151 | Ret. General Dan Bolger: Why We Lost in Afghanistan and Iraq

hey everybody welcome back to the realignment you are tuning in for the season premiere of the show on today august 19th as you can tell i'm on the road right now but we are continuing to put out really great stuff huge thank you to everyone who gave us a bit of a break and to all of you commenters who have firmly suggested i should not experiment with green cricket shaped rowing blazers rugbys we have learned an important lesson i'm going back to a polo sauger's in his classic supreme shirt we're getting back to basics here sagar yeah we've got lieutenant general dan bolder he's a retired army general he wrote an incredible book years ago called why we lost about the wars in iraq and afghanistan and since he's been consistent for so long we thought he's the perfect person you guys can hear from general bulger gives probably the best articulation of the actual how did we get here you have to go all the way back to 1975 saigon actually which you've probably heard a lot about and by doing that we're gonna take you step by step in this episode through every single thing that went wrong um the building up to the fall of kabul that we all just saw last week i think it's incredibly valuable for anybody this is a huge episode for us because we wanted to do an episode on afghanistan that wasn't just about this specific tactical thing happened or this specific thing didn't happen this is looking at the bigger picture how he got there sagar said it really well let's get into the episode [Music] dan bulger welcome to the realignment thank you thanks marsha we were wondering who to record an episode with to really unpack the broader strategic and military picture around what's happening in afghanistan and obviously the broader war on terror that that intervention has to be considered under and you immediately came to mind specifically because a little over five years ago actually more than five years ago my timeline's a little warped you wrote a book called why we lost about the iraq and afghanistan wars specifically but you made that claim years in the past which was far far before we had finished the campaign against isis in iraq that's before we had the withdrawal we had last weekend so let's just start here why in 2014 were you as retired lieutenant general comfortable stating we had lost both of these conflicts well um marshall i completed my military service in june of 2013. and the last job i had although i did two tours in iraq and commanded troops my last job was um in command of the nato training mission afghanistan for about a year and a half from 2011 into 2013. so that was my last job got out been in 35 years and i just knew that what we were doing in both countries was not working um it was obvious to me um you know i've read studied history i was a little too young for the vietnam war but all the sergeants and officers who trained me when i came to the army in the late 70s were all vietnam veterans and so one of the things they beat into my head and that that generation people that people would still know like like general colin powell from that era the late general norman schwarzkopf those vietnam veterans and they were the guys who trained me guys like that schwarzkopf was my old division commander at one point when i was at fort stewart they beat in my head hey don't repeat the mistake we made in vietnam whatever else happens don't get involved in an irregular war where the people there are quite different than americans and they don't want us there um you know it's one thing to go and make a raid it's another thing going to make an airstrike or a drone strike or something like that but going in on the ground and trying to rearrange another society and not a good idea and and when guys like general powell say that or the late general schwarzkopf you know our own history tells us that you know how did we like it when people in london king george the third and his ministers were trying to tell us what to do no we didn't like it at all and we didn't like having red-coated british troops stationed in our cities and marching through our streets and and shooting us because we gathered at a time they said we shouldn't you know we fought a revolution over there so i don't know what would make us think especially after getting badly burned in vietnam and you could argue okay well that was part of a cold war against communism and things like that why we would think that the right answer to a terrorist attack on 911 was to go into two countries quite different than america with different cultures different values different civilizational history and try and rearrange it and try and do it sort of at the point of the gun listen social work out of the barrel of a gun is a bad proposition general i'm i'm really curious for this because you are actually of that timeline where as you said let's go back to 1975. saigon um i did a whole thing today on what i think the real lessons of saigon are but i've studied enough military history to know that it had a searing effect and that there was a decision within the united states military never again we shove the counter-insurgency manuals and all that stuff we want to not even be equipped to fight this type of war because this is not what we're all about so given your experience coming up within that culture how did we get to a point of 2002 2003 but then even more importantly in my view suddenly it's 2012 and all of the lessons seem to be have completely out the door can you give us maybe an oral history of the culture of the united states military and then where the turning points were everything went wrong great question great frame i'll tell you where where things went wrong and it comes from what usually gets people in trouble and that's um that's a little too much pride you know you go back to all our religions they always warn you that pride is the underwriting under weaning sin that gets everybody in trouble well the us military is pretty proud of itself and i think rightly so we had we've come back from a pretty low point in vietnam we we re-energized ourselves as a volunteer force we regained the respect of the american people we sure didn't have that when i came in the service in in the 70s you know where the military was respected and people thought well of it we were able to complete the cold war and if you remember after vietnam we were very very careful about how and where we used military force so you and i can remember you read about it and know about it i mean i remember from from when it happened we did occasionally put the military in we do airstrikes we might invade a small country like like panama or grenada but it was quick um it was very um short operation very decisive and then we were out so then this our great adversary the soviet union collapses and by the way their collapse was also rapid and unexpected there's sort of a pattern here we we have a very expensive and highly trained intelligence community but they get things wrong because they're dealing with people i mean we we accept that in our daily life that we're going to guess wrong you know go out forget our umbrella and it reigns on us you know but but in international things that can happen too and the intel community was stunned when the soviets who in retrospect were given every indication their economy was falling apart political reform was not working under mikhail gorbachev nevertheless they go under very very quickly at the end of 1991 after losing control of eastern europe over the previous two years um might add by the way that one of the precipitating cause of that was their 10-year