I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Danny Sherson.
Of course, as you know, he was a major in the U.S. Army.
He was in the Iraq War II surge and the Afghanistan surge, and he wrote Ghost Soldiers, The Bag Dad, and his new book is A Real History of the United States, and before that was Patriotic Dissent, and he's a regular contributor at antiwar.com.
Thank goodness for that, and I should mention, because I should mention, that right there tied with Doug Bondo, he is the most prolific writer probably in American antiwar history, certainly in our current era, and I'm not saying that you have to live up to that week in and week out until you fall down of exhaustion, but that just happens to be the case.
So if you guys want to read some Danny Sherson, there's a brand new one pretty much always somewhere.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
Oh, I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Really happy to have you here.
So listen, I mean, the whole damn thing fell apart, and I want to hear everything that you think about it.
You know, frankly, I'm sort of like a mix, and I guess a lot of the vets I talk to who are critical of the war feel the same way.
You know, there was like a range of emotions, you know, they say there's like stages of grief or something.
So I've gone back and forth over the last few weeks between, you know, like a sort of frustration with, you know, what was it all for, the waste, the loss, even just like the emotional turmoil over the years, talking to guys or even their families who were, you know, killed or seriously wounded that I knew or served with me, and then completely not surprised, not really.
Maybe the speed, the sort of like scope and scale of the takeover, you know, was a little surprising, but I had said, you know, not to make my predictions out to be amazing or something, but I had said in the weeks leading up to this, you know, I don't think it'll fall within weeks, Kabul, but there's a significant chance it will, because this thing may pick up a momentum, like there might be an inertia to this Taliban tidal wave, and that the thing is probably going to turn on morale and psychological factors.
In a way, the speed with which this thing came apart is the ultimate exposure of, well, shoot, I mean, nobody's been more on this than you, right?
Nobody's been more astute on Afghanistan.
Nobody has been, you know, kind of honing in on the disaster of this war, even back when folks were saying it was the good war than you.
And so I'm sure you're not surprised either in a way, because it exposes the ludicrous, like the absurdity of the mission, the hollowness of the attempt.
And then I think what has angered me and has along the whole time is the lies, the deceit, the deception, the dissembling, the variety of that from the military leadership, from the civilian leadership, and that all came crashing down.
My final guilty pleasure feeling about this, and we can dig into any one of these, is I'm kind of impressed with the Taliban, right?
And I've had at least one person say on some sort of social media that I'm like some sort of Taliban supporter, which I find fascinating.
I almost like that.
I'm like, well, I must be saying the right things if they got that wrong impression, you know, because what fascinates me, even just from, let's take like a military tactical and operational standpoint, I've been doing a lot of like autopsy reading recently on just how this all came together.
And really, since about 2014.
All coroners are apologists for murderers.
Everybody knows that.
Right.
Right.
You know, but it is it is interesting, though, when you look at like how effective this campaign was, you know, if you even roll back to about 2014, when they they really put this plan into effect, you know, I think they were reacting to circumstances to a certain extent.
But they just the X's and O's on the map, you know, the way that they took highways and and slowly isolated district and then provincial centers and the methods with which they convinced, you know, Afghan forces for the couple of government to kind of lay down their arms and the way they went straight to the north and seized Kunduz and Nazari Sharif before the others could get him.
What a great move that was.
You know, if they could if they could prove that the warlords in the north had turned bougie, right, were more had their houses elsewhere and were really hollow compared to what they were during the Northern Alliance time, if they could expose the gap between those warlords and the Ashraf Ghani government, because no one wanted to die for Ghani.
I mean, folks were saying that we don't want to die for, you know, Ashraf Ghani.
It was sort of a it was a well crafted campaign.
You can be illiterate even and craft such a campaign.
And and I have to stand a little bit and and slow clap a bit and say, hey, you called in the chips.
You called in our bets.
And it was pretty effective.
And I don't think we should forget to give them a degree of credit on a military tackle perspective.
Yeah.
I mean, look, this goes back to who lost China, right?
Shanghai Shek lost China.
Mao won it.
And same thing here.
All of our discussion about the war, the Taliban are never described as having won the war.
Just, you know, well, the ANA lost it somehow or something like that.
But and I think you and I had talked about somebody is going to go back one day and do their Ph.
D. project on transcribing or having their super smart computer transcribe all my shows and go back and find all our correct predictions here.
But I think you and I had talked about the possibility that the Taliban would just walk right into Kabul when it came down to it, rather than have to lay siege or fight for it at all.
Probably.
We mentioned that a few times over the years, that that would be, you know, what it looks like when the whole thing comes down.
But absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think, you know, what else is interesting, Scott?
I mean, because you've studied the longer arc of this.
This was a more so far, right?
There could be rebellions that could crop up.
Oh, yeah.
Different areas over the over the north.
Yeah.
This is a story.
This is the first day of the rest of their life.
I mean, this is we have we don't know what's going to happen now, really, you know, now they have a lot of warlords to appease or kill.
But this was a more complete victory than ninety four, ninety six, ninety eight, right?
I mean, that they they took the whole place, essentially.
And even the Panjshir Valley appears like they it's it's not holding out in the same way.
I mean, we'll see what happens.
Masood's son was talking to him, I had read.
And this was just this was complete in a way that others, you know, haven't been there.
There wasn't rocket attacks and street fighting in Kabul for years like there had been with the Mujahideen after they came in like ninety two.
So that's interesting.
And I think we have to take that into account.
You know, someone else is going to do their Ph.
D. on probably at the Army War College or something, you know, is going to do their thesis on this campaign and study the success of the Taliban efforts.
And and I think that's fascinating.
But it's your point about the media coverage, the political coverage is basically the two.
There's two ways to look at it.
Biden lost this personally.
This was a Biden failure.
This was like, oh, just feckless Biden or the ANA were cowards.
They didn't want to fight for their own country.
You're right.
No one's ever like, well, the the Taliban did win.
Right.
