Pod Save the World - A history of failure in Afghanistan

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

Tommy and Ben explain why the Russian foreign minister is in Washington and why Vladimir Putin is in Paris, the media and political reaction to the Saudi flight student who murdered his classmates in Florida, updates out of North Korea, an exciting leadership change in Finland, and a troubling religious law in India. Then Afghanistan policy expert Jeff Eggers joins to talk about some extraordinary reporting by the Washington Post about the (somewhat) secret history of policy failures in Afghanistan, which is based on documents that the Post is comparing to The Pentagon Papers.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, Ben, you're in Kuala Lempore, someplace I've never even thought about going. What are you doing there? Yeah, continuing my fall of travel. I'm here with our former boss, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. They are doing a program for their foundation with 200 young leaders from across the Asia Pacific region who will be here for a few days. Obama will meet with them. Michelle Obama will meet with them. I will. Not that that's on the same level. But basically, it's trying to help young leaders in civil society and government and entrepreneurs to network with each other, to get better what they're doing so that hopefully the next generation of leadership does better than we have. That's really cool. That's an admirable

program. I'm glad you guys were doing that. I didn't know he was doing that stuff. It's an infusion of hope at a time when we need it. You know, seriously, you may remember some of these town halls he did with young people when he was president. But like when you, when you get in a room with a couple hundred young people from, you know, countries that have huge challenges, some worse than us for sure. And they're still persevering and they're coming up with new ideas and they're trying to change our communities. Like, you know, you feel in a little bit better. Yeah, those are the best parts about the Obama foreign trips. But lots to talk about today that will also depress you. So we're going to start by talking about why the Russian foreign ministers in Washington, D.C. and why Vladimir Putin is in Paris.

talk about this Saudi flight student who murdered three classmates in what might have been an act of terrorism and the response from the government. Some updates at North Korea, a very exciting leadership change in Finland. Some important bills are moving through Congress that we want to talk about in a troubling one in India. And then our guest today is a guy named Jeff Eggers. Jeff is a former Navy SEAL. He worked on Afghanistan policy during the Bush and Obama administration. You and I, Ben, both got to work with Eggers. He's a great guy. So we talked about this. pretty extraordinary reporting in the Washington Post this week about the history of policy failures in Afghanistan. It's based on documents that the Post is comparing to the Pentagon paper. So there's

literally no better person to explain the context here and to assess what was written in the post in this after-action report generally than Jeff. So very grateful to him. Yeah. He's a great guy, too. And he served as a seal. He served with Stan McChrystal. He served in the White House. So this guy saw the war from like every vantage point. Yeah. That's exactly right. Okay, so the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is in Washington today. He met with Secretary Pompeo. They held a joint press conference where Lavrov spewed lies in propaganda and disinformation about Russia's interference in the 2016 election. To his credit, Pompeo was, didn't take his bullshit. He was clear the Russians did it and that it was unacceptable.

Later this afternoon, Lavrov heads over to the White House for a meeting with Trump. So we'll see if Trump is more eager to take Lavrov. But Ben, you know, I was thinking about this today. I'm sure Obama met with Lavrov and other foreign ministers on occasion, but I still find it weird that Trump would want to take this meeting right now. I mean, I hope the agenda includes extending the New START Treaty, which reduces the number of deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons in the world because it's going to expire in February 2021. But otherwise, I'm not entirely sure what the urgent priority here is. But what did you make of it? Yeah, I mean, look, it's not unprecedented for a president to me,

the foreign leader, but it's done very rarely, and usually when there's some very pressing piece of business that needs to get done. Let's just say, you know, not only did Russia interfere in our 2016 election, but, you know, odds are they're already interfering in our 2020 election. You know, we know from a lot of the reports that a lot of the disinformation campaigns continue to this day. So literally, you have a foreign minister of a country that is actively undermining our democracy on behalf of this president, meeting with that president and his foreign minister. It doesn't exactly send a robust message of a commitment to defend our elections. And keep in mind, Tommy, that Trump was leveraging a meeting with Zelensky, the president of

Ukraine, an ally that has been invaded by Russia. He was dangling, as part of his quid pro quo, a meeting in the White House. He would not give a meeting in the White House to the president of Ukraine, but he'll give one to the foreign minister of Russia, the country that has invaded Ukraine and interfered in our election. It says a lot about where we are in 2019. It really does, especially when you consider that Lavrov's boss, Vladimir Putin, is in Paris today meeting with President Zelensky of Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor, Uncle Merkel, convened and basically refereed this meeting as part of an effort to broker a peace deal. So, you know, when they came out of it, Zelensky said,

that he and Putin had agreed to a prisoner exchange and a ceasefire, TBD, if that ceasefire will hold. Previous ones have not. Putin said, you know, relations between Russia and Ukraine were in a thaw, but he's going to continue to push Ukraine to give more power to regional governments within Ukraine because he wants the ones currently occupied by Russian troops to have more say. And he's also going to try to find ways to keep Ukraine out of the EU and out of NATO. So, Ben, you know, like you said, I raise this because, first, obviously the future of Ukraine is important to the world. But second, you know, it's worth noting that Zelensky went into these meetings in a much weaker position because it was clear that Trump dislikes Ukraine because of an insane conspiracy theory that accuses the Ukrainians of interfering in the 2016 election when that theory was probably put out by Russian intelligence. Yeah. And if you look at like the backdrop to all this is if we were meeting with Russia and we had this.

