7/2/21 Matthew Hoh on Veteran Suicides, Afghanistan and America’s Failed War on Terrorism

I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, last one of the day here.
On the line, it's the American hero, and I really mean that, retired Marine Corps captain Matthew Ho, decorated hero, saved others' lives in Iraq War II, and then is really a hero because he tried to stop the Afghan surge in the summer of 2009 by telling the truth about how it wasn't going to work, and then they ignored him, and they escalated the war anyway, and that was 12 years ago, and now we lost anyway.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing, sir?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
Thank you for that incredibly, overly generous introduction.
Yeah, well, I look up to you a lot.
Hey, no, I was really brave what you did there, and they should have listened, and it ain't just that.
It's that when you did this, then your boss, Eikenberry, took your side, too, and he was a former general in charge of the war, so big wimp Obama.
That was all the tough guy he needed to hide behind was his Marine Corps captain and his former Army general running the State Department mission over there, telling him that this is no good, and you don't have to do it, and he did it anyway.
He knew better, and he did it anyway, son of a bitch.
And Holbrooke, who was the senior representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time, took my side.
He complained to me directly at the time that he couldn't get a word in with President Obama because Hillary Clinton was in the way, and then on and on.
When I asked Karen DeYoung, who wrote the story about me for The Washington Post, which was a big, above-the-fold, front-page, 3,000-word to-do, I said, Karen, what did you do this for?
Why did you do this?
And she said, because everybody I asked, and at that point, Karen was with The Washington Post, and she traveled with Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time.
DeYoung had been around forever, had written a biography of Colin Powell, so she knew a lot of people.
She said, everybody I asked in Washington—State Department, Pentagon, CIA, White House—I asked about what you said.
They all said that you were correct.
So it wasn't just like Ike and Barry.
Everybody knew this was not going to work, and they went along with it anyway.
Here we are now, right?
It's got people looking at you and I and other people, people who are listening to supposed to do now?
And they get all hysterical.
Oh, you know, the mayor taking over these provincial capitals and et cetera, et cetera.
This is exactly what we said would happen.
This is exactly what we said would happen if we pursued this stupid war, escalated it, just threw fuel on the fire.
What do you think was going to happen?
You know?
And here we are.
And so how are you and I supposed to answer these questions about what to do now, when you were saying it a lot longer than I was, saying, don't do this because this is going to end in catastrophe?
Now here we are in the catastrophe, and I don't know what to tell you we can do.
You know?
Build a time machine.
That's all I can tell you.
Yeah.
And then don't go at all.
I mean— Exactly.
That's exactly right.
You know, there's this narrative that, jeez, if only Obama had doubled down and tripled down instead of, you know, quadrupled down instead of just doubling down or something like that.
That wasn't enough.
But really, you know, from everything I can tell from all the research I've done and all you guys I've talked to who've been in the war over there, that actually the surge was just making matters worse, essentially.
It wasn't that they were achieving minor gains, but the surge was just too small and too temporary to hold those gains.
It was more like the whole thing was just a big PR campaign for the Taliban.
It really was.
It really was.
You know?
And then the other argument is that, well, if—and you're hearing it now because of Rumsfeld's death—well, if the United States hadn't taken its eyes off of Afghanistan and invaded Iraq, et cetera, no, you just would have had the same situation just a lot sooner in time.
You know?
You just would have had—rather than what happened in 2009, 2010, 2011, et cetera, rather than that happening then, it would have happened in 2003, 2004, 2005.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, this idea that somehow we just didn't do it correctly, we just didn't do it good enough is just—it's ludicrous.
It's ludicrous.
Yeah.
And look, the ones with that narrative, they had their chance a dozen years ago, right?
That was their argument way back in history, in 2009, that Bush took his eyes off the ball, so now we got to go back and do the good war right.
So—and then they sent 140,000 men, if you count the Europeans, too, and it wasn't enough, in fact, it's counterproductive.
So for them to try to use that same argument now, it's sort of like when the crash happens at the end of Bush, and they go, yeah, well, that's because Bush was Ron Paul and we just lived through eight years of laissez-faire free market capitalism.
Well, I don't remember it that way.
You know what I mean?
No.
No, no.
It's the same thing they do here.
It's like, oh, yeah, the New Deal never happened.
I don't know.
We just—I don't— No, exactly.
I remember, you know, my friends and I in 2007, 2008, calling DC Versailles, right?
I mean, like, it certainly wasn't because, yeah, this small government was put in place and that the government wasn't spending any money and, you know, leaving things alone.
You know, and to your point about the 140,000 troops that Obama sent also include about 100,000 contractors as well.
I mean, so you're talking about a quarter million people Obama put into that war, plus hundreds of billions of dollars.
Remember in 2010, 2011, the Congress was appropriating about $120 billion a year just for Afghanistan.
I mean, you're talking massive, massive sums, a quarter million-man army, basically, which is really what it was, because you have to include the contractors.
And yeah, here we are, you know?
And all the suffering that's gone on—and it doesn't end.
It's not because we left Bagram Airport—Bagram Air Base.
It's not because all of a sudden it's all going to end.
No, this thing's going to go on and on and on.
I mean, Afghans are going to continue to suffer.
The consequences throughout the region are going to continue to reverberate.
I mean, we're seeing what Afghan army forces fleeing into Turkestan and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and there's problems with that now.
This is just a mess.
And then, as many people saw, the end of last month, end of June, Brown University's Cost of War Project put out the new numbers on soldier and veteran suicide, and you're looking at four times as many guys and gals have been killed by suicide since coming home than were killed in combat over there.
I mean, that's not going to stop.
We know that.
I mean, there are two veterans who are in their 80s and 90s who are still killing themselves at rates three to four times higher than their civilian peers, 75 years after the war's over.
I mean, this thing ain't stopping, even though the U.S. may not officially be involved in the war any longer, which also we know is a complete farce.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
You know, all right, well, let's get back to that in a second.
I'm going to stick on Afghanistan here for a second.
Phil Roggio over at the Long Word Journal, I respect the guy even though he's a hawk just because he does detailed work and he doesn't embellish.
Yeah.
And he didn't take the side of the terrorists against the Shiites in Syria because, yeah, he still don't like Bin Ladenites, no matter what you tell him about the Ayatollah.
So good.
And I think he probably hates the Ayatollah, too, just not that much.
But anyway, yeah.
So Roggio had a thing where he's quoting Surajin, Surajin, however you say it, Haqqani, the son now, Jalal ad-Din's dead, I guess.
And the son is now in charge.
And apparently he's really speaking for the Taliban.
And Haqqanzada is still the emir of the Taliban.
But this is, you know, apparently Haqqani has taken on this large role as, you know, kind of spokesman and, you know, kind of right hand man.
And so.
I'm getting to the point here, I swear to God, he put out a thing saying, hey, everybody, be real nice and don't execute your captive.
In fact, don't even take them captives.
When the Afghan army surrenders to you, take their rifles and send them home in peace.
Tell them that they're brothers and that all is forgiven and it's fine.
Go home.
And we don't want to hold them.
We just want to let them go.
And also, we've been very surprised by our recent gains all over the north of the country here.
It's walking right in to district after district and seizing these military bases and all these armaments and all of these things.
But we don't want to get carried away.
And so, for example, we stopped at the gates of Kunduz and you are all hereby commanded to not seize any provincial capitals.
We don't want to piss off the Americans and get them to break the deal.
And that could provoke them.
So we'll take over these districts, but we're going to hold our horses and not take over the provincial capitals yet.
And this kind of thing.
And I thought, you know, they've really grown up the Taliban.
They really learned a lot about how this is done.
