Afghanistan is now, I'm the fourth president, who has faced the issue of whether and when to end this war. When I was running for president, I made a commitment to the American people that I would end this war. Today, I've honored that commitment. It was time to be honest with the American people again. We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission in Afghanistan. After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, I refused to send another generation of America's sons and daughters to fight a war that should have ended long ago. After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan, the cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan for two decades. Yes, the American people hear this, $300 million a day for two decades. You take the number of $1 trillion, as many say. That's still $150 million a day for two decades. What have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities? I refuse to continue the war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interests of our people. And most of all, after 800,000 Americans serving Afghanistan, I've traveled that whole country, brave and honorable service. After 20,744 American servicemen and women injured, and the loss of 2,461 American personnel, including 13 lives lost just this week, I refused to open another decade of war for Afghanistan. We've been a nation too long at war. For 20 years old today, you've never known an America at peace. So when I hear that we could have, should have continued the so-called low-grade effort in Afghanistan, at low risk to our service members, at low cost, I don't think enough people understand how much we've asked of the 1 percent of this country who put that uniform on, willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation. Maybe it's because my deceased son, Bo, served in Iraq for a full year. Before that, maybe it's because of what I've seen over the years as senator, vice president, and president of traveling these countries.  Deployment after deployment, months and years away from their families, missed birthdays, anniversaries, empty chairs of holidays, financial struggles, divorces, loss of limbs, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress. We see it in the struggles many have when they come home. We see it in the strain on their families and caregivers. We see it in the strain on their families when they're not there. We see it in the grief borne by their survivors. The cost of war they will carry with them their whole lives. Most tragically, we see in the shocking and stunning statistic that should give pause to anyone who thinks war can ever be low grade, low risk, or low cost. Eighteen veterans on average who die by suicide every single day in America, not in a far of place, but right here in America. There's nothing low grade or low risk or low cost about any war. It's time to end the war in Afghanistan. As we close 20 years of war and strife and pain and sacrifice, it's time to look at the future. It's time to look at the future. Live from CN Studios in Sydney, Australia. Welcome to CN Live. This is season three, Episode 10, Afghanistan, the 20 year disaster. I'm Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Boss. The White House speech on Tuesday, a lucid and angry Joe Biden took on his critics who say the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan and escalated the war. He declared an end to the era of ground troops fighting terrorism and of so-called nation building. He said he never believed democracy was possible in Afghanistan. It was a significant statement from a U.S. president undermining the myth of spreading democracy upon which so much of the empire is built. But Biden is no anti-imperialist. Instead, the imperial wars will continue with the chilling euphemism of using over the horizon capabilities that is deadly drone and other airstrikes over the horizon because the attacks are directed from the other side of the world. Biden will continue to strike at Afghanistan and other countries that do not threaten the United States and the possibility of arming insurgents inside Afghanistan may be on the cars. One warlord wrote in the Washington Post that he's ready to receive American arms. Still, it's a rare moment of truth for the U.S. Empire facing up to a defeat against a markedly weaker opponent fighting on its home turf. A new era of no ground wars has been declared. How long that last remains to be seen? At a time of clear defeat that cannot be sugarcoated, there's a green light to write about what has been true for decades, namely that the U.S. is engaged in neo-colonial adventures as New York Times Kabul bureau chief Adam Narcissus was astoundingly permitted to write. Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, who was fired from the Times for speaking out against the Iraq war, told me that that peace by Nassiter went ahead because the U.S. had lost the war. So military defeat brings out truth, but for how long? After defeat in Southeast Asia in 1975, there ensued a 16 year Vietnam syndrome that kept militarists back on their heels until the first Gulf War of 1991, when George H.W. Bush said the Vietnam syndrome had been licked. Will there be an Afghan syndrome keeping the U.S. out of large-scale military interventions? America's long history of direct involvement may or may not be over. It began with the Carter administration spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet-backed government there intended to promote prompt the USSR to invade, which it did. Out of the Mujahideen grew some of the Laden and al-Qaeda. The Soviets were driven out in 1989 after the Civil War, the Taliban and the Civil War came to power, sorry. After Civil War, the Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s. After 9-11, the Taliban offered to surrender bin Laden to the United States, an offer that was rejected. Instead, the United States invaded 20 years ago, almost to the month, where he leaks Afghan war diaries revealed the ugliness of the U.S. war from running death squads to targeted civilian casualties, none of which has been mentioned by Biden or the corporate media in their retrospectives. Vice President Biden was opposed to the surge and angry that the military had played Obama. He promised he'd get out on the campaign trail and he stood up to the brass and the forever war crowd and got out. He deserves credit for that in the midst of heavy criticism, even from his own party and friendly media. But ominously, while Biden closed one chapter on the imperial era, he's opening a new, even more dangerous one, pivoting even more towards confronting nuclear armed Russia and China, neither of which threatened the U.S., only its imperial dominance abroad. Joining us to discuss developments in Afghanistan is an all-star cast. We have Scott Horton, the radio host and author of the 2017 book Fools, Aaron Time to End the War in Afghanistan, David McBride, an Australian military lawyer who served in Afghanistan and blew the whistle on war crimes there. And we're waiting to be joined by Pippi Escobar, the Asia Times correspondent, who has just written a chilling story about the future of Afghanistan, as well as by Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and U.S. Marines counterintelligence officer. You could tell us a little bit about the thinking of the Marines on the ground in Afghanistan, particularly in that last final chaotic week. Thank you all for joining us. And Scott, let's start with you, since there's so much to talk about. Each of you have your own perspective. So I'd like to get both of you right now. And the others, when they come in, just give you five minutes. We don't normally do this, but there's so much to talk about. So I'll give you five minutes to give us your own perspective on this 20-year American-led disaster. Then we'll get deeper into the details. Why did the U.S. invade?  And what does this defeat mean for the U.S. empire? Lastly, what happens next? Those are just the broad questions we'd like to look at. Let's start with Scott Horton, Austin, Texas, Scott. Thanks for having me here, Joe. Well, I'll go back to 1979 and the Vietnam syndrome. The American people didn't want any more Vietnam's after the disaster there and in Korea. And our government considered it a mental illness that the American people didn't want to engage in any more of these proxy wars. So that was then where they came up with the brilliant idea. Well, let's bait the Soviets into overexpansion instead of containing them. We'll get them that way. And that was why they started backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to provoke the Soviets into invading. That's not really why they invaded because they had their own problems anyway. But still, that was the purpose behind it. And then once they invaded the Carter government and then the Reagan government doubled and tripled down on support, not just for the Afghan Mujahideen, but for the Arab Afghan army that came from all over the world, including from the U.S. and the Philippines and Chechnya, but especially the Arab world to go and fight in that war. Then to make a long story short, H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton turn them against us by launching a Rack War One and then the dual containment policy and the permanent no fly zones and bases in Saudi Arabia through the 1990s. And that was the primary reason that the Mujahideen, the Arab Afghan army that the U.S. had supported in the 80s turned against the U.S. in the 1990s. And they attacked us all through the 1990s. But Bill Clinton kept backing them anyway in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Chechnya, where even though they were paying for the Russian side of the Chechen War, they were also helping with the Saudis, helping support the Chechen jihadist fighters against the Russians at the same time, which has helped lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin, by the way, for those who regret that so badly. But anyway, then after they attacked us on September 11th, the government essentially just decided to exploit that violence. And I think there's reason so many people were September 11 or 9-11 truthers is because they might as well have done it themselves with the level of cynicism that they took to exploiting that tragedy in order to accomplish their other agendas. And one of their first lies that they told was that the Taliban had done it and that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are basically two words for the same thing when that just was not true. And people thought, well, how could it be that a bunch of hillbillies from the far side of the town of Bedrock out in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia, they came and knocked our towers down because they hate our freedom? That just doesn't make sense. So people thought, well, Dick Cheney and the Israelis did it or whatever it was, their theory was when the answer was it was a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis who happened to be hiding in Afghanistan. But there were no Afghans involved in the September 11 attack at all, had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban government of Afghanistan. It was the, you know, the Salqaida group that had attacked us from there. And then what did W. Bush do? The first thing he did was attack the Taliban, sent the Green Berets to go back up Dostom, fighting the Taliban up in Mazar-e-Sharit, sent the Rangers down to Kandahar. Meanwhile, everybody knew, you know, Peter Arnett and Robert Fisk and John Miller and all these guys had interviewed bin Laden at Torah Bora at the Lion's Den hideout, they called it at Torah Bora. They had every reason to think that he that that's where he would be. And but they didn't even begin sending the troops to Torah Bora until December, about eight weeks into the war.  And then famously, no matter how many times the CIA and Delta Force begged for reinforcements on the ground and there were Rangers and Green Berets and Marines available, they were turned down over and over again. And then once bin Laden, so called, slipped across the border, the Delta Force was refused permission to chase him across and to go after him. And that was because and I make the circumstantial case in both books, but I think I make it pretty clear they let him go because they needed an enemy because how are they going to make your mama afraid that Saddam is friends with Osama if Osama is already dead? And the American people believe that the war is one and wanted dead or alive. We got him dead and justice is done. And that's what happens when you mess with the best. And how is that now a year and a half later, we have to attack Iraq. That's not going to work. They needed their Emmanuel Goldstein figure out there, the permanent shadowy enemy out there. And if people remember back to the early years of the war on terrorism, the fact that bin Laden was still out there really mattered. It was a huge part of the propaganda and that Saddam as Bush said, imagine September 11th, but this time those Al Qaeda terrorists armed with Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and all of this. And that's how they got us into Iraq war two, which had nothing to do with, you know, in fact, a Wesley Clark's famous list of the seven nations on America's hit list for regime change after September 11th. Not one of them had anything to do with September 11th or even a friendship or alliance with Al Qaeda of any kind. They wanted to go after Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Iran. OK, what's that got to do with Al Qaeda in September 11? Nothing at all. It's just an excuse. In fact, the closest excuse that could come to tying it together was Paul Wolfowitz said, well, the reason Al Qaeda attacked us is because of our bases in Saudi Arabia. So now that we're invading Iraq, now we can get our bases out of Saudi Arabia, we'll move them to Iraq instead. That was the best that they could do to tie it to the war on terrorism. In fact, George W. Bush told Katie Couric in the White House that trying to connect Iraq to the war on terrorism is the hardest part of my job, just because it's so difficult for him to tell a lie that made any sense through all of this. And then I'm sorry for going on so long, but, you know, you guys know the story of the rest of the wars there. But to focus on Afghanistan after they let bin Laden go, they focused on regime change against the Taliban, which, first of all, they couldn't negotiate it. Second of all, they could have focused on Al Qaeda.  But you still don't have to regime change the capital city. But even then, if people look, September 11th is a pretty big deal. Mullah Omar let bin Laden live there for five years, six years. Fine, screw them. Let's overthrow their government for the sake of argument overthrown. But then what they do? Then they announced they're staying and they're making enemies out of all the new government's enemies, and they're going to do everything they can to prop this thing up in power. And they're not just going to build a state with an army. They're going to build a democracy with a brand new hydroelectric dam. And with, you know, girl schools everywhere and essentially an unlimited writ to remake the entire country. And they were biting off far more than they could chew. It was clear from, you know, at least 2004 that there's a popular posthum based resistance led by the Taliban rising up against the United States. And it was clear by 2005 and 2006 that the more we fight them, the worse it gets. And, and it was predicted by, you know, long before the surge of 2009 through 12 that this is just going to make it worse. This is not going to defeat the Taliban. It's going to drive more resistance into their ranks as we kill innocent people. And then even Stanley McChrystal admitted it in surgeon math for everyone you kill, you recruit 10 more. Well, that's not a very good way to fight a war. They were trying to pretend that the Americans belonged there. The Taliban were the foreign fighters from the far side of Mars somewhere. I don't know. And that we're going to win over the hearts and minds of the women and children of Hellman and turn them into enemies of their husbands and brothers and fathers. And so guess what? They lost that war and they lost that war fully 10 years ago. David Petraeus, General David Petraeus, who pushed that surge and so hard really extorted Obama into launching that surge in a way, which he didn't have to give in, but he did.  