Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Adam Winchey.
He is a research fellow with the New Quincy Institute and a PhD candidate at Boston College.
He's a U.S. Army veteran, did two deployments to Afghanistan.
And he wrote, I think the best thing I ever read in the New Republic, the real costs of the war in Afghanistan.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
The boss at antiwar.com said, I don't know who, who said that we should run this New Republic article as the spotlight.
And I said, oh, that was me.
And he's really a New Republic article.
Yeah, no, I'm, I'm pretty sure I didn't find anything bad in it.
It's really great.
The real costs of the war in Afghanistan.
A very, you know, important perspective, I think you bring to this thing.
So let's talk about the costs.
How do you break them down, Adam?
So I think the point of the article is mostly to sort of point out the fact that the way that we've been talking about the costs of war have sort of been surface level, basic, not really getting into the details.
And when you do that, it's really easy for you to, you know, justify doing another 20 years of this thing, because it looks on the surface as if the, you know, the war is not really that expensive when you actually break down and look at some of the details.
It obviously becomes clear, like I'm sure you're obviously aware and your listeners are obviously aware that the war itself is not actually that inexpensive as some people want to think that it is.
Yeah, well, and it all depends on how you measure it.
And of course, the most important things can't be measured in quantities, only in qualities.
And so like, for example, the value of a human life when it comes to condolence payments, I guess it's 1500 bucks.
Life is cheap in the Orient and all of that kind of thing.
But how much is an American soldier's life worth?
Yeah, so that's actually what got me interested in writing this article in the first place was an article that was put out by all of these former, you know, State Department officials that served in Afghanistan, basically trying to make the case against.
They're basically making a case against withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And they said, and here's a quote from the article that I wrote in here, it says, the lives and money being expended are serious, but the costs are ones we can sustain for negotiations to result in a sustainable peace, which just kind of struck me as strange.
Like trying to say that, oh, we lost 17 soldiers, but it's OK, we can keep doing that, just kind of struck me as odd and strange that you would sort of put up a value of a human life just so casually like that.
And so that's where I started looking at this and trying to break it down in a more clear way of what these actual costs are.
Well, yeah.
And there's so many baked in premises there about the justification for any of this in the first place.
But you know what?
I might at least hear the guy out if he had something like an honest description of what a sustainable peace is supposed to look like and how we're supposed to get from here to there at the level, at the same level of casualties that they're saying we're taking now.
As though right now we're on the road to some progress and a resolution rather than losing the war terribly.
Right.
I think I started this article of I just want to – it was just sort of like a project for myself.
I want to see what the actual costs are, which are hidden.
What is it actually costing the United States to continue this war?
And I think by the end of it, I came to the conclusion like, look, none of this matters because nobody can tell us what our strategy is there.
Nobody tells us what our exit plan is.
Nobody tells us what we're actually doing there other than sustaining operations, which if you ask any military strategist is not a strategy.
That's just continuing military operations for the sake of continuing military operations.
Yeah.
Well, and the other thing is too is they're implying that it's at least a stalemate if they're not making progress.
But that's not really true either.
I mean, we keep at it essentially the way we are now.
We're going to have nothing but the Bagram Air Base left.
And then what?
Right.
Yeah, it's interesting to look at this whole situation in Afghanistan.
I think depending where you look, there's some issues where you can see some progress and there's some issues where you don't see progress.
I mean, the obvious ones are Taliban are continuing to gain territory.
They're continuing to inflate violence.
The national security forces are sustaining more and more casualties.
But, yeah, at the end of the day, I just I so the strategy was believable when they said, like, look, we're going to increase the pressure on the Taliban and try to bring them to the negotiating table.
That's a strategy to try to get out of Afghanistan.
Now that those talks are over, I don't really know what the strategy is.
And so, you know, regardless of how you're measuring progress there, there's just no I just I don't see what the plan is.
I just don't know what it is.
The plan is to not leave.
That's the plan to stay.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon dot com.
Well, that makes sense.
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Won't cost you a thing.
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Announcing the latest book to be published by the Libertarian Institute.
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Isn't it interesting that sometimes they admit that the reason we're there has nothing to do with helping the Afghan people at all.
It's all about Russia and China somehow.
Yeah, so I got some of that response when I put this article out on Twitter, I got some responses like that.
