And this is Alan Minsky, and I'm sitting in here for Susie Weissman on Beneath the Surface, and I'm joined live in studio by Scott Horton of Antiwar.com.
We just heard his interview about Iran and Iranian issues with Gareth Porter, and now Scott is going to take us on a dialogue with Michael Hastings about the situation in Afghanistan.
Michael Hastings is a freelance journalist.
He's written investigative pieces for GQ and most recently and most famously for Rolling Stone magazine.
He's the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott, man.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
Now, you know, your article made all these waves and, of course, cost General McChrystal his job as commanding general of the Afghan war, but it seems like the only real lesson that was learned by the political class in D.C. was that the rules of engagement on our soldiers is far too restrictive and reminiscent really of the myth of Vietnam that we could have won that war except that our guys had their arms tied behind their back by the politicians who wouldn't let them fight.
Well, I think certainly the rules of engagement is an issue that Petraeus is saying he's going to directly address just to give the soldiers their better ability to defend themselves.
But I would say actually, you know, the story did also spark this debate about the timeline.
I think that's really the key issue.
I don't see rules of engagement changing too much really, but I think this idea of the timeline of when we're going to get out of there, people also started talking about that as well.
Well, in fact, I just saw a poll today that said that the majority of the American people are behind a timeline and even when the question is phrased, no matter how bad it is there, and they say yes, no matter how bad it is there.
No, and I think that's clear.
I mean, even when Obama took office, the war had been sinking in popularity and the fact of the matter is the more attention that people focus on the war, the less popular it becomes.
That was actually a comment that one of McChrystal's senior advisors told me.
So it's no secret, and I think this is the sort of strategy going forward, if you can call it that, and what sort of Petraeus has sort of proved he could do in Iraq, is that, you know, getting the war off the front page.
That's the goal, is to get the war off the front page, especially going into the 2012 election.
Well, and that was really the same thing that Petraeus said about Iraq, that it was all about adding time to the Washington clock.
Exactly, and I think that's what's very interesting about the dynamic here.
The war in Afghanistan has been going badly for a while, but we only start paying attention to it when there's some event in Washington that sort of focuses the policymaker's attention on it there.
It happened last summer when the General McChrystal Strategic Review was leaked, and it happened again just recently with the Rolling Stone story, where it becomes a sort of Washington story, and that's what drives the news cycle and drives the attention.
So what's going on in Kabul, though, should be very relevant, actually isn't in terms of how these decisions get made.
Yeah, well, it should be relevant also for the listeners, though, to make up their mind about how they feel about this.
So why don't you tell me whether you think that the Karzai government and the parliament that America has created in Kabul could last in a million years.
I think there's serious, serious, serious questions about how credible and how stable the Karzai government is.
I don't think they're in any danger of being overthrown.
I think even if we had only 50,000 or 30,000 Western troops there, they would never be overthrown, because they have a lot of weight behind them.
They have a fairly significant army and police force, even though it's corrupt and not the greatest in the world by any stretch of the imagination.
But they certainly are going to take all the support we're going to give them.
If someone's writing you a check for a billion dollars every week, there's not much incentive for you to say, hey, I like the billions.
I'm buying new departments in Dubai.
I spent last weekend at Wimbledon, so you guys should just cut out giving me all this money.
And that's not going to happen.
Well, now, if for some reason they were so public-spirited that they spent all the American tax money they were receiving on attempting to build this counterinsurgency Western European nation-state that supposedly is the end goal here, is it possible with all the ethnic divisions and the geography and everything else?
I certainly think there's no precedent for it.
I think when you talk to people, the sort of policymakers, they'll tell you this.
They'll say, look, Afghanistan was great in the 70s.
We're going to try to turn the clock back to 1979.
This is literally the argument.
But you look closer at the 70s and you say, well, okay, there were, what, two coups and an invasion from a neighboring foreign power.
So if that's your model, then I think you're in a tough situation already.
And certainly there's no precedent for that, for a sort of government getting established.
As I sort of said recently, look, it took 40 years for Americans to get into the World Cup.
It's going to take more than 40 years for Afghans to embrace democracy.
Well, and also they're in a situation where our guys are the redcoats and fighting colonials who are hiding behind rocks and then running away.
And so there is no set-piece battle where the Americans get to take out the Taliban.
This is why McChrystal, I guess, had focused his strategy down to, I guess, basically taking the Delta Force and the Navy SEALs and using them to do these targeted night raids, while then the rest of the Army is supposed to basically stand around like a bunch of traffic cops making friends with people or something.
Well, exactly.
And that really rubs a lot of people on the ground there, the souls on the ground, the wrong way.
And I think that's fair enough.
They didn't sign up.
You don't sign up to the Marines because you want to be a cultural anthropologist.
I mean, this is sort of stating the obvious, but I don't think it can be said enough.
And I remember, I mean, last time we spoke about a month ago when all this stuff was going down with McChrystal, I was at the Kandahar Air Base, which is being attacked fairly regularly.