Well, that just did not happen. David Petraeus lost. And here we are. That was 10 years and a month ago. And it just did not take place. And the Taliban ever since then and the drawdown from after the surge, they've been steadily gaining more and more and more ground over the south and east of the country for years. It's been said they control half the country at night about 65 percent. I mean, pardon me, half the country in the daytime, 65 percent or more at night. And they've just been growing and growing and growing and taking over more and more territory and and gaining more and more power and influence inside the country to the point where once the Americans finally agreed to leave, it was like turning on a light switch.  You saw it took them what three and a half weeks to take over the entire country four weeks, five weeks. And so then that was it. Here is the most minimal mission that could have been over by Christmas 2001. And they wrote themselves this writ to extend it indefinitely. They bit off more than they could chew and they lost. And they killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the meantime. And here we are having this discussion about the end of the Afghan war now in the end of the summer of two thousand and twenty one deep into the future. You know, when this thing could have should have been over so long ago, never had to be this way at all. Scott, before we move on to David, I just wanted to follow up by asking what was the original motive to go into Afghanistan as part of that list of Clark seven countries and did that change as the longer they stayed there as Biden said in his speech and morphed into this into this nation building thing and how much is defense contractors and the kind of huge amounts of money that was made. And what is how does that I think, you know, the original key to I mean, they had to go and at least make a show of going after Afghanistan. You know, Tony Blair made Bush promise. Look, I know you want to bomb Baghdad, but you got to go to Afghanistan first. Or it's just going to look so bad. That's what the guys who attacked you are, you know, that the Prime Minister of Britain had to insist that it's just going to look too funny if you bomb Baghdad first, man, you can't do that. But so I think, you know, that's the key to the thing was they didn't want to just get bin Laden and wrap the thing up. They wanted to conflate Al Qaeda with the Taliban and do a regime change in Kabul as they put it back then to make it clear that the war on terror is a lot bigger than just trying to catch the guilty one man, you know, and his 400 friends that and and it's in Bush at war. This is really such an important book by Bob Woodward from the Bush years because W. Bush just told the National Security Council, give him everything. It's good old Bob Woodward. It's fine. And so he has, you know, first hand interviews with a lot of these guys, but he also has the notes of the National Security Council meetings, you know, on a classified level where Donald Rumsfeld is saying, listen, if we get bin Laden, that's not victory. And if we fail to get bin Laden, that's not failure. And, you know, we have to make sure that the American people understand that this war is much broader in in scope in space and time than any, you know, manhunt for the guilty here. And I think we really need to start bombing Baghdad right now just so the American people understand that we're not anywhere near over it yet. In fact, Joe, I know you remember in March of 2002, just six months after the attack, W. Bush was confronted at a press conference. All you talk about these days is Saddam Hussein. But what about Osama bin Laden? Don't you think that we need to really get him? And it's W. Bush is the best he can do, right? So he has this nuanced, sophisticated message he's trying to get across to her about the broad scope of the war on terrorism. But it comes out as just this ham-handed mess where he insists that it doesn't matter if bin Laden got away. It only mad bin Laden only mattered when he controlled the Taliban, when he was like this parasite that control the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Now that he's on the run, that's fine. I'm truly not concerned about him. Let me repeat, I am truly not concerned. And then he's lecturing the the woman reporter who asked him the question. You just don't understand, OK, the broad scope of the war on terrorism. It's this gigantic thing that we're doing all over the place and it's going to last when you just don't get it. If you think that it's all about killing Osama bin Laden, when it's really it's this giant other thing instead. And so I think that was really the main reason they had to go after the Taliban was just because it was going to take a year and a half to build up the troops in Kuwait enough to send in the invasion. So they had to have some kind of war ongoing. They had to claim, as Bush and Rice did, that there are Al-Qaeda terrorists in 60 countries around the world, and we're going to have to send special operations forces all over the place and we're going to have to announce this whole new doctrine against preventing states who could ally with terrorists from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, which is clearly just a red herring and was an excuse. So this would explain why war against their enemies. This would explain why the U.S. did not accept an offer of surrender basically from the Taliban very early on. That's right. Saddam Hussein, too. Saddam Hussein also offered to surrender twice, both times, unfortunately, to Richard Pearl. There's a Jim Risen piece in The New York Times and a Seymour Hirsch piece in The New Yorker about two different emissaries. So Saddam Hussein told Richard Pearl, look, we'll give you everything, man. We'll do whatever you say. And Pearl said, you tell Saddam and his men, we'll see him in Baghdad. All right, David, let's move to you in Sydney. You were on the ground in Afghanistan. You witnessed or learned of war crimes. You've blown the whistle on it. What does this moment mean for you now that this long war and that the U.S. alone did not fight but had its allies like Australia? What exactly does this mean to you at this very moment when you see the war coming to an end? Well, not so much coming to an end, but it's very important to me because the debacle at the end, tragic as it might be for the Afghan people, encapsulated everything I was trying to say. So in some ways, I'm quite hopeful that some good will come out of this in the sense that the war was the emperor's new clothes. You know, we were always pretending something was happening. And it was the biggest scam in town. They were generals upon generals and politicians pretending that something was happening, which wasn't happening like the emperor's new clothes. And that debacle at the end was just like when we were like Wizard of Oz, I'm full of all the literary analogies now. But, you know, the curtain got pulled down. It wasn't some sort of, you know, last minute collapse. There was never a real Afghan government, Afghan force. It was always a Potemkin village full of drugs, marglers, pedophiles, Chevron executives. It was it was all marketing from the very beginning. It was all my belief at the moment. I mean, I totally agree with everything Scott said. And I loved all the detail. There was some detail that I didn't know, but I agree with all. But I think up until now, and Biden has to carry the can, it was a victory. It was a victory for all the wrong people and the wrong reasons in the Bush got reelected with an increased majority. If I think I know, you know, Obama did a lot of bombing and he got two terms. Trump, you know, we talked about ending the war. And then, of course, he didn't. But I mean, and that was, you know, he was he only got one term. And any war is good in our country as well. Anybody that committed troops to war and put out the false messages about how good it was going got reelected. I think that was really the driving force. And I know and this is one of this is one of my theories now about Biden not wanting to send troops there. They still want to win elections by dropping bombs. But they they don't want to send troops on the ground. But you know, with Biden said, oh, we're going to chase these people to the ends of the earth, expect more light shows about how was bombing people because they that's such a vote winner. Aggression, explosions, jets. And you obviously, you know, you sell of a lot of equipment. They need to do that. That's all they were doing for 20 years. Everyone on the ground knew it was going to collapse like an inflatable castle as soon as everybody left.  And you know, because it really I think this is one of the problems.  You know, we were taught we believed our own propaganda to a certain extent. We were fighting a non-existent enemy, the Taliban. You know, we painted this sort of Rambo Hollywood version of the Taliban that they lived in caves and, you know, killed women or what. And we were fighting something which didn't exist. And in fact, in many, many Afghans eyes, they were sort of righteous warriors who, you know, they were the equivalent of the greatest generation for a lot of Afghans. And we tried to paint them as something that they weren't. And subsequently, we weren't we weren't fighting the real force with anything that made sense. We tried to pretend that the Afghan National Army was something that it wasn't in the government. And they were surprised they got a real come up into the end because they were surprised that the Afghan Army, you know, weren't capable of the collaborator army. And it's right to call them collaborators, unfortunately, because that's what they were because they'd believed all their photos, shoots of how good the Afghan army. They'd believed all the public. They began to believe their own public relations releases, the schools, photos, it was talked about the the highways to know where the things that were put in just to get the photo to send back to the voters and to get the vote. They started to believe that in some sense that some of that was true because anyone like myself who spoke the truth and there were quite a few heroic American people who did as well. We were shunted. We were pushed sideways. You know, I had two psychological reviews. I'm obviously facing 50 years in jail. This is what happens to any empire when when the dissenters and I was I was very much within the tent. I wasn't a Julian Assange figure. I was a, you know, an officer, a bit like Scott Ritter, perhaps, you know, I was very much in the organization and I believed in what we're doing. So when I started to say, oh, I think we're getting close to the edge of what's legal and we're really we're stepping over the line from information and operations to complete lies. And I was doing it from the point of view, not because it was kind of bad, but because it would lead to failure. If we don't correct our mistakes and, you know, it's like a doctor and not looking at the true symptoms of the patient, the patient's going to die if you start doing an operation that's not needed. So I was trying to do the right thing to help the organization. I was thwarted. And as I said, I was ostracized. And many other people were anyone that tried to point out the truth was and I don't even think it was they weren't ignored. There was something more sinister than that, you know, that they were like people who were going weak on this basically, which was becoming a bit like an organized crime thing, like nobody say anything. We'll just pretend it's going OK until the next election cycle. And then it's someone else's problem. David, did you believe the bullshit that this was about building a country and democracy at any time and then? No, I didn't. Well, I never did when I first went there. I know one of the one of the the the interesting things about my career was I I've been in the British Army in the 80s and then early 90s. And then I was sort of a security consultant. And as part of being a security consultant, I went to Afghanistan with a television crew when the Taliban were in power 2000. So I'd seen Afghanistan more than most soldiers. I'd actually seen it when the Taliban were power as part of my duties. I'd met the Taliban and I'd negotiated with them for us to travel around the country. I knew that they were kind of an amateur band of soldiers. And I knew what they were and what they weren't. So I knew a lot of the stuff that a lot of the propaganda. I certainly knew they weren't Al-Qaeda, although I met some Al-Qaeda as well, on that same trip. But I knew we were putting out a full story to begin with. But yeah, I was going I was in I was back in the military by then.  I could see. But as the years went on, I could see we had crossed the line where it was just a self-licking ice cream. And everything was sort of false. Everything, you know, oh, look at this wonderful thing and look at this fantastic photo and I began to get sickened by it. I mean, our presidents came to visit us and we were put up the PowerPoint.  The more colors there were, the more people were happy. And and it was it never occurred to anybody that it was a problem that the pie diagram was a complete lie. And that that's that that's kind of right through the American and Australian militaries. Well, I'm like the last one before I move on to Scott, as the Australian government learned anything from this adventure in Afghanistan, will Afghanistan, will Australia and NATO countries be so willing to join the United States in these kinds of adventures in the near future? Well, that's the million dollar question. That's what my case is about. Obviously, I don't want to fight. The past is past, but I want to make sure we don't make the same mistakes again. I want some sort of accountability. All it needs to happen is to some some body caught or whatever to look into what happened with a a fairly balanced point of view. So I don't know whether they had enough to be there now or with some sort of commission of inquiry. And it will be extremely embarrassing for the Australian politicians who just blindly follow the Americans.   