WTH is going on in Afghanistan? Gen. Jack Keane on the US withdrawal, Taliban history
Episode #109 | June 30, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Gen. Jack Keane
Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.
Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on now?
Marc Thiessen: What is going on is that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is going faster than expected, and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is going faster than expected. The Taliban have taken more than 50 of the country's 400 districts since May as US forces pull out. And our intelligence community, which initially estimated that the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani could survive as long as two years once the US withdrawal was completed, has now cut that to perhaps as little as six months. There are some US officials who say the Afghan government could fall within three months of the US withdrawal.
Marc Thiessen: So the collapse of Afghanistan is what the hell is going on right now and all the gains we made since September 11, 2001 in taking that safe haven away from terrorists and their enablers.
Danielle Pletka: So for our listeners, we're having this conversation on a day that President Biden is meeting with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, his sometime partner in governing the state. They're here because they are watching the implosion of their country. And for those of us who have watched this situation for more than the 20 years since 9/11, I think the general sentiment is that the United States, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan, we've lost more than 2,000 troops, we have sustained the most serious attack on our homeland that was headquartered and planned out of Afghanistan, and the Biden administration is, within a few short months, frittering that away for I think as best anyone can tell no reason ... Marc, were you at that parade demanding a withdrawal from Afghanistan?
Marc Thiessen: No, I missed that parade, Dany. Didn't happen, no political pressure to do this. This is purely ideological, purely pressure from the isolationists, quite frankly, on the left and the right. But look here's the thing, a lot of Americans look at this and say, "Oh for crying out loud, we've been in Afghanistan for 20 years. We haven't
2 had another terrorist attack on our country. Okay, so Afghanistan falls, Taliban comes back, women are worse off, democracy is set back, why is that my problem? I don't want to risk my kids' lives for women's rights in Afghanistan. I'd like for there to be women's rights in Afghanistan but it's not worth billions of dollars of our money and deployment of thousands of American troops for that."
Marc Thiessen: And the answer to that is: One, we're not fighting a war in Afghanistan anymore. Our combat role ended in 2014, what we've been doing is supporting Afghan forces who are doing the fighting for us against our enemies. Generally speaking, when you're enabling other people to fight your enemies for you, that's a pretty good deal. Second of all, we're not trying to create a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan. Our goal is to have a country, and I get we went through periods where we were doing nation building and all sorts of other stuff like that but that's long past. Our goal in Afghanistan is two-fold: One, to make sure that a government is in power that may not be a Jeffersonian ideal of democracy, but doesn't wake up every morning thinking America's what's wrong with the world.
Marc Thiessen: And two, that the country doesn't become a safe haven for the terrorists who attacked us on September 11, 2001. And by that standard, our deployment in Afghanistan has been a huge success. And we have accomplished both of those goals. There is a government there that is far from perfect but they're a US ally.
Marc Thiessen: And they're good enough, and Al Qaeda is not in a position to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for terrorist attacks against America. Now, by this withdrawal, we are frittering away those two goals. The Taliban is going to come back in power, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And when they come back in power, guess what? Al Qaeda's coming back. The people who attacked us on September 11th will once again have Afghanistan as a safe haven to organize, to train, and prepare attacks against the country.
Marc Thiessen: And so I just don't understand the low investment of dollars and troops that we had, a few thousand troops providing intelligence and operational planning and air support for Afghan forces plus counter terrorism missions occasionally when we want to knock out a leader, someone pops his head up. The cost of that compared to the cost of withdrawal and losing those gains after 20 years on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is just, I just don't understand it.
Danielle Pletka: Well, let me provide a little pneumonic for our listeners. It is as if you turn 40, let's say, and you haven't smoked and you haven't drunk and you haven't done drugs and you're in outstanding health. You look good, you feel good, and you say to yourself, "Well, you know, clearly I'm a healthy person. I should probably start smoking and drinking and doing drugs now because after all, what could happen? The last 20 years have been good to me," and of course this is what the Biden administration so weirdly doesn't understand. We have invested in something and we have achieved an outcome. That outcome can dissipate and will dissipate and the threat remains out there.
Danielle Pletka: But I'll say this about Joe Biden, that man can't learn a lesson for love or money. Look, if you don't like my health analogy, let's talk about Iraq. Okay, in 2011, Barack Obama, that genius, pulled us out of Iraq and took all of our troops out, and he didn't just take our troops out. Troops where we had had fewer than 10
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3 casualties in the previous full year and had maintained the peace and had suppressed Al Qaeda and Iraq and supported the Iraqi government ensuring peace and security and democracy there. We pulled out, and what happened? We got, in the blink of an eye, ISIS. Even Barack Obama recognized the problem that he saw there. And by the way, the United States is under pressure to pull out the troops that we have in Iraq that we had to put back there after the rise of ISIS and Biden has resisted it because he learned that lesson.
