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Aug. 3, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
17:36
We're Losing Afghanistan. Can We Win?

President Trump held a tense meeting with his generals last month, where he complained that after 16 years of war, we're losing Afghanistan. Some tell him to escalate (again), others suggest withdrawing. How can we win? President Trump held a tense meeting with his generals last month, where he complained that after 16 years of war, we're losing Afghanistan. Some tell him to escalate (again), others suggest withdrawing. How can we win?

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China's Mineral Dominance 00:05:53
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Good.
Well, I have some news today.
Breaking news.
It's not fake news, and it didn't come from a political leak of any information.
It was an explanation by some people who attended a meeting back on July 19th, a very important meeting.
It happened in the strategy room.
That's an important place in the White House.
They had a bunch of generals there.
The president was there, and the vice president was there.
But they have come to the conclusion that this is the breaking news that people should really pay attention to.
And it is the announcement that our president said that we're losing the war in Vietnam.
We lost the one in Vietnam.
We're losing the war in Afghanistan.
Can you believe that?
This is really big news.
Unbelievable.
So the question is, of course, in a serious manner, the war, they aren't winning the war.
Nobody knows why we're there exactly.
I mean, is there a national security interest?
They claim.
Is it to protect our Constitution?
Sure.
Is it to protect our freedoms here at home?
Sure, even though it does the opposite.
So was it a declared war so we know who we're fighting?
No, that wasn't.
Do we know what really the goals are?
No.
So we don't know when the war is going to end.
So do we need more troops?
Well, we did have a time when we had a lot of troops in there, and now we don't have so many, and some people argue that we need some more.
But it goes on and on because I don't think they address the real matter, and that is what is the purpose, and should we be surprised that we're not winning the war?
And there's a lot of suggestions.
Trump is suggesting, well, Nicholson, the general that's in charge, he should be a good one.
He's the 17th commander of the Afghan affair over there.
So maybe he's the best.
But it isn't the lack of a good general.
It's the lack of a sensible policy and an understanding.
And, you know, just as an aside, the cost is significant.
It's a monetary cost.
But these last 16, 17 years, we've lost something on our liberties.
And, of course, this is the longest-lasting war.
It's going into the 16th year now that we have been fighting there.
And, of course, our solution is not complicated.
And there are even a few people have suggested that.
So maybe we should put a little pressure on them and say, you know, we actually have a pretty good option.
How many trillions do we spend on that war?
We probably could have bought the country, just right a check and buy the country.
But, you know, Secretary, Defense Secretary Mattis, I think it was in February, appeared before Congress, and he said, we will have a strategy for Afghanistan within six months.
Well, that's come and gone.
There's no strategy because, as you well point, you better be careful.
They're going to call you up because you've identified the problem perfectly.
They have no idea what they're doing or how the war ends or what it looks like.
But what's interesting is they have two simultaneous plans, one's for escalation and one's for withdrawal.
You know, it's one or the other.
Maybe they'll flip a coin at the end.
Well, we live in an age of internationalism.
Trump has challenged it.
He doesn't think that this internationalism and NATO and UN is the solution.
At least he pays lip service to that.
But even in this debate, I shouldn't laugh.
Trump is saying, if only NATO had helped him more, we might have won.
Well, there may be some truth to it, but dependency, depending on somebody like NATO to fight these wars, which are for American security interests, financial interests, and oil interests, and minerals, the minerals that are being mined over there.
And the real irony, of course, is that some of these precious mining, rare, rare minerals.
Guess who's making it and mining it?
They're in there, and they don't have any troops, and that's China.
I mean, if you think of the foolishness of how much we've done to enhance the arch enemy, Iran, because they seem to be winning all the wars, and now we don't like China, so China is winning the money.
They must have had a different understanding of how you make money compared to some of our people in our administration for the last 25 years.
And here's the big irony, of course.
You know, those horrible commie Chinese, they actually bought the mineral rights to Afghanistan.
So they're actually just going in claiming their purchase.
And Trump, apparently, from the July 19th meeting, was furious.
We need these minerals.
Why aren't we getting these minerals?
The Chinese did the horrible thing.
They just bought them on the free market.
And it reminds me a little bit about what happened in South Sudan, which we've talked about a few times.
The U.S. was coveting all the oil in Sudan for a number of years, and they cooked up a phony human rights problem to excuse the separating of Sudan.
South Sudan is now a nightmare.
We were supposed to get the oil in the bargain.
