Aug. 18, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:20
3794 The War In Afghanistan | Erik Prince and Stefan Molyneux
Afghanistan is an expensive disaster for the United States of America. Erik Prince joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss his proposal for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the suggestion that a private military force could provide the skeletal structure to the Afghan soldiers, how his plan compared to H.R McMaster's suggested troop surge and the skeptics suggestion to simply leave the middle east all-together. Erik Prince is a U.S. Navy Seal veteran, the founder and former CEO of private security company Blackwater USA, the head of Frontier Resource Group and the chairman of Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group Ltd. Prince is also the author of “Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror.”Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror: http://www.fdrurl.com/blackwaterThe MacArthur Model for Afghanistan: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-macarthur-model-for-afghanistan-1496269058Frontier Resource Group: http://www.frontierresourcegroup.comFrontier Services Group Ltd: http://www.fsgroup.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, here in his car with Eric Prince.
He is a U.S. Navy SEAL veteran, the founder and former CEO of private security company Blackwater, USA the head of Frontier Resource Group and the chairman of Hong Kong Listed Frontier Services Group Limited.
Eric is also the author of Civilian Warriors, the inside story of Blackwater and the unsung heroes of the war on terror.
Eric, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Nice to see you. Sorry to have to be from the car.
That's absolutely fine.
Absolutely fine. Now, Of course, they're debating this today, so we're going to get this video out as quickly as possible, but let's start with a little bit of history, because I mean, this is America's longest war, 16 plus years, and it seemed to me that the goals, the sort of stated goals of the Bush administration after 9-11, which was to rout the Taliban, was achieved.
You know, 100 CIA guys, a couple hundred special forces guys, some air support, and boom, these guys were done and dusted to a large degree by early 2002.
I'm not really sure what's been happening since other than random and fairly useless surges.
I agree. You know, the Taliban are not 10 feet tall.
They were largely defeated or devastated in those first few months.
But the more we've turned this into a conventional nation-building exercise with conventional army generals running it, we've gone backwards slowly and steadily.
And now that we've spent close to a trillion dollars, more than 20,000 wounded, 2,400 American dead, The Pentagon just wants to do more and more of the same, and that's what the president has heretofore rejected, at least. We've had seven years of the Bush administration, eight years of the Obama administration.
Both of them kind of got it wrong.
So the president doesn't really own the failure that is Afghanistan so far, but the next decisions that he makes as soon as today, he will start to own that longest and very failed war.
So, I think before we start getting into the military strategy questions, the first thing that concerns me, I guess as a former manager, is the lack of continuity in decision-making processes seems to me entirely guaranteed to produce the kind of craptacular failure that we're seeing in Afghanistan.
What is it? 17 commanders in 16 years.
You've got rotating diplomats.
You've got troops going in and out six to nine months as a whole.
So any relationships, any accumulation of knowledge or wisdom about local conditions, to me, gets continually wiped off the whiteboard and everyone starts from scratch again.
I agree. You've had 17 commanders in 15 years, different diplomats in charge, and a complete fragmentation of unity of command.
Changes their coach every year.
It doesn't. So, you know, you've had...
That's what's allowed no one to really be responsible.
If you can ask, I mean, for the president, if you go back to the apprentice days on TV, who would he say you're fired to for all these incremental decisions?
And because no one's been around even long enough to own it.
That's why when I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in early June, I said, you need to have unity of command.
I said a viceroy...
Yeah, I meant it to be slightly controversial.
It's not in any way because we want to rule Afghanistan, but rather someone that has the unity of command to ride herd over U.S. government policy.
DOD, Department of State, CIA policy, and for all the money that applies to Afghanistan and for Pakistan, because the interagency process has completely failed.
I think books will be written about just how badly America did in Afghanistan at messing it up year after Okay, so let's talk about the strategy aspects.
Of course, the American military in its sort of modern-ish format was developed as a means of threatening or perhaps even repelling a potential USSR invasion of Western Europe.
