All right guys, check it out.
The book is done, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find it at foolserrand.us.
Got all the good blurbs for you there and all of that, and it'll forward you on to the Amazon page.
It's doing well, number one in the war and peace section there on amazon.com so far now.
So check it out, foolserrand.us.
And listen, we're starting a fundraising drive at the Libertarian Institute right now.
Anybody who donates $50 or more to the Libertarian Institute gets a signed copy of the book.
For those of you who are interested in that, check us out at libertarianinstitute.org.
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 hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing, they are.
He died.
We ain't killing, they are, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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.
Introducing Daniel Davis.
He famously was a whistleblower on the Afghan surge in the year 2012.
And he is now, he was then a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, and he is now at Defense Priorities.
And here he has a new article called Trump Wants You to Write Him a Blank Check for War in Afghanistan, Don't.
And that is at the national interest.
We'll be running it on antiwar.com tomorrow.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Danny?
I'm doing really well.
Thanks for having me back.
Really happy to have you here.
Happy that you wrote this article.
I hope people pay attention.
You know, I read a thing where they did a poll where only 20% favored increasing the troop numbers there in Afghanistan.
20% had no opinion.
Can you believe that?
A fifth, no opinion whatsoever.
But anyway, only 20% supported doing this.
I don't know, you know, how opposed the opposition are and how motivated they really are, but no one's really behind this next escalation.
And you know better than most why not to.
Tell them, why not?
Yeah, because it's a virtual, maybe even a literal impossibility to attain a military victory in Afghanistan, especially with the numbers of troops that were, even the highest number that they're talking about.
You just can't do it.
So remember in 2012, when I, you know, published all the information I did about how the leaders were not being honest with Americans back then, about how the war was going, et cetera.
Well, that was when we had 140,000 NATO troops on the ground.
And even at that time, with the maximum number of troops that we had at any point, there was still massive areas of the country.
And I'm talking about the strategically important areas where we had no even influence, much less control.
Now, just imagine with the Taliban now substantially stronger now than they were then.
And then we've got like one 10th of the troops, but even that's a bit misleading because there were 15 brigade combat teams in Afghanistan when I was there in late 2011, when I finally left.
And there will be none on the ground now.
These will all just be trainers and advisors and the like, and maybe some special forces, et cetera, with counter terror, but you can't possibly affect anything on the ground when you don't even have any, you know, standard ground combat troops.
So for the president to last night, emphatically talk about how we're going to win and we're going to have victory.
And he's talking militarily victory.
It's just impossible.
Yeah, well, and you know, it's funny.
One of the things he said was that he had studied Afghanistan from every angle and all of that.
So I wonder if he's even familiar with the kind of split there.
They probably must've told him, right, that we got the Marines down in Helmand province and we got the Army Rangers and some support there, or is it the Green Berets, whatever, in Nangarhar province there, special operations guys in Nangarhar, and that that's pretty much it as far as fighters go.
And I guess even the Marines in Helmand, they're really only in an advisory role going out with the Afghan army, right?
That's my understanding, yeah.
I mean, I guess, but the special operations guys fighting supposed ISIS targets in Nangarhar, you know, as we've seen, that's where they're getting killed, right, is these Green Berets are getting killed.
They're fighting in Nangarhar out there.
Are they on their own missions or are they just also assisting the Afghan army, the ANA?
I'm actually not sure exactly what they're doing.
I just know that they're down there.
They're in that area where they were in, in like, again, about a tenth of the number that they were in when they were stationed out there at Camp Leatherneck.
So they have enough combat power and advisories, so it's called, to basically keep the district centers afloat and the, you know, and the bases where the Afghan National Army and police are located, but certainly not enough to go out and make any difference on the ground, none.
All right now, but so 2012 was a long time ago and maybe something's changed and maybe they figured out the right formula for training up this Afghan National Army and paying it well enough and supplying it well enough that they can, you know, eventually clear hold and build the southern parts of the country and really maintain a monopoly on control over the land.
I mean, it's not that big of a country, right?
Well, it is a pretty big of a country, but you are onto something here, but I would look at it from a slightly different perspective.
