All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we got Kelly Vlahos on the line.
She was stuck in traffic on the government roads out there, but we won't hold out against her.
You all know Kelly, she writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me, and thanks for your patience.
I'm sorry about being stuck in traffic and everything.
Give me a break.
No problem at all, and we got plenty of time to take you into the next hour, too, so we can get a good couple of segments out of you.
So your article, What Really Goes On in Afghanistan, at original.antiwar.com/Vlahos, original.antiwar.com/Vlahos, What Really Goes On in Afghanistan, is about the difference between what's really going on there and what it is that we kind of see on TV, absorb even for those of us who read the papers a lot and try to find out as much as we can, that really there's this giant gulf between the reality and our perception of it over here.
And you illustrate that, or you begin to illustrate that, with describing the difference between the way they described a battle in the Nuristan province back on May 25th and what turns out really happened there, as we found out a couple of months later.
And so I was wondering if you could start with giving us the lowdown on what really happened there and the narrative.
Sure.
Basically, on May 25th, there were reports that the Taliban had basically taken over a district in Nuristan, which is an eastern province that's near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And members of the 1st Battalion, 103rd Infantry Regiment, the quote-unquote Iron Man Battalion, which is part of the Red Bulls Task Force, had gone in to check out these reports.
At the minute that they, within seconds, they said of landing, they had been pinned down under heavy Taliban fire for about an hour until they got back up.
And a firefight ensued, lasting several hours, in which our reports say that they killed over 100 Taliban and they did not sustain any casualties.
There's other reports that have been denied by NATO that a group of Afghan police had also been killed, as well as civilians, because they had been pinned down so bad that they had to call in for airstrikes.
Now, initially, the ISAF, the International Security Assistance Forces, had put out a very brief press release that had talked about how our forces assaulted into this district and got into some fighting at the helicopter landing area, but they had not proven that the Taliban had indeed taken over, quote-unquote, anything.
It was very brief, very curt.
Well, a few weeks later, not even a few weeks later, reports emerged in the local newspaper of this National Guard unit, which is in Iowa, in which soldiers on the ground spoke very colorfully about what had happened to their local news, you know, reporter, who I believe, it sounded like either he was embedded or had some sort of contact with these guys, who basically said that this was the worst firefight or most intense firefighting that the Red Bulls had taken since World War II, which is a dramatically different account, or at least a dramatically different description than the original ISAF briefing.
And so, the real color came out about how they were pinned down, first of all.
Well, that group must have spent Vietnam and Germany or something, huh?
I know, right.
So, these guys were obviously very pumped up and ready to tell their story.
And they apparently had not been in this sort of intense fighting before, because they were ready to talk, and the UK independent Julius Cavendish had, you know, did a follow-up story and made some calls into ISAF and said, you know, what the heck?
You have this original report that says that the Taliban did not take over anything, and that there was, quote-unquote, some fighting.
And then you have, you know, these National Guardsmen telling their local news reporter, wow, they took over the entire district, and we were pinned down for an hour and several hours of fighting, and all sorts of weaponry were coming at them.
And they said, you know, they, of course, massaged their original statement, but stuck to their guns in terms of it being not a taken-over situation.
They said all the fighting occurred at the landing pad and, you know, and yada, yada, yada.
But the take-home of this is, A, that the military, the brass did not want to, obviously, did not want this story to get out in the fashion that it did.
Because if it did, and it was proud of what happened, they would have went right to the national media and brought all these National Guardsmen to talk to their embeds from CBS and, you know, Fox News and, and, you know, so they must have gave some tacit, like, approval for these Guardsmen to talk to the local reporter, probably thinking, well, they'll get out to the local papers, you know, hometown guys make good, but it won't make a big splash.
For obvious reasons.
I mean, they were pinned down by the Taliban and in a place that they had vacated a couple years earlier to go fight the surge in the South.
And the Taliban had since moved in.
Cavendish said that the Taliban had actually raised a flag there in this in this Doab district.
I couldn't, I couldn't, you know, I couldn't find any more record of that.
But obviously, this did not make our military look good.
And it makes us wonder how many instances like these happen every day, where we are confronted by Taliban in different parts of the country.
And we either play it down or it gets buried because there are so few media resources there.
Now, you have the embed to, you know, in many cases are very compromised about what they can say, whether they want to say it or not, you know, and then there is this black hole of coverage in which security is so bad that unless you're embedded with a unit, you don't get out to these places.
So it makes us wonder about really what is going on in Afghanistan today.
Well, yeah, you know, I don't know.
It seems to me, especially in the last couple of years with the advent of Petraeus moving from Iraq over there to CENTCOM and the new coin doctrine and all that, that basically what you just said is a microcosm of the whole war.
I mean, if you take any other time that civilians got killed and it got reported, go back and look at the press release that came out before it about how they just killed four militants and whatever.
And of course, militants still mean civilian, only civilian with a gun.
Right.
You know, there is no army over there.
