11/26/12 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by the Future Freedom Foundation at www.fff.org.
Join the great Jacob Hornberger and some of the best writers in the libertarian movement like James Bovard, Sheldon Richmond, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more for a real individualist take on the most important matters of peace, liberty, and prosperity in our society.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation at www.fff.org.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com/scotthortonshow for some examples, and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here for libertystickers.com.
If you're like me, then you're right all the time.
Surrounded by people in desperate need of correction.
Well, we can't all have a radio show, but we can all get anti-government propaganda to stick on the back of our trucks.
Check out libertystickers.com.
Categories include anti-war, empire, police state, libertarian, Ron Paul, gun rights, founders quotes, and of course, this stupid election.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Ben Franklin said those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.
Hi, Scott Horton here for the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's a plain card-sized steel bill of rights designed to set off the metal detectors anywhere the police state goes.
So you can remind those around you the freedoms we've lost.
And for a limited time, get free shipping when you purchase a frequent flyer pack of five Bill of Rights Security Edition cards.
Play a leading role in the security theater with a Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
Okay.
Next guest is Kelly Vlahos from antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here and very happy to read this article.
Another Thanksgiving in Afghanistan that you've written for the American Conservative Magazine.
And it just seems everybody in the world, but you've lost interest.
Well, and the Afghans have lost interest in this thing.
I can't even find an article to read about it.
But I sure appreciate your attention to this most important matter.
A scandal takes center stage and warlords amass as soldiers hit the mess for Turkey Day.
So, in other words, here we are in 2012 and the war is still lost.
Right.
And I can't think of anything more demoralizing than being in Afghanistan and watching and looking at the news and seeing that, you know, your top general has so much time on his hands that he's able to do, you know, hundreds, write hundreds of letters to some socialite in Florida.
And your former top general, you know, General Petraeus in a sexual affair with a woman who had been tagging along Afghanistan for a full year.
I think the war itself is demoralizing, but it seems that this leadership, this, you know, sort of lack of leadership, this crisis in leadership can't make things all that better, especially when they're fighting and they're dying and they're watching their buddies bleed all over the battlefield.
And you look home and they're all partying and hanging out with socialites and even eating caviar on Tampa's finest lawn.
It's got to be bad there.
I couldn't even imagine.
Yeah, I mean, whatever little reports we do get about morale there, none of them are very positive anyway.
No, they're not.
And as I mentioned in that piece is that, you know, it might not seem a lot in comparison with previous wars and previous years, like say in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But we lost 13, you know, guys over there from November 1st to November 20th.
I think when I filed that story, I never see any of that in the paper.
I mean, the Washington Post at least does like once a month will do a compendium of all the war casualties.
And it kind of takes you by surprise because because you don't hear about it as it's happening, that you're just assuming that things are going OK over there.
And then you realize that these guys are dying, you know, mostly from IED blasts, but also firefights and these green on blue attacks.
And they're happening in the media is just at this point, just ignoring it.
Yeah.
And so I think it's a you know, I think that it's a lot worse over there, despite what the military continues to say publicly, or at least the top brass says publicly when they are asked.
Well, and, you know, back to the Petraeus scandal, I mean, part of what was going on there, I guess the key to the whole thing, right, is that he was screwing his PR flack.
That's who this person was.
She would follow him around telling everyone that everything's fine when it wasn't.
That was her job.
That's why he loved her so much.
Well, that's the thing.
What I get most upset about is these these blog entries, columns, what have you.
You snarky, you know, Twitter tweets or whatever, saying, you know, what's with all the prudishness?
It was just sex.
Why do we got to get in Petraeus' bedroom?
And I'm saying I this isn't about sex.
This isn't about the affair itself.
It's just what you said, that the woman that he was having an affair with, he was engaging in this inappropriate relationship that was that was the sexual nature of it was was not important.
What was important is that he brought a woman on board, brought her into his inner circle.
She had no experience in journalism or writing, but convinced everybody around him that she was the best person to write his biography.
And then she turns out to be his hagiographer.
And not only that, not only writing a book, which is, you know, unseemly enough because the book itself is just it's just a whitewash.
But the fact that she was doing news, she was doing interviews, but she was also doing blog posts on Rick, you know, Thomas Rick's blog, defending, you know, coin and counter insurgency practices, including the erasing of an entire village in Afghanistan, defending these practices publicly while she was working as his biographer on our dime.
That is what is the the critical nature of this, not the fact that they are rolling in the hay.
Right.
Yeah.
Just that he had her that close.
That's how professional their relationship was.
And it and it reflects it reflects the whole solid, you know, creepy nature of the Petraeus machine.
