Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/30/21 Jack Murphy on America’s Failed Drone Campaign in Afghanistan

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Scott talks with Jack Murphy about the piece he wrote detailing the surge in drone strikes that took place under President Trump.  Murphy explains how the whole project started when a distraught drone operator approached him. It quickly became clear that that drone operator was not alone. Murphy details how Rules of Engagement (ROE) are formulated and how they evolved during the Obama and Trump presidencies. This leads to a discussion of the ruthless drone campaign that the U.S. carried out against the Taliban during negotiations. A campaign that killed numerous Afghan men for the crime of simply using a radio.  Discussed on the show: “Looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign” (Audacy) “The Uncounted” (New York Times) Rand Corporation Study on Limited Intervention  Jack Murphy is an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran. After returning to civilian life in 2010, he graduated from Columbia University in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Find his memoir here and follow him on Twitter @JackMurphyRGR 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; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. 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 the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing jack murphy from connecting vets dot com formerly with soft rep and i'm sure you all remember some of that journalism from a couple of years ago but check this out looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover, inside America's failed Afghan drone campaign. You find this at odyssey.com. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y-O-Od-Sy.com. Welcome to the show, Jack. How are you doing?

I'm good. How are you? I'm doing great. Listen, I've been a fan of your journalism and your Twitter account and all kinds of things for many years now. And I really appreciate you joining us on the show, especially this is such a good. an important piece here. I guess I could say we knew that Donald Trump had escalated the air war along with a small escalation of forces back in 2017. And we know that in Afghanistan and also in Somalia and Yemen and other places, I think, that they had devolved the command authority to order strikes further down the chain of command from the way it had been in the Obama years. But now what you've done with this piece is you've told that story from a whole new point of view, from inside the drone warriors in the, I guess the Air Force and Joint Task Forces, fighting the war in Afghanistan and just flesh the story out so well for us here. And what a horror show it is. So I guess first of all, can you, actually, before we get too far into that, could you tell us about your experience?

in the military, and so the audience knows who they're listening to here? Sure. I spent eight years in Army Special Operations, starting off in Ranger Battalion and then in Special Forces deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and then got out of the Army in 2010, majored in political science, and began working as a journalist. You know, I've traveled to Syria a couple times, Iraq a couple times, Kurdistan, the Philippines, a few other places. is reporting on the ground over the years. Mostly, I report on military, special operations, military history, covert operations, things of that nature. And can you tell us what years were you in Iraq and Afghanistan? I was in Afghanistan what feels like a million years ago. It was

the winter of 2004, 2005, and then I was in Iraq, the summer of 2005, and then again in 2009. Okay. All right, cool. I was just curious about that. I wanted to hear you out on that. Okay, so you got this story. These, I guess, talk first about your sourcing here. You have brand new footage no one has ever seen before of drone strikes on apparent civilian targets. Yes. I, you know, through the, initially how this story started was speaking to one of the drone operators. who came to me because he was distraught about some of the things he had participated in and witnessed. And he was not alone, as it turns out. He, he, this person, you know, gave non-classified drone footage to me that he had saved from one of his trips overseas to demonstrate, you know, what he was upset about, namely the targeting of unarmed, apparently civilian males in Afghanistan and Helmand province in 2019. And as I began to kind of flesh out this

story, I mean, it's a very complicated, very technical story. And just having the footage itself doesn't really explain very much. It doesn't tell you very much. And like just as an example, what I'd tell you is if you were to see helmet cam footage of the bin Laden raid, what it would show you is a American commando shooting an old man in his pajamas in the middle of the night. It would look on the surface pretty bad, but if you understand the context and you understand who the target is, it completely changes the nature of the story, right? The same is true here. If you see the video without any further knowledge, these look like any other drone strike like we've been seeing for 20 years. So it was important to really dig deep and gather as much sourcing as I could.

I interviewed over two dozen people, military lawyers, Air Force. J-Tax, which are the people who specialize in calling for fire, many other people who are involved in crafting policy, people who work at various task forces and headquarters and in the intelligence community. And, you know, my initial source, as it turns out, was not the only one suffering from some level of moral injury over what they had seen and experienced in Afghanistan. Yeah. Just on that point right there, You know, I've heard it dismissed, and I may have dismissed it, too, the trauma of being a drone warrior, sitting safe and sound in a trailer in New York State or in Nevada, killing somebody with the entire diameter of the earth as your shield. But then I've heard it from the drone warriors themselves.

