5/1/20 Daniel Davis on Getting American Troops out of Afghanistan

Daniel L. Davis 0:10
All right shall welcome it’s Scott Horton shelf. I am the director of the libertarian Institute editorial director of anti war.com, author of the book fool’s errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org dot org. We can also sign up to the podcast feed full archive is also available@youtube.com. Slash Scott Horton show. Aren’t you guys online I’ve got retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, an American hero, not for his military service, but for his great whistleblowing at the end of the Afghan surge in 2012. He broke ranks and went public Blick and announced David Petraeus for lying to the American people into the US Congress, about the state of that war, and what needed to happen. And he’s been fighting for an end to it, and a rational foreign policy ever since then to welcome back to the show. How you doing, Danny?

Thanks, God, I love to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 1:19
Very happy to have you here. So and I could have mentioned you were in Iraq War One iraq war to Afghanistan. And you know what, actually, let’s talk about this a little bit your tour in Afghanistan, you had a especially kind of unique view of the war rather than being stationed just here. There. You are all over the country. On that last tour there, right.

Daniel L. Davis 1:42
Yeah, I was working for an organization called the rapid equipping force, which was basically a created offshoot under the Army’s g three the operations department in the Pentagon, for the purpose of trying to shorten the amount of time from the the point where an organization You know, brigade says, Hey, we need this kind of equipment, we need this thing we didn’t know we needed until we got on the ground, you know, the normal acquisition process would have taken longer than a than a tour last. And that would be pointless to do to you know, to get them what they needed after they left. So they created this. They said, hey, let’s let’s give them what they need as rapidly as possible. So they had my organization had an on the ground presence and I was the Afghan team chief. And I was required to literally go to every combat brigade in Afghanistan all over the country, army brigades to find out how they were doing, what their operations were looking lack and where were the holes in their equipment so that we could get them what they needed quickly. So that gave me the opportunity. Literally to see everything on the ground drawn the you know, the position of the absolute lowest level in the in the tactical zone on all across the country from the east to the to the I guess kind of the Middle East. And then all the way to RC South all the way across there. So I really may have had the best view of on the ground reality Afghanistan has anybody.

Scott Horton 3:08
Yeah. And then so what was it that was so off that had you breaking ranks? And you wrote a big piece in with the Armed Forces journal? right.

Daniel L. Davis 3:18
Right. Yeah, it was, it was painfully obvious from you know, from the get go, that all the things that you know, like David Petraeus, Michele Flournoy, were saying in front of Congress or you know, on every news channel that would listen to them, newspapers, etc, was nothing close to be in the truth, everything that they said about we’re on the right Asmath and things are strings are starting to improve, we broken their momentum, all those catchphrases. They used it everybody loved to repeat, simply were not true. They were just statements that were made to make people think things were going better. But on the ground, it was blatantly obvious that they weren’t. And anyone who had an opportunity to see on the ground, you know, virtually everybody I talked to, at the tactical level understood exactly what I did, because they lived it. The only people who didn’t wear those, you know, at the highest ranks and a lot of the, you know, the civilian leaders who just wanted to cling to the fiction, they wanted the reality to be what they preferred it to be, not what it really was. And frankly, and the reason that drove me to go in public is that they didn’t seem concerned at all about the human cost to it. The fact that there were so many Americans who were getting killed, getting their limbs blown off getting traumatic brain injuries, suffering from PTSD, that didn’t seem to be a big problem for them to continue to maintain the fiction. And, you know, now we see the results of that, you know, eight years later and continue on with no closer to an end than we were before. We still have all of the details and the evidence, physical evidence on the ground screaming that it’s not working. And, you know, hopefully, maybe now that we’re gonna finally do something to get out. We’ll see if Trump makes good on his Look, what’s been reported is something that he wants to do. Let’s see how that works out, but maybe there’s a chance.

