01/20/16 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, Libertarian activist Arlo Pignatti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all.
QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commodity discs dot com.
Or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity discs.
And thanks.
All right y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott and it's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is Kelly B. Vallejos, writer for the American Conservative Magazine.
This one is called When Money Can't Buy an Army.
Welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you doing?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show.
And I'm sorry it's the same story, different year here.
But you do such a great job covering the Afghan war and it just keeps going on.
So I guess we got to talk about, you know, the current status.
And then, you know, I'll meet you back here in a couple of months for the same thing.
Yeah.
How goes the surge working or whatever?
I don't know.
Where do you want to start here?
Well, I think what had really piqued my interest in this story, well, on two fronts.
One is trickling news that the Taliban has gained more territory in Afghanistan than it has since 2001.
When it was when we first went in there and, you know, supposedly toppled the Taliban, driving it from its strongholds.
This was a little-known factoid that had come out in a foreignpolicy.com piece a couple of weeks ago with little fanfare.
Because, you know, of course, where, you know, the mainstream media is just so swept up in the presidential elections, like every four years, that they don't pay attention to any substantial news anymore.
But anyway, so the Taliban has, you know, basically secured for itself more territory than in 2001.
On one hand, and on the other, the Afghan army, the security forces that we poured $65 billion into building, is unable, and in many cases unwilling, to take on the Taliban.
So it was able, you know, that resulted in the ceding of all of this territory.
And it hasn't been without a cost, a human cost, because as it turns out, that they've lost, you know, something like twice as many men in 2015 alone, than the Americans have in the whole 13 years that we've been there in Afghanistan.
So that tells you right there that there has been a huge casualty count on behalf of these Afghan army and police forces that has not been reported in the U.S. mainstream news.
So that basically piqued my interest, because, you know, as we go along, and Obama has pledged to keep more forces, U.S. forces, in beyond the deadline, I think it's something like, you know, 10,000 until 2017 or 2016.
You know, it's implicit that we have to stay there because the Afghan army can't hold the territory, can't beat back the Taliban sufficiently without our help.
But I don't think it's been really examined how bad it is there.
So I wanted to write a piece about why, and what I've discovered over time, and just going through the public documents that are available, is that, you know, there really wasn't a sure footing by the Afghan training or military training effort in the entire 13 years we've been there.
It's like I call it in the piece, a Potemkin village that's been set up by the military, Congress, and the media to sort of portray this as an ongoing and almost successful effort.
Well, it's never been successful.
It's always been on the brink of failure.
And we've been told otherwise because they needed the money, they needed the resources.
And after $65 billion, there's not much to show for it.
Right.
Man.
And so, and you're right, and again, you know, back to the whole Groundhog Day nature of this, is this is something that we've covered all along too, that these recruits, they show up, they get a rifle, a little bit of money, maybe a pair of shoes, and then they're gone.
Because the U.S., what's the counterfactual, right?
In what universe would they join up really to be all they can be and defend and fight for their country and all these things?
We would have, the U.S. occupation would have had to create a new nation there that all these different factions could really believe in and want to defend from any who would tear it down.
And that's a complete and total laugh.
And we're a million miles from that.
And I don't even know if they were really even trying to do that.
They sure as hell didn't succeed in it.
And nobody ever really thought that they did, did they?
I'm not sure.
I don't, I can't talk, there's nobody to talk to today that would actually try to defend the statement that there is a working, viable Afghan nation for these security forces to fight for.
And as I said in the story towards the end, I say, you know, that is the foundational problem here, is that we always assumed that being the U.S. government, always assumed that it could impose this Western-style template upon Afghanistan without taking into consideration the ethnic, the sectarian, the tribal makeup of that country.
So you're expecting a Western-style military to emerge out of what is really a tribal country, a tribal place.
So what happened here is that we kept pouring money and pouring money into a sieve because there really wasn't the element of success, the foundation of success was not there.
And that was to take into consideration what was good for Afghanistan, what was good, what would have worked in Afghanistan in terms of national security approach.
And so what we just did is just hoped and prayed that money was going to make it better, and more U.S. advisors and more contractors on the ground.
And that hasn't happened.
And just yesterday there was a report in Reuters.
Reuters reported that some one-third of the Afghan security forces had to be replenished in 2015, meaning they're all green because of desertion, because of casualties.
You know, that's amazing.
And, you know, it's not all, you know, sometimes the instinct is to blame the Afghans, that they're not up to the task, that they're not fighters, that they're just, you know, taking their duties or walking off the job, they don't have the ethic.
But, you know, if you look at it, these guys are being paid pennies, and they're expected to deal in conditions that our troops have had difficulty serving in.
But with the difficulty, all of the advanced equipment, all of the training, all of the support system that the United States brings to bear, these guys are just like, you know, they're basically swinging in the breeze.
They're being asked to do multiple tours of duty, so to speak, without real compensation for it.
So you kind of don't blame them for walking off and saying, hey, I want to go see my family.
Right.
You know, so there's both sides here, you know.
And, you know, one-third, that's a lot of people to expect to just take on the challenge after being new and green.
