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.
All right, you guys, introducing former military intelligence officer from Great Britain, Frank Ledwich.
He wrote the book Losing Small Wars, British Military Failure in the 9-11 Wars, and also Investment in Blood, the True Cost of Britain's Afghan War.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Frank?
I'm great.
It's absolutely wonderful to be with you again, Scott.
Great to have you back on the show.
And, you know, people might remember that I cite you in Fool's Errand talking about a conversation that you had with Gene McKenzie, the great reporter from the Global Post, who did such a great job covering the Afghan surge back 10 years ago, and how you had had this discussion with her about where, oh, I guess she was explaining to you the history of British intervention, not just in Afghanistan, but in the Helmand province, where you and other British troops were engaged in the surge there, supposedly trying to win these people over.
And she's explaining how you're the only place in the world where you would be less welcome than the Helmand province would be the Londonderry in Northern Ireland.
And how, gee, it was kind of meaningful that neither you or anyone else in British intelligence even knew that or had any idea why something that happened 150 years ago shouldn't matter at all in the history of our current war there.
Yeah, but, you know, the thing was that history started somewhere around 2006.
So anything that happened before that wasn't really worth talking about or worth mentioning.
And anything 100 years ago, more than that, man, that just did not count.
Yeah.
But for the people of Helmand, it sure did, right?
Funny old thing.
Yeah.
Because actually, for the Brits, as you know, history does play a part in our culture.
You know, we've got Battle of Agincourt against the French, 1415, Trafalgar, Waterloo and all the other things, just like you guys have.
Turns out that for the Afghans, all of those battles are rolled into one, plus a little bit of Joan of Arc as well, because the hero of this, of the Afghan battle of Maiwand is a young girl called Malalai.
Turns out that that's quite important for them.
So they roll all this history up into one battle.
Who was it against?
It was against us in the second of our four wars against them.
I met this guy, met this soldier, he was a medic, a paratrooper medic, and he was wandering around Gereshk, Souk or Market, and some old guy stopped him and said, what are you doing here?
He said, what do you mean?
He said, well, you've been here before, and the last time you burned our market.
And the young paratrooper said, well, I haven't been here before.
And what do you mean?
Yes, you did in 1880 under General whoever it was, I can't remember whoever it was.
This is just a normal conversation with this guy.
For us, of course, we just arrived last week.
You know, here in the United States of America, it's been 245 years, and we also are proud of our fight for independence from the British Empire.
You might have heard of that.
It's a thing of ours.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We call that the War of Independence.
Yeah.
But anyway, that doesn't matter.
2006.
History begins in 2006.
And so listen, the special occasion why we have you here on the show is to talk about not exactly, or to start here anyway, the British Special Operations Forces, but the Australian ones who have now, boy, I don't know if you saw this, Frank, I have a message from an Australian friend of mine in the Reddit group said that in the last week, seven members of Australian Special Forces have killed themselves.
Since this report came out implicating them in war crimes, at least 39 cold blooded murders of innocent Afghan civilians, not even combatants after they're captured, but just farmers and women and children in their homes and God knows what here.
This is a huge deal breaking out in Australia right now.
And yet you have a little bit of something to add to this story from your own perspective, your time spent down in the Helmand province in Afghanistan.
What's that about?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Concerning those fellows that killed themselves, and we just don't know why that is, but, you know, the 39 that they're talking about in their report, it's called the Brereton report.
You know, if you read through the report, that's a small proportion of how many they actually killed.
You know, if you were to look at things beyond the criminal standard of proof, it's way more than that.
And that's just the Australians.
Yeah.
But what you're addressing there, Scott, I think is something that happened when I was in Helmand myself, which was 2007-8.
And I had this friend or contact called Tassal, I hope you won't mind me mentioning his name, I don't think so.
He's a journalist and he's the guy that broke this story, a story of a massacre at a place called Tubei.
Now, Tubei is in the far south, in Gamsah, and some of your listeners may know US Marines eventually went there, but at that time it was the Brits and this raid went in.
It was a raid went in from foreign soldiers by helicopter into this village.
And the story goes that troops fought their way, they didn't do any fighting at all, they ravaged their way through the town and killed at least 19 people, and those are the people that the one survivor could name.
And the last three who were killed, if I remember the story exactly right, certainly this is the basic detail, were lined up and one of them had his throat cut, another one had his throat cut and they were being questioned, you know, do you know where the local insurgents are?
No.
Right, he gets killed.
Second one the same.
And the third guy, same thing happened to him because needless to say, no one were insurgents and nor did they know anyone who was at that time.
The third guy they tried to kill, he survived and he ended up in hospital and this is where the story came from.
So it was clear that foreigners had done this, it wasn't, the Afghans didn't have helicopters then, I don't think they've got that many now.
So I heard this off Tassal and in fact Gene had originally introduced, Gene McKenzie, who you've already mentioned, a great journalist, had introduced Tassal and so I thought, well clearly nobody reads any of the newspapers down there on the army side of the base.
So they were quite surprised to hear that this had happened, the Green Army, ordinary regular British commanders, on their patch and there's a great flurry for about, I don't know, two or three hours, until they determined, oh it wasn't us, now by us I think they meant their own troops and we call, you know, ordinary line troops, Green Army, but it was special forces.
I think they were unable to determine whether they were British or any other nation.
And that's the first time I came across this idea of death squads in Afghanistan and as you are aware more than anyone, it's not the last time, but it's certainly the first time I came across it.
At least 19 people killed just that one night in that small village and set the tone.
Tone was already properly set, probably set, but as far as I was concerned it was a bit of a wake up call.
All right, a couple things.
First of all, we got noise on your microphone, so if we can figure out how to prevent that it'd be better.
Yeah, it's probably me leaning forward and back, so I'll try and stay still.
Okay, yeah, make sure we're good on that.
And now, I'm sorry, because I saw where you sent me the link to a news story about this particular massacre and it wasn't known then, and did I hear you right now, that we still don't know whether that was Australian or British special forces that did that particular attack?
No, we don't know if it's Australian, British or American.
The most likely candidates are that it was actually US special forces, and I say that because Gene went to see the general at the time, I think it was Commander Isaac McNeill four star or whatever, just how many stars he had, general, and McNeill told Gene that it was not ISAF, which is to say the NATO force, it was another force, and the only other force in town, as it were, at the time were the Enduring Freedom, and their special forces, mostly Marines at that time.
That's what she extrapolated, but it could have been anyone, I mean, who the hell knew?
