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 scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Jack Murphy from connectingvets.com, formerly with SoftRep, and I'm sure you all remember some of that journalism from a couple of years ago, but check this out, looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover, inside America's failed Afghan drone campaign.
You find this at odyssey.com, that's A-U-D-A-C-Y, odyssey.com.
Welcome to the show, Jack.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Listen, I've been a fan of your journalism and your Twitter account and all kinds of things for many years now, and I really appreciate you joining us on the show, especially this is such an important piece here.
I guess I could say we knew that Donald Trump had escalated the air war, along with a small escalation of forces back in 2017, and we know that in Afghanistan and also in Somalia and Yemen and other places, I think, that they had devolved the command authority to order strikes further down the chain of command from the way it had been in the Obama years.
But now what you've done with this piece is you've told that story from a whole new point of view, from inside the drone warriors in the, I guess the air force and joint task forces fighting the war in Afghanistan, and just flesh the story out so well for us here, and what a horror show it is.
So I guess, first of all, can you, actually, before we get too far into that, could you tell us about your experience in the military and so the audience knows who they're listening to here?
Sure.
I spent eight years in Army Special Operations, starting off in Ranger Battalion and then in Special Forces, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and then got out of the Army in 2010, majored in political science and began working as a journalist.
You know, I've traveled to Syria a couple times, Iraq a couple times, Kurdistan, the Philippines, a few other places, reporting on the ground over the years.
Mostly I report on military special operations, military history, covert operations, things of that nature.
And can you tell us what years were you in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I was in Afghanistan, what feels like a million years ago, it was the winter of 2004, 2005, and then I was in Iraq the summer of 2005, and then again in 2009.
Okay.
All right, cool.
I was just curious about that.
I wanted to hear you out on that.
Okay.
So you got this story, these, I guess, talk first about your sourcing here.
You have brand new footage no one has ever seen before of drone strikes on apparent civilian targets.
Yes.
I, you know, through the, initially how this story started was speaking to one of the drone operators who came to me because he was distraught about some of the things he had participated in and witnessed.
And he was not alone, as it turns out.
This person, you know, gave non-classified drone footage to me that he had saved from one of his trips overseas to demonstrate, you know, what he was upset about, namely the targeting of unarmed, apparently civilian males in Afghanistan and Helmand province in 2019.
And as I began to kind of flesh out this story, I mean, it's a very complicated, very technical story.
And just having the footage itself doesn't really explain very much.
It doesn't tell you very much.
And like, just as an example, what I'd tell you is if you were to see helmet cam footage of the Bin Laden raid, what it would show you is a American commando shooting an old man in his pajamas in the middle of the night.
It would look on the surface pretty bad.
But if you understand the context and you understand who the target is, it completely changes the nature of the story, right?
The same is true here.
If you see the video without any further knowledge, these look like any other drone strike like we've been seeing for 20 years.
So it was important to really dig deep and gather as much sourcing as I could.
I interviewed over two dozen people, military lawyers, Air Force JTACs, which are the people who specialize in calling for fire.
Many other people who are involved in crafting policy, people who work at various task forces and headquarters and in the intelligence community.
And you know, my initial source, as it turns out, was not the only one suffering from some level of moral injury over what they had seen and experienced in Afghanistan.
Yeah, just on that point right there.
You know, I've heard it dismissed and I may have dismissed it to the trauma of being a drone warrior sitting safe and sound in a trailer in New York state or in Nevada, killing somebody with the entire diameter of the earth as your shield.
But then I've heard it from the drone warriors themselves.
I think they talk about this in National Bird that when you're flying a B1, you fly over, you hit your target.
You might find out whether you hit it or not when you get back to base.
Something like that.
When you're a drone pilot, you follow these people around for weeks and you get to know them in a way and they become very, very human.
And then after you bomb them, you watch them bleed out, screaming and freaking out on the ground as they die.
And it's a whole other level of intimacy through that video screen.
And it's really, really has been very hard on some of these people.
That's no, that's really accurate.
And I mean, also some of the optics on these drones now are so clear that you can really zoom in on these people.
You can tell if they're wearing eyeglasses or not in some cases, they would be assigned tasks.
So just as you said, not only are you watching them for long periods of time, then you're watching the strike.
And then some of them are assigned to watch the bodies and literally watch the ragged corpses left behind to see who shows up to claim the body, where are they taken?
So I mean, these are in some cases, these drone operators are watching, you know, bodies of men, women, and children being thrown onto the back of a pickup truck and driven to the hospital.
I mean, they're seeing all of that.
You know, well, let me ask you, is this your experience too?
They just feed you Hitler and the Wehrmacht your whole childhood long.
So then you join the army thinking that that's what you're going to do.
You're going to be fighting against an army in a field somewhere and not, you know, drone striking some guy in a pickup truck.