As long as we stay there and as long as we continue providing the Air Force for Afghanistan and as long as we continue doing special operations and medical support and the logistics support, which is a lot of the things that we have been doing and probably will continue to do so, so long as we do that, then they are almost certainly not going to develop those abilities themselves and they'll continue to rely on it indefinitely.
Now, if on the other hand, you say, all right, and this is what I propose, is if you say, all right, we're going to have a phased redeployment.
So we're over a five-year period, we're going to, with the current force levels the way they are, we're going to say you have five years to figure this out.
You have five years to get your stuff in order.
And then on the fifth year plus one day, it's all yours.
And so you are going to have the motivation.
You're going to have your life in your own hands.
And so that will focus you on getting stuff done.
But if I say, hey, I want you to develop all these areas, but I'm going to continue to provide it virtually indefinitely, then what motivation do you have to do those things for yourself?
You don't have any.
So we will never get beyond what we're doing right now.
And that's why, in my view, all the president said the other day is that we're now on a permanent war.
And if I could say one other thing, Scott, and I suspect from libertarian point of view that you're probably going to be in agreement with me here, I would guess, but I'm a little bit troubled by the president's comments about how, okay, this is no longer a phased approach, a time-based approach.
We're now going to have a conditions-based approach, but he wouldn't tell us what those conditions were.
And he said, I'm going to send more troops over there, but I'm not going to tell you how many.
That's not acceptable as an American to me.
Forget about the virtues of whether they should or shouldn't go in there.
But basically what he asked, and hence the title of my article that you mentioned, he's basically saying, trust me on this.
Don't ask me any questions.
I'm not going to tell you what we're going to do, but if you do that, number one, I don't even know if I want you to do that as an American.
I don't know if I want you to pursue the goals that you're pursuing without my knowledge.
And I will have no way of knowing if you're succeeding or not because, you know what I'm saying?
And I just think that's a big problem.
Yeah, well, all right.
So first I want to go back to a second before the part about the secret policies and the American people's role, whether we're allowed to even know anything about this or not.
As far as the training the army, I totally understand your point of view that as long as, and believe me, you know, in all the, nobody ever writes about Afghanistan except at a time like this.
Now there's all these articles and people are making the case that, hey, listen, when you surge in a bunch of troops to do the ANAs fighting for them, then of course they're going to try less hard and let the Americans do the work.
And that's the experience of 2009 through 12, for example.
Right?
Totally agree.
But that doesn't mean that the opposite is true though.
Right?
That if the Americans just say to them, as you're saying in your five-year plan, look, we're going to phase out our support, call it five years, two and a half or one or over whatever period of time, that this really is on you.
Did they even have the motivation at all?
I mean, in other words, the soldiers who are actually fighting in the ANA, they're just fighting for a paycheck.
They don't have a real, you know, motive to try to conquer the South and East of the country other than to try to get paid and make it home to their family.
Right?
And the government of the North.
I mean, in other words, if you did your five-year plans, is there really any reason to believe the ANA would be any more successful than they are when they know they can depend on us?
Well, I'm sure that there's certainly a bit of that, but I do also know that there's quite a number of Afghan folks in military that care deeply about their country and they would and desire to defend it.
And so I think that if they had the chance, I don't think that they're all just doing it for paycheck, but what mitigates against that and makes it a little bit difficult, you kind of alluded to it.
You have like the Tajiks and a number of political parties in the Northern part of the country.
And then you have Pashtuns and several other smaller groups and other political parties spread in the East and the West and then in the South and Southwest.
And the question is, can those people all pull together to form one national army?
And right now, as you may know, that there's a lot of political divisions going on there with some of the cabinet members and people kind of posturing for the 2019, I believe it is, presidential election, the next one that's over there.
And there's a lot of division right now.
People who were supporting, for example, Abdullah are now kind of forming their own.
So now that you've got Abdullah's people, you've got Ghani's people, and then now Mohammed Adhanur in the Balkh province up in the North by Mazar-e-Sharif, he's kind of now pulling in a new direction.
Then of course you have Dostum who's trying to raise some people up there.
So you've got a lot of internal divisions.
And the problem is almost all of those factions have militia or parts of the military that's more loyal to them than the Afghan state.
So it's uncertain as to whether they would, but ultimately, Scott, in my view, it's theirs to either make or not make.