I don't even think McNeill knew.
And they didn't want to know, right?
They didn't look into it.
Yeah, no, no, no, that's the point.
And I said this to the Brits at the time, look, you've got a duty to investigate this, don't just brush this over.
We're supposed to be here to be to help and protect people, and we shouldn't be in this game of covering up death squads or murders.
I mean, in this report of that massacre, the 18 or 19 there, this included two children, essentially babies.
I don't know if they were, you know, infants or toddlers, as they're described here by two different witnesses, murdered in their cradles.
Yes.
Well, that's the kind of thing that happens if you're tearing your way through a village with orders to kill everybody or kill all the males or what have you.
That's what they do.
And now, something that's in the, you know, all the official coverage of the Australian report that's come out here is that, according to the soldiers interviewed, this happens all the time.
We might have, in this case, we have 39, as you said, you know, cases that are strong enough that they could take them to a criminal jury kind of a case, but that this is essentially a daily occurrence.
But help me understand this because, and I do understand, I mean, I wasn't in the military I think, but I've seen enough movies and had enough friends in the army that I understand the whole thing about you go through boot camp and, you know, basic and whatever, and you're taught kill, kill, kill, blood makes the grass grow.
And here we are, we're the team of the baddest hombres in the world, so give us an enemy and we'll go kill them.
And then they get out to a place like, this happened a lot in Iraq War Two as well, where they're fighting essentially against ghosts.
They never get to see their enemy.
They're getting blown up by roadside bombs.
They're mad as hell about that.
Maybe they get sniped or something, but there's nobody to return fire to, you know.
And so I get that they're very frustrated and they want to get into a battle.
They want to get their first kill and all of this stuff.
I'm not saying that's, you know, admirable, but I understand it.
But what I have a bit more trouble understanding is, well, here's this 14 year old kid.
And so, you haven't got any kills yet, freshman, so you need a kill.
So what we're going to do is, you're going to slit this 14 year old boy's throat and then throw his corpse in the river.
And that's going to be your kill as a special operations soldier, elite tier, best of the best.
It seems like, you know, if I was a Green Beret or, you know, equivalent, that I would say, well, actually, no, like show me some Taliban with rifles and I'll kill them.
Show me somebody to engage in a battle with.
But I'm not going to slit the throat of a 14 year old boy because, I mean, that's no fun, right?
You don't get the credit for that.
That's not a kill in a fight in battle, which under this kind of framework is what makes you a man, right?
Killing a kid doesn't make you a man, doesn't make you a soldier.
So they're just really angry and hateful and so they just do this out of revenge?
Or this is really for the stripes or what?
I don't know.
It's kind of strange.
Well, there's all kinds of reasons that the, you know, the academics and the military commentators talk about.
You know, it's just group membership and not everybody was doing this.
From what I've heard, certainly the Brits are involved with this.
The ones who didn't like it, they just left.
And so what you have remaining are people who accept that kind of culture.
And I think it's fair to say, you know, most soldiers who go to go on tour, as we would call it, or go on operations, somewhere between 95 and 99 percent can manage to go through heavy combat, very demanding conditions, all the stuff you mentioned, without murdering their prisoners.
They may pull the trigger and it may have been the wrong target.
I've got friends who, you know, hoist grenades over the wall and found out it was the wrong people on the other end or, you know, fired a burst of machine gun, fired at the wrong target and they're still, you know, to be fair, they're still trying to cope with the consequences.
And one of my friends is really damaged by that.
He was there six months and six of his men were killed and, you know, had a pretty, pretty rough time.
But those guys are professional soldiers.
We're not talking about that here.
What we're talking about is not combat.
We're talking about exactly what you say.
We're talking about prisoners and the quite cold blooded, deliberate murder of largely innocent people.
And I say it's the tip of the iceberg, Scott.
You know, looking at Helmand and, you know, Helmand, where the U.S. Marines were deployed to bail the Brits out between 2000, I think it was just the year 2011.
These raids killed, we're looking at here, and this is not controversial, these are the official figures, killed 900 people in Helmand alone in one year.
Now those are the ones they'll admit to.
Those are the objectives that they killed or dealt with in other ways, killed mostly.
But there's multiples of that figure who were not objectives, were not even alleged to have been members of what people call the Taliban, insurgent groups, narco groups, all this ecology that we didn't understand.
There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were killed here, maybe thousands by these people.
It's highly unlikely there'll ever be any accountability.
And, of course, all this drove directly against what we were supposed to be doing, which was winning the hearts and minds of other specious platitudes like that.
We weren't doing that, of course.
But certainly your situation isn't helped when thugs break into your house in the night and kill your neighbors and take your sons out and shoot them in the head.
You know, your situation isn't helped by that.
But that's what was going on.
And another thing, I was talking to a couple of guys at the weekend, although I'm a so-called retired officer now, but there's a rag-taggle bunch of us who take interest in this.
I was talking to someone who's still in the service the other day, who's a very straight professional individual, who told me, look, we all knew this was going on.
Everybody knows this was going on.
Question is, can you show it?
The answer is you can't, just as you can't if you're a member of Cosa Nostra and some other group is committing whatever it is that they, whatever, very few things are unacceptable to them.
You're never going to find out because of a murder.
Same in these services, same in these units.
Right.
And, you know, we see that with local sheriff's departments and everything, too.
Thin blue line, this and that.
We're in it together against the enemy.
And so everybody keep your mouth shut, honor among thieves and that kind of deal.
The street rules of criminals, right?
Snitches get stitches and all that.
Snitches get stitches.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that makes a lot of sense.
And now on the blowback, I mean, this is really huge.
You can't really understate the point there about how the people of the Helmand province feel about being treated this way and how, you know, you mentioned that this old man mentioned, you know, the massacre that the Brits had prosecuted back in the 1880s, still relevant to him.
Well, if that's true, how relevant are these massacres in just over the last 10 years, the last 20 years?
And how is it?
You know, I'm reading every day.
I just read this morning in The Washington Post, oh, God, all of our progress in Afghanistan is going to all fall apart.
And now the Taliban is going to gain in strength.
And now the government in Kabul is going to have more problems because they don't quite dare say this.
But the implication is that that bastard Donald Trump is snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
And here everything was about to start going perfect right when he's, you know, getting weak and tired and calling it quits.
But they can never admit that actually the people of Pashtunistan, essentially, they hate us and they hate the government that we've built to rule over them for good cause because of horrible war crimes that our men committed, murdering their children.
