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You guys on the line, I've got the Skeptical Vet.
That's his name on Twitter.
Danny Sherson, he's a major in the US Army.
Man, he was in the Iraq and Afghan surges.
He wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad, as well as Patriotic Dissent.
He's the most prolific writer in the anti-war movement, and we're very proud to feature all of it.
Much of it.
Just about everything.
One way or the other, at AntiWar.com, where he is a regular contributor.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Listen, man, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm just throwing a dart here, but I'm pretty sure that you must have read this proposal for a new peace deal for Afghanistan that was published by the Washington Post.
I'm crossing my fingers the answer to that is yes, so that then I can ask you the follow-up, which is what in the hell is going on around here, man?
Well, I mean, of course, the thing about folks like us is we can't stay away from it, right?
Sometimes I wish I wasn't keeping abreast of some of the things that are going on, because it's inevitably always disappointing.
I think that one of the interesting things is everything, when it comes to Iraq or Afghanistan or any of the American forever wars, the word new gets thrown around a lot, right?
There's always a new something, like, oh, this is the new plan for this or the new strategy, and nothing's new under the sun, right?
Every time, it's like the old is new again.
The reason I say that is not just to play with the language, but to make a broader point that, look, everything's been tried before, for the most part.
Most of the stuff that gets branded as this is a new political deal, this is a new settlement, this is a new compromise to satisfy the Biden administration's hedge, needle threading, the reality is that it's not new at all, right?
It's often something we've seen before that's already failed, but ultimately, it's failed multiple times.
I think that that's one of the big things that kind of jumps out at me.
So okay, this is an eight-page proposal.
I wonder if there are three unique and new thoughts in the entire thing, and the answer is usually no.
Well, but I mean, they are talking about scrapping the Constitution and starting over, including the Taliban, which is new, right, or not?
No, I mean, it is- I mean, the Taliban and their friends have been in the parliament one way or the other for a while, I know that, but still.
Right.
No, I mean, what's interesting about it is that it's new for the latest phase of America's actual troops on the ground war, and what I do think- Right, and that's the real question, right, is this cover to leave or not?
And well, I hope so.
I mean, look, it's nasty to say that, but I'm kind of over caveats.
This to me, in some ways, is a recognition of reality, sort of, right?
And when I say nothing is new, we've put the Taliban in power before, and we've abandoned Afghanistan before, and I sort of reject the term abandoned in many cases, because it implies that we could have done something, but the fact that this was leaked, right, or the fact that this was kind of shrouded in secrecy, I think does tell us something, because this looks nothing like what the Afghanistan study group put forward, for example, right?
This to some extent is a recognition of reality, which, as you mentioned, the Taliban's already been in the parliament.
They just couldn't run under the Taliban party platform, but I paid the Taliban to dig ditches or pretend they were.
I mean, this is not particularly new in that sense, but what I think is interesting about it, again, is what you said, that for the American involvement, where it was always built on the facade of, like, Kabul legitimacy, constitutionalism, much of that was a lie, but it was always built on that, and then we fought on that lie, right?
You know, it's like in The Wire, where I think Slim Charles says something like, well, if it's a lie, then we fight on that lie, you know?
And that's kind of how the last 20 years have gone for the United States, and it is time to recognize some of the realities on the ground, which is, of course, that the Taliban is in a stronger position than they've probably ever been in, and that Kabul has never really been legitimate, and it's just been another group of warlords, largely.
So I think that that is interesting, and new for the last 19 years that we've had troops on the ground.
Yeah.
You know, I wondered if that was what you meant when you're like, oh, it's the same thing again.
In other words, we're right back where we were in 1998, with the Taliban in charge, with the Northern Alliance refusing to accept their authority, right?
Wouldn't it be interesting to think of it that way?
