Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/9/21 Dave DeCamp on Developments in Afghanistan and Syria

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

This week on Antiwar Radio, Scott talked with Dave DeCamp. DeCamp gives an update on Afghanistan where the Taliban are attempting to form a government. Both Scott and DeCamp agree that the Taliban are likely to face difficulties as they try to govern the country, especially if they continue to only appoint Pashtun men to positions of power. Both point to the retaliatory drone strike that killed civilians in Kabul as a preview of what “over the horizon” operations will look like if Biden is serious about continuing them. Lastly, DeCamp provides an update on Syria where insiders appear to be happy with the status quo. And both Scott and DeCamp point to northern Syria as a perfect example of Washington’s hypocrisy on “terrorist safe-havens.”  Discussed on the show: Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal Emily Horne’s statement about Taliban cooperation  “Tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by US in ‘Forever Wars’” (Airwars.org) “The Other Afghan Women” (New Yorker) “Looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign” (Connecting Vets) Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com. Follow him on Twitter @decampdave. 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=1gXOqV7NIeo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, September 12th, 2021, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome to show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and the author of the book enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right. Introducing our guest, anti-war.com news editor, Dave DeCamp. Welcome back to

the show. How you doing, Dave? Good, Scott. Thanks for having me back. Happy to have you here. 20 years into the terror war, and man, do we still have a lot to cover here. And let's start with Afghanistan, where we no longer have combat troops on the ground. I guess not even Special Operations Command. But we do still have a rapidly developing situation with the aftermath of America's withdrawal, and including at least promises of continued American intervention there. So I guess let's start with the Taliban announcement.

the creation of their new government and wrapping up, am I right, of the conflict in the Panshir Valley, which would make it official that they truly control at least nominally 100% of Afghanistan now? Yeah, that's right. So the Taliban say that they've taken over Panshir Valley, which was the last, the only little pocket of resistance that sprung up. Now, some of the, you know, resistance leaders, Ahmad Masood, the son of the late Mujah Jahedin commander.

He's still, you know, saying he's going to fight on. It's not clear where he is. Him and Amrullah Salah, he was the last vice president for the U.S. back government under Ashraf Ghani. They're both somewhere in Afghanistan. It's not really clear where. And then Massoud has an uncle who's in Europe, I think, Switzerland, and he's saying a lot of stuff, but it seems like, for the most part, it is over.

And now are Dostom, General Rashi Dostom, and Mohammed Atah Noor, are they still part of the group in Panshir? Not that I'm aware of. I'm not sure. Okay, go ahead. But yes, so since they won that little battle there, the Taliban have announced a new government that they say is a caretaker government, it's temporary, and it's all made up of Taliban members, some on U.S. sanctions lists, and a lot of people are criticizing it

saying, because they've promised to form an inclusive government that includes other political elements in Afghanistan or other ethnic groups because they're, I mean, they're all Taliban members, so I assume that they're all Pashtun. So, uh, the acting prime minister is, uh, Muhammad Hassan Akun, and he has been, you know, he's, he was close to Mullah Omar back in the day in the 90s. He's been around a while. He's under UN sanctions. So then, but they're all poshtuns and Taliban, right? Or did I read? There's one Tajik,

and the rest are all posh tunes? There might be. From what I understand, it's all posh tunes. Yeah. So that's got to be making a lot of people nervous, you know, for what their intentions are.

You know, I had read in the past quite a bit about this lady, Ashley Jackson, who's been writing quite a bit for the papers the last few weeks. I had read her thing before about one of their, you know, really smart moves in the last few years was bringing in more Tajiz and Uzbeks and even Hazaras, who are Shiites, into their kind of shadowed government. But I guess at least so far, it seems like that only goes so far.

Yeah, I was surprised because it seemed, because up to this point, their PR has been pretty good. I thought maybe they would name some kind of token, you know, minorities or throw Karzai, you know, somewhere in there. But there's, you know, they say it's temporary. Taliban smokes and says that they're going to take people from around the country to form for other cabinet positions. And then for the U.S. side of things, the, you know, some of these guys are under U.S. sanctions. The Interior Minister, he was the leader of the Hacconi Network, which is blacklisted

as a, you know, international terror organization by the U.S. He's wanted by the FBI. He has a bounty on his head for $5 million. And interestingly, I saw today that the Taliban are accusing the U.S. of violating the Doha agreement, which was the deal that paved the way for the withdrawal. Because if you read the deal, it says that after intra-Afghan negotiations start, the U.S. will work to lift sanctions on the Taliban members. You know, of course, the U.S. is going to say, well, there's no law, you know, you guys took power. There's no Afghan government.

