Angry Planet - Why a troop surge in Afghanistan is a terrible idea

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

How many soldiers does America need to turn the tide in Afghanistan? The Taliban controls half the country and continues to gain ground. The Pentagon and generals in the field want U.S. President Donald Trump to send an additional 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers to Afghanistan to help win the war. But we’ve been here before. In 2009, Stanley McChrystal famously requested a troop surge and got it. In the long run, an extra 30,000 soldiers didn’t matter. This week on War College, journalist and author Douglas Wissing tells us why he thinks a troop surge in Afghanistan a terrible idea. Wissing has embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan three times in the past 16 years. He’s written two books on the country and he’s not optimistic about America’s long-term military prospects in a war that’s almost two decades old. By Matthew Gault Produced by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. When we invaded in 2001, Afghanistan was a basket case at the bottom of virtually every human development indices. It's 16 years later. $117 billion, it remains at the bottom of virtually every human development indices.

So, you know, and so doing more of the same, adding more soldiers, spending more money, doing more nation building, that's not going to work. This is a lost war. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. My guest today is journalist Douglas Wissing. He's here today to talk to us about Afghanistan, America's longest and least reported war, and also the subject of two books by Mr. Wissing, the latest of which is called hopeless but optimistic.

Doug, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Glad to be with you again, Matthew. All right. So Afghanistan is remarkably back in the news. U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a troop search. At this point, Afghanistan is America's longest war. And back in 2009, Barack Obama tried this.

He had a troop surge where he sent an additional 30,000 troops to the country. And the numbers that Trump is reportedly considering are between 3 and 5,000. So my first question for you, Doug, is how many troops will it take to win Afghanistan? That is a great question that's been asked down through the millennia. Alexander the Great asked that question. he had 90% of his horsemen tied up in Afghanistan. He said, Afghanistan, an easy country to march into a hard country to march out of. It's, for good reason, called the graveyard empires at the peak.

The U.S. had 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at the height of the Obama surge. And, you know, here we are. It's now in our 16th year, that surge failed miserably. now the Pentagon is asking the Trump administration to have a mini surge, surge 2.0. So the numbers are floating around from 3,000 to 5,000, without any indication as to why another few thousand soldiers would make a difference when 100,000 didn't. We do have to remember that the Taliban insurgency has been growing at double digits since at least 2005. and each year growing in double digits, well, we do need to remember that the long-held special forces dictum is that if an insurgency isn't shrinking, it's winning. And that's the case that we have here.

You bring up a really good point in something I don't think a lot of people have considered, because in a lot of the reporting on this issue, people say that we're in a stalemate or that there's a deadlock in Afghanistan, and that's not really accurate, is it? No, we're really looking at a lost war. We're propping up a particularly dysfunctional and feckless proxy government that is among the most corrupt on the planet that ranks at the very bottom of all the lists relating to rule of law. We're not talking about Switzerland here. We're talking about a particularly corrupt government that ranks among the most corrupt governments on the planet. and it's not a stalemate. This is a lost war. And, you know, we're trying to reset what those indices are where we get to call it a stalemate. But the reality is the Special Inspector General

for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Cigar, the congressionally mandated oversight agency, noted that security incidents in Afghanistan were at their peak in 2016, and that continued into to 2017. The Taliban now controls, the Taliban-led insurgency now controls about half of the country. There are shadow governments in virtually every province. They control quite a number, including Helmand where I was during the last withdrawal. They are knocking on the door of provincial centers all over the country. And insurgencies are central peddle. They, they, they, move from the countryside toward the government centers. The capital, Kabul is besieged.

We're seeing successful attacks all the time, and I can testify that it's an incredibly unsafe place. Attacks and kidnappings are just endemic there. And just so people have kind of a sense of how quickly the Taliban has turned this around, especially in the past year, Cigar releases quarterly reports. The most recent one, like you said, showed that the Taliban had taken 50%. The one before that, just three months before that, I think they were only up to, there were about a third of the country, 30%.

