Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Danny Sherson.
He is now retired, but he started writing for Antiwar.com before he left the US Army where he was a major.
He fought in the surge in Iraq War II and the other surge in Afghanistan.
And he wrote the book Ghost Riders of Baghdad.
And it's been writing for TomDispatch.com for a long time and now writes for us regularly at Antiwar.com.
You can also find him at Truthdig and we reprint all of that stuff too.
And very happy to have you back on the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm doing great, man.
Thanks.
Always a pleasure to be back on the show.
Oh, yeah.
Happy to have you here.
And I like your article.
It's called Could Donald Trump End the Afghan War?
And you're not being cheeky either.
That's a serious question, huh?
It is.
I mean, and I think there's a short answer.
Yes, if he wants to.
I mean, I think it's as simple as that.
Now, I'm not certain he's going to do it.
But I think the answer is since American presidents are veritable dictators, and since his people will stay with him regardless of what he does, right, whether he walks into North Korea or whatever, he may be positioned to be the guy that could do it.
I don't like the guy, but if he wants to end the war, he sure can.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was just talking with Tim Shorrock about Korea and this whole Nixon goes to China sort of a phenomenon.
And even with the Democrats wearing themselves out, calling him a pro-Russian traitor and all this kind of stuff, essentially at the end of the day, the reality is that he's an American right wing conservative nationalist patriot type.
And that means that he can make peace with any so-called enemy of America that he wants to.
And everybody knows that he's wrapped in the American flag.
And he's only doing what he thinks is right.
He's not selling out to any foreign power, like some crazy accusation about maybe Trumpian accusation about Obama's allegiance to Islam and Kenya or whatever garbage, right?
He's immune from all of that just for the fact that he's a Republican and for that matter, a real estate tycoon.
You know, he's perfect for the job.
And so tell me then about Zalmay Khalilzad's position here working for Donald Trump.
I mean, it seems like this thing, these negotiations with the Taliban could have fallen apart a hundred times all this time, but they have not.
And that must represent something here.
It does.
And if I'm not mistaken, this is the seventh iteration of talks or stillborn talks in the past in Doha, right?
In Qatar.
So, you know, I think what it means is there's real potential for some sort of at least truce, at least a ceasefire.
You know, I'm not going to jump on and say Afghanistan is going to become a Jeffersonian democracy, whatever that means.
That will not happen regardless.
But we may be able to extricate the United States in this war and work out some sort of tentative power sharing with the Taliban.
What happens after that?
Anyone's guess.
I have my opinions and we could talk about that, but it's all centering around this one problem.
The Taliban, and they've got a point, says that the Kabul-based regime, the Kabul-based government are just puppets of the West, right?
And so for the other six iterations, I believe it was, of these potential talks, they would not meet with anyone from the Kabul-based government, right?
So essentially it was America talking on behalf of Kabul with the Taliban, but there were no Afghan representatives there.
And that of course was a major problem.
Well, the breakthrough is that in Khalilzad's latest talks, the Taliban have allowed members of the Afghan government.
Now, caveat, you probably know this, they're technically only representing themselves rather than Kabul, but that's the compromise the Taliban made.
But for all intents and purposes, they're talking to other Afghans on the other side.
You know what, I'm a little confused about that though, because weren't they having some talks in Moscow too?
They weren't.
I think it was in the exact same capacity.
They refuse to say that they're negotiating with the puppets, but they are now talking to other Afghans.
And I think the Moscow based thing was a little different in the sense that it was kind of outside the American sphere, which may have opened up more opportunities for the Taliban.
Now, I read a thing, I think it might've been in the New York Times, and I'm pretty sure this was about Doha, not Moscow, but it was by a guy named But it was by a woman parliamentarian, a female parliamentarian from Kabul saying, wow, the Taliban, they treated us with respect and gave us tea first instead of last and this kind of thing.
And they were pretty impressed by that and seem like, you know what, obviously we don't see eye to eye with these people, but we do think that maybe we can negotiate with them without just the fear that they're only going to walk all over us, that kind of idea.
Well, yeah, you're right.
Not only are they meeting with representatives from the other side, but I do believe that even now, currently one of them is a female.
One of the Kabul based people is a female.
I mean, that's a pretty huge deal.
I mean, the fact that the Taliban would even countenance the presence of a woman on any side is somewhat remarkable.
So this is speculation, but then that must mean that it's because Khalilzad said, listen, guys, if you'll lighten up a little bit, I think that you know that we're really serious about pulling the troops out here.