But it really raises all the questions about, you know, the real reality of their power compared to that of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Security Forces after America leaves.
I mean, I read a thing, Matt, I don't know if you saw this, where I don't know how many different divisions they have, but it was one group of Afghan special operations forces who are credited with being actually capable, who were completely just slaughtered, cornered and slaughtered by the Taliban and lost.
I don't know how many 20, 30 men or something like that.
I wonder, you know, how many really capable Afghan, you know, National Army forces they even have left at this point.
And and I mean, it raises all these questions, just like with the fall of South Vietnam and the humiliation and all of that there.
Can the American Pentagon take this L as they say it now, this humiliation in this loss when the Taliban, you know, decides to go ahead and march into these provincial capitals and probably even including Kabul within a year?
I don't know.
Maybe much less than that, right?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, the Taliban, to me, makes me think of a difference between above ground and below ground water, right, where you think of a wave coming in.
And that's not like what the Taliban are like to me.
Very much they remind me of, you know, water that comes up from below the ground.
That's how, you know, some really dangerous flooding is.
People in Florida, right, are dealing with that right now with the limestone down there.
The water just comes up through the limestone with the rising sea levels.
It's not like it comes over the ground, it just comes up from the ground and it's there.
And that's what the Taliban remind me of.
I think what we're seeing with this collapse of the Afghan army, hey, very similar to what we saw with the collapse of the Iraqi army, right, in 2013, 2014.
I think I remember hearing Patrick Cockburn talking about this with you back then about how the Iraqi army, it's not an army, it's a business operation.
You know, you purchase your position as a division commander and, you know, your brigade commanders purchase their position and, you know, it's just a whole extortion and bribery racket that falls downward.
And you claim a bunch of infantry that you don't have because you just want to confiscate all their paychecks.
But then on paper, it looks like we've got a couple divisions out there, but we really don't.
That's right.
You know, and I think what's happening in Afghanistan is that, you know, again, those the folks who have been on the take, who've been living there, profiting off of all the American money that's been flowing in there and the Western money and the Japanese money, whatever has been flowing in there for the last couple of decades, they realize that's about to drive up.
So I have a feeling they've been pocketing it.
One of the reasons why you're seeing just the Afghan army just basically fall apart and walk away is because I have a feeling their pay hasn't been showing up.
You know, it's not so much that the American air cover isn't there anymore.
The American trainers aren't around anymore.
You know, I mean, maybe that's got something to do with it.
Maybe sure.
Yeah.
Hey, there's there's less chance of American bombers showing up to support you.
But I really do think a lot of it's the fact that the paychecks, they don't get paychecks, they get cash, that the cash just hasn't been showing up because it's being pocketed by those above them, pocketed even more than it's usually pocketed.
But realizing that this may be the last of the pay for a while, you know, and why are we going to keep fighting for you, particularly if I'm not even my home province, not even my hometown or village or valley or whatever?
I'm not fighting for these men, you know, and good for them in the Afghan army for walking away and not dying for those for that corruption.
You know, it's so it but it is it is a situation where you see the Taliban coming across as very organized, rather disciplined, with with kind of a strategic outlook.
And then their operations straight guided by that strategic outlook.
Certainly nothing really we could claim here in the U.S., you know, in terms of how our wars have been conducted.
I actually had you bring up a Connie I had I was on an Afghan podcast, gosh, a month or two ago.
And Navid Haqqani, one of the one of the members of the family who was acting as a spokesperson for the Taliban, was the other person on the podcast.
And yeah, and the thing is, the Afghan Ministry of Defense had been invited to come on and they had declined.
They didn't.
They supposedly they declined all the time.
So, I mean, you have and this was an Afghan podcast dedicated towards Afghans.
So most of the podcast podcasters in Dari and I had a through a through a WhatsApp call, I had a simultaneous translation so I could follow what Haqqani was saying.
But very polished, stuck to script, you know.
But also, too, like you were saying that Rojo had had had commented on offering the olive branch, basically like, hey, put down your weapons, go home.
We're not going to bother you, whether or not that is the case.
But I think it might be the case.
There are those within the Taliban, I think, Scott, that want their revenge, that want complete victory, that want to see their enemies dragged through the streets, hung from light poles, et cetera, et cetera, want that final victory.
But I think there's also a good amount of Taliban that are just like, look, we've been fighting for four or five generations now.
This goes back to the 70s.
We're tired.
I don't my sons are fighting.
I don't want to see my grandsons fight.
Let's just stop this thing.
And I think there is an element within that.
They want victory.
They don't want defeat.
But they also don't want to see the slaughter and the also, too, I think they're students of war enough to know that you can't predict what's going to happen, that that the consequences of war are always almost always unintended and uncontrollable.
And I think that there are those in the Taliban that have a respect for that, at least.
So I do believe that these offers of look, just go home and we're not going to you know, you have our amnesty.
I think that might be true.
I mean, I could be wrong, but but I think that might be true in certain cases.
Yeah, I mean, you know, never mind the ANA.
Once everything starts devolving and you have the local strongmen raising up their own militias, we might find out they're a lot more capable in that form.
And Lord knows they've got a lot of money and weapons from this whole time.
So they could still I mean, if when we started this war 20 years ago, the Northern Alliance controlled the small area in the far northwest of the country and the Taliban ruled all the rest of it.
And you know, that's going to be more or less where we're picking up, picking back up here.
It seems like they could put up a hell of a fight for that territory or I don't know.
I guess the Hazars are all mostly focused in Ghazni, south of Kabul.
I mean, they're going to they're going to either have to get it together and prepare for a hell of a war or they're going to have to figure out how to shake hands with these Taliban guys.
Yeah, and hopefully, hopefully they can figure out how to shake hands all sides.
I mean, I don't want to see this go further, but you're absolutely right about the militias and then with the Hazars, particularly if the Hazars feel as if they may be on the wrong side of a genocide as what would occur to a degree in the 90s against them.
You know, one of the one of the things that you get, you know, principles of warfare and you know, it's often get overlooked or dismissed or technology is important now, et cetera, et cetera.
And the U.S. military has been really guilty of not paying attention to, you know, these these, you know, principles of warfare.
One of them is will.
And I shouldn't say that because because they have in a way, I think that on a small unit level, they have the American military.
That's why U.S. infantry squads are so good, you know, in a sense that they're capable, they're effective because they're composed of young men who are bonded together, who fight for each other and who believe they believe the American exceptionalism narrative.
They believe that what they're doing over there is protecting people back home.
They have a will.
The Taliban have a will.
I think these militia members will have a will.
Just as you say, you see the will to fight within, say, the Kurdish forces in Syria, the Shia forces in Iraq.
You know, they have a will to fight because they feel like they're really defending something.
They feel like they have a purpose behind what they're doing other than getting one hundred and eighty dollars a month, which is, you know, I don't even know if that's the pay anymore.
That used to be the pay at one point for the Afghan army.
But so I think you're right, Scott, with the militias and whether or not the militias strike deals with the Taliban will be something we see in the next few months.
I expect they would.
You know, I mean, I really do think that at this point, if sides because that's what made the Taliban so successful in their rise to power in the 90s, they did a lot of fighting, but they also bought out a lot of their competition.
They also bought a lot of their adversaries.
You know, I mean, I heard that from a lot of people over there.
What was the secret to the Taliban's success to victory in the 90s?
And it was the Pakistani rupee.
They just basically bought the other side and allegiances are switched.
And I think you'll see that here, too, you know, and hopefully because that's a way to get to at least some form of stability, to some form of ceasefire.
And, you know, and so this bloody thing could eventually maybe get some there's some chance of it ending.
