Kelley B. Vlahos on The Afghanistan Papers, The Blob, and Conservatism

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

March 25, 2020

KELLY VLAHOS: When you build up these institutions in this culture over a matter of seventy years, it's not a matter of being brought into the office on the first day and being told that this is how you have to think about everything. It's ingrained.

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MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, the podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. This week, we're joined by Kelly Vlahos, the executive editor of The American Conservative. We're going to get into the Afghanistan Papers, the conservative argument for restraint, and how to combat the military industrial complex.

We have a lot to get to. But before we do, a lot has changed with the spread of the coronavirus since this episode was recorded earlier this month. From us here at None of the Above and the Eurasia Group Foundation, we wanted to encourage everyone to stay safe and to listen to the CDC guidelines. We hope you're doing well out there. Now let's get to it.

HANNAH: Kelly, thank you very much for spending some time with us today.

VLAHOS: Thank you very much for having me.

HANNAH: Some of the biggest foreign policy news that has broken in the past six months is the revelations about Afghanistan. There were a trove of documents leaked to the Washington Post. They're calling it the Afghanistan Papers now in kind of a rhetorical nod to the Pentagon Papers, and it came out that many top officials, both in the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration, knew the United States was failing in Afghanistan since the beginning—since 2002.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: The report raises a lot of questions. Why did we stay the course for all those years, and why did it take until now for the public to find out about all this?

After you read through it, what did you think the major takeaways were?

VLAHOS: Well, in my mind, they were a tragedy because we all knew all of this before. The magazine and the people in our orbit fighting to get some sort of platform in the American media had been warning about all of the things they're warning: the cooking of the books, the spin on the statistics to make things look rosier than they were, the fact that counterinsurgency wasn't working. You know the whole story. This entire military industrial complex is all engineered so that everybody is onboard and supporting it, and when you have a situation in which things are going south, the first instinct is to lie and spin and misdirect because you have to keep the operation going. You can't fail. So, that means you've got to continue pouring money into the military, into reconstruction, into diplomacy, and into the counterinsurgency.

HANNAH: What was the biggest revelation—the most hideous or troubling revelation—for you from reading over the Afghanistan papers?

VLAHOS: I think what bothered me the most is—and there was just so much across the board—reading about members of the military saying they never believed counterinsurgency could work.

As a reporter myself during that time—when General Petraeus was brought on by Obama to roll out counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and all of the excitement and unquestioning adulation Petraeus and his “COINdinestas” got for a number of years—finding out there were people in the military who thought it was all phony baloney and was never going to work really troubles me because we needed those people to come forward back then in 2009, not 2019. It does us no good to find out there were people—top officials, people in the military—who believed this was all BS to begin with.

When I lived through this period, people like me were admonished for questioning whether COIN could work. This was such a phenom, and it was really disgusting because there were a lot of people in this town who were riding high and writing books and writing white papers and going on MSNBC and CNN and doing the circuit. They even had, “Who are the top ten COINdinestas?” It was really sickening because everybody jumped on the bandwagon. There were lone voices of people like Gian Gentile, who is a West Point Army professor who I interviewed at the time, who was a lone voice going, “This ain't going to work. This ain't going to work.” General Petraeus, David Kilcullen—all these guys were faded intellectual warriors who were saying, “This is going to work.” Now we find out it was all a bunch of flimflam.

HANNAH: But why? I mean, have we learned nothing from Vietnam and the kind of humiliation we underwent as a country when it became clear we were not just lying to the world—which is bad enough—but lying to ourselves?

VLAHOS: I agree. I'm as incredulous as you are. I think the simplest and crudest way of explaining this is that you're looking at a loss of livelihoods, jobs, and status and position in Washington. If you pull out and say, “Let's go home. We failed,” that means the military won't get their budgets. That means the defense industry is not getting the contracts they want. That means consultants, lobbyists, people, bureaucrats, and technocrats in Washington won't be able to keep their jobs. This is a self-sustaining planetoid. When you build up these institutions in this culture over a matter of seventy years, it's not a matter of being brought into the office on the first day and being told that this is how you have to think about everything and this is how you have to respond to all of these little skirmishes and issues and fires that might spring up. It's ingrained.

