Sept. 8, 2019 - Steve Pieczenik
04:39
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, this is Dr. | |
| Pachenik and I'd like to address this talk to my audience and to President Trump. | |
| Mr. | |
| President, please resume these secret Afghani talks and let Zalmay Khalazad The neocon whom I have been criticizing for the past 12 to 15 years, give him the chance to finish up the agreement. | |
| I know Zal very well. | |
| He worked with me on the West Bank and a lot of places, but he's born in Afghanistan. | |
| He, like Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, were both born in Afghanistan. | |
| Both were at the American University in Beirut. | |
| Both are probable CIA operatives. | |
| Both are very talented. | |
| Zalmay went to University of Chicago, became our ambassador to Afghanistan. | |
| And then our ambassador to Iraq. | |
| The point of fact is that he understands the Taliban very well because he worked with them. | |
| So let him finish up what he needs to do. | |
| There is a tension point between Ashraf Ghani, who is a professional anthropologist, worked at the Columbia University, got his PhD, and the fact that he was placed in his position as president of Afghanistan by Zalmik. | |
| So that tension has been rising to the point Where I might think, I'm only saying I might think, that even the so-called Taliban attack may have been created by people on Ghani's side to hold off the continuation of the peace talks. | |
| Their peace talks are imperative. | |
| This will be a point of success for you, as I'm going to quote Brigadier General Donald Baldock, B-O-L-D-U-C, who'd been 10 times in Afghanistan. | |
| He said, look, We're good to go. | |
| We lost the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Korean War, all generals who have created theories and ideas which never came to success. | |
| The only general I know who has been successful were Eisenhower, who got us out of North Korean War and made sure we didn't go to Vietnam, and General Marshall, who... | |
| The point of fact here is, let me give you the numbers that are involved in what happens in Afghanistan if we don't have a peace talk. | |
| Number one, we've been there for 18 years. | |
| Number two, five to ten thousand American soldiers and employees have been killed there. | |
| Number three, we've had 20,000 to 40,000 wounded American soldiers and employees in Afghanistan. | |
| Number four, the cost of the war. | |
| The cost of the war is $3 trillion. | |
| Not $3 million, not $3 billion. | |
| $3 trillion. | |
| That's $6,400 per individual in the United States over an 18-year period. | |
| So what we have is a failure that's compounding itself day by day. | |
| You were wise enough and understood it very carefully from the beginning to say that we do not belong in Afghanistan. | |
| We do not belong in Syria. | |
| We do not belong in Iraq. | |
| We have to bring our soldiers back home and that's what should be allowed to continue. | |
| Let me put it this way. | |
| Zalmay knows how to finish this agreement. | |
| You know how to make negotiations happen. | |
| You know what it means when you can't effectively negotiate for a hotel or a condo or something comes up as a problem. | |
| This is exactly what happened in the Afghanistan peace talks. | |
| We got a problem. | |
| Unfortunately, an American died. | |
| But that is the price we pay to leave Afghanistan and make sure that we don't repeat what Alexander the Great was defeated. | |
| We don't repeat how the British were defeated. | |
| We don't repeat how the Russians were defeated. | |
| Lest you think I don't know anything about Afghanistan, Mr. | |
| President, I want to tell you I was there in the 70s. | |
| And came back in other decades. | |
| I warned our military and our intelligence all the way back in the 70s that the Russians would come in and be defeated. | |
| Let me quote to you Tolstoy who said the most imperative requirements for peace is time, our time and persistence. | |
| And also let me quote to you your words. | |
| We can lose a battle but we will win the war and the war is peace. |
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