effort in afghanistan there should have been a warning right there the british had been in there three times and it didn't help them during the area of the empire british raj so now it's 91 and what happened coincidentally that year the united states for the first time since vietnam with a bunch of allies committed a major ground force to the middle east and and waged a successful limited war to liberate kuwait which had been overrun by the iraqis under saddam hussein that war was was wildly successful way more than anybody in it when you go back and read what was predicted again those vietnam veterans general colin powell chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at the time general norman schwarzkopf our field commander there those people were thinking hey we're going to lose 25 000 troops in this operation we're going to lose a bunch of aircraft we're going to lose ships you know why because they sort of did the numbers and they said hey you know this guy saddam his force has been fighting iranians for eight years you know this is gonna be a cakewalk well we were pleasantly surprised i mean obviously people were killed on both sides but it was a much quicker and more decisive war than we thought right and here comes the pride so we the soviets our allies our great adversaries have collapsed you know we win the cold war after 46 years of holding the line and struggle and mistakes in places like korea bay of pigs and vietnam but but nevertheless we hold out we win so our strategy had worked of containment and now we've had this smashing success in the middle east the place we'd always we had treated it like it had cooties we did not want to go in to the middle east especially on the ground you know our our view there was use allies use folks like the saudi arabians the iranians before they sort of went radical the the israelis the egyptians anybody but american troops on the ground there and yet we've done it and we pulled it off and then we began to do a series of other interventions we sent troops into somalia most people would remember the black hawk down episode that didn't go too well but the lesson we learned from that if you ask americans what they know about the somali intervention in the early 90s they remember the book of the movie black hawk down it's it's some kind of you know it's a saturday afternoon matinee where our people are heroic and all that hey the operation failed right you know i mean yes there was a lot of heroism but a warning was missed there instead we go then into haiti in an intervention and you know that's that's a country the united states has intervened in before that one gets a u.n okay and sort of kind of works and we're able to pull out after about 18 months we go into the balkans eventually after a brutal civil war there that our european allies were pleading for us to come in finally in 95 we go into bosnia 99 we go into kosovo and the war settles down we think it's because well the americans have showed up and now we've settled this i think in retrospect we could see that the people there just killed themselves to the point where they couldn't take it anymore the war had been so brutal for so many years with so many genocidal lineups of families and things like that the people in the balkans that had it anybody could have come in there i mean any country on earth you know the united forces of antarctica or something and it would have ended because the people there wanted it to end but we thought it was us so when 9 11 happens and the u.s president at that time george w bush turns to his military and says and remember general colin powell is sitting there now as chairman of the drugs he's not as chairman anymore but now he's the secretary of state do you have the meeting after 9 11 what should we do and a military response is proposed it's noteworthy that powell was the only guy the only guy you had vice president cheney you had various other people he had the chairman directors all these others saying we can do this we can get in we can we can knock out the taliban we can get al qaeda we had we had no ability to hunt down al qaeda again back to our movies that we watch one of the points of black hawk down was we couldn't find the guy we were looking for that's how can the blackhawk get shot down you know i mean this is very tricky to go man hunting in a foreign country and we had no such capability at that time the drones that we use now were just in their infancy the cia have been experimenting on the side and of course our u.s air force not surprisingly in 2001 said we don't want to plane with no pilot and that's not our thing you know so so instead we come up with a war and then we we are again you know americans we're optimistic we go into afghanistan we go in there in the fall during the crappy weather we run the taliban out we sort of see the same phenomenon we've just seen over the last few weeks where the afghans are they're good fighters individually and they are they're all about sort of bushwhacking and stuff but standing up to airstrikes or standing up to form troops not their thing and so what happened was the taliban began to put their finger in the air they realized hey these americans got the planes they're going to win and people just switched sides there was there was only a little fighting just as there was in this most recent taliban offensive only a little actual shooting mostly those people just saying hey i want to get on the winning side of this or get the heck out of it get away from it and so we swiftly took over afghanistan with no idea of what to do next because we didn't expect a quick victory you know we expected sort of you know air strikes shooting guys you know and all that and unlike somali where we pulled out immediately unlike haiti where we were able to get the united nations involved and get out unlike the balkans that settled down afghanistan didn't settle down and it was sort of low level i mean the taliban didn't know no taliban wanted to be the first guy to stick his head up and get a smart bomb on it but they kept their operation going they got across the pakistan border horrible terrain there the hindu kush mountains and there they are and they're sort of percolating in the background again arrogance lack of humility thinking we can do everything pride so when the president says hey it's a global war on terrorism we don't want any more terrorist groups what about this sodom hussein guy well the military had a plan to fight there going all the way back to 1990-91 we liberated kuwait but we never knocked out saddam hussein we blockaded the country by sea and air for 10 years during the 90s americans forget that because we weren't the ones getting blockaded but iraqis had were cut off from all international trade their oil couldn't be exported people were not in good shape the iraqi economy fell apart and it wasn't that great to begin with but you know when you're an oil economy you can't export oil you're hurting and we were daily dropping bombs and shooting smart missiles and all this in during the 90s so the idea of the pentagon and you know guys like me that's about when i became a general was hey let's clean up our mess that we have with this guy sit down he can't fight that well his troops we saw in 91 they stink we'll roll right over him and it'll be over and and in the words of of the deputy secretary of defense paul wolfowitz they will greet us with flowers and stuff like that just sort of like the liberation of paris in 1944 by the us army well didn't go anything like that again the people there definitely didn't like saddam in iraq but they wanted us out and now you've got