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The Realignment
580 | Jake Tapper: How to Fight and Prosecute Forever Wars from Al Qaeda to Venezuelan Strikes and Mexican Drug Cartels
00:36:55
Jake Tapper, CNN host and author of Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Jake discuss the saga of the first and only successful prosecution of an Al Qaeda fighter in American courts, why the Obama administration failed to shut down Guantanamo Bay, whether terrorism is best fought by civilian or military means, and the applicability of the post-9/11 approach to fighting terrorism to the Trump administration's airstrikes against Venezuelan boats that the Pentagon claims traffic drugs and cartel organizations in Mexico.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is CNN's Jake Tapper. Jake has a new book out, Race Against Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the dawn of the Forever War. Race Against Terror tells the story of the only Al Qaeda fighter successfully prosecuted for killing American soldiers during the war on terror. The fighter, known by his nom de guerre Spangul, was released from a Libyan prison during the Arab Spring and immediately confessed on a refugee ship to killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. The key word there is prosecuted, which represents how unique using the civilian court system to prosecute a person who explicitly considered himself at war with the United States was the decision to do so. And the story Jake tells raises a bunch of questions. What is the line between the use of civilian agencies to prosecute terrorism and the use of the military instead? We used civilian means to go after okada in the 1990s, and that was notably unsuccessful. Did the approach we took towards the military option over the civilian option work? Especially as Jake and I discussed the War on Terror forever war feels increasingly out of sight and out of mind almost 25 years after 9 11. And the Varda questioned how our legal system, with its standards of evidence along with the incident international court system will handle the increasing ways that conflict doesn't look like two uniformed, technologically evil forces lining up against one another. What makes this conversation, not just naval gazing over recent history, is that all of these questions directly tie into the ways the Trump administration has shifted the war on drugs over his second term. We're now actively striking boats in waters off of Venezuela that the administration claims are used to transport drugs that kill Americans. The administration has explicitly stated that it intends to treat Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, with all of the attached military implications of that statement. Now that the war on drugs has shifted from a civilian to a military enterprise, the questions above and our answers to them are top of mind. Hope you all enjoy the conversation.
- [02:11]
B
Jake Tapper, welcome to the realignment.
- [02:13]
C
It's great to be here. Thanks so much.
- [02:15]
B
Yeah, super glad to chat with you. It was funny at first. I didn't know when I saw the book that this was a book of fiction or a nonfiction book, but this is history. This is what I love talking about, but also history that we could really bring into the context of the present. So how about you just introduce the book and I'd love for you, without telling people the story, to introduce the precipitating incident that makes all of this go down.
- [02:40]
C
So it's the Arab Spring 2011, and there's a refugee crisis in the southern Italian islands. The Tunisia and Libya are in the, in the midst of civil war and unrest. And so people are flocking to the southern islands of Italy, which are closer to Africa than they are to Rome. And it gets so bad and the islands get so overpopulated that, you know, Angelina Jolie goes there, the UN High Commission on Refugees, etc. Etc. Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, commandeers a giant cruise ship to take refugees from the southern islands to the mainland. On that cruise ship, an Italian Green Beret is just standing there keeping the peace. And a five foot six African man approaches him, asks for some water. He gives him the water and then notices that the man has a bullet scar in his arm. Asks him, asks him where it came from. He says, well, I came from. I was fighting Americans in Afghanistan. I don't belong here with these refugees. I'm with Al Qaeda. That's the precipitating event because everything flows from there. And what happens is the Italians start asking him questions and they realize that he sounds like he's actually with Al Qaeda. They call the Americans, do you want him? The Americans come over, hear his confession, and conclude that he's the real deal. But they have to prove a case against him before they can take him to the US because this is the Obama era. There's no Gitmo taking in new, new detainees. You have to prove a case in a criminal court of law. So there's this race to build a case against this bad guy with fingerprints and witness testimony before the Italians just get fed up and put him in a refugee camp from which he will easily escape and then go and fulfill his quest to kill as many Americans as possible. So it's a procedural in some ways, like the kind of stuff I love from like CSI and Cold Case, proving a case against a bad guy. But it's a completely true story. And I tried to write it in the style of a thriller, of a page turning thriller. Even though it is true, I think.