But technically the deal, it didn't require a power sharing deal. It just required that the Taliban enter these talks. Right. But it was vague. So I don't expect that the U.S. to be like, oh, you got us. I guess we'll live sanctions. Yeah. But, you know, I've been seeing the Hawks.

We've got to address this, Dave. You know, Bill Roggio from the Long War Journal and others are on this kick that see, Hakani equals Zawahari. And this is the big, you know, connection between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Taliban still is, look, they're friends with Hacani, and Hacani is friends with Al-Qaeda. But they never demonstrate it. All they ever do is refer to these stupid U.N. reports. Oh, Dave, there's a U.N. report.

It says Al-Qaeda's running around there, and that Hacani's good friends with them all. But then if you read the U.N. reports, that's all they say. Oh, yeah, Hacani's running around with them all. But they don't say anything else about it. There's no details at all. They don't name names. and they just say, well, we got this information from member governments. So in other words, the U.N. didn't do any investigation, but this is a pretty powerful narrative

that, oh, look, they're breaking the deal when all they're doing is, I mean, Hacconi's been partners with the Taliban all this time. He's been part of the insurgency since they refused to accept his surrender back in 2003. Yeah, and you would think you mentioned what's his name, Bill Roggio, with the FD, the Long War Journal. I mean, during the whole Taliban takeover, they were following stuff real closely on the ground. It seems like they had a pretty good grip of what was going on. You would think that if they really thought this,

they would have some information, something to back it up with. And then it's always just, oh, yeah, UN reports. But anyway, I'm sorry, because I interrupted you with all that spiel when you were going through more members of the Taliban government and what they're doing now. Yeah, well, I was just going to say that for the U.S. side of it, you know, it's going to kind of be interesting to see how the U.S. engages in the new,

with this new government. And we had today, there's the first civilian flight left the Kabul airport since the U.S. finished its military withdrawal. And there were some U.S. citizens on it. And the White House, the NSC. spokeswoman Emily Horn, she put out this statement that said that, you know, the Taliban cooperated. And let's see how she put it. She said they have shown flexibility. They've been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them. This is a positive first step. So, you know, of course, the Hawks are jumping on this and are all mad about how the White House is talking about the Taliban. But for me, I think this, it's kind of a good sign. Because right now, besides the sanctions on the individual Taliban leaders, the U.S. is also frozen, you know, $7 billion in Afghan reserves, which is kind of desperately needed money for the country that wants to try to rebuild after 20 years of war.

So I just hope, you know, from the U.S. side of it, I think the best thing to happen would be the U.S. to kind of recognize and engage with the Taliban instead of try to put them under crushing sanctions. Right. Yeah, I mean, talk about being a sore loser, right? I mean, go ahead. They want, oh, we're going to not recognize that they're the government of Afghanistan? Well, let me ask you. Are they the government of Afghanistan? In which case, if the answer is yes, then what are you proving by not recognizing that,

other than that you like to throw temper tantrums after you lose, you know? And we don't have to give them aid, but yeah, give them their money that actually, you know, allegedly belongs to the sovereign state of Afghanistan. return that to them and be open with them for future business. Of course, we're talking about our national government, right? So they're not looking to just get along in the world. They want to suborn the Taliban to their purposes, right? They want to go back to the 1990s when Bill Clinton thought it was a great idea to help put

these guys in power in the first place to help secure our interests. And the two obvious ones would be, one, fighting ISIS, and two, joining with and backing Chinese ISIS. And that's what I'm most worried about if you look back at the Trump years. Mike Pompeo took the East Turkestan Islamic movement off the terrorist list for a reason. But then again, you know, the Afghan Taliban's in tight with Pakistan and they're in tight with China. I don't know exactly the state of Taliban-China relations. They're at least on speaking terms.

and the Taliban would be insane to now ally with the Democrats like the Clinton years to train up Uyghurs against China. I mean, but I could see, you know, the Americans pushing really hard for that. But I don't know if they'll get away with that. But I guess the more immediate danger

is that they'll get Taliban permission to help them continue fighting against the Islamic State forces there. But I don't buy that that's going to happen. I don't see the Taliban. saying yes to that. So there's a lot of talk about that, but... Yeah, they said they don't want help from the U.S.

to fight any terrorist groups in Afghanistan. I mean, the way politics work here, Dave, is Biden had to say, don't worry, everybody. I swear to God, we're going to leave mercenaries and CIA and Special Ops and Airpower. We're just pulling out the troops, but we're going to continue killing people there. So don't be too critical of me for withdrawals.