The Chinese came in and they're the ones getting the oil.
They probably just bought it.
You know, another thing, I shouldn't laugh at this stuff, but it gets so silly that the subject came up and they poked fun at Trump for saying, well, they're not taking advice from the right people.
And he compared it to the restaurant in Manhattan that had a major overhaul and they found out we're spending a lot of money getting really important advice.
They said, well, your kitchen is not big enough.
And that was the problem.
And Trump was using this as an analogy.
Chinese Buying Oil 00:10:35
They said, why don't you go and talk to the people who work there?
You know, the average person.
They probably could have given you a lot better advice on the cheap instead of paying a lot of money, taking other advice, and it not working.
And I got to thinking, maybe that is a good analogy.
If he would use that, maybe that would mean that he should talk to some of our soldiers when they come home with loss of limbs.
How about the families who have suffered, the people who have lost lives over there, and the people who have suffered the consequences, the invisible people who have suffered, the people who suffer from the abuse of our civil liberties here, and the invisible people who might have had access to some of these funds, a trillion dollars or so, in the instead of what principle?
Instead of wasting all this overseas in a war that can't be won and that money being left in a community.
Those are the invisible people.
If he could ever see that and understand it and take advice from those principles, we would have never gotten into it and we would know exactly what we have to do right now.
And I know what you used to say on the campaign trail, you're not in favor of state-provided medicine or welfare, but the people that have become to rely on it, you know, while we're transitioning should be taken care of.
Well, think about that trillion dollars, you know, with how that might have helped people that genuinely are in need, although it's not the long-term solution.
Well, yeah, and that is the trans, that was my idea of a transition.
That if you, and my, my condition was, let's say, you save, I think they were building the embassy at the time, a billion-dollar embassy in Iraq.
I said, cancel that, save the billion dollars, put half of it toward the death, and use the other for the transition, you know, and take care of the people that we've taught to be so dependent.
You could work our way out of it, but of course, that's not going to happen.
But if you did have a true free market, they would get all the money.
You know, you wouldn't be paying off debt and doing all these other things.
Then they'd be fighting over it.
But they don't understand, nor do they care, nor do they want to endorse a system that actually distributes wealth more fairly, and the country becomes more productive, and the country is more peaceful, and our liberties are better protected.
It seems like we don't do a good enough job.
We, as believers in this principle, I think they are so positive.
Why can't we win the intellectual battle?
And I do think that we're gaining, but we have to see this as an ideological battle and not picking and choosing which general.
All the generals have been taught one thing: fight wars, kill people, occupy.
And they do the same thing.
That's why the 17th general is not going to do the trick, and Trump's not going to be happy with him, but he's not going to be happy with the 18th one.
I can guarantee it.
It almost likes something out of a Monty Python skit.
The next one falls.
Right.
And the next one falls.
But, you know, the thing is, this is a political liability for the president, as it was for President Obama.
President Obama listened to his people around him, and he ramped it up to 100,000 troops over there.
This was a big surge.
That was going to be the final push and win the war.
Well, of course, it didn't win that because, as you would say, it's an unwinnable war.
So, what do you do with the political liabilities of an unwinnable war?
Well, there's one suggestion that's being made, and this was made by Eric Prince and his mercenary group, and the head of Deincorp International.
These both provide mercenaries and weapons.
They said, just privatize it to us.
Let us take care of it.
We'll take this off your hands.
It'll be a nice, quiet, private little war.
Yeah, the reason I have paid attention to it is I'm pretty sure during the coming up of the Iraq war, I visited with somebody with his business, with that philosophy at least.
And that is when I introduced the solution or a suggestion of what we ought to do and just get the Congress to write letters of market reprisal, which illegalizes private industry.
But it doesn't, I think it's a lot different than privatizing a whole army and giving them a lot of money to go over and fight those wars.
I imagine they couldn't be less efficient, but why would there be less temptation to perpetuate war?
You know, they need a war to go on, so they might be part of the military-industrial complex.
I don't know whether you have a more positive attitude toward that or not.
No, and your letters of Michael Rapazo Bill was specific.
Identify the top people who were responsible for this, put them on a wanted poster, and take care of that.
This is something very different.
We're going to continue this inchoate, this ill-defined war.
But you know what's interesting about this is another thing we talk about a lot here on the program.
Something like Dein Corp International.
It wouldn't take very long to do a little bit of research, find out who they give money to.
They make a lot of money doing private stuff.
They give it to think tanks.