- [04:54]
B
What'S crazy, just to tell two more seconds of the story. When I'm reading the book, I'm thinking, why is he confessing? But as you make very clear, he's confessing and it really makes sense within his worldview, right? I like to be empathetic. We should be empathetic. He's a fighter, he's not a refugee. He is a person who signed up to fight in the war on terror, on the terror side. And he's just not A refugee. And he's someone who was released. He was one of those people who was in Libya, was imprisoned. Arab Spring's happening, so as Gaddafi's getting overthrown, they release and open the prisons. So he's like, I'm not a refugee. This is my deal. Treat me straightforwardly. Something I'd love to hear from you. Obviously, in the 15 years since this incident, refugee resettlement and taking refugees has become one of the defining issues in Western politics. There was a right wing reading of this story, right? If I were to basically like sit in Steve Bannon's lab and say, this is what happens when we let refugees in, terrorists sneak in, this is the thing. How common was it that this type of person was mixed in with the refugee inflows?
- [06:05]
C
I don't have any evidence that it was common at all, actually. That's really interesting. I hadn't even thought about that, that reading of it. But first of all, you're completely correct. Like, he was very, very proud of what he is. Like he's a terrorist. He's. Well, he doesn't think of that. He thinks of himself as a, as a holy warrior and he's very proud of it. And he wants to tell his story to as many people as will hear it. Having been locked up in a Libyan prison for five years, I don't think that the, that the refugee population contains a great number of individuals like this. I mean, I'm sure that there are some. Inevitably, if you let in a group of tens of thousands, of any group, there's going to be some bad guys in there. You let in the 10 tens of thousands of Americans fleeing America during our pending civil war and going to Canada, if Canada is going to let in some bad Americans. I mean, it just happens. But I don't have any indication that that, that that was representative of the populace, of the refugees fleeing Libya and Tunisia in any way.
- [07:09]
B
From a character study perspective, what kept him going? Right, because this is the history episodes. We're thinking about it in this context. So it takes a Hiro Onoda. So the Japanese soldier who stays, who is found on an island in the 1970s and he just would not surrender. That was not the norm. So what was it about this guy? He spends five years in prison and he survives. The regime is getting overthrown, he's escaped to the West. Most people give up, right? So I'm sure there are probably plenty. So to the point of like, you know, are there fighters in the refugee flows? There's probably a number of people who fought right And Afghanistan is also complicated because how do we define a fighter? Is it a person who is fighting in his local village and took his family AK47 and shot at American soldiers? Like it's this. But why was he so persistent?
- [08:05]
C
Well, first of all, Hiro Nona is one of my favorite characters from history. Did I get the name right? Yes, yes, the Japanese soldier who was discovered in, I think 1973 or something. But there were others, you know, after World War II who were found in a bunch of those islands in the Pacific. Onoda was not the only one. He was just the last one. And that's, I love that story so.
- [08:31]
B
Much and critically like to make it clear for listeners who aren't Japanese history buffs, they literally had to find his commander, fly him out to convince him that it wasn't a ruse. Actually, his story actually ends. It's actually a really sad story because it is, because he goes back to Japan and he finds a totally different Japan, gets existentially depressed, becomes a right wing reactionary and moves to Brazil because he's just so not with his country and what it's evolved into. But sorry, go on, Jake.
- [09:04]
C
Well, I mean, as long as we're taking the show.
- [09:07]
B
Yeah, go for it. This is your show.
- [09:09]
C
Think about, think about who he was. He was somebody who would not surrender. And think about the Japanese imperial principles of death before surrender and think about the, the culture that would create a kamikaze pilot. And so he comes to a Japan that is westernized, that has surrendered, that is embarrassed, that also had this horrific act of violence against them when America dropped the nuclear atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So you can almost understand why it was such a shock. Okay, back to Race Against Terror. So I mean, it's actually very similar culturally in terms of what you're talking about because this is a guy who would not surrender. He had been raised, his parents were from Nigeria, they had gone to Saudi Arabia for pilgrimage, stayed and then were living kind of a life of, or lives of indentured servitude. Spin Ghoul is, is his nam de guerre. And so I'll just refer to him as that. Spin Ghoul is raised in the 90s hearing stories about these legendary holy warriors, the Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan with, by the way, US funding and arms. The Mujahideen who fought the Russians in Chechnya, the, the, in, in the former war torn Yugoslavia. The, the, the Muslims were, you know, the victims in many cases. So like his worldview was shaped by that, and then, you know, and then they, the Mujahideen turned their sights to the US and blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Kenya. And that became something he really wanted to replicate. So this was in his blood. This was in his DNA. He wanted to be a holy warrior. His story, I don't think is all that different, beyond the motivation itself from the story