and we had this many negative things going on, we would be talking about that leading into the meeting. We'd be framing our concerns. And you don't hear that at all from the Trump people. You know, it's like, oh, Lavrov is coming to town. And meanwhile, they've put Ukraine in a very difficult position, right? Because the only leverage Ukraine has on Russia, the only leverage they have to defend their sovereignty is the combination of U.S. and European sanctions on Russia and U.S. military and other assistance coordinated with Europe as well. And the whole world knows and Vladimir Putin knows that Donald Trump could care less about that, that he basically was willing to use that assistance to pressure Zelensky,

that he's out there every day talking up basically a Russian disinformation campaign. Trump is really no different from a Russian bot, pushing this completely fake debunked theory about Ukrainian interference in an election. So imagine the situation that puts Zelensky in going into that meeting with Putin. And what Putin wants is he's annexed Crimea, these two provinces of eastern Ukraine that Russia essentially occupies. He wants to kind of consolidate some control there. And at the same time, yeah, like you said, he wants to control whether Ukraine can draw closer to the West and the European Union. And in the real world, not the world of like talking points on Fox News or Devin Nunes,

like fever dreams at congressional hearings, the real world is moving on accepting the reality that, you know, this president, Chloe doesn't care about Ukraine. And I imagine, you know, that's going to leave Ukraine in a much weaker position as these negotiations go forward. Yeah, I mean, the mere fact that the French and the Germans are brokering this conversation to begin with, it's a little disappointing because he figured normally the U.S. would be a part of a set of talks this important. Yeah, we did let the French and the Germans often take some of the lead here, given that it's a European security matter. However, President Obama was deeply and personally involved in all of the diplomacy, right? So if you had a meeting between the French and the Germans

and the Ukrainians and say the Russians, around that meeting, Obama would be calling all of the players, we'd be helping design the play that the French and the Germans were running inside of that meeting. We'd be leveraging either existing sanctions or the threat of sanctions to try to get Russia to take certain steps. And, you know, you just get a sense that none of that is happening. You know, that basically miracle Macron are trying to solve this on their own. Trump is completely, you know, consumed when he hears Ukraine, he hears a conspiracy theory about 2016. So, you know, it's another sign of kind of the world kind of moving on and addressing these issues without us. And I can only imagine what Trump really wants to talk to Lavrov about.

I mean, I'm sure Ukraine will come up. But it makes me nervous who's going to be in that room. And we know people like Fiona Hill aren't there anymore who might have once been in those types of meetings. And so anytime Trump has been so eager to get into rooms with Russians, it does make you wonder why it is if he wants to spend this time with Sergei Lavrov. Yeah. I've never wanted John Bolton in a meeting in my life until now. Yeah. Okay, let's turn to another Trump buddy, the Saudi.

So last week, a Saudi Air Force trainee killed three classmates in a horrible murder that's being investigated as an act of terrorism. There's some reporting today that this guy's demeanor changed after a recent trip back to Saudi Arabia this year. Previously, there were reports that the night before the shooting. The shooter watched mass shooting videos of other Saudi cadets and that some of them might have filmed him as he was going on his rampage. So obviously the facts here need to be investigated. But two things I want to talk to you about, Ben, which is first the political response and then Trump's response. So I think it goes without saying that if this had happened during a Democratic administration, whether it was Obama or Clinton or anybody else, the Republicans would be going

insane and demagoguing the issue and calling them soft on terrorism. And you know, you and I went through this several times, Fort Hood and other incidents. So I'm actually glad that's not happening. I think that kind of hysteria doesn't do anyone any good. But I do worry about the fact that the U.S. just sent another 1,800 U.S. service members to Saudi Arabia to defend them against Iran. And I hope Congress or someone is pressuring them to make sure that those guys are safe because, you know, these tragic incidents happen sometimes, but you have to quickly learn from them and fix any systemic gaps in the vetting or whatnot to make sure it doesn't happen again. And then second, I mean, Trump's response was just to parrot the Saudi King's talking points and

defend them, which is, it's pathetic. I mean, he should be pressing the Saudis for full transparency and cooperation in any sort of investigation, and instead it's just the Saudi party line. And it is just, it's, it's, I agree with you that I'm glad that there's not hysteria. I think it is worth pausing on this to just underscore the Republican hypocrisy on this. Any time there was anything that happened remotely like this when Obama was president, the very first series of questions that we would get is, will you label this an act of terrorism, followed shortly thereafter, by every single Republican member of Congress rushing to a microphone and Donald Trump to his Twitter feed to demand that Obama say radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism and basically suggesting that these

events happened because we didn't call them that, you know? And remember, this is what Benghazi was about, you know, how fast we labeled this terrorism. So it is worth putting a pin in the fact that this exposes that that that was just bullshit, you know, that that was just cynical bullshit trying to score political points on the backs of terrorist attacks, shootings, whatever you want to label them. And I think that's worth, worth remembering. On the second point, it is really alarming. This is not, the way Trump responded, there's nothing normal about it. I mean, there was a phone call he had with the King of Saudi Arabia. And then Trump essentially put out a statement for the King of Saudi Arabia. It was like the king expresses his condolences. It was a kind of statement that you'd expect

the Saudis to put out. And then Trump very quickly pivoting to say that the Saudis are going to pay to these families and kind of like, let's all move on. The Saudis can write a check. And that's disgusting. You know, where's the focus on what are the Saudis doing to help us investigate what happened? What are the Saudis doing to vet people who are in U.S. military facilities intermingled with our service members? We have a Muslim ban. on the countries that Trump doesn't like in that region, but no such vetting for Saudis, even though we've seen repeatedly Saudis involved in acts of terrorism, acts of violence against Americans over the last 20 years. And so the way in which he pivoted to essentially being

the defense attorney for the king of Saudi Arabia, I mean, I'm not saying we should be like going to war with Saudi Arabia or something. I'm just saying we should do regular order here, which is demand investigations, demand cooperation in those investigations, put in place some vetting to give some confidence that this isn't going to happen again, basic stuff. And Trump is not doing it. Yeah. And look, I'm sure there's some value to these training programs. I mean, I reached out to some of our former colleagues who said, yes, you know, in particular when it comes to relationship building in training with some of these Arab military forces, you know, these have been valuable programs over time. But if these pilots are getting trained to then bomb Yemen

into the Stone Age, I mean, it does speak to this need. to have a broader rethink of all our interactions with the Saudi government under Mohammed bin Salman that just hasn't happened. Yeah, no, that's a great point. I mean, you know, it matters what they're here to be training for. Just as it matters to, you know, Trump, who talks about ending wars, has dramatically increased the number of U.S. service members in the Gulf region and in the Middle East because of these deployments to and around Saudi Arabia.