And we just can't get in the way of that.
They have to want it for themselves.
If they can't, we can't be there literally being the armed forces for Kabul.
Yeah.
Now, so as far as all the separate militias up there, I guess I always sort of wondered why is it that the army is so dominated by the Tajiks?
And I know the Kabul government is sort of an alliance between the Tajik warlords or political leaders who, the most powerful among their tribes anyway, in alliance with the Hazaras and the Uzbeks as well.
But the Hazaras and the Uzbeks don't seem to make up the population of the army at all.
And I guess, is that just because, no, they still, the Uzbeks just fight for Dostum, the armed ones, the armed organized ones.
They fight for Dostum, the vice president, and then the Uzbek, the Hazaras have their own chieftains and et cetera like that.
And they're just, they just never really have taken up joining the Afghan army this whole time, have they?
Well, in name they have.
Now, whether in their hearts, that's certainly a different question.
Well, I mean, as more than ghost soldiers, have they?
They actually really participated in the ANA that much?
To some degree, yeah.
I mean, again, whether their hearts in it is a separate question, but they, all the ethnicities have some representation in the military.
All right, well, so, I'm always worried about oversimplifying that a bit.
Is it, is there a difference between the officer corps and the, you know, the members of the infantry in terms of that?
You know, I honestly, I'm not certain.
So I really couldn't give you a good answer because I don't know.
Well, it's certainly been a little while since you were there.
Now, so, and you did two different tours in Afghanistan when you were still in the army, right?
2005 and then in 2010, 11.
And so what were the differences then?
Oh, wow.
It was a big difference.
So in 2005, there was, I wanna say 20,000 total US forces there.
Maybe it was a little bit less.
I can't remember exactly.
But what I do distinctly remember is that the country was very, very different than it is now, or even when I was there in 2010, because I could go around the country in just unarmored Humvees and actually went to one mission in Mazar-e-Sharif, or outside of it, actually, in just a regular truck.
I mean, not only did I not have my full combat gear and the breastplate and all that kind of stuff, I mean, all I had was a pistol just because I had to have something.
But we went to the bazaar in uniform and did some shopping.
We were invited into the famous Blue Mosque, to the inner courtyard, not the primary part, because apparently only Muslims can go there, but the imam that was in charge invited us in to see inside the courtyard, which, written right now, would be just insane.
I mean, we would be attacked before we would even get close to the building.
And of course, we definitely couldn't go shopping.
But so that's how badly the security deteriorated from 2005 to 2010.
And of course, it's worse now than it was when I was there.
Well, now, so in 2012, what you wrote at the time, I mean, it was a pretty big deal, because what you said really was that you couldn't really help it.
You had to say, in English, David Petraeus is lying.
This isn't spin.
This isn't, well, Senator, we're trying hard, and we think that it might work out.
No, he was outright lying, saying things were getting better when things were not getting better, and that it was bad enough that you decided you were gonna write about it in the Air Force Journal, and I guess give the story to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and whoever to, and blow the whistle on the general himself, a lowly lieutenant colonel.
How could you be so bold?
What was so bad that you felt you had to go to that extreme, Danny?
Yeah, it was the, whether he knowingly lied, i.e. he knows the truth, and he's trying to tell somebody else something else, or whether he convinced himself that that was the truth, I'm actually not completely sure, but it really doesn't matter, because what is absolutely certain is that the story he told was grotesquely out of proportion to what reality is, and was intentionally deceptive.
So what he was saying was, we're on the right asthma, things are getting better, we're making progress, it's fragile, which of course means that he can take credit for anything.
If it gets better, it's great, and if it doesn't, well, he'd say, well, I told you it was fragile.
So it was really good speaking in ways that were hard to nail you down, but he unequivocally told everybody things were getting better, when in fact things were, you could actually argue they were getting worse, but in no case were they getting better.
It was either status quo or deteriorating, and I argued then that it was clear that we were putting, not just putting men's lives at risk, we were losing men, men and women in combat situations where they had, there was no possibility where they could do anything that would improve American national security, or win the war.
Instead, it was just combat actions that had no utility, and they had no consequence, even to the tactical fight in that area.
