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.
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, y'all introducing the great Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor of antiwar.com, which in English means he writes like 10 times a day at news.antiwar.com.
He's on top of everything, everywhere, all day long, every day, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty good, man, except for the fact that I'm looking at the tag for Afghanistan at news.antiwar.com.
I guess I like the top headline.
Taliban prepares delegation for new peace talks with the US.
Let's start with that.
They've had some talks and there was one short ceasefire there.
So I don't know what's going on.
Well, there were peace talks with the US in July in Qatar.
The State Department sent a small delegation to Qatar to meet the Taliban at their office there, which that's been something of a controversy for Qatar with the Saudis and everything, because they're all mad that Qatar is hosting the Taliban's official political office.
But in reality, there were a lot of countries in the region that offered to do so, and Qatar's just the one that ended up winning it.
The Saudis are mad because they wanted to host them?
Kind of.
Or they're claiming to be critical of it.
I mean, we know they've been backing the Taliban all these years anyway.
Right now they're claiming to be critical of it.
Qatar is supporting terrorists and they're letting terrorists set up offices in their country.
But in practice, a lot of the GCC nations were offering to host that office.
What did they really accomplish there?
Much?
Well, they had talks that didn't immediately break down, which is pretty significant considering it's the US and the Taliban.
I mean, that's pretty good.
But it made the Afghan government kind of angry, because President Ghani has been trying very hard to get the Taliban to peace talks himself.
He wasn't invited to the Qatar talks, and no one from the Afghan government was invited to the Qatar talks, so he was kind of getting the sense that he was being cut out in the US peace process.
So he was critical, and the US at the time seemed to understand, because they issued statements afterwards saying, Oh, this definitely has to be an Afghan government process.
All the talks from now on have to go through the Afghan government.
But these new talks, the Taliban's putting together a delegation, and they're saying that these are going to be direct talks with the US, and there's no sign that the Afghan government is going to be involved in these either.
So I'm not sure what happened in the last two months, but it looks like the Afghan government is once again being cut out.
Yeah, well, so that's the thing of it, right?
I mean, I guess they said that this was a Taliban demand, that they'd speak directly with the Americans, but not the Afghan government.
But I thought the Taliban position the whole time was, We're not talking until you leave anyway.
There's nothing to talk about until you're on your way out, at least, right?
So was that really a major change there, that they said, Okay, we'll go ahead and talk to you, but as long as Kabul didn't belong to?
They're talking, but it's going to be a limited talk.
They're saying these next round of talks are going to focus on confidence-building measures.
The Taliban are trying to get a prisoner exchange negotiated.
They're saying if that goes well, they'll be open to another set of talks further down the road.
But they're being very careful about it, because, understandably so, previous U.S. attempts to get the Taliban to talk, the U.S. was pretty public about the idea that they're going to have these talks specifically to try to split up the Taliban, trying to get the moderate Taliban on board with the peace process so they can sort of divide and conquer what's left.
Yeah.
And so now with the talks sort of looking like they're starting up again, the Taliban is being very careful.
That's not what ends up happening again.
Yeah.
Well, and we'll talk in a second about what hardball they're playing with all their escalating attacks all across the country and what all that means.
But I wanted to point out this piece by Barry Posen that I okayed to run as a viewpoint on Antiwar.com today, and that's despite this major flaw where he actually says it would be okay to continue providing foreign aid to the Kabul government, which is definitely completely against our party line at Antiwar.com.
But I let that one sentence in the article slide for the rest of the article, which actually ends with my same take, which is there's nothing to talk about.
They've already won the war, the Taliban, and it's hard to imagine talks leading to a position where the Americans are willing to admit defeat and say, okay, you got us, we're going to leave on your terms or anything like that, and yet we can't do any better than that either.
So he says, well, the answer then is just to go.
We don't have to talk with them.
Hopefully they'll be able to talk with the Kabul government and negotiate something rather than having a full-scale civil war and victory over the northern factions.
But there's nothing to negotiate here because there are no terms that the Americans would stoop so low as to accept.
And same thing for the Taliban.