I think they talk about this in National Bird, that when you're flying a B-1, you fly over, you hit your target. You might find out whether you hit it or not when you get back to base, something like that. when you're a drone pilot you follow these people around for weeks and you get to know them in a way and they become very very human and then after you bomb them you watch them bleed out screaming and freaking out on the ground as they die and it's a whole other level of intimacy through that video screen and it's really really has been very hard on some of these people that's uh no that's really accurate and i mean also some of the optics on these drones now are so uh clear that you can really zoom in on these people. You can tell if they're wearing eyeglasses or not in some cases. They would be assigned tasks. Just as you said, not only are you watching them for long periods of time, then you're watching the strike,

and then some of them are assigned to watch the bodies, and literally watch the ragged corpses left behind to see who shows up to claim the body, where are they taken? So, I mean, these are in some cases, these drone operators are watching, you know, bodies of men, women, and children being thrown on to the back of a pickup truck and driven to the hospital. I mean, they're seeing all of that. Yeah. You know, well, let me ask you. Is this your experience, too?

They just feed you Hitler and the Wehrmock, your whole childhood long. So then you join the army thinking that's what you're going to do. You're going to be fighting against an army in a field somewhere and not. you know, drone striking some guy in a pickup truck. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that even the footage that was provided to me, I mean, the reason why they had that footage was because earlier on in the deployment, they were proud of the strikes they were doing. Like, hey, we're killing bad guys.

We're doing work out here, right? And as the deployment went on, they stopped making recordings of the strikes because over time, it began to dawn on them what was taking place here and they were no longer comfortable with it um it's uh it's a different dynamic for the drone operators sure um i i hesitate to even compare it to some of my own experiences i i think it differs sure well yeah i mean it's got to be different all the way around but uh you know a lot of similarities there too but um you know you know sure it's a matter matter of perspective i suppose yeah well you know like joe biden's son's death from the cancer from the burn pits clearly has gotten to him and yet i've heard combat veterans say

hey he may have died of the war but he didn't die in the war not like my friends did and i got to respect that yeah like he was not a combat death but then again if you're joe biden he was same difference to you you know what i mean right right i mean though the entire war and as we're just beginning to see now the social fallout. I mean, it affects so many different people in so many different ways. And we're only at the very beginning stages of beginning to process that or cope with it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And we're still not even done yet. Okay, so now, can you talk to me a little bit about the rules of engagement as they were under Obama? Because it was no picnic the drone wars under Obama. But what were the rules that then got suspended here?

Right. There are a number of different dynamics that were all taking place at different times. And there was no uniform, or at least the way it was interpreted on the ground, the rules of engagement were not evenly distributed. They were not uniform. Obama came in and put some restrictions in place largely because of the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan, which is a whole different animal in many ways. But he brought in some restrictions as far as making. requiring the commanders and the people who had strike authorization to ensure a near certainty that there would not be civilian casualties. This came in during the McChrystal years in Afghanistan. And what happens is there can be some presidential policy guidance that lays out some very broad strokes of what the White House expects. But then commanders write the ROE, the rules of engagement in country. It's a common fallacy I find with veterans and soldiers that we think the ROE is written by politicians or mandated by politicians. It's actually

written by the military itself and commanders own that ROE. It is written based on all sorts of different input. I mean, military lawyers absolutely weigh in on it. It has to be at least in accordance with international law. It always must meet the thresholds of international law, but it can be more restrictive. It can be increasingly more restrictive than is required by the Geneva Conventions or the laws of land warfare and so on. But what would happen with the ROE is that commanders would reinterpret it differently based on the politics of the day, the political implications at that time. It could be based just informally on signaling or policy decisions that are coming on or press coverage. If there's some negative press coming out about as a certain

military task force, maybe they adjust the ROEs. I mean, it's, it's, the ROEs have not been hardened fast. They have been something very open to interpretation and reinterpretation on the ground. and each task force on the ground in Afghanistan had different ROEs on top of that. The conventional forces and the time frame, you know, my article is written about 2019. The conventional forces operated under the NATO rules of engagement. The special operations task force operated under a completely separate rules of engagement. When soldiers would show up overseas, they would suddenly have to get read on to the rules of engagement, which was hundreds if not thousands of pages

with all sorts of legal caveats included in them. The J-TACs, the Air Force Joint Terminal attack controllers would joke that they were also Barracks lawyers as a part of their job description because of the amount of legalese that they had to process. And what ended up a lot of times was that the military relied on those J-TACs in their understanding of the ROE

where there were commanders in theater who did not understand their own ROE that they operated under. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that it led to a very convoluted situation. And I lay out some examples in the article where the ROE was too restrictive, where we had American soldiers under fire engaged in combat with the enemy, and the bureaucracy would not allow air strikes to go forward. You're talking about under the old rules. Correct?