I mean, she's just the sort of like the ultimate, you know, manifestation of it.
But as we know, and we've talked about it, he created this situation where he had all of these yes men and women around him.
He cultivated a whole media stable of people who gave him positive press, gave him, you know, that acted as his surrogates in the media.
So he had a little machine going on our, you know, at our taxpayer expense, which reflected back to us a skewed version of events of the war, kept us thinking for, you know, six or seven years or whatever, that things not only were going well, but his strategy was the best way of getting us extricating us from Iraq and resolving the problems in Afghanistan.
We know now that it wasn't.
But because of of this machine that he put together, that we spent all of these years building him up as a hero when it turns out that he was just as corrupt and morally compromised than the worst of them.
And that's the saddest thing about this thing, that we were suckers for this guy.
We weren't me and you and your audience weren't.
But the mainstream, which, you know, in the establishment, which powers everything.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the whole thing, right?
I know.
And you write about this in your article that the most violence in the country is where he went and did the surge.
Oh, that was completely not predictable at all.
We expect total victory in the surge areas.
And then remember, Michelle Bachman said, well, you know, the problem is you only did half a surge into Kandahar, but you didn't do another separate surge into the tribal areas that would have fixed everything.
But now, since you only did a half a surge, look at how screwed up we are.
So everything is already falling apart.
And they say that we still got another year and a half or two to go.
And so are they leaving early or are they never leaving?
Are they going to have to surge again?
Or what the hell are they going to do?
I mean, a big part of your article here is about how all of the Northern Alliance commie warlords that work for the United States are already pulling their militias that they had disbanded back together.
You know, they're going to have things their way one way or the other.
If they can't get it through our sock puppet government we've created for them, they'll just call back their old militia and go back to war like the 1990s.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, we saw this coming down Broadway like a few years ago.
I, you know, interview people and I get these little tidbits and comments and quotes from people who would say, you know, we're just waiting for you guys to leave.
We know you're leaving.
You're going to leave us hanging.
So we're going to get what we can now and, you know, and just prepare for the moment when you leave and all of the place goes to hell in a handbasket.
So I think the Afghans are looking at this a little bit more without the rosy glasses that we have.
You know, for years we were told that we can't leave because we'll leave this terrible mess behind and then we'll leave, you know, Afghans hanging, you know, women's rights and all of those things.
But I think they know over there, they know we're going to leave.
They've been preparing.
These warlords are like, hey, we got to defend, you know, we got to defend our places, our tribes, our people.
You know, they're amassing, you know, fighters.
You know, I think it's I think it's the American people that are disillusioned about our role there at this point.
But, you know, I opened up the paper this morning and it says that General Dunford, who is replacing General Allen, another scandal ridden general, is calling for a 10,000 residual force of 10,000 when we're supposedly leaving in 2014.
So there's still this, you know, there's still this illusion that we are going to stay, we're going to train these this this army that's, you know, pretty much disrespected by the rest of the whole Afghanistan, you know, and we're just going to we're just going to keep throwing bad money after good until so we're chased out of there because we know we'll be outnumbered by that point.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
At some point here, they start playing around with the danger of, you know, a Benghazi situation where they don't have the force protection for all the State Department weenies they've got in the in, you know, downtown.
And so at that point, you better leave now before it's the sacking of Saigon type moment, people hanging onto the skids for dear life.
You know, the last few weeks leaving the country.
Right.
So you have this residual force and everybody's holed up in these bases, you know, surrounded by unfriendly, basically not going off the bases, but training and just basically just throwing our our tax dollars down a drain.
And these these training programs and these counter narcotic programs, you know, that are never going to fully work.
We've never spent any time on understanding the cultural and political landscape of Afghanistan.
I know as we've talked about, you know, we're just trying to impose our version of democracy and our version of of of what a working nation should look like on Afghanistan when they clearly have eschewed, you know, a sort of central government, central military construct.
We're going to keep at it.
We're going to keep propping up Karzai.
And it's just we can't afford it anymore, I guess.
Or like you said, we get chased out.
But, you know, Karzai is just lapping up all our money, hold up in Kabul.
But outside of Kabul, he has no control.
Well, and, you know, with three years ago, they tried to get rid of him and replace him with a different CIA puppet.
I guess he successfully faced that DM kind of coup attempt down.
But it makes me wonder whether they have a backup plan for him.
I mean, what if he overdoses on heroin one night?
What are they going to do?
I don't know.
But I think the scariest thing, which I mentioned in my story, was that you have these very powerful warlords who are remnants of the pre 9-11 days where they were fighting each other, you know, for supremacy.
Taliban eventually won out.
