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 Scott Horton Show.
All right, you guys, introducing Professor Alfred McCoy.
Of course, he is famously the author of The Politics of Heroin and also A Question of Torture.
And his latest is In the Shadows of the American Century, the Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.
And he is a Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Alfred?
Good, Scott, and yourself?
I'm doing great.
Wonderful to talk to you again here.
And you know, whenever anybody asks me about Afghan heroin, I always point them to your pieces at TomDispatch.com, and this is no exception.
The True Meaning of Afghan Withdrawal, or also titled How Washington Lost the Ultimate Drug War.
And in my book, Fool's Errand, I cite you heavily about the influence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar back in the 1980s when he was the CIA's favorite guy and the major role that he played in converting Afghanistan's entire economy toward an opium economy there.
And you touch on that in this, too.
But maybe we should go back and you tell us who's Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and how he becomes such good friends with the CIA anyway.
Right.
In many ways, he's a key to understanding the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan.
When the United States decided under Zygmunt Brzezinski, when he was National Security Advisor to President Carter, that we would intervene in Afghanistan.
The idea was that the Soviets had armed and supplied the Vietnamese to give us our debacle in Saigon in 1975 when Saigon fell to the communists.
And so we would give them their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.
In December 79, the Soviet Red Army occupied Kabul and then began the task of trying to pacify the country of Afghanistan.
And Brzezinski came up with something called Operation Cyclone, which would mobilize radical Islam and not only bloody the Red Army in Afghanistan, but destabilize the then Soviet Central Asian republics, which were all Muslim, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Stans.
And Brzezinski's aim was that this would break up the Soviet Union, liberate Eastern Europe and win the Cold War.
And to that end, he mounted a multi-billion dollar CIA operation.
But the problem was, of course, that Afghanistan's a landlocked country and we were not on good terms with Iran.
So the only way, and the Soviet Union, of course, was on the northern side, so the only way in was via Pakistan, which at the time was actually a very close U.S. ally.
So the CIA worked through Pakistan's intelligence service, Inner Service Intelligence, or ISI.
And they already had this rather unsuccessful fundamentalist Islamic asset named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was first known in the early 70s for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women at Kabul University.
He then fled to Pakistan.
They turned him into a kind of fundamentalist warlord, and he had amounted an abortive uprising in a remote Afghan province that had failed, and he'd fled back to Pakistan.
So the CIA, through the Pakistanis, kind of dusted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar off the shelf and made him the core of about a $2 to $3 billion covert operation that, you know, took 10 years and effectively drove the Red Army in defeat out of Afghanistan.
But in order to finance the resistance for a protracted period, you know, the mujahideen, the Afghan resistance, had to come up with a livelihood beyond the weapons that the CIA was providing, because basically the CIA was just turning over ever-increasing numbers of weapons.
And they didn't pay the fighters and their families for labor lost through warfare.
And so what the resistance did was they turned to opium.
And Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s.
By 1989, 1990, by the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium, 100 tons per annum, had grown to a major amount of opium, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world's illicit heroin trade.
And the impact on the Afghan-Pakistan border was nothing less than phenomenal.
So Afghanistan went to being the number one producer of illicit opium.
As the CIA caravans with arms came into Afghanistan, particularly the mujahideen resistance areas in the southern part of the country, they would return carrying opium.
That opium was then refined in several hundred heroin laboratories that opened inside Pakistan near the frontier.
And by 1985, the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands were the source of 60%, six, zero percent of all the U.S. illicit heroin, 80% of all the illicit heroin in Europe, and Europe suddenly had a massive problem.
And the regional impact or the local impact was nothing less than phenomenal.
According to a Pakistani government report, in the late 1970s, that country had zero heroin addicts.
Okay?
1979, zero heroin addicts, more or less, okay?
That's the number zero.
By 1985, the same Pakistani government statistics record 1,200,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan.
Today it's 1,500,000.