So what really forced me to come forward was the fact that I knew that what they were doing was had, I mean, by name, I'd seen men who had been killed in action for something that I knew was not true, and I just found it immoral, to be blunt, that our leaders could be telling Americans that, oh, this, we're making great progress, and these guys sacrificed their lives for America, and they're keeping us safe.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It was an absolute waste of their lives, and I took that personally because, as you may know, when you're in the armed forces, it's like a family.
Everybody who's over there is a brother or a sister, and I just could not tolerate being quiet while my brothers and sisters were getting killed and blown up.
Well, now, so Donald Trump said in his speech, and this is clearly the point of view of the generals, too, is we can't just pin this on crass old Donald here.
He said, no, listen, we're gonna honor the sacrifice of the lives of these young men by getting it right.
That's a cut and run, even after 16 years, would be to say that, would be to give up on all the sacrifice that's been made over the last 16 years, and how in the world can you do that, Danny?
Yeah, so I got an answer for that.
Let me just put it to you this way.
Let's say that your son is one of those that's gonna be deploying on this.
Do you give a crap what happened before then?
Are you willing to sacrifice your son's life so that he's just added to the list of those who have sacrificed their lives and destroyed their families and everything else for something that is not gonna keep the United States safe because, well, we've already paid so much, we have to keep paying?
I can assure you, you wouldn't, and that just really aggravates me and angers me when I hear that kind of logic, because all that says is, okay, we've thrown a lot of money into a pit, let's just keep throwing more because otherwise the money's been wasted.
No, all you're doing is making sure that there's greater tragedy that also does not benefit the country.
It's time to stop the bleeding.
Yeah.
Well, you know, to me, those kinds of things really sound more like slogans you'd see on TV during a football game or something.
I mean, it's a whole different category of argument, right?
Like, hey, what about my feelings about, you know, I mean, in other words, in vote for a sunk cause, it's a whole different quality of argument.
It's a whole different approach to making a case than saying, you know, really being an adult about it and saying, listen, you know, what exactly are the ends here?
Can the means accomplish them?
At what cost?
And is it worth it?
And this kind of thing.
And once you start talking like that, you end up saying that quitting now is better than quitting later for the same result.
That's it, right?
Yeah, and you know, you have to look, and if maybe the biggest sin of President Trump is who he surrounded himself with, because as I think I tweeted out shortly after the speech that he had, after his speech, he'd been rolled by the generals.
Because you look at all the stuff that candidate Trump said, which I agreed with to a large extent as it pertained to war and peace kind of situation, especially in Afghanistan itself.
And what he said on that speech, and it's like the candidate Trump became, you know, invisible and disappeared.
And all of the things that like H.R. McMaster and some of these other generals had said in the past, that's what Trump said now.
So it's like, you know, he's only surrounded himself with people who have that view.
Now, what general in the world who's been part of this disaster all the way up through here is gonna say, you know what?
Yeah, it's been a disaster.
It's been a failure.
You know, like for example, McMaster, who was there from 2010 to 2012.
Can you imagine him going, you know what?
Yeah, that was all a waste.
We should never have done it and we should shut it down now.
So I'm advocating a withdrawal.
Of course he couldn't.
He would, you know, he's a general.
His DNA is wired to say, no, we just need a little more time and a little more troops and then we'll do it.
And then we'll, all these sacrifices we've made, the investments we've made, then they'll pay.
No, they're not.
All you're gonna do is just increase the cost of failure.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, I got a brand new sponsor.
It's this great book, No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
Principles Governing the Ideology, Methodology and Praxeology of Informed IT Decision-Making.
It's by Hussain Bhadrakchani.
But it's really good for those of you in the technology industry, libertarians, get your head on straight.
Read this great book, No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
Also, The Worst State and Wall Street Window by Mike Swanson, Roberts and Roberts.
If you wanna buy medals, Liberty stickers for your propaganda, 3T editing to make your writing read well and et cetera.
Scott Horton.org.
Yeah, it seems like the only general who was willing to say yes, I was in charge of this war and we oughta call it off was General Eikenberry who had become the ambassador and served sort of as the foil to Petraeus back during the Obama surge that, you know.