Because that is exactly what I meant, you know, and you and I have like a long enough arc of studying this stuff to kind of get it, but I think maybe it's misleading to certain listeners who are thinking just, you know, since 2001, October, but isn't it interesting if the Afghan war, such as it is, the American phase the last 20 years, ends with the status quo largely what you just described, which is the Taliban seizes maybe the lion's share of Afghanistan, certainly the South and the Far East, and a new Northern Alliance that just happens to be rebranded, you know, as a legitimate government, right?
And maybe holds Kabul a little longer, basically controls the North.
And so we could end up in a situation, like you just said, where it's 1998 all over again, and then you're left wondering.
Yeah, now Hekmatyar is inside the gate already.
Right, right.
Well, like what?
And then what was it all for?
Right.
And then I'm always left asking that.
And I mean, the money and the blood and the 2400 American lives and you know, whatever Afghan lives, which are countless because we don't bother counting and maybe they would have died anyway in a certain sort of civil war.
But nevertheless, it does leave you feeling very, very dark, right?
A little like fatalistic.
Yeah.
Look, Danny, I mean, the whole thing is unfair what they asked you guys to do over there.
The whole thing.
Never mind how unfair it was for the people of Afghanistan who never heard of New York City to have to go through this for something that they had essentially nothing to do with whatsoever.
And then on what was obviously an impossible task from the very beginning, to create a central government for a nation of countryside.
And what the hell are we even talking about here?
You know?
I mean, I don't know why.
The whole thing is stupid.
I use the analogy all the time and I almost wonder why no one else does.
I mean, the all volunteer force, right?
The American active duty army will say a Marine Corps is basically 700000 Don Quixotes for the last 20 years.
Right.
Just tilting at windmills all over the world, being adulated for by the American people, except not really because no one really pays all that much attention.
But they say the right things and put us on jumbotrons.
But the reality is, I mean, really, it's not woe is me.
It's not to say that the U.S. military doesn't have some complicity in this, that we shouldn't question militarism and the reasons you joined and all that.
But in terms of what we've actually been asked to do, as you mentioned, I mean, there is a tragic tragicomic element to it.
It's almost Greek.
I mean, we're literally out there on impossible ventures and then constantly rebranding them and constantly coming up with these like, oh, this will work.
This new snake oil strategy will work or we'll try it this way or now we'll have a polite emperor in charge.
Now we'll have a buffoonish emperor in charge.
Now we'll give a middle ground Biden, you know, emperor in charge.
But again, when I say nothing's new under the sun, I mean, nothing's worked.
We've tried a lot of this before.
And if the answer is to go back to 1998 in Afghanistan, that sucks.
But maybe it's a recognition of reality and the limits of power, right?
The limits of American power and agency to control things, especially in distant lands that aren't ours.
Man, if they'd left 10 years ago, the Taliban might have had a reason to find to negotiate with the government in Kabul, where now they might imagine that they could just walk right in and take over the capital city if they want to.
And maybe they were already there.
You know, they're just they don't want to bring on a massive American air campaign against their fixed positions.
You know, by biting off more than the Americans will tolerate them getting away with at any one time while we're still there.
Right.
But then once we leave on a Matthew Ho said something that was wise to me that, you know, in 96 or 94 through 96, you know, the Taliban had the support of Bill Clinton's government along with the Saudis and the Pakistanis for the specific purpose of taking Kabul and creating a monopoly government there was what they wanted.
You know, lots of Sharia law pipeline.
We can live with that.
They said a direct quote.
And so but this time they wouldn't have that.
And presumably the Biden government would lean hard as hell on the Pakistanis to not support their sacking of Kabul and that to maybe, you know, keep the lines more or less where they are on the ground.
And then as far as going to Kabul, it should be going to Congress, not going to war.
And is it possible?
But then with the Ghani government, the Abdullah sort of pseudo unity government, as they call it, as it stands now, I mean, is it possible at all that they will feel the pressure from the Americans and really try to negotiate with the Taliban or they're just more determined to fight?