You know what I mean? That was essentially the narrative. Because if he just said, we're quitting this war and I mean it, instead of being hoisted up on everybody's shoulders, he'd be, you know, the greatest scorn in D.C. So they had to come up, you know, with this kind of argument that don't worry we're going to keep intervening. But that seems to count on the idea that they would still have a government in Kabul that would invite that to happen. Now that the Taliban controls a whole country, it seems like that's a pipe dream. And I don't think the Taliban, Taliban need their help when it comes to killing ISIS guys. I mean, what do they have, but small arms? Whereas the Taliban has a brand new military. You know, they got trucks and tanks and howitzers now. Yeah. Like you said, you know, a big result of that, suicide attack at the Kabul airport that killed U.S. troops

and a ton of Afghans, death tolls over 100 people. Biden bombed Afghanistan on the way out. And the drone strike that they launched in Kabul killed 10,000. civilians. According to the witnesses on the ground that seems to be correct based on all the reports I've read about it, they spoke into all the big, you know, the associate press, CNN, Al Jazeera, just all the big media that was there, pictures and everything. And the U.S. claims it was an ISIS-K guy that they killed, but I think that's just totally bogus. So, and they launched another air strike in Nangahar in a rural area. So who knows? They, they, they, they

the Pentagon said it killed ISIS K planners, but they didn't release any names or details, so it could have been another case where they just blew away a bunch of civilians. So this is what if the U.S. continues, the drone war in Afghanistan, that's what it's going to look like. And the Taliban, they don't want anything to do with that, especially if the people know that the Taliban are working with the Americans.

Right. Yeah, that'll really undermine their credibility, you know, in power, for sure. So I don't think they want anything to do with it. And they said, was the other day, one of the spokesmen, there's a few of them, I keep forgetting all their names, but he said that we don't want help from the U.S. or any other country to fight what they call terrorists inside Afghanistan, obviously referring to ISIS. But, you know, the U.S., they're still kind of desperate to hang on, and there is a report in Politico. I read that the Navy expects to be

continuing some airstrikes from aircraft carriers that are in the North Arabian Sea. there's two aircraft carriers that were deployed there for the withdrawal and they're still there kind of like I think they want to keep the drone war going but I don't think yeah like you said it without the permission from the Taliban I don't think that they're going to do it so it seems like and as far as we know there's a chance special ops could be somewhere in Afghanistan or CIA we'll never really know that but it seems like the war is like actually over which is pretty amazing I think we all expected some level of conflict to keep going. Okay, hang on just one second.

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Support good anti-government stimulant suppliers. Go to Lorenzotti.comfee today. Yeah, I mean, they just, I guess it was the second or third thing they did was seize the north of the country and head off. the Tajik's and the Hazaras and the Uzbek's off at the pass there and prevent them from creating that northern enclave. And then you had the Panshir Valley, but they're just outnumbered completely. And so, and at this point, as you said, the Americans are getting along with the Taliban, and it would not be in their interest to start supporting with a bunch of money and weapons, the resistance to them in Panshir.

That's just going to ruin the cooperation they are getting so far. and they still have American civilians, you know, that they've left behind here. And by the way, there's a new Air Wars report about civilian casualties out in, at airwors.org about airstrike casualties in Afghanistan and the rest of the countries, too. And there's a new report by Anand Gopal in the New Yorker about civilian casualties down in the Helmand province. And there's a new report. What did he? The other Afghan women.

Yeah, it's a great article. Yeah, great piece. Really long, like 20,000 words, but totally worth it. And then Jack Murphy has this piece at Connecting Vets that's all about the Trump years, Trump era, air war, drone and airplane air war, particularly in the Hellman province, in the Trump era. And it's just devastating. I mean, they're just killing civilians all day long. Anybody with what looks like it might be an antenna. has a radio and is therefore a dead man and just it's really bad stuff and you know all coming out

here just kind of you know as the cap on the war this is how america's war in afghanistan went there's an absolute it's the most fitting thing in the world you know as horrible as is i'm not saying it ain't horrible but i'm just saying it fits perfectly that the war ends with a massive suicide attack and then a reprisal drone strike that kills innocent people on the way out the door. But like, yeah. If you wrote the book on Afghanistan, this is how it would end if, you know, you didn't publish it four years ago.