Yeah, I thought it was interesting that even the footage that was provided to me, I mean, the reason why they had that footage was because earlier on in the deployment, they were proud of the strikes they were doing like, hey, we're killing bad guys.
We're doing work out here, right?
And as the deployment went on, they stopped making recordings of the strikes because over time it began to dawn on them what was taking place here, and they were no longer comfortable with it.
It's a different dynamic for the drone operators, sure.
I hesitate to even compare it to some of my own experiences.
I think it differs.
Sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's got to be different all the way around, but, you know, a lot of similarities there, too.
But you know, it's a matter of matter of perspective, I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, you know, like Joe Biden's son's death from the cancer from the burn pits clearly has gotten to him.
And yet I've heard combat veterans say, hey, he may have died of the war, but he didn't die in the war.
Not like my friends did.
And I got to respect that.
Yeah.
Like he was not a combat death.
But then again, if you're Joe Biden, he was same difference to you.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Right.
I mean, the entire war.
And as we're just beginning to see now the social fallout, I mean, it affects so many different people in so many different ways.
And we're only at the very beginning stages of beginning to process that or cope with it.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
And we're still not even done yet.
OK.
Can you talk to me a little bit about the rules of engagement as they were under Obama?
Because it was no picnic, the drone wars under Obama.
But what were the rules that then got suspended here?
Right.
There are a number of different dynamics that were all taking place at different times.
And there was no uniform or at least the way it was interpreted on the ground.
The rules of engagement were not evenly distributed.
They were not uniform.
Obama came in and put some restrictions in place largely because of the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan, which is a whole different animal in many ways.
But he brought in some restrictions as far as making requiring the commanders and the people who had strike authorization to ensure a near certainty that there would not be civilian casualties.
This came in during the McChrystal years in Afghanistan.
And what happens is there can be some presidential policy guidance that lays out some very broad strokes of what the White House expects.
But then commanders write the ROE, the rules of engagement in country.
It's a common fallacy I find with veterans and soldiers that we think the ROE is written by politicians or mandated by politicians.
It's actually written by the military itself and commanders own that ROE.
It is written based on all sorts of different input.
I mean, military lawyers absolutely weigh in on it.
It has to be at least in accordance with international law.
It always must meet the thresholds of international law, but it can be more restrictive.
It can be increasingly more restrictive than is required by the Geneva Conventions or the laws of land warfare and so on.
But what would happen with the ROE is that commanders would reinterpret it differently based on the politics of the day, the political implications at that time.
It could be based just informally on signaling or policy decisions that are coming on or press coverage that if there's some negative press coming out about a certain military task force, maybe they adjust the ROEs.
I mean, the ROEs have not been hard and fast.
They have been something very open to interpretation and reinterpretation on the ground.
And each task force on the ground in Afghanistan had different ROEs on top of that.
The conventional forces and the timeframe, you know, my article is written about 2019.
The conventional forces operated under the NATO rules of engagement.
The special operations task force operated under a completely separate rules of engagement.
When soldiers would show up overseas, they would suddenly have to get read on to the rules of engagement, which was hundreds, if not thousands of pages with all sorts of legal caveats included in them.
The JTACs, the Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, would joke that they were also barracks lawyers as a part of their job description because of the amount of legalese that they had to process.
And what ended up a lot of times was that the military relied on those JTACs in their understanding of the ROE, where there were commanders in theater who did not understand their own ROE that they operated under.
And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that it led to a very convoluted situation.
And I lay out some examples in the article where the ROE was too restrictive, where we had American soldiers under fire, engaged in combat with the enemy, and the bureaucracy would not allow airstrikes to go forward.
There was- You're talking about under the old rules.
Correct?
Right.
Right.
And, you know, there's one example that I probably should have included in the article the 2015 Battle of Kunduz, when there was a Taliban tank, an actual tank driving around the city of Kunduz, like, just rolling around, and the military would not authorize a airstrike on a tank and an enemy tank driving around the city.
So it took hours and hours to get this airstrike approved.
And that's just the ridiculousness of it, the flip-flopping back and forth, the oscillation from one extreme to the other, that has frustrated so many soldiers in Afghanistan.
So when you hear troops complaining about the ROE and it being overly restrictive, that may be based on perceptions at some point, but some of their criticisms are very valid.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you talk about guys pinned down under sniper fire, and they wouldn't take out the enemy there.
And I certainly remember that, especially from the counterinsurgency campaign, heroic restraint and all of this under Stanley McChrystal.
There were a lot of complaints about, you know, Vietnam-type-sounding complaints about being made to fight with one arm tied behind their back and all of that.
Right, right.
So this is part of Trump's politics, was nobody was ever going to accuse him of that.
And that's a very important kind of shibboleth in Washington, DC.
That's something that H.W. Bush made a big deal about, too.