I mean, how they got General Dostum and all these guys, how are they supposed to compromise with the Taliban?
Danny?
I'm worried.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's a warlord coalition.
I mean, they call it a unity government.
I guess it is.
It's a unification of various warlord militias, you know, that are tolerating one another.
What are you getting along with?
Heck, mature.
Right.
So maybe they can get along with the Taliban.
He ain't no different from them.
It's interesting, though.
Oh, of course not.
No.
I mean, if we want them to have to negotiate seriously with the Taliban, the Kabul government, they're only going to do so under duress.
They're only going to do so if they're out of options.
And the way to make them out of options is to pull their air support and to pull the troops, you know, whatever limited amount are left.
And that sounds really callous.
But you know, I'm a professional enabler in my personal life for certain people.
OK, so I'm not one to speak.
But countries can be enablers, too.
And the best way to make sure that Kabul is intransigent and actually blocks any whatever hope there is, if any, that you could make it work with the Taliban in terms of a unity government.
But they're going to have to try.
The only way to make sure that happens and happens in a serious way where they really give themselves to trying is to pull the is to pull the planes, right, to pull the air support and the drones and some of the logistics and probably some of the mercenaries, because there's like more mercenaries there now, you know, Western, I mean, then there are U.S. troops until we do that.
It's not going to happen.
And one last thing about the lines on the ground, whether or not maybe this goes back to 98, but except Kabul stays maybe in the hands of the you know, the Northern Alliance government, you know, government that's in charge now, a lot of people forget that if you're a geeky historian, Kandahar was kind of the the main capital, the main city of Afghanistan through most of its history.
Not Kabul.
That's more mod.
That's a more modern manifestation of its power in, so to speak, the region that we now call Afghanistan, because it wasn't always the same borders was in Kandahar, right?
Iskandar, right?
Named after Alexander the Great.
That's where it comes from.
That's where the power is.
So, you know, if for the Taliban's perspective, I mean, I wonder if they couldn't live with and maybe they can and maybe they can't.
Maybe the sort of young Turks within the Taliban won't accept this.
But, you know, maintaining Kandahar and the south and the Pashtun heartland in the mountains, you know, by like the Khyber Pass and stuff in the east where they used to wipe out British armies.
Maybe that should be kind of enough.
And what we deal with is a new settlement, a new partition that recognizes the ethno linguistic boundaries as they exist on the ground in modern Afghanistan.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Man, you know, you're right that this is not the Afghan study group's policy, which, you know, was the the military consensus that, you know, the same thing as four years ago and the same year, the same as eight years before that, that the beginning of the new presidential administration, the military's got to roll them into escalating here.
And so, you know, in a tea-leaves criminologist kind of a sense thing, is there a thing here where Biden is telling the Pentagon, no, I'm really not happy with your options and I really do want to at least seemingly, sincerely threaten them with a May withdrawal?
I mean, I guess, so this is the thing I hadn't asked you yet either, which is that, man, they're bound to leave on May 1st because if they don't, the Taliban are going to go back to war.
And they know that and they can blame Trump if they want or whatever it is, but they are absolutely painted into that corner at this point, right?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, they're already at war, but they're inevitably going to escalate if the deadline comes and goes and, you know, the U.S. troops stay and nothing changes.
And remember, like the, you know, the Taliban is a baseball team.
They fight on a baseball schedule, right?
There's fighting seasons.
I mean, one of the things that always fascinated me about the war in Afghanistan is that it had its, you know, everyone always talks about, oh, they don't, you know, the Taliban doesn't follow the Geneva Conventions, et cetera.
And, you know, that's true to some extent, but there were de facto rules, right?
In 2011 in Kandahar, which is one of the two hearts of the surge, right, of the surge strategy, like the fighting grounds.
And I was in one of them, you know, the one being like Helmand and a little bit out in the east, too.
But they didn't fight at night.
They didn't.
