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I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that 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 and I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name and say it, say it 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 on the line is Matthew Ho.
He's a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps and then some kind of civil service weenie in the State Department in Afghanistan.
He is now on the advisory boards of Expose Facts and Veterans for Peace as well as World Beyond War.
And he is a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
I really sold you a short shrift on that introduction.
Of course, everybody who's read the book Fool's Errand Time to End the War in Afghanistan by me knows you.
You're the guy who tried to give Obama an out, tried to give the American people ammo to use to put pressure on Obama and give him an out so that he could say, listen, you know what?
We just shouldn't do it.
Matthew Ho is on the ground down there.
His boss, the former general.
Damn it.
I can bury.
I always want to say kill Cullen, but that's a different guy.
Your boss, his boss, I can bury as well, falling in line on this, saying, Obama, you don't have to do this.
And then he did it anyway.
Can you take us back to that time?
What were you thinking?
Yeah, trying to publicly challenge the war party and the Washington, D.C. consensus the way you did back in 2009, Matthew.
Well, that wasn't my plan at the start.
It was really just I was done with it.
I was done with the wars.
I was, you know, morally spent, you know, just just spiritually spent.
I was sick of the killing, sick of seeing the the the waste of it and the lies that were being used to continue the waste.
And I saw the escalation of the war.
They escalated the war before I even got to Afghanistan.
You know, as soon as Obama comes into office, he sends more troops.
But, you know, it's really the seeing McChrystal's, you know, there's several things, but seeing McChrystal's assessment team in 2009 come in primarily staffed with these these men and women from these think tanks that are, you know, funded by the Defense Department, I mean, funded by the defense contractors and defense companies and coming in with this presupposed narrative of what Afghanistan is about, what it has been about, what it will be about and fitting this what's happening on the ground to their plans, to their policies.
There was this document put out called Triage by the Center for New American Security that was reading this 15 page document about what we should do in Afghanistan.
It was as if they were talking about the Amazon or talking about the moon for all its relation to what was occurring in Afghanistan.
But they were forcing Afghanistan to fit into their grand romantic plans of war.
And also, too, this would sell more.
Right.
I mean, we go from seeing the war in Afghanistan costing, I don't know, may say about 25 billion dollars a year to 120 billion dollars a year.
You know, I mean, so it's so many people.
But when I resign, I'm just done with it.
And it's actually the guy who had hired me to work in Afghanistan, the director of the Afghan operations for the State Department, who when he calls me after Holbrook reads my letter and says, who the hell is this guy?
You know, he says to me on the phone, he says, are you going to go public with it?
And that was the first question they asked me from Washington, D.C., and I had not thought about going public and I didn't plan on going public.
And when I met with Ike and Barry, I met with Holbrook and they say they agree with me.
Holbrook says he agrees with 95 percent.
But what they're telling me, Ike and Barry and Holbrook, is that their legs are cut out from underneath them, that because of Secretary Clinton, this type of dialogue, this type of conversation about Afghanistan doesn't come from the State Department side.
So the president really is receiving no information like this.
And so when I get home in September and October of 09 and just seeing the the discourse on Afghanistan, just the continual referencing to how this is a safe haven.
If if, you know, if we don't have troops there, then they're going to fly planes from Kandahar and crash them into the Empire State Building and all this kind of nonsense.
But just the the the dialogue was so was so shaped and so directed and so massaged towards boxing the president in on having to escalate, as well as the actual plans he got from the Pentagon.
He received no plans from anybody else in the government, just only the Pentagon of small, medium and large escalation that, yeah, in like kind of a fit of anger.
And as well, too, I accidentally run into a Washington Post editor.
I'd shown him my letter.
He said, call the Foreign Affairs desk that, yeah, the Washington Post took an interest in it, a very serious interest in it.
Karen DeYoung, who's one of their preeminent writers, you know, spent six or seven hours interviewing me and ends up front page above the fold.
And later on, when I asked Karen, I said, why did you write why did you do this?
Why did you write this big story about me?
And and why, you know, generate and Karen said, because and at that point she was traveling with Secretary Clinton all the time.
Karen said, well, because I asked a lot of people about what you have written in the government and outside of the government and no one said you were wrong.
So, you know, and then it turns into this affair where I get taken to dinner at the Cosmos Club after I gone public by one of Holbrook's right hand people.
And he tells me that keep going, keep going on the media, because what you're doing is really important, because this is the only avenue we have to get this type of information out that we are just really intervening in the midst of the civil war, that there is no real threat to national security from Afghanistan, except for the fact that we just keep this war going, which causes a cycle of violence and a cycle of revenge to continue.
