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