Danielle Pletka: I'm sorry, dude, can you not see that lesson applying to Afghanistan as well? I find it incomprehensible.
Marc Thiessen: And who did Barack Obama put in charge of that withdrawal from Iraq? Joe Biden. He's the one who went to Baghdad to preside over the withdrawal of the final forces and told Barack Obama, "Thank you for letting me end this goddamn war." Well, he didn't end the goddamn war because what happened was, as you said, in the blink of an eye, according to John Brennan, who's Obama's CIA director, they were down to about a couple hundred forces in the country. They suddenly ballooned to tens of thousands, took over territory the size of Great Britain, and sent cells that metastasized all over the world and carried out terrorist attacks in 29 countries across the globe.
Marc Thiessen: He saw all that happen. He presided over it. And what else happened, by the way? We had to send American troops back and put them at greater risk and Americans died in fighting to beat back ISIS after that ham-handed withdrawal. And so you would think he would have learned his lesson and not repeat history in Afghanistan because the same thing is going to happen. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Danielle Pletka: This definition of insanity is the famous and really overused Santayana quote about those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, but this really is a Santayana presidency. But I want to point out another irony. Look, these dumb ideas are not just Joe Biden's. Donald Trump wanted desperately to get out of Afghanistan. Donald Trump was the godfather of this abortive deal negotiated by Zalmay Khalilzad that theoretically was going to create a power sharing between the Taliban and the democratically-elected government of Afghanistan that would enable us to withdraw. That was always a farce but these are the stupid ideas not just of Joe Biden but also of Donald Trump unfortunately.
Marc Thiessen: He wanted to invite them to Camp David.
Danielle Pletka: Oh right, on September 11th if you recall. You know something? Right, we now have two presidents: One who wanted to invite the Taliban to Camp David on September 11th, and the other who is so unbelievably tone deaf that he set the date for withdrawal for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as if he wanted to give a 20th birthday present to Al Qaeda. It's just staggering.
Marc Thiessen: It is also something that Al Qaeda predicted 20 years ago. So my friend Jim Mitchell is the guy who interrogated the mastermind of 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammad for the CIA, and he spent thousands of hours talking with the KSM in his cell in a black site, not in interrogation format but just talking because they spent a lot of time together.
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4 Marc Thiessen: And one day, he tells me this story and it's in his book, which I recommend to everybody to read. But he told me this story that one day he was sitting with KSM and they were talking about this. And KSM looked at him and he said, "Look, the United States may enjoy some fleeting battlefield successes," but he'd said in the end, this is a quote, "We will win because Americans don't realize we do not need to defeat you militarily, we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourselves by quitting." That is a quote from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in his CIA interrogation cell in around 2003. And here we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the attacks that he carried out and we are fulfilling his prophecy. That's what Joe Biden is doing.
Danielle Pletka: Well, maybe he's an advisor at the White House as well. There's an element of additional hypocrisy that I want to underscore for our listeners because you guys are all well aware that I care a lot about democracy building, I'm one of those infamous neocons. I care a lot about governance in foreign countries because I think that when countries are well governed, they don't represent a threat to the United States. This is not altruism, this is selfishness on my part. I'd much rather send a guy from AID and some striped-pant diplomat than I would send American forces.
Danielle Pletka: But think about what's happening in Afghanistan in a different context for a second. So, Joe Biden has said that he wanted to bring human rights to the center of American foreign policy. This is sort of an indirect slap at Donald Trump who he thought didn't prioritize human rights. He has talked about women's rights, about choice, about all the great things that he's going to do for women, he's got the first female vice president of the United States. Okay, listen to a couple of statistics that I just picked up from ABC News. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, girls were not allowed to go to school. Today, 37% of students in Afghanistan are girls. 2,500 Afghan women serve in the military. Under the Taliban, they had one TV station in Afghanistan. They now have 75 and 175 radio stations. Parliament is 27% women, that's more than Canada, France, and the UK.
Danielle Pletka: So that is about to end as well. If you care about women's rights, if you care about equality and you want to pat yourself on the back for being a champion of those causes, you should go and hide under a couch because what this president is going to do to women in Afghanistan is going to set them back 100 years.
Marc Thiessen: And remember that he just came from a NATO summit in Europe, and a G7 summit, where the theme was rallying the world democracies against the world autocracies. But he is going to preside over the overthrow of a democracy and the establishment of an Islamic radical autocracy in Afghanistan as his first major foreign policy achievement.
