposed to the war.
Washington Post polled this week.
Two-thirds of Americans say the war is not worth fighting.
Three-fourths of Americans want to see a quicker drawdown, a substantial drawdown, starting this summer.
President Obama promised that he would start withdrawing troops this summer, but the Pentagon is pushing for this just to be a token withdrawal.
Three-fourths of Americans disagree.
Three-fourths of Americans want to see a substantial withdrawal.
Half of Republicans say the war is not worth fighting, so that suggests Washington Post didn't report this specifically on Republicans, but that suggests that the majority of Republicans want to see a substantial withdrawal, like the three-quarters who want to see a substantial withdrawal.
And now today Congress is debating a resolution put forward by Representative Kucinich, Representative Jones, and Representative Paul, which would require the president under the War Powers Act to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of the year.
And we also saw that 80 members of Congress yesterday wrote to the president demanding a substantial drawdown.
Last month, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution calling for a swift withdrawal.
So this is what's happening outside of the Pentagon-Petraeus bubble, more public opposition, more opposition in Congress, and more public opposition across the political spectrum.
It'll be interesting to see today, you know, they're going to vote on this resolution today, it'll be interesting to see if there's an increase in Republican opposition in Congress, matching the Republican opposition outside of the beltway.
We saw this week Haley Barber, one of the likely Republican nominees for president, said we should consider withdrawing down troops from Afghanistan and cut the Pentagon budget.
So this is really a big question going forward.
There has been so far in the National Republican Party a kind of lockstep party line where you just see, you know, six, seven, eight, nine Republican members of the House supporting these various anti-war initiatives, while public opinion among Republicans has been moving steadily against the war.
So at some point there's got to be a break, and maybe we'll see some evidence of this today.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me, there's so much to go over there already, but just from this morning watching on C-SPAN the debate in the House of Representatives, there's been at least one or two Democrats that stood up in opposition to this thing, and I guess, you know, mostly that's to be expected from the Republicans.
As you say, there are six or seven who might vote good on it from time to time.
But this is, this Kucinich bill is basically just holding Barack Obama to what he promised in his West Point speech of November of 2009, right?
That the war will begin to end in July of 2011, and it seems like it could take about six months or so to end a war if he meant what he said.
And, you know, this is not that radical of a thing, doesn't seem like to me, compared to what the President claims his policy is.
Well, it's certainly, it's a little bit sharper than, significantly sharper, actually, than what President Obama promised at West Point.
He said, when he said, you know, we're going to start withdrawing troops in the summer of 2011, he didn't say when we're going to finish withdrawing troops.
So this bill talks about when we want you to finish withdrawing troops.
They want you to finish withdrawing troops by the end of 2011.
Yes, I think the broader point there is true, in that President Obama gave people the impression, and I think this was deliberate, that, you know, in the summer of 2011 we're going to start winding this war down.
That's what a lot of people took away from the speech.
And that's what a lot of people, not just the public, but members of Congress, you know, A year ago, then-Speaker Pelosi said, I expect to see a substantial drawdown in the summer of 2011.
Vice President Biden said, you can bet on a whole lot of people, a whole lot of people coming out in the summer of 2011.
So that's what people were led to expect.
But that's not what the Pentagon is planning for.
The Pentagon is planning for a token withdrawal.
And so there is a fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, what President Obama led people to believe, including members of Congress to believe, and what the current plans are by the Pentagon, which is token withdrawal now.
And even, you know, Petraeus in his testimony said, even after 2014, we're going to try to have joint bases with the Afghans.
They're talking about a very long war in the Pentagon.
So there is a fundamental contradiction there.
And, you know, people in Congress have to be pushed to declare their position on this long war.
You know, are we going to be there indefinitely?
Are we going to make a plan to get out?
Well, you know, part of this, I think, is funny in a way.
You talked about how they kind of tried to bury the report.
There was the report to Congress that came out right before the report to the president.
And all of these things, basically where these soldiers, the generals have themselves investigated to see how good of a job they're doing, where it reminds me of the cops on that show The Wire, where it's all just a numbers game and they call off a real investigation into the real criminals in order to just do street rips all day and get the numbers up.
