Speaker 1: The Armstrong and Getty Show. You know, I think our
Speaker 1: young men and women that we send to war are
Speaker 1: best in our brightest They deserve better, They deserve an
Speaker 1: open airing of what is the mission. I've been saying
Speaker 1: for several years now that I can't meet a general
Speaker 1: anywhere who can tell me, really what is the mission
Speaker 1: we're trying to accomplish an Afghanistan Will Rand Paul. It
Speaker 1: turns out, according to the Washington Post reporting that came
Speaker 1: out yesterday and is ongoing this week, the reason you
Speaker 1: couldn't find a general that could tell you what was
Speaker 1: going on is they didn't have any idea what was
Speaker 1: going on. And we're saying that to each other behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, and haven't for a very very long time.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post with a blockbuster, multi part piece of
Speaker 1: journalism about the war in Afghanistan and the way the
Speaker 1: American people have been misled and the overspending in the
Speaker 1: waste and the it's just it goes on and on
Speaker 1: out this week. It's absolutely fascinating. We encourage you to
Speaker 1: read it, but to discuss the topic in general, we've
Speaker 1: invited uh Mike Lyons, military analysts for CBS News, also
Speaker 1: a man who commanded UM combat troops in Operation Desert
Speaker 1: Shield and Desert Storm, etcetera, and knows what he's talking about. Mike,
Speaker 1: how are you, sir, like the one of guys. Great
Speaker 1: to be back talking about this difficult topic here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's and we've talked about it through the years with you.
Speaker 1: But can you help us understand why the military and
Speaker 1: the civilian government so often just hits Things are going well,
Speaker 1: we're making progress, things are going great, We're about to
Speaker 1: turn the corner. Why that drumbeat even when everybody knows
Speaker 1: it's not true. I think it's this level of cognitive dissidence.
Speaker 1: It's not accepting what's what's actually happening. I think the
Speaker 1: report in and above itself doesn't really distinguish between lying,
Speaker 1: which the people in the ground say that they're not doing,
Speaker 1: versus sailing. There was a lot of sailing and going on,
Speaker 1: but it looks like it's being portrayed as they were
Speaker 1: lied to. So you take that, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: the bureaucracy is going to bureaucracy mentality. Um, you lay
Speaker 1: over sixteen named commanders in the time frame since the
Speaker 1: whole thing started. Um, you basically don't have an eighteen
Speaker 1: year war. You have UM sixteen one year wars that
Speaker 1: that are led by eighteen different individuals, and so so
Speaker 1: you bring all these things together. UM. I think the
Speaker 1: article and I spent some time yesterday trying to find
Speaker 1: the other side of the story and talking to people
Speaker 1: that were involved in UM are now doing some self
Speaker 1: analysis of what was going on, and they're just concerned
Speaker 1: that this painted of a broad brush because what they
Speaker 1: tried to do was this, they tried to take an
Speaker 1: Afghana poor country and make it rich. But the bottom
Speaker 1: line is Afghanta violent country, and to take a violent
Speaker 1: country and make it peaceful is a wholly different mission
Speaker 1: and something that you know, maybe we shouldna be trying
Speaker 1: to do. Maybe maybe I should back back up a second.
Speaker 1: Did you know this story was coming and the Washington Post?
Speaker 1: And then when you first saw it, what was your action? No?
Speaker 1: I thought I knew that this was coming from this
Speaker 1: particular author, and I think that there was concerned that
Speaker 1: he was going to tell the story the way he did,
Speaker 1: that it was more of a scandalous, more of a
Speaker 1: you know, more of kind of a sensationalist thing, and
Speaker 1: when in fact, you've got to dig a little bit
Speaker 1: deeper into the story. For example, UM, you've got to
Speaker 1: look at Afghanistan pre two thousand and six and post
Speaker 1: a thousand and six. You've gotta look at it post
Speaker 1: pre and post serge. You've got to look at different administrations,
Speaker 1: three presidents now obviously involved with this. UM. So when
Speaker 1: you do have to break it down into pieces, UM again,
Speaker 1: that thread of continuity, I would say, it's not lying,
Speaker 1: but it's sailing. And you know, each different technique that
Speaker 1: was tried in order to gain different results failed and there.