I had talked to a government defense reformer who was in the Pentagon in the sixties, and he's been fighting the system ever since. His name is Chocks Benny. Look him up. He's the best. He basically says when you're a young buck right out of the military, maybe still in the military, you go to work at the Pentagon. You quickly learn how the game is played. You suck up to the defense contractors. You don't ask questions. You don't think outside the box. Then maybe there will be a cushy job for you twenty or thirty years down the road. But if you make waves, you're out on your keister, and you’ve got to go look for a job elsewhere. This is all internalized from the beginning. That’s just the young buck coming out of the military, but you're thinking about kids who are coming to Washington and working at think tanks. And then maybe they're going to work on the Hill. You know, they're not going to make waves. They're not going to question the validity of the strategy.

HANNAH: I want to ask you about an article you wrote about John Rood, the top Pentagon official who was forced by the president to resign. You focus on something else about his profile, not so much the retaliatory measures that were taken by the president, but about his revolving door relationship with the defense industry. Can you talk about the points you were trying to make in that article?

VLAHOS: Well, one of my biggest criticisms of “the Blob,” which we call the military industrial complex, is that one of the reasons you have an inculcated culture that's unquestioning is because you have so many people revolving in and out of government, the defense industry, and the military. We call it the revolving door.

Interlude featuring archival audio

VLAHOS: The Project on Government Oversight, the best group in Washington to follow on these issues, has done numerous reports on the revolving door. What you do find is that the defense industry plucks—people from the military—I believe the Project on Government Oversight had done a report just recently, in which they found, in 2018 alone, 625 instances of defense industry hiring top senior military officials right out of retirement for what are essentially influence-peddling roles—consultants, board members—because they know all the programs. They know all the people inside the Pentagon. They'll be able to grease the skids for contracts. You have the people from Congress who work on the Hill who also know how the budgets work, who know all the members, and know all the greasing of the skids there. And all of this is interchangeable.

My issue with John Rood was that he had worked in the defense industry specifically for Lockheed Martin on the F-35 program, which continues to be funded by unbelievable amounts of taxpayer money despite the fact that there are people in the military who would like the money to be shifted elsewhere. But Lockheed has an army of lobbyists on the Hill convincing members that if they don't fulfill these contracts or re-up them every year, they'll lose jobs in their districts.

HANNAH: Is there some merit to that argument? Obviously, a lot of the lobbyists aren't really looking out for the individual employees as much as the profit margin.

VLAHOS: The merit is that these defense contractors are smart. Basically, they have spread programs over multiple districts and states. So, every state has some little piece of a program, whether it be the F-35 or Navy helicopters or whatever. And so you look at a map—and I had one in my hand at one point—and, yeah, you could say, for example somebody, an incumbent, in Florida is up for reelection and his opponent wants to take some of that money and end the F-35 program. The congressman or woman could just turn around and say, “Listen, are you saying you want to eliminate fifteen hundred jobs in our district?” Of course, fifteen hundred jobs isn’t a huge amount, but when you're fighting a tough reelection campaign in a localized election cycle, nobody wants to be known as the guy or gal who wants to take away fifteen hundred livelihoods. These defense contractors aren't stupid. They’re literally spreading these programs over multiple states.

HANNAH: So that they can hold hostage the representatives that represent those districts.

VLAHOS: I have a problem with the fact that our top military leadership at the Pentagon are all coming from places like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. And after they leave, they go back, and then they come back. Our Secretary of Defense has cycled in and out of the defense industry and back again. How do we trust that their best interests are the American people and are our strategic interests and not the interests of industry?