It's the heaviest rate of addiction in any place on the planet.
So it transformed Afghanistan to the epicenter of the global drug trade.
And it was actually, from a real politic view of a strategy, Brzezinski planned and then inadvertently created a perfect operation.
What he got was a perfect convergence between a geopolitical alignment, China-Pakistan-U.S. against the Soviets.
That's at the broad geopolitical level.
And then, unwittingly, Brzezinski mobilized the gritty local realities of opium and warlords in the countryside in Afghanistan.
And that gritty local reality, combined with that grand geopolitical alignment, basically crushed the Soviet Red Army.
And after we armed the mujahideen with Stinger missiles in 1985, they began shooting down those lethal Soviet helicopters, which were ravaged in the countryside, and they bloodied the Red Army.
They lost hundreds of helicopters, thousands of tanks and trucks, heavy casualties.
And Gorbachev called it the bleeding wound of Afghanistan.
They had to quit, and they did.
Three years after that, the Soviet Union collapsed, and America became the world's sole superpower.
Afghanistan, of course, plunged into chaos.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was the nominal prime minister of the country.
The CIA invested a couple hundred million dollars in trying to give him control of the country.
And the CIA backed him for about three or four years, up to about 1992.
But he kept going.
And with all the rockets and artillery that he acquired from the U.S. and the Pakistanis, in a kind of frustrated bid for power, he ravaged the capital, Kabul, with artillery and rocket fire, and killed about 50,000 people.
Well, the Pakistanis realized that he was failing.
So they reached into all those madrasahs, all those Islamic schools.
They had about three million Afghani refugees in their country, and the Saudis and others were funding the madrasahs as a way of educating the youth, because, you know, you had these massive refugee camps with young people with nothing else to do, and no way of advancing their lives.
And so the Pakistanis called likely fighters from the madrasahs, they called them the Taliban, which means students, and they armed and supplied them to capture Kabul in 1996.
And that regime, presiding over a country which was just ravaged, turned to opium as its sole source of exports and government tax revenue.
And they doubled the country's opium production.
By 1999, Afghanistan's opium production had gone up to 4,600 tons, which was, again, the great bulk of the world's illicit opium and heroin supply.
And they, moreover, the Afghanis, under the Taliban, introduced heroin refining into their own country, because the Pakistanis began shutting down the labs to try and deal with their massive drug problem.
So the labs just moved across the border into Afghanistan, and the Taliban taxed them.
And then they did something really curious about 2000.
They decided that they would make a serious bid for international recognition.
Up to that point, only three countries in the world were recognizing them as a legitimate government.
And so they turned up at the UN, and there was an active UN drug control program in Afghanistan.
I think the Taliban got the inflated idea of how important drugs were in international politics.
They thought that if they played ball on drugs, they'd get recognized.
And so they sent a delegation to the UN, and the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell rewarded them for their drug control efforts by giving them, I think it was $41 million in U.S. aid for drug control.
And the Taliban presided, because they're ruthlessly efficient, you know, their public executions of people for violations of Sharia law, Islamic law, you know, in the soccer stadium in Kabul were notorious.
They were spectacularly brutal.
So they had really very effective coercive capacities.
And they decided they'd wipe out the drug trade.
And they did.
And they wiped Afghanistan's opium production down from 4,600 tons to 185 tons.
And the country, you know, was at that point, you know, dependent economically on opium.
It was the major source of employment in the countryside.
It was the overwhelming source of government tax revenue.
And so when they wiped out the opium industry, they basically committed an act of economic suicide.
The economy collapsed.
The country was hemorrhaging refugees by the millions as farmers were fleeing into refugee camps inside Pakistan and even Iran.
And so when the first U.S. bombs dropped after 9-11 in October 2001, the Taliban government just collapsed.
It was a hollow shell that really shattered with the first American bombs.
So once again, the U.S. got the alignment right.