But, you know, I think what the spoiler is going to be is that there are going to be elements, of course, that are going to be left out of that, that those power, those negotiated deals at power, the Afghan government, of course, chief among that right now, but as well as to the American special operations and CIA people who are over there, who are raging these secret wars from, you know, the Atlantic coast of Africa all the way to Pakistan.
This is just going to be another one of these wars that are classified wars that can't be discussed because it's all done by CIA, CIA, JSOC and drones.
So by legal definition, they're covert actions and can't be discussed.
You know, they're fine with it because they're just happy to have the wars and they don't really care about who's in power as long as they have their operations going on and they feel like they're doing their part to control their part of the empire.
And then, of course, the army is happy to have their battle with Russia and the Navy is happy in the Navy and Air Force are happy to have their battle with with China.
So everybody gets what they want in the Pentagon.
Yeah.
I mean, if that doesn't say it all right there, that the Navy don't give a damn about Russia.
The Navy is interested in China and the Air Force and the army.
I guess the Air Force is interested in China and Russia, but the army doesn't give a damn about China because the army isn't useful in a war with China.
They want to take on Russia or at least build up in Eastern Europe.
And then a special operations command.
Well, they don't give a damn about Russia or China because they don't really play too much of a role there.
Maybe some anti-aircraft to wear, but in the scheme of things, they would rather fight Sunnis with rifles or I guess sometimes four Sunnis with rifles against their Shiite enemies from Nigeria to the Philippines in these ongoing Afghan occupation like wars.
Yeah.
I mean, that just says it all, doesn't it?
This whole thing is a racket.
This isn't about protecting you.
This is about the Pentagon protecting their own budgets.
Yeah.
I mean, exactly.
And to sell weapons, you know, you want to justify a 13 billion dollar aircraft carrier, Scott, you need China.
You need to justify a half billion dollar bomber plane, the B-21 Raider or whatever they call this thing.
You need China and Russia, I guess, too.
You know, I mean, that helps, right?
And then, of course, you have the whole nuclear side.
We've got this, what is it, one and a half, two trillion dollar nuclear upgrade going on, modernization, you know, we're getting all kinds of new missiles and bombs and fuses and warheads and eventually new submarines.
And, you know, well, you need Russia and China for that, too.
But you got to keep the special operations guys and the CIA happy and they're happy to run their, you know, their world war, basically.
That's really what it is.
It's a world war that goes from, again, from Western Africa all the way to Pakistan, all throughout the Muslim world, you know, and if you're there, hey, say you're a guy in Delta or in the SEALs or whatever, you know, you grew up hearing about these, you know, SF guys who went into Afghanistan and then rode on horseback and fought the Taliban.
And, you know, that's your that's your foundation story.
That's your creation story.
You know, as well as, too, if you're a CIA guy, CIA's got an army of 10,000 dudes in Afghanistan, at least, plus their armies of Kurds in Syria, their armies of Kurds in Iraq.
Who knows what they've got going on in Africa?
God help us.
Right.
I mean, but like there is so much here for everybody in terms of the weapons you want, in terms of the back story to why you are doing this, the narrative for why you exist and how you're protecting America and making the world safe for democracy, as well as you're keeping the defense industry very happy.
Now, it is it's a complete racket.
And the ability for everyone in the Pentagon to get what they want is is really quite clear.
All right.
Sorry.
Hang on a second.
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Speaking of which, and, you know, the staying in Afghanistan forever part.
So you mentioned this earlier and I really buried the lead.
I should have said this right after I introduced you was we're recording this on July 2nd and which is the real Independence Day, you know, the anniversary of the signatures on the Declaration of Independence.
So yesterday and I guess.
Maybe today, Afghan time, they called it quits on the Bagram Air Base, which is just unbelievable to me.
I kind of don't believe it, but I got multiple sources and nobody's saying otherwise that that's it.
There's nobody left.
All the Americans are gone.
And, you know, I read a report that said that the locals are scouring the place for anything that they can salvage.
Nobody's stopping them.
There's the place is empty.
But then they want to keep and everybody read up.
I think Jason and Dave both are doing such great work on this and antiwar dot com right now.
I think the latest one is from Dave about how they want to stay.
They want to keep 650 troops for the embassy.
They're trying to keep the Turks to hold on to the airport.
So this raises questions about whether that's breaking the deal, whether the Taliban have agreed that, yeah, you can leave 650 for your embassy.
I don't think so.
And I wonder, you know, if they're getting away with something there, that's one of them secret annexes that maybe the Taliban did agree to or they're trying to push their luck right now with that.
What do you think?
I think it's because the U.S. embassy probably won't leave unless there's a presence like that.
And that presence includes, you know, and I learned this from whether it was Jason or Dave or whoever wrote this in antiwar, that presence at the at Kabul airport includes a counter counter artillery, counter battery fire.
We have the people don't know in the U.S. military.
We have radars that as soon as the enemy fires rockets, artillery, mortars, these radars pick them up and they're able to basically triangulate and locate where they come from.
And they're very effective.
I mean, to the point that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, whenever the insurgents shot at us, they really only could fire three or four rounds and then have to pack up and get out of there because our counter battery fire will respond within a minute.
I mean, it was very effective.
And that's what they want to leave there at Kabul.
But I have a feeling that that 650.
So you're talking about like a battalion minus, right?
I mean, you're talking about it along with helicopter support.
It along with helicopter support, this counter battery support, you know, yeah, that's a significant number of guys.
But yeah, like I think I would think that that was a stipulation for the U.S. for the State Department to say whether or not we're leaving.
And of course, politically, if the State Department shuts down the U.S. embassy in Kabul, that's something for the White House wants not to happen at all.
And I would I would wonder if maybe the Taliban are in agreement with this.
You know, I mean, certainly that small of a force, you know, that's got nothing to do with the JSOC and CIA commandos that are raiding and kicking in doors.
I can imagine the Taliban saying about this 650 strong force.
OK, if that's what you need in order to keep this process going, because we realize if it's not there, then your embassy will close and the White House can't have that for the political reasons, just as, you know, you said Haqqani said, let's not scare the Americans into coming back in.
Let's not frighten them.
Let's not do anything to kind of break the pace of this.
And you saw with the Taliban message about Bagram being closed or Bagram being evacuated, American personnel, they said this is a positive step forward, is a very cheerful, supportive Twitter message.
I mean, their their messaging campaign is is very well done.
I mean, for people that we characterize as living in caves and being backwards and everything, they're much better, I think, at public relations a lot of times than we are.
But this whole thing, Scott, of how basically from everything I understand, the drawdown of American forces is complete.
Again, today's July 2nd is complete this weekend.
You know, it's two months ahead of schedule and barely two months after it began.
And it goes to show the insubordination of the U.S. military.
And maybe Trump wasn't so firm about this and the White House really didn't push it.
But there's no reason why this drawdown could not have taken place in the first few months of the Biden administration.
It was simply, you know, over the last few months of the Trump administration, Biden came into office and said it's logistically impossible for us to do it, which is complete bullshit because, right, we saw that it took us two months to do it here.
You know, I mean, so you have to wonder about that insubordination, that feet-dragging by the U.S. military in Afghanistan against, hey, and I'm no fan of Trump, but, you know, we saw this in Syria as well, right?
Jim Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador, the anti-ISIS ambassador, you know, he bragged, you know, several months ago how Trump was continually lied to about the status of U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq.
I mean, so you also have this situation in Afghanistan where, you know, was the military insubordinate to the president in terms of the drawdown?
I mean, because certainly how it played out, how quickly the U.S. military got out of Afghanistan belies the notion that it's going to take us a long time.
It's really complex.
This is going to be really difficult.
