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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line is Danny Sherson, a former major in the US Army in the Iraq and Afghan surges, wrote Ghostwriters of Baghdad and Patriotic Dissent, and he writes a million articles a week, far more than you have time to read, and including, luckily for us, at antiwar.com, where he is a regular contributor as well.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, man.
Lots to talk about.
I guess I want to know everything that you know and think about the current situation in Yemen, and actually, more importantly, in Washington, D.C., in regards to Yemen, what's the future of that war?
Well, you know, I mean, there's a lot of celebration going on.
On the Democratic side, everyone is so thrilled that Trump is gone, especially based on how it ended without even weighing in on what that all means.
Right.
Like, just leaving that aside, the way everything went down at the Capitol and the sort of heightened and hyper awareness on both sides, what was already going to be like a massive celebration of Trump leaving that was going to have the effect or was probably going to have the effect of anything Biden doing being seen through that lens and been, you know, given a plus three, you know, that's been heightened even more.
So look, I mean, kudos to Biden or any president that comes in making a policy speech, making a first foreign policy speech that says, you know, we're no longer going to support Saudi and United Emirates led offensive operations in Yemen.
But I happen to think that regardless of one's political affiliation, we should probably take a very careful look at what exactly offensive operations means in terms of its definition.
And what does the Biden administration actually mean about that?
Especially when Yemen will prove, if I was a betting man, to be the worst stain, you know, right up there with Iraq, like worst stain on post 9-11 America.
So I don't know, I just happen to think we should maybe take a close look at this language and find out what it means.
Of course, doing that means that I'm today I was called a blue maga on social media.
And I think that's instructive, right?
I'm not sure what that means.
That means that you're a Biden man, because you're saying, let's look critically at his proposal and see whether he really means what he says about doing the right thing.
No, they mean the opposite.
So I'm blue maga, which I guess means I'm Democrat Trump, like Democrat, make America great again.
So I'm like a secret Trump supporter in like a, you know, wearing blue, you know, sheep's clothing or something.
That's that's what they mean.
And I mean, I've of course seen this.
So that's the first time I saw that clever language.
But you know, that's the kind of stuff you get when you take a hard look at what's Biden, what Biden's doing.
But, you know, if you hate Trump, then ignore him.
Let's move on and hold and hold Biden accountable.
That's so funny to me.
Like, whenever I hear someone say something, the first thing I do is try to put them in a category that I can dismiss.
Okay, well, that must be exhausting.
And he must never learn anything.
You know, I don't know.
Not you.
I'm the guy that called you that, of course.
I mean, just so we're clear.
Anyway, I'm with you.
I got to say, my impression was, I think they more or less mean it, and that by defensive, they mean a lot of patriots and Iron Domes and Aegis radars and anti-drone tech that whatever they can try to do.
So they're, we're not throwing our friends, the Saudis, under the bus, but we are going to stop helping them wage this war.
And then Kirby said the next day that, oh, yeah, no, intelligence, logistical and maintenance support has all been canceled.
You know, the Horton list, if you ask me, what are they doing?
Well, maintenance, logistical and intelligence thing.
All that's canceled as per the president's order.
And we're halting all of them sales and Boeing and Raytheon are sad, but they got actually, did you see where Dave DeCamp wrote about this, where they got at antiwar.com, they got a giant bonus on a bunch of welfare to sell weapons to the Europeans to help make up for it.
Like a half order.
It was not quite as much as they would have made selling to the Saudis this year, but it was like half as much, kind of as a reward for being patient.
Anyway, so it seemed to me like, not that they're ending the war, but that they're switching back to the war against Al-Qaeda.
Maybe they really are going to leave the Houthis alone.
Oh, and then they sent this guy, what's his name, Link later or something.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
The, you know, kind of like a special envoy, you know, over there.
And apparently like his job, they said his job was to try to wind this thing down somehow.
I don't know.
