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Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 who's win?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they 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, Scott Horton Show and introducing Andrew Bacevich, former colonel in the U.S. Army, academic historian, retired now, author of a great many books.
The New American Militarism, I believe, kicked it off.
And then there's been quite a few since then.
The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, and the latest is America's War for the Greater Middle East, a military history that came out last year.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Doing great.
Thanks.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show here.
And you wrote a thing recently for the American Conservative Magazine about the, I guess, coming escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
And I guess I'd like to start with, you know, your impression of the situation in Washington, D.C., or maybe even in the West Wing of the White House here, where, you know, I had asked Mark Perry back in February, when do you think they're going to announce the new Afghanistan policy?
And he said, well, I mean, Mattis has gone to meet with Nicholson in Afghanistan.
And so I expect they'll have something to announce next month.
And now here we are almost at the end of August, and they keep kicking the can down the road and not deciding.
Well, they, the president has not decided to escalate yet.
And I wonder what you think is going on there.
Well, I mean, all I know is what I read in the papers, and it sounds like the president's key advisors, and on this particular issue, they appeared to be Mattis and McMaster, and apparently Steve Bannon.
The key advisors are sharply divided about how to go ahead.
And the president is seems unable to make up his mind.
And so we have a situation that is just as you described it.
The commander, Nicholson, back in February said, here's what I need.
I need more troops.
This is what I think I'm going to be able to do with those troops.
I don't for a second agree with his analysis, but he was quite forthright in identifying his requirements.
And the administration has not been able to make up its mind in the ensuing what, eight months?
And I don't believe that in my own mind that the Afghanistan issue is the most important facing the United States in the national security arena at this particular moment.
But it is illuminating, instructive, that the administration can't reach a decision on that particular issue.
It kind of suggests a broader disarray at the top levels of the administration.
Apart from Afghanistan, one of the things that really strikes me is there really has been no comprehensive statement, big speech, glossy pamphlet that says, here's how we, the Trump team, see the world.
Here's how we see the role of the United States in that world.
Here's how we, here's the five, six, eight principles that we are going to adhere to in playing that role.
So there really is a remarkable absence of articulated vision and purpose at the present moment.
Well now, so it seems like the entire establishment is against Donald Trump's election in the first place, but he made a deal, some kind of peace, with the military and apparently especially the Marine Corps that, you know, I'll let you guys run the foreign policy.
And he's, you know, put so many of them in the cabinet and he's given them carte blanche in virtually any way.
You know, if there's some nuance there, I'm happy to hear it.
But basically he's told them, go ahead and do what you do in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen.
I don't think, I don't think I agree with that.
I mean, there was some reporting a couple months back that suggested, along the lines that you just said, that basically we were told that Trump had gone to, turned to Mattis and said, hey, it's your war, you want it?
You make the decisions?
Well, I'm talking about everywhere but Afghanistan, actually, is the point I'm making.
It seems like he told them, do whatever you want in Syria or in Yemen, et cetera, like that.
But when it comes to Afghanistan, he has this particular reluctance.
Again, I don't know that that's the case.
I don't know that he told the military to do whatever it wanted to do in Korea with regard to Korea.
It seems to me there, what we have is evidence of some pretty sharp disagreement that the president's language has been very confrontational.
I mean, I think bizarrely confrontational.
And that inner circle of advisors, people like Tillerson and Mattis, they have not been on the same sheet of music with the president.
Again, to me, what we see is evidence of disarray, profound disarray.
And I find it very troubling.
And again, it's not that I wish they would all agree that we should send 50,000 troops to Afghanistan.
I think that'd be a mistake.
But the absence of a consensus, the absence of some kind of a common viewpoint as a basis for formulating policy, that's pretty troubling, I think.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and this is part of what we all saw coming with Trump all along, is that here's a guy who doesn't read, who's not really interested.
He's sort of George Bush, but maybe even more sure of himself, you know?
Yes, I think that's actually fair.
I mean, and I'm not a big fan of George W. Bush, but you did have a sense that he was not particularly well informed.
He was not particularly curious intellectually when he took office.
But in comparison to Trump, George W. Bush looks like Bismarck.
And again, that has to be really troubling.
What's more troubling still is, you know, you could take somebody like President Obama.
I don't think President Obama knew much about the way the world works.
I don't think he'd reached any great conclusions about America's role in the world.
But whatever you think about Obama, I think he applied himself to the office.
Now, he was an intelligent human being who took his responsibilities seriously and learned on the job.
And it doesn't seem to be what we're getting from Trump, who gets himself so preoccupied with what he perceives to be personal insults or media reporting that he finds offensive.
And so the amount of energy that he expends in really matters of marginal importance is, to me, striking.
And of course, there are these constant efforts made to discipline him and to bring discipline to his administrations.
Every two weeks, there's some new appointment made that the papers say, aha, here at last, things will settle down.
And of course, they never somehow settle down with General Kelly, I think, being his appointment to be White House Chief of Staff being the latest example of that phenomenon.
Yeah.
Well, and talk about the new American militarism, right, where all of American liberalism now is basically pining for a military coup d'etat to stop this guy.
Well, I don't know if they're pining for a coup d'etat, but you're right.
Well, liberal Twitter is, anyway.
There is a remarkable sort of willingness in the left to look to the CIA as the source of truth, to look to the military as the source of mature judgment.
And that would not have been the view from those quarters any time, probably any time since the Vietnam War.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, so part of the disarray here, though, is good, right?
I mean, not that I'm favoring the Eric Prince plan here or anything.