And that, of course, was conventional.
You've got lines of tanks, you've got air support, you've got battalions crashing into each other.
It doesn't seem to have adapted very well.
I know that some of the more private contractors have, but it doesn't seem to have adapted very well to this new form of warfare.
I mean, if you're really good at one particular kind of warfare, your enemy is going to avoid that kind of warfare as much as humanly possible.
And that's what they've been doing, it seems to me, you know, sort of from Mujahideen in the 1980s in Afghanistan onward.
We have the greatest military in the world.
If we could only get our enemies to Look, for 70 years, the U.S. military was trained and equipped and supplied to fight the Fold-A-Gap fight, right?
That big conventional war to repel a Soviet invasion of Europe.
But now taking that capability and adapting it to fighting against guys with flip-flops and pickup trucks, clearly we have failed to do over 16 years.
Because they've come with a cost structure, a bureaucratic structure, a behemoth trying to fight against nimble insurgents.
And the Pentagon has never changed how they really deploy, how they organize their people.
They keep defaulting to the existing Cold War maneuver warfare structure, and that's one of the reasons we continue to fail in Afghanistan.
And it's funny because it has struck me that, of course, America won its independence from England way back in the day through insurgency and through not having uniforms and through scattering and wearing down the economic resources, the military resources and the will to win of the British troops.
And it's kind of tragic in a way how the country that was founded on an insurgency seems to have lost any capacity of an idea how to deal with one overseas.
Look, the former CAA station chief in that area, Kevin Holbert, wrote a great op-ed last week, and he talked about H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor, who is a three-star conventional army general, a tank guy.
He wrote a scathing thesis on the failure of Vietnam generals' leadership.
And he called it dereliction of duty.
And Holbert compared it I think, rightly, to the failure of U.S. military leadership in Afghanistan to adapt to the realities on the ground.
And he said if he's not careful, some smart colonel is going to be writing dereliction of duty to the Afghan years.
Because we don't. We have a Pentagon that just hasn't adapted to the realities that they're fighting.
And it has struck me when you have talked recently, Eric, about the restrictions on the decision-making process of the underground commanders.
As you point out, you shouldn't have to call 12 people to find out if you can drop a bomb in the heat of combat.
It really reminds me of what seems to have happened in late-stage Vietnam, where you had LBJ and other people trying to micromanage a war that was happening thousands of miles away, where on-the-ground responsiveness was very necessary.
Do you think that there is this kind of clogging up of decision-making capacities, and how would this Viceroy position deal with that?
We're almost cursed by all the mega communications equipment, and video conferencing, and streaming video, so that instead of the on-the-ground field commander making the decision, being empowered and responsible for what occurs, now everything becomes a committee with people at CENTCOM and the Pentagon and their component now everything becomes a committee with people at CENTCOM and the and then, That's why I said, look, you have to have unity of command.
One person that the president puts in charge To fix it.
And it's almost equivalent to a bankruptcy trustee.
If you've ever seen a business go into bankruptcy, the court appoints a trustee and that person has all power In this case, set the rules of engagement to control troop rotations, control the promotions of the people that are there, and of course, spending and policy decisions.
The United States has provided $25 billion to Pakistan in the last 16 years, and yet the Pakistanis are still providing military aid to the Taliban.
And you have to say, why?
How are they able, through the interagency process, to still be getting U.S. money when they're killing our people with those weapons?
Now it seems to me that I'm sorry to be putting all these weasel words in, but, you know, you're the expert and I've just, you know, spent a couple of days reading, so feel free to correct me where I go astray, Eric, but you've got 330,000 Afghan army and police, and it seems that they have been trained to operate in a similar way as the U.S. Army, not in a way that the enemy is using to fight against the U.S. Army.
In other words, hey, we've got a really failed model of military combat, but we're going to train you how to do exactly the same thing.
How do you think that might change if the Viceroy is appointed?
The U.S. Army went about recreating itself in Afghanistan.