And it was nothing I expected, Scott, to ever be.
And like I tell people, the last time I'd ever been in the news was, you know, in 1991 for High School Track, you know, so it was something I kind of forrest gumped myself into.
But I'm really happy for that because, you know, I've lived living a much better life than I was, you know, kind of slave to, you know, the lies of war, you know.
Well, and look, importantly, in the scheme of things, too, Eikenberry came out right after you and basically said, OK, you know, Ho did the hard part for me.
I'm going to come out and tell the world, yeah, he's right.
And that was pretty huge.
And you know, you're right.
And I report this in my book as well.
Well, I'm just quoting Bob Woodward, really, that the entire national security cabinet had the exact same assessment that you just made about Hillary Clinton, that she always staked out the most hawkish position for her own political reasons.
She thought somehow after Obama defeated her for being such a war hawk, that still, yeah, got to be a war hawk.
That's the ticket.
That's what people want to hear.
Robert Kagan told me so or whatever it is.
And so and Mark Penn told her so.
And so even though she's the chief diplomat on the at the NSC Principals Committee meetings, they're like, well, what do you think, Hillary?
And instead of having anything dovish to say at all, all she can say is, yes, whatever McChrystal wants, you've got to give him nothing less than that will do, et cetera.
So there was no one who who was taking what was supposed to be the State Department's more diplomatic position there.
And so, yeah, I mean, it must have been pretty bad if I can bury never mind you at your level.
But if the ambassador who was the former general in charge of the war himself had to resign over it, or at least I guess he didn't resign or but he he basically marginalized himself right the hell out of power by publishing his own assessment in the I forget if it was the Post or the Times right after you.
That was certainly enough that Obama could.
I mean, first of all, that shows how bad Hillary was.
But secondly, Obama, I think that goes to show he could have said, we've got to look at the advice of these guys.
He could have just quoted you guys.
That he could have just said, just like Trump could be saying right now, hey, this is all my predecessor's fault, man, I just got here and they got us on a mission that doesn't work out, that's not going to work.
And that's the same way you put it, too, in utilitarian terms that we're trying to foist a minority government on the plurality population of the country that just won't accept it.
That's it.
Game over already.
Yeah.
And the war had been going on for decades.
I mean, you would see in the South with the ANA, the Afghan National Army, which, you know, really stood for Army of the Northern Alliance.
You'd see them.
I mean, just just posters and pictures in their trucks on their bases, you know, of Ahmed Shah Massoud, you know, who had been one of the main leaders of the Northern Alliance, who was from up north and that there was this real ethnic tension that exists.
And now it has existed and is going to be utilized, I think, now with the CIA and the Americans with our with our new war plan or policies in Afghanistan.
But this was something that had been utilized for decades in Afghanistan, whereas, you know, in the previous 40 or 50 years in Afghanistan, under the king's rule, everyone had lived in peace.
You know, right.
I mean, the same kind of thing can be said about Iraq and Syria and all these other places where we have just utilized sectarian differences and made sectarian differences or exaggerated or aggravated or accelerated them in order to try and have our own geopolitical machinations come true.
But, yeah, I can bury, you know, his thing to me.
He asked me not to leave Afghanistan.
He wanted me to become his personal advisor to McChrystal because he said, you know, McChrystal just doesn't get it.
He just doesn't understand it.
He just thinks, you know, once you take one hill, you have to move forward and take the next hill.
I mean, this type of and everyone always says Biden was a dove in Obama's cabinet.
But Biden's recommendation was to send 20,000 troops into Afghanistan.
You know, I mean, it wasn't he wasn't talking about pulling out or reducing the presence or deescalating the war or talking with the insurgency or anything like that.
You know, and it was then it was so that was between Biden's 20,000 and McChrystal's 40,000 that Obama splits the difference after he'd already sent what, you know, 40,000 troops already to Afghanistan, plus a similar amount of extra contractors and NATO troops and everything else.
Yeah.
So I really was the and I remember Obama, President Obama in 2009 getting the first tranche of plans for Afghanistan.
Remember, he throws them back at the Pentagon.
This is about November of 09 and says, give me something else.
And then they basically gave him the same thing again, you know, tweaked a little bit, I think.
But he was always boxed in, you know, and but he had the opportunity not to escalate the war.
It's something he didn't do.
And there are literally tens and tens of thousands of people who are killed and maimed.
