Scott Horton and Dave Smith dissect Afghanistan's chaotic withdrawal, labeling it a disaster that left the Taliban in control while Afghan ISIS executed a deadly Kabul bombing to lure the U.S. back. They expose corporate media's narrative flip driven by former intelligence officials and debunk the al-Qaeda threat using General McChrystal's 2009 report, which omitted the group despite recommending a surge. The discussion critiques the military-industrial complex for rejecting Taliban offers to kill bin Laden and highlights how long-term lies from Bush and Obama administrations created a dependent state, ultimately suggesting the war's conclusion reveals systemic failures rather than simple strategic errors. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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America Teaming With Iran00:10:48
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
The war in Afghanistan is over, which feels a little bit surreal to me.
And I wanted to talk about that and who else it would be libertarian crime to not have the great Scott Horton on to discuss it.
Of course, he wrote the book on Afghanistan.
If you haven't read it, you really should.
It's called Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And then more recently, he put out Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terror.
Scott, of course, also finds his stuff at the Libertarian Institute.org, antiwar.com.
And he is the host of the Scott Horton Show, which if you really want to understand what's going on in foreign policy, there's really no better podcast out there for that.
So, Scott, thanks for joining us.
How does it feel?
For me, it really is a kind of, it's an odd feeling that this dang thing is actually over and all of the U.S. forces are out.
Yeah, it's really great.
And it really sucks, of course, how horribly they executed the final withdrawal there because it takes the, you know, a bit of the victory, if you can call it that, out of it.
You know what I mean?
But, but, I mean, I guess it was destined to be that way.
It wasn't a victory.
It's a goddamn disaster the whole time.
And so, why should the withdrawal have been any different than that?
You know, that's the way it works.
And now the Taliban is in control of the country and it's going to be pretty ugly for the people of Afghanistan.
And I know that most people stop paying attention at all at anti-war.com.
We'll still be covering it, you know, in depth forever.
And, you know, all the cynics are right to say it's not over yet.
But let's just clarify.
The war against the Taliban is over.
The war to prop up the government in Kabul is over.
That government no longer exists.
People talking about, oh, they're going to send troops back.
No, they're not.
They're going to do anything now.
It's going to be the CIA partnering with the Taliban, either against ISIS and/or supporting the Uyghurs against China.
And so that's what we're going to have to look out for the most.
But the government that George W. Bush created in Kabul does not exist in any way, shape, or form.
There are a couple of warlords holding out in the Pancher Valley, but, and look, I don't know the future.
They could really fight.
Maybe the CIA is going to give them $50 billion and try to launch a whole thing, but I don't think so.
I think that they're going to end up making a handshake deal with the Taliban and try to go forward.
Yeah, that certainly seems like the most likely and just the most practically doable from a logistic point of view.
I mean, it's not like, you know, what are we actually going to do?
I mean, if we were actually looking at fighting the Taliban, well, we couldn't do it with well over 100,000 troops.
And there's just no political will to see another, you know, a huge surge like we saw under Obama in 2009, 2010.
That's just not going to happen.
Then again, I mean, look, the Taliban have bitten off a lot.
And it's not clear that they can chew it all.
You know what I mean?
They basically, look, the way they took over the country was not through force.
Well, it sort of was.
It was through the very credible threat of force.
Yes.
Right.
Like, look, you can either join us or die.
But primarily all over the country signed up and said, okay.
So from a libertarian point of view, yes.
No, it was, to be completely precise, it was through force, but it wasn't really through violence.
It was really fighting.
Yeah, it wasn't, you know, pitched battles.
So, you know, the prelude to this was that they controlled, you know, a huge percentage of the countryside.
You know, I don't know, 70, 80 something percent of the countryside.
But they'd always withheld, you know, procrastinated, put off seizing the provincial capitals because that will get you B1 bombered off the face of the earth again, right?
So they had to kind of stay as an insurgency.
They're like in the daytime, they're a guerrilla force.
At night, they're the local court system, you know, but like, but not in the provincial capitals.
But then they just kind of walked right into the provincial capitals all over the country and just walked into military bases.
And they had a great PR strategy, too, which was, listen, give us your rifles and go home.
And sometimes they took the commanders out back and shot them in the head.
There were quite a few of those, I think.
But for all of the enlisted soldiers at the bases, they just let them surrender and didn't, you know, didn't execute them and didn't even put them in jail.
They just let them go.
And so it was very easy for them.
You know, it was a political win, much more than a military win, you know, for them to take over the country.
But so now, you know, they have to hold on to it, right?
And you look at how what a hard time the Kabul government had standing up without all that American money to back them up.
Well, I mean, I guess Biden will probably give them some money, but not the kind of billions that it took to help the previous government, you know, stay in power.
So, you know, how much autonomy they give the various warlords in various parts of the country and how much they demand and are willing to put up with from the Taliban as the central authority and all that, all that remains to be seen, you know, but I do think that And I've been reading this lady, Ashley Jackson.
She wrote this thing back a couple of years ago.
Sorry if I'm being redundant from saying on the show previously, but so she wrote this stuff back a few years ago, and she's been writing kind of op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post and, you know, different places.
But she spent a bunch of time over there, you know, traveling all around in the countryside and interviewing people and stuff.
And she had written this thing, I forgot how many years ago, but she talked all about how after they assassinated Mullah Mansour and the new guy took over, his name is Hakanzada, and he became, you know, him and his group became the leaders of the Taliban, that they had embarked on this new strategy of no longer just trying to blow up everything the Americans had made, but instead co-opting it all, taking over, you know, the form of the government that the U.S. had set up.
The governors, the police chiefs, the mayors, they said, fine, you want to have a mayor system?
We'll just make sure our guy's the mayor.
We'll make sure our guy's the school principal.
We'll make sure our guy is the governor in many cases, rather than just fighting.
It became a strategy of co-opting.
And then, but at that same time, they were reaching out to Hazaras and to the Uzbeks and Tajiks too, and saying, you can join the Taliban too.
You're a good Muslim.
You can be part of our group.
And really try to de-emphasize the kind of exclusivist Pashtun nature of the Taliban.
That's clearly their base and where they come from.
This is why the Tajiks, Hazars, and Uzbeks, who are about 20% each, have, you know, as a 60% coalition, have had such a hard time ruling over the Pashtuns.
It's because it's very much like ethnic division and who's ruling over who.
So, you know, and, you know, there's that massive sectarian division too, where the Shiites, pardon me, the Hazaras are Shiites.
And so there's a real question of whether the Taliban, you know, I guess I don't know a lot about this, but in the 90s, I think the Taliban were pretty harsh on the Shiites on the Hazaras.
And so we'll see how that goes too.
You could see, Dave, like, I mean, I don't think this is likely.
I'm not predicting this one, but it's like on one of the cards on your table is like America teaming up with Iran to back the Hazaras against the Taliban, like coming soon here.
I mean, that's who we've been back for 20 years.
We didn't need Iran's help before, but we might need them now that we're out of there, you know.
Well, you could legitimately see us on either side of that conflict.
You could also see us teaming up with the Taliban to undermine Iran.
You know what I mean?
So U.S. foreign policy is really mixed up all over the place.
And like I say, with the CIA going back, they could go back to team up with the Taliban to kill ISIS or to back Chinese ISIS, which is, you know, the Uyghurs, ETIM, the ETIM, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which is, you know, the Pentagon bombed them in 2018.
They were piling around at training camps with the Taliban.
Then Mike Pompeo took them off the terrorist list.
Like, how transparent is that?
Why not just break the law and do it secretly?
You got to announce to the whole world that these are our new pet jihadists We like they served us so well in Syria fighting with al-Qaeda and the CIA in Syria.