of any extremist, whether it is a right wing extremist training somewhere in Idaho right now, or a left wing extremist plotting some murder of a healthcare executive. Like, these are people who, something's wrong with them. They have a zealotry, they believe they have a cause, they have a grandiose sense of self importance in history and they think that acts of violence are the way to their greatness. So he joins Al Qaeda. He's recruited by somebody who works for the Saudi government. He joins Al Qaeda and he's proud of what he did. He's proud of the attack on the US that he is part of a group that ambushes American soldiers in April 2003. He's proud of it. He's proud of his plan to blow up the US Embassy in Nigeria. And when he's telling his story, when he's confessing his story, it's this is, he loves this. He wants to tell his story. He's been asking, he wants to go to the Hague, he wants to talk to the UN Secretary General, he wants to talk to President Obama, he wants to share his story. And this story I'm about to tell you is not in the book. But I asked Dave Bitkower, who's one of the prosecutors, he's the original prosecutor who told me the story of Spin Gool. You know, why, why did he confess? And he told me Bitcower went to Yale. And when he was at Yale, he wrote a story for the Yale Daily News, which was an interview with Bill Buck, not Bill Buckner, with Greg. Ron Darling. Ron Darling. Ron Darling was a New York Mets pitcher who had gone on to win the 86 World Series. And he also had played at Yale. Bitcower wanted to ask Darling about his time pitching a no hitter when he was at Yale. And he was stunned that Darling remembered every single detail about this no hitter. He pitched in college because, I mean, who cares? It's a no hitter. You pitch in college, you've gone on, you've won a World Series, blah, blah, blah. But no, he remembered every detail. And Spin Gould telling his story to that courtroom in Italy reminded Bitcower of Ron Darling telling his story and both of them very proud of their work. Now, obviously, you and I, we look at Ron Darling quite differently than we look at a terrorist. But that is the sense of purpose and greatness.
- [13:24]
B
Something I'm curious about. So what's also interesting from 2011 and early Obama era debates about the war on terror is there's been enough time that we could actually sort of look at this as history. One of Obama's promises that was basically ruined by the politics of the time was to close Guantanamo Bay. And I just did a quick Google search for this episode. Like, you know, it's not closed. There's like 15 remaining people there. Would love to hear your take. Cause what also makes this complicated too is you could find yourself asking the question of, this person clearly thinks he's in a war against the United States. Yeah, he is at war with the United States, but we're also talking about the Hague and we're talking about all these different things in the US Is has to be the people who prosecute him. But we didn't try individual German soldiers who shot American troops, let's say, in Germany, the way that we're trying him. So can you just talk about like, the legal. Because this is what I want people to kind of take a bigger picture and like, think about, like, this was a unique formulation and challenge that we're confronting.
- [14:29]
C
Well, this is the only foreign terrorist ever tried in a US Criminal court for killing service members on a battlefield. It had never happened before and it has still not happened since. Although there is another guy that the Trump Justice Department is prosecuting who was behind the Abbey Gate attack. Who would be the second foreign terrorist tried in criminal court for killing service members in a war zone. But it is very unusual, and the book does get into the evolving positions of the US Government when it comes to how to combat terrorism. You're right that Obama was never able to fulfill his pledge to shut down Gitmo. It's not entirely the politics of the moment that kept him from doing that. And there's a lot of politics that is. I mean, it was weird researching this book and going back in time to 2011, 2012, 2013, when members of Congress were so terrified by the notion of bringing a terrorist to US Soil for prosecution, they acted as though he. They would, you know, immediately bust out of prison and that they were bestowed with superhuman powers like Thanos, and they would be able to just like, run through the streets, zapping people with lightning out of their fingers. And, you know, when Trump announced that they were bringing this guy Jafar, who was behind the Abbey Gate bombing, to Virginia for prosecution. There was no response like that. So it is interesting whether that's. It was particular to Obama or that moment in time or, you know, Trump has an only Nixon can go to China thing. I don't know. But it is strange how that has changed. The idea of how to tackle, how to deal with terrorists has been just like part of the. Of the debate since 9 11. And Obama didn't clear out Gitmo in part because he had a commission. And two of the heroes in our book was on that commission that were looking into everybody in Gitmo and figuring out, okay, which ones can be prosecuted in a criminal court, which ones can be prosecuted in military tribunal, which ones can be flown to another country. And then after they did that, there was this other group that were too dangerous to release, but the evidence against them was too tainted to use in prosecution. And that's the 15 that are sitting in Gitmo right now. But that wasn't the politics of it. That was Obama's own conclusion. He agreed with the recommendations that there's like, here's 15 guys, and we just can't do anything with them. They just have to stay in Gitmo, and that's why Gitmo is still open today.
