Hey, everybody, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Ah, there's a good way to get you to go to my website.
Soon, at ScottHortonShow.com, you'll be able to listen to all of that interview with Robert Murphy that just ran into the commercial break, because I couldn't stand to interrupt him.
ScottHortonShow.com, I don't know, in a few days.
There'll be a Bob Murphy interview for you there.
It won't run on AntiWar.com, because it just wasn't anti-war enough.
Sorry.
But that's all right.
Kelly Vallejo, she's anti-war enough.
She writes for AntiWar.com.
And she's on the line.
Welcome back, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I was watching the general.
I missed the beginning of it, where probably most of the fun stuff happened.
But I was watching the generals testify about the AfPak war on Capitol Hill yesterday morning.
And I thought of you.
Time for us to catch up and get a progress report on the success of the surge in Afghanistan.
Were you terribly impressed?
Not really.
I mean, it was reminiscent of a lot of the, or most of the generals' dog-and-pony shows or their typical smoke-and-mirrors that they present to the Congress biannually, or twice a year, rather.
And I really didn't see a lot of there there in terms of any breaking news in terms of the progress.
Just a lot of the same old language, a lot of the same old rhetoric.
And their members of Congress haven't done much in terms of pushing back.
They weren't too surprised at that either.
But, you know, it almost gave me a sense that everybody's really tired of this war.
The generals seem tired.
The members of Congress seem tired.
Nobody seems particularly credulous anymore.
What I got out of it is that the military does not want to draw down any more troops after we do this next drawdown at the end of the summer, which will leave about 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, plus contractors, going into 2013.
And the military really doesn't want to reduce anything until 2014.
They don't want to talk about gradual or rapid withdrawal.
So I think you're going to see a fight going into the next year, which is going to just prolong the inevitable.
And I think we seem to all understand that.
But this timeline just seems to get more protracted as we go on.
This will take us beyond Obama's first term and into a possible next Obama administration.
It's so funny to me that, I don't know, you talk about the atmosphere of the Congress, how they don't really seem into it anymore.
It's not like they're all beating on their lapel pins and demanding, we see this thing through in those kind of stark tones, or not very much.
I might have missed it if a couple of Republicans said that.
But there didn't seem to be very much excitement in the room about it or anything like that.
And again, we're not arguing about appropriations for D.C. sidewalks or something here.
They're talking about a war.
And yet they go from gung-ho to kind of disinterested, rather than against it.
Right, exactly.
And as we know, Scott, they're always inclined to believe what the generals are saying.
There's this feeling that they have to defer to the generals.
And if the general is telling them that the Afghan troops are being built up and are more capable than ever, and that there is a good relationship between the Afghans and the U.S. soldiers in the field, and that things are progressing and the Taliban is being, their momentum has been, all of the tropes that we've heard before, most of these members of Congress are inclined to believe that, whether it be out of this inferiority complex they might have, this whole idea that the military is not only stronger, but it's smarter on these issues, and they tend not to push back.
You have somebody like that who would push back.
Somebody with the personality of John McCain does tend to push back.
But what's he pushing back on?
He's pushing back on, why aren't we putting more troops in?
Why aren't we bombing more?
So yeah, we have Ron Paul, and we have a few others in the Congress that have questioned the war.
But on the most part, they listen, they ask some questions, some tough questions, but there's not a lot of good follow-ups if you watch these hearings.
It's very frustrating as an audience member to be listening and going, well, just ask that.
Say why, what do you mean, what proof do you have?
It's very difficult.
Right.
Well, and you're right that they just talk, and how much room there is for the follow-up questions there, really.
Yeah.
There's this ad we run here on LRN in rotation, it's an Onion Radio news ad about the new Pentagon spokes drone that speaks in these clichés.
Yes, we're taking the fight to a number of enemy sanctuaries.
It doesn't really mean anything.
And this is right, as you're saying, this is right when the congressman is supposed to say, oh yeah, well in what province did you do what, on what day, and where, and how much, and how successful was it, and how long did it last?
And oh yeah, who's in charge there that I can ask him if you're telling the truth about it?
There's no any of that.
It's all just, wow, a number of sanctuaries, huh?
