Title: Talk Afghanistan
Show: Garland Nixon
Date: 2021-09-01
URL: https://youtu.be/j4cxV2fz6ks
Duration: 24:00

---

[00:00] my name's garland nixon and i'm john kiriakou and the united states has finally left afghanistan after a 20-year invasion and subsequent occupation plenty for john and i to talk about and we want your feedback let's talk [Music]

[00:43] so my name is garland nixon and i'm here with my good friend john kiriakou john and i are going to start doing a lot of stuff online together um and i'm looking forward to it make sure you follow me at garland nixon on twitter of course at john and keep an eye on us we're going to be doing a lot also make sure everything that we do you share it on all your social media platforms good evening john this is i think we're going to have a lot of fun i'm looking forward to doing a lot of good shows together i've i have to agree garland i've been looking forward to this for a long time and uh

[01:13] boy there's a lot to talk about there really is i mean 20 years and here's what i'd like to like let's just dive right into it because i want to ask you something about you know a lot about the area you know you worked in pakistan you worked in the area and the first thing i thought about was the how fast the um afghan i don't even know to call them that but the afghan military such as it was melted away fell away and i just thought that you

[01:45] know it seemed to me that a soldier that doesn't feel like they have a legitimate government to fight for that doesn't have anything to fight for just either negotiates or walks away what are your thoughts about why the afghan military just disappeared melted away almost let's be realistic it was overnight they didn't fight it was uh in fact president biden said uh in public that he believed the central government could hold on for six more months in fact it held on for six days a huge huge difference and the

[02:18] problems in the military garland were several fold first of all most of the the afghans who were recruited into the afghan military and the afghan national police didn't really want to be there it was a job they knew that the americans paid their bills so you know it was it was something they could do to make a couple of dollars there was no real commitment to a central government there was no commitment to protecting the country um secondly a lot of those guys

[02:48] were at least ideologically taliban or taliban sympathizers and third the the military controlled really very little of afghanistan we used to joke even 10 years ago when i was on the senate foreign relations committee staff that that hamid karzai was really no more than the mayor of kabul you know there was this this false belief that the the central government of afghanistan controlled the countryside

[03:19] or controlled much of the country that's just simply not true they controlled really very little and and fourth there were serious tribal issues you know there were pashtuns who wouldn't work with hazaras and tajiks who wouldn't work with pashtuns and uzbeks who didn't want to work with anybody and people just hated each other there was one terrible incident in 2012 where um dyncorp was was uh training people for both the military

[03:50] and the police uh one of the recruits was a taliban sympathizer and he put poison he put arsenic into a pot of stew and poisoned um many of his of his compatriots he killed about a dozen of them wow and then that night he opened the door and let other members of the taliban into the dormitory and they they stabbed most of the other recruits to death wow so that's what we were up against you know from the very beginning this was this was really a western a

[04:20] western style military that we were trying to impose on this country that has never had a western-style military yeah it seems to me that that's i i can't remember where i read this but years ago i read someone wrote an article about um the us and the middle east and they said the problem is we look at the middle east and we see america and we try to rebuild america and we try to build the type of bureaucracy that we have here we try to build a military with a type of bureaucracy that our military works which i might add may be one of the reasons that it's ineffective in that

[04:51] region you know because it's a our military is built to fight you know it's all you know what it reminds me of it reminds me of the revolutionary war where the uh the british soldiers were you know taught to fight by the queensberry rules you know suicide pretty much you know when you stand in a line and you shoot and they shoot back and you all die you know it's pretty stupid but that's what they were trained and the um you know the americans kind of did what they had to do they fought from trees and roadsides and they took advantage of

[05:22] that and it seems to me that it's the same type of empire fighting a ragtag group of people who live in the countryside and that's what we do in um in the middle east particularly in afghanistan and as they the the the the a lot of the shiites say in in the middle east you got the watches we got the time you know i was in afghanistan in 2007 as a private citizen i went on behalf of paramount studios which is a whole different story but uh one of my meetings was with the leader of the hazaras in

