I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, 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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Andrew Coburn, and again, of course, he wrote Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, which we were talking to him about here on the show a few weeks ago when Donald Rumsfeld dropped dead finally, and he also wrote Kill Chain, this great book all about not just the drone wars, but decapitation strategy and all kinds of aspects of the modern terror wars, and he wrote this piece, which Sam Husseini sent out a press release about this this morning, The Long Shadow of a Neocon, and it's a couple years, a few years old, but that's okay.
It's about Zalmay Khalilzad, who has played a central role in so many facets of American foreign policy, and I'll tell you what, when he dies, you can repurpose this as his obit, and then I'm going to write a competing one, because I've got a few other things I want to add, but anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Oh, great to be with you.
Great to talk to you again.
Pretty good.
So, Zalmay Khalilzad, Long Shadow of a Neocon, now, when you use the term neocon here, you are using it advisedly.
This guy actually counts as a neoconservative from, what, the second or third generation, is that right?
Second, yeah, third, maybe, well, second, that's a good question.
I'm not sure.
Maybe second, maybe third, anyway, a minor, but his role has been as disastrous as any of the leading lights, because as I say in that article I wrote a few years ago, he always did well in those circles of people like Crystal and Pearl and all that crowd of characters, because he was the only Muslim any of them had ever met, mostly, and he was kind of a lick spittle who told them what they wanted to hear.
So that might have been fine, except that we invaded Afghanistan, and who do we turn to to install the new government, the new regime that was going to usher in the new Afghan state, or did, was Zalmay Khalilzad, and the Afghans, everyone says it was always going to be a disaster.
The Afghans, right at the beginning, right after the displacement of the Taliban, they had an assembly, a lawyer jirga, as it's called, who said, what we'd like is actually, we'd like to go back to the king.
We used to have a king who was in exile in Rome, and actually that wasn't so bad, we'd like to have him back.
And it might have been peaceful, would have been an Afghan solution.
I remember there was some quite sensible proposals floating around from Afghans at the time, like, we don't want much money, just a small amount of money would help us a bit of reconstruction, but otherwise we can get along fine.
And Zalmay said, no, you're not going to have the king, you're going to have me.
I'm the ambassador, and I'm calling the shots, and I'm going to rule through the warlords, which is what he did.
And he really certified the rule of the warlords, which was what rendered this sort of puppet state completely unviable, which is now vaporized.
So he, you know, that's only part of his totally disastrous imprint on this unfortunate country.
Yeah.
Now, so you talk about in there, you quote some, I forgot who's saying that they thought part of the reason why he chose Hamid Karzai to be the first sock puppet leader of the country, which I don't know if you remember this, it's so long ago now, but they used to pretend that he wasn't even going to run for president in 2004.
He was just there as the caretaker thing to set everything up until they could hold an election.
And then of course, they held one for him and rigged it for him and everything.
But anyway, so you quote some experts in here, I forgot who's saying, they think that Khalilzad chose Karzai because he was weak, because he was basically kind of a middle-ranked guy from Kandahar city and didn't have enough pull to really do things in a way that would be effective.
Well, right.
That's the, that's the MO.
They always do that.
You know, they always, they never like to pick a strong person if they can help it.
Because then it's harder to control.
So they picked Karzai, you know, they, you know, they complained afterwards, oh, well, he's weak and you know, he's corrupt.
They pick, they pick these people because they're corrupt and weak so that they can control them.
So they can twist their arms, they can threaten them.
It's all, it's part of, it's in some rule book, which, you know, sitting in some classified safe somewhere, or I don't know, and maybe in a Brookings Institute policy paper or something to you know, to do it that way.
So Karzai was by no means an exception.
Yeah.
Well, and him and his colleagues then, look, I mean, I don't know how else it could have really been, or how it would have looked under the king or anything like that.
But Karzai essentially allied with all these worst kind of warlords.
And you talk about a few of them in the article here.
What's his name in Nangarhar province there?
Oh, yeah.
The big, the big, the big, the old dope dealer.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And Akinzade in Helmand.
You know, these were all people who got rich initially in the, in the 1980s war against the Russians that we, you know, that were financed and armed and everything by the Americans.
And then, you know, when it was time to displace the Taliban, as it turned out temporarily in 2001, they simply went back to these same people and said, you know, we'll pay you to change sides, which they did, you know, so suddenly the Taliban collapsed.