I don't mean to be a, you know, Biden bot or anything like that.
I'm certainly not.
But in context, it seemed like they meant it, that they're changing the policy from one thing to another now.
Right?
No.
And I hope so.
And I think that what happens sometimes is folks will read, you know, a headline or they'll assume that something coming from you is just going to be your hater all the time, you know.
But if anything, throughout the course of the article we're talking about, which I'd written at antiwar.com a few days ago, Biden's bullet from Yemen, question mark, you know, I mean, throughout it, I'm trying to say, look, I really hope this is this is a real thing.
And I really hope that it demonstrates some sort of real pivot.
And same thing on Afghanistan.
I mean, I'm a little less hopeful there.
But I'm willing to say, for example, you know, that once in a while, old Joe will will have a flash of, OK, you know, we'll make we'll make the right call on something.
And I'd like to think that the Yemen war finally went far enough off the rails.
And he felt that he had the political capital to be able to really change the policy here.
And I'm not a person who thinks that we should never give an attaboy, because frankly, if this actually helps Yemenis, right, and if this actually helps even ever so slightly to make us look less like monsters, you know, in the world view, then then like, OK, let's support it.
Let's say, good.
Now let's build on this.
And I think we have to be willing to do both.
Yeah, I think that's totally right.
You know, not even trust, but verify, just take what actually develops and then push for more.
That's it.
And in this case, you know, and this is an important point, too.
I was talking with Hassan El-Tayeb from the Friends Committee, who's been working on this so hard in D.C., along with a bunch of other groups, Code Pink and all different Arab groups whose names I don't know and and whoever he named them all on the show the other day, that they've been working so hard to push for this.
And that really, that's it, right?
There's just regular people in the country who care about this.
There's no power faction that has decided to align with the Houthis.
There's nothing like that.
It's simply people, regular American citizens.
And I guess, you know, Arab-Americans who maybe have even more of an interest in the subject and know a little bit more about it are simply insisting, you know, on humanitarian rights, human rights concerns, that this must be stopped.
That's it.
There's no Yemeni lobby.
There's no Houthi lobby in Washington, D.C.
It's just the Quakers saying this isn't right.
And then, you know, all the other people helping to support and push for that thing.
And so that that really goes to show, you know, that it isn't like we're in charge, the people of the country, but we can move the margin a little bit if we push really hard.
Right.
No, and I think that we need to recognize that.
And I'm glad you said, you know, the Quakers like it.
It's funny because it's true.
You know, there are certain groups and they may be a significant minority, but but there's always been groups that have just been in the favor of decency in the United States and, you know, time immemorial.
And this was a grassroots push and it took a while to pick up steam.
But there have been people who were there on the ground from the start.
You're right there.
The Houthis don't have a whole lot of, you know, influence on K Street or anything.
You know, if anything, it's kind of amazing in a sense.
I mean, not to be all positive and everything.
I'm not known for that anyway.
So no one's really going to mistake it.
But think about what the people who are trying to end this support for the Saudi war, imagine what they were up against.
Like take those Quakers, right, and their allies.
They were up against, besides maybe Israel, the most powerful of lobbies, two of the most powerful lobbies, because you're talking about the military industrial complex, like defense contractor lobbies, and then also the Saudi Gulf States lobby.
And oh, by the way, Israel's basically complicit with them anyway.
So you're really up against the trifecta.
And so look, I mean, I hope that this really makes a difference.
And it would be interesting if it did, too, because so many people in Biden's cabinet or in Biden's national security-like advisory team are the architects who were in on the ground for the start of Yemen.
So look, I mean, I hope this turns out as well as it potentially could.
And I hope we build on it and really relook the whole Saudi relationship.
And there's been a lot of articles from people that we both read who've been saying that for years, if definitely months.
Right.
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And you know what it comes down to?
