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REFLECTIONS ON AFGHANISTAN: Williamson and Chayes discuss Chayes’ article “The Ides of August,” about her experiences working as a reporter and special counsellor to the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war in Afghanistan.
Learn more about Sarah: https://www.sarahchayes.org/
Read “The Ides of August”: https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-…
Read Sarah’s books: On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake: https://bookshop.org/books/on-corrupt…
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security https://bookshop.org/books/thieves-of…
The Afghan people hated the Taliban but they were thankful for ridding the country of the war lords.
President Karzia is responsible for bringing the taliban to Afghanistan.
The CIA allied itself with the war lords that the Afghan people hated.
The war lords took over the provincial governments and corruption was rampant.
The US allowed Karzai’s corruption. When one of his staff was caught accepting bribes, it turned out to be the bag man transporting money from the CIA to Karzai.
We trained guerilla fighters to fight a conventional war dependent on our military equipment rather than a guerilla war.
The corruption and failure of Afghanistan is a mirror of American corruption.
Why is Pakistan considered an ally, given that we didn’t trust them not to tip off Osama bin Ladie and they armed the Taliban with military aid that the US provided them.
Jon Stewart’s Children, and Trolling the Press Corps
In the years after 9/11, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz; Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show”; Bassem Youssef; and the founders of Reductress. An alt-right blogger turned White House correspondent explains that journalism is only politics by other means. And the cartoonists Emily Flake and Drew Dernavich attempt to escape from an escape room.
Sound and Fury
John Paul Vann, the legendary Army officer and civilian adviser during the Vietnam War, said about the right way to fight guerrillas: “This is a political war, and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worse is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you’re killing.”
An Israeli general made a similar point to me after the defeat of the second intifada, saying, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 rather than an F-16.”
.. war requires careful calibration in the application of violence, lest excessive firepower kill lots of innocents and drive more recruits into the enemy’s camp.
.. both American airstrikes and civilian casualties have increased since the Trump administration took office.
.. the use of the MOAB was a “very, very successful mission,” and he is probably right, in the narrow tactical sense. But for the bigger strategic picture he would be well-advised to read the 2006 United States Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by his own secretary of defense, which states: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents.”
.. It is a sign that the war in Afghanistan is not going well.
.. When the enemy becomes too powerful, as it did in Vietnam, then it becomes necessary to call in air and artillery strikes. That was not a sign of progress; it was a sign, in fact, that the security situation was spiraling out of control.
.. the trajectory in Afghanistan has been headed in the wrong direction since President Obama prematurely ended his surge and withdrew most American troops by 2016.
.. the Taliban either “control or contest” “a total of around 10 million people
.. the Afghan Army was unable to advance into its stronghold in the Achin district of Nangarhar Province