What is this all about? You know, both issues we've discussed today, Russia and Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, You cannot look at this and think that Trump's decision making is normal. If a Muslim national from any country other than Saudi Arabia had committed that attack, I guarantee you Trump's response to be different. And that doesn't mean it be right. I don't want him to be demagoguing this. It just suggests that we don't know why he acts the way he does with respect to a handful of countries, all of whom happen to be countries that are ripe targets for corruption. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia jumped to mind. And that's, again, why impeachment matters, because the Ukraine scandal confirms

what we all suspect, which is there are times when Trump puts his personal interests ahead of the national interest. Yeah, agreed. All right, let's turn to North Korea. So earlier this month, a top North Korean official threatened to deliver, quote, a Christmas gift, end quote, to the U.S., which presumably does not mean the new putter for Trump or whatever it is. You give your authoritarian friend. Over the weekend, the North conducted some sort of test at a missile site. That comes on top of all the recent short-range missile launches that have freaked out our allies in the region. On Monday, North Korea called Trump a, quote, heedless and erratic old man before adding the time when we cannot but call him a dotard may again come very friendly. And then for some reason, inexplicably on

Tuesday, the White House blocked an effort by members of the UN Security Council to hold the discussion on North Korea's human rights abuses. Basically, Trump is bending over backwards not to offend Kim at the UN because he's worried about the nuclear talks completely falling apart. The context here is that Kim Jong-un is given the U.S. a deadline of December 31st to lift sanctions and return to the negotiations. And if we don't, the suggestion is clearly that they may resume ICBM tests or nuclear tests or something worse.

So then, like every time we talk about North Korea, I feel like this policy is speeding towards the edge of a cliff. No one is doing anything to stop it. But to quote President Trump, I guess we'll see what happens. Well, I just can't believe the amount of praise that Trump has heaped on these people on Kim Jong-un in particular. And we're back to Dothard from them. And they've meanwhile been advancing their nuclear missile programs this whole time. I mean, when you think back on all the fanfare around that summit in Singapore, it's just, it's extraordinary how not only has he got nothing,

but they're basically like not treating him with anywhere near the respect and deference he's treating them. And this human rights thing shows it's substantive. And, you know, we've talked in the past on this show about like, well, you don't necessarily always want to link issues in a nuclear negotiation. So you may not want to say we will only, you know, pursue denuclearization with you if you take certain steps on human rights. But the thing you definitely don't want to do is the opposite, which is in a way they're linking it by, by giving up on any human rights concerns and trying to create an environment around these talks,

letting them off the hook, one of the most brutal regimes in the world for their human rights violations. So Trump is now linking human rights in the worst way. Instead of linking it to try to get something on human rights, he's saying, I'll make a unilateral concession on this issue. I don't know, Tommy, you're very good at, like, bringing us back to this issue. It never seems to break through. Like, what do you think is necessary to get people's attention about the deterioration that's taken place since Trump's Summatory.

I was thinking about that today. I mean, if John McCain were around, I'm sure he would be talking about this and concerned. I mean, we should point out that this is actually the second year in a row that the U.S. has blocked this conversation on National Human Rights Day. I don't know if you knew that, Ben, December 10th is like National Human Rights Day. I didn't get you anything this year, but next time. But, you know, like there needs to be some pressure coming from the right.

But I don't know, maybe those sort of neocomies. types have been sufficiently diminished. Maybe we're all too distracted by impeachment. I don't know. I don't know what it will take to get people to pay attention to the giant nuclear crisis on the horizon in North Korea and the fact that we're about to just let lapse a critical non-proliferation treaty with the Russians. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of me thinks, like we cover a lot of these deteriorating situations around the world on this podcast. And not, and not. One of them seemed to particularly stick to Trump. There's no sustained pressure on him anywhere near how there'd be, for any president, by the way, Republican or Democrat, would be facing, you know,

given Iran resuming its nuclear program, we're not talking about that much in our politics. This highest profile initiative of his presidency on foreign policy, North Korea, has led to this. I do think that Democrats should be doing more to raise these issues. And, you know, in Congress and the candidates running. I get that they want to focus on some of these bread and butter issues. But in a way, like other than a few voices like Chris Murphy, you're not hearing a kind of sustained critique from Democrats about how Trump's policies have made us less safe, less respected, how all the initiatives that he's personally invested in, whether it's North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela, have all gotten worse. And, you know, Americans are consuming a lot of information. They're not necessarily going to be following this. If we want voters to know, what the record is. At some point, we're going to have to make the case. Let me jump to something that I want to talk about. Actually, frankly, I just wanted to complain about Congress for a minute. The House, on Wednesday, I believe, is going to vote on

the National Defense Authorization Act. This is an annual bill that sets the budget for the Department of Defense. This year's Virgin creates Trump's Space Force because he wanted that so badly. Democrats were able to get language in the bill that includes 12 weeks paid parental leave for all federal employees, which is objectively a very good thing. But back in the day, Republicans would use this bill, the NDAA, to extract all kinds of concessions from Obama. For example, they basically made it impossible for him to close Gitmo by putting language in the NDAA. And so I'm a little frustrated that Democrats didn't push harder to use that bill to say end support for the Saudi war in Yemen, or block Trump's border wall, or overturn the transgender troop ban. I mean, it just feels like a,

you have little points of leverage on some of these must-pass spending bills, and I don't know that we're maximizing. You're exactly right. And, you know, frankly, the Democrats weren't that great on this NDA when we were there. They kind of rolled over on the Gitmo's restrictions. What they do is say, you know, put in the NDA, if people want to know why Gitmo's not closed, the Republicans who put these provisions in saying you cannot transfer any of the Gitmo detainees to U.S. territories, which basically left us with people that weren't transferred. other countries had to be stuck in Gitmo. There were several provisions in the House NDA that were quite good. One was the bipartisan provision on ending support for the war in Yemen. Another was,