The geopolitics still worked.
You know, China was aligned with the U.S. and very closely with Pakistan.
They were supporting that intervention in Afghanistan.
And the CIA shipped in pallets loaded with $70 million in greenbacks.
They paid all their former drug lord, warlord allies.
And they were the fighters on the ground that swept the Taliban from Kabul and wiped them out seemingly forever.
And that was how the drugs was a critical factor in two great American military and geopolitical victories, beating the Soviets in 1989 and destroying the Taliban government with a handful of American special forces operation and U.S. air power in 2001.
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And then famously, I guess a few years later, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar bragged at least, I presume it was true, that he took the CIA's money and then helped bin Laden escape anyway.
Not that Bush was really chasing him or anything like that, but then in his group, Hizbi Islami became really partners with the Haqqani Network, another former favorite of the CIA, and both of them fought as partners with the Afghan Taliban insurgency against the Americans since 2004 or so, right?
Yeah, in fact, at one point during this period that you just referred to, the U.S. tried to assassinate Hekmatyar with a drone and they got a, I think they spotted his caravan and they hit it with a drone, but they missed him.
He's since survived and is sort of, he became something of, believe it or not, an elder statesman.
He was welcomed back to Kabul in an act of national reconciliation.
Right, in 2016, yeah.
But the situation then really got way beyond that intervention in the 1980s.
One of the, the U.S. right after we captured Kabul in basically October 2001, and then we created a client government under Hamid Karzai and put it in power and then tried to develop a viable government in Afghanistan.
The U.S. made one critical mistake, or actually made a couple of critical mistakes.
First, the Taliban actually offered to surrender, and the U.S. wouldn't even treat them as if they were in any way a legitimate combatant and absolutely refused to honor them with a surrender ceremony.
So the Taliban was in a kind of indeterminate status.
Second, the U.S. administration was kind of concerned with building up a military and trying to create a government in Kabul, and they didn't pay any attention to the drug trade.
They outsourced drug control to the British and police training to the Germans, which are the two critical aspects of narcotics control, policing and narcotics, of course.
And so from 2002 to 2004, the U.S. essentially ignored it, and very quickly the warlords that the CIA had backed with all those greenbacks and helped recover control of the countryside, the first thing they did to revive the local economy sensibly enough was to restore the major cash crop of the country, opium.
So that by 2003, opium production had boomed up from 185 tons to nearly 3,600 tons.
It was providing, and this is extraordinary, that 3,600 tons of opium provided 62% of the gross domestic product of Afghanistan.
Now that is phenomenal.
That's never happened in the history of this planet, that a militia economy has been the backbone of a country's gross domestic product.
A case in point, let's take Colombia during the era of the cartels in the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the attacks on the Ministry of Justice, you know, Escobar himself got elected to the Colombian National Assembly, all that, okay?
At that peak of the cocaine cartels, not to mention the Crips and Bloods, the violence in American cities, the drug crisis in America, all that, you know, in the midst of this cocaine boom, cocaine accounted for 3%, that's one, two, three percent of Colombia's gross domestic product.
Well, here's a situation where 62% of the economy is coming from illicit commodity, which means that everybody, whether they're Taliban, or warlords, or drug lords, or the government, everybody is somehow, in some way, implicated in this traffic, and the traffic kept booming.
You know, the U.S. recognized it by 2004, that not only was the drug trade booming, but the Taliban had taken control, again, of the drug trade in the countryside.
They were using that money to pay fighters and rebuild their guerrilla resistance against the United States.
So the Bush administration rustled up what became very quickly a $7 billion drug war that failed.
By 2007, in the sixth year of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the drug trade was booming to nearly 8,000 tons, it was providing over 90% of the world's heroin, and it was still over half the gross domestic product of the GDP of Afghanistan.
And the Taliban kept booming, growing, taking control of the countryside.
