All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Kelly B.
Vlejos, writer for the American conservative magazine and antiwar.com original.antiwar.com/Vlejos.
Her recent piece is at the top of the page today in the highlights section there.
Do Afghan riots spell exit?
Oh, come on.
Say it.
So welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you?
Good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
So is it true?
Is it accurate?
Did I read you right?
Are you reporting to me that there are actually people who live in Washington, D.C., who are saying that, hmm, maybe we should stop being so generous to these Afghans and quit occupying them?
Well, I think I think what I'm hearing and what I'm reading today especially is that there's been a lot of discussion, not not about whether or not we need to get out right now, but about what our exit strategy is.
And from what we've heard in terms of the president telling us we need to wait for another couple of years to till a full withdrawal until we leave some advisors there, if whether or not that's a viable strategy.
So what I was writing about today is there seems to these riots have opened up a discussion here domestically on what the hell are we doing there?
What are we accomplishing?
What will happen when we do leave a residual force, which is what we're told is going to happen at some point?
Are those forces safe?
Are they useful?
And have we accomplished anything there?
So I think it's I think it's opened up a debate within the last 48 hours or so that may may not have been occurring because of other distractions like, you know, the Whitney Houston funeral or the ongoing, you know, circus that is the Republican presidential primary campaign.
Right.
Well, OK, so I overstated it.
But still, though, there is something other than the premise that we'll just stay forever and don't worry about it is changed now that we're at least worrying about it, I guess is the way to say it.
And, you know, and I did bring up, you know, I'm driving down the street, I'm listening to National Public Radio, which is pure establishment radio.
You can't get more establishment than NPR.
And the reporter from Kabul is saying there's been chatter about whether or not these these riots will actually speed up, you know, the exit process.
And I think I think that's key here, because I think the more restive people get here domestically and the more exhausted our troops are getting, the more negative feedback you're getting from troops who are now returning home, like Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who who has written a whole essay and report about the lies that he feels that we're being told about Afghanistan.
I think the the more that those negative reports and discussions gain momentum, I think that there will be less willingness for us to continue to fund this through and beyond 2014.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, but when you hear an establishment, you know, radio broadcast talking about chatter about speeding up the exit and then the administration having to respond to that yesterday about whether or not these riots are affecting our exit strategy.
I think that's I think that's notable.
I think that it's where we've hit on something.
Well, yeah, especially when Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh are saying, well, it's time to stop, you know, because, of course, they conflate Hamid Karzai himself with the government of the country, which I don't know if there's really any such thing as that.
And of course, with the people of the entire place, regardless of who they are, all is sort of one thing.
And then so Gingrich's attitude was, well, if that's how they want it, we'll stop helping them.
You know, we're only there to help them, of course.
And so, you know, if you don't like it, why should we have to apologize over some burning books when you're killing our guys over there while they're over there trying to help you?
That's Rush Limbaugh's new spin on this thing today.
Well, that's just your pure, selfish, you know, right wing reaction.
I'll take it, man.
Yeah.
But I mean, I'll settle for it.
Yeah.
I think what's going on here and I think if this started and if I could put a start date on it, but I started hearing these rumblings more publicly is when you had that poll several months ago that came out and said that soldiers that had been surveyed from both Iraq and Afghanistan had both said that they felt that they're fighting that war, those wars was a waste.
And that was key.
A majority of them said it was a waste and went on in a litany of complaints about, you know, that waste.
So you hear that and then you have veteran after veteran chiming in, talking, you know, writing about it, like Danny Davis, about how things are a mess over there.
And they have busted through the sort of the the message filter that that was so carefully placed up there by David Petraeus and his gang of counterinsurgency operators.
You know, throughout the last 10 years, they're busting through that filter now when they come home and they say it's a waste and they're coming home with more complex injuries from IED blast this year and last year than in all the years before.
And people are seeing that and they're exhausted.
You know, that's when unfortunately that's when it's sort of hitting a saturation point, I think, even though you and I and others have been talking about this for years and have been opposed to the war for years.
I think now that you're having troops come home and you have you see these riots over there, you get sort of a visceral, you have a visceral reaction to that.
We've been over there, billions of dollars.
They're telling us to go to hell.
They want us to die.
These are the people that, you know, not not the bad guys.
These are the people in the capital city that supposedly are our friends, the people that we're fighting for against the bad guys and that kind of thing in the narrative.