[05:54] uh in kabul and the hazaras of course are an ethnic minority they have more in common with the iranians than they have with the costumes that run afghanistan and they're shia muslims right well in this guy's living room he had a large shadow box mounted on the wall and it had every one of his judo belts from from white to you know fifth level black and i congratulated him on it and he said do you know why i'm a black belt in judo do you know why every hazara

[06:25] studies judo and i said no and he said because we are forbidden by law from carrying a weapon it's the only way that we can protect ourselves now this was after six years of u.s occupation wow this is after the us imposed a democratic government and there was still still such strife such intercommunal strife between sunnis and shias that shias weren't even allowed to defend themselves well so the reality is while the u.s

[06:58] claimed that we were we claimed to we're going to basically impose a western-style government on there a liberal democracy etc we s and and and i got to add this let me let me throw this at you and tell me if you've heard about it and what you know about this because i've only heard rumors and i've seen articles but i never looked in depth that literally there were afghan soldiers afghan politicians who had child sex slaves

[07:28] and that our government instructed our diplomatic personnel and our military personnel to ignore it have you heard the are you familiar with those stories yeah those stories are true um it's something that i try to address uh at the senate foreign relations committee uh it's a it's a it's a cultural thing where um pashtun men have sex with uh with boys young boys uh provided that they're unable to grow a beard because

[07:59] it's not considered to be homosexual if they're children as crazy as that sounds and so what they'll do this was actually in the book the kite runner and the movie the kite runner what they'll do is they'll they'll purchase these boys from poor families and have them work as t-boys as valets um they'll make them do homoerotic dances for for entertainment and they'll have sex with them and this

[08:29] is seen as something that's that's quite acceptable because it has you know a millennia-long uh uh history and so when we went there and were justifiably appalled at the way children were being treated our soldiers were told and and more than just our soldiers everybody who was in afghanistan was told this is cultural it's not for us to judge and we just let it go you know it's kind of like the heroin trade garland we could do an entire show just

[09:01] on heroin poppy but i went to afghanistan in 2009 to do a study on poppy cultivation and the military was not happy about this at all because they had to fly me all around the country i wanted to meet with poppy farmers and distributors and you know drug lords and people spoke freely about it but i i went to the village of lush garga which is the capital of hellmann province and almost all of the country's heroin came from helmand and from kandahar right

[09:32] right so i went out into the fields and i i met up with a poppy farmer and i very naively asked him why instead of poppy he didn't grow something with two growing seasons like onions or pomegranates or tomatoes and he was just exasperated and he said oh he said you know the americans told me in 2001 that if i told them where the arabs were that i could grow all the poppy i wanted and now you come here and you tell me i

[10:03] can't grow poppy and i said i said what american told you you could grow poppy and as soon as the words came out of my mouth my military handler said meeting over we have to go and the guy literally pulled me back onto the helicopter and and we we left i i wrote it up as best i could but the message was clear you know i i was told later by a dea officer that afghanistan produces 93 of the world's heroin

[10:33] and almost all of it goes to iran and russia right you don't care if iranians and russians are addicted to heroin you one might knowing the history of our intelligence agency one might make the argument that they would encourage uh you know if you look at the history you'll look back at the british empire and the opium wars etc sometimes it could be it is encouraged as a method of uh another underhanded kind of warfare i would agree i would agree so you know it i tell you the other part of it too is this

[11:04] and that is what you're talking about it to me is one of the reasons that the us or any empire should not be going around the world trying to rebuild the world in its own image you know i know i you know i've traveled in south america and i've gone you know i've been fortunate enough to go to some small villages and talk to people in south america venezuela different places and as an example coca what you find is that there are areas in the you know in these different places but

[11:35] there are areas where that's the only way these people can make a living that if you were to say you can't grow your coca leaves anymore which is processed and turned into cocaine if you can't do that everybody in the area would basically starve and you'd have a civil war the government would be overthrown i mean it was just it would completely destabilize everything so while it's may seem like a bad thing in the um in the grand scheme of things from the perspective of the people who are living in those areas that's their only option

[12:06] i i think you're exactly right that is their only option and you know we we bring this very american mindset to the problem too uh when i was in afghanistan uh there was a lieutenant colonel there who asked very pointedly why don't we just spray roundup on everything we'll just fly over these fields and just you know like with one of these crop dusters just spray everything with roundup and the us ambassador said