Danielle Pletka: Yes. "Achievement." Our listeners know our guest extremely well, General Jack Keane has been with us before to talk about some of the military issues that have confronted us. He is himself an accomplished military leader, four-star general, former vice chief of staff at the US Army, Presidential Medal of Freedom. He's now a national security analyst but he's advised every single one of our secretaries of defense, every single one of our commanders on the ground in
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5 both Afghanistan and Iraq. There's no better person to talk to about what is happening on the ground and where the Biden decision is going to lead than Jack.
Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.
Marc Thiessen: Jack, welcome back to the podcast.
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah. Delighted to be here. Thank you.
Marc Thiessen: Well, thank you. We're always thrilled when you join us. So the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is proceeding at pace and so is the collapse of the Afghan government. It looks like the intelligence estimates have changed, initially they said that the Afghan government could survive two years once the US withdrawal was completed. Latest intelligence estimate is now that the government could fall between six and 12 months after US forces leave. And other officials say it could come as soon as three months after the collapse. Are we going to see the collapse of the Afghan government and the rise of a Taliban government on Joe Biden's watch?
Gen. Jack Keane: Well, it's certainly possible. And all indications are we're tragically moving in that direction. I do think there are a number of things that we can do to prevent that still. This is a decision, the US pull out and NATO pull out, I believe, that the Biden administration is going to come to regret. It's interesting, from my NATO sources, military sources primarily, when President Biden attended the NATO summit, he did receive some pushback from our European partners who are involved in Afghanistan as part of the NATO commitment. And they were, one, surprised by the announcement. No coordination with them, of course. And two, were somewhat frustrated by it because in their minds they had made the commitment to stay the course with the Americans, knowing full well they have the same concern that we have. We don't want the Taliban to take over and we don't want the Al Qaeda and ISIS to reemerge.
Gen. Jack Keane: And that clearly has changed rather dramatically now with the US commitment to move out. I guess, essentially more than half of those forces are gone. And yes, the situation is grave and it is worsening.
Danielle Pletka: So Jack, let's widen the aperture for people who haven't been paying attention to Afghanistan for quite a while. We went into Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/11 and we're creeping up on 20 years now. For what Marc and I fondly call the endless war crowd, their allegation is: We've been there for 20 years, we routed Al Qaeda, we routed ISIS, we really don't need to be there anymore. Joe Biden is clearly listening to those people. And I guess the question is, what have we been doing in Afghanistan for the last few years anyway?
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah. Well certainly in the 20 years in Afghanistan, there's been a fairly remarkable evolution in that country that has taken place. They moved towards a constitutional democracy, admittedly at our insistence, and they have embraced it. They've had four elections, none of those elections were perfect to be sure. They still don't have what we would consider to be a full throttle effective democratic government that's capable of providing services to its people and
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6 also providing a measure of security to its people. But it was moving, and has been moving, in the right direction, certainly human rights protection for women. The population has literally doubled from a little over 20 million to over 40 million in that time. Many of the people are educated that were not educated, they're a more educated country. I wouldn't class them as an educated country yet but certainly they've made significant progress for that.
Gen. Jack Keane: And the other thing is, this is an epicenter of radical Islam in South Asia. And our presence there is pushing back on the reemerging of Al Qaeda and certainly ISIS, which grew exponentially in Syria. And our presence in South Asia, the United States' presence there for regional stability, I believe, has always been very important to us. And yet, it's a relatively modest commitment to get that. When we're gone and the NATO forces are gone, Russia, China, and Iran are the benefactors here. They all want us out of there. It's going to be to their national interest to be able to exploit that situation to their own goals and objectives with the United States out of there. So this doesn't make any sense in terms of Afghanistan pulling the rug out from underneath them, it doesn't make any sense in terms of our regional strategy.
Gen. Jack Keane: And so our audience understands, we're staying in Afghanistan so that Al Qaeda and the ISIS do not reemerge and become a threat to the United States. Both of those organizations have aspirational goals to attack America. And we are doing the very same thing in other countries where the radical Islamic movement has aspirations for us. There's 40 or 50 of these movements around the world. We're only interested in about five of them because they want to kill Americans. So, that's why we're in Syria with modest forces against ISIS, that's why we go into Yemen and take down the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula because there's aspirations to attack America. That is why we're in East Africa for the very same reason. And we have 800 troops or 1,000 troops on the ground there in a maritime task force, and that is why we wanted to stay in Afghanistan. That is it. We obviously have forces in Iraq helping the Iraqis prevent ISIS from reemerging as well.
Gen. Jack Keane: I believe multiple presidents have supported this strategy. And because the Afghanistan strategy is tied to 20 years of involvement, for some reason, it has nothing to do with the conditions on the ground, we should just leave because it's been there too long. Well, the threat is there. The threat hasn't gone away, that's why we're there. And that's why we're in these other countries because the threat is there, and our commitment is very modest and we can make a shift to deal with China principally as a threat and maintain these modest forces against radical Islam. Actually, in my judgment, they're an economy of force measure where we get a huge payoff with very little investment in terms of protecting the American people.
