Tonight President Barack Obama is going to be giving his speech announcing what in all probability is going to be about a 30,000 troop surge, I don’t know what the word is, into Afghanistan. We spent an hour on this yesterday at some length, the third hour of our program with multiple perspectives. We’re going to revisit it again in the second hour of our program. Scott Ritter is going to be with us, the former weapons inspector. One of the early voices warning us about the stupidity of going into Iraq. Frankly I think it was stupid that we went into Afghanistan in the first place, I think it’s stupid that we’re staying there and I think it’s stupid that we’re continuing. There’s a number of reasons for this. The main reason is that people don’t get it, that Afghanistan is not a nation.

Let me say that again, Afghanistan is not a nation. It is a collection of tribes. It’s like, you know, a metaphor that is highly imperfect but I think probably most Americans will get, that you probably haven't heard anywhere on any network television or anything like that, is this is a little bit in some ways like Zachary Taylor or some of the, you know some of the early US presidents, going out and negotiating with “the Indian tribes,” right, and cutting a deal with one tribal leader. And but really there’s 40, 50, 100 tribes. This is a nation of tribes, this is a nation of small autonomous communities. And they have different loyalties, they have different ethnicities, they have, it’s not, it is not a nation state. And you just, you can’t, well as I said, I want to get into that at some length in the 2nd hour.

I think that as Bob Herbert headlined today, as I recall, in today’s New York Times something like “Sad Choice” or “Bad Choice” or “Big Mistake Mr. President” ["A Tragic Mistake]". On the other hand there is the political reality that the Karzai government that we have been propping up, the war lords that we’ve been propping up, the heroin war lords, Hamid Karzai’s brother that the CIA has been paying off, that the, you know some of the tribal groups. Many of these folks who have been associated with us and that we’ve been propping up, if we pull out of there, there will be over the short term, there will be a civil war as it were. Not so much a civil war, there’ll be a realignment which is going to mean people dying. Not that people aren’t dying right now. And so if Obama were to say you know I’m pulling out right now, we’re just pulling out, to heck with it, we’re out of here. Which is not what I would advocate either, I think that we should be doing a development sort of thing the way that India was with Afghanistan a decade ago, frankly. The "Three Cups of Tea" strategy, Greg Mortenson’s. But if he were to pull out right now that realignment, that blood bath would happen over the course of the next year and it would become front and center the issue in the 2010 elections. So you know it’s once again we can’t escape politics. But as I said, we’ll get to that in the 2nd hour.

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Well, as the Chilcot inquiry continues in the United Kingdom, as they’re trying to figure out in the UK how was it that Tony Blair decided to go along with George W Bush, and last week the phrase that was used in the testimony was that a pact was signed in blood at the Crawford Ranch. That Tony Blair went out to the Crawford Ranch and hung out with George W Bush and George W Bush basically said we’re gonna have a war, you’re with me or you’re not. And apparently laid out for him all the wonders of being in a war. Look at how, Maggie Thatcher, I mean, her biggest claim to fame, one of the most, the height of her popularity, absolute height of her popularity was the Falklands war. Small popular war, hey, easy to knock over opponent. Ronald Reagan, some of his most popular moments, Panama, Grenada, you know, little war, yeah, it’s just, people like a little war, you know, it’s kind of like sports. Especially if a whole lot of, not many people die and he says, come on, he’s got no weapons of mass destruction, we’ll take this guy in three weeks. And we did. You know, the war only lasted a couple of weeks. And there was apparently no discussion of the occupation.

So, anyhow, as the British are now seriously, well, semi-seriously inquiring into what went wrong, what happened, how did it happen, who lied to whom about what, who advised whom about what, who told whom about what. How did it happen that the British ended up in an illegal war, a war that was not authorized by the United Nations? How did that happen? As the British are struggling to figure this out, we now are preparing to start basically a whole new phase of another war. Now, arguably it was the original war, you’ll recall that George W Bush declared victory in Afghanistan just a few weeks after we bombed that country. And, you know, the Taleban basically just said, 'okay, we’ll go hide in the hills, we’ll go hang out in Pakistan for a while. But, you know, we’ve been living here for 10,000 years, you think we’re going away? Come on, give me a break.'

So, tonight President Obama is going to announce 30 or 35,000 troops. And I am so, my emotions about this are so mixed and so strong. It’s much like the healthcare debate. I understand the political imperatives. I understand the Rahm Emanuel perspective. I strongly disagree with it. I wish we had a President who was willing to stand up to the Rahm Emanuels of the world and say, 'no, I’m sorry, I’m gonna do the right thing. I don’t care if it’s gonna be the political thing or not, I don’t care if it’s gonna help my party or not'. I don’t think, frankly when Ronald Reagan did that, when George W Bush did that it helped him with his base. And it could with Barack Obama but he hasn’t so far. Now, hope springs eternal, as you know I haven’t written this guy off yet, but I know that what’s coming down the road, and he knows what's coming down the road is the elections in 2010 and that when you go into a country, when you occupy a country with tens of thousands of troops and you drop hundreds of millions of dollars into a country where the average income is about $400 a year, and you start paying off this faction against that faction and you just totally screw everything all up.