Now dropping a bomb from the sky and killing a family for whatever reason is somehow different than armed special operations troops breaking into people's houses in the middle of the night and killing their babies in their cradles.
I mean, we're still killing Afghans over an attack that they didn't do to us 20 years ago.
Yeah, but 96.
Well, I think it was a 90 to 92 percent of Helmandis had never heard of 9-11.
Right.
And when they're told that, you know, a plane crashed into a building in the village of New York, which is in a valley far away, piloted by Arabs, they go, well, what the hell has that got to do with us?
Right.
And why are you here?
Are you American?
And why are you taking it out on us?
I mean, those are literally conversations that were had with people line up.
What are you doing here?
Some Arabs flew a plane into a village a long way away that's occupied by people that aren't you.
Yeah.
Which is a pretty good question, you know?
Yeah.
Which, and by the way, when you describe it like that, that's because they've never heard of the New World before.
If you try to tell them that it was New York City, the megalopolis in the United States of America, they would say, huh?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Ninety two percent of Helmandis have not heard of 9-11.
And let's say let's say they had, you know, Scott, because your book is the is the fountain and origin of information on this war.
Great digest of everything.
And, you know, you know very well that the police were hated by Afghans because they were constantly zapped up on drugs and raping and murdering and all the rest of it.
And the army was slightly less hated, the Afghan army, mainly because only three percent of them were Pashtuns and they were as foreign as the Russian army or the British army.
But the most hated, the most hated part of, let's say, government security forces were the Pashtuns in the Helmand and other provinces down there called special force.
They don't have a special force.
Those were the most hated, the ones doing the night raids.
I find that incredible.
And my friend Chris Green, who is an infantry officer, civil affairs officer, told me that time and again they'd say, give us the Afghan army, give us the police, but don't let those people near us.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, the narrative is now that, look, we could send our infantry in there to wipe out the enemy.
But because we're fighting for hearts and minds, because we're trying to love these people to death until they finally give up their resistance and go ahead and join our side kind of deal, that that's why we do drone strikes and night raids, because they're a scalpel.
This is how you get only the bad guys while leaving the rest of the innocent civilians alone in order to avoid the complication of that insurgent math that says that for every bad guy you kill, you get 10 more.
You know, if we try to keep our collateral damage at an absolute minimum by using night raids and drones, that's how we'll be able to win over everybody else.
And yet, yeah, it doesn't sound like they were asking the posh tunes.
That works, right?
Is that how you guys feel about it?
You don't...
Well, do hearts and minds work?
No, of course it doesn't.
We're invaders and ravagers and the inheritors of people who are even worse.
And that's the main problem.
How many people in Texas or Arkansas or California, or for that matter, the north of England are going to welcome a Chinese army occupying because somebody's told them that they're going to preserve what crappy government you've got?
No one's going to do anything except fight against them.
And how are we different?
Right.
And that's something very few of us realized when we were there.
Yeah.
And you know what...
Saying essentially, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's an enemy force.
Right.
And, I mean, this should not take the imagination of a fifth grader, say, well, let's see how we feel about West Point and the Alamo.
And how would we feel about somebody trying to take the Alamo away from us?
You know, probably most Texans don't know what happened there, but they know that they'll kill some violent occupying force attempting to take it away.
They know that, especially Texans, you know?
And so, yeah, guess what?
The Washtoons, they're like Texans, only somewhere else.
And they resent being occupied in exactly the same way we would.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember once I was in a tube in London and, you know, sometimes some things hit you.
And I kind of thought, I thought, well, maybe we were the bad guys.
And this is just shortly after I got back.
I was in Iraq as well.
And, you know, it kind of started to dawn on you, but you're so socialized within the armed forces.
You know, we're the good guys.
And when you step outside, you think, actually, you know what?
We were the invaders.
We were the bad guys.
We shouldn't have been there.
We were part of a very, very big crime.
And now with all this Australian stuff, and by the way, it's far more of the British, it's eventually going to get uncovered.
But, you know, we weren't just involved in a mistake.
We're involved in a very, very big crime.
Yeah.
You know, I do get emails and stuff from people all the time, from soldiers all the time.
I just got one, a new one the other day from a guy who was in, I think, a Marine in Iraq War II, saying that, you know, the truth really helps.
In fact, I had a friend back years ago now, who he was in Iraq War II doing like door to door sweeps of arresting Sunni male, fighting age males and the Sunni triangle kind of thing.
And he had real problems with PTSD and all of this.
And he said that once he admitted to himself what you just said, that, hey, the reason I'm having such a hard time with this is because what I was doing was wrong.
That's the key.
I shouldn't have been there.
I wasn't Luke Skywalker.
I was the Imperial Stormtrooper.
And that once he admitted that to himself, that was the first step on the road to getting his head right.
And so, you know, after 20 years of this, we're talking about, I don't know how many, what, two, three million Americans have been to these wars and back.
I don't know how many Brits and Australians, but it's a hell of a lot have, you know, been over there and been through this and have had the time to reflect, you know, all that stuff I went through in the Battle of Ramadi and then look at Ramadi now, you know, that kind of attitude.
Yeah.
I spoke, I've spoken to thousands of thousands of soldiers and sailors and airmen, Marines about all this.
You know, when you write a book that's called Losing Small Wars and it's all about defeat and when you're writing something like that, you think, you know what, it's going to be a lot of people thinking I'm letting the side down here or maybe I'm thinking that a bit.
And then it comes out or anything like that.
The other guys who you've got on all the time, written books like this or written articles, you think, am I letting the side down?
And you know what, Scott, of all those thousands of people that have spoken, literally thousands of ex-servicemen or currently serving service in schools or colleges, academies or barracks or what have you, nobody has poked my chest and said, you, you let us down.
No one has.
Because there's at least, at the very least, a recognition that this was something we shouldn't have done.
And a lot of people are coming to the realization that it wasn't just that, it was a crime.
It was a massive mistake.
It's something we should not only be acknowledging, but atoning for, which includes, by the way, reparations.
We should not be acknowledging those we killed wrongly.
But I'm sure it's the same in America.
I saw in the United States, I think you'll know better than me, that 60, what, 60 something percent of service personnel believe these wars were a mistake.
It's probably, in the Brits, I think it's more than that.
I would go for 80 to 90 percent.
But anyway, a majority of both cases, it's growing.
