Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw 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, you guys on the line.
I've got Matthew Ho.
He's from the Center for International Policy.
And as you probably know, he was a Marine in Iraq War II.
And then he was working for the State Department in the Afghan war just before the surge of 2009 through 12 there in the early Obama years.
And he was a whistleblower in the summer of 2009, trying to stop that surge and warning that it's not worth it.
It can't work.
It won't work.
And so you shouldn't do it.
It'll just get people killed for nothing.
So now here we are.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing, sir?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
Thanks for having me on again.
I'm really happy to have you here and happy to be able to rely on you for your great analysis of the situation.
What's your analysis of the situation?
Well, I mean, I think it's you know, you got to go back to what you get taught in your international relations 101 class in college.
Right.
That point of foreign policy is always domestic politics.
And so I think what you see here is, you know, Trump trying to live up to a campaign promise.
And so there's going to be a deal to withdraw troops in Afghanistan.
It's very similar to I think you can look back and say, this is kind of like how Nixon did it.
You know, you escalate the war.
This is also what Obama wanted, you know, that we're going to escalate the war.
And then we're going to get a peace process or a negotiation or some way to say that we've won, get the troops out.
And then there'll be a decent interval before Kabul falls or before, you know, Saigon falls.
And we can blame it on those, you know, on the Afghans for not being able to hold it together.
So I think ultimately that's what it comes to.
It reminds me a lot, too, of what we saw in, you know, 1989 with the Soviet Union withdrawn, where it was the Soviet Union got out, but there was not a peace agreement for the rest of the war.
And the war continued for another three years until, you know, until the Soviet Union collapsed, basically.
And then the communist government in Kabul couldn't hold on any longer, and they descended into civil war.
And so I think it's very similar to that as well, where the goal is to get Trump to be able to say that he has done what Bush and Obama couldn't do.
I mean, very seen at Pompeo, Secretary of State Pompeo saying the war has been successful.
They're already lining up all the arguments that why we've won, you know.
And then the main thing being is, OK, you get the American troops out, the foreign troops out, because there's about 14,000 U.S. troops there and about 5,000 or 6,000 NATO troops there.
You get them out.
But then what happens?
Do you have some kind of peace agreement, some type of peace settlement, some type of power sharing, whatever, to try and end this war that, you know, as we all know, goes back to the 70s?
This thing didn't begin in 2001.
This thing began, you know, in 1973 when they deposed the king.
So, you know, I think that's where we're at.
But it's a good thing that the talks are going on.
It's a good thing that U.S. forces are withdrawing, that the Taliban have agreed to cease fire in a couple of provinces.
And we don't know anything about—everything we know is leaked.
The Khalilzad, the American envoy who had been, who's an arch neoconservative, goes back decades.
He had been ambassador to Afghanistan around 2004, 2005, 2006.
Then he became ambassador to Iraq.
He's holding the details very closely, supposedly.
President Ghani of Afghanistan doesn't even have a copy of the deal himself.
So—but it's a good thing if this actually does bring about some degree of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and that then extends into a greater ceasefire.
Because from what I understand right now, the agreement is pull 5,000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops out over the next five months or so in exchange the Taliban will stop attacks in Kabul and in Paiwan province.
And that leads into the next stage of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Yeah.
Man, all right.
So there's so much here.
First of all, I haven't seen anything—and I'm probably under investigation by the FBI now for as much time as I spend on the Taliban's website looking for a statement saying that, yeah, the reports are correct.
We are agreeing to a deal that's going to have 5,000 out in, say, two or three months, and then we'll see about the rest of the soldiers maybe leaving in another year or a year and a half?
Because what a climb down from them, even though they have been on a rampage, killing soldiers, killing cops, setting off suicide bombs, killing American soldiers as well.
And as they said the other day, yeah, well, we're trying to negotiate from a position of strength.
You know, the Americans, they only understand one thing, force.
And so that's the way it goes, right?
And so I still haven't seen their confirmation here, and I'm kind of dubious about where we're at here.
They're announcing that the deal is essentially done from this side.
