Steve Pieczenik - OPUS 173 Resume! Afghan Peace Talks
Aired: 2019-09-08
Duration: 04:39

[00:00:01]  Hi, this is Dr.
[00:00:03]  Pachenik and I'd like to address this talk to my audience and to President Trump.
[00:00:08]  Mr.
[00:00:10]  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.
[00:00:24]  I know Zal very well.
[00:00:26]  He worked with me on the West Bank and a lot of places, but he's born in Afghanistan.
[00:00:31]  He, like Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, were both born in Afghanistan.
[00:00:37]  Both were at the American University in Beirut.
[00:00:40]  Both are probable CIA operatives.
[00:00:42]  Both are very talented.
[00:00:45]  Zalmay went to University of Chicago, became our ambassador to Afghanistan.
[00:00:50]  And then our ambassador to Iraq.
[00:00:53]  The point of fact is that he understands the Taliban very well because he worked with them.
[00:00:58]  So let him finish up what he needs to do.
[00:01:01]  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.
[00:01:17]  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.
[00:01:32]  Their peace talks are imperative.
[00:01:34]  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.
[00:01:43]  He said, look, We're good to go.
[00:02:01]  We lost the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Korean War, all generals who have created theories and ideas which never came to success.
[00:02:11]  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...
[00:02:24]  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.
[00:02:32]  Number one, we've been there for 18 years.
[00:02:35]  Number two, five to ten thousand American soldiers and employees have been killed there.
[00:02:41]  Number three, we've had 20,000 to 40,000 wounded American soldiers and employees in Afghanistan.
[00:02:48]  Number four, the cost of the war.
[00:02:50]  The cost of the war is $3 trillion.
[00:02:54]  Not $3 million, not $3 billion.
[00:02:56]  $3 trillion.
[00:02:58]  That's $6,400 per individual in the United States over an 18-year period.
[00:03:05]  So what we have is a failure that's compounding itself day by day.
[00:03:11]  You were wise enough and understood it very carefully from the beginning to say that we do not belong in Afghanistan.
[00:03:18]  We do not belong in Syria.
[00:03:20]  We do not belong in Iraq.
[00:03:21]  We have to bring our soldiers back home and that's what should be allowed to continue.
[00:03:28]  Let me put it this way.
[00:03:29]  Zalmay knows how to finish this agreement.
[00:03:32]  You know how to make negotiations happen.
[00:03:35]  You know what it means when you can't effectively negotiate for a hotel or a condo or something comes up as a problem.
[00:03:43]  This is exactly what happened in the Afghanistan peace talks.
[00:03:48]  We got a problem.
[00:03:49]  Unfortunately, an American died.
[00:03:51]  But that is the price we pay to leave Afghanistan and make sure that we don't repeat what Alexander the Great was defeated.
[00:04:00]  We don't repeat how the British were defeated.
[00:04:02]  We don't repeat how the Russians were defeated.
[00:04:05]  Lest you think I don't know anything about Afghanistan, Mr.
[00:04:08]  President, I want to tell you I was there in the 70s.
[00:04:11]  And came back in other decades.
[00:04:13]  I warned our military and our intelligence all the way back in the 70s that the Russians would come in and be defeated.
[00:04:22]  Let me quote to you Tolstoy who said the most imperative requirements for peace is time, our time and persistence.
[00:04:32]  And also let me quote to you your words.
[00:04:35]  We can lose a battle but we will win the war and the war is peace.