01/06/15 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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Rad.
I got Kelly Vlahos on the line.
Hi, Kelly.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Kelly Vlahos, everybody.
She writes for the American Conservative magazine, and she would still write for antiwar.com, but she just don't have the time no more to all of our detriment, unfortunately.
What a great piece you did here for the American Conservative, theamericanconservative.com.
The article is called Afghanistan's Still Broken Government.
Thank you for caring enough to even pay attention to what is going on over there so that you can explain it to the rest of us, because everybody else packed up with the quote unquote end of the war, or maybe two, three years ago.
Everybody else quit caring to pay any attention at all.
Thank you for even doing this, and especially coming on the show to talk about it, too.
Sure.
Okay.
The Kerry-brokered Afghan power sharing agreement hasn't resolved any problems or appointed any ministers.
Please remind us about this power sharing agreement, first of all.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
There was an election last year, 2014, to replace outgoing President Karzai.
The first round found that Abdullah Abdullah, who is the former finance minister of Afghanistan, Tajik, was in the lead, but he didn't have the 50 percent threshold to win outright, so a runoff took place.
Now most of his opponents were Pashtun, so what happened there was President, or now President, but Ashraf Ghani, who is a Western-style official.
He had been within the Karzai government, but then left because he couldn't take the corruption and went to work for the World Bank, and so he's had a lot of experience outside of Afghanistan in terms of working on development plans at the UN and the World Bank, came back to run for office.
He emerged as the frontrunner in the runoff.
He, after, I guess, let's see, after the first tallies came to light, turned out he was winning by like 56 percent to 43 percent for Abdullah Abdullah, and had just about declared the winner when Abdullah Abdullah cried fraud and said he would not accept the results.
He was pretty much ready to rip apart the government at that point, if there wasn't an audit, which is very understandable since these elections are typically riddled by fraud.
During the Karzai years, every election, there was rampant fraud.
So it wasn't surprising that these questions were raised, but the people I talked to figured that there was probably a lot of fraud going on on both sides.
But what happened was, as this audit was going on, there was a movement towards perhaps brokering a power-sharing agreement between both men to sort of keep the tensions and the possibility of there being a real break in the government between the ethnic factions and the tribal factions, of which they run very deep there in Afghanistan, and Ashraf Ghani being a Pashtun, and Abdullah Abdullah being primarily Tajik, though his mother is Pashtun, really threatened to really rip the government apart.
So John Kerry, Secretary of State John Kerry, helped to broker this power-sharing deal.
It was in the works before the audit was even finished.
Well, by the end of the summer, the International Election Committee that was overseeing the audit said that President, or I'm sorry, Ashraf Ghani had emerged as a winner, though they never told us how much he won by.
We never got the final tallies, but upon hearing this or the announcement of his winning, they signed the power-sharing agreement anyway, from what I understand, that it was heavily pushed by the U.S. government.
So they signed this agreement, which was hailed as progress, in which 25 of the ministries would be split evenly between the selection.
Each man would be able to select half of the ministries.
Ashraf Ghani would be declared President, and Abdullah Abdullah declared the CEO, which in fact is a prime minister's role.
What has happened is that they haven't been able to agree on who gets which ministry and who fills them.
In the meantime, Karzai's ministry has, all his ministry leaders have been dismissed.
So there's really no working government in Afghanistan right now because these two men have not been able to come to any agreement.
And we have a government there already in Afghanistan, a history of rampant fraud, corruption, nepotism, patronage.
It is a Byzantine government built not on merit and not on experience, but on tribal relationships and politics and hand-washing and all that, as you can imagine.
Ghani has come in saying he wants to clean all that up.
And from what I have heard and people I've talked to that have worked with him or know him or have interviewed him have said that he's pretty earnest about that and coming from a more Western-style sort of system and approach, you know, I think he really does believe that he is the guy that can come in and clean up all of the mess that's been left over from the war and the Taliban and all of the, you know, the stain of the corruption.
But now that there is this power-sharing agreement in which you have Abdullah Abdullah, who is really a kind of an over-king of the Karzai administration in respect that he was in the government since the fall of the Taliban in 9-11 and truly benefited from all of the aid and all of the infusion of Western dollars there, and, you know, people I know that have worked with him, you know, believe that he really enjoyed that role.
I don't know how much, you know, of a, how much reform is going to take place when you have him fighting for his place and for his people and Ghani fighting for his place and his people.
And so it's become a sort of national joke that they don't have a cabinet yet.