Like they did orchestrate a campaign against a, you know, a fairly sizable, although overrated, but fairly sizable Kabul government force that had been backed and assisted and at some points led by the global self-styled superpower.
I mean, we do have to give them a little credit here.
Right.
So listen, man, did you see that piece by Jack Murphy about the drone war and air war in the Trump years?
You know, I haven't seen that particular piece, but I have read a bunch of stuff about just the you know, especially after the the children were killed in that last sort of drone attack.
Just a lot of reflections on the stats of overall American drone strikes and stuff in the Trump era.
But a piece like this, man, is, you know, I think we've known for a long time that total numbers had gone up.
You know, the cost of war project and others, I think human, I don't know if it's H.R.W. or Amnesty or some had written about the higher level of casualties from airstrikes.
And then we knew from I hate to say it, that fraud, Charlie Savage's reporting in The New York Times and others, that the that they had reduced the command authority lower down the chain of command.
It used to be under Obama for at least the Afghanistan theater.
You had to get a general to check off a box before you could do a strike.
And they got rid of all of that and all that.
So we already knew that.
But then this is from the point of view of the guys doing the killing, man.
And Jack Murphy, he's a former Green Beret.
And he had numerous sources about all this, including brand new footage that was given to him and talks about how essentially what happened, Danny, was unsurprisingly, I guess, the rules of engagement, which were terrible, right?
Everybody, you know, Daniel Hale and the drone papers show how horrible the drone war was in Afghanistan, killing innocent people.
But that was under the relatively strict rules of engagement.
But then what happened was the Islamic State took over western Iraq somehow.
Never mind the back story there.
Apparently, we just pull our troops out of Iraq and that's what caused it.
That's all you need to know about that.
But anyway, once that happened and they went to war against the Islamic State, well, that was a whole different level of rules of engagement to destroy the Islamic State.
And then those rules of engagement migrated back to Afghanistan.
So then it became, even though there's not a cell phone tower for 300 miles in any direction, anybody with a radio is dead meat.
Literally, they explode them to death with bombs.
And so they just killed thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
And then if they had any corroborating evidence or intelligence at all, it was that this guy's in communication with a guy who was once in communication with a guy who we accuse of being Taliban.
And that kind of just absolute, you can't even call it bare bones link analysis, right?
It's just computerized conspiracy theory bullcrap.
And, you know, I'm looking at the piece right now and it does sort of corroborate some of what we knew.
And then it also demonstrates, I think it takes it a little further.
So we knew that the strikes, you know, overall airstrikes have gone up like six times, you know, from 2015 to 2018 and 2019.
Oftentimes folks will say, you know, the military is lying about how effective their technology is, how precision it is.
But in some ways that misunderstands the real problem.
The real problem isn't whether the drone strike, the missile itself is precise.
That's a problem.
But the issue is targeting.
And so even during the Obama era, there was these like signature strikes.
This is demonstrating that it went even further.
I mean, what they decide to count as an enemy combatant or evidence of being an enemy combatant, it is not much more than what it took to get stopped and frisked in New York City.
You know, I mean, I've studied some of this stuff, you know, on a scholarly side when it comes to, you know, race and policing in New York.
And most of the things that are listed are like furtive movement or matches a relevant description.
Well, it appears that in Afghanistan and other theaters, like you said, a radio or a vague communication with someone that might be Taliban.
That is such a great analogy.
Furtive movement.
Exactly.
Waistband.
Right.
And so that's the thing.
So even if the missile is as technologically savvy as they say, it's not.
But even if it is, maybe we're talking about the wrong thing by focusing on the shrapnel, by focusing on the blast radius, because it's really what does it take to strike somebody?
And if the threshold is so low to strike somebody that makes them a target, and if we decide to count anybody who meets that as not a civilian casualty.
So like they mentioned in the article in Hellman's, they list that one toddler, but not the two random people next to them, next to that child.
It's like, how can we ever know?
And will we ever really know the number of civilians that we were killing?
So this whole idea that America pulling out was like a human rights disaster.
And as long as we stayed, we were going to protect us like, no, no, we you know, we were killing us and the Afghans in 2018, 2019.
We're killing more civilians in the Taliban.
And that was with the numbers we had.
And who knows how high it really was?
Yeah, we were part of the problem.
All right.
Now, even though we kind of just answered this question, I'm going to step back one.
And this to me, obviously sounds like total BS.
And I know that you won't agree with it either.
However, I want you to take it seriously for argument's sake, if only because of where it's coming from.
And that is General H.R. McMaster, who's, you know, Mr. Brainiac of the U.S. Army, reads books and everything.
And he was the national security adviser under Donald Trump, the second one there for a while.
And it was he and Mattis who came up with the plan for Trump's Afghan surge, 10,000 troops and the massive expansion of the air war that we just talked about.
But he is absolutely livid and all over TV and probably, you know, writing articles, I guess, you know, complaining about this Afghan withdrawal and that's happening at all, not just how badly it was botched, but that it's happening at all.
And one claim that I saw him make was that, look, man, you know what?
Right around 2017, we had this thing finally dialed in and we finally had our act together and we really knew what we were doing.
And we could have, man, if only I was, you know, still there this whole time kind of thing.
Things would be going exactly our way.
And then what happened?
Stupid old Donald Trump went and started negotiating with these guys and gave them a ceasefire.
And so then we had to dial back, see, not the air war.
We had dialed back our ground war against them, our assistance to the ANA on the ground to a degree and our participation and all of that and taking the fight to them.
And then ever since then, that was when the Taliban started getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
So, you know, but everything was cool back when he was there.
And obviously that's self-serving.
But you know what?
Maybe it's also true.
And you know what?
If you were in charge and you thought you had it straight and then you got fired and then everything went to hell, then you would say it the same way, too.
So maybe he's right.
What do you say to that?
I do think we have to take the guy seriously.
Look, I think HR Masters has gone off the rails over the last several years.
I've been following him for a long time.
I mean, I come from a world, the West Point world, the West Point History Department world where HR is a god.