- [17:12]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. My sort of theory on Trump bringing someone to Virginia would be. It's not a Nixon goes to China situation, though I think it would have been approved during the 2010s. I think in a weird way, we've just moved past the war on terror. It's just not an activated thing. So something I'd ask you, like, you know, you've done this book. You obviously wrote the Outpost that was turned into a movie. I would be curious to what degree do you think in our present moment, the war on terror, Afghanistan, et cetera sort of impacts the way we're thinking about the present.
- [17:47]
C
I generally agree with your take that, like, people just don't think about it the way we used to. You look like a young man. How old. How old are you?
- [17:54]
B
I'm 30. I'm 33. So the mustache is so I can age myself up a little bit.
- [17:58]
C
Okay.
- [17:58]
B
28 doesn't work well.
- [18:00]
C
I'm just saying, like, so. So 24 years ago was 9 11. So you. 6, 7, 8, 9. So you probably remember you were nine years old.
- [18:09]
B
I was in fourth grade.
- [18:10]
C
You have a visceral memory of it. But I think. I think the degree to which people have Kind of, I don't think, come to terms with it, but made it part of. Yeah, this happens. Yeah, in a way that, that Europeans were there, you know, decades before we were. I mean, there were all sorts of terrorist incidents in Europe in the 60s and 70s, planes hijacked, this and that. And you know, they just, they came to terms with it or, and that doesn't mean they accept it, but, but they just like, it just became like background noise of like, this happens. I mean, there was an ISIS inspired attack in New Orleans on, on New Year's Day this year. And you know, like, if that had happened 15 years ago, you know, you and I would know the name of the guy, which I don't. And people would be scared to leave their homes. But that kind of fear just doesn't rule as much anymore. So I do think I, I think you're right to a degree that people just don't think about it as much. And now also, by the way, Trump is like taking these terror powers which were, I mean, the whole argument about the power, the, the, the whole system of justice, quote, unquote, that Bush set up after 9, 11, enhanced interrogation or torture, extraordinary rendition or kidnapping, gitmo, enemy combatants, etc. Etc. Where people were said that, you know, this, these are not soldiers, so we do not have to apply the laws of war the way we would do with a German soldier. But they're not criminals. It's his own thing for terrorists. We're setting up a whole other new framework. And now Trump is taking that framework and applying it to what had been considered until like two months ago, criminals, narco traffickers. And I think the US has now killed like almost 60 of these guys by just dropping bombs on boats with. And the justification, we don't know the justification. We're, we're like, in terms of like, what has legally been provided as sort of like guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department. We don't know. And on and on and on. And, and people are kind of complacent about this too, as, okay, now Trump's going to take the powers against terrorists and use them for drug runners, drug traffickers, by calling them terrorists. I don't know. I think that there's just something in the American mind about this world that we're in and bad things that happen and steps that are taken to, quote, unquote, protect us.
- [21:03]
B
It's really interesting. So literally right before we started recording, I did an episode with the co. Founder of Wellcome. So they're like One of the big centrist.
- [21:12]
C
We had Dave Weigel on my show yesterday to talk about Welcome's study. That's interesting.
- [21:17]
B
Yeah. So there's a system here, but in the actual report, they list out the most popular things Trump is doing. And labeling cartel members terrorists is one of his most popular. It's in the top three or four, really. Right wing thing. So I'll ask you about forcing you to take a political position on this. It is interesting because I personally don't like what's happening in Venezuela. I have not been convinced, I think a lot of people haven't been convinced that these boats are actually full of people who are literally sending drugs either to the United States or they're part of any organized thing. I think there have been a bunch of fishermen have been killed. But what separate Venezuela for a second and talk about Mexico. So in Mexico, the drug cartels do have many. They engage in acts of terror. You know, like the famous stories about they'll take a mayor, they'll kidnap him, they'll decapitate him and throw him into the street center. Like that is an act of. Like that is a literal textbook. This is my foreign policy. That is a textbook definition of like a terror tactic. Like you're using violence to achieve a political outcome in terms of your sort of substate control of society. So how do you at least think, think about, especially through the lens of this book, to make these deals? How do you think about the drug cartels through the terrorism lens?