Now we're going to work on using them on to soften up China's western flank.
How about not doing that?
You know, yeah, or yeah, they certainly don't feel that they need to take anyone off the terror list in order to send them weapons or fight on the same side as them.
They're willing to do it anyway.
It's not like it's not like Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been taken off any lists and they're still fighting on their side in Yemen.
Switching The Narrative Quickly00:03:21
So the main, you know, we'll get into like some of the logistics of this because I'm and some of the events that have transpired over the last few weeks.
But the thing that I've been like hitting the hardest, like what I think is the most interesting and the most important point in all of this, and I've talked about this on Kennedy and Tim Poole and on my podcast a whole bunch is, and I don't know how much of this you've seen, but it's really fascinating to me to see how hard on the Biden administration the corporate press has been over ending this war.
And oh, yeah, Gareth Porter has a great new piece about that today, actually.
Well, okay, so I haven't read the Gareth Porter piece, but I'll be very curious to read that.
But it's really the only thing, it's the inverse is the only thing I could compare it to, where you have this dynamic where the corporate press, I mean, has been, there's no secrets about this with a couple right-wing exceptions, you know, a couple like Fox News and maybe a couple other, you know, things out there.
But for the vast majority, 90% of the corporate press has just, I mean, been carrying Joe Biden.
I mean, it's as if they've really been a part of his campaign.
I mean, I would argue they were the majority of his campaign.
It was really Trump versus the corporate press with Biden in his basement for the entire election season.
And in the same way, the corporate press was, of course, completely against Donald Trump for his entire campaign and presidency.
That was their big moneymaker, we're the anti-Trump network.
And it's almost like the inverse was when Trump bombed Syria the first time in 2017.
And all of a sudden, on a dime, the entire corporate press decided, well, this was very presidential and look at all these beautiful bombs.
And you could almost see where if Donald Trump had gone full enthusiastic war hawk, he could have actually won over the establishment.
And then, likewise, while Joe Biden can do no wrong, all of a sudden he ends a war.
And on a dime, it's like this.
Oh, all of a sudden, that without saying it, they're basically like, look at this incompetent old man who had no plans and doesn't know what he's doing.
And it's really just, I mean, I think it's very revealing, but it is fascinating to watch how quickly they can just switch the narrative.
Yeah.
Well, and also, look, I mean, why?
Because they're completely infiltrated from top to bottom by former CIA officers on every one of these channels and military guys of every description, former secretaries and cabinet people, and everybody who lost the war are all their sources.
So all those people, all of those anchors and journalists on especially cable news and all that, who are they talking to all day?
They're talking to the Pentagon and the CIA.
That's who their sources are.
And even a lot of times, right there with them at the desk as paid consultants, you know, outright parts of the network.
But even besides that, this is where they get all their information from, everything, all their points of view from.
Everyone they know thinks we got to stay.
But then, so what does that also reveal?
That the Pentagon and the CIA have still been doing a full court press through the media to try to force Biden to change the policy, to back down and break the deal with the Taliban and start the war all over again, which is what he'd have to do.
And, you know, Daniel De Petrus, quite a few people have written about this, but Daniel De Petrus has a great one that he wrote for Newsweek.
Tinkering Around In Afghanistan00:14:23
There's no middle option.
They keep trying to sell this middle option for Afghanistan.
They're like, oh, no, what we could have is a status quo.
You addressed this on the show with Robbie last week or the other day.
Um, where, oh, yeah, no, see, we could just leave a few thousand guys because we've had so very little casualties lately, and we just leave a few thousand guys, and that would be enough to prop up the government.
And never mind creating a democracy and even a centralized state, but at least we could hold a stalemate and the status quo.
But that's just not true.
We've had low casualties over the last year and a half, two years because we had a ceasefire and a deal with the Taliban.
But we don't have that.
If we break the deal and send troops back and insist on staying, they always just imply but skip over that somehow we'll make the Taliban like it or something, or that the Taliban will not react to having the deal broken and decide to start targeting Americans again.
They never even just answer that part of it at all.
They can't address it because they can.
It disproves their entire theory.
They would have to send 25,000, 50,000 troops and massive air power back and have a massive new campaign, another surge of troops.
And look, you can read, if you read the intelligent and honest Hawks, people who in the past have supported this stuff, you'll see them now saying, look, we have tried this before.
We surged and surged and surged again.
You just can't do this, man.
Well, what did the Soviet Union have in Afghanistan?
At one point, I think they had over 400,000 troops or something like that in there.
I mean, they surged, you know, they made our surge look like nothing.
And they used air power.
They used air power like the Americans in Vietnam or World War II or something, where they just absolutely carpet bombed the place.
I mean, they killed something like a million people in that.
Yeah, so with hundreds of thousands of troops and gloves off, no strings carpet bombing, they still found themselves in the same position basically after that, just with a lot more dead people there.
And they were starting as not a rich, as rich a country, so a lot more bankrupted.
But so it really, yeah, I mean, anyone, even the Hawks, I think would have to look at this and be like, you know, because they, at least like you said, the smart ones, they know that this middle ground isn't an option.
They know that we'd be looking back in another surge.
So when you look at it through that perspective of what the Soviet Union put into their war in Afghanistan and just what Obama put into the war in Afghanistan, even putting in another 25,000 troops, I mean, this is kind of just tinkering around.
This isn't really even a serious effort if you were talking about winning the war, whatever the hell winning the war even means at this point.
All it would mean is the same stalemate where we've been, which is they're steadily encroaching power, but we keep them out of the provincial capitals and we get to say face and pretend that we hadn't lost the war yet.
That's where we've been for 10 years, for 10 years.
Okay, so there was the other day, of course, I'm sure everyone knows at this point, but there was a terrorist attack, a suicide bombing right outside the airport there in Kabul.
And so it first was being reported, oh, there was this suicide bombing and like 130 people died, which did was eyebrow raising at the beginning that one guy took out that many people with the suicide bomb.
You're like, wait a minute, what was the setup exactly?
Like, did he knock over a building?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like that, that collapsed into people.
Like, how exactly did that many people die from it?
What happened there?
Well, so first they said, well, it was two suicide bombings.
And then they said, well, it was a gun battle.
They might have said that in the middle.
There was a, you know, after the suicide attack, then, you know, ISIS, you know, snipers, you know, started firing or whatever.
I don't know.
But it seems to be, there's multiple reports that say this anyway.
I guess you couldn't say it's confirmed, but pretty close anyway.
Sure seems like after the suicide bomber detonated as fast that Americans and or their CIA militia guys that were with them on top of the towers opened fire into the crowd.
And there was a doctor who talked to a EBC reporter and explained that everyone was like really crushed together tight and how they had a group.
I think he said, what, eight?
I think he said he'd seen like eight people this way or something.
Not sure about that.
Anyway, there were multiple victims where he said they had bullet wounds coming in their heads and like in their shoulders and the top of their chests.
Nothing lower than that because everybody's all bunched together, but that the angle was down, you know, that they were fired upon from above.
I guess, you know, possibly, you know, soldiers or whoever else may have panicked and fired into the crowd to kill, you know.
And then I don't know.
Do they just completely open up with machine guns?
I mean, 170 is a lot of people, 175.
And then, you know, so I don't know, some significant number of those, what, 50 or more or something, were killed by the suicide bomber.
You know, that wouldn't be all of them, but maybe another 100 dead by gunshot or something.
I'm not exactly sure, you know, what the number, what the ratio was.
Flip it around the other way, 100 by the bomber and 50 shot.
That's still a lot of people, innocent people killed in a, in a panicked overreaction.
And then that's just swept right under the rug, just like the drone attack.
That was retaliation for it.
Now they did two drone attacks.
One was out in Nangahar province where don't ask, don't tell who died in that.