So it's, they're pushing and they're winning, like you said. Well, and I tend to view all of those estimates with a jaundiced eye. I have had some security analysts that I trust have told me that essentially about 90% of the countryside is controlled or is influenced as a term that's often used by the Taliban. And I can tell you that I've been in provinces what they were terming influenced. And, you know, the fact that you have to set up a full-scale military mission to go two miles in a town that supposedly government-controlled. I mean, you know, you're in full battle-rattle in armored vehicles with machine gunners on the top,

and you practice that mission for a couple of days to make sure everybody's on the page to go two miles in what's termed a government-controlled capital. If that's influenced, you know, what is it when it's controlled? And what is, when we say shadow government, what exactly do you mean? It means there is a parallel government that is, you know, there's a governor, there's a Taliban governor, there's a sub-governor, there are sharia courts, and we have to remember that Afghanistan is among the most corrupt governments on the planet. So if you are so unfortunate as to take a case to court, you're going to be there for years.

And it just becomes an opportunity. It's a predatory government. So it's never going to get resolved. Or you can take it to the Sharia court, the Taliban court that's considered pretty honest. You get pretty quick justice. They resolve land disputes. And Afghanistan has got, you know, law. land disputes to go back to when there was a king and then there was a communist government,

then there was us, then there, you know, so land disputes are just rife in Afghanistan. And we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to, quote, resolve the land title issue. And it's still not done. We're still like studying what to do. It's Afghanistan is a country about the size of Texas. There's only about 30 million Afghans. This is a finite problem. The land title issue is just one of the examples of how badly we've failed, how badly the United States nation building and development and aid projects have failed. We've spent $117 billion at the last time I looked, so it's higher now. That's more money than we spent on the Marshall Plan adjusted for inflation on a country

that is about 30 million people. When we invaded in 2001, Afghanistan was a basket case at the bottom of virtually every human development indices. It's 16 years later. We've spent $117 billion. It remains at the bottom of virtually every human development indices. Life expectancy, literacy,

electrical generation, infant mortality. It's at the bottom of all of them after that, after 16 years. So doing more of the same, adding more soldiers, spending more money, doing more nation building,

that's not going to, going to work. This is a lost war. So at this point, do we even have any idea what winning would actually look like? I certainly haven't seen anything that defines that. We're essentially running without a strategy

now. There is no end game. You know, the Obama administration kicked the can. They didn't want it to collapse on their watch. And so now the Trump administration is, some of his advisors, Bannon and Kushner, are saying that Obama, or

you know, that Obama's war didn't work, that, you know, and that counterinsurgency in nation building was a disaster. And Trump has run on a program of America first. So they're saying, why are you trying to do nation building? On the other hand, the generals, you know, generals fight the last war. It's just, unfortunately, the last war is still this one. So they want to do another escalation without really being able to explain what it's going to accomplish or what the goal is. What does victory look like? That's a great question. Has not even been addressed. Let's talk about those administration officials, because from the reports that we're getting, the guy in the room that's really pushing this troop surge is National Security Advisor,

H.R. McMaster. That's right. Do you have any idea? What's your sense of him and why is this war important to him? Well, both H.R. McMaster, the current National Security Advisor, and General Nicholson, who is commanding the forces in Afghanistan, both of their careers have really been defined by Afghanistan. And the National Security Advisor, General McMaster, he commanded one of the major nation-building military units in Afghanistan that's called Operation Transparency, which was an effort to try and get some handle on the corruption that led through the entire Afghan government up to the very top and reached down to the Taliban, where we were, as soldiers constantly were reminding me, we were funding both sides of the war. We are funding both sides of the

war. We're pouring money in, and everybody's getting their cut of it. You know, everybody's in on the take. One intelligence officer, very smart intelligence officers said, it's the perfect war. Everybody's making money. So McMaster really was deep into the counterinsurgency strategy. He was right there at the very top of those kind of nation-building things. And, you know, he's going back to what he knows. He's really a supporter of, you know, we're trying to set up now new nation-building things. And they didn't work before. They, you know, they got sideline when it became politically complicated because the Karzai government didn't want us to pursue that. They didn't want us to pursue the corruption at the highest levels of the Afghan government.