It got so bad that in 2009, in 2010, President Obama decided to have a surge of 102,000 U.S. troops, which we did, and they occupied the heroin heartland of Afghanistan, the southern provinces, particularly Helmand province, and you actually had U.S. Marines engage in comprehensive drug control and crop substitution programs.
The Marines did a pretty good job, but Obama had said that, you know, by December 2014, the surge would be over.
So as soon as the Marines and their British counterparts pulled out, you know, in Helmand province, the Taliban came back, the poppy fields were replanted, and the drug trade boomed and continues to boom today.
And the Taliban captured control of the drug trade, and, you know, within a year of that withdrawal in 2014 of the surge forces, the Taliban had captured half the countryside, and they just kept growing and expanding up to the point that in 2017, and this is another one of these extraordinary events in the history of this war, in 2017, the U.S. command decided that they would use B-52 bombers and F-22 Raptor fighter bombers, billion-dollar aircraft, multi-billion-dollar aircraft, and they unleashed them to attack the Taliban heroin industry.
And they bombed 10 mud huts with these billion-dollar aircraft.
And they issued a press release hailing this as a great victory that had crippled the Taliban finances.
Well, a British drug expert who was on the ground and works very closely in the area did a careful calculation published by the London School of Economics that determined that these billion-dollar aircraft had deprived the Taliban of exactly $2,800 in revenue.
You know, in other words, it was a clear statement that by 2017, that the gritty local realities on the ground, the warlords, the Taliban, the drugs, in a kind of yeasty stew, had defeated the U.S. war effort.
And the other thing that was changing in 2017 was the geopolitical side of the dimension, that perfect alignment of China, Pakistan, and the U.S. that gave the U.S. the backing of the Pakistanis and land access to Afghanistan, that ended.
Donald Trump turned up at a conference in Southeast Asia, and he met with Narendra Modi, the head of India.
India had long been, you know, kind of neutralized, hostile to U.S. foreign policy in that endless Pakistani-India wrangling.
We were always on Pakistan's side against India.
Well, suddenly there was a shift.
Narendra Modi and Trump formed something called the Quad, the Quadrilateral Alliance, and they started doing naval maneuvers to check China in the Indian Ocean.
And that meant that that grand geopolitical alliance ended.
And then, New Year's Day 2018, Trump tweeted out, you know, our foreign policy conducted by tweets under Trump, that after years of military aid, the Pakistanis have repaid us with nothing but, and this is a quote, lies and deceit, in other words, a breach.
So basically, the grand geopolitics and the gritty realities on the ground that Brzezinski had so perfectly aligned back in the 1980s to defeat the Soviets, and then the Bush administration aligned again to defeat the Taliban.
They were now turned against us, and our defeat was a story, an outcome foretold.
Well, I mean, the the Pakistanis have been backing the Afghan Taliban against the Americans since 2005 anyway, because they had, because even W. Bush was bringing the Indians and so was Obama bringing the Indians in.
And so the Pakistanis were hedging their bets, playing a double game this whole time.
Yeah, complex on the ground, but more or less, you know, we have the access.
Okay.
Well, that's true.
And that's really important.
People picture the map.
There's not only is Afghanistan landlocked, it's landlocked behind mountains.
And so the convoys have to drive all the way up from the port of Karachi to the Khyber Pass in order to take a hard left at Albuquerque and even get into Afghanistan.
So with that route closed, as you're saying, that was the final scotching deal.
And they closed it for a while in 2012 when Obama's forces had killed some of their guys on the border and forcing them to go to the Russian route through the north for a little while there.
But I see what you're saying that once Trump made this hard turn, you're saying that now that route from Karachi to the Khyber Pass is closed and so they have to call the war off now.
They have no choice, really.
Yeah.
The Pentagon is desperately trying to get an alternative, you know, right in that period around 2012.
I guess they could go through Iran, but no, that won't work.
Well, we used to be able to come in through Russia before relations got really bad.