We're not jerking your chain.
So go ahead and give a little and you'll get a little, you know, you know, absolutely.
The Taliban is not stupid, man.
Like they, you know, this, they're hard as hell about this too.
No negotiations.
We won't talk with anybody.
No tripartite talks.
And we'll only talk with the American.
We'll never talk to Kabul.
And we'll only talk to the Americans after they agree to pull their troops out.
And so they fudged on that, but only a couple percent.
And, you know, the report, at least from a number of sources and a number of mainstream outlets is that the Taliban has agreed not to harbor Al-Qaeda or, or ISIS, which if we think about it, if we trust that to be true, and frankly, I don't think they have a lot of, a lot to gain from harboring those people again, then what are we doing in Afghanistan?
That's why we weren't in the first place, isn't it?
I mean, at least ostensibly.
So that's certainly the safe haven myth is the most important talking point of the generals.
Right?
No question about that.
I mean, the last one, though, is what about the health of all the people involved in the government that we've been propping up all that time?
And by we, I mean, you?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, this is what happens, right?
Mission creep, whatever, I hate that phrase.
But the bottom line is, the longer you stay, the more you work with the locals, the more invested your military and your government gets new reasons to stay bad reasons, but new reasons to stay crop up.
So now the minute we pivoted from counter-terror to nation building, which happened very fast, very, very fast.
Once that happened, now we're invested.
Now we have to think, or at least we're told we have to think by the generals and by everybody else.
Oh, what happens to the people who worked with us?
What happens to the interpreters?
What happens to the government officials?
What happens to women writ large?
That should never have been our problem because it sets up a forever war scenario.
By that logic, once the United States steps into any foreign country, it has to stay forever, or at least until there's total victory.
Now, as my article points out, since post-1945, there haven't been a lot of total victories by any Western nation, including the United States.
So reality is, if we start talking about what happens when we leave, we're staying forever, frankly.
Yeah.
Well, and that's really been the thing from the very beginning was, what, just a few weeks into the war, they put Laura Bush on the Voice of America to say, we promise to stand with all the women of Afghanistan to make sure you're as free as a New Yorker from now on.
Which sounds real sweet, I guess, if you're not paying attention, but it's a writ for a limitless war.
And actually, a pretty expansive addendum to the AUMF wasn't quite portrayed that way at the time, but that was the effect that it had was, hey, look, we just wrote ourselves a mandate to accomplish any and everything for these people from now on.
Absolutely.
We've dug our heels in, in so many places, and it's going to be difficult to get out.
But the irony for someone like me, who leans more to the traditional left than you, but the irony for someone like me and for all of us, I think, is what a weird paradox that I'm placing my hope in Donald Trump.
The reality is, compared to Hillary Clinton, look, I didn't vote for Trump.
I won't vote for Trump.
What I'm saying is, compared to Hillary Clinton, the Taliban is more likely to make peace with Trump.
Trump is more likely to make peace than Clinton than we would have ever had.
Now, that is ironic.
It's discomforting for me to place my hopes in this sometimes unhinged guy.
But look, like you said, he's well-placed.
And the Nixon analogy that you made, only Nixon can go to China, right?
Only Nixon can go talk to Mao Zedong without being called a traitor because he was such a cold warrior, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Wrapping the flag, Republican, tough guy.
That's the argument I made right at the beginning of the article.
I said, if only Nixon can go to China, God help us, but maybe only Trump can go to North Korea, or in this case, maybe only Trump can pull American troops out of Afghanistan.
And if we're ideologically consistent, if we are consistent in our values, which most Democrats are not, right, or most anyone is not, then we have to cheer him on.
You know, Rachel Maddow got to do that.
And you know what?
The thing is, too, about Hillary is, if it was just Wesley Clark, or I don't know just, but if it was somebody like Wesley Clark, who was a four-star general and almost caused World War III back in 1999 and stuff like that, then maybe he could do it.
But Hillary Clinton, she was actually uniquely bad at this kind of full-scale buy-in to the narrative that a Democrat must always be a hawk and muscular and tough to prove what a commie they're not.
And for her, that was doubly true because she was a woman.
And so she had to be as muscular as possible.
That was a whole big part.
And it's in the emails, the ones that were gotten from the State Department by Jason Leopold from FOIA, there, where her aides are talking about how, yeah, this whole Libya war is a great way to frame you.
This is how we're going to use it.
We're going to say, you're a big, strong, tough, muscular leader.