They just like night was the quietest time, which is like the opposite of most wars, right?
We could sleep pretty easy at night and they don't really like fighting in the cold either, in the winter.
And the reason I bring that up is the May deadline kind of just happens to cohere with basically around the time that what they call every year the fighting season in the spring amps up.
So if you look at U.S. and Afghan casualties year by year, and of course, you know, there's having written books on this, they spike every year, you know, in like the March, April time frame is when it starts to pick up and then late spring, early summer.
And so the timeline is interesting because the Taliban, it'll look like the Taliban has gone back to war.
And certainly they will.
And they'll probably have a little mini Tet offensive, if I had to guess, but it'll be a mini one.
I won't have the power of, say, 68 Tet, but it will also cohere with their plans already.
I mean, in other words, this is what they do.
This is their 20th season, you know, and they're a team that's on the come up, right?
They're like the Royals in 2013, 14, they've been getting better, right?
And they're about ready to win the championship.
You know, they play a lot of small ball and they put the time and the work in and they got a heck of a farm system.
And I'm taking the analogy far, but it's a real thing.
And so I do think, yeah, but as to Biden, I mean, that's a great article.
If you haven't written that one yet, my friend, I'm doing it next week.
Now that you say it, I wasn't.
But when you said it, I think it's an interesting one.
And I think I will write it up for anti-war as an original.
But the last thing on Biden is I hope that that's what this is like.
I hope I don't know if we know that Biden is really going to pull the rug out from under the kind of like Pentagon defense analyst, you know, class, you know, I don't trust the guy and I don't think he's been right about very much ever.
But occasionally his instincts on Afghanistan have been decent, at least compared to some others.
And I would really like to think that as president, he'll be even close to where he was as vice president, which is the most skeptical guy in the room.
Maybe not skeptical enough, but the most skeptical within the Obama team about the surge and about the ability of the United States to really make a difference, because he's the guy that said to Holbrook, I'm not sending my boy back over there to fight for women's rights.
It won't work.
It's not going to work.
Well, I hope he lives that out as president.
I'm skeptical of that, but maybe.
And this could be some indicator of that.
In fact, it comes out of the State Department, not the Pentagon is also interesting.
Yeah.
Man, and, you know, it seemed like that letter that they wrote to Ghani that was leaked to Tolo News there last week was, I mean, I don't know.
I don't read that many diplomatic letters to compare it to, but they seem to really be threatening him there.
And then, although I honestly, I don't know how to read it.
I don't really understand it because.
It seemed like they were saying, look, he's calling our bluff that we're not going to leave as long as he won't deal with the Taliban, then we won't leave him in the lurch.
So we have to let him know, screw you.
We are not bluffing.
We will to leave you in the lurch.
But then the thing is, they have to leave him in the lurch because otherwise they're going to have to send more troops, right?
They're going to need just for force protection.
They're starting the war back up again.
The guys at Bagram are going to need reinforcements, right?
This is going to be, could be a real problem when they've had this kind of cease fire for almost a year and a half.
It could be the start of not just like the championships, like you're saying, sort of season after season, but this is a whole new kind of ball field that they're playing on now where they're, you know, virtually every official and everybody in the stands and everybody on the field.
And we have just a couple outfielders left over there kind of deal, you know?
I mean, it is interesting about like, most people don't understand how the military works and like, I mean, either do I.
And I was in it like nobody really does, but there are certain elements of like we do business a certain way.
And it's force protection is one of them.
And people forget why did the first Marines go into Vietnam in 1965 or forgets why the actual mission was, they sent a couple of Italians in, was to protect the air base, like Danang and stuff where we had air power and maintenance people and we had like advisors.
That was what, that was the initial thing that brought them in.
So we sent them in to provide force protection, but then they said, well, in order to make, to do force protection, in order to have the Viet Cong stop attacking the base every night, we're going to have to start doing some active patrolling, right?
Like the best defense is a good offense kind of thing.