And the U.S. operated an airbase in Manas, I think it's Kyrgyzstan, but that's been closed.
So we could fly across Russia, stop and refuel at Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan, and then our big C-5A transports could fly troops and equipment down into Afghanistan.
Now it's a 2,400-mile flight from our nearest base in the Persian Gulf.
Well, you know, that'll work for transports, but if you're talking about drone operations on an hourly, almost minute-by-minute basis, if you're talking about instant response by fighter aircraft in support of troops that are suddenly ambushed by Taliban in some remote mountain valley, that's not going to happen.
Right.
Hey, is it China's influence as well and Pakistani influence behind the Afghan Taliban's insistence that you may not keep that Bagram airbase?
You guys have to go, because that would be the one, you know, loophole in what you're just saying there.
Well, if they can keep Bagram, you know, then at least they can build up and, you know, through transports from the Gulf and build up at Bagram.
I don't know what the Taliban are saying out, but is that shot being called in Beijing or Karachi, you think?
I think that they would have every interest in cutting it, you know, because China's geopolitical game is pretty simple with Pakistan.
They've spent $40 billion in building a transport corridor from Western China through Pakistan, which is road and partially rail and pipelines that go from Western China down across the length of Pakistan, all the way to the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea.
And the Chinese transformed a sleepy fishing village through an expense in excess of $200 million.
And they built a modern port at Gwadar, which they've now then built into a Pakistani naval base.
And the Chinese have provided the Pakistani Navy with the ships and the Chinese have courtesy of the port.
So they've gained a strategic naval base 300 and some odd miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
And I don't think that the Chinese and the Pakistanis would be interested in having a U.S. air facility sort of on the flank of this strategic corridor that they're building.
Right.
And you know, the Afghan Taliban have stuck by that position for more than a decade now that they will not accept American troops in any form.
Yeah.
If the Taliban comes into power as a coalition government, that's likely to be a demand.
And the government would probably collapse on that point.
Or if they seize power by force of arms, then they'll clearly close Bagram because the U.S. will be bombing them to try and stop them from taking power.
So for all those reasons, I think we can pretty much forget the access to Bagram and kind of our air base, which was the sort of second major facility in the second part in the southern part of country, you know, right near Helmand.
We're still running bombing operations out of that, but that's going to close pretty quickly.
We've basically pulled out of there.
So in essence, our in-country air facilities are gone.
And we've got a 2,400 mile roundtrip flight from the Persian Gulf, which is pretty unsustainable for constant air operations.
All right, now you talk about the fall of Saigon and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and you got a big picture end of an era type scenario going on here, right?
This is the big embarrassment, the moment in time where we should be learning some kind of important lesson, something like that?
Yes, let's look back, OK?
First of all, this is America's longest war.
It's 2,400 American war deaths.
There's contractors that have died, several thousand.
There's over a thousand NATO troops that have died as well.
There's close to 70,000 Afghani troops have died, 47,000 Afghan civilians.
This has been a huge war effort.
And we're now leaving with the enemy almost at the gates, OK?
The Taliban are expanding across the countryside.
They're encircling cities, even as U.S. forces are pulling out from Kandahar Air Base.
There are Taliban rockets hitting the base.
So we're leaving, and it's like Saigon in 1973, OK?
We negotiated a peace agreement.
We got out.
And in 73, nobody said very much.
We turned things over to the South Vietnamese government, and everything looked OK.
Two years later, when Saigon fell in that moment of drama, with thousands of Vietnamese pounding at the steel gates of the U.S. embassy, American helicopters plucking Americans and Vietnamese from the rooftops of Saigon, flying them out to Navy ships in the South China Sea, and those ships swelling literally with thousands upon thousands of refugees, 135,000 fled.
The helicopters were pushed into the South China Sea to make room for more people on the decks.
I mean, that was a spectacular debacle for U.S. policy that eviscerated U.S. foreign policy capacity for a full decade.