They claim it was bad guys.
And I don't know if there's any reporters left out there, you know, willing to travel out to see who it really was.
But then they did the second one in Kabul where they killed innocent people.
They killed an army soldier from the Afghan army, an interpreter who had worked with the Americans, and then all civilians, including little kids.
Like a whole family of little kids from what I saw.
It's pretty.
Yeah, I believe it was three little boys and a little girl, something like that.
And I'll tell you what, Matthew Aikens, I don't know why I can't get him to respond to me.
I know he must be really busy, but he's this great reporter that I've interviewed a bunch of times in the past.
And I'm following him on Twitter and he went and interviewed the survivors and has like the whole story on.
You can look at his Twitter feed.
And it's Matthew, it's M-A-T-T-H-I-E-U.
So I'm not sure which country's spelling of Matthew that is, but that's how you find him.
And then A-I-K-I-N-S Aikens, Matthew Aikens.
And he's a really great reporter, man.
He's covered Afghanistan for years.
He did a great job covering the election of 2014.
And he also wrote a really great article for Rolling Stone about Yemen, where he got in a rubber dinghy and crossed the Red Sea and snuck into Yemen and went to North Yemen and saw the Saudi war against the civilian infrastructure up there in the Sada province and stuff.
Really brave, you know, behind enemy lines type reporting from this guy for years.
So, and he's still in Kabul now.
Everybody's evacuated.
He's sitting there reporting.
So geez, that's pretty cool.
He even interviewed the survivors.
He showed pictures of the kids.
He says, here's a picture of this little boy sitting in the courtyard where I am now.
Only he's dead now.
This is the kid that they killed and he's like a seven-year-old boy, you know.
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Let's get back into the show.
And so this is now.
I remember when this, when the suicide bombing first happened, I had some people on Twitter and stuff who were shoving it in my face because the first assumption was that it was the Taliban.
And so they're like, oh, yeah, look, you said the Taliban was actually being fairly reasonable in the way they were allowing Americans to leave and stuff like that.
But look at this.
But I do think it is, it's interesting and noteworthy that in fact, no, this wasn't the Taliban.
This was ISIS who came in to do this.
And what is obviously the what's the goal here of ISIS to have a suicide bombing right as America's leaving?
Well, it's not to like force us out of there quicker.
It's not to say, hey, yeah, continue doing exactly what you were doing.
I mean, we're already leaving.
And I don't think it's just to like count a few more bodies on our way out.
I think this is, you know, much like the September 11th attacks initially.
This is a provocation to attempt to lure America back into Afghanistan.
Yeah, exactly.
To get us to fight the Taliban, to essentially frame the Taliban for it.
And if nothing else, make the Taliban look like weaklings for going along and cooperating with us on the last, you know, couple of days there and proving what tough guys they are for their own domestic politics.
But, you know, I kind of, maybe I should have held my fire on this.
I don't know, but I trashed Tulsi Gabbard a little bit for saying, oh, yeah, see these suicide bombers, man.
They just hate us for refusing to convert to their religion.
It's just like, what?
What are you talking about?
And then, so I said that, and I got a lot of responses from Twitter where people are like, well, if this isn't about religion, what's it about?
Well, politics, man.
It's about politics.
What are you talking about?
What is it about?
They bombed a bunch of Muslims.
Was it because they wouldn't convert to their religion that they already share?
Or this is a power fact.
And come on, Scott.
This ISIS, Afghan ISIS, they want to create a global caliphate and force the whole world to convert to their religion.
Yeah, really?
Well, right now they can't even get control of the Kunar province.
Okay.
Let me know when they've seized one mountaintop.
The reality is, two years ago, the Taliban, and with some help from the United States, completely, almost completely destroyed ISIS, killed them by the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and roused them out of Kunar and Nangahar province.
And then, as I mentioned on your show before, it's in the Washington Post from October of last year, 2020, by Wes Morgan, where inside the Taliban's Air Force.
And by that, they mean JSOC, top-tier Special Operations Forces Task Force, working with the Taliban, passing them information, intelligence for targeting ISIS and flying drones as their air cover in the Taliban's war against ISIS and blasting them to bits.
And this has been going on for a long time.
But yeah, no, okay.
These guys who control, you know, an area that the Marines couldn't hold on to in Kunar province, they're now like in the place of the Kremlin and the Illuminati and the United Nations and the Chinese and whoever is going to create a one world government and enslave us, Dave.
Now it's ISKP in exile camping out in the woods in the dark with no roof in the Kunar province.
Yeah, it's this whole thing.
I mean, I've been through this for so many years now, but what gets so frustrating about this argument about like, you know, religious fundamentalism versus, you know, kind of blowback and political forces is that it's not, nobody's claiming it's strictly one or the other.
Like nobody's claiming ISIS.
are not extremist religious fundamentalists.
Like, of course, that is true, but the analogy I used to use all the time is like, if you had some like, you had like an evangelical Christian family who like locked one of their children in a basement and beat him and was just like, you know, horrifically abusive.
But they were all very, very religious evangelical Christians.
And this kid grows up to be like a serial killer.
And he's like, in the name of Jesus, I'm going to kill all of these people.
Like you could blame the fact that they're evangelical Christians.
I mean, and that certainly has something to do with the dynamic there.
And the guy is saying in the name of Jesus, I'm going to kill all these people.
But like, let's focus on this locking them in a basement and beating them like his whole life.
Like that might be more of an explanatory force that's at work here.
And, you know, you have 1.3 or something like that billion Muslims in the world, a whole lot of them extremely religious.
And we have major, at least in the West, the problems with terrorism has been two groups.
It's been al-Qaeda and ISIS.
I mean, those are the ones.
And both of them have received CIA weapons and money, in some cases, training.
And they've all in their stated grievances when they recruit.
It's all about, you know, support of Israel and propping up dictatorships and all of this.
So it's, it just seems like such a distraction.
And for Tulzi Gabbard, the thing is, what's so frustrating is that she's kind of like, she's one of the most popular kind of known as anti-war figures.
So for her to get it that wrong, it really is just, it makes you want to pull your hair out.
Seriously.
And look, man, on the numbers, you got, I don't know, millions, at least low millions, maybe more than that, of Salafists and Wahhabists in the Arabian Peninsula who are like the most strict kind of fundamentalist, literalist interpretations of the Quran and whichever hadiths they're choosing or whatever.
CIA Weapons And Money00:10:59
Okay.
But they don't do anything.
They just sit there all day.
They are what's known in almost all like Abrahamic religions and Christians were like this in the United States for the most part until Jimmy Carter was actually not Ronald Reagan, it was Carter that organized the fundamentalists, you know, the evangelical Christians to vote.
But before that, they were also what's called what are called quietists, which means people who their religious indoctrination says, you don't worry about earthly politics.
You just focus on passing your tests so you can live forever.
That's why you're here.
And, you know, render unto Caesar and don't worry about that crap.
Right.
Well, so that's what the Quran says too, that look, man, if God didn't want your king to be your king, he wouldn't be your king, would he?
So don't you worry about that.
You worry about doing what it says, you know, what your imam says, et cetera, like that.
And so these people, in other words, they're total dropouts from politics.
They have no interest in politics or in fighting wars.
You know, it's just not how they are.
And those are the most extreme, you know, sects of Sunni Islam that you can find.
Look at the height of the Islamic state when they ruled a land the size of Great Britain and they demanded that all good Muslims come and travel there to western Iraq and eastern Syria to join them and fight.
It was their most numbers.
Absolute highest estimate was 100,000 men.
And that's not true, dude.
It was more like 50 max.
And that included, I mean, probably most of those were local Iraqi Sunni conscripts who were not bin Ladenites in their heart or mind in any way, really.