the united states bogged down with troops in afghanistan troops in iraq no idea what to do next other than keep hanging around that was the environment i was in when i served in both countries and that's what caused me to write that book and to put that title on it because i knew this thing was going in the wrong direction the united states was not going to stay in these countries for a hundred years and as soon as we decided to pull out of either of them the roof would cave in yeah because the average person in those countries wanted nothing to do with americans you you just suggested soldiers you suggested something really really interesting which is let's define what victory looks like because in the story you've told there's a way of arguing that in some ways we won other ways we lost so most obvious way osama bin laden is dead he did not achieve his objective of causing the us to collapse much in the way that the soviet union did you can say all you want about the various disasters of the afghan occupation our country still exists nato still exists the us is still successful as a country in the sense that after 1975 you could say all these terrible things about the us global world presence yet 15 years later you have that presence in desert storm obviously so my question for you then is what exactly do you find a lot define any loss ads because it seems that you just said a loss was the fact that we can't stay in these countries forever they're going to collapse but going back to 2001 the objective initially was not let's reconstitute a democratic government in iraq it wasn't what's constituted democratic government in afghanistan so just help us understand winning and losing sure in these weird irregular wars because by the way you said this earlier i want you to define a regular war for our listeners because that really gets to the nuance we're trying to get to okay so we'll start with getting our terms straight regular versus regular war everybody knows what regular ore is it's what you play on call of duty it's it's what you see when you go to a movie like saving private rhyme both sides line up and wear uniforms you know world war ii you know iwo jima the japanese are wearing brown uniforms the marines are wearing green uniforms everybody's got you know fighting in in a style in a disciplined manner with a clear chain of command and by and large the civilian population is off the battlefield they've been evacuated maybe they've been killed by pre attack bombardment but but the the the local population is not part of the issue so for most of us regular warfare is what we think of when to get an image in our head of war of weapons discipline leadership all that kind of stuff you know we see the u.s army marching down the street on fourth of july in our hometown the national guard or something that's what we're thinking of that kind of war irregular war is in some ways the antidote to regular war if you're a poor country and there's no way that you can field a bunch of tanks and b-52s and submarines and all this other stuff you say well what can i do well what i can do is i can mix in with the population i can wear the same clothes they're wearing i keep my ak-47 under my cot and i only pull it out at night when i need it i've used weapons that i can make in my backyard from from fertilizer and from gasoline and things like that and my goal is not necessary to beat these americans in a state or british or whoever you're talking about a stand-up fight is to wear them out in a protracted war and again u.s history we do know something about this this was the way we fought the first half of our american revolution you know we loved george washington and all these guys alexander hamilton they made the the musical bottom enjoy it's great hamilton was a very brave soldier in the war but what we forget sometimes as americans maybe we don't like to think about this we got we got our butts kicked in every major battle by the british till the french showed up yes the french bail itself of the war and they bailed us out not because they loved american liberty far from it but because they hated the british it was done for big power politics of the year nevertheless we benefit from it but much of our war effort consisted of guys who weren't in a uniform who took a squirrel rifle off their their fireplace and went out and sniped at british you know it was it was very much a sort of insurgent terrorist war that's irregular war the minute man the bushwhacker the the gorilla gorilla comes from the spanish word for little war when the french went into spain and they defeated the spanish regular army but the spanish population took their weapons and fought back and so that's regular in irregular war so then victory you say okay well great you got all these terms laid out how do i know if i won historically there's always two indications of victory two indications of victory and if you get both of them you know you've won the war if you get one then you can argue about it so here's what they are first one is one that we don't like to talk about but frankly we do all the time and that's how many people on each side got killed in the war or in the battle or in the engagement or whatever in other words if i lose 10 and you lose 20 i've won in that component but there's a second component as well because i would our i would tell you in the war in afghanistan and iraq the numbers brutal though they are are very much in our favor i mean sadly though we've lost over 6 000 people in both countries we've probably killed five to 10 times that number of terrorists okay but there's another component and that's known to to use the oldest term going all the way back to to early historic times in sumerian stuff like that is who holds the field who holds the ground in other words when the dust settles and you've counted up the dead on each side and all that who's left there with their flag raised over that town so in afghanistan today that would be the taliban right you know we saw over the weekend our ambassador and our team at the embassy literally lowered the american flag and yes we've still got troops there doing an evacuation but we're out of there you know our effort is over the government we supported is gone the republic of afghanistan they're gone and there's a taliban emirate now in position in place there so those two things you look at for victory and and as you you all both know and i think we should understand you often get a split decision so you get this situation where america like you said marshall americans would say hey we prevented a terrorist big terrorist attack since 9 11. we killed bin laden we killed all these terrorists there's al-qaeda guys these isis guys these isis k guys in in afghanistan yes that's true but you didn't hold the ground and i know admittedly we still have troops in iraq but our current president's already announced they're going to be pulled out also so i mean that thing is going to wrap up within the next few months too now that may get relooked and based on what happened this weekend who knows here's here's the quick follow-up because it's incredibly important i really appreciate the way you define this because soccer and i are both really frustrated about broader implications folks who don't have the deep military experience that you have are taking from this conflict and because what i'm kind of getting at is what does the loss in afghanistan say about our broader or armed forces so to give an example what i'm talking about you will see folks saying things like the us has lost in afghanistan the u.s couldn't hold on to iraq the u.s is now permanently in