 Aloha! It's September 1, 2021. It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. That can mean only one thing. Time for What Now, America? I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and today's title is 20-Year Afghanistan War Over, but it's not. You know, it was August 31, 2021. We saw the last flight, leave Kabul Airport, and that marked the end of the 20-year war that United States was involved with, not just the United States. We had coalition forces. This war encompassed many, many, many nations, not just the United States. It all began October 2001 called Enduring Freedom. But you know, fast forward 20 years, and we have 2,469 US troops lives lost. Over 19,000 American soldiers wounded, some of them permanently. Mentally, we had over 71,000 Afghan citizens killed. We have scores more wounded. We had over 177 Afghan national military and police killed. And at the end of 20 years, you have to say, what did we get out of this? What did we learn? And hopefully this nation and other nations, they're going to take a moment to reflect, that reflection point to say, what were we doing there? What was the mission? And how did we create the mission, create off the initial mission? What was the original mission? It was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden. That was it. Like Vietnam, it's going to take months. And hopefully, you know, we have COVID. We have the voting rights. We have global warming to contend with. And we need that time to still have a point of reflection to say, what was it worth? Did we accomplish what we wanted to? And if we didn't, how are we going to learn from this? How are we going to learn from our mistakes? And with that, I go to my guests. Today, we have Jay Fidel and Winston Welch. Welcome. Jay, you can't help but draw parallels on one, how we got into this war, like we did with Vietnam, how we had a very clear mission. But then over time, the mission crept. They, you know, it got foggy. We went from trying to destroy Al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden to now becoming a nation builder, impose our style of democracy. What parallels do you see between the 20 years war in Afghanistan compared to Vietnam? A lot, a lot of parallels. I mean, they're not exactly the same, but largely they're the same. And it makes you think that, you know, since World War II, as the United States won a war, we didn't, we didn't win Korea. Maybe we won Haiti, you know, but we haven't really won a war. We haven't won a war in the Middle East for sure. And this was an example of, you know, what did Santayana say, you know, he who ignores history is doomed to repeat it. And I don't think they teach history enough at West Point and Annapolis. I think, I think we, you know, we played the same tune in Afghanistan that we played in Vietnam. We, we lied to the public. We had no clear mission and we failed. And as time went on, it was more and more clear that we failed and then we could not gracefully extract ourselves. Bottom line is our military, our military initiatives really haven't improved since Vietnam. And Afghanistan was a good example of that. And I guess you could, you know, you could blame it on whatever president, whatever presidents were in office at the time. But it's really a military question. It's a political question. And it's a public question. You know, the U.S. always has this recalcitrant isolation, isolationist default. And they, you know, they played in that played in both, both wars. We could have, then should have done a better job, both in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. And I think at the end of the day, we just threw money at it. And, and we lost it. And we lost so many lives, 50, 50 some odd thousand lives in Vietnam. So, you know, it's hard to argue with Joe Biden when he wants to get out. He said, it's a good policy decision. But there are problems that will follow. And, you know, in Vietnam, they, you know, the North Vietnamese closed it down. And they built it, they built the country. You got to give them credit. They built the country. And now things are pretty sweet. It's still communist, but it's sweeter by far than people expected. And query whether, you know, that is going to happen in Afghanistan. And the problem in Afghanistan, we should talk about it sometime in this show, is the geopolitical forces that, you know, could come from other nations who do not wish the United States well. So Russia is a factor. Iran is a factor. You know, other nations that would give them nuclear weapons and weapons of all kinds. Those are factors. And those guys would love to see nothing more, you know, than rogue nation emerge in Afghanistan. And so really the question looking forward is whether we're going to have a rogue nation or a responsible nation. And the chances are it'll be rogue, not necessarily because that will be in its best interest, but because there'll be forces applied to Afghanistan now from other rogue nations that will encourage it. So the more we turn our backs on it, the more we refuse to give them their funding, the more we don't help them and criticize them and call them names. The more likely it is that other rogue nations will make them a rogue nation. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think- Well, let me draw up a parallel. Parallels are clear. Yeah. Well, there's many of them. And if we fail to recognize them, we're doomed to repeat them. I mean, Vietnam, we had Daniel Ellsberg, you know, release the Pentagon Papers. Clearly, in the Pentagon Papers, it reflected that General Westmoreland and Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense were basically covering up the fact that we are losing the war. They hid numbers. They said everything's going well. You know, they lied to Congress. And what do we have now? We have the Afghanistan Papers, where we have Petraeus putting on a spin that really wasn't there. And so how do we avoid, once we're embroiled in the fog of war, how do we keep it from the generals from putting a happy face on it? And maybe it's political. Maybe the presidents that serve at that time say, I don't want to hear any bad news. So they don't want to give any bad news. How do we avoid that being enmeshed with public relations on how the war is really going versus how they want to be perceived how it's going? Well, they have to be honest. I think Biden is basically honest. But you can't guarantee that in a president. And you can't guarantee that in the chiefs of staff. They are inclined to tell them what he wants to hear. But you know, all of this, you have to wrap around the notion that the people, you know, the public, they don't want to be disappointed. They want to have good news. And the press wants to give them good news. But the press loves raw meat. The press was so quick to criticize Biden about the evacuation. You know, it's almost as, oh, let's go back to the good old days with Trump. It was incredible the way they attacked him. And I say to myself, you know, if the press is going to do that, then it encourages lying, doesn't it? We all have to be honest. And the press has to be honest. And the press cannot go for raw meat all the time. Because if you do that, then you actually encourage lying. And I think that happened in Vietnam. And it certainly happened here in Afghanistan. So we all have to develop a more sophisticated view of these things. It's not just the president. It's not just the chief of staff. It's everybody. It's the public needs to be better informed in general about how this kind of thing works. And the press has to be more, I don't know, the right word for this. Winston will have the right word. The press has to be more tolerant, conciliatory, understanding, instead of looking to criticize somebody. And of course, you know, one of the factors about criticism is that we have a divided nation, and we really can't help that right now. And the Republicans are going to take every opportunity to criticize Biden about everything. You know, McCarthy gets up there and socks him with public criticism. Would you expect anything else? I would faint if he said, oh, Joe Biden did a good job. I would faint right on the floor. Because the Republicans are going to take every opportunity. So we as a nation, really, if we're going to handle this going forward, if we're going to be an effective world policeman or whatever we want to be, we have to be together about it. We can't be fighting with ourselves all the time. Good point. Hey, Winston, do you draw parallels that what we've experienced in the last 20 years in Afghanistan, do you draw parallels to what we experienced for our 13, 14 years in Vietnam? You know, Vietnam is, I think, most Americans in history, like World War II, is quickly fading into the past where folks of a certain age, I think if you asked most kids under 25 or 30 if they even knew that America was fighting in Afghanistan today, or if you, I mean, it's a reality that you, if you asked them who we were fighting in World War II, sizable numbers don't know who the difference between the Axis and the Allied powers are. You know, the Korea, Vietnam, these, you know, you mentioned about which border we went to. I think, you know, we won that one pretty well in the Reagan era. The reality is war is not what it used to be in the olden days. The reason why we went in Afghanistan and the reason why we stayed very complex, Joe Biden, I think, is doing, you know, what he can, which is the will of the people saying we don't need to be in this country anymore. We cannot win this war or whatever you call it. Can I interrupt you for a moment, Winston? Absolutely. You know, we've all been using the word war. You've used it. Tim has used it. I've used it. And the press has certainly used it. But war? What is war? You know, we went in there in order to deal with the al-Qaeda. And okay, that was effective, at least for the first year. But war? We haven't made war on them. They've made war on us with their explosive devices and ambushing our troops. We never went after them nearly so much as they went after us. So I'm not even sure I call this a war. It's something else, but it's not a war in the conventional sense. It's not a war in the conventional sense, but whatever it is, it's people shooting at each other, killing, being maimed, and dying. And so whatever we call it or don't call it, I think Americans overwhelmingly did support the withdrawal of American troops from this region, realizing that it's a quagmire that would never be solved. It's the, you know, the graveyard of empires. And I would disagree, though, with your premise that they want a rogue state there. I don't think that's in anyone's interest. It's not in Pakistan's interest, China's interest, Iran's interest. You know, it may be, it seems like North Korea is a bit of an interesting foil for the Chinese to have as a sort of a bargaining chip. And on some level, why else would they tolerate it there? But I don't think that's going to be the case. So we'll see that in Afghanistan. However, what's the solution? No large power has been able to go in there and subjugate these very different groups of tribes and ethnic divisions inside of this country that we call Afghanistan. But in fact, it's many different nations inside of this country. And I think that it will be interesting to see