But anyway, I just—I guess I'm not denying it, but it just doesn't seem right to me that they're going to agree to something like that after all this time of refusing to capitulate at all.
Essentially, they've demanded unconditional surrender from America this whole time.
Now they're going to put it off?
Are they going to give them 18 months?
Well, the idea being I remember I met with a guy who was an interlocutor for them back in 2011 or so, and he explained to me that this is how it worked in 88, 89 with the Soviet Union.
It was a phased withdrawal.
The Taliban aren't so—the leadership at that point—and this again now, but what I'm saying here, what I'm quoting from the conversation I had, you know, that's eight years ago already.
And, you know, the Taliban, as we know, have seen changes in leadership.
They've been fragmented.
There's been splinter groups.
There's now the Islamic State, which is a threat to the Taliban, and they're fighting each other constantly, as well as the Islamic State conducting suicide attacks and killing civilians.
That the Taliban aren't so unrealistic to think that all the American troops are just going to get up one day, all get on planes and leave, that there is a logistics to it.
You just can't possibly move out that many people that quickly.
But there's also, too, that you have to allow the other side to do what it needs to do to achieve its part in negotiations.
So I'm not so concerned that the Taliban haven't said anything about it.
You know, I mean, they've been fighting for, you know, four decades now, some of them, and they're tired of the fighting, but they're not going to surrender.
And it's interesting how things have turned.
I mean, for most of the previous 18 years that the United States has had ground forces in Afghanistan and been waging this war there, the United States has come to the Taliban or have said, basically, the only way we're talking with you is if you surrender.
I mean, for most of the last 18 years, the preconditions for the U.S. to talk was that the Taliban lay down their arms and accept the Afghan government, which is basically saying, hey, you need to surrender before we talk to you.
And then because the Taliban never accepted those preconditions, there were never really any real talks.
There were some starts of talks in the Obama years, but nothing really happened.
And then Trump comes in the office.
He escalates the war.
We're dropping more bombs than at any time in the last 18 years.
We're killing more Afghans than any time in the last 18 years.
And then some point last year, late last year, he decides he's going to talk.
And the reason the talks occur is because we just talk.
I mean, and that's the shame and the tragedy of this, that for the last 18 years, these talks really could have occurred at any time.
The precondition for the talks was always setting up U.S. victory.
And now you have a case, though, where you have an American president who, for his own political reasons, wants to end the war there.
And so it is.
You have this reversal, as you pointed out, where the Taliban are kind of demanding surrender.
But we'll see.
I mean, they they've always held their cards fairly close.
I've not looked at their Web site as thoroughly as like I used to.
And I don't look at the regional press, the Pakistani or the Afghan or the Iranian press, where a lot of times, you know, when I was there, we used to have analysis of it or we said translations of the regional press.
And you would see the Taliban.
Well, the Pakistanis had a piece, and I forget if it was Dawn or the which which one, saying that they're taking it before the Shura Council, which is sure to rubber stamp it essentially.
Yeah, was the piece.
So I guess I would just so far we're not hearing anything about a specific timeline for the end of the withdrawal.
And they're saying, well, it's conditions based and all of this, which that's what I would be surprised.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they agreed to something that had a definitive timeline for a year or even more.
But yeah, I think Trump's going to want to have something by the time the general election rolls around to say that he did this.
Although I don't.
But but, you know, as we've seen with the Democratic primary debates so far, there's been almost no talk of the war.
But any of the wars that we're in, any of the 15 or 22 or however many, depending on how you count them, conflicts we're in right now where, you know, young American boys and girls are killing other people and being killed themselves.
Well, in fact, the head of the House, the Democrat head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is demanding that Khalilzad come and testify because, hey, listen, if we're going to leave, oh, that's great.
Everybody wants peace.
But we have to finish winning the mission first, of course, and make sure that the government in Kabul is going to be fine and all the women are going to be fine and everything's going to be fine.
We can't end the war before that.
Yeah, you know, I mean, this this is another another example of what, you know, a lot of people call, you know, the Trump derangement syndrome.