How many millions of refugees now that if had gone forward and you talk about this in your book, you know, you know, Anand Gopal's research and other things about just the our unwillingness to negotiate, our unwillingness to actually seek peace.
You know, how many people have suffered because of that?
And how much longer is this war now going to go on in perpetuity, just grinding away people because we had to have a Democratic president win a war, improve himself better than the Republican president?
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All right.
Now, so here's the thing, though.
If you ask Washington, D.C. now, the narrative is clear.
Obama really did fail because he set a timeline and withdrew, telegraphing to the enemy that all they had to do was wait us out.
And so now the lesson has been learned.
McMaster's having his do-over, and we're announcing that there are no timelines.
Everything is conditions-based, and the conditions, whether we're winning or losing, will always be that we have to stay, either because we're losing or to make sure to consolidate the gains that we've made.
Wherever we can claim we've made gains.
And so then that's it.
And now that the Taliban knows that we're never, ever going to leave, now they will go ahead and concede and come to the table instead of continuing the fight.
And that is the brilliant genius of the new McMaster, Mattis, Donald Trump plan for Afghanistan.
What say you?
Yeah, the the absurdity of it, right, because we're always going to now you've got this argument that, well, we can't leave because the Taliban have the upper hand and they're not going to negotiate from a position of strength.
But if we ever get the Taliban to where they're not in a position of strength, we're going to say we can't leave because we're in a position of strength.
Why would we give that up?
You know, and they're not going to go.
I mean, it's just an absurd, circular type of reasoning.
That just is.
But but we're totally bereft of any strategy or any policy or any real outcome that we desire.
And my view is what Mattis and Kelly, because I think Kelly is heavily involved in this, too.
General Kelly, the White House chief of staff and McMaster have put together is basically a unified war plan across the seven Muslim nations that we are bombing every day, you know, and killing in every day.
That basically the idea is that we are just going to subjugate them.
We are just going to punish them.
We are going to mow the grass because that's all that can be expected.
I really do think Mattis and Kelly believe, which Mattis is is such a careerist and such an opportunist.
And, you know, he's brilliant at what he does.
I mean, he got himself and he co-wrote the counterinsurgency manual, which everyone forgets because betrayers took all the credit for it.
But Mattis was involved in all that formulation of the war plans in Iraq and then in Afghanistan again.
But he's able to keep himself clean.
I mean, he's he's really a Teflon man, a Teflon general.
What they, I think, really want now or what they view the world as is very mannequin.
If you look at Kelly and Mattis's statements going back, you know, a decade or a decade and a half.
I mean, we have public records of these guys talking.
They speak about the world in terms of good and evil.
They speak about America as the apex of civilization and these lands as barbaric or uncivilized.
They talk about human nature is always going to be in a state of warfare and that this is just a natural state.
And that's so we must and they see themselves as modern day legionnaires.
And they must.
I mean, particularly look at General Kelly's comments in this whole issue with Representative Wilson and the widow of the young man who was killed in Niger, you know, talking about how the only the only people of value in the United to paraphrase the only people of value in the United States who are volunteering and being selfless are the American military, you know, which is completely which complete nonsense.
You know, it's such an insult to so many people who are doing great things every day in this country selflessly.
But that's how they see it.
And so they view that their role is to keep the American empire safe, that these are borderlands or border regions that are always going to be in conflict, that the policies of the past were a mistake.
And so pursuing a political outcome, having elections, doing economic development, seeking reconciliation, whatever is not the best way forward.
The best way forward is firepower.
And I think what we've seen, how Iraq conducted its operations in the Euphrates and Tigris River valleys, what Saudi Arabia and the UAE are doing in Yemen, I think that helps explain what the policy in Afghanistan is going to be, where we're going to turn the posturing areas into basically free fire zones and use Afghan commandos and these CIA teams that were, you know, so lovingly pronounced by, you know, these military romantists that write for The Times, you know, this past Monday in The Times, these CIA counter pursuit teams to terrorize villages at night.
And basically the idea being that we're not going to, we're just going to try and punish them and we're just going to try and subjugate them.
And there's no sense in trying to find a political accommodation with anyone who is in disagreement to our proxies who are in power.
And I think that's what we'll see for the next, you know, however many years, even if Trump is no longer in office after 2020.
Yeah, it seems like the project to train up an effective, nevermind affordable, Afghan army, it's always just successful enough to keep fighting, but could never be successful enough to actually win the war.
In fact, there's a brand new CIGAR report out, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction about the failure, about the AWOL rate and the ghost soldier rate of these troops.