Right now, you know, he's got to pack up a whole bunch of planes, basically, you know.
So that's something that people need to be aware of and be really, you know, this is really dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, as far as the Taliban taking all these districts and everything and the Democrats and the Pentagon and all their media friends crying about how we don't get our decent interval and the Taliban are humiliating us on the way out the door by seizing all these districts.
Well, we had a deal.
You could have stuck with the deal, be out by May 1st.
And then all this is your decent interval, you know, where that's that's exactly everybody stops paying attention before the worst of it.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, this is a this is a self a self goal or an own goal.
What do they call it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
An own goal.
Right.
You know, an own goal.
Yeah, it really is.
It's as well as to just the consequences of all this, the catastrophe that it is, the fact that it's a complete failure, you know, that that that this is a disaster, that the war in Iraq was a disaster, the war in Syria.
We lost that war.
And I want to tell you, Scott, I don't think I've spoken to you since I reread the direction by Seymour Hersh.
Oh, yeah.
Which is what you say all the time.
Every speech I talk about it.
Yeah.
Oh, you know what?
And I finally I printed it out months ago and I finally got around to to reading.
Holy cow.
You are absolutely right.
I mean, like, my God, isn't that something I was worried about?
I was messing with their lawyers because I think I quoted it for a whole page in the new book.
But I'm like, man, I don't know what to cut out of here.
I want to use the whole damn article.
It's just something else.
It's like, you know, as well as it just the experience of it all.
You know, one of the things that when I when I speak about how counterproductive this has been and I've probably said these numbers before, but it's worth repeating, you know, in 2001, the State Department said they were and I think you say this in your book, too.
You know, in 2001, the State Department said there were four terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Now there's 20.
Right.
You know, I mean, you get the whole size of Al-Qaeda was 200 or 400 people strong in 2001.
Right.
And now 20 years later, just any look at the last couple of decades, Al-Qaeda has been a success story to grow from any organization that starts out with 400 people that then expands and has operational success, as well as, you know, financial and social media success and everything else like Al-Qaeda has over the last 20 years.
You know that they really did well for themselves.
You know, I mean, the Americans did really well for them.
That's exactly right.
Right.
And then, you know, my other favorite number is, you know, we stand up Africa Command in 2008.
Right.
We've got to have this military command for all of Africa.
And in that year, there were 300 terror attacks all throughout Africa.
10 years later, or I think more than 10 years later, in 2020, there were 5000 terror attacks in all of Africa.
Right.
And these people in Washington, D.C., the first thing they'll say is, well, correlation is not causation and some nonsense like that just shows that they're so stupid.
You know, this is starting a war in Libya does show causation.
Sorry, pal.
I was paying attention the whole time during that.
And that's exactly how we got the jihadist from Libya who moved on to Mali and then made friends with Boko Haram down in Nigeria and then spread their violence into Burkina Faso and all the rest of the Lake Chad region there.
And all of that is because of the war in Libya.
And having US commandos and aircraft in those countries is not helping, right?
It's literally if we did nothing, it would be better than what we're doing.
And, you know, on the other side of this, I know you want to talk a bit about drones.
I think, you know, the danger that people have been saying about drones now for 20 some odd years about how we have to do something about this, we really need to regulate it, ban them, whatever.
Well, we're seeing that reality, you know, whether it be with the way the Azerbaijanis use drones to totally beat about the Armenians last summer, whether it be the fact that drones are being used against US forces in Syria and Iraq, whether how well the Houthis use drones to blow up half of Aramco's refinery, I mean, on and on.
And now we have reports of these autonomous drones using some form of artificial intelligence that don't need anybody behind a keyboard or a stick or watching them.
They just basically take off and go hunt on their own being used in Libya.
I mean, if people want an example of how dangerous the drones are and how revolutionary they are, look at the US Marine Corps.
The US Marine Corps is getting rid of its tanks.
One of the reasons why it's getting rid of its tanks is because it looked and it saw what happened with Azerbaijan and Armenia and said, you know what?
Tanks are going to get killed on the battlefield from now on.
We don't need them.
You know, we got to do something different.
Yep.
You know?
So, I mean, and this is why people again, 20 years ago were saying, wait, these drones as sharp as it looks and how it's going to be great.
But, ah, you know, I mean, now we're bearing the consequences of it in the fact that it's just not nations, but groups, people can, you know, individuals have these things and, and they're very dangerous as well as too, then you get into the whole implication of that.
These drones have been used by the United States for extrajudicial assassinations that are, you know, we've killed American citizens with them.
Ah, the whole drone program is classified.
So any drone operation is just something that doesn't get discussed, not because the government's lying about it or because they want to keep it secret, but because by law they can't talk about it.
I mean, my God, the whole, the whole war that exists between again, Atlantic coast of Atlantic coast of Africa, all the way to Pakistan will now be basically one big CIA JSOC drone operation that by law is covert, which means it's classified and can't be discussed.
So it's, it's, it's quite a, ah, the situation we're in is troubling on so many levels, um, that we really are, uh, you know, you talk about opening the Pandora's box of warfare, the, you know, we're, we're really seeing these consequences, uh, the invasion of Iraq with creating Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Man, that seems rather, uh, compared to some of this stuff, just dealing with Al-Qaeda in Iraq seems rather simple at this point than some of the things that we're dealing with right now.
Yeah.
And well, so I wonder if you think there's an opportunity for, you know, more cooperation here with the Afghan Taliban as they take back over that country, um, not that I'm for intervention here, but I'm just saying in the scheme of things, you have a thing where, um, what almost a year ago now, I guess the fall of 2020, um, the post and the times said that, and I forget now, maybe you can help me.
I guess it was seals were flying drones.
JSOC, you know, SEAL team, six types, top tier special operations guys were flying drones as air cover.
Maybe it was Delta.
I can't remember.
Yeah.
Or Rangers could have been like over in Nangarhar and Kunar that area.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're flying drones and air support for the Taliban fighting against what they call ISIS-K there, this group of basically Pakistani refugees from the Pakistani Taliban from that war in, in, in 2010 there, um, in the Swat Valley and the Northern federally administered tribal territories and all that.
Um, but so it's sort of like the awakening only many, many years later that, Hey, you know what we could do?
We could just forget that we ever had a trouble with this insurgency.
And we'll just ask them, we'll ally with them to turn against the worst parts of And so, um, and which I cover in the book that the Americans and the Afghan government helped groom the rise of Al-Qaeda in, I mean, pardon me, ISIS in, uh, Afghanistan in order to use them against the Pakistanis, which blew up in their face here and against the Afghan Taliban, which backfired.
But anyway, um, um, when you talk about the ongoing drone war, is that going to be in support of the Taliban against their enemies there?
And then, Oh, secondary question is, uh, the UN reports, everybody always refers to the UN reports.
Then you read the UN reports and the UN reports site, no information whatsoever, other than they just claim information provided by member states or member intelligence agencies tell us they provide no real context at all.
But they claim that Afghanistan is crawling with Al-Qaeda guys and that that's because of Haqqani and because the Haqqani network is essentially totally merged with the Taliban at this point, as sounds like this probably right, as we were talking about before.
Um, and so then, and it's the Haqqani's who are such best friends with, um, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, not that they ever really describe there's one Egyptian.
They said that they killed who was like a propagandist.
Um, but otherwise they're never specific about who are these supposed Al-Qaeda guys in Afghanistan.
Except for occasionally they mentioned Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, which sounds like someone else's problem to me, pal, but it doesn't sound like they're Egyptians or Saudis or Jordanians or have ever messed with Americans at all, whoever those guys are, but I wonder whether you think there's really any truth to that and does that really complicate things if the Taliban are keeping a relationship going with Al-Qaeda and splitting them against ISIS and good enough, we're going to end up bombing them again here soon.