Gen. Jack Keane: And look what we're doing now with the government of Afghanistan. We're telling them as we pull out, we're contracting out to them America's security by saying, "Look, we want you to prevent the Al Qaeda and ISIS from establishing a safe haven here. We're not going to commit any resources to that per se but we want you to do that for us." That de facto was what w saying to Ghani and that's why today I think he's got to put some big requests on the table with President Biden certainly.
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7 Marc Thiessen: So when most people look at Afghanistan, they think, "We've been there 20 years, we're fighting this endless war." They have this image of the early part of the war where we had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground. Can you tell us how many troops, before Biden's decision to withdraw everybody, how many troops were there? And what role were they playing? Were they actually going and fighting war or were they providing support for Afghan forces who were doing the fighting?
Gen. Jack Keane: We pulled our combat forces out of Afghanistan 2014, seven years ago. And what we recognize is that there were 300,000 security forces there, far from perfect, but they're fighting other Afghans. They're not fighting conventional military. And we believe that we have been providing, these seven years, training and assistance for that force and also coordinating for the use of United States and NATO air power, which is decisive. And providing a relatively robust intelligence capability so that the Afghan ground forces, as well as our air power, can benefit from that. And we maintain a small counter terrorism force to deal with any Al Qaeda or Taliban leadership that we can focus on. And as a result of that, because it's been publicly disclosed, we have a CIA base or bases in Afghanistan that we have been using to conduct attacks against Al Qaeda because their leadership is still in safe havens in Pakistan. And we have done that periodically throughout the entire 20 years.
Gen. Jack Keane: Of course, it was from Afghanistan that we attacked into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden. So yes, we have been out of the ground war in Afghanistan since 2014 and that's why our casualties have been so low and so very light. Look, you're in a combat zone, you're vulnerable to get hurt even if you're just trying to provide training or even if you're just assisting, certainly, the Afghan security forces. But they have borne the brunt of all of this. And so our audience can understand, so what's happening now? Why all of a sudden the Taliban making all these gains? Because the United States air power is no longer flying in support of the Afghan ground forces. That is why the Taliban is making these decisive gains.
Danielle Pletka: So Jack, I hear everything you're saying and our listeners know that I agree wholeheartedly with you, but I guess I'm trying to illuminate for people what the debate is here. So if we've been operating for so long in Afghanistan, I hear everything you're saying, I also hear all of the good news about the situation on the ground in terms of women in school and government and democratic elections. Okay, but if we've been there so long and we've been pretty effective, how come the Taliban is still there on the ground? How come they've been gaining in strength over the last few years?
Gen. Jack Keane: The Taliban, as best as I can tell, are the most unpopular insurgency in history. Routinely, the surveys show that 85% of the people reject the Taliban. I mean that is staggering for an insurgency. When people resort to armed insurgency to overthrow a host government, it's usually because there are legitimate grievances against that government. Leaders who want to take up this insurgency popularized those grievances, get support from the people, arm the people, and usually require some kind of external support to be able to carry on this insurgency and as they make progress, they get more and more popular support for the movement. That's the classical way.
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8 Gen. Jack Keane: And even though that is the case, overwhelming majority of insurgencies fail because host government resources usually can outlast them. That's the history of insurgency. But here in Afghanistan, the Taliban couldn't win an election even in the districts they control, if it was a fair election. Because they're barbaric, they're tyrannical. The only education is their fundamentalist education. And the actual, physical pain that they incur with people is really quite extraordinary. They take women when they want them, they beat the men for minor grievances, and they change people's lives every single day. And the country lived under this organization for half a decade until 9/11 came and we deposed them, so they're very familiar with it.
Gen. Jack Keane: But yes, this is a very unpopular insurgency. They're not gaining because of the support of the people. They are gaining recently, as I said, because the lack of decisive air power to do that. Until we began these godforsaken negotiations with the United States and the Taliban, excluding the government of Afghanistan, which I thought was a huge policy mistake by the Trump administration. The reality is the Taliban did not have the wherewithal to take over the country, nor did the Afghan security forces have the wherewithal to completely defeat the Taliban. So we were stalemated, but since the negotiations took place and the deal was made with the Taliban, we have been hands off in terms of supporting the Afghan security forces and that has changed the momentum to the Taliban's favor. From a military perspective, that's completely understandable what has taken place now.
Marc Thiessen: So when you talk about all the progress that's been made on the ground in terms of democratic elections and then human rights and women's rights and all the rest of it, I think a lot of Americans listen to that and say, "Hey, that's great. We're glad that that progress is there but I don't want to send my kid to risk his life for women's rights in Afghanistan. If I'm going to risk my kid's life, it's going to be for our national security." And we've had all these shifting goals, we had a period where we were going through nation building. Americans don't necessarily support that and they think that's what we're doing out there.