And, you know, as they say, and as CIGAR, I guess, especially them and the United Nations are out front on reporting and the Wall Street Journal, I guess, too, that the Taliban now control as much as half of the country, at least at nighttime, maybe 40% in the day.
And then as you say, there's this new New York Times story, any headline that begins this way, Matthew, a newly assertive CIA, boy, you got my ears and eyeballs perk up at that.
Newly assertive, as Walter Block might say, compared to what?
Yeah, you know, a newly assertive CIA expands its Taliban hunt in Afghanistan.
So these are the counterterrorism pursuit teams.
So this is not the Afghan army.
This is not the Green Berets training up an Afghan army.
This is exactly what?
They're it's and they've had these teams for a while, and I guess they're going to expand it.
And yeah, I'm laughing, too, about this term.
I guess when they are breaking into the United States Senate computers, that wasn't assertive.
That was just right.
You know, right.
Yeah.
Now, when the director of the CIA was telling the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee to back down.
Yeah, that wasn't very assertive.
But let alone everything else they've done, you know, in their in their, you know, in their glorious history.
The yeah.
So these teams are are they're organized and trained by the CIA.
They are composed of of militia members, basically.
I mean, it's they are men and they are men who are who have a great experience, who have I have no doubt in their capability in terms of kicking in doors and killing people like I have no doubt about their ability to, you know, conduct these death squad operations that basically that they they have been doing and will be doing.
And they're completely unaccountable.
They're drawn mainly, I believe, from the northern part of Afghanistan.
The you know, the various militia warlords that we have been in cahoots with that we have been giving bags of cash to for the last 15, 16 years that we have, you know, allowed them to use cargo aircraft and helicopters to ferry drugs, you know, that kind of thing.
They have provided, I believe, a bulk of these men that make up these counter pursuit teams.
And yeah, they're they're very capable in terms of, like I said, kicking in doors and shooting people while they sleep.
And that's going to be the the role.
And it comes out of this.
This is nothing new, right?
This is what this what the Operation Phoenix program in Vietnam was.
This would be these were the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador.
And this is, too, like what we saw in Iraq.
And I think you and I have spoke about Negroponte before.
You know, Negroponte shows up in in Baghdad as the American ambassador in 2004.
He had been heavily involved in the death squads in Latin America, particularly El Salvador.
And he shows up and all of a sudden death squads start, you know, showing up in Baghdad and bodies with holes in their heads from electric drills start piling up every morning.
I mean, so this is I mean, the only surprise, Scott, would be is if they weren't doing this.
Right.
You know, I mean, like that'd be the only surprise as they're doing something different.
But they're going along with what they believe is necessary to terrorize and to dominate a population that is supporting the Taliban and refuses to accept the legitimacy and the control of that kleptocracy in Kabul.
Man, I'm so sorry that I got to go.
I'm so late.
I got to get Patrick Coburn on the line here.
I just want to point out this quote from that New York Times piece.
Again, a newly assertive CIA expands as Taliban hunt in Afghanistan.
The quote is the American people don't mind if there are CIA teams waging a covert war there, said Ken Stiles, a former agency counterterrorism officer.
They mind if there's 50000 US troops there.
So, yeah, I guess that's the problem is that he's mostly right about that.
Exactly.
Particularly if no Americans are dying.
You know, I think it was in that piece, too.
It pointed out that three CIA officers were killed in the last year in Afghanistan.
And I'm not sure I heard about that.
Did you hear about that?
Only in the New York Times, like three weeks ago, I think.
They had a whole profile of the Special Activities Division, the paramilitary forces there.
Yeah.
So they keep this stuff quiet.
And that's another thing to really be concerned about is there's no accountability for anything they do, including Americans being killed.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Matt.
You do great work, man.
Yeah, thanks.
And hey, to everyone out there, Scott's book on Afghanistan is really one of the best.
And if you want to understand why we're at where we're at now, read Scott's book.
It is a terrific, terrific book.
It sounds just like you read it and it sounds as if you're speaking as if you're speaking.
It's in his voice.
It's terrific.
It's great.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate that a lot.
OK.
All right.
You take care.
All right.
You too, man.
All right, you guys.
That is Matthew Ho, heroic whistleblower from the Afghan surge in 2009.
And my mouse ran out of batteries.
So I can't read his whole bio to you here.
But he was a combat veteran, captain in the Marine Corps in Iraq War II and in Afghanistan, and then also worked for the State Department in Afghanistan before he blew the whistle there.
Read all about him in my book, Fool's Errand.
Thanks again, everybody.
