Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/12/22 Daniel Davis on the Myth that Victory in Afghanistan Was Possible

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Scott talks with Daniel Davis about David Petraeus's latest attempt to rewrite the history of the war in Afghanistan. Davis knows firsthand how the war actually played out back when Petraeus was in charge because his job required him to travel all over the country. The mismatch between what he witnessed and how it was all being presented to the American people convinced him to break rank and go public. In this interview, he debunks the claim that the war in Afghanistan could have been won, and he rips the media for continuing to listen to men like Petraeus, whose history of lying about the war is not even controversial. Discussed on the show: “David Petraeus Is Wrong” (19fortyfive) “Go Big or Go Deep” — Davis’s 2009 Report Blunt Vietnam Vet Marine Tells You Exactly What Happened To Him “The Afghanistan Papers” (Washington Post) “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way” (The Atlantic) Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line, I've got retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis.

He's at defense priorities, and he writes all the time now for 1945. It's the digits, one nine, and then 45 spelled out. And I guess that's all about the nukes, before and after the nukes, before and after the end of World War II and the rise of the new order. The American liberal rules-based international order of governance and cooperation, otherwise known as the American Empire. And here he's got a few great ones, including, to start, David Petraeus is wrong. boy there's an evergreen statement for all time the afghanistan war was never winnable welcome to the show sir how are you doing i'm doing really good scott thanks for having me back happy to have you here and uh you guys i didn't really uh give this man his due this guy's one of the great heroes of america's war in afghanistan

and that is because at the end of the surge in 2012 he broke ranks and told the truth about what was going on in that war that david batraeus was lying about how the war was going. And, you know, I don't know, probably help give Obama ammunition to stick by his drawdown. He delayed it a little bit, but not very much when he drew down from the height of the surge. But most of all, consequences aside, most of all, a great truth-teller of that war, sort of a twin with the great Matthew Ho, who warned that the surge wasn't going to work three years before. Yeah.

And so, yeah. Anyway, very happy to have you back on the show. And would you just remind us, Danny? And, oh, and I should have mentioned, too, with H.R. McMaster and under the command of later, Colonel Douglas McGregor, you were involved in the great tank battle of Iraq War I, famously there. And then you also were in Iraq War II as well as Afghanistan, which is important. for people to know and decorated with bronze stars and all these things. But so can you tell us about your role in Afghanistan? And in fact, what gave you that sort of special advantage that the average lieutenant colonel probably did not have on the ground there in order to tell the story

that you did tell back in 2012? Yeah, as it turned out, I would say maybe the most accurate window and ability to see what was going on on the ground, possibly of any single individual in Afghanistan, because I was the chief of the Army's rapid equipping force, which was an organization created during the, after the 9-11 wars had started to get new army equipment through the bureaucratic hurdles a lot faster so that when new equipment needs emerged during conflict that the units didn't have to wait years to get it because obviously they would be rotated out by then. So they had this organization that was designed to find out what troops needed right now and then source it with whatever they could that was available immediately so

that it could be deployed into theater while the unit still was there to need it. And so as a result of that, they sent me, I was the team chief for the Afghan version of that, that was also one in Iraq, and sent there with the requirement that I had to visit. and talk to all the senior commanders of the regional commands, basically the division level commanders with brigade commanders and then go all the way down to battalion company and even platoon all the way literally to the tip of the spear out on, you know, foot patrols, ground patrols, going out with special forces

and some of their missions at the, you know, on the ground throughout all the areas that were really the most critical ones for the army from the northeastern part of the country up along the Pakistan border down to the central part and then into the southern of Afghanistan all throughout there. I traveled a total during my one-year tour from 2010 to 2011, over 9,000 miles going back and forth between my two headquarters in Bogram and Kandahar. And then we had a couple of others, or one other one that was kind of added a remote outpost. And then I just went to all these different places throughout the entire area.