They were just joining with the new regime that was rising up, taking over their land and fighting their enemies for them.
And keep in mind now that, right, like these are people who many of them, there were disbanded from Saddam's military, a huge number of them had nothing else, no other training except how to be kind of basically militia men and nothing else.
And then that the U.S. propped up Shiite government had really been pretty harsh on them.
So then here come in this other group that offers you something and that's kind of your only way to go with them.
It's like, well, all I know how to do is be a militia man and this group isn't letting us participate in society.
So I guess we'll go with them.
There's lots of other explanations there than some type of pure religious, you know.
I mean, the thing to me that's so crazy too is that what they'll say, so, and we'll get back into the Afghanistan events in a sec, but what they'll say, and this is kind of like what Sam Harris and a lot of these people who argue that it is just fundamentally about religion and that Islam is such a barbaric religion and all this stuff, is that they'll make the point, right?
So their rejoinder to your point about like, well, look, most of these Wahhabists, like they're not even, you know, on board with the Sioux.
They'll be like, yes, yes, but they tacitly approve of it.
Like if you ask them in opinion polls, you know, like, oh, well, should we fight this war against the great Satan in the West?
A lot of them will agree that they should.
And that is true.
But you also look at like, look, all it takes, and I remember arguing this on Essie Cup show and whenever you talk to like, you know, like regular people, you get this all the time, where all it takes is like one little, you know, if there's like an ISIS inspired attack in France or in Texas or wherever, you know, and you ask a bunch of people, well, should we go back and do something to all them?
You get a lot of people who are like, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they did something to us.
We support going and doing something back to all of them.
And by that, they mean they killed some of us.
Let's go kill a whole bunch of them.
And so our, you know, secular religion of statism or whatever you want to call it is just as easily persuaded to be.
So how do you think they feel when, you know, there's this, this drone bomb that just killed a whole bunch of children?
I mean, come on, man, if those were children in any of our community and anybody was asking us, do you think some people should die over this?
What do you think our response would be?
So again, it's not to pretend that these aren't religious people.
They are certainly very fundamentally, you know, fundamentalist religious people.
But there's all of these other just more basic human explanations for what's really the motivating factor here that it just, it seems so obvious.
Again, like I've sat around a table of suit and tie wearing, you know, Democratic strategists and Republican strategists and all this.
Now, these weren't like, these weren't, if, you know, in the comparison, al-Qaeda would be like neocons, you know, like the people who wake up every day plotting on how can we commit more acts of terror against these people.
But these are just like regular kind of people in politics.
And yeah, as soon as there's, they understand blowback because they're living it out.
As soon as there's an attack right here, they go, well, we got to do something.
That's their biggest criticism of me.
Well, you're just saying do nothing.
We got to do something.
It's like, oh, yeah, you get hit.
You got to hit them back.
Okay.
We'll now just apply this to them.
Right.
And look, here's, you know, I don't know if you saw this, but my last piece for antiwar.com was called Peter Bergen is Mistaken about Osama bin Laden's strategy.
And this is the famously, he was a producer for CNN and traveled with Peter Arnett.
And it was Peter Arnett actually who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997.
And was it 96?
Forgive me.
I think it was 97.
And so Peter Arnett interviews bin Laden and they did this huge special report all about it.
And there's John Miller from ABC News in 1998 went and did the same thing.
And of course, there's, you know, if you're willing to sit and read, there's Robert Fisk and the other interviews.
Abdel Bari Atwan wrote a whole book about his interviews with bin Laden.
But if you just go and watch the Peter Bergen special and the John Miller special from CNN and ABC News from 97 and 98, they interview Bin Laden.
And what's it all about?
America supports the Israelis slaughtering the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
America has bases on the holy Arabian Peninsula, which they're using to bomb and blockade and kill Iraqis.
Now, the way that they explain this in the documentary, the motive is not controversial.
Well, Jim, what he says is he's mad we got bases in Saudi Arabia.
Back to you.
And that part, no one is saying, yeah, but really, isn't it because they're trying to convert us?
And isn't it really because they hate our freedom and our freedom to choose a different religion from them?
That's not part of it at all.
It's not part of it at all.
You know why?
Because Bush hadn't told that big, stupid lie yet.
So they were simply just going with the words of the man and what he said.
And that was what he said.
And then, you know, especially, well, I think it's in both of them.
The first thing he does, he just goes on and on about Israel and Palestine.
And he's not saying, I really hate Jews, which nobody quote that out of context.
That was a quote of what somebody was not saying.
But he's saying, look at their violence.
They murder women and children.
They kill people.
And you support them.
And you think we're going to let you get away with that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's the whole thing.
It's not religion.
It's politics.
It always was politics.
And I'll hear this other rejoinder to this point where people will say something like, which this one just drives me crazy.
But I hear people say, they go, yeah, but that's just, that's just what Bin Laden's saying.
He's just saying that to recruit people.
So it's like he doesn't actually believe that.
And then you're like, okay, fine.
But then by that argument, his recruits believe that because that's what he's saying to recruit other people.
Like, fine.
I don't even care about arguing what was really in bin Laden's heart.
I mean, like, you know, like, obviously bin Laden didn't care about killing innocent people.
I don't know what really motivated him.
Yeah, he's probably just some freaking, you know, like sociopath.
I don't know.
But this is what was getting men to be, you know, willing to go commit these acts for him.
So that still kind of proves the point.
I got an anecdote.
Sure.
Mohamed Atta, who crashed Flight 11 into the North Tower and was the lead organizer in the United States of the September 11th hijackers.
He was motivated by the Israelis murdering Lebanese.
That was what it was.
And there's a great book called Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, who is an LA Times reporter.
And he talks all about how Mohammed Atta and his buddy Ramzi bin al-Sheib, they're studying, well, I forgot about Ben Al-Sheikh, but Atta studying engineering in Germany.
These guys are all living together in Hamburg.
And in 1996, Shimon Perez invades Lebanon, which is on and off again war between Israel and Lebanon.
But they invade what's called Operation Grapes of Wrath.
And then right then, Mohammed Atta fills out his last will and testament, which is like symbolically, he's joining the army.
He's willing to die in this fight, whatever he's got to do.
So I guess it was just before that was when Sudan, at Bill Clinton's request, had kicked Bin Laden out and he went to Afghanistan.
And then shortly after he arrives in Afghanistan, he puts out the declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of two holy places.
You can read it on the PBS News Hour website if you want.
And in there, he goes on at length about Operation Grapes of Wrath and especially what's now known as the first Khanna massacre because it happened again 10 years later.
But this was in 1996, and the Israelis bombed a UN shelter that was full of all women and children, killed 108 of them.
And bin Laden goes on and on and on about, we'll never forget the images of the severed heads and the arms and legs of the babies and blah, blah, blah, like that.
Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib found out about bin Laden's declaration of war.
Bin Laden said he's going to get some old Mujahideen together from the old Afghan war and he's going to take the fight to the United States as revenge for America supporting Israel killing women and children in Lebanon.
Sign me up.
And those two men then traveled to Afghanistan, met with bin Laden, were recruited into Al-Qaeda, who said, wow, you guys got Western passports and all this stuff.
Awesome.
And that was, you know, what made the planes operation something other than a nice idea of something that maybe we could do someday to something that they thought, wow, we actually have an opportunity to do this now.
Let's do it and did it.
And that was where that came from.
And it was, it had nothing to do with, man, can you believe that, you know, white people in Iowa go to Methodist church?
God, that drives me crazy.
Don't you want to die in a suicide hijacking to prevent that from happening somehow?
And let me ask you, how stupid do you have to be to believe a lie like that?
Neocon Risks About Leaving00:14:47
Give me a break.
