All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, there's this book, Patriotic Dissent.
It's brand new out.
It's by Danny Sherson.
And of course, he previously was the author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad, writing about his time in the Iraq War II surge in 2007, and then, as you know, he's written 10 million articles about his time in Afghanistan during the surge in 2010 and 11 there for a hundred different outlets, including antiwar.com, and is probably the most prolific antiwar writer in the world right now, which is saying a lot, because you've got some competition, you know?
David Swanson's out there.
Right, right.
And there's Doug Bondo.
I mean, you're neck and neck with Doug, I guess, in terms of total numbers of articles per week, I think, coming out of you guys, but anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm good.
I'm glad to be on the show, and it was great seeing you in Westchester near Philly, talking about Endless War at the Grave of Smedley Butler.
Yeah, man, wasn't that something?
I was going to say, great to meet you finally in person there, and for everybody who didn't listen to the entire two and a half hours of my Danny Davis interview, you might not have heard the end, where I said, hey, everybody, I'm going to be doing this event with Danny Sherson.
I should have put out a couple of more promos, huh?
Anyway, so it was bringourtroopshome.us, the great Dan McKnight invited Danny and myself to give talks, and there's some Republican politician there, too, whatever, anyway.
You can watch the whole video on YouTube, and it's embedded at the Libertarian Institute and at antiwar.com on the blogs there, if you guys want to watch the video.
I'm sorry, I realize now that I went on way over my time.
I was trying to go fast, Danny, I swear I was, but anyway.
Well, I like that you went full Scott Horton, though.
You didn't hold anything back, and it was ...
I mean, it was longer than they wanted, but it was probably the shortest but also comprehensive brief history since 1979 that I've heard.
They should bottle that, and then send it out to every school and media network so they can all ignore it.
Yeah.
I did skip a lot.
I was trying to go fast, but it is a lot of material.
It's a lot of wars.
It is a lot of wars, and a lot of pivots that everybody missed, and plenty of truth bombs that you dropped.
Of course, you always walk off the stage or wherever thinking of 13 things you should have said, right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, and especially when I talked about the whole thing about attack direct from the right, and I brought up Donald Trump's attacks on Bush, and I brought up the great Ron Paul.
Obviously, I meant to bring up Smedley Butler there.
Why do we talk about Smedley Butler?
Because he was a two-time Medal of Honor winning, toughest Marine in America, and he says it's a racket.
It's not because he's a wimp now.
It's because he's smart, and he figured it out, as simple as that.
The fact that I didn't mention that, the fact that at the beginning of my speech that I forgot to say thank you very much for having me here, or any of that, I spaced out on plenty.
The fact that I forgot to take my sunglasses off until about 90% of the way through the talk, and I realized, oh my God, I got my sunglasses on the whole time here.
There were some errors.
Well, I read it as a power move, and you had so much to say that I think the time for niceties, and there was no room for that, and I had said a little bit.
I think I had said enough about Smedley in my surprisingly brief remarks, so I think I balanced it out for us.
Yeah.
Well, and they were definitely brief in comparative terms, so yes.
Again, sorry about that, everybody, but no, you were great, too, and I learned a lot about the guy, too, so, you know, I read War is a Racket long ago, but I haven't really studied the man himself that much, so that was really something.
And thank you, Dan McKnight, and Diego Rivera, of course, and everybody who was involved in having me out there, and Price for the ride to the airport, and everybody, so, yeah.
That was very cool, and so, yeah, listen, one of the things about you that I forgot to mention, it's quite an extensive biography you got there, you taught history at West Point, and apparently, I guess I presume that that's where you read yourself a good ten or fifty books on Nagorno-Karabakh, which means that you probably know more about that situation than any man in North America right now, and you gave us a great backgrounder a couple of weeks ago about this conflict.
I will oversimplify it horribly that what we have here is a West Berlin inside East Germany type situation here, with one country wholly surrounded by another, and a dispute over that territory, a little piece of Armenia inside Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan is trying to kick them all out of there and take it, I guess, but now, so could you please tell us everything we need to know about recent developments, and where we are, and possible broken and unbroken ceasefires, and whatever you got for us, Danny, please, sir.
Well, you know, this is now, what, twenty, you know, twenty-one, twenty-three, no, I'm sorry, twenty-five to twenty-eight days of fighting, if you take the brief ceasefire, that never really was a ceasefire, I mean, there was some fighting during it, but, you know, there was a briefly brokered truce that was broken, but this is about seven times as much sustained combat in terms of days that the conflict has had since 1994.
What is remarkable about it is that it's just staying the course.
The negotiations attempts are really, you know, emanating from Moscow.
It is, in many cases, there's a lot of good talk from the United States and France to a certain extent, but if this thing does end, if there's a truce that brings it back to its frozen state, right, they call this a frozen conflict, it's probably going to emanate from Putin, the peacemaker, right, which is interesting and not something you hear a lot in the media.
So basically, depending on the count you believe, the Russians say about 5,000 people have died, which is the highest estimate I've seen, and that includes soldiers and civilians, although it's mostly soldiers.