You know, you know, why didn't we talk about, you know, the cost of the Afghan people?
Because as I'm sure you've seen, you know, the the coalition forces and the Afghan government are now in a position where they're killing more Afghan civilians than the actual non-state armed groups are in the country.
And my response was basically I ran out of space.
I very much wanted to talk about that because that is, you know, that is, you know, a factor that we need to consider, you know, when we're talking about the cost of any war.
Like, you know, Trump had mentioned that, you know, he had a plan for getting out of Afghanistan, which I don't think he said it explicitly, but basically was saying, like, I'm going to drop some nukes and then we can get out of there.
But what is a victory if no one is left to survive and live in that piece is something that certainly needs to be asked, but I don't think often does get asked.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, there's the real bad part of this is there is no real kind of victory.
And when we do leave, whatever groups that we've been propping up are going to suffer terribly because they don't have the natural power that our money and our armed force has bolstered them with.
And so there's going to be hell to pay.
You know, it's going to be ugly as hell.
I don't know.
I've heard a lot of people criticize the war in Afghanistan and say, you know, you've got to get out right now.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, and then chances are it's going to be fine.
You know, things will work out.
I don't think anybody thinks it's going to work out other than just it's got to be the local people who do the working out for the peace to finally be sustainable, whether that's after we leave now or after we leave in 10 or 20 years or whatever it is.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's the interesting question now is, you know, what, what are we, you know, what are we going to do about this situation, right?
Because it's one thing to just say, you know, we're not winning the war, we don't have strategy.
You know, people who want to get out, they want to believe that there's, you know, some sort of plan.
And so, you know, that's one of the things that I'm working on right now for the Quincy Institute is, you know, trying to figure out what, you know, obviously our position is we need our military to get out of Afghanistan now.
But the question then is, okay, then what, what does our, you know, what does that situation look like after the fact?
And one of the things that I've been doing is comparing the Soviet withdrawal to the sort of US drawdown that's been happening since, you know, 2011.
And a lot of people I think want to, you know, point to Afghanistan as being a situation where if we do pull our military out, it'll be exactly like it was, you know, post Soviet withdrawal.
And the point that I'm trying to make is that that's not necessarily going to be the case.
Because for the Soviets, they withdrew in about a nine month period, they withdrew 100,000 troops.
And then a couple years later, they collapsed.
And so all military, all diplomatic engagement ceased.
And one of the things that surprised people was that, you know, the regime in Afghanistan held on with the Soviet withdrawal much longer than they expected it to.
So I don't think that it necessarily follows that the Afghan government will collapse if we withdraw our troops.
I think the 100,000 troops, you know, that the Soviets pulled out is obviously far different than the 14,000 troops that we have there.
I think it's absurd to think that just because 14,000 troops are getting pulled out, that all of a sudden, Afghanistan is going to collapse into, you know, civil war like it did before.
Now, that's not to say that, you know, obviously, there's a lot of problems and obstacles that come up.
But, you know, thinking about how we engage with Afghanistan after the fact, I think is important, because a lot of people are assuming that a military withdrawal is just going to be a complete withdrawal of everything, all our contact.
And that does, you know, we can maintain our diplomatic engagement.
I don't think we have a problem with that.
We maintain diplomatic engagement with lots of countries.
But I think dropping bombs on a country is not going to help them achieve any kind of peace.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I certainly hope for the best, but I'm predicting the worst, I guess, because without America's armed force, the Kabul government doesn't really have an armed force at all.
I would expect their army to dissolve at the first real threat without US support.
And the Taliban, I don't know if they could just walk right into Kabul, but I suspect that they could just walk right in.
They got Hekmatyar is already there with all of his guys.
They're a good friend.
So I don't know.
But you know, they don't have the Taliban don't have presumably wouldn't have the backing of the Pakistanis to take the capital city, right?
We ought to be able to lead on Pakistan and say, Look, tell the Afghan Taliban that, you know, call timeout and draw the lines where they are.
We could try to influence that way.
But I don't know.
The Taliban, the momentum is on their side.
So I would imagine and their cruel suicide bombing, you know, bastards, and I don't expect them to, to be wise enough to say, Hey, we bit off exactly as much as we can chew.
This is perfect.
You know what I mean?
They're gonna go too far.