That's always my favorite.
The Pat Buchanan line that he said George W. Bush acted as if Osama bin Laden stumbled on a copy of the Bill of Rights in the sands in the desert somewhere.
It was like, what?
Are you, what?
You can say what you want and own a gun?
This has just been, you know, it's, yeah, it's all goofy.
And that's why I love, you know, like for any of the right-wingers listening, like there's, hey, go, go read Pat Buchanan, read Ron Paul on this.
I mean, they're, they're as, I mean, Pat Buchanan is a real right-winger and Ron Paul, at least culturally, is a, is a right-winger, and they're, they see through all of this crap.
It's not like some hippie stuff that we're, uh, that we're giving you here.
And then you could probably read some good hippies on it too.
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Let's get back into it.
So one of the things back to Afghanistan and the state of things there.
One of the big things that the Warhawks are really pushing now is that now that we're gone, you know, I heard somebody who was like a former Pentagon guy on the news the other day, and he was saying, well, you know, the real reason we went into Afghanistan was to prevent, you know, the ability of like terrorist attacks being plotted there against America.
And now that we're out, or that risk is right back and the risk that Al-Qaeda and ISIS are going to be back in Afghanistan and somehow they can plot attacks in Afghanistan that they can't plot in the neighboring countries or something like that.
I don't exactly understand it, but what do you think?
I mean, how big?
Look, ISIS did just pull off this suicide bombing there.
How big is the presence of ISIS or Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point?
Well, first on ISIS, I don't know how many individual people as you count them are left, but now that the Americans are out of the way, I expect the Taliban to finish killing them good and or, you know, suborning them under their authority one way or the other here.
I mean, I guess it's possible that you have foreign state intervention there.
A friend on Twitter sent me a bunch of different articles about how the Taliban have been leaning away from the Saudis lately.
So maybe the Saudis will want to get revenge and dump a bunch of money into the ISIS group there or something like that.
But I don't expect ISIS to pose a problem to the Taliban.
You know, I was just reading this piece about the war two years ago where the Taliban would have ISIS cornered and then ISIS would surrender to the Afghan national government.
You know, stop hitting me.
And that happened over and over again because they didn't want to surrender to the damn Taliban.
So they'd surrender to the ANA instead.
But it was the Taliban who were taking the fight to them.
So I don't think there's much of a threat there.
And you know what?
I mean, I got to tell you that it's a big country and the Taliban is a lot of different guys.
And, you know, I don't know their motivations and I don't know what anybody can do about it in terms of accountability to prevent them from making real bad decisions here.
So I'm not trying to say like it could never be, but I got to tell you, it looks to me, Dave, like all the claims of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan are a bunch of crap.
And they've been saying this for a few years now, but go back to 2009 when Petraeus and McChrystal and Gates and the Center for a New American Security and all the TV media were on this massive push to get Obama to launch the surge, right?
And part of that PR campaign, General McChrystal wrote up a big report for the Congress about all the new support that he needed and all this.
And Lindsey Graham says to him, Hey, man, you forgot to mention al-Qaeda.
Nowhere in your massive report recommending a surge in Afghanistan do you mention Al-Qaeda.
And don't you think the American people need to think that this is about Al-Qaeda?
And McChrystal says, oh, yeah, thanks a lot, Senator Graham.
I totally forgot to even include them in here, right?
Because, Dave, they're a non-issue, right?
It's a PR stunt for you and me is all.
And so McChrystal dutifully goes and adds, oh, yeah, also we got to take the fight to Al-Qaeda.
That's what we got to do.
And his big recommendation for counterinsurgency.
Now, there was a claim.
I don't know that this was ever proven to be true, but there was a substantive claim that there was an Egyptian killed in a drone strike, that they said that this guy was an al-Qaeda PR guy, and he was killed back just a couple of months ago.
That would have been at least the first substantive claim of an al-Qaeda fighter there that I've read in a long time.
I've read, you know, in the New York Times, there was one from like 2018, I guess, from Thomas Gibbons Neff, who I really respect.
He's a former Marine and a friend of a friend of mine, and he does really good reporting there, you know, from Afghanistan from time to time.
And he had this huge report about how they found a massive al-Qaeda training camp in the Hellman province that apparently had been right there under their nose for some extended period of time.
They had no idea.
And then they went in there and carpet bombed the hell out of it or something like that.
But then at no point in the whole article does he say, yeah, they were Arabs.
They were Libyans and Saudis and Syrians and guys who used to be friends with Zawahiri, whose names are on our list or something, right?
There's nothing like that.
So what makes these guys Al-Qaeda?
I don't know.
There's nothing in the article that says why they're not just local posh tun goofballs with rifles like everybody else around there.
What distinguishes them as Al-Qaeda guys?
Nothing.
And then every other accusation anybody can find about Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in recent times.
They all cite UN reports.
Oh, well, the UN says, well, first of all, why are we referring to the UN or deferring to the UN?
Who are they to be the ones to have the definitive, authoritative report about Al-Qaeda?
I mean, why don't you at least show me the CIA claims to the Washington Post or something?
Now you got the UN.
So then you go and read the UN reports.
And what do the UN reports say?
Well, some member state told us this.
And that's it.
And there's no information, no elaboration at all.
They don't say, well, yeah, no, there were some dead Al-Qaeda bodies near Herat in December 2019.
Nope.
They just say, well, member states inform us that Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.
Do they even say which member states they are?
Of course not.
No.
Yeah.
But we could guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It doesn't even matter, does it?
Right.
No, but I'm just saying, if we had to guess, if you give me five guesses, I bet I could guess.
You could probably do it.
I'm thinking I could do it in one, but you know.
And then they, and then it's just a perfectly circular thing where then the newspaper goes, well, the UN says.
And then the Americans say, well, the newspaper says that the UN says that this is the thing.
And yet, just show me some Arabs, man.
I just want to see some Arabs.
Well, the only other thing you can find is Reuters.
I think this is right.
Only the other thing you find is Reuters saying, well, you know, you got to be careful of AQIS Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.
To paraphrase one of my favorite comedians, yeah, it sounds like somebody else's problem.
Yeah.
I just don't see what the hell that has to do with me at all.
Well, I think Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.
In other words, Pakistani-trained militia fighters in Kashmir.
Right.
Right.
Which ain't got a damn thing to do with bin Ladenite international Arab terrorism focused at America or our Western friends at all.
Well, the funny thing about it is they almost like the kind of like the neocon types and the Warhawks who always put like this is the big risk about leaving Afghanistan is that Al-Qaeda can come back there and then plot attacks.
Like they almost make it sound like there's something magical about Afghanistan that this is, I mean, look, we know that there's an al-Qaeda presence in Yemen that's not stopping us from fighting on their side and serving essentially as their air force or at least, you know, arming and training their air force.
There's been Al-Qaeda presences in Libya.
I'd imagine there's still some in Libya.
I don't think there's too much in Syria anymore.
Oh, yeah, no, they own the Idlib province, totally under American and Turkish protection still.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So I'm going to say that.
Yeah, and all of their friends there.
So, so why is it that like what like they can't plot attacks from there, but somehow if they get back to magical Afghanistan, then they're going to be able to.
He's got this hobgoblin about being consistent, Dave.
It's like your slogan or something, trying to find consistency.
There's no consistency, man.
Well, right.
Just because they got one line of horse shit to convince you about one war doesn't mean you can try to apply that to a different one.
Right.
And the funny thing is, and you talk about this in Fool's Eren, that the kind of the original, like 9-11, the plotting of 9-11, I mean, a lot of it was done in Europe.
A lot of it was done in other places.
And really, it was as much a comment on our immigration system as it was on anything that was going on in Afghanistan.
I mean, we allowed these people in.