cutting enormous new investments in low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. So low-yield means, you know, trying to figure out a way to have potentially maybe more usable nuclear weapons. Great. Not exactly something. I think that the American people are clamoring. for and something that could have a very hefty price tag. The provision that said that there's no war authorized with Iran was also in the House NDA. Now, I don't think you're going to get that Iran provision in the full one, but you've got to use your leverage here, you know, and you've got to say that the Yemen provision in particular had bipartisan support and both the House and Senate. That should be in this NDA. There's no reason that Democrats should have ceded an inch on that,

because that is the bipartisan view of both houses. And so it's really frustrating to not see that there. The paid leave is good. I'll just say, you know, for listeners, like to give you a sense how crazy this is, you know, when I had my first daughter, Ella, whose birthday it will be when this podcast comes out, my wife was working at the State Department and got no paid leave. So, I mean, you know, the day after she gave birth, literally, she's burning like vacation time. just to be able to stay home with their child. So this was something that we wanted to fix in the Obama administration, couldn't get it through Congress. Again, shows you the utility of having a Democratic House. I'm sure this is a priority for Pelosi. So that's good. But on the foreign policy and national security provisions, yeah.

I mean, all of the key Democratic wins in the House NDA basically fell out of the negotiated final product. And it makes me pretty disappointed in the Senate Democrats for not fighting harder for some of this, particularly Yemen. Yeah, agreed. All right. This is a very cool story. So some positive news here. So Finland just swore in the world's youngest prime minister, a 34-year-old woman named Sana Marin. She was elected to parliament in 2015 by Finland's Social Democratic Party. She is now leading a five-party coalition government, all of which, all of those five parties are led by women. Four out of those five leaders are under 35. So the prime minister and three others are all under 35. So look, I don't know a ton about her. but I am already quite confident that she will do a better job than some of the other notable world leaders under 35, like Kim Jong-un and Mohammed bin Salman.

But like a very cool story in Finland, they've also been battling back a really nasty right-wing party. They beat them in the elections. There's some polling that shows that the bright-wing parties gaining some support. But very cool. I just love this. And look, you know, the people we talk about on this show who are causing so much havoc around the world, you know, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bibi Netanyahu, Taip Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, Havier Bolsonaro.

They all have one thing in common. They're all men. And they're all basically, you know, insecure men taking it out on the rest of the world or men who think that they have to show their strength by, you know, putting people in camps. We would do well to have more women in charge of more places. And there does seem to be, seriously, a movement in progressive parties around the world towards, you know, elevating younger women in positions of leadership. That is great.

I mean, that is going to bring a new energy to politics, you know, and hopefully drain some of the toxicity that we've seen. And again, this continues the trend that we've seen in a bunch of European elections of beating back these far-right parties and increasingly having some pretty interesting new faces emerge. And what's so great about someone like this who's 34 or like Justin Ahern in New Zealand, who's also under 40 when she became prime minister is, hopefully these people are going to be around for a while and we can benefit from their leadership for some time. Yeah, that's right. All right, you mentioned one of these insecure men, so now I have to

talk about them. So on Tuesday, the Lower House of India's Parliament passed a bill that would establish a religious test for migrants who want to become citizens. So basically, if you're a migrant moving to India and you practice one of the major religions in the region, you have a clear pathway to become a citizen unless you practice Islam. So it's making Muslims a second class citizens in India. And last week, we talked about that amazing New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the way nationalism and demagoguing Muslims has fueled his career. I mean, this bill is another piece of that puzzle. It's side by side with another program in parts of northeastern India that is stripping millions of Muslims of their citizenship

enforcing them into detention camps. So this religious test bill is expected to pass and become law. I'm sure Prime Minister Modi will run on it. Ben, I mean, look, this is some scary shit. And we seem to be getting to a point where we need to revisit how we talk about India generally, whether it's actually a democracy. I mean, like there's too many scary things happening at once. I mean, what's clear is, right, in Modi's first term, obviously, you know, he was a Hindu nationalist who had, you know, troubling history. But some of these more dramatic steps, obviously, we didn't see taken. And, you know, he got reelected and basically all we've seen since his reelection is this nationalist agenda, the takeover of Kashmir and the repression there, the denial of citizenship to these people in a province of India. And now this new bill that, you know, could be essentially a way not only to restrict migration into India from Muslims, but to, essentially categorized Muslims as second-class citizens. So he's all in now on this nationalist agenda. Interestingly, at a time when the Indian economy is really slumping, so part of this may be he's emboldened

in his second term. Part of this may be, you know, he's got a weak economy and he's therefore looking to assert himself in other places, distract people. But the other thing that I can't help but notice is part of the international trend here. And if you want to know when we talk about one of the most important things that the United States has is our example. Well, we have a president of the United States who, one of the first actions they took, was restricting migration to the United States or travel even to the United States from a number of Muslim majority countries, right? We have a president of the United States who very publicly embraces the concept of putting kids in camps to send a deterrence message at the border. And you cannot avoid the troubling

echoes in these policies that other authoritarian leaders have taken. And so it makes you wonder what kind of license they feel that they have when the President of the United States is not only not going to raise these issues with them, but is pursuing, you know, somewhat similar policies, not of a similar scale as Modi in this case, but certainly some similar intent behind them. We've talked here. There's rightful scrutiny should be put on the fact that Obama developed a close relationship with Modi, but we would have been calling this out. And I frankly don't even know that Modi would have been doing all these things if he felt like there was going to be international pushback from the U.S. and other countries. The reality is at a time when

the U.S. is doing these things, the Chinese have U.S. and camps, and we see this trend everywhere, what you're seeing increasingly is leaders who have authoritarian tendencies saying, this is the time. You know, if I have a step that I've wanted to take against a minority or to consolidate control authoritarian or otherwise in my country, now is the time to move, right? And I think that is very worrying on International Human Rights Day and also worrying for where that could lead in the next coming years. And that's why our election is related to these things. We need to get back to setting a different example and having countries that care about this and will use some leverage on the world stage when this type of stuff happens.