I'm not going to be Lyndon Johnson over here dictating to my generals on the minutiae, you guys are in charge, you do your best job, and no one's ever going to say that your loss is my fault, because I gave you everything you need.
And that, you know, Donald Trump said something like that quite a few times.
Well, it's interesting, because American soldiers always have the inherent right to self-defense, that if you receive fire, you can fire back, and our military can fire back with, you know, indirect fire, artillery, airstrikes, and so on.
But what we've seen is these examples where the chain of command did not allow them to fire for various reasons.
So at a certain point, you can't even blame the president or the policy decisions that are made at the White House.
These are decisions that are being made in Afghanistan by the military itself.
Right.
Although, I mean, the change came from Trump, right?
He told Mattis that you go ahead and do your worst, pal, correct?
There was some definite policy changes that what happened in Afghanistan specifically was that there was a pressure campaign that was designed, and this was part of the negotiations that were going into Doha.
The Trump administration obviously wanted to pull the US military out of some of these foreign entanglements and these conflicts abroad.
I mean, we saw Trump trying to pull us out of everywhere, right?
Germany, South Korea, Syria.
It's kind of funny to watch the haphazard way he went about it.
But there actually was a deliberate strategy in Afghanistan to go into negotiations with the Taliban.
We dropped some of the preconditions that we wanted the Taliban to also negotiate with the Afghan government.
We're going to negotiate directly with the Taliban now.
But in order to have leverage as we went into those negotiations, we crafted a pressure campaign to heavily target the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The idea being that we're going to make them bleed.
We're going to put a foot on the back of their neck so that when we go into those negotiations in Doha, they're willing to do almost anything to get that boot off of their neck.
That was the idea behind it.
And Scottie Miller, General Scottie Miller, was a big part of taking the gloves off in Afghanistan, which he did, according to many of the sources I talked to.
The Special Operations Task Force was targeting high-level personalities, you know, so-called high-value targets, HVTs, whatever the terminology we use now.
And they were timed.
They were actually timed with the negotiations so that those strikes would happen while our people were in the conference room with the Taliban in Doha, so that when they came out of a meeting, they would pick up their cell phones, find them ringing, pick up the phone and realize that all of their buddies were getting blown up back in Afghanistan, so that when we went into the next meeting, they would, you know, at least in theory, be frightened and be open to negotiations, a little bit more open than they were previously.
The new rules of engagement, if you will, this new targeting methodology for this pressure campaign was also brought into effect by some of the conventional forces.
And those new rules, the lessening in restrictions, one of the big ones that affected the conventional forces was that strike authority previously had to be authorized by, like, the four-star general in charge of all of Afghanistan.
So every drone strike, this four-star would have to approve.
And that would mean if this guy was asleep, if he was in a meeting, if he was otherwise indisposed, you could not get strike authority.
And so in some cases, legitimately bad, you know, guys, targetable personalities were allowed to go.
This resulted in a lot of frustration.
During the Trump administration, he pushed strike authority down to field grade officers, roughly down to, like, battalion commanders, to task force commanders, so that they could authorize their own strikes.
And of course, this helped pick up the pace of the drone strikes significantly.
And that would mean what?
That would mean captains or lieutenant colonels or?
Lieutenant colonels and colonels predominantly, yeah.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
So yeah, this led to the task forces, specifically looking at Task Force Southwest, which was running ops out of Helmand Province, gave them strike authority.
And they used it to a point that some of those involved described as excessive, as punitive, or even nihilistic, because the people we were targeting were not high value personalities.
They were Afghan men who were seen carrying a radio, or maybe somebody flying a drone thought they saw an antenna poking out from under a person's clothing.
Or they perhaps thought they saw a tactical vest concealed underneath the person's clothing, the type that could hold Kalashnikov magazines or hand grenades, maybe.
But a drone operator would just think maybe they saw a flash of this through the drone's camera, and that person would immediately be targeted with a lethal strike.
Okay, so now you talk in the article about how some of the dumbing down of the restrictions here happened first in Iraq War Three, where they're fighting against the Islamic State there, 2014 through 17.
And so Trump came in about two thirds of the way into that war.
But the rules of engagement had already changed there in Iraq and Syria or not?
Yes, it had already changed quite a bit under the Obama administration.
And that had to do with the setting up of, well, I mean, it had to do, of course, with ISIS sweeping across Syria in Iraq.
And that's a whole history there in of itself.
But we sent troops in to reinforce the embassy in Baghdad initially, like 2014 timeframe.
And that mission kind of expanded outwards as we decided, you know, something's got to be done about ISIS.
At the same time, the Obama administration had just withdrawn from Iraq, we don't want to reinvade the country and do all that all over again.
So how do we do this with a light footprint?
We send in special operations soldiers, and we use drone strikes.
And this led to the setting up of strike cell operations.
So I guess as a point of comparison, I'm reflecting a little bit on my own experience here.
I mean, the old days in Iraq, we did a lot of counterterrorism missions.