And this is not just true for 9-11.
I mean, the Boston Marathon bombing is a good example of this too, where we had warning, you know, for all.
And I know the guy was giving me a hard time.
What's his name?
Alex over at the Cato Institute was giving me a hard time because I said I'm not for open borders or whatever.
But so I'm blanking on his last name, but he's the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
But he put up like the chart of all the government bureaucracy that it takes to like become a legal citizen and all the different, it's like this crazy, only the government could come up with something like this.
And he's like, oh, so are you defending this?
And I was like, no, like, of course not.
I mean, that's, I completely get why libertarians are just like appalled by this ridiculous red tape that you have to go through.
But if like Vladimir Putin gives you a call and says, hey, I got these two kids who are looking to plot a terrorist attack against you and your country.
I mean, I'm just saying like maybe those guys shouldn't be let into the country or maybe at least, you know, we go check it out, you know, or whatever.
I guess they did go check it out and did nothing about it in the Boston marathon bomb.
Well, they were busy entrapping some idiot into a fake plot at the same time.
The Boston FBI was.
Right.
So that.
And then there was the whole weird thing where they killed one of them in Florida way after the fact.
Anyway, leaving all of that aside, I will say that I do, I hear some libertarians and a whole lot of other people, a lot of neocon types saying that really we should just bring all the Afghans in here.
Jen Saki, here, let me see if I could pull this up because she just tweeted out today that, let me see if I can get this exactly right.
She said something about like over 100,000, I think 120,000 people have been evacuated from, yeah, she said after, let's see, 124,000 people have been evacuated to safety, whatever exactly that means.
I'm not sure the numbers.
Do you have any concerns about just bringing in people from Afghanistan and just being like, okay, we're bringing them all over to America?
Because I got to say, that does concern me a little bit, particularly with the like, you know, with the understanding of blowback and things like that.
And, you know, I saw the other day this guy, Sean Purnell, who you might have seen.
He was one of the guys who I was arguing with on one of those clips of mine on SE Cup show that went viral.
But he was a, he, he served in Afghanistan.
I think he's running for Senate or something now.
But he tells this story about how he's like, look, man, we had a translator who was working with us for two years and was like considered a good friend.
And he ended up like turning on the unit and killing a whole bunch of guys there.
And I don't know.
I just, I do get it.
I do understand the room for concern of like, hey, you just been bombing this country and waging a war for 20 years.
And now we're going to bring a whole bunch of people over.
Like maybe there's the right winger creeping up out of me, but I'm like, are they vetted?
Is there like any type of like process that we're like, all right.
Don't worry, man.
These guys are moderate rebels at worst days.
They're fine.
Vetta than very well.
No, Look, I mean, I think, first of all, most of those people probably are just going to neighboring countries.
And if they're refugees, then the idea is they're going to go home at some point.
They're waiting to see what happens and hope that it's not total chaos and whatever.
So if we're talking about refugees, that's one thing.
If we're talking about mass immigration because all of the Hazaras or all of the Tajiks decide they're leaving Afghanistan and they all want to come to North America or something, that's a different conversation.
I mean, there's got to be some kind of numerical limit on it.
I don't know what it is.
I kind of don't care that much.
Stopping The Killing Inspires Hatred00:03:52
But I do think that, like, and this isn't like as revenge against them necessarily.
I don't mean it that way, but just in terms of who's got to pick up the tab for all of this, they should all be resettled in Northern Virginia.
The ones who are coming here should all be settled in Northern Virginia and in the Hamptons and in Martha's Vineyard and in Aspen and in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and let these people with all the money that they got off of government largesse, let them recycle that right back into integrating these people into America.
All right.
I can't argue with that.
I met a lot of immigrants in my life.
And I mean, they all, to me, mostly with few exceptions, there are some exceptions, but they're almost all like super patriots, right?
They love America more than average Americans who don't even think about it at all.
You know what I mean?
Who are their whole lives with your whole, but Afghanistan is a little bit different of the situation.
It sure could be.
What do you think?
I mean, part, you know, the Hessian soldiers that were hired by the English to come and fight the Americans, they're like, man, it's nice here.
And they settled in Pennsylvania.
You know what I mean?
So I think, you know, we ought to focus on perfecting our country so that everybody who comes here wants to be in America and not be a sleeper cell waiting to blow up our mall at their first opportunity.
I agree with you on that.
But we got to do that.
Like I was saying before, yeah, stop killing people first.
This is what the guy on C-SPAN asked me.
I did the C-SPAN interview.
And he's like, well, how do we protect America from terrorism then?
I go, look, man, to be perfectly honest, we have to stop supporting it first.
Okay.
The Idlib province, AQAP, you know, and the different places where we're actually supporting these guys, that's the first thing we have to do is knock that off.
And then secondly, we got to stop the war against them too.
And we got to call off the whole policy of dominance in the Middle East.
You know, I asked Harry Brown, who ran for president in 2000 on my show in like 04, oh, yeah, well, if you'd been president on September 11th, what would you have done?
And he says, well, first of all, it wouldn't have happened because I would have ended all support for Israel and I would have got all our troops out of Saudi Arabia and I would have completely renounced the policy of American military dominance over there anyway.
So they would have called off the attack because they wouldn't have gotten any mileage out of doing the thing.
But then if it happened anyway, then whatever.
I would have done an extremely limited mission to get only the guilty and call it all off and give my Statue of Liberty speech every day for four years or whatever was the rest of his answer.
And so I think that, you know, is the answer right there.
You start doing the right thing.
Stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing as soon as possible.
That is the number one best way to provide American security and protection.
Yeah, look, I completely agree and I completely agree with the late, great Harry Brown.
I mean, he's absolutely right about that.
I'll say one more time, like I always say, that what Harry Brown wrote on September 12th, which is archived up at antiwar.com, if you want to read it, is one of the greatest pieces of American writing ever.
And not just because it was beautiful and to the point, but because the unbelievable courage that it took on September 12th, 2001 to write that piece is just like, it's just incredible.
But there is something to the fact that, like, yes, you want to stop the killing that inspires so much hatred, but there is, as we know, it is a reality that that killing inspires a lot of hatred.
So, if you were to end that and renounce the American policy and stop doing that and all of that, that might be, you know, that's the best way to go.
But to just stop the killing one day, not renounce everything, thank all of the servicemen for what they've done, and then say, Hey, all you guys who claim to have been American allies in this country, come on over, that is a little bit more dangerous.
Working It Out With Taliban00:15:18
I want to ask you about this because this is a big thing, and I wanted to get your take on this.
The accusation, which is the biggest one coming that Biden is being criticized for, is the idea of the stranded Americans in Afghanistan.
Now, I got to say, I have some kind of mixed feelings about this.
I do, obviously, I get, yeah, it's a horrible thing to think that there are Americans who want to get out of Afghanistan who are unable to.
But I do see this being used as an attack on Biden as he's doing the greatest thing he's ever done.
And I think that, you know, I've heard some people in the State Department say, which I got to say sounded really fairly reasonable to me, that they were like, look, we've been putting cables out since January to let the Americans there know that this war is going to be coming to an end and you really should get out of here now.
And it does seem that even with the, you know, the whether you went on Trump's timeline or Biden's timeline or frankly, any real timeline of actually ending this war, I don't know logistically how they're going to get Americans who are out in the countryside.
It's not like they're just going to run a shuttle bus around and pick everybody up and shuttle them back to the airport in Kabul.
So I just like realistically, what could have been done to help these people or what can be done?
I guess now they're saying they're going to try to negotiate with the Taliban, but don't is it just the fact that none of them took Trump seriously or Biden seriously?
Because it's not as if this wasn't announced months and months and months in advance that we will be leaving at this time.