I was asking Gareth Porter about this, that like, okay, you know, I get it, superpower client state, they help us with our hegemony thing and we provide them security and they buy U.S. government debt and they have influence over Bahrain where we have a big naval base, but still, like, how does this explain just the slavish devotion to this foreign monarchy in this way?
It's just crazy.
We overthrew the English.
We've got nothing like the level of devotion to England that we have to Saudi Arabia, for God's sake.
And Gareth goes, oh, yeah, no, it's all about Bahrain.
You said it, baby.
Fifth fleet naval base right there.
And if the Saudis say to Bahrain to make it hard for us or to kick us out, that's all they got to do is say the word.
And so therefore, you know, our vassal state holds this blackmail over us, holds us helpless to their will by letting their friends, the Bahrainis, have us station our naval base on their territory.
I mean, I mean, I think Gareth's certainly onto something there.
I mean, let's be clear.
I mean, not every country gets to have, you know, an island country.
That's their own little aircraft carrier, like Saudi Arabia does, that they then rent out to us.
I mean, so there is a lot of power and influence there.
It's a fascinating country.
Air Strip 3 or something like that.
I guess that would be code, right?
It is wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
It's wild.
But but at the same time, I think there's there's got to be more to it.
You know, I mean, that's certainly a major factor.
I also think that sometimes, you know, there aren't any adults necessarily minding the war.
There aren't always people thinking this through in any broad sense.
Like, I almost wish that there were like puppet masters, like venal, awful ones who were like thinking every move through, because at least you know what your enemy was and how to fight it.
I think sometimes policies like support for Israel and Saudi Arabia not to minimize the leverage they have or the power of their lobby.
But these things take on like an inertia, especially after half a century or more.
And I don't know.
I sort of never rule out that that that simple argument, I mean, sometimes there's something to that simplicity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes a lot of sense, too, that, you know, hey, whose side are you on?
We have our alliance over there and the lines are pretty stark.
And it's not that they're fighting over religion, but it's Riyadh versus Tehran.
So i.e.
Sunni versus Shia and their alliance versus ours.
And so, as we've talked about, in Iraq, World War II, America added Baghdad to the Iranian side of the ledger, which just makes the emergency for the American slash Sunni side, you know, that much more heightened.
You know, there was a suicide bombing in Baghdad recently, and it sort of seems like that's going to be how it is from now on, right?
The Saudis are going to continue to fling suicide bombers at Baghdad for now and to eternity.
They'll never take that capital city back for the Sunnis, right?
They can't.
There's no force that they have equivalent to your army and Marine Corps that cleansed that capital city of Sunnis for them and and the area around it, too, and just solidified this Iraqi Shia stand.
They can't undo it without a nuke or something.
And so they're just going to keep flinging suicide bombers at it, right?
What else are they going to do?
It really is remarkable that, and I think this is actually true, that the Iraq war is going to really define our foreign policy, I would say for better or worse, but actually just for worse.
I don't know indefinitely, because what you're describing is absolutely true.
To oversimplify, we sort of, you know, change the calculus.
People say, like, gave Iraq to Iran.
I think that's an oversimplification.
But we did take away a Sunni state from the ledger, you know, to the extent that that's a real thing, to the extent that the whole Sunni Shia thing is as simple as that.
We took a Sunni state off the ledger, made it a Shia state.
And now it seems, like you said, we are going to bang our head against the wall.
And so are all our clients and some of our vague enemies trying to undo what can't be undone in Iraq.
And what I mean, talk about blowback.
I mean, sometimes blowback can take this.
Is this going to be 30, 40, 50 years that this is going to define our foreign policy?
And we're not talking about whether the troops are coming home from Iraq very much right now.
But I don't know if I've ever seen, you know, a rocket magnet target like the American troops in Iraq right now.
I mean, someone needs to explain to me just what they do.
Right.
Like, just I have former students that are like, I'll tell you what they're doing.
They're fighting the guys that the Saudis are flinging at Baghdad.
That's right.
That's right.
My former students have like been there and been there and out like already more than once.