Marc Thiessen: Our strategic goals are two as I understand it, which is one: To make sure, not that a Jeffersonian democracy takes place, but that a government that doesn't wake up in the morning thinking America's what's wrong with the world takes over. And two: That it doesn't become a safe haven for the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th. It sounds like, even before a complete withdrawal that the first goal, which we've had, is falling apart. How long until the second goal, we lose that as well?
Gen. Jack Keane: Oh, I think it's around the corner, frankly. Listen, I fully admit that protracted wars test the resolve of democracies. That's true for our country and for others. And it puts a premium on the leadership of the country to interact with the American people and continue to provide promotion for the purpose and meaning of what we're doing. And also explain the setbacks that we may be having. I fault the Bush administration for not doing this properly in Afghanistan and also to a certain degree in Iraq, and the subsequent administrations as well.
Gen. Jack Keane: For Obama, he did the surge and increased the forces, but in terms of purpose and meaning and the rest of it in continuing to explain that to the American
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9 people, that just was not done and it certainly wasn't done with the Trump administration near the end. And then that contributes to the evaporation of political support because in indirect warfare, which we're dealing with here, which are insurgencies, the insurgent has time on their side and they can slow down the pace of operations, they can drag things out. And yes, time eventually erodes that kind of political support. And that, I think, is what has happened here. And to suggest that we're going to send troops in way to make sure our schools are running properly or the manifestation of a Jeffersonian democracy is taking place, no, I don't buy into that at all. That's not the reason why we're there and that's not the reason we went there in the first place.
Gen. Jack Keane: After all, we were completely focused on the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and running them out of there, when the Bush administration made the decision in December of 2001, this was weeks after we defeated the Taliban, I was in the Pentagon and received that message with the other chiefs of services when the Bush administration in December of 2001 made the decision to go to war in Iraq. At that point, we began to move resources towards that primary commitment that that would entail because we're dealing with conventional armies and a huge amount of resources.
Gen. Jack Keane: Satellites started to move, CIA started to move, Afghanistan became a secondary effort. We were never able to put troops into Afghanistan in any consequential way until the surge had succeeded in Iraq in 2008 towards the end of the Bush administration. And then Obama put more troops in there in 2009 at the recommendation of his national security team, Generals McChrystal and Petraeus both recommended the minimum force to succeed and accomplish our objectives is 40,000. Obama, at the insistence of Biden who recommended 20,000, compromised at 30, which was a 25% reduction and announced he would pull the forces out in 15 months. Those decisions guaranteed a protraction of the war indefinitely in Afghanistan. US policy decisions, Iraq number one, number two: Not giving very capable commanders who know how to fight insurgency the resources they needed to do the job. And the other thing that protracted the war is multiple administrations, Bush, Obama, and Trump tolerating the Pakistan providing safe havens for the Taliban leadership and its fighters inside of Pakistan, which is really quite outrageous.
Gen. Jack Keane: These are policy decisions that drove the so-called endless wars and the United States owns those decisions in terms of that protraction and owns why there's been an evaporation of political support for the wars.
Danielle Pletka: So Jack, I have a two-part question for you and I'll just ask the two bits separately. This supposed commitment by the Biden administration to assist the Afghan military "as needed, do you have any idea, to steal from our title, what the hell that means?
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah. I have misgivings about it, Danielle, myself. Listen, I have spoken on the phone to Ashraf Ghani a number of times about what is happening all in the last several weeks, the President of Afghanistan, and among some others I was with him last night for dinner. I can't really speak to what his concerns are because they're confidential and I don't want to discuss that before he has a meeting with the President. But certainly the United States has made a strategic commitment
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10 to Afghanistan in the sense that we continue to be your partner, we're not going to pull out of here, we're always going to be there for you. These are the same rhetorical comments we made in 2011 when United States was pulling all of its troops out of Iraq. By the way, recommendation by then-Vice President Biden to President Obama as Obama's envoy to Iraq, and we made that commitment and three years later we got ISIS. That certainly not only grew a caliphate in Syria but entered the world stage as such a barbaric form of radical Islam.
Gen. Jack Keane: I don't know what's behind those statements and certainly that is something that President Ghani has got to get some edification of today. And he's got to emphasize that the strategic partnership that we do have, the United States has a huge amount of resources that we can apply to this. Here's something that the audience will be befuddled by. We're pulling out all of our Air Force, all of our air power, and no longer supporting them but, as I said, that's why the Taliban have been making gains. Well, Ghani's got an Air Force himself, limited certainly by comparison to ours. There's 18,000 contractors that we've been paying for to support his air force, and particularly the US side of it. He has some Russian helicopters, Blackhawk helicopters, C-130s, and other fixed wing aircraft. We're pulling all of those out even though they want to stay and support it. So that means in a matter of weeks, his air force, limited as it is but nonetheless it has capabilities that are very valuable, that's going to be grounded. That makes no sense.