Notice, maybe when I speak to you next time next year, we'll see what I've been successful or languishing in jail and we're at war with China. We'll check in with you again. Scott Ritter, thanks for joining us from upstate New York. Scott and Bush in sorry, in Biden's speech yesterday, he said the era of ground troops fighting terrorism and nation building and building democracy is over. He never believed in democracy was possible in Afghanistan. He was opposed to this war for 10 years. Now he's going to pivot towards over the horizon capabilities, which I find a very chilling euphemism for killing people that are literally over the other side of the world and you can't even see them except electronically. And now he's going to also pivot to Russia and China. That is maybe the most dangerous thing that he said yesterday. He was already pivoting that way, but they're going to put more emphasis on that. Scott, give us your view, your overview of the 20 years of war. And is there a really a new era beginning? As Biden said, is there going to be an Afghan syndrome that will stop America from large scale military invasions like this for the coming years? Well, first of all, let me let me start right off that. I don't have any skin equity in Afghanistan. I'm not an Afghan veteran, never been there. And other than an Australian SAS guy who I knew from my time in Iraq. Haven't lost any close friends in Afghanistan. So it's it's it's not, you know, the Iraq war is much different compared to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has always been Afghanistan has always been an abstraction to me. More of an academic interest. You know, I my academic background, I wrote a couple of scholarly studies of the anti Soviet resistance, the Basmachi movement in Central Asia. And I was an analyst of the Russian adventure in Afghanistan. I studied the Russian military operations as they were occurring. And I spent some time debriefing Russian Spetsnaz and paratroopers to get some insight into their tactics. But, you know, when we when 9 11 occurred and we went in Afghanistan, I always viewed it as an outsider. You know, I didn't have the kind of investment in Afghanistan as I had in Iraq. But having said that, I am a military professional. And so I come at it with a an informed observer, so to speak. A couple of things. One, Afghanistan. Absolutely destroyed the United States military. And I'm not talking about casualties.  Two thousand five hundred dead is nothing. If we go to war against Russia or China, we're going to lose that in five minutes. All right. It's literally a drop in the bucket. It's sad for the families, tragic for the families. But from a military perspective, it's absolutely nothing. Nothing. We when I was in, you know, I was I was a Marine during the Cold War and we used to train to go toe to toe with the Soviet enemy.   That was just the reality of war. We would mock two thousand five hundred dead because we were prepared to take far greater casualties. So we didn't get defeated on the ground in Afghanistan. Now, we, you know, we never lost a major tactical engagement. We prevailed every time we went toe to toe with the Taliban. They can't beat us militarily. We beat ourselves.  We redefined the American military through this 20 year disaster in Afghanistan. We used to be the world's most preeminent military force. When I was in there, we could stand toe to toe with anybody and beat them all. All we could fight two and a half wars anywhere in the world and prevail because we were organized, trained and equipped to do what was called combined arms warfare. Um, we don't know how to do that nowadays because we spent 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq training American soldiers how to kick down the doors of villagers' homes and terrorize the civilians inside. That that's the war we fought. We were very good at it. We were very good at going in and surrounding a village. We were very good at helicoptering guys in to an X or a Y.  You know, when Admiral McRaven talked about the Osama bin Laden raid, he said it was nothing. That was the least complicated thing we've done. That same night we ran 15 kill operations in Afghanistan that were far more complicated. Now, when he says 15 kill operations, he means putting American special forces together with their Afghan counterparts in an Afghan village to assassinate somebody. Now, we were good at this, but two things. One, we didn't win the war. So for all the assassins we were doing, all the special operations we were doing, all the testosterone infused, you know, murder we were doing, we lost. Two, we put all our effort into building this kind of military, a military based upon low intensity conflict on a flawed counter insurgency warfare model that we lost our ability to do anything else. You know, when again, in 1980s, we could deploy multiple divisions to Europe in a 10 day window to reinforce in case of a Soviet attack. Today, it takes six months to prepare a single armored brigade to go to Europe. And even then, it's just a slow, molasses like movement. Let's not even talk about the Pacific or China. So first of all, we broke the American military. We broke it. It can't fight today. We spend seven hundred and sixty billion dollars a year on a military that simply cannot fight. Can't do it. We don't we don't have the ability to fight. We bought equipment that doesn't work. The F 35 fighter doesn't work. You can go all the way down the line. We nothing works. We have too high of a maintenance level, the too low of an operational threshold, and we are unable to train our troops to the intensity necessary to prevail in modern conflict. You know, who hasn't been wasting 20 years in Afghanistan, destroying their military, Russia and China. Instead, they've built two of the most magnificent modern fighting forces the world has ever seen. The Russian military is not the military in the past. You know, when they went into Georgia in 2008, they weren't very good. They were they were still struggling from the post-Soviet hangover. But they learned the first thing they learned is that the Georgian troops who were trained by American Marines were very tactically proficient. They could shoot, move and communicate on a low level. And the Russians, what these guys are kicking our butts, if it weren't for the fact that we had more tanks of them, they might win. We need to learn to do that. And they did. They did.  They have a professional military now. They've modeled their equipment on the West, on what the West should have been doing. And today they can field a large land army capable of combined arms warfare. No one who else can. The Chinese. And they've been doing it in a way that we can't even imagine on a scoping scale that's unimaginable. And the worst thing from an American perspective is that the Russian is Chinese, who used to be sort of mortal enemies. They just got together and had a major military exercise where they have joint command structure, where they're practicing joint fires together, joint maneuvers together, all the things that you need to do to win. The things that NATO used to do. You know, there was a reason why NATO was the preeminent military alliance in the world is because we took all these nations of NATO and the pre expansion period. We trained them to the same level. We taught them to communicate on the same level. We taught them to fight and have logistics on the same level so that when if anybody came across the border, they were fighting a singular entity. The Russians and Chinese are on their way to do that. So not only did we destroy our military in Afghanistan for the last 20 years. We're not prepared to fight the fight. We claim to want to fight, meaning that, God forbid, we ever go toe to toe with the Russians or the Chinese. They would kick our butts in a unconventional conflict. And the scary thing is that because it's an absolute certainty, we would lose conventionally the only thing we have left is nuclear. And yes, we're right back to it again, where America's arrogance and hubris have brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation because I'd forbid America loses an aircraft carrier or two or three. That's 15, 20,000 dead Americans. You think an American politician, a president can stand there and absorb that kind of loss without making somebody pay a price somewhere? And the only price we can exact is a nuclear price. So we've destroyed it now. We have, you know, because we're Americans and we can fool ourselves into believing anything, we've led ourselves to believe that we have this magnificent counterterrorism capability. Now, let's just start up. We've been fighting a counterterrorism war for 20 years and we've lost. We haven't won a single aspect of it. Killing a 57 year old diabetic locked into the third floor of an apartment or a compound in Pakistan is not winning the counterterrorism fight. OK, that's just assassinating an old diabetic, you know, a guy with kidney problems. And I'm talking about a son bin Laden. It is not the most glorious moment in American military history. It was an assassination of an old diabetic. That's all we accomplished that night. We didn't win the war on terror. We've lost the war on terror. Al-Qaeda has metastasized throughout the globe. And and yet we did all that when we could put everything we had to bear on the problem in Afghanistan. There's not a single military asset short of nuclear war that we didn't bring to bear in Afghanistan. And we lost. We didn't win. But we fooled ourselves into believing that we have this wonderful over the horizon capability. Yes, we can launch drones from anywhere. That's technologically pretty cool. We take a drone off from Qatar. Satellite takes over and we got some dude in a air conditioned room and creature Air Force Base in Nevada flying it, looking at fuzzy little video game type images and deciding life or death decisions. Hey, I'm going to take them out based upon what criteria. Who knows? We know it's not real criteria because we kill far more civilians than we do actual terrorists with these capabilities. But even if we killed every terrorist we pulled the trigger at. We wouldn't win. We're not winning. We can't win. It's an unwinnable fight using technology that's not up to the task. It's up to the task of killing people, but it's not up to the task of actually prevailing in terrorism because terrorism isn't about bodies.  They don't care because they have more.   And we get an entire population furious at us. And then they go and they join that cause. We can't win using all the technology and capabilities we brought to bear when we were in Afghanistan and the hubris and the arrogance to think that we're going to win it when we're out of Afghanistan simply by flying drones overhead and murdering people. I mean, take a look at the two strikes that we flow in support of this most recent evacuation over the horizon, first strike against a tuk-tuk floating through the streets in Jalalabad. Yeah, we killed two guys.  We won't give you a name, but we killed two and wounded one. We said, that's it.  Who was the mother in the third and the three children? Is that if we screwed that up counting the numbers, does that mean that maybe we didn't get the people we thought we got? And now let's talk about the last attack against the car bomber. No, we killed 10 people. We killed a guy who was employed by an American NGO. We killed his nephew, who was a security guard for the United States military, who was applying for SIV status. We killed wives. We killed seven children, seven children.  Well, let me tell you a couple of things about over the horizon. The people who make the call about pulling the trigger are poorly trained, young American men and women who have no clue what they're looking at. We pumped them through the drone operators course. We pumped them through a video imagery analyst course. We pumped them through now that we have singing capability, a language course that isn't up to the task. Mr. McBride's been in Afghanistan. He knows they speak a billion different languages with a billion different dialects using a billion different forms of slang. Special operations signals the intercept guys, communication intercept guys would spend weeks just listening in on the phone calls of one person to get a voice, to learn the voice, to learn what he's saying, to learn the slang before they even thought they could make a call. And now we have some kid listening in from Creech going, I think he's saying this. He doesn't know what they're saying. He doesn't know anything. The guy that's looking at on the ground doesn't know what he's looking at either. I will bet you a dime to the dollar. That the guy we killed didn't stop as they claim to put high explosive in the trunk of his Toyota Corolla. I've been to bomb school. I know what a car bomb does. It punches the engine block clear out of it.  There wasn't any high explosive in that car. But he loaded it using containers that might have looked like cooking oil. But the thing is they also move potassium chloride in this in these containers. So this guy might have looked at a schoolbook solution. Oh, they're moving potassium chloride and canisters of it in there. That's a car bomb. And then the singing guy might have said, he's talked about picking up the material. I think we got a bomber. And because we had to go in and kill something because we lost 13 service members, we pulled the trigger and then resolved as we murdered 10 people. That's over the horizon. That's all it will ever do. It will never win the war on terror. It will never curtail terrorism. All it will do is create terrorists by killing innocent people. And Joe Biden is saying, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. No, it isn't, Joe. It's the same kind of murderous policy that we've been implementing for the last 20 years. You've just packaged it differently. And I apologize for the emotion. This thing just gets me angry. Joe, you're muted, but I think it makes a lot of people angry. Scott, Joe, you're still muted. Hey, Peppy, welcome from Bangkok. How are you doing? We can hear you, unfortunately. Mute, yes.  Around 10, maybe. Yeah, not in 10. Yeah. How could you sum up 20 years of disaster in in a few words?  All right. And we're going to drink properly, all of us on camera. Only 10 p.m. in Bangkok. So you got a couple of hours. It's now 9 p.m. It's too early and we just emerged from a max lockdown. So actually, I had my first proper dinner tonight. Well, guys, look, I am I'm sorry. I'm late because I was on an important phone call that had to do with Afghanistan. It's and it's very worrying, actually. They are throwing everything and the kitchen sink against the Panjir. And this is not good because this means there's no dialogue between Massoud Jr. and the Taliban. And especially because of Amrullah Saleh, former vice president. I'm sure Scott, for instance, knows this prime CIA asset in Afghanistan. And he is the guy who is running this resistance in the Panjir. But Massoud Jr. is a bureaucrat. You know, he has unlike his dad, which I met and was an extraordinary man. Massoud Jr., you know, he spent one year at Sandhurst Military Academy and then he graduated International Relations at City University in London, which is not exactly very good. And that's it. He has no no practical. He has no political experience, no military experience. And this is something that I have been discussing with some of my Pakistani friends, especially in Iran. He can be easily manipulated, which is what we suspect is happening. Saleh is running this whole thing. He's imperious to dialogue. And, you know, one of the best indicators is that the Taliban sent a hefty delegation to the Panjir to talk, including 40 Islamic scholars.   No, Islamic scholars and nothing happened. They have been trying to explain to Massoud that it's counterproductive to what they're trying to do now, which is to organize an inclusive government to have an insurgency in the Panjir. And we all know that the Panjir, first of all, is the natural fortress. You cannot get in. It's absolutely impossible to get in and to get out. There's only one road, actually. I took this road 20 years ago, in fact, at the time was not a road. It was basically an ancient Silk Road trail. And we were in a Soviet ship, which was the only way to negotiate that road. That's it. Maybe now the road is better, but that's it. That road goes east to Faisabad, the capital of Badakshan province, which, by the way, now is controlled by the Taliban as well. So they are surrounded on four sides. The Taliban controls the whole area. They are in their natural fortress. They don't have a lot of equipment as far as all the best local sources tells us. And it's a stalemate, which is absolutely horrible, because there's also an inside, an internal division among the Taliban. The old school guys, Mullah Baradar, you know, the generation of the 90s, let's put it this way, they are now they are much more moderate. There is a new breed, which is very well educated. Those that speak fluent English, like Sohail, Indoha, like a guy called Abdul Abdul-Kadir Al-Balki, who's in charge of the cultural commission in Kabul. Extremely well educated. These guys are 26, 27. Anas Hakkani, he's 26. These, this is the new breed, diplomatic Taliban generation. But there are a lot of lunatics in the mix as well. And it's very hard for Mullah Baradar and the leadership to control these people. And they are already saying, now let's go to the Panjina. Let's kill everybody, essentially, including Massoud Junior, which would be a really bad move, because then it would radicalize the whole of Panjir and vast stretches of the Tajik North, which they conquered before they arrived in Kabul, easily, by the Pashtun way, negotiating, cajoling, offering bribes, direct and underground.  