So there would be signals intelligence and humans intelligence, human intelligence gathered on specific terrorists.
And the Special Operations Task Force would send soldiers after these terrorist leaders, and we would fly in and helicopters in the night or drive in and vehicles and explosively breach the door and go in and enter and clear the the structure.
And ideally, we'd pull the bad guys out of their beds at night and flex cuff them and bring them back.
And if they pick up picked up arms, I mean, it was going to be a firefight.
This all goes out the window when we start talking about the war against ISIS.
Because of the lighter footprint we have in the country, but also because this is not some low intensity conflict anymore.
These are not like SWAT team style raids, counterterrorism raids that we're doing in a semi permissive environment.
ISIS is an actual army that has taken over and occupied broad swaths of territory, including major cities.
So the way that we targeted them had to change.
And this is why we moved from a intelligence driven approach to targeting to what is known as a target engagement criteria.
This would basically be, it would involve us flying around.
And if you see a group of or even a lone person behind enemy lines carrying a rifle or carrying a weapon, we would hit them with a drone strike.
That target engagement criteria, I mean, at certain points, it certainly involved, you know, if we saw somebody behind enemy lines carrying a radio, I had one intelligence official tell me that the engagement criteria could be met if there was a building, particularly in Mosul, where there was more than six cars parked out in front because of the preponderance of suicide vehicular improvised explosive devices.
So in other words, a car bomb driven by, you know, a suicide bomber, which ISIS used a lot.
They use those a lot.
So if we saw vehicles parked outside of a building, too many vehicles from, you know, based on our assessment, we would just level that entire structure, just bring it down.
And there's a rationale, there's a method to the madness here.
I mean, we are fighting, you know, an enemy army, and we are now fighting a war of attrition.
It's not a counterterrorism mission in the way that it was, you know, eight years prior.
So we use the targeting engagement criteria to great effect, but there is also a lot of collateral damage in retrospect.
There is a reporter, Asmat Khan, she has written for the New York Times, did a really amazing article that I would definitely recommend people read in tandem with the one I wrote, because what she shows in there is that the strike cell operations and the task force in Iraq, on paper, they say they accounted for every bomb dropped, which in one year, we dropped 39,000 bombs, we were dropping more bombs in Iraq than the logistical supply could keep up with.
In other words, we were firing more missiles than could be manufactured and transported into Iraq.
That's how many we were firing.
CENTCOM will tell you they had accountability for every missile fired, that they, you know, where each missile struck, that they know that, you know, the collateral damage was fairly low.
But what Asmat Khan showed in her article was actually CENTCOM really had no idea what they're talking about, and that we blew up all kinds of buildings, including civilian structures all over the place.
And CENTCOM was denying it to her, and she said, well, you know, actually, you guys posted a video of it on your YouTube channel.
And I went and talked to the people who live there.
And like, you blew up a family of five.
And CENTCOM's response was to start taking down those videos off of YouTube.
There's also a Ranch Corporation study that I think showed that the airstrikes were not quite as effective as we might have hoped they had been.
But anyway, the point I'm getting at here is that this is where the strike cell model grew out of.
And when I say strike cell, what I'm talking about is a Air Force JTAC, a military lawyer, a JAG, and the drone operators, well, it could be a representative who's on a phone, like a VTC, or a conference call, like a Cisco conference call.
But a lot of these people are all in the same room.
And what it is, is the commander is basically waiting for all these people to bless off, to kind of give the green light for the strike.
And it would happen very quickly.
Sometimes it would happen in seconds in Iraq.
And because the commander would like, at one point, I was told they had ping pong paddles.
So each desk in the room would have red on one side of the paddle and green on the other.
And what they would do when a drone pilot got eyes on something they thought met the target engagement criteria, they would bring that over to the big flat screen.
And everyone in the room would hold up their ping pong paddle.
And once they were all green, the commander would authorize the strike.
So it happened extremely quickly.
Like I said, one year 39,000 bombs dropped in Iraq.
So they were they were moving.
That model, that template started migrating its way over to Afghanistan.
Starting around 2017, for sure, it was starting to make its way over there.
And it had been fully implemented by 2019.
And that's why we saw the Special Operations Task Force targeting the Taliban quite heavily.
But also a conventional task force, Task Force Southwest, trying to use engageable criteria and trying to do strike cell operations.
And arguably, it got out of control that their operations down there just came off the rails.
And there are some, I guess you could call informed speculations.
I hate to speculate, of course, as a reporter, but I there are some, I couldn't get anyone in the strike cell specifically to speak to me, which was interesting.
But there are perhaps some reasons why that happened, why they relied on drone strikes the way that they did.
One of which being that Helmand Province was it was it was more or less always under de facto Taliban control.
It was always a hotbed for enemy activity.
By the time we get to 2019, the Marines know the war is winding down.
