Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/3/21 Gareth Porter on the Media’s Reaction to the Withdrawal From Afghanistan
Episode Date: September 6, 2021Gareth Porter joins Scott on Antiwar Radio to discuss his latest piece about the media’s reaction to Afghanistan. Porter lays out how virtually the entire media ecosystem is arguing the withdrawal w...as done prematurely from both a counterterrorism standpoint and in terms of the evacuation of American citizens and allies. However, the media is ignoring the root of the problem was the overconfidence the U.S. Military and Intelligence Community had in the Afghan National Army. Porter argues that that is where the blame ought to lie, rather than squarely on Biden. Now Porter thinks we’ve reached an inflection point, with historic calls for those responsible for these disastrous wars to be held accountable. Discussed on the show: Gareth Porter’s page at the Grayzone “Afghanistan collapse reveals Beltway media’s loyalty to permanent war state” (Grazone) news.antiwar.com — better than CIA briefings according to Chalmers Johnson “Surprise, panic and fateful choices: The day America lost its longest war” (Washington Post) “Top defense firms spend $1B on lobbying during Afghan war, see $2T return” (Responsible Statecraft) Joe Kent on Tucker Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on the national security state. He is the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and, with John Kiriakou, The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter and listen to Gareth’s previous appearances on the Scott Horton Show. 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7sBhWmTreU Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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And to our guest, the best.
The great Gareth Porter, welcome back to the,
show gareth how are you doing hi scott i'm fine glad to be back again very happy to have you here
and uh everybody you know gareth wrote perils of dominance about vietnam manufactured crisis
about uh the iranian nuclear program and i don't know somewhere around 5 000 articles or
something since the w bush years on the terror war every aspect of it and especially oh man he was
so good on the afghan surge back 10 years ago and all of this and uh so very happy to talk
with you, Gareth. Oh, and I should mention, he writes primarily now for the gray zone.com,
Max Blumenthal and the crew over there at the gray zone. Speaking of which, you have a piece
at the gray zone now about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but one narrow aspect of it,
at least to start with here on the show today, Gareth. And that is the mass media's take.
And I say take singular because there is only one take on Joe Biden's withdrawal and
end of the war in Afghanistan on all of TV news and all the newspapers and all the pundits and
everybody knows apparently everybody with power and influence and a Harvard education
knows that we absolutely should not have ended this war and that this is the worst thing
Joe Biden's ever done in his life something like that what do you think it is something like
that yes I mean you know the the mass media the corporate media definitely agree a
wholeheartedly, that the United States should not have left yet.
Now, none of these people, presumably, would try to argue that the United States should stay
forever in Afghanistan.
But what they do argue is that this was premature, it was too fast, and it was done without
the president listening to his military advisors, i.e., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, particularly, and therefore not really taking care
of the primary U.S. national security interests that should have been kept in mind as we talked
about internally within that, not we. They talked about internally in terms of withdrawal
from Afghanistan. That is to say, the concern about counterterrorism.
And, of course, not sufficient concern about rescuing our allies from the clutches of the Taliban.
So it was those two twin themes that everyone basically agreed upon.
There were variations in terms of how much emphasis was put on one versus the other in various outlets and at various times during the days immediately, you know,
following the withdrawal by the by demonstration but but that's the that's the overall situation i
think the overall description of how the mass media uh really dealt with this with this problem
well i mean it must be said that boy did they screw up on ending this thing leaving all of those
weapons in the hands of the taliban and and and creating a situation
where they were completely dependent on the Taliban's graciousness
to let them escape peacefully to the airport
and out of the country and all of this.
And then culminating also in, I mean,
it's almost perfectly fitting as an end to the war.
A suicide bombing that killed 13 American troops
and then a revenge drone strike that killed two families
on the way out the door.
