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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
Well, we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, 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.
On the line, I got William J. Astore writing again for Bracing Views at bracingviews.com.
We re-ran this at antiwar.com as well.
On Afghanistan, Trump is right to be skeptical.
Huh, isn't that amazing?
A president skeptical about a war.
Who would have thought that at all?
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Bill?
Hey, great, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
So listen, your article is the name of my frustration because I'm trying to wrap up my Afghanistan book right now.
And I've been juggling this around.
They keep kicking the can down the road a little bit at a time, whether they're gonna announce what they're gonna do here.
And I've decided to go ahead and publish it with it up in the air about just how much they're gonna, I mean, it's more or less, seems mostly resolved.
I don't know.
But they're either gonna escalate a little bit or a little bit more or probably keep the status quo somewhere around the same and announce a strategy for continuing the same failure it looks like.
If you have any insight as to a date where they're gonna make this clear, then let me know.
Otherwise, I'm gonna go ahead and hit publish on the thing this week.
But- Hey, sure, yeah.
It doesn't seem to be much for a strategy, though.
It's just doing the same thing we've already done for about the last 16 years with very little to show for it.
Yeah, it sure seems like it.
But so now here's the president who says, oh yeah, bomb him, go ahead.
Bomb who?
I don't care, yeah.
Yemen, go ahead and continue the Obama policy.
Bomb on both sides of that war, who cares?
Gloves off in Syria.
He's like the kind of guy, he responds to that criticism.
You know, we'd have won in Vietnam if it wasn't for Lyndon Johnson making the boys fight with one arm behind their back and this and that.
They were only searching and destroying.
They should have been clearing and holding and building more and this and that.
And so he has said to the military, hey, whatever, man.
You guys decide what to do.
Drop a Moab if you want.
It's up to you to make the call, even, as delegated.
And yet, for some reason on this particular war, he seems to have a problem.
Well, I think Trump recognizes, Scott, as you know, our military talks about Afghanistan being a generational war, which is another way of saying it's an endless war.
When they come to Trump with a strategy, they're talking about, well, after about another 10 years of pacification, counterinsurgency, so on and so forth, you know, maybe the Afghan government will finally be ready to stand on its own.
And that's not Donald Trump.
We all know Trump is an impatient man.
I mean, he's a businessman.
I think he thinks in terms of a quarterly business cycle, or maybe in terms of when he was a celebrity on TV, you know, he thinks in terms of weekly ratings.
You know, this is not a guy who thinks in terms of generation.
So I think he's rightly skeptical and rightly frustrated with the military on Afghanistan because Trump wants quick wins.
Sure, he'll support a quick raid into Yemen, even though it was a failure, and then he'll blame his generals.
He doesn't want to get bogged down in this, what he sees as a losing effort in Afghanistan, and he's right about that.
Yeah, well, as you said, 16 years, well, that's just three years short of a generation right there.
Right.
It's already been won.
Absolutely.
All right, so now here's the thing, not to spoil the whole book or anything, but anybody who listens to this show already knows this anyway, which is that the reason that the war can't be won is because they're trying to support a coalition of minority tribes to lord it over the plurality population of the Pashtuns, and that just can't work because of the terrain, because of the amount of weapons, because it's a warrior culture that will never give in, and so there you go.
As you said, the same war we fought this whole time, and yet what I've come to notice is that no one ever really says that.
I only know that because I read all these books and I know Eric Margulies and stuff like that, but so lucky me.
But nobody ever says, in fact, I read a report, they kind of try to teach a little bit of this to Trump, and he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they probably weren't even really being that straight with him at all, and certainly it's just like in Iraq War II.
The framing on TV is always, well, listen, we're supporting the government against the terrorist bad guys who are the rejectionists of it, and they don't even admit that it's an ethnic division between who's back and who, and why that's a recipe for continuing failure.
They just say, well, we've just gotta fight harder and tougher and smarter and take a left turn instead of a ride at Albuquerque next time, and then it'll be fine, the same thing again.
Right, and I think the remarkable part of the article I was talking about in my piece for anti-war was this NBC article that said that Trump was thinking about firing General Nicholson, the commander on the scene in Afghanistan and how you had the pushback from NBC's hired guns.
They're military experts who are basically saying it's Trump's fault, it's the White House's fault that the war in Afghanistan is starting to go even further south because Trump hasn't decided on a strategy yet, and then you've got General McCaffrey there, who's another NBC hired gun, who's basically like Trump talked to some lower-ranking officers and sergeants and corporals and majors who are basically telling him, hey, Mr. President, we've got a serious problem in Afghanistan, our strategy isn't working.