And the new government, the Ghani, Abdulah, the national unity government, a particularly misnamed organization, there's no real push. They say, oh, yes, we're going to fight corruption. The country remains at the very top of the corrupt country list. It feels odd to me that someone that was supposedly such a crusader for transparency and anti-corruption wouldn't get the message that feels strange. That McMaster isn't willing to do that? Yeah, I mean, he had a front row seat for all of this, right? I mean, he's seen the same reports that you and I have seen and has met the same people.

Why is that such, why does he have such a different takeaway? way. You know, the military is trained to continue the mission no matter what. That's just the way they're hardwired to do that. And when all you got the hammer, everything looks like a nail. Upton Sinclair, I'm sometimes remembering the Muck Raker, Upton Sinclair, who famously said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And I think as I have analyzed these toxic networks that include ambitious American careerists, corrupt Afghan insiders, for-profit American corporations, the elected officials that are dependent on the contributions from those corporations and the insurgency that

network that connects it all, it makes sense to me. has something to gain. I've been with military officers out in Taliban country, and there's kind of a sense of getting this if an IED goes off near the convoy because everybody gets a combat arms patch, and that means that that colonel may go from being a colonel to being a brigadier general.

There's just, there's a lot of medals to go around. And with that, a better gig. That's on the military side, on the development and the military industrial side, giant contracts, gargantuan contracts beyond almost our ability to comprehend sitting over here where we're trying to scratch together money to fix our collapsing infrastructure and bake sales for the schools and whatnot. And the military industrial and development industrial contracts that have accomplished nothing,

We have to remember that the American taxpayers are on the hook now for about a trillion dollars just for the Afghanistan war. And as the Pentagon once more, we spent $50 billion is what was appropriated approximately for 2017 operations, military and development operations just in Afghanistan, you know, somewhere around a billion dollars a week. and if we can draft that with what was appropriated for the fight against ISIS in Syria that is only about

$5 billion so $50 billion versus $5 billion Afghanistan while it is the Forgotten War as you mentioned remains by far

our largest foreign military engagement it is just sucking money and I'm also reminded of Osama bin Laden's prevenciamento back in 2004

where he announced the big strategy, really, was to bleed us until bankruptcy. You know, he said in one of his talks, he said, you know, we send a couple of al-Qaeda guys over there, a couple of jihadists, they wave their flags, the generals sent all those soldiers over there. We send a couple more guys over there, wave the al-Qaeda flag. You know, and I keep thinking, the bleed-till-bankruptcy strategy is working like a charm right now. And we've got these other fights. We've got some serious, you know, national security challenges.

Russia, North Korea, ISIS, run down the list, and we're draining our resources off on this lost war. On that distressing note, we are going to pause for a break. I am Matthew Galt. You are listening to Reuters War College. We're sitting here with Douglas Wissing, and he's talking about the possibility of another troop surge in Afghanistan. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to War College. Matthew Galt with me is journalist and author Douglas Wissing. His newest book is hopeless but

optimistic. It is about Afghanistan, and that is what we are talking about today. Just before the break, you were talking about the other national security threats that are far more important than Afghanistan, but one of those being Islamic State, and we now know that Islamic State is operating in Afghanistan. Does that change this calculus at all, do you think? Well, you know, it's a little bit complicated there because the Islamic State did begin to germinate in Afghanistan. And that was the result of us killing one of the Taliban leaders. And there was a splinter group was a big part of that particular element. There's about 20 different insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the largest, of course, being the Taliban by far. And at its height, there were only about 2,000 ISIS.