That is way higher than Armenia or Azerbaijan admits to.
Armenia admits to at least 900 KIA, right, 900 soldiers killed in action and about twenty-five to thirty civilian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and then the Azeris.
They're saying that it's, you know, about 60 civilians, but they won't say how many soldiers.
They won't admit to it.
But nevertheless, this is sustained combat, armored air, everything that you've ever heard of, and it's just churning along.
That's the thing that's most interesting about it.
It's just straight up churning along and there's really no change to the status quo.
There's supposed to be a meeting that Mike Pompeo is going to be involved in, but as of now, it's just churning.
And so that's the basic update as of now.
Now, we're talking about a pretty small area there.
So I mean, essentially, you're telling me that the the Azerbaijanis are not really succeeding.
I mean, they must have driven a lot of civilians out just in terms of being, you know, refugees from the violence.
So is that count as a partial success for them taking that territory?
Well, you know, some people so they've taken some small territories back.
They have taken some small territories back.
And part of it was, refresh my memory here, but part of it was that Armenia controls not just the Armenian section, but they control some surrounding districts which are predominantly Azerbaijani.
And so those would have been the first ones to fall to the Azerbaijani government here or be liberated by them, I guess, depending on your point of view.
That's right.
So seven districts that are Azeri or Azerbaijani ethnic majority were also taken in the 1994 or the war that ended in 1994.
In addition to all of Nagorno-Karabakh, essentially, the Azeri Blitzkrieg, as it was literally called by a number of different, a number of different outlets, and essentially Azerbaijan admitted to it, you know, this was a, this was an attempt to change the facts on the ground through conquest.
They weren't happy with the status quo.
They had some initial limited success, but as always seems to happen in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, it bogged down, you know, neither army is particularly capable of changing those facts on the ground.
So they took some districts back and there have definitely been another wave of civilians who have chosen to leave their basements where many of them are living now, you know, these unheeded buildings that they're literally in the basement of.
But there have been thousands of refugees, nothing like the scale of 1994.
But you know, this is the problem, is Azerbaijan had initial limited success, Armenia was able to retrench their defenses, and now it's just kind of going back and forth.
So the big gamble of Azerbaijan, that they could totally shift the paradigm, totally shift the discussion, create new realities, hasn't really panned out.
So now you've got the sustained fighting.
Look, if even if a thousand people have died in this fight, which is the bare minimum, I mean, the Armenian side admits the 900, let's say half of what Russia estimates, which is 5,000 total is correct.
You know, for an area the size of Rhode Island, with only 150,000 people, this is pretty significant per capita casualties.
And now they're bogged down.
And I think that Azerbaijan, if you listen to some of the narrative, some of what is coming out of the foreign minister and their other like state media, it's interesting, because they gambled and they failed.
They're still fighting.
So now they're saying, well, actually, maybe this will be a bargaining chip.
Maybe the limited success we had will let us be stronger at the negotiating table.
And it's just very interesting how they've had to shift on the ground.
And you know, I just think that the reality here is that nobody is really talking about it in a serious way in U.S. policy circles, and certainly didn't come up in the debate now, did it?
Nope.
Which, can you imagine them trying to discuss that there?
Now, so do you think that the Turks are going to send in ground troops the way they threatened to?
God, do I hope they won't.
You know, I mean, I absolutely hope that that's a bluff, that that's sort of an attempt to make up for the failures of the Azeri military.
They've sent mercenaries, they've sent drones, some of the Israelis, of course, and they've done just about everything they can to bolster the Azeri position without throwing in ground troops.
I mean, Madcap Erdogan is capable of a lot.
I mean, he is capable of that, but I think in the end, probably he will stop at the edge of the abyss of ground troops and, you know, kind of step back.
But there's really no way to be certain.
And so I think what's important to understand here is if this continues, if this gets bigger, if this escalates further to an actual proxy war, which it largely has not been up to this point.
It has not been Syria or Libya, despite what certain media outlets have said that the conflict has never really been that.
It's also never really been about Russia.
However, if it goes bad, mark my words, it's a NATO member with the second largest military in NATO that's going to be responsible for that.
And I think that's just an inversion of the narrative that we're going to hear, even if it goes that way, and certainly an inversion of the current narrative emanating from Washington or New York media.
Yeah.
All right, man.
So now what about the Russians?
Because I read that, you know, the Russians have always backed both sides here.
And this is very much they're near abroad here in the South Caucasus.
And so can they throw their weight around in a way?
Are they making it worse?
Or are, you know, I think I had read that they were trying to to broker the ceasefires that weren't holding here, but I really don't know enough.
They've actually tended to make it better in a lot of ways.
And that's interesting because, look, they're not innocent in any of these situations.
They're involved.
This is their near abroad, like they're very, very near abroad.
I mean, if you if you actually looked at the distance in miles, it wouldn't even be that far into Mexico, you know, from the Russian border if you were to do it from the United States southern border.
So they're involved.
But they've in most cases, they've tried to balance the two sides.
They have a relationship with both sides.
Yes, you'll always hear it in every single article.