But yeah, it seems like the rest of these guys, especially McMaster, they kinda, you know, based the rewrite of the coin manual mythologically anyway on his supposed success at Tal Afar in Iraq where actually he committed war crimes and I interviewed the army officer who was in charge of investigating his treatment of prisoners there.
It wasn't in interrogations, it was just the way he was holding them was in violation of Geneva and all this stuff.
But anyway, supposedly he had done this great job there in Tal Afar and that was the basis for Mattis and Petraeus to rewrite the coin manual back then.
So yeah, you talk about unwilling to admit that they were wrong and you know, of course Dunford was in charge of the Afghan war himself.
He's now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Robert Kelly was never in charge of the Afghan war but his son died in it and his other son is fighting there right now as a Marine.
So talk about a collection of guys who are just, there's no way in the world they're gonna let Obama, I mean Trump, same difference, turn around on this.
And you know, that was the same thing with Obama too and I write about this in the book is that it came down to he was afraid that Gates and Petraeus and McChrystal would all resign if he didn't give in to the surge and that that would just destroy his presidency to have the Secretary of Defense resign in protest and all his top generals resign in protest like that.
And so ultimately they completely blackmailed him.
When it came down to it, he wanted only send 10,000 or something like this himself and they made him send 30 more.
He'd already sent 20 or 30 before that.
Yeah, yeah, 20 before that, yeah.
So, man.
Yeah, but you know, and let me point out one thing too since you brought it up about HR and Tal Afar.
I don't have any personal knowledge about war crimes or whatever so I'll leave that with others and you to figure out.
But it is clear that there was a definite tactical success there based given the conditions that existed when he got there and the conditions he left, he existed when he left.
But that's not where the story stops and that's where the story does stop in the popular retelling of it.
All they talk about is the time before he got there and what it was like before he left and when it was good as though that's all there was.
But here's the thing and here's why it is completely futile to continue to do this kind of operation because as soon as HR left, the brigade over the 1st Armored Division, I believe it was 1st Brigade, 1st Armored was there for a little while and then they actually got redeployed elsewhere, I think into Anbar province actually because things started falling apart there.
Well, as soon as they left, then the terrorist attacks within the city started popping up again.
And then, and I can't recall exactly when it was, 2006, 2007, there was like a big explosion in there and there was a mass casualty of Sunni against Shia and then the Shia policemen went crazy and just had retribution across people who had nothing to do with it, but because they were Sunni and then all hell broke loose and it turned in a complete, even worse than it was before HR got there.
And it stayed that way up until, literally it stayed just like that, that complete chaos until ISIS swept in.
And so when people talk about- ISIS holds it to this day.
When people talk about the success of Tal Afar, it's like, look, you actually got to look at it from the larger perspective.
It was meaningless.
Yeah, you did, you stopped it while he was there.
But the minute that a whole cavalry regiment pulled out, then the place went back to normal.
And unless you're going to leave the entire Middle East garrisoned by American troops and all the major cities forever, that's going to be the case everywhere.
They're going to do whatever they're going to do.
You can't stop that.
And so just imagine how many people did we sacrifice with the 3rd Armored Cav Regiment and the 1st Armored Division while they were there for something that fell apart within months of their departure.
And that's the epitome of what's going to happen.
That's the true story of Tal Afar.
Yeah, well, and then isn't it also the case that, as you're saying there, you had a Shiite population and a Turkmen population were a large part of the people in Tal Afar way out in the Northwest of the country, really in a predominantly Sunni area.
So it would make sense that they might feel like they have no choice but to collaborate with the Americans if their only other choice is a bunch of Zarqawiites in the Sunni-based insurgency.
But that doesn't mean that they would rather be ruled by North Americans forever or anything.
That just means that here they are in an absolute desperate situation in the middle of a war, and they have to pick, who's going to bring me peace for the next six days is the best choice that they can make.
That's it, right?
I mean, it makes technical sense.
I mean, who wouldn't do that?
I would do the same thing in their situation.
I would do whatever I needed to do with the resources I had to survive today so that I even could worry about tomorrow.
Otherwise I could be dead and my family could be dead.
So of course, that makes perfect sense and it's reasonable.
But that's why the same kind of policy would never work in Fallujah, right?
In Fallujah, they don't need you, right?