So I was able to talk with the lowest grunts, you know, the infantrymen, the sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and then the lieutenant colonel, battalion commanders, brigade commanders, and then all the way up to the generals who were commanding. So I had really about the best view of anyone you could imagine. Because I was high enough in rank that a general would talk to me and a colonel would talk to me. But I wasn't too high in rank that even a private would be willing to talk to me because I was, you know, just kind of out there with them and sometimes sitting with their officers smoking cigars and whatever in between missions. So I really had a great view of everything that was going on there, to include the Afghan troops as well. And as I went on some of their patrols with them as well. Yeah, that's really something.

and so then what happened was and now I'm sorry remind me the years because just in case people don't remember Obama announced the surge at the end of 2009 and really they'd been escalating all year long in 2009 with 40,000 something troops

then he had another 30 on top of the 40 is what really happened and then they brought in NATO as well but so so now you're there in what time and what was it that these people were telling you and And were there exceptions or everyone was just saying I want to go home or what? Yeah.

So the surge officially kicked off in January of 2010 under General McChrystal at the time. And he was replaced about, I guess, six or eight months later by General Petraeus. And I joined the foray in October of 2010. So literally at the height. I mean, all the troops, surge troops had deployed by the summer of 2010. So I got there just after the top of the height of all the troops. There was about 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops there at that time. And I stayed all the way through until October of, or November, rather, of 2011.

So a full 12 months on the ground throughout that period of time. And just to back up just a hair, I had actually written an extensive. article, a report, rather, in, I believe it was August or September of 2009 when President Obama was considering the surge and was, you know, openly pondering about it and, you know, in the news that he was visiting with various generals and whatnot. And I argued then in a very detailed report that it was a bad idea that if you, if you, the report was called, which I think you can still find online if you Google it, go big or go deep. And the gist of it was that if you go big, which is what, of course, it eventually happened,

there's this whole list of things that I said are likely going to happen as a result. And we're not going to succeed that the Afghan army is going to be, we're going to try to make it too big and it won't be sustainable, that the Afghan government is too corrupt, that the Pakistani safe havens where they were supporting the Taliban, if you can't get rid of that, there's almost nothing else that's going to matter. All those things, why you shouldn't do it. And I said we should instead withdraw the majority of our combat forces and maybe leave a small special operations footprint to go after any direct threats to the U.S., etc. And, of course, we didn't do that.

Then in 2010, I wrote another piece before I deployed. And in it, I started out, the very first sentence was the war in Afghanistan is going so badly that if we don't make major changes, we will lose this war. As far as I know, I'm the very first one in the West, and certainly in the U.S., that directly claimed that we were on a path to lose the war if we didn't make changes. And throughout the rest of that article, I listed again all the reasons why things that we had to change or we would lose the war. We didn't change any of them, and we lost for exactly those reasons. So when just before I deployed, Petraeus had gone to Congress and had been on the media left and right talking about, hey, these surge troops and the things that he's trying to reprise

from his so-called Iraq surge in 2007, which tactically did succeed very well. He said that it's, you know, we're now starting to see the same things in Afghanistan. Things are getting better. We've arrested the momentum of the Taliban. We're making progress in all these different areas. The government's becoming less corrupt. The Afghan military is becoming more capable. You know, all of those things. And I thought, wow, okay, well, maybe I was wrong. I'm glad to be wrong if it's going to end the war and it's going to stop the killing. I'm all for that. And so I was actually looking forward to going there and to be in any kind of a part of something that's going to, you know, help usher this in. And I thought, man, it would be great.

if I could be there when the war ended, that would be super cool to be a part of something to see this successfully ended. So I had hoped that I was wrong and that he was, what he was saying was true. But when I got there and I started going out on the very first patrol that I went, which actually was a joint operation with the Polish military up in the northern part of Afghanistan, and I was like, oh, my Lord, not a thing he said was true. And then I thought, well, maybe this is just this one area. And so then I went into the Kunar province. And then into several other provinces that are also astride the Pakistan border. And every single place that I went, every soldier I talked to, every patrol I personally observed, reinforced that nothing Petraeus had said was true.

Nothing that Michelle Flournoy had said, who was in the, I believe, the deputy secretary of defense in testimony, all these things they kept saying about progress was just fiction. I mean, there was nothing to it at all. And I, you know, and I became, you know, embittered. And then, of course, when I think I've told you before that when some soldiers that I had met during my tour were later killed in a roadside bomb, and I knew that they had been killed for absolutely no gain. And, of course, there are just two of thousands that were similarly killed for no value to our country and no help to Afghanistan. That's when I came to the conclusion that I was not able to keep my mouth shut. and I had to go public with what I knew, you know, when I got back just after the first of the year in 2012. Yeah.