Yeah, man, these nationalists are really having a moment and it's frightening. Yeah, they're having a ball. One last one, one last story. So you probably didn't see this report because you're traveling and it just posted. But Jewish insider reported that Corey Lewandowski and David Bossi are in Israel this week for meetings about potentially joining BB Netanyahu's campaign team. So, you know, maybe Steve Bannon will jump on. Maybe Kelly Ann. She can't be far behind. I don't know if Jared's looking to leave the White House, but just wanted to let you know that all the Trump team is reassembling, the evil Avengers are reassembling behind Bibi Nandau. Well, yeah, just

complete the merger already, you know? I mean, make it one, you know, can they just make the one campaign? I mean, they're basically sharing consultants and media strategies and talking points. They might as well just have the final merger between the Republican Party and the Lekud Party. Yeah, that's right. Okay, when we come back, my conversation with Jeff Eggers about an explosive new report on Afghanistan. My guest today is Jeff Eggers. Jeff served for over 20 years as a Navy SEAL. He also worked at the White House for, I believe, six years during both the Bush and the Obama administrations on Afghanistan policy. So he is as expert as expert gets on this subject matter. Jeff, thank you so much for doing the show. Thanks for having me, Tommy.

Great to be with you. So the reason we are talking today is the Washington Post published this big six-part series on the war in Afghanistan. And it's based off of 2,000 pages of interviews with more than 600 people who were part of the Afghan war effort in some capacity. That includes the military, the State Department, USAID, the NSAID, the NSC, British officials, Afghan officials, like it really runs the gamut. And so the Washington Post got access to these documents through impressive and dogged Freedom of Information Act requests. But the interviews themselves were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or Cigar, which is an entity created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud as part of

this big project called Lessons Learn that was supposed to document policy failures and successes in Afghanistan. So this is just context about what we're talking about today and how this all came to light. But my understanding is that these interviews led to the cigar publishing seven reports, but it omitted all the names basically of those interviews. And it was less blunt than the original interviews that were obtained by the post. So Jeff, you were one of the individuals who were interviewed for this project about lessons learned. Can we just start there and talk about that process? Was this something folks were compelling? to do? Was it voluntary? Why did you participate in? What was it like? It's important context because

many of us didn't see this story coming, although we probably should have. I was just kind of going about my business, my normal life last week when I got an email from a journalist, and usually I'm pretty selective in commenting publicly about these things. And I usually decline most of these requests. But this one, caught my eye because the email was essentially from the journalist from the Washington Post saying, hey, just want to give you a heads up that we're going to be running some quotes from some documents we obtained from some interviews you gave a number of years ago. And I kept reading. It was like a really nice three-page email that explained the history of how they had obtained the documents, how they had gone through FOIA channels to get permission to use them, and how they had reverse engineered my identity back to the interviews, which were originally

redacted when the government handed them over, but they somehow figured out that I was the person behind the interview and that they were going to name me in the articles. And they further went on to say, and we found your interviews to be quite colorful and candid, so we're going to be running a number of your quotes. And I started to read the quotes and I thought, oh boy, I was rather candid that day. But it was a it was a very sincere effort, an internal effort by the government to start to do some stock taking of, you know, more than a decade into these wars. How had the decision making progressed and what were the results of our efforts and so forth? Not so much to be critical or to point fingers, but really to try and start to lay some groundwork in terms of

lessons learned for the next generation. Yeah. So it's a huge body of work that led to the government report. It's a massive six-part series that the post-published. So I guess I'll try to take this into smaller chunks because it's such a complicated issue. But I guess it's safe to say that one main takeaway from the article, or at least the journalist took away from the documents, is that the U.S. failed to achieve almost all of its goals in Afghanistan. The one major caveat to that, I would say, is the destruction or at least major degradation of al-Qaeda in the region, including the operation to take out Osama bin Laden, which is the reason we were there. But the other, you know, point that they make is that policymakers failed over time to clearly define those goals.

So I wanted to read some of the quotes from the piece, one that you just mentioned, and we can sort of discuss them piece by piece. So the first is from you, or that they, attribute to you, which is you say, quote, what did we get for this one trillion dollar effort? Was it worth one trillion? After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama bin Laden was probably laughing in his watery grave, considering how much we spent on Afghanistan. And so, end of quote there. I think it's hard to argue with that in any way. But I'm guessing, I guess what I'd love to know from you is, what do you think the lesson learned is in hindsight from that context, a trillion dollars, bin Laden? Like, was the answer to get out right after the bin Laden operation?

How could we have fixed things, do you think? Well, I think it goes back earlier than the Bin Laden operation. And there was a lot of discussion after the killing of Bin Laden, whether that constituted success criteria. And you asked the question, how do we know when we've achieved our goals and what should our goals be? And in some ways, that's where we got off on the wrong foot at the very beginning, is we essentially went to war to prevent the condition,

that had led to the attack of 9-11, where roughly 3,000 Americans lost their lives. An extremely kind of stark and traumatic experience in American history, really unprecedented in many ways. And because of its traumatic nature and lack of precedent, the goal was really to prevent a recurrence. In other words, to make sure that this never happens again. And that's really where we get off on the right foot because necessarily when you define something as the absence of a future recurrence, you're never finished, right? Right, right. You're just never done. I mean, there's always tomorrow.

What if? What if? What if? And so part of the problem was that that mindset of preventing the conditions that led to this attack, which then when you get to a more operational level says, well, what led to this attack was the fact that we had a, a quasi-state in Afghanistan that was run by a conservative religious group, militant group, an insurgent group, that had won the insurgency that they had been fighting in Afghanistan. And that that was what led to al-Qaeda gaining ground there and therefore having, quote, unquote, a safe haven. And so our strategy became one of, we're going to prevent safe havens.

because that's what led to the attack. And now immediately you've signed yourself up for putting all of Afghanistan, which is a huge rural piece of land, you're going to put all of that under effective security and governance control so that you don't have the ability for these small rag-tag terrorist groups to gain a foothold. And right there, you've signed yourself up for something that probably is unachievable. But in the wake of this massively traumatic event, that's what you sign yourself up for. Right, right.