decline there's a big broader contention one could make but i think and this is very important if you read your book you start off the book by talking about then captain h.r mcmaster leading one of the most successful tank engagements in world history during desert storm so this is a general who in one context a regular war as you're describing tank against tank manoa mantle last man standing wins utterly eviscerates the iraqis just complete and total victory but you then take that same general those same troops age them up 20 30 years to put them in this afghan context and they can't win a war so what i want to know from you is how should we think about the ability of our militaries to win wars in this context because there is just this rhetoric around we can't win wars since world war ii does this say something about our nation and what i would put forward is we've always been terrible at irregular warfare the british were terrible to regular warfare in the american context right the british lose the revolutionary war but the empire doesn't peak for another 120 years so i would just love you to respond to how we should think about the differences between these two towers of war and how that affects our own politics yeah i think here i would go back to obviously one of the greatest thinkers in history adam smith you know the guy who defined capitalism you know his his comment in 1778 is the american war is going badly for the british where he says there's a great deal of ruin in a nation and what did he mean by that he's talking about his own country great britain but what it means is if you're truly a great power you can afford to stumble in an inconsequential event world war one or world war ii we could not have afforded to lose those wars if we lost those wars all three of us may not be here we'll be living very different lives if we were under nazi control or something like that quite different um sadly some of these other interventions are the type that they're not essential to our life now the scary part here is yes they're not essential to the american life in other words our failure in vietnam we surmounted that because it was it was turned out to be a strategically peripheral era area we kept our eye on the ball to turn the soviet union you know the soviets were never emboldened to try a nuclear strike or invasion of europe you know i think today people are saying oh with this the chinese will be attacking taiwan i doubt it all right they might do it for their own reasons when they do it but whatever happened in kabul won't remember i talked about those two aspects of of victory and i told you when you get a split decision people can argue either way what i and i have no knowledge of what vv putin or xi jinping and their people are doing today but looking at their history knowing a little about both guys and knowing how their countries work what they see is they see an american military that's very capable of killing people and blowing things up we're real good at that but that's irrelevant i mean it's like it's like being in a football game and winning the the yardage but you don't win the score you don't ever put it in the end zone you go up and down between the 20s so what that's that's what we've done our problem in america is more strategy problem than the tactics or the fighting h.r mcmaster dan bulger any of these people you pick we're good at the hook and javin stuff we're not good at the strategy level and part of some of the challenge going back to old adam smith and dealing with the british when you get to the policy level it's not nor should it be strictly people in uniform you bring in political people you bring in diplomats you bring in intelligence folks you bring in thinkers folks like you you know saw you and marshall get you know i mean it might not happen to you yet but it will you'll get asked to join an administration and do some work and do maybe you're already doing some consulting form so they bring all you in too i mean nobody i worked with in the u.s government came to work in the morning said how can i screw this war up all right they were all trying to do it right but the problem is some things are just not solvable by an external force you know you know to give an example it is solvable to eventually track down osama bin laden and kill him it may take ten years like it did but you can do that right it's not solvable to quote change the environment of south asia so that you'd never again have a bin laden who could it can't be done we mentioned the british a couple times greatest empire the world's ever seen even they realized they could not change the cultures of the countries they went into including ours and we in the united states probably because of our immigration patterns had more in common with with england than most others right you know when the british went into south asia yeah great they taught folks english they did all that but the fundamental civilization there was much more powerful than a few tens of thousands of guys in red coats let's talk about this there's limits that's what we have to realize let's talk about then your own personal experience in the war in afghanistan and give us an oral history of the war itself so you've already started off in with taliban we you know i've said this publicly i think the greatest mistake that the bush administration made is not throwing everything we had at the battle of tora bora and trying to kill bin laden because i mean i'm curious for your for your view on this yes i think a lot of people would have died but that would have actually fulfilled the mission and then we could have gotten the hell out of there so tell us the explicit like tactical decisions that were made by the bush administration the obama administration but also in the army which transitioned from okay now we're going to kill bin laden well actually can't find him anymore so now we're backing this guy named karzai and then we're transitioning to democracy and als oh wait now the taliban are rising again and we have to we have to tamp that down so folks like yourself go up and surge but now that's over and now it's all about assisting the government and propping them up these are all wild decisions that were made you know within the concourse of 20 years so could you live like you know you lived it ex tell it a little bit to the audience explain to them because many of the people who listen to this podcast i'm 29. so i barely remember you know it was like nine years old 9 11. some of the people listed this podcast are 18 19. they weren't even alive um they don't even know why we're in afghanistan and i i was explaining the conflict to somebody yesterday and they were like oh yeah they're like what was the deal with bin laden they were like 10 when bin laden was killed so just give us the uh the history of that if you will well i think i think son you you've raised several really important issues that we that we can talk about so i show up in afghanistan it's 2011. what's the situation there keep in mind that the united states goes into afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 to get bin laden as you said you mentioned that fighting at tora bora i've been to tora bora the white mountains i've been to that area i've seen the cave done all that stuff done operations down there because it's it's a big area that the uh the taliban continue to use because it's a great place to hide it's hard to get them um when that battle occurred in december of 2001 we run the taliban out of the major cities this is like bin laden's last stand and he's down in his torah mountain range which is right on the border with pakistan