When you pull out, all kinds of power vacuums occur. And some of those power vacuums are filled by people rushing in with guns rather than with money. And people die. And you know messes happen. Happened after Vietnam, happened after the Korean war. Well, not so much, I mean we, the truce there, it certainly happened after World War II. In every case, largely in every case, but particularly of an occupation. You know it took us over 40 years to essentially get out of the Philippines. 40 years. And actually we still have troops in the Philippines. And Teddy Roosevelt fought in that war.

So, you know, occupations are long and messy and dirty and, and, and, and I understand that if President Obama were to say, 'no, you know, instead of giving you 30,000 troops we’re gonna pull out all the troops who are there right now. We’re gonna pull together a coalition of groups in the region, we’re gonna get the Arab League involved, we’re gonna get India involved.' India has substantial resources in the area, India has a long history of actually helping, working with Afghanistan. They’re doing it for their own self interest, they’re doing it because they want a buffer against Pakistan. Many of the same reasons that we used to be supporting Saddam Hussein because we wanted a buffer against Iran. But nonetheless, there’s geopolitics at work here, but nonetheless, if he were to do that, if he were to say, 'no, we’re just, we’re leaving', a couple of things would happen:

1: We would lose much of our access to the oil and the oil, and the gas and the pipelines. Our influence in the region would dramatically diminish. Guess who’s going to rush in to fill it, it’ll be the Chinese and the Russians. But principally the Chinese. And at this point in time the real politic, you know there’s this Zbigniew Brzezinski bunch, they’re not willing to see that happen. The Rahm Emanuel bunch. But that’s the kind of practical things.

Secondly there’s going, there would be in the course of the realignment there would be a blood bath, I don’t know how else to describe it. People would die. People are gonna die anyway. It’s just that what we’re electing to do is have it happen slowly rather than rapidly. But if you were to pull out, that process is going to last for about, it’ll take about a year for the country basically to reorganize itself. Now frankly I think that we should be working with the Taleban and they already control over half the country and help put this thing back together. But you know, that’s just undoable. So what he’s looking at is the possibility, not the possibility, the absolute certainty that having lost a war is, that is how the Republicans will spin this thing. You already have Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, one of the most evil men in the history of the United States government, one of the most sociopathic, evil men ever. You’ve already got this guy out there attacking President Obama for not putting enough troops in. 'It's not enough of a war, you’re not killing enough people'.

Afghanistan is not a nation state like Germany or France, it’s not a unified, it is a collection of all kinds of small tribes. There’s no, I mean all we can do is, even with 30,000 more troops, 34,000 more troops is nail down some of the densely populated areas like Kabul and protect the pipeline, the gas line, that’s being built as we speak. But I’m telling you, if he were to pull out now, look at the timing of this thing. It is November of 2009. May, April May June of 2010 is going to be when the serious campaigning begins for the November 2010 elections. If he can put a cork on the Afghanistan situation for the next 18 months then the Democrats at least won’t be damaged by it. And I suspect that that’s the political calculus that’s going on here. And I say this with a heavy heart and with absolute disagreement about it.

I would rather save lives, not have the violence happen, I mean if we’re gonna spend a million dollars per soldier. You know it costs a fraction of that to build a school in Afghanistan, you know, all the things that we could do. I would much rather see a peaceful solution to this than a military solution. And my guess is, you know, we don’t have a decent partner in Afghanistan. We have a corrupt government, we’ve got narco lords, we’ve got a culture of corruption. I’ll go through the list when we come back from the break. And, well, we’ll see.

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The headline over at the top of Huffington Post right now, "Obama wants Afghan war over in 3 years". I have seen this movie before. In 1972 Richard Nixon was elected, beat Hubert Humphrey as I recall in the election of ’72 on the platform of ending the Vietnam War. And uh, the Vietnam War that was very unpopular. Lyndon Johnson, who I, were it not for the Vietnam War, I think probably was one of our very best Presidents and tragically, I was out in the streets chanting “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.” I was out in the streets getting tear gassed and CN gassed and you know I was never shot at but some of my peers were. I remember that time.