Gen. Jack Keane: If we're going to be the strategic partner, let's provide support for them. And also, he needs intelligence support. We can have that intelligence support in the embassy. He needs drones and other reconnaissance platforms, those are out there on the world marketplace. Help the Afghans get that kind of capability or give them American capability. They don't have to operate it, they don't have to have the big, major drones. I'm talking about more tactical and operational drones so they can see where the Taliban are massing. And if he's dead serious about really supporting the Afghans, the funding with the Congress should be increased to mitigate our departing. And lastly, the Taliban are holding back from taking any of the major cities and they're taking the rural areas around those cities, which are not hard to do. But they're going to have to mass to take the cities. And when they start to do that, they are very vulnerable. They're no longer a small insurgency. The on the battlefield as they did back in 2001 when they were dealing with the Northern Alliance.
Gen. Jack Keane: At that point they are very vulnerable to air power and air power support. And we can bring that while it's no longer in Afghanistan, even though we may have to bring it some distance, we can bring that and be very decisive and effective. And I hope we would make that kind of a commitment to it. But yeah, it begs the question, what does it really mean when you say you're going to continue to support us? And certainly, I'm confident President Ghani wants to get clarification of exactly what that means and certainly he'll make a case for the support that he certainly needs.
Danielle Pletka: And the second part of my question, Jack, it's a little bit in the weeds but there's a reason I'm asking because I think that a lot of the arguments that are being made by the Biden administration, as you've laid out very neatly, are actually unbelievably dishonest. Here's a quote from the White House Press Secretary Jen
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11 Psaki, there haven't been attacks on American troops so some are questioning if there are no attacks on American troops, what's the hustle? And she says, "Had we not begun to draw down, violence would've increased against us as well, so the status quo in our view was not an option. For me, this is one of the most dishonest statements that's been made in the context of discussions around this. Do you see any basis for this suggestion that we needed to draw down because of a rise in power and likely attacks by the Taliban on us?
Gen. Jack Keane: No, no, none whatsoever. The Taliban hasn't had any margin of success against our forces that are in Afghanistan. Have we taken very light casualties from time to time? Yes, certainly. Our forces didn't feel any threat, certainly, that was consequential from the Taliban, that's just a facetious false statement whatsoever. Look, we made a horrible deal with the Taliban then. Zalmay Khalizad and that deal surrounded the fact that the United States would announce their withdrawal of all of its forces as a result of that deal and the concession the Taliban would have to make is that they would commit to enter into negotiations with the Afghans, no cease fire I may add, no cease fire which is unbelievable. That should be a prelude to any concession whatsoever. And the other thing is that they would separate themselves from the Al Qaeda and reject them.
Gen. Jack Keane: Well, they would enter negotiations and those negotiations got stalled pretty quickly, no progress there. And they have not rejected the Al Qaeda and they intend not to. When you think of the Taliban, think of the Al Qaeda. They're kind of one. They're like mind, they have common purpose and objectives. They are brothers. This is the same Taliban that when President Bush offered them the opportunity in 2001 to separate themselves from the Al Qaeda, and if you do that, I will leave your government alone and leave you alone and I'll just go after the Al Qaeda, and they refused to do that, knowing full well that thousands of their fighters would die as a result of conflict with the United States and they may lose control of the country. But that's how much the Al Qaeda meant to them because they said no to the President of the United States. And now somehow after all these many years, they're going to separate themselves from them when they were willing to put at risk their entire regime to protect them? That is foolishness and irresponsible on people's part to think that and somewhat indefensible, frankly.
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah, we made a lousy deal here and it's outrageous. And as a result of that, we pulled our Air Force off of the Taliban, as a result of that lousy deal. And they have not adhered to any aspect of that negotiations that we made that were so ill- designed from the outset to not have the government of Afghanistan included in these negotiations, made no sense whatsoever.
Marc Thiessen: One of the lies the Biden administration is telling us is that, well it doesn't matter if we pull out because if Al Qaeda makes the comeback and establishes safe havens there, we have an over-the-horizon capability and we can take them out. You've described that we do have an over-the-horizon capability to take out Taliban forces massing around cities and that's because you can see armies massing at borders or around cities from satellites, we know where they are. But to Al Qaeda, we need intelligence on the ground to tell us where the Al Qaeda are. So are we going to be able to get that if we abandon Afghanistan? Are people going to tell us where the Al Qaeda are? Are we going to have that kind
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12 of intelligence? And is this over-the-horizon backstop that Biden keeps saying justify it, is it real?