And McCaffrey is like, how dare the president listen to these lower-ranked military people?
But the gist of his comment was he needs to be listening to the generals.
He needs to be doing what we want rather than talking to lower-ranked people who actually have the experience on the ground.
So, again, I grudgingly have to give Trump credit and NBC for just supporting whatever the generals and the admirals say.
Yeah, well, and it's amazing for anybody who doubts, it says right here, look, one of the last things you necessarily wanna do is form policy advice based on what current combatants think about something in a war zone.
Yeah, don't listen to them, what do they know?
Well, and, you know, apparently, as you said, Trump had this meeting with these, I guess, lower-ranking officers, as you're saying, the ones who actually do know a little bit about it, and they had nothing but discouraging things to say is apparently what came out of that meeting, right?
Right, exactly.
And so, well, and what were they supposed to say?
Yeah, give us a little bit longer and we'll rule Helmand Province.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, I mean, that's already been tried with that huge surge back in 2009, 2010 under Obama.
Well, and this is what nobody ever says to these guys, and you would think even if they're just pretending, you know, on NBC, I mean, even if they're just pretending to be objective, you would think they would sorta sometimes accidentally come up with something like, well, but General McCaffrey, weren't we supposed to have already won this war by now?
Right.
Wasn't David Petraeus the greatest general since Eisenhower or something?
And so we all knew as long as it was in his hands that no problem, this war is gonna be wrapped up by July, 2011, I remember.
That was the deal.
Yeah, and I remember a recent interview with King David Petraeus when he came on PBS again.
I mean, that's the thing, even though Petraeus failed, you know, the same guys fail, but they're the go-to guys for what we should do.
And so Petraeus was on PBS, and he basically said, this is a generational war, we have to stay the course, we need to be patient, we need to keep working, et cetera, et cetera.
The same old stale advice.
So again, I think Trump, you know, I think Trump, one thing, he has a nose, I think, for a losing approach.
And the other thing is, is I don't think he wants to be saddled with the Afghan war.
I don't think he wants to, you know, he's, as we all know, he's a vain man, and he doesn't want to be, you know, he's inherited this war, and he doesn't want to be associated as president with what he sees as a losing effort.
Right, well, but then on the other hand, can't he just say, okay, whatever, keep fighting for four or eight years?
Well, I mean, we'll see.
I mean, it's, I think, I think he's trying to pursue a hands-off policy so that, you know, let's say they do send a few thousand more troops, and we're still, as the military would say, stalemated.
There's a good euphemism.
You know, it's interesting, Scott, again, that when the military talks about Afghanistan, they say we're not winning.
I mean, that's what they say, we're not winning.
Well, what does that mean?
It means we're losing.
Well, and I think you're onto something there, too, about how Trump is kind of trying to pass the buck to Mattis and say, okay, listen, you decide on the troop numbers, that's just a tactic, and Mattis is not taking the bait.
Mattis is saying, well, thanks very much for the authority, I'll put that in my pocket.
You let me know as soon as you've decided on which strategy that I should use these men to implement, and so pass the buck right back again, which is kind of funny to see, in a way, but.
Yeah, yeah, well, as you know, Trump's also working with our military expert there, Steve Bannon, and Eric Prince of Blackwater fame.
They've actually talked about trying to privatize the war, you know, basically take the U.S. military out of it as much as they can, and turn it over to mercenaries.
And I think, you know, the boy genius there, you know, the boy wonder.
Kushner?
You know, Gary Kushner has put himself, he's put his status behind that, to a certain extent.
So it's just a mess.
You know, the best thing we can do is just withdraw.
You know, declare victory, withdraw, and let the Afghan people sort out their lives the way that they've always done for thousands of years.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying.
Now, but so here's the thing, and I hate saying this, I'm doing the devil's work here, but Barack Obama, he did a lot of things to create ISIS, like rig the election for Maliki in cooperation with Iran in 2010, when really, Alawi had won the election, and his party had the first chance, should have had the first chance to form a government in the parliament there.
Obama did that, and then, of course, he backed al-Qaeda in their wars in Libya and Syria, and that's what led to the rise of the Islamic State.