They're calling on thousands of their fighters to basically fill a vacuum that they probably rightly predict is going to be there when we leave.
And as we leave, you know, Karzai, who knows what's happening there, this is the last thing he needs or wants.
Meanwhile, we're told that, you know, things are going good.
We're not we're not negotiating with the Taliban.
You know, there are places in eastern Afghanistan that we cannot go.
So we can't, quote unquote, route them out of there.
Pakistan is no help.
So we seem to be at the same place we were when you and I were talking about this, say, two years ago.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
If you take the Iraq analogy, at least there, they lost in a way where they put themselves on the side of the people who were destined to win anyway.
And so they could sort of call it a victory as they got their asses kicked right out of there.
But in this case, they're fighting for a bunch of people who no one in the country wants, not even from their own ethnic groups.
These warlords, Dostum and Karzai and the rest of these commie thugs.
So, you know, it's not like anybody loves the Taliban, but it seems like the advantage is, you know, still after all this time or maybe even now, especially again, after all of this effort, all bets are, I guess, right.
If you took the Americans out of there today, the Taliban would end up taking over the whole country within, what, a year or so at the most.
Well, the sad thing is that, as I also mentioned, is that we've been supporting these local police forces, which are, you know, in many cases, glorified thugs and goons of whatever, you know, power broker is operating there.
So we've been arming bad guys all over the country.
People are terrorizing the local population, which isn't, you know, the opposite of what the so-called coin or counterinsurgency was supposed to do, which was help protect the population.
You know, so we've managed to create a situation not unlike what happened in Afghanistan in the 80s, Charlie Wilson's war, where we're arming these people and then we're going to abruptly leave.
You know, I mean, at least we're going to pull back to the point where we're just pulling back the bases.
So you still have all these guys who are trained and armed by our special operations guys running around terrorizing their own people.
I mean, how is that going to work out?
Yeah, I was reading one of these things had and I believed this.
It wasn't just, you know, stick by by an officer or something.
It was a soldier saying, you know, whenever we're pulling out any of these towns, the locals say, no, man, don't leave us with these guys.
Yeah.
About the local police that they put in power there, wherever they go.
And they're like, geez, you know, I mean, think about what a horrible situation that is to be a regular Afghan schmuck and have to prefer the Americans to the guys that the Americans hired to be your cops and have to beg the Americans.
No, please don't leave me with these guys.
Well, you know, and the sad thing about all of this is that on paper, you know, on paper and on a look at it, you know, somewhat objectively on paper, a lot of these things look good or at least they look they appealed to sort of the more humanitarian interventionalist impulses of people in Washington.
It says counterinsurgency, protecting the population, going in, learning the culture, you know, having the local councils or shuras choose the local police, you know, putting money towards local projects and development, you know, switching the farming culture to, you know, other than to things other than, you know, the poppies.
All that sounded great on paper, but there was such a disconnect in how all these things were implemented that they end up having the opposite effect.
You know, I've read the complaints that, you know, the Human Rights Watch has basically went out and they they gathered all the evidence and they talked to all the locals about these local police, you know, police forces, you know, the ones that the people were supposed to select.
Well, turns out special forces were pushing certain, you know, power brokers and their goons to become the police officers against the will of the local people.
So, like you said, they're more worried about us leaving because these local goons have all the guns because they were buddies with our special forces guys.
For whatever reason, they were expedient to the situation.
Well, you know, this is all real complicated.
You know, I guess I'd like to see Margulies and Landay fight it all out someday or something about who all is who there.
I guess Landay is probably the most in terms of just raw information about who's who.
You know, understanding wise, I guess I'd have to give him the credit.
Although I believe the big point of contention there would be that Margulies says that Massoud, the guy that Al-Qaeda killed on September 10th, 2001, was the leader of the Northern Alliance, that he was KGB.
So the Northern Alliance guys somewhat have a reputation of being, you know, also the guys who fought the communists, also the Mujahideen who fought the communists.
But according to Margulies, you know, Massoud, in fact, he's the guy who his character is featured in Rambo 3 and everything.
But what he was doing was he was taking all the CIA's money.
But then he was doing exactly what the Soviets wanted, which was pretend to fight, but not get much fighting done.
And then it was really the Pashtun warriors who actually were the real Mujahideen who fought that war.
It's so complicated.
And the sad part is after 10 years, 11 years, we are no more better informed than we were on September 12th.
You know, and that is not that is purely the fault of the Washington establishment, because I remember from the beginning, there were smart people that said, listen, we got to learn about Islam.
We got to learn about the culture.
We got to learn about the people, the different ethnicities and languages.
And we got, you know, we can't impose our construct on these people because we will lose.