Yeah, I think that's a good point, because we've been told all the way up until now that Kabul is the safest place in Afghanistan.
It's a I don't forget one of our ambassadors or one of the ambassadors.
I don't know if it was a British one or a United States.
One thing that this is a safer city than, I think, New York or L.A., stupid statements like that.
But we've been told and it's been generally true that that's that's the safe part of Afghanistan, as opposed to southern and eastern the Pashtun areas, which I have been generally restive and filled with Taliban.
So now we're seeing this happen, like where these guys come from.
You know, we know where they came from.
I mean, they're angry, and I think this goes well beyond the Koran, you know, and the book burnings, though, that's obviously feeding that.
But they just don't want us there anymore.
And I think that's hard and harder for us to stomach here at home when we feel we've made all these sacrifices.
And like I said, I'm going to I'm going to be doing a column for next week about these IED injuries that are coming back now are worse.
So you have guys coming back with one limb left.
And the injuries are so bad because they're they're they're blasting them as they're on foot patrol, as opposed to in, you know, in the vehicles, like in Iraq, where they were suffering mainly from maybe one injury, one limb amputation and brain injury.
They're suffering from multiple limb injuries where they can't even fit prosthetics on some of these guys because it cuts right up through their stomach.
And this we're supposed to be winding down.
What are these guys doing over there?
Yeah, that's the thing that you'll never hear from Rush Limbaugh on Newt Gingrich that, well, wait a minute, maybe this whole thing that I've been supporting this whole time has been for not and sorry for all the people who listen to me and took my advice and sent their son over there to take part in this noble cause, et cetera, et cetera.
That goes for a hell of a lot of Rush Limbaugh listeners.
You know, it does.
He tells them what's true in the world and they believe it.
Right.
And I think it's so great that you do have whistleblowers like Danny Davis coming back and say, wait a minute, they're lying to you.
He has you know, he doesn't have any dog in the hunt to come back here and start blasting the military if he's military himself.
You know, so whenever these generals continue to get up there and President Obama gets up there at the Union at the State of the Union address and says, we're we're beating the Taliban, we've got them licked.
You know, you look around, you go, what is he talking about?
You know, I got access to the Internet.
Yeah.
All right.
Now we'll have to stop here and take a break.
We'll be right back with Kelly Blahos from the American Conservative magazine and antiwar dot com.
This is such a great article.
There's so much great research and reporting going in here.
Do Afghan riots spell E-X-I-T?
I sure would like to think so.
We'll be back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Kelly Blahos from the American Conservative magazine and antiwar dot com.
You look right there at the top of the page in the highlights, you'll see her latest piece to Afghan riots spell exit possible tipping point in the war, a tipping point in the war of the way people in D.C. see it.
Now, one of the things about the Iraq war that, of course, you could you could have read about this at antiwar dot com back in 2002 and 2003 was that we were going to be fighting for a bunch of guys who ultimately wouldn't need us.
And we see that after America helped the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi army win their civil war against the Sunni Arabs for Baghdad, that they turn around and kicked us right out.
Thanks a lot for the help.
And now you can go because they're the majority and they're allied with the neighbor next door.
And so they just don't need us anymore.
On the other hand, in 2014, Hamid Karzai, if he still wants to be the mayor of Kabul or the mayor of his own palace or whatever he is there, he's going to still need Americans, because in that case, rather than backing the majority, we're backing the people who were on the eve of a complete loss of their civil war at the time of the American intervention, the Northern Alliance, who don't have what it takes to defeat the Taliban and whatever themselves, whoever's the insurgency now.
I don't want to call them all Taliban because what the hell do I know?
But if America goes, Hamid Karzai comes with us if it's hanging on to the tail skid of the Huey or Blackhawk now, I guess.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, even more importantly, I mean, even worse, I guess, than that is that Karzai is like a man in an island there in Kabul, because the army he does have, the American National Army, they're not there.
The ranks themselves aren't necessarily supporting us either.
And I think this was borne out in a classified, used to be unclassified survey, but is now classified.
That was done for the army that basically surveyed 600 Afghan National Army men and about 100 Americans.
And what came out of that is that there is still a serious level of distrust between both sides.
We don't get them.
They don't get us.
We don't like them.
They don't like us.
So we're in Iraq.