I mean, some I've told you that somebody sits at his desk, the desk that he used to have in his office when he taught there as a captain in the major is like it's an honor if you get that office.
You get to sit at HR's desk.
You know, he wrote he wrote Dereliction of Duty.
He reads books.
He's one of those warrior monks, right?
Him and Mattis and Petraeus and all that.
And he's not always been wrong about everything.
But I have watched him come off the rails a bit.
I've watched him become a hyper hawk more than he was.
And I have no explanation for that, by the way.
I really have thought about I don't know why.
He may not be completely wrong that we had the thing in a stasis while he was there.
He may not be wrong that we may have been able to maintain that basic stalemate where the Taliban, not exactly a stalemate, because the Taliban was already stronger in 2016 than they had been and, you know, pretty much any other time.
And they were creeping up on their power.
But we were able we were probably able to keep them in check.
We went from the Taliban controlling zero provincial capitals to pretty much all of them in the course of what, nine days?
I mean, so for for 19, you know, if we say it was 20 years, it wasn't exactly 20 years that we were there.
But let's take that, you know, for 19 years and, you know, 356 days, the Taliban really couldn't control any provincial capitals.
And suddenly they did.
So I understand where he might come from with that.
But what he can't answer, and nobody has really been able to, is to what end?
For how long?
When was the tipping point going to come where we really turn the tide against the Taliban?
When was the Afghan government going to have enough income?
What do they have?
It was an $18 billion GDP or revenue, I think it was, basically not enough to pay for their own security forces.
When was that going to get fixed?
When was the massive tiger economy growth for Afghanistan going to come, right?
When were they going to be able to pay for themselves?
When were they not going to rely on our airstrikes?
When were they going to be able to maintain their own helicopter fleet and their own fixed wing fleet?
When was that going to happen?
You know, he didn't have any answers for that.
He doesn't have any answers for how long.
His answer, actually, he does in a way, is forever.
I mean, these are the guys who talk about 100 year wars.
And I almost respect those folks, because unlike the polite liberals, they will say generational war, like plural, generationals or whatever, right?
So there's that.
And you know, but I also reject a lot of this warrior monk stuff.
And yeah, they read books, Petraeus reads books, like take a guy like Petraeus.
First of all, his thesis on Vietnam is all wrong.
I mean, the whole idea that counterinsurgency was going to win that thing, that the real key was, you know, the sort of civil military cords program and the strategic hamlets and the Marines had it right.
And if we would have stuck with that, you know, it reminds me of that scene towards the end of The Hunt for the Red October, you know, where Captain Ramius is talking with Harrison Ford, you know.
So it's like Sean Connery and, you know, Captain Ramius, you know, Sean Connery, the Russians like, hey, what books did you write?
You know, I heard you write books.
He says, oh, I wrote a biography of Admiral Halsley.
It's called like The Fighting Sailor about naval combat tactics.
And then Sean Connery, the Russian goes, I know this book.
Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan.
You know, and in some ways I feel that way about these warrior monk types.
Like they read books, but they're reading all the wrong books and they're coming up with all the wrong conclusions.
So that's my general view of HR.
I don't find the critique to be persuasive, but I do understand where it is coming from.
It's just there's that next point where I don't think they've ever really been able to answer the question of, okay, to what end and for how long?
Yeah.
Well, you know, Douglas McGregor, his former superior officer, and I think sort of rival if you read Mark Perry's take on it.
Yes.
He, he said in his blurb for Fool's Errand that he recommended Fool's Errand to the Army War College because he thought it was really important that they look at it, but they didn't.
It was the War College or some other thing, two different military schools that he, you know, asked them like, hey, you guys ought to add this book to your roster or whatever.
But I see no indication that that ever happened.
I don't guess that they're into reading things like that so much.
Yeah.
It's funny you should say that.
I don't see any of my books necessarily getting on the official reading lists of, you know, the chiefs of staff or anything like that.
But I can tell you that there have been at least two officers, one of whom is pretty high up there, who have assigned ghost riders of Baghdad like to their lieutenants and captains.
And that always makes me laugh a little bit.
I have to admit, like there's some sort of like vindicating feeling, but then there's also this part of me that's like, oh no, like I can't even imagine someone would do that.
Yeah.
No, that's true too.
But Fool's Errand is a little bit different in a way because it is like, you know, it's, it's not like the memoir disillusionment, although there was plenty of analysis in my first book, but it really is a take that folks should be reading that.
Like people who are about to take over brigades and get to that senior level should be reading critical histories of these wars and too often what they read, because I've seen the reading list.
I've gone through them.
I've read almost everything on every chairman's reading list, every war college reading list.
I'm fascinated by that.
In fact, I want to write a whole article about these reading lists.
Maybe I will for anywhere I'll come, maybe I'll write a series.
Most of the books that are critical, they, that they think are radical choices.
What they really argue is like the tactics were wrong or like the strategy was a little off.
Like if we would have done more coin or we would have done a little less coin and more conventional, you know, they, they nibble at the edges and they never take a look at a book that says the whole thing was preposterous and here's why.
Right.
Yep.
Um, well that wouldn't be in their interest to do so would, um, man.
So listen, talk to me about veterans.
I don't know about, I saw some headlines about tens of thousands of guys calling the suicide hotlines and stuff as all this has fallen apart.
I think, you know, when ISIS rolled into Western Iraq in 2014, a lot of guys took that really hard as well.
You know, you're telling me me and my boys gave our all in Samara and Ramadi to see all this fall apart.
I guess Ramadi took another year, but anyway, you know what I mean?
So, uh, yeah.
And look, I, I know you gave this thing, you're all when you're there.
I mean in Kandahar province of all places in the heart of this thing, uh, how do you feel about it and what do you have to say to your guys?
Major?
Well, they've been checking in with me, you know, my, my peers, um, some of my superiors, I mean there's a general officer in my life who's checked in with me and just been horrified and frustrated and angry and, and not, they're not a monolith.
And then my soldiers, right?
I'm in touch with a lot of these guys and people are checking on one another.