HANNAH: And these failings—you mentioned the Obama Administration and David Petraeus—really continued whether there was a Republican or a Democrat in the Oval Office. When I read the Afghanistan Papers, I've asked different members of both administrations, “Did you know this was going on? Did you? Were you aware? You were in top level positions in the National Security Council.” And I kind of got blank stares back. So, is this problem so chronic and so endemic that it almost doesn't matter what individual is sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office?

VLAHOS: It's all about politics and power. And from my vantage point as a nobody—as somebody who is on the outside writing for American Conservative and Antiwar.com and places nobody ever heard of because I couldn't get into the mainstream—it was easy for me. I didn't care who was president. I didn't care who was in power. And our magazine doesn't. So, when we came out, we had the hardest choice by going up against another “conservative,” quote unquote, George W. Bush. But then we never shifted when Obama took over and started doing the same stupid things. We were right there.

Unfortunately, not everybody in Washington is like that. So, a lot of the Democrats who, during the Bush years, were like, “Go American Conservative! We hate Bush, too!” all of a sudden went dark on us. They had nothing to do with us. And some of our writers who, during the Bush years, had sort of toggled between left and right publications about the war, all of a sudden couldn't get a phone call returned at different left-leaning publications I won't mention.

So, you see there's a lot of superficiality in Washington. It's all about who's in power. They like to say Obama came in and was going to fight the good war in Afghanistan, and when he started doing all this dumb stuff and proceeded to help the invasion of Libya and started arming terrorists in Syria, they didn't want to say anything. And now that Trump is in office, all of a sudden he's doing all sorts of bad things. This is the Washington game, and it's unfortunate. But I'm proud to be part of a magazine that has never wavered in its consistency of criticism against “the Blob.”

HANNAH: There's a sense I get from your publication that people in government aren't holding themselves, or even military leaders, accountable for mistakes and disastrous overreach. I'm very familiar with the critique from the left, but can you talk about what conservative values are being undermined when a democratic institution is being left unaccountable?

VLAHOS: I was asked this question once by my bosses: “What are your conservative values?” The first thing that came to my mind that I felt identified me with the magazine was that I felt like I was a constitutional conservative. In his famous farewell address, George Washington had warned against a standing army. He warned against what he called dangerous associations or dangerous entanglements with other countries and spreading ourselves thin. John Quincy Adams was talking about going off in search of monsters to destroy. That wasn't part of what American values were all about. What George Washington had warned about, what the founders had been wary about was having a standing army and a federal system or government that became too unwieldy, too out of control, and had not left decisions and livelihoods to Americans.

I feel that at the core, conservatives are concerned about the corruption of centralized power, and they have fought back and forth with the Democrats over this issue for many years on domestic issues. But in foreign policy and national security, you see it play out in the expansion of the military industrial complex, and as it has expanded since the end of World War Two, you have seen it become more separate from American society—everything the founders had feared. You have a separate entity that is unaccountable to the American people. It's grown in size. You now have the Defense Department employing 2.8 million people, plus another six hundred thousand in defense contractors. They are spread all over the world. The military itself has its own justice system. It is no longer accountable to the U.S. Constitution, which puts its troops in danger, but it also creates a situation in which they're acting with impunity overseas. They have their own rules and norms and culture, and as it's gotten bigger, the executive has gotten more power. There have been a number of operations, incursions, and wars that have not been authorized by Congress. Congress has ceded a lot of its constitutional authority in this regard.

So, you have a military that's engaging in wars overseas and other operations the American people don't even know about at this point. They're spending money, a budget that's up to over seven hundred billion dollars a year, much of which we don't know where it's going, much of which is classified and seems to be only benefiting the defense industry. It’s a sort of self-licking ice cream cone by which people, budgets, and programs are sustained. Business is happening and booming for the defense industry, but our grand strategy seems to be uncertain and not really working.

HANNAH: Such that it is, to the extent that we have a grand strategy, right?