It's like mandatory for them to say that Armenia is kind of backed by Russia because they're in the CSTO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which is like a very NATO light, you know.
But the reality is Russia has sought to avoid intervening on Armenia's behalf because they maintain relations with both sides.
They sell arms to both sides.
They try to keep it fairly balanced.
And every time this thing blows up, if there is a truce, if there's something brokered, it tends to be brokered in Moscow.
That's where a lot of the energy comes from.
So this is not one of the situations that fits in with the really largely myth.
And you've written some of the best stuff on this, right?
It does not fit in with this myth of Russian aggression, Russian, you know, regaining the Soviet empire and all that.
If anything, this is like a hassle for Russia.
I mean, this is something that they feel like they have to deal with, but they don't like it.
They don't like when this blows up.
It puts them in an awkward spot.
And they're very, very scared of Islamist influence, anything that could radicalize the population.
The worst thing for them is the Turks sending in all these Sunni Syrian mercenaries out of their refugee camps, former rebels, many jihadi linked into Nagorno-Karabakh because they're still fighting a low intensity insurgency in the Northern Caucasus.
And they're scared to death because of their own, you know, war on terror.
So I think this is a hassle for them.
This isn't a power play by Moscow.
This is like a, you know, a crazy relative that they've got to constantly buck up.
You know, and I think that unless we see it that way, unless you start there, which is just factual, if you actually read the history and policy on this, unless you start there in the narrative, then everything you write after that in any explainer or article or interview is going to be tainted by a total misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the situation.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Well, yeah, I never presumed that, you know, Russian nefariousness is behind all these conflicts.
It's always a story that goes back, you know.
And so, for example, the way that they, right in the same region, the way that they spun the Georgia war of 2008, they just pretended.
The New York Times and the Obama and McCain campaigns and all the major media, you know, TV media, everyone just, the narrative was Russian aggression.
Russia invaded Georgia.
And that's all you need to know.
Except that anyone who was paying attention that night knows that Georgia started that war.
And Georgia attacked these breakaway regions that were occupied by Russian peacekeepers who were there under a deal with the European Union that the Americans, of course, had signed off on in the first place.
And it was only after Russian peacekeepers were killed that they rolled into those breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and secured their independence.
And then they could have conquered Georgia, former Soviet Georgia, but they didn't.
They went like a few hundred yards into Georgia and said, see, we could if we wanted to.
And then they didn't.
And all you need to know, though, is Putin is Satan.
And he did this because of just what an aggressive aggressor he is.
And anyway, and it was funny, actually, because of that November.
This is how long ago this was, 2008, Danny.
That November, the New York Times ran a correction and said, you know what?
We were wrong.
We were in the wrong part of the war.
You guys were right.
Sorry about that.
Oh, really?
Thanks, guys.
It was a few months late.
But these days, they wouldn't dream of admitting that they had lied about what Russia had done ever.
Right.
Well, nobody reads the correction, but I guess the New York Times took that to mean they shouldn't do them in the first place, because I don't expect a correction, of course, on bounty, gate, or anything that follows from there.
Georgia is a player in this, tangentially.
The BTC pipeline that runs from Baku over to Ceylon, Turkey, it goes through the T.
Right.
And the T is, you'll see, the capital of Georgia.
And the reason it goes there instead of the shorter route through Armenia is because the whole goal of that energy pipeline is to cut out the Russians, cut out the Iranians.
And because Armenia is seen as an ally of Russia, cut them out, too.
Yeah.
And by the way, how's that pipeline going these days?
It's funny because the Azeris have talked about how, you know, Armenia is attacking the pipeline and, you know, isn't that a tragedy?
I thought, well, maybe they should.
And also, by the way, all the energy reserves in the Caspian Sea and all this talk of this is the way we're going to change the game on energy and remove Europe's reliance on Russia and pull them even tighter into NATO has every time been exaggerated and overhyped.
In most cases, there's never been as much energy, oil, gas, as they said, and it never pumped enough through with the consistency to actually change the energy formula.
So the whole thing that that has caused us to slant towards the Azeris was built on sort of a false promise that never came to fruition.
Yeah.
Well, this is why Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
It was because we got to stick all our soda straws into the Caspian Basin and suck all that oil out to the south or to the east or the west or whatever, so that we don't have to pay rents to the Russians, essentially.
Right.
And I think it's also really important to understand that one of the reasons that the Russians let us go through, you know, the northern network and that Putin calls Bush first isn't because, you know, Putin's a great guy and he loves America and feels so terrible.
It's because he sees us now, oh, we'll slant towards him in his own war on terror in the northern Caucasus.
But I guess he figured out pretty early on that that was a bad play and that America is not a friend, even to people who do help them out.
And so I think that's a very important factor in this whole, you know, region.
If you don't go back to Clinton and the energy deals and Al Gore shaking hands with the father of the current mini Stalinist in charge of the family dynasty of Azerbaijan, Haidar Aliyev, if you don't go back to that, those oil deals, the thought process behind why we'll deal with anybody.
So we'll deal with the state terrorist Aliyev family and we'll deal with the state plus real, I guess, sort of terrorist Taliban.