Right.
Or not.
Well, my understanding, let's start with those UN reports.
My understanding and exactly, you look at the reports and it says member states and a couple of people I've spoken to about it.
Um, most of the information comes from the Afghan government and specifically the NDS, the national director of security, their version of the CIA slash FBI, um, slash, you know, uh, uh, drug Lords.
Um, and so that information of course is incredibly, I mean, these are people who want the U S to stay, who are going to say anything they want in order to stay in power.
Uh, so that information on Al-Qaeda is incredibly suspect.
Uh, the Haqqani network is yeah.
They're, I mean, they're pretty vile and, um, they are, are, are, are brutal and they, they conduct kidnappings and they tortured the hell out of Bo Bergdahl and, uh, you know, I mean, other, other things, uh, but also remember 10 years ago, uh, the Pakistanis were telling us you can have a deal with Haqqani if you want it.
And we chose not to, we were going to defeat them militarily.
So they're reasonable to a degree, or they're willing to talk or they're willing to negotiate.
Sorry.
That was 10 years ago, not 15 or 20.
You're talking about that was like 10 years ago.
I remember, I mean, maybe even before that, I remember specifically the Pakistani saying, uh, in around 2011, um, look, Haqqani is ready.
You know, we could talk, you could talk with the Haqqani's and, you know, and that was probably, so that would have been a lag of maybe like, um, uh, a year or two, uh, from, and they ended up making peace with his be Islami, Hekmatyar's group.
And of course, you know, as, um, Anand Gopal, who I know later turned into a recruiter for ISIS in Syria, but, um, in his great book, no good men among the living and in his articles for tomdispatch.com, he's really done the best job of explaining about how Haqqani had tried to surrender to the Americans over and over again in the early days of the war as well there, but I'm sorry for interrupting, go ahead.
But like most of the insurgency did, and, uh, has be Islami, you know, Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar, uh, they, his guys were the guys that came in and wanted to talk to us.
I mean, he's, he, that's the group that when I was in Jalalabad as the, uh, acting brigade political officer, uh, for that effort for the, for those four provinces out there where I was in, um, you know, they were the ones who came in and want to talk to us.
And when I, when I spoke to the embassy about it, wrote the, you know, send a thing to the embassy.
Uh, I was told, don't talk to him, stay out of it.
Reconciliation is a strictly Afghan process.
And when I said to them, are you kidding me?
You're, you're, you're saying that the people who are in charge of reconciliation are the people who have the most to gain from not reconciling.
Um, you know, the silence was just, you know, everything you needed to hear on that.
But I, in terms of, it makes sense in terms of, it would make sense in terms of the U S end up having this, this support and alliance for the Taliban.
If you understand and believe that the Taliban's intentions are purely for Afghanistan, that the Taliban is an organization that is devoted to armed struggle to reclaim their country.
Uh, whether you believe it's their country or not, it's another story.
However, their aspirations don't go outside the Afghan borders.
I mean, I'm sure there's some Afghan Taliban who want to take over, you know, who want, uh, a much larger Pashtunistan want to get rid of the Durand line.
That sort of thing.
But for the most part, if you understand that and accept that their intentions are that, then their intentions are something that the United States, uh, if you are a real counter-terrorism planner or policymaker would accept and, uh, find as something that could be worked with.
The problem with all that though, Scott, is that for 20 years, even longer, um, the people that are CAA and JSOC have been buddy buddy with over there, have been friends with, who have established relationships with, et cetera, are the people who are in the Afghan government or the, and the various drug Lords and the war Lords.
So what is going to make them give up that loyalty and certainly the decisions on who we're going to bomb and how that fight's going to take place, particularly as you know, we were just talking about earlier, how the whole war there is going to be a covert war that's not discussed.
That level of planning is not going to rise to the white house or to the, you know, that's going to be take that level of playing as me done at the, at the, really at the, the local levels, uh, to, to large degree.
Um, so who are the CIA and the JSOC guys going to continue to side with?
Are they going to continue to side with the people that they've basically fought alongside?
Uh, you know, you, you're, you're a JSOC commander, you know, uh, whether you're, you know, you're Delta or SEALs or Rangers or Green Beret or whatever you are, you know, and you've been, you've been on five deployments, six deployments now to Afghanistan, you know, a bunch of the Afghan commandos, you fought with them.
Whose side are you going to take?
You're right.
I mean, the same thing with the CIA.
You've been in bed with these drug Lords, right.
For 20 some odd years now, things are good.
You guys have dinner together.
You know, each other's wives, you know, literally that kind of thing.
Um, whose side are you going to take?
So I think it's very complex because you have the human element of this, right?
The relationships, the legacy, the longevity of experience, um, that complicates it, um, but now certainly it's already happened as you, you described, and I don't see why it wouldn't happen because, um, I think that, you know, you look at the, yes, there are groups within the area that while the Taliban are not this, they're very religious, but their pursuit is not a religious pursuit like you have among some members of Al Qaeda.
But again, that's very small, you know?
I mean, it's very small.
And, and, and so the danger is conflating that, which is basically why we're in this position, right?
We conflated Al Qaeda in 2001, those 200 to 400 people worldwide with all of Afghanistan.
And then we conflated them with Iraq.
And then we conflated Iraq with Libya and Syria.
And, and here we are.
Um, I mean, it's the same way to talk about domestically.
I mean, you have a handful of people in this country who, who probably are devoted to violently overthrowing the government and starting a race war and everything.
But it's a handful of people.
It's not all 60 million people who voted for Donald Trump or however many voted for him, you know what I mean?
Like, but we have this problem here of conflating, of making everything very manichean, right?
If you're not on my side, then you're against me.
You're either with us or against us as the great George Bush once said, right?
And you know, so much of that is based on, you know, what happened with the riot on January 6th there.
And yeah, if you watch, you know, the New York Times has this big new production all about it and everything.
And as they emphasize over and over again, the sitting president told these people to believe this was, you know, the right thing to do and was going to work somehow to, you know, cancel the electoral college vote and keep him in the chair.
And then the audience there, the group of people who are there obviously don't represent the rank and file of the Republican parties, essentially the QAnon people and Alex Jones fans, which is a much more marginal part of it.
And then, you know, a few of those type, you know, militia type groups were there as well.
But in other words, this, there's no, they kept all that fencing up like it was going to happen again any day now or whatever, but it was the present United States had summoned those people there and said, now we're going to march down to the Capitol and all of these things, which I'm not trying to demonize him.
I'm just saying the point is it was a one off, right?
There's nobody coming to seize the Capitol building.
That's ridiculous.
In fact, I went down to the Texas state Capitol and they're all standing around with AR-15s or whatever they are.
Actually, they're different, but you know, AR-15 type rifles and like, come on, I've lived in Austin my whole life that these are just state troopers and they always have just carried revolvers and, you know, maybe you could upgrade them to a Glock with a 15 round clip or whatever, or a magazine, but for them to be standing with rifles, like combat rifles at the doors to the Texas state Capitol, are you kidding me, you know, who do you think is coming to, what kind of costume party is this, you know?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, the Capitol police, you know, had so many, I mean, they had, now they're getting another billion dollars a year or whatever they're going to get, of course, you know what I mean?
So, you know, I mean, they always, these agencies that fail always seems to somehow profit from it.
But, you know, and people have been warning about this, you know, guys like Jim Bovard, you know, Peter Van Buren's been saying this kind of stuff, you know, and, and yeah, it's true.