All right. Now everybody knows David Petraeus is a pathetic fraud and a liar and a scumbag and a lousy general who you talk about his tactical victory in Iraq. You mean for Iran's strategy of putting the Dawa and Supreme Islamic Council in power? Yep. That's Dave Petraeus all right. Same guy who armed up al-Qaeda in Mosul before that. But anyway, I asked you. in 2000, I'm going to say 13 or 14 or something maybe

when I first interviewed you or I don't know if it was when I first interviewed you first or second or third or something like that but I says to you I says okay but if it wasn't this ridiculous incompetent boob David Petraeus but instead had been a competent general and if instead of 140,000 troops

and you could just forget the 40 because NATO doesn't count they weren't doing nothing anyway right in sandals and flip-flops. That was what ISAF stood for, right? So if I said to you then, I said, if it had been a competent general and he had had not 100,000 troops, but 500,000 troops, like the coin doctrine says, well, what then? I mean, might that have worked or it still would have been a fool's errand? And you said it still would have been a fool's errand because the more we escalate, the worse

it made it. And short of, I guess, just carpet bomb in the place with H-bombs and eradicating the people you're trying to pacify, you're just not going to pacify them. You put in 500,000 troops, you're just going to make one million more insurgents. Forget it. And that's where the title of the book Fools Aaron came from was that discussion. But so, I mean, do I remember that right? Am I paraphrasing you there correctly? That this thing was just hopeless, right? I mean, the Russians killed a million people and they lost. Yeah, right. And I will never forget, before I'm deployed on that second one to Afghanistan, I actually had set down with Matthew Ho, the great Matthew Ho. You mentioned a minute ago. And he's the one that first told me, because, you know, he had been on the ground. And of course, he had resigned to great fanfare over the policies. And I remember so clearly when he told me at one of our first meetings, he said, the more you send over there, the more enemy. you're going to make because these people historically and culturally over centuries

have viewed all foreign militaries as occupiers no matter what anybody says, no matter what good things they may do. And if you sent over a large force and the Soviets proved it, if you send a large force and you're just going to create more enemies and there's going to be more casualties. But you are definitely not going to succeed militarily. And it just took us 20 years to prove that that was still true. Well, look, I mean, this was even the doctrine of Petraeus and McChrystal themselves, right? This was McChrystal's doctrine of heroic restraint. Don't fire unless fired upon three times or, you know, this kind of thing.

Because every time we kill somebody, not just an innocent civilian, but an insurgent fighter, who actually also is just a civilian only with a rifle, we create two more. Or ten more. It was for every one we kill, we create ten more. For every two, we create 20. And so that's why our soldiers were supposed to. to try to act like, you know, the regular infantry were supposed

to try to act like traffic cops while the special operations forces only go after just the bad guys at night, this kind of thing. It was total nonsense and they gave up on it within a couple of months, right? They quit Marja

or quit trying to pacify under their counterinsurgency doctrine by the end of March 2010. Three months and they were done. They didn't even try it in Canada Har City, whatsoever. And, you know, the ironic thing and perverse thing is that up until that time, and up until March from January, you know, the media was just filled with all kinds of

stories of success and especially with McChrystal, you know, walking around with all these media folks that he would bring regularly over and just tell them what was succeeding. And, you know, they're walking around with all these cameras flashing everywhere. And, you know, in America's like, okay, cool, the government to box, all that stuff worked. And now then they're pushing the Taliban back and the people are supporting their government. You know, all of it was fiction. None of it was true. And, you know, and you see it was very quietly abandoned after that.

And they moved on to other things. But, you know, they were sure not quiet when they were sailing the fiction. And unfortunately, as you said at this top of this show, it's all about perceptions. And, you know, they left people in the United States who watched those first. episodes if i can use that term uh from from the crystal and et cetera that things were going well that things were on the path and then of course betrays in that same month we have to point that out of march in 2010 uh he also starts telling everybody that that things are going better and things are succeeding across the board etc and all of it was fiction but it has the implication on members

of congress who most of well none of whom actually go into the combat zones they just some of them went to Afghanistan to be briefed and you know and shown the dog and pony show as it's called but most don't know anything and though certainly the american people only know what they're being told and they're historically believe what a general's going to tell him because of course he's not going to lie to us and that's the impression that's why the war kept going year after year because they keep hearing and have the impression of success and then they just you know they kind of wonder well why does the war not end but since the only message just relentlessly imposed on the American public is this fiction of success, you know, that's why it was continuing