Well, so that brings me to another quote, which is from Doug Lute, who was your former boss. He was a three-star Army General. He ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for a period under Bush. Then he stayed on to run Afghanistan policy under Obama. And one of the quotes they used from Doug is, quote, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn't know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here?

we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking, end quote. And so I think it's important to clarify that I believe Doug is referring to the early days of the war effort because he says in the underlying documents that, you know, that was the case before Obama. And then when Obama took office, in part because of a presentation from Doug that expressed the sentiment in that quote, there was this massive months-long strategy review. So Obama himself chaired 10 NSC meetings over the course of several months, that came on top of thousands of hours of cabinet level, staff level meetings with people like you doing all the work. So, I mean, that's just context to make the point here that even after this absurdly deep dive into the policy by the president of the United States

himself in a massive troop surge, we didn't achieve our goals. And so I'm curious what you make of that. Like, you're right that there was this original sin of defining against an absence and not necessarily having a clearly defined goal. But once we defined one, we still didn't solve it. Like, what's the lesson learned there, do you think? Well, one of, I mean, there are many, but one of the lessons you've raised is to think more laterally and broadly about what does it mean to win. And particularly in the American culture and, and doubly so in the American military culture, we're very action-oriented, and we tend to define success as the achievement of our objectives. And, you know, there is a way of thinking militarily, particularly, that success can also

be achieved by denying your adversary their objectives, right? And in this case, we probably would have been a lot better off if we had just occasionally reminded ourselves of that inverse formulation, which is to say, what if Al-Qaeda's goal here is not to defeat the United States militarily, because clearly that's never going to happen? What if Al-Qaeda's goal is just to drag us into a protracted set of wars in the Middle East that will bleed us economically? And if you flip it around from that point of view, then your bias is not. not going to be towards escalation. Your bias is actually going to be towards de-escalation,

to deny al-Qaeda what it is they're trying to do, right? Bin Laden's original gripe was with the Saudi government. And, you know, this idea of creating Islamic caliphate was, was in many ways kind of a rhetorical narrative and device, if you will, to pull in the foot soldiers to get after what he really was starting with, which was this grievance with the Saudi government. And in many ways, he felt that the only way he could kind of diminish the United States or put a dent in the United States at all, given kind of the strategic punching weight that America has was through this kind of very asymmetric means of pulling us, sucking us in. And I think if you flip it around in that way, it's important to remind ourselves,

of, you know, what is this costing us? What is this doing to us economically? And that's, you mentioned the trillion dollar figure, which I quoted many years ago in that interview, and the numbers obviously much higher now, some estimates as high as $6 trillion. But part of the problem we had here, and this is probably the second lesson learned, is that a democracy, a liberal democracy like ours, needs to have greater participation in, you know, decision-making about going to conflict from its constituents. And that's where you get good decision-making about going to conflict. And in this case, we really didn't have that.

You have an all-volunteer military force, so less than 1% of the nation, really is going to be burdened in a direct way. 2% if you pull in their families, which you should, because they bear a lot of the brunt of this. So you have 2% of Americans that are directly impacted. by these conflicts. The rest of America is not being burdened by war bonds or a war tax. They're not planning victory gardens.

And in fact, much of the expenditures have been deferred to future generations through these creative funding mechanisms we came up with. You'll recall the overseas contingency funding and so forth that really essentially was alone from future generations, if you will. And so most of America had very little impact by the decision to undertake in these wars, right? There was, and that's where I think the decision making goes wrong. We were able to keep the casualties low because we've become, one, good at that, but two, risk averse in how we go to war in this modern era. And so you didn't have a lot of Americans coming back in caskets and so forth.

You didn't have a lot of protests over the casualties, nor did you have a lot of people feeling that pain either directly or indirectly. And that's where I think the decision making gets off the rails. You also have a politics where it's easier for a president or a politician to be pro-war in favor of sending more troops, spending more money, than to cut a deal or pull troops. groups out and be accused of cutting and running or, you know, pick your annoying attack. And like, I guess that to me, I don't know how to fix that. Yeah, it's a human, it's a human fallibility that we, we are susceptible to being kind of pulled by the call of rallying against others. This narrative of it's us against them is very effective in creating a sense of unity, right? And that's been leveraged across history unfortunately to great effect but but the downside there is is just as you

say you you you pay a political cost for a narrative of de-escalation right or of restraint in when someone raises the specter of of a threat particularly in the wake of one that just occurred and caught the the national attention um it's just It's politically very, very thin ice. Yeah, agreed. So the Post compares these documents to the Pentagon Papers and essentially says that U.S. officials lied about the war to the American people and hid evidence that it was unwinnable.

And I'm struggling with how to deal with that characterization. Because take, for example, the quote I just read from Doug Lute. I mean, I know for a fact that Doug was in meetings with presidents, Congress and journalists where he would say basically the same thing. And he would talk about how fucked up things were in Afghanistan. And in fact, I think that candor at times got very senior people at the Pentagon pretty pissed at him. I also think it's absolutely fair to say that parts of the government, the Pentagon in particular, were constantly looking for good news to highlight.

But I would also note that more of the brutal truth came out about the reality of what was happening in Afghanistan than I think some of those rosy facts. So I just I don't know how to think about this because obviously a lot of these interviews were done with the benefit of hindsight. Does that mean a military trainer interviewed for this report in 2015 was lying in 2007 when he said they were making progress? Is that individual obligated to tell the media that his troops are illiterate thieves as he's training them? Like I'm really struggling with this because I don't want to continue behaviors that perpetuate dumb policies and dumb wars, but I'm trying to be fair to the people involved. Yeah, and this is where, as you know, I think headlines get overwritten, right?