I mean, in America, it's the veterans of the Afghan, not just veterans, including Korea and Vietnam and whatever of older generations, but just veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
As you said, it's 60 something percent, I think 64, 65 percent, say that these wars were a mistake.
They should have never been fought.
And that percentage is higher than the general population.
The reason the general population, by the way, don't agree in even greater numbers is because they've been so brainwashed and inculcated that if they don't support the war, then that's the same thing as spitting in the soldier's face and calling him a baby killer, like what supposedly happened after Vietnam.
And so they're too intimidated to oppose the war because they're told that's disrespecting the troops and stealing their valor and all of these kinds of things.
But the number would be a lot higher if you didn't have that whole, you know, silly narrative left over from Vietnam.
Yeah, we have exactly the same thing.
And it's orchestrated by government, just as it was, I'm sure, in the U.S.
The dead were brought home with a great, great ceremony.
You'd have people lining the streets and, you know, but then of course, the subtext for that is, and all the things that I think your airbase was at Dover, where they all used to come in, same thing, big ceremony, all that palaver, rightful palaver.
But the question is, should it be filmed and treated as a national ritual?
The answer, no, because what happened then, and this is what the government wanted, was that you see, you're criticizing the war, you're criticizing the troops.
And it's that, and of course, I think there's a backlash to that now, both over there and over here.
People are like, hang on a minute, there was something badly wrong with all that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I understand why the platitude is easy, fighting for freedom or this kind of, you know, these sorts of things, but they don't stand up to a moment's thought or scrutiny.
You know, these guys are making, and it's widely understood, everybody understands, that most people who join the army, they're not fighting for freedom or anything like that, they're going because that's how they can, you know, be, have a working class dad, but go to college.
You know, that's essentially it.
It's an economic draft.
And even for the guys who joined up after September 11th, they joined up not to go and hit Saddam Hussein or go fight the Taliban in the Helmand province forever, they thought somehow that America didn't have a standing army and needed one, and to go and fight al-Qaeda, the guys that hit us.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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This is something that I ought to ask you, because this is the same for the Brits as it is for the Americans involved in all this stuff.
How do you feel when you look and see the Americans and the British supporting Al-Qaeda in the wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen?
They hate Iran so much, you know, you guys went and did all this in the name of fighting the guys what knocked the towers down, but our last few wars are on their behalf now.
Yeah, and I couldn't agree more.
You could add in much of North Africa now, because of the splash effect of Libya, Mali too, Somalia, that whole belt I was reading today, I can't remember now who it was, that whole belt, there's a guy called Aiden Hartley actually in The Spectator, the whole belt from Mauritania across to Somalia is engulfed in war.
Why?
Because of Libya, because of that splash effect, millions of weapons flung out of Libya during that stupid intervention, which by the way, I have to confess I was involved in as well, I was part of the British government team down there, you never learn, do you?
Anyway, all directly, directly a result of that appallingly misguided intervention there.
And as to Yemen, well, you're in it, we're in it, we've got our special forces doing the fighting, but who knows what, certainly they don't.
And furthermore, exacerbating all the atrocities and famine with arming Saudi Arabia against the civilian population of Yemen, helping to enforce a blockade against the civilian population of Yemen.
And we haven't even started on Syria, and where that all came from.
I know you're fully conversant with that more than I am.
Yeah, and we're all complicit in that.
All right, so listen, I ought to ask you to tell us some more anecdotes here about Afghanistan, but also, I'm sure the audience is dying to hear everything you've got to say about Libya too.
But talk about British forces, American forces.
I know you were in Helmand, it was 2007 through eight, you were in Afghanistan, where else were you?
And what else can you tell us about Delta, SEALs, Rangers, whoever?
Well, I was in Afghanistan seven to eight, as a so-called justice advisor, which was definitely one of those oxymorons, because there's no justice, as you know, in Afghanistan, such as there is provided by the Taliban, what's called the Asli Taliban, the real Taliban.
And I saw things going wrong, I suppose doubts started to be presented when the chief justice of the province apparently began kidnapping people for ransom.
So one of the first cases I had to deal with was this old guy who spent all of his time and most of it in Saudi Arabia, I think he's dead now.
It was alleged, I think I have to say, that he ran a kidnap racket.
So I spoke to the victims of this, and it turned out that apparently he did.
And furthermore, that he was allegedly receiving money from, now it's difficult to say the Taliban, because we're not quite sure who our enemies were, there were several different groups.
As you know, we dived into this province with no clue who were fighting.
Apparently the first battles weren't fought against the Taliban, they were fought against militia groups.
And the militia groups had been rendered unemployed because we'd had the governor who'd employed them fired.
So he had no money from his thieving and drug dealing left to pay them.
So they started to fight us, those were the first battles in Helmand.
Anyway, so there's a lot of money sloshing around the province, and I need to say, almost all of it is provided by the drugs trade, and the way to get so-called justice was to pay for it.
And we were flying this guy up and down to Kabul, a senior judicial official, shall we say, in our own aircraft, bumping soldiers off so that he could get a seat.
And I thought, well, now whether he was going to bank his ill-gotten gains, I couldn't possibly say.
But what was certainly the case was he'd disappear, and he'd disappear with large amounts of money.
And that whole effort, I mean, you said before, Scott, you said that the warmongers, and I think we can call them that, because they're mongering war, promoting it, are saying that our gains in Afghanistan are collapsing.
Well, it won't take long for that to happen, because certainly in Helmand, I know this, and I still speak to Helmandi people quite regularly, there are no gains.
BBC went there before, a couple of years, I think a couple of years ago, and found that in Nad Ali, which was a place of very intense combat for us, I think they managed to install a cricket pitch, which was very important at the time.
Anyway, concerning special forces raids, we're looking at, you know, we're looking at thousands of dead.
The figures seem to show that when we used to arrest people, when people were lucky enough not to be killed in the night raids, about 14% of them had been part of the insurgency.
So if we were killing 800, 900 people a year, maybe 100, 200 on the outside will have been part of the insurgency.
The rest, of course, will be entirely innocent.
Intelligence was poor, we were being used at the time.
By the way, just to clarify, Frank, when you say we, you're talking about your particular British group there, or you're talking about, you had a view over essentially all special operations forces action going on from the Allies there?
No, insofar as I had any view, it was only for a very short period of time and only in Helmand.
Now, I'm talking about research and people I've talked to since then, research from various places.
All this is open source, you know, anyone can discover, it's just very, very hard to find these figures.