Well, and as you say here in your article, you're quoting this AP piece from just a couple of days before saying that 40 percent of them don't even exist at all.
So the ones that are there are basically kids.
Yeah.
Well, so now you know what I wonder, though, man?
When I read that, the 40 percent, hey, that's a lot.
Yeah.
Now, and this is the same military that told us, oh, Kandahar, yeah, no, we're not worried about Kandahar.
Yeah, there have been a couple of Taliban attacks here and there, but, yeah, we're not worried about that.
And then the Taliban sacked the whole city, and they lost it again.
But still, that was just a couple of months ago.
And I'm thinking, you know, these generals seem to do a lot of whistling past the graveyard here.
And I wonder, and I'm no military strategist or anything, but I wonder whether the 10,000 guys and the couple hundred drones they got over there are enough or whether they're really counting on this ghost army to fight with in the event of some kind of full Taliban assault on Kabul or something like that.
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
Maybe our guys could really get caught out here.
Well, yeah.
And just a couple weeks ago, I think now, there was that case, and forgive me if I'm wrong, I want to say it was Marjah, you know, the government-in-the-box Marjah just a few years ago.
Our troops did get caught.
Right.
And it took them about 15 to 20 hours to get them out of there, and they were special forces.
So, yeah, they can get caught, and if we don't have enough air support, close air support to go in there in these times of, you know, in the clutch, you know, yeah, we could be putting our guys in harm's way as well.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, everybody.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with the great Kelly B. Vallejos, writing at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com, when money can't buy an army.
It's a great piece.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darrenscoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
Darrenscoffee.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton talking about the Afghan war with the great Kelly Vallejos from the American Conservative magazine, When Money Can't Buy an Army, is the article here.
A great one.
We'll be running it on antiwar.com, probably the spotlight tomorrow.
All right.
So, got to make sure and hit the right button here so we can talk some more.
Now, the surge is long over.
It's 2016, and we're down to 10,000 men or so with, I think, a couple thousand more NATO troops, I guess Germans and not Frenchmen, right?
I don't know who.
A couple thousand more than that.
But we're talking about how the Afghan army kind of hardly exists, and I guess at the break we're sort of puzzling over whether the U.S. military has based its plans for holding on for dear life in Afghanistan on the phony numbers of the Afghan army or the real numbers and the real strength of it to fight with.
And, Kelly, in this article you quote Anthony Kordesman, who is, I guess, a somewhat skeptical foreign policy wonk in D.C., a former Reagan administration official, comparing this to Vietnam and talking about how surprising it was.
He says to the North Vietnamese, but I think he meant to the Americans, of just how easily the South Vietnamese army folded as soon as the NVA finally came down from the North.
Yeah, and I think that was Larry Korb that was talking about, who's the Reagan administration official that I talked to.
I also talked to Anthony Kordesman.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I mixed those guys up.
I think this is the first time just now I realize those are two different people, Korb and Kordesman.
I'm sorry.
No, well, you know, they're kind of coming from the same perspective.
They're in the Washington think tank world and definitely skeptical, and Larry Korb has been a good source of mine over the years, who was sort of the first of the think tank guys that became skeptical in these wars.
But, you know, he was in Vietnam, and he did.
He mentioned that this is sort of like a deja vu all over again, so to speak, with leaving a country and saying, well, you know, we poured all millions of dollars, billions of dollars into your military.
They look great on paper.
See you later.
And then they crumble like a cookie after we leave.
And we saw that in Vietnam, but he was drawing comparisons to Afghanistan, but also Iraq.
I mean, what I'm thinking here is as long as there is any inkling that there is an ISIS presence in Afghanistan, we won't be going anywhere, and they'll just keep pouring troops in there little by little, just like in Iraq.
I saw a piece in the paper today that Ash Carter has confirmed that we'll be putting more troops into Iraq because the successful clearing out of ISIS in Ramadi has signaled to the U.S. military that, yes, they can do this as long as they have, you know, U.S. assistance.
So I believe as long as Afghanistan is considered part of the war on ISIS or whatever they're calling it these days, that we won't be pulling out anytime soon, and they'll just keep pouring troops in there and soldier on, no pun intended, and trying to build this Afghan army, even though, like you pointed out, the APU says 40 percent of them may be on the books, but they're not in existence on the ground.
Well, and as you point out, though, the comparison to Iraq, too, they've had their fall of Saigon moment.
They lost the entire western half of that country in the meantime, precisely because the American military, well, I don't know precisely this, that, but it sure seems like the military basically were going off of their script, their PR script meant for us that there's such a place as Iraq anymore and that the government of Baghdad is the government of Iraq, and the Iraqi army is the Iraqi army, rather than recognizing the reality.
What they created was an Iraqi Shia-stan army that was occupying Iraqi Sunni-stan, and they really were in foreign territory.
Patrick Coburn was on this show a year before the fall of Mosul, saying that the Iraqi Shia-stan army, these guys are deserting their posts up in Mosul, because it's like they're out in Fort Apache, out in enemy territory, and they don't have the support to be out there.