So what you've seen this last week or so has been just the obverse, the reverse of that process that happened in 2001.
The warlords, you know, once upon a time supported the Taliban, then they changed sides, the Taliban collapses.
Warlords thought of, in a pitiful way for their own end, support this, you know, the sock puppet, whatever sock puppet is in charge in Kabul.
And then they change sides and that regime collapses.
There's a certain, you know, certain circularity to all this.
Now, you know, there's a lot of wise acres on Twitter, and maybe they're right when they say that America was never trying to build a successful state here.
They wanted a weak, pathetic, not just, you know, guys in charge, but they didn't really ever want to succeed in integrating the country or any of the things that they said were their goals.
You know, they knew they'd lose in the end.
They just wanted to keep fighting and spending money the whole time.
But I wonder, you know, what's the percentage of that versus they really thought they could pull this off and yet they couldn't.
What do you think?
Well, what was the maybe they had?
Well, we know they didn't think they could pull this off from the Afghanistan papers.
We know that what the generals were thinking, you know, back 20 years, it was all kind of hopeless.
It wasn't.
I mean, I don't I don't see why their private thoughts should be necessarily taken, you know, as totally credible and authoritative as opposed to what they were telling the rest of us.
But the fact is what they were actually thinking was this is a wasted.
This is a hopeless cause.
But in the meantime, it's great for us.
You know, they all you know, they liked us.
Someone was pointing out to me yesterday, you know, they liked the fact that the war went on and on because there was more time to get a four star rank, more, more, you know, more generals could cash in, you know, more, more four stars could become multimillionaires.
You know, it's been a good from that point of view.
I mean, I've argued in other pieces that the war shouldn't necessarily be considered a failure.
It's been a great success.
You know, think of all the money that got made, you know, that I mean, I once asked John Sopko, the inspector general, special inspector general, in putting out honest reports all these years about, you know, how much money was being wasted.
And I asked him how much money never even leaves Washington.
You know, the money that's on the Afghan ledger, how much money never actually leaves Washington.
He said, oh, quite a bit.
He he said the exact they did have an idea, but it was classified.
The you know, that they, you know, most of it, you know, they go, you pay off a contractor.
Contractor gets a contract.
They slice off, you know, 20, 30, 40 percent for themselves.
They said some contractor to someone else.
They slice off that percentage.
And eventually there's a sort of trickle down to some, you know, hapless character in Afghanistan who pockets the remainder and, you know, no money ever gets spent where it might have been needed.
In your recent Spectator piece, you have a quote from a guy, a general saying, talking about Trump's escalation of the war in 2017, saying they knew it wouldn't make a difference in the war, that it would be good for us at budget time.
Yeah.
I mean, that was a direct quote of a general.
There was a summary where my actual there was a was told to me by an officer, not a general who was a stopper.
He was, you know, he was on the staff.
And so he was one of those people who get to sit along the back wall while the high ups are conferring.
So he was describing to me a meeting of very senior generals at that time to discuss, you know, the Trump surge.
And what he said, what they said was, well, this isn't going to do any good.
This is not going to make any difference at all to the war, but it will do us good at budget time.
And that was a direct quote.
So back to Khalilzad here, when I was writing my last book, he keeps coming up over and over again.
I finally put aside a part of my notes where it's just my Khalilzad section.
And then I don't know if anybody noticed this, but there's a running gag in the book where I just always call him neoconservative policy advisers all make Khalilzad no matter what role he's playing at the time, just because he comes up so many times from all the way through.
I think his first appearance is something that I'm cribbing from Robert Dreyfuss in Devil's Game, that when the Ayatollah won the revolution in February 79 in Iran, that Khalilzad wrote that, yeah, this is great.
This will help inspire the revolution against the communists in Afghanistan that we're backing right now.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a great, great quote.
What an idiot.
Yeah.
And then he had also written in the Washington Post about how, oh man, I'm sorry, I forget what he called it.
He had a name for it.
It wasn't Operation Cyclone.
He called it something else.
I'm sorry, but that their plan to basically bog down the Soviets in the Afghan war, that they didn't think they'd actually win the war, much less that they would break the Soviet unions back the way they did, and that it would be such a big part of the destabilization of the country as it was going down there.
He kind of brags about that.
And then, oh, also he had written in the 80s somewhere, I forgot what it was, where he had written in favor of supporting Saddam Hussein against Iran because of the danger of the Ayatollah and his regime.