Now, this is after she lost to Barack Obama because she was the hawk and he was not in 2008.
And this is after she had sat in the Obama administration for four years, constantly attacking him from the right and removing his running room in the national debates, as they put it, supporting the surge in Afghanistan and all of that stuff, in the National Security Council debates, I mean, and ran against Trump, who was beating her by running, quote unquote, sort of, kind of, you know what I mean, to the left of her on foreign policy.
And even through the debate, she's going, we must have a no-fly zone over Syria and all of these things.
And couldn't, she was saying, what I'll do is I'll have Robert Kagan hold a fundraiser for me, and that will appeal to right-wingers.
And I'll go to Texas and Arizona and I'll get right-wingers to vote for me based on what a war hawk I am.
I mean, she was just absolutely straitjacketed by this old, outdated, conventional wisdom from maybe 2004 or something, but had no application in 2016.
So, if it had been her in the presidency right now, there's every reason to think that she would have been as bad as she could possibly be on Syria, Afghanistan, Russia, China, her famous, you know, pivot to China essay for foreign affairs and all, I mean, for foreignpolicy.com and all that.
I mean, she would have been acting every bit of that conception of American politics out in the very worst way, the very absolute inverse opposite of only Nixon can go to China.
You know, a Democrat must kill everybody, starting with David Koresh and stopping never.
I mean, you're right.
And it even goes further back than that.
I mean, one could argue that since Truman inaugurates the national security state with the 47 National Security Act that ever since then, Democrats have been loath to look weak on communism.
And then communism went away and terror quickly took over, right?
First, it was domestic terror, and we're talking Ruby Ridge.
Well, I was just starting with her first war was in 93 there in the prairie, but go ahead.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, the whole thing is nuts, but you're right that Clinton was uniquely bad.
She was uniquely bad on foreign policy.
We came, we saw he died, talking about Gaddafi in Libya.
Now look at Libya, right?
It's under the control, half of it by a warlord general, half of it by Islamist kind of infused provisional government.
It's a mess, right?
And even our allies are split, like Italy's backing one side and France is back in the other.
And these are NATO allies, right?
So the whole thing's a mess.
There's no way Clinton would have ended the Afghan war.
She is the worst example of a hawkish Democrat, the worst example.
And you know what's interesting?
You mentioned how Obama beats her sort of because he's a little bit more on the left, or at least a little more anti-Iraq war.
But this is what's interesting about Obama.
In some ways, his ascendance to the presidency, at least on foreign policy, it's an anomaly.
It's an accident of history.
Because the reality is his little anti-war speech that he gave in Illinois, he was a state senator.
He had nothing to lose and had really no experience in foreign policy, but he happened to call the Iraq war a dumb war.
And he was right about that.
But I don't believe for a second, I'm not one of these Obama cheerleaders.
I don't believe for a second that if he was actually at a national platform, if he was a representative or a senator, I don't believe for a second he would have voted against that war because he'd have been so constrained by the Democratic machine, by the neoliberal machine, and by the money that I'm convinced that just like Schumer and just like Clinton and just like Joe Biden, he'd have voted for that war.
So I don't believe for a second that it was honest.
Well, certainly if he'd been in the Senate, I mean, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in the House did vote against it to their credit.
I hate to give them credit for anything, but they did vote in majority, I think the vast majority of the Democratic Party in the House voted against it.
But they lost because it was controlled by the Republicans, by Dennis Hastert.
Yeah, absolutely right.
So yeah, it's potential that if he was in the House, he may well have voted against it if he lined up with Pelosi.
But I just don't think it was as genuine as it was made out to be.
And the proof is in the pudding, right?
The proof is in what he did once he took over the reins, right?
He had the opportunity.
He could have been transformational on foreign policy if he wanted, right?
He could have been all hope and change.
He was never anything but Bill Clinton anyway.
I have a funny anecdote about that.
The Future Freedom Foundation restoring the Republic Conference in 2008, there was like the party in the room in the higher floor or whatever at the hotel.
And I walk up there and there's Greenwald and Raimondo arguing.
And Raimondo's going, I like Barack Obama.
He gave that really nice speech about foreign policy.
It really impressed me.
And Greenwald is saying, well, I don't know, Justin.
I think we better wait and see.
And I walk up and I'm like, both of you are completely ridiculous.
Shut up.
This is like in the spring of 08.
The guy is a war criminal and waiting right now.
He's nothing but Bill Clinton.
You're confusing him for Dennis Kucinich somehow?
No way.