to be popular to support because Americans at their heart want to help people. There's so many really good Americans, so many great soldiers that I met with who were given these impossible tactical missions. You mentioned them a second ago about how they were told, you know, to go after their hearts and minds and try to, you know, not kill anybody that's not supposed to be, you know, to all these things. They did that sincerely. They did the best they could to accommodate that. They genuinely wanted to help people, but they're given an impossible mission, and all it does is get them killed, get them with PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, or just frustration,

and then all these innocent civilians in Afghanistan killed for no reason at all, all because of the fiction that was perpetrated. Yeah. And, you know, I was mentioning to Matthew A. who I was interviewing earlier, the freelance reporter who covered the Afghan war, about how there's this clip.

You may have seen it. It's in my YouTube margin all the time. YouTube's been trying to make me watch it for years. It's this guy's wearing a kind of brown sport coat, and he's smoking a cigarette, and he has kind of long 70s hair, and it says, Vietnam veteran talks about his experience,

and it's about 15 minutes long, something like that. And he just sounds exactly like he's talking about the war in Afghanistan. It's more brutal in Vietnam what he's describing. In fact, he says his first day there, he's a Marine. His first day there, he walks up and Marines are throwing these old people off a bridge. And he's like, whoa, what in the world? But anyway, same story as Afghanistan, essentially that, as I heard numerous times report, and I guess in the phrase of a question for you is, how often did you hear this? But I definitely heard

it reported numerous times throughout the war where soldiers would say, listen, And the only mission here is trying to stay alive long enough to go home. That's it. Keep your buddy alive. Remember the guys talking about, yeah, my job, I'm a bullet sponge. I just, you know, I hope I don't get one in a vital organ. But my job is to go out there and get shot at, which sucks. But nobody thought that they were nation building anything over there other than some state department goon hiding behind a wall in Kabul.

But no specialist out there believed that this. This was actually happening or something. Some of them did. They got there with that belief. They believed that's what they were doing. When they got there, they tried to get that done. But yes, to answer your question, absolutely I did. In fact, I wrote on this in the Armed Forces Journal piece, I specifically recorded a key area in the southwestern part of the country, I'm sorry, southeastern part of the country, where the unit had suffered all kinds of casualties.

in the Argon Dau Valley, that's where it was. I remember now. And that's exactly what the commander told me that they, you know, he said, now they're just, they just want to stop the bleeding. They don't want to lose any more soldiers because they had lost a bunch in the first quarter of their deployment. Their first sergeant was killed. And I remember so vividly the commander telling me that he was just agonizing over when

his tour was over, how he was going to go and talk to the wife of his, you know, senior enlisted guy, his first sergeant, and explained to her why he died. You know, what was he there for what, what value to the, to the nation, to the unit even, was it because he said there isn't any. It was, it was just, I think it was a roadside bomb that got him or one of the assassination groups from the Taliban that they were, you know, busy with snipers. That was the two biggest killer. In fact, that was the primary killers. And, you know, he said, but they didn't, he knows that they're not accomplishing anything. So they're really just trying to keep their guys alive and not putting them in

foolish situations where they could, you know, end up getting in firefighters and getting killed for no value. But, you know, it's a struggle because you're there on a mission. You don't get the choice. You don't get the, you don't have the flexibility. I didn't have the flexibility to just not do my job while I was there or to just leave. You can. So you have to do the best you can to keep your troops alive.

While still, though, obeying the orders that are. given to you and it's just such a conundrum and it's just a criminal that we had to put our soldiers in such positions to have to make those kinds of agonizing phone call or visits to the widows of the soldiers that they lost and trying to not create any more widows by getting anybody else I necessarily killed and still accomplishing the mission that you're ordered to every day. It is just a horrible situation that should never have happened. Yeah. So Now, a year and a half after Fool's airing came out, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers, which was a certain debriefings of people involved, civilians and military, involved with the war, that they gave supposedly in private, I don't know how candid all of them were being. Some of them were being quite candid. Some of them knew this is going to leak out someday and we're clearly being guarded for that reason. But it's, well, I don't know. What did you find in the Afghanistan papers? when that hit well yeah other than the part where he goes horton was right you can just read fools

there and you'd be good yeah it could have uh you know gotten this years earlier yeah i should have said horton was right that davis was right okay sorry go ahead it was just intensely frustrating well it turned out to be frustrating and let me back up when i first heard about this i thought okay now then you have mainstream washington post just blasting this stuff out there for everybody to read. And now then we see that, you know, the same thing that I had reported in 2012, the same thing that you'd reported on, not just me, but on many people in your book and all these radio shows that you've done, podcast and everything that you've been beating this drum forever. And now then there's a validation at the highest levels. Finally, something's going to happen.