And the Afghan warlocks and WikiLeaks have played a great part in that.
So we're looking at killing, as I've said already, hundreds of people a year.
And, you know, this went on till 2014.
And I mean, I'll give you just one vignette, one little story, just to give you a clue about, not a clue, but an idea, I suppose, you know, the way that these things happen.
So I knew some people, and this is hearsay, it has to be, who were involved with handling prisoners.
And one night a helicopter came in and one of the prisoners on the helicopter asked where his friends were, because of course you're blindfolded on a helicopter.
And they didn't notice any other prisoners coming in, but it's quite a serious thing.
If somebody says, well, there were three people with me and now there aren't any, then you've got two people missing.
Where are they?
Could be anywhere on the camp, we can't have that.
So they looked around and checked and didn't see anyone actually had come in.
They went over to the special forces compound, which was 600 meters away, spoke to the sergeant or warrant officer, the NCO on duty, who told them, what has this got to do with you?
And they said, well, we need, this guy wants to know where his friends are.
And we're kind of wondering ourselves.
Three people got on the helicopter and only one person got to the other end.
That's concerning, right?
And the reply was, all right, he didn't make it, or the other two didn't make it.
And just one other piece of information, it's 600 meters between here and your compound.
Suicides happen on this base.
Accidents happen.
Be very careful on your way back.
Now, these two guys reported nothing.
There's no point in doing so.
These are the blue-eyed boys.
These are the SEAL Team Six.
These are the Delta for our army.
You don't report them.
And if you do, they'll get a slap on the wrist at best, but you're likely to get something rather more serious.
They're both now quite senior officers, these two.
But nobody I've spoken to related this story is surprised about it.
This kind of thing and this kind of attitude and this kind of approach and what it reflects is accepted in the British Army.
And whatever anybody says, that's the case.
And very few people would counter that, I think.
And there's the culture you have also with the Australians.
It's the culture that gave rise to the canoeings of SEAL Team Six.
We saw in the intercept.
It's the culture that brought us and continues to bring us killings all over the world by these people, none of which are subject to any meaningful oversight whatsoever.
The best you might get is they'll say, oh, well, we've dealt with this.
We've written an ethical guidebook, which is what was done for the Special Air Service, our equivalent Delta Force.
Anyway, I went off on one there.
I don't know if I answered your question in any way.
Yeah, sorry.
Telling stories, that's what I wanted to hear, because each anecdote has a point, and so that's how they come out.
Concerning Helmand, I can remember one meeting.
We used to have these operations meetings every night, and everybody would be there and they'd tell us about the operations the next day.
By everybody, I mean all the major command groups.
You have the Civilian Justice Advisory, you'd have a Stabilization Advisor, all the other euphemisms for Mayor De Well, such as myself, plus all the major military commanders.
The army were planning a sweep through some villages, and it looked like the attack on Kursk or something.
You had arrows coming from the left, arrows up the center.
This unit would attack here and drive the enemy into that, and all that sort of planning nonsense.
So I asked, okay, so this is looking at great plan.
What about the civilians in these villages who are going to be inconvenienced by your military operation against insurgents that may or may not exist there?
They will have to leave their homes, won't they, if you're going to fight through their homes, fight through their community?
And the response was, and I quote, yes, well, they can go to their families or the desert, can't they?
Yeah, as if that's what you do.
And, of course, what actually happened is that those people who would, many of whom would have their houses destroyed by this fighting and these British soldiers ravaging through there, is that they would have to go somewhere where they may have a chance for some jobs or shelter, and that would often be Kabul, which produced in District, I think it's District 6, somebody may correct me, I hope, District 6 in Kabul, a refugee camp full of thousands and thousands of people from Helmand, which is like having, in New York, a refugee camp full of people from Idaho or somewhere like that, somewhere far away, rural and remote from the metropolis, but very, very, very poor.
And in that camp, Palamine, a journalist, discovered that people were selling their children for firewood.
And, I mean, that's the level we were getting to.
And those would be the same people, by the way, who would be driven out by this military operation and told by the army, you can go into the desert or go and see your families.
And this is the sort of approach that was going on there.
You know, this is the counterinsurgency that the British were fighting.
And you had the same later on, you know, as I say, you know it at least as well as I do, probably better, you know, on a national basis.
And then, of course, there was the Taliban being asked to guard our supplies.
So there was a USAID ran a program in Helmand for the Kajaki Dam.
You know that, Scott, right?
The dam which never actually produced any electricity.
Right.
And they were desperate to get bits and pieces up to the Kajaki Dam.
But the only way they could do so, and again, this won't be news to anyone on your show, was, of course, to do what?
To pay the Taliban so it wouldn't attack them.
And indeed, on one occasion, the guy in charge or involved with this program told me that the Taliban refused to guard the convoy unless the helicopters were made to land.
So the helicopters were made to land.
Taliban guarded the convoy, obviously paid to do so.
And there you have it.
I mean, again, down to the cost now.
I think most of your listeners, we tend to forget about this now because it's a long way off, but you've got a huge deficit and so have we.
It cost about $1.1 million a year for each soldier.
Again, that's not new.
But I suppose what might be an unusual figure might be the figure that the US paid for air conditioning.
I'm talking about the US now.
In fact, I think this is all of ISAF.
And the answer was for air conditioning.
The cost every year was $20 billion, billion, bravo, billion dollars.
It cost $400 to send one gallon of fuel to your average forward operating base, a large proportion of which, of course, was paid to Taliban or other insurgent groups to guard that fuel as it came up through Karachi, through the mountains, and then got it was transferred to Jingleys and taken through the Badlands of Afghanistan.
$400 a gallon being paid by US taxpayers and less so UK taxpayers.
Look, I could go on and on and on.
But the point is beautifully made in your book, amply made in your book and made very well elsewhere.
And it is utterly unforgivable.
You know, there's a guy, I didn't realize this until after my book was done, but there's a guy who actually wrote an entire book.
I'm sitting here looking at my mess pile of books here on my shelf, trying to find it.
It is an entire book about paying the Taliban.
And as you say, B, bravo, billions of dollars, billions of dollars.
The United States of America has paid in protection money, that is taxes to their government, the Taliban, to provide protection for their convoys to bring gasoline and other supplies to their forward operating bases so they can fight the Taliban.
And the Taliban takes the money and buys all the weapons from the Afghan army that we built.
So it's just why they've got night vision and Humvees.
Your supplies aren't going to get through if you don't pay.