They're in the position of strength, so they're not going to sign on to any American demands either other than the ones they've been offering all along, which was to not host international terrorists there.
Right.
And ironically, that's the same deal we probably could have gotten in 2001.
Yeah, exactly.
Even before the bombs started dropping.
Right.
And it's quite true that the U.S. isn't going to want to accept any deal that is officially a defeat.
But I think as defeat becomes more and more obvious, U.S. officials are being more willing to look at half measures that are defeat and everything but name and say, well, we can declare victory, withdraw, and let the whole thing collapse six months later, which is roughly what the Soviet Union did.
I mean, they basically declared the situation stable and the Afghan communist government was fine and they're going to always be fine and they left and then they got immediately overrun.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like, and I obviously don't know enough about this really, but it seems like if the northern factions, the current government, would offer that, look, we'll stop messing with you guys and you can have your full autonomy in the predominantly Pashtun regions of the country.
We'll leave you alone.
You leave us alone.
We'll call it federalism or something.
It doesn't have to be necessarily full-scale independence and break the country apart officially.
But, you know, you do your thing, we'll do our thing.
And as long as you guys promise also not to sack the capital city, we'd appreciate that kind of thing, shake hands on that.
That seems reasonable enough.
And after all, I mean, the Taliban probably could take Kabul, but then that would be biting off a lot of problems to deal with at the same time, whereas really calling a truce right around where things stand right now is probably pretty fair.
Yeah.
And, of course, the Taliban are making a lot of gains in the far north in the last couple of weeks with their offensives.
They're sacking a lot of security posts and things like that and showing that they can go a lot further if they have to.
But you're right, holding those territories isn't all that practical for them right now, and it would be a lot simpler to just have sort of a federalism system.
Yeah, well, so in speaking of which, you know, I think it might be a mistake for us to assume that there's some unified command where the guys holding the talks are, you know, in one chain of command with, you know, the Taliban Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security Advisor who are coordinating all of this.
But if you take, you know, some kind of unification of command for granted here, for sake of discussion at least, it sure looks like they're ratcheting up the pressure big time for these talks.
Like, yeah, we're going to have these talks, but watch, we're going to launch, you know, kind of mini-TED offensives all over the country for weeks leading up to the talks here, just so it's clear who's in a position of strength and who's coming to whose table and to whose terms.
I mean, maybe as I speak, some soldiers are being rounded up and executed.
This has been going on daily over there, right?
Right.
And one would think they wouldn't need to do all that because it's pretty apparent to anyone that's been following the situation just how badly the security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated, how much territory is being lost.
But when you're dealing directly with the U.S., I mean, the Pentagon is offering official statements a couple times a week anyway, claiming that the fact that there's talks at all proves that the war is making progress.
And I guess the Taliban has to be aware that some on the U.S. negotiating side may be buying into their own hype about this, that they feel like, oh, yeah, we're doing well here, and this is going to just be fine.
Amazing.
All right.
So give us a bit of a rundown, which is starting with Ghazni, or do you want to go back to before that?
But can you just give us sort of a short list of recent successes?
And they can be temporary ones, too.
I mean, the Tet Offensive also was a strategic victory but a tactical failure on every level, right?
So I don't know exactly how these are shaken up, but they've made at least some pretty major gains in different places, right?
Right.
They took most of Ghazni for the better part of a week.
The Afghan government had to send a large number of reinforcements to eventually retake the city, which they did.
But in the meantime, the Taliban launched several offensives in the north against Baghlan province.
And I'm sorry, the provincial names are escaping me for some of these locations, but they were hitting military bases in these areas, and the commanders there were warning, hey, if we don't have reinforcements, we're going to get overrun.
But all the reinforcements were going to Ghazni, so they basically just let all these other territories fall.
So you have Afghan military bases falling left and right in the north.
And more recently, they haven't been attacking large sites like that.
They've just been going into police checkpoints and military checkpoints around the highways and just rolling right over the top of them, which from a logistics standpoint probably makes a lot of sense to them because they're looting a lot of equipment from these little checkpoints that have five or six troops in them.
And they can do it with relative ease and no real risk that the Afghan government's going to send reinforcements to try to stop them.