We're going to get some kind of accountability here. Maybe this could even finally get to the point to where the war is going to end. And it was the classic Washington stuff. It was a for a couple of weeks and then died out and nothing happened nobody was held accountable and you still to this day still have david petraeus going on every tv show as you know being as a respected expert in so many areas even though we know he lied i told you he lied the washington post told people that he lied and it's just self-evident and he's still saying those same things in the in the atlantic a couple of days ago i mean he's still getting like yeah It was probably two, three thousand word essay.

It was a huge one, allowing him to just repeat all of the things that were false he had said before. And it's just dumbfounding to me how when such abject obvious failure, as graphically demonstrated one year ago, when the Afghan army and government collapsed in a single day, that all of our efforts for 20 years had been exposed for the fiction that they always were. And yet, not only is no one held accountable, but these guys, you know, like both Petraeus and McChrystal, continue to be held in high regard. And I just don't get it. Yeah, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydrocanabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America.

Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the Hempspot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally. Because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order, and free shipping on any order over $100. Legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest, in your state. The Hempspot.com. Spell the THC. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II National. security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years.

It's called the war state. I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. The War State by Mike Swanson. Well, I don't know if this is really the first time or not, but I know the earliest time that somebody found of me predicting a fall of Saigon moment in Kabul was 2012 in a conversation with Gareth Porter. But I think it was probably sooner than that. Because, you know, I've been talking with Eric Margulies all along since I started the interview show in like 2003 or something.

And he's a major expert on Afghanistan because he had covered the 80s war. And so he knew all of these warlords by first name and it, you know, everything. So I had a real leg up there. And at anti-war.com, of course, we had the great Kellyweller. Velaos, you know, she was the best of us on the search then. Yeah. We had Justin and everybody, you know, covering all of this during that time. So everybody at anti-war.com gets some credit for that.

All right. Now, listen, David Petraeus, you report here. I didn't bother reading it. He says, no, the problem was we had a lack of resolve, Danny. Does that even mean anything or what? No, of course not. And then neither does any of the rest of the stuff that he put in there about what we should have done and then how this, you know, this disastrous ending quote didn't need to happen at all is how he emphasizes it using italicized words and everything to make, you know, to really drive at home that we could have won if only we had stayed forever, offering no evidence whatsoever to validate why staying longer would have achieved something that the first 20 years didn't or and then ironically, well, not. ironically, I guess, predictably, he gives himself credit for, of course, we got the inputs right

and the strategy right while I was there. But then that darn old President Obama, he's the one who dropped the ball and didn't maintain all that stuff. And, you know, and he set us up for failure by saying, yeah, we're going to have a withdrawal even before we had gone in there, not mentioning anywhere in there. This is something I pointed out and would love to do here again that he didn't point out at that particular moment that he himself had said, yes, Mr. President, we can definitely do this in 18 months and know, Mr. President, to directly answer your question, if in 18 months it doesn't work, no one's going to say we should keep staying. That was in 2009, okay? And now then in 2022, he's saying we should have stayed longer. That not only was more than 18 months, it's now

then a full decade plus he's still saying that we should so look look patrice which was it was it yeah agreed with this in 2009 that 18 months would do it or is it 22 that no forever would have done it and and of course there's it's it's absurd to suggest that and yet that's that's the that's the argument he's making so it is we need to expose that for the just the illogic that it is hey a surge by definition is temporary you want to call it an escalation just call it an escalation and a permanent one so even by his own reckoning he's a damn liar there but yes you're absolutely right about that you know and i try to bring this up as often as i can that petraeus himself is the one who promised he would have the taliban on their knees with a big bloody nose begging him