And I think in this case, the Post has done some important journalism, but the leading piece was in some ways a bit off in terms of the headline. I'm not sure that this is a case of malicious deception, even though we got it wrong. I think it's as much that it was a case of cognitive bias of group think and so forth, that it's a problem with collective rationality, not some sort of deliberate conspiracy or deception effort. You know, the term group think became popularized by Irving Janice in 1971 when he was looking at the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And the people who came in, this is a smaller case, certainly.

and in many ways then either Vietnam or the wars after 9-11, but many of the same dynamics exist where you have, it wasn't a problem with the intelligence of the people involved or their experience, right? It's a problem of what happens when humans come together in these ways with these various dynamics. And I'm not making excuses for it, but I'm just saying it's more complicated than kind of labeling at this deception of the American. American people. The people involved by no means were malicious people or unintelligent people. You had some of the most experienced and some of the smartest people in government working these

problems. And yet there is a dynamic that comes together, particularly when you have a lot of the reporting done by the people who are implementing the policy. Right. Yeah. And in this case, most of the resources we had to deploy, even though it wasn't really a military fight, right? It as we discussed, a lot of the so what behind the strategy was trying to reestablish a functioning state. And that's not the job of the Pentagon to do that. But the Pentagon had all the resources, right? So we deployed the military resources we had against a mission that wasn't military in nature. And then the ones who have all the resources to implement the strategy are also the ones that are reporting back on how it's going, for the most part. And they have a loud voice.

And even when you have objective views on how it's going, like you get in the intelligence community, I mean, the intelligence community in the United States is a wonderful, wonderful apparatus and equally filled with some of our smartest and best people. And moreover, they're trained to be objective in their thinking, right? They're actually trained to be critical and objective in their thinking. And yet, in these discussions that you were a part of, they didn't have the loudest voice in the room, right? They were literally sitting most of the way down the table from the president. And so there's a bias right there that the people responsible with implementing the policy

are getting the loudest voice in terms of how it's going. And right there off the bat, you've introduced your tremendous amount of bias. Right. I mean, to your point about the military, right? I mean, there is an incredible, admirable can-do spirit in the military. They're the biggest, baddest fighting force on the planet. They've taken on and accomplished harder tasks than I could ever imagine. But the flip side of that can be blind spots about limitations and then there are political limitations to how you are even allowed to talk about the limitations of the U.S.'s capacity around the world. And so I guess my question is like if someone should have stood up at an NSC meeting on Afghanistan policy and said, guys, this is fucking insane. The Soviets lost here.

This is not a country. It's a bunch of tribal authorities. There's no history of governance, let alone a government, we need to get the hell out of there. Like, who should that have been or is it not an individual? I mean, I'm trying to think who could have sounded the alarm. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure that that didn't happen. I mean, we had lots of meetings where we had either outside academics who were brought in just for that purpose to say, give us some, give us some authoritative historical context here of what we're up against, right?

And those people are out there. there's not a ton of them, right? Because Afghanistan was a pretty small issue on the global stage before 9-11. But there were people out there who had that perspective and were brought in to these meetings and these discussions. I mean, I'm not sure I would call it sounding the alarm in that way, but they were pretty clear about what we were signing ourselves up for and the probability of success. And that still didn't really move the needle against this massive kind of tidal wave of post-9-11 incremental escalation and can-do American spirit, right? When you're deployed to fight an enemy who just killed 3,000 Americans, you're going to go in with a mindset of we're going to get this done. Yeah. To your point about those early days, one of the most frustrating parts about the war in Afghanistan are the missed opportunities in those first few years. You know, the report details how we could have cut a piece deal with the Taliban. We could have increased training of Afghan security forces before it got really violent. But it does seem to me that it's very hard to not focus on the elephant in the room, which was the decision to evade Iraq. Do you think it's possible to disaggregate the lessons learned that are specific.

Pacific to Afghanistan and the challenges there and our efforts there from the part of the government that just got completely distracted by Iraq. Yeah, and that's a fair point. There was really two ways in which we overaggregated things to our detriment. The first is the one you raise, but it's not in the way you raise it. But that's how you often hear it. You often hear that the real problem was we took our eye off of the ball because of the invasion. Iraq. And there's no question that there was some dilution of resources and attention and so forth. And those in Iraq will, you know, bear witness to the fact that they felt like the focus of attention and so forth had shifted. There's no question about that. I think that's not the strategic mistake. The strategic overaggregation between the two was actually in thinking

that what we did successfully with a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq was due to our counterinsurgency efficacy and that we could replicate that in Afghanistan. And that's really what happened from 2001 through the invasion of Iraq in 2003, through the shift back to Afghanistan when President Obama was elected and comes in in 2008, is that there was a shift on the ground in Iraq, right? The intensity of that conflict kind of peaked and then ebbed in 2006, 2007, and it was attributed largely to General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy. And then that carried over to let's try the same thing in Afghanistan, quite literally. And that was the mistake there that pulls in Iraq. The second overaggregation, once in those early years,

once we pivot back to Afghanistan, is that we confused the regional enemy, the, the adjacent enemy of the Taliban with the core enemy that attacked us on 9-11, and that is al-Qaeda. And these are distinctly different groups, as you know, but most people don't understand the distinction, you know, down to where did they get their particular conservative sex, of Islam to what are the regional and language variations and ambitions and so forth. We overaggregated a regional insurgent group with a global transnational terrorist group. And that was in some ways predictable and inevitable, but it was unnecessary and harmful to our strategy because we just made our enemy and our mission that much bigger than it needed to be.

Well, do you think then the answer would have been to be like talking with the Taliban earlier, cutting deals with the Taliban because look, I mean, Obama did the five for one swap, right, of the five Taliban guys for Bo Bergdahl and the conservative media establishment exploded, right? But, you know, there were also chances to cut a deal with the Taliban early on in the Bush administration than other voices in this report like Ryan Crocker, who was the ambassador who said he never really thought that the Taliban talks were going to go anywhere. I guess what I'm sort of blabbing about is when you look at these documents, there's a lot of very smart people offering their opinions, but sometimes these opinions are contradictory.

So it's even hard to sort out what's fact and fiction within the report and the reporting itself. But I'm curious, like, what you think the U.S. should have done with the Taliban as early as 2002. Well, as I said, I think our first mistake was combining two enemies into one, when really we should have focused on the one. But even once we get past that point, and to this day, it has been the case that the only way out of this was going to be through a political strategy and a political settlement with the Taliban. That to try and defeat the Taliban militarily was, even if it was feasible, it was not an efficient strategy because it would just cost too much in terms of American lives and American treasure and so forth. Now, on moral grounds, you could object and then say, why would we ever facilitate or enable a political arrangement with a group that we find reprehensible in terms of their social values and so forth? That's a point of view one could take. I'm more pragmatic than that.

