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 scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Matthew Ho, and earlier I was telling you about how retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis is the hero of the Afghan whistleblowing war of 2012, telling the truth about the failure of Petraeus and McChrystal's Afghan surge there, Obama's Afghan surge there.
Well, Matthew Ho, he was the hero of 2009, a former Marine Corps captain, decorated combat veteran of Iraq War II, who was then serving as a State Department employee in Afghanistan, and blew the whistle in the summer of 2009, trying to stop Obama from launching that stupid, horrible surge in the first place, and gave him all that he needed in order to avoid that.
But, of course, was ignored anyway, and, of course, then Davis and Ho both have been just great on everything ever since then, too, and we're sure as hell lucky to have them.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Matthew?
Thanks, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
I'm really happy you're here, because I want to talk to you about this horrible thing, and I'm going to make you sit here and listen to it for two and a half minutes, but I am too.
And this is Joe Biden at his press conference yesterday.
I wanted to ask you about Afghanistan.
You face a May 1st deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country.
As a candidate in foreign affairs, you wrote that it is past time to end these forever wars.
Can you commit to the American people that by May 2nd, the U.S. will no longer have forces in Afghanistan?
The answer is that it's going to be hard to meet the May 1 deadline, just in terms of tactical reasons, hard to get those troops out.
So what we've been doing, what I've been doing, and what Secretary Blinken has been doing has been we've been meeting with our allies, those other nations that have NATO allies who have troops in Afghanistan as well.
And if we leave, we're going to do so in a safe and orderly way.
We're in consultation, I said, with our allies and partners on how to proceed.
And Secretary Blinken is meeting in Brussels this week with our NATO allies, particularly those who have forces there.
And General Austin just met with Kayani, and I'm waiting for the briefing on that.
He is the leader, quote, in Afghanistan and Kabul.
And there's a U.N.-led process that's beginning shortly on how to mechanically get people – how to end this war.
But it is not my intention to stay there for a long time.
The question is, how and in what circumstances do we meet that agreement that was made by President Trump to leave under a deal that looks like it's not being able to be worked out to begin with?
How's that done?
But we are not staying a long time.
You just said, if we leave.
Do you think it's possible that we – We will leave.
The question is when we leave.
Sorry, do you believe, though, it's possible we could have troops there next year?
I can't picture that being the case.
I'm sorry.
I know people are probably desensitized after four years of Donald Trump.
I can't believe this man is the President of the United States right now.
My God.
Yeah, I mean, I just – I don't know, man.
These people in Washington, D.C. just lie and lie and lie, and everyone just goes along with it and acts like it's OK.
I mean, this nonsense about we can't get the troops out because of tactical reasons, that's such – you know, you're talking about 3,500 men and women there.
That's what, 15 747s, right?
I mean, it's just such nonsense.
It's such – nonsense is too much of a use of business.
It's just lies.
It's just continued lies, and these people don't care.
They don't care that they've wrecked Afghanistan, they've wrecked the entire Muslim world, they have wrecked hundreds of thousands of American families, have been just wrecked by deaths, injuries, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, suicide, moral injury, et cetera.
These people just don't care, you know?
And you've got a press, a media that can't even get the basic facts about Afghanistan right anyway.
If I hear one more time that the Afghan war is 20 years old, I'm going to lose it, Scott.
You know?
I mean, like, this war has been going on nonstop since the 1970s, right?
I mean, so you've got an American press that can't even get the basic construct of the war correct, you know, let alone, you know, ask a simple – you know, ask questions or follow up, you know, what do you mean by you can't get the troops out for tactical reasons?
You know, it's complete BS.
And what does he mean that General Qayyani, the former commander of the Pakistani military, is the president of Afghanistan?
He has no idea even what he's talking about at all.
He's completely befuddled up there.
Totally.
You know, it is.
What these men and women at senior levels know is incredibly limited.
You know, you can understand it in some ways because they deal with so much, right?
You know, a guy like President Biden he's dealing with, you know, or President Trump or President Obama.
If you give them the benefit of the doubt, which I don't think at this point any of them ever deserve, but if you're just, say, for the sake of argument to do that, they do have to know so much about so many things that they are dependent upon their staff for understanding key points.
But I mean, you see this all the time where, you know, they just don't know the basics or they don't know the realities.
I mean, I've had experiences where, you know, I've been in Congress with members of Congress who just basic things like number of troops we have in Afghanistan or number of troops we have in Iraq, just basic information like that.
They don't know.
Yeah.
Right.
You know.
And look, I misspeak all the time, too.
I'll call Daniel Davis, Matthew Ho right to his face or something.
I don't know.
I do that.
But in this context, you know, General Kiani, it seems like he would have at least noticed that he said the wrong name there.
And no, no, no.
I mean, of course, I meant Ghani.
Something like that.
Right.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It rhymes.
But it rhymes.
Right.
But this is and he may not really know the difference at all.
I mean, is the real problem, I think, you know, what, a week or two ago, he couldn't remember his secretary of defense's name.
You know, I think there's a lot to it.
And he's talking about running for reelection again.
He asked him at the end there, look, do you think can you do you think we might still be there next year?
But I just, you know, I don't know.
I don't picture that happening or something.
I forgot exactly how he said it, but you're in charge.
What is he talking?
And then.
OK, well, let me ask you this.
This could be meaningful, I think, Matthew, in the sense of he had a discussion with the staff about what to say.
So this stuff you're saying he's lying about.
It's a tactical thing.
But is there like a silver lining on that where I mean, first of all, he's admitting if that's true at all, as you say, is probably just outright lie.
But if it's true at all, that means that the military has not been preparing to leave by the agreed upon deadline that they've been insubordinate to the previous president anyway all this time.
If they're not really ready to leave by May 1st or if they're incapable of drawing down in the space of a year and three months, then they're clearly not capable of winning a war either.
So that ought to be the end of that.
But anyway, the way they framed it was, well, you know, it's just a tactical thing.
We got to stay a little bit longer.