I have noticed that.
And I've read other veterans who've written that, you know, are you doing all right?
How are you feeling about all this?
And not everyone feels the same way.
You know, some of the veterans are like Biden blew this, right?
Uh, and I don't agree with that, but some feel that way.
And I, and I know why they do like, I, like, I get it.
Like, especially guys who aren't hyper sophisticated on this stuff, right?
Who haven't been following and reading the books that you and I have, so I don't hate him for it.
Um, even if I disagree profoundly with the conclusion, there is something pretty grotesque about the way the volunteer force has been used.
And yes, we were all volunteers and yes, especially if you volunteered after nine 11 and a good bit after nine 11, the evidence was there, what you were volunteering for.
But I still don't fully accept the idea that that obviates you of like any sympathy.
I do think we have to take that seriously and I think we're not just victims, right?
I'm not that veteran who thinks that, but it's kind of grotesque that we've been used for, you know, enlisted soldiers at the lower level, 30, 40 grand a year, maybe 50 on with combat pay of stuff like if they're infantry guys and for these like absurd crusades, hopeless lies about the progress, you know, cause they're not just lying to the American people when they say there's light at the end of the tunnel, they're lions of the veterans who have to go back, you know?
And I, and I think that that really is obscene and I understand the frustration about it.
Um, I'm glad it's over or at least this one is kind of probably hopefully, you know, uh, I'm glad that no one else is going back, you know, hopefully.
But you know, Phil Kly wrote something in the New Yorker, you know, he wrote that like award winning a book redeployment, uh, years back.
And I did, there were parts that jumped out at me and there's just one paragraph that he'd recently published.
He said, how does it, it resonated enough that I was reading it, you know, just last night.
In fact, highlighting it and that it kind of hit me, you know, cause I've experienced some of this with some of my guys said, how does it feel as a veteran who watched the Iraqi province where I served fall to ISIS to now watch this country where Marines I knew were shot or blown up or killed fall to the Taliban?
Who cares?
He says, who cares how the vets who battled alcohol addiction only to start drinking again this week are feeling?
Who cares what my Marine friends are feeling as they receive frantic text messages from Afghan allies, not for sure Americans for the last 20 years.
Now that's a pretty angry paragraph, at least the end, but I will tell you there are moments I allow myself to feel that frustration with the public that whole show, what 13, 14% were actually following the Afghan war.
Um, I allow myself that frustration well, and I will tell you a lot of my fellow vets feel it real strongly.
And I know guys who started drinking again, but you know, you guys know too, you guys know too what a Jedi mind trick, more like a Sith mind trick they use on the public here that no to criticize the wars, betraying the troops.
You can't say that the war is wrong.
That's what stabbing Danny in the back rather than saying, look, we're risking Danny and his guys lives out there for no good reason.
This thing ends in 10 or 20 years.
It's going to look the same.
We ought to not do it.
That's controversial.
You want to support the troops.
You support the war.
Everybody knows that.
And so it sucks because people are really stuck behind that.
There's, I don't know.
I'm sure you must've seen this hilarious clip from, uh, Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm where the guy's like, yeah, I just came home from Afghanistan and everybody thanks him.
Oh, thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service.
And then Larry's like, Hey, how you doing?
And then everybody gets all mad that Larry doesn't, you know, genuflect before this guy for being in the infantry.
You know?
Oh yeah, dude.
We're so much freer in LA because you were out on patrol in the Helmand province somewhere.
Let's all pretend to believe that this afternoon or whatever it is.
And you're in real trouble, Larry David, if you don't too.
Everybody's mad at him, you know, the rest of the episode.
And anyway, so they screw the American people.
You got to be willing to say, no, I, I'm sorry.
I have my own criteria for what counts as sticking up for soldiers.
And I'm going to stick with that.
But you have to have some wherewithal for that, you know, that takes a degree of confidence that's completely lacking.
And I actually like it better.
I like it.
I like the Larry David way better.
I can't stand the reflexive and obligatory, like just thanks and pretend because most of it's pretend.
Like even most of the people who are saying it, even if they're not saying it in like a mean way or anything, not trying to insult you, do they really believe that that it deserves a thanks that you patrolled sand gin district, you know what I mean, like in Hellman's like.
The honest part of it is thanks for putting yourself at risk in a selfless way to protect me.
You believe at least anyway, right.
You know, kind of thing, which sure, sure.
You know, I appreciate that too, Danny, frankly, you know, like boy, were you on a fool's errand out there.
But the fact that you were saying like, Hey, look, to protect my people back home, I'm willing to risk my own ass.
That's a big deal in its own little way, you know, and in a weird way, I'd probably do it again.
That's the crazy part.
I mean, I don't even know if I liked the way I sound saying that or if I even like that feeling.
But people ask me all the time, what would you do?
Like, would you go to the academy again?
Would you, would you, would you choose a combat job?
Would you, would you do that?
And like, there's this sick, maybe it's the masochistic, you know, mother's Irish side of the family part, but I probably would.
I mean, in a crazy way, there's just this sense of like, well, like kids were out there doing it.
And I don't know, maybe I, maybe I would do the whole thing over again.
I don't love the way that sounds, but maybe that's even a character flaw that that's possible that I would think that.
So, you know, I'm not certainly not like shitting on the veterans or even the idea of people like thanking us.
I think a lot of times it does come from a good place, but I think that it also requires like a degree of civilian, like gumption that I respect to be like, yeah, but this whole thing is a mess.
This whole thing is wrong.
And just because I didn't serve doesn't mean I don't get to say that.
And I'm a citizen.
And because I'm a citizen, my representatives are the ones supposed to making these decisions.
And I think this is wrong.
And so while I respect that you went out there and did it, I think it's a fool's errand.
And, and it doesn't mean that I don't respect the troops to say that.
And I do think that especially in their first decade after nine 11 and really even still, but especially then that was immediately thought of as being at the troop.
And that was a canard.
That whole thing was purposefully kind of built and it's been there for a long time, was there during the Vietnam war, especially in the beginning.