fighters in Afghanistan that were tagged as being ISIS. And you have to remember, the U.S. opened the bank in Syria in our fight against ISIS. And the one thing the Afghans are not is stupid. They understood you could get more money by saying everybody's ISIS. So you have some instances where insurgent groups that maybe weren't ISIS suddenly got, you know, that tag put on them. But what's happened is ISIS does have an international. agenda. The Taliban is essentially very nationalistic. They just want to get the infidels out of their country. That is their goal. So what you had was the Taliban was fighting ISIS also. The Taliban fighters were fighting ISIS. And this year, that number now is down to about 700. Now, we've then

made a fatal miscue. We dropped the Moab bomb, 22,000-pound bomb on ISIS. ISIS fighters over in Nangahar, which is by far the largest collection over in eastern Afghanistan by the Khyber Pass. We dropped that. And what we did was the Taliban spoke out against the use of that bomb. That's our largest non-nuclear bomb. And they're saying Afghanistan is once again being used as a testing ground for U.S. weapons like we did with the drones. And it's kind of hard argue with that. So we melded the Taliban and ISIS together against the common enemy, us, by the use of that bomb. And also former President Karzai spoke out against it. As did some of his diplomats, we had a lot of Afghans that were really enraged by the use of that bomb.

The Taliban and Islamic State are more friendly with each other after the use of that bomb? They at least allied on that particular issue. I've got what may be an odd question. Do you, it's in our discussions, it feels like the Taliban, obviously they understand the country better. They're better, quite frankly, at winning the hearts and minds. They're more efficient. Would it have behooved us to try to establish some sort of power sharing with them

or incorporate them into the unity government? Do you think that was a mistake? Well, I mean, one of the root causes of all of this chaos, is the Constitution that the U.S. and the other Western powers, primarily the U.S., imposed on Afghanistan, that centralized all of the power after we invaded 2002, 2001, that that constitution centralized all the power in a way that never had been the case in Afghanistan. It's always been an extremely decentralized country. It's a tribal country, and the key was kind of having lots of small power. our groups all over the country. We centralized everything under the Kabul government, and we centralized corruption in a way that's never happened before. When we invaded Afghanistan,

was somewhere in the middle of the list in terms of corruption. It was a lot less corrupt during both the Soviet era and during the Taliban era. But it was kind of in the middle. and it just skyrocketed to the top of the list at one point. It was number one in the world. It just went, you know, skyrocketed, you know, left up the list with a bullet, as they say. And there's been many criticisms that we really made a major mistake by not bringing the Taliban back to the table right after the invasion and let them take part in some of the power sharing. It would have brought the past dunes back. it would have, you know, negated what went on.

And then, of course, we had the disaster of shifting our focus to Iraq and, you know, completely lost interest in Afghanistan. And the insurgency took off in those period in that period. But, yeah, it was a big miscued. And now we're saying, oh, well, you know, one of the arguments is that we can make it so difficult for the Taliban because, you know, it's quotes a stalemate, which, as we've talked about, it isn't, that they'll come to the negotiating table. So let's think about this. When we had 100,000 soldiers in the country, the Taliban were essentially biting their time. They only

controlled about 7% of the countryside. They didn't go to the negotiating table then. We were desperately trying to get them to the negotiating table to the point where it was almost like a comedy to watch how we were contorting ourselves to do this. And it failed. They didn't need to do it. they were winning. They were just waiting. They were just husbanding their forces. So, you know, the Taliban have a great line that they've been saying forever, talking about asymmetrical war, where the U.S. has so much of a technical, you know, technological advantage. They say the Americans have the watches, but we have the time. They're very patient. You know, if there's another surge, if we, you know, nobody's got the guts to send in another 50,000 soldiers again.

That's not going to happen. I don't believe. But they'll just wait. You know, they can meld back into the population. It's clearly a popularly supported insurgency. You know, it's, you know, and they have a, they have someone who will help them out. They have other regional partners that will provide safe havens will provide supplies. They can wait us out.

Were you there during the 2009 surge? Yeah. What was, I'm wondering what it was like from the American perspective, how the troops felt? Trained to be positive. Can do spirit. Accomplished the mission. So there was a period where people did feel like there was some hope. It was a pretty brief period, I have to say. And pretty quickly, people began to understand the structural issues of what was going on, the corrupt government. And our stated goal was to bind the people of Afghanistan to Jeroa, to the government, the Islamic State of Afghanistan. And it was a totally corrupt predatory government. So that's tough, isn't it?