But that could be worse.
Right.
They could have said, well, look, he could have said we have to stay there to make sure that the Kabul government does not get taken over by the Taliban or, you know, that they don't sack the capital city or something, something.
Instead, he defined it very narrowly, although, I mean, who could believe it's going to take till the fall to withdraw?
But yeah, I'm just saying he could have announced that our strategy is that we're not admitting defeat yet.
He didn't say that.
Yeah, he certainly didn't.
At least gone is the at least gone is the victory narrative, right, that has defined this for so many years where we're going to be we're going to defeat the Taliban militarily and drive them to the negotiating table and, you know, all the other.
He didn't he didn't throw in a reference, at least I didn't hear him throw in a reference to 9-11.
You know, he didn't make any kind of sunk cost argument.
Right.
He didn't put up a you know, he didn't put up all the all the justifications, the rationalizations, the apologies, et cetera, that existed before.
And we've heard ad nauseum for, you know, 15, 16, 17, 18 years now.
But you're absolutely right.
He is the man.
In charge.
And he doesn't seem like he has a thought about where Afghanistan has been with regards to his own decision making for the last 20 years.
I mean, he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while he was in the Senate.
He then became vice president of the United States and was heavily involved in the escalation of the war and the decision making with that and then with the overseeing of that.
And I mean, he has been integral.
And so the way he talks about this, it's as if he's just encountering this for the first time almost.
Right.
You know, or that he doesn't have much information on it.
He's unfamiliar with it.
And he is just just kind of all this stuff has happened by accident.
You know, it's just just has occurred that that fate has brought this upon the United States.
And now he's got to figure it out.
Yeah.
So here's the thing, man.
I have here, my friend, if I could click on the right tab.
Statement by Islamic Emirate regarding vague remarks by the American president.
This is from the Taliban's website, Alamara English dot net.
As the U.S. president recently made vague remarks about implementation of the Doha agreement and withdrawal of all foreign troops, and moreover, some NATO member states are seeking to extend the occupation of Afghanistan.
The Islamic Emirate would like to clarify its stance regarding the issue as following.
The Doha agreement is the most sensible and shortest path to ending the past 20 year war between Afghanistan and America and establishing a peaceful Afghanistan.
The Islamic Emirate is firmly committed to its undertakings outlined in the agreement and wants the American side to also remain firmly committed to the Doha agreement and not wasting this historic opportunity due to flawed advice and incitement by warmongering circles.
If God forbid, all foreign troops not withdraw from Afghanistan on the specified date in line with Doha agreement, undoubtedly it will be considered a violation of the accord by America for which it shall be held liable and which shall also harm its international standing.
In such a case, the Islamic Emirate, as representative of the believing, valiant and the mujahid Afghan nation, will be compelled to defend its religion and homeland and continue its jihad and armed struggle against foreign forces to liberate its country.
All responsibility for the prolongation of war, death and destruction will be on the shoulders of those who committed this violation.
The resolve and seriousness of the people of Afghanistan must not be tested any further and reason and logic must prevail to end war.
Afghanistan is the home of Afghans.
The establishment of whatever type of government is the lawful right of its citizens.
No other nation can impose upon them a government or system from abroad, nor do they reserve such a right." Matthew Ho, what do you say?
I think that if U.S. and foreign troops are there May 2nd, the Taliban are going to start killing them again, something they have not done since a Doha agreement was signed.
Look, the Doha agreement is flawed.
I mean, I don't think you're going to find anyone who's going to say it's a great deal.
You know, I mean, there's lots of things about it that anyone who on any side of this argument can say this is not a good agreement.
You know, one of the things, of course, too, is there's no transparency.
There's all these hidden and secret annexes that, to my understanding, the Afghan government doesn't even have access to.
So there's all these secret deals between that Zalmay Khalilzad on behalf of Donald Trump made with the Taliban that no one has access to besides the Americans and the Taliban and maybe some others, too, maybe the Pakistanis or who.
But yeah, the Taliban will start killing Americans on May 2nd, which will lead to an escalation of violence, of course, because that's what always happens.
You know, I mean, violence begets violence.
It's just that simple.
And that will give the hardliners on all sides in the U.S. government, you know, the pundits in D.C., the Raytheon, Lockheed, you know, lobbyists, as well as then to the hardliners in the Taliban and, of course, the hardliners in the Afghan government, all the reason they need to break this peace a peace process apart.
This is the first peace process in Afghanistan in three decades.
You know, the last time there was a peace process in Afghanistan was after the Soviet Union left, and that was famously undone by a lot.
There's a lot of bad things.
A lot of things happen.
But one of it was the fact that the United States just, you know, continued to to obstruct that process by continuing to arm the Mujahideen, you know, by just just all kinds of other chicanery.
So what you're looking at here is the very real possibility that if U.S. and foreign troops are there without some type of agreement to allow their stay with the Taliban, the Taliban certainly don't seem like they're open to, you know, creating an extension to the agreement.
This is this is this is very serious, very bad, very bad tidings for the Afghan people, because I don't see how the violence starts again between the Americans and the Taliban directly and that anything other than escalation comes out of it.
And then I don't see how on the Taliban side there is a willingness then to negotiate anymore.
Look, in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, if you're looking at the Taliban website, if you're if you're reading regional newspapers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, you know, et cetera, if you were in a position where I was in the State Department, where you had access to interlocutors from the Taliban, they were asking to negotiate at that point.
And the United States was going to win.
We're going to we're going to, you know, win the war.
We're going to surge in Afghanistan and, you know, prove that Obama was a better commander in chief than Bush was, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And so we spurned them then.
And then this deal occurs.
You know what?
All it took was Donald Trump to say to Zalmay Khalilzad, go talk to the Taliban.
The Taliban were right there.
The deal happened as quickly as it could, you know, even including a six month temper tantrum from from Donald Trump during the midst of it.
And you know, the Taliban get spurned again.
So why are they ever wire or anyone in the Taliban who wants to negotiate going to have any leverage within that organization to negotiate in the future?