you mentioned about Vietnam coming along 20 years from now. If you were to go into Saigon or Hanoi, you would be surprised at obviously the level of what we would see as just corporate capitalism there as they produce immense quantities of things that the world wants to buy. So it may have a single political party, but I don't know that we're going to be able to expect that from Afghanistan. But let's see what 20 years of having some sort of Western presence that we had in Afghanistan brings about. However, I wouldn't remain that optimistic. Look, when was the revolution in Iran, 1978, 79, something like that? Most of the young people in that country as well don't remember a time when the Shah was there. This is a young nation. We're going to see the same thing in Afghanistan that 20 years from now, 30 years from now, the kids won't have a memory of that. But all of them will have a cell phone guarantee you in the smallest village. They will have to change because they'll realize if we don't, we will have failed our people. You're seeing this even in Cuba. So the world's going to change as it changes. As we bring back our troops, it's going to be easy to, with the 2020s, look back and say, oh, you should have done this, that and the other. And absolutely, is there room for criticism on the way that this happened? Should they have seen that the government, that the military there would have fallen so instantly? Probably. It's one scenario, but we've had spectacular intelligence failures in the past. And I think probably leading up to 911 and from then on. But we've had amazing intelligence that tells us things that 99% of it we don't hear about, that are victories that are wins that are that are watching things from the sky and and on the Internet and other places and human intelligence. So we don't know about those things and we don't hear about those things. However, let me ask you this. We're not done with Afghanistan, although we saw the last plane fly out. We still have one to 200 Americans and we have countless of Afghan allies that didn't get out. So the question is, to what degree do we work with the Taliban and incentivize them or whatever arrangements we have? Now, clearly they were helping, believe it or not, they were helping Americans get to the checkpoints, get to the airport, to the point where some of the news services were reporting they were carrying their luggage for them. To what degree do we engage with the Taliban, our enemy today, but potential partner tomorrow to combat ISIS-K and other groups. There's so many, as you said, there's so many tribes here that you don't know who's against who on what particular day the Mujahideen has sworn that the Taliban is their enemy and they will begin to take action against the Taliban. Does the Taliban become now our on the ground ally? It should. Because that avoids the risk of it going rogue. It avoids the risk of atrocities and war crimes, or at least it minimizes it. It makes them a responsible member of the community of nations. They're not organized. There's this guy, Barasata, who seems to be emerging and he seems to be civilized, although he talks about the Shia law, which is a dangerous thing for any country. My feeling is that it's in the United States best interest to deal with them, not only to get the 100 Americans out and other people out, but to make them a responsible, accountable member of society, of the global society. I think there's a possibility there, because they really do want to rule the place. They don't know how. They need to be left to their most civilized inclinations and do that. They could be very successful the way Vietnam has been. Take a while. Let me interject something here. Why couldn't that have been done 20 years ago, 19 years ago, before the invasion, to try to work with a tribal group and avoid all the death and mayhem that's transpired in 20 years? Why can't diplomacy, those efforts take place before war is declared? Well, we weren't smart. We weren't smart. We considered them adversaries and we weren't going to give them a break about anything. They were our enemy and nobody was going to make an effort to be conciliatory with them. I don't think there was any conciliation, but there could be now. The problem is a political problem, because the Republicans will criticize that. I think a lot of people in the military will criticize that and they like it or not, they have a voice in politics. The GOP in general, the right side of things, will criticize that. Biden will have a political problem if he tries to sidle up to them and make deals with them. On the other hand, he's the president. He can do it. My advice to him would be to start early and to develop diplomatic connections with them to show them the way to being responsible leaders, to cooperate with them. In that way, they won't become colonies of China or Russia or Iran. We want them to have a viable government and hopefully we can help them better from the outside than from the inside in a warlike fashion. Much better to try diplomacy. I'm happy that they established a temporary diplomatic agency in Doha. I'm happy that there's at least some connection going on. I'm happy that Burns of the National Security was in our CIA went in there and talked to Barasota. There are already connections here. Biden has to play it carefully. Tony Blinken has to play it carefully. But that is the mission now and we should be much smarter now than we were before. Winston, do you agree with Jay's position that it is a wise decision to try to work with the Taliban and have them as an uneasy ally but an ally nevertheless? I don't know about ally, but at least not adversary. I