Yeah, and you could say the same thing with virtually any place over there.
I mean, it's the same everywhere.
I mean, and it's almost a carbon copy of what happened in Tal Afar is also what happened in Helmand province where the Marines were.
As you may remember that up until like 2006 when the Marines went in their heavy, it was the Brits and the Canadians before, and it was the biggest area of fighting that there was in Afghanistan.
And it continued that way until a very heavy presence of Marines finally ended up pacifying the area.
But as soon as they left, these big victories of Sangin and Musa Qala and several others, we had some success there.
But as soon as we pulled out, the Taliban came back in because the local forces just couldn't hold it.
And that will, there's no difference against.
We're back into Helmand.
So whatever they wrest out of control, it'll stay in control as long as those Marines are there.
But unless you're gonna keep them there forever, then it's gonna fall back into whatever it's gonna fall into.
And that's why they have to take control with whatever's gonna happen because they alone are gonna have to live with the consequences.
Well, you know, I read a New York Times piece, I guess about a month ago, that said that, it was quoting, it was funny.
It had the Marines and the local Afghan army guys who like had, they were old friends from a few years ago, five, six, seven years ago.
It said they were comparing their hairlines and kind of making jokes about the old days, which isn't that funny?
It's already the old days, the Afghan surge now, now that we're going to Afghan surge too.
And it was saying, you know, so the Marines are going out with the ANA there and that, of course, as you're saying, the entire Helmand, vast Helmand province is completely lost to the Taliban, except for those cities, but they control all of the rest of it.
And it said in there that they got all this equipment.
They're driving Humvees, they have night vision, they have American rifles and weapons and artillery.
And there was no way during the withdrawal, I mean, you know, they were claiming victory, right?
So they were clear holding, building and transferring those fire bases over to the ANA and the ANA just withdrew.
And so now you got the Taliban driving around in MRAPs, shooting, you know, American shoulder fired missiles or whatever the hell they got over there, you know?
And with night vision.
And I just want to add one more thing to that, which is a guy who says he's a medic, a mercenary medic over there, who's going back over there.
He said, he's going to bring copies of my book with him to give away, if you could believe that.
But he said, hey, 700 bucks a day over there, man, what can I say?
I gotta go.
And he's going, but he was saying, you know, one thing that people don't really admit about another one of the costs of keeping the war going on for so long, it's not just that they end up with our old Humvees and stuff like this, as we've seen repeatedly now, as in Iraq and Syria and all that.
But they get better.
And he said, he went from seeing jihadis spraying their AK like an idiot, to now they move like us, they fight like us, they shoot, they aim and they shoot like us, they signal like us, they, you know, they've been learning by fighting the Americans.
In fact, I saw Eric Prince on Fox News the other day.
And of course, he was just shilling for his own Blackwater Services, you know, Frontier Services Company or whatever, so.
But he had a lot of great arguments.
And one of the things he was saying is, we've been there so long.
They are inside our decision loop, he said.
They know everything that we're doing and what we will do.
If they do this, we will do that every time.
It's by the book.
They got us figured out, we've been there too long.
And that all rings really true to me.
I warned against that exact same thing in 2012.
That's part of what I warned of, is that they had the book, you know, the FM, whatever, 3-24, whatever the counterinsurgency manual was, they have it.
So now that they know what we're gonna do, and it's only now, you know, all the stronger now because they have had all that experience.
And yeah, so there's, it would probably have a different result going back there now than we would have before.
All right, so now, as I characterize you in my book, I quote you from an earlier interview answering me.
This is where I got the title Fool's Errand from.
I guess it was my question before it was your answer.
But anyway, that was the way I phrased it.
And I says to you, I says, so wait a minute, even Nevermind Perfume Prince Petraeus, let's say McChrystal had five years, the great McChrystal had five years, and he had, I don't know, 300,000 guys.
Could this thing have worked in the end?
Is there a way that, you know, because come on, everyone on the other side of this argument from you is like Hillary Clinton, right?
If only, if only, if only.
More time, more money, more provincial reconstruction teams, more infantry, more SEALs in Delta on their night raids to target the bad guys and then to pacify the population and make them trust us.
Do like Tal Afar only for a long enough time that the people really, you know, go for it and adopt our ways and accept the new national government call.