That kind of thing.
And then I guess they had a season where it was all about the school district, too.
And so everybody's always just trying to juke the stats.
And like in Afghanistan, they quit counting the provinces where the puppet government's representatives would be welcome at all or had any level of approval.
They just quit counting that from the year before because the number was just going down.
And it seems like even with those reports, they can't convince anybody of anything, really.
As you said, two-thirds wish we'd never done it now.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm going on and on.
It's Robert Naaman from Just Foreign Policy.
We'll be right back and let him talk more.
Welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Robert Naaman from Just Foreign Policy.
He's got a new piece at Truthout.org, Washington Smackdown, Petraeus vs.
Substantial Drawdown.
And I don't know if you wanted to comment on my bit about juking the stats, but it seems like that's really a big part of all these reports, claiming progress based on, you know, as Robert Gates would say, soda straw type views of the war.
Statistics here, statistics there, ignoring the truth of the matter, which is that this war can't be won and everybody knows it, including David Petraeus.
And we all know he knows it, too, right?
Well, that's true.
You know, there's two ways of measuring progress.
One is that you try to come up with indicators that are about the result.
And the other way is you come up with indicators that are about what you're doing.
And the pattern that we've seen here is exactly what you described.
It goes back to Vietnam where, you know, in Vietnam it said, oh, you know, we've killed X many Viet Cong.
But that doesn't have anything to do with whether you're winning the war necessarily.
And there's this famous story where, you know, a U.S. general talks with a Vietnamese general after the war and he says, you know, you never beat us in any battle.
And the Vietnamese general pauses and thinks for a second and then he says, well, that may be true.
But it is also quite irrelevant.
And that's exactly the situation we face in Afghanistan.
Nobody disputes.
After all, the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world.
We have all these planes and guns and bombs.
Nobody disputes that we can destroy stuff.
Nobody disputes that we can kill people.
So, yeah, you can say, you say our goal is to kill insurgents.
Then that's certainly a goal you can meet.
And nobody disputes that.
But so what?
You killed a bunch of insurgents.
So what?
What did you change on the ground?
Are there less insurgents?
Is there less violence?
Are less people being killed?
No.
No, no, no.
There are more civilians being killed.
The Red Cross just put out a statement saying the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating and life has become untenable.
That's after, you know, a year into the surge.
There are surges in place.
What is their excuse now?
They're not meeting any of the goals in terms of the overall outcome, that life is not getting better for people in Afghanistan, more territory, you know, more.
The government is not in effective control of more territory.
This surge has failed.
Even compared to the surge in Iraq, this surge has failed, as was pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, saying, you know, a year after the surge in Iraq, General DiErno could go to Congress and say, well, you know, we have less insurgent attacks.
Can't say that.
Can't say that in Afghanistan.
How much longer, how much more of an extent, how many more extensions are we going to give the Pentagon on their book report before, you know, giving them a failing grade and change the policy?
That's the ultimate question.
Change policy.
And we have an open door to a policy change.
It's not like nobody has any ideas on how to change the policy.
Hang on a second about that, because I wanted to go back to your actual point that you want to change the policy based on, in your article here, you quote directly General Ronald Burgess, or Burgess, head of the DIA, saying the U.S.
-led coalition has been killing Taliban militants by the hundreds, but there has been, quote, no apparent degradation in their capacity to fight.
So I just wanted to add that in there, because you're speaking more kind of rhetorically, you know, yeah, you killed a bunch, but does that mean you're actually doing anything?
Well, here's the head of the DIA saying no.
Yeah, and that's why we pay these guys.
You know, that's why we have an intelligence community to give us these kinds of assessments.
As you said, when General Petraeus reports to Congress, you know, he's evaluating his own project.
He's probably not going to come and say, well, you know, my ideas failed.
They didn't work.
So that's why we have intelligence assessments that are supposed to.
And, you know, let's give credit.