We'll deal with anybody to play the energy game that was so dominant, really, in the late 90s and really well into the 2000s.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right now, speaking of the Taliban, man, we got business here.
I got to tell you what, like I said at the beginning here, you know a thing or two about it and not just from teaching at West Point, but lead men in the field during Obama's surge there.
And I'm not sure if you noticed the top headline on AntiWar.com today, US is covertly helping the Taliban fight Afghan ISIS.
In this case, Afghan ISIS is really just local posh tunes, some of them Pakistanis, but more or less locals.
I don't know if there's some Chechens in there with them or whatever, but they call themselves ISIS and so that makes them transnational, international terrorists.
So this article, it's, well this one is of course by Dave, but it was based on this thing in the Washington Post by a guy who's written a book about all of this now, a guy named Wesley Morgan.
And he says that JSOC, although I don't think he specifies Delta or SEALs, and I guess he's talking mostly about air power here, so I guess JSOC has their own air detachments and whatever too.
But anyway, that JSOC, they call them the Taliban's air force.
They call themselves the Taliban's air force.
And they are, it's the awakening movement, just as we talked about previously.
It's the Afghan awakening, where we're going to go ahead and ally with the local Mujahideen, who we've been fighting all this time and pretending we're a bunch of terrorists.
And we're going to ally with them and pay them and help them to fight the actual transnational or international terrorists, the foreign fighters who got no business here.
And so they're kind of replicating that whole strategy right here in Afghanistan.
I wondered about if you had read about that and what was your comment on that?
Well, I had read about it and it's interesting because, you know, I was all angry about McMaster's comments about the travesty that we're dealing with the Taliban and that this is, you know, Trump's policy in Afghanistan is a new Munich analogy and all this.
But I'll tell you, this ISIS, you know, affiliate, right, this franchise, this facsimile of ISIS that we're seeing, like, don't be surprised if the Pentagon military industrial complex establishment click, you know, sort of uses that as the new argument, right, is like the last, you know, card they have to play on precisely why we need to maintain this presence in Afghanistan indefinitely.
Right.
You know, in other words, OK, so even if we take the fact that, OK, we're probably going to really do this deal with the Taliban, although we'll see what happens with Biden, right, we'll see how squishy he is when he comes in and tries to do the opposite of Trump, the way Trump did the opposite of Obama.
But if we assume, OK, there is going to be a deal with the Taliban, so that's not we don't have to stay to fight them.
Wouldn't it be fascinating if we kind of go back to the future and find ourselves allied with the Taliban?
And oh, by the way, isn't it so great?
You know, if you were a conspiracy theorist, you would say the Pentagon or the CIA, probably the CIA founded, you know, ISIS chorus on.
Right.
Which is what I think they call.
The CIA there.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, yes, of course.
In other words, like if you if you wanted to stay forever and the Taliban was no longer working, they no longer had the utility of keeping you there forever.
Like you'd almost have to found something worse than the Taliban to, you know, to keep you there.
And I just think this story, it's it's so it's it's fishy.
I mean, it makes sense in a way, I guess, to be willing to work with the Taliban, except we shouldn't be there in the first place.
And I'm pretty sure the Taliban can handle it.
If you look at the number, of course, the backing on the ground, I don't I don't understand.
They don't really need our air force unless our concern is to minimize the Taliban casualties that are taken in this little civil war, which I don't know why we care about that.
Yeah.
No, it's amazing.
But yeah.
No.
And by the way, the limited hangout version, at least the Occam's razor razor version, frankly, the one that's believable to me is already horrible.
And that was that the Afghan intelligence services, a.k.a. the CIA, that when these Pakistani refugees from Obama's Pakistani drone war and alliance with the Pakistani government and their invasions of the Swat Valley and the northern northwestern federally administered tribal areas there in 2010.
And so when these guys, they came across the border into Afghanistan for safe haven.
And some of them were had been members of the Tariki Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban.
And so the Afghan government, again, read the CIA, recruited them to use them against the Pakistanis.
And they said, one, this will be tit for tat for them giving safe haven to the Afghan Taliban to attack our guys will give safe haven to the Pakistani Taliban to attack them.
How do you like that?
And then they also thought we can use these guys against the Afghan Taliban because they're the bad guys.
They're our enemy.
Again, we're talking 10 years ago.
They're the bad guys.
So we use this new group against them.
And then later on, they hoisted the black flag and said they were actually loyal to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi instead of Barack Obama.
And so that was how they became ISIS right there was it was a little piece of blowback inside the whole scheme of things there.
Well, you know, and as you say, very convenient that, oh, you're tired of being afraid of the Taliban.
Oh, here's ISIS, a whole new lease on the safe haven myth.
Very convenient for them.
They fail upwards.
These guys always, you know, well, I think it proves, you know, once and for all that, you know, Trump must have been right.
Obama was the founder of ISIS.
And now we know the ISIS affiliates.
But, you know, I watched Benazir Bhutto's assassination reporting from the gym on my base in Baghdad.
I rotated back from my little outpost and I watched it.
And so this was really, you know, we're talking 13 years ago, but it was what you're talking about.