They do not want to do patrols outside of the base.
They're basically seeing this as, you know, their last hurrah in Afghanistan on the way out the door.
Other conventional task forces were doing, you know, they were doing drone strikes, but they're also doing fly to assist.
So when Afghans would come under fire, enemy fire, they would fly out a team to advise and assist.
Task Force Southwest and Helmand Province was not doing that.
Another real problematic thing about what was happening in Helmand, especially using the engagement criteria of somebody carrying around a radio, you know, their intelligence assessment was that anyone carrying a radio around Helmand was a Taliban member.
But this was problematic because the Taliban had been dismantling the cell phone towers in Helmand for years.
So walkie talkies or radios was the only way that people in the province really had to communicate.
They didn't have cell phones like, you know, normal people would normally use.
And you know, these guys who had radios or they thought they saw somebody using a radio or even saw somebody just touching a radio was targeted with lethal strike operations.
So there is a number of reasons why this became highly problematic in Helmand.
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Now I think that I know that a big part of the escalation of the air war in the Trump years was not just drone strikes, but air strikes by B one bombers and whatever else you got to.
And, but is that part of this same operation or that's a whole different subject?
Yeah, it is.
I'm glad you brought that up because, uh, if drones in, in, in Helmand province, most of the drone strikes I've been speaking about were conducted by gray eagles, uh, gray eagles are flown by army pilots, not air force.
Uh, the other drones that were very prominent in that area were called scan eagles, which are unarmed, uh, unarmed surveillance drones.
So the scan eagles would be flown out every day into grid squares, searching for people who meet the quote unquote, engageable criteria.
Uh, once they found something or someone, the gray eagles would then be called in to do the strike.
If gray eagles were unavailable, other platforms could be brought in.
Um, like in, in much of the, not much, but some of the footage that, that was given to me, um, you see a 10 strikes.
So, uh, sometimes it would be a 10 Warthog would be called in to do this strike on the person.
Um, and some, which were, you know, a particularly grizzly, the hellfire missile from the gray eagle failed to kill the target.
And then the eight 10 would be called in to finish them off.
Um, so what we are talking about airstrikes, um, full stop, the gray eagle or the drone was really just one platform that could be used.
Right.
Uh, and now do you have stats on, or, I mean, I guess there are different stats from different places on the increases of civilian casualties under the Trump air war.
Um, so if you could, you know, refer to what you know about that, but also can you help clarify for me, because we had a ceasefire with the Taliban, but that just meant they stopped shooting us, but we're still bombing them the whole time because the ceasefire kicked in, in what, late 2018, right.
When the talk started, um, well, I mean, it was limited, you know, um, yeah, I don't, I don't know how much, how much importance to put on it to tell you the truth.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, it's just funny.
That part kind of always goes unaddressed that we had the ceasefire that, I mean, it clearly meant that the, the green berets in, in, uh, Nangar, I guess even quit fighting ISIS or anybody that all stopped.
And then as you were saying, the Marines down in Helmand stayed on their base, um, and didn't do much, but the air war kind of continued all along, I think until when, um, I mean, we did a drone strike yesterday.
Yeah.
It kind of, yeah, it kind of continues, right.
And killed all innocent people, by the way, in that, yeah, we, we, I mean, we have one more day in Afghanistan and then we're going to have so-called over the horizon capabilities to do counter-terrorism strikes.
So I mean, it's still going to continue to some extent.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you more about that.
You got time to hang around.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm real curious about that, right?
So America has been helping the Taliban fight ISIS, but there ain't much ISIS and the Taliban can take them without us anyway.
But then, so I wonder like, do you think, or do you know, are they going to try to back this resistance movement in the Panjshir Valley kind of thing?
Or is the next plan, the next stage of this is to make some kind of deal with the Taliban where we get to stay as allies with them in order to fight against ISIS supposedly there or whatever.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, wars make for strange bedfellows.
That's for sure.
And I mean, I don't think I necessarily have the answer of course, but I, there are perhaps opportunities where we're going to collaborate with the Taliban or where we're going to take actions that inadvertently aid the Taliban in fighting ISIS.
You know, Wes Morgan wrote that piece in the Washington Post about how we were acting as the Taliban's air force to fight ISIS.
Situations like this have kind of unfolded in Syria as well.
In certain cases where it's like, Hey, are we doing airstrikes for Shia militia now?
You know, like weird, weird things that maybe are unexpected, but pragmatically make a certain amount of sense.
I mean, how it all shakes out.
I mean, the thing with ISIS is, you know, ISIS as it stands in Afghanistan, I mean, they're really just rebranded Taliban to begin with.
And you know, that ISIS moniker, different parties adopt that in order to goad the United States into attacking them.
You know, that's how they see themselves as gaining credibility.
I mean, you even saw this with ISIS in the Philippines.