It's just not going to happen.
I just don't see that possibility as well then to the Afghan government.
And this is why I was pleased, you know, in the last few weeks with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, at least with the letter he put out to the Ghani, to the Ashraf Ghani's government in Kabul about negotiations about, look, you know, hey, we may not we're not going to if you think we're going to stay here forever, you're wrong.
And, you know, I thought that was really great because that's what was needed, because in my understanding of what's occurring, the Afghan government has been really incalcitrant, like really difficult because they know that.
Right.
I mean, why are you going to negotiate if all you have out of getting on negotiating is possibly losing power?
You're not going to negotiate.
And that's what the Afghan government's been doing for more than a decade now.
Right.
So they can say, no, America, you can't leave yet because look at the lurch you'll be leaving us in.
And we're going to stay in that lurch so that we stay because they know that without us, they're screwed either way.
Right.
Exactly.
And continue to send send them hundreds of millions or billions of dollars every year and keep them in power and keep them rich in this way.
The Afghan government officials, they continue to are they able to buy their their condos in Dubai?
They're able to continue their, you know, relationship within the narcotics trade, which makes them a ton of money.
I mean, they are doing really quite well.
And, you know, you hear from Afghans, you heard the same thing from the Iraqis that, you know, they would say this is the golden time because the Americans have the gold, you know, so get what you can.
But no, this is this is a very serious this is very serious.
It's not the glibness that I see from Washington, D.C., commentators on this about how, oh, you know, just just a decision Biden has to make and he can change his mind later on.
But he just needs to buy himself more time now.
And, you know, this their perspective on it is just after 20 years of direct war with the Taliban, with other insurgent groups throughout the Muslim world, none of these people have learned anything about who we call our enemy.
It's really shocking how little the United States and its experts know about who we consider our enemies to be.
You know, and one of the things is that when these people say something, they mean it.
You know, it's just who they are when they say they're going to, you know, I mean, so it is and our vein of politics are our strand of politics is not amenable to what what they how they act and how they deal and how they have relationships.
It just doesn't work that way for them, as well as the fact that this whole, you know, what you heard in that Taliban statement you read, it's all about the defense of our country, the defense of our religion, you know, and whether or not that's true.
And I hope I'm not coming off as some type of of of, you know, fan or cheerleader or ally of the Taliban, because I'm not because they're despicable and they're they're heinous.
But there is so much truth to what they're saying from their perspective about how they are defending their country, their people, their their religion, their land, their way of life from not just a new occupier, but from a continuum of occupiers that goes back 150 years, you know, even longer if you want it.
We could trace it all the way back to right to Alexander the Great.
But like, let's just go just go back to the Brits that, you know.
Right.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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I'll tell you what, man, I met an Afghan war vet at a speech I gave in Missoula, Montana the other night, and I was telling him about how, you know, I've heard this over and over again through the years and including from Matthew Ho.
But you see references to this even in movies sometimes.
I think this comes up in the movie that they made out of Michael Hastings book.
I'm sorry, the name has escaped me.
The Netflix movie War Machine, War Machine, War Machine.
This just comes up over and over again that the local Afghans.
This is how not guilty they are of attacking us on September 11th.
They've never heard of the new world before.
And so when they meet you, they think you're Russians.
And you know what this guy said to me, he said, that's what happened to us, too.
They thought we were Russians.
It's exactly right.
We had to explain to them we're from an entirely different country.
And they're so isolated.
They didn't even know the Russians had left 10 or 15 or 20 years before.
They're so isolated to the point that, you know, this is something I haven't spoken about in a while, but we used to use this term in Afghanistan called valleyism, as opposed to, like, say, nationalism, valleyism, because particularly in the east, they are so, their lives and their communities are so built around the individual valleys that they're in.
There are pockets there, say, like the Korangal Valley, which is very famous because that was, Americans call it the valley of death.
It was up until around 2010 or so where the most Americans have been killed in Afghanistan.
Complete, no reason for us being there, you know, at all.
But in the Korangal Valley, the people there, in the Korangal Valley, I don't know, was 15 kilometers long by a couple, two or three kilometers wide, maybe, you know, they spoke their own language in that valley, right?
So, I mean, you shouldn't be sending soldiers in there, you should be sending an anthropologist, right?
I mean, like- And they're just fighting over who controls the timber industry and all this crap.
That's exactly right.
And they were so localized, Scott, that with that timber industry, they didn't even really take it out of their valley.
They took it to the mouth of the valley or to other passes into the valley, and then that timber was then picked up by traders.
These people never left their valley.
So the idea somehow that they were combined with al-Qaeda or whatever was complete nonsense.
And I actually know this for a fact, because when I was there, I was in that part of the country, and Admiral Mike Mullen, who was the chairman and joint chiefs of staff at this time, came and visited.
And the Korangal was in, I was at that point the acting political advisor to the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which was responsible for that part of the country.
And Admiral Mullen said, what are we doing in the Korangal?
And nobody knew.
And so Admiral Mullen said to us, he said, you know, figure this out and tell us what happens if we leave.
Well, the answer to what happens if we leave, everybody told him right away, nothing happens if we leave.
The Korangalis are glad we're gone, and that's it.
And that's more or less what has happened.
You got, after the Americans left the Korangal in 2011 or 2012, whatever it was, yeah, they took some video there of various, you know, Afghans with rifles and turbans on standing atop the old American bunkers, but nothing else ever came of that, you know.
But to his point, though, his question about what are we doing there?
Well, myself and an Army officer, we decided we'd answer the question for him.
And we went back and we called every unit, right, found out, you know, we called every unit that had been stationed in the Korangal and said, what were you doing there?
And it took a while because you had to track people down because people had moved, you know, moved units and everything.
And everybody said, I don't know.
We took it over because the unit before us had been there.
And so finally, we found the first guy who had gone into the Korangal.
And at that point, he had been a Marine Corps lieutenant because the Marines had been up in that early, up in that area back in like 2005 or so maybe.
