For Pacifica Radio, September 12th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
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I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and the author of the book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
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Introducing our guest, antiwar.com news editor, Dave DeCamp.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Dave?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Happy to have you here.
20 years into the terror war, and man, do we still have a lot to cover here.
And let's start with Afghanistan, where we no longer have combat troops on the ground, I guess, not even special operations command, but we do still have a rapidly developing situation with the aftermath of America's withdrawal and including at least promises of continued American intervention there.
So I guess let's start with the Taliban announcing the creation of their new government and wrapping up, am I right, of the conflict in the Panjshir Valley, which would make it official that they truly control at least nominally a hundred percent of Afghanistan now?
Yeah, that's right.
So the Taliban say that they've taken over Panjshir Valley, which was the last, the only little pocket of resistance that sprung up.
Now, some of the, you know, resistance leaders, Ahmad Massoud, the son of the late Mujahideen commander, he's still, you know, saying he's going to fight on.
It's not clear where he is.
Him and Amrullah Salah, he was the last vice president for the US-backed government under Ashraf Ghani.
They're both somewhere in Afghanistan.
It's not really clear where.
And then Massoud has an uncle who's in Europe, I think Switzerland, and he's saying a lot of stuff, but it seems like for the most part it is over.
And now are Dostum, General Rashid Dostum and Mohammed Atta Noor, are they still part of the group in Panjshir?
Not that I'm aware of, I'm not sure.
Okay, go ahead.
But yes, so since they won that little battle there, the Taliban have announced a new government that they say is a caretaker government, it's temporary, and it's all made up of Taliban members, some on US sanctions lists.
And a lot of people are criticizing it saying, because they've promised to form an inclusive government that includes other political elements in Afghanistan or other ethnic groups, because they're, I mean, they're all Taliban members, so I assume that they're all Pashtun.
So the acting prime minister is Mohammed Hassan Akhund, and he has been, you know, he was close to Mullah Omar back in the day, in the 90s, he's been around a while, he's under UN sanctions.
But they're all Pashtuns and Taliban, right?
Or did I read there's one Tajik and the rest are all Pashtuns?
There might be, from what I understand, it's all Pashtuns.
Yeah.
So that's got to be making a lot of people nervous, you know, for what their intentions are.
You know, I had read in the past quite a bit about this lady, Ashley Jackson, who's been writing quite a bit for the papers the last few weeks.
I had read her thing before about one of their, you know, really smart moves in the last few years was bringing in more Tajiks and Uzbeks and even Hazaras, who are Shiites, into their kind of shadow government.
But I guess at least so far, it seems like that only goes so far.
Yeah, I was surprised because it seemed, because up to this point, their PR has been pretty good, I thought maybe they would name some kind of token, you know, minorities or throw Karzai, you know, somewhere in there.
But there's, you know, they say it's temporary, the Taliban spokesman says that they're going to take people from around the country to form other cabinet positions.
And then for the US side of things, the, you know, some of these guys are under US sanctions, the Interior Minister, he was the leader of the Haqqani Network, which is blacklisted as a, you know, international terror organization by the US.
He's wanted by the FBI.
He has a bounty on his head for $5 million.
And interestingly, I saw today that the Taliban are accusing the US of violating the Doha agreement, which was the deal that paved the way for the withdrawal, because if you read the deal, it says that after intra-Afghan negotiations start, the US will work to lift sanctions on Taliban members.
You know, of course, the US is going to say, well, there's no law, you know, you guys took power, there's no Afghan government, but technically the deal, it didn't require a power sharing deal, it just required that the Taliban enter these talks, you know, and that's what the deal is about.
But it was vague, so I don't expect that the US to be like, oh, you got us, I guess we'll lift sanctions.
Yeah.
But, uh, you know, I've been seeing the Hawks.
We got to address this, Dave, you know, um, Bill Roggio from the Long War Journal is, and others are on this kick that see Haqqani equals Zawahiri.
And this is the big, you know, connection between al-Qaeda and the Taliban still is, look, they're friends with Haqqani.
And Haqqani is friends with al-Qaeda, but they never demonstrate it.
All they ever do is refer to these stupid UN reports.