It's just the whole thing is, you know,
it's hard to find a.
right-winger saying hyperbolic stuff about how bad the withdrawal was, who's not correct about
it, really? Well, it was, of course, a mess. There's no question about that. And, you know,
the question is, what was the fundamental cause of that whole series of screw-ups? And I think
this is where the corporate media steer the public very, very wrong, instead of
really discussing the fundamental problem, which was that the intelligence community and the
military were so confident that they had an army and a regime that could last for a while
longer, at least. They just did not understand just how dicey the whole situation was.
And I must say, you know, it is so reminiscent of exactly.
what happened with Vietnam in 1975.
I mean, it's almost a carbon copy of the situation that prevailed within the U.S.
government in regard to the end of the war in Vietnam in April, May, well, April of
1975.
I've been reading about it myself, so I'm sort of essentially amazed at the parallels between
the two. And the fundamental parallel, the most important one, is that the entire U.S.
national security state in both cases thought we had plenty of time. Now, there were differences,
of course, within the national security state. But the people who had the greatest power
within that structure were confident that they could ride this out for a while longer.
there was no hurry about getting people out, okay?
And that was the fundamental mistake, certainly in both cases,
that they felt that they could, you know,
sort of take their time and serve other political interests
and not have to worry about starting the process of evacuation.
of both Americans and the South Vietnamese in the case of Vietnam, and the Afghans in the case of
this current recent war.
So that was the fundamental problem, which the media response over the period of a couple
of weeks completely ignored.
I mean, they didn't really talk about that.
Instead, they wanted to blame Biden personally for having screwed up.
Now, you know, I mean, I'm not going to defend Biden's, all of Biden's decisions.
I'm sure he made some mistakes.
But this was in the context of a much broader screw up by the national security state, which is the fundamental reason for this complete, you know, utter chaos.
And as you point out, I mean, a situation where American troops were unnecessarily killed.
And of course, this final drone strike, which was supposed to be just killing ISIS-K terrorists,
but in fact killed 10 members of two families who lived very close to where that car was.
Apparently, they didn't care about collateral damage under the circumstances.
They felt they had to strike at that very moment.
They didn't really have to, but they went ahead and did it anyway.
Well, I saw this. It started out as a claim by Liz Sly from the Washington Post, so I wasn't sure until I saw it was confirmed later that they left behind the guys from Radio Free America or Radio Liberty, whatever they call it now. They just forgot about them or something. They left behind hundreds of Americans. And in some cases, these are Afghans who got American citizenship, but they're really Afghans and they're staying. But in some cases, they're not. In some cases, these are Americans from here who,
got left behind there, even government employees. And look, I'm not the best on time zones and
everything, but didn't they leave a day early? They still had, you know, more than half a day.
I think they had still 24 hours before they had to go by the end of the 31st. And here they were
all wrapped up on the 30th while they left a couple hundred people behind. And I'm sorry because
it's happening to me too, right? It's such a ridiculous thing that here we are.
distracted onto the point when, as you're saying, it kind of serves as cover for the failure
of the whole war. And you hear the government and the army completely evaporated. And so, yes,
it came down to a strange question of Taliban providing security at the airport because the ANA
didn't exist anymore. So, yeah. Did not exist. And, and, you know, again, I just, I can't emphasize
enough, the startling parallelism between what happened in 1975 with regard to Vietnam
and what happened just in the past few weeks.
And listen, I mean, it should be said here as Chalmers Johnson, who was a former CIA contractor
analyst and professor at USC, said numerous times that reading anti-war.com is far more
informative than a CIA daily briefing and that just listening to my show and reading those headlines
as put together by Eric Garris and Jason Ditson, now by Dave DeCamp every day. No one who's a regular
reader of anti-war.com was confused about what was happening in Afghanistan. Right, right. I couldn't agree
more, but even on top of that, we had a situation where people who were calling it correctly
within the intelligence establishment, the intelligence network of the United States in both cases
were ignored because it didn't fit the interests of the people on top.
You know, there was clearly a situation where the naysayers, the doubters, were basically pushed aside.