But to hear television and Washington, D.C. tell the story, what happened was he pulled the troops out of Iraq, and that's what caused the rise of the Islamic State, and in fact, pulling troops out of Iraq means that Barack, that single thing, it means that everything bad that happens in Iraq from now on is because Barack Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So the lesson politically, if you're Jared Kushner, is you can't ever pull the troops out of anywhere, let it be Chelsea Clinton's problem or whatever, and go ahead and keep them there, because otherwise, every suicide bombing that they ignore now, they're gonna hang around your neck from now on, if you pull out of there.
Right, and that's always the dilemma for American foreign policy, is so much of it is driven by domestic politics.
So much of it is driven by this fear, either Democrats or Republicans, the fear that if you actually stop a war, back in the Vietnam days, of course, it was the dominoes.
If you stop fighting in Vietnam, the dominoes will fall on Southeast Asia, of the Philippines, Thailand, all those Southeast Asian countries will go communist.
Now we have this idea that you pull the troops out of Iraq, or you pull the troops out of Afghanistan, that that will cause even more terrorism, even more strikes against the United States.
And that myth, and then the fact that attacks will be used on American domestic politics to vilify the other party, it doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican, it goes both ways.
It's those myths that are keeping us in these endless wars, these horrible wars.
Well, you know, it's funny too, is it's all gone on so long that everybody just tuned it out as far as the mass of the population.
So the polls, and I don't think they've asked since 2013, back when the answer was, we all think it was a bad idea in the first place now and wanna get out, they quit asking the question.
But on the other hand, it's the lowest priority of all.
So you have a consensus among the population that yeah, Afghanistan, we're still fighting there, we shouldn't be fighting there anymore, if you call that off, right?
But compared to everything else, it's number 25 on the list of issues that people are upset about.
It seems like right now on the eve of escalation is the best chance we have of getting people's attention.
And I don't know what good it is.
I guess honestly, I do have the idea that during 2009, when the Obama administration was going through this exact thing with the generals forcing the escalation on them, and all the political advisors are saying this is stupid, and we know it's stupid, but they're under all this pressure to do it anyway.
I mean, this sounds completely corny and stupid in a way, but I still think it's sort of right.
That when they're sitting there in the Oval Office, if in the president's imagination outside that window, the people are mad as hell about this, and they really would be mad at him for escalating and would support him for telling the generals no, that at least then, theoretically speaking, that would give him the position to say, you know what, Robert Gates and them, I decided against this and make it stick, right?
But if in his imagination out that window, nobody cares either way, right?
The Republicans are gonna not attack him on Afghanistan if he goes ahead and escalates it, and the liberals all love him, they don't care, so go ahead and do it, right?
If that's the consensus, then we saw what happened.
He went ahead and did it, right?
But it seems like, you know, Trump knew that everybody hates the Afghan war, they really do hate it, then in his mind, we all agreed with him about how stupid and wrong it was, and that actually could give him the space to do it.
He is, you know, not as much of a pushover in life as Barack Obama after all, right?
I mean- Yeah, well, I think so, but I just think it's also very hard to take on the national security state.
It is so large.
I mean, even his own party in Congress, you have Senator Graham, who's basically saying, you know, is a Republican, as everyone knows, Lindsey Graham, who's basically telling Trump, listen to the generals, you know, do what the generals say to do, telling Trump this.
So I think Trump could do it.
You know, he could basically say, I think this is a losing strategy, I think we should, you know, withdraw, but I don't know if he has the political capital in the spine to do it.
I think instinctually he knows, you know, he talked about it on the campaign trail, he knows the Afghan effort is a losing war, he knows it's incredibly expensive.
I think in a way he would rather, he either wants a very quick victory, which is not coming, or he'd prefer to get out.
But it's very difficult to go against the national security state, and it's very difficult to go against, you know, strong Republicans in his own party who are telling him just do what the generals say.
Art of the deal, man.
Go ahead and turn it on its head and say, listen, Lindsey Graham is the biggest joke in the United States of America.
You ask anybody, anywhere, and they'll tell you to hell with Lindsey Graham.
Not only do we not care what he says, we're against whatever it is he says.
Ask anybody.
And then just say that.
Right, just say, I'm gonna do the opposite of whatever that guy said, just because it's the opposite of what that guy said, he'd get a standing ovation.
Yeah, you know, there's a great book.
You've probably heard of it.
A book came out recently, written by, you know, it's a compilation by a bunch of military, you know, service members who served in Afghanistan.
It's called Our Latest Longest War, Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan.
And it's edited by Aaron O'Connell, who is a military officer who served in Afghanistan.