I mean, as, as, as you had these people who try to overturn the electoral results of the United States by seizing, you know, the gavel of the Senate, you're right, that kind of thing, you know, but it was a handful of people and by no means does it warrant any of the things we're hearing now, by no means does it warrant the fact that the FBI and NSA and, you know, literally everyone else should be giving more power.
They don't need more money.
They don't need more resources.
You know, but that's, that's what happens in these circumstances.
You know, the, the, the people who, who had can profit from it, you know, never let a crisis go to waste.
Right.
I mean, that, that's a maxim.
I think that very good political leaders and I'm in, and not just politically, it's very good bureaucratic leaders understand.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm, I'm a man, like when I was a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps right after 9-11, or maybe, maybe six months after 9-11, our supply officer in the battalion I was in, you know, he comes, he comes up.
He's like, Hey, if you guys want anything, all you gotta do is just somehow write in global war on terror and I'll get it for you because the floodgates were open.
Right.
I mean, so here we are in Okinawa, a combat engineer unit, and I'm able to purchase from my Marines really anything I want, as long as it's somehow associated to the global war on terror.
I mean, like we were on, you know, right.
We were riding the gravy train with biscuit wheels, you know what I mean?
Like in such a racket and we were just, we were, you know, a battalion in third Marine division, you know, out in Okinawa and we had all this money, you know, and so if that trickled down to us, but yeah, no, it is, it's a racket.
The whole thing's a racket, you know, and these wars are, you know, chief among them, uh, you know, and they're the worst kind of the racket because of the suffering that they bring on to, um, you know, uh, you know, whether it be the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Yemenis, you know, I mean, all the, all across Africa, et cetera, et cetera, Pakistanis, the Pakistanis have suffered terribly in these last 20 years, you know, but we make them out to be villains all the time.
I mean, yeah, no, they're not the best.
They're not the best people in the world.
Those, the people in the Pakistani military and the ISI, those in government, but the Pakistani people themselves have suffered tremendously these last 20 years, uh, and the Pakistani armies lost tens of thousands of, of, of, of young men.
Who do you think those young men are?
You think they're all gung-ho about it?
No, they're, they're conscripts or they're doing it for the pay so that their family doesn't starve, you know?
And then they end up in, yeah.
Like you were saying earlier, something like that.
Yeah.
America's they have the economic draft here too.
You know, we certainly do.
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I don't know if they still do this anymore.
Honestly, I quit watching TV once Hillary Clinton started running for president.
I hadn't turned it back on since I just can't stand her voice.
But, um, I think this really goes back to the Bush years where I, in fact, these commercials probably get them in trouble now, but they had these commercials in the Bush years for the military, you know, for recruitment that were just so blatant where the message was, Hey, you Mexican guy.
We all know that you could never be a helicopter repair man unless you were in the military first and learned how to repair helicopters in the military.
Then you can have a life in the civilian world, being a successful helicopter repair man, join up today.
And then it was like a series of them.
And the second one that I remember, I think there were three or four of them.
The second one was, Hey, black guy, you know, you could never be a fireman unless you join the army first.
So here, here's the story, you know, a little montage of a black guy who joins the army, becomes a fireman in the army.
And then later after he gets out of the army, he becomes a fireman in real life.
And so you see, that's how it goes.
This is your entry way into the American economy.
Basically, if you're poor and a minority is you got to join the service first.
And well, you know, on the left, Scott, I have seen, um, that there are, uh, groups that went, that represent, uh, people of color, um, that are not so gung ho on, um, you know, slagging off military recruitment because for so many minority groups, it is one of the few ways into the middle class.
Yeah.
Um, right.
I mean, but you're absolutely right in terms of the way it's recruited.
Uh, so I was a combat engineer, you know, and I was always on the combat arms side and I mean, honestly, half my kids or half my Marines were, were, were, were Hispanic, uh, you know, because they get recruited with the idea of like, oh, you can become an engineer.
We're going to teach you to build things and et cetera, et cetera.
And actually, no, what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to Iraq and you're gonna look for IEDs, you know, or you're gonna go to Afghanistan and you're gonna look for IEDs on foot.
Um, but you know, I mean, that, that's the way it is.
If you're, if you're, uh, if you're Hispanic, uh, the recruiters are exactly that telling you, you're going to learn a trade if you're black, same thing too.
You're going to learn a trade.
We're going to teach you how to use computers.
We're going to, this is army Marine Corps.
I'm sure the Navy and air force are probably a little different, but, um, you know, and if you're black, you'll, you'll learn how to do this and that.
You'll be able to, just like you said, you'll become a, you'll be able to get a job as a firefighter.
You'll be able to, to work in an office someplace, you know, and the one exception I do understand though, is that the recruiters do tend and you see that the infantry units are generally, um, overrepresented with white, uh, w w with white kids and, um, and it's because a lot of times when they do go into the, the, particularly the Southern high schools, the message they put out to the young white men is you want to go out there, fight for your way of life, protect your nation, protect your, you know, protect us from those Arabs, you know, that kind of thing.
And that does appeal to a large segment of young white men.
Um, but yeah, there's the job security there too.
I mean, I saw an interview with a white guy and, uh, I think it was the air force guy a couple of years back where he goes, look, man, I got a house.
I got food.
I got healthcare.
I got decent pay.
Show me where in America I can get a square deal like that.
If you go like, Oh God, I'm just gritting my teeth down to the gums.
But Scott, it's true.
And the reason why is because we took all our wealth and we gave it to him.
So we don't have any.
So now that's the only place he can get a job is working for the military.
That's exactly right, man.
If you are 18 years old, you go into the military in two years, when you're 20 years old, you've had two years experience in the military, you basically gone to the schools and you've been in a unit now for maybe a year or so.
Uh, you're a private first class or a Lance corporal or specialist or whatever.
Yeah.
You are making approximately $40,000 a year when you put all the benefits together, that's how much you're making in housing, food, everything else, your base pay, and that doesn't include that you're not paying anything for healthcare.
Uh, you know, and then you get all kinds of other benefits.
Like, you know, you, you got free gym membership.
The gyms on the basis are usually quite good, you know, but there's stuff like that and then, you know, on a weekend like today, 4th of July weekend, Oh, I get $5 off here, 10% off here.
Uh, John Kiriakou, I think it was John Kiriakou had a really good essay recently, I'm not sure where it was in common dreams or consortium news or someplace like that about his experience going to baseball games.
And every game there's a reenlistment ceremony, or you got to stand up for the, and how at the middle of the, uh, you know, we don't, we don't sing, uh, take me out to the ball game in the seventh inning anymore.
We sing God bless America, you know, and it's just all manufactured.
Of course, the Pentagon pays for all that stuff to happen.
But if you're a young man, our young woman, and you're 20, 21, 22 years old, and this is happening to you, you're in a stadium of 45,000 people and everybody is standing up and applauding you.
Yeah, that's, that's, that feels pretty good.
Yeah.
You know, that feels pretty good.
And then of course you go to war, you come back and five years later, you put a gun in your mouth and blow the back of your head off, but we don't talk about that so much, right?
You know?
Well, so let's talk about that so much.
I think the last number I'd heard from you was you thought it was, uh, what the last study you'd read on, it said 9,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's some other 21st century wars as well, but with fewer ground troops, of course.
Um, but this is not including Vietnam, Korea and World War II or Grenada.
Uh, this is just, uh, 21st century wars.
And then we just had this new study come out.
Uh, I interviewed the guy, uh, Ben Sweet is his name from the cost of war project at Brown university, a PhD.
And he went in and crunched the numbers and found that, uh, uh, his extremely conservative estimate, Matt is that 30,000 soldiers, uh, who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed themselves.