We have this part of the U.S. government that's telling us the truth about what is happening in Afghanistan.
And they're saying we don't see any evidence that this policy is working.
So if the policy is not working, if it's been in place for some time, which it has, all the troops have been in place for some time, which they have, then it's time to change the policy.
We have an open door.
We're talking in March.
In July, this drawdown is supposed to start.
It could be made a real drawdown and not just a fake and token drawdown.
And that would have immediate, tangible, substantive benefits for the people of Afghanistan and the people of the United States.
For one thing, if you have fewer soldiers in Afghanistan, then fewer soldiers are getting killed.
That's a clear pattern since 2001.
The more U.S. soldiers we have in Afghanistan, the more get killed.
If U.S. soldiers being in Afghanistan is bad, then more being killed is more bad and fewer being killed is less bad.
If you look at the majority of U.S. soldiers that have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001 were killed since January 2009 when President Obama came into office.
If you look at the average during the Bush administration, it was five U.S. soldiers killed a month.
If you look at the average during the Obama administration, it was 32 U.S. soldiers killed a month.
So we can save a lot of American lives by moving decisively to draw down U.S. forces.
The same thing is true for Afghan civilians.
Pattern over years is the more U.S. soldiers there are in Afghanistan, the more Afghan civilians get killed.
We can save Afghan civilian lives by drawing down our troops.
Not only that, by drawing down our troops, we can open political space in Afghanistan for a negotiated political settlement, which even Petraeus, even our government officials concede is the only way that the war is going to end, not through military victory.
So this is something that we can do.
We have this opportunity here in the next few months to change course.
And I think this debate today in Congress, nobody expects the Kasinich-Paul resolution to pass, but it's a stepping stone to getting to the place where this summer we start a substantial drawdown that starts to wind down and end the war.
Well, you know, back to the public opinion poll numbers that you mentioned at the top of the interview here, you know, it seems like this could be a real test for the possibility of Americans using their so-called representative system to have it their way.
I mean, two-thirds saying, gee, it wasn't worth it after all, and three-fourths saying they want to end by the end of this year.
We've got, as you said, a few months until, you know, Obama's claimed day for the beginning of the end.
Why couldn't this be the thing where the American people actually get to win against their Congress and make their Congress do the right thing, you know?
Why couldn't this be the one that, you know, they are afraid of their constituents, you know, and their re-election prospects if they do not go along with the people on this?
We've got the super and the super-duper majority on our side here.
Come on.
We can do this, right?
Or can't we?
No, I think we can.
You know, you don't know when a decisive shift happens.
It's hard to predict, right?
You know, you could say that the stock market bubble or the housing bubble was going to collapse.
You couldn't say when.
You could say that these, you know, regimes in the Middle East were going to be unstable and eventually people were going to rise up, but you couldn't say when.
And I think this is like that.
You know, at some point, this wall in Congress is going to break.
You know, maybe the Republican presidential campaign will be something that helps it break, where you have people like Haley Barber and maybe other Republican presidential candidates will start to split off.
And that will be the signal for Republicans in Congress to say, oh, you know, we don't have to support this anymore.
I mean, remember, you know, what happened when Michael Steele, the RNC chair, spoke out against the war.
You know, they came down on him like a ton of bricks.
As far as I'm seeing, nobody came down on Haley Barber when he said we've got to start talking about drawing down troops.
So maybe this is the moment, you know, maybe we'll see this in a couple months that Republicans will start to break ranks.
Of course, when Republicans start to break ranks, then even more Democrats, I think, will, you know, the ones that are still on the fence, will start to go to the other side.
So we could see a very dramatic shift.
And, of course, a lot of it depends on, you know, the American people making some more noise.
And maybe this also this budget fight will where, you know, we're cutting domestic spending and spending money on the war.
Maybe that'll, you know.
Well, it sounds like your phone went out on us just right at the end of the show anyway.
So, OK, well, thanks very much, everybody.
That's Robert Neyman from Just Foreign Policy.
His new piece at Truthout is Washington Smackdown, Petraeus versus Substantial Drawdown.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