I mean, they're just kind of like local bandits and, you know, various rebel groups that have been around for a while and they rebranded themselves as ISIS.
And it's like this weird situation that everyone benefits from where the local government gets American aid because we're freaking out about ISIS.
So we give them military aid.
You know, ISIS gets this sort of international press coverage and credibility because they're the new boogeyman.
And the United States also gets to, you know, be directly involved in our military, has something to do, you know, mission creep and all of that.
So, I mean, the ISIS crisis is sort of like the grift that keeps on grifting, you know, and I don't know that there's going to be ever any real end to it.
Yeah, it's a great transmission belt of power back and forth between the hawks on both sides.
Always is.
Right.
It's like something that everyone benefits from.
Right.
So when they dropped the Moab bomb, there was a guy who wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times who was I forgot exactly who he was.
I think it was some kind of Pakistani government official said that on the radio there in Nangarhar Province, they were bragging about that at the ISIS radio station, saying, see how important we are that the Americans drop their biggest non-nuclear bomb on us.
And so even though it sounds crazy to join a group that's getting bombed with gigantic bombs, it makes sense to join a group that is so important that the Americans take them that seriously.
And now they have a whole new motive, taking revenge for them dropping their biggest bomb on us.
And so it's a huge rallying cry.
Great PR stunt for them by our side.
Right.
Well, look at look at what ISIS did in Syria and Iraq, where they were advertising their most grisly war crimes.
It was like every day there is something new like, hey, we're setting this Jordanian pilot ablaze, you know, lighting him on fire alive.
We're blowing up people with det cord.
We're beheading people.
We're throwing homosexuals off rooftops.
If you look at the Philippines, you know, ISIS goes and takes over Marawi, they take over an entire city and declare themselves a caliphate.
These are like publicity stunts.
And then they you know, they know they can get the media to kind of do the job for them by hyping the threat.
So yeah, I mean, it builds their credibility.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we're all over the place now, but I got to ask you about the politics of this moment.
There are so many hawks saying, you know what?
The war would have been fine in Afghanistan, I mean, if we would just stay and hold this stalemate and hardly any of our guys are dying anymore.
And and it's just the worst thing in the world for Joe Biden and the Democrats to give in now and give up the country to the Taliban.
And if only we had stayed, say, all the hawks.
It's completely insane and detached from reality, and the Taliban were taking over district after district.
I mentioned, you know, the 2015 Battle of Kunduz, I mean, that city was lost several times to the Taliban.
We had to fight them back.
I mean, it provides like a prelude, almost everything that happened that, you know, the Afghan special ops guys came in and fought with a handful of Green Berets and took back the city.
The conventional ANA were not willing to fight until they saw that America was involved.
It was the Green Beret actually going and banging on the barracks door saying, hey, America's here, get out.
And they have like 17 gun trucks in the parking lot just sitting there while the Taliban took over their city.
And when they were when they saw, oh, America's here, suddenly they came out and were willing to at least, you know, somewhat participate.
This kind of speaks to the larger phenomena that took place across Afghanistan, that you had all of these provincial capitals that were surrounded by the Taliban, other areas being taken over.
You had Afghan military soldiers being, you know, killed in droves.
It was not a sustainable stalemate, as many have tried to claim.
That 2019 pressure campaign that I was mentioning, where we really did take the fight to the Taliban during that time frame when we stymied their operations.
But that was a limited time thing.
We did not have the resources to keep that kind of campaign up indefinitely.
As Biden said in a speech, his choices were to carry through with the withdrawal and get us out of there, or to surge troops for the spring fighting season, which we have already surged troops many, many times before in Afghanistan.
So this was not a sustainable situation.
It's so detached from reality, I almost don't know what to say, except that it's a sustainable stalemate for the people who don't have to pay any of the prices.
Yeah.
All right.
But so if I was the president and I had put you in charge of closing the thing down, how might you have done it better than they have?
Well, it's all in hindsight, of course, but I mean, you know, President Biden promised us an orderly withdrawal, and this was definitely not that.
This was a mess.
This was a huge mess.
I think that we misunderstood the capabilities of not just the Afghan military, but the Afghan government and how quickly they collapsed.
It was not so much, you know, some people have said this is like a case study in guerrilla warfare.
It's not.
It's a case study in political warfare.
This was not a war as much as it was a handover, right?
It was like in military terms, we'd call it a relief in place.
You know, the Afghan government took off and the Taliban just flooded right in.
You had, you know, Ghani just like two days before he fled the country, he was like holding, you know, cabinet meetings about building a hydroelectric dam up in Kunduz, which was an area that had already fallen to the Taliban as his as his capital was being surrounded.
This is what he's talking about, like this is a guy who is just in a bubble.
And we clearly misunderstood that we thought that the government would hold out for, you know, maybe till the fall, maybe till October.
If we were to do it all over again, the evacuation of American citizens, refugees, green card holders, S.I.V. holders, all of that should have been factored into the withdrawal plan.