and i think you know when we talk border in the united states people think of crossing down in el paso or up near niagara falls no i mean there's no markings there's nothing i mean to you or i if we if we walk up there or fly over the plane the only reason one side of the border the other is the gps tells us because you can't even tell from a map or from looking there's no markings so um in this area around the border we get bin laden we think he's there we're pretty sure he's there and we later confirmed that he was but the problem is all we got are special forces and and people should realize again we all play call of duty or we watch you know seal team tv show or whatever you're talking special forces you're talking a dozen or so guys a very small number of people so great shooters real smart men and women i mean the best so people we've got in uniform as far as their capabilities but if your job is to sort of spread out and do a snipe hunt and find this guy it's pretty darn hard to do that with 12 guys and so the hundreds of guys that we were working with were all afghans well you know the afghan it's december it's cold they want to eat they want you know they've been fighting since the soviets invaded in 1979 bin laden's not their problem he never attacked them so you know they're willing to cut a deal they're willing to do this so you got our 12 guys trying to encourage them and they got a radio and they're calling in airstrikes and you said we should abort in every troop we had the problem was the number of troops we had in afghanistan at that time was very very small we had a small marine force a couple thousand guys near kandahar which is quite a ways away it's on the southwest side of the country the mountains of torvo are southeast side and then we had these smatterings of special forces that all together might add up to 500 guys and we had a lot of airplanes and we we didn't know exactly which radio call was bin laden you know which which little bleep that was coming in talking in pashto or arabic was him talking on the phone and not just some other guy because you're just getting signals you're not really getting you know i i know on tv and you know like ncis they can always track them right down to the warehouse but it you know like that in real life and it sure wasn't like that in 2001 so we missed that opportunity he got away he got across the border began to reconstitute the taliban a lot of their leaders got away and remember most of the taliban never left afghanistan they just went back to being villagers and waited for the day when they'd be relieved so you say run a run thing ahead so what happens is we sort of lose interest in afghanistan yeah we knocked we beat him up we took over the government we put in this karzai guy how many karzai was installed nato has somewhat taken charge of it and so we sort of say okay we got that under control it's not too bad bin laden we don't know where he is but he's not in afghanistan now this iraq thing so iraq was very much the war we wanted and it you know in retrospect people beat up george w bush how could you go and iraq everybody wanted to go to iraq go look at the vote for that 2003 war that vote is taken in october 02 right before the off-year election it was a more decisive bipartisan vote than the one for the 91 war way more i mean and which is crazy upon reflection yeah it turns absolutely insane well it's crazy because a lot of those people who voted yes later said oh i didn't agree with that i mean and i included that our most previous president who said oh i was always against go back and look at his statements now again they made him on the howard stern show not the state not the floor of the senate but but the point is american sentiment as reflected by our elected officials and you can always tell with our elected officials when you're really getting them reflecting the voice of the public like a month before they they go to the voting booth you're going to definitely hear that john and jane q public are going to hear what they want to hear at that point why do i mention that because great consensus to go into iraq and quote finish the job fear that saddam had nuclear biological and chemical weapons and he had residual chunks of those things but the whole country was a mess the year of the 10 years of blockade and all that iraq was a basket case and they did not put up much of a conventional war they were easily crushed but the problem is and we've got this thing percolating in afghanistan that we haven't cleared cleaned up now we've got a thing percolating in iraq the average person in iraq did not want foreigners staying there iraq had an issue that went back they could remember when the turks ruled them they hated that they absolutely hated the british mandate after world war one they fought a major insurrection against them you know the iraqi people are just like you and me they you know would we like a foreign army living in our country driving i mean just even if they're relatively well disciplined like the american military is they're still you still got their tanks driving all over the place the helicopters flying overhead and you know causing your chickens to drop eggs and also you know that's besides any fight and so um basically we by 2003 by by december of 2003 about two years after this global war on terrorism started we now have two insurgencies one in iraq and one in afghanistan and the one in iraq went bad first so in afghanistan we beat them up pretty good the first round it took them a while to reconstitute but the reason they were constituted were busy trying to stomp on this fire in iraq and so you say you know i get when i get to afghanistan we were only about a year and a half into president obama's attempt to refocus on the war in afghanistan because he said hey we've ignored this for 10 years while we handled this problem in iraq seemed like iraq was under control it always seems like these things are and that was just pre-isis isis would show up around 2014. but you know uh abu al-baghdadi he was on my uh target list when i was in command in baghdad for the first cavalry division he was one of the guys we were looking for he'd been one of our enemies for a long time isis came out of al-qaeda in iraq so they've been there the whole time help abu bakr al-baghdadi was actually in our prison there at camp luca for a while we let him lose because he convinced us he was a a low-level pipe swinger good job by him but not too good for us um so i don't mention i just lay that out to remind us that president obama puts us in so when i get there in 2011 with the mission to help the afghan security forces get squared away we really only got about 18 months of effort on the ground at that point because this has been the secondary effort as i joke with people who know the history of world war ii afghanistan from about 2002 to about 2009 was the china burma india theater in world war ii i mean it was it was of interest to the people there but the average american was following what was going on in the pacific and what was going on in normandy they didn't care about this business of this what they saw as a secondary area and so um we're so we're trying to to get this sorted out and some things became very very obvious the first was the old british adage that you know you can't buy afghan loyalty but you could rent it that that the afghans who were joining the police military were doing it basically for three hots and a cot they had no you know they could care less about president karzai was the president of time and i also know ashraf gamiyama ashraf ghani ahmedzad the guy who fled both ghani