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah. This over-the-horizon business is a placebo, for crying out loud. Afghanistan is a land locked country. We would have to come off the deck of maritime ships or we'd have to come from great distances of the bases that we currently have in the Middle East. And without intelligence on the ground, without the Afghan security forces providing us that intelligence, and without our own robust intelligence capability inside of Afghanistan, that was one of the things that we want to keep there, we're not going to have the resolution that we desperately need to be able to deal with a rising and reemerging Al Qaeda.
Gen. Jack Keane: Listen, they are there already. It's not that they're going to come across the border, they're already in Afghanistan and it will grow and we will not have visibility of it until it may get to the stage where it's threatening to us. So yes, you put your finger on the essence of the argument, that we're putting American people at risk unnecessarily so, by pulling everything out of there in a way that we're not willing to do in Iraq or Syria or our commitment to go against the Al Qaeda in Yemen and also in Eastern Africa. Yeah, vulnerability is going to come as a result of this decision because the intelligence, Marc, is really crucial to have that kind of visibility and be able to respond to it.
Gen. Jack Keane: The over-the-horizon business that we're talking about, yes, are we going to try to do that? Given the suddenness of this decision and the fact it was unexpected when the President made it, the State Department and the DoD are scrambling right now trying to coordinate with countries to put bases there.
Gen. Jack Keane: So we're scrambling to do all of this. A policy decision like this, if it was coming, we should've given the agencies of government the opportunity to work through the issues before making this decision and those issues on where we're going to support Afghanistan from from bases in the area would've been one of the conditions in that policy formulation and in that decision making. But look, if Biden wants out of Afghanistan, I don't think he really cares about it, to be frank. If you look at the history of his involvement in this situation, the rhetoric is going to be there and, Dany, you're right, you have every right to question what is behind his rhetoric when he said, "We're going to support you, we're going to be your partners," given how we walked away in 2011 in Iraq using the same kind of statements from virtually the same person, certainly not as president but as vice president at the time.
Gen. Jack Keane: We have every right to be very skeptical here about the US' commitment to Afghanistan after our forces have left and put it in there the resources that can help to sustain this government and its security forces.
Marc Thiessen: Jack, I lied, I said that last question, just one quick follow-up. Biden is the guy who presided over the US withdrawal from Iraq, and look what happened. ISIS went from a few hundred fighters to controlling a caliphate the size of Great Britain, and launched attacks all across the world. One thing we know that Dany and I have talked about many times on the podcast is the Biden foreign policy team is the Obama foreign policy team. These are the same people that presided over the act of Iraq withdrawal. Are they not learning from their own mistakes?
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13 Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah, apparently not. And it's absolutely stunning when you see it. Not only here as a result of Afghanistan, which I think is a misguided policy decision, but the largest threat in the Middle East is coming from Iran and here we are back negotiating the same terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. The same terms with no commitment to prevent ballistic missile development, no commitment to change their behavior in the region, and no commitment to change the sunset clauses, which gives them a nuclear weapon in nine years. Why would we ever go back to the same deal with the same terms?
Gen. Jack Keane: Same teams making the same mistakes. So you're absolutely right. When it comes to foreign policy and national security, the Biden administration is prone to make some pretty serious strategic mistakes here. Afghanistan is one for sure, and certainly what they're doing with Iran is another strategic blunder in my judgment as well.
Danielle Pletka: So this is, of course, the kind of foreign policy throughout the 1990s that led us to 9/11. We can only hope that it isn't going to lead us to another substantial attack on American territory because it's very, very helpful to Al Qaeda and all of their allies to have an operational base in Afghanistan. Thank you, Jack. Thank you for illuminating this for us and for being so generous with your time, as always. Depressing as hell.
Gen. Jack Keane: Yeah. Great talking to the both of you. Appreciate it very much. Thank you.
Marc Thiessen: Look, Jack just laid it out on the line. We are not going to be able to prevent Afghanistan from becoming an Al Qaeda safe haven again if we don't have any boots on the ground. And this is the thing that I don't understand. I would get it if we had hundreds of thousands of troops and that there were all these families that have been separated with five deployments and kids not seeing their parents for years and the battlefield losses piling up on a regular basis, I would get that we wanted to withdraw and people were getting sick of the war. We have a few thousand troops in Afghanistan and I go back to the period after Vietnam when Ronald Reagan came into power and there really wasn't an appetite in our country for major deployments around the world after the Vietnam War.
Marc Thiessen: And so what Ronald Reagan's great innovation was, we needed to confront Soviet communism, so what we did is we allied with indigenous forces around the world who shared our goals and willing to do the fighting for us. And we armed them and we trained them and we gave them support in places like Nicaragua and Angola and Afghanistan. And they did the fighting for us. That's essentially what we're doing right now in Afghanistan. We have a few thousand troops on the ground that are training and supporting the Afghan forces, they're providing them with air cover which is essential. The reason the Taliban are having all these successes now is because the US air support has disappeared. And we've also got small numbers of counter terrorism forces that we can use to go whack Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders or ISIS leaders when we find them.