Oh, Dave, there's a UN report that says al-Qaeda is running around there and that Haqqani is good friends with them all.
But then if you read the UN reports, that's all they say.
Oh yeah.
Haqqani is running around with them all, but they don't say anything else about it.
There's no details at all.
They don't name names and they just say, oh, they're friends with al-Qaeda.
So in other words, the UN didn't do any investigation, but this is a pretty powerful narrative that, oh, look, they're breaking the deal when all they're doing is, I mean, Haqqani's been partners with the Taliban all this time.
He's been part of the insurgency since they refused to accept his surrender back in 2003.
Yeah.
And you would think, you mentioned, what's his name?
Bill Roggio with the FDD, the Long War Journal.
Yeah.
I mean, during the whole Taliban takeover, they were following stuff real closely on the ground.
It seems like they had a pretty good grip of what was going on.
Yeah.
Like you would think that if they really thought this, they would have some information, something to back it up with.
I know.
And then it's always just, oh yeah, UN reports.
But anyway, I'm sorry, cause I interrupted you with all that spiel when you were going through more members of the Taliban government and what they were doing.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Well, I was just going to say that from the, for the US side of it you know, it's going to kind of be interesting to see how the US engages in the new, with this new government and we had today there's the first civilian flight left the Kabul airport since the US finished its military withdrawal and there were some US citizens on it and the White House, the NSC spokeswoman, Emily Horn, she put out this statement that said that it you know, the Taliban cooperated and let's see how she put it.
She said, they have shown flexibility.
They've been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them.
This is a positive first step.
So you know, of course the Hawks are jumping on this, but you know, they're you know, of course the Hawks are jumping on this and are all mad about how the White House is talking about the Taliban.
But for me, I think this, it's kind of a good sign because right now, besides the sanctions on the individual Taliban leaders, the US has also frozen, you know, 7 billion in Afghan reserves, which is kind of desperately needed money for the country that wants to try to rebuild after 20 years of war.
So I just hope, you know, from the US side of it, I think the best thing to happen would be the US to kind of recognize and engage with the Taliban instead of try to put them under crushing sanctions.
Yeah, I mean, talk about being a sore loser, right?
I mean, go ahead.
They want, oh, we're going to not recognize that they're the government of Afghanistan.
Well, let me ask you, are they the government of Afghanistan?
In which case, if the answer is yes, then what are you proving by not recognizing that other than that you'd like to throw temper tantrums after you lose, you know?
And we don't have to give them aid, but yeah, give them their money that actually, you know, allegedly belongs to the sovereign state of Afghanistan.
Return that to them and and be open with them for future business.
Of course, we're talking about our national government, right?
So they're not looking to just get along in the world.
They want to suborn the Taliban to their purposes, right?
They want to go back to the 1990s when Bill Clinton thought it was a great idea to help put these guys in power in the first place to help secure our interests.
And the two obvious ones would be one fighting ISIS and two.
Joining with and backing Chinese ISIS, and that's what I'm most worried about.
If you look at back at the Trump years, Mike Pompeo took the East Turkestan Islamic movement off the terrorist list for a reason.
But then again, you know, the Afghan Taliban's in tight with Pakistan and they're in tight with China.
I don't know exactly the state of Taliban China relations there, at least on speaking terms.
And the Taliban would be insane.
To now ally with the Democrats like the Clinton years to train up Uyghurs against China.
I mean, that but I could see, you know, the Americans pushing really hard for that.
But I don't know if they'll get away with that, but I guess the more immediate danger is that they'll get Taliban permission to help them continue fighting against the Islamic State forces there.
But I don't buy that, that that's going to happen.
I don't see the Taliban saying yes to that.
So there's a lot of talk about that.
But yeah, they said they don't want help from the U.S. to fight any terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
So I mean, the way politics work here, Dave, is Biden had to say, don't worry, everybody.
I swear to God, we're going to leave mercenaries and CIA and special ops and airpower.
We're just pulling out the troops, but we're going to continue killing people there.
So don't be too critical of me for withdrawing.
You know what I mean?
That was essentially the narrative, because if he just said we're quitting this war and I mean it, instead of being hoisted up on everybody's shoulders, he'd be, you know, the greatest scorn in D.C.