Everybody always does.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the Afghan government itself, obviously, certainly believes that that was going to be the case.
Once those talks collapsed, you know, that was sort of their first sort of messaging after that happened, which was, you know, Trump made the right choice, these peace deals aren't going to go anywhere.
Like they were concerned that, you know, the Taliban were not negotiating, honestly, which I don't think is, is a stretch to say that they weren't.
But they were just assuming that, you know, Afghan or the Taliban were on their way to marching to victory.
And if you look at their national security advisor, he was saying in a recent, you know, tour around the United States that Afghan commanders, you know, in the lead up to nearing the end of these talks were essentially sending out messages to their fighters of, you know, this is, this is how it's, you know, this is how the situation is going to be once we win.
So they, they were expecting the peace talks to deliver them victory, not, not a compromise.
All right, now, so let's talk about, I don't know, you and your buddies, and the temperature out there, there's a new poll out not long ago, that you must have saw on Twitter, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's a new poll out there, and I'm not sure if you saw it, but there's overall, yeah.
If you look at military strategy, this is just not how you're supposed to fight wars.
It's just not how it's supposed to be done.
It's not what the military is an effective tool to be used as.
I think what you're seeing in those polls is all of these soldiers, especially my generation of these veterans, where I joined specifically because of 9-11.
I joined shortly after, that was my motivating factor, and I wanted to do something about that sort of atrocity.
Early on, you see widespread support because we felt like we were doing something to help that, to prevent that from happening.
But as it drags on, I think people are seeing more and more, and especially veterans are seeing more and more, that what we can use a military for is extremely limited.
There are a few things that it is very well-suited for, and there are things that especially the American military is very well-suited at doing.
But spending 20 years chasing terrorists and insurgents to the mountains is just not an effective use of that tool.
And so now you get to a point where veterans are just feeling like they're not being used to achieve important objectives anymore.
They're just there so that some leader somewhere doesn't have to admit that we made a mistake by staying there longer than we needed to in the case of Iraq, starting a war that just didn't need to be started in the first place.
Yeah.
And think of the arrogance of these think tankers talking about, well, you know, we lose a few Green Berets here and there, but so what?
Yeah.
And I think that was the main point that I was trying to make at that, right?
Because so many people are trying to make that point that if we lose a couple, that's okay because we lose a couple in training.
But it ignores the fact of what is the purpose of their sacrifice, right?
And I think that's why you see so many veterans sort of shifting against favorability of the war is because I think they're getting to a point where they just don't know, they don't see what the value of their sacrifice is anymore.
You know, if there was a clear strategy to achieve victory and it was reasonable to believe that that strategy would work and we could achieve victory in a reasonable amount of time, like those sacrifices are then justified.
But if it's just to prevent someone from admitting that, you know, we're not going to win this or we just can't win it anymore, then what is that sacrifice being made for regardless of how many troops are being sacrificed?
There needs to be, there needs to be a purpose behind it.
Otherwise it's, it's, it's wasted.
Yeah.
And you know what?
He had a political purpose in saying so, but still the ultimate hawk himself, Dick Cheney in 1994, when justifying not going to Baghdad, because he said we'd end up turning Iraq over to Iran.
Anyway, he says, um, we got praised in Iraq war one for the low number of casualties on our side.
And then Cheney said, but let me tell you something.
Those weren't low numbers to those family members of those dead soldiers.
And so how many more of those dead soldiers was Saddam Hussein worth?
I got to tell you, not very damn many.
That was what he said.
This is the ultimate sacrifice for some guy who had one son and now he's dead.
It's nothing to a think tanker.
It's a number lower than 20 per year to them.
So they're going, remember that time when we all died on the beaches of Normandy or something.
So this doesn't compare to that.
So it's fine.
As though the low number is actually the value of each of those lives too, but that's not right.
Yeah.
And I think you see it from the military on both sides.
Right.
So like when you see, like, like you said, you know, people sort of discounting the sacrifice of American soldiers just because it didn't reach some number that was achieved in some other war.
But you also see it when we're trying to, to defeat, you know, other enemies, right.
Saying like, oh, we killed this many.
Therefore we're making progress, but body counts aren't progress regardless of which side they're on.
Right.
So, um, I think the situation with the Iraq war, the first one, I think is a clear example of what a military can be useful for, right.