And I remember Richard Nixon running on a platform of he was gonna end the war, and then once he got into office, well it’s gonna take a couple of years and we’ve got to escalate this thing, we’ve gotta do this that and the other thing, and he was basically you know I mean Kennedy had beat Nixon back in 1960 by saying that Nixon was soft on Cuba because in ’59 Nixon was the Vice President and he had let Castro, he had, in fact the US helped Castro, we got Batista out of the country brought Castro to power, we thought he was gonna be a small d democrat, turned out he turned his back on us and decided to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, became a Communist. And Kennedy beat Nixon up about that terribly. And in part won the election because Nixon was 'soft on Cuba'. So here’s Nixon, he’s elected in ’72 as President, and he’s, he’s elected to end the war but he also knows that if he ends the war it’s gonna be a bloody mess and he doesn’t want to be the guy on whose watch that bloody mess happens. So he keeps extending the war on and on and on ’75, ’76, ’72, ’73, ’74, ’75 *. And he is up for re election in what, ’76.? And what was his re election? He’s got a secret campaign, a secret strategy. Him and Kissinger had this secret deal to end the war.

And so when Obama, when I see this headline over at Huffington, "Obama wants Afghan war over in three years", I’m thinking what’s 3 years from now? Three years from now is the Presidential election. And it may, and again I’m seeing this tragic intersection of the American political process and lives. And had George W Bush not opened the gates of hell, had he not started this, bombing Afghanistan in the first place which was insane. And then the war in Iraq. Had he not begun this we wouldn’t be in this god awful position and Barack Obama wouldn’t be having to make these horrible decisions. But it may well be that if you look at the incredible amount of political capital that’s going into just getting healthcare passed this year, and then next year’s a political election and you can’t do anything. And then the year after that maybe you can do something but the Presidential election is coming and what are you gonna do about that? It may well be that it’ll be 2013 before he has the political capital to actually end the wars in the Middle East. Call me a cynic if you want, but. And I’m not saying this by way of condemning him.

I well understand the horrible box that this man has been given. I made a joke on the morning show the other day with Carl and Christine, and, who did such a great job for filling in for me last week on Monday and Tuesday by the way, if I haven’t, I think I’ve thanked them before, but if not, thanks again to Carl Wolfson and Christine Alexander, they’re spectacular talents. And Mike Dirkx here in Portland hiring them and putting them on the air and helping put together a great morning show.

But in any case, I made the joke that basically what George W Bush did to Barack Obama, it’s the equivalent of he pulled out his belt and dropped a ferret in his pants and said okay good luck! I mean that’s basically the war. I mean what do you do? Somebody drops a ferret in your pants, it’s like WhoaHo! Wait a minute! And this is the situation. I mean, it’s a disaster. So.

Al Qaeda is not the deal. The CIA says there’s maybe 100 al Qaeda guys in Afghanistan. We’re gonna send 200,000 people, when you include contractors and back up people and CIA people and military and all the rest to get 100 al Qaeda? There’s maybe 200 Al Qaeda in Pakistan? Al Qaeda is a dead movement for all practical purposes. You know, they’re not the factor. The insurgency is spreading, guess what, just, the same way it would here in the United States if Canada or Mexico invaded the United States to help save our republic because it was destroyed by George Bush or by the corporatists. 'We’ll bring back your jobs, don’t worry!' You know, people are saying, 'no wait a minute, we can do this ourselves'.

The Afghan army? There’s an oxymoron for you. Here’s a country that’s really not even a country. It’s a bunch of different tribal regions, it’s a bunch of different ethnicities, it’s a bunch of different languages. And in many cases in the army to the extent that we’ve controlled the army, we’ve been putting Tajiks in charge of Pashtuns and Pashtuns in charge of Tajiks and they’re not getting along and basically they’re taking a paycheck if that. And they’re working for a guy who is now revealed to the world as a ballot stuffer and his brother is a heroin war lord, and this we’re gonna die for? We’re gonna have soldiers die for? I’m sorry. I want to have no part of it.

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* By the way, I plead jet lag. I was saying ’72 and ’74 or ’76 or whatever. It was ’68 that Nixon came to power on the pledge that he would end the war. We also played on this program some, oh gee, about a year ago, I still have the audio, we chopped up all those audio clips when they, when the LBJ library released them where LBJ found out that he was actually trying to end the war in Vietnam ’68 and he had a deal with the Vietnamese to end the war and the Republicans went into Vietnam and they cut a deal with the Vietnamese and said if you’ll extend the war through the election then Nixon will give you more favorable terms and LBJ called Everett Dirksen and said this is treason and Everett Dirksen agreed with him and promised that he would talk to Richard Nixon about it. And he did, and Nixon just blew off Dirksen and said 'forget it'. And so, anyhow, Nixon won in ’68. And it was ’68 and the secret plan was ’72. So I had my years wrong, and like I said, I’ve, I woke up at 3 o’clock this morning. Welcome to the wonderful world of jet lag. My brain is working at half speed. My apologies. But, and thanks to all of you who called to tell Shawn, 'hey, tell Thom he’s got his years wrong'.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.