Scott Horton 5:06
Alright, so I wrote this book fool’s errand and that title about Afghanistan. And that title comes from an interview of you where I had asked you, okay, but what if instead of betray us, we had had a competent, General and honest one? And what if he had had 300,000 or 400,000 troops instead of just the hundred and 40,000 that he had? And that was what the Hawks were saying was, look, Obama, he gave him an escalation surge, but not as much of one as he really wanted. And things could have gone that much better. And then you said, Nope, it was a fool’s errand all along, no matter what. But so. Explain why that’s true. Then even if I gave you a magic wish, 500,000 men you still couldn’t win this war of their Colonel. What’s the deal?

Daniel L. Davis 5:57
Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. And that was that was Such a just be blunt. That was crap from the beginning. Because, first of all, the guy who asked for those troops Stan McChrystal, General McChrystal, he had originally asked for 40,000, Obama ended up giving him 30,000 plus 7000. NATO. So he almost got everything that he asked for number one. Number two is that that came after Obama already added almost 20,000. Before that. So he actually in the span of a single calendar year, added 50,000 troops to the ground. So this claim that oh, well, we didn’t win because we didn’t have enough troops is crap because they had tons of troops on there more than anyone even thought they could get in a single year. But to your second point, absolutely correct. If it was 500,000, we still wouldn’t win because of the nature of the fight itself. The only way that you win with 500,000 is if you’re going against an army, like when I went to Desert Storm, and not 90 and fought in 1991. We had 500,000 troops that were deployed there. And we were facing a physical army on the battlefield. And we were able to defeat that military folk. And we were able to win and then redeploy five months later, right? I mean, that’s a classic military victory. There is no enemy army in Afghanistan. Because, as I saw, I’ll just give you one example because it was so graphic to me, I went down into I want to say it was God’s new province, I think it was Gosney in in the middle of the summer of 2011. And the the unit that I had went to visit there had just had a big battle the day before, to secure the forward most position in their zone of a building complex that the Taliban had been using as a forward operating post and they, they drove them out of there. And so the unit was going back in the next day, to begin establishing it as an American strong point, which is there, you know, like I said, forward most and so I went with the whole and That? Well, while they’re literally digging sandbags, or you know, putting sandbags around, They’re digging in machine gun pits, they’re, you know, they’re siding in their weapons and you know, to have converging fields of fire and all that kind of thing, that normal stuff that you would do in a, in a setting up a strong point, I can see off in the distance in what looks like a wheat field, I think it was, you could see a bunch of black turbans in there and maybe a mile and a half away. But with binoculars, you can see them pretty clearly. And, you know, the The question is, are those Taliban? Are those people that we drove out? Or are they just the farmers who own that land, and they’re just curious as to what the Americans are doing? They’re coming to see there’s no way for us to know at the time. Now, some people might say, well, you should have just killed him, just kill them all. And then that way you make sure you get the bad guys will of course that would make us an immoral organization because that mean we would be willingly killing we people that we knew some percentage of would be innocent. And that’s not the American way. That’s not the way anyone should operate. Because you don’t know you have to wait until they attack in order to shoot the back, because by day they’re there. Some of them are farmers. But not some of those people are Taliban. But some of those same farmers aren’t Taliban. Some of the other farmers aren’t Taliban there. They literally are just farmers. They don’t like the Taliban, they don’t want to go, no one can distinguish one from the other. So it’s impossible, whether you had 50 100,000 500,000 don’t make any difference because you can’t distinguish the enemy on the battlefield, all you can do is create more targets. And this is precisely the dynamic we saw from the beginning of the Obama surge. All we did by putting more troops on the ground would provide more targets for the Taliban to attack and that’s precisely what they did. That’s why they casually count went way up, but we still didn’t secure anything because as soon as we predictably left, they came right back in as though we were never there, and they’re still there. To this day. In higher numbers. Now point is one last thing out right here. At the time I went over there, there was estimated 20,000 Taliban. Do you realize it today after eight years, and you know those wanted to have many surgeries and now then this is even smaller search that Trump has done since he’s become president. It’s now estimated at 60 to 80,000. So everything that we’ve done all the casualties we suffered all the Taliban that we’ve killed, which is estimated at 40,000 higher all it’s done is increase the number of Taliban and done nothing to diminish it. You can see militarily it is on winnable.