And this is the way the system.
always works when the United States you know the counterfactual of you know because the major
crisis here is leaving all those weapons in the hands of the Taliban from the A&A just you know
turning them over and and running away or surrendering and then of course also you know the
crisis of the civilians left there the only way that I can think of that could have prevented
this it's you know you're alluding to this but like let's do the narrative right Biden would
had to come right out after assuming the presidency and say, we're sticking with the deadline.
You heard me, general. No delay, because it was, as we know, was all the Pentagon, you know,
basically pushing him and pushing him to review and review and review. You got to let us leave some
troops and all this. He should have told them, hell no, and if you want to fight about it,
you're fired. We're leaving by the first. And he would have had to announce to the American people
in a big speech that the puppet government in Kabul and the army that we built are an absolute joke
and they could never stand and we're betting like 90 to 10 that they're going to cease to exist
and that if we leave all these weapons with the ANA they're going to end up in the hands of the Taliban
so we're taking their weapons away and we're pulling all of our civilians out for their own
protection because we don't think the Kabul government can last and so then just think of all
of the criticism that they would have faced that of course if you take all the weapons from the
Afghan army and if you withdraw your civilians in a way that you know uh portrays your absolute lack
of confidence in the government you created there they would have been blamed for causing the
fall of the army and the government there but Biden would have had to be man enough to say I don't
care you blame me all you want but that's the truth and I'm making the bet but in order to
keep civilians safe and keep our howitzers and helicopters out of
of the hands of these goons. We're just going to really make a clean break with the Afghan war
and come home and do it right now and to the nth degree. And when I put it that way, I can hear
your gears turning in the audience, too. There's no way in the world they could do that.
The Democrats never tell that much truth in a row ever about anything. Well, that that's true.
It's the nature of the beast that they just don't operate that way. But had that been done,
had Biden had the Cajonis, if you will, to really take that position, he could have brought this off very well.
I mean, because we know that the Taliban were in favor of a controlled ending.
They didn't want to have chaos any more than we did.
And so, you know, they would have been willing.
And, you know, I think this is clear from a whole series of indicators.
They were willing to have the United States begin the withdrawal early under conditions
that would be arrived at through talks between the United States and the Taliban.
And that could have been started in April.
And the government, you know, obviously would have crumbled very quickly,
question about that. But it would have been a situation where there was still a controlled
ending, allowing the United States to complete its military withdrawal and to get civilians
out of the country. That's a tradeoff that I firmly believe the Taliban would have been glad
to have negotiated.
And go ahead.
Go ahead.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was going to say, there's a report in the Washington Post that the Taliban said, listen, we won't enter
Kabul. If you guys will secure
Kabul until you get all your people out, that's
cool with us. And that the Biden people
said, well, I guess we don't have enough men to do that.
So no, come on in.
They did offer that option.
But it was a bit
too late at that point in terms
of what the United States needed to do.
But in any case,
that's part of the reason why I think
that the Taliban would have been
ready to agree
to a broader
set of detailed arrangements.
for the United States to do everything over a period of weeks in an orderly fashion.
Yeah.
And to get them more time, really, to prepare for going into Kabul and having to be in charge of it
because they weren't really ready, I don't think.
I mean, it's clear that this happened pretty fast, and, you know, they could have used more
time basically to prepare themselves.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, well, so let's zoom back out here
because I've seen even some pretty angry right-wing hawks
who are focusing on the catastrophe of the withdrawal
saying that, look, the whole war was bad.
obviously this was 20 years wasted we shouldn't have done it there's this new uh congressman peter
mejah something like that and and there's a guy named joe kent another uh kind of uh right
wing trump guy running in washington state mad as hell just like you would expect you know a fox
news guest to be about the withdrawal uh and and just for the exact reasons that we're talking about
here but then saying but then saying that generals and the think tanks and the media they've lied to us
this whole time. They said, I saw this guy Joe Kent saying, they said that it was worth it for our
guys to give their lives for this thing. And yet look at the truth. It's, you know, it's in front of us.