Now, what I came forward with a recommendation beyond the Viceroy and Union of Command, but to do for the Afghan security forces what has already worked in parts of Afghanistan, and that is the Afghan Special Forces.
It's a unit of about 17,000 people.
They do 80% of the offensive combat missions in Afghanistan.
That model works because they've been trained and mentored by Very experienced U.S. Special Forces people that come and work and live with them.
So that model works, but the conventional army, where you have U.S. soldiers that rotate in for six or nine months, spend a little bit of time with that local, but they don't live on the same base, right?
And so there's that fracture in continuity.
Again, so a U.S. trooper goes into country for six to nine months, and they leave, and all that experience leaves with them.
What I recommend happen Is embedded mentors, contractors, go live with, train with, and patrol with those Afghan units and basically provide a skeletal structure for each Afghan battalion to function with.
The battalions is where the money beats the road, is where the rubber beats the road in Afghanistan.
That is the basic unit of combat.
They're not doing bigger units than that because the Taliban are only, you know, moving in tens and twenties and hundreds, but not thousands yet, fortunately.
Great. In the same way that a special forces team builds a battalion of indigenous forces, they need leadership, intelligence, communications, medical and logistics expertise, that would be provided by those contractors.
Again, let me be very clear, this is not an expansion of the use of contractors.
This would lead to most of them leaving.
There's almost 9,000 US troops there now, 4,000 NATO troops, 26,000 contractors.
So this would lead to a significant reduction in contractors, in active duty people, everything else.
Whether you're right, left, libertarian, or statist, I think anybody would truly want the Afghan war to end because we've lost a lot of people and you have to have a point.
It has to be an endgame here.
This at least, you know, the president has met with these decisions to pull out completely, in which case, you know, the true, the valid concern is do you have The Taliban or ISIS raising their battle flag over the U.S. Embassy in six months or a year.
That's probably what happened.
Or we can keep doing, I would say, the same failed strategy that we've been doing for 16 years.
I tried to come up with a very cheap strategy that would strengthen the Afghan security forces in a proven way and set the terms and the realities on the ground so that conventional U.S. forces can go home and we can bring this war to an end.
And one of the things that, in doing the research for this, Eric, just was astounding to me, was the problem of defections.
What I've read is that it currently delivers the equivalent of two trained infantry divisions per year to the enemy.
I wonder if you can talk about how that is occurring, that the U.S., of course, is spending a lot of time, energy, and money training soldiers who then defect to the enemy.
Sure. Again, for any army, you have to pay them on time, you have to feed them on time, and resupply them.
I feel terrible for that Afghan trooper who's sitting in a base, who has to go outside his base on a patrol, because he has no confidence in any quick reaction force if they get attacked.
He has no confidence in medevac if he gets hurt.
No confidence in close air support.
If they're in a big fight as well.
So they're really on their own.
And then when that Afghan soldier's pay is getting stolen by senior officers and their food is lousy because the money is being stolen for their food, you have systematic breakdown of those basic elements to build a force.
So my plan consists of those mentors we talked about embedding at each of those battalions to make sure the men get paid and fed and led properly.
Some air support so that they do go outside the wire, they get medevac, they get close air support, etc.
And again, in both of those cases, the contracted professionals attaching to the units and the aircraft would be Afghan aircraft, meaning they become part of the Afghan security forces serving as adjuncts.
So even by UN definition, they're not mercenaries.
The third part of the plan I would call governance support.
There are seven corps in the Iraqi army, I'm sorry, in the Afghan army.
That's where those battalions call to get food, fuel, ammunition, and parts resupply.
You have to put some logistics professionals, some accounting people there to prevent corrupt Afghan officials from stealing the fuel, stealing the money for the food, and selling the ammunition to the enemy.
That's what's happening now.
If you prevent that and the battalions get supplied on time and they get air support and they're well-led, you have a very different reality on the ground.