And then, of course, as you know in your piece too, he played a major role in writing the defense planning guidance of 1992.
You want to explain what that is to the newbies here?
Well, that really, it was a sort of absolutely foundational document.
It was really laid out what they should, you know, should do.
You know, what they actually did was in terms of destabilizing, you know, Arab regimes, you know, the whole war hawking policy that they put into full effect when they got into power in 2001.
Yeah.
I mean, you know more about it than I do.
Oh, well, I doubt that.
It's a lot of fun to read about.
And I did actually, recently I read, you know, all the inspector general report about it and all of that.
And I guess the Senate reports about the neocons and the WMDs had some stuff about it in there too.
But yeah, I mean, I guess the biggest thing in there is where we'll never allow there to be a near peer competitor ever again.
And that will establish total military dominance over the planet where no one else will even try it.
And if they try it, we'll bomb them before they even start their build up and, you know, all that kind of thing.
Right.
Well, that, you know, it was an excuse for, remember, they were in a bit of a crisis at the time, the war machine, because, you know, we'd had the Soviet Union had irritatingly collapsed.
So there was suddenly a short, you know, a peer competitor and, you know, the forces were being cut right, left and center and troops, you know, huge bases being evacuated in Germany.
It was a dark hour.
So to say, well, we're just going to have total world domination, you know, with or without an enemy, we'll just prevent even one ever appearing was a very urgent task at that time.
Right.
And the quote was, he said, Khalilzad said that Cheney said to him, you've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.
Thanks.
We needed one.
Yeah, exactly.
Because they sure needed one at that moment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and then and he supported the rise of the Taliban in the 90s, along with the Clinton administration.
For all I know, I need to learn more about this, but I know the Clinton government went along with the Saudis and the Pakistanis in supporting the rise of the Taliban.
And I met Rashid talks about that in his book quite a bit.
But I wonder whether Khalilzad was really influential in that decision being made even at the time.
You know, I never think of him as influential, more as a sort of a horse holder, you know.
And that, you know, the guy they'd sent, he was the as I said, he was the useful Muslim.
And then they, you know, as I said, disastrously, they sent him to Afghanistan.
And then, you know, later on, they disastrously they sent him to Iraq, where he wrecked equal havoc or almost as great havoc.
Hey, I'll check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us.
Our whole movement, I mean.
And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
I actually just reread his article with Bill Kristol called Overthrow Him in the Weekly Standard from 1997, which I guess I had read when researching the book a couple of years ago.
What did he say?
Well, we need a massive war, a massive military intervention in order to prove to the world that we really mean it, that we're going to support the people who want to be free and rule themselves there and prevent Saddam from making his weapons of mass destruction.
And coups and CIA subterfuge and exile groups won't cut it.
We need a massive intervention, guarantees to Iraqi army divisions that if they switch sides we'll back them.
We should have never betrayed the uprising in 91.
We should have taken it all the way to Baghdad then.
And let's do it now.
The only sensible thing in there is why do we have sanctions on parts of the country that Saddam Hussein doesn't even rule?
Like Kurdistan and down, I guess in, you know, far south in Basra or whatever, his state has barely any authority at all.
We still have these people under sanctions.
That doesn't make any sense.
To them, it was just a part of their overall program.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
They've always loved the Kurds.
If they can use them, they'll turn around on them real quick too.
But yeah.
So then, now, so that's important.
So Khalilzad, and I don't remember anymore, I'd have to go back and look at the timeline from, was he, do you remember, was after he appointed Karzai to rule Afghanistan, he made himself an ambassador to Afghanistan then and they didn't bring him over to Iraq until 2005 or something.
Right?
Was that it?
That's right.
Yeah.
And then crucially in 2006, he picked Maliki to be prime minister of Iraq.
All right.
So tell us why that's so important.
Because the, no one else wanted Maliki and Maliki, as it turned out, as they could have said, you know, was a very hard over sectarian Shia, also extremely corrupt.
I mean, there was some quite, you know, by comparison, more reasonable people they could have picked.
Maliki was the one who, by pursuing a very adamant sectarian line, really drove the sectarian divide in Iraq and the, you know, the very bloody civil war that was going on.
And then, you know, I mean, I say in that piece, there was a, I mean, suddenly, because he's kind of, you have to remember, Khalilzad's kind of an idiot, that he summons Maliki to the, you know, to the Viceroy headquarters and says, how would you like to be prime minister?