Speaker 1: But Mike, if Mike, if they're if they're failing, but
Speaker 1: telling us they've succeeded and we're making great progress, that's
Speaker 1: I call that lying. Well, yeah, I'm not sure you
Speaker 1: saw that. You know, we've not had any parade of
Speaker 1: celebrations about great progress there. It's it's been more or less.
Speaker 1: Things are going okay, we've just got to keep it going.
Speaker 1: I mean, look what happened when the president, this president
Speaker 1: decided he wanted to take all the troops out of there.
Speaker 1: He was told no. And a lot of it just
Speaker 1: us have to do with the bureaucracy that's underneath him,
Speaker 1: the industrial military complex that UM is really similar. It's
Speaker 1: you know, it's a stone deep state. It's its own
Speaker 1: thing that hasn't enough in nurse you to it. Um.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the blame falls back on
Speaker 1: all called big army um our. Our army just signs
Speaker 1: up for these missions at times, and the people running
Speaker 1: the military um and and thinks that they can get
Speaker 1: these things done. And again that cognitive dissidence, their inability
Speaker 1: to recognize what they can and can't do. Guess in
Speaker 1: trouble is it is there something to do with the
Speaker 1: personality of uh of you military people? And this is
Speaker 1: a good part of you. People that are successful in
Speaker 1: the military, you can do. People you're optimists. You look
Speaker 1: for the you know, the good news in a story
Speaker 1: and figure out a way to fix it. I mean,
Speaker 1: those are the kind of people that are successful. But
Speaker 1: those are also kind of the people that are the
Speaker 1: it's likely to say, this ain't never gonna work right.
Speaker 1: Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, and that's the
Speaker 1: best example of it. UM. I'm involved personally. I know
Speaker 1: that people. I know the commander on the ground in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan right now is named Scotty Miller. Is my west
Speaker 1: Point cross mate, and he tells me that they're doing
Speaker 1: good things there, and he says, it's like it's this
Speaker 1: place is like an ocean and there's just lots of
Speaker 1: sharks here and you just got to avoid the sharks. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, we live in a country that they don't know.
Speaker 1: We don't have sharks. We're not worried about things like that.
Speaker 1: And he's trying to paint it in a way that
Speaker 1: you know, just just right over that hill. It's the
Speaker 1: same mentality soldiers have had. I'll go back to the
Speaker 1: Civil War, the go back to the mentality of the
Speaker 1: military to think, just over that hill, if we just
Speaker 1: get this one more thing accomplished, will be good in them,
Speaker 1: things in momentumal role, and things will go on our way. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's one of those cultural things in our military. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's cool, and I get that, and that explains
Speaker 1: the military end of it. But the reason we have
Speaker 1: a civilian leadership in the United States and the way
Speaker 1: we've done that, the way we've done it, is so
Speaker 1: that that won't come to you know, I guess, how
Speaker 1: do we not have our civilian leadership, whether it's a
Speaker 1: president or Congress, were they getting the right information or
Speaker 1: were they being misled or what's going on there. So politically,
Speaker 1: UM George Bush invades Afghanistan first, gets distracted into Iraq,
Speaker 1: recognizes he's not going to get out of Afghanistan. Barack
Speaker 1: Obama ran under the platform that Iraq was always the
Speaker 1: bad war. We're gonna focus on Afghanistan. So he comes
Speaker 1: and doubles down on Afghanistan politically, without really thinking through it.
Speaker 1: He brings in petray Us, who at the time has
Speaker 1: this new way of warfare mccarro insurgency, which is something
Speaker 1: that the big Army doesn't want to do anyway. Petrayus
Speaker 1: is not necessarily uh you know, in leading the big
Speaker 1: Army to do this because they've got to do something different.