Scott Horton 10:38
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Daniel L. Davis 13:02
Well, I mean, I’ll give you another way that that certainly is true and a big problem by itself, but there’s an even greater dynamic along those lines. And I’ll give you another example. We went on a long foot patrol through an area where we went to into a certain village and, you know, we hit our guys out in front of the patrol, it was a joint American Taliban, our Afghan Afghan patrol, you know, they were clear in the past with the bomb detection equipment to make sure we didn’t step on any mines etc. When we came into this village, and we the we met with the senior I guess the village elder who was kind of in charge of a really old guy, actually, he was blind, didn’t his his eyes had both been put out by something we never figured that out. But we were questioned them and said, Hey, you know, we’re here. We’re for you. We want to protect you. You know, are there any talent in this area? He’s like, No, absolutely not. They’re not in this part. I don’t know where they are. But y’all there’s no point in waiting on here. And so they continue to have some Conversations through the interpreter. And while we’re doing that, we had some of our other troops had been doing a perimeter sweep around the village, and they actually captured a Taliban who was who was potentially planning on. Yeah, probably he was just doing some reconnaissance, but he got caught. And he had bomb making materials on him. So he was right there next to it. So you know, we’re like, okay, so there’s no talent here. But here’s one right here, who was probably had been in the village before we got there had just gone outside, but but we had been captured. And upon further examination, they said, Look, man, we don’t like the Taliban. We’re victims of them. But if I do anything for you, as soon as you take your little patrol and walk out of town, guess what happens? They come right back in and nothing, they’ll punish anyone who did anything for you. He goes, You know, I know that you guys are here. And when you’re in the village, no one can do anything. But the minute that you leave, then we become vulnerable again, the Afghan government itself can’t protect us. Because all they do is all these strategic points they have, they basically stay in those little points. So outside of that in the in the countryside, no one’s there to protect them. So they don’t lack the Taliban. They don’t want to be part of it, because they didn’t last, you know, in the 90s when they were running the place. But they know that we’re only going to be there temporarily, however, temporary turns out to be defined. And so they’re not going to turn against the Taliban because then they know they’re powerless to stop once we walk out the door. So that exam or exposes the real conundrum that the population has that they can’t rely on their own security forces to protect them. They definitely can’t rely on us. They don’t like the Taliban. But what are they going to do? They’re not going to turn against the Taliban because, you know, the Taliban is always there. It’s going to be there because for the most part, it’s fellow Afghan citizens, so they are from there. And so that again, just strongly reinforces how this cannot be one military.

Scott Horton 16:00
Well, you know, this is one of the big criticisms from the Hawks about Obama’s policy of the surge was that well, it would have worked fine, except that they announced the big deadline in advance that we’re only doing this for 11 months. And then come July 2011, we’re going to start drawing down and miracle a miracle. So Obama actually stuck with that thing. He gave him a couple of months delay or something, but otherwise stuck to the timetable. And they said, Well, you know, that’s the problem is they should have done the surge and but made it essentially indefinite, and let the Taliban know that we can wait them out, which just turns the whole reality on its head, that the Americans are really the indigenous security forces there. And that the Taliban are the foreign invaders, when in fact, the Taliban aren’t from Taliban to stand next door. That’s where they’re from the Helmand Province. That’s their land.

Daniel L. Davis 16:56
Right and, you know, let’s examine how that goes dead. Especially For the Hawks who love to point that, that kind of thing, let’s look at how that deadline was even formed. And there’s a great description of that whole process in Jonathan ultras book about Obama during this period, which I have talked to some of the participants in that meeting in those meetings, who was mentioned in the book and asked him how accurate he was. And they said upwards of 75%. It’s that’s pretty close to how it actually went down the way he described it. And the key part of that is that Obama had no intention of getting into forever war. He didn’t want to do something that didn’t have a chance to work. So he, Pip pointedly looked at both. I believe it was a McChrystal and Petraeus who at the time was CENTCOM commander, and said point blank. Can this be done in the timeframes that we talked about here? I think it was, I think it was 18 months of open ended stuff and then a draw down until July 2011. He said, Can we get this done with this? amount of troops. Is this the right inputs portray us absolutely said yes. He said yes in public. And Gates said yes.