So why have people not been like, I don't understand why they haven't been trying to get out?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what the State Department has been telling them, but they should have known.
I mean, if they, you're in Afghanistan, it's kind of your responsibility to keep up to date on current events and see what's going on here.
And I don't know who these people are.
I mean, I think, you know, some of them are mercenaries.
Some of them are people who want to stay, you know, who feel like they're, you know, welcome enough, that they're not in danger or whatever and want to be there.
There may be some people who just made bad decisions there.
But I do have to say, though, that the Biden government, they really did screw this up really badly.
And that, but the problem is they painted themselves into a corner, right?
They would have had to tell the whole truth that, look, man, the Afghan government and military is like Solyndra or Citigroup or something.
It can't exist without American largesse.
That's a good comparison.
Yeah.
That's what I'm, that's all I meant to say on Kennedy last night.
I forgot my funny line.
I just called it a Potemkin village.
But anyway, so they would have had to just be upfront about that, right?
Look, there's nothing we can do.
We're leaving.
And the government and the military, they're going to fall.
Right.
And so we're just going to completely annihilate all the equipment, all the weapons, everything that we've left for the Afghan National Army so the Taliban can't get their hands on it.
And we're going to pull out every civilian that we can between January 21st and May 1st.
Everybody, get your shit together and get ready.
We're leaving, all of us.
We got to go.
Now, the thing is, you know, that's like the whole truth, but they couldn't say that.
You know, they're the Democrats, right?
They could tell the whole truth.
So they had, instead, they had to say, well, look, we, and this is what Biden said in his first big speech or second big speech about it, was that, um, look, it's okay to leave because we've built this great government there.
It's okay to leave because we've built this 300,000 man army.
Yeah, right.
And it can stand and it's going to stand and fight.
And then, geez, if it can't, well, that's their tough luck.
We've done all we can do at this point.
But they had to stand by the fiction that there was some kind of successful government that they had left in power that made it okay to leave.
That was built, you know, baked into their narrative.
So they couldn't just tell the whole truth.
But now think about it politically.
If they had told the whole truth right up front, they would have been slammed that pulling the, you pulled all the equipment out.
That's what causes the collapse of the Afghan army.
You pull all the diplomats out.
And this is the diplomat's excuse, you know, today in the news is, geez, if we had ordered an evacuation, that would have signaled a crisis and confidence in the government and caused the collapse of the government.
But so it was going to collapse anyway.
So you should have just, you know, like they say, no, look, I get what you're saying.
It's, there's something out of it.
It's almost like some like Greek tragedy because, of course, he's got no leg to stand on saying this, what we're living through now could have happened if we had done that, right?
So in hindsight, it's not a very strong argument.
However, the counter to that is just that, I mean, you, it doesn't take too much imagination to just imagine if Joe Biden had actually said, we're destroying all the weaponry of the Afghan, the Afghan government, and then we're evacuating all of our people.
And the bad side about that is then that would have, we'd be in the same position, except the Taliban would have less weaponry.
So I guess there's a benefit there.
However, the real problem there is that then the entire big fat lie of the Bush and Obama years is preserved.
And they go, yeah, we had this mean force that totally would have handled this if it wasn't for Joe Biden destroying all of their weapons.
So the silver lining, at least here, is that at least we see now, you know, as I say the other day, and I know, you know, you would have hit this point if you had had, you know, more time.
And Kennedy, you got to, you know, get like 30-second snips out there.
I'm not sure.
But even the, yeah, it's not exactly what you're built for, but you're great.
You've been great on it both times.
But, you know, it's like they're all sitting here.
Who's going to be held accountable for the botched withdrawal?
And like, okay, I'm not against holding anyone accountable if they could have done a better job or something like that.
But I mean, how about holding George W. Bush and Barack Obama accountable for just lying to us?
They've been lying to us for, you know, for it's been a 20-year lie going that we had built up a government.
Yeah.
Oh, and on your previous question, too, I should have addressed specifically about sending a shuttle around.
Yeah, they could have done that, right?
If they had not said, oh, we're kicking the can down the road, we're not leaving until September.
Forget May 1st.
And even then, even after kicking the can down the road, they told the Taliban, hey, when we say September, though, we really do mean that.
We're not kicking the can down the road after that.
We said, we're not breaking the deal.
We're just bending it.
So we'll beg your forbearance because we really are still leaving.
So the Taliban didn't take that as breaking the deal and go back to war.
Not with us anyway.
They kept marching.
But so in other words, if they had, they could have worked it out with the Taliban.
Listen, we're going to send helicopters around to all the major provincial capitals to pick up all of our people.
And we, you know, or, you know, wherever, wherever they are, and we expect your cooperation with that and don't screw us up.
The Taliban have proven that they're perfectly happy to help us leave.
You know what I mean?
They had no interest in shooting our guys on the way out the door.
In fact, on the Kennedy show last night, the most hawkish guest.
It wasn't on the same panel as me.
It was earlier in the night was Jocko Willink was saying even that even after we're gone now, and he was the most hawkish guest on there, but he was saying, even though we're gone now and they've left all these people behind, he expects the Taliban to help them get out.
They don't want beef with us right now.
And his idea was like, oh, these are the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst.
But that doesn't make them totally irrational.
And why get carpet bombed now when you've won the war?
Don't do anything crazy and stupid.
And apparently they've got pretty good discipline in their ranks too, as far as having orders stick all the way down the chain of command and that kind of thing.
Well, it's hard.
I'll tell you, I think this point is hard for a lot of people to grapple with because, look, we all are, myself included, everybody falls back into binary thinking at points.
And it's hard to think in nuance.
That's always more challenging.
And so it's like, well, the Taliban, these brutal, awful guys, you're telling me they can be counted on to not do this or that.
But just look right in front of you.
I mean, look, the Taliban, what they could have done over the last month if the Taliban was interested in just going nuts and killing as many people as they wanted to kill.
I mean, they've taken over this whole country and they had taken over the whole country while we still had a few thousand military people there.
I mean, they could have gone all out and just slaughtered a whole bunch of people.
Again, not to say they've been perfect and they have killed some people, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it that they're showing some restraint and they're showing some restraint for very obvious selfish reasons.
Yeah, they want to be a government now.
What's the most successful militia gang you can be?
Well, it's called the state and they get to be a state now.
So that's what they're trying to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, look, as Ron Paul pointed out numerous times in those debates back when he was running for president, we negotiated with Stalin and Khrushchev and Mao Seitong.
Okay?
So we can negotiate with anybody.
What's the big deal?
And then, but that's a recognition too, that ruthless does not always equate to irrational, right?
And it doesn't always equate to larger ambitions than make sense, right?
So again, back to the Taliban.
This was always, there's this great book, Dave, called An Enemy We Created by Kuhn and Lynn Shotin.
And it's the myth of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban merger in Afghanistan.
And it's about how, to oversimplify it, but correctly, Al-Qaeda are radicals.
The Taliban are conservatives.
So do they both lean far right religious?
Yes, but they're different things.
And, you know, the Taliban, even when they were revolutionaries back in the 90s, they took the capital city.
They walked right in, just like this time.
They walked right in and took over Kabul in 1996.
And so even if you say they're revolutionaries the day before that, once you seize the capital city, and I don't know who I'm paraphrasing here, this is somebody else's quote, not mine.
But the radical becomes a conservative the day he seizes the capital city.
That's the deal.
So the Talibans, as you were just saying, what's the most successful gang?
A state.
You seize the capital city.
Now you get to be a state.
And now some loudmouth rich boy from Saudi Arabia wants to come and bring the whole house down on you.
They had a real problem there.
And there was really, if you go back 20 years, there's just this whole industry of liars talking about how Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were the exact same thing and how Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were blood brothers with each other and all of this stuff.