- [22:33]
C
Well, I think it's interesting. I mean, as a journalist, my imperative is just to demand explanations, not to agree or disagree with them. I mean, it certainly is a novel argument that they're not making the argument you're making necessarily. Well, I mean, first of all, we don't know because they haven't released these memoirs. Right. So that's one. But what I, what do I have heard from Republican politicians when I have asked them about this, and I do frequently. We just had Congressman Dan Crenshaw on and he was based. And I said, look, the, the cocaine coming from Colombia and Venezuela is not what's killing Americans in the tens of thousands. That's opioids, which are, you know, by us, and then also fentanyl, which is China, through Mexico. And his argument was, yes, but it's all the cartels. And all the cartels are part of this narco trafficking terrorism enterprise. That's their basic argument. But as you noted, the actual acts of terrorism that is done by these drug gangs, these horrible drug gangs in Mexico that have been going, this has been going on for years, where journalists are killed and reformist politicians are killed. It's horrible, absolutely horrific. Certainly undercovered by the US Media for whatever reason, one of them being it's tough to get journalists to go to Mexico to tell these stories because they get killed. But the other thing is, that's not the argument that is being made publicly. It's being made. The argument being made is, look, drugs are killing 80,000 to 90,000Americans a year with overdoses, and that's these people. Look, it's all horrible and I'm not defending any of it. And, and obviously I want the fentanyl trade and the opioid abuse and all that to end, but it is not the same thing. A terrorist hijacking a plane and flying it into a skyscraper and killing 3,000Americans and selling drugs that people take willingly and then die. Like, I am not saying the latter is better, but I'm just saying it's different. And I would like to see the legal argument and I would think there should be more of a debate or a discussion about this. The Democrats are maybe, because of the memo you just cited, not really eager to talk about this. I, I think that there's might be a political wisdom in that. Like, how many times are they going to be convinced to defend somebody awful on principle, on American principle, and then realize, like, why am I, you know, I, I just know anecdotally people saying why are the Democrats defending this Abrego Garcia guy who beat his wife? You know, the guy that was, that could have been sent to any country other than El Salvador and it would have been perfectly legal, but they sent him anyway. So maybe that's part of the, part of the reason. But I just, I think it's novel and I think it's, I'd like to hear more of an argument about it and I would like to have there be more of a debate about it, but I might be one of the few.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah.
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B
And it doesn't. And it's actually interesting because to take it back to Afghanistan for our last section, there's actually a perfect parallel here between what happened in Afghanistan in the 1990s, what happened during the war on terror, which was a transition from this being a civilian criminal matter to one that's kinetic and based on warfare in the US military. So during the 1990s, famously, the FBI is going after bin Laden after the Nairobi bombings, after the Yemen bombings. And it basically, literally did not work. If we're defining, worked as getting bin Laden. So what we do with the war on terror is like, no, we have to handle this as a military manner. So the sort of implicit to your point argument that the Trump though I've interviewed Bill Barr about this a couple years ago when this was like he wrote. So I used to be at the Hudson Institute and he just wrote an article saying we need to do drone strikes in Mexico that was crazy with overton. Windows shifted since then. But he was just clearly laying into the same argument that transitioned out to 9 11, which is handling this as a civilian, FBI, legal, police matter just doesn't work. And the only answer is actually using interdiction against it. And I think what's difficult with Afghanistan, and this is always why whenever I do an Afghan related show, I basically ask the closing question, which I have one more question, but this will be my second to last question for you is I think a lot of the zoomers and the gen alphas in my audience are just sort of have this generic take of a. They mix the Afghan and Iraq wars together in a way that I think is not helpful because like they're very, very, very different. I will always defend the decision to go into Afghanistan. I will not defend the decision to go into Iraq. But critically, like by certain standards, the war on terror, we kind of want it right? Not in a narrative sense, but like from an empirical sense, like Al Qaeda has been decimated. We don't feel like we're under the threat of terror in the same way. So that is a complicated thing. But. So you could argue that the transition from civilian to military worked in the war on terror at a very, very large cost. I mean, the question Americans should be asking themselves now if they're thinking deeply about this, to your point, is is this transition the right thing? Is this going to work? Is this going to once again open the Overton window? Like when we do like all this sort of war on terror legal authorizations, I don't think literally anyone, whether you're the most neocon of neocons conceived this would be used against potential Venezuelan fishermen. So that's what we should be thinking. So I'd love to hear your take on this.