think we've already seen this. As Jay said, they're carrying luggage. Thank you very much. Get out of our country. We'll help you load the plane. Now, it's not been that smooth or easy or simple. Essentially, these peace negotiations or withdrawal negotiations, whatever you want to call them that started in the Trump years, Qatar was a big facilitator of those. If you're coming from a mud shack where you have to worry about being bombed all the time and you get to go stay at the higher regency in Doha and have all the beautiful luxuries that that society is able to provide its citizens, I think any normal person would say, I would like this from my country too. This can be achieved with peace and with development and with cooperation with the rest of the world. It helps the Qatar sitting on a ton of oil too, but the idea is that 98 nations came together and made an arrangement to facilitate getting out people that still need to be gotten out. That's a huge coalition right there of people and that the Taliban were willing to deal with. This was a negotiated withdrawal. Was it done perfectly? No. Was it done well? No, but we're still going to see a lot of movement out of the country, dribs and drabs. You're going to have the diaspora of Afghanis around the world who are then going to contribute back into the society. Maybe similar and that might be the parallel J is as they have gone abroad then they will continue their relations inside of the country and rebuild from overseas with new ideas, with new technologies, with connections from overseas so that they can build up their country into something that resembles where Vietnam is today. That would be the hope that we have and of course we have to engage with them if we're to hold up our best vision and values for the world as well. The dark side of that is that if we don't, if we turn our backs on them, if we continue and our isolationist approach to things, we won't have the benefit of any of that and they will be dangerous to us. Russia and China have already recognized them as a valid holder of the government of Afghanistan. That's on the surface. You can imagine what's going on under the surface. It's a race to see who can be more conciliatory with them right now. We should not lose the opportunity. Okay, we got a question from a viewer here and we appreciate every question we get. And this one is through you Winston. Do you think the private sector soldiers should start missions to extract people stuck in Afghanistan and what sort of problems could those contractors create? Oh, I don't know. There's movies on Netflix that show stuff like that. However, we get out our allies and our friends that have been there that are trapped and that are facing really bad fates. We need to do all we can to bring them out, whether it's negotiations with the Taliban, whether it's cash payments, whatever it is that it is to take them out or organize caravans. And it seems like the Taliban has a couple choices here. If I were starting a nation afresh, well, do you want an entire brain drain of people that have connections with the external community of the world? Or are they going to be an irritant in your side as you try to form your new society under your own values and more? So they're facing that question. And I think they're probably going to let the people go to a certain point. And that's going to be easier for them rather than facing constant internal division. They're going to have enough of that, like you said, with the Mujahideen and others in their country. But they may also say, no, we need all of you to stay here in this society. But I have a feeling like they're just going to say, let the folks go. And they have been letting them go until now. I don't know what's going to happen in the next week. And I would hope that all of the marginalized people that would be victims of this, the worst victims of this regime. And obviously, you can't depopulate half the nation of all the women that are going to be suffering here. But there's a lot of other groups that really need to be taken out, the translators, the helpers for Americans, any LGBTQ folks, if they can't even be recognized. I don't know how we even undertake some of these things, any other religious minorities and whatnot. So we've got even that they left the dogs behind. I read in one of them for the military dogs. So, you know, you've got a lot of cleanup to do and it's not going to happen right now. We're just going to have to see how the scene unfolds. And that's it. But there is $1.2 trillion in a Federal Reserve Bank in the United States with Afghan's name on it. And I'm sure that has some influence. So we'll see how that how that plays out. Hey, Jay, we got a second question here. And that is, what have made a difference if Donald Trump had not let out the prisoners of all these soldiers that basically has taken 20 years to round up? They were let go is, yeah, we did a so back in March of 2020, talking about how they're probably have been released before the ink was even dried on the, you know, the agreement between the Taliban. Donald Trump was completely incompetent in a commander in chief things in handling the Joint Chiefs and certainly in diplomatic relations. In fact, I would say it's worse than incompetent. What is worse than incompetent? I mean, it's corrupt incompetence. So I don't give him credit for anything. On the other hand, to answer this question, I'm not sure it would have made a big difference because if the country was going to collapse anyway, they would get out. It was just a matter of time. They would get out. They would be out now, for sure. Maybe the there's an inference there that