So you've got a problem then, haven't you?
If you can't go out on patrol because the fuel doesn't arrive because you haven't paid the Taliban to guard it.
What a stupid world.
You can't pay the Taliban to be able to do your patrols.
Makes sense.
You know, I think my whole book could have just been one page long.
Look, everybody, Afghanistan is the size of Texas.
It's in the middle of Asia.
That's it.
There's no route there from the sea other than all the way up through the Khyber Pass.
You know, I mean, this, the whole thing is so insane that they would even try this at all.
It's just, I don't know.
It makes sense if your job is taking a cut every time you pay protection money to the Taliban, but for the rest of us, yeah, not so much.
It's the only way to get all the supplies up to Kajaki.
It's the only way.
That's the dam, which, of course, never, never, never worked.
We had a huge military operation.
It was treated like the Battle of D-Day or one of the great logistics successes of the past to carry a turbine up the hill to this confounded dam.
And I think we had 8,000 soldiers involved.
It was a huge operation, great success of British, British ingenuity and courage.
As far as I'm aware, the turbine, this was operation 2008, the turbine sits still sits wrapped in plastic.
Just alongside the dam in Kajaki.
Oh, man, it was laid there all those years ago and it will stay.
They built an entire diesel power plant in Kandahar that people pointed out that it was so cost inefficient to bring the diesel there in order to run it.
And they were losing, I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars a year running the electric plant in Kandahar.
But the whole point of it was, no, don't worry.
This is just to tide us over until we get the dam project in Helmand finished and then it'll be fine.
But they never did.
And of course, how are you going to get the diesel there?
Yeah, I have no idea.
Chinook or truck from somewhere.
Paid for, escorted by our friends in the Taliban.
Yeah.
You know, there was a guy, oh, I know who it was too, it was Aram Rostam, the guy that wrote the book on Choluby.
He also, he had a piece in the Huffington Post about how, it wasn't Rostam, it was somebody else at the time.
I forgot the guy's name, was the defense minister.
And his son had his own little private Blackwater security group that specialized in paying the Taliban to provide protection for the convoys.
And how on top of that, he actually went and hired a K Street lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. to lobby for the surge and to keep the war going longer.
That's in your book, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's so much fun.
It's just crazy.
Although it's not fun.
You know, I just read in the, I saw, I didn't even read the article.
I just saw the headline because it was, oh, it was the, it was the article in the Washington Post about how insane and horrible and crazy and irresponsible it is to consider withdrawing so hastily after only 19 years.
And then in the margin was a link to why did my father die in Afghanistan?
Yeah, I gave it, I gave a talk to the equivalent of Fort Leavenworth War School, whatever they call it, the Army, Army War College.
And it was to a load of majors, about 150 majors.
And the main message was the whole thing was an expensive mess, which achieved absolutely nothing.
But I think for veterans out there, it's worth remembering those who haven't already thought this way, that just because we achieved less than nothing, we caused mayhem and left a legacy of ashes.
Paradoxically, it doesn't mean that people died for nothing because of course they were professionals and they were doing a job, most of them that they loved, and they were trying to do it.
Huge majority of them trying to do it really well.
That in itself is worth something.
The question though is, was, did it achieve anything?
The answer there is absolutely no, nothing.
We achieved negative value.
We wrecked the place and it remains wrecked.
And what gets me, again, I've seen these headlines as one in The Economist this week, the British magazine, The Economist, saying, oh, you know, British is just around the corner and just another push and we'll let, all that stuff that you've said.
It's this, this dead horse is still being flogged.
It's still being flogged.
It's still being flogged.
We've got a thousand British soldiers there.
Now, nobody knows that in the UK except the soldiers' families.
But what?
I think they're running some kind of military academy, which obviously will be one of the first things that will go in the next few months.
But there we are.
What's that got to do with us?
Yeah, that's amazing.
I mean, and you could see, I think you really hit it right there, is because they lost, because they did all of this destruction and got absolutely nothing out of it.
And because there's been no accountability, especially in America, for the leadership who, you know, they were exposed in the Afghan papers.
D.C. didn't read my book, but they did read the Afghan papers when they were published in The Washington Post last December.
But no one was held accountable where they admit right there that, yeah, we knew we were bald-faced lying the whole time.
No different than Vietnam.
We knew the war couldn't be won, but we kept escalating it anyway.
And because there's no accountability, these are the same people in charge now of wrapping it up.
So they won't, because that's the only way to make sure that they don't lose with a capital L is to just stay and let it be somebody else's problem later after they're all dead and gone and let somebody else lose the war, you know, under the Chelsea Clinton administration in 15 years or whatever it is.
Yeah, but they'll be OK.
You know, there are mercenary companies to go and work for.
There's Lockheed Martin.
There's Raytheon's British Aerospace.
Don't worry about them.
They'll be OK.
And they all got their awards.
For the Brits, by the way, every single senior commander in this disaster received the highest or some of the highest awards, every single one, which can only lead one to the conclusion that the people who lost this war, as one friend of mine in the infantry said, must have been us.
We must have lost the war.
Must have been us that did it, because all those generals got and colonels, brigadiers, they all got medals.
Yep.
And, you know, I guess it really is this way in inside the military, as it is on TV, where they all just speak in generalities.
None of it has to make any sense at all.
Well, we're going to, you know, fight a little longer.
We're going to escalate a little bit here.
I mean, the war in Afghanistan now has wound down to the point that America's backing the Taliban against the Islamic state fighters.
But, you know, essentially, though, it's all just like a bunch of salesmanship, like a bunch of TV commercials, glittering generalities, right?
About how, well, you know, we're going to fight for freedom a little bit harder, a little bit longer, and then things will be better.
And we can't leave now because then things would be worse.
But they never have to say that explicitly because they wouldn't dare now say that, no, but if we just stayed a little bit longer, we know that there's light at the end of this tunnel.
We've almost solved it.
You know, they can't say that, but they imply that.
They leave it kind of hanging as though there's some kind of positive outcome that we are almost at, if only you would leave us alone to do our work, something like that.
But they'll never quite say it because, I don't know, I guess they would bust out laughing and that could be a problem.
Maybe something else, you know, if this thing ends, if all those 2,500 or 8,000, I think now American soldiers, 1,000 Brits, if they all leave, then that's a definitive end.
And then some people may start asking questions.
It's ended now.
Whereas if you've still got troops there, it's not yet ended.
You know, victory is still around the corner.