So they had to come up, you know, with this kind of argument that don't worry, we're going to keep intervening.
But that seems to count on the idea that they would still have a government in Kabul that would invite that to happen now that the Taliban controls the whole country.
It seems like that's a pipe dream.
And I don't think the Taliban need their help when it comes to killing ISIS guys.
I mean, what do they have but small arms, whereas the Taliban has a brand new military.
You know, they got trucks and tanks and howitzers now.
So.
Yeah, like you said, you know, a big result of that suicide attack at the Kabul airport that killed U.S. troops and a ton of Afghans, death tolls over 100 people.
Biden bombed Afghanistan on the way out and the drone strike that he that they launched in Kabul killed 10 civilians, according to the witnesses on the ground that seems to be correct.
Based on all the reports I've read about it, they've spoken to all the big, you know, the Associated Press, CNN, Al Jazeera, just all the big media that was there, pictures and everything.
And the U.S. claims it was an ISIS-K guy that they killed.
But I think that's just totally bogus.
So and they launched another airstrike in Nangarhar in a rural area.
So who knows?
The Pentagon said it killed ISIS-K planners, but they didn't release any names or details.
So it could have been another case where they just blew away a bunch of civilians.
So this is what if the U.S. continues the drone war in Afghanistan, that's what it's going to look like.
And the Taliban, they don't want anything to do with that, especially if the people know that the Taliban are working with the Americans.
Yeah, that would really undermine their credibility, you know, in power, for sure.
So I don't think they want anything to do with it.
And they said, it was the other day, one of the spokesmen, there's a few of them, I keep forgetting all their names, but he said that we don't want help from the U.S. or any other country to fight what they call terrorists inside Afghanistan, obviously referring to ISIS.
But, you know, the U.S., they're still kind of desperate to hang on.
And there is a report in Politico I read that the Navy expects to be continuing some airstrikes from aircraft carriers that are in the North Arabian Sea.
There's two aircraft carriers that were deployed there for the for the withdrawal and they're still there.
Kind of like I think they want to keep the drone war going.
But I don't think, yeah, like you said, without the permission from the Taliban, I don't think that they're going to do it.
So it seems like and as far as we know, there's a chance special ops could be somewhere in Afghanistan or CIA.
We'll never really know that.
But it seems like the war is like actually over, which is pretty amazing.
I think we all expected some level of conflict to keep going.
OK, hang on just one second.
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Yeah, I mean, they just I guess it was the second or third thing they did was seize the north of the country and head off the Tajiks and the Hazaras and the Uzbeks off at the pass there and prevent them from creating that northern enclave.
And then you had the Panjshir Valley, but they're just outnumbered completely.
And so and at this point, as you said, the Americans are getting along with the Taliban and it would not be in their interest to start supporting with a bunch of money and weapons the resistance to them in Panjshir.
That's just going to ruin the cooperation they are getting so far.
And they still have American civilians, you know, that they've left behind here.
And by the way, there's a new Air Wars report about civilian casualties out in that Air Wars dot org about airstrike casualties in Afghanistan and the rest of the countries, too.
And there's a new report by Anand Gopal in The New Yorker about civilian casualties down in the Helmand province.
And there's a new was that the what did he the other Afghan women?
Yeah, it's a great.
Yeah, great piece.
Really long, like 20,000 words, but totally worth it.
And then Jack Murphy has this piece at Connecting Vets that's all about the the Trump years, Trump era, air war, drone and airplane air war, particularly in the Helmand province in the Trump era.
And it's just devastating.
I mean, they're just killing civilians all day long.
Anybody with what looks like it might be an antenna has a radio and is therefore a dead man and just is really bad stuff.
And, you know, all coming out here just kind of, you know, as the cap on the war, this is how America's war in Afghanistan went.
There's the absolute is the most fitting thing in the world, you know, as horrible as it is.
I'm not saying it ain't horrible, but I'm just saying it fits perfectly that the war ends with a massive suicide attack and then a reprisal drone strike that kills innocent people on the way out the door.
But like, yeah, if you wrote the book on Afghanistan, this is how it would end if, you know, you didn't publish it four years ago.
Yeah, you know, the past few years in Afghanistan have been the deadliest for civilians, like since the war, yeah, yeah.