And it makes me I mean, seriously, not to get like all like sentimental.
It makes me sick.
It makes you want to vomit in a trash bin thinking, you know, after I did that immediately upon graduating in 2005, essentially, you know, we're still sending soldiers, officers over there.
And like they are their targets, their targets for the people that are, like you said, are being flung at them by some of our ostensible allies, if indirectly.
Yeah.
And this just gets one paragraph in the new book.
And I could only find I honestly, I really researched this.
I mean, I guess I didn't read every book about Iraq, but in terms of like all the major newspapers and everything and a lot of other stuff, you know, kind of more alternative stuff, I find very little reporting, but certainly enough to confirm it was true that the Saudis were financing the Sunni based insurgency against you guys in Iraq war two the whole time.
Certainly, you know, once they let the Skiri write the new constitution in the fall of 04, it was sectarian war was on and our allies, the Saudis were on the side of the Sunni insurgency that you guys were mostly I know you were in Sadr City.
That's an exception.
But for the most part, we're fighting the war on the side of the Shia against.
And then they got away with it.
And I think as I put it in the book, the CIA and a couple of staffers on the National Security Council complained to the Washington Post a couple of times, but that was about it.
No, but George Bush never said to the king, Hey, man, you keep blowing up my guys.
I'm like carpet bomb Riyadh.
What the hell do you think you're doing?
I don't care if you like my Iraq policy at all or not.
You're not going to murder my guys or I'll murder you, which is what someone might think George Bush might say to someone who was murdering his guys.
No, you're guys, Danny.
No, I think what's interesting about what you're saying here is like I had the the relatively strange experience within my 15 months of moving four times like moving sectors.
And so in my and I wrote about this in Ghostwriters in the first like four months, I fought largely Sunni like, you know, Tawheed al-Jihad.
So like a precursor Al-Qaeda in Iraq, basically that kind of stuff.
You know, he's called JTJ in the beginning.
So I saw that end and and then I went up and fought like the Shia militias or whatever.
But I think what you're what you're saying is so interesting because it shows how like totally hypocritical and obtuse and shortsighted our policies are, because, you know, me and you have talked about this a number of times and you've pointed out and instructed me in many cases on the, you know, not overplaying this Iranian influence on the EFPs and the Shia militias.
But count the number of articles that have been written about how exactly to the man, how many American soldiers Iran supposedly killed, right, through supporting the Shia militias versus how many articles have been written in these mainstream papers about how many, you know, how many American troops were killed by Sunni insurgents, you know, that the Saudis and some of our other allies were like backing.
You know, there's almost no there's relatively no coverage of it.
And that that tells you like almost everything you know about what really runs.
Do we really care about our troops?
Do all troops lives matters?
Well, it depends who kills them.
Right.
Or it depends who we say killed them.
I mean, look, in this case, Danny, you know, it's really relevant that 4000 Americans died fighting the Sunni insurgency and 500 died fighting the Shia.
It's a super important point.
And and of and that should be true, logically, because the side that had the most reason to fight, right, the side that had had, you know, the rug pulled out from under their power base was the Sunnis.
And so it made sense that that insurgency went through all of its phases, you know, where it was kind of nationalist and Ba'athist and then Islamist and all those things at once.
I mean, there was a lot of reasons for the Sunnis to fight, because as everyone knows, they were sitting on the losing hand in the sense that they don't have a lot of oil in their sector.
They're a relatively small percentage of the population, et cetera.
So, you know, I mean, there's about as many Sunnis as there are Kurds.
You know, folks forget that.
And then.
So because of it, it made sense that the Sunnis would kill most of the Americans that died.
And, you know, West Baghdad and Anbar were bloodbaths for, you know, for a long stretch, whereas that Shia insurgency really doesn't kick off hardcore until, you know, around the surge with a few flare ups before that.
So, yeah, I know it's an important point you're making.