And you read the essays in that book, and basically, you know, what these military members are telling you is like, look, we served in Afghanistan.
We've tried everything.
It's not working.
You know, it's time to leave.
And if Trump came out and said, as you said, you know, screw Lindsey Graham.
You know, I'm gonna listen to the troops.
I'm going to ignore the, not ignore, but, you know, my generals are wrong on this one.
Where I think he could get away with it, but whether or not he's going to do it, I don't know.
Remains to be seen.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately for me and my readers, I found out about that book right after I was done reading the last of the books I was gonna read about Afghanistan for this one.
But geez, I guess maybe on the second edition.
All right, well, listen.
So let me try to ask you about one more thing as long as I have you on the line here.
Have you noticed all the propaganda about Russia and Iran are now backing the Taliban, William?
Right, right.
Well, again, it's a worrisome thing.
I mean, here's, I mean, there you have the potential for something, you know, far more serious.
I mean, number one, of course, is the Taliban did just fine, you know, without a lot of Russian and Iranian support.
So this kind of inflated propaganda is a sort of a way, it's a way, you know, when I heard, when I heard the US military talking about, well, you know, the Taliban is now getting support from Iran and Russia.
And of course, you know, Russia and Iran are our enemies.
It was another way of saying, you know, uh-oh, this war is not going to end because all of a sudden it's being inflated in importance.
If, you know, we're not just fighting the Taliban, but our arch rivals are involved now as well.
And again, this worries me because it just ratchets up the rhetoric and the importance of Afghanistan, making it much less likely that we're ever going to get out of there.
Yep, yeah, that's the thing all along, ever since they got there, just as Chalmers Johnson said, that this is always a thing long before they got to Afghanistan.
Once you give these guys a base anywhere, they'll, the first order of business is coming up with more reasons to need it forever, even when circumstances change.
Right.
And the real general reason that you put it there is over.
But geez, now that we're here and we're adjacent to Iran, we're just over the hill from Russia and from China, right there, you know, the very Eastern edge.
And so, wow, what a great strategic position we're holding when really you could just turn that around too and say, well, no, you're just putting us all at risk, right?
Why should we have to share a, why should we be at risk of a border incident with Iran when Iran is way the hell over there and we're way the hell over here?
It's not a strategic asset, it's a strategic liability.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course- It's a sinkhole.
I'm not sure whether it's preventing war with Iran actually even, because I think the military knows that that Bagram Air Base is laying wide open for Iranian retaliation if they end up starting a war in the Persian Gulf, that the Iranians will be able to retaliate against our guys that way.
Maybe they're keeping the peace right now after all.
Right, yeah.
Ha!
What a funny empire, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's sort of, sadly, it's reached, you know, the absurd end of funny.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, let me ask you this.
This is a funny question.
I don't know if I've ever asked anybody this before.
Did you see the Tucker show the other day?
No, no, I didn't, I'm sorry.
Well, no, this one is worth searching because it's Colonel Douglas MacGregor who wrote this America First anti-war spiel for the Washington Times, and it was good enough we ran it at antiwar.com.
I think there was only kind of one minor flaw in it that I decided it was good enough to run.
And then- Interesting.
Tucker had him on the show, and he's formerly McMaster's commanding officer when they were both the big heroes of the tank battle of Iraq War One, and then they've gone their separate ways kind of thing.
Mark Perry's written about this, and McMaster's much more the hawk, and MacGregor now the dove, although he never made general, so I don't know if Trump would listen to him since he likes generals so much.
Right.
But he went on the Tucker show and said some really great things, but one of them, it wasn't so much great as much as kind of shocking in a way, the way that he put it, and I don't know exactly what Trump heard from those lower-ranking officers he met with, but the way MacGregor put it was the force is broken.
The men do not believe in the mission.
The thing is over.
You gotta realize that inside the Army and the Marine Corps, I guess he's saying, that they are done with this, and you cannot continue the policy if that's the way that your infantry feels about it.
You know what I mean?
They're not gonna, at the very best, they're gonna drag ass around in this war and do their very least, so what is the point of even deploying a force like that?
I'm putting words in his mouth a little bit, but he was actually, I think, more drastic than me the way he said it was.
They have absolutely had it with this thing.
Yeah, I think so.
I think there's a certain amount of fatalism among American troops, the idea, and I'm sure something similar happened in Vietnam.