Speaker 1: Um Barack Obama decides to saying thirty thousand more troops
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, but they're gonna come out in
Speaker 1: eighteen months. John McCain says, you can't keep it to
Speaker 1: a timeline. You know this, that, this, that, and the
Speaker 1: other thing. Finally enough enough, Donald Trump says We're all
Speaker 1: coming out. And now everyone says, no, we can't do
Speaker 1: that because the whole thing will be destroyed. So who
Speaker 1: wants to don't talk. At least it's going to have
Speaker 1: the guts to leave Afghanistan. And when the movie is
Speaker 1: finally over in two years, when the Taliban take back
Speaker 1: over the country, and you know, the scene of the
Speaker 1: helicopter leaving the embassy roofs is going to be replayed
Speaker 1: again that we saw in At least Donald Trump doesn't care.
Speaker 1: He's gonna have the guts to pull everybody out. And
Speaker 1: I don't think Americans are gonna care, not much, you know, Mike.
Speaker 1: That that brings us, I think to the great permanent,
Speaker 1: overarching questions which should overarch every conflict we send American
Speaker 1: boys and girls into, and that is, do we have
Speaker 1: a specific achievable goal and do we have a sound
Speaker 1: strategy for achieving that? To me, having read you know,
Speaker 1: most of the multi part uh it's practically a book. Um,
Speaker 1: it seems pretty clear to me that the answers are
Speaker 1: are mostly no to those questions. I mean, at some
Speaker 1: point they they had an idea of what the specific
Speaker 1: goal was and a pretty good idea of whether it
Speaker 1: was achievable. But I mean that's just gotten swept away
Speaker 1: like the very sands of that hell a whole country, right,
Speaker 1: What happened was in big army perspective. The counterinsurgency guys,
Speaker 1: the kind of the you know, the grass eaters, the
Speaker 1: bug eaters, the special lots guys ran this knowing that
Speaker 1: they could get this thing done, and kind of the
Speaker 1: big army guys, the tankers, the infantry, those kind of
Speaker 1: regularly guys took a back seat. I could tell you this.
Speaker 1: The armist pivoted back now towards the focus on a
Speaker 1: big conflict we're looking at, possibly a conflict with the Chinese,
Speaker 1: for example, in the South China. See we could do
Speaker 1: something with Russia in Europe. We're kind of gearing back
Speaker 1: towards that and moving away from this um. But again
Speaker 1: to your point, I think that you know, you know,
Speaker 1: we owed ourselves a better oversight and recognize that we
Speaker 1: were repeating history without trying to do the same thing over.
Speaker 1: I could talk to you about this all day, the
Speaker 1: war in Afghanistan, but we got one minute left. I
Speaker 1: want a minute on training Saudi nationals that at least
Speaker 1: some of them seem to be joh hottests. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: send every one of them home. I'm furious about this.
Speaker 1: I can't even think for a second that the President
Speaker 1: gets on and says, don't worry, the Kingdom of Side
Speaker 1: of Arabia is going to take care of those families.
Speaker 1: You explained to that ends and enable academy graduate. You
Speaker 1: explained to that mother on how her son died in
Speaker 1: a classroom training to be a pilot from a Saudi national.
Speaker 1: Every single one of those Saudis need to be removed
Speaker 1: from that school, sent back home and we'll we'll set
Speaker 1: the training up over there. But there's just no excuse here.
Speaker 1: This President's got to make a decision. You want to
Speaker 1: support the troops, it starts right now by not putting
Speaker 1: us in the room there. And if we've come to
Speaker 1: find out that they've infiltrated and their sleeper cells in
Speaker 1: these places, um, shame on the NBI and shame on
Speaker 1: all of us. For us, we're gonna sound I'm enraging
Speaker 1: to this one, and he needed to do something about it.
Speaker 1: Well said Mike. Well said my clients military animals for
Speaker 1: CBS News always enlightening. We thank you very much for
Speaker 1: the time. Mike. Thanks guys, thanks for having