So which doesn't bode well for bringing this country into the 21st century and keeping it safe from the Taliban, which is always at the door.
Well, it's funny because it just sounds like you're describing American democracy only without all the marble and flags and stuff for people to believe in.
But just, you know, hey, this is the wheeling and dealing and how business is done.
But so and I mean, obviously, America pays the entire bills for the entire state.
There is no state in Afghanistan whatsoever without the American taxpayer, you know, so the whole thing is pretty much fanciful.
But as far as it goes anyway, did these guys even like each other at all?
I mean, can they have a deal where at least, you know, the two of them and I guess you just answered this with the fact that they can't even put a cabinet together.
Can they not sit down and go, oh, yeah, yeah, you know what?
You can have this as long as my guys get that and actually work something out like mobsters do sometimes.
Well, I mean, if you read if you read the accounts in like the New York Times, for example, you have their spokespeople are constantly saying, yes, we are sitting down.
We are coming to we are coming to a point where we can announce a cabinet.
Well, you know, we are getting to the point where we're going to start announcing names and then it never happened.
So I would imagine from the folks that I have talked to who are a lot more learned learned in Afghan politics than I am, that the the tribal competition and the tribal factionism in that country is so deep and it's so complicated that, you know, they, you know, unlike the United States, which, you know, have all of our flaws and problems, they are dealing with a situation where it's completely new and they have to basically tear down the whole system to build it again for it not to be.
I'm sorry, I got to interrupt and hold you right there.
We'll be right back.
Everybody after this break with the great Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative magazine, the American conservative dot com.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Kelly Vlahos.
You know, you came up on the show the other day, Kelly, where I was talking with this British civilian advisor to the surge and Hellman kind of thing and I was saying, yeah, yeah, but we all knew the surge was bogus before it started.
I mean, Kelly Vlahos, et cetera, et cetera, right?
And and he talked about how, oh, yeah, no, I we didn't know anything.
We we didn't know what would or wouldn't work.
We didn't know nothing at all.
He didn't even know about Britain's wars and how the posh tunes most famous Alamo against the British was about six miles down the road from where their new base was and how how much this meant to the local population to completely clueless until Gene McKenzie clued him in on it this kind of thing.
But anyway, so that's the running joke on this show is that, you know, this basically pirate radio turned Internet radio nothing show is where we get the work done that never happens anywhere in DC or London or the ministry of this that or anything that matters at all.
Yeah, they just go ahead and they do their work.
They don't read the American conservative.
They they really believe in this stuff that we just think they're lying when they tell us, you know.
Oh, yeah, the surge.
Well, it worked in Iraq.
It's going to work in Afghanistan and we're laughing and they believe it.
Yeah.
Crazy.
All right.
Well, so yes, being of the surge working.
So what about this?
You're talking about the difficulty and I'm putting together this new government in Afghanistan, a ridiculous kind of nature of the compromise that Kerry came up with here and how it's just not working.
Well, what about the resistance?
Aka the Taliban, but also the Hakanis and basically any posh tune with a rifle anywhere.
I don't know if there's much of a resistance outside of the posh tune community, but they're 60% of the country, right?
So they claim the war is over, but they've left how many tens of thousands of troops behind and are they enough to to keep the insurgency at bay?
And what is the situation with the war Kelly?
Well, I mean, don't think that the Taliban isn't watching everything that's been going on with this government in Kabul.
I mean, just today there was a story in which the Taliban has been tweeting, you know, mercilessly mocking the fact that there is no government and there's no cabinet right now.
So, I mean, they're shifted from, you know, bragging about killing people to making jokes about the cabinet.
They have stepped up their attacks on civilians.
I mean, the civilian death toll in comparison with just a few years ago, I mean, is up.
I think it was, I saw a figure of like 3,100 civilians died in the last year and that's up from, I think, you know, 2,500 just a few years ago and injuries from, you know, suicide bombings and other attacks are up.
The security situation is dire.
The poverty is up.
The fact that you had touched upon just a few minutes ago about how we have basically created the economy there in Afghanistan over the last decade, but as the economy and as the war has been in transition with us leaving, you can see all of the effects that that balloon that, you know, constricting balloon is having.
So, the economic vitality is no longer there.
So, production is down.
There's no new businesses starting, you know, the schools, there are kids aren't going to school anymore, you know, all of the effects of the money, the spigot being turned off is showing.
So, poverty is rising, you know, the economic indicators are flagging.
The security is worse and we're leaving.
So, we're leaving a country in and just as bad a spot.