If we applied that standard around the world to a lot of the other places where not only are we willing to a lot of, to allow a political accommodation, but we're doing a lot of business and military sales and so forth, we wouldn't get very far, right? So I think the pragmatic and most cost-effective way to have done this would have been to push for some sort of political accommodation at the outset. In fact, some of the most knowledgeable people you'll talk to about this say that all of this stems from the original bond agreement, which of course the... agreement after 9-11 that essentially set up the interim government in Kabul, Afghanistan,

and so forth, that our first and original sin, as you said, was actually excluding the Taliban from those talks. Now, in the context of the time, that made sense to most of the people involved. Why should those who recklessly governed this country to the point where it led to this catastrophe? Why should they be allowed a seat at the table in the international discussions that going to set a new way forward. So in hindsight, that that sounds better than it would have felt at the time. But inevitably, like, it's hard to imagine a political construct for Afghanistan that excludes the Taliban. It's not like they're, they're an ethnic majority in the country. They're not by any means. But to try and to imagine a way forward that excludes them completely and

defeats them militarily is really been silly at every stage of this, this process. Yeah, and they live there after all. Two quick questions, and I'll let you go. And frankly, the way I've ordered this interview probably speaks to one of the problems with the strategy to begin with, which is, you know, the media understandably fixated on troop level discussions. And you and I in this conversation have focused on the military effort. But ultimately, it seems like the total lack of.

capable governance or services was maybe an even greater challenge to, you know, conduct a successful war effort. Do you think you can beat the Taliban if you can't provide citizens an alternative to them? And, you know, does that speak to a fatal flaw in the strategy, which was creating a government in Kabul is a hundred-year process and we didn't have that much time? And we bet on Hamid Karzai early and he was impossible to deal with. You know, I think you've put your finger squarely on the heart of the problem here. We, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we have encouraged and enabled and been participants in promoting elections, right, and democratic elections for their various systems of governance.

And that feels natural from our point of view because we see that as part and parcel as a, as a well-established, well-functioning governance entity, government entity. And yet, elections are a consequence of having all the things that make a civil society and a governance structure functional, right? They are not the thing that makes it work. They flow out of all the things that make it work. Yeah. And that our ability to conduct elections is still changing.

challenged, but it depends upon, you know, a system of security forces, you know, courts and judges, and so forth, right? Without all of that, the idea of holding elections is dubious at best. And yet we've, we've been out of the gate pretty fast in both countries with the idea of holding elections, as you said, taking for granted all the time and infrastructure that takes to make those work. So as imperfect as it was under the Taliban, there was a system of social justice and so forth. And it was just unrecognizable to us. And I'm not saying that we should go back to that. In fact, I think most Taliban would say they're not going back to that. I mean, the Taliban of today are in some ways moderated from what ruled the country prior to

2001 and and to try and accelerate the establishment of all the things that it would take to kind of have a civil society that would be familiar and of our of our approving is is is is laughable yeah last thing and I'll let you go so the peace paints you know an incredibly damning picture of just a woefully corrupt Afghan government and it's corruption that's not you know sort of part of the history of the country, but, you know, they talk about how it is, it is fueled by the U.S. presence and the bags of U.S. cash that came with the U.S. service members and U.S. AID and State Department folks who were working there. And, you know, I know that these corruption challenges were not a secret. At times, they would flare up in big ways.

I remember being in hours and hours and hours of meetings about Kabul Bank nearly folding, which is a big focus of one of these articles in the post. I'm just curious how you guys thought about prioritizing anti-corruption efforts because you obviously had the core counterterrorism mission. There was the Afghan security forces training. There were its efforts to build up governance and capacity. But then there was this kleptocracy that sort of undercut almost everything we were doing. Right.

And that's where you really get into a vicious cycle where there were actually incentives for the perpetuation of conflict. from those that were actually benefiting from the conflict by virtue of the U.S. presence and all of the international funding that was flowing into Afghanistan by virtue of the conflict. Quite literally, you know, there were people getting rich off of our attempts in the international community's attempts to bring a more developed infrastructure to the country. Something as simple as, well, let's take the, let's take the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. known case of gender equity and education. If we want to build more schools for school age

girls, and in many cases, it's appropriate in the cultural context for those schools to perhaps be separate. So we're going to build girls' schools. Well, that's a contract right there, but then you've got to build a road into that village or that area that doesn't yet exist. So that's another contract to build that road and so on and so forth. All of that contracting is taking place in an environment that doesn't have all of the other existing infrastructure that you need to do that type of economic commerce and so forth. And so there's just massive amounts of leakage, not to mention it's being done in the, quote, fog of war where there's even more difficulty, right, in terms of getting things done.

So there's just a massive amount of overhead, if you will, that is really the leakage of trying to inject all of this international development funding into a system that isn't capable of holding it. Jeff, thank you so much for talking to me, man. I really appreciate it. And everybody should read these articles because Craig Whitlock did incredible reporting to get his hands on these documents. but, you know, it's worth the entire country understanding and investing some time into our longest war in history. Thanks, Tommy. Good to be with you. All right, buddy. Have fun in Kuala Lumpur. Travel safe. And see you soon. Yeah, no, we had a pretty good night out here. You weren't on the trip that we had here in the second term.

But there's some fun spots at Kuala Lumpur. We were out, you know, one of those nights at the end of a foreign trip where you blow off steam. And there was a band that basically started taking on command. I'd call it. them recommendations, but then they became demands. And then by the end of the night, people were like singing with this band. And so it's like one of these like, blow your stack, like led your steam off at the end of farm trip. So kale can be a fun place to get out. All right. Well, we all expect to read out immediately upon your return if that happened. Yeah. Yeah. It's not as, it probably won't be as fun, you know, this time. You had some fun on these trips. Oh, man. All right. Well, travel safe and see you soon.

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