But that's dangerous talk and, uh, and it, and it suits the powerful, right?
It suits the Hawks to have that be the, the culture.
Yeah.
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Well and it's funny because some people swear that this never happened.
There's no evidence.
There's no real newspaper, contemporary newspaper reports about it and this kind of thing.
And then other people swear that, Oh, they know it's true.
They saw it with their own eyes of people spitting on soldiers coming home from Vietnam conscripts coming home from Vietnam and hippies spitting on them.
Who knows whether it happened or not?
I don't really know, but it doesn't really matter.
You know, what matters is what a great myth for anti-war forces to have to live down forever even though they never did any of it.
Nobody around today saying anything or in the last 20 years criticizing this policy has anything to do with that.
But Oh no, to criticize the mission would be essentially what would the soldiers think if they heard that people back home didn't believe in the war?
That's like spitting on them and telling them that they're, you know, doing the wrong thing and you never want to do that.
Think of how bad you could hurt the feelings of a soldier if you were telling them he was doing the wrong thing.
But of course the whole point is that the think tanks and the secretary, the deputy secretary of defense for policy and the president United States are doing the wrong thing.
You can't find any, but well, I won't say that.
It's very rare to find someone who would write a whole piece about how really this is all the infantry's fault, you know, them and their dads that sign them up for this thing or something like that.
People might write something like that every like once in a while, but I can't say I've ever seen one like that.
I mean, in a, in a way there's an argument there.
If no one signs up for the army, then we don't have one.
Great.
But, um, that's not that good of a point compared to criticizing Richard Pearl who lied us into war.
You know what I mean?
Um, but, but yeah, what a great canard, as you said, what a great little kind of veil to hide behind, you know?
And you know, the other irony there, Danny is, you know, I know a guy ran a business that was near Fort hood where he's got soldiers coming in all the time.
And he's like conditioned from TV that he's supposed to say this, Oh, thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service.
And he says he quit saying it because all the soldiers were all annoyed by it.
And that they would all say the same thing to him.
It's just a job, man.
Doesn't mean anything or something like that, you know, but that was like the refrain.
It's just a job.
It's like having a different job, only it's this job and not much special to it.
And then, you know, that's not like a dissenting point of view.
That's just kind of neutral, you know, people who spend a lot of time around soldiers probably do do that less after a while, that reflexive thinking, because I have noticed that, you know, sometimes when I'm actually further from the bases, when I'm further from the world where folks actually know and love and care about and interact with soldiers on a regular basis, you'll actually see more of that sort of reflexive thinking and that like strange sense of caveating before they give any opinion by saying like, you know, I didn't serve and all that.
I understand some of that, but it can go a little far.
But people who spend a lot of time around troops, yeah, I've noticed that where they're like, yeah, like, I get it.
I know what they're really about.
I know how they feel.
And when you're a professional, and this is a volunteer force, and the people who stay in my peers, they're pros, you know, I always like will say, like, I felt like a mercenary by the time I got to Afghanistan, because I was fighting wars I was against, you know, and I was staying for bad reason.
Now, no, I'm not saying that all of my peers felt that they didn't.
I happen to I don't think that everyone necessarily should.
That's up to them.
But they definitely see themselves as pros like this is a job.
This is my career.
And, you know, I, I'm not a conscript, I know what I'm getting into, I don't need to talk about it all the time.
And so it doesn't surprise me what you're saying about somebody who's got a business outside hood or a place like that, because you kind of get the feel for soldiers after a while and get a sense for what matters to them, what makes them tick.
I mean, sometimes they don't, they don't want to always be a cliche.
They don't want to like be defined, just you know, some do don't go wrong.
There's, there's guys out there who like just can't get enough of it, but that's, that's the exception.
I'd say the vast majority that they don't want to be defined by what they did, what they do for a living, who they are.
I think most of the time that's just, it is just a job and we, and we should be honest about that.
And it doesn't mean that you disrespect the troops.
And actually what you were saying about how sometimes there's a, there are articles occasionally that are like blame this on the troops.
A lot of times those are actually written by the, by vets, which is interesting.
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
There's nobody else who dares say that, you know, really, or very rarely anyway, you know, there there's, I guess there are political radicals who might take that position, but I think you're right that that's mostly in fact, the only person who comes to mind that I'm thinking of who I can think of who said anything resembling that at all in recent memory, the former Marine.
I won't name him here.
Cause I don't know.
He'd probably want me to.
It's Adam Kokesh.
You know, he's the kind of guy who will say, no way, man, if you're a specialist, you're a grown man, you know what you're doing or, you know, whatever it is that would, I'm sure would be his position on that.
I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing him from, uh, you know, something on Twitter just the other day.
In fact, and he was there at Fallujah, which he, he wasn't fighting.
He was like in support at Fallujah, but you know, more or less same, same part of the same war.
Yeah.
And, and I, I do think that by a certain point in the wars for sure, I mean, we knew what we were involved in.
I felt complicit by the time I was in Afghanistan and, but at the same time, like you said, I really, I did give it my all.
I mean, even when I was against the overall war, I mean, at that point, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, I have some guilt about it.
And then other times I give myself a little grace on it.
I don't know.
But, but when I was there in 2011 in Kandahar, I didn't, I didn't think we should be doing what we were doing as a country, but I was there and I thought, well, what am I going to do in my district?
So it was a combination of definitely top priority in many ways was just walk away with as many of my guys as I could.
And there were times frankly, where I broke rules, I, I told lies, right?
Or I get half truths or omissions in order to minimize the number of missions that I was sending my guys on and all that.
But, but, but I was also still trying to bring as much stability as possible to the area, partly because if I could achieve that, then maybe there would be less violence and less of my guys would get hurt.
But I was still trying, you know, we, we did give our all.
It's not like we were just out there just slaughtering people or just hiding on the base.
It was always more complicated than that.