I obviously advocate only full withdrawal from everywhere.
But in this case, Madison McMaster want at least four or five thousand more guys, according to one of the very credible reports I read recently.
I forgot exactly which one.
McMaster himself said that his plan is to fight for another four years or so.
And then at the end of that, then they'll start looking at maybe what they can do to pressure the Taliban to have some talks.
Just let me keep fighting for the rest of at least your first term is the argument.
And that's no argument at all.
They have no plan for any kind of victory at all.
And here, President Idiot has known just as well as you and me for years and years that this is a stupid mission.
We shouldn't be on it.
And he criticized Obama for escalating it.
And in fact, he supported Obama when Obama finally did stand up to the military in 2012 and say, no, we are sticking to the timeline.
The surge is over.
When they wanted to stay, he said, I support Obama and the timeline.
Get out of Afghanistan.
So it wasn't even just political.
He even supported Obama explicitly when it came to that.
So President goofball knows better and the military wants him to escalate and he's resistant.
But then there's no other plan, right?
That's the problem.
The only other plan is to hire Blackwater to do it.
Well, I think I think I think that's about right.
You know, when you began that by suggesting the one good thing that could come, I think that the one good thing that could come out of all this, and it certainly has not yet and maybe it won't come, is that the president's, however erratic he is, but his basic rejection of the trajectory of U.S. national security policy over the past quarter century, you know, the long wars that drag on and on and cost so much and accomplish so little, to the extent that that is his genuine view, and to the extent that he is able to stick to it, that really does invite a much needed debate about the fundamentals of U.S. national security policy.
He is, in that respect, he is an adversary of the establishment viewpoint.
What hasn't happened, I think, is his opposition triggering that much needed debate.
And part of the problem there is that the president's entire manner is so off-putting to many people that the things he says or tweets from one day to the next, in a way, probably reduce the chance of having that kind of a debate.
You know, he's just not a very attractive champion for the cause of greater restraint in U.S. policy, even though, to my mind, to my mind, restraint is what we need.
But it's got to be restraint that's somehow connected to a set of principles.
It's got to be restraint connected to a vision of the way the world works and where it's going.
So that, you know, the purpose of restraint is not simply to avoid action.
The purpose of restraint is to establish a posture that is more conducive to promoting the well-being of the United States of America and to the extent possible to promote some level of stability in the international order.
I mean, the argument of those who are in the restraint camp is that the absence of restraint has hurt the country and has created more problems in the world than it has solved.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, I think you're really hitting a key there where he's observed this just as well as most Americans have, but he doesn't have a real framework to plug it into.
He doesn't have a set of principles that explain why, when you do the wrong thing, it leads to bad consequences in this kind of deal.
So he can say, oh my God, we'd have been so much better off without the Clintons and the Bushes and their stupid wars.
And he gets a standing ovation, but then there's no there there to replace it.
There's no...
Correct.
And the people that he's hired, you know, Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, frankly, they don't really share Trump's critique.
And they are themselves, by and large, figures who fall within the establishment.
And so I think they lack the imagination, the creativity to look beyond the routines that have defined establishment policies.
And I think that really then the Afghanistan thing issue, again, it's a lesser issue, but it's a illuminating one.
I think that's where we see the difference between the president's instincts and the habits of the establishment figures around him.
So as I understand it, you are correct that McMaster says, yeah, we need to fight on.
We know however long it takes, somewhere out there, there is going to be success.
And the president's scratching his head saying, what are you talking about?
How can that possibly make any sense?
But there's nobody around him that says, yes, Mr. President, here's the alternative vision.
And so there's this floundering that is pretty embarrassing.
And you know, we might end up with John Bolton, right?
Because John Bolton...
Please don't even say that, please.
People from that kind of right-wing nationalist point of view, they probably sound to him, that's a lot more to his liking, the let's go get the Muslim Brotherhood or, you know, whatever kind of Frank Gaffney...
I don't know if that's true.
I mean, it's again, it's very difficult to tell.
I mean, I thought it was kind of appalling the way that...
I mean, he could have made Rand Paul the Secretary of State, and he could have made you the National Security Advisor, and he could have made Doug Bandow your deputy to run that thing and make sure that to run the NSC and make sure that this thing goes okay, but he didn't do it.
Well, I mean, I don't really know, but I mean, one might suggest that the reason he didn't hire figures in that camp, the one that you just described, not me, but others in that camp is that he's not...
Trump himself is not sufficiently well-informed even to know that there is such a camp.
I don't think he sits around sort of...
It's a Bannon-nozo, right?
Bannon can differentiate between a neocon and a this and a that.
Well, fair enough.
Bannon would know.
Yeah, you're correct.
Bannon would know.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I'm looking at the clock here, and I've kept you over.
Thank you very much, Andrew.
I really appreciate you coming back on the show.
Okay.
All right.
Good luck.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that's the great Andrew Bacevich.
You should check out his books.
They're so good.
And listen, in fact, everybody asks me constantly, hey, what's the one good book I should read to get me up to speed?
This is it, America's War for the Greater Middle East.
That's the deal.
This is the book I started to write, but then he beat me to it anyway, and it's already, of course, way better than I could have ever done.
It's America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich.
Before that, The Limits of Power, The New American Militarism, Washington Rules, American Empire, Breach of Trust, The Long War.
You see what I mean?
All right.
Find them also at the American Conservative Magazine.
This one is called Yes, Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam.
I'm Scott Horton.
I got a new book out, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Check it out at foolserrand.us.