This is the Pashtun way. And in fact, this is the way they won the 11 day war. In fact, they started winning that years ago. And the last stretch, not only the African National Forces collapse, but they're negotiating powers with different tribal elders in different parts of the country where they didn't even have access. For instance, the Tajik dominated North and that part in the Northwest, which is very close to Uzbekistan when they conquered Shebergan. This was all negotiation, barely a shot, in fact. So they cannot do what they might do in the Panjir. The optics will be absolutely horrible internally, of course, and globally. So this is to give an introduction where we are at the moment. And this is terrible because today is Wednesday, right? Two days before they announced on Friday, the new government, which is going to be quite something because the negotiations in Kabul at the moment, wow, it's just there are a few leaks here and there. What we do know is that it's pretty hardcore because, once again, internal dissension. And we have the two major articulators, which are basically in the eyes of many Taliban, not the old school leadership, Baradar and company. They are NATO people. Hamid Karzai, former president, and Abdullah Abdullah. And there is a council of three in the beginning who was more or less organizing the discussions. It was Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Bomber of Kabul, turned America's most wanted, turned politician, Gubuddin Hekmatyar. So they put Hekmatyar on the corner for a while. Now it's basically Karzai and Abdullah with Mullah Baradar's people trying to, OK, let's get our inclusive government in a way that we're not going to be completely ostracized by the Americans from day one, which is something that we will no more or less will happen, of course. But they have the backing of the people that really count the Eurasians. They have the backing of China, of Russia and even Iran. And that will make the whole difference. And we're going to see that this is very, very important. In fact, I'm sure a lot of people in the US don't know about this. The really important meeting in September is going to be the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Dushanbe in a little over two weeks from now. Why? Because the number one issue is going to be Afghanistan and Iran, most probably there's no 100 percent confirmation, but it's practically certain Iran is going to be admitted as a full member. So then we're going to have at the top of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and four Central Asian stands with Afghanistan as an observer, as well as Turkey. This is Eurasia integration on the move. And they're going to discuss what they have been discussing already for a few years now. And now is crunch time. Now it's the Holy Grail. How we are going to integrate Afghanistan into the organization and into this whole process of Eurasia integration that has to be for years now. Happy to have some bad news for the United States. How will they react to this? We have Maasoud, when Maasoud is writing from, you say, he's he's circled by the Taliban, but he has a op-ed in the Washington Post saying, send us American arms. So there I know, I know, it was how will the US respond to Afghanistan, the Taliban, this government of unity, if possible, will be recognized by the Shanghai. It was it was published in every major European newspaper as well, even before the Washington Post was out at at the major European papers. The problem is he has no stature and he's not he's not people. People don't even know him in Brussels, unlike his dad. You remember 2001 before 9 11, Maasoud went to the European Parliament at the time he was received like a war. A hero. In fact, everybody knew Maasoud in Brussels, in Strasbourg, in Paris, in London, et cetera. The son is an unknown quantity. He hasn't done anything. He hasn't proved himself. And the fact that he is allied with Saleh, which is you, I would say, universally the spies inside Afghanistan, including by Tajiks. He's an old Northern Alliance guy. But a lot of people inside the Northern Alliance, they despise him because this guy is he's been CIA from from the start and he was. And nobody knows him in Europe. Same thing. Was he the vice president vaguely? You know, even Gunny, Gunny never had an international profile, apart from some some parts of East Asia and Central Asia. But that's it, you know, but Joe, we don't know. In fact, Scott could answer what about the American reaction because this is basically. I would I would say the most important moment institutionally of the whole process of Eurasia integration, which is this has been my job for the past seven years. In fact, I write about this all the time and I travel to all these places before COVID all the time as well. And now it's it's the real, real thing. We were always discussing when are they going to have an important SEO with everybody sitting on the same table? It's not now it's the moment because finally they're going to have Iran. And finally, they're going to discuss Afghanistan as the most important issue that all of them have, not only Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India, etc. But of course, the the Central Asian neighbors, whose security is guaranteed by the Russians. So they're not worried. And the Russians are going to secure the whole area via the CSTO Treaty. And they have an absolutely outstanding base in Tajikistan. They have a base in Kyrgyzstan as well at the airport. In fact, so it's not a problem. And everything that moves in that area is under Russian surveillance, including the Vakhan corridor, which is exactly that board. OK, OK, let's have Scott talk about the possible. You asked for your questions. Yeah, right. Yes, go ahead. Well, first of all, I understand that the CIA is not a force for a global good. You know, it's it doesn't exist to do the right thing. The CIA is about promoting that it should be about collecting intelligence to inform policymakers, and there is an aspect of the CIA that does that. And they're they're pretty good at that. But especially since. Nine eleven, the CIA has been taken over by the paramilitaries. It has an expansive paramilitary operation whose job is not to collect intelligence, but to to disrupt to carry out operations of disruption. And what what Pepe is described as this coalescing of Eurasia is one of the greatest threats to American global hegemony that that that exists today.  When we're talking about a Eurasian network, we're talking about a synergy that that combines economic power with political power, with the kind of societal power that that that's beyond the scope of traditional transatlantic understanding. You know, this is Turkic. This is Asian. This is not something that we do well with. And, you know, here's the irony. The United States claims that it does not want to recreate the conditions that led to the chaos that allowed al-Qaeda and organizations like al-Qaeda to gain hold in Afghanistan, from which they could plot, you know, their their their their attack on the United States. I will say that the the actual plotting took place in Hamburg, Germany. But that's irrelevant. We claim that we want to engender stability in Afghanistan. I can guarantee you right now at CIA headquarters, there is a coterie of paramilitary officers who have spent the last 20 years cutting their teeth in Afghanistan. And they're saying, boss, this is our chance.  They become a cancer to Afghanistan. They become a cancer to the region. And we will be able to get regional allies that will support this, not the Russians, because in the old days, we used to operate out of Dushanbe. Prior to 9-11, you know, we had a Dushanbe chief of station who bought some helicopters in Tashkent and we'd fly helicopters with CIA operatives with money into the Northern Alliance. This is before 9-11 we were doing. Yes, I wrote in one of them, Scott, I wrote in one of them. I wrote in one of them. So, I mean, so you know this. But, you know, so we wouldn't replicate that. But as as director CIA director William Burns has said, the US military may be out of Afghanistan, but the CIA is not. We actually we have our most critical asset is Saleh. Saleh is a CIA goon. He's a man that will the Taliban will never make peace with this man. Saleh ran assassination teams, his units. You know, right now you have the CIA building up the glory of the of the zero units, zero one, zero two, zero three, zero four, glorious heroes all. And I mean, maybe they fought bravely, but they were created for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to assassinate Taliban leaders and to create hate and discontent of the Taliban ranks. They murdered the families of the Taliban. These are and yet these are the people that we flew out in the airplanes. They're coming to the United States. They're going to be absorbed into our society. Murderers, literal murders that we call heroes. But Saleh has a bunch of them with him right now. He has CIA communications and cryptic communications. I don't believe there's any Americans on the ground right now because that will require a whole level of thinking from Joe Biden that I don't think he's there yet. But we have American trained people who are just as good as Americans in terms of doing the basics. And there's going to be a discussion now that Joe Biden's National Security Council is going to be addressing that's going to come to a head now, as if he said, two weeks from now, they meet two weeks from now. And if we allow them to coalesce, if we allow them to become a reality, then we're in a lot of trouble because this becomes far more complicated than simply taking on Russia and taking on China, which is complicated. But because we're idiots, we tend to believe we can do this simultaneously. But now if you throw in this Eurasian reality, this conglomerate, we're doomed. And the CIA knows this. I mean, I'll say one thing for the CIA. They understand how the world works because you have to understand how the world works if you're going to disrupt the world. Yeah, that's what they do. They disrupt the world. This is not a force of good. And we have a whole bunch of very experienced paramilitary officers who are right now looking at Afghanistan, not as a defeat, but as an opportunity, an opportunity to do something bigger and better and brighter. And that's what's going to happen. I don't know. Maybe Joe Biden is a different kind of president. Maybe he's the president that can tell them no. There hasn't been a president yet that can tell the CIA no. For any number of reasons. But number one of which, and again, if you go back to what Chuck Schumer said about Donald Trump, he saw the intelligence community. They have six ways from Sunday just for you. All right. And because they play these are guys that have mastered the art of political warfare. They know how to leak things to the press. They know how to manipulate the press. They know how to do any number of things. They can make things go boom around the world that maybe you don't want to go boom. They can make governments fall. They can support other governments. And sometimes they do it with the permission of the president. Sometimes they do it on their own. They have ways to manipulate this thing. I mean, this is why I mean, I'm getting off track here, but I said that one of the greatest threats to America as a nation that supports to be a democracy is the CIA. And that the best thing we could do is to dismantle this organization, get rid of it. We have military intelligence capabilities that are just as good at collecting intelligence or better than the CIA. The military can do human intelligence. The State Department can do human intelligence without recruiting spies.  It means you're recruiting garbage. The average CIA officer, when they recruit, when you take a look at the people they've recruited over the years, none of them are any good. The best effectors are the walk-ins. They were the CIA didn't have to do anything. But the CIA says, we go out and we recruit. Well, you recruit prostitutes. You recruit taxi drivers. You recruit drug addicts. You recruit alcoholics. You recruit wife feeders. You recruit cow rapists. That's who you recruit.  We don't need that. We literally don't need this. I just want to jump in really quickly and just add, I mean, from what you're saying, it's really clear that our interference, that the war, so to speak, is not ending at this point. It's just transforming. And I'd like to just ask all of you to kind of comment on the way in which this transformation of this war could actually serve to really raise those tensions between the United States and Russia and China and really actually lead us further towards an open conflict with them. Yeah, it's going to, I have a question for Scott, just a little introduction before my question. Yes, it's repositioning and now it's going to become a very vicious shadow war. The way we see it and the way the Russians are analyzing it, the way the Iranians are analyzing it. Well, that's why they need something like a body like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to have a concerted policy, not only for the whole of Central Asia, South Asia, but especially to Afghanistan. They know that Saleh and whatever Afghan operatives he has with him, probably not many, but yes, certainly some guys from the Cost Protection Force, which are not in the US at the moment, they decided to stay for destabilizing reasons. And some of the old people that he controlled at National Directorate of Security, he was the head of the NDS as well. So these are the people who are with Saleh at the Panjir at the moment. There's an extra problem. He has no allies, nobody in the stands not to mention Pakistan or Iran, et cetera, once a civil war in Afghanistan or CIA-style destabilizing shadow army like they had before, exactly killing Taliban at random. In fact, this is the theme of one of my columns that you guys have republished, that I think one or two days before. Blowback the Taliban against the CIA shadow army. Yes, we learned from a source at the Ministry of Interior that the Taliban had, in fact, still have, the list of all the cost protection force and NDS people were directly involved in death squads going after Taliban and their families. So these were the guys they were after these past few days are, ah, they are knocking on the doors of translators, bullshit, this was serious, serious intel stuff. They were going after the guys who were killing them. For the past 10 years. So this is very, very serious. And we don't have many of them left in the Panjshir. They were nowhere else. They are in the Panjshir or they left to the US. So, and they won't get protection in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Forget it, out of the question. The Russians have their best intel on it all the time. And obviously they are sharing information with the Taliban as well. As much as the Taliban were sharing information with the Pentagon last week. You know, that's how it works. So I don't, my question to, let's say a technical question for Scott. Under these circumstantial Scott, how could this a very small, lily pad task force in the middle of the Panjshir could organize an effective shadow war operation, not only in Kabul, but in different parts of Afghanistan, considering that the Taliban controls now virtually the whole country. Pepe, you answered that question, whether you know it or not. The United States is smart enough. I mean, look, I know many of these guys that do this stuff. Personally, they're not bad guys. I have trouble sometimes dealing with their world view. They're purists. They believe that they were doing the righteous thing, that these are guys that many of them started cutting their teeth on, you know, we're standing up against communism. Then they bought into this whole, we're standing up against terrorism thing. And they're all frustrated. They're all drunks. They're all, because they can't handle the reality of that's happened. But they're smart enough to know that if you are going to build an anti-SCO operation, that's what we're talking about here. Yes, yes. An Afghan destabilization operation, the future of that does not rest with either Saleh or Masud.  