And we said, why did you go into Korangal?
And he said, because we'd never been in there before.
And then we said, you know, I said, well, why did you guys stay?
We said, why did you set up a base there?
Because it just made sense.
It was a good traveling distance from our other bases.
And that was it.
That's the reason why we ended up in the Korangal.
That's the reason why the Korangal became the Valley of Death.
The story then goes on.
The Americans, of course, we occupy the richest man in the Korangal Valley.
He's got like this timber yard kind of place.
We occupy his timber yard as our base.
The Afghan police show up who aren't from the area.
They take it over as well.
They start taxing these people, right, so on and so forth.
And they're, you know, that that's how it becomes the Valley of Death for the Americans.
And that's like in a microcosm.
That's the entire Afghan war.
The whole stupidity of it.
It's based on absolutely nothing.
And like what you said, Scott, about the new world, the 9-11 attacks, you bring it up all the time, I know, which is such a great, a great thing to bring up.
In 2010, 2011, or whenever it was, someone went around doing a survey in Helmand province, which is at that point was the deadliest place for Americans at that point, you know, take it over from the Korangal.
Helmand was just a buzzsaw, basically.
And 95% of Helmandese had never even heard of 9-11, you know, they couldn't find New York City on a map.
I got a great anecdote recently about that from Frank Ledwidge, who is a British naval intelligence officer who was stationed there in Helmand.
And he told me that the way he put it was, he says, when I would explain to them that they would ask, why are you guys even here?
And he would say, well, because some Arabs crashed a plane into some buildings in a village called New York in a valley far away from here.
They would say, what the hell has that got to do with us?
And the fact that that was how he had to explain the most important city on the face of the earth.
New York City is a village in a valley far away from here, because they've never heard of the new world.
You've never heard that America exists.
And probably they don't know very much about Eurasia either.
Yeah, no, they, you know, life is very, I mean, again, this country has been a country that's been at war for more than 40 years.
It's been devastated in every way possible.
Life is very, very difficult and it's very rural, very poor.
You know, now, now there's cell phones and stuff, but, you know, 10 years or so ago, there wasn't too much of that.
So certainly this idea that somehow this is all connected to them.
But then also too, they know their own history, right?
I mean, like, look, we're still fighting over the Confederate flag in this country.
So why wouldn't the Afghans still be concerned about the Brits who occupied them in the 1850s?
Let alone the fact that the Brits reoccupied them a number of times throughout, you know, the 19th century.
And then of course the, you know, famously the Soviet Union and now us.
You know, it's, again, the lack of knowledge, the lack of understanding and the inability to see this conflict in a way that maybe the Afghans see it or other people see it.
But we're, as a people, we, and I use the proverbial we here in the United States, and I know it's not most of the folks who are listening, but we tend not to understand the world in a way that makes sense for the people that we're trying to interpret.
So we see this conflict.
Of course it has to be about 9-11.
Of course it had to, you know, again, like I was complaining about earlier, journalists make this arbitrary start of the Afghan war as 9-11.
You know, it has nothing to do with the Afghans for the most part, right?
I mean, like the relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was tenuous at best, you know, depending on who you talk to, you know, I mean, but just leave it at that, tenuous at best.
And for 99% of the Afghans, even more, they've never seen an Arab fighter.
They've never met an Arab.
But they've met plenty of foreign fighters who speak English, you know, and who drive their armored vehicles and fly their helicopters over.
And at this point, how many villages in Afghanistan have had an experience that has been deadly because of American forces?
And now in the last bunch of years, it's been more as the U.S. has evolved in its military policies and everything, you know, a lot more of the doors being kicked in or being done by proxy forces.
So in this case, by Afghan commandos.
Those Afghan commandos are not from the Pashtun areas.
They're coming from other areas.
So they're seen as just as much foreigners as the American commandos or as the British commandos or as the Australian commandos, etc.
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You know what?
So let's get back to the real crux of this thing, which is the future of the capital city of Kabul, right?
This is the nightmare that these guys don't want to face is the fall of Saigon moment here when it's completely too late and their project falls completely apart.
And I guess they figure as long as they have air power based at Bagram and a couple other air bases in the country, then they can prevent a real concentration of Taliban forces to sack the capital city, something like that.
I want to kick that can down the road indefinitely.
But, and we've talked about this before about how you said, well, no, the last time the Taliban took the capital city, it was with Bill Clinton and the Pakistanis and Saudi support at the time.
And so I guess possibly if the Americans are really leaning on the Pakistanis to really lean on the Afghan Taliban to not sack Kabul, then maybe that could be useful.
The Russians are holding these meetings in Moscow, which Khalilzad went to, and I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't read up on the results of this attempted summit that they had there trying to work out a deal.
And in a way, right?
It's a sock puppet foreign government created regime there in Kabul.
But at the same time, there is a parliament with some members of it who would prefer to keep it that way.
I don't know how many people, you know, actual people they represent beyond their own selves or not.
Maybe you can address that if there's really any kind of substance to that government at all other than it being a puppet regime.
But clearly it cannot stand against the Taliban without our support.
And so that's politically the rock hard place situation.
He really believes in the safe haven for terrorist crap.
It's all about the fall of Saigon moment, I think, and the humiliation of who's in the chair when that all takes place.
Because you know, Ari Fleischer is going to say, geez, if only George Bush were here, everything would be fine.
And we'd still be living up to Connolly's, Rice's promise that we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever leave and abandon you.
And that was just a few years back.
I was just reminded of Ari Fleischer, the comment that he made a year ago after General Soleimani was assassinated.
You know, the Iranian general was assassinated by President Trump.
And again, just to show how American commentators have no idea what they're talking about most of the time.
Fleischer said something along the lines of how now that Soleimani is dead, Iranians are going to rise up and break their shackles or whatever.
Yeah, they rised up in these massive demonstrations of grief.
I mean, like he was the most popular figure in Iran across the spectrum.
People of all political stripes loved Soleimani.