for a piece of paper to sign on america's terms by july two thousand 2011 and then that didn't happen. So, you know, what other standard are we supposed to hold him to, Danny, other than his own? Other than his own. That's a good way to put it. And, you know, and I just long for the day when the media and the reporters, you know, across the board start calling him out on those things and saying, wait a minute, here's what you said. Here's what you said. Here's what you said. Then. and here's what happened and here's what you're saying now please reconcile these irreconcilable positions unfortunately they don't

and as you said then he knew he was lying then just like he knows he's lying now one of the big tells back then was he would say well we're having all this success as you paraphrased it earlier too they never said victory

forget victory we got the new edition of the New Speak dictionary victory's not in there success is the best we can promise you but even that success why it's fragile and reversible.

Percible, yeah. Meaning it's not really progress at all. It's just that, yeah, if you put a bunch of Marines with a bunch of weapons in a place, the enemy is going to stay outside of artillery range from them, I guess. You know, otherwise.

You're not really doing anything. I remember even seeing a... Here's what it was. It was like if you have a bucket of water and you clench your fist and you jam that hand into the water, into the bucket, the water will displace. It will move around because it is powerless. It's just wherever you want to put your fist, it will displace the water until you pull your fist out and the

water will roll back in and no one will even know your fist was ever in there. That's what happened in Afghanistan. So everywhere we sent these surge forces and everywhere we had a base, we could secure and hold that terrain. The Taliban did not at any time, not even a tiny little meter of ground take from us. They couldn't. But the second we left every single place we were at, they just rolled back in as though we were never there. And that was always going to be the case. And it was always predictable. But that's, you know, they brought the camera career where the hand was in the water. It's just look how strong we are. And then the cameras left. And then the fist came out and the cameras never went back to see the obvious. Yeah. Well, and they also, as part of their

heroic restraint had these rules where no group is allowed to go more than this amount of distance in radius away from their firebase. So you essentially have just these little bubbles where the Taliban doesn't go because they'll get shot. But they know. Absolutely. Yeah. So I even saw like a graphic. I'm almost certain it was a military production of a slide that show like a map of southern Afghanistan from some kind of sort of, you know, three quarters angle that showed like little bubbles on the map. This is where our guys are, and there's a little bubble of what they call stability, right, the piece of desolation around our little firebases. But everywhere we're not, the Taliban still is. And it's their Islamic Emirate. We just didn't call it that until they

sacked Kabul, but that's what they called it all along. Right. And it already was there. It's just funny to see it represented like that. Little bitty bubbles across the Hellman province, you know. What I did in so many of those cases to include that one I mentioned a minute ago about the joint patrol with the Polish groups is that we would go on these long patrols through cities, you know, walking through villages or whatever. And I remember so vividly talking with at that time the platoon leader that was leading the patrol for the Polish, I ask him how often he went through this particular village. And just to just to give you a sense of how that happened. So we were mounted in Polish combat vehicles, you know, going down a certain route. And then when we got to this village, everybody dismounted, or a lot of them dismounted, the vehicles continued to go through the village at walking pace.

There was troops on either side of the road walking through. And, you know, and I actually have pictures of this. I've published. You have the people that would come out basically along the parade route, and they were just sitting there watching us. some men were sitting in some places and kids and girls and you know and little girls or whatever were watching you know from their from their windows some on top of the buildings and then we we got to a rally point at the end of the village everybody mounted back up and we continued you know to roll to the next place and I asked the platoon leader during that last halt before we remounted

I said how often do you come to this town he goes about once every six or eight weeks and I said well do you meet with like the village elders or anything or you know do you have any kind of engagement with him he goes no no we just it's a presence patrol and and i'm it i looked back at those pictures subsequently and i'm like you know here's this group of four or five men on the side just sitting there watching us and i'm like for all we know those guys could be talking openly about you know planning the next attack against us and no one would even know it because we don't speak their language and they didn't have any interpreters with them uh but even even if they didn't, the second that we left the ground, that's all there was. And then the Taliban

was there. A separate one. Let me tell you about this one. A separate one in the really close to the U.S. patrol, I believe it was the 82nd Airborne, very close to the Pakistan border. We again went to a village, and they were actually getting biometric data at that time on all the Afghan people. They were collecting so that they would know who they were to allegedly to ensure their safety and whatever. But there was, I saw such anger in some of the faces because we were going into this village. And, you know, and we asked them, are the Taliban here? No, no, absolutely not. No Taliban here. Definitely they don't come here. And so we did this biometric stuff. We left. And before we left, some of the Afghan guys who were kind of doing patrolling around