And there's a whole cabal of people whose reputations are based around this.
I remember talking to a very well-known academic in the UK and making much the same points that you and I are making now.
And he said, well, you know, this was in 14, I think.
Well, it's not over yet, you know.
And I thought, honestly, really, what kind of thinking are you applying to this problem?
And this is it, you know, all these generals you're talking about in the US, in the UK, in Denmark, in all these other countries that lost hundreds and thousands of young men.
There's never appropriate or proper challenge for any of these people.
You rarely hear or see on CNN, Fox, BBC, certainly not on BBC, anyone say, general, this was a pointless war and you were responsible for advising the government to continue it.
Is that not right?
You never hear it.
It doesn't happen.
Same in the US.
Yep.
And a bunch of cowards.
Hey, tell us all about Libya.
I was going to say, since when was Matthew Ho ever put alongside Petraeus?
I have never seen such a juxtaposition on the media, but that's what's needed.
Right.
No, they wouldn't dare.
They wouldn't dare.
You know, you can read you can read in an obscure publication about like one time, a long time ago, they invited David Petraeus to a big hot.
I mean, it was pardon me.
Please forgive me, Andy.
They invited Andrew Bacevich to one of these hot conferences and let him give the dissent.
And he got up there and he barbecued the hell out of them.
And then that never happened again.
In fact, what he did, yeah, he goes, what if we went to this?
I got a great idea for we will go to this country that has a terrible problem with warring drug lords.
We don't speak the language, but we do have a lot of expertise and a lot of great, really smart experts.
And we're going to engage in this giant counterinsurgency strategy, help build a new government in their capital city.
And, you know, he essentially parroting back to them all about the wonders of coin, the counterinsurgency doctrine, you know, rewritten by Madison Petraeus and how great it's going to be.
And then he says, come on, everybody, let's go to Mexico.
And the whole audience groans.
Oh, my God, how insane.
Can you imagine America going and just conquering and occupying Mexico and trying to rebuild as Woodrow Wilson said, teach them to elect good men and pacify their drug cartels and all these.
And come on.
And they wouldn't dare say that.
Yes, of course, the American army can accomplish that in Mexico, but they'll push the same line Afghanistan because the consequences are too far away for most Americans to have to deal with.
You know, if they destroyed Mexico like that, we would have to deal with an extra 20 million immigrants next year.
And Americans would notice, you know, instead, it's the Germans and the Hungarians who have to deal with the influx of refugees from Afghanistan.
Absolutely.
I've got a friend of mine now on Lesbos, the Greek island, which is the first port of call for lots of these poor refugees.
Eighty percent of the people in the camp are Afghan.
Same for many of the refugees across Europe.
And people don't make that connection.
They just don't have that.
There's no those those dots aren't aren't linked.
Right.
And why should they be?
You know, in what way in what way does does this touch most people?
It's somebody else's problem.
But soon it may be our problem.
Certainly in Europe, not for you guys, but for Europe, it's becoming this is becoming a major issue.
Yeah, well, that's a great segue to Libya there.
Right.
So we have this massive refugee problem over the last decade, especially in the middle part of the last decade, especially this huge refugee crisis where, you know, as you say, but you could continue not just Afghanistan, but Iraq and Yemen and Syria and Libya.
This is where all the refugees are coming from, the countries that America has decimated.
And in fact, you know, not just Libya, but sub-Saharan Africa, where there may or may not be American backed war zones going on, but there's massive economic migration to Europe where it used to be that the Europeans relied on Muammar Gaddafi to keep them out and to keep, you know, essentially a lid on how many people could cross the Mediterranean.
And so in the chaos of Libya, all that got canceled.
And there are so many, you know, essentially black African economic migrants trying to make it to Europe that they restarted the slave market in Libya.
They started capturing these people and selling them as chattel slaves because of the excess population of people trying to get to Europe there.
And all of this is directly related to America's wars.
Of course, as you say, in the media, they don't ever make the connection.
I go, yeah, there sure are a lot of Iraqis and Syrians and Libyans and Afghans and Yemenis and would be Palestinians, except they're not allowed out of their cage.
But, you know, anyways, yeah, there sure are a lot of refugees and they don't make the connection, but you certainly have.
And I just made it to Libya there.
So what can you tell us about your role in the war there?
What time were you there?
What was your job?
And how much of this is really your fault, Frank?
It's pretty much I have to take my share of this.
You know, George Bush said, fool me once and fool me twice.
I got fooled several times by my government, but then I was gullible enough to be fooled.
All right.
So I was a justice and security officer for the Brits during the war between- What does that mean?
That's like a JAG, a Judge Advocate General type job?
My job was to advise, supposedly, the ambassador on the reform of justice system and the security architecture, police, and to some extent military, mostly police.
And given that there was no justice architecture or police, which we were to find out as time went on, it became a rather broader remit.
Yeah.
So I got sent there.
And I'll just tell you a little vignette, a little story.
So a friend of mine was a journalist in Libya for three years, and he spoke Arabic.
He knew all the figures there.
And Alex Warren is his name.
He wrote a good book about Libya.
And I hope he won't mind me mentioning his name.
But anyway, he really knows his stuff.
On my way to the airport, I rang him up and I said, Alex, I've just been appointed to this.
What can you tell me about Libya?
And he said, for two and a half hours until my phone battery ran out, he told me about Libya.
He said, look, the thing to remember is it's been 42 years, but not essentially under the ground, under the water there, not too much has changed.
It's a tribal society.
It's city states.
People are still very devoutly Muslim.
Gaddafi put a lid on it, but it's all still there.
Three provinces, he said, mutually hostile, largely, and plenty of disorder under the surface.
I hope I'm paraphrasing correctly.
OK, so that's the message I got.
When I got to the embassy, there was a young guy who was one of the, I won't say his name or anything, he was one of the officials that I was doing, British officials, let's say.
And I said, Rupert, I said.
That wasn't his name.
But Rupert, I said, it's a typical name for this kind of person.
My friend Alex has said this, that, and the other.
Oh, in his language, Cambridge educated, young voice, said, look, my dear chap, it's been 42 years, the country's entirely changed.
And what did we find?
We found that there are three provinces in Libya, just like in Iraq, by the way, or three Ottoman provinces in Iraq, three in Libya.
They're all mutually hostile.
It's a country of city states.
It's quite religious, to put it mildly.
They don't like invaders.
And everything spooled away from there.
We had, by the way, I just want to segue just across just for 30 seconds to Afghanistan.