So obviously there's quite a bit of resistance, and the soldiers there feel like they're not able to sort of fight back in the way they feel appropriate.
Now, the thing is, soldiers have always complained about rules of engagement, at least over the last five years or so, but I'd never seen it so widespread and so targeted at a particular individual.
Their distaste for McChrystal, you mean?
Yeah.
I mean, they like him as a man.
They just didn't like this policy that he became so closely associated with.
It's not an accident that Petraeus' first move was to very publicly say he's going to review the rules of engagement.
That was a move to build morale among American troops.
How much of the rules of engagement are really going to change?
I don't think that's clear at this point.
But certainly it got to a point where you're literally telling the soldiers, look, we want you to go out on patrol, and we don't want you to get attacked, so we just want you to sort of be targets.
And I think that's tough for the soldiers' mentality.
Obviously it should be a good policy.
Hey, we're not killing civilians.
Right.
I mean, that should obviously be the policy we want to pursue.
But the reality is, if we're there, civilians are going to be killed.
And if we don't want to kill civilians, we shouldn't have 150,000 American troops there, or Western European and American troops.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Michael Hastings, freelance reporter who recently made big headlines with his article, The Runaway General, in Rolling Stone magazine.
Now something that features pretty prominently in that article is the story of Marja, which started out as this, I guess, teeming metropolis of 80,000 people.
And then it turned out that, no, maybe only 10,000 people live there, and they're all just a few farmers and whatever.
But this is still going to be kind of the showpiece of the new clear-hold-build counterinsurgency center for a new American security strategy.
And yet the headline yesterday was they've sacked the new district commander, or whatever they called him, the guy that they had placed in charge there in Marja, and they're going to try to start all over again.
Government in a box, notwithstanding.
Yeah, guess what?
I mean, government in a box doesn't work, and that should have been obvious to begin with.
I think when we look at Marja, Marja was supposed to be the set piece.
It was supposed to be what they called the proof of concept for the Kandahar operation.
It was clear to people on the ground who were saying, look, things are not going well here.
The Taliban are still coming back at night.
Government in a box is not taking hold.
So that played in very, very largely into the fact that the Kandahar operation, which was scheduled for the summer, has been delayed.
And we often look at it through sort of this U.S. viewpoint, obviously.
But the question is, well, why was Kandahar delayed?
Okay, one, yeah, Marja was sort of a disaster and sort of was perceived as a disaster.
And secondly, we went to Kandahar and we said to the people of Kandahar and the tribal leaders, hey, do you guys want a U.S. operation here?
They all said, hell no, which makes sense, especially if you're a tribal leader who's going to be running for office in September.
You know, there's parliamentary elections in Afghanistan in September, so why would they do anything that's going to upset the population that would lose them votes?
So we, as Americans, rarely, yet again, fail to understand the most basic of dynamics in Afghanistan.
And I'm not some expert on, you know, some expert.
It's just sort of like very kind of obvious things.
Yeah, well, it sounds like, you know, they have the strategy set up around the idea that the average resident of Kandahar wants to be invaded so that the Americans will come and get rid of all the bad guys, clear and hold the place.
But you're saying that, no, that's not what they want, and the proof is right there in the tribal leaders who have to stand for election.
They're not going to take that gamble.
Certainly not when they're up for it.
Maybe they will agree to it.
I think they're going to have to agree to something, but that's going to happen probably later in September.
I spoke to one U.S. military official who described the Kandahar operation as putting a noose around the city.
Those were his words and meant in a way that I think was supposed to be positive, where I think if you're a member, if you live in Kandahar, when you hear the Americans saying they're going to put a noose around the city, that does not necessarily inspire confidence.
Not that there aren't really bad people in Kandahar.
That's not the issue, but obviously it's a minority, and you ask your average guy in wherever, they're not going to want fighting in their streets.
Now there was a report that General McChrystal's last order before he went back to D.C. to be fired was to cease the night raids.
Is that true?
They had put out restrictions on night raids, I think it was earlier than that time, but there had been serious restrictions that they were trying to place on the special forces community in particular.
Again, that was also very controversial, and there were certainly questions about whether General McChrystal not really had his heart in that order.
But yeah, I think obviously if you are listening to Karzai, Karzai is going to say, hey, people don't like it.
The fact that it took us nine years to figure out that people don't like it when foreign troops come into your bedroom in the middle of the night and search through everything you've got, the fact that it took us nine years to realize that creates resentment is a little astounding to me as well.
McChrystal actually says in there that he has this McChrystal ratio or something.
For every innocent person you kill, you create ten new enemies.
I was just wondering, somebody ought to ask these people whether they think that counts going back in history or whether we should check.
Well, exactly.
I think that's probably true to a large extent.
I think in the end of the day, a lot of innocent civilians were killed in Iraq during the surge, which was considered the playbook for counterinsurgency enthusiasts to look at.