We're fighting.
It's all just the civilians of Afghanistan on the receiving end of this.
And usually it's their wives and kids, too, when they do these so-called surgical strikes with their drones and with their Delta Force raids in the middle of the night and all of that.
And the whole thing, it's like what I learned about Vietnam when I was a little kid about every night they go, hey, but we got these really great body counts and we're it's hard work, but we're making progress.
And, you know, just a little bit more time and a few more tens of thousands of troops and we're going to turn everything around.
And meanwhile, virtually every little story and the whole story together is that none of that is true.
The whole thing's a disaster.
They've known they can't win there for years this whole time, just like the Pentagon Papers revealed about Vietnam.
They knew better all along.
They did it anyway.
Right.
And, you know, and if it weren't for it, for some dogged reporters that are there on the ground, like, you know, just, you know, quick to mind is Jerome Starkey, you know, who has a British reporter who has actually followed up on some of these cases in which there have been conflicting reports about civilian casualties after an airstrike and actually has gone in and interviewed the villagers and interviewed local officials and found out that there were such discrepancies that he'd go back, you know, and make us think about it with the NATO sources and then they'd come back and then there'd be some investigation and then you'd have NATO force saying, okay, yeah, this did happen, but, and it makes you wonder what stories actually fall through the cracks when you don't have good reporters who are willing to sit there and interview the locals, you know, and, and, and push the, push the envelope.
That's, that, that's the sad thing here because this isn't a media saturated war, like say, where you in Vietnam, you had it, you know, everybody's watching it from their, you know, the, the old adage about, you know, it's right there in everybody's living rooms at dinnertime, you know, there's so much is falling through cracks.
And this, this is to the advantage of Petraeus and his message machine, which have done so much to craft and the perception of this war and their favor.
And right now it's in their favor that we have so few details about the actual military operations.
We have a lot of ambiguities and vague notions about, you know, arresting, you know, momentum and all that, and going from the South to the East and, you know, but we don't have a lot of meat and potatoes as to what's going on there.
Yeah.
Although we, we certainly can measure what they've promised is going to happen versus the lack of press conferences announcing that it did like the building in Marjah and Kandahar and all that.
All right.
Hold it right there, but it's a Kelly B. Blahos from antiwar.com and the American conservative magazine.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Kelly B. Blahos from antiwar.com and from the American conservative magazine.
Her last couple of pieces are both about Afghanistan leaving as tragic as staying and what really goes on in Afghanistan.
Now, Kelly, we were talking about how there just aren't enough reporters on the ground there.
I guess a war has to be, you know, really the coolest latest thing to have all the TV networks put their guys on the ground, like during the invasion of Iraq and that kind of thing.
Even the beginning of the Afghan war, he had some reporters on the ground.
I guess the TV people are mostly useless, but you'd have some newspaper reporters, but now there's Carlotta Gall and, and maybe a couple others, that guy from what the telegraph that you mentioned there, there's very little that we get on the particulars.
And yet from what we're hearing, even from the powerful talking amongst each other about what's going on, the ambassadors and the generals and whatever, it's pretty easy to see that the Afghan government we're clearing, holding and building there is not capable, will never be capable of being the government of that country.
Right.
I mean, what am I missing here?
Yeah.
And I think in the last couple of weeks, as we've seen, as the Taliban has shifted into this, this new strategy, I don't know if it's relatively new, but they've definitely amped it up of, of, you know, targeted assassinations to really invoke this fear in places that we're supposed to put like Lashkar, Lashkar Gah, and others, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, and other cities in which we're handing over security.
And next thing you know, there is this instability, targeted assassinations, the whole bit with Wali Karzai being killed out in the open, and then a suicide bomber going into one of the mosques for, you know, the memorial services and blowing his turban off.
I mean, these are all cases in all instances that feed this, this idea in the sense that the security is going to fall apart when we do leave.
Places like Kabul, which, you know, our officials and British officials have bragged in the past is, is, you know, safer than the streets of New York City.
You know, we're seeing assassinations, we're seeing suicide bombings over the last year there, that, you know, the Intercontinental Hotel attack a few weeks ago.
So I think, like I mentioned in my story, that, you know, the natural course of events is, is filling this, this vacuum, this news vacuum.
And we're finding it right at the time when we have David Petraeus sitting up in front of members of Congress and talking about this, this progress, this fragile and, and not irreversible progress is really a smoke and mirrors.
But I guess part of that too, is just a remnant of the fact that they never really explained what they were doing in the first place.
I mean, yeah, I mean, TV didn't, the generals kind of, you know, Petraeus had made their, their coin case that, you know, or at least, you know, supposedly this was the deal that they made with Obama.
If we get to war against these guys really hard with this surge against the Taliban and whatever other assorted insurgents, Akhani types and whatever for a year and a half, then we'll be in a position to dictate terms to them and they'll have to accept and whatever.