Marc Thiessen: If you're against endless wars, this seems to be the ideal situation because our allies are doing the fighting for us, they're sustaining the casualties for us and all we have to do is provide them with some intel, air support, and quick reaction forces. And we've got a friendly government and no safe haven for Al Qaeda and
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14 we're just going to pull that out and lose all of those gains and then have to go back in later. It makes no sense to me at all.
Danielle Pletka: No, it doesn't make any sense to me either. Sometimes decisions are hard to make, this is not a hard decision. This is an easy decision. And I think that's why it's so bizarre to us is that this is a low-cost effort that we're engaged in. It's not Germany, it's not Italy but as far as the cost and the cost in investment, and the cost in troop deployments, this is a pretty low-cost operation for a big, big benefit. And there's another element-
Marc Thiessen: Dany, we have, just to jump in, we have fewer troops in Afghanistan than we do in Germany or Italy.
Danielle Pletka: Or Spain. Or Spain, I know.
Marc Thiessen: This is such a tiny deployment that we get so much bang for the buck from this presence at so little cost that it's foreign policy negligence to give that all up.
Danielle Pletka: Well, I think that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of foreign policy negligence that we're going to see over the next couple of years. But I think that there's another point here and it's one that actually, you know I was with our colleague Ken Pollock in Iraq a couple weeks ago, and we talked about this. When you talk to our political and diplomatic leaders about our military deployment, their main focus seems to be on troop security, not on the mission. Well, we need to leave because they're going to start attacking us. And the answer is, I'm sorry, what do we think our military is for in this country? Do we think that our military is to protect other military members that are deployed overseas? Is that what we're doing in Iraq? Is that what we're doing in Afghanistan? Or is our military there to serve a national security mission? I think this is a much deeper and much bigger problem, which is that our political leaders have forgotten what we use our military for.
Danielle Pletka: They think our military is a giant socialist experiment in which we need to talk about equity and inclusion and diversity and cradle-to-grave healthcare and not talk about terrorism, threats to our national security, nuclear programs, potential war with China. This is going to be a major challenge for everybody in the coming years.
Marc Thiessen: You're 100% correct, Dany, but the other point is that-
Danielle Pletka: Of course I am. I always am.
Marc Thiessen: Yeah, exactly. That is true. Except when you're not. But even that being the case, our troops are not in great risk in Afghanistan because they're not engaged in day-to-day combat. They are there as a force enabler for the Afghans who were taking all the casualties. And we had basically come to a stalemate where the Taliban were held down. We had our boots on their neck and they weren't getting up and we're taking the boot off of their neck. You mentioned Italy and Germany, I'd throw in there Japan and south Korea. Imagine if Harry Truman had had the same philosophy as Joe Biden. And after World War II we decided, like
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
15 many Americans wanted, we're going to withdraw all of our troops from Germany, we're going to withdraw all of our troops from Italy, we're going to withdraw all of our troops from Japan and we're not going to send them to Korea and if we did by chance we're going to withdraw them as well.
Marc Thiessen: What would the world look like today? The Soviet Union would have been able to overtake Western Europe. The entire Korean peninsula would be unified under communist rule. And who knows what would've happened to Japan. The peace and stability of the second half of the 20th century and our victory in the Cold War that created this unipolar moment in American foreign policy after the collapse of Soviet Union, none of that would've come about. None of that. Our small deployments in these countries create conditions of peace and security that have allowed democracy to emerge, have allowed trade to emerge, have enriched the American people through the expansion of global trade and all the rest of it. And I just don't understand why we don't look at what our successful policies of the last 70 years have been, and wonder why we're doing the opposite in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Danielle Pletka: Well Marc, if I may say, it is because we are incapable of learning the lessons of history. That's a theme that's come up just a couple times today.
Marc Thiessen: But you would think that a Democratic president would want to emulate Harry Truman, not repudiate him.
Danielle Pletka: Well, you would think that a president of this age would at least remember what that history was but I think Joe Biden was not a-
Marc Thiessen: I knew Harry Truman.
Danielle Pletka: I think Joe Biden was not a star student in history. Hey folks, we have been listening to you and we know that sometimes our sound quality isn't as good when we're not in the studio. Sometimes, unfortunately, reality intervenes and we're not able to be in our studio. We hear you, we recognize the challenge, and thank you for your forbearance. Sometimes the issues are too great, the guests are too important and we end up having to record this in different ways. So thank you for listening. Send us your comments, send us your ideas and take care.
Marc Thiessen: Thanks for listening.
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