It sounds pretty good.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think, you know, what I think the members of Congress were most interested in listening to, hearing in this case was, you know, the aftermath of the massacre, and the aftermath of the Koran burning, and how that was affecting the relationship of not only the troops and the Afghan forces, but also our relationship with Karzai and moving forward.
So the military, you know, the general was going into the message management mode, which that's been their chief occupation since the war started, is how is the war perceived on a domestic front?
How can we manage the message so that we will gain the support to keep this war going?
So if you have an entire hearing that's crafted around trying to make Congress feel a little less ickier about what we've seen happen in Afghanistan in the last month, you know, you're going to come out of it feeling like you don't have a lot of new information.
You've just been listening to a lot of spin for the last time.
I'm reading General Allen's statement here, and it's really only about six or seven pages, double-spaced, and it just talks about how the Afghan security forces have expanded to 330,000.
Yeah, fine.
You've got 330,000 bodies.
How many of them turn up for work every day?
How many of them come back after vacation?
How many of them would you want to have you side-by-side in a battle?
But they do this.
They throw out a lot of numbers.
It's like the kill list.
It's just a lot of emptiness.
I don't think anybody's really satisfied after it.
Did you find out anything about, you know, I don't know, ongoing projects, specific projects like, say, Marjah and Kandahar, things like that, where remember when we told you it was going to work?
Well, see, this is an example of something that we've been doing that's working well.
Was there anything that specific in there?
I don't think so.
I remember hearing a bit about that in one of Petraeus' last briefings with the Congress.
And, you know, Scott, they talk in such vague terms.
You know, they'll talk about this new market opening up or the traffic on a street that had been previously deserted because of all the violence is now hustling and bustling.
But, you know, if you're a real student of this, you go on the Internet and Google around, you'll find out what the, you know, where the gray areas are and how things are really, you know, faring.
And I think, and I've said this in articles before, at the beginning of the coin surge into Afghanistan, you know, all of the experts said, you know, we will determine whether this is successful or not if the local population is protected, if the local population isn't dying, isn't injured, can go out of their homes, can go out about their business.
And if we are continuing to hear about bombings, IEDs, battles, night raids, so on and so forth in places like Kandahar, which was supposed to be the crown jewel of the coin operation, then we know that things haven't progressed the way that General Allen is trying to convince our Congress that it has.
Yeah, you and your medium-term memory.
Why do you always got to bring up old stuff?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Kelly Vlahos, hold them responsible.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly Vlahos.
She writes for Antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
And fortunately for us, not for her, she lives in Washington, D.C., so she writes about what they talk about at all these war party conferences and all that fun stuff.
Great fly on the wall for us.
Yesterday, of course, the generals, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and the head general in charge of the Afghan war testified before the Congress, the House of Representatives, I believe.
And I wonder, Kelly, and of course she writes all about the counterinsurgency doctrine, the whole strategy for the Afghan war and how well it's working out or not so much over these past few years.
And I wondered whether did anybody ask any serious questions about the assassinations or murders of American officers and contractors and so forth by Afghans, the so-called green on blue violence, if I don't have those colors switched around, or were there any questions about the kill team, the urinating on the dead bodies, the burning of the Korans and the massacre and these sort of kind of gray swan events, I guess, things like these are to be expected in a war, but they are sort of singular events that really shock everybody and captured obviously the attention of the people of Afghanistan.
Were any of the congressmen asking serious questions of the DOD on these issues?
Well, I didn't see the whole thing, so please forgive me, Scott.
I didn't hear about the violence on our soldiers by Afghan soldiers, any questions about that, but that doesn't mean that they didn't occur.
And I can try to look through the transcript while we're talking.
There were plenty of questions about what we saw with the Koran burnings and the massacre and what that means for the greater mission and how it's going to compromise our mission there, about whether or not our soldiers are safe and what kind of relationship they have with the Afghans, because they're hearing all of these stories about how the number of our soldiers who have been shot and killed by Afghan trainees over the last year, they've been hearing these numbers have slowly trickled out into the mainstream.
But as we were saying before, the follow-ups, I mean, they only are willing to go so far.
So if they say, well, how is the relationship or should we be worried that these Afghan trainees are fragging their American or their NATO trainers, and then General Allen turns around and said, well, the larger relationship is great.