And it just ballooned from there.
Now this is a different scenario because we're 20 years in, but the point you're making is an important one, which is that if you want to escalate even in the air or even with advisors, right, you know, name all like the Obama Biden-esque options, right, where they like to just toy with the technology and the proxies rather than like reinvading someplace, it still will probably involve some sort of escalation because the more sites you operate, the more security you need.
And the mercenaries, the contractors can only do so much of that.
And so there's absolutely, if, if there's, if we stay and if we say that we're not only staying, but we're going to try to change the facts on the ground, even marginally, that's going to require more than the number of troops on the ground right now.
And the question is, how do they sell it?
Right.
Cause you can't send a new surge in the old way that like we did in 2009 and 2007 and in Iraq and Afghanistan, that probably won't play right now politically, I think.
But they'll find, they'll have to find ways to escalate.
And then the question is, I think this is the final question.
No one has an answer to this.
And this is the answer.
The question, I mean, 257 Afghan security forces were killed in February, not the fighting season and during a time when ostensibly there's supposed to be a decrease in violence because of whatever deal.
Now, of course, the war never really stopped.
Now, 257 dead in the shortest month of the year, right under those conditions is a lot of Afghan security forces.
And you know, that's 3084 a year for many years now.
The Afghan government has not been able to replace their casualties at the rate they're losing them.
So then they just made it secret.
Right.
We just, you know, we classified it basically.
But the New York Times reports on it because they use other open source reporting to get close to the number.
No one has an answer to that.
And no one has an answer to the fact that Kabul can't pay its own police.
Like they require foreign aid, right, to maintain their budget, you know, even just to pay and field an army to do our bidding, sort of, or to do their own self-protection bidding.
And I just, I just think that there are no options on the table that have an answer to that, because the surge of 100,000 Americans couldn't really answer that.
So what's a surge of 2000 or staying two extra years or you name it going to do?
The only thing that can answer that is a degree of sort of surrender and fatalism and busting the whole paradigm and jumping out of the matrix and jumping out of the matrix is partly what I think the leaked State Department report does to some extent, which is admitting that the facts on the ground are such that, you know, we can't even pretend anymore.
20 years of this charade is about to blow up in our face.
Yeah.
And you know, isn't it telling too that, I mean, there are some hawks who are saying, no way we can't leave, but where are all the usual suspects?
Where's Condoleezza Rice saying, no, we promised we would never leave again.
She's not saying a damn thing because everybody knows, everybody knows the gig is up, man.
You know, we could win with H-bombs or we could lose, right?
We could win with genocide or we could call it off.
And that the game, look at what year we're talking about this.
And so the silence of a lot of the people who got us into this in the Bush and in the Obama years is pretty telling to me.
But then, so that I'm sorry, I got to wedge extra question in here first.
One of the recent times we spoke about this, say within the last three or four interviews, I'm pretty sure, Danny, I think we talked about the Washington Post said that JSOC, that is top tier special operations forces air power is flying as the Taliban's air force fighting ISIS.
And they say that they're not in direct contact with them, but they know who's who on the ground and they're just flying above as air cover and bombing the hell out of ISIS targets for the Taliban as they're fighting in the Nangarhar province.
I mean, talk about upsetting the whole goddang everything going on over there right now.
If we leave on that note, it's like, all right, good game to stick with your baseball thing here.
You know, you guys beat us, but we're being good sports about it.
Hope you guys can be too.
And good old handshake on the way out, high five kind of thing and leave.
But we're going to ruin all that and turn this into another little mini war against them and then leave anyway later.
But then also, that's the whole thing.
But then also, I guess I'll go ahead and ask you, too, about like, politically speaking, how can they do anything but kick the can down the road somehow, even by sending 50,000 troops?
Isn't that better politically for a Democrat than knowing that two years from now, at minimum, the Taliban are going to rule all the capital city and there's going to be refugees everywhere and massive, horrible fighting.