the village while we were in the inside of it, captured a Taliban guy who had, some bomb making materials physically on him. And, you know, they took him to the village elder who had just said there are no Taliban here. And they go, uh, what about this guy? Oh, I don't know where he came from. Well, then he subsequently says, look, he goes, here's the thing, man. Yeah, there's Taliban here. But every time you guys come here, you put us at risk because they come and shake us down afterwards. So hell no, we're not going to do anything for you because all it's going to do is put us risk because you're going to leave and not come back. And that was endemic across the entire country. Everybody was like that. Nobody was ever going to side with us who was going to

leave, whether Obama said a deadline or not, everyone knew we were eventually going to leave, and the Taliban, who are Afghan people for the majority, are always going to be there. So that was always the case. And one of the other practical, fundamental reasons, this was never a winnable war. Man, the lack of resolve I hear in your voice there. All these rational arguments, Danny. They make so much sense. Look, the country is the size of Texas, which is anybody's ever been to Texas or driven across Texas or flown near Texas and seen it out the window or anything. It's really big. And it's bad lands too, right? Mountains and deserts and warriors with rifles all over the place. So who would try it? Oh, and landlocked, not just behind,

Not just a nation away from the sea, but behind a mountain range, too. So to even get there, you've got to take a highway for a thousand miles before you can even take a left and get where you're going. A little bit of a difficulty there. Yeah. All right. Now, sorry, I'm going to let you off the hook in just a minute here. But I want you to talk about the real argument here is about staying last year, that irresponsible Trump. and his peace deal, Biden should have backed right out of it,

and he should have said, Taliban, we're staying, get used to it. And we'd still own that Bogram Air Base, and then we could still kill bad guys, and everything would be great. And quitters never win. And so it's all the Americans' fault. After all, they could have stayed, right? The Taliban had no actual literal firepower ability

to force a full American withdrawal. In fact, we just take every last soldier in Germany and put them in Afghanistan in a week. and then escalate the war right back up again and stay for another until the dollar breaks. And so, therefore, quitting is losing. And it's just because of, you know, Joe Biden's fecklessness and that kind of thing. And so what do you say to that? Yeah, I just, I shake my head and just in astonishment that this evening has to be said out loud, yet it does.

because we have proven, proven over 20 years, and for all the reasons that we just talked about in this whole podcast here, that it was a physical impossibility as close as it could possibly come to being an unwinnable war, meaning under any circumstances with any amount of inputs or numbers of troops or years of service, et cetera, to win this war. It just was never was. and you know we've been arguing yeah but danny they just needed to not lose right that's their argument is we could have stayed and that's not even success but it's not just not leaving yeah and it's at least

the pretension at least is that we'd have been able to continue to prop up the government in Kabul to at least for safe for face saving purposes of nothing else right yeah i don't know about this i don't even know whose face they're trying to say because all it was going to be doing was making us lose face because look i i had even talked to some of our allies i'm talking to our allies people who were on our side and they were just puzzled is that why do you keep doing something that can't succeed and just continue to lose your troops continue to spend these billions per month why do you keep doing that that doesn't make any sense so yeah we could have continued to puzzle our allies we could have continued to waste american money and waste american lives and kill

afghan people and keep it in a perpetual state of war Yeah, that's something we could have done. We have the capacity to do that. But I mean, under what possible rationale does that make any sense? And let me answer the question that some may actually put to theirs. Yeah, but that would have allowed us to keep going after bad guys and terrorists and whatever. Okay, we proved last week, I think it was, that we took at Amunel Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, when we had no troops in Afghanistan in Kabul. And we took out al-Baghdadi of ISIS in Syria where we had no troops in that area, and the ones we did have in there had nothing to do with that raid. Or when President Obama took out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, we had no troops on the ground there. We can deploy troops anywhere and deploy combat power anywhere there's a direct threat to the United States. We do not need troops there. So all those alleged troops that were there to get bad guys, as they are often called, we're nothing but shooting a bunch of people who had no threat. made no threat to the United States. We're never going to be a threat. Even if they hated us,