And you know, the massive, the outpouring, the displays, the number of people who showed up for the various funeral and memorial services were just, you know, the crowd stretched to the horizon kind of deal.
You know, these people are so wrong, but just the way it's a whole nother show to talk about why the media is the way it is.
But I think there's the other thing that keeps the Taliban from taking Kabul is American air power.
And I think the Taliban are wise enough to know that if they take Kabul in a way that, say the Islamic State took Mosul, the same fate is going to befall them.
If the Taliban take Kabul in two years time, Kabul is going to look like Raqqa or Mosul or Aleppo, you know, et cetera.
It will be destroyed by American air power.
And no one in the West will get it, right?
No one will care.
I mean, look how many, how many tens of thousands of people did we kill in Mosul and in Raqqa and everything and all, all throughout the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys.
We just, you know, how many tens of thousands of people are buried underneath the rubble when we are, when the United States was bombing the Islamic State from 2015 through 2017 or whenever it was.
Right.
And so that, that's what, that's the fate of Kabul.
And I think the Taliban, if they're smart, will recognize that.
And as well as too, we're talking about, I don't think the Pakistanis are going to back them.
They want, I, what the Pakistanis want of course, is they want a client state in Afghanistan.
Of course they want that just as, just as India does.
But failing to get that, they want a stable state.
And I think they understand, the Pakistanis understand that the Taliban take Kabul in such a way, again, it's going to look like Mosul in a couple of years and that does the Pakistanis no good.
So I really do think that is the case.
What you'll have happen is that the territory that, that, and you gotta remember as well, the Taliban, you know, they view Kandahar as their capital, capital, you know, Kandahar was, was, was, was, you know, historically the capital of Afghanistan.
You know, when Mullah Omar ran the Taliban, if I recall correctly, he never even went to Kabul.
He always stayed in Kandahar.
Right.
So it's Swiss Confederation.
There you go.
You got already, the lines are already where they belong.
You know what's funny is this makes so much sense to me, but I talked with an Afghan journalist who's like, you have no idea what you're talking about.
What do you mean the Taliban are dominant in Pashtunistan and not necessarily in the other places?
And so let's leave it at that.
That's, that's crazy.
We just need to have a negotiated settlement where it's one strong central government.
I just thought, I don't know, man, it looks like, why not, as you just said, let Kandahar be the capital of the Islamic Emirate and let the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras and their other partners rule in Kabul.
And it can still be Afghanistan, be the United State of Afghanistan, and they can have strong federalism and, and not more against each other.
Yeah.
Capital, Kabul can remain the capital for all the things it needs to be.
The Taliban are pretty inward, inward looking.
The Taliban also evolve.
I mean, the Taliban in 2001, when, you know, the United States bombed them out of power and everything, they were against cell phones.
They were against, you know, all kinds of things that they have since embraced.
I mean, the Taliban social media game is much better than the American government social media game.
And these people were completely against that sort of thing 15, 20 years ago.
They can evolve.
I mean, these are human beings.
These are not, I always, I always bring up if people are, and I don't know, I never read the books, but I just remember from the Lord of the Rings movies, the evil wizard, uh, whatever his name was, you know, sour man, sour man, Eric, he's making the trolls that his army is composed of out of a pit, right there.
They just make, you know, that's not where the Taliban come from.
These are people.
Right.
And so they have the whole range of experience, emotions, uh, desires, wants, et cetera, that we have.
And one of those things is, is a Taliban leadership understands the need for foreign money.
The Taliban know that if they take control and they do not have foreign money coming in, they are not going to last very long.
The opium trade and et cetera, et cetera, that will sustain them in some ways, but they need to govern and to govern for, for, for longevity.
They need foreign trade.
They need foreign investment.
They need, uh, of course, humanitarian assistance, et cetera.
And so this is what, what bothers me so much, Scott is by again, getting back to reneging on this deal.
You have people in the Taliban who are willing to negotiate.
Are they going to drop their weapons and embrace everything we want them to?
Of course not.
They've been fighting for a while.
Why would we even think that they're going to agree to everything we say?
No one ever does that.
Well, what is your, does your wife or your husband ever agree to everything you say?
I mean, come on, this is silly, but that's the stance of the American government and the American media towards it, which is really, uh, but so by again, by alienating them, by reneging on this deal, letting the hardliners get what they, what the hardliners want out of this.
Well, you know, I mean, how, how then, you know, you talking about them when they physically take power, you know, it's all going to be on their, uh, uh, you know, we're going to have some, there's still be some leverage, but at that point too, they may decide, uh, you know, who, at that point, if you're the Taliban, you physically take in power, you're going to shut the door on the Americans of course, and you're going to turn to the Russians and the Chinese.
And you've brought this up a plenty of times too.
At this point, the Americans have been functioning as the Taliban's air force against the Islamic state.
Right.
And that's the way it's going.
And you know, for, if, if you're literally, I mean, that's in the Washington post JSOC flying drones as air cover, as the Taliban engaged in direct land battles on the ground firefights with what's left of so-called ISIS there.
Yeah.
And so if you're some type of, uh, if you describe yourself as some kind of a geopolitical realist and the purpose of us being in Afghanistan is to ensure there's no nine 11 again, and all the blah, blah, blah, all that garbage about safe havens, you know, we, you've, you've mentioned before.
Well then this makes the most sense then to have that relationship with the Taliban because the Taliban are not going to attack us.
The Islamic state is the driving force of those kinds of attack.
The Taliban are, have never launched that.
They're not going to.
And even local ISIS there are still just Pakistani Taliban refugees from that war.
So.
That's right.
That's right.
Uh, you know, it, it just all this, but it goes back to, you know, what you were saying, the fear of Saigon, you know, even further back, you know, go, I always recommend to people read David Halberstam's the best and the brightest, you know, how we get into Vietnam because of the whole who lost China, uh, finger pointing in the 1950s.
And that's very much.
So, I mean, you, one of the things that, that is haunting Biden right now, of course, is in it's in it's garbage, right?