Him and Cravel obviously have a principled stand against war.
Barack Obama is nothing but John Edwards up there.
Give me a break.
How could anybody believe in that for a minute?
And of course, they both snapped out of that pretty quick because he did show right away how bad he was on so many things.
He was a nightmare.
When you look at the expansion of drone warfare, the expansion of the war on the press, you name it.
The war in Afghanistan that he knew couldn't work, that he only did because of his war in Washington, D.C. for his own re-election and how to appease John McCain and stay out of trouble on this one issue.
And that's what you were doing in the Kandahar province.
You're absolutely right.
I'm extraordinarily resentful of Afghan surge, too, because about 1,000 Americans died in that phase of the war or in everything that sort of followed.
Those were really high casualty times.
Three of them were my kids.
And then, of course, another killed himself after, so I guess you could say four.
But times that by hundreds, those deaths were unnecessary because the surge accomplished nothing.
It only prolonged the war.
The Taliban now controls more territory than they did at any point since basically 2001.
So the whole surge was a political move.
It was a compromised, cynical political move to help him get 2012 elected.
And, you know, I know kids who died behind that bullshit, and I won't ever forgive them, you know.
And sure, do I consider myself a liberal or progressive, whatever the we even say anymore?
Sure, I do.
But reality, I am not a cheerleader for Barack Obama.
I mean, that surge, his expansion of the Afghan war is unforgivable.
Yeah.
Well, I never even mind all the rest of them.
I mean, and that's the thing of it, too.
As you look back on it, Bush only did the two big ones.
But Obama added Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
And oops, Libya led straight to Mali, too.
So there's another.
And the Pakistan drone war as well, which Trump, I mean, Bush Jr. was just barely hitting.
And Obama came in and turned into a giant catastrophe that ended up really putting America on the side of the Pakistani army against the Tariqi Taliban, and all these offensives in the Swat Valley and so forth that had nothing to do with America, or the fight against the Afghan Taliban, such as that was.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's really something to make George Bush look like some kind of, you know, wary interventionist or something with a humble foreign policy.
Nobody talks about him that way that often, but geez.
It is remarkable in some ways.
And the mainstream liberal press, you know, and I'm just talking about the MSNBC crowd.
I mean, their worship of Obama is pitiful.
And their obsession with Trump, who I think is a bad guy in a lot of ways, domestic policy, race, I've got a lot of problems with this guy, a lot of problems with this guy.
But their intellectual inconsistency and their cynicism in the way they not only put Obama on a pedestal, but they go against anything Trump does, even things that are good, even things with potential, simply because he's Donald Trump, and he's not Obama, and they hate him.
And so they've bought themselves, I mean, they're twisted.
They got their ideas like twisted in knots.
So we get into these weird places where Rachel Maddow is defending the war in Syria.
And I'm like, are we through the looking glass, Alice?
Like, we're not in Kansas anymore.
Yep.
And that's all it takes is, you know, simple partisanship to change all these things around.
What would be interesting would be if Trump had, you know, the political advisors, never mind the strategic ones, but had the political advisors with the insight to say, hey, listen, we have so many wars going on now that you could end every quarter until the election, and you'll be Trump the Great.
You'll walk right in there, no problem.
You know, super majorities in every state.
All you have to do is end the wars in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria, and just say, listen, I'm not promising, you know, sunshine and roses and happiness and all these places when we leave.
But let's face it, this is all Bush and Obama's fault.
So far, at least, he hadn't attacked Iran and expanded any of the wars.
He has actually escalated each one of them in their own ways by a few thousand troops here, there, and the other place.
Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, for example, and Libya, too.
But he hasn't started any new ones, and he could just blame any bad outcome on his predecessors, which would be accurate.
Even at this late date, he could still say it's not his fault and bring them all home.
And as you cite in this piece here, and in your previous piece for interwar.com, you now have essentially an equal measure.
The American people, and including veterans of these wars, not just all American veterans, but veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, in super majorities agree, more than 60 percent, that we never even should have fought these wars.
Not just that they want to end them now, but we never should have done this at all.
It never had to be this way in the first place.
Wow.
I mean, that is a perfect opportunity for this guy, and then to force the Democrats into the position of trying to attack him on all of these things.
How dare Donald Trump make peace in Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen.
If Obama says we have to commit genocide in Yemen, then we have to commit genocide in Yemen.
Let's see Joe Biden run on that.
Well, I think you're right.