Yeah. You know, the past few years in Afghanistan have been the deadliest for civilians. Like since the war. Yeah. Yeah. And Trump dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2018 and 2019 than any years since they've been keeping track of the amount of munitions, more than the surge since 2006, they started keeping track.

Yeah, that was part of this story was even while they're negotiating. They have the ceasefire while they're negotiating. They're still doing airstrikes in the name of putting pressure on the Taliban to cooperate more in the talks. And another thing people probably didn't understand only people that really followed this stuff closely is that for years, the U.S. and Taliban officials were meeting and shaking hands and talking. Like, it's not like the cooperation of the Taliban. And I mean, of course, the idea of them being our security at the airport is like bizarre, but, you know, it's not really that crazy because of the talks, the negotiations, and they had every, they had every interest for that to go smoothly. And for it to still go smoothly for now, as there are some Americans left.

And, you know, we can't say what's going to happen in the next few years. But right now, especially after reading that New Yorker piece, it's like, you realize. that the state of the country now, it's more peaceful and it's been in a long time. So, hopefully, you know, the Taliban, I'm sure aren't going to be nice, but hopefully there's not a major civil war. It doesn't seem like it's going to be. Yeah, well, and we'll see how it goes. They've got a lot of warlords to keep assimilated into their order, and they're going to demand certain degrees of autonomy, and then they're going to fight or not based on whether they get it.

And so it's one thing to be an insurgency. It's another thing to be a federal government of a state the size of Texas. Ascombe Karzai and Ashrafgani, they'll tell you, it's not that easy. So, you know, we'll see. But they certainly have a hell of a challenge on their hands. And, you know, I don't know to. I think, yeah. Yeah, I think it's going to be pretty ugly.

I've been predicted in the worst for a long time, and maybe I'm just used to it. But I think that, you know, as we talked about before, they've set up this new exclusivist kind of a posthune regime to rule over the whole country. That's a pretty kind of blatant move up front about how they mean to proceed. You know what I mean? I would take that, especially if I was a Hazara, if I was a Tajik or a Uzbek in Afghanistan, right now, I would take that as a pretty bad sign. Then again, Taliban are fools.

If they think that that's what they're going to do, is that they're just going to inflict their rule on the rest of the country and that it's not going to lead to bitter fighting. You know, we talked about this before with it. There was that video, the Taliban leader meeting with the Hazaras. And he's going, hey, we've always been really nice to you. And they're like, oh, God. But he's saying, yeah, we're getting, hey, you guys are cool.

don't mind that you're Shiites, as long as you're Muslims, you're cool with us and this kind of thing. Like, I don't know how much he meant that, but I'm just saying they better mean that. If, you know, if they want to be able to rule that country, they're going to have to treat their, you know, conquered tribes essentially with some decent amount of respect, or they're going to have permanent insurgency. You know, Patrick Coburn, I think, was predicting to be a lot harder for them to take over the whole country than it was. But I think he still had a point when he said, you know, there are five million Hazaras, you know. Yeah, it's a lot of people.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can just completely grind them under your heel. They've got to be somehow persuaded to go along with this, you know, so I don't know. Listen, let me ask you real quick here about what's going on in Syria because I think we sort of kind of have a status quo type situation where our government is mostly invited. to stay in western Iraq by the Baghdad government. It's a little complicated, but not that complicated. But boy, our forces uninvited guests in

what they call Eastern Syria, which I think is like the entire eastern half of Syria, you know, including continuing to help the Kurds hold on to Raqa, which is not their city. And I know that, you know, it's constantly, you know, going on under the radar,

but it really is scandalous American troop presence in Syria and their aims and goals there. So I was wondering if you could kind of catch us up on the latest from there. Well, like you said, kind of the status quo is about the 1,000 U.S. troops in northeast Syria and that that presence is kind of reliant on the bases in Western Iraq. And as far as news out of Syria, I haven't seen too much since we last talked about kind of the U.S. presence there. One thing that's kind of interesting, you know, a lot of people expected a big escalation in Syria when Biden came in. But this is kind of exactly what they want. Brett McGurk, who's ahead of the Middle East on stuff on the National Security Council. He wrote an op-ed in the