And it tends to be, it tends to be, but that, and that's part of the frustration is like, man, we were all in and, and people will criticize folks who criticize the war and then we'll forget to criticize people who created and then lied about this whole thing.
And that is frustrating.
Yeah.
Hey man, tell us a little bit more about this counterinsurgency doctrine and, you know, strategy as you were, was it already over?
I mean, this is right at the time you were there in Kandahar.
Were you implementing COIN or everybody's already rolling their eyes at this BS and we're just kind of escalating.
I mean, what did this look like to you?
And I guess, I mean, again, you know, I can't play devil's advocate too stupidly.
Like I don't know if the whole thing sounds ridiculous to me, but maybe there was something of an angle to these people really don't support the Taliban.
The Taliban might as well be foreigners to them really.
And that they would like for us to protect them and build up a separate security force to keep the Taliban away and that we could win their hearts and minds so that they'll accept you guys as the security force.
And then you guys can bring the Afghan national army in kind of to replace you.
And because look, the Taliban are a bunch of medieval goons who could possibly want them around.
So, you know, I'm trying to set up the parameters for belief that the surge might be a worthwhile policy to try in Kandahar, something like that, so that you can explain what it looked like when you tried it, sort of deal, you know?
Sure.
Well, it was still hot enough.
Petraeus had taken over.
McChrystal had already been fired.
Petraeus did this weird back step from what he had done in Iraq.
So when he takes over from McChrystal, he actually is a little less coin than McChrystal was.
He re-implements more airstrikes.
He takes away some of the limits on rules of engagement.
For all his BS, Petraeus did know that Afghanistan was a different country, I mean, in his heart than Iraq, and that the situation was different.
He knew he couldn't provide even the false gains at the level he could in Iraq, partly because there was no like Anbar awakening that was really capable of happening, although there were many efforts at that within certain tribes, and I was part of that.
It was still big.
It was.
What I ran into, though, was at least in Kandahar, and I think this was true in Helmand and Kunar and Nuristan, the really heavy casualty districts where the Taliban was popular, or at least very strong.
We were so busy trying to fight our way off our bases.
We were so busy having our towers attacked on the daily that it made it incredibly difficult and almost absurd to believe that we could do the hearts and minds coin, that we could do the separate the insurgents from the population, population-centric coin.
That's what I was always trying to tell my boss was, look, yes, I'm paying people who line up at my base every week to clean canals and paint the one road, paint the lines on the one road.
Yeah, I'm doing that, and you could say that that's like fueling the economy, and I would always say, look, the only reason I'm able to do that is because the Taliban stopped shooting us during payday because they're skimming off the top, because I'd say six days a week, sir, when we step off the base, every one of my patrols gets hit.
We're talking direct fire here, not just stepping on an IED, I mean ambush.
They were just contesting every single inch of space, and we really did only control the ground that we individually stood on, and we tried things.
We raised an Afghan local police so that we were the first conventional unit, non-special forces unit, although we had an A team with us to help, to stand up a Afghan local police unit, which was essentially a militia in our area, and we went and lived in the village that was essentially across the road from us.
The fact that that still got attacked every day, that little outpost, we called it a VSP, village stability platform, which was the mini base that we set up basically in one of the mud huts at the far end of this village called Charkusa, called the village stability platform because the official name for raising the ALP, for raising the Afghan local police in special forces lingo, was called the VSO program, the village stability operations.
This was the closest thing we had to what Petraeus had done or had built on, which was turning the tribes, turning some of the Sunnis against Al-Qaeda, so it never really picked up the same momentum.
I was never able to get more than, say, 20 recruits for that, and then who knew how many were showing up.
Coin was the language we used, but it bore almost zero resemblance to what we were doing in Kandahar and from what my friends and peers and superiors were doing in Kunar and in Nuristan and Helmand.
What we were really doing was fighting a guerrilla war, and so we never even, even at the height of the surge in those areas, most units never got to the coin stage.
It's like clear hold build is what they say.
You got to clear the area, you got to hold it, and then you got to build.
We really never got out of the clearing phase in most of those areas.
It was a big ...
That was a big lie.
We used the terminology of coin, and every boss that you ever ...
Every colonel had a brief what he was doing on the coin side to the generals.
Every week, everyone just made it up, acted.
We all just winked at each other like, yeah, that's what we're doing, but all of a sudden, on the ground, we're like, that's not really what we're doing.
I know that in order for my career to progress and to get out of here and please the colonels that he'll go away and stop flying to my base to yell at me, I know I have to tell him I'm doing that, but we never really were.
We never really were.
The whole coin thing there was ...
We never even really got into that phase.
Not in the contested areas.
How foreign were these Taliban guys that you were fighting?
Were they even from Helmand province next door, or they were from the Muslim part of India or something, or who were these guys?
Were they Kandaharis?
They were Kandaharis.
They were the cousins and the friends and the brothers of most of the people.
There would be reports of basically platoon leaders or company commanders in the Taliban who were from Pakistan, or some of them had come over from Helmand.
Again, remember, I was in the western, southwestern part of Kandahar province, so Lashkar Ghar was not that far away.
We weren't far from the border of Helmand, so I'm sure some of them were from Helmand, but every piece of intelligence that I got was that the foot soldiers, the vast majority, were local.
That's what this whole ...
Wasn't it ...
The narrative is that the Taliban are the invaders, and you are here to defend the people from the invaders, but that's obviously completely upside down, but no, that really becomes the premise of the whole mission, right, based on that?
It fits the narrative that the bosses wanted us to meet.
It didn't fit reality, but if you could say, look, the Taliban is really actually foreign, then it makes it plausible that you could do this coin thing, that you could divide them from the population, but that really never matched any sort of reality.
Like I said, there would be reports that some of them were foreign, but here's what I really noticed, because I did this thing called talking to the locals, partly just because I was fascinated by the place, just like I was in Iraq.
I wanted to know because I'm in this country.
I knew this was a profound moment in my life, and I'm interested in people, and I wanted to understand what the hell is happening around me.
I left both wars feeling like I really didn't understand, and I know for a fact I understood more than most.