You know, in special forces terminology or doctrine, you would call this the demobilization phase or I think we call it the transition phase now.
It all should have been factored into the planning and been an organic part of the withdrawal plan that factors it in as a part of a orderly withdrawal.
And for some reason, we thought we could do a military withdrawal and not have to consider all of these civilian factors because we thought the ANA and we thought the Afghan government would hold out and fight.
You know, clearly, Ghani, I mean, he was saying like just a week prior, I will stay and fight for my people.
If they want war, we'll give them war.
This guy didn't fight till the last bullet.
He didn't even fight to the first bullet.
He just took off and left in the night and just abandoned his people and left so many people in his own government and his own citizens in the lurch.
So America shares some of the blame for this, but there's a lot of finger pointing that can go around.
Right?
Yeah.
Well, so, um, I know a guy or I don't know him that well, but I have an army officer source who told me on July 14th, it might've been the 13th, that they were preparing to drop a bunch of paratroopers on Bagram and take it back.
And this is just a week or two after they'd given it to the Afghan national army.
And it was for just this scenario, the fall of Saigon.
We got to be able to get people out and the Kabul airport only has one airstrip, but Bagram has two.
And so, and then the problem was the ANA turned it right over to the Taliban.
In fact, I think he said the whole area was crawling with Taliban in a way that meant that they would have had to fight or it would have been, you know, by their rules, not a safe thing to do even to, you know, I guess you can't just drop guys right inside the base.
You'd have to land outside where it's open anyway.
So they had abandoned that plan.
But in other words, they didn't really know what the hell they were doing.
They were trying to figure it out, but Bagram already belonged to the Taliban by the time the emergency came in.
And so, um, they really were winging it at that point.
And they were really worried about a black Hawk down type thing where the Taliban or whoever else, ISIS start slaughtering all of our diplomats on the road between the embassy and the airport and this kind of thing.
So at least it wasn't the worst case scenario that they were afraid of there, but it seems like the Taliban, they've been playing it fairly smart so far.
They haven't been getting stupid like ISIS committing all the insane war crimes and everything else because their prerogatives are different.
They're not looking to be some sort of internationally recognized terrorist group.
They want to be a, you know, caliphate in their own country in Afghanistan.
And it seems so far that they're smart enough to realize that if they do a bunch of stupid stuff, you know, America tends to start dropping bombs on you.
And that would not facilitate or withdraw out of the country after 20 years.
So they are being smart about it now.
Is that going to hold or are we going to see them going back to executing women in soccer stadiums or are they going to be a little bit smarter and carry out the executions in the basement of the parliament building like, you know, third world authoritarian regimes normally do?
We'll see.
We'll see how that pans out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So far, they're more clever than crazy on this part.
And just because they're ruthless, just like pretty much all governments in the world, just because they're ruthless doesn't mean they're irrational and don't know how to play a public relations campaign.
And after all, it's the 21st century, you know, it's not even the 90s anymore.
That was a long, long time ago now.
So, yeah, I guess we'll see how all of that goes.
But I'm sorry, because I want to I do want to get back and I guess let the last word be about the civilian casualties here in the Helmand province in particular during this Trump surge, because, you know, you've mentioned a couple of times here that the criteria for killing people were as little as, jeez, I think he's wearing a vest, which, man, or I think I saw an antenna, which would indicate a radio and a radio indicates Taliban connections.
And I'm wondering, I think you do mention this actually in here about whether or not in some cases or others that any other kind of cooperating intelligence at all.
But then how mostly that would just be SIM cards in contact with each other, which doesn't really mean anything anyway.
That kind of thing.
Right.
You know, even if you were to do a sort of link chart analysis on the communications from people in Helmand, the Taliban was so pervasive there that everyone had some sort of connection to the Taliban.
It didn't necessarily mean that you were a member of the Taliban just because, you know, had to pay your taxes to the Taliban or whatever the case may be.
The targeting of Afghan men with radios or who appeared to have some sort of radio was also based on, you know, some intelligence based assumptions, I suppose you could say.
So it's based on an intelligence assessment that the people who are carrying radios in this area are Taliban.
It's a pretty big assumption to make, especially like I had explained earlier when the cell phone towers in the province have been disabled.
But we were making this sort of intelligence assessment that if you're in this province in this area known to be frequented by the Taliban and you're using a radio, then we think it's highly probable that you are a member of the Taliban.
And then when we actually fly in there and we get eyes on a person with a radio, we can then say this is sort of double sourced intelligence, right, that we have this guy in an area known as to be a hotbed of Taliban activity.
And here he is using a walkie talkie.
Oh, man, now we got him.
That was considered a big win by the task force, Task Force Southwest.
That was a big deal to find somebody like that and to be able to drop a bomb on them.
Hmm.