This bunk, this idea that because Obama pulled the troops out of, uh, pulled all of yours forces out of Iraq in 2011, that's what allowed this, the Islamic state to take over Mosul and Northern Iraq and Western Iraq, et cetera.
Um, you know, so that's haunting him, you know, and that's, that's something that is on the minds of Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, you know, you know, when they advise him as well as, you know, his, whoever he speaks to Chris Coons or whoever else he talks about.
It seems like, you know what, when they're all together in the room though, they could kind of whisper to each other that, well, you know, really it was our war in Syria that created the rise of the Islamic state.
And if we hadn't have done that, we wouldn't have needed troops in Iraq at all.
So as long as they can get that to themselves and each other, then maybe they wouldn't have to base their stupid policy on the false lesson there that it was leaving Iraq ever at all.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a realistic Cheney warn that would lead to the rise of a caliphate there.
Maybe Cheney shouldn't have put the Dawa party in power in Baghdad if that was what he didn't want for the West.
These are people that will still claim with a bald face that, uh, Libya, the problem with Libya was just, we just didn't, you know, go through with as much as we should have.
Right.
You know, these, these are the same people who have never thought once about the thousands and thousands of thousands of Libyans who are laying dead on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea right now because of what we did in that country.
You know, um, you know, these people just don't care.
They only care.
They're not, they have no principles.
They have no vision.
They have no worldview.
They're not theorists.
They are politicians.
And that includes the men and women like Blinken and, and, and, uh, Avril Haines and, uh, Jake Sullivan who surround the president.
They are only concerned about what is politically possible and politically beneficial there.
You know, and part of that of course is maintenance of the American empire.
Part of that is, you know, making sure the American empire is at least as big, if not a bigger, uh, you know, when they leave, uh, and you heard this in Biden's voice, uh, yesterday or this past week, whenever it was talking about China, you know, this whole idea that China wants to become the most powerful nation in the world in Biden saying not on my watch with, with a passion and an energy that, you know, it exceeds his usual levels of enthusiasm and passion.
I mean, that's the purpose.
And this goes back of course to George Kennan, you know, and, and the whole, uh, uh, uh, his, uh, policy planning directive number, whatever it was, 17, 1926, whatever it was, he wrote in, what was it?
1947, 1948.
I wasn't prepared.
I wasn't prepared.
Oh, 68.
NSC 68.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I usually, if I know I'm going to bring something like that up, I'll look up the numbers.
So I sound halfway, uh, but it does, right.
It goes back to Kennan, you know, it goes back to the, you know, post-World War II, this idea that, Hey, look, the United States has, uh, you know, more than half the world's wealth.
We've got less than 5% of the population.
This is a disparity that everybody can see.
How are we going to keep that?
And this will be the purpose, the primary mission of all United States presidents to maintain this imbalance of American power and wealth compared to the rest of the country.
You know?
So I, that's, that's when I, when I say they don't have any principles or anything that doesn't include that type of overarching, you know, I mean, in a sense that they don't have progressive principles or they don't have conservative principles or they, you know, there's not some type of idealism behind what they're doing.
Politics and all of that are just completely stupid anyway, we're supposed to bomb the rest of the world into staying poor compared to us, or they really think they need a world empire just to have wealth or let the rest of the world create their own wealth and there'll be more wealth for everyone to go around.
And I don't think Paul Nitzen knows what the hell he's talking about to tell you the truth.
The worst of it was, uh, there's a book by, uh, T.R. Ferenbeck called this kind of war, uh, about the Korean war, which is a very popular book in the Marine Corps.
It was on the reading required reading list for officers.
And it talks about how, uh, Marines are the modern day legacy of the Roman legions and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you'll have beating your chest kind of stuff.
But that type of attitude, that type of idea of the being the defenders of the empire, and there are tigers in this world and you're going to have to go march out and kill those tigers to defend, right.
You know that these ideas that there are these barbarian lands or these uncivilized land, these borderlands, basically, you know, guys like Jim Mattis, you know, General Jim Mattis, um, uh, who is Trump's secretary of defense.
They really subscribe to that type of, of, of, uh, thinking to that type of, of purpose in life, to that type of, of meaning for what they do.
They really see themselves that way.
Um, and that's of course how you can understand why we have all these wars.
One way to see all these wars we have in these Muslim countries and, and all throughout Africa and everywhere else as being these skirmishes, these, these borderland battles right on the fringe of empire, keeping those areas safe, the frontiers safe.
You know, there's a lot to that type of thinking that pervades American military officers minds.
Yup.
And you know what?
Back to the, where the rubber meets the road here.
The Taliban ceased fire for a year and four months and now stumbling Joe Biden, bumbling Joe Biden.
I don't know.
I'm told that I got to give him more time, I guess, so I don't know.
But this could mean that, uh, this last year of no dead American GIs over there is coming to an end real soon.
And then of course, yeah, you know, they could launch a real escalation based on this, right?
That seemed to you like that's the Pentagon's plan, make things worse and then go ahead and send another 10,000.
I don't know if Biden's going to go along with that though, man.
Even in his senile old head, he's got to know that he doesn't want to do that.
I don't know.
No, I don't think so.
I think, um, I think you, you might see, uh, or you know, I think it could potentially see a couple thousand more troops there.
But the problem is when you send more troops, you always send up sending more troops, right?
You send a couple companies of Rangers, uh, because you're going to do direct action and then they want to be, they want to have outposts.
So then you need to send more infantry to protect the outposts.
Well then, uh, those infantry, you know, are out there and they're just nothing but guys with guns.
So now you're going to want to send civil affairs out there.
But now that you have civil affairs out there, you know, you got a lot more patrols.
So now you need more attack helicopters, you need more vetted for our guys.
Right?
Exactly.
At this point.
Well now, Hey, you know, you know, we're going to want the gunships can't, don't work that well when it's, you know, cloudy out when the weather's not too good.
So you're going to want to want, um, some artillery and some 120 millimeter mortars, you know, on and on it goes.