Here we are 20 years later. The Taliban took over everything in a few weeks. They just walked right in
and took over the whole country. Are you kidding me? It's inescapable now by the calendar and by the
result here that this never should have happened. So that's what I really want to hear from you about is
your analysis of this beast, as Oliver Stone's movie characters call it, when
Richard Nixon calls it the beast in the Stone movies.
And I want to add one headline here that just came out by our friend, Eli Clifton, writing
at the Quincy Institute here.
Top defense firms spend $1 billion on lobbying during the Afghan war.
See $2 trillion return.
Not a bad investment, huh?
One measly, stinking, tiny little old billion dollars.
One.
Yeah.
Well, what you're talking about is very important.
I mean, I think that this marks a turning point, an inflection point, I guess, the pundits like to call it, in the history of the U.S. national security state.
because it, to me, tells us that there is a real chance here for the first time that there is a degree of anger toward the military as an institution, toward the brass, the people who have been running the show for the first time since the Cold War began, that is going to demand accountability.
And this has been ignored.
This need for accountability has been ignored for decades and decades.
It was ignored after the debacle in South Vietnam.
There was no call for accountability.
I was simply shoved under the rug.
It was ignored after Iraq.
There was no real movement or serious discussion of accountability.
But this time on Afghanistan, we have a real.
real demand here for accountability. And I think it's an issue for which the time has come. We need
a mass political movement to get behind this idea of a real institution that will hold the
national security state accountable for what happened in Afghanistan. What's that look like?
Yeah. A house on un-American think tank activities committee? Or would it?
How do we do it?
Well, I think what we need is a national commission outside of Congress and excluding,
obviously, people who themselves were involved in this that would include people from the
military who are themselves in favor of accountability and specialists on the military who
support the idea of accountability, specialists on the national security state who are in favor of
accountability. And this is a formula which could produce a very important document, which would
shed light on this that, I mean, of course, the news media in their fealty to the military,
the Pentagon, the national security state will try to avoid covering it. But I
I don't know if they would be able to if it was given the kind of personalities who would serve on it that would make it really credible.
So, I mean, that's my idea.
And I'm going to write something about that.
Yeah.
Well, there are, you know, after a generation of this, there are a lot of really great anti-war veterans, including officers, you know, at least medium rank, you know, lieutenant colonels and so forth who have a lot to say about this.
And I'll tell you, that guy, Joe Kent, I don't know any other thing about him.
I know he's running as an America First Republican in Washington State.
And I saw him interviewed on the Tucker Carlson show.
And Carlson lobs him a softball and says, isn't it a shame that there's never, ever, ever, ever going to be accountability for this?
And he just says, oh, yes, there is, too.
Because, you know, he's going to win his election and the Republicans are going to win the House.
And then the way he put it, and I'm not saying I buy it.
this or whatever but he sure was motivated and meant it when he said it gareth and that was that
we're going to investigate the entire afghan war and all the lies that we were told by the
politicians and the generals this whole time and then he says an iraq too because we know they
lied about that too Tucker and this guy this has stealing his back that's where the sentiment is
you know this this guy is stealing his back he is he's formidable as far as i'm concerned
And didn't they drum them out of the military?
At least they're trying to do that.
I don't know exactly what the status of it is, but that's what I read.
I honestly know very, very little about them.
But I just know that that kind of sentiment, especially coming from the right, then I think
this is the one thing where the public really can have their way, where the government must
respect public opinion.
They have to have at least one of the party's voting bases.
You know, the Colin Powell doctrine, the Weinberger Powell doctrine was you have to have
the country united behind you and the w bush doctrine was well we'll settle for half but then
how are we supposed to have a war on terror when nobody supports it at all you know guess what scott
it wasn't just it wasn't just bush it was obama as well the Obama administration at the same
yeah Obama continued the bush doctrine there you know and with the same half supporting the war too
right anyway right um so anyway yeah i mean that invention in public opinion is 20 years too late
but it's a really big deal,
and I think we all need to pay very close attention to that.
But so now, here's one thing.
I mean, your article's really focused on the media's role in all of this.
And I get it.