There had been interest on both sides to work together.
And by and large, they did for better or worse.
Here we have, after 10 years, a national army that, A, doesn't necessarily support Karzai and the central government with the rigor that the Iraqi army does.
And B, they hate us.
And we don't like them either.
So we're not worth it.
Our troops are basically saying that they're untrainable.
They're illiterate.
They don't get their culture.
They don't see them as adequate fighters or to the level that they, that we are supposedly, that they need to be to hold back the Taliban.
So there is such a weakness there.
And now we see that there's this emerging issue in which they're shooting our soldiers.
So it's, it's, and these are the people that do need us.
They want to go ahead and kick us out and lose.
They would rather just get on with it, I guess.
We're not even talking about the Pashtuns here.
We're talking because the Pashtuns make up a infinitesimal level percentage of the Afghan army.
To this day, we have not been able to recruit them at levels where they represent that the army represents the general population of Afghanistan, which is about 40 percent Pashtun.
So there's a problem in itself.
But the fact that this army still, I mean, is still reticent and so culturally different and and divisive towards our soldiers who are trying to train them.
That's, again, to the level where there's fratricide going on, you know, which has gotten to the point which I don't think most Americans know this.
But seventy seven of our soldiers have been shot by Afghans.
They were trying to train, train in the last three years and most of them in the last year.
And I guess almost like a dozen at the beginning of the year.
We're only in February or early March.
And I don't think they stopped reporting that.
Apparently there was a U.S.
Numbers are getting too high.
We don't want to hear any more.
Yeah, I mean, because that's the real crux.
But there are a couple in the news that you already mentioned, right?
Where a guy who is when they say a policeman, Afghan policeman killed two soldiers.
They mean, yeah, they were all hanging out in the break room together or whatever.
And he pulled out a gun and shot them in the head.
Yeah, really bad.
Just like Americans would do if, say, Chinese troops came and occupied Texas and said, oh, here we need volunteers for our local police force.
Some of us and, you know, people who volunteer to be cops for anybody, you know, pretty much cowards mostly.
But occasionally one of them would pull out a gun and shoot his Chinese trainers.
Right.
It's not very hard to understand why they would do it.
You know, it's not.
And I think but that but that is the whole nub of the issue, because if we're if our exit depends on training up these Afghans so they can take over security so we can get out and those Afghans are not ready.
Well, under most opinion, will never be ready to take over their security.
And not only that, they hate us and are killing us while we're trying to train them.
What the hell are we to do?
I mean, so that's where I wrote this piece, you know, in in sort of this it to look at this from the perspective of maybe we should get out sooner because we're not accomplishing and maybe others in Washington will start talking like that, because I think when you get to the point when our troops are being shot by the very people we're supposed to be helping.
Plus, there's no trust, there's no trust level there.
It's not like the Washington Post, the way they have it.
Speaking of riots, they say violence in wake of Koran incident fuels U.S. doubts about Afghan partners, not their doubts about our guys.
But I guess the fact that Karzai doesn't have the ability to tell people move on nothing to see here and make them obey him means that, jeez, why are we working so hard for this guy?
I mean, it makes sense in a way they're not.
We shouldn't expect them to see the irony in their statements, I suppose.
But I mean, that's pretty meaningful, right?
If they're finally giving up on this guy, Karzai, who's been nothing but a joke since 2001.
Right.
And we're looking at when you look at Afghanistan and Iraq, they're just two different places.
Their idea of nation is not the same as the idea of nation in Iraq.
In Iraq, they wanted a Shia nation and everybody on the Shia side was working hard.
They saw the United States as a benefactor, the weapons, the training to accomplish that goal.
Maliki, strongman, you know, here we have Afghanistan, which is elaborate of tribes and ethnic groups and loyalties where you have local communities that feel that that is their Afghanistan, not necessarily what's coming out of Kabul.
So their idea of what a nation should look like is different.
And we've tried to impose our vision of what it looks like, what it should look like through a Western model.
And it's not working.
That Western model includes a central army and they're just not having it.
On the other hand, we're establishing these local police forces, which are just as dysfunctional and corrupt.
And I think that when we do pull out, it's those local constabulatory that are going to be taking over the country, working with or against the Taliban or whatever.
But it's not going to be a central national army that's going to keep the security in that country, if at all.
I think we're just holding off a massive breach, you know, that's going to happen with or without us.