What you have to do is create the conditions that create a new leader. And what you do is you encourage these guys to resist. You encourage the Taliban to move in and annihilate them. You encourage the kind of war crimes that will occur, villages slaughtered, Tadjik's murdered. You encourage this, you broadcast this, you proclaim it to the world that, aha, see, we couldn't trust these Taliban. This is who they are. And now the Northern alliance rises up from the ashes. Not with the old corrupt leaders, no more tostum.   A new Uzbek leader will rise up. A new Tadjik leader will rise up. A new Turkmen leader will rise up. And those are the guys that we will be working with. Those are the guys that we will empower with money and with equipment. And those are the guys that we will create something that is viable and capable. Not of taking over all of Afghanistan, we don't need that. We just need to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't become a model of success that glues the SCO together. We need Afghanistan to become a cancerous tumor that tears the SCO apart. And that I think is the strategy that is being, look, if I were sitting in the situation room and I were the CIA and I was tasked with this job, that would be my strategy. Because I think a lot like the guys that are, that actually do this for a living. I'd give a high degree of certainty that that's the direction they're leaning. There's nobody right now in the CIA that's saying, we should be working with the Taliban. Now, there's a certain, I can't say nobody, a Doha station that basically ran these negotiations. Negotiations. Is staffed with people who have learned to talk with the Taliban. They're deemed right now very dangerous people within the CIA because they're a voice of moderation. That's not the voice that the paramilitaries, the paramilitaries don't like these guys. They don't like these thick in the waist, thin in the neck, you know, bespeckled old men who speak about diplomacy. William Burns is the worst enemy of the paramilitaries though. He is a diplomat. And he is a minister who pushes us. So there will be a fight. But again, William Burns is an outsider. And anybody who has studied the history of the CIA knows that outsiders never survive an internal death match with the directorate of operations. The directorate of operations always wins. So, and then the other thing is the United States is in a very vulnerable position right now. I'm meaning that, you know, I always tell people, hey, don't panic, look at Vietnam. I mean, we got our, you know, we got run out of Vietnam and yet today we're friends. I said, you know, if you let the human nature run its course, we could very well be friends with the Taliban run Afghanistan, you know, 20, 30 years down the road, and that's not a bad thing. But you, if you tried to tell people in 1976 that we needed to become friends with the Vietnamese, they would tell you to pound sand because the emotions were too raw, too raw. And right now in the United States, the emotions about Afghanistan are too raw. The military, again, we have people that just don't know what to think. They all know that we weren't gonna win that war. There's a few die-hards to say, if you'd just given us the resources capable we could have done it. But almost every realistic person said we had to get out. But they all come up with, you know, there had to be a better way to get out. Well, the best way to get out of something is to get out. I mean, I'll give Joe Biden credit, he got out. He didn't mess around, didn't do this. But this is what happens in defeat. In defeat, people mull around and all. But understand that we're not defeated in the way the Japanese and the Germans were defeated. Okay, when the Japanese and Germans were defeated, they had nothing. Hell, we're still a superpower. Our military didn't get beat. We didn't have our colors captured by the enemy and paraded down Moscow. We didn't have our military leaders hung by the neck until dead for war crimes. Our military is intact. Our military was not defeated. You know, this isn't a myth. This isn't, you know, the German stab in the back at the end of World War I. This is a reality. Our military was not defeated. Not defeated. And they'll tell you, we weren't defeated and they're telling the truth. Nobody beat them. The politicians beat them by giving them an impossible task that couldn't be accomplished. But the point is, there is not an appetite for moderation outside of a handful of people in the Biden White House and in Doha Station. The vast majority of Americans are looking for revenge. Not Americans, but well, I mean, yes, Americans. Again, if we take a poll of the average American right now, if you told them, okay, option A, peace, love and happiness with the Taliban. Option B, kill as many Taliban as possible. Option B would get more votes. Yeah, yeah. Because we want revenge. Scott, you did say before Pepe joined us that the U.S. military was destroyed maybe by what happened. They cannot fight a war against Russia and China anymore because of the waste in Afghanistan. No, they're saying it wasn't defeated though. No, well, again, we didn't lose a battle. But remember, you can win every battle and lose the war. And which is what we did in Afghanistan. What I mean by that is that in order to fight Russia and China, we have to have a military that is singularly focused on combined armed warfare, modern warfare. Instead, we spent the last 20 years ripping up the magnificent military that we built during the Cold War and turning it into this low-intensity conflict, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency amalgamum that while they didn't get beat, they didn't win. But now that we've pulled it out, we don't have the ability to fight toe-to-toe with Russia anymore because we don't have the seventh core sitting in Germany with three armored divisions, three armored infantry divisions with artillery and the logistics and everything that's necessary to wage that kind of war. Got a couple brigades with some strikers. We got one armored brigade, but 300 tanks, they'll be dead within a week. And we can't reinforce them. We've got no depth right now. In China, the Marine Corps had to absolutely redo its entire existence. I mean, the General Berger came in and said, if you want me to go to war against China, we have to stop being the Marine Corps that existed for Afghanistan. And even during the Cold War, you got rid of tanks. You got rid of military police. He's restructured to fight littoral warfare. And even then, that may not be enough because even if the Marine Corps can do it right, nobody else can. So that's what I meant that our military because of 20 years in Afghanistan has destroyed its ability to fight the kind of fight necessary to take on a Russia or a China. There's an extra element applied to Afghanistan, Scott, Joe, everybody. They lost the war because essentially because they didn't have grounding tell. It's simple as that. Okay, I'll introduce a multi-Pytonish element to the whole thing. You know what's the best analysis of the U.S. in Afghanistan? War machine, staring bread pit. It's better than any 10 million word council of foreign relations analysis. Why? Because it was based on Michael Hastings book, which by the way is excellent, the operator. And Michael actually talked to everybody that was around General McChrystal at the time. And it's absolutely outstanding because they didn't have a sense of mission. They didn't know what the mission was, apart from that management school rhetoric by McChrystal. Their grounding tell was less than zero because there were no, you know, even when the war was over, you know, even when there were staged encounters where McChrystal would arrive by helicopter and meet the local elders. And then deliver a speech and two or three would raise their hands and say, okay, very nice, but please go away. This is our land. You don't talk to Pashtuns like this. You know, this is basic social anthropology, which is something that I'm sure McChrystal and company never studied. Even though they're fabulous social anthropologists in the West. If you understand a little bit of the Pashtun mentality, you would go there. You would stay with them for a while. You would break bread with them. You understand the local tribal problems. You would have Ashura, a council with the tribal elders. You would listen to them because in Ashura, it's not you speaking.  Everybody has the same rights. They raise their hands, they talk. They can talk for one hour if they want, everybody listens. Everybody talks and in the end, they reach a consensus. And if you have a foreigner in the middle, you can also vote for the consensus as a foreigner. You are their esteemed guest. This is how it works. McChrystal and company never did that.  Especially these areas that are extremely hardcore, like Helmand province, there's nothing in Helmand province. I'm sure Scott knows that. It's a huge desert with two or three villages and one big city, Lashkarga, that's a big city. It's a big village, in fact. And that's it. So you have to go to all these places and talk to the local people. There's no other way. I remember another stupid example, but I would say very illustrative to our discussion. 2002, I was in Kunar province with an excellent fixer, fluent in Urdu and Pashto. He was my guy. And you know what we were doing? Tracking Hekmatiar, which was the big, big thing at the time, you know? So we were just a couple of guys, hitching rides, taxis and tracking Hekmatiar. And we bumped into the Marine Corps with the whole Paraferdalia, you know? First time they said, what are you doing here? I presented myself as a, look, I'm a journalist. He's my fixer. And we heard a lot of stuff. We want to see where the tribal elders are. We want to talk to them because apparently Hekmatiar is here or has been here or will be here. There's going to be a huge meeting. So in the end, after the three or four encounters, the Marines started to ask us about local information. In fact, I asked my fixer who was fluent in Pashto and talked to everybody. So he knew more than this million dollar Marine detachment in the middle of Kunar province. Once again, ground intel. This is how it works, you know? Not to defend the Marines. They're not trained. I know, I'm sorry, no offense, Scott. No offense. No, but I'll say this, you hit the nail on the head.  And we fumbled that badly, not because of the guys on the ground. The CIA actually had some very talented teams in place that pinpointed bin Laden's location. We supplemented them with a number of special forces and special operations for two different things. Special forces are the Green Berets. They're trained in carrying out unconventional warfare, including the recruitment and training of guerrilla armies, which I'll get back to in a minute. Then we have our special operators who are purely assassins. They close with it, destroy the enemy or whatever it means necessary. And we have bin Laden up in Khoraborra and we could have killed- In Khoraborra, I was there. We were there, but I'll tell you a story about that after we finish. Well, the point is we blew it. We blew it not because of the special operations guys, but because the American leadership, the Bush administration down in Runschfeld didn't want to commit what was there.  Spot on. And they wouldn't do that. So we allowed everybody to flee. Now, we move into, we have to get past, you know, Thakur Ghur and Shahi Khot, which was in March, another big, big set-piece battle. But the difference there is that the military did commit. We did send in the 10th Mountain Division and we started to engage in this conventional warfare. And here's the problem. We had some very talented special forces guys, guys from the seventh group. We're very good at what they did. I mean, you can watch 12 Strong.  But the reality is we sent in these A teams, the detachment, and they met with the locals. They bonded with the locals and they turned them into an effective fighting force that defeated the Taliban. And now these guys who are trained to do exactly what Pepe said, these guys know, how do you deal with this?   If you're just patient enough to listen, they will tell you what the answer is. And then you do that. And that's what these guys were trained to do. And they were very good at it. And they would come in and gradually take control of a valley and gradually, when I say take control, let the locals take control. Let the locals tell you what needs to be done. And it was wonderful and victorious. And then big army said, what's going on down there? Oh, well, we got some Taliban elements, but we're gradually neutralized. No, no, no, you got Taliban, stand in the army! Who are these guys laying on line?  And they're also going, you just ruined everything we were doing. Oh, but we killed 12 Taliban. Dude, 10 of the guys you killed weren't Taliban. The two that you killed, who cares, they're going to replace them with 400. With 400 exactly, yeah. And that's the thing. We have the capability of doing this kind of stuff, but we don't trust it because we don't trust the Afghan people. And that's the problem. We never were willing to sit down and listen to the people of Afghanistan who were willing to tell us what was necessary to win. And I'll just leave with this. I knew the war was lost. Because at the same time, you're talking about the operators, but Crystal, and I'm sure you've heard the name, Harry Tunel. Colonel Harry Tunel. Yeah, yeah. Harry Tunel is a friend of mine. I mean, and I have the highest respect for Harry Tunel. He's been muddied by, as a war criminal and all this. Harry Tunel is a warrior's warrior, okay? You don't get a better warrior than Harry Tunel. I knew we lost the war in Afghanistan when I saw how they treated Harry Tunel. Harry Tunel was trained to go into Iraq. And Pepe knows this. I think everybody here knows it. Iraq was a different war than Afghanistan. Completely, exactly. And we stacked more bodies in Iraq than people ever know. And we trained to fight a different kind of fight.  You're going to be fighting the Sunni insurgency, fighting the Shia insurgency, but it's a different battle. And he trained for that. And Barack Obama decided, well, we're going to surge in there. We're part of this counterinsurgency thing. And we're going to help the Afghan secure for the election.  Yes, yeah, yeah. In vicious close-in combat. They said, now you're going to Afghanistan now. He said, okay, no problem. My boys can do anything. And Harry Tunel went to the national training center to train for Afghanistan. And everybody who's pulled, all the McChrystal people were pulling their hair. They said, what are you doing? He said, trained to kill the Taliban.   