So basically, the other shoe hasn't dropped in Afghanistan.
You know, we're pulling out.
You know, it's a little bit sticky now.
Not the best, but if Kabul goes up in flames, if the Taliban takes power, if women are put in burkas, if women's schools are closed, if women legislators and feminist advocates are, you know, punished and shot, you know, who knows what could happen?
If it gets really bad, that could represent another Saigon-like searing defeat of U.S. foreign policy, a signal to the world that the world's foremost military power has lost its ability to order the world as it wishes.
In other words, the decline of U.S. global hegemony, which is ongoing as we speak, will become clearly visible for all.
Yeah, and, you know, I admit, I think that's a real danger as well, that these guys, without the Americans there to back up the Kabul regime, what is the real ratio of violent force available to these two different sides?
And it seems like the Afghan national security forces will be overmatched immediately.
Hey, here's something Matthew Ho brought up.
He said, you know, back in 1996, the Afghan Taliban had the full support of the Pakistanis.
And I might add the Bill Clinton administration to go ahead and take Kabul.
And in fact, at least some reports I read, so the people of Kabul welcomed them as long as they were getting rid of Massoud and his guys at that point.
But they had the full support of the Pakistanis at that time and with, again, American acquiescence there, too, or agreement.
So I wonder, and Matthew Ho was saying, maybe that'd be different this time.
And maybe if the Pakistanis are not encouraging them to sack Kabul or possibly even are encouraging them to refrain from sacking Kabul, maybe some kind of power sharing agreement could be worked out short of the kind of catastrophe that you're just describing there, where essentially the Taliban try to conquer the entire non-Pashtun north of the country and inflict, as you're saying, their cultural dominance over everyone else in the way that they did in the 90s.
Yeah, the Taliban, for outsiders, is a bit of a black box.
Nobody really knows what they're like.
You know, are they the same force that is going to bring back this really draconian form of Sharia law?
Are they going to plunge the country into economic immiseration like they did during the 1990s?
Are they going to place a premium on a strict constructionist of Sharia law about all other considerations, development, education, all the rest?
Who knows?
Right now, there's very little indication that the Taliban have changed in any significant way.
If we go by their past record, you know, it's going to be likely to be draconian.
But that's just a guess.
Nobody really knows.
For example, Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, just had a piece in Foreign Affairs talking about the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban.
And he was as speculative as I've been.
He knows apparently no more than you and I do about what they're really like and what they're likely to do.
You know, sure, they've changed.
Yes, there's a new generation of leadership, but the values fundamentally change that produce that draconian regime back in the 1990s.
We don't know.
But every indication is going to be that it's not going to be a liberal, flexible, you know, even a kind of modernist Islamic regime.
Yeah, right.
So, well, you know what?
I guess we could triple down on another 20 year project and see if that works or just call it off, huh?
No, we're calling it off.
We're gone.
I mean, that's clear.
We are pulling out.
It's over.
You know, the transports are arriving.
The bases are being disassembled.
Equipment's been blown up.
We're out.
We're gone.
OK.
Well, you know, they're saying in The New York Times that, well, they want to keep JSOC and CIA and mercenaries, some in the country and some, you know, maybe in the Indian Ocean or if they can swing some kind of new base in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or something.
Is that just PR on the way out that they got to try to pretend they're not withdrawing all the way?
They really are?
Or what do you think they're going to do there?
There's been a secret war against the Haqqani network, against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and elements of the Taliban fought by the CIA.
And they fought it through a force that none of the press coverage mentions, which is, I think, called the Afghan National Security Directorate.
It's the CIA's local counterpart agency that was, in fact, as far as we know, built by the CIA in the CIA's image, particularly the paramilitary side of CIA operations.
And so there are going to be agencies, officers who have very good relations with their Afghani counterparts, and they're going to try and preserve those relationships and maintain those operations.