And next thing you know, you've got 15,000, 20,000 troops there, 10,000, you know, half of those are three quarters of those never leave the base.
You know, that kind of deal.
Right.
I mean, I remember Scott being in Kandahar in 2009, uh, and troops are being searched up.
And I was talking to the head civilian.
He was the head, head European diplomat there.
And he was involved with all kinds of stuff with the base and operations of the base for some reason.
And I said, how many people are on this base?
And he said, I don't know, 20,000, 22,000, 23,000.
We have no idea.
Right.
I mean, like that, it was huge.
And Bagram was even bigger, you know, and so you're talking about that point, including a secret torture prison.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
That's exactly right.
You know, no, it just, there is a right now an American family who, uh, who will be notified at some point in the first week of May that their son or daughter was killed in Afghanistan.
For what reason?
You know, again, for, because Biden said it was tactically not possible for us to leave Afghanistan.
Uh, it, it just makes, uh, but again, it gets back to the whole thing.
These people don't care.
This goes back to your exact words in 2009 when you said, look, I came forward here because the question comes down to, can I justify the deaths of these men to their people?
And I can't.
Yeah.
That's it.
So what am I supposed to do?
That's exactly what you said.
That was the deciding factor right there.
I'm supposed to tell this guy's wife what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you've ever had to do that work and I've only had to do it one time, thank God, I've had friends who've done it many, many times.
Gosh.
When I was in Iraq, my good friend, my second time in Iraq, my good friend, the same time I was in Iraq, he was doing a lot of that.
I think he did 14 notifications, something like that.
Right.
Had to go 14 times to people's doors.
Uh, most of the time it's parents at that, that point just happened for him, you know, parents and knock on the door and tell them their son was dead, you know, and ruin, destroying somebody's life like that for what purpose, right?
Again, for what, what value?
I mean, there's no 7,000 times over in the last 20 years here.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, and that's not including, you know, an equivalent number of contractors have been killed.
Those people get no notification.
They probably get a phone call, maybe even a text message.
Who knows about what happens.
And that doesn't all just mean mercenaries either, uh, who are combatants at least, but that also means truck drivers and regular people to a lot of good people.
A lot of good people go over there to do it because one, they think they think they're doing the right thing, but also to the money's good.
People need money.
I mean, let me, that's it.
We can have a whole nother talk about that.
Right.
So God, I mean like you and I disagree on economics, but we'll both, we both agree that this American economy is not good for most people.
Right.
They piss all the wealth away into the sands of Iraq.
People are trying to catch some on its way down, you know, yeah.
So you got a home, you know what I mean?
Particularly maybe after, you know, particularly after the housing crash, right?
Maybe you're losing your house, maybe you're underwater, you know, going over to Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever, be a truck driver, run a generator, work in a kitchen.
You know, that's not a, yeah, yeah.
I understand why people do that.
Join the Marines.
You know?
Yeah.
Hey, I mean, yeah.
I did.
Right.
I mean, but it is.
I mean, the, the, the way that they're able to continue this war, these wars, um, without an examination of like whether they've been productive, I mean, you know, the, the, the, the things Danny Davis brings us up all the time, um, and, and I just looked at this again in 2000, the state department listed four terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Now the state department and the Pentagon list like more than 20 terror groups in those countries.
Right.
You know, Al Qaeda goes from less than four, about 400 people worldwide in 2001 to controlling entire cities to have in branches on every continent except for the, um, you know, Antarctica, right.
You know what I mean?
And the space station, they, they don't have a presence there, but otherwise, right.
I mean like, right.
You know, I mean the, the, the, the colossal failure of this, the cow counterproductive it's been.
Um, it's just, you know, anything else is just missing the point of it.
It's just has totally failed.
And then of course, if you want to get into the morality of it and the criminal nature of it and this, the, the opportunity course, like you said, just pissing away all this money, um, that we could have done anything with.
You could just, I mean, I, at this point, like I, like you could have returned all the money in tax rebates to people or whatever you wanted to do, you know what I mean?
But anything would have been better, uh, than what we've done.
Yeah.
And in fact, even, you know, like Jeff diced, the head of the Mises Institute said to me that like, Scott, wouldn't you prefer even if they had socialized healthcare with all this money instead of killing all those people over there, even a absolutely hard ass libertarian like him or me agree on that, that as bad as that would be, it couldn't possibly be as bad as all this.
And then just the same as a guy on the left, like you can say, Hey, if you just didn't tax the people and just let them keep the money, that would have been better than this too is the same thing.
Of course, you know, no question about it.
It's a total loss for all of us and especially for them.
And, and I know you like to bring this up because it is so important to that when we count the dead there, that there's more dead veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars by suicide than in the wars now.
I think you said last time was at 9,000 so far.
Yeah.
And at 9,000 numbers dated now, that's a couple of years old.
Uh, we lose about, uh, two Iraq and Afghan veterans every day to suicide.
Okay.
So I think it's like 1.7 or 1.8, but just say two, cause a lot of it's undercounted, right?
How do you know if a guy's OD'd and you're not, Hey, I just had a sailor, one of my sales from when I was in Iraq, he OD'd back in January and died, left behind three kids and, and, um, uh, you know, not count of the suicide, talked to everybody about it, it was a suicide, you know?
According to the statistics, it's not going to be a suicide.
So let's say two every day, two times 365, you know, um, uh, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I wasn't a math major, but that's, uh, you know, the only, only a few times, only a few years in the wars did we have more killed in action than that.
Um, so, and that's a number that doesn't go away.
Uh, you know, world war two veterans are still killing themselves at rates much higher than their peers are.
And they're in their eighties and nineties now.
Uh, I mean, so this is gonna, this is, this, uh, everything we know about it tends to, tends to plateau.
And then when these guys start hitting their fifties, sixties, seventies, it tends to get worse again.
Um, so yeah, the number of dead and then every suicide, uh, uh, the numbers I've seen is that each suicide directly affects 165 people, um, which is amazing when you think about it.