It was when we came in except for the one difference is that the Taliban is not in charge, but we don't know how long it will be until the Taliban makes more aggressive moves in into Kabul right now.
Kabul is like a ghost town in comparison to what it was just a few years ago when it was, you know, it was thriving with Western money and Western people, Westerners there working, you know, journalists were there, you know, it was thriving, maybe not as, you know, by our standard, but I just read a piece in the Washington Post just a few weeks ago about a woman, you know, a woman, a Westerner who has been working there for the last several years and she said, this is the grimmest, creepiest, you know, Christmas holiday that I've ever spent in Afghanistan because the whole place is shut down.
People are terrified.
Westerners are gone.
It's just like Austrian economics and in fact, it's all Federal Reserve phony money in the first place, but instead of a bubble in housing or a bubble in the stock market, it's a bubble in the power of the people over there who were chosen or figure out the best way to cozy up to the occupation to get their hands on the money, to get their hands on the guns, to get, you know, to have outsized influence, but it's all necessarily a malinvestment that did not come from real savings by real people who have the interest on the ground there.
So it's a bubble that's destined to pop and then like you're saying, we don't know if it's going to, how long it's going to take to turn back into the situation it was on September 10th, 2001, when the Northern Alliance was on the verge of complete and total defeat and Osama had just suicide bombed their leader on the day before the 9-11 attack.
So, you know, they were, we don't know exactly how long it'll take to crash all the way to the bottom, but we do know that it's basically, they haven't even really tried to do what they said they were going to do, which was kind of build this government up, clear hold and build and employ the Afghans in the ruling of their own country in this 21st century Western European nation state democratic kind of a way.
They never even really tried to do that at all.
They just pass a bunch of money out to a bunch of cronies in Kabul, like you're saying.
Yeah, giant mansions and stuff.
And we know, when we know now in retrospect, but I mean, we, you and I and people have been watching with a critical, I had known this all the time, but they're, they weren't monitoring the money.
The money was just going through a sieve, you know, all of the effort and time and energy was put into building up this military, which no longer can afford itself, you know, without Western assistance.
And like you said, the government was never, it was never built up outside of this corrupt structure that I had spoken of.
So the money, like you said, it was just, you know, you just throw a bunch of money at these people and it disappeared down a rabbit hole.
And now all the Westerners are leaving.
So you don't even have the, you know, you know, the conceit of their being Western trainers and people assisting and consulting.
They're all gone.
And so a lot of the projects that had been set up with our money are going to just fall down, sort of like, you know, fritter away and become sort of like ghost-like structures, like in Iraq, when we built up a lot of things and then they couldn't sustain it after we left.
And that's what's happening already in Afghanistan.
We built up a lot and now we're leaving and they can't afford to keep these things up without outside assistance.
All right now, but so are we leaving?
That's news to me, if that's really true.
I mean, obviously it's not 2010 anymore, but what is it?
Well, we got about, I guess they're leaving 5,000 troops.
Maybe, I can't figure out, Obama had announced, I think right before the Christmas holiday, that they were going to add another additional 1,000 troops to stay behind.
So I don't know if it's 5,000 or if there's 6,000, but it's 6,000 US troops added to perhaps another 6,000 international NATO forces.
So it will be about, the highest would be about 1,200, I mean 12,000 Western troops will be left behind, which is just a fraction.
And, you know, all I can envision is that would be good for, you know, guarding the embassies and bases.
I mean, I just don't see how they're going to do much and they're supposed to train and, you know, act as an advisory role, but I really don't know how much real security that those Western troops are going to provide.
Meanwhile, there's about 350,000 Afghan troops.
But they're so embattled with all sorts of issues in terms of, you know, they're not getting paid, they go off on leave and never come back, they've sustained, you know, casualties over the years that aren't even reported in the US media anymore.
But, you know, they've been really hurt by all, you know, they talk about how the US casualties have gone down, but the Afghan casualties have gone through the roof.
So there's a lot of problems with the forces themselves.
I just read a story where they don't even know that, you know, the new President Ghani got rid of all of the forces that were protecting the bases because he didn't trust them.
But now they're building up a whole new force just to guard the bases and they're asking us to pay for it.
So there's not a lot of trust in their security being able to hold any areas that they managed to get, you know, it's going to be like the helicopters fleeing the roof of the Saigon Embassy here for too long.
Unfortunately, they got enough soldiers there to get shot but not enough to protect themselves.
It's a hell of a thing.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much for your time, Kelly.
Well, thank you for having me.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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