So it seems like they could basically take these over as many times as they want to.
Yeah.
Well, you were saying before that they're, I guess, at the very least, making a statement that they can strike outside their territory too.
Now, I know that there are some kind of Pashtun areas up near Kunduz in the north that are remnants from a relocation program that took place back in the 1920s or something like that.
But now all these attacks in the north and all the towns that they're taking and police stations they're attacking and army bases that they're attacking, this is not just in predominantly Pashtun territory, but this is going much further than that.
Is that right?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we're seeing, like you say, the Kunduz area, Baghlan, some of the Balkh province, there are Pashtuns up there, but we're seeing them hit practically everything in the north, Saripol province, Faryab province.
I mean, they're really hitting the entire northern border of Afghanistan and carrying out operations in all those provinces at the same time.
So they've got a presence pretty much everywhere and the ability to carry out these attacks pretty much everywhere.
And so far the Afghan government seems not to be able to do much about it.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes when something's in the New York Times, it's not the news itself, but it's the fact that it finally made the Times or that they're the ones reporting or whatever that's actually the news story.
So they had one that you wrote a news story about, in fact, the other day, about how, well, the government's just been lying all along, and specifically lately about just how much territory the Taliban control.
And they've been spinning hard as hell to say that it's only 40 when really it's 60 percent of the country.
And that's just in the daytime.
They had casualty and attrition rates and all of these things far worse than the government's claiming there.
I wonder what you think is the agenda behind that.
Is there a Pentagon push to increase troop strength again?
Or is there some pressure to cut?
I mean, it might just be a news story because somebody did some damn journalism.
That happens once in a while at the Times.
It seems like it could fit with a pro or anti-war agenda, in fact.
You know what I mean?
That, look, either this thing is going nowhere, and even Trump is right when he says that this is going nowhere and we should just quit because how obvious a truth that is.
Or it could be that, oh, geez, he just wouldn't commit enough guys to it, and now we need another 20,000 or 30,000, et cetera, like that.
I do suspect that's probably what's going to eventually happen.
This latest surge of Pentagon lies about how the war is going really started about the time that officials were talking about Trump wanting a new security review, a policy review for Afghanistan.
It had been about a year since he announced the escalation, and he wanted to kind of look at how things are going since they're obviously not going well.
And the Pentagon started just offering random statements saying things are going well, but backing it up with actual data is a lot harder than that.
So that required a lot of just flat-out making up numbers, saying, oh, the Afghan government controls far more of the country than it actually does, saying the Afghan security forces have 300,000 fighters when in reality it's about 200,000 because there are about 100,000 ghost soldiers on the books that don't exist and have never existed.
Well, and how many of those troops are actually combat troops versus support and what have you, too?
Right, and in Afghanistan that's a fine line because a lot of the soldiers aren't well-trained to begin with.
They get very basic training.
They're given a gun.
Hopefully, for the Afghan government's perspective, hopefully they stick around and use that gun on somebody.
Fairly often they just take the gun and sell it and go home.
Right, keep the boots, though, right?
Right.
I mean, the Afghan military is one of the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs you can get in the country, so it's not surprising that people don't stick around for it.
But if you're in the do-you-have-a-bad-enough-economic situation, you might show up just to get the free gun.
And if you're the idiot brother of some family that they can't think of anything better for you to do, they might send you there to just get a gun.
Yeah.
Well, and you've got to wonder, the strategy, the Taliban strategy of sending infiltrators to go in and shoot their American trainers in the back, which really began with the surge back in 2010, and so 2009 and 10.
I mean, it had happened before that, but as a real committed strategy that this is what we're going to do is infiltrate trainees in there.
I wonder the degree to which that's hampered efforts.
You know, they have, there was that one New York Times article about the Marines down in Helmand Province where at all times there are guys on the guard towers, not facing out, but facing in, called the guardian angels, as they're snipers with their scopes constantly trained on their Afghan allies that they're training up.
Which, think about that from the point of view of one of the Afghan trainees that's not a sleeper cell, green on blue attacker in waiting, but just as a regular guy trying to get along here.