This this affiliate, this this group in Taliban, the Tariq al-Taliban and in Pakistan was, you know, coming back across the border.
And it does seem that whenever the CIA is faced with an Islamist problem or any problem, they always one up the Islamism.
It's like, oh, the Taliban's bad.
We'll make a worse one.
And that'll do the trick.
Never understanding or maybe understanding, maybe even knowing knowingly that this is going to blow up.
I mean, in what world is gathering people who are to the right of the Taliban not going to have negative effects?
Right.
Yep.
And so there you go.
Just like in the last discussion with Daniel Davis a few minutes ago, like in Africa, he said, of course, you know, when we send SOCOM across Africa, they can not win.
He said it's like trying to drain the Great Lakes with a straw or something.
You can't just defeat Sunni radicals with rifles wherever they may be.
That's just a right to fight forever.
And of course, but what you can do is make more of them by fighting them and generate more resistance against you.
So from the point of view of a doe eyed American citizen, that doesn't make any sense.
But from the point of view of a general in the Pentagon, perfect.
That's what we'll do.
You know how many nations are in Africa?
Me neither.
Let's find out.
Find work to do.
And the more work we do, the more work we'll make.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I remember when Petraeus and the faux intellectual class, you know, supposedly took over the army and the Pentagon during the Iraq war.
And we were constantly told, you know, be careful about killing civilians.
Be careful about being rude.
Make sure you take your sunglasses off when you talk to people to be polite, because otherwise your actions may create more terrorists.
And it was such a cliche.
And it's true.
But I remember thinking at the time, and I think it even more now, that the missing piece there is you're fighting the symptom.
Because what if U.S. strategy that's levels above even the generals, levels above the brigade commander, and certainly levels above the lieutenants like me, is creating them for us regardless of whether I kill civilians or not?
Yep.
And or whether you're rude to them or not, you know, and I mean, and this goes to the real point of this kind of this whole thing.
I guess maybe this is the argument that Trump finally got Khalilzad to admit or something that the Taliban are not from outer space.
They have not invaded Afghanistan.
They are from there.
And these people that they're telling you not to offend with your sunglasses are the wives and sisters and brothers and uncles of these very same fighters.
And so by taking off your sunglasses, you're supposed to persuade them to like you more than their own kin.
But they never admit that.
They never framed it that way.
Certainly I know.
I'd be amazed if they ever framed it that way to you when you were in the middle of this shit over there, Danny, that these men are from here.
Well, when I was in southern Afghanistan, when I was in Kandahar, I was three miles, three miles from the village mosque that Mullah Omar, you know, prayed in one day and decided to go attack a checkpoint.
You know, I mean, I was from I was in his home turf.
And so I remember saying to my boss at one point, look, these are really farm boys with guns.
This is the home team.
And so your whole thing about, hey, we got to like, right, you know, raise a militia and a tribe that's going to turn on them like the Anbar awakening.
And you know that we got to prove to the people that we're the better bet that the Kabul government and the soldiers from Kabul who can't even speak the same language because they're not Pashtos, they're from the north, which he didn't know until I told him, which is fascinating.
And I was telling him all this and I said, I said, sir, the whole problem with this narrative is that you're assuming that we're not in Philadelphia asking these people not to root for the Phillies.
This is their home turf.
This is the home team is the Taliban, whether they have issues, some of the civilians, some of the villagers have issues on the margins with some of the Taliban policy.
They believe in the same values.
They live most of these same values.
And so this is the home team.
And no one ever talked about it.
You're right.
All right.
So, Mr. History professor, what's Munich and what the hell is H.R. McMaster talking about?
Well, you know, Munich is the analogy that keeps on giving.
And I mean, giving to the military industrial complex and the warfare state.
Look, the worst thing that ever happened to the United States in an odd way was winning World War Two the way we want it.
You know, it set off this idea that force works.
It set off like a triumphalism.
So you know, even if the Nazis had to lose, right, even if in the end they were going to have to be fought, the second and third order effects is that we go back to World War Two.
That's the treasure chest of analogies.
And the problem is that the Nazis were largely an anomaly.
World War Two is anomalous and it very rarely applies to the current mission or the current strategy or the current threat to the extent that exists or we create it.
But if you want to galvanize the people, although I don't think it's working much with the population anymore, but if you want to galvanize the media, if you want to convince the establishment that we have to stay, we have to fight, we can't appease, right, we can't appease this enemy, whatever they are, then you go back to the Munich analogy.
So what does it mean in terms of the actual history?
That's when Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of Britain, you know, went to Munich and made a deal with Hitler and, you know, Hitler said, I won't take anything more than this sliver of Czechoslovakia, you know, the Sudetenland and, you know, don't worry, it's peace in our time.
Neville Chamberlain came back and said, and of course Hitler gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia and the war came.
Now it was all more complicated than that.
And Neville Chamberlain was not as naive as he's come off as, and in many ways the British and the French were actually buying time for their own mobilization to get themselves ready.
So it wasn't as neat as they say, but that's the analogy.
But think about it.
Every single American enemy has been compared to Hitler ever since.