You know, any of us can watch CNN and sort of read Jake Tapper's mind.
We understand who this guy is and how he feels about things.
He makes himself very clear, you know.
Yeah.
But at the same time, it does seem odd that the media is so unanimous about this.
that when Trump launches a missile, they fall in love with him.
No matter how much they hate him, they go, wow, Donald Trump's the president today.
I'll tell you that.
Or, you know, and then when Joe Biden, he ends a war and oh, my God, do they let him have it?
They're like piranha.
How dare you end this war?
They scream at Blinken, at Sullivan.
What is this cult?
Who are these people?
How does this happen this way?
This is a very, very important question, Scott, and I don't know if I can give you the absolute complete answer to that. I think there's some things about it that we still don't quite understand, but the roots of this go back very far to the beginnings of the Cold War and the role that the corporate media played very early on in cheering on, the
the Atchisans and the others who were, you know, pushing very hard for hardline policies,
particularly getting rearmament. Rearmament was the key issue for, from the late 1940s
into the early 50s. And, of course, that did take place from 1950 to 52. And once the
rearmament was completed, then the corporate media became a cheering section for the military
to expand very rapidly around the world, military commitments and involvement in various issues
and conflicts, particularly Indo-China, China, of course, itself, China, Taiwan, and the continued
expansion of these commitments and even trying to get commitments in the Middle East,
this was part of it. This was one of the big things that the media served as a cheering section for.
They were very much involved in pressuring both Eisenhower and Kennedy to go along with the most extreme demands of the Air Force for missiles that turned out to be unnecessary, not only unnecessary, but provocative, and the cause of the Cuban.
crisis. And then, you know, they continued to be the cheering section for the United States
getting into the war in Vietnam. So they had played this role to the hilt. And, you know,
part of it was the elite, all the elite in the media knew all the elite in the national security
state. And they paled around together. They, you know,
met frequently, and of course, the media depended on the national security state for stories.
They were meat and potatoes, of course, of what they were doing day by day.
They were dependent on their sources to continue to churn out stories that got favorable,
you know, applause from their editors and from the shareholders.
So there was that system that developed during the Cold War,
that I think continued in the post-Cold War period.
Well, now, Garrett, I mean, it used to be easy to say, look, General Electric owns NBC,
and General Electric makes engines for the Air Force, you know, clue in.
But it's not that simple anymore because GE sold NBC to somebody else or something like that.
So there's, it's just interlocking investments from the same banks that invest in the war machine,
also invest in the large media companies.
It's that simple kind of a thing?
Sure, sure.
You know, there is an investment.
There's no doubt about that.
The corporate investors in the media, you know, also invest in stocks that have to do with the national security state and the war state.
So that connection still exists.
There's no doubt about that.
And especially in the Trump years, you know, Glenn Greenwald has done a great job of pointing out how in the Trump years, CNN and MSNBC especially, they just hired like two or three.
three dozen CIA and FBI and former generals to come in and be their paid staff consultants on a
full-time basis. So they're just in the newsroom all day. It's nothing secret about it. Well,
we're going to ask James Clapper what he thinks about what, you know. Yeah, this is a new,
this is a new and very disturbing. And I'm sorry, real quick, because we're real short on time here.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is a development that just shows just how the degree to which the media have
become indistinguishable from the national security state. And that is a new, that's a new sort of
phase of the development of this whole relationship that's, that does add to what we're now
talking about to this fealty to the military that was shown in response to Biden's withdrawal.
All right. You guys see why I've interviewed Gareth Porter more than 300 times, far more than any
other guest I've ever had on the show, because he's so great on every single thing.
This one is called Afghanistan Collabs Reveals Beltway Media's Loyalty to Permanent War State.
It's at the gray zone.com and, of course, in his archive, also at anti-war.com.
Thank you so much for your time, Gareth.
Thanks, as always, Scott.
All right, you guys, and that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm at Scott Horton.org and at anti-war.com.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPS.
FK 90.7 FM in L.A.
And I said it wrong, but anyway, see y'all next week.