He's got a Marine scope constantly on his head because that's the position that they've put both sides in, in that country there still.
And they keep dying in those attacks too.
There was just one another, what, a week ago or two.
Right, last week there was one.
And we kind of saw that stop near the end of Obama's term because what the Pentagon did was they said, you know, we can't stop all these Afghan soldiers from shooting us every time we get near a military base, so we're just going to not go there anymore.
And basically the Afghan, I mean, the U.S. troops in Afghanistan are basically being kept away from the Afghan military and Afghan police forces and any of these training sites just because they were convinced they would get shot if they went there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that story about the Marines, it stands out because that's one of the only places the Americans are still in direct contact with these guys in that way.
Right, and since last year's escalation, they've started having more direct contact again because there's such a focus on training as part of the strategy.
But, of course, once they start having direct contact again, what happened is the exact same thing that happened last time.
They're getting shot again.
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And you know, back when in 2013 and what have you, years ago, this was specifically one of Donald Trump's complaints against the war.
Back when he was against the Afghan war, this was specifically one of the things that he cited.
These guys were trained shoot our guys in the back.
What is this?
Just call it quits.
Forget it.
Just stop.
Who needs a victory parade or who cares what you call it as long as it's not going on anymore.
You know what I mean?
If even Donald Trump can come up with that, you would think that even Donald Trump could implement it.
But yeah, I guess not.
But yeah.
So instead he implemented a South Asia strategy which was the first thing was no timelines of any kind.
We're staying forever.
And that way the Taliban will learn that they can't wait us out.
The time is on our side there, not theirs, which doesn't seem very likely that that kind of lesson is going to kick in for them anytime soon.
I don't know.
But then also they're pressuring the Pakistanis.
Nobody ever thought of that before, Jason, I guess, that they're going to tell the Pakistanis that, well, call off some aid to them for their support for the Afghan Taliban.
So is that winning any changes over at ISI or what's the deal?
Right.
I mean, obviously that's not going to have much of an impact because what we're seeing again is the exact same thing we saw during the last surge.
I mean, we did all these same things then, saying that there was no timetable for the war, we're going to stay forever, the Taliban can't wait us out, going after Pakistan, picking all these diplomatic fights with Pakistan, cutting what we're calling aid, but in actuality is payment to the Pakistani military for services rendered in the war and saying, well, we're just not going to give you that, which I mean, how long that's going to work is anybody's guess.
Sooner or later, it seems like the Pakistani government's just going to stop providing this support with transporting equipment, support with intelligence, all this stuff, because they're not going to get paid for it.
And they know they're not going to get paid for it.
Yeah.
And then meanwhile, I haven't seen many stories about this recently, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised if you have about India, because this is part of the strategy where they said deliberately, this is in the book too, that, and I guess they really are this, you know, just nearsighted or whatever the problem is, however you want to define it, where they said, yeah, what we're going to do, we're going to threaten the Pakistanis not just with taking away their aid money, but with bringing the Indians in to help in Afghanistan on our side more and more, which is the whole reason that the Pakistanis are intervening in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban in the first place is to keep the Indians friends that America's installing in power out.
So this whole thing that's supposed to be like a punishment to them to make them back down might as well be deliberately calculated to make them escalate their support for the Afghan Taliban.
But that's what passes for, you know, think tankery in DC, I guess Mattis and, and his advisor, what's her name?
Lisa, whichever.
Right.
And I haven't, I haven't seen much in the past month or two about India, but this has been a recurring issue in Afghanistan because of course Afghanistan's always kind of been Pakistan's backyard in the event that they get into a war with India that it's like, well, this is going to be a fallback position for the Pakistani military.
When, if, and when this huge war on the subcontinent breaks out and the US is constantly threatening to bring India into the Afghan governments, basically from the start have been cozying up to India and being fairly hostile to Pakistan.
And unsurprisingly, Pakistan's not happy with that situation.
Right.
Now, so by the way, I should mention that Colonel Wilkerson was on the show who famously was Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was the secretary of state and lied us into war at the United Nations.
And Wilkerson, of course, has been a great anti-war guy since then.