and even more so ghani than than karzai when the russia when the russians with the uh when the average afghan saw ghani i had him tell me this the guys when i'd be out on patrol with them the afghans would talk to you about stuff and they're like oh connie you know they say he's an american you know he went to columbia christian quick fun fact he um went to my high school i'm from he went he spent a year at my high school um yeah that's wild that's a that's a little fun fact there you go and he taught at berkeley you know marshall so went to your high school but to an afghan what they see with that guy is a guy who's cashed in with the foreign hand you know that's the guy we decide him and karzai karzai who also speaks impeccable english spent a bunch of time in india these are the two guys we think are great guys to run afghanistan they're the worst guys i mean the average afghan looks at them and sees a toady a collaborator they're the vichy french to the average afghan you know wow and so when we were when we would be recruiting police and military one of the things we had to do was teach them all how to read and write so that they could just do their job because you know and and look i i hear all this stuff on the news about you know the sophisticated american equipment we get their equipment is like dick and jane equipment i mean they got rifles they got machine guns they got trucks i mean the police are equipped with the same ford truck you can go down and pick up at any used car lot there's no sophisticated equipment they have very little heavy artillery they had a little tiny air force but it was unable to run without americans there to fix it for him and stuff so so we shouldn't we should one thing we should not worry about it's not like we gave these guys a bunch of abrams tanks and a bunch of f-16 and no they don't have any of that kind of stuff they they got very little but one of the things they didn't have when they would join up was the ability to read and write so we would teach them that you know it's amazing is for saga marshall and for the audience i would just tell you it's amazing we were there for 20 years we never put an emphasis on literacy for the average afghan yeah we do these spot programs where we'd educate women we we do a little thing at the university we've had partnership program in robotics all that's boutique screwing around what we could have done in the villages that would have made a huge difference was a literacy push you realize if we were taught those little afghan first grader equivalents in about 2002 to read those people those men and women now would be adults they'd realize that that the taliban is selling a bunch of direct and they shouldn't be buying it wasn't an emphasis our emphasis was you know build their military and we define and build their military essentially get numbers through the door well you can get numbers and you can hand them an american m16 rifle and you can give them a ford truck and you can do all those things but the other thing that that army and police and air force counted on was their american and nato partners they were taught to fight side by side with us and be like us and so as a result when you pull away that side by side it was like watching a balloon deflate and that same thing happened by the way in southeast asia in fact i've heard a few people say by the way marshall before you jump in i've heard a few people say well you know the south vietnamese held out for two years after the americans left we had a huge uh military advisory component millions and billions of dollars sent in of equipment we left them with tanks jets all this kind of stuff that two years they held out they had a lot of american support we didn't really cut the money for them until the spring of 1975. with afghanistan we've been weaning them down for years and this by this year they had no american allies at uh advisors partners or anything that's why they went under so quickly so it would be the equivalent of we had cut out the south vietnamese in january 73 when president nixon's people signed the accord with north vietnam but we didn't we actually backed them for two more years yeah go ahead marshall yeah i i'd like to i'd like you to say something on behalf of the soldiers of the former afghan army because i've ever everything i'm hearing you say suggests that we should not be too disparaging towards 18 or 20 year old afghans who weren't willing to fight for any of these dynamics so you get this rhetoric where people say well if they weren't willing to fight for their country then that's kind of on them and i'm not saying this that's just to support a continued presence in the country i'm just hearing everything you're describing and i'm thinking wow like this just wasn't a thing that suggests there was a country to fight for because to compare the south vietnam to compare the south vietnam example and the afghanistan example say we went about south vietnam that was a country that was a country there was a it was a horrific military and there's always civilian and military control issues but there was actually a constituted company country like the army of the republic of you know arvn i can't remember the exact act like that's an actual thing that you're right i do not hear anything that could compare what the average afghan soldier last week was experiencing they could compare to that experience so i just i i just come away from a lot of sympathy for af for afghan soldiers so i would just love to hear your perspective marshall i'm glad you mentioned that because one thing that most of our folks here in our country should keep in mind the afghans almost every year the conflict that i was involved in so once you get the us surge and we go in with nato in a big way during the obama administration like 2009 or so the afghan security forces every year took more debt and wounded than we did in fact the afghan security forces since we drew down in 2014 each year until this year had more debt and wounded than we've had in the entire war so many they were fighting but for them for you you got to put yourself in the perspective as you said an 18 year old afghan who's left home trying to get three hearts in a cot trying to learn how to read and write he knows about protecting his family he may know about protecting his village afghanistan is an abstract concept and when he thinks of it he thinks of ashraf ghani who's really an american wearing an afghan shawi's you know but he talks like an american acts like an american went to school in america so he's not fighting for ghani he doesn't care about him or the other people in kabul he cares about the guys next to him and you know like most soldiers do but um but when he hears this year that the americans are pulling the plug in a lot of ways he thinks to himself all right the only thing that's keeping body and soul together for me is americans we paid their salaries you know that's no small thing we gave them their supplies like fuel and ammunition and all that stuff you cut that stuff off and it's obviously cut off and it's publicly announced well you know every taliban propagandist was sending the americans have abandoned you the americans are cutting you off you won't get paid anymore you won't get you won't get ammunition for your rifling so what does a young guy do i think what a lot of them did is what we've seen the last few months they've fought fiercely for the last six or seven years they've taken high losses and you know what they say if nobody's backing us it's time to start taking care of me and i'm gonna go home to my village and i'm gonna protect my family and the