Right, right. And there, you know, there's one. one example that I probably should have included in the article during the 2015 Battle of Kunduz when there was a Taliban tank, an actual tank driving around the city of Kunduz, like just rolling around and the military would not authorize airstrike on a tank and an enemy tank driving around the city. And so it took hours and hours to get this, this air strike approved. And that's just the ridiculousness of it, the flip-flopping back and forth, the oscillation from one extreme to the other that has frustrated so many soldiers in Afghanistan. So when you hear troops complaining

about the ROE and it being overly restrictive, that may be based on perceptions at some point, but some of their criticisms are very valid. Yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about guys pinned down under sniper fire and they wouldn't take out the enemy there. So, and I certainly remember that, especially from the counterinsurgency campaign, heroic restraint and all of this under Stanley McChrystal. There were a lot of complaints about, you know, Vietnam-type sounding complaints about being made to fight with one arm tie behind their back and all of that. So this is part of Trump's politics, was nobody was ever going to accuse him of that.

And that's a very important kind of shibboleth in Washington, D.C. It's something that H.W. Bush made a big deal about, too. I'm not going to be Lyndon Johnson over here dictating to my generals on the minutiaia. You guys are in charge. You do your best job. And no one's ever going to say that your loss is my fault because I gave you everything you need. And that, you know, Donald Trump said something like that quite a few times. Well, it's interesting because American soldiers always have the inherent

right to self-defense, that if you receive fire, you can fire back. And our military can fire back with indirect fire, artillery, air strikes, and so on. But what we've seen is these examples where the chain of command did not allow them to fire for various reasons. So at a certain point, you can't even blame the president or the policy decisions that are made at the White House. These are decisions that are being made in Afghanistan by the military itself. Right. Although, I mean, the change came from Trump, right? He told Mattis that you go ahead and do your worst, pal, correct? There was some definite policy changes. What happened in Afghanistan specifically was that there was a pressure campaign that was designed. And this was part of the negotiations that were going into Doha. The Trump administration obviously wanted to pull the U.S. military out of some of these foreign entanglements and these conflicts abroad. I mean, we saw Trump trying to pull us out of. of everywhere, right? Germany, South Korea, Syria. It's kind of funny to watch the haphazard

way he went about it. But there actually was a deliberate strategy in Afghanistan to go into negotiations with the Taliban. We dropped some of the preconditions that we wanted the Taliban to also negotiate with the Afghan government. We're going to negotiate directly with the Taliban now. But in order to have leverage as we went into those negotiations, we crafted a pressure campaign to heavily target the Taliban in Afghanistan. The idea being that we're going to make them bleed. We're going to put a foot on the back of their neck so that when we go into those negotiations in Doha, they're willing to do almost anything to get that boot off of their neck. That was the idea behind it. And Scottie Miller, General Scotty Miller was a big part of taking the gloves off in Afghanistan, which he did,

according to many of the sources I talked to. The Special Operations Task Force was targeting high-level personalities, you know, so-called high-value targets, HVTs, whatever the terminology we use now. And they were timed. They were actually timed with the negotiations so that those strikes would happen while our people were in the conference room with the Taliban in Doha so that when they came out of a meeting, they would pick up their cell phones, find them ringing, pick up the phone, and realize that all of their buddies were getting blown up back in Afghanistan. So that when we went into the next meeting, they were, they would, you know, at least in

theory, be frightened and be open to negotiations, a little bit more open than they were previously. The new rules of engagement, if you will, this new targeting methodology for this pressure campaign was also brought into effect by some of the conventional forces. And those new rules, the lessening in restrictions, one of the big ones that affected the conventional forces was that strike authority previously had to be authorized by like the four-star general in charge of all of Afghanistan. So every drone strike, this four star would have to approve. And that would mean if this guy was asleep, if he was in a meeting, if he was otherwise indisposed, you could not get strike authority. And so in some cases, legitimately bad, you know, guys, targetable personalities

were allowed to go. This resulted in a lot of frustration. During the Trump administration, he pushed strike authority down to field grade officers, roughly down to like battalion commanders to task force commanders so that they could authorize their own strikes. And of course, this helped pick up the pace of the drone strikes significantly. And that would mean what that would mean captains or lieutenant colonels or lieutenant colonels and colonels predominantly. Yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. So yeah, this led to the, task forces, specifically looking at task force Southwest, which was running ops out of Helman Province, gave them strike authority. And they used it to a point that some of those

involved described as excessive, as punitive, or even nihilistic, because the people we were targeting were not high value personalities. They were Afghan men who were seen carrying a radio or maybe somebody flying a drone thought they saw an antenna poking out from under a person's clothing or they perhaps thought they saw a tactical vest concealed underneath the person's clothing, you know, the type that could hold Kalashnikov magazines or hand grenades maybe. But a drone operator would just think maybe they saw a flash of this through the drone's camera. And that person would immediately be targeted with a lethal strike. Okay. So now you talk in the article about how some of the dumbing down of the restrictions here happened first in Iraq War III, where they're fighting

against the Islamic State there, 2014 through 17. And so Trump came in about two. thirds of the way into that war. But the rules of engagement had already changed there in Iraq and Syria or not? Yes. It had already changed quite a bit under the Obama administration. And that had to do with the setting up of, well, I mean, it had to do, of course, with ISIS sweeping across Syria in Iraq. And that's a whole history there in of itself. But we sent troops in to reinforce the embassy in Baghdad initially, like 2014 time frame. And that mission kind of expanded outwards as we decided, you know, something's got to be done about ISIS. At the same time, the Obama administration had just withdrawn from Iraq. We don't want to reinvade the country and do all of that all over again.