And he said, well, the reason we're there now is because we're already there and it's really difficult to get a real occupation force installed in place there.
And so once you have one, you don't ever want to shut it down again, which that's just bureaucratic inertia for Bagram and that kind of thing.
But he says, and also it's all about China.
I guess they're not as worried about Russia, but they're worried about China and them building the one belt road initiative, you know, through there somehow as though the security situation in Afghanistan would ever allow such a thing anyway.
But then he got right to the point too, where the Americans want to be able to use the Uyghurs of Western China, the oppressed Muslims of Western China, and use them against China, just the same way they use them to help fight in the Syrian war against Assad.
And in fact, Eric Margulies has said on this show that the CIA was training Uyghurs for use against China in Afghanistan under the Taliban in 2001 at some of those training camps anyway, were for the Uyghurs there before 9-11.
Anyway, so this is why we're there.
It's not about, you know, and what's funny is, I'll go ahead and repeat myself from earlier interview on this too, because I think it's important that when I talk with Daniel Davis, the Lieutenant Colonel and, you know, the great whistleblower on the war after the surge in 2012 and how it had failed and all this, and he knows all this about this stuff.
And I asked him that, you know, did they ever talk about their role?
I mean, he was an officer, right?
Lieutenant Colonel.
It's not the highest.
It's not like he's a three-star general or something, but still like they ever talk about their role and what are they doing in the middle of Asia anyway?
Like, is there a purpose here other than, you know, looking at the war through a soda straw and the Taliban presence in this district, in this province, this week kind of thing.
And he said, no, they never discussed that.
China never came up.
Except that, you know, if you ask the think tankers and if you ask the Pentagon, you know, back at the base, that's what this is about.
And so all the soldiers who were told that they're out there, you know, spreading literacy to the young girls and protecting America from a terrorist base of safe haven to attack us from or whatever, that none of that is right.
They're there because they're afraid that the Chinese are going to build a highway through there and then, you know, make money trading stuff on it or something like that.
So I don't know.
I just like pointing out, you know, the level of cynicism and nonsense and craziness.
17 years after the excuse for this war started that these are the kind of excuses they're coming up with, at least, if not the real reasons for it, you know?
Right.
And looking at the 17 years we've been in Afghanistan, building a highway through Afghanistan is no easy task.
Exactly.
It's the same thing about, you know, all this stuff about mining.
Oh, they're going to send in Blackwater and a bunch of mining companies to steal all the mineral resources in Helmand province.
And it's like, you think the Americans and their friends can control the Helmand province?
Welcome to the history of the Afghan war.
I guess it's your first day then, if that's what you think, because, yeah.
Think about the infrastructure it takes to mine lithium, you know?
They're just going to put that there when you can't even, you know, open up a 7-Eleven without getting that thing robbed.
Right.
I mean, we've put a lot, a lot of money into trying to build highways in Afghanistan and we couldn't do it.
I mean, those roads don't get built.
Yeah.
Afghanistan's basically got one road that goes in a circle around the country, at least as far as paved roads are concerned.
I mean, maybe they have some streets in their cities, but for roads in between cities for trade sort of thing that China would want, that just doesn't happen in Afghanistan and it's not going to happen no matter who's there.
I mean, we've got a much larger military and we're committing a lot more troops than China would be willing to commit for the Silk Road initiative.
I mean, there are other routes to get from China to Europe and Afghanistan is probably the worst idea for a route right now.
Right.
Well, and now, so speaking of Helmand province there, where all the minerals are that they're never going to mine, how are the Marines doing?
I guess there are two, two wars, two major wars going on, right?
The Marines down in Helmand and the Green Berets in the Nangarhar province in the East.
Is that right?
Right.
And, and of course there's a lot of other troops all over the place, but those are the two big, big areas.
What's, what's in Helmand province seems to be enough to keep the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah from falling outright.
The Taliban always seems to have fighters just a stone's throw away from the city, but they never seem to, at least since the Marines escalated back into the area, they never seem to be directly challenging the city itself.
Yeah.
Now, so Sanj and the rest of the province have long since fallen again to the Taliban, right?
It's just Lashkar Gah is holding out.
Is that right?