Maliki, you know, he'd basically been running a butcher shop a few years before, you'd know it.
He says, are you serious?
And the British ambassador, who was meant to be, you know, this is meant to be done in coordination with the British, British ambassador says, wait a minute, what are you talking about?
Making this guy, this guy, prime minister?
Whereupon Khalilzad kicks him out of the room, the ambassador.
So Maliki's in charge, institutes, as I say, a very sectarian and extremely corrupt regime, you know, driving really major assist in the creation of ISIS, you know, well, Al Qaeda in Iraq, which turned, you know, eventually turned into ISIS.
But it's not, we shouldn't blame Khalilzad totally, because in 2010, 2011, there was an opportunity to get rid of Maliki.
And the then deputy, what was the deputy national security advisor or security advisor to Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, makes it clear that the U.S. wants Maliki.
So Maliki stayed for another disastrous few years.
And that was what really propelled, propelled ISIS.
Yeah, that's such an important point.
I'm so glad that you mentioned that because a lot of people don't know about that or they neglect to mention that where, you know, and it was so ironic, right, that Eyad Alawi, who had been the Ba'athist and then the CIA agent from the failed plot of 1995, I guess, or maybe 96, I forgot which one.
Yeah.
But and then he had been the first sock puppet prime minister under Paul Bremer and everything.
And yet here he was, his party won.
And he was a Shiite and a former Ba'athist.
Very briefly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so like he if there was one man in the country to be prime minister who might have been able to deal with both sides in a frank kind of way and move forward, maybe he would have had a shot.
Yeah.
And as you say, boy, we got the exact opposite of that with Maliki's continued rule.
Exactly.
That was disastrous.
Yeah.
So and then finally they send, you know, Khalilzad back into to negotiate, you know, he negotiated the Doha Accords.
Oh, wait.
Hang on.
Wait.
We still got a few minutes.
So before we go back to Afghanistan, because this is really Khalilzad's triumph and we're going to end with that.
I'm a Khalilzad fan now, but I'll explain why in a second.
But before we get to that, it's the worst thing he ever did in the world, which is the redirection program.
And people hear me say this all the time.
I wonder how many people hear me say this all the time.
They still don't read the article or how many people say, OK, OK, finally I'm going to read this thing.
But it's the Seymour Hersh piece from the spring of 07, March of 07, where it's about how Khalilzad and Elliott Abrams come to Bush and say, look, we just fought a whole war for Iran and we feel really stupid.
And the king of Saudi is pissed as hell at us.
And so we have to turn this thing around and do what they called the Sunni turn was, you know, the way that they called it.
And part of that was the awakening.
But then, as Hersh detailed in that piece and follow up articles preparing the battlefield and the coming wars and a couple of others from that year, that meant backing bin Laden night terrorist groups as though 9-11 and Iraq War II's war against Al-Qaeda in Iraq had never happened.
Now we're going to back the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist groups in Syria and this group Fatal Islam in Lebanon and Jandala, the headchopper suicide bomber crazies in Iran.
And and then, you know, this is oh, and then he's in the WikiLeaks where it's Khalilzad when the king says it used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran.
Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
And now what are you going to do about it?
And Khalilzad says, well, whatever you say, Your Majesty, and all of that.
So that's the big deal to me is because everybody always neglects that thing.
But that's really like the pivot point of, you know, after they invade Iraq and score this big goal for Iran by putting Iran's friends, Maliki, the Dawa Party and their allies in power in Baghdad.
Well, now they got to make it up to the Saudis, which explains why Bush and then Obama especially backed Al-Qaeda, especially in Syria, was backing the Sunni side against the Shiites to try to make up for Iraq war two.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's at the core of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's walking deeper into the you know what.
It's astonishing.
And you know, today we read about, well, you know, we got the agreement and I don't want to sort of preempt what you want to end with, but we got the agreement not to, you know, the Taliban won't allow Al-Qaeda back in.
Well, why should we object to that since we're backing Al-Qaeda in Syria?
I know.
They make such a big deal about this safe haven myth.
And it's like, have you guys ever heard of the Idlib province?
Or how about in southeastern Yemen right now, where America's backing the Al-Islah and Al-Qaeda there?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm wondering, I'm speculating, how long before we start to hear that the CIA has got some deal with the Taliban to run operations against the Chinese in Xinjiang among the Uyghurs?