Washington Post after he resigned from the Trump administration because Trump said he was going to withdraw from Syria. And he kind of outlined, he said, we shouldn't leave Syria. You know, we're not going to go in and try to topple aside again. Here's what we should do. Keep about a thousand troops in the east there, support the Kurds. They say against ISIS, but it's really supporting them to keep that area of the country out of the hands of Damascus and support Israeli air strikes in Syria, which happen pretty much on a weekly basis. Not every week, but I bet if you tally the strikes each year, it's about on average once a week, Israel, bomb Syria. So that's really the status quo that they've created and on top of that the brutal sanctions regime and the

kind of tacit endorsement of the of hTS in idlib the al-Qaeda affiliate that's still holding out in idlib and there's been a ceasefire between them and the syrian government and russia that has been holding relatively well there's occasional flare-ups but so that's you know kind of the situation there um There was some, like, fighting in Dara al-Balad in the south, which is where the, what they call them, the free Syrian army, the opposition where they, like, kind of first sprung up. And there's talks between them and the Syrian government. I think Russian troops just went in there, and they're keeping a ceasefire. There, they shipped some of their fighters up to Idlib on buses. So, yeah, it's kind of, that's the way things are there for now.

And I don't see an escalation, but I don't see a drawdown or anything when it comes to the U.S. side of it. Yeah. So now, it's interesting, right, the way the situation in Idlib has just persisted for so long here, where what's left of the different Al-Qaeda factions and so-called Free Syrian Army factions and I guess ISIS fighters that fled the fighting in the east as well have just ended up there and are protected. And, boy, you talk about a save haven. And hey, Dave, had you heard, we can't leave Afghanistan because supposedly the U.N. says Haqani knows an Arab or something. But meanwhile, there's never been a safe haven for al-Qaeda, like what exists in the Idlib province right now under essentially Turkish protection under the ceasefire deal.

Have you heard of any plans for what anyone means to do about that? Or they're just going to let there be Al-Qaeda stand there in northwest Syria forever. Yeah, I guess so. And it's funny because Biden, when he's saying, rattling off the list of reasons to get out of Afghanistan, he says the terrorist threat has metacized and spread. And he cites Syria as kind of his, that's like his go-to. And then the idea is there that we're fighting ISIS, but the U.S. isn't really fighting ISIS. The Syrian government fights them occasionally in the desert and kind of central, more eastern areas. But if you think of, what the American people would think of terrorists, you would think Idlib, but that doesn't seem like that's a problem for the U.S. Although there was some drone strikes. I'm curious. I don't remember seeing any since Biden's come in in Idlib against Haras-Aldean, I think they're called. I forget. It's another Al-Qaeda offshoot. And they were during the Trump administration, they were bombing them with like sword bombs

in like these really crazy drones that fire like big blades and my guess just based on the few articles I've written about it and following it on a pretty basic level is that HTS was giving

the US the intelligence for these drone strikes because they had had their problems with them right and then they get to say no see Al Nlesser or HTS they're okay It's, you know, real Al-Qaeda is these bad Harassal-Den guys. And it's treason. It's just incredible. I mean, they say that Jolani has renounced Al-Qaeda.

But no, he hasn't. He's just said things like, well, look, we're not really part of Al-Qaeda anymore. Uh-huh. Well, so what about your blood oath to Iman Oswahri? Let's hear you denounce I'm an Oswahri then, dude. Nobody ever put it to him that way. Martin Smith on front line didn't put it to them that way

and so you know they never announced Al-Qaeda they just said look you want us to say that and then we can have money right okay thanks and the fact that this is still going on in you know the second half of 2021 is just it's world record books for

astounding and incredible I don't know what to say except that I'm out of time even though I still want to talk to you about what's going on in Yemen and with the Iran nuclear talks. But we'll just have to catch up another time. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Dave. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me back. All right, you guys. That's Dave DeCamp. He's our news editor at antiwar.com. News dot antiwar.com. And that's it for

antiwar radio for this morning. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I am the editorial director of Antiwar.com. And I'm the author of Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You find my full interview archive, 5,500 and something of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See all next week. Thank you.