After many years of so-called Vietnamization, here we are now trying to supposedly train the Afghan security forces so they can defend themselves and all that, but again, as you know, we've been doing it pretty much for a generation, and yet the Taliban controls more territory than ever.
If I was being deployed there and was halfway educated about history, you can't help but be skeptical and maybe even fatalistic about the prospects of success.
Yeah, well, you know, back to Trump and his mindset about this, one of the statements, oh, I guess I should disclaim here that it was Eli Lakes reporting that I'm quoting here, although in this instance, he didn't seem to have much reason to lie, although he could have just been the conduit of lies.
Anyway, what he said was that Trump was mumbling about how Alexander the Great couldn't do it and the British couldn't do it and the Russians couldn't do it, and to me, what that really signifies, do it, what that really means, what he's saying is pacify the local tribal people, which to me means that he is differentiating between them and international Arab terrorists, like whoever, Jolani, our ally in Syria, people like that who are loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, and so if that's really true, if he really can conceive of it in those terms, which is saying a lot for Donald Trump, I think, I'm trying to give the guy credit, I don't mean to just be sarcastic about it, that like, hey, you know, that's certainly not what he's being told, that's not what the rest of us are being told, if he really looks at that as two separate issues, then, you know, and I guess, I don't know why Stephen Bannon is not for this, I mean, he's apparently a horrible Iran hawk, I don't know why the hell he's an Iran hawk, if he's good on Afghanistan, why would he be bad on Iran?
If he's this bad on Iran, why would he be good on Afghanistan?
I don't know.
Right, right.
He apparently differs with these generals on different issues, but neither of them are better.
It is really interesting to see how this whole debate about Afghanistan is playing out among, you know, Trump and his minions, you know, I was quite surprised and very pleased that, you know, my article at Anti-War was actually tweeted out by Ann Coulter, I mean, you probably heard that, and as far as I know, it's the first article I've ever written at Anti-War that Ann Coulter picked up on and tweeted out to all of her followers, so, you know, I think there's a certain wing of the Republican Party, you know, that is quite skeptical of these wars, you know, they see, I think Trump sees, I think Ann Coulter, to give her a little bit of credit, sees that there's not a winning strategy here.
Yeah, well, you know, the average rank and file right-winger supports war in the sense of, yeah, go kick butt and fight the enemy and all that kind of thing, but fixing Eurasia, which is, you know, the bogus premise of the long war here, you can't get the average guy to believe in that, and of course, especially when it's their sons that have to fight in this thing, to them, it's all very real, you know, to the political establishment, you better worship all the soldiers or whatever, but in real life, the soldiers, they don't believe in this crap either.
They're not really the government, they're the people, the enlisted guys, at least, they think of themselves that way, and they're on the victim end of being lied to with the rest of us, you know what I mean?
And a lot of them see right through it, too.
I mean, they should all quit, but that's a different matter, but.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you saw the poll where, or the survey study where they went and found that this is what really hurt Hillary Clinton in those swing states, those industrial states, where these were the counties that had the worst amount of their sons die in the Iraq and Afghan wars, were the counties who went for Trump, and I know causation and correlation can be a problem, but that sure sounds right to me that she was on the face of it a worse hawk than him, and completely unapologetic about it, where at least he always was talking out of both sides of his mouth about, yeah, we're gonna bomb the hell out of them and torture them, but also we're gonna stop doing stupid things, too, you know?
Right, right, yeah, no, I remember seeing that poll, and it made a lot of sense to me.
Well, so, anyway, here we are.
I guess, is it as apparent to you as it is to me about just how perfect the metaphor or the analogy or whatever the hell is from 2009 and the way Petraeus and McChrystal did Barack Obama and the way Mattis and McMaster are doing Trump right now in forcing this escalation, just seems like I can hardly even find the difference.
Yeah, I guess the only difference is one of scale, really, because back in 2009, McChrystal was basically saying, I need at least 40,000 troops as a bare minimum for my surge, whereas now the military is saying, well, maybe we only need about 4,000 or so as trainers, but whether it's 40,000 or 4,000, it's always a wedge.
It's just a wedge in the door for further escalation.
Yep, all right, well, listen, I sure appreciate all your writings.
That's Bill Astori, everybody.
He writes for Tom Dispatch all the time, Tom Englehart's great site, and we run it all at antiwar.com and your website, BracingViews at bracingviews.com.
Thanks again.
Yeah, thanks, Scott.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
4,500 and something interviews there for you at scotthorton.org.
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