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This Transcript Was Exported on Aug 16, 2021 - View Latest Version Here This transcript was exported on Aug 16, 2021 - view latest version here. James Lileks: Now we welcome to the podcast, H.R. McMaster, Retired Lieutenant General, following 34 years of service. Herbert Raymond McMaster played key roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He's been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Consulting Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, served as the 26th National Security Advisor and is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before enlisting, he graduated from the US Military Academy in '84, later earned a PhD in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his PhD thesis formed the basis for the book, Dereliction of Duty. More recently, he's published a memoir, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. We have him with us today to speak of the forthcoming withdrawal from Afghanistan and what it means for quote, all civilized peoples, as he put it. Before we get into that, thoughts that you laid out in your Wall Street Journal piece on how to mitigate the disastrous consequences of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. What do you think of the decision itself to go and thank you for joining us today. H.R. McMaster: No, hey James, it's great to be with you. I love your podcast. I just think, I wish all Americans would listen to it and be better informed. I think that could help us be a better country as a result. Rob Long: Oh, I agree. H.R. McMaster: I love the discussion on education as well. I mean, I write in Battlegrounds that this is the most important thing we can do, is to help educate the next generation and also continue to educate ourselves, because learning has to be a lifelong endeavor and you guys contribute to that. It's great to be with you. So, I think it's a disaster. It's a disaster, because what it will do is it will lead to the strengthening of jihadist terrorists who already want to commit mass murder as their principle tactic in a war against all civilized peoples. H.R. McMaster: We know this is not a theoretical case, we know from the most devastating attack in history, 9/11, that when these terrorists gain control of safe havens and support bases and they have the time and the space and the resources to plan and prepare and train for, and then execute mass murder attacks to become orders of magnitude more dangerous. We saw this with ISIS as well. Remember in Iraq when Vice President Biden at the time, called President Obama in December, of 2011, he said, "Thank you for allowing me to end this God damn war." Well, hey, wars don't end when one party disengages. What we saw in 2014 was the rise of Al-Qaeda Interact 2.0, ISIS, which became the most devastating terrorist organization in history, in control of territory the size of Britain and conducting, planning, inspiring attacks across the world. H.R. McMaster: So, this is the situation we're facing in Afghanistan. What's so sad about it, I think, is that it's self- inflicted. I mean, James, we'd already won the war. We had 8,500 troops there. Now, if you're Ecuador, that might be a stretch, but we're the United States damn it, and those forces were enabling Afghans to bear the brunt of that fight to maintain the freedoms that they've enjoyed since 2001, after the end of McMaster_Standalone (Completed 08/16/21) Page 1 of 13 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Aug 16, 2021 - view latest version here. the Taliban regime. But then also to fight on the frontier, a modern day frontier, between civilization and barbarism. James Lileks: A lot of people would say, if we were still in Germany 20 years after the conclusion of the Second World War and trying to mop up Nazi revanchists hiding out in caves, we might consider leaving and just letting the country go. But this is different. What, however, is the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, when it comes to being able to fight, hold, seize territory, find the guys and extubate them? I mean, there's a question simply that one is full of nooks and crannies and mountainous redoubts and the other one is fairly flat and you can see the dust plume of the guys moving across? Why were we able to do it in Iraq? We couldn't do it in Afghanistan? H.R. McMaster: Well, we did do it in Afghanistan. I think that really, what is sad about both wars, or Iraq and Afghanistan is we often debate, "Hey, should we have done it?" Mainly talking about the invasion of Iraq in 2003? I think what we ought to talk about is, who the hell thought it would be easy and why they think it would be easy? Really what occurred, I think, in both wars is that a short-term approach to what was essentially a long-term, complicated problem and a simplistic approach to these problem sets actually lengthened those wars and made them more costly. Paradoxically, sadly, we're learning the wrong lesson from these conflicts that, "Hey, it's just intractable, and we should never have done to begin with. We should disengage as an unmitigated good." H.R. McMaster: But hey, when you disengage from war, it's not as if you know these jihadist terrorists are looking around, saying, "Oh, hey, the Americans are gone. Let's just stop our jihad." Our narrative is one of ending the endless wars as we call them, but this is an endless jihad and our enemies have a say in the future course of events. That's why it's important to remain engaged with them. I'll tell you, James, we really had the enemy in a difficult situation in Afghanistan. It was obviously still contested, Afghanistan had not become Denmark, but Afghanistan doesn't need to be Denmark, it just needs to be Afghanistan. It was going to be a violent, screwed up place at a certain level, but it would be a place that was not in the control of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and their jihadist terrorist allies. H.R. McMaster: That was an insurance policy, essentially, an insurance policy that the premium of which was 8,500 troops, casualties that would be at risk, but very small number of casualties, compared to the costs that the Afghans were bearing to really fight the fight against jihadist terrorists and about $22 billion a year. That number was going down. So that was sustainable and it was preventing what we're seeing happening right now, which is a humanitarian catastrophe that was predictable. Obviously, what the jihadist terrorists will characterize as a victory. They're going to say, "Hey, we defeated the world's greatest superpower. Come join our cause." I think we're going to see, as we did with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, a much more potent jihadist terrorist threat, and we're going to have to go back. We're going to have to go back at a much higher place, as we had to do in Iraq as well. Rob Long: So General, I'm may ask dumb questions, before we get to what's going to happen in the next month or two, which I think we all know what's going to happen in the next month or two, it's happening now, McMaster_Standalone (Completed 08/16/21) Page 2 of 13 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Aug 16, 2021 - view latest version here. there will be an article on the front page of every newspaper, every morning about a new area that has been Talibanized, right? Just now we just got an alert that Afghan provincial capital, Zaranj, just fell to the... I guess the Taliban we're calling. So, who got it wrong? Did, I mean, Biden get it wrong? Did we get it wrong? Did the American people get it wrong? Because the American people kind of think, "let's get out of there" and they feel like we failed, so that we should get out of there. H.R. McMaster: Right. Rob Long: Whenever you ask people, they say, "Well, how long were we supposed to be there? What were the standards of success?" We know what the standard of said, World War Two, Hitler dies in a bunker and we get France back basically, right? H.R. McMaster: Right. Rob Long: How do we know? I think what you're describing in Afghanistan is a winning that no American knew to define as winning. H.R. McMaster: Yeah. No, I think you're right about this. So I think to your question of, "Who failed?" I think we all failed. I think our leaders failed across really four administrations now. So we often hear the mantra of, a 20- year war, a two decades war, but it's not a 20-year war, it's a one-year war fought 20 times over, with strategies and policies that were based on really what we would like the war to be and the enemy we would like to fight, on the delusional view of Afghanistan, rather than reality on the ground. Rob Long: Right. H.R. McMaster: I think the American people would have sustained the effort.
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