heck with gani and the other crooks in kabul and again yeah yeah it makes sense from a rational point of view i don't blame the average afghan soldier but you know and i'd like to for you to speak to this the senior commanders and the average government official were astoundingly corrupt um in terms of every audit that our own government has done john sopko is somebody i've followed for a long time very well i i respect the hell out of him and he's actually one of the people who turned my own opinion on the afghan war back in 2015 reading a lot of the reports that he wrote and his organization in terms of the rank corruption and the way that many of these you know illiterate soldiers were used in order to line the pockets of senior commanders and of senior government officials so i i don't want to let so many of the afghans off the hook i mean ashraf ghani gave an interview may 17 2021 where he said i will die for afghanistan he literally said i would die for my country and then he got on a helicopter full of cash and skipped town um that tells you what you can do with any statement by ashraf ghani it always has you know the the expiration date on it right well i'm curious i would like for you to speak to that view because i think i knew many afghan field commanders who were competent um and and from what i can tell some of them are still in the field there there are remnant areas that one of the things we aren't talking about is what's going to happen next and when we get to that but um the taliban's going to have an insurgency on their hands i can tell you that the tajiks taliban is primarily a pashtun movement the tajiks uzbek hazara people are not going to play along with this very long the turkmen the the nurastanis the various minorities in afghanistan they'll give the taliban a couple months but when they don't get what they want they'll go into revolt a lot of these these colonels and majors and sergeants major who were the key fighters you know look and it's the same in the united states nobody in the pentagon wins the war they're nice people but the war is won at the front by sergeants and by junior guys it was the same in afghanistan and those people to include the field commander types and i've followed some of their names they're all still out there and they have pulled the same thing the taliban did in 102. they've gone to ground they hid their uniforms they put the ak-47 or the m16 under the bunk and they're gonna wait and see what happens and then they will begin the insurgency and the taliban was tangling with an insurgency when they took over 96 they had an insurgency going that we jumped on oh yeah for years all the way until the alliance on that absolutely you know well those guys aren't going away and they have the younger generation as well um many of those guys and frankly for a lot of them they're gonna be in their element they never liked too much putting on the uniform fighting american style but but bushwhacking they love that that's what they do and so that and that's how they they protect their families so we are going to see that and and i think it goes to you know the corrupt crooked guys in kabul that get out in terrible well you know and it's it's horrible that it was that way but you're exactly right they're they're one of the most corrupt countries in history and we we knew that you know you mentioned john sapko i respect the heck out of him and his his cigar team is special inspector general for iraq recon for afghanistan reconstruction there was also one in iraq by the way that found horrible things but the the afghan case was worth respect him but you know what was sad he was cassandra he was prophesying and no one was listening to him i actually sat in meetings with our am ambassador and embassy team with our senior military and they go oh yeah johns hopking found x plan z but you know he's always complaining it's like he's showing you what's going on you know you can keep saying hey it's not you know it's not this way but it is this one so something i'm wondering especially as you tell the history of the post-vietnam era i wonder what should folks who are either in the military want to join the military the captain h.r mcmasters of today what should they do with all this because a key thing that needs to be said in defense of our generals and you know such as yourself and the military is that we live in a civilian led country so right you can to sagar your point about generals saying no more vietnam's that's great but ronald reagan could say ronald reagan could say something entirely different ronald reagan could have said well now it's time to go into cambodia or now it's time to do this do this dude it's not actually up to the military and we just got i don't want to say lucky because that was i think something that george h.w bush should be cited for desert storm was a war that had excellent political objectives the military capacity was there the coalition was there that was just the apex post-world war ii defense of our system and how it can work but my point is what i really wonder is you could say we're never gonna do vietnam again but 30 years later everything repeats itself in a history rhymes type of way so what do you just suggest that folks in the military or folks who are civilians or interested in the defense policy national security side what should they take from this what should they do to actually think about all this because once again we could have had the same conversation in 1977 and it wouldn't have actually changed the underlying dynamics i i think the big thing marshall that that you have to do is you have to honestly look at what we did in other words you yes you want to honor the men and women who fought there they did a great job heroism same thing in vietnam no lack of heroism or skill in the hooking and jabbing fighting part well done but the strategy is messed up in both vietnam and in this global war on terrorism that's got to be looked at with a clear clear eye and it's got and we have to hold ourselves accountable one of the great things that happened after vietnam and all the services the armed services and it also happened in department of state and it also happened in the cia and the other parts intelligence community there was a reckoning people said what were the lessons of what we just did one of the worst things that could happen right now in this situation we're being given an opportunity to examine ourselves i would love to see the current administration appoint a board a blue ribbon panel get the right people on it john sopko would be a guy definitely have on this as a witness as a minimum if not a member get a panel of these wise men and women and say what the heck just happened the british did it for their operations in iraq with the chillico report and board and that's an excellent archive it shows what happened um we need that because you're exactly right we're going to be faced with other insurgent situations uh from a military perspective i can tell you the solution to the insurgency sorry sir i just want to say something to pin for audience members because the key thing is that in the wars we are describing we did not start out saying hey let's go wage a counter insurgency that's the key thing we didn't say that's the whole thing of vietnam we weren't you know we didn't wake up when the french left the country and said hey it's time to go fight a guerrilla war that happened the same thing with afghanistan and iraq so i just really it's a really important point to know but please continue yeah exactly right you you tend to back into guerrilla wars no no major power wants to fight a guerrilla