Did that really have any impact in terms of what the final resolution was?
Not really.
I think what's more important than limiting...
Obviously, on a moral level, we should limit civilian casualties, but at the end of the day, counterinsurgency is a cold-blooded thing.
Hearts and minds is sort of a PR phrase, and what matters is basically showing that you have power and coercing the native population to behave in the way you want them to behave.
If tactically it's advantageous not to kill civilians, then that's what they're going to do.
If they think there's advantages to killing civilians, that's what they're going to do.
It's all about showing that you have legitimate authority or that the Afghan government that you're propping up has legitimate authority.
I think it was Kelly Vlahos who said, this is like trying to stick a round peg in a brick wall.
The counterinsurgency doctrine has failed, and Andrew Exum and the guys over at the Democrats' PNAC, the Center for a New American Security, are already saying, well, you know, maybe we could do the Biden plan, where we just kind of do hunt-and-kill operations and never mind counterinsurgency.
It sounds like they've already admitted defeat.
They just don't want to call it that.
Well, I think that's what we're fighting towards, the Biden plan.
Well, tell us what that is, the Biden plan, please.
The Biden plan, essentially, the idea is a limited number of ground troops, and you're focused on counterterrorist operations and training the Afghan army and police.
Why can't you do that and negotiate with the Taliban?
Why can't you have Richard Holbrook in Pakistan negotiating with the Pakistanis to help with the Afghan Taliban, while you're propping up your government still, you're giving the special forces guys enough to keep them busy, you're giving the CIA enough to keep them busy, and you just don't have this huge occupying force there that's costing billions and billions of dollars.
But essentially, the idea is we're fighting to get into a stronger negotiating position, and we eventually will have to negotiate with the Taliban, and putting that off a few more years just to prove some point that we save face, I think is rather suspect.
Well, yeah, the theory is they'll be weaker by the time a year and a half goes by and we can start the negotiations, but then again, we take in that McChrystal ratio into account, we look at just the recent history, the more troops they put in, the more resistance they have.
I was just reading last week that at least by some estimates, the Taliban control 60% of the country in the daytime and 80% at night.
Michael?
And this is the most violent year of the war so far.
Now, military planners hope that eventually we'll hit this inflection point where the violence will start to drop down, as we saw in Iraq.
There's this sort of escalation of violence between 2007, but by the time you get into the middle or end of 2008, all of a sudden the violence sort of drops off precipitously.
So that's what they're hoping for in Afghanistan, and that's what they're trying to achieve.
But there's no guarantee that that's going to happen.
I mean, I think everybody would hope that, you know, if they're using as many resources and doing this, that the violence obviously drops and that they can find peace.
But it seems like, you know, it's one of these things where, you know, if peace is our goal, then why don't we really start trying to get peace now rather than waiting a couple years.
I don't think that's very naive.
You know, I think it's actually something that would be doable.
And instead of saying, hey, because the reason we don't do it is because we don't want to look weak, and Obama doesn't want to be accused of cutting and running, but I think the way to frame the debate would be, hey, we're just changing our strategy to one that works and makes sense.
You know, it's not about weakness.
It's not about, you know, saving face.
It's about doing something that actually makes sense.
Well, of course, they've already changed tactics or strategies so many times.
That's nothing but euphemism for admitting defeat before.
Why not admit it again, right?
Well, I think it's funny.
I mean, it's not funny in a ha-ha way, but if you go back to this idea of the Vietnam syndrome, right?
We leave Vietnam in 1975, and the North Vietnamese take over the country.
You know, and oh, it's this huge defeat for American prestige.
Yeah, five years later, according to the law, it's mourning in America again.
Reagan, it's the height of America's glory in the 80s.
Well, it did keep us out of any real overt wars until 1991, at which time they announced, we beat the Vietnam syndrome.
Finally, the American people are behind the empire forever again, and we're going to have to leave it there.
I'm sorry, Michael.
Everybody, that's Michael Hastings from Rolling Stone magazine, GQ, and he's a freelance reporter, writes for all kinds of people, and wrote really the biggest news story of the last few months anyway, in Rolling Stone magazine.
It cost Stanley McChrystal his job as the top general in that war.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Take care, man.
And this is Alan Minsky again, sitting in for Suzy Weissman on Beneath the Surface, and you just heard from Scott Horton and Antiwar.com.
Now, folks, go to Antiwar.com.
They'll find a lot of other material, am I correct, interviews you've done about the American war machine?
Yes, we keep all the foreign policy news from all around the world updated, all day, every day, all of the best columnists from the left, right, libertarians, and everybody else.
And as far as my radio show, yes, there are archives of hundreds of interviews going back to 2007 there, Antiwar.com slash radio.
That's Scott Horton, and thank you so much for joining us on the show today, Scott.
Thank you.
And we're going to be right back, where we're going to hear from a political scientist, Tom Ferguson, and a little scoop that's been provided to us from Paul the octopus.