[12:37] oh that would be just great and then as soon as we see the first birth defect in a villager or the first evidence of down syndrome they're gonna blame the roundup and they're going to blame the americans and then we have a whole different fight on our hands yeah and and so again what we're talking about are things that to me this is all the reason that you you you you shouldn't be there because in reality

[13:07] you cannot change a society if you have a society that's been doing things a particular way for ten thousand years five thousand let's just say hundreds or thousands of years in many cases we go there and i tend to believe one of two things that or maybe they're not mutually exclusive the people who run our foreign policy are such ideologues to a point that it makes them fools you know they that it's not that they don't believe it's that they do group think

[13:39] and they believe things that are not in keeping with the reality and they continue to try to push their beliefs onto the world number one but number two that after this process gets going they they say we're gonna go in afghanistan we're gonna do whatever oh we're gonna make it a wonderful place it'll be a you know a regular new york city yeah right but at any rate good luck with that but once that process gets starts get gets going the money starts flowing in the good times and everybody there is

[14:10] getting paid and they're handing money out i heard a guy to say to me that he was in the military and he was there and he would be given hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash every month to hand out to the villagers and that he basically what he said was you know when i was there i didn't take any of that money and i pocketed it he said but other people did and he says and in hindsight i probably should have he said because i could have thrown it in my duffel bag we just got on our planes and came home and he says in hindsight i could have did it and he says other people did it but that's the

[14:42] other part of it that you're there in an area where there's corruption and then you're just shoveling money you're recreating the corruption and then our people go there and now they're getting a piece of the corruption and now you get a society you get an you get a dynamic where there's a country that nobody wants to leave because they're getting paid man they are getting paid well and there's just cash flowing everywhere that's not being accounted for i can't tell you how many times over the years that i was with the cia that i took delivery of millions of

[15:13] dollars in cash in duffel bags i'm proud to say that we accounted for literally every last dollar i i spent probably 10 million in cash maybe more than 10 million it was probably around 10 million in cash when i was the head of counter-terrorism operations in pakistan but we accounted for every single dollar i'm not at all surprised that other elements of the us government couldn't account for their money um and it's because intelligence and warfighting

[15:44] garland is a cash business and you know i i was driving i was driving one day from islamabad to uh to lahore with a colleague and we had two million dollars in two duffel bags and i said to him you know i always used to joke whenever we would hear that somebody at the agency had been fired or was being prosecuted for stealing you know six hundred dollars or a thousand dollars i always used to think man if you're going to steal something steal

[16:14] millions you're right still still enough to retire on exactly from here we were driving just the two of us with two million dollars in cash and we looked at each other and just started laughing because even with the millions you got a job to do and your country trusts you and the american people trust you and so you have to do the right thing well and let me ask you this we're going to get out of here we're only going to do about 20 minutes what are your thoughts i tell you um there was as we left there was the attack on the

[16:47] airport yes and the u.s then said oh well you know biden said oh we're going to strike back of course a drone strike and i've done a lot of research it certainly appears that there was a family of nine that was killed yes um and to me that's kind of emblematic of the whole isn't it those two things we we're there to quote fight terrorism as we leave a car bomb goes off kills a bunch of people including in in including 13 soldiers and then we go to strike back as it were and kill a family if not a killer family if not that's all

[17:19] of afghanistan to me those two things are all of our policies in the middle east all summed up in one and that's why it's counterproductive to what we claim we're trying to do what are your thoughts on that i agree and you know seven of those nine were children and five of them were under the age of five wow the drone program is a is is an act of terrorism as far as i'm concerned we can certainly talk about that at length at some point but you're right i i'll say too that that had the suicide bomber not killed um

[17:49] uh what was it 12 marines and a sailor yeah um i think that that this evacuation would have gone down as as a major success at the end of the day because we've gotten out tens of thousands of people americans allies afghans who had worked for the u.s government or for the u.s military without those 13 deaths we wouldn't have had this last drone strike and we would have been able to get out with no loss of life um it got ugly at the end and