And every single time one of the two parties or one of the two policies presented by the establishment isn't seen as tough enough, aggressive enough, or forward thinking in its militarism enough, then they go back to that Munich analogy and they say, look, it's just like Munich.
We're appeasing the new Hitler.
We're soft on terror.
We're soft on communism, just like we were soft on Nazism.
The problem is that not only is it a historical, not only does it not apply, but it is an actual built in formula for forever war.
Yeah, clearly.
And the thing is, I mean, if you just turn it around, you got to admit, none of these hawks would say that America can never be appeased, that we are bent on total global conquest and domination, and there's nothing anyone could do to ever get peace out of us.
They would say, all we want is peace.
That's all we're fighting for is peace.
And so you'd have to admit that, okay, well, there is one hole in your model.
There's one example of a country that could very easily be appeased.
If only North Korea would get rid of all their nukes, and if only the Ayatollah would hang himself from the balcony, and if only the, you know, a few other things, and then everything would be perfectly fine, right?
According to them, that's what they would say, then, you know, we're in the defensive in all of these matters.
And if we didn't have these matters to defend ourselves from, then we wouldn't be fighting at all.
And so if that can be the case for us, that could apply to other nations at other times.
In fact, look at all the nations that aren't invading each other for territory right now, that, you know, don't need to be appeased because they're not being aggressive.
So it seems like you'd have to explain at least why it is that the Taliban home team farm boys are a lot like the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party in the most powerful industrial nation in the world at the time, in the late 1930s, for example.
So, or anything like that, what does it mean when Manuel Noriega is like Hitler?
And when Saddam Hussein, after Daniel Davis and them decimated his army in Iraq War One, was still Hitler anyway, you know, all of this stuff, it kind of doesn't mean anything.
I think maybe you're Hitler.
Why not?
Well, you know, it gives me an idea for an article I want to write about.
I want to call the title either the reverse Munich analogy or the Munich analogy comes to Tehran or something.
And what I have to do is I have to get some Google Translate going and figure out if some of our, you know, quote adversaries in Pyongyang or Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, are they using the Munich analogy where we're Hitler?
I hope they are.
And if not, I'm going to write a fictional sort of article on what that conversation would sound like, because I think it'll be instructive on the exact points you made.
Because if anyone has been getting appeased, it is sometimes the United States, which is actually the aggressive threat.
And so, you know, who is more of a threat to peace, security, stability and, you know, bloodletting that is unleashed?
Manuel Noriega, some tin pot dictator, whoever was in charge of Granada in 83?
Or is it or Muammar Gaddafi?
Or is it the United States?
I mean, there's no comparison between the two.
And yet we will make anybody into Hitler.
We will go as absurd as possible.
Catch 22 style.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, David Petraeus himself said that the people of the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan, they prefer the Taliban to us.
We created these courts for them, civil courts and criminal courts and local police forces and stuff.
And for some reason, they just hate them.
And they would rather do things the way that they've done them for millennia.
Can you believe that?
And so.
But it seems like.
Wait, I mean, but if you can see that, then that means call the whole thing off right now, then just stop then.
If you say that they prefer it this way, the the the people of the countryside here, that's what they think and that's what they want.
Then you know that the infantry can't do a thing about that.
You know, night raids by Delta Force can't do anything about that.
Oh, how unfair is that when you already admit that the game is lost because there's nothing that we have to offer them that they want from us?
Huh?
Well, when he used to say stuff like that, when I would hear comments like that in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would get so dark and depressed because I would think, well, if that's true, sir, then why in the world should I go on patrol tomorrow and risk another of my boys getting two or three of their limbs blown off?
Like what's the point?
You just described it.
And you're right, though.
I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I was told by villagers who looked me in the eye and were willing to say this out loud.
They said, listen, I have more faith in the shadow courts, right?
The Islamic courts that the Taliban has that they were running is like a shadow government.
And I do when I have to bribe a corrupt judge or prosecutor in the Kabul based system.
Look, I don't have to like those courts.
I don't have to like those values.
But they don't even have electricity where I was in southwest Kandahar province.
And they were sending kids on motorbikes with a backpack full of cell phones to charge.
And they would have to drive two hours to Kandahar City, even though it was like 20 miles, because the roads were so pockmarked with IEDs.
So, I mean, it speaks to this point.
The idea that even if we find the Islamic courts of the shadow government Taliban loathsome, that the fact that they told me that to my face makes me think, well, what's the point of all this then?
And why would someone think that a bunch of scouts or infantrymen or rebranded artillerymen as infantrymen are going to make any difference?
It's a ludicrous concept.
And it really does prove if you know, and it is depressing because it tells you that every American soldier who died was dying then or continues to die now is really doing in a futile way, which is why I've been willing to say a number of times, yes, my soldiers did die in vain.
Yeah.
Well, and I know that you don't take that lightly saying it that way.
You know, a lot of us, I mean, the whole society, when this does come up at all, it's numbers of soldiers, but rarely real stories about real people and their names and their shoe size and real details.
Just like Afghanistan itself is a shape on a map rather than a real place.