I read more, and I talked more.
What I found was this.
If you got close enough to some of these people, especially some of the tribal leaders who work with us, they would eventually have some candor with you.
What they would say is, because remember, the narrative is the people hate this brutal medieval Taliban, and they really don't want them.
They're just scared of them.
If we could somehow wedge ourselves in between that, take away the fear and secure the people that we could win.
What I actually found for most people was twofold.
One, in a place like Kandahar, which is the birthplace, the home territory of the Taliban, the culture, most people kind of agreed with the Taliban view of the world.
They may not like all the violence.
They may not like the fact that they bury bombs and maybe don't mark them so well, because we had a lot of times where kids would step on these things.
That frustrated a lot of people.
They didn't love being taxed for their opium harvest, but they treated their wives the same way.
There was that element.
In many ways, their social program was pretty popular down there.
It may not have been popular in the cities.
It may not have been popular in all parts of the North, but in Kandahar, it sure was.
That was one element.
The other element was, they were seen as a stable force for law and order.
The thing is, we have the privilege of saying, oh, the Taliban is evil.
Here in America, where we have a vague democracy and some freedoms, and it's not just a chaotic civil war, but in war-torn societies where the place has been a mess for 40 plus years, they may not have that privilege.
I'll tell you, stability and order looks pretty good.
The Taliban had a reputation down where I was and in many parts of the country of being a fairer and swifter meter out of justice.
A lot of people would admit to me that they preferred the Taliban to be the mediators in disputes over goats and land and canals and water and the opium crop, than the corrupt officials, especially from the North, in the Afghan security forces, especially the army where a lot of them were Tajiks and Uzbeks, and even from some of the people down South.
Think about it, Karzai, President Karzai's brother, half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, ran the drug trade.
He was a drug kingpin in Kandahar at the same time that he was in charge of the place.
The people did not see the representatives of the Kabul government, even if they were local, as necessarily more just and less corrupt than the Taliban.
Those two elements, the fact that most people agreed with the social program of the Taliban, even if they didn't like the violence, and the fact they saw them as a better force for sort of order and justice and mediating disputes.
Until we recognized that and admitted it, then the whole idea of this coin program was never going to work.
Look, you know what, man?
My famous footnote for that is David Petraeus admitting that that was true.
I forgot if you and I had discussed that particular aspect before in your experience there, but every time I cite Petraeus from now on, I'm citing you with him.
That yeah, even Petraeus admitted it, but my guy Danny was a major over there at the time on the ground in Kandahar and said, that's exactly right.
And think about that.
How horrible and corrupt does our system have to be where people are saying to themselves, thank God the Taliban is here.
And how bad does that situation have to be where Petraeus knows it and even admits it as good and as well as you?
Petraeus on Afghanistan fascinates me.
You know, everything he says now is absurd.
I mean, every interview he gives, every statement he makes about the Afghan war is just like blame Biden.
But when he was there, when he had a run the joint, he had a far more realistic and nuanced view of it.
I mean, there's a lot of quotes from him.
There's a lot of accounts from people who worked with him.
He knew the deal.
He knew that we were in the fight of our lives and that we weren't able to implement the stuff that he wrote in his manual.
He co-wrote with Mattis 324, right?
That's the interesting thing about Petraeus is like when he was in the clutch in the breach and had to run that place, he was a lot more nuanced.
And I think that that speaks volumes.
Yeah.
I mean, he sent the head of JSOC, the hunter killer, to go do coin and then the hunter killer got fired.
And then Mr. Coyne came in and did hunting and killing instead of even trying it.
Right.
And the whole thing.
Coyne, in fact, you know, I think the records show if we check Michael Hastings and the timeline, I have to go back and look at the book, but I'm pretty certain that McChrystal had essentially, if not officially, canceled Coyne before he was fired and before Petraeus even was demoted to replace him.
Because after Marja, he said, yeah, that didn't work.
Marja's a bleeding ulcer.
And that was where because so many people had run off the Marines, it was like two Marines for every citizen, which is got your coin ratio way off the chart and still didn't accomplish a thing.
So that was supposed to be the first little mini test case before they went to Kandahar City.
And then they never even tried it in Kandahar City.
Right.
Did you know that there's that really, really interesting kind of powerful chapter in the Hastings book where some sergeant after like one of his buddies gets blown up, killed down in Zari district of Kandahar Province.
He writes an email and gets himself in trouble with his colonel and stuff.
He writes an email directly to McChrystal saying, you should come down here and see how your strategy is not working and how bad it is.
McChrystal agrees, and he goes down to this little outpost on the frontier in Kandahar Province.
And he walks a patrol with them.
And of course, nothing happens that day.
But when he has a sensing session, they call it, basically people are allowed to speak freely, supposedly, and air their grievances, like the enlisted guys got to talk to him.
And they were all like yelling at him and saying, like, you don't understand.
That was my base before I got there.
That was Kopp Pashmul South, Combat Outpost Pashmul South.
It was named something different because at the time it was named after dead soldiers.
But by the time I got there, they said all those base names after the soldiers who died there were getting rid of those and were giving them all local names.
That was my base.
And I took it over.
And so the fight hadn't changed.
I'm almost certain.
Oh, man, I'm sorry, it was 10 years ago now, but I'm almost certain that I interviewed Michael from that base.
And he told me that story before he wrote it in Rolling Stone.
I'm like, 90%, 95% sure that that's right.
That was my exact base.
I walked that exact patrol route.
I went to that exact whatever they called it, Ant Hill or whatever that exact like mound that you know.
It's depicted in the movie War Machine.
The Brad Pitt satire is based on The Operators.
And that's the book, everybody is The Operators by Michael Hastings.
And so he'd answer the phone at four in the morning Afghanistan time to do my show back then.
You know, I'd talk to him all the time while he was there.
When I first read that, you know, I was just blown away.
You know, thinking about what struck me is, when is that?
Was that oh nine or 10?
He's down there, right?
Yeah.
So I'm there in January of 11.