That's a part of this that, you know, scan the press coverage, tell me I'm wrong, Scott, but nobody's reporting on that part.
OK, and that's the part that's likely to stay.
And the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence Committee will try and work with through the Afghan National Security Directorate, which is certainly brutal.
Their human rights record is atrocious.
I don't know how efficient they are, but the agency seems to like them.
And so that looks like a relationship that might survive for a while, as long as there's at least a coalition government in Kabul.
Of course, when the Taliban become the dominant partner coalition government or seize power through armed violence, well, then the Afghan National Security Directorate will probably flee because they've been tracking and killing members of the Taliban.
They'll have to flee for their lives.
Mm hmm.
Well, you know, the pressure is going to stay on Biden to change his mind on this, and they're going to come up with every, as you were describing, plausible nightmare scenario here for what it's going to look like when the government that they've propped up all this time falls into feat.
Although, I don't know.
I mean, it seemed they leaked out that that Biden had talked to W. Bush and Obama and they both agreed that he should do this.
That was a pretty important press release there to try to cover his flank.
There with W. Bush and say that even he says it's OK to give up now, this kind of thing.
But you're right that it's going to look ugly as hell.
And that's a great argument for the chiefs to say, geez, we could just stave him off a little longer, boss, with a little bit of air power.
And he's already broken the deal we had.
And so if the Taliban continue to escalate and they have really launched a new offensive, it seems like and if they continue to escalate into the fighting season, now the the snow is melting and it's on for the fighting season.
And if they start attacking Americans, that would be the excuse to cancel the withdrawal and double back down again is what I'm afraid of.
And I think a lot of people are predicting.
You know, the Taliban are rocketing, I mean, they've been rocketing Kandahar Air Base, but there's not many Americans there and the rockets are mainly falling in the Afghan side of the base, not the American side.
And I think the Taliban have been playing a waiting game for getting the Americans out.
They've been mainly concentrating their attacks, to the best of my knowledge, on Afghan National Army and particularly Afghan police.
So, you know, they've had their eyes on beating their local rivals.
They just want the Americans to go.
And I think that so I would be surprised if the Taliban actually attacked American soldiers.
OK, that would be, you know, a miscalculation on their part, likely to at least in the immediate term produce a massive airstrike, which we can mount from carriers in the Arabian Sea offshore and even from the Persian Gulf.
You know that we can do.
Right.
So, you know, I'd be surprised.
So what I mean, just to guess, OK, well, my expectation is the Taliban will continue to to encircle the cities, cripple police, force Afghan National Army forces out of their outposts, try and erode their morale and produce an effect so that right after the U.S. leaves, that the Afghan National Army does what the Iraqi army did back in 2014.
You remember when the Islamic State started their advance and the Iraqi army, about a third of the army, maybe even a half, just threw away their helmets and their weapons and fled.
You know, that's what I think they're hoping to produce, you know, a mass flight.
We've seen it happen twice now.
That's what happened in South Vietnam.
Some of the units fought and fought hard, but most of the South Vietnamese units just, you know, took off their uniforms and fled.
They melted away.
It was a massive, million strong army with the world's fourth largest air force and fifth largest navy and, you know, an armada of tanks and trucks.
It was a huge army.
It just collapsed.
The same thing with the Iraqis.
We spent many billions of dollars in building that army up.
And when the Islamic State attacked, it just collapsed.
You know, so if you look at the past on these kind of, you know, surrogate state operations, trying to build up a government that has capacities beyond the legitimacy that the government commands, you know, it's failed twice so far and it's very likely to fail a third time.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that is Professor Alfred McCoy, of course, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and A Question of Torture, and his latest is In the Shadows of the American Century, The Rise and Decline of U.S.
Global Power.
And this one is at TomDispatch.com and running also under Tom Englehart's name there in the archives at Antiwar.com as well.
The True Meaning of Afghan Withdrawal.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks for the conversation.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