And then particularly alarmingly, the story was that I don't know exactly how all this breaks down as a statistician.
I'm a great anti-war guy, but, um, apparently, uh, veterans, and I don't know if you include, I think this is including combat veterans, that veterans overall usually have a lower rate of suicide compared to people in the general population, which might go to show what a crisis we have in the general population.
But anyway, um, in this case, no, the numbers have now crossed on the curve and a veteran suicides of the 21st century wars are now, uh, outpacing civilian suicides by apparently quite a bit on the scale of things.
And it's such a huge number when you consider approximately 7,000 soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and Marines and sailors and airmen too.
Um, and then I forgot the number.
I think you mentioned it earlier.
Uh, the number of, Oh no, you just talked about the number of contractors who'd been over there, but, um, there's a number of contractors killed over there.
It's roughly the same as the number of soldiers killed over there.
Yeah.
Oh, is it really almost 7,000 of them?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when you say there's, yeah, and that's something else that Brown University cost of war had, had, had really done great work.
They went into like the U S department of labor data and all that.
Yeah.
The estimates are that as many contractors were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as, uh, soldiers were.
So when you say all blackwater mercenaries, that's truck drivers and potato peelers, right?
That's exactly right.
Guys driving trucks.
I mean, you was to drive, you know, you drive on the, uh, on the, uh, the roads and you'd see these, any, any gal tell any guy or gal will tell you about all the, the tractor trailer type trucks that have been blown up, you know, and that's, that's some, um, that's some Kuwaiti or Indian or Filipino truck driver, maybe a lot of them were, you know, depending on the job, but they're all doing jobs that in previous wars would have been done by an American soldier.
Yeah.
Um, and so, yeah, when you look at that, when you look at that 7,000 number for killed in combat, you really have to double it and say it's 14,000.
And with the suicide numbers.
So with the suicide, um, that 30,000 is all veterans and soldiers of the post from, from post nine 11, including those who did not go to war because you've got a large portion that have not gone to war.
In fact, he said the rate is higher among those who didn't go to the war compared to those only among.
Yeah, this is where, this is where he runs into some trouble.
And this is one of the problems you get with PhDs who don't have the experience, the real experience, understand that he mixes up using soldiers and veterans a lot when he talks.
So he mixes up often.
I've heard him speak and I've, I've spoke, I've spoken to him.
Um, uh, about this, he, he, he, at times, and I've heard other people this too, we'll say veteran when he's talking about active duty service members.
So among active duty suicides up until around 2006, 2007, it's, we're talking about people who are in uniform going to the chow hall on, on aircraft carriers, you know, I mean, the actually serving in uniform up until around 2006, 2007, their suicide rate was lower than the civilian population.
Then around then around 2007, it starts to creep up until now it's well above active duty service members have a suicide rate higher than the civilian population within the active duty service members.
We do see this where those who have not deployed have a higher suicide rate than those who do have, who have deployed, who have gone overseas to war.
That is not too unsurprising though, for a number of reasons.
One, the, the, the, the disparity between the active duty rate and the civilian rate is not as great as say the disparity between the veteran rate and the civilian rate veterans being people who are no longer in uniform civilians now haven't been in the military, whether it's been one day, one year, 50 years, et cetera.
Um, within that, what we're seeing, I think is, is a couple of things within the active duty suicide rates.
One, I think you're seeing, um, you're bringing in people who would not have met the standard for induction.
Um, we're, we're giving a lot more mental health waivers, things like that, because the military is having a hard time recruiting people and has been having a hard time recruiting people for 15 years now, so you're just bringing in, I think a lower standard to put it, and it's not a very polite way to put it, but, but that's the best way, and then also too, you're seeing a representation of the of suicide among the general American population occurring within, uh, the active duty, um, but the more alarming thing is among veterans.
So those who are no longer serving and the vast majority of those 30,000 casualties, uh, to suicide, um, uh, are among veterans, uh, you know, you're talking about veteran suicides, uh, being about 6,000 a year while you have about 350 active duty suicides a year.
So there's quite a big difference in terms of the population in terms of who's being affected.
And, you know, you, you see suicide more pronounced in veterans, I think for a number of reasons.
One, simply because they're no longer in the bubble.
They're no longer, they no longer have that support team.
They're no longer going to work and around people who think like they do, you know, and they no longer have that reason and they're long, longer have that tunnel vision and they leave.
And now, uh, you know, life happens to them, but also too, they're able to look back at what they've done.
And maybe they don't agree with what they've done anymore.
The morality starts to kick in the, they start to listen to things like the Scott Horton radio show.
And, you know, and, and all of a sudden, uh, the stuff they told me turns out wasn't true.
You see, I have a lot of that, which doesn't happen as often as the active duty side.
But among what we do know among the veterans is that that number.
So when I, when I said 9,000, uh, dead by suicide, that was for what I understood as a rock and, uh, uh, Iraq and Afghan veterans, the 37,000 number that Brown university was talking about is for all veterans who've been in uniform since nine 11, which includes millions and millions of men and women who never went to Afghanistan or Iraq, so about 2.7 million of us who went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, oh gosh, I forget the total number of post nine 11.
I think it's like five or 6 million total though.
Uh, who, you know, so you're talking about a pretty big population where it gets really Harry Scott is weighing in and he's, when you look at the numbers that we know based upon who's gone to war and who has not gone to war, uh, within the veteran population.
The last time the VA published information, the data that provide information was in 2014 and they haven't published it since because it paints such an ugly picture of what happens when you go to war, but if you looked at the demographics in 2014 for a young, uh, for a man, 18 to 29 years of age who had not, who was from the general population of the United States, his rate of suicide in that demographic is 12 per 100,000.
Okay.
When you look at the rate of suicide for the entire veteran population, including those who went to Iraq and Afghanistan and those who did not among, uh, uh, among veterans aged 18 to 29 who are male, that rate of suicide was 39 per 100,000.
When you pull out the veterans who went to Iraq and Afghanistan in that demographic, 18 to 29 male, the rate of suicide is 140 per 100,000.
So you're talking about if you're a young man in who are, it was 18 to 29 and you went to Iraq, your chances of killing yourself are roughly 12 times greater than a civilian who was never in uniform and roughly three or four times greater than the general veteran population.
Now you got to remember that 39 figure for the general veteran population, right, that number itself is inflated by that one 40 figure for the guys and gals who went to war, right?
So the overall vet for the veterans who didn't deploy, it's lower than 39.
So you really see like the effect that going to war has, and those numbers hold for all demographic groups.
If you go and you look at the VA data, uh, and if you look at the demographics and you look at the age groups that correspond with the war years, so, uh, men who are, uh, of the age where world war two and Korea happened and those during Vietnam, you see the rates of suicide for those groups, much higher, three to four times higher than their civilian peers.
When you look at the peacetime veterans, guys who were in the army, say, or the Navy or whatever in the seventies, in the late seventies, the eighties, most of the nineties, their rate of suicide is still high, uh, but it's not nearly as high as those who went to war.
Oh, it's very clear.
And there has been plenty of studies that have shown a link between combat and suicide between guilt and suicide.
But the thing that people should be pissed off about is that the last time the VA published information in this detail was in 2014, every year they put out their, their, their veteran suicide report and their tables are broad, their demographic groups get larger, of course, which water down their findings, like lessen the rates.
But you know, they have not published since 2014, any data to my knowledge that delineates the difference in suicide rates between, um, those who went to war and those who did not.
Um, and I think it's clearly because politically it's embarrassing.
Yeah.
I mean, you're basically right.
Yeah.
It's a coverup.