So how do we do this with a light footprint? We send in special operation soldiers and we use drone strikes. And this led to the setting up of strike cell operations. So I guess as a point of comparison, reflecting a little bit on my own experience here. I mean, the old days in Iraq, we did a lot of counterterrorism missions. So there would be signals intelligence and human intelligence gathered on specific terrorists. And the special operations task force would send soldiers, after these terrorist leaders. And we would fly in in helicopters in the night or drive in in vehicles

and explosively breach the door and go in and enter and clear the structure. And ideally, we'd pull the bad guys out of their beds at night and flex cuff them and bring them back. But if they picked up arms, I mean, it was going to be a firefight. This all goes out the window when we start talking about the war against ISIS. Because of the lighter footprint we have in the country,

but also because this is not some low-intensity conflict anymore. These are not like swat-team-style raids, counter-terrorism raids that we're doing in a semi-permissive environment. ISIS is an actual army that has taken over in occupied broad swaths of territory, including major cities. So the way that we targeted them had to change. And this is why we moved from a intelligence-driven approach

to targeting to, to what is known as a target engagement criteria. And this would basically be, it would involve us flying around. And if you see a group of or even a lone person behind enemy lines carrying a rifle, carrying a weapon, we would hit them with a drone strike.

That target engagement criteria, I mean, at certain points, it's certainly involved, you know, if we saw somebody behind enemy lines carrying a radio. I had one intelligence official told me, tell me that the engagement criteria could be met if there was a building, particularly in Missoull, where there was more than six cars parked out in front because of the preponderance of suicide vehicular improvised explosive devices. So in other words, a car bomb driven by, you know, a suicide bomber,

which ISIS used a lot. They used those a lot. So if we saw vehicles parked outside of a building, vehicles from, you know, based on our assessment, we would just level that entire structure, just bring it down. And there's a rationale. There's a method to the madness here. I mean, we are fighting, you know, an enemy army, and we are now fighting a war of attrition. It's not a counterterrorism mission in the way that it was, you know, eight years prior. So we use the targeting engagement criteria to great effect, but there is also a lot of collateral damage in retrospect. There is a reporter, Osmott Khan. She has written for the New York Times did a really amazing article that I would definitely recommend people read in tandem with the one

I wrote because what she shows in there is that the strike cell operations and the task force in Iraq On paper, they say they accounted for every bomb dropped, which in one year we dropped 39,000 bombs. We were dropping more bombs in Iraq than the logistical supply could keep up with. In other words, we were firing more missiles than could be manufactured and transported into Iraq. That's how many we were firing. CENTCOM will tell you, they had accountability for every missile fired, that they, you know, know where each missile struck, that they know that, you know, the collateral.

damage was fairly low. But what Osmat Khan showed in her article was actually Centcom really had no idea what they're talking about and that we blew up all kinds of buildings, including civilian structures all over the place. And Sentcom was denying it to her. And she said, well, you know, actually you guys posted video of it on your YouTube channel. And I went and talked to the people who lived there and like you blew up a family of five and sentcom's response was to start taking down those videos off of YouTube. There's also a ranch corporation study that I think showed that the airstrikes were not quite as effective as we might have hoped they had been. But anyway, the point I'm getting at here is that this is where the strike cell model grew out of. When I say

strike cell, what I'm talking about is a Air Force JTAC, a military, military lawyer, a JAG, and the drone operators, well, it could be a representative who's on a phone, like a VTC or a conference call, like a Cisco conference call. But a lot of these people are all in the same room. And what it is is the commander is basically waiting for all of these people to bless off, kind of give the green light for the strike. And it would happen very quickly. sometimes it would happen in seconds in Iraq and because the commander would like at one point I was told they had ping pong paddles so each desk in the room would have red on one side of the paddle and green on the other and what they would do when a drone pilot got eyes on something they thought met the target engagement criteria they would bring that over to the big flat screen and everyone in the room would hold up their ping pong paddle and once they were all green the commander would authorize the strike so It happened extremely quickly. Like I said, one year, 39,000 bombs dropped in Iraq.

So they were moving. That model, that template started migrating its way over to Afghanistan. Starting around 2017, for sure, it was starting to make its way over there. And it had been fully implemented by 2019. And that's why we saw the special operations task force targeting the Taliban quite heavily, but also a conventional task force, task force Southwest, trying to use engageable criteria and trying to do strike cell operations and arguably it got out of control that their operations down there just came off the rails.