And the people that said that were dismissed as chicken littles, weak, you know, too soft on terror, you know.
And so it's like 11 years later, we don't know the difference between one, you know, one ethnicity, one tribe against another.
Everybody's clueless, you know.
And it's just it's amazing because that's how the Washington hive works.
And they could have been really learning, getting in there and learning about the people and taking it from there and designing a policy based on Afghans or knowing when to pull out at least.
Yeah, I mean, I can't help but think if we if they just kept Donald Rumsfeld, that war would have been over a long time ago.
Or, in fact, if they'd, you know, if he'd had the priority of the argument even back then, I think his whole plan was this was going to prove his light and fast transformation.
We hire some, you know, former communist agents on horseback to point some laser pointers for us.
And then we bomb the bad guys and then we move on.
We bribe whoever's going to be the new rulers and we move on to our next war, which I'm not saying I like that part, but it seems like that was why they fired him from Iraq or two was because he said, you know what, let's just make Maliki get his act together and defend his own government instead of doing it for him anymore.
And they wanted to double down.
Yeah, it became a nation building exercise with with General Petraeus at the helm.
You know, it was nation building, you know, 2.0.
It appealed to both the hawks and the humanitarian interventionists.
Yeah.
And all the so-called realists.
Yeah.
Right.
Gates was the realist stamp of approval on the neoconservative escalation.
Right.
And then you have the Obama administration coming in with Susan Rice and Samantha Powers and Hillary Clinton, you know, who really love, you know, the interventionist model because they claim it's to help people.
So they bought into it.
They love Petraeus because he made them feel strong.
They made they validated their impulse for war.
You know, he was the guy that covered everybody's ass.
Right.
That poor old, you know, America was stuck with Donald Rumsfeld and his incompetence.
What we really needed was some able managers for this project.
Yeah.
The project can never be questioned.
We just need the right people to do it.
Right.
And here's Petraeus.
I mean, he he was the godsend, you know, with his big toothy grin, aw shucks attitude, great press.
You know, I mean, they built him up to be some sort of godlike figure.
The only good thing to come out of the scandal is that that myth has been busted.
I kind of wonder maybe we'd be better off with him on his pedestal, still running the CIA, because really, if he was the only one capable of convincing the American people that their defeat in not the American people's defeat, the American government's defeat in Iraq was a victory, then maybe we really still needed him to lie us out of Afghanistan, too.
If the American establishment, that hive mind in D.C. that you talk about, if they absolutely cannot ever call it quits without calling it a victory.
Yeah.
Maybe we actually just lost our last chance to ever leave Afghanistan.
Right.
Yeah, because the whole facade is broken and it's gone in Afghanistan.
I don't know anybody, say, for, you know, a person here and there, you'll see on an op ed say the things are going going all right there and that we just got to hang in there, except for, of course, the Kagan team, Kimberly and Fred, who were in the Washington Post yesterday, and I do not know why they still get so much play in the Washington Post.
You know, this big op ed in the Sunday paper saying why we still need to be in Afghanistan.
And it's just, it's, I mean, it would be funny if it wasn't so sad seeing that they were part of this betrayist machine, you know, of neocons that he had over there in Iraq and then Afghanistan, plotting this awfully, this awful failed strategy.
And they're still given, you know, huge headlines in the Sunday paper saying we need still need to be in Afghanistan.
So maybe, you know, maybe, I mean, the hive takes a little time to break down.
And that's, you know, but for the most part, I don't know many people are saying that we, you know, this, you know, we just give it more time.
Things will things will turn the tide over there.
Well, you know, it's just a disaster.
I've got a new theory of foreign policy, and it says that when you resort to saying, well, maybe we just need to drop neutron bombs on them all.
And that basically is the same thing as admitting that you've lost and you might as well just quit.
And I don't know if you saw this or not.
I don't know how much play it's getting, but it's in the Pakistani paper, the news.com.pk dot com dot pk.
Neutron bomb idea shocks British House of Lords.
And this guy, former Labor defense minister, Lord Gilbert, has said, you know, we could do is we could just drop a bunch of enhanced radiation devices on the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And that will, you know, the Duran line, the British drawn Duran from 100 years ago.
That will solve our problem there.
Or maybe 150 years ago.
Oh, boy.
I didn't I didn't know there were anybody left in the British parliament who talked like that.
Isn't that amazing?
That would come from our Republican Party on the Hill.
Yeah, I mean, I could I could.
Yeah, I could see that getting play, at least in the House.
But, you know, I it's two it's two very important principles here.
White supremacy and the idea among American and British politicians to this day that it's still perfectly OK for them to mass murder whoever they feel like as long as they feel like it.