Basically you're saying, look, these guys that were these guys and gals that were sending to war, they're coming home and they are sticking guns in their mouths at a rate that is 12 times higher than their friends who didn't go to war, what does that say about the wars?
What does that say about the American government that sent them to these wars?
And you know what?
I hate, I hate to do this.
I really do.
But I think it's worth doing man that, and I don't know, I guess I could look for it again.
I tried one time to find it again.
I couldn't find it.
But I know that one time I'm an Ozuahare, uh, was mocking the Americans and saying, you know, my guys commit suicide, essentially out of altruism in defense of hearth and home and blah, blah, blah.
Your guys commit suicide out of despair in their pickup truck out back and what the hell is that?
And once you look at yourselves or something like that, and I'm like, you know what, I'm not usually one to remind, uh, to, uh, encourage people to take life advice from Ayman Ozuahare, the butcher of New York city.
But you know what, if Barack Obama can finance all his guys in Syria, I can at least say, Hey, we ought to listen to him when it comes to this kind of irony, because he's got a real point there that, you know, our government used you and your comrades over there in Iraq and Afghanistan in exactly the way that Al Qaeda might have accused America of using soldiers to kill innocent people, to wage war, not against Hitler's Wehrmacht in a field in France somewhere, you know, tanks versus tanks or some kind of you sank my battleship out in the middle of the ocean, like you got it coming kind of deal, but instead killing people.
And, you know, no wonder American soldiers come home when they realize that, uh, the enemy out there wasn't really the enemy.
It was just some guy that they killed over there.
I mean, I, it's pretty easy for me to imagine after spending all this time paying attention to this kind of thing, what it would be like to be in that situation and have to try to deal with that.
I know it ain't easy.
And, and I really want to end with this and make sure, cause I know I do have a hell of a lot of veterans in the audience by this late date, um, that listened to this show.
And I know that, you know, the answer to the question of if people really are feeling down and they need some help, forget all that macho crap about just drink beer and forget about it.
Right.
You can get help from people who have been through this too.
Isn't that correct?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, one thing just to get, just to let people know what the disparity is like, um, one, I just heard these numbers from someone who is in charge of, they run like a, a social group.
Um, it's more than a social group.
It's like a mental health group for the brigade that they had been in Afghanistan with.
And during the year that that brigade was in Afghanistan, oh nine to 10, they had 11 or 12 guys killed in combat and a bunch of wounded and everything.
Since then they've had had more, they've had more than a hundred suicides.
I mean, so you take, you look at that where you look at and you say, my God, an infantry brigade, it, you know, since coming back from war, they've had 10 times as many people lost to suicide as were killed by the Taliban.
Um, and it's, you're absolutely right, Scott.
It's not about just being tough and drinking beer and getting through it.
I mean, that's one of the things that it's a problem is because that's what we were taught in the military.
First of all, you try and recruit, uh, men and women that are team players that are going to put other people first, you know, that played on the football team, right, to have that kind of, uh, you know, uh, that, that view that, you know, view of others and view of themselves.
And, but then, you know, we, we teach them in the military, do not, you know, you do not be a burden, you take care of other people, you know, do not be the weak link, and so it's really easy for us when your buddy says they're hurting to reach out and do everything you can for them, but when it's yourself, you know, we fall back into that double standard of, I don't want to be weak.
I don't want to be a burden.
And the reality is, is that you need professional help.
Um, you need professional help, uh, to get through this and you can manage it, but it doesn't go away with time.
World War II veterans are still killing themselves at rates much higher than their civilian peers are, and those guys fought the good war, this is something that stays with you forever, you know?
I mean, Audie Murphy, uh, you know, the most decorated war soldier of World War II, you know, going on to be a Hollywood star and everything else, he used to put a gun to his wife's head, put a gun in his mouth a bunch of times, you know, and that guy, just like you're saying, so that was killing the Vermont, you know, what was fighting across Europe.
I mean, if that guy didn't have a reason to feel okay or justified in what he did, but turns out he still felt tremendous guilt for killing these other young men.
Um, and you know, it's something that stays with you.
It's not going to go away with over time.
And the only thing you can do is to get professional help, call the VA.
One thing we do know is that veterans who are in VA healthcare have a much lower chance of suicide than veterans who are not get in touch with groups like wounded warrior project or mission 22.
Talk to people, talk to you, you know, whoever is important in your life.
You look up to no one is going to turn you away.
And if they do, then they're then, then punch them in the nose and move on to, to, to somebody else.
I mean, this is, um, this is something that is, is, is it's unique to all of us.
The suffering that we go through with it is unique to us.
It's, it's really unexplainable, but it's not unique because so many of us are getting, are trying to live our lives with it and it just crushes your lives.
Plus it's crushing everyone around you.
You know, it's something like the, the suicide people, the people that do like the suicide day regular, you know, all kinds of suicide, just suicide they say something like every suicide directly affects 166 people, you know?
And you think about that, the way it ripples out, whether it be your, you know, your, of course, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, people in your school on and on and on, it just keeps rippling out.
So, you know, it's not only something that is destroying the individual, it destroys entire families, social groups, neighborhoods.
So be persistent because you have to be persistent with the VA.
I'm sorry, but that's the case.
Look for groups like mission 22 and wounded warrior program, as well as, um, recognize that what you would do for your buddies, they would do for you and ask them for help.
Uh, and if you're, uh, uh, if you're a husband or a wife or a father or mother, or, you know, son or daughter, who's listening to this, you know, you have to be persistent, you have to nag, they're going to go to the VA.
They're going to not want to go again.
It's going to suck.
They're going to get all pissed off.
Something's going to, bad's going to happen.
Their appointment is going to be messed up.
They're not going to want to go.
You got to push them back.
And most of the guys I know who are successful in their post-war dealing with suicidality have been successful because they've had women in their lives who have pushed them, nagged them, uh, made them get help.
Yeah.
Uh, because that's unfortunate.
We need a lot of times is that pushing that, that, that someone making us get the help we need.
Yeah.
I know.
I appreciate, uh, you know, and even too, like if you don't know who you can reach out to me, you know, I mean, you can find my information.
I'm on Facebook.
You can look up my website, Matthew ho.com.
My email's on there, you know, same thing.
I'm sure if you send a note to Scott, he'd be happy to talk to you.
I mean, there are people who want to help.
So recognize that too.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I mean, we're at, uh, about an hour and 20 minutes here.
I want to make sure that people want to listen to this whole thing.
Got to say, they could have watched the movie, man.
I'm going to take a nap, but, uh, thank you so much.
I got the COVID.
I have an excuse for napping.
Oh yeah.
I hope you're at hope yet.
Please don't give it to your wife.
Yeah, I'm, I'm staying away from her.
She should be all right.
Okay.
But listen, man, I appreciate you so much.
And, uh, I really mean what I say about what a goddang American hero you are.
And, uh, and how much I appreciate you coming on the show to talk with us about all this stuff as always.
All right.
Well, thank you, Scott.
And yeah, feel better, man.
And happy, happy, uh, holiday weekend.
Appreciate that, man.
Have a good one.
All right.
Aren't you guys, that's Matthew Ho.
He could have stopped the Afghan war back in 2009, the surge.
I mean, that's all they had to do was listen to him and end the thing instead of escalating it.
A lot of these soldiers wouldn't be veterans of a thing.
Um, but anyway, and by the way, we didn't get a chance to talk about this, but, uh, Matthew has a piece on antiwar.com today, Mike Gravel and an ongoing road to courage, and, uh, it's a really great piece that he wrote in memory of a Senator Mike Gravel, who read the Pentagon papers into the official record from the Senate floor way back in, uh, what, 71.
So, uh, all right.
Thanks everybody.
Appreciate it.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APS, radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.