You can kind of think of how it would work in the United States if our government was totally as predatory as the Afghan government was and is. and then a foreign power came in and demanded that we ally with it. There would be resistance, don't you think? There absolutely would be. So is there a possibility that this discussion about this next troop surge and the possibility of this troop surge makes people reassess why we're there and maybe we leave? Well, one would hope. I do need to mention that there is a new bill that has been interested.

introduced HR 1666 that has been introduced by a bipartisan group of congressmen to literally debate the Afghanistan war. We really haven't had this discussion since 2001. We're still running on the same congressional authorization that was passed in an emotional frenzy after 9-11. That's still the authorization for this war 16 years later. And the HR 16, is hoping to have a congressional debate about whether we should continue this war. That seems pretty reasonable to me, and it would cut off funding, you know, and, you know, it would have to be reauthorized and whatnot. The authorizations for the appropriations are given 10 minutes debate in Congress,

five minutes, four, and five minutes against. That's it. $50 billion a year, and it goes on. What do you think the end looks like on the ground? Eventually, America will leave. And then does the Taliban just become resurgent and things look like it did before we got there, but with a bunch of new infrastructure? Well, the infrastructure is falling apart. I mean, that's not even a given that that was such badly made infrastructure. I mean, the ring road, the Afghan Highway 1 was so badly made at an astronomical cost. You know, I've driven down Highway 1 and convoys, and there are potholes on that thing big enough to swallow a donkey and a cart. It was very poor infrastructure.

Schools were falling down almost before they were completed, the wells that have drained, completely disrupted. You can go on and on and on. My book, Funding, The Enemy, has got lots of instances, and then in hopeless but optimistic, journeying through America's endless war in Afghanistan. It's a series of anecdotes of a journey across the war zones of Afghanistan, just pointing out this bizarre waste of billions and billions of dollars

and, you know, kind of what that looks like, what it looked like to be traveling across the lost war. So the infrastructure, we haven't done anything. I mean, I spoke to a lot of Afghan officials. They all agree they have this golden opportunity that's all been lost. The Afghans, as I mentioned, remain at the bottom of every human development indices. And they're the victims of what's called phantom aid, where there's all this money that appears to be going for development and aid, but it's all sucked off in either the money that giant development corporations take as overhead

and take a, you know, they just sub it down to where finally, maybe it's a $100 million project, and everybody takes a cut of it, and then by the end there's some guy down on the ground who's trying to build something with a tiny amount of that original money, and it's really bad. So the infrastructure is no good. You know, and Phantamate has done that. It has to do with greed and corruption in both the donor country and the host country. So that's not going to do us any good.

And will the insurgents, will, you know, the conservative Afghan people go back into power, probably, just as they are in Saudi Arabia or a lot of other countries? But it's the Afghans to run. It's their country. They've run their country for centuries and centuries. And I'll be honest, most Afghans just would like for us to go, just please leave. The people that are, of course, making many millions from it, they would like for this to go on. But Afghanistan has been at war for over 30 years. It's a country that has essentially national PTSD, and we need to stop.

And for us, the costs are staggering. You know, we are destroying our military with this. The number is something like we have 700,000 veterans that are 30% are more disabled. 320,000 deaths with traumatic, you know, brain injuries. PTSD is rampant. Female veterans have suicide rates that are two to five times higher than that. and their civilian counterparts. And this is all being born by less than 1% of the population.

In the military families, the care is falling on them. This isn't working. In Afghanistan, there were tens of thousands of combatant casualties in deaths last year. There were 12,000 civilian casualties, including 983 kids killed. It's 50 billion a year. this isn't working. Douglas Wissing, journalist and author of the book, Hopeless but Optimistic,

thank you for coming on War College again to talk to us about the possibility of a troop surge in Afghanistan and why it is a bad idea. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. Matthew Galt hosts the show and tracks down our guests. My name is Bethel Haptay,

and I trim the fat off these interviews so that all you hear are the juicy bits. To support our show, rate us on iTunes. It'll take you a few minutes, but we'll appreciate it forever. Tweet us ideas for future shows. We are at War underscore College. Till next week.