And there are some, I guess you could go. call informed speculations. I hate to speculate, of course, as a reporter, but I, there are some, I couldn't get anyone in the strike cell specifically to speak to me, which was interesting. But there are perhaps some reasons why that happened, why they relied on drone strikes the way that they did, one of which being that Helmand Province was, it was more or less always under de facto Taliban control. It was always a hotbed for enemy, activity. By the time we get the 2019, the Marines know the war is winding down. They do not want to do patrols outside of the base. They're basically seeing this as, you know,

their last hurrah in Afghanistan on the way out the door. Other conventional task forces were doing, you know, they were doing drone strikes, but they're also doing fly to assist. So when Afghans would come under fire, enemy fire, they would fly out a team to advise and assist. Task Force Southwest in Helmand Province was not doing that. Another real problematic thing about what was happening in Helmand, especially using the engagement criteria of somebody carrying around a radio, their intelligence assessment was that anyone carrying a radio around Helmand was a Taliban member. But this was problematic because the Taliban had been dismantling the cell phone towers in Helmand for years.

So walkie-talkies or radios was the only way that people in the province really had to communicate. They didn't have cell phones like, you know, normal people would normally use. And, you know, these guys who had radios or they thought they saw somebody using a radio or even saw somebody just touching a radio was targeted with lethal strike operations. So there's a number of reasons why this became highly problematic in Helmand. Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things, like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck, and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them, so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional, defiant disorder,

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Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out in why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now. Now, I think that I know that a big part of the escalation of the air war in the Trump years was not just drone strikes, but air strikes by B1 bombers. and whatever else you got too. But is that part of this same operation or that's a whole different subject? Yeah, it is. I'm glad you brought that up because if drones in Helmand Province,

most of the drone strikes I've been speaking about were conducted by gray eagles. Gray eagles are flown by army pilots, not Air Force. The other drones that were very prominent in that area were called Scan Eagles, which are unarmed, unarmed surveillance drones. So the scan eagles would be flown. out every day into grid squares, searching for people who meet the quote-unquote engageable criteria, once they found something or someone, the gray eagles would then be called in to do the strike. If gray eagles were unavailable, other platforms could be brought in.

Like in much of the, not much, but some of the footage that was given to me, you see A10 strikes. So sometimes it would be an 810 warthog would be called in to do this strike on the person. And some which were, you know, particularly grisly, the Hellfire missile from the Grey Eagle failed to kill the target. And then the A10 would be called in to finish them off. So we are talking about airstrikes full stop. The Grey Eagle or the drone was really just one platform that could be used right uh and now do you have stats on or i mean i guess there are different stats from different places on the increases of civilian casualties under the trump air war um so if you could you know refer to what you know about that but also can you help clarify for me because we had a ceasefire

with the taliban but that just meant they stopped shooting us but we're still bombing them the whole time because the ceasefire kicked in in what late 2018 right when the talk started um well i mean it was limited you know um yeah i don't i don't know how much how much importance to put on it to tell you the truth yeah um yeah it's just funny that part kind of always goes unaddressed that we had the ceasefire that i mean it clearly meant that the the green berets in in uh nangar i guess even quit fighting ISIS or anybody. That all stopped. And then as you were saying, the Marines down in Helman stayed on their base and didn't do much. But the air war kind of continued all along, I think, until when? I mean, we did a drone strike yesterday. Yeah. It kind of,

yeah, it kind of continues. And killed all innocent people, by the way, in that, yeah. We, I mean, we have one more day in Afghanistan. And then we're going to have so-called over-the-horizon capabilities to do counterterrorism strikes. So, I mean, it's still going to continue to some extent. Yeah. Well, let me ask you more about that. You got time to hang around? Yeah.

Okay. So I'm real curious about that, right? So America's been helping the Taliban fight ISIS, but there ain't much ISIS. And the Taliban can take them without us anyway. But then so I wonder, like, do you think or do you know? are they going to try to back this resistance movement in the Panshire Valley kind of thing? Or is the next plan, the next stage of this is to make some kind of deal with the Taliban where we get to stay as allies with them in order to fight against ISIS supposedly there or whatever.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, wars make for strange bedfellows, that's for sure. And I mean, I don't think I necessarily have the answer, of course. but there are perhaps opportunities where we're going to collaborate with the Taliban or where we're going to take actions that inadvertently aid the Taliban in fighting ISIS. You know, West Morgan wrote that piece in The Washington Post about how we were acting as the Taliban's Air Force to fight ISIS. Situations like this have kind of unfolded in Syria as well in certain cases where it's like, hey, are we doing air strikes for Shia militia now?