That's what we do. We don't do anything else. He was being honest. He was telling the army, I don't do counterinsurgency. If you want counterinsurgency, if you want that, bring in the special forces, bring in the Green Berets. If you're bringing in my brigade, all I do is kill people. That's all I do. I can do, you know, pass out money. I can build bridges and all that stuff.  And they never let them do it. They screwed, I mean, that the few times that he started getting some traction, they threw him in a valley. The Angar, I'm going to butcher the name, the Angarab Valley outside of- Then Eastern Afghanistan, maybe Kandahar? Outside of Kandahar. Kandahar, maybe. Okay, outside of Kandahar. All right. Okay. The Canadians who were there, who never rallied out, said they got about maybe 30 Taliban in there. No big deal. A couple of arms, no big deal. Harry Chinnell sent in his group, found that there's 500 Taliban organized in a battalion level with an in-depth defense throughout the entire system. And he said, this is the fight that I want. And he sent his guys in and he killed them, slaughtered them. They killed his guys and people started to panic. You're losing men. That's what war is, man. We're closing with the enemy. We're destroying them. We're pushing them out. And Harry was thinking conventional combat. Right. Now he could have killed all the town. He still wouldn't have won because at the end of the day, he didn't have the loyalty of the people. But the point is we, the US government destroyed Harry Chinnell's career because he was the most honest man there. He came back and wrote a letter to the secretary of the army. And he said, let's talk about Afghanistan. He said, first of all, please don't start talking about women's rights when basically misogyny is in the DNA of every Pashtun male. You want me to be allied with Pashtun male? Yeah, it's different, Scott. I know, look, Harry Chinnell is not. Yeah, it's more complicated than that. It's more complicated than that.  Of course it is. And we have to respect that. And that's why this Green Beret guys did well.  Differently, yes.   I can't train them to drive a car when they've never driven a car and they don't know how to read, they don't know how to maintain the car. This is a joke, what you're asking us to do. We're doomed to fail. The point is that the experience of Harry Chinnell's brigade should be studied by everybody when you wanna know why we lost the war in Afghanistan. Because the army isn't trained to do counter, you're absolutely correct.  But that wasn't the solution for Afghanistan either. The solution was bringing in the Green Berets who would sit down and hold the Shuras. That's not sexy. You're not stacking bodies. You're not capturing terrain. You're not holding objectives. And our politicians couldn't handle it. Our military leadership couldn't handle it. And the ultimate reason why is we didn't know why we were in Afghanistan. Of course. We didn't know why we were in Afghanistan. Nobody could answer that question. You can't start to do something unless you have an ultimate objective. And at the end of the day, the CIA found out the easiest way to be seen as doing the ultimate objective is to buy everybody. And we just went in and we bought, ask yourself why these district governors, these district officers were living in mansions that would make Hugh Hefner jealous. Because they were receiving $100,000 a week in cash from the CIA. Ask yourself why anything happened in Afghanistan. It didn't happen because the government was functioning properly. It happened because the CIA would prime the pump with money. The CIA was experts. Talk to these guys. They'll tell you how much a million dollars and a hundred dollar bills weighs. What's the best way to shrink wrap it? What's the best way to carry it? Man, if you know this, that means you're bribing people. And they said, we would just carry in, backpack some money and just hand it off to people. And you could get short-term objectives done that way, but you don't build a government that way. You don't build a society that way. All you do is create corruption. Anyways, I'm rambling right now, but we were never focused on what needed to be done to win Afghanistan. Winning in Afghanistan was the simplest thing. Sitting down and listening to the Afghans. You know this, Pepe. When we first went in there and got out to Taliban, Iran was telling the United States, you've got to form a loyal jerker. You've got to form a loyal jerker. You've got to bring all the tribes together and have this wonderful council. And they will pick the leader. And they will succeed. Iran was interested in this because they were having a hard time in the Taliban. They didn't like the Taliban. They were sort of thrilled that we went in there and got rid of them. But now Iran's saying, we need a stable Afghanistan. We need to do this to hold a loyal jerker. We did hold a loyal jerker. Not in Afghanistan, held it in Germany. In Germany, exactly. Yeah, instead of bringing in the tribal leaders that needed to be brought in, we handpicked them. But even then, it could have worked if we had sat there and listened. But instead of listening to them, we said, oh, okay, thank you for coming to our meeting. And here's Hamid Karzai. He's the next leader of Afghanistan. That's exactly how it happened. And they were absolutely pissed. You know that the majority of the population at the time, they were expecting King Zahir Shah. They wouldn't like that. Everybody was sure that, ah, the king is gonna come back from Rome. He's gonna be the next leader. And a few days later, Hamid Karzai, parachuted by the Americans somewhere near Kandahar.  And I remember because we were in Kabul already and they sent a bloody UN mission. And they gave this press conference. And I was like, Jesus Christ, these guys come from Brussels to lecture Afghans in Kabul about their next leader. It's a theater of the absurd thing. And obviously the press conference, there was no Afghan media at the time. Of course, at the time there was no Afghan media. It was immediately after the fall of Kabul.  Well, okay, another thing, complimenting what you were saying, ground intel again. Tora Bora. You know what happened in Tora Bora? They were getting their ground intel from a commander that they had bribed with a lot of money. His name was Hazrat Ali. He was the command, a Pashtun of a sub-tribe in Eastern Afghanistan. In fact, he's the guy, I was with a British friend of mine and he allowed us to be on the frontline, which was sleeping with the Mujahideen in a former Taliban weapons depot, which could be hit by the al-Qaeda's on the other side at any time. But we had the kamikaze spirit at the time. And then we were start to talk to the local Mujahideen and they said, ah, they're bombing the wrong mountains. They should be bombing that mountain over there, not that one over there. We know where the al-Qaeda are because we are intercepting their radio comps. So they were passing wrong ground intel. Obviously the Americas were bombing the wrong mountains, which means that by that time, when you were there, I think beginning of December, end of November, Osama Al-Zawiri and his Yemeni bodyguards had already left Torah Bora and they tracked, it was, I don't know how they did it because it's a 50 kilometer track. What you, Scott, were saying exactly a few minutes ago, that border was absolutely easy to cross. And they ended up in a small town in Pakistan called Parashinar after tracking 50 kilometers over the hills and mountains. No surveillance, no electronic surveillance, no US planes, nothing was so easy because they were convinced that they were still in Torah Bora. And the Mujahideen then told us, ah, we don't care. We just want our money. I remember we were there in the front line. A special forces team shows up and then they see two journalists. They obviously didn't like it. They said, what are you doing here? I said, well, we're journalists. We got a chance to be here, we're here. So we got there before they did. You know, everything was multi-Pitan, in fact. So only later we learned that the leadership of al-Qaeda had already left. More or less simultaneously when the bombings started, they had already left because they knew the Americas were coming. They knew the B-52s were coming. So they had time to prepare. I think they were also, I think your buddy Ali was in constant communication with them and they cut a side deal. Yeah, they cut a side deal. Exactly, Scott. But this is how it works in Afghanistan. Everything in Afghanistan is a side deal. Everything, everything, you know? And that's how tribal elders switch allegiances that's how former Taliban fighters switch allegiances.  That's how it works. If you don't understand how. I learned this, again, through academics, but if you study, and I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but King Amanullah back in 1928, 29, 30, just study that period of time where he was making an alliance with former Basmachi and then you had Nadir Khan, who was a general with the Pashtun tribes. And then you had this guy Habibullah and Ataji who came down and took over and ruled for a while. But you look at all this complexity and you're saying, well, my goodness, so there's a lot of players. No, it's really not a lot of players. It's just a lot of players changing sides. Changing sides, yes.  And then the next day, somebody else would have a better conversation and he'd win. And that's when I realized that we're never going to succeed because I was studying the British. The British had their intelligence people in Afghanistan trying to control the situation. Control the situation, exactly. And it became clear that the British were never going to control this. And once I realized that and the light bulb went off and that was sometime in the early 1980s when I was graduating college and putting a lot of effort, studying that, I took a look at Afghanistan. I realized, I said, the Russians are never going to win because no matter what happens today, the Afghans are going to have a conversation tonight and the situation is going to change tomorrow. Change tomorrow, exactly. And it was the same thing. Their grounding tell was not good enough. In fact, that grounding tell only was good at the end. For instance, they left. Remember that absolutely well organized withdrawal in February. In February, 89. It had started in May, 88. They withdrew for a period of seven or eight months. And this was organized with the local tribal chiefs. And at the end, the last brigade, it was negotiated with Masoud himself. Masoud left the salang tunnel open. He said, nobody's going to attack you guys while you're leaving. I control the salang tunnel, it's open. You can leave it any way you want. Once again, good intel, local negotiations. Very simple. The best intel we had against the Taliban took place the last couple of weeks. We actually talked about it. Exactly. When we sat down and talked to them, we had the best intel possible. And the best result. I mean, it was tragic. Again, the 13 Americans and the hundreds of Afghans who lost their lives and the whole situation. I mean, that's just a different story altogether. But the fact of the matter is the takeaway from this, and again, I just wish I could go to the White House situation room and sit in on these meetings. Because my takeaway is, if you just sit down with the Taliban and listen to them. Exactly. They will tell you what the solution is, and the solution will be the best thing you could ever hope for. Just listen to them.  Don't try to dictate a solution. But unfortunately, arrogance is in the American DNA. I mean, if we were not... When you are a hyper-power and a hubris, always them. I wanted to jump in really quickly and just ask a couple of rapid-fire questions. First of all, on the issue that I think a lot of the media is covering, that we haven't really talked about here a lot yet. And that is the way that the rights of women are being used, essentially in the propaganda narrative around this exit. And I wanted to ask you about that. To comment on that, especially in light of the stuff that we don't hear about in the media, our support, for example, of Saudi Arabia, their terrible treatment of women and human rights in general. So if you could just comment on that, because I think that's something the media is really covering intensely in a very dishonest way. Yes, Elizabeth, I agree with you. And well, it's too early to tell because first we need to see the composition of this government. For instance, if they're gonna have women in this minishura, we don't know for sure. Even Shiites, we still don't know if they're gonna have Shiites in the inclusive government. Probably yes, because Abdullah Abdullah is pressuring for it. Second, how this is going to develop in the first few months? For instance, no interference in education in girl schools, no interference in the University of Kabul. Nobody knows. The promises are there. The guy who's, I would say, the number one Taliban guy responsible for it is that guy that I mentioned before, Abdul Qadir Al-Balki. He's in charge of something called the Taliban Cultural Commission, which implies civil rights, human rights, women's rights, et cetera. This guy is very well-educated, speaks fluent English. It's very interesting. I still can pinpoint where he comes from, apart from bringing from famous bulk where Alexander the Great arrived and was like, ah, I wanna live here. But that was 2500 years ago. He probably studied in a very good university, maybe in Qatar. It's very well-archiculated. So he's the guy who will be in charge of all this. Not the old school 1990s generation. So it's a waiting seat. They have promised all that. We still don't know. And considering that they are clashes inside the leadership, the 1990s generation, the new generation radicals and the new generation diplomats. So there are at least three factions. We still don't know, right? So, well, obviously the way it's being covered by Western media, not only American, European, if you read French, German, Italian, media is the same thing. There's gonna be a Holocaust of women tomorrow. No. And because they learned their lessons. I remember during Talibanistan, in fact. I remember very well. It was a horror story. There's a column that I published yesterday from my travels at the time. And I'm gonna send it to you guys as well. We managed to do something pretty amazing at the time. We managed to interview three Shiite, Hazara girls who never left home in a bombed out Kabul neighborhood. And they were absolutely terrified. They couldn't leave home. They had a cousin that went out to buy food. And they were literally hostages of the bombed out house they were living. So this was the situation of, especially Shiite, Hazara women at the time. And I went to the University of Kabul at the time. There was no University of Kabul. And the director was an Imam. So they're not gonna do the same thing again. That's for sure, we know that. But wait and see. I'll say this, I'll start off with this little war story. I went to Iran right after Ahmad Dinejad was elected. And I was there to do some research on the nuclear aspect of things. But I was able to meet with my, I gotta be careful what I say. I was able to interact with some guys from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. IRGC guys, top IRGC guys, great. Yeah, and they, and these guys, we're now talking 2005. And it's, but these are guys that joined in 1979. They were the street fighters. They were the guys who brought the MEK to heal through vicious fighting. And these are the guys that were sent abroad to assassinate the MEK. So these are basically street boys from Tehran who got bloodied in some very violent action. Some of them hunted down the Kurds in the vicious fighting that took place there. Where Ahmad Dinejad, by the way, cut his teeth and so did Qasim Suleimani. But then they got sent to places like Paris and Berlin to carry out these assassinations. And they came back and they'd go to their bosses. And the guy would say, you know, the most moderate people in the IRGC today are the assassins that came home. Because they saw the West and they said, whoa, boss, boss, it ain't all bad. Yeah, we don't, you know, you think it's all about chasing women and drinking whiskey. We see it's about trains running on time. We see it about fully stocked stores. We see a functioning economy. And you know, we can't be against the West in totality. We need to actually work with the West. And so I brought that up by saying that in the past 20 years, all the street thugs, all the mountain boys that were hardcore Taliban, the Talib, the poor boy from Kandahar that was sitting in a madras with rogue memory of the Quran who fought and bloodied himself.  