[18:22] another thing that bothers me is the government wants us to believe that this don't drone strike killed two isis k leaders uh they've not identified who those leaders are which leads me to think that no isis k leaders were killed this was just an innocent family that was killed and we're trying to put the best face on it yeah and you know it's kind of like um syria and iraq for many years every other week you ever noticed we always killed the second in command of al-qaeda or isis it was always every couple weeks

[18:53] guess who we killed outback daddy we killed him about a dozen and a half times that guy had more lives than a cat so it gets to a point where you realize that um there's a certain level of propaganda and the gov our government won't and can't simply say oh oops darn we accidentally killed a family oops sorry about that they can't ever do that and so what we end up creating is a bunch of people that hate us and and you know you know you've got kids i've got got a daughter if that happened to my child

[19:23] i'd be i'd want some you know i'd i'd be angry i'd want revenge i might be a terrorist if that happened most people would and so we're creating terrorism by doing that by not using diplomacy in the middle east and really to be quite honest not allowing the governments that have strategic interests in the area you know what i mean i mean regardless of how the us gets along with iran iran has strategic interest in um keeping terrorism from incubating in iran and

[19:55] iran you know what i mean the countries on the border china russia has uh was it uzbekistan or tajikistan that's right on the border both right so they have all of these countries have a strategic interest in maintaining some level of um stability there and the us won't just simply say hey we'll work with you to have a stable area it's almost like uh you know we'd rather have an unstable area than have our i'll put it like this an unstable

[20:26] area that makes life harder for iran and russia and china etc um even if it causes us problems i think that's exactly right and and we have to recognize too that we can't be everywhere in the world i have to hand it to the chinese i think the chinese have really played this right they maintained good relations with the afghan government and at the same time they may in good relations with the taliban uh several years ago six years ago they signed an exclusive agreement with the

[20:57] afghan government to mine rare earth metals it's worth a trillion dollars and that deal is being respected by the taliban so uh you know the chinese didn't lose anybody the chinese didn't drone anybody and the chinese the ones who are going to end up making money out of this whole deal and and your last thing we'll touch base on i think i look at a country like china some of the countries china and russia particularly and one of the things that they do that i think we'd be far better off and that is they'll do business with you they won't

[21:29] they can say we don't like your style of government we think you're doing terrible things blah blah blah but we're not going to interfere in your internal affairs if we can make money you want to buy our oil you want to buy our gas or we need your oil or your gas will buy it what you do there is your business to me when i look at what's happening with china's economy as fast as it's growing and ours is is is you know struggling in our people are getting angry there's more division etc and i

[22:02] think you know we'd be far better off if we'd actually take our noses out of other people's businesses look here and try to adjust the problems we have with the pandemic and the evictions and all that stuff but we're so it's like our government doesn't give a crap about the people we got to go around the world and stick our nose in everybody else's business and try to fix them when we're broke yes it's it's sad but true and it's a lesson that we just don't seem to learn look at all the different places that we've been bogged down in just in the last 20 years

[22:33] since september 11th you know we can talk about afghanistan and iraq and syria and yemen and somalia and libya and uh you know there's an argument even to be made for venezuela when do we learn yeah i do want to talk to you i want to get back on soon and i want to talk about pakistan and how they fit into this because the fact of the matter is the pakistan um intelligence agency i mean you can argue the u.s kind of built the um you know founded the militant

[23:06] islamist movement in the late 70s you know and throughout the 80s to push back against the soviet union something again that i disagree with because it was at least stable under the former what was that the people something party of afghanistan right but whatever it was but it was stable at any rate but i know pakistan had a lot to do with building the taliban creating the taliban funding the taliban and i think there's a lot more that they're going to be a big player going forward in dealing with

[23:38] taliban 2.0 and you spent a lot of time in in pakistan so we'll get together soon and uh within the next day or so we'll talk about that also i want everybody to know john and i are with thursdays may be the day but we're going to pick a day one day of the week and we're going to talk about um whistleblowers we're going to talk about john we're going to talk about julian assange we're going to talk about um daniel hale um and we're we're gonna have a great time so thanks a lot john thank you darling look forward to talking to you soon everyone share this

[24:09] on all of your social media platforms follow at garland knicks and follow at john kiriakou let people know john and i are going to be doing a lot of shows and a lot of stuff together we're looking forward to it thanks we are out