And really, I mean, isn't it right now that we're off on the history of Iraq war two instead of Yemen anymore?
I just love talking about this stuff.
It's so interesting.
I mean, isn't it really right that Petraeus just picked that fight, right?
Sauter wasn't rising up in insurgency against American forces at the beginning of 2007 when they launched the surge.
And so Petraeus said, well, we're going to have to clamp down on that.
He just said, I'm sending you, Danny, to go and fight this guy and his men.
And then they fought back.
And it was really, as Gareth says, it was all just a pretense to try to frame up Iran and use it as an excuse for strikes inside Iran to try to start the war, because Petraeus was really working for Cheney.
And that was the plan, was how are we going to, you know, the nuclear lie isn't going anywhere for a minute.
So let's switch to the EFP lie.
And that whenever an Iraqi Shiite kills an American, we're going to pretend that Iran killed them.
We're just going to leave out the part where it was an Iraqi Shiite that even did it.
And then we're going to say that, you know, George Bush has to strike IRGC targets inside Iran and all of that.
What do you add to that or to track from that?
No, I mean, I think that.
So Petraeus comes in and look, if you have a if you're a social scientist, if you're a poli sci guy and IR guy like he is, you've got your deductive model that you're going to apply and you're going to apply it wholesale.
There's no like nuance.
Like if you're going to do coin the way they say coin needs to be done, you're going to do the whole thing.
So that meant like disarming all the militias and picking a fight everywhere.
And, you know, clamping down and flooding troops into every place where folks are armed, which is everywhere in Iraq, right, where there was these different militias and stuff everywhere because they were self-defense entities as much as anything else and criminal organizations, all that.
So, yeah, we flood these areas and in a sense end up picking up or at least hyper escalating an existing fight.
America has like, of course, a long term history of like creating the enemies it needs or doesn't need, but somehow decides it wants.
And, you know, Petraeus just took this model, threw it at the wall, saw what stuck.
What ended up sticking was a whole lot of enemies and a lot of troops got killed for it.
They declared victory.
Nothing changed.
And that's what's going to happen in Afghanistan.
I mean, you know, it's happened four times already.
So.
Mm hmm.
Well, so, yeah, let's talk about that.
I mean, they haven't made an official announcement yet, I don't think, but they are clearly, you know, leaking all over the place that they're going to cancel the withdrawal deal with the Taliban and stay.
What do you think is going to happen after that?
I actually do not know.
I mean, the short answer is more of the same.
They'll make it invisible again.
It seems that there's like a process that every president, for the most part, has gone through because of the fourth Afghan war president.
Right.
In the United States.
I mean, if you start with a one when we put troops on the ground, Bush is a little bit of an exception.
You know, someone says that there's endless wars and they've kind of got to stop.
They come in.
They escalate at first.
They sort of stop talking about it and make it invisible.
Then they draw down.
But then they don't draw down as far as they said they were going to.
They hedge and they leave a certain amount and then they hand it off to the next guy, having said, I did what I could.
And then we go through that process again.
What I don't know is what any right thinking mind, which assumes there are any right making these calls, could actually think that the 2,500 troops there can do.
OK, well, we can start bombing again.
All right.
What's the long term effect of that?
OK, we can start doing some, you know, McChrystal style like assassination raids again.
OK, we can do all that.
But even if we add 2000 more soldiers, which some of these reports and these like alarmist, you know, analysts are putting out there, like, let's get back to where it was before Trump did the evil thing.
I do not know what they think those troops or America's, you know, continued effort at this like low level can actually do to meaningfully move the needle in Afghanistan in terms of government legitimacy, facts on the ground in any long term sense.
It seems to me that this has to be this has to be a domestic political calculus, a domestic move, not really a about Afghanistan.
But why should that surprise us?
We never cared about Afghans in the first place, whatever they say about women and burkas and all that.
Yeah.
Boy, they quit talking about that, you know, and plenty of burkas to go around that place now.