And Trump dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2018 and 2019 than any year since they've been keeping track of the amount of munitions.
More than the surge since 2006, they started keeping track.
Yeah, that was part of this story was even while they're negotiating, they have a ceasefire while they're negotiating.
They're still doing airstrikes in the name of putting pressure on the Taliban to cooperate more in the talks.
And another thing people like probably didn't understand, only people that really followed this stuff closely, is that for years, U.S. and Taliban officials were meeting and shaking hands and talking like it's not like the cooperation of the Taliban.
I mean, of course, the idea of them being our security at the at the airport is like bizarre.
But, you know, it's not really that crazy because of the talks, the negotiations and they had every they had every interest for that to go smoothly and for it to still go smoothly for now, as there are some Americans left.
And, you know, we can't say what's going to happen in the next few years.
But right now, especially after reading that New Yorker piece, it's like you realize that the the state of the country now, it's more peaceful and it's been a long time.
So hopefully, you know, the Taliban, I'm sure, aren't going to be nice, but hopefully there's not a major civil war.
It doesn't seem like there's going to be.
Yeah, well, and we'll see how it goes.
They've got a lot of warlords to keep assimilated into their order and they're going to demand certain degrees of autonomy and then they're going to fight or not based on whether they get it.
And so it's one thing to be an insurgency.
It's another thing to be a federal government of a state the size of Texas, as Khamenei Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.
They'll tell you it's not that easy.
So, you know, we'll we'll see.
But they certainly have a hell of a challenge on their hands.
And, you know, I don't know, too.
I think, yeah, I think it's going to be pretty ugly.
I've been predicting the worst for a long time and maybe I'm just used to it.
But I think that, you know, as we talked about before, they've set up this new exclusivist kind of a posh tune regime to rule over the whole country.
That's a pretty kind of blatant move up front about how they mean to proceed.
You know what I mean?
I would take that, especially if I was a Hazara, if I was a Tajik or a Uzbek in Afghanistan right now, I would take that as a pretty bad sign.
Then again, Taliban are fools if they think that that's what they're going to do, is that they're just going to inflict their rule on the rest of the country and that it's not going to lead to to bitter fighting.
You know, we talked about this before where that there was that video of the Taliban leader meeting with the Hazaras and he's going, hey, we've always been really nice to you.
And they're like, oh, God.
But he's saying, yeah, we're good.
Hey, you guys are cool.
We don't mind that you're Shiites as long as you're Muslims.
You're cool with us.
And this kind of thing.
Like, I don't know how much he meant that, but I'm just saying.
They better mean that if you know, if they want to be able to rule that country, they're going to have to treat their, you know, conquered tribes essentially with some decent amount of respect or they're going to have permanent insurgency.
You know, Patrick Coburn, I think, was predicting it'd be a lot harder for them to take over the whole country than it was.
But I think he still had a point when he said, you know, there are five million Hazaras, you know?
Yeah.
So people.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think you can just completely grind them under your heel.
They've got to be somehow persuaded to go along with this, you know, so I don't know.
Listen, let me ask you real quick here about what's going on in Syria, because I think we sort of kind of have a status quo type situation where our government is mostly invited to stay in Western Iraq by the Baghdad government.
It's a little complicated, but not that complicated.
But boy, are our forces uninvited guests in what they call Eastern Syria, which I think is like the entire eastern half of Syria, you know, including continuing to help the Kurds hold on to Raqqa, which is not their city.
And I know that, you know, it's constantly, you know, going on under the radar, but it really is scandalous American troop presence in Syria and their aims and goals there.
So I was wondering if you could kind of catch us up on the latest from there.
Well, like you said, kind of the status quo is about the 1000 U.S. troops in northeast Syria and that that presence is kind of reliant on the bases in western Iraq.
And as far as news out of Syria, I haven't seen too much since, you know, we last talked about, you know, kind of the U.S. presence there.
One thing that's kind of interesting, you know, a lot of people expected a big escalation in Syria when Biden came in, but this is kind of exactly what they want.
Brett McGurk, who's the head of the Middle East on stuff on the National Security Council, he wrote an op ed in The Washington Post after he resigned from the Trump administration because Trump said he was going to withdraw from Syria.