Scott Horton 18:09
Now when Secretary defense Gates was in on it with

Daniel L. Davis 18:12
them, and oh, yeah, gates, and then Secretary of State Clinton were the other two that were there. So those four were arm and arm, basically, not basically, but directly telling the president Yes, we can do this. Yes, we can do it with these resources. Yes, we can do it with this timeline. And Obama said, okay, but nobody’s going to come back in July of 2011. This ain’t working and say we need more time or more troops. Right. And all of them nodded. Yes, absolutely. So these people who were the leading hawks and desire to do this, were the ones who were on the record and not just in you know, reporting the book, but in front of congressional testimony and elsewhere, said yes, we can do it. Yes, this numbers good. But now then, after it predictably failed. Now they want to come back and say number one, didn’t get enough. troops. Number two didn’t have enough time. And you know, Obama did it with this date. Yeah, the date was given to him by you by the leading advocates of the war Hawk people. So you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say yes to it here and then say, oh, but it was your fault when it didn’t work that you sit. But that’s you know, that’s that’s just the the way things work, because they don’t take responsibility for anything. Everybody else is always at fault. And they still want to go back, even if even now, they just want to continue to do what for two decades has been an abysmal failure. And they just want to do it harder and longer. It’s insane.

Scott Horton 19:37
Yep. And in the Afghan papers, as published by the Washington Post there, Petraeus just lies about this and says that Obama just spraying the 18 month timetable on him at the last minute basically just forced him to concede which is not the reporting of as you say, jonathan alter, but there’s also Obama’s wars, which is really open bombers war. The bob woodward book is just all about this, the politics of the fight over the Afghan surge. And also those two reporters over David Petraeus, his words

Daniel L. Davis 20:13
that don’t fly either, even if Obama did spring and he didn’t. But let’s say that even if he did, and is that a valid defense? No, you are the military commander, you’re the one with all the experience. If you don’t think 18 months can work, then you tell the commander in chief, no, this won’t work. I don’t think you can work in here. And we’ll do the best we can but it won’t work. That’s not what happened. So you don’t get to hide behind that. You know, Monday morning quarterback look in the past because you messed it up. Then you had the ability at the time, even with the excuse you’re claiming to either fix it or to not stand behind it. And you did neither of those things. So you have no excuse now.

Scott Horton 21:04
Yeah. And by the way, there are plenty of people who knew better than today. Do this stupid search in the first place, including Barack Obama, as you said, you know, he already knew better than this and gave into them for political reasons. He had to deal with Lindsey Graham and john mccain in the Senate. He had to deal with the threat that Petraeus, McChrystal AND gates would resign and make him look weak. And so he rolled over and gave in to them. And politically, it worked. The the, you know, Obama voters of America, they didn’t mind one bit. And yet he was able to, you know, completely bribe away an entire line of attack from his Republican opponents. When is McCain and Graham agreed that as long as you give us at least 30 more thousand, then we’ll leave you alone on it and stuck to their end of the deal there.

Daniel L. Davis 21:46
Yep, that’s how it worked out.

Scott Horton 22:42
But you know, Kelly flay hosts at the American Conservative magazine and Colonel gn Gentile or however you say, his name, Gentilly, whatever. And then of course, Colonel Let’s McGregor and all kinds of experts but everybody@antiwar.com and consortium news calm and wherever else. We all knew that this could never work. Gareth Porter, you know, the great journalist, we covered this thing. And the idea that Oh yeah, David Petraeus is going to have the Taliban on their knees with a bloody nose signing to his dictates, like the Japanese on the battleship Missouri. By July of 2011, is a ridiculous joke. It’s an obvious lie in the first place. Of course, Matthew Whoa, before they decided this, Matthew, who gave Obama all the out that he needed. As a former Marine Captain on a State Department expert over there saying this is not going to work. We should not do this. Here’s porn men into a volcano for no reason at all here, and he still did it anyway. So this isn’t all just hindsight. You know, this is as obvious as could be at the time. To those who cared about it, right. Alright, so let’s talk about Trump’s peace deal. But first is escalation because they rolled him the same way that they did Obama. In fact, Obama held out to the end of November, Trump gave in by August 2017 said finally gonna have 10,000 more troops and ordered a massive escalation in the air war there, which is something that’s hardly been covered because there’s no media out in the Afghan countryside. But we end up finding out sort of by the end of the year, when they inventory how many sorties and how many bombs dropped that Trumps when killing 10s of thousands of Afghans in the air war since 2017.