You know, like weird things that maybe are unexpected, but pragmatically make a certain amount of sense. I mean, how it all shakes out. I mean, the thing with ISIS is, you know, ISIS as it stands in Afghanistan, I mean, they're really just rebranded Taliban to begin with. And, you know, that ISIS moniker, different parties adopt that in order to go. United States into attacking them. You know, that's how they see themselves as gaining credibility. I mean, you even saw this with ISIS in the Philippines. I mean, they're just kind of like

local bandits and, you know, various rebel groups that have been around for a while and they rebranded themselves as ISIS. And it's like this weird situation that everyone benefits from where the local government gets American aid because we're freaking out about ISIS. So we give them military aid. You know, ISIS gets this sort of international press coverage and credibility because they're the new boogeyman. And the United States also gets to, you know, be directly involved in our military has something to do, you know, mission creep and all that. So, I mean, the ISIS crisis is sort of like the grift that keeps on grifting, you know, and I don't know that there's going to be ever any real end to it. Yeah, it's a great transmission

belt of power back and forth between the hawks on both sides, always is. Right. It's like something that everyone benefits from. Right. So when they dropped the Moab bomb, there was a guy who wrote a opinion piece for the New York Times who was, I forgot exactly who he was. I think it was some kind of Pakistani government official said that on the radio there in Nangahar province, they were bragging about that at the ISIS radio station saying, see how important we are that the Americans drop their biggest non-nuclear bomb on us. And so even though it sounds crazy to join a group that's getting bombed with gigantic bombs. It makes sense to join a group that is so important that the Americans take them that seriously. And now they have a whole new

motive taking revenge for them dropping their biggest bomb on us. And so it's a huge rallying cry. Great PR stunt for them by our side. Right. Look at what ISIS did in Syria and Iraq, where they were advertising their most grisly war crimes. It was like every day there was something new. Like, hey, we're setting this Jordanian pilot a blaze, you know, lighting him on fire alive. We're blowing up people with debt cord. We're beheading people. We're throwing homosexuals off rooftops. If you look at the Philippines, you know, ISIS goes and takes over Morrowly. They take over an entire city and declare themselves a caliphate. I mean, these are like publicity stunts. And then they, you know, they can get the media to kind of do the job for them by hyping the threat.

Um, so yeah, I mean, it, it builds their credibility. All right. Now, I'm sorry, we're all over the place now, but I got to ask you about the politics of this moment. There are so many hawks saying, you know what? The war would have been fine in Afghanistan. I mean, if we would just stay and hold this stalemate and hardly any of our guys are dying anymore.

And, uh, and it's just the worst thing in the world for Joe Biden and the Democrats to give in now and give up the country to the Taliban. And if only we had stayed, say all the hawks. It's completely insane and detached from reality. The Taliban were taking over district after district. I mentioned, you know, the 2015 Battle of Kunduz. I mean, that city was lost several times to the Taliban. We had to fight them back. I mean, it provides like a prelude almost to everything that happened that, you know, the Afghan special ops guys came in and fought with a handful of green berets and took back the city. The conventional ANA were not willing to fight until they saw that America was involved. It was the green beret actually going and banging on the barracks

door saying, hey, America's here. Get out. And they had like 17 gun trucks in the parking lot just sitting there while the Taliban took over their city. And when they saw, oh, America's here, suddenly they came out and were willing to at least somewhat participate. This kind of speaks to the larger phenomena that took place across Afghanistan, that you had all of these provincial capitals that were surrounded by the Taliban, other areas being taken over. You had Afghan military soldiers being killed in droves. It was not a sustainable stalemate, as many have tried to claim. that 2019 pressure campaign that I was mentioning where we really did take the fight to the Taliban during that time frame and we stymied their operations.

But that was a limited time thing. We did not have the resources to keep that kind of campaign up indefinitely. As Biden said in a speech, his choices were to carry through with the withdrawal and get us out of there or to surge troops for the spring fighting season. which we've already surged troops many, many times before in Afghanistan. So this was not a sustainable situation. It's so detached from reality. I almost don't know what to say,

except that it's a sustainable stalemate for the people who don't have to pay any of the prices. Yeah. All right. But so if I was the president and I had put you in charge of closing the thing down, how might you have done it better? than they have. Well, it's all in hindsight, of course, but I mean, you know, President Biden promised us an orderly withdrawal. And this was definitely not that. This was a mess. This was a huge mess. I think that we misunderstood the capabilities of not just the Afghan military, but the Afghan government

and how quickly they collapsed, it was not so much, you know, some people have said this is like a case study in guerrilla warfare. It's not. It's a case study in political warfare. This was not a war as much as it was a handover, right? It was like in military terms, we'd call it a relief in place. You know, the Afghan government took off and the Taliban just flooded right in. You had, you know, Ghani just like two days before he fled the country. He was like holding a, you know, you know, cabinet meetings about building a hydroelectric dam up in Kunduz, which was an area that had already fallen to the Taliban as his as his capital was being surrounded. This is what he's talking about. Like this is a guy who is just in a bubble. And we clearly misunderstood that. We thought