I mean, it was a bad news. There's no defending any of it. They survived the slaughter that was brought to bear on the Taliban in 2001, 2002. And they went off to live in places like Pakistan. They went to places like in Doha. They traveled throughout the Middle East. They went to Indonesia. Not to spread the revolution, but to survive, to get educated. And they saw things and they realized, whoa. One of the reasons why nobody came to our assistance in 2001 is because we sucked. We were pretty bad. We were awful too. If we wanna survive, we gotta get better. We gotta get better at being who we are. We have to redefine who we are. And these are the guys that we're seeing today. Now, let's talk about women for a second. I think one of the greatest disservices the United States ever did in the West was to breathe hope of a kind of society that would integrate women in Afghanistan that could never exist in Afghanistan without foreign intervention.  Well, the women of Kabul will be sacrificed. Travel 30 miles outside of Kabul. Go to Jalalabad. They're wearing burkas. They've been wearing burkas for 20 years. And we didn't do a damn thing about it. You know why we have female engagement teams in the Marine Corps? Because our men can't engage with women because women are segregated. So we had to bring in female engagement teams and train them so they could go and talk with the women. So there's a reality, there's this perception that somehow all of Afghanistan was liberated that women were running around burning their bras and wearing mini skirts and doing disco dancing and all this kind of stuff. No, the vast majority of Afghanistan was living as Afghanistan has always functioned with women.  We are honored by our men, you know, our men cherish us. And I will tell you this too, and Pepe, you know this, it's the same thing, it's true with Saudi Arabia. I'm loathed to defend Saudi Arabia about anything, but go inside a Saudi home. Now women ain't wearing a burka, she's dressed to the nines and she interacts with her family on a very, very different level than what you see in public. Now, if a stranger comes in, the women will immediately cover up their lives in the background.  The queen of the castle is the woman. Absolutely. I think another important aspect of this is that when the media talks about this whole issue, we're not, there's no accountability taken for the US's role in helping overthrow a government that was relatively liberal in Afghanistan, you know, in the 1970s, that's not discussed. It's just all of this issue now about the Taliban versus this Western liberation, as you said, so it's very dishonest. The interesting thing is, you know, if you take a look at Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, you know, back in the pre-Soviet era, the women were treated much as they are today. And the whole Basmachi revolt, I mean, again, I'm going back to my academic roots, but the whole Basmachi revolt was a societal rejection of the modernization that was being brought in by the Soviets, and it took the Soviets decades, decades to turn things around so that women could go to university, women could be integrated in society.  Women still have rights, they're still there. And the thing is, in the 70s, Afghanistan was going down, even though they, you know, we called them Western, they were going down a path that mirrored the Soviet experience in terms of converting the society, not through force of arms, but through force of modernity by bringing in hydroelectric plants, by bringing in electricity, by modernizing agriculture, by getting people educated, taking the time to educate a generation, then they get that generation out there. The Soviets have a long-term view on how this needed to be done, because they experienced it. You know, the Soviets didn't win over Central Asia by killing everybody. They won over Central Asia by, guess what? Sitting down and listening, listening to them and saying, this is what we're going to do, we're going to respect religion, we're going to do this, even during Stalin, they sat down and listened.  There was brutality, of course there was. But the point is, if you're talking about, we're talking about women's rights, women's rights are far more advanced in the former Soviet republics than they are in Afghanistan, because the Soviets took the time. You know, we came in and we wanted shake and bake liberation. You know, that's what it is. We wanted them to take the time to build the necessary foundation of societal understanding and acceptance, to get the Pashtun male to agree that the best thing for Pashtun society, Pashtun tribal culture and Islam was to get women to be a participant in society in a way that reflected modern thinking, not Western thinking, modern thinking. Iran, again, serves an example. I'm not going to sit here and say that women have a wonderful on Iran. But they do, compared to women in Saudi Arabia. There's no comparison at all.  It is, you know. Maybe they don't drive well. This is a power, yeah. But the men, we know who runs it, the men run it. But the point is, in Iran, the women are far more liberated than Saudi Arabia. So there's just different ways of approaching this issue. But even Saudi Arabia now, MBS recognizes that 30 years from now, Saudi Arabia's got to change or it's going to die. So they're talking about creating certain areas where women are being elevated in a micro-society to experiment. How does that work? How does men and women working together work? How do we learn from that and then adapt it to the larger society? So, you know, there's hope for the women of Afghanistan. It's going to be tragic for the women today because they were given expectations that Afghanistan will never live up to.   It was a tough life.  They'd say, yeah, but it sucks to be a farmer right now.  But if people take the time and this is where the SEO comes in handy because the SEO is comprised of nations that have not perfected the art of integrating women because women, even in societies like the United States that claim to be perfect women are oppressed in many ways. You know, but they have made progress in integrating women and they can provide that kind of role model to Afghanistan saying this is the path towards success. This is how you succeed. And all those moderate Taliban that traveled around the world and saw this, know this. And that's where there's not going to be, there's not going, now look, if you're a prostitute in Kabul you're probably going to get stoned at them. Yeah. Exactly. So that's just the way it is.  But the Taliban isn't going to do that the way they used to do it. I think the days of dragging the women out into stadiums and- And that's over, it's over, yeah, yeah. Over, because they understand optics. And again, I'm not going to say that this is the ideal situation. How can you have an ideal situation after 40 years of war that have destroyed society? That have reinforced the very Pashtun misogynistic tendencies that we wanted to correct we only reinforced them after 40 years. Understand what beat us is traditional Pashtun society. That's what beat us. Yeah, exactly. So not a Pashtun tribal culture that said, let's moderate, let's do this. No, Pashtun culture that went in on itself like a turtle with that hardened shell and rode out all the violence that we could inflict. And they emerged victorious, but women continue to wear the burqa and be subordinate. Now, if you want to change that, you've got to offer them a different path than conflict than war. And the moderate Taliban see that and recognize that. And I just wished to God that we had enough people in Washington, DC that would respect this instead of strangling the Afghan economy by sanctioning and freezing assets would say, no, what we're going to do is work with you and we're going to come up with a methodology to relinquish these assets to you and we're going to promote economic engagement.  And there's a CIA guy that's saying, nope, we don't want to strengthen the SEO. We got to go in there and we got to mix things up.   Because now, Scott, is the ultimate of Brazilian nightmare plus two. In fact, it's not one peer competitor. It's a strategic partnership of peer competitors. This is the ultimate nightmare for them. It's three peer competitors. It's Russia, China, and the Eurasian. And Iran, exactly. And Iran is almost a peer competitor. Exactly. And just one last question. Elizabeth, just one thing, answering your question. Do you know there are no women issues in the stunts? At least the three most important ones. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. My last trip was a year and a half ago. You should see the level of the universities in Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Western level, top level universities. Women all over the place. Same thing, capital of Kyrgyzstan. Excellent, including an American university, Bishkek as well. Tajikistan, in the countryside, you go in the middle of the Pamir Highway. Life has been the same for 2,500 years. And village life, men and women. They have one of those beautiful shawls, colored shawls. That's it. Perfectly integrated. They work everywhere. They work in small government offices, banks, et cetera. No issues. An interesting point. Because the media right now would have us believe that US intervention is required to create any type of progress. And so that really speaks to that point. One last quick question before I pass it back over to Joe. And that is about the viral comments that were made by Juliet Assange in 2011, but have received a lot of attention recently, where he describes basically the war in Afghanistan as the Western general Europe in the United States, sort of laundering money through warfare from the tax base into transnational security corporations. I just wanted to really quickly have you guys comment on those comments, especially in light of Assange being imprisoned right now. Scott, you want to start? I'll start. Let me start off by saying this. That what Juliet Assange described was an accurate snapshot of reality that existed at the time he was speaking. But I caution anybody into saying that was the intentional result. Because that requires a level of competence and conspiracy amongst the military industrial commission complexion government that simply doesn't exist. We started Afghanistan with one model. What it became was not because of good planning. What it became was a result of incompetence. And then trying to make up for that incompetence by coming up with a new plan and a new plan. And shortcuts were taken. We have ways of doing business in the United States that are supposed to prevent this kind of corruption. But when you have a failure, a constant failure like Afghanistan, that is continuously being solved by making something up today that's supposed to succeed tomorrow. So all shortcuts are taken. What you get is the sea of corruption that was described by Juliet Assange. But it wasn't intended to be that way.  Had we done it correctly institutionally, but in all the checks and balances, you wouldn't have had that kind of corruption. But then again, if we were able to think that cogently, we wouldn't have been in Afghanistan to begin with. Well, Scott pretty much answered the question. I would say that I would only add this was what our friend Ray McGovern calls Missy Matt. It was a Missy Matt war, essentially. And the top industrial military complex companies, they made a killing out of it. And if you invested in them, you also made a killing out of it. So these were the real winners. Everybody else lost. Everybody else lost. Scott, I just want to thank both you guys for this tremendous discussion that you allowed all of us to watch and listen into. But I had just a small question about what happened at the airport the day on August 26th, the day of the suicide bombing. You probably have seen that the BBC, in particular, interviewed eyewitnesses who said that they were fired from above, that there were shooting come above. And there was an Afghan soldier who also said in another interview that he saw the bodies and the wounds seemed to come from above. The story that they're telling is that American and Turkish troops, either on that wall or in a tower there, panicked when the suicide bomb went off and just started shooting. Now, your experience as a Marine, and most of those Americans were Marines, I believe, in that instance, is that something unusual that if a bomb went off, that they would just start shooting everyone who they might think was the enemy? Or why would that reaction be if that indeed happened? Is that credible, in other words, that story? Let's parse it out. First of all, let's start with the Marines that are involved. These are Marines from a company, Gulf company, of a battalion, second battalion, first Marines that had been specifically trained up for a crisis response duties in the region. Fact is they had just come out of training in Jordan where they were working with a Jordanian army about crisis response. And crisis response isn't traditional combat. It's going into to rescue people in urban environments, et cetera. This is their training. And as a Marine, I will tell you that that training is beyond what an average civilian could imagine. And there's a depth. And Marines are trained through muscle memory to give you an example, ambush, counter-ambush drills.   Now, the average person will fall to the ground and assume a fetal position. The way the Marine Corps is trained is the second you receive fire, you orient on one segment so the leader or whoever survived because we accept we're going to lose that leader orients. And there's a direction of assault. And the Marines assault through the ambush, turn around, consolidate, and then move in and defeat the enemy by muscle memory. They do everything the opposite of what their body's telling them to do. And they do this successfully over and over and over again because they are extremely well trained. Now, the reason why I brought that up is the Marines that were out there amongst the crowd were people who were designated and trained to go out and find these, the people who had the appropriate paperwork and bring them in. And remember, the Marines were told, told that there was going to be a terrorist bombing. This was not a surprise attack. The Marines were told, you are going to have a suicide bomber coming in and blowing themselves up. And for that reason, the Marines were told, seal the gate, pull back. But the British went, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got about 150 people at the Baron Hotel. We got to get out. And the Marines said, we got to help our British buddies. So they kept the gate open, knowing they were going to be attacked, knowing they were going to be attacked.  