Scott, they don't have the capacity to attack us. Only the people who do like Zawahiri or possibly even Baghdaddy and even up with that in only a possible, but only somebody who has a global reach and the wherewithal to get to us. That's a valid target and it remains so. But we have the capacity to go after them anywhere in the globe to this day. And we do not need those. So those troops, we had in Afghanistan were a drain on our security because it was a drain to go after things that weren't even a threat to us and it cost us potentially our intelligence ability to look for those that might represent a threat to us. And so I just violently, vehemently reject anybody who says that our security was threatened because we withdrew troops out of Afghanistan because

we have proven it does not yeah and boy for all their crocodile tears about it they sure forgot all about it a minute later and especially all about the women and girls that they cared so much about who are now going hungry and thank goodness all the other nations of the world are stepping up to feed them because otherwise they're just completely out of sight out of mind you know if they're not within a thousand miles of our green berets they don't count so what differences is a make you know um yeah it's it's pathetic and yeah i mean they act like yeah we could have just left our you know five or 10 000 troops of bogram and then that just would have been fine as though they wouldn't have had to dump another 50 000 in there to fend off the new taliban offensive at

that you know yeah taliban somehow we're going to acquiesce to that when all they'd acquiesce to was that we'd promise we were leaving and they said okay that was always their demand was get the hell out. Yeah. And look, and I commend President Trump for coming up with that deal, even though he took a lot of heat. And I commend President Biden for following through and getting them out of there. Because he took a lot of political heat. He took heat that nobody else would take. Even Trump. Trump could have done this while he was in office. He actually said he was going to do it before he left at the end of 2020. And unfortunately, he didn't follow through with it. I really wish he had if he could have gotten a lot of credit. And ironically, if he had gotten us out under that

time frame, probably the Taliban wouldn't have been able to roll in before we had left because they still were too far out. But the time, the additional time that gave them time to make their deals with the Afghan soldiers so that they didn't fight, it's not that the Taliban won the fight. They just made negotiated deals with the Afghan people to not fight and just hand the place over, which is exactly what they were doing when I was there. They just did it on a larger scale, and all that was predictable. So I'm glad that it's over, and I regret that you have people like Petrae is still making money off of it and still being listened to, but at least we're out and no more soldiers

are being killed. Yeah. And listen, that is such a crucial point that even when it comes all the way down to it at the bottom line, how did they screw up the withdrawal by delaying it, by not getting it over with? the thing was supposed to be over by the first day of hunting season. Instead, they kicked the can till the end of the summer. And so the Taliban, as you're saying, took the whole country while they're leaving.

I do need to address that. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. The deal that Trump made, even though he said he was going to get out before the end of 2021, he didn't. No, I'm sorry, 2020, he didn't. But the plan, the agreement was that we would be out by May of 21. And if Biden had just stuck with that and followed that path, then we would have got, we would have been able to get in complete order according to our own timelines. And there would have been at least the facade of a government still standing when we left,

because the Taliban had not progressed far enough to be able to do that. But the time that Biden delayed on not making a decision until, I want to say after the deadline had passed, then that's when he came up with the August 31st one. That gave the Taliban the critical time they needed to be able to make the deals in time to just walk literally into Kabul. And if it had to happen for that, then those 13 soldiers that died and the 200 civilians that were killed at the airport, all would be alive today. You just have to admit that's the truth. yep all right man well listen you're an american hero and i really mean that and i really appreciate your time on the show i wanted to talk about ukraine and china too but then i figure you know we only have 15 minutes before we're really pushing our luck on time here and right i'll

figure i rather pick this up a while so i'll look forward to coming back on talking on those because there's a lot to be said there too yeah absolutely uh if we're not all dead in an h bomb war i'll meet you back here next friday that's all right Sounds good. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Danny. Really appreciate you. All right, you guys, that is the great Daniel L. Davis, retired lieutenant colonel, the U.S. Army.

Read him at 1945. It's the digits, 19, and then the words 45.com there. And so first of all, we have David Petraeus is wrong, of course, about Afghanistan. And then China's military was built to defeat America in a Taiwan war, and Ukraine needs a miracle. to drive Russia's military out of Kurson. Those are two great articles that we didn't get a chance to talk about today, but you can find all of that at 1945.com. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio,

can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.