And, you know, I haven't like I grew up in the New York area, you know, right outside New York City.
So I've not liked Trump for as long as I've been alive, you know, and I'm, you know, really pretty far left and everything.
So, you know, but the it reminds me of just, you know, a couple of years ago or a year or two ago when he was talking with the North Korean leader Trump and everybody was, you know, the Democrats put forward a motion that U.S. troops could not be withdrawn from South Korea.
Basically, we can't end that war.
You know, it's nuts because I was reading that we just talked about how Elliot Engel, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House, you know, is threatening the subpoena.
And some of his comments were, yeah, they would rather their political elements.
So, yeah, I mean, it's again, it goes back to everything's being driven by domestic politics in this country.
And just I would assume the same there's considerations on the other side, the Taliban side.
But the Taliban, they I think they need to, if they're going to continue to control the parts of the country and expand their control of the country, they need to show that they can deliver as well.
So they have their own constituency.
They have their own group that they want to be the leadership of within Afghanistan.
They have to show that they can actually get things done and deliver themselves.
And so, you know, as I said earlier, 10 years ago, the Taliban were, while they weren't monolithic at all, the Quetta Shura did control and did have a good say in what the Taliban did.
And then as the U.S. surge happened, that leadership got fragmented a bit.
And so now you've seen, I think you've seen a coalescing within the Taliban leadership within the last couple of years.
But I think, again, they really have to deliver on something for their own people, their own faction, their own fighters who they've promised that they will win the war for.
So and I think with the conditions, you know, I mean, I think this is the way it goes.
You withdraw troops.
The Taliban hold up to its agreement to have, again, this is all based upon leaks because we haven't seen the document yet.
If the Taliban hold up to its side of the bargain to not wage attacks in two provinces, and then hopefully, I mean, the next step is this intra-Afghan peace process, you know, where the Taliban sit down with Ghani's government.
Presumably Ghani wins the presidential election this month if that doesn't get delayed or whatever again.
So, you know, from the American side, what you would say is that, well, we withdraw 5,000 and if those talks don't go, then we still have 9,000 troops there and we'll send 5,000 back again.
I think that's the way that you would look at it as a negotiator.
Now, Khalilzad is, you know, I'm not surprised that Engel is threatening to subpoena him.
Khalilzad, I guess, has never gone before Congress, even though he's been invited to go before Congress.
And I remember him from his time when he was ambassador, both with Afghanistan and then Iraq, and he feels that he works only for the president.
And he will, he never talked, when he was ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, he caused all kinds of headaches at the State Department because he never talked to anyone at the State Department.
He felt he had a direct line to George Bush, and that's the only person he would talk to.
Well, in this case, he really is a presidential envoy.
He doesn't work for Pompeo.
And I think as we spoke about this, I think last time I was on, you know, a bunch of months ago, we spoke about this, that Khal, if anyone's to deliver a peace deal, you need to have, or sometime agreement, you need to have someone who's got the type of hubris and arrogance and personality disorder that Khalilzad has.
This is the author, one of the authors of the defense planning guidance of 1992.
So I think that's about as arrogant as you could ever get.
And who's able to flip around, who was like this arch neoconservative, who, if he wasn't in this job right now, would be writing in the Wall Street Journal, decrying the withdrawal of American forces, how it was isolationist and it was weak, and how the, you know, the planes are going to take off right away and attack us again, and it's going to be another 9-11.
You know, if he wasn't the envoy right now, that's what he would be saying.
And you know what, I guess he's not in this position yet, but soon he should be in the position of publicly defending this deal and selling it to his fellow neoconservatives.
And he really did study under Leo Strauss with Wolfowitz and then back at the University of Chicago, or Wolfowitz was under Wollstetter, but it was Libby and all those guys studied under Leo Strauss and he was one of them back then.
So it should be on him to sell this to the rest of the Hawks.
And so here's the thing of it, right?
The Hawks can't stand this.
I'm sure you saw in the Atlantic, they wrote this giant thing, all these former officials saying that, look, this is defeat.