I mean, I kind of sound like I'm trying to make it sound ridiculous.
I'm trying not to.
I'm trying to make it sound like, come on, man.
I mean, come on, Danny.
Is it possible, maybe, or you're saying no.
It's just a fool's errand, sorry.
1832, the British, after I forget how long their occupation was, were finally driven out and actually suffered quite a bit of loss.
They went back again.
18, I want to say 68, they got driven out again.
And of course we know about the Soviets in the 1980s and then now us for 16 straight years.
Do you see a trend here?
No, it won't make any difference if you had 600,000 American troops.
If you did decide to permanently garrison the entire country of Afghanistan, it will never make a difference because Afghanistan wants to be ruled by Afghans and they have to sort out among themselves how they're gonna do that.
And nothing you can do imposing from the outside will ever succeed.
It will never succeed.
All right, now what about this though?
It's a safe haven.
No matter how bad Bush and Obama and their preceding 17 generals have failed, Trump and Nicholson, they gotta get this right or else Al-Qaeda is gonna use that place as a base to attack Manhattan.
What did the president say in his speech the other night?
He said, one of the reasons that he justified having to do this, look at Barcelona and that's all you have to do.
And I'm like, okay, you know what?
That's a really good thing.
Let's look at Barcelona.
Of the 12 suspects that they've been looking at, at least as of two days ago, were any of them from Afghanistan?
Had they trained in Syria?
Had they been in Iraq?
The answer is no, no, and no.
So they had nothing to do with here.
In fact, as far as I understand, most of them were from Syria, I'm sorry, from Spain and reports that are coming in now is that there might be some Moroccan association, but they are not from these areas where all of our troops are stationed.
So that just shows wherever you put your footprint, they'll simply go somewhere else.
There will never, never be a shortage of places on this earth where they can go to train and plot and whatever they wanna do where you aren't.
And of course, with the current technology and social media, they don't even need to train anymore.
They can do most of the stuff online and then they can just meet anywhere that they want to in the world, where we're not, if they need to do some kind of physical training and then they'll go into the location.
So in all these places like Barcelona and several places in France and in a lot of these other attacks that have been happening over the last 18 months, I'm not sure that any of them originated in Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq.
I think they've all come from elsewhere or they're just homegrown.
So what does that tell you?
That tells you that you're using conventional military power to solve a problem that doesn't exist there.
It exists elsewhere.
And so you're using the wrong tool and all you're doing is providing justification for all of these self-radicalized people in all these other places because they point to those areas where you're at and where you're doing all that kind of stuff.
So it's self-defeating.
Yeah.
Well, you sure state it well.
And it wasn't too long ago, really, that the problem was that all the terrorism cases were simple entrapments by the FBI.
They had to make them up.
And we used to say on this show that, man, we're lucky, really, the limits of the blowback that we've really faced from all of this during all of this time.
But if we keep this up, it's going to change.
And now we're at, here in 2017, we're at the point where there's at least, what, a couple of score of these lower level, but still pretty horrible terrorist attacks since September 11th in the West and in the United States and in Europe, especially just over the last three or four years, right?
I mean, we've seen more and more and more.
We have, but here's the real problem.
And this stuff has an incubation period.
So as you may recall, and especially in the beginning of all this terrorism season, and especially once we started the occupation in Iraq in 2003, and then stayed in Afghanistan is that a lot of the initial leaders were from the Mujahideen period in the U.S.-backed Soviet period of Afghanistan.
That's where a lot of them got their, cut their teeth and got their credentials.
Well, we've now done that by orders of magnitude more.
And so if President Trump just called me this afternoon and said, hey, Dan, what do you think we should do?
I said, I think we should phase out.
He said, roger that.
I'm going to start Dix Tuesday.
We're going to shut it down.
And he did, the incubation period, I mean, we'll probably still be suffering from this like five, 10, 15 years from now.
And although now there's more of them and they're more sophisticated than they were before, this is not going away.
But what we must do is cut the bleeding now so that we can mitigate what might happen in the future.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing too, is we've already seen what happens when al-Qaeda in Iraq goes home to Libya and Syria.
We've already seen, and now we're seeing what happens when al-Qaeda in Syria goes home to Europe.