You know, the, there are too many things that kind of get in the way, but when you're talking about this, you're talking about very real men to you.
I know that that's no joke coming from you.
Absolutely.
And look, I mean, and as we're just talking about here, that reality that we're talking about that had in fact filtered up all the way to David Petraeus, maybe surprisingly, right?
Instead of just blowing smoke up his rear end, people below him said, sir, the locals around here, they really liked things the way they were before.
And he heard that maybe as, as bad as he didn't want to listen.
And he still sent you out there.
Well, that's the most obscene part because you know, I, I use the right paragraph report every night I was required to put a paragraph update of my sector on a slide and send it up to the headquarters.
And I was pretty sure no one was reading it.
You know, I just had to give my assessment of how things were in my sector that day.
And I actually took it seriously, you know, unsurprisingly, and I would change the font to size seven so I could fit my paragraph, you know, which was really a page.
And you know, I was not the only one doing that.
There were other like-minded officers across Afghanistan were probably saying the same things because they were hearing the same thing.
So I remember thinking also that it's good to know, well, at least someone's reading our reports.
The problem is that the, the conclusions they came to after reading them were similar to ours, but then their policy prescription was, so get back out on the road tomorrow, mean feet to the river tomorrow and see what happens regardless of the fact that we admit that the people want the Taliban.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I was just talking about McMaster a little bit with Daniel Davis, who served under him in Iraq war one and knows him very well personally served under him in Germany and everything before that.
Have you read Davis's new book, the 11th hour?
Oh yeah, I did.
Oh yeah.
I read the book, read an early copy.
Of course.
Yeah.
I'm so glad that he, that he wrote it.
And, and one of the things that gives him that interesting credibility is, you know, he spans all the Iraq wars, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 that you talked about in that speech.
So I think it's really important that he was the voice that was kind of giving energy to this as well as Afghanistan, of course.
Yeah.
But no, so I'm not going to get into that.
I'm not going to get into that.
I'm not going to get into that.
I'm not going to get into that.
I'm not going to get into that.
And he had a job during the surge as well.
He was in charge of anti-corruption in Kabul.
He was in charge of fighting corruption during that whole thing when, when you know, McChrystal came and went and Petraeus came and went and you came and went and everything stayed the same or worse.
And of course, Kabul is right up there with the United States of America and Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world on all the lists to this day.
And he has to know that he's a guy who did spend time.
I don't know how much time he spent there before the Petraeus surge.ever had been to Afghanistan, you know, for, for any of the fighting or, or, you know, any of that Bush era, part of the war there.
But no, no, no, that was his first, that was his first like actual tour there.
He may have, you know, visited or something, but he never commanded there.
He, you know, he never did any line duty there, but he's got, I know he didn't have your experience, but he's got to know better than to say that if only we had fought, we were on the right trajectory for getting everything just fine.
If only they hadn't called it off so soon.
I mean, how cynical is that?
Come on.
No, he knows better.
He's not a dumb guy.
When I, you know, my connection to McMaster, I met him twice and he came to visit the history department when I was on the faculty there.
And he's a legend in the history department.
Everyone's so proud of him.
You know, his original desk, when he taught there in the nineties, after the Gulf Persian Gulf War one, uh, they kept his desk and it has like a, I dunno, some sort of placard.
I think on a saying this was HR McMaster's desk when he was captain McMaster, you know, and major McMaster right after the war, you know, and, and whoever's office has that desk and it is like super proud that they're in like the McMaster office.
So he would come back and talk to our faculty and, you know, I mean, it's clear that he's a smart guy.
He has a reputation as one of these intellectuals.
It's just like that scene in a hunt for red October though, where, you know, uh, the Alec Baldwin, Jack Ryan characters talking to Sean Connery, the Soviet sub commander.
And he's saying, Oh, you know, I, I once wrote a book about the fighting sailor, this like world war two book.
And Sean Connery says to the Jack Ryan character, I read this book, all of your conclusions were wrong, Ryan.
Well, you know, that's the thing with McMaster.
He's not a dummy.
I think he does know some of this stuff and he, and he can write fairly well and he's a, he's a pretty good researcher, but all his conclusions are wrong.
Because when he came to West Point, I remember him saying, and then I saw it in his national security document that he wrote the official one.
But I remember him saying, uh, Oh, the thing is we have a two plus two plus one enemy structure ahead of us.
And he's telling this to the faculty.
It's like a private meeting, like a lunch meeting with us, like a brown bag lunch.
And he's saying, uh, the big, it's, it's two big ones.
That's Russia and China, two mediums, North Korea and Iran, and one persistent, which is terror.
Right.
And I remember thinking, Oh my God, like this smart guy, that's the conclusion he came to that we have to fight everybody.
Because think about it.
If you take two plus two plus one that he laid out, that's the whole world.
I mean, you could find a way to fit every single conflict, former colony, uh, ethnic problem somewhere into that model.
And I'm like, this guy is off the rails.
And so hearing him say this stuff about Afghanistan being the new Munich analogy, and you know, he, I think he called it a travesty, you know, Trump's deal.