And he kind of outlined, he said, we shouldn't leave Syria.
You know, we're not going to go in and try to topple Assad again.
Here's what we should do.
Keep about a thousand troops in the east there, support the Kurds.
They say against ISIS, but it's really supporting them to keep that area of the country out of the hands of Damascus and support Israeli airstrikes in Syria, which happened pretty much on a weekly basis, not every week.
But I bet if you tally the strikes each year, it's about on average once a week, Israel bombs Syria.
So that's really the status quo that they've created.
And on top of that, the brutal sanctions regime and the kind of tacit endorsement of the HTS in Idlib, the Al-Qaeda affiliate that's still holding out in Idlib.
And there's been a ceasefire between them and the Syrian government and Russia that has been holding relatively well.
There's occasional flare ups.
But so that's, you know, kind of the situation there.
There was some like fighting in Daraa al-Balad in the south, which is where the what they call them, the Free Syrian Army, the opposition where they like kind of first sprung up.
And there's talks between them and the Syrian government.
I think Russian troops just went in there and they're keeping a ceasefire there.
They shipped some of their fighters up to Idlib on buses.
So, yeah, it's kind of that's the way things are there for now.
And I don't see an escalation, but I don't see a drawdown or anything when it comes to the U.S. side of it.
Yeah.
So now it's interesting, right, the way that the situation in Idlib has just persisted for so long here, where what's left of the different Al-Qaeda factions and so called Free Syrian Army factions and I guess ISIS fighters that fled the fighting in the east as well have just ended up there and are protected.
And boy, you talk about a safe haven.
Hey, Dave, had you heard we can't leave Afghanistan because supposedly the U.N. says Haqqani knows an Arab or something.
But meanwhile, there's never been a safe haven for Al-Qaeda like what exists in the Idlib province right now under essentially Turkish protection under the ceasefire deal.
Have you heard of any plans for what anyone means to do about that?
They're just going to let there be Al-Qaeda stand there in northwest Syria forever.
Yeah, I guess so.
And it's it's funny because Biden, when he's saying rattling off the list of reasons to get out of Afghanistan, he says the terrorist threat has metastasized and spread and he cites Syria as kind of his that's like his go to.
Right.
And then the idea is there that we're fighting ISIS, but the U.S. isn't really fighting ISIS.
The Syrian government fights them occasionally in the desert and kind of central, more eastern areas.
But if you think of what, you know, the American people would think of terrorists, you would think Idlib.
But that doesn't seem like that's a problem for the U.S., although there was some drone strikes.
I'm curious.
I don't remember seeing any since Biden's come in in Idlib against Haras al-Din, I think they're called.
I forget.
It's another Al-Qaeda offshoot.
And they were during the Trump administration, they were bombing them with like sword bombs and like these really crazy drones that fire like big blades.
And my guess, just based on a few articles I've written about it and following it on a pretty basic level, is that HTS was giving the U.S. the intelligence for these drone strikes because they had had their problems with them.
Right.
And then they get to say, no, see Al-Nusra or HTS, they're OK.
It's, you know, real Al-Qaeda is these bad Haras al-Din guys.
And it's treason.
It's just incredible.
And they say that Jolani has renounced Al-Qaeda.
But no, he hasn't.
He's just said things like, well, look, we're not really part of Al-Qaeda anymore.
Uh-huh.
Well, so what about your blood oath to Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Let's hear you denounce Ayman al-Zawahiri then, dude.
Nobody ever put it to him that way.
Martin Smith on Frontline didn't put it to him that way.
And so, you know, they never renounced Al-Qaeda.
They just said, look, you want us to say that and then we can have money, right?
OK, thanks.
And the fact that this is still going on in, you know, the second half of 2021 is just it's world record books for astounding and incredible.
I just don't know what to say, except that I'm out of time, even though I still want to talk to you about what's going on in Yemen and with the Iran nuclear talks.
But we'll just have to catch up another time.
But thank you so much for coming on the show, Dave.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
All right, you guys, that's Dave DeCamp.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I am the editorial director of Antiwar.com and I'm the author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You find my full interview archive, five thousand five hundred and something of them now going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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