I mean, this is, it's already on.
In fact, there are times, we were just joking with Eric Margulies about how you have DOD-backed Kurds fighting against CIA-backed jihadis in Syria.
But you know, you also had DOD-backed Shiite militias from Iraq who were fighting on the side of Hezbollah against, I guess, not really against the Kurds, but against the same jihadis the Kurds were fighting, and certainly on a whole other different factor, fighting with Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran, and the Syrian state.
And the Bata Brigade is on their side, but we're on the Bata Brigade's side.
And then, and then the ultimate wrinkle on it was American-backed Hazara fighters from the coalition government in Afghanistan were traveling to Syria to fight on the side of Hezbollah and the Syrian regime.
And you had Afghan Taliban jihadi types who were actually going to fight, at least back in 2013 or so.
There were some reports of these guys going to fight on the side of Jabhat al-Nusra.
So they're saying, why, or maybe this is earlier, this is, you know, 2012, why face the army infantry in Helmand Province when we can go ahead and get CIA backing to fight for the USA over in Syria for a while and take a break?
It's just insane.
There's just no good outcome of this.
I mean, the only thing that we can do that makes any strategic sense in terms of American vital national interests is to withdraw from the area and to let these local forces figure it out.
And then we can contain it to make sure that nothing gets outside of there.
You know, we can use our intelligence services and ISR and whatever other things we need to, and, you know, domestic defense capabilities to keep this from getting to the United States, but we, the only thing that we can do that has any chance to actually succeed is to withdraw militarily, though not diplomatically, I want to clarify that.
We don't want to leave the region, but we do need to withdraw military forces because they are absolutely working against our interests.
Yeah, well, yeah, and our intelligence services too.
You can keep your analysts, but no more operations.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, so, all right, now, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more, and it's great to hear it said the way you say it and everything, but so just one more devil's advocate then, because I know that you know.
Look, you're an Army Lieutenant Colonel, retired here, but I know that you know the other side of the story is, are you kidding me?
You want to withdraw without tying up the loose ends.
You're making the case that we can't tie up loose ends, only make more loose ends.
Nobody wants to hear that, Danny.
Come on, say something else or something.
Convince your buddy, the Hawk, who ain't hearing it.
I mean, I know you have friends who want to fist fight you over this, right?
So explain it to them, to their type.
My Hawk buddies, I would tell you, fellas, we've been having this argument.
I started out loud having this argument in 2012, and virtually, actually, before that, I don't know if you've even seen it, but I'm not sure I ever said it to you, but in 2009, before President Obama made his decision about the surge, I wrote a, I don't know, 30, 40 page research paper that said, look, we do not need to go big, because if we do, here's the risk that we take.
Here's these things that are likely to happen.
Almost everything on that list has exactly happened the way I said, almost everything on the list.
If we go big, here's what will happen.
Now, 2012, I told my Hawk buddies again, here's what is happening, and if we don't stop this, here's what's gonna continue, and that has turned out exactly like it.
So now then, here in 2017, Hawk friends, I tell you the same thing.
You will not tie up loose ends.
All you will do is make more enemies, spill more American blood, and you will push the status quo of failure yet deeper and cost more American families, their sons, daughters, husbands, and wives.
So, yeah, I'm not willing to sacrifice American lives anymore on your hubris.
All right, you guys, that is Daniel Davis.
You can follow him on Twitter, Daniel L. Davis.
He writes for the national interest here.
We published him at the Libertarian Institute as well.
He famously wrote Dereliction of Duty 2, and others, three or four different publications back in 2012, and what was the title of the one from 2009?
Go Big or Go Deep.
Okay, I'm gonna find that.
This'll all be in the show notes.
Damon has been doing new improved show notes, y'all, at the page at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
So I'm sure he'll have all of that for you there as well.
And thank you very much for the blurb, Danny.
It means a lot to me, and it's prominently featured on the back of the book and on the inside there.
You bet, my pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
All right, you guys, that is the great Daniel Davis, Afghan war whistleblower.
Find him again at thenationalinterest.org.
No, it's just nationalinterest.org.
Trump wants you to write him a blank check for war in Afghanistan.
Don't.
Thanks again, Danny.
You bet.