Daniel L. Davis 23:42
Yeah, and and towards what end? I mean, it’s, there’s, I think there’s certain periods here just in the last six months or so, where it was the the highest concentration of bombing even higher than during the surge lose 100,000 Americans on the ground and it’s just stunning. And yet you See the physical result on the ground is what? The Afghan Government losing ground, not gaining anything. So obviously the bombing has no positive impact whatsoever. It hasn’t driven the Taliban to make a deal to the contrary, Taliban remain in the strong position right now, which is why they can, you know, hold out for you know, really hot, good deals, and cannot agree to something they don’t like, and let the work continue to go on. Even though we may want to have a peace deal, because they have all the strategic advantages right now and have no incentive or motivation to make the serious compromises necessary to get to an in state that they don’t like. So they’re okay with going further. Because they see that we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna stick around there forever. I mean, Trump is clearly signal we’re on the way out, so that leaves even less motivation to them. But here’s the thing, Scott, we don’t need to be doing any of this negotiation with the Taliban. We don’t need a predicate our presence on the ground, no matter how How these negotiations come out. In fact, we shouldn’t even be making any. And that should be something that the Afghan government absolutely doesn’t, we should facilitate that, you know, help them out to any degree that we can, you know, been working with both sides to have it. But our military presence there needs to end and it needs to ends on our term and on our timetable. And then those people on the ground who have to live for the next 500 years, you know, they’ve got to be the ones to figure this out. They’ve got to both sides have to say how can we live because even the Taliban, even the, you know, some of the people in the Afghan government that they are sick of war, they don’t want to keep going on this for another 40 years. But until they each have their own motivation to make whatever compromises are necessary, they’re just not going to so our presence there extends the war. It there’s not even a possibility that it will end it but it can extend it into perpetuity as long as we have there to have the backs of the Afghan government with no strings attached. Maybe that’s starting to change now, but it needs to just absolutely end.

Scott Horton 26:12
Hmm. You know. So there were some reports by let’s say Kimberly Dozier had one. And there were a couple of more that said that there were secret annexes to this afghan peace deal and that the Taliban are actually gonna let America keep some special operations forces there after all, which just sounded like fiction to me, they’ve been holding out all these years to go ahead and concede the presence of American troops. Or what do you think was behind that?

Daniel L. Davis 26:32
I mean, this. I can, of course, I don’t have any insider information on this particular aspect of it. But based on what I do know, in the history of the place, I mean, I can see where Taliban would make any promises at all. Oh, yeah, sure. If you get rid of all the main combat troops then yeah, whatever. You can keep some, you know SDF behind no one that they had no intention of actually allowing that but if they could say anything to get more troops to leave, you know, then that would be in their advantage. And They could work with a much smaller group later, etc. Or hope that they would be driven out. But I can’t see them suddenly radically changing course and saying that America could keep Special Forces their long term, when that goes against everything they’ve ever stood for or asked for. But you know, we’ll see.

Scott Horton 27:18
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. If they were just making the bet that well, they’re not going to leave Special Operations guys here without adequate force protection. And so if we say, Sure, but you can only keep 1000 guys or whatever, they’re gonna go ahead and pull them all out anyway, something like that. I could even see it as just you know, traveling or not traveling is but sort of propaganda for the American hawks that don’t worry, they’re gonna let us keep some guys here. When and, you know, I guess we’ll see how it goes in a year from now.

Daniel L. Davis 27:59
Because there are those who are like, they’re just so desperate to not lose troops anywhere. That okay if the worst case scenario is that we can at least least keep special operators on the ground, then we’ll take that over nothing. Which is really troubling to me because that seems like that keeping troops deployed combat troops deployed all over the place in the world anywhere that we got them. They’re afraid to pull off of anywhere and black, they’re terrified of that or something instead of facilitating it, because we should seek, you know, peaceful relations anywhere that we can. But that just shows you because you see that absolutely a play in Iraq, in Syria. And even to some degree in the Yemen situation, definitely throughout Africa. They’re terrified of losing any opportunity to keep combat troops on the ground, even though you can’t tie a single one of them to American national security. And they all need to end.