that the government would hold out for, you know, maybe till the fall, maybe till October. if we were to do it all over again, the evacuation of American citizens, refugees, green card holders, SIV holders, all of that should have been factored into the withdrawal plan. You know, in special forces, you know, terminology or doctrine, you would call this the demobilization phase, or I think we call it the transition phase now. It all should have been factored into the planning, been an organic part of the withdrawal plan that factors it in as a part of a orderly withdrawal. And for some reason, we thought we could do a military withdrawal and not have to consider all these civilian factors because we thought the ANA and we thought the Afghan government

would hold out and fight. You know, clearly, Ghani, and I mean, he was saying like just a week prior, I will stay and fight for my people. If they want war, we'll give them war. This guy didn't fight till the last bullet. He didn't even fight to the first bullet. He just took off and left in the night. Yeah. And just abandoned his people and left so many people in his own government

and his own citizens in the lurch. So America shares some of the blame for this, but there's a lot of finger pointing that can go around, right? Yeah. Well, so I know a guy or, I don't know them that well, but I have an Army officer source who told me on July 14th, it might have been the 13th, that they were preparing to drop a bunch of paratroopers on Bogram and take it back. And this is just a week or two after they'd given it to the Afghan National Army.

And it was for just this scenario, the fall of Saigon. And we've got to be able to get people out in the Kabul airport only has one air strip. But Bogram has two. And then the problem was the A&A turned it right over to the Taliban. In fact, I think he said the whole area was crawling with Taliban in a way that meant that they would have had to fight or it would have been, you know, by their rules, not a safe thing to do even to, you know, I guess you can't just drop guys right inside the base. You'd have to land outside where it's open anyway. So they had to abandon that plan. But in other words, they didn't really know what the hell they were doing.

They were trying to figure it out. But Bogram already belonged to the Taliban by the time the emergency came in. And so they really were winging it at that point, and they were really worried about a Black Hawk down type thing where the Taliban or whoever else, ISIS, start slaughtering all of our diplomats on the road between the embassy and the airport and this kind of thing. So at least it wasn't the worst case scenario that they were afraid of there, but it seems like a food ball moment. They've been playing it fairly smart so far. they haven't been getting stupid like ISIS, committing all the insane war crimes and everything else because their prerogatives are different. They're not looking to be some sort of internationally recognized terrorist group.

They want to be a, you know, caliphate in their own country in Afghanistan. And it seems so far that they're smart enough to realize that if they do a bunch of stupid stuff, you know, America tends to start dropping bombs on you. and that would not facilitate our withdrawal out of the country after 20 years. So they are being smart about it. Now, is that going to hold or are we going to see them going back to executing women in soccer stadiums or are they going to be a little bit smarter and carry out the executions in the basement of the parliament building like, you know, third world authoritarian regimes normally do?

We'll see how that pans out. Yeah. Yeah, so far, they're more clever than. crazy on at this part and just because they're ruthless just like pretty much all governments in the world just because they're ruthless doesn't mean they're irrational and don't know how to play a public relations campaign and after all it's the 21st century you know it's not even the 90s anymore that was a long long time ago now so yeah um i guess we'll see how all of that goes um but um i'm sorry because i want to i do want to get back and i guess let the last word be about the

civilian casualties here in the Hellman province in particular during this Trump surge because, you know, you've mentioned a couple of times here that the criteria for killing people were as little as, geez, I think he's wearing a vest, which, man, or I think I saw an antenna, which would indicate a radio, and a radio indicates Taliban connections. And I'm wondering, I think you do mentioned this actually in here about whether or not in some cases or others, they had any other kind of cooperating intelligence at all, but then how mostly that would just be SIM cards in contact with each other, which doesn't really mean anything anyway, that kind of thing? Right. You know, even if you were to do a sort of link chart analysis on the communications

from people in Helmand, the Taliban was so pervasive there that everyone had. Everyone has had some sort of connection to the Taliban. It didn't necessarily mean that you were a member of the Taliban just because, you know, you had to pay your taxes to the Taliban or whatever the case may be. The targeting of Afghan men with radios or who appeared to have some sort of radio was also based on, you know, some intelligence-based assumptions, I suppose you could say. So it's based on an intelligence assessment that the people who are carrying radios in this area are Taliban. It's a pretty big assumption to make, especially like I had explained earlier, when the cell phone towers in the province have been disabled. But we were making this sort of intelligence assessment that if you're in this province in this area, known to be frequented by the Taliban and you're using a

radio then we think it's highly probable that you are a member of the Taliban. And then when we actually fly in there and we get eyes on a person with a radio, we can then say this is sort of double-sourced intelligence, right? That we have this guy in an area known as to be a hotbed of Taliban activity. And here he is using a walkie-talkie. Oh, man, now we got him. Like that was considered a big win by the task force um task force southwest like that was a big deal to find somebody like that and to be able to drop a bomb on them all right well um and then again i'm sorry do you have some numbers from the last few years here it's in the low tens of thousands from the trump year something like that uh as far as number of strikes oh no as far as number of dead innocent people