It wasn't as if the Brits or the Americans were short of advice from serious people when we went in.
You know, there were serious people who told MI6, who told the British foreign officer, I'm sure, told the US, the last thing you guys want to do is put boots on the ground.
All right.
So it was six months on and off.
And of course, the situation got worse and worse and worse until by the end, we had a Tripoli where we ended up being based.
That was itself divided into little kingdoms for all the militias.
And we had to negotiate the checkpoints as we went through in our heavily armored cars.
And it got worse from there.
You know, it became, it's now an entirely failed state.
And in fact, worse than a failed state, as you well know, it's a war zone.
And a proxy area, proxy combat for about six major powers in the region.
Not to mention the chaos that it's engendered to the south.
Yeah.
And the country was only united.
I think people don't really realize when you talk about the few decades since they've been united, it's really just after World War II that Libya became a single nation state, even when they were occupied by various European powers over the eons or whatever.
They were still three provinces under occupation.
They weren't even no one even attempted to unite them, I guess, until after World War II.
Right.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you know, to say, oh, yeah, my dear chap, everything has changed.
Don't worry.
There's no chance that this country is going to split back apart again after being after we, you know, lynched the strongman who's held it together.
Seems like a pretty brave assumptions for people who really have no idea what they're talking about.
No clue.
Yeah.
I mean, I was selected on the basis, I think, that I've been on a Nile cruise or something, or I've been in a country where they spoke Arabic.
Yeah.
You know, no expertise at all for this.
I mean, I know a lot about justice reform and all that, you know, but most of my experience was in the, you know, Soviet zone and military experience elsewhere.
But, you know, I can't understand what the hell I was doing there or anybody else, by the way.
No one, of course, had been there for 40 years.
I don't know why this guy or any of the others presumed any form of expertise.
But you can read that across, by the way, all the way across all the nations, with the possible exception, by the way, of the Turks, because they knew what was going on, having been involved for decades and decades.
Right.
Well, and they were big fans of the project, right, because they wanted to help install their Muslim Brotherhood friends there or not.
They got on board later or they were.
I think they got on board later, especially when ISIS started to get a good old grip to the northeast of the country.
And yeah.
And then it all broke apart with.
Oh, yes.
And of course, there's General Haftar's little role in all this.
Formerly a resident for a couple of decades of Langley, Virginia, for some reason, he got back involved.
I think he's still haunting the place to some degree.
But it's, yeah, it's chaotic and it's spread south.
You know, we tend not to look at the southern countries there in the Sahara, but that's what partly what drive the consequences of all that are what partly what drives all those poor people looking for something and ending up as slaves in Libya now, as you say.
Yeah.
And there are thousands of them.
This isn't a rare occurrence.
Right.
You enter Libya, you enter there even as a paid migrant, even if you pay a lot.
I mean, we could go into how much people pay and the conditions you can expect when they pay it.
Pretty much anyone who goes there can expect to be either enslaved or rendered a forced prostitute before they may be gifted a trip across the Mediterranean.
And as you said yourself, not a single migrant crossed or tried to cross from Libya.
Let's not forget Tunisia either until 2011.
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You know, this sounds like war propaganda too, but I keep finding it from, you know, real decent sources, including a guy named, I'm almost certain it's Jeremy Keegan is the British Mali expert who I've talked to a couple of times and I was just reading this thing that was from, I forgot exactly what it's called, but it's like JSOC University or something like that.
It's the Joint Special Operations Command thing and they actually have a lot of open source reports and they were talking about this and they had names and dates and places and credibility behind the story that the Boko Haram guys have had gone up from Nigeria up to Mali to receive weapons and training and religious indoctrination.
So they could be worse and then sent back to be worse than they already were as, you know, mass kidnappers and guerrilla fighters causing problems down there in Nigeria.
And I'd say it sounds like war propaganda because this is a big part of the war party's narrative that, oh look, links.
There's linkages between, you know, this, this, and this group.
And of course all this links back to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton knocking off Gaddafi, taking the Libyan Islamic fighting group and Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb side in that war that then spread it on down into Mali and everywhere else.
But then you have the jihadis in Mali then helping make the jihadis in Nigeria worse.
And of course you can only find just a couple of reports about this because I guess nobody cares, but you got American special operations forces hunting down Boko Haram in Nigeria right now.
I mean, partnered with their government, but helping in that, which that's huge.
I mean, it's a huge country and that's sure to have incredible consequences going forward here and all this, as you say, spilling out.
That's the, the subtitle of that section of my book on Mali, the, at the end of Mali, it's spilling blood because then here it just keeps going and going from there.
As you mentioned, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Chad and Niger and all this caught up in the special ops and drone wars against these, you know, consequences from Libya, 2011.
Yeah.
And none of that's driven, of course, without weaponry and the Libyan weapons dumps, as you know, were comparable in size to the ones in Iraq.
And I spent six months in arms dumps in Iraq and a huge, you had square kilometers of arms, the same in Libya.
And that's, that's what's driving all this ultimately, as well as the, you know, the political source of all that instability.
And we've got a war now and the French are very, and if you saw this recently, the French defense minister went to Mali to go and visit the soldiers there.
Last year, I think four and a half thousand people were killed in Northern Mali.
Now Northern Mali isn't a heavy, heavily populated place.
So it's a pretty heavy rate of casualties up there, big battles going on.
But the French, I mean, I'd say this is a fair way of approaching things.
The French don't expect to win this.
What they expect to do is just contain it.
And I guess, you know, from their perspective, make sure it doesn't get out of hand.
But the reason they have to be there in the first place, let's not forget, is because the French led, we were led by the nose and the Americans are pulled into it willingly or otherwise.
Either way, we all did it.
And this is the result.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, listen, in that email to me, you mentioned that you wouldn't mind writing an article or two about this stuff.
And I have to tell you, you're more than welcome to submit anything to the Libertarian Institute or antiwar.com or both here.
I'd love to run your stuff.
So be a fine addition to our antiwar veteran collection that we're putting together here.
I'll get on it.
Great.
All right.
You got my email.
I better let you go.
My next guy's waiting on me.
But thank you so much for coming on the show, Frank.
It's really been great.
All right.
So all the best to you, Scott.
Cheers.
All right, you guys.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
That's Frank Ledwich, Navy intelligence for Her Highness's Royal Navy over there.
And he is the author of Investment in Blood, the True Cost of Britain's Afghan War and Losing Small Wars, British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