But that's what the, that's what the suicide people say, uh, directly affects.
Right.
And then on, after that, that ripple, right, ripples out, all those people are affected.
I mean, so the, and then if you take it and I recommend to people, uh, if you have, if people haven't seen it, uh, did not get good reviews, um, but the film cherry, uh, on Apple TV with Tom Holland, the guy who plays Spider-Man, um, it's a story of a young man who joins the army in 2004, 2005 goes to Iraq, uh, comes back, uh, gets, uh, has, has the problems coming back, uh, gets hooked on, uh, opiates, ends up doing heroin, end up robbing a bank, you know, that kind of thing.
Um, and so while the film again, didn't get great reviews, I thought that the film's discussion though of the anger, the despondency, the addiction that we deal with coming back from war was the best I've seen in terms of films, uh, you know, in terms of dealing with that, would you say it was called again?
It's called cherry C H E R R Y with on Apple TV with, uh, uh, guy plays Spider-Man Tom Holland.
Um, and yeah, Bill, uh, and, and, and for those who rather read that it's, it's book of the same name, it's a semi autobiographical novel guy.
His name is Nico Walker.
Uh, and, uh, he was, you know, this guy who joins the army early part of the Iraq war guys, a medic goes there, comes home, has problems, you know, that he gets hooked on, on, on, uh, ended up getting on heroin on and on and on.
And, and so many lives like that completely devastated.
But what that shows though, is how the devastation wrecks entire communities, you know, because it's just not the one person who's getting wrecked.
It's the girlfriend, the spouse, the, the, the children, the parents, the neighbors, the friends, you know, the, the people that you have interactions with, uh, people that you're in school with people you work with, you know, on and on and on.
It just, it, it's, it's massive.
Uh, so let's end with this Matthew, cause I know that you have a really good answer to this too.
And I think it's a concern of mine because I know that some substantial part of my audience are now anti-war combat veterans of these wars and otherwise veterans of these wars.
And, um, I know that, you know, the answer to where can they go to get some help if they need it instead of just drinking themselves to death or, or choosing a darker path?
Yeah, you got to get to the VA and a lot of people don't want to go to the VA, the VA, the VA system is, is if you've been to one VA, you've been to one VA.
So my experience is that the VAs I've been to, I've been lucky.
I've been to good VAs.
I know there are some VAs out there, uh, but you gotta go and you gotta get yourself in there.
And if you're listening, um, particularly for women, um, what I've found as I've worked with other guys and, and I'm sorry for not being gender, gender neutral, just my experience has mostly been with men.
Um, but a lot of women are dealing with this too.
So, but what I found though is that usually women in people's lives are the people who get them help.
So if you're listening and you're a mother, a sister, uh, a spouse, whatever daughter, uh, usually it's your work that gets people help because particularly men were adverse to getting ourselves help.
I mean, there's all kinds of reasons for that, right?
It's the culture we're brought up in.
Then we're in the military, we're conditioned to be, to take care of others, not to worry, not to be weak or to have to be a burden to anybody else.
I mean, there's all kinds of reasons for it, but get to the VA.
There's other groups out there too.
The Cohen's veterans network, uh, is, uh, is, is a very good place as well as to the wounded warrior program is another place.
But call one of those three places, be persistent, realize that sometimes, you know, I mean, it's hard.
I mean, I, when I first started getting help 10 years ago or so, however, now it was a nightmare.
I mean, it was an absolute nightmare.
Uh, you know, getting into the VA was difficult, but fortunately I had a woman at the time with me who made me do it, stuck with me, persevered.
And after a couple months and literally it was a couple months, we found someone who was going to help me.
You need to have that level of perseverance, but also to remember that, look, the reason we go into the Marine Corps, you go in the Army, you go into the Marine Corps, you're going to spend 13 weeks at Paris Island or San Diego.
And then you're going to go to your, uh, infantry training or your, or your, your MCT, your Marine combat training or your, or whatever you call it in the Army.
The reason why you do that is you're spending weeks and weeks, almost years of your life being deacon, being conditioned to be a killer in the military and to take on these other things.
Right?
How do you, why, why do we all think that all we got to do is just walk out of the military and all that conditioning is just going to be gone.
You know, it's going to take a long time for all this.
That's the other thing I say is that like, realize that when you go into this, nothing is going to be six weeks.
Nothing's going to be eight weeks.
Nothing's going to be 12 weeks.
You might go to a group and they're going to say, you're going to be in this group for 12 weeks.
Yeah.
But you know what you're going to do right after that group's over, you're going to sign up for another group because this is not even years of your life.
It's your whole life managing this, you know, and you get to a point where you don't even notice it, but it's always in the background though.
But so that's a two things be persevere, be persistent and realize that this is a long lifetime, long, uh, healing process you're going to be going through.
Yeah.
I, uh, there's a friend of the show, a guy, uh, whose Twitter handle is life's choices.
And I know he's a regretful veteran, but you know what, it is what it is.
And we got to make the best of it because we still have positive things to do all of us.
So that's absolutely right.
And anyone I can, I can be of help to in any way, please feel free to reach out to me.
You can get ahold of me on Facebook or on Instagram, last name spelled H O H. Uh, you know, if you contact Scott, you know, Scott can get ahold of me as well.
So yeah, I'm always happy to be of help to anyone because you know why a lot of people were helped me.
A lot of people still are a help to me.
I'm only sitting here talking to Scott because other people helped me.
I would have blown my head off.
Uh, my family be celebrating their 10th anniversary of my death if it wasn't for other people.
And that's, that's not hyperbole.
That's not bullshit.
That's the truth.
So definitely, you know, if I could be of help, I know Scott's the same way too.
Scott's like such a great guy.
He'll help anybody is, but, but lean on other people cause other people are going to lean on you and it's just the way life goes.
You, we help each other.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
All right.
That's a great way to end it then.
Thank you so much for your time on the show again, Matt.
You bet.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Matthew Ho y'all.
The Scott Horton show and anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APS radio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