That's what they're saying on Fox News.
Brit Hume was saying, man, this is defeat.
There's nothing else you can call it.
But that is what it is.
Exactly.
So in other words, though, think of how much easier, at least it should be if Israel wasn't involved, to leave Syria once the Islamic State is destroyed and we're no longer backing al-Nusra Front and all that Obama year policy.
So we ought to be able to say, OK, Islamic State's defeated, we can go.
But in Afghanistan, yeah, no.
The Taliban won and we're leaving and we hope they don't kill everybody in Kabul and take it, but hey, they might.
And who's going to stop them?
Not us.
And it's ugly as hell.
And that was why in my book I said we shouldn't even deal.
We should just go and then just look away, because how are you going to get the Americans to agree and really shake hands with the Taliban, solidifying a deal where they win?
You know, that's like rolling out the red carpet for Ho Chi Minh.
Yeah.
They won't do it.
They'll rather kill everybody than ever.
But so maybe I'm wrong about that.
But that's what Donald Trump is up against.
The Hawks are going nuts over this.
Yeah.
And I think that the deal is, though, is like it's Trump's consideration and his belief is that there'll be a decent interval, you know, just like Nixon did in Vietnam, where there'll be a couple of years before and kind of like what happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left, you know, where, you know, it's the Ghani government or whoever holds on for a while.
And I actually saw today an op-ed I read from somebody arguing for U.S. withdrawal.
They put it on the Afghans.
The Afghans in 18 years haven't been able to deliver on what we've given them.
That's the line that's being used, you know, that we gave the Afghans all kinds of chances.
And it's their fault that this war hasn't been won.
What's that?
It's the plurality ethnic population of the country refusing to be ruled from what we call the capital city.
And it's amazing.
Before we go into the country in 2001, newspapers and people talking about Afghanistan described it as a civil war.
As soon as we got involved, like the use of the term civil war was completely shunned.
Because that implies that, as you were saying, that we are up against a plurality, right, that the Pashtun people.
And what I've noticed too, more so than in Iraq, there's almost, there's very little acknowledgement in the United States and Western media about the ethnic splits within the country that define this war.
In Iraq, I felt that like there was much more conversation about Shia versus Sunni.
But with the Afghanistan conversation, there's very little conversation about how the Taliban, more or less, you know, it's not a perfect description, but more or less are representing that plurality, those Pashtun people, like, as you said, Scott, who don't want to be ruled.
You know, but I think I get exasperated, and I'm sure you do as well when people ask me about this war now, you know, and you were saying this long before I was saying it, I started saying in 2009, you were saying this long before that, you know, like, don't do this.
Because it's not winnable.
And what are you going to end up with?
And this is what, you know, you've been saying for 18 years, or however long you've been saying, and I've been saying it for 10 years now.
What do you expect is going to happen?
You know, I don't have a good answer to give you right now about the war, because I said 10 years ago, don't do this.
What do you think of when I said don't do this?
I meant, you know, I mean, it's going to end up to a position where it's just going to be an awful situation, where there are no good answers.
And so like, as you just said, yeah, the best thing possible is get the foreign involvement out.
So at least, at least the foreign involvement out, that takes away that part of the insurgency that's based upon a resistance to occupation by a foreign power.
So at least you've taken, you know, one log off the fire.
But yeah, there's no good options here.
You know, the best thing you can do is try and get ceasefires, try and get some negotiated settlements, try and stop the amount of money and amount of weapons moving into the conflict, you know, and hopefully a peace process can come about.
Because I do feel that, and I feel too that the Taliban are the ones that are more sincere about it than the Afghan government is.
Because the Afghan government, you know, as you've written about, as you've spoken about so well, is everyone, you know, knows, is a kleptocracy.
It's a complete, you know, it's a palace of crooks.
You know, they're warlords, they're war criminals, they're drug lords.
They're the ones who are going to lose out if the war comes to an end.
So, you know, I do believe that the Taliban have at least some degree to be more sincere about achieving some kind of peace, even if that peace means that they've taken Kabul and they've reestablished the Islamic Emirate.