That's for sure.
Yet.
No.
So here's the thing of it, man.
I know you saw this thing in The Washington Post.
I forget if we talked about it or not nowadays.
My brain doesn't work as good as before.
But we're the JSOC is the top tier Special Operations Command.
They're flying, as they put it, as the Taliban's air force right now.
It's the awakening movement.
We're separating out the foreign fighter jihadists, which ISIS-K is really just some Pakistanis.
But OK, let's pretend they're Saudi suicide bombers or something.
And so and so we're befriending our enemies, the local tribal Sunni insurgency.
And we're turning with them against the real bad guys, the ISIS guys.
That's where the war stands right now.
And so what an awkward place to be in, Danny, to break the deal with the Taliban that we're going to leave come May.
Yeah.
I mean, we did talk about that.
We did it on one of the episodes where we're going to talk about Nagorno-Karabakh.
We ended up covering that.
And I haven't seen a lot of reporting on that since, for the most part.
America will take a formula that didn't work, but they lie and say did work, like the policies in Iraq, and then keep doing it over and over again.
Like Einstein, you know, apocryphally said the whole like doing the same thing over and over again, expect the result result is insanity.
We're past that.
I wish that's what we were doing.
Instead, we like we do the same thing that we didn't work.
We lied about it, said it did work.
We keep applying it.
It keeps not working.
I mean, we're so off the rails with all this.
And so, yeah, I don't even know what that would mean.
So OK.
Fraud.
That's what it is.
Right.
And then you have the analysts who are telling us that we have to stay because the Taliban is like close to Al-Qaeda still.
Right.
And there's never very much evidence or context or, you know, a real assessment of what that threat would mean to the homeland.
You never see any of that because there largely is not.
Right.
Yeah.
No, they go, oh, you know what it is?
It's Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.
And I'm going, you know what?
This sounds like a personal problem, buddy.
I don't think that has a damn thing to do with me.
And I think that you're using this term Al-Qaeda way too broadly.
You apply it to Al-Shabaab and I shrug and roll my eyes and kind of am annoyed.
But you're telling me I got to worry about every Islamist insurgent in Kashmir and in India?
Nope.
Like, yeah, that sounds like that sounds like a Modi problem.
You know, you'd like to say someone in conversation that sounds like a you problem.
Like, let's let Modi chase his tail a while because he's already got the most militarized, you know, space on Earth there in Kashmir.
There's like five to six hundred thousand Indian soldiers in Kashmir on any given day.
But you know, the language that's being used is so interesting because if they really had a credible intelligence threat that leaving Afghanistan would mean a real imminent threat on the United States from this like alleged collusion with the Taliban, believe they would have leaked every ounce of that.
And that's all you'd see on TV.
For the most part, it's actually been very vague and a lot of hinting.
But instead, you've got a guy like Steve Cole in New Yorker.
OK.
And in his article that he wrote in like January 26th, he doesn't say at any point he doesn't so much as one time in like fifteen hundred words mention a vital U.S. interest there, a realistically assessed threat to the homeland.
No.
Instead, he and the study group authors like the Afghanistan study group, I remember when there was an Iraq one that was a monster.
It's just so wild.
We're using the same language.
What he says is he speaks instead of, quote, Kabul's fortunes, the terrible consequences for working women and the foreboding fortunes of, quote, globalized urbanites and democracy and assorted democracy dreamers.
And all I can say, and this sounds callous, is why do I really care about Kabul's fortunes?
That's not my fortunes, right?
Like that's not America's fortunes.
We can't fight Kabul's battle.
Kabul is lacking legitimacy after 20 years of effort.
The fact that they're using that kind of language of like, no, we have to stay to help Kabul to help women is because they don't have a realistically assessed threat to the homeland to throw at us, because we know the CIA would leak anything that would help whatever the narrative party line that they preferred and that, you know, their masters preferred.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, for the audience, this man was a major in that war in Kandahar, out there fighting and gave his all to this thing.