Militaries are good at defeating other militaries.
Once you park them in some country and occupy that country and try to tell that country what to do, then you're using a military for something it's not, you know, useful for doing.
And then in that situation, those sacrifices are no longer justified or honorable.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad you bring up the burn pits in here too, is an example of these things.
You talk about the suicide rate.
So that has a lot to do with PTSD and, and the different guilt syndromes and all of this, but also, you know, Joe Biden, all the scandals about his son.
How about the other scandal about his other son who died of brain cancer?
Cause he was stationed next to a burn pit in Joe Biden's Iraq war too.
Yeah.
How do you put a value on your son dying or daughter dying of cancer that your own army gave him?
Right.
Yeah.
That was one of my biggest frustrations with this article from the diplomats of them trying to say like, Oh, our body count is low.
I'm like, okay.
But just because somebody dies doesn't mean that's the only sacrifice that's being made.
Right.
So soldiers right now in a war that doesn't have a real strategy are faced with some pretty terrible options, right?
Their option is to either come back with physical or mental wounds or it's to come back in a body bag, right?
Like their options are not like, they don't have very good options.
And so to ignore the fact that people are getting sick because of burn pits, or even in, you know, the Gulf war, people got sick because of, you know, sarin gas that was floating around, right.
It's called Gulf war syndrome.
Right.
So to ignore, you know, those costs I think is, is pretty disingenuous and it, it, it sort of undermines the sacrifices that all these soldiers have been making, you know, whether they came back, you know, in a body bag or not.
Right.
All right.
So it says here that you were deployed to Afghanistan twice.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yeah.
So, um, so like I said, uh, when I put this out on Twitter, I, uh, I actually joined the military or I, um, I took extra classes over the summer so I could graduate early from high school so that I could leave for the military sooner.
Um, I thought I was running low on time.
This is 2004 when I enlisted.
Um, and I, I tried to graduate, uh, high school early because I actually thought at the time, which is, you know, painfully naive as we see it now, but I actually thought that I was going to miss the wars.
Like I wanted to, I wanted to participate.
And so I tried to leave, you know, as soon as possible because I thought they were going to be over fairly quickly.
Um, like a lot of words that the U S has fought.
Well, I guess previous wars that the U S has fought not so much anymore.
Um, but, uh, but yeah, so I joined, um, left in about 2005.
Um, and my position in Afghanistan was actually pretty unique.
I was able to, uh, to fly around, um, and provide support for a lot of soldiers all over Afghanistan.
So I got to see a lot of the country, meet a lot of people, um, see a lot of the country and what was going on there.
That's great.
So, you know, that was, uh, your story is in common there with Daniel Davis, who had a job.
He's Lieutenant Colonel, of course, you must know, uh, who his job was, he was like the emergency resupply guy, making sure everybody in the field had whatever equipment they needed.
And on that basis, he was traveling around the entire country and seeing the different theaters and talking with the different guys in the different situations.
So that was where he really came to decide, man, this is not working.
These boys are dying for nothing out here.
So was that your same experience too, that as you were traveling around, it kind of dawned on you that, man, this place is as big as Texas.
What the hell are we doing?
You know, it's interesting, not, not in the moment.
Um, I think in the moment I was sort of caught up in that, you know, that, uh, just that feeling of, of doing something meaningful and, um, purposeful.
And I just, I don't think I saw it at the time.
It was, you know, it was years after I come back when I had time to sort of reflect and think about it.
Um, and then when I actually started studying Afghanistan, you know, professionally, um, then it started, I just like started putting all these pieces together of, you know, not only have we not achieved what we thought we were going to achieve, but the odds of us being able to achieve that, like in the first place was, was ridiculous to think that we were ever going to achieve these things.
Um, one of the metaphors that I use in the article is that, uh, is saying that advocates of staying Afghanistan are sort of akin to trying to jump across the grand Canyon by standing in the middle and seeing what happens.
You know, like we went in there with a very limited specific purpose and we achieved that very quickly and very effectively.
But then once we were there, we're like, well, what else do we want to do?
Let's see what else we got going on.
And you see that with all of these military operations that are going on, like, uh, for example, in Syria, right.
US troops went into to fight ISIS.
And then once they were there, then it became this nondescript sort of never ending operation to counter Iran, which is not, it's not an effective way to use a military.