But that just wasn't true.
And, you know, the Taliban barely tolerated Al-Qaeda.
And when Bin Laden first got there, he was expecting to team up with Rabbani, who was a warlord up in the north.
He didn't know these Taliban guys and had no reason, you know, they didn't know him.
They had no reason to, you know, they essentially ended up stuck with him when they took over the country.
And so they didn't kick him out, but they weren't willing to negotiate with him.
And in Fool's Erin, I quote at length from Milton Bearden talking to the Washington Post.
You can find this in the Washington Post where Milton Bearden, who was the CIA officer who ran the 80s war, told the Washington Post that, look, man, the Taliban have been trying to get rid of bin Laden since the Africa embassy attacks in 1998.
And we've been talking to him off and on about this.
And he says, the Americans just don't speak the same language as the Taliban.
They try to give us hints that we don't do subtlety.
And then I'm sorry if I'm being redundant from earlier shows here, but I never can remember what I say what to.
So one of the times that they had a chance to kill Bin Laden was when, which there were at least 10 and possibly as many as 13, bin Laden was out falconing out in the countryside.
And the Taliban told the Americans, geez, you know, Osama bin Laden, he's out in the countryside playing with his falcons and stuff.
So, geez, that'd be really unfortunate if something bad happened to him while he was outside of our protection, you know?
And then the Americans go, turn him over, Talhead.
But they just did.
They just said, now would be a good day for you to kill him and for me to claim it's not my fault.
He was out of my protection out in the countryside, putting himself at risk, right?
I just handed him to you on a, you know, clay platter.
Take him, you know?
And then, but the Americans, as Bearden says, they don't do subtle.
So they're like, look, unconditional surrender, Tojo, you know, and the Taliban, they don't do unconditional surrender.
So, but can we not work something out here?
This is right, you know, before the war began, even.
This is, I'm almost certain this is like end of September of 2001, before the war is really even on.
And Bearden is saying, man, these guys, there's so much enmity here.
We can divide these guys.
Yeah, and you've covered, you've covered this a lot in your work.
And a lot of Noam Chomsky, back when he was heroic, before he humiliated himself over the last couple of years, he was writing about this back in 2001, that George W. Bush was turning down every single offer that the Taliban would throw at him.
And they were making offers that were like, look, we will turn over Osama bin Laden to someone to, you know, like, well, let's do some type of deal or do some type of like international extradition or something.
And every time George W. Bush's administration was just that cowboy shit.
We don't negotiate.
You basically started down.
And once the war started, some, including Rice and George Tenet, the National Security Advisor and the head of the CIA, they wanted to target only the Arabs, only Al-Qaeda, and leave the Taliban alone, demonstrate to the Taliban that, look, man, we're really not trying to mess with you.
We just want to get with these, you know, get these guys instead.
And, you know, another major piece of evidence for how willing the Taliban were to turn on these guys was in Gary Bernson's book, Jawbreaker, where he talks about getting a Taliban commander on the radio and that, and the guy wants to surrender to him.
Where The Terror War Begins00:05:45
It's just a CIA officer and a few militia guys with him.
And he's got his entire division of Taliban want to surrender to him because of the air power mostly.
And Gary Burnson says to him, you have any Arabs in your group?
And the guy says, yes, I do.
I have 20.
And Burnson says, kill them.
And the guy says, hold on a minute.
And then you can hear in the background, rat, tat, where the Taliban lined up all their guys.
In their group, all the Arabs in their own group lined them up and shot them all in order to save themselves.
So, you know, thanks for your help against the Northern Alliance, but that was last week.
Now we're up against the Americans and they want you dead and bye.
Sorry.
And then that was it.
So, you know, at that time, if they had wanted to play that, and look, the fact that the CIA and Connolly Zerice were recommending that course of action, not just just to Ramondo at antiwar.com, right?
But inside the Bush government, they were saying, listen, we should really focus on the guilty and not the not guilty here.
And then they were overruled.
And the idea was, no, we want to fight the broader war against the Taliban, even at the expense of the war against bin Laden and the guilty.
Yeah.
And, you know, as I know you've alluded to enough already and I've certainly talked about before, if you did want a broader war and you really wanted to spread the war over into Iraq and go after Saddam Hussein, and who knows, maybe even then like five more wars after that, maybe it was the smarter move.
I mean, I'm just saying, if you were looking for a giant gravy train for weapons companies and this greater war to remake the Middle East and all of that, well, then it doesn't really help too much to take out Osama bin Laden because just imagine where the Americans, you know, the mentality is November, December 2021, we take out Osama bin Laden.
I mean, how scary is the threat that, you know, Saddam Hussein is working with Osama bin Laden?
Like, you mean the dead Osama bin Laden?
You go, oh, yeah, I guess you don't really have a justification for.
I thought we won that war a year and a half ago.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, exactly.
So that doesn't really work.
And the whole threat of, you know, they're going to hand it out.
You know, it's not just that circumstances have.
Yeah, no, it's worse than that.
I mean, you're making a great circumstantial case here from how it played out, but we got it out of the horse's mouth, man.
It's all in Bush at War by Bob Woodward, where they all talk to him.
And not only that, Bush, the idiot, told the National Security Council staffers, give it all to Bob.
He's a good guy.
Don't worry about it.
And they gave him everything.
And so Woodward quotes in there from the National Security Council minutes of the principals committee after September 11th, where they talk about this.
And Rumsfeld especially is the very worst of them.
But they essentially all agree that, look, man, Rumsfeld says, hey, if we get bin Laden, that's not victory.
And if we fail to get bin Laden, that's not defeat.
And the American people have got to learn that this is a much bigger war than just Al-Qaeda.
And in fact, he wanted to start bombing Baghdad immediately just for public relations for the American people.
So we understand that this is a war that is going to last through this, you know, for a long time and over this very broad space.
And that this is not a war on al-Qaeda, man.
This is a war to go after any enemy in the Middle East that we feel like messing with.
And so then, come on, at that point, it's right there in their own words.
You read and weep.
At that point, it's absolutely, it would be insane for them to, you know, really try hard to kill bin Laden.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to really try hard to kill bin Laden.
And it does.
And it explains why.
And then it explains why when they have him cornered in Tora Bora, they don't really go all out and make the effort to kill him when they could.
Oh, you know, I read a new one today.
He melted across the border into Pakistan.
For 20 years, it was he slipped.
Yeah, he slipped across the border.
I've read one in the New York Times today or last night.
He melted across the border.
I always like the old one slipped.
It was always like you had bin Laden in your hand.
He was like, oh, look, look at that.
He's gone.
And I just love the way you're just never supposed to.
It just never comes up.
And then after that, the Delta Force just decided to go home.
Or what?
Like, what difference does the Pakistani border make?
You make it sound like then they slipped across the Russian border, where obviously our troops can't follow.
Why can't our troops follow him into Pakistan?
No one ever explains that part of it, ever, ever, because they can't.
So they just melted.
And that's the end of that.
Next subject.
And even in 2009, when Obama's, you know, basically launching this drone war in Pakistan, I was like, oh, well, if we can do that now, how come we couldn't have just gone into Pakistan then?
Anyway, listen, I got to wrap here, but this is part of the reason why Afghanistan and the end of it is so fascinating because it's kind of like where the terror war begins.
And you go through everything that kind of rippled out from there.
And so much of the stuff that rippled out is still going on, unfortunately.
But I appreciate you, Scott, for coming on and helping break down this.
I'll talk to you before the next time we end a war.
We won't wait that long to do another one.
Great.
All right.
Go check out all of Scott's work.
Of course, Fools Aaron, enough already.
Also, The Great Ron Paul, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, and the Scott Horton show.