VLAHOS: It seems very counterproductive. If it was all working, and we were in a safe, peaceful world with no wars going on and everybody loving each other and nothing on the horizon, one could say, “Wow, this self-licking ice cream cone is really working.” But it's not. We've created more terrorism, more uncertainty, and more never ending wars, which is great for business, but not great for our security at home.

HANNAH: I want to talk about the moment we're having right now within conservatism around foreign policy. There was a kind of sense that for a long time being a conservative meant that you promoted a very muscular approach to America's international relations. And obviously, Donald Trump ran on a platform of doing less in the world and focusing more here at home. Is the conservative movement having a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to foreign policy?

VLAHOS: Well, I wouldn't call it an identity crisis. I would definitely call it a shift. And for the folks at The American Conservative, it's a very welcome shift. It’s something our magazine has been working on since 2002. If your listeners aren't familiar, Patrick Buchanan had started the magazine back in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq war buildup. It was that weird gray period of time between the launch of the Afghanistan War and 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which he felt that conservatives needed to come out strongly against the neo-conservative drive to war.

HANNAH: A rare moment of agreement between Patrick Buchanan and Bernie Sanders.

VLAHOS: That's right. Patrick Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos—the three founders of the magazine—showed there was a slice of the conservative movement that was for a restrained foreign policy, or at least examining our foreign policy and expeditionary military operations up into that point, which was an anathema at the time. If you remember right after 9/11, the mantra was, “If you're not with us, you're against us.” And the Republican Party under George Bush was pretty much lockstep in favor of that muscular foreign policy you speak of. We had already invaded Afghanistan, and like we said, there were a number of neo-conservatives in the orbit surrounding Vice President Cheney and others kind of finishing off what had begun in the first Persian Gulf War. We have many conservatives in our magazine, in our orbit, who were against even that war. So, this goes back a long time.

HANNAH: What conservative values do you think somebody like Vice President Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons who got us into the Iraq war—what conservative values do you think they betrayed?

VLAHOS: Well, I don't believe they betrayed any conservative values, but they had fallen into the trap of believing we could use U.S. foreign policy to promote democratic values overseas, that it was our responsibility to promote those values, to maintain security, a paternalistic foreign policy, if you will, throughout the world.

This idea did not come out of a vacuum. It came out of World War Two, out of the United Nations, and it is shared by many on the other side, on the Democratic left, as well. Many of these conservatives who had come out of the world of the anti-communism movement under famous conservative godfather William F. Buckley were very hardcore anti-communist. So, all the way up through the nineties, Republicans and conservatives were pretty much of the view that it was our responsibility to pursue this American military primacy overseas as a way of maintaining some global world order.

HANNAH: But when you get into making a kind of critique of the military, you've mentioned that especially in conservative circles, that can be interpreted as downright unpatriotic. Have you or your colleagues at The American Conservative been sort of flamed online or criticized for being unpatriotic? And how do you deal with it?

VLAHOS: We were absolutely flamed when the magazine was launched. And you can look it up. The National Review had an article called “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” and it mentioned Pat Buchanan right there, front and center. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to us because it exposed the neo-conservative and establishment right, which we call “Conservative Inc.” for their transparency and superficiality. The fact that they could not reconcile that there were people who thought differently about war within their own ranks and lashed out in such an ad hominem manner showed them for the weaklings they were. But it took time. It took a few years when the insurgencies broke out in Iraq, and the military was not prepared for it. It took time to find out we were being lied to. It took time to find out how woefully unprepared we were to reconstruct that country, and then people started looking at The American Conservative and saying, “Wow, they were right.” And we're still right. We were right about Afghanistan. We're right about Iraq. We're right about a lot of things. That doesn't make us feel any better, but it has caused people to give us another look. And I can't emphasize more how many military people have come over to our side, how many military people are writing for us and reading us because in their hearts they knew there was something wrong with the way our foreign policy had been rolled out even since Vietnam. But they didn't consider themselves peaceniks on the left. Now they see these Republicans—people they identify with on other issues—talking their language, knowing what it's like inside “the Blob.”