Well, it is an air support game out there, and I wonder if you can help my listeners, Eric, understand what has happened to the maintenance and combat readiness and availability of the fixed and rotary wing aircraft out there.
So, the U.S. taxpayer has invested billions of dollars in building an Afghan Air Force capability, but only 40% of those aircraft are still functional.
I mean, there was $500 million written off on cargo aircraft provided by the U.S., To the Afghans.
And three years later, they were sold for $40,000 total in aluminum scrap.
So again, this mentor model of fixing what's there and making it functional will provide the Afghans something that works.
It has been, I mean, the Inspector General has at least been calling out these things, calling out some of these problems.
But the problem is there's really no accountability at the Pentagon.
There's no generals getting fired or demoted or anybody else that says, you were hired, you were directed to do this mission, and you failed.
If it was a contractor that was hired to do that job, they would be prosecuted.
So in the past, of course, the goal, there's this old cliche from like war movies, you know, we're going to hold this hill, we're going to capture this territory.
The old war model was to grab geography and hold on to it at all costs.
But this seems to have shifted quite a lot now, that the control is the economic arteries, it's where the money is being produced, why the Taliban is focusing, and to some degree, even the US focusing on allowing the Afghani farmers to harvest all of this poppy and 93% of the world's opium coming from Afghanistan and so on.
What needs to change in the mindset of what it means to be winning this conflict, given that it's not about geography anymore?
Well, sure, the Taliban know how to make money, and they're doing it.
Off of Obium, you mentioned, hash, gold, lapis, marble, and pistachios.
They control the economic trade in those areas because the U.S. Army has been fixed on controlling geography instead of how people actually make money.
Or even how the government makes money.
So the government is not making money on any of those resources right now because also in 15 years, the United States has not even pushed through or pushed the Afghans to complete a mining law or an energy law.
So an investor that says, I want to dig or mine gold in this area can't even get the legal permission to do that.
But again, my approach, a lead federal official That runs this and coordinates this policy.
You put an Afghan battalion near that gold mine or those centers of economic activity to prevent them from being used by the Taliban to fund their resources, to protect entrepreneurship, and to promote legal and actual trade.
Well, this is the astonishing thing compared to what happened in post-Second World War Germany, post-Second World War Japan under MacArthur.
The free market reforms, the protection of legal property rights, the right of contract, as you point out, the more abstract rights of mining and resource ownership.
Currency reform in Germany was hugely important in allowing the powerhouse of German manufacturing to start up, pointed more at civilians than at the military complex.
There doesn't seem to have been the same focus on the kind of free market reforms that would peel people away from fundamentalism.
I'd always rather deal with an entrepreneur than a fundamentalist in certain situations because they're now invested in a continuance of the legal system.
You're absolutely right. I mean, my article talked about the MacArthur approach.
He dragged the Japanese economy forward by centuries with land reform and human rights issues.
We haven't done anything like that in Afghanistan.
Yes, it's wonderful that people are going to school more, but the fundamentals of an economy are bureaucrats and leaders seem to have forgotten over the last 15 years.
Property rights, mining law, energy laws would have ejected Huge amount of capital and taken a lot of people off the streets and put them in jobs instead of as jihadis.
So again, the Afghan debacle is fixable if you do pare back and focus on a few of these basics and strengthen the Afghan security forces in a way so that you can keep pressure on all these terrorist groups.
If we keep doing the big DOD approach, we can expect...
I mean, look, past performance is the predictor of future performance.
Need I say more? Now, the argument, of course, coming out of McMaster and McCain and others is, well, we just need to search.
We just need to crank it up.
I think McCain wants another 4,000.
What's the case against that that you can make?
So what's different about their 4,000 than they had when they had 140,000 troops in country?
Back in 09, 10, 11, the numbers went up to 100,000 American troops and 40,000 NATO troops.
The mission is not to do the fighting for the Afghans.
The mission is to let the Afghans finish their fight themselves.