I get there on February of 11.
Actually, I visited in January.
I think the book must come out shortly after that, right?
It did.
Yeah.
Because I'd read it either while I was there or right when I got back.
But I remember reading it and just being like, okay, I took this thing over from, you know, the two units before was that unit.
And it was just as bad.
I mean, in other words, that whole COIN program, he's going to come in, he's going to change the war, the surge is going to turn the tide, it's going to change everything.
Well, okay, maybe in a few places there was some progress, but I can tell you for a fact is that in the heartland of the Taliban, the place that's depicted in that book, the place that McChrystal decided to go and prove and argue with the soldiers, because he's arguing with them in that scene, right?
He's going back and forth.
I'm like, they're yelling at him.
And he's like, no, this will work.
I get there a year and a half later.
And if it's not just as bad, it's worse.
We control no more ground.
We're still can't get out of our base without the same attacks.
And it was, it was demoralizing to read.
I'll tell you, I don't want to just personalize it, just, but I will say on a personal level, reading that, commanding that outpost, I couldn't help but be demoralized by the whole strategy and just blown away by it.
Yeah, man, what a hell of a thing.
And, you know, I'm sorry, you know, not to personalize on this side, but just from here, this is all the slowest motion train wreck.
This happens to be, I had great sources of what the hell's going on in the world since, you know, way back even before this century began.
So I never got roped into believing in this thing and was able, you know, never even mind the first decade of it.
Right.
But by the time they're coming around to launch in the surge and there were so many good people opposed to it.
You know, like Kelly Vallejos was writing for Antiwar.com like once or twice a week and focusing on the Coindenistas and all their conflicts of interest and how nonsensical all of their claims were for, you know, the entire year of 2009.
God dang, Obama didn't announce the surge until December 1st.
We spent the whole year saying, don't do this.
And Matthew Ho comes out and it's like, look, man, I just got back from Valley X, Y and Z. And let me tell you something, we should not do this surge.
This is crazy.
He was a Marine captain turned State Department official on a provincial reconstruction team over there.
And then the ambassador backed him up, kind of, and said, really, he's right.
You should not do this surge.
And then they did it anyway.
And here we are, 12 years later, talking about, yeah, that sucked.
And the Taliban rule Kabul again.
And just, you know, I keep people quote me now.
I like this.
I mean, it's not like just some gimmick or whatever.
I just always had said this.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Who are making these decisions?
Why is it like this when it clearly doesn't have to be?
And the proof it doesn't have to be is look at all the people who disagree with it.
You know, there was this guy, Colonel Gian Gentile, Giant Gentile.
I'm sure, you know, the guy who John John John Gentile, who's writing a you just pronounce it John.
For Christ's sake.
It's just like I'm sorry.
So he he he was he ran the American history or the military history division at West Point right before he got there.
She had just left.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was a colonel.
He was saying all the time.
Yeah.
He was saying, listen, man, I looked at the history books and they say that these guys are all wet.
This isn't going to work.
This is crazy.
That's all they had to do was the right thing.
You know what I mean?
They make it was there.
History is always written like, well, you know, that's how it played out.
But yeah.
But only because they made it this way when they clearly did not have to.
All Obama had to do was say, you know, my fellow Americans, let me introduce you to Matthew Ho.
He's a Marine Corps captain, decorated hero from Iraq, where to and and he's telling me don't do it, man.
Just got back from there.
It's not worth it.
And I believe him.
That's all he had to do.
And John McCain.
You know what?
I'd let you decide.
But you lost the election by 10 points a year ago, old man.
So screw you.
And Patrice and Gates, if you don't like it, you're fired.
That's all he had to do.
That's what I would have done.
That's what you know.
That's what John Gentile would have done.
You know.
Yeah.
I mean, he he was already saying he commanded a battalion in West Baghdad in like 06.
And he was already saying, you know, 708 or nine, you know, in the lead up to the Afghan search, you're saying two things when not a lot of people.
But as you mentioned, some important people were already saying it.
He was just one of them.
He was saying the surge in Iraq was snake oil, the surge in Iraq, even when no one, you know, at a time when that was not a particularly popular thing to say, he was saying, uh, no, this thing's not going to hold.
It's not what they're saying it is.
And it certainly isn't going to work in Afghanistan.
He's saying that from uniform as a full colonel in uniform at West Point running one of the divisions of the history department.
He wasn't saying it like out of uniform.
You know, you have this degree of academic freedom when you're on the staff there, especially if you're a permanent professor like he was at that point.
You could actually get away with a little bit more critique while you're on staff there.
It's like a weird hybrid.
There's like a policy.
So anyway, he's saying that right out of Baghdad, full professor in the history of West Point.
You know, he's not like in veterans for peace, you know, grabbing the mic.
And you know, Spencer Ackerman's recent book, which, which I'm, uh, I'm finishing up right now.
He's going to come on our podcast pretty soon over Fort Stonehill.
It's called Reign of Terror.
And the way he summarized that, that was really well put.
He mentions a lot of stuff you and I have about the Afghan surge real quick here cause we got to wrap up.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
He, he, he basically says this, this surge, no one really believed in it.
Even the people who are touting it, like nobody really believed it was going to work.
And he shows that pretty demonstrably.
Oh, and he was great on it back then too.
And I'm not his biggest fan for various reasons, but I do respect him, but he was really good on reporting during Afghanistan, during the surge back 10 years ago.
No way to deny him the credit for that, you know, for sure.
But anyway, listen, I'm sorry.
I just like talking to you and I didn't realize how late we are here and got to run, but thank you so much for doing the show again, Danny.
Appreciate it, bud.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Always a great talk.
All right, you guys, that's the great Danny Sherson.
He's at, it should be antiwar.com slash Danny, but I don't think it is.
Is it?
No, it's Danny underscore Sherson and just use a J instead of an H, but it's just Sherson.
Antiwar.com slash Danny underscore Sherson.
And the latest here is the perils of forgetting, learn it from the Afghan war or repeat it.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