And that was a year before the invasion in the fall of Mosul, so you can see how, it sure seems like at least, they're basing their policy on how things are going to play out, based on the lies that they tell us that they need to keep doing what they do, rather than the reality of the situation.
So in other words, you take that same parallel back to Afghanistan, we could have real trouble with the Taliban here.
If they're as powerful as they've been at any time since 2001, do we have any idea what's the ceiling on that at this point, and when there's only 10,000 American soldiers there to oppose them?
Right.
And absolutely not.
I mean, unless we're willing to go all-out war, which is to put hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops back in Afghanistan, and just blowing places to bits, which we are not going to do, because if we were going to do that, we would have done it in 2010, in 2011, in 2012, when Crystal was asking for twice as many troops, I think it was, during the surge of Afghanistan.
We're not going to do that.
So what does that mean?
That means we just have a forever war presence in Afghanistan, just holding it enough so that the Taliban doesn't take complete control over Kabul and the Afghan government.
But, I mean, how long does that last?
I couldn't tell you.
I mean, it's been 13 years already, and I don't see any end to that, and I don't see any end to our presence in Iraq, if anything, that it's growing and growing, because we haven't created a stable society there the way that was sold, like you said, sold to the rest of us, that we were creating stable societies in either of these countries, and with them, a security force able to sustain the peace when we leave.
That's not happened.
Right.
Yeah, and I don't want to sound too alarmist about, you know, a big Black Swan-type event here, when the status quo is horrible enough that if they're just going to have to stay forever in order to prevent the obvious, you know, ultimate outcome when they leave 25 or 30 or 40 years from now and we have the same damn thing happen with the Taliban or their grandsons taking over or whatever it is.
They just can't declare victory and leave because it'll be too embarrassing when a week later they lose.
But now, oh, and we're almost out of time.
I'm sorry.
Let me ask you one more thing here.
The best I understand it is they really kind of created two different armies here, the police for Pashtunistan and the Iraqi, I mean, pardon me, the Afghan army for the rest of the place.
And I wonder whether it's, and I think you mentioned this in the article, whether it's basically the same thing when we talk about 40% are ghosts and whatever other percent are green and this and that kind of thing.
Is it basically the same story whether we're talking about the army or the so-called police forces here?
Yeah, I couldn't tell you either way, and I would hesitate to say that I knew any better in terms of drilling down on the details.
I do know that there is a difference, and I hope this was conveyed in my story, that you have the Afghan national police, the Afghan national army, and then you have the local constabularies, the Afghan local police that we created, which is another mess that you and I have talked about many times on this show.
And they're separate from the police.
And so that could have probably been the best recipe for success, because there are local police that had been raised up locally, but because we meddled in who was going to lead them, we ended up putting, and I say we, the military ended up putting in many cases warlords, militiamen, and real evil people in charge of these places, which has caused a whole other problem for another show.
And I'm sure those are humming along, it's just probably the wrong people in charge.
Right.
Yeah, I always like to take the opportunity to recommend the documentary This Is What Victory Looks Like that Vice News put together, I guess, a couple of years ago, where it's like a scene out of Catch-22 or something, where the sergeant is basically just crawling out of his own skin at how upset he is at who it is he is made to fight for here, or the lowest scum of the earth, these child rapists, warlords, murderers.
And then when the captain or whoever it is that comes with the fancy shirt, he has to play along like, oh, yes, sir, everything's going great, and not dare say a word to his superior about what's really going on here.
Just swallow hard and carry on.
And it's just, this is what victory looks like?
Victory looks like, oh, man, I think that's how you're supposed to enunciate the title of that thing.
Yeah.
With a question mark in italics.
Like, oh, my God, this is what America's project is in the world right now?
Is this?
It's just insane.
Yeah, and I think, and somebody had pointed out to me, and I think it was Anthony Cordesman, he said, you know, you expect these guys to go over there, they spend a year, maybe a little more, they come back, and you really expect them to start saying how terrible they did, that they didn't achieve what they set out to do, that things are a lot more nuanced, shaded, falling in the toilet than the paymasters at home believed.
So it's been this constant battle where the truth never gets out.
And Daniel Davis had talked about this, where the generals just gave this rosy picture of what was going on.
But it was happening, you know, down the chain of command.
Nobody wanted to really come home and say, we're failing over there.
I didn't do so well.
Yeah, partisan politics really screwed the population on this, too, because the Republicans don't want to criticize the military, and the Democrats don't want to criticize the president.
And so, you know, the entire left of America just pretended that the Afghan surge and the rest of it never even happened.
Yeah.
So that was major criticism that just went lacking for years.
Right, exactly.
And Democrats, of course, are afraid to look soft on the military, not, you know, amply supportive of the military.
So, yeah, there was all sorts of elements working against the truth in this regard.
Hey, listen, you do great journalism.
Thank you so much for coming on my show, Kelly.
Oh, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate that.
That is the great Kelly B. Vlahos.
Read her at the American Conservative Magazine when money can't buy an army.
We'll be right back.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East?
Or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full-spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.