It's worse than anything Obama said.
I think he was quoted as saying that Washington post article, it's ludicrous that he's come to this place and it's almost like he's had some sort of lobotomy or he was never really that astute in his conclusions in the first place.
And the dude was overhyped just like the tray is.
And I'll tell you, I'm leaning more and more to the latter.
Yeah.
Well, um, you know, we know from, uh, the various reporting it's, you know, including in my book from the various sources I pulled together there that in 2017, the Madison McMaster plan was, and they ended up getting this 10,000 more troops and they were, they asked for as many as 30,000 more, but they very quickly settled for less than that.
But enough to essentially make sure we're not leaving Marines to helm and more green berets and that kind of thing, uh, for Nangarhar, I guess.
And, um, and, uh, then his deal was, you know, cause it's all, you got to compare it to like how he played it compared to how Petraeus, uh, played it for Obama in oh nine.
Right.
And so he wasn't so stupid as to give this 18 month timeline and swear by it and all this stuff.
So what he said was, give me the troops and we'll fight them for four years and then we'll see about, uh, you know, possibly beginning to negotiate.
So he wasn't making any promises like Petraeus did that.
I'll bring their bloody noses to the table by July 11.
I swear to God, kind of garbage, you know, that Obama ended up holding them to, um, sorta.
But, um, so that was the plan they wanted.
And then of course, even from right there, the four year plan means that it wouldn't, we wouldn't be getting to the end of four years until presumably the first year of the Biden administration, you know, after Trump has gone.
And so now we're trying to roll him the same way was basically, I guess the thinking there, they didn't dare call it the three year plan so that Trump would be able to reevaluate where we are within his own first term.
And you know, he, he started to go for it.
I mean, he gave them the troops they wanted, but he didn't adopt the plan.
But basically that was what McMaster was pushing for then.
And Trump instead hired Khalilzad to make a deal to get us the hell out of there, which actually really surprised me.
I said in the book, we ought to just go because I couldn't imagine that the Americans would actually make a deal with the Taliban, much less bring in Khalilzad to actually make a deal with the Taliban with a firm timeline on withdrawal and everything is just a miracle to me that that happened at all.
I could have never guessed that and I didn't advise it because I just didn't think that I thought that would be a poison pill.
If we have to negotiate our way out, hell, we'll never leave.
But you know, I don't know.
But that is where his head's always been, is that, you know, oh, Afghanistan, bring him on.
We're only 20 years in.
So what's the problem?
You know, just to further fuel the left establishment conspiracy theory that I'm working for the Trump campaign.
I mean, it is remarkable that in many cases it was this president who, you know, maybe after some false starts and bad moves and getting convinced a little bit, has been the one who's pulled back the reins from the more establishment respected by the bipartisan national security figures like Mattis and McMaster.
You know, whenever they put forward something that was absurdist and status quo, you know, may have allowed himself for a number of character and maybe political reasons to be initially convinced.
But for the most part, he was the one that kind of pulled the reins and said not.
But we're not really going to do that forever and we're not going to go too big.
And I'm not really into this anyway.
And it is a kind of one of the remarkable and slightly unexpected, I think, by some aspects of this campaign.
Yeah.
You know, I'm reminded of the first Woodward book where he says that they wanted out of Afghanistan in the first couple of months there.
They were pushing for it.
I don't care what Mattis and McMaster say.
Let's do this.
It was Bannon and Trump really leading it.
And then Bannon made a deal with Mattis.
OK, if you promise to get more hawkish on China, I'll back off on getting out of Afghanistan.
I was like, come on, they were going to get hawkish on China anyway.
Right.
Give them Afghanistan for that.
And what a bad start to this presidency, you know, because I'm sorry.
Every time I talk about Donald Trump, I always have an analogy to Barack Obama.
Every single time.
It's just like Obama getting screwed by Netanyahu on the West Bank.
I'll tell you what, I'll give you a run if you lay off the West Bank.
OK, no, I won't give you a run.
The same thing.
Anyway, man, everyone go out and buy Danny's book.
It's called Patriotic Dissent, America in the Age of Endless War.
And it's as great as you might think it would be.
And of course, read all his great articles at Antiwar dot com.
And where else all are you writing right now, Danny?
You know, I'm a sheer post occasionally.
And then, you know, if you go to my website, sheer post, that's the new incarnation of truth.
Dig everybody.
Robert Shear.
Right.
That's right.
That's Bob Shear.
The old senior editor over there.
It's kind of truth.
Dig light.
I'm there fairly often.
I'm on the road doing a bunch of stuff after the West Chester event and always a pleasure to talk about these things with somebody who is sane and has not taken the pill.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, yeah.
Appreciate that.
And again, everybody, you can watch that video of the event in West Chester's myself.
Danny and the great Dan McKnight, the founder of Bring Our Troops Home dot US.
And the video is embedded on the blog at Antiwar dot com slash blog and at Libertarian Institute dot org slash blog as well.
And for that matter, check out Bring Our Troops Home dot US.
And thank you again, Danny.
Appreciate it, bud.
Glad to do it.
Talk soon.
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.