It's really, it's an interesting moment here where if Trump's smart, he can put the Democrats in a really awkward position where they have to somehow find a way to be more anti-war than him.
But that's going to be really difficult for most of these guys, especially a guy like Joe Biden, because if Trump starts ending these wars, if he starts pulling some American troops home, you know, that's popular.
It's popular with veterans.
It's popular generally with the American people.
The only people it's not popular with is the establishment and the arms industry, right?
And the national security sort of people who make their living on the teeth of the national security state.
In other words, it's the perfect issue to exploit, even for the most cynical political reasons.
It's perfect.
This giant gap between DC and the rest of America now on this.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I mean, people were chanting Nobel Prize, right?
I remember when he was doing his whole thing with North Korea.
But he pulls out of four American forever wars.
You start having to think, who's the last American president to deescalate on such a level?
I mean, I'm not going to say, hey, give Trump the Nobel Prize.
But I have to say, look, that chant's no longer ridiculous if he starts to make some of these moves.
Now, I don't know if he will.
And he's put some odd people in place in terms of Bolton and Pompeo.
And I think he is being restrained by the Republican establishment to some extent.
But he's shown himself willing to blow up the whole state.
He's shown himself willing to just go against everybody.
And his people are going to follow him.
The Republican establishment's dead.
I don't think they really have any control over Trump.
And I think Trump is the Republican Party now, at least for a while.
If he says, nope, I'm walking away from this, no one's going to care about the Kagan's of the world.
His people will stay with him to the end.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, by the way, his people need to make it clear to him that it's all this ironic Nixon goes to China, peaceful stuff that they like, and not all the tough guy hawkishness.
You don't need to impress us with how macho you are, dude.
We already get that.
We saw you on the WWF back when it's cool.
Now go ahead and shake hands with Ayatollah.
That's what we want to see.
Absolutely.
And, you know, he has escalated the situation.
He is playing a really dangerous game in the Gulf, you know, in the Strait of Hormuz.
But he didn't, you know, they shot down a drone and he didn't bomb them.
There's something to be said for that.
I mean, that kind of restraint is rare from American executives.
And I'm not so sure that Hillary Clinton wouldn't have thrown some cruise missiles, you know, towards Tehran in the same situation.
I'm really not convinced that she wouldn't have escalated even further than him.
So, you know, again, I don't want this interview to sound like let's rah-rah for Trump, but look, we're just being consistent here, I think.
Hey, he's the one who's in the chair right now.
That's why he's the subject of the discussion.
And again, yeah, hey, compared to her, anybody looks great.
And it is true.
I mean, I guess I'll reiterate in the interest of not sounding so rah-rah, he did send more troops to Afghanistan, to Yemen, to Somalia.
He's waged a massive drone war in Libya that hardly anyone ever talks about at all.
He's, you know, doubled down on all of Obama's SOCOM expansion across Africa and all of these things.
And for that matter, he's escalated the Marine and Navy's air-sea battle garbage in the Pacific and the U.S. Army's, you know, build up an escalation with NATO in Eastern Europe and, you know, all of these things.
So we do have Afghanistan where he clearly has told Khalilzad he wants a deal and wants out of there.
I don't know any other explanation for how far it's gotten so far that he must have said he wants to see this one through.
And then there's the talks with Kim in Korea.
So yeah, like you're saying, all we can do is grade these things on a curve, but those things for what they're worth are excellent and incredible and should be encouraged as much as possible.
That's all.
And he ought to see that, you know, all the escalations piss us off.
It's when he goes and shakes hands with former enemies that that's what makes people want to support him.
Absolutely.
Look, like I said, it's no coincidence that his people, who are supposedly so hawkish, who are supposedly, you know, seen as like super tough guys, it's no accident that they'd supported his Korea thing.
And they were they were yelling no bell.
And, you know, whether they're, you know, whether they're hypocrites or not, because obviously, I think if Obama did the same things, they would have been saying the opposite.
But either way, it shows that most of the American people have just about had enough.
And sometimes I think that Trump has the pulse of the people on foreign policy, at least when he is being when he's going with his instincts and being genuine.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I sure appreciate your time on the show again, as always, and all your great writing for antiwar.com, Danny.
Thanks a lot.
And I'm glad to come back anytime.
Great.
All right, you guys, that is retired civilian, former army major, Danny Sherson, and regular columnist for antiwar.com, Iraq war two and Afghan war vet.
Could Donald Trump end the Afghan war is his latest originally ran at Tom dispatch.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarian institute.org at Scott Horton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fool's errand.us.