And then secondly, they know they've lost.
They know that short of dropping neutron bombs on them all, you can't win there.
The whole thing.
They're just they're asking these British and American soldiers to be the last ones to die for a lie.
And they know it.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
And, you know, the thing about the, you know, the racism is is pretty clear.
The Washington Post printed the story about the the kill team or not to kill team, you know, the kill list, you know, our drone killer drone program, which is basically extra is extra judicial and secret.
And it's going on.
And, you know, if we were doing this in any Western white country, this would be not only a scandal, but it would be an uproar and it would be ended immediately.
But because it's occurring in a Muslim country against brown people, that somehow, you know, we just have to accept that it's happening, reason it away.
You know, I don't know anybody who's talking about this day for for for us and, you know, and the people that, you know, make a living, you know, paying attention and and getting anxious about this.
But, you know, walk down the street.
Nobody cares about kill the kill list or that that we're killing innocent civilians because it's happening in Yemen.
It's happening in Pakistan.
It's happening in Somalia.
You know what?
And what planet would we be able to just start dropping bombs in in the UK?
We just wouldn't happen.
So I do think that it's racist, racist in nature.
I do.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, what's funny, too, is this sort of crude American nationalism.
It crude is exactly the right word.
All nationalism is crude to me.
But this sort of especially vulgar and stupid American nationalism, it sort of makes honorary white people out all brown people in America, too.
You can all be white supremacists in your war against your forever war against the people of Pakistan.
As long as you're from between Canada and Mexico, you know, you're honorary Caucasians, at least for the foreign policy sake, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
And again, with Petraeus leaving as CIA director, from what I'm reading, I don't think it's going to get much better.
You know, the folks that are being sort of buzzed about in terms of replacement for David Petraeus are all supporters and to some degree of shifting, you know, the shift in the CIA towards more of a paramilitary role away from spying and surveillance and analyzing and all that other old-fashioned stuff.
So I can't see the situation getting any better now that Petraeus is out.
You know, one of the guys I was reading yesterday, one of the guys who's up for his replacement, Michael Vickers, has been around since the 80s.
You know, he was integral to the whole Charlie Wilson's war.
He was even in the movie.
And his big role throughout the global war on terror has been the sort of behind the scenes, you know, proponent of hardcore counterterrorism operations.
You know, special ops, drones.
If he's the guy that might replace David Petraeus, it's going to make David Petraeus look like Charlie Brown.
Well, hey, the other leak was maybe we'll get Jane Harman to do it.
The burn is really spot.
Oh yeah, there you go.
I mean, give me a break.
I love living in America at the end of 2012.
It's hilarious.
I mean, it's horrible, but yeah, it's kind of yeah.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today, Kelly.
It's great to talk to you.
Great talking to you.
All right, everybody.
That is Kelly B. Vallejo.
She writes for the American Conservative.
That's theamericanconservative.com.
And of course, antiwar.com.
This piece, let me find it here.
Another Thanksgiving in Afghanistan.
A great piece.
Please read it.
Pass it to your right wing friends.
You know, hey, all Scott Horton here.
After the show, you should check out one of my sponsors.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by Mike Swanson, a former hedge fund manager who's investing in commodities, mining stocks and European markets.
Mike site Wallstreetwindow.com is unique in that he shows people what he's really investing in updating you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike's betting his positions are going to go up due to the Federal Reserve printing all that money to finance the deficit.
See what happens at Wallstreetwindow.com.
In an empire where Congress knows nothing, the ubiquitous D.C. think tank is all.
And the Israel lobby and their neocon allies must own a dozen.
Well, Americans have a lobby in Washington, too.
It's called the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They advocate for us on Capitol Hill.
Join CNI to demand an end to the U.S.
-sponsored occupation of the Palestinians and an end to our government's destructive empire in the Middle East.
That's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, ladies.
Scott Horton here.
If you would like truly youthful, healthy and healthy-looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit.
Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com.
Dagny and Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code Scott15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Hey, folks.
Scott Horton here for Veterans for Peace at veteransforpeace.org.
I'm not a vet, but if you are, I'd like to ask you to consider joining Veterans for Peace.
As you know, in matters of foreign wars, a veteran's voice is given much more weight.
Well, Veterans for Peace is making veterans' voices heard in ways and places where they can really make a difference.
There are more than 175 chapters of Veterans for Peace in all 50 states working hard to eliminate nuclear weapons, seek justice for veterans and victims of war, and abolish war as an instrument of American national policy.
It's the peace vets versus the chicken hawks.
Join up the good fight at veteransforpeace.org.