Our Afghan soldiers are wonderful.
We've been training them.
They're learning lots of things.
We think they're going to be able to take over security next year.
The timeline is in place, and we're keeping to it, and we all have this confidence.
Most members of Congress do not say, yeah, but.
They usually go on to their next question.
And if you listen to these briefings or these hearings long enough, you realize that most of the time they're reading questions that have been typed up by their staff.
So there's not a lot of wiggle room for follow-ups there, and it's really pathetic.
Right, it's because they don't care enough about the issue to have even worked with their staff on what we're going to ask them today at all.
Right.
So they'll just go to the next question, okay, now about this.
Right, they're writing their lines for the C-SPAN TV show.
Right, exactly.
And you always can tell which member of Congress really knows their stuff and which one had just been handed this paper full of questions, which is usually very insightful questions and very intelligent questions, and you wonder, like, you know, how sad it is that the staffers are usually smarter than the member of Congress.
And, you know, it's like you want to put them in the spotlight and pull them up in front of there to ask the questions instead of this puppet up there, this member of Congress with their perfectly coiffed hair and their silly jokes.
And, you know, I was watching the British Parliament last night.
They had some excerpts from this on, I think it was, I can't remember if it was on PBS or C-SPAN or whatever I was watching.
And, you know, these guys have to go up there, they have to craft an argument, they have to deliver the argument, and then they have to take questions, hostile questions from the opposition.
And they've got to think on their feet and they've got to defend their point of view, their position.
Yeah, they have to stand there and be heckled.
Heckled, you know, and their feet are literally put to the fire, whereas you look at our Congress and everybody's so, you know...
I'd trade them for a queen in a parliament right now.
No!
Let's shake hands on the deal and we'll just get rid of them.
We'll ship them off to England and trade.
Well, we don't demand that our members of Congress need to be smart or intelligent or articulate.
I mean, they just need to spiel off rhetoric in a somewhat charismatic way.
But that doesn't mean they have a firm grasp of the issues or are able to convince the electorate of why their policy position is the right one.
It doesn't help that the Republican Party has been demeaning intellectualism for the last several to ten years since the Bush administration.
So they keep electing people who are anti-intellectual.
You know, and what does that do to the gene pool in the Congress?
You know, they're just a bunch of speech makers at this point.
You get a general up there.
You get some dumber than they already were, even.
Yeah, and then you get a general up there and he's talking his business and he's telling you that this is how it's going.
We're sticking to a timeline and everything's groovy, you know.
And they're going, oh, okay.
Because they don't know where to take it from there.
You know, everything's politicized.
So they either agree and they suck up to the general if they're a Republican or they suck up to the general and maybe ask some fae follow-up questions if they're a Democrat.
But really, they don't have the gut.
They don't have the intellectual vigor to put this guy right on the spot.
Well, and he wasn't all that impressive.
He made this big, fake smile every time he lied.
It was pretty obvious.
It seems like anybody, you know, his lies, as we were talking about, weren't very impressive or detailed or anything.
Anybody, you could have, if you were in the Congress, could have totally thrashed him.
Anybody could have thrashed him if they actually had their act together.
But I guess the Congress is pretty easy to run circles around.
Right.
I don't really think that they respect Congress.
You know, it's just another body of people that they have to get through to get their purse strings open, you know, and to move on with their war.
And I think that that plays itself out in any of these books by Woodward or Michael Hastings, you know, the operators.
They could care less about these civilian planners and the civilian purse holders.
You know, so when they go up in front, the disrespect is, not disrespect, but they just sort of, they have really no, I guess respect is a good word.
Right.
Well, none of us do.
It's just really dangerous that they don't.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
None of us should.
It's just that they don't.
It's scary if they just decide, you know what, Congress, how about we'll just be the Congress.
They can do that.
Yeah.
I mean, they don't.
It's like.
Like in Mali today.
We're the Congress now.
We're the president.
Right.
The colonels take over.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I'm sorry we're all out of time.
Well, thank you.
It's great to talk to you again, Kelly.
Appreciate it.
Kelly B. Vlahos, everybody, the American Conservative Magazine and AntiWar.com.
We'll be right back after this.