maybe other than Taliban released, maybe there was ISIS involved in those prisons as well. I don't know. Maybe so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that's true. I think mostly we were looking for Taliban and we put Taliban in jail. ISIS, it's very interesting that you mentioned ISIS because the only real violence in the past two weeks has been by ISIS. And arguably, the Taliban can't control ISIS. They're their own crazy people. And it was not the Taliban that did that violence. It was not the Taliban that blew up anybody. And you have to make that separate. I thought a lot of criticism that Biden got was because of that terrorism. But that wasn't the Taliban. Furthermore, I don't know if you guys remember, but there was something about how the Biden administration had cut a deal to extend the August 31 date in order to permit more people to come out. But the Biden administration decided that they didn't believe it. They didn't believe it. They weren't going to accept that deal, even though they made the deal. And they brought them out by August 31. As a matter of fact, by August 30, which I thought was interesting, they beat their own deadline. That was really very cautious on the part of the Joint Chiefs. And I think what you have here is an inflexibility, perhaps. They were paranoid, not necessarily because of the lives involved, but because of the public reaction and the GOP criticism. So I'm not sure the Taliban is all as bad as we think. With that 1.2 billion, did you say? Trillion, trillion. Right, trillion. That is a big bargaining chip. They don't have to let it all out, but they could certainly, as Winston suggested, like it let a little of it out and buy some peace and quiet, buy some further evacuation. I think that's obvious and easy. In fact, I think that's what's going to happen. And I think that's part of the right approach, because money does talk in this context. Yeah. We're almost out of time, but Winston, does the Taliban even survive as ruling the government or are they overrun by other tribal groups or ISISK? Your thoughts about the viability of Taliban to even stay in power? It's a good question, but we hope that there's some stability in that we don't want to fail state and complete chaos. That doesn't help anybody. My heart goes out to all the U.S. soldiers, especially who have been sent to Afghanistan over the years and fought for what they were sent there for. And a lot of that is confusing right now, and probably some of them are wondering, what was I doing there? But I think we were trying to help this nation on some level and provide people with a sense of peace and justice. And so the sacrifices that they've made and that they continue to make and as they come back, we support our military and the good men and women who staff that. And also for all the people in Afghanistan right now who are undoubtedly living in a state of pure terror about what the future will bring. So hopefully we will engage with them. We will do the right thing as best as we can. Our government will do the best that it can as it withdraws from this quagmire of 20 years. And let's hope that a bunch of calm comes on that nation. We've got enough to deal with right here at home. So maybe without Afghanistan taking any attention, and it needs a lot of attention right now, we've got a lot to focus on right here. Those are great final words, Winston. Thank you very much. Great thoughtful and great stage. Jay, your final thoughts and closing remarks. We really have to learn from what happened in Afghanistan. You know, not even getting to the question of comparing it with Vietnam. We have to learn how to deal with the kind of problem we found in Afghanistan with the kind of challenges we had in its infrastructure. Remember, it was really a primitive society. I remember looking at the, you know, at the website. Who does this? I think the CIA has a website. It's public about every country and they had something like 11 miles of railroad in the whole country with the 38, 40 million people. Anyway, we have to learn how to deal with this. We made a lot of mistakes. We put contractors in there to do things. They were not really responsible. They were not really citizen diplomats. We put contractors in there to do fighting. And we lost control of the situation. We just threw money at it without having a long range. But next time, we have to do way, way better. And we have to know how to get out. We have to know what our mission is. We should have been out of there in a year or two, not waiting 20 years. So somebody ought to write a book, maybe Winston. Winston, you should write a book about the lessons that we have to apply next time around. The reality is from a moral point of view, this will happen again. And people will call upon the United States as either a good leader or not so good leader, a global leader, to deal as the world's policeman. And we should be the world's policeman. Nobody else can do it in the high moral aspect of how we think, at least how some of us think. So bottom line is this ought to be a learning experience that we'll have to do better. And we should start doing better now. Well, when we get that call from another nation, and you're right, Jay, it will happen. Hopefully we remember the two words that are paramount. And that is mission creep. And hopefully we avoid 20-year engagements because we know our mission, the scope of the mission, and the objectives, and we stick to it. So Jay and Fidel, thank you very much for joining us. Winston Welch, thank you for joining us for What Now America. Join us next week at 11 o'clock on Wednesdays. I'm Tim Appichell, your host. Until then, aloha.