And he wasn't Buttigieg sitting in a tent driving a Humvee around the camp or some kind of thing.
He's got the right to say it wasn't worth it, you know, a lot more than I do.
I mean, I will say this, like, I'm tired of like banging the veteran drum to some extent, and I've done it less, you know, I've just been like, you know what, I'll just write eight articles about Ethiopia because I'm a dork, you know.
But at the same time, like when Afghanistan comes up and Iraq, but, you know, right now it's Afghanistan.
I'm just like, you know, I was there in 2011 and a bit of 2012 when we had 100,000 Americans on the ground.
And I was in the district of the province, which, you know, for the army, because the Marines had helmets.
For the army, we were told that we were the main effort, right?
And that's a big deal in army terminology.
We were the main effort.
Kandahar province, protecting Kandahar city was it.
Like we were going to, you know, our strategy was going to be made or broken right there in Kandahar.
And all I know is that my troops, including myself, well into that year, we're sometimes still diving into canals before we left the serpentine of barriers outside our outpost, because we held zero inches of ground besides our little Alamo, literal sandbag outpost that I lived on and I independently commanded.
Why am I supposed to believe?
It's an insult to me.
It's an insult to my, my dead guys, my wounded guys, the ones who killed themselves afterwards and their families to try to tell the American people that 2,500 troops is going to make any difference, that another 2000 is going to make any difference.
Because when we did 100,000 and we flooded that joint, we didn't win a thing.
I never felt like a winner.
I felt like I was barely holding on and treading water at best.
And we, and we fought hard.
I tried hard.
I wasn't like quitting and avoiding anything.
Danny, tell me, I'm sorry, as long as we're on Afghanistan here, let's wrap up with this.
Can you tell me what is the strategic significance of the Bagram airbase other than, I guess, you know, keeping the Taliban from sacking Kabul?
Does it have any other use for the American military or the American people that you could think of?
No, not, not that I can think of.
Of course, we know that that was what the same base that the Soviets largely used as their main logistics hub.
But it's important because we, because we're there.
You know what I mean?
It's, it's not to my knowledge, right?
It's not like some sort of layover point for other operations.
In fact, you know, Afghanistan and like that whole region, we're talking like kind of Northeast Afghanistan too, is, is, is really a, just a backwater regionally in the sense that it's this like landlocked, like vaguely almost Central Asia, not too far from China thing.
So one person might look at that and say like, oh, it puts us close to China.
But you know, I, I don't think so.
In fact, having Kabul in our possession, having, you know, Bagram outside of Kabul in our possession has only required us to kind of put other bases, you know, like we used to have in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, which is where I went through Kyrgyzstan like four or five times.
Those satellites are satellites of the Bagram thing.
So I don't know that it to be like a layover point to get somewhere else.
That's the end of the empire, sort of, you know, I mean, that's the end of the road.
And it doesn't influence, you know, operations or logistics further West in, you know, the, the real Middle East.
So no, I think it's, it's important because we're there.
So we say it's important.
Yeah.
All right.
You guys, you got to catch up with all of Danny's writings.
I do too.
I'm behind on a couple of articles here, Danny, I see you've been delving deeply into America's policy in Africa.
And then you've got these great articles about Biden on Yemen and on Mali, guess we're going to be escalating there too.
So maybe we'll be catching up on some more of your Africa coverage here sometime in the medium term, if we can.
Absolutely.
Yep.
You know, I'm a hyper geek, so I'm going to be working that piece and going to be working a piece up on a called why we need to talk, we need to talk about Chad.
So, you know, stay tuned.
Thanks for having me on Scott.
All right.
Thanks very much, Dan.
Appreciate it, buddy.
Okay.
Talk soon.
All right, you guys, that's Danny Sherson.
He's one of the great writers of Baghdad, patriotic dissent, and check out all of his articles at antiwar.com.