I mean, don't you think that that's bound to happen?
Don't you think?
Absolutely.
I'm publishing an article tonight that has that in parentheses.
Now we've got to keep the CIA from aligning with the Taliban and this group, which I don't know how old they are.
I guess America bombed them at least one time back in 2018.
But this group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, you know, Uyghur Islamist separatists who sound right up the Democrats' alley.
You know?
Oh, yeah.
Bill Clinton, call your office.
We got some Mujahideen for you to back, buddy.
Yeah.
Exactly right.
You know, since we found our peer competitor now, China, I mean, it's bound to happen.
Isn't it funny?
Because I've seen a few people mention that on Twitter, too, where it's just the most obvious thing that like, you know, we could have deal, corrupt, horrible deals to do even worse things with.
The Taliban.
It's just obvious.
Why wouldn't we?
You know, we meaning, you know, the party in power at the time right now.
Yeah, exactly.
But now.
OK, so talk about the door thing, because they did end the war.
And I got to tell you, Andrew, I never thought in a million years that when Trump.
Well, I don't know.
A million years.
But I was very doubtful that when Trump told Khalilzad, all right, make me a deal here, that Khalilzad would actually do it rather than just running out the clock or some kind of subterfuge.
But he really did.
Huh?
He did.
Yeah.
I mean, basically.
I'm basically saying we surrender.
Right.
Fairly straightforward, as you said.
Yep.
You know, but when we're apportioning blame, I think we ought to mention, you know, that Biden's getting, you know, the pressure after Biden to this week probably won't last.
But, you know, because of those unpleasant scenes from Kabul airport.
But if we're going to lay a blame on this, how about General McKenzie, head of CENTCOM?
I mean, that was this was his thing.
He was the man in charge of organizing the evacuation and all that.
And this this fiasco at the airport and the whole sort of sudden last minute, whoops, oh, sorry, gosh, we've got to leave, was basically his doing.
I mean, he at least should be fired.
I mean, he should be fired for all sorts of reasons, being, you know, a prominent member of the let's go to war with Iran group.
But I, I just want to put in my 10 cents that nominees for the chop should certainly be the military here, because as usual, the military will escape unscathed.
Well, you know, people are talking about how embarrassing and horrible it is, but mostly it's just embarrassing.
Right.
If I told you that, listen, when the Taliban wins the war, as America withdraws, there be hardly a shot fire.
The whole thing will be a coup de main and last a week and a half, two weeks.
And they'll walk right into Kabul.
I actually have been predicting this for years.
Audience knows it.
They just walk right into Kabul and just take over the government and without a slaughter.
You know, they talk about this like it's Pol Pot or whatever, but I just don't see the evidence of that.
Right.
Like there are certainly people panicking, trying to get the hell out of the airport.
But my bet, at least so far, is playing out that they're right now going to choose to be more clever than cruel and play it cool.
And that's how they've said that, like, hey, listen, we're just here to provide security and this kind of thing.
You know, they have a public relations campaign going on that like this isn't the holy reign of terror now that, you know, thank goodness we're here is the narrative they're pushing.
And so even on the international level, I don't think that they want to, you know, get everything completely off on the wrong foot with every power in the world as their diplomatic staff, you know, head to the airport and that kind of thing.
I mean, there could be a big Blackhawk downslaughter, but so far it hadn't happened.
Yeah, well, we'll see.
I mean, there's some pretty unpleasant people in that bunch, but we don't know.
Right.
But, you know, I wonder, I mean, at the time we're recording this on Monday morning or Monday afternoon, I guess, I'm not sure how far they've completed the evacuation of the American staff.
I think they're pretty much done now.
It's a question whether any Afghans can get a ride, too.
Right.
Well, they were getting their dogs out.
Did you see that?
Yeah, I did see that.
Man, that looks so bad.
We got to get all our dogs.
You people wait here.
Yeah.
First things first.
Not you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right out to the front.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know you have to go on it on a tight time budget here, but thank you so much for your time on the show.
Great to talk to you, Andrew.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, likewise, as always.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, that's the great Andrew Coburn.
He is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
And you can read this when it's a few years old, 2014, but it's still great.
The long shadow of a neocon, all about the history of Zalmay Khalilzad, neoconservative policy advisor.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