Scott Horton 29:19
Yeah, and now so I’m glad that you frame it that way. Because this is such an interesting piece. It’s just, it says so much between the lines here well and in between Print to NBC News. Trump tells advisors, US should pull troops as Afghanistan COVID-19 outbreak looms. And the article is about how Trump is telling his staff. Let’s just go ahead and pull all the troops out. Now, who cares if the deal says we stay another, you know, three quarters of a year, another year. Let’s just go ahead and go. There’s a big outbreak in Afghanistan. We don’t want to get our guys caught up in that. And the whole frame of the article is about how this is obviously crazy. And this nut is off on another one of his tears. And will the responsible adults be able to talk him out of it or not, is essentially the entire framing of the thing. All of his advisors are doing everything they can to prevent him from making this terrible and rash mistake. Because after all, what might happen if America left Afghanistan, Danny Yeah,

Daniel L. Davis 29:58
well The framing that they continue on if you if you I’m sure you notice in the article was they said okay if you want to pull the troops out because of that then you’re gonna have to pull them out of Italy and all these other places all

Scott Horton 30:11
ight then finally we’re talking sense.

Daniel L. Davis 30:14
Hmm Oh, that we don’t need any in Italy they don’t need our defense. Sure let’s pull them out of there too. But that’s it. This one for another another podcast for another day. But the it just shows that they’re they’re so myopic on keeping the troops there at all costs, that the actual ramifications to America don’t seem to matter what they always default to have. I mean, from the Talon Petraeus back in 2010. All the way through to today is that there will be a new 911 lindsey graham is the most famous one for saying that and convincing Trump and scaring him that if there’s a new 911 and it happens because you pulled out john you’re watching you know be stained on your reputation cetera and that has kind of tempered him from not doing what he’s you know what he really wants to do. But it’s Actually detailed in a paper that’s going to be released possibly today or tomorrow your defense priorities. That is hogwash. The original 911 didn’t happen because of Afghanistan, it was incidental to the process. And in any new now, you know, a new terrorist attack won’t happen because of a piece of dirt in Afghanistan, as opposed to the other millions of square miles across the rest of the globe where these things can happen. It’s absurd to suggest that that tiny little.on the planet is somehow special over the rest of the entire planet. If we can do that, then we’re going to be safe. That’s crazy. We have other ways to keep us safe, no matter where the threat comes from, through our global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, our ability to strike any direct threat to America anywhere in the world. That’s what keeps us safe. Not troops on the ground, anywhere.

Scott Horton 31:50
Yeah. Well, and you know, if we’d stop backing al Qaeda, like the current war in Yemen, and that probably would help to

Daniel L. Davis 31:58
Yeah, it certainly does. eminence is not even an international interest in any way, shape or form. The last thing I think we should be doing is helping Saudi Arabia do anything because they’re not working on us. You know, they’re not working for our benefit. So I think we need to be, you know, actually employing if you want to do it, get down to the brass tacks of, you know, something that benefits America first. This is not it.

Scott Horton 32:22
Yeah. All right. Well, listen, we’ll be keeping our eyes open for that new piece at defense priorities. What’s the title?

Daniel L. Davis 32:30
I haven’t actually seen the final title yet. It’s still been in the works but it’s a it’s basically a new kind of a deep dive on Afghanistan explore examining the the core fundamental issues and how it relates to American national security, what the costs and benefits are of both staying an leaving.

Scott Horton 32:55
Okay, great. Well, make sure I’m on your email list or I’ll make sure to double check anyway and see for when that runs and we’ll definitely run it at anti war calm. Thank you again for coming on the show. Danny. Appreciate it. A lot of play. Thanks, Scott. All right, you guys. That’s the great Daniel L. Davis, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and now preach in peace at defense priorities. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org