All right, well, and then again, I'm sorry, do you have some numbers from the last few years here?
It's in the low tens of thousands from the Trump year or something like that.
As far as number of strikes?
Oh, no.
As far as number of dead, innocent people.
Oh, yeah, it is in the article.
How many there were those in those months and years.
But yeah, it was like the numbers that were being reported out of Afghanistan were pretty low.
We're talking of like tens of people.
But as I came to find out fairly quickly, just like Asma Khan's article, those numbers aren't accurate.
They're not even close to accurate.
And I lay out a one such scenario in the article where one of the drone operators, they were watching a they saw somebody using a radio.
Then this guy hops on a motorcycle and they follow him around for like six hours that day waiting for him to be isolated on a road because they did try to strike these people in the middle of a road or in the middle of a field so that they could limit collateral damage, people they were not trying to target.
When they finally fired a hellfire missile at this guy, suddenly he comes to an intersection in the road and another motorcycle is crossing paths with the one they were targeting.
And on this motorcycle were two Afghan men and a toddler.
And just as they're crossing paths at this intersection, the hellfire missile strikes.
And the person they had been targeting rides right through the smoke and keeps going.
The three people on the other motorcycle who just happened to be there that day were killed right off the bat, the two men and one child.
Now if you look at the report that DOD put out about civilian casualties in 2019, you can find the date of that strike in Helmand and it records one civilian casualty.
So what they're saying is that the two other people who just happened to be there, that they were reported as enemy.
Makes no sense whatsoever.
In other words, were they actually categorized as a so-called jackpot?
Like yeah, we got who we were trying to get?
Is the lies right in there too, not just by omission?
I don't know.
I wish I had access to some of those reports and to see how it was reported up, but maybe that's what they did.
I don't know how they pencil whipped that one.
Yeah.
Man, so this is anti-war radio and I got some substantial minority at least of my audience are anti-war veterans, at least by now they are, or by now that's true.
And one of them is a guy who is a Green Beret in Syria.
He said they dropped a bomb on a house and then it was a dud.
And then he sat there and he watched a bunch of women and children run out of the house.
And he's like, oh man, those people he almost just killed.
I'm afraid to say I'm not an anti-war veteran.
I mean, I think there's a need for war, unfortunately, and it does provide, there is a social utility to killing in certain circumstances.
The problem is I'm not anti-war, I'm just anti-stupid.
And some of the operations we've been talking about here are just stupid.
That we're targeting civilians.
It is not helping anyone or anything.
It's not helping US national interests.
It is not helping us win the conflict.
It is not helping the people of Afghanistan.
It is only accomplishing negative things when we strike civilian targets like that.
And the problem from my perspective is not the drones.
It is not even the target engagement criteria or the rules of engagement.
It is how they end up getting misapplied.
There's a time and a place for certain tactics to be used.
This was a example where we're seeing the misapplication of a certain tactic and the end result was catastrophic and horrifying.
Yeah.
Well, I'm interested in what you think about the whole terror war about, you know, as far as, I mean, take for granted for the sake of argument, you know, going after bin Laden with the Delta Force at Tora Bora and all that, but what about regime change in Kabul and then on to Baghdad and in Tripoli and sort of Damascus and Sana'a and Mogadishu and the rest of this?
Yeah.
I mean, these are all like complicated cases to look at individually, but I think that, you know, a broad statement we can make is that the United States does not do regime change very well.
We've engaged in this behavior in a number of theaters and it just hasn't worked out.
And you know, I spoke out publicly about, you know, Syria because we were over there waging all kinds of covert action campaigns to unseat the Assad government.
And as I said at that time, I am not an Assadist.
I don't have some weird, you know, predilection or affinity for, it can barely be described as a democratic government.
But if we remove Assad, what is the option?
What is the alternative to Assad?
And the alternative was chaos.
It was ISIS.
It just does not make sense.
It does not serve American interests.
And I mean, it doesn't serve the people's interest in these regions either to implode these governments.
I mean, we saw what happened in Iraq.
I mean, was that better for the people of Iraq or worse?
I mean, I think you'd have a hard time making the case that we improved the quality of life for people there over the long haul.
So yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
Go ahead with yourself.
Sorry.
I'm just pointing out that, you know, these regime change operations are not something that we do very well.
If we showed more strategic patience, maybe we could transition some of these governments to democracies or more democratically leaning regimes over a longer time horizon.
But instead we opted for shock and awe, you know, covert action, particularly when we rely on partner forces that are not viable partner forces that just don't work out for us.
You know, we we've seen the result, then the result is chaos.
Yeah.
All right.
You guys, that is Jack Murphy.
He is at ConnectingVets.com, which is hosted at Odyssey.com that's A-U-D-A-C-Y, Odyssey.com.
And this article is called Inside America's Failed Drone Campaign Against the Taliban.
Thanks so much for your time, Jack.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thank you, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