Oh yeah.
I mean, Lashkar Gah there's some there's some outskirt areas that aren't worth anything that never necessarily fell, but anything that the Taliban wanted, they took a long time ago.
And even Lashkar Gah, I mean, it's its value is questionable in Helmand because it's not like it's a big city that has a huge economy or anything.
It's the poor part of the country.
Helmand is mostly opium farmers and people like that.
It's, it's an agricultural district.
So controlling the farmland is a lot more important than controlling the city that happens to have the provincial government in it.
Yeah.
I mean, seizing the provincial government at this point would just get the B1s call out on them and then they'd have to leave again, which I guess they might do that the same way they've done in Ghazni just to show that they can and then withdraw.
Is that the same situation in Kandahar city too, where the government is nominally in control of Kandahar city or the Taliban outright rules there?
Well, there is a government there and I don't know how much they're actually in charge of anything.
It seems like in a lot of cities that are in sort of the Taliban homeland, which of course Kandahar is, is the Taliban homeland more than any place else.
They kind of exist only so long as the Taliban allow them to exist.
If they want to start a project in a lot of these cities, they have to go to the Taliban and negotiate and make sure that the Taliban's okay with them doing this project.
Now, in terms of the casualties, that's all been the Green Berets in Nangarhar this year, right?
Are the Marines fighting and they're just sitting at their base doing water?
Do you know what's going on in Helmand?
I haven't heard anything out of Helmand of major fighting.
It seems like they're there to keep the Taliban at bay and to keep them from overrunning the province entirely, which they've been able to do, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of fighting involved.
Like you say, Nangarhar is where all the major fighting is going on.
And that's against the Islamic State supposedly there, right?
Right.
The ISIS-K, ISIS affiliate that's operating out of there, that the Afghan government has declared that group, the ISIS in Nangarhar totally destroyed three or four of them.
You know what, man?
It would be a major climb down, Jason, but what if they tried to spin it and do an awakening with the Taliban?
Like, hey, guess what?
The Taliban are cool now and they're helping us fight ISIS the way that they did with the Sunni tribes and the Ba'athists when they got them to, or went along with really them turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq back in 2006.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe we should just call it al-Qaeda in Iraq back in 2006 and seven and just call it a victory that way.
Maybe that's something that the Americans could, you know, claim as something to gain in a negotiation.
Not just a promise to keep international terrorist groups down, but eliminate the Islamic State for us.
Because after all, the Islamic State and Afghanistan really aren't international terrorists, right?
They're locals just calling themselves that.
And listen, I don't mean to endorse any of this stuff.
I'm being cynical and retarded here, but I'm just saying that trying to come up with a way for the Americans to spin their way out of this damn place finally.
Right.
And that does make a lot of sense because the Taliban has been fighting the Islamic State quite a bit.
We had incidents of the Islamic State assassinating, not a high ranking Taliban leader, but sort of a local leader.
And that was not in Nangarhar, that was further north.
But the Taliban launched an offensive against them, killed a large number of the ISIS in that area.
And what was left mostly surrendered to the Afghan government because they didn't want to get taken captive by the Taliban.
There you go.
All right.
And I'm sorry, I think I kind of interrupted you there when you were going to say something more about Nangarhar.
Oh, no, no.
It's just that we've launched these U.S. and Afghan offensives against Nangarhar, repeatedly promising that we're going to wipe out ISIS there.
And the Afghan government has been quite satisfied that they've wiped out ISIS several times in the past two years.
At least three or four times they've issued announcements saying, hey, they're totally wiped out now.
You won't see them around Nangarhar anymore.
They blow up the radio station that was broadcasting ISIS propaganda.
They'll claim to have killed every last ISIS fighter that was there.
And then they leave and ISIS seems like they're back up and running with the new radio station and everything in just a matter of days.
So it seems like they can't take them out.
Well, and they certainly can't supplant them with the Afghan National Army, but you know who might be able to take their place and stay there.
But anyway, all right, listen, I better let you go.
But thanks very much for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it, Jason.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, that's the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com.
And he covers every single one of America's wars for you in-depth every day.
News.
Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