And think tanks come up with new papers by experts saying we need new wars.
More money to Deincorp, more money to think tanks, more papers for war.
This is how Washington works.
And it's just ripping off the American people.
Well, they've been very successful because look how successful they were with the deep state and the special interest being able to accelerate the war against Russia, you know, with the sanctions.
And not only that, along the way, they wanted to improve it, and they held up and played games.
Well, well, we want to make sure it's constitutional by expanding the attack on the Constitution by saying, oh, we don't want to just sanction Russia.
We've got to go after Iran, and we have to go after North Korea.
We have to really stir up trouble because nobody can vote against that.
And then the lobbyists come in, military-industrial complex, and the different special interests, and lo and behold, they get 99% of the vote.
People vote for it, and the congressmen are intimidated.
I keep arguing they don't know history.
These generals and our leadership don't know the history of Afghanistan, but I don't even know if they know the last 10 or 15 years.
You know, when are they going to say, well, how successful is this interventionist foreign policy where we go and we declare war against a movement, you know, and a strategy and say, any place there's terrorism, we have to go and root it out.
And of course, all that does is make more enemies for us.
But they never look at it and look at the lack of success.
They just figure that a military is the only answer.
It looks to me like Trump might be in a little bit of a quandary.
I don't think his heart is in it.
I think if all things were equal, he might, you know, not want to be in Afghanistan and come home.
But in his heart, we would like to think that he would like to have a better relationship with Russia, but he goes ahead and signs a sanction.
So it's going to be tough predicting and actually knowing.
My suspicion is that they're not going to give up on trying to solve this problem with more troops.
So I think the attitude that we have to have our military there, we have to have a new strategy, and that will bring about victory.
And my other prediction is ain't going to work.
Well, I would just follow up by saying, you're still right about them not understanding Afghanistan.
This is not a war against global jihadist terrorists.
The Taliban are just tribal leaders.
They happen to have had al-Qaeda on their territory, but so do a lot of countries.
In fact, our policies in Yemen are helping Al-Qaeda.
So there's a misunderstanding of the problem.
But if I can make my final prediction, you've got to make one.
And here's what I think.
This is based on what we talked about yesterday.
I think President Trump is going to try to split the difference.
He thinks he's going to appease the neocons by giving a few troops here, and he's going to appease the others who don't want the escalation by not putting too many in.
He's going to end up irritating both.
He'll be on the short end of the stick again.
I think that's probably a pretty good estimation.
But you know, what I worry about the most is what I remember so well in the 1960s when Johnson was president and things weren't going well.
And when he was getting ready to escalate, he said, I do not want to be the first president ever to lose a war.
So that's when the troop levels, he didn't start the war, Maddovag Eisenhower had a lot to do with that.
That he said that what we need to do is win the war, and then we ended up, I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands of people and 60,000 Americans died because it was saving face.
If there's anything worse than a government saying we have to do it to save face, I don't know what it is, but to escalate war because we don't want to be embarrassed because we lost a lot of lives.
We don't want those lives to have died in vain.
So we'll go and lose more lives.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
So that's the thing that I worry about best.
At least, Daniel, your position is it's in between and maybe he won't ask for 100,000 troops, but not leaving is going to set the stage for a possible escalation because what can happen is accidents and false flags to the point where even the American people chime in.
And the propaganda machine is so strong, there was no real resistance against accelerating our hostility toward Russia with these sanctions.
A lot of lack of understanding.
A lot of people just ignored it.
But no, the people go along and they can be easily scared.
And the American people finally, after a year or two of propagandizing, the people supported escalation of the war in Iraq.
And right now, the propaganda is actually much stronger, not for more escalation in Afghanistan and dealing with that.
This is almost a minor problem as compared to the massive propaganda going on with Korea.
Because quite frankly, I just don't think they have any big bombs.
And I don't think they have an intercontinental missile.
Massive Propaganda On Korea 00:00:54
Maybe they would like to.
And they have a pretty good reason for that because, you know, it's when you give up your nuclear weapons that the United States moves in like they did in Libya, like they did in Iraq, and like they're doing to Iran, that they don't have it.
So he's acting in a rational manner, but the propaganda, universal liberal conservative stations, TV station, they're beating the war drums.
And we saw this announcement just recently that American citizens were told to get out of Korea, North Korea, because there are some there, get out of there by September 1st.
So who knows what's going to happen?
I hope some sanity comes to our leaders.
I do want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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