Right.
And so we see that all the time and that's where I started to sort of, you know, rethink, you know, how we're doing these military operations and, um, how they just sort of find purposes in themselves that aren't really useful.
Yeah.
The self-licking ice cream cone, they call it their own term for it.
Right.
At the Pentagon.
I wonder who originally created that.
Maybe Spinney or one of those guys.
I should, I should find that.
But I like that, uh, metaphor too, because that jump into the grand Canyon thing that works if you're Bob Bernquist or Wiley Coyote, but no one else, you know, those are two people who can land that and safely get away.
I mean, Wiley Coyote always takes a bad slam, but then he's all right.
Uh, but for the rest of us, yeah, no, don't jump.
In fact, a guy jumped in the grand Canyon last week and he's dead now.
So yeah.
And you're right.
I mean, that is the deal, right?
And they won't say, if you watch on TV, depending on the narrative of the day, they'll say, can you believe that Trump wants to get out of Afghanistan?
But then there's nothing about how everybody knows that it's fixing to work out.
And he's, you know, trying to quit just a few months before we finally have everything settled perfectly or anything.
They don't even have to, they don't even have to have an argument.
It's just, you know, and in fact, their premise really is everybody knows we lost.
Everybody knows that the only reason that we're still there is because we won't leave.
But otherwise nothing that we said was going to happen has happened or gone our way, or certainly not in two thirds of the country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's actually, it's interesting.
Uh, Mark Milley, the new chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, uh, said in his confirmation hearing that, you know, he basically said we shouldn't get out of Afghanistan.
You know, it would be a strategic mistake if we get out.
And I thought that choice of words was interesting, strategic mistake.
Um, because if you look at how the military sort of talks about their operations in Afghanistan, the way they measure success is not strategically it's operationally.
Right.
So they'll say, oh, we, you know, we took this city back or we killed this many Taliban forces, or, you know, we dropped this many bombs, but those are operational metrics, right?
Like you can drop lots of bombs, but if that isn't getting, getting you to like a strategic objective of, you know, peace and withdraw, then you're not actually making progress.
And I think we made the same mistake in Vietnam of trying to say, look, look, we killed this many, you know, uh, enemy soldiers, therefore we're making progress.
But as we know, like, you know, making progress in an operation doesn't mean you're making progress in a, you know, in some strategic operation or military campaign.
Yeah, exactly.
And so in other words, he, he meant it one way, but he phrased it the other for public consumption and indirect defiance of his commander in chief, who at least at that time was insisting that Zalmay Khalilzad iron out a deal with the Taliban.
And that's an important point that he would dare to say that that's a strategic mistake.
That's above his pay grade.
He's already been overruled on that.
He doesn't get to say that, but yeah, he does.
And instead of being fired like MacArthur for daring, he's still sitting there.
In fact, he's promoted, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I, I hope that he knows what he is saying was sort of a misstatement because if he doesn't, then, you know, I question the, uh, the ability to actually, uh, achieve our strategy in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, I'm sure when we get our 19th general over there, he's going to have the magic solution and figure it all out for us.
Once we, you know, that is the common sort of defense of staying in Afghanistan, right?
Like, Oh, we'll get it right this time.
Just give us one more, one more chance.
We'll get it right this time.
Yeah.
You know, it really is.
I'm sorry.
I'm just complaining here, but it, it ain't personal.
It really is something, isn't it?
That David Petraeus can write in the wall street journal that no, we can't leave now.
When he was the guy who said he would have a deal with the Taliban by July of 2011, then he would get the strategic advantage and they would do what he said.
And then that didn't happen.
So now doesn't he have to not talk?
Yeah.
It's, it's a, it's a seductive illusion to think that, you know, victory is just around the corner, but you know, based on what we know of insurgencies and terrorism and trying to democratize other countries, like there is, there is very little that should give you confidence that, you know, this operation is gonna, you know, is just around the corner from turning around.
Did I say January?
Cause I definitely meant to say July.
Listen, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate this article.
I'm glad to know that you're writing stuff for the Quincy Institute here.
And so keep it up.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, you guys, that is Adam Winchey.
He is at the Quincy Institute and that is quincyinst.org and find this article at the New Republic of all places, the real costs of the war in Afghanistan.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, timed and the war in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