If the U.S. Army could send 4,000 senior sergeants and staff officers, just, you know, you have to be a senior enlisted or an officer to go, they should.
But they can't. They can't organize like that.
They haven't done so in 16 years.
The tooth to tail, the amount of support people they need to have one trainer in country is another 20 support people.
So if they want to put 4,000 mentors in, do the math.
It's tens of thousands of additional soldiers, U.S. soldiers, to support them in that mission.
They can't organize as thin and lean as the private sector can.
It is a challenge for me because my sort of thought is, you know, after 60 years, mission's not done, it's time to bug out.
But having seen what happens in places like Libya and Syria and, well, of course, Iraq is the big example as well, seeing what happens when there is a sudden withdrawal of U.S. forces, it does create a power vacuum.
The crazies seem to get in more power and then there's more attacks.
And then, of course, there's a migrant crisis and lots of other things going on.
So I am, of course, very tempted, as I think are a lot of people, to just say, you know, we can't fix it.
You've got an IQ83 population.
It can't be turned into anything productive.
People have been trying to fix Afghanistan from the outside for 250 years.
We've got a country that was a communist insurgency and then warlords and then fundamentalist Islamists.
We can't fix it.
The time is to get out.
The time to do it is now.
And you did mention earlier some of the negative repercussions, but I wonder if you could help people understand some of the risks that is faced if there's exit without stabilization.
Well, you know, the reason ISIS had legitimacy amongst the eyes of other jihadis was because they had a physical caliphate.
They claim ownership of a caliphate.
So, you know, trying to drive that out of Iraq and Syria, a unilateral pullout in Afghanistan quickly would lead to a caliphate forming there.
Very quickly. It's effective what the Taliban claim now is their own caliphate there.
And ISIS is even competing with them for that.
So it becomes a fetid swamp of terrorist groups competing.
They have a huge earning potential that they're making money on now off that opium trade.
And so they start to become like an international jihadi version of the FARC in Colombia making money off the cocaine trade.
So... I believe you have to have some level of presence and stability and ability to put pressure on all these terror groups, deny them sanctuary, but let's do it in a way smarter, cheaper, more flexible way than we have been doing the last six Last question I have, there was a quote that you had mentioned in a couple of interviews, Eric, that really struck me where you said that the perspective from the Taliban and their saying is, the Americans have the watches, we have the time.
And it struck me as one of the things that bin Laden talked about way back in the day, that he wanted to take down a superpower by dragging it into unwinnable conflicts, bleeding it dry of blood, treasure, and of course, soldiers.
And the same thing that happened in the Soviet Union when it attempted to fight in Afghanistan was the destruction of the host country's economy.
Is that what they mean?
What do they mean with that statement, I guess, internationally maybe, but locally on the ground?
Well, you know, the 9-11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon, 9-11-2001, cost Al-Qaeda anywhere from $350,000 to a maximum of $500,000.
Look at the trillions in defense spending in homeland security and everything else we've done since then.
So they can, with very asymmetric effects, damage our economies, our liberty, and our way of life.
The point of going to a much smaller, much cheaper, flexible approach in Afghanistan, and away from the Pentagon, big government approach, is to put the time back on our side.
Because With a cost-effective way to put unrelenting pressure on the terrorist organizations, you can now outweigh them.
Like you said at the beginning of the program, a hundred CIA officers, a couple hundred soft guys, and some air power routed the Taliban.
They're not ten feet tall.
If you go back to that paradigm and put unrelenting pursuit and pressure on them in a cost-effective way, then they make a deal.
They realize that they don't have the time anymore.
They don't have the time to wait us out because they will be hunted into extinction.
Well, I really, really appreciate your time, Eric.
I wanted to mention to people, of course, to check out the book, Civilian Warriors, the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War and Terror.
Really, really appreciate your time today.
I hope you got a window or two cracked in that car.
But I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
And I certainly hope, of course, that people will look at something that is cheaper, that is more effective, and look at it as a potential way of getting out of this seemingly intractable problem.