Should be.
I mean, hey, if they listen to me, then, hey, you got all of Pashtunistan.
Take that and you can still be Afghanistan.
You don't have to break the state apart.
But how about everybody has a hell of a lot of autonomy instead of trying to have this central government and everybody can work on peace from there?
I mean, you know, people make this mistake often.
And I think maybe I'm making it here.
Maybe it's not one in this case that people conflate extreme violence with like instability.
Like if these Taliban are willing to continue these ruthless suicide attacks and slaughtering, you know, innocent people along with the soldiers they're near and all this kind of thing, then they would probably keep doing something crazy and go ahead and try to take over the whole rest of the country as they were doing in the 1990s and early 2000s before we intervene there.
Because why not?
It's not like we should trust them to do the right thing, but it should be that they should be smart enough, though, to know that essentially they got everything how they want it.
Why take the capital?
You know, why go through what they went through in the 90s with a giant civil war over the capital?
Well, the civil war that they came in to end finally in 96 and were welcomed in back then.
But anyway, it just seems like it's a good place for everyone to call time out and make a tree.
You know what?
I cite you all the time, actually, because you said the most optimistic thing about this to me, which was that the Pakistanis and the Saudis and the Americans back in the 90s were encouraging the Taliban to keep going and were helping to finance them.
And wanted them to win the civil war outright.
The Clinton administration, they didn't even want a peace settlement.
They wanted an outright Taliban victory for their policy of a true monopoly state there that could protect their pipeline from Turkmenistan.
But so they don't have that this time.
And presumably if the Americans have their act together at all and you got Imran Khan, who seems like a pretty reasonable guy to me, is the new guy in Pakistan now that America could say, hey, we're going to really you're going to help us strongly encourage the Taliban to quit while they're ahead or something like that, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, everything I know about the Taliban taking control of most Afghanistan in the late 90s comes from, you know, it was based upon Pakistani rupees.
You know that that's how they did it, that they they won a lot of battles, but they bought off a lot more people.
And somebody provided them with all those Toyota pickup trucks that they drove around it.
And the population of the capital really were willing to give them a chance if they were going to replace Massoud finally.
Absolutely.
And you read...
They don't have that going for them this time at all.
No, no, they don't.
But the idea being that that, as you said, they could they could, if they take what they have now, they've essentially won to a degree.
Pakistan as well.
I mean, the whole the Western understanding of this, of what Pakistan wants is they want that safe space, that cushion in Afghanistan to do whatever they need to do in case of a war with India.
That extends kind of and they get that with Pashtunistan as an easy way to describe it.
You know, one thing about as people keep saying about how the Taliban, well, you can't trust them.
They're talking, but they're still killing people everywhere.
We're doing the same thing, too.
We're dropping more bombs.
We're killing more Afghan civilians than at any other time.
We're killing more.
According to the U.N., more Afghans are being, which is always kind of a fuzzy number anyway, but more Afghans are being killed by U.S. and Afghan government forces than by the Taliban now.
Well, the total numbers of airstrikes and everything is greater than at the height of the Obama surge in 2011.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, so we're just as we're we're we're we're talking out of both sides of our mouth, I guess, if that's how you want to describe it.
But that's different.
We're exceptional and they're not.
I know.
I know that the heresy that that is being spoken right now is just.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, man, I'm sorry.
I got to go.
But I love talking with you.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Matthew.
You bet, Scott.
And for those listening, if you haven't read Scott's book, Fool's Aaron, I get intimidated coming on, Scott, because, you know, you know, more you know about, you know, just as much about this as everybody else does or more.
Right.
I mean, and if you haven't read Scott's book, Fool's Aaron, you want to understand how we got to this point in Afghanistan.
Read that book.
It's a fantastic book.
Well, yeah.
And you're only saying that, though, because there's a whole section about you in there.
But OK, I'll take it.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Matthew Ho.
The Center for what is it again?
Center for International Policy.
Of course.
Of course.
The Center for International Policy.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
You have a good one.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Aaron, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Aaron dot US.