And then at that point, all those silent people now who don't dare speak up are going to start saying, oh, yeah, see, I told you, you shouldn't leave and all of these things and make them look bad and make them look weak.
You know, as George Carlin said, what did we do wrong in Vietnam?
We pulled out.
Well, that's not a very manly thing to do, is it?
You can't.
You can't.
I mean, how is Biden supposed to run for reelection when Afghanistan or Kamala Harris, when Afghanistan is in chaos?
Because it will be, you know, almost certainly.
And then not that it isn't now, but of course, as long as we have forces there, well, hell, that's just despite our best efforts.
But if it's after we leave, then it's because we left.
And that's unforgivable.
Well, I mean, there's so much that's that's interesting and valuable, which you said that you just really don't see reported or people don't really have this discussion, which is, you know, the Democrat dilemma that I always talk about of toughness and the language is fascinating and not just because I love prose, you know, in the Cold War, there's actually a scholar.
I can't remember his name.
He's got an Italian last name.
He wrote a whole article about the language used by cold warriors, like Cold War hawks, and talked about the sexuality of it that you mentioned with George Carlin.
In other words, to be, you know, if you weren't strong enough on communism, you were soft.
Right.
You know, you were you were like all of this was very sexualized and manliness.
And I think that matters because with the Democrats in particular, you know, they're afraid to look weak because they believe the Republican talking points, even though they're not really accurate, Democrats start all kinds of wars, maybe more wars.
But they've they've they've begun to believe the pejoratives that have been thrown at them because the Republicans are good at one thing for sure, and that's staying on message to a certain extent.
So what you're talking about with that is they've started to believe that they are the weak party and and because they believe that they're so afraid of it.
And so the fear, of course, is that they that, you know, they'll look weak and run for election.
But what I hope is different this time, you know, just wrapping up here is that the gig is up.
The gig is up.
And 20 years in, I just I have to believe that for once and I'm going to be disappointed, but I have to believe that for once they're not going to play the game and just do the script again where they're well, we'll stay a little longer because of political gain and we don't want to be the ones that lost Afghanistan.
But Afghanistan's already been lost.
It's a zombie war.
Just no one told the people who are going to still die in it, that the war is already lost.
Like the only people who don't know are the walking dead that are just rolling around in this zombie war.
And I think that that's sort of an important point.
But we will see what happens.
And we've talked about those flying for the Taliban and all that.
And you raise an important point there.
The bottom line is, if you want to know where the way a war is really going is a little like Pearl.
Just watch for the special forces doing because the special forces guys are usually a little more honest.
The nature of their mission is like they're usually in the vanguard of where it's really going.
So whether it was, you know, for example, when they were forming the local police, which was really just warlord militias as part of the village stability operations like when I was there, that was the way the war was going right towards proxies and accepting the reality that the Kabul government really is warlord anyway.
It was going there.
And if you keep your eye on what the Green Berets are doing, you know, they don't just grow beards and look cool.
They're usually on the forefront of what's coming.
And they're a little more honest about it.
Not because they're great guys.
It's just the nature of their mission.
So yeah.
But anyway, you know, I've got to run here in a minute, Scott, but but I think this is really important.
And I have a feeling we're going to be talking more about it because there's going to be responses to the response that there's going to be responses to this memo.
There's going to be actions taken.
And I think that what you brought up is so important.
It'll be interesting to see how Biden plays this.
Yeah.
Is he going to get out of the matrix or is he going to do the same thing again?
And May 1st is coming fast, buddy.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
All right.
Danny Sherson, thank you very much, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
It's a pleasure.
All right, you guys.
Again, that's Danny Sherson.
He was a major in the wars in both the Afghan and Iraq surges, and he taught history at West Point and he's a regular writer for us at Antiwar dot com.
Oh, check out his most recent book.
It's great.
It's called Patriotic Dissent.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