But we're just kind of holding it off for the next couple of years.
Well, and probably whoever takes over after we go will be pretty bad if it's the Taliban again.
You know, they like to throw people down the well and whatever.
But I can't see how that's any more immoral than dropping Hellfire missiles or shooting Hellfire missiles at women and children or sending the Delta Force in to do a Waco raid per night over there on the people of Afghanistan or more.
Yeah, exactly.
And what are we and are we really going to leave a residual force of advisers there when we can't even keep our advisers safe today when we have 90,000 troops there?
I mean, let's think about it.
If what Obama is doing now is negotiating with Karzai to keep residual force there after 2014, which means groups of advisers sort of on these little islands and these installations, how are they going to be safe?
What are they going to be for if we can't train these Afghans now and get them to where they need to be?
What are these this residual force of, quote unquote, several thousand troops going to do?
You know, I think it just further agitates the local population.
You know, in Iraq, they kicked us out.
We're all out of there.
We have no influence there anymore.
It's that's another thing I'm working on.
But if you look at what happened in the State Department, they're like scared under siege in the green zone now.
They can't even leave, you know.
And yeah, that's not good.
But I think it's better than us having a few several thousand troops there constantly under attack, drawing fire from all different ends, you know.
Well, you know, something that you and I've talked about on the show for years, and of course, Gareth Porter and a lot of other great journalists, Patrick Cobra and others, we've talked about the surge the whole time.
And from the very beginning, of course, on this show, day to day, debunked the lie that the surge is working.
The surge is working.
Well, now that was years ago.
It's been years since the surge worked.
And I was actually amazed, just rhetorically, not in reality, but I was amazed, actually.
I shouldn't have been, but I was, Kelly, to see.
Oh, and I meant to say, of course, you've written a lot of great stuff on the counterinsurgency doctrine and all the surge work propaganda.
But I really was amazed to see Colonel Davis in this kind of whistleblower report that he wrote says that, well, the military told the Congress and the president that the surge worked.
And so we're going to replicate that in Afghanistan, in Iraq.
And so we're going to replicate that in Afghanistan.
And it's going to be great.
And the surge means we just put in more troops for a little while, whoop on them really good.
And then things work out after that, you know, sort of like the underpants gnomes.
And at the end, profit.
But they sort of leave out all the step two.
Yeah.
But so Davis says that, OK, so this was the snake oil that Petraeus was selling in D.C., but that Barack Obama bought it, that the civilian leadership of the government.
I mean, I guess I could see congressmen buying it or whatever.
But we're supposed to believe that on the National Security Council up there, they really believed the surge worked rather than they knew that we had just helped one faction win its civil war against the other.
And they escalated a few troops in at the end of that.
And big deal.
Yeah, well, if you remember, it was it was really a political operation.
Yeah.
One more time on the Washington clock.
That was how Petraeus said it.
Right.
And you remember here it became a political issue.
So if you support the troops, if you support victory, if you support God and country, then you support the surge.
Right.
And Obama came out and gave his fealty to Petraeus speech on that.
And he said it was beyond anyone's best dreams.
He said something like that.
Yeah.
So was it about whether this could work or let's let's let's bring some real military strategists and experts up here and hash this out with all right.
Which side are you on?
Are you on the Republican side that is all for the search?
Are you on the Democratic side?
And then we had a presidential election, which worsened that that political situation.
You have to choose sides.
And so that's where we now you have people like Davis and you have an entire military community because I'm following them every day on the Internet who are saying one after the other that the surge was a myth.
You have the ability.
Now, these are soldiers, veterans, people actually fought in the surge were there who will admit now that it was all smoke and mirrors.
They never say sorry, though.
They never say, geez, we should have been listening to anti-war radio this whole time.
We'd have known that.
Now, come on, you're the one who writes an article every day.
No one has any excuse in a world with Gareth Porter in it.
I know.
Got to love Gareth.
He's the best.
Yeah, well, you're pretty close runner up there, Kelly.
Oh, you're very sweet.
Thank you.
All right.
We're over time.
I'm going to let you go.
But I really appreciate this article.
It's very good work.
I really hope that people do go and take a look at it.
It's quite full of substance, like you just heard.
Do Afghan riots spell exit?
Kelly B. Vallejos at Antiwar.com today.
Thanks.
Thank you.