But I mean, I guess if you interview Kelly Blahos all the time for your radio show, then you understand these kinds of things, but they never really discussed that on television.
And so now, I mean, even the senators and the congressmen doing the so-called grilling on C-SPAN, they don't even know what question to ask, you know, that was your promise.
Have you done that?
Obviously the, even the premise was you can't defeat the Taliban.
So have you weakened them enough that you can dictate terms to them?
No, you haven't.
You're a giant failure is the answer, but they don't even know the question.
I think that the most telling thing and what I, you know, what interests me into writing about this is that if indeed we have cleared and held all of these places that, you know, Petraeus had talked about during his, you know, hearings on the Hill in June, why haven't, you know, where are they?
Where's the footage?
Where's the pictures?
Where's the interviews?
You know, when do we get to get some sense of what the people are saying there about their own security?
You know, the businesses supposedly moving back, you know, it seems like there's such a blackout, but there doesn't, there, am I the only one talking about it?
I don't know.
So I was curious and tried to talk to some, some, some folks who make it their business to report on this every day from the states, you know, and they agreed there's, if, if indeed all of these great things were happening, you would think that the military would be pushing it down our throats ad nauseum, you know, that they would be on the soapbox talking about the successes of Kandahar, the successes of Marsha and all these other places in between, but yet we don't.
So that, that puts the kernel of suspicion in there because on one hand, Petraeus is saying all of these places in the South have been pacified for better or worse, you know, better or worse but yet we have no footage of that.
We don't have reporters, you know, confirming any of that.
So what really is going on there?
And like you said, during the invasion of Iraq and even in Afghanistan, you know, they had people, you know, we had full segments on the news where you'd have, you know, a general was, you know, working with the Pentagon most likely, but you had people up there making a pretense of let's, let's, let's learn about the geography of the place.
Let's learn about who, who are the principal players, the Shiites, the Sunnis, you know, the different tribes.
We don't get any of that anymore.
We just take it for granted that David Petraeus go up there and tell us what's going on and, you know, won't base a decision on that.
You go on and there's plenty of people talking about Afghanistan.
You know, I'm on Twitter all the time now and, and I go to all the different websites of the, of the, the military blogs and the foreign policy blogs and, and people are talking about Afghanistan, but A, they're not necessarily there.
And B, they're just regurgitating or debating about things that other people have written, second, third hand accounts.
It's all about, well, does coin work or, you know, is this, you know, this parliament member fighting this parliament member, you know, uh, you know, really either in the weeds conversations or just debates over who is right over what policy would have worked there, but you're not really getting any news.
And it, well, and it doesn't sound like, um, you know, much of that is really relevant, you know, which member of parliament, this, that, or the other thing.
Cause the real point, uh, as you make clear in your other article is that, you know, when you say, uh, leaving, uh, is as bad as staying, which is, you know, kind of turning the conventional wisdom around on them a little bit.
Um, none of these people that we put in power would be in power if it wasn't for the U S and NATO.
I heard a liberal school.
Well, that's NATO.
That's not, that's not America.
That's NA okay.
Fine.
If it wasn't for NATO, uh, none of these people would be in power.
These were all the former KGB backed warlords who were losing the civil war terribly at the time that America intervened.
And they're, they're basically just the quizlings.
And you know, everybody knows that when the Nazi stopped backing the quizling, then the quizling falls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The whole prospect of, of leaving, you know, um, it's sad because there, there's no, we've passed the point of an easy answer for this.
We do leave and the place is going to fall apart economically, security wise, potentially.
Um, so just, just leaving it, it, it, it doesn't, it shouldn't make anybody feel good and staying same thing we stay and we're, it's, it's like we're a torch there.
And, um, I was watching for the second time last night, this, the frontline episode, the capture and kill operations.
And it's just so sad when you think about what's been done in our name, but yet this was the second time that this, this program was aired.
And it's just, what's even sadder is that it doesn't really generate the outrage that you would think, you know, when people think of all the lives have been lost on both sides, you know, you know, due to this and for what we're going to leave and we're going to leave a hell hole behind.
And I don't, I don't think I'm over-exaggerating there.
Well, yeah.
Well, I think you're being optimistic because you're leaving out if we don't, you know, bomb the heck out of Pakistan, you know, go to war against the state of Pakistan on the way out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Uh, that, that thing there, and you know, uh, Gareth Porter and Pepe Escobar both been on the show talking about Saleem Shahzad's new book, which, uh, I got to read.
I guess I'm gonna go ahead and recommend to you on their recommendation where he talks about this whole thing in specific is not just the Afghan war in general, but this has been Laden's policy was to get us bogged down more and more closer to the Pakistani border in those mountains while Qaeda goes out the back door, our heads for Yemen.
But anyway, I guess that's another show.
Thanks very much for your time, Kelly.
Thanks, Scott.
Kelly B. Vallejos, antiwar.com, the American conservative magazine.
What really goes on in Afghanistan?
We don't know.
No, we ain't winning.