HANNAH: Is that limited? But was that philosophy, that outlook, or that approach limited to conservatives?

VLAHOS: No, absolutely not. We see that within the Clinton Administration as well. You see that in the Bosnian wars. You see that in Kosovo. You see that in other operations the Clinton Administration had pursued. You see that all the way through the Obama Administration with Libya. The idea that we need to be a shining light on the hill—of course, that extended to what we call liberal interventionism or humanitarian interventionism. It is just the flip side of the coin of neo-conservatism, which is a little bit more “America first.” It's a little bit more about imposing security and imposing norms as opposed to what the Democrats had been more about, which is, “Well, we need to spread democracy and protect the world.” But it all ends up with the same thing, having five hundred thousand troops overseas stationed in 150 countries, which we have right now.

HANNAH: Do you think Donald Trump is going to get us out of Afghanistan? A peace deal has obviously been signed. There's still, however, a lot of uncertainty, both because of local Afghan politics as well as our own.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What are your hopes for pulling troops out before the end of the Trump presidency?

VLAHOS: I'm under no illusion that President Trump agrees with me on any of this. I believe his instincts, which in many cases I think are good, are more about politics or more about his personal performance, his personal legacy. So, that dovetails with a lot of the things The American Conservative is proposing. That's great, and I think it all started when he had given his speech—his foreign policy speech—ahead of his election on the campaign trail, when he said, “I want to bring troops home. I'm finished with these overseas wars that are extending our military. They're keeping families separated and draining our resources.” We agree with that. I think he really does mean to get out of Afghanistan, and if his election prospects are hurrying that along—you know, the actual election—so be it. I think he has made a calculated—

HANNAH: He wants to keep that promise come 2020.

VLAHOS: I think he wants to keep that promise, and he wants to say, “I'm bringing the troops home.” I think that's why you saw him reengage the negotiations after he pulled out of them abruptly in September. I think he wants to make it work. There are a lot of people here in Washington who are deathly afraid we are going to pull all those troops home. We still have fourteen thousand troops there, and this deal they're talking about now, if it goes forward, will only bring home maybe half of those in the next year or so, if you're going to believe the details you're reading. So, we're not talking about an abrupt withdrawal like all the Chicken Littles are saying in Washington right now. I think he means to make good on some of the things he promised.

HANNAH: You mentioned he's concerned about his legacy. I think part of the trickiness in getting out of Afghanistan is going to be messy, and Kabul will probably fall. Who wants to be the president to let that happen? Maybe obsessing over one's legacy leads to avoiding some really difficult—and what would be courageous—decisions.

VLAHOS: Right. And I think it will be difficult for him because he has a Pentagon and a military that will be whispering in his ear the entire way. What you just said—it's going to be messy. It's not going to look good. It's going to be Hanoi imagery of the helicopter and people hanging off of it. He doesn't want that. Now, let's hope he has other voices on his other shoulder whispering to him, saying it's going to be messy anyway, and there will be American deaths—drip, drip—over the next year or so or however long you're here. There will be Taliban attacks. Your legacy is going to be nothing, either way. Maybe getting out—and I know this is long term, and it's hard to convince people of this who are political animals. But the Afghans have to find a way to start taking responsibility for their own country, and I think they want to. I don't want to sound condescending here, but the fact is the corruption is rampaging there after all of these years. And all of the billions of dollars we've put in have just gone down a black hole. I feel that if we did leave, there would be some sort of reckoning, and they would have to take control themselves. And, yes, it's going to be messy. I think the Taliban will have some role in that country. I don't know what kind of role, but I think we've proven within the last twenty years that we're not the solution.

HANNAH: Right. Well, check out The American Conservative. I want to thank Kelly Vlahos, the executive editor, very much for joining us.

This has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation, where we constantly, continuously, and persistently seek new answers to America's foreign policy questions. I'm your host, Mark Hannah. Please email us at info@egfound.org and follow us on Twitter @EGFound. I am also @ProfessorHannah. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.

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