Oh, yeah. It is in the article how many there were those in those months and years. But yeah, it was like the numbers that were being reported out of Afghanistan were pretty low. We're talking of like tens of people. But as I came to find out fairly quickly, just like Osmach Khan's article, those numbers aren't accurate. They're not even close to accurate. And I lay out, a one such scenario in the article where one of the drone operators, they were watching a, they saw somebody using a radio, then this guy hops on a motorcycle, and they follow him around for like six hours that day, waiting for him to be isolated on a road because they did try to strike these people in the middle of a road or in the middle of a field so that they could limit collateral damage, people they were not trying to target. When they finally, fired a hellfire missile at this guy, suddenly he comes to an intersection in the road and another motorcycle is crossing paths with the one they were targeting. And on this motorcycle were two Afghan

men and a toddler. And just as they're crossing paths at this intersection, the hellfire missile strikes. And the person they had been targeting rides right through the smoke and keeps going. the three people on the other motorcycle who just happened to be there that day were killed right off the bat the two men and one child now if you look at the report that doD put out about civilian casualties in 2019 you can find the date of that strike in helmand and it records one civilian casualty so what they're saying is that the two other people who just happened to be there that they were reported as enemy makes no sense whatsoever in other words were they actually categorized as the so-called jackpot like yeah we got who we were trying to get is the

lies right in there too not just by omission i don't know i wish i i wish i had access to some of those reports and to see how it was reported up but they i mean maybe that's what they did maybe i don't know how they you know pencil whipped to that one yeah man And so, you know, this is anti-war radio, and I got some substantial minority, at least of my audience, are anti-war veterans. At least by now they are. Or by now, that's true. And, you know, one of them is a guy who is a Green Beret in Syria. He said they dropped a bomb on a house.

And then it was a dud. And then he sat there and he watched a bunch of women and children run out of the house. And he's like, oh, man. those people he almost just killed and i'm uh i you know i'm afraid to say i'm not an anti-war veteran i mean i i think there's a need for war unfortunately and it does provide there is a social utility to killing in certain circumstances the problem is i'm not anti-war i'm just anti-stupid and some of the operations we've been talking about here are just stupid that we're targeting civilians, it is not helping anyone or anything. It's not helping U.S. national interests.

It is not helping us win the conflict. It is not helping the people of Afghanistan. It is only accomplishing negative things when we strike civilian targets like that. And the problem from my perspective is not the drones. It is not even the target engagement criteria or the rules of engagement, it is how they end up getting misapplied. You know, there's a time and a place for certain tactics to be used. This was a example where we're seeing the misapplication of a certain tactic and the end result was catastrophic and horrifying. Yeah. Well, I'm interested in what you think about the whole terror war about, you know, as far as, I mean, take for granted for the sake argument, you know, going after bin Laden with the Delta Force at Torabor and all that. But what about

regime change in Kabul and then on to Baghdad and Tripoli and Sorda, Damascus, and Sina and Mogadishu and the rest of this? Yeah, I mean, these are all like complicated cases to look at individually, but I think that, you know, a broad statement we can make is that the United States does not do regime change very well. We've engaged in this behavior in a number of theaters and it just hasn't worked out. And, you know, I spoke out publicly about, you know, Syria because we were over there, um, waging all kinds of covert action campaigns to unseat the Assad government. And I, as I said at that time, I am not an Assadist. I don't have some weird, you know, uh, you know, predilection or affinity for you can barely be described as a democratic government. But if we remove Assad,

what is the option? What is the alternative to Assad? And the alternative was chaos. It was ISIS. It just does not make sense. It does not serve American interests. And I mean, it doesn't serve, you know, the people's interest in these regions either to implode these governments. I mean, we saw what happened in Iraq. I mean, what was, what's that better for the people of Iraq or worse? I mean, I think you'd have a hard time making the case that we improve the quality of life for people there over the long haul. So yeah, no, no, go ahead with yourself. Sorry. I'm just pointing out that, you know, these regime change operations are not something that we do very well. If we showed more strategic patience, maybe we could transition

some of these governments to democracies or more democratically leaning regimes over a longer time horizon. But instead, we opted for shock and awe, you know, covert action, particularly when we rely on partner forces that are not viable partner forces that just don't work out for us. You know, we've seen the result. Then the result is chaos. All right, you guys. That is Jack Murphy. He is at Connectingvets.com, which is hosted at odyssey.com. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y-O-D-C-O-D-C-O-Sy.com. And this article is called Inside America's Failed Drone Campaign against the Taliban.

Thanks so much for your time, Jack. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Scott. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-Wore Radio, can be heard on K-P-F-K-90.7 FM in L.A. A-P-S-Radio.com. antiwar.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.