They went, no, we can get one more. We can get one more. We can get one more. Now, the Marines that are on the wall are the designated marksmen. These are Marines that are handpicked for their ability to shoot, shoot. They don't panic. This is my point. Marines don't panic. They never panic because they're trained. And now you could say, well, they could panic if a bomb just went off out of the blue. They knew they were going to get bombed. They knew people were going to die. They said, we're going to sacrifice to get as many people out as possible. And so when the bomb went off, they were ready for it. Now, this is where things get tricky. The Taliban were there too. The Taliban lost 28 guys in that explosion. The Taliban have guns. The Taliban method of crowd control is to take an AK-47 and shoot it in the air. Sometimes if they really want the crowd to go, they shoot it at the crowd. So now the Taliban who are not as disciplined as the Marines, because the Marines are saying that a couple of gunmen from ISIS opened up afterwards. Okay, but they have yet to produce the ISIS bodies. And I will tell you that a designated marksman, if he's aiming at somebody, will know who he killed. So you have some Taliban who probably were misidentified by the Marines as ISIS gunmen who panicked and started shooting. And their shooting may not have been where it was because some of the Marines that are being treated were shot. Most of them, there's 20 wounded Marines right now at Walter Reed Hospital. And a certain number of them, not an inconsiderate number, were shot with gun wounds, which means that somebody in the crowd was shooting them. Now, my guess is that there weren't ISIS gunmen. There were panic Taliban who freaked out and started shooting to disperse the crowd. And some of that gunfire impacted on the Marine positions. And the designated marksman seen, because if you can tell me that you can distinguish between an ISIS K gunman and a Taliban gunman, you're the best intelligence analyst that ever walked the face of me. Exactly, exactly. There's no distinction between the two. So my guess is that the designated marksman on top started shooting. And then they were followed because it wasn't just Marines on the top. There were Turkish soldiers and there were these Afghan and zero commandos. And I can't vouch for the level of training of the Turks. I do know the Turkish military. I've worked with the Turkish military and they are disciplined, but I can't vouch for their level of training because I don't know it. I can vouch for every single Marine up there. They don't panic. There's no indiscriminate fire. That's not what they're trained to do. Marines don't spray and pray. It's well aimed shots at a target.  The Turks, I would like to believe they would do the same thing. The Afghans. The Afghans. The Afghans know the Afghans will panic because remember the situation they're in.  These are the CIA's trained goons that had been killing Taliban forever.  And all they're thinking is that those people come through have lost control of the perimeter and then I'm gonna die. I'm not getting out of the country. They spray and pray. And that's my guess is that the Afghan commandos who were on that wall opened fire in a very indiscriminate fashion. Thinking that that's what the Marines were doing. Not understanding that what the Marines were doing is putting well-aimed grounds into known targets. I can guarantee you every time a Marine pulled a trigger it was at a Taliban who carried a AK-47.  But the Marines did not just open up and indiscriminately spray down the crowd because they were specifically trained not to do that. And muscle memory takes over in a time of crisis when you have highly trained people. The Turks, I'd like to believe were trained in a similar fashion. I'm gonna give the Turks the benefit of the doubt because they are a professional military. But the CIA trained. The CIA trained the Afghan for a second. They don't have this kind of fire discipline. These are the guys that would launch night raids into a village and just kill people. Randomly, these aren't highly trained marksmen. These are just assassins. They're on top of a wall watching their entire ticket home disappear. They had to be thinking, my God, this is it. They're gonna leave, they're gonna abandon me. I've got to stop this. And they started opening fire. I will bet you a dime a dollar. That's how it went down. We don't know. And this allegation is serious, so serious that it has to be investigated. If I were still in the Marine Corps, and I was in a position of responsibility, I would investigate this, get the facts out. Because I'll tell you what, if the Marines were spraying and praying, that could never happen again. That's not what we do. That's not how we fight. We need to identify that. We need to make sure of that. We need to have every Marine account for every round fired. And believe me, again, because we're the Marine Corps, we know how much ammunition every Marine carried. And we know how much ammunition he reported in that night. So we know what he expended. And if he can't tell me that I put 20 rounds into the target and I fired three rounds at this guy, two rounds at this guy, and all these guys had weapons, because he's a Marine, he's trained. That's what he's trained to do. We're not amateurs. So I think this should be investigated, but I will bet you that the investigation will show that the indiscriminate fire, because it sounds like there was indiscriminate fire, came from the Afghan NSD commandos on the wall who panic, Marines don't panic. Scott, this is the best analysis so far.  And when I published my column, I struck out an absolutely key passage, which in the end I thought was too speculative. I was basically arguing that the guys who did the shooting were Afghan NDS. Exactly like your analysis, your interpretation. And I discussed this with the others, I said, look, I'm not sure. I have a guess considering their background and the way they were trained, but I'm not a specialist like you are. And I think you gave us the definitive answer, let's put it this way, considering the hazy, fuzzy circumstances. That was the most complete answer I've heard. And I appreciate you that Scott, since we're on this issue of the withdrawal, I don't know how much you experience you have or knowledge you have of evacuations at the end of a war. Well, Biden said yesterday that they're never gonna go smoothly, but Jim Jones, the national security advisor for Obama was quoted an NPR saying that normally you get civilians out first and then the diplomatic community and Afghan collaborators, he didn't call them that. And then the military leaves last. Is that normally how it should be done? That wasn't how it was done. They closed background air base, they got military. He had to send more soldiers back and Marines back in because to do the evacuation. So did Obama, excuse me, Biden screw up the withdrawal? I'm gonna, again, I have to give the, in the interest of a full disclosure, I hate Joe Biden and you know why, you know my background with him, you know my history with him. And I just view him as literally one of the worst human beings on the face of the earth.  Now the objective part, go on. Look, I just said full disclosure. So, the reason why I brought that up is I have to be very careful when I put on my analyst hat not to allow my disdain and feelings towards this man color analysis. I have to be fair and objective. If you take a look at the evacuation from Vietnam, you know they're calling this the largest evacuation in modern history. Well, Vietnam's not ancient history and we pulled 130,000 people out of Vietnam.  Now we did have a Vietnamese military that fought a little bit harder than the Afghan military. You know, there was some hard battles up by Hue and Quang Tri and Da Nang. Then they fought their way down and there was a big battle outside of Saigon where the first division fought and died gloriously if you're believing glorious death.  I mean, go take a look at the imagery of Air America lifting off from Hue and Da Nang and the CIA pilots punching Vietnamese in the face. Look at the bodies dropping off of those airplanes. Look at the will-wills when the planes landed in Guam that were filled with crushed Vietnamese who were hanging onto the airplanes. I mean, that happens when you abandon a population which we did. And, you know, the imagery they show that a UH-1 helicopter on the building in Saigon isn't the Marines taking people out. But that's the CIA taking off CIA employees that had been abandoned by the Marines because it was so chaotic. And then the other thing we don't, you know, a lot of people bring up but most people think about is that Vietnam was aided by the fact that it had this huge coastline. So everybody was able to run to the water and that's where we get the boat people. My family hosted boat people in April, May, June of 1995. People have fled. The wife of the family we hosted was a CIA employee. Worked for Air America. Her husband was a doctor and the kids were fantastic. One kid grew up to be a doctor.  He gave back to American society like you wouldn't believe. But my point is Vietnam was chaotic. Didn't cost Gerald Ford his presidency. Well, Gerald Ford sent Marines into Cotang Island. You want to talk about abandoning people? Sent Marines into Cotang Island to rescue nine Mayaguez seamen.  We thought they were on Cotang. We sent a Marine battalion in, a big firefight. We lost 31 Marines in combat. And when we pulled out, we left three Marines on the beach. We never leave a man behind. Well, we left three. They were captured by the Khmer Rouge and that subsequently executed. We didn't go back to get them. Didn't cost the president, didn't cost Ford his presidency. Now, Biden made a politically difficult decision. We're leaving Afghanistan. And he had everybody come at him and give him solutions that involved us, not leaving Afghanistan. Leaving a residual force, 2,500, et cetera. And the other thing is he got the intelligence wrong, just like we did. We thought the South Vietnamese would hold out forever. They didn't. We thought that, you know, we were making some assumptions based upon the Afghan government's ability to fight. It couldn't. Things collapsed. The Biden administration deserves kudos for having the courage to sit down and talk with the Taliban. Because the only reason why this thing unfolded as successfully as it is, because the Taliban let it happen. This isn't about the Americans going in and creating a situation that allowed us to withdraw our troops. That was all theater, theater of the absurd.  The fact that we didn't burn ourselves to death doesn't mean that it was a good plan. It was a bad plan. It was a bad idea. Putting 6,000 American troops into Kabul International Airport is like setting foot in a sea of gasoline. The Taliban at any moment could have turned this into dim bin food, could have turned this into Custer's last stand. They could have shut down that airport. They could have hit us with suicide bombers, hit us with mortars, hit us with artillery, overrun the airfield. We run out of ammunition and everybody there is dead or captured. That was the only outcome possible. We would never win that fight. It would have been one of the greatest defeats in American military history. But that's not what the Taliban was about. The Taliban was about letting us do what we wanted, what we needed to do to get our people out. And we achieved that by talking with the Taliban in Doha at the diplomatic level when General McKenzie went in and talked to them about setting up de-confliction. When William Burns flew in to Kabul and talked about post-August 31th arrangements that will be made to get Americans out. When General or Admiral Mosul of Astley, I think his name is former SEAL team six commander who used to lead those NSD zero teams and assassinated the Taliban, think about that for a minute, was engaged in multiple daily conversations with the same Taliban he tried to assassinate on coordinating things. We're now finding out that the Taliban were driving the buses that were going around the cities, picking up the Americans during the minute. The Taliban were doing everything we asked them to do. When we gave the Taliban intelligence, we went on and interdicted ISIS K fighters. This is why this evacuation succeeded to the degree it did. It was a cluster. So Biden may have politically has to say the right things. We'll get every American out.  We didn't get every American out of Vietnam. A lot of Americans were captured and killed by the Vietnamese. A lot of Americans had to make their way out clandestinely. A lot of Americans were captured and were held prisoner for a number of years before they were released, American civilians. We didn't get every American out of Vietnam. Gerald Ford didn't lose his presidency. We weren't gonna get every American out of Afghanistan. And yet they're talking about Joe Biden losing his presidency on this issue. No, we dodged the bullet. Afghanistan was a cluster, you know what? It was a bad scene. And yet we ended up getting 130,000 people out of there and we only lost 13 Marines. I view this as, again, this is hard for me to say, but I view this as a political victory for Joe Biden because he did what no other president was able to do. Get us out of Afghanistan. It was never gonna be pretty. It was never gonna be pretty. And thank God it wasn't as ugly as it could have. Scott and Pepe, this is probably my last question. Although I'll let you guys go for as long as you want. Bush, Biden made a speech yesterday and he sort of set down what could be called a Biden doctrine. He said the era of ground troops and ground wars to fight terrorism is over. He's gonna use this over the horizon, which is a chronic chilling euphemism warfare.  He didn't believe in that. He didn't think Afghanistan could ever be a democracy. Is this pronouncement that he made yesterday that he seems to wanna make world historic? Will it last more than the next three years of his presidency if he lasts that long in office? Or is this something that will have an effect for 15, 16 years like the Vietnam syndrome did? There was no major mass invasion by the US until the first of all four, which was 16 years after the fall of Saigon. Will this have an impact like that on the strategy of the military in terms of mass invasion? That'd be your turn. But I'm not gonna answer the question. I wanna go the Eurasian way, which from the point of view of the players here, this is irrelevant. They don't care. Why they don't care? Because the game is a completely different game for them. The game for them is a mix of what the Russians call greater Eurasia partnership, which is an official policy in fact, approved at the Kremlin level. And the Chinese, of course we know is the Belt and Road Initiative, the New Silk Road. And they are merging. And there was one missing, a key missing piece in the chessboard called Afghanistan. So from the perspective of my work and the fact that I work in Asia most of the time, this is what we're looking at in the long term. It's a new paradigm. It is, this is a major, major geopolitical game changer because finally we can have what they have been talking and implementing here and there in scattered places across this part of Eurasia. Now the fulcrum, the graveyard of empires, which was always a crossroads of civilization, then fabulous ancient civilizations, Bakhtriana, Sogdiana, the Sittians in the North, the Pashtuns, you know. Now they can try to put this country more or less back together or help them to put this country more or less help together and start to, their projects are going to go through Afghanistan as well. A few examples. The Chinese are going to build a highway from Peshawar to Kabul and from Kabul to Tashkent. What is this highway in practice? Eurasia integration. You are integrating central Eurasia with Central Asia, South Central Eurasia with Central Asia. You know, something that the Brits never thought about it or the Pak