war because the challenge is if your enemies at all competent you're going to be in a protracted war where the best outcomes of stalemate and likely a defeat so um what i was going to mention is when we face this situation it may happen again like you said we intervene in country x and it degenerates into a guerrilla war here's the important thing to remember and i say this having been been on the advisory side and one of my tours in iraq and also in my only tour in afghanistan for a year and a half what you got to realize at that point is it's their war and so you have to go into the advisory mode yes you use some air support some logistics some um you know some intelligence support from america and our allies but it's their war i would tell you had we done that fine but what did we do instead in both countries we had troop surges which put in more americans to fight the war look if i'm an iraqi or an afghan i look next to me and i say why should i fight this war i got the best army in the world fighting for me you and i mean that only makes sense it's the americans with the french and the french in the american revolutionary war once the french show up we let them lead the major assaults at yorktown and stuff because why they're better troops than us but but the but i think that's the deal we need to take a clear-eyed look at this and realize strategically if anybody comes to a u.s president and gives he or she the advice put a large number of ground forces american into a counterinsurgency throw them the heck out of the room like yesterday that is not an answer i mean and i speaking as a guy who's trying to be a history professor right now i can tell you that is a lesson it's sort of like don't invade russia in winter you know it's one of those things just don't do it and yet sir though the current crop as far as i can tell are telling our current president our past president and the president before him exactly that but that's a story for another day i want to finish with uh uh really a discussion around and bring it back to what you said around china and taiwan because i've seen the same thing all these takes oh the chinese are now going to invade taiwan and i'm like yeah the chinese are going to look at a pull out from an insurgency and extrapolate that they're going to win a thermonuclear exchange in a ground war with air like air-to-air combat exactly in a uniform mission that they would be the dumbest people of all time i respect them far more than to think that they would be so dumb in order to do that or you know the russians taking over ukraine it's the same thing i mean or not ukraine a real nato nation like a a member nation within nato estonia or something no like tanks are not rolling into tallinn tomorrow that would be crazy so can you just actually just speak once again to what the military is actually good at because look there are a lot of people who are military list in this podcast i've had a lot of service members reach out to me um thanking me for my you know my position at least on resolutely supporting the withdrawal from afghanistan and i i don't want us to take away the you know i don't want us to take away the lesson that we're we have a terrible military we just use them for something they were not designed to do right exactly right exactly right it's like it's like you know essentially saying you know all i've got is a rake and i want to mow the lawn the rake is not going to mow the lawn you know i mean you got to use tools for what they're intended for the military tool of the united states is largely designed for conventional warfare so back to our taiwan china thing i would tell you right now you mentioned thermonuclear weapons since 1945 there's been no nuclear war no no major power now would some crazy terrorists who got to use it possibly because they they're not thinking straight but no major power that wants regime survival in that communist chinese party that is number one goal is survival of the control the communist chinese party chinese communist party but but they're not going to take a risk with a with a nuclear armed power our navy has been only peripherally involved in these global wars on terrorism our air force has been more involved but they a lot of their parts have not our deterrent forces you know are as strong as ever and this was a big lesson from 1975 you know you know there were attempts by moscow in 1975 to to do things in the developing world what it turned out for them is they just went and got burned in places like sub-saharan africa in the in the caribbean in latin america and most notably in afghanistan you know to a degree one of the things that the americans would would benefit from would be if the chinese were stupid enough to militarize their belt road and get involved in a bunch of these these brush fire wars because they'd find they'd have the same problem that we did you know they also are conventional force and and you know the days of the mao zeitung guerrillas are long over just like the russians thinking they can relive the the glory days of the civil war you know not going to happen once you get that conventional buildup and the nuclear deterrent force is going to prevent it i i agree with you saga we've got a great military because of the men and women in it we have to support them and it's particularly important right now something we haven't talked about today but we should keep in mind we've got to do this extraction right we've got up to about 6 000 americans right now in a very precarious spot uh near the the kabul airport and uh we got to get our people out and we got to not mess around with that mission yeah thank you so much for coming this is really really helpful and i hope that the listeners really took your definitions and your framework seriously because once again we're going to be in some similar type situation 15 20 years from now we can't over cyclicalize history but that is just something consistently happens we're not going to say hey it's time to democratize the world again that's never how this works there will be a new problem a new situation things will escalate and it's really going to be at that meeting that you're describing around when someone comes with a plan that this is going to come down for so the last just really obvious question could you please shout out any work i know you recently published a book on world war ii please shout out uh obviously um you've been writing not just since 2014 yeah i would love to hear a quick shout out to that yes i've been very fortunate i've had the chance to write you know people think the military is sometimes they think we're a bunch of knuckle draggers but they actually do encourage you to think and write and stuff like that um yeah my latest book is called the panzer killers it's about the third armored division of the us army fighting world war ii that conventional warfare stuff regular war um fighting the germans in world war ii it came out in may and uh it's available everywhere most notably through penguin who is the publisher but also amazon has it and by this time heck the local grocery store may have it i don't know if it's supposed to be coming out paperback priests we'll have links to all of those down in our description so i appreciate you joining us sir thank you very much thank you yeah [Music] you

Channel: The Realignment

Views: 54,194

Rating: 4.8766112 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 8LAY0KWwPUY

Length: 60min 22sec (3622 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cannablubber]

Thoroughly enjoyed this episode. Definitely need to go back and give it second listen before elaborating.