- [28:13]
C
Well, I mean, I think so. I guess one of the questions I have when I think about your very smart question is if this framework had been up and running in the 90s under Bill Clinton, is it less likely that 911 would have happened? And I think yes, I think yes, it is. I think that there is more of a focus on terror intelligence assets in the right places nobody is taking their foot off the gas when it comes to trying to get ahead of a terrorist attack. Not only seeing it as law enforcement now, I don't know that transitioning it to military as opposed to the way that the drone strikes I think are probably the most, the easiest thing for presidents to do, to use to go, oh, we hear that there's a terrorist here and we're going to take a strike whether it's a drone strike or a plane strike. Right. I mean, when Pete Hegseth leaked his strike to Jeff Goldberg in that signal chat he was talking about, I think that was a, those were jets that were about to drop bombs on some Houthis in Yemen. So I mean, like, there is a non stop intelligence and military approach to killing bad guys where they are before they're able to like concoct some sort of attack on us, beyond which they're already doing. I think that, I think the transfer to terrorism, terrorism to, to narco traffickers is highly problematic because. Or potentially highly problematic because military intelligence as, as great as it is, is not 100%. Nothing is. And I don't sense, I mean, we've now done 14 of these strikes. I think maybe I have that number wrong.
- [30:16]
B
I think, I think it's 14.
- [30:17]
C
Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, Rand Paul makes the argument like that when it comes to guessing which boats are drug boats, 25% of the time, the US gets it wrong. Not in these 14 incidents, but like in general. So that's innocent people that are killed. And for anybody who would say, well, we don't get it wrong, which was an argument Scott Jennings made on my show once. I mean, I would just point you to the bombing that the US did after the Abbey Gate bombing where we killed an entire Afghan family. And that was just bad intelligence. And it happens and it's awful. And it's part of war. Innocent people get killed during war. Without diving too deeply into the Gaza, Israel situation, like one of the things that we see going on there and we can debate and maybe that's a different topic, a different show of like, you know, the whether or not Netanyahu was and the IDF have been more willing to have civilian casualties than they would have in a different situation. I don't know. But one of the things that you see there is war. This is what war looks like, is lots of civilian casualties. We did it. The US did it in Iraq, the US did it in Afghanistan and the US Is still doing it to smaller degrees around the world. So I don't really understand the idea of like, oh no, the intelligence is 100%. Because that's ridiculous. Nothing is 100%.
- [31:57]
B
So for the last 30 second question here. So like I said, Gen Z's and zoomers are listening to this for the book part of it. And I think for them, I try to explain that there are like three or four different Afghan wars, right? So like we go in to overthrow the Taliban.
- [32:17]
C
It wasn't the 20 year war, it was 21 year wars.
- [32:20]
B
Exactly. There's always like, there's always like different wars.
- [32:22]
C
Right.
- [32:23]
B
And this incident, the actual killing of the American soldiers, happened in 03. So I just. You give as quick an answer as you want to this, but I think I just know for a fact that there are going to be people in the audience who are just thinking, because you do a great job of like telling the story of like the service members who were killed. And just like their unit and their families, they're going to ask what were they doing there. So I just wanted to ask, so you don't have to tell me what they're doing there. But like, as someone who's written two books about the Afghan war, how do you think when someone asks you that question? Because I just always felt very sad thinking, like, man, I could not give a coherent. If I were like a commander or a politician, I could not give an excited answer to their fan. Not excited. You know what I mean? I could not give, I believe in this answer. So how do you think about that as a writer?
- [33:07]
C
Well, first of all, I mean, just for your listeners, I think that they'll like the book just because it's a good yarn. When I first heard the story, it's just an interesting story and it's about sleuthing more than anything else. And it tells some real stories of some real people that I think are compelling. Not because of me, just because of who these people are and what they went through in terms of the Afghanistan, why were they there? Which is something that I wrestle with. And I definitely, you know, I'm not one to say and not neither this book nor the Outpost. I mean, one of the things I like about one of the things that I think I've achieved with both of them is you can support the war or you can oppose the war. And you will read the book and you will enjoy the book and you will find evidence for your argument there and have the same conclusions that you had before. And if you don't know what to think, I don't know that you're going to come out with a conclusion one way or the other. You'll just hear more about the war and like its effects on people. They were there theoretically in 2003 to catch the people that attacked on 9 11. That's, that's why, that's purportedly why they were there in 2003. All the soldiers there had joined the army before the air Force, before 9 11. Just like Spin Gol had joined Al Qaeda before 9 11. Like it's a. It's a. It is. They were already part of the military. They did not join to fight the war on terror, which is different from the outpost. The guys from the outpost, a lot of them had joined after 9 11, but these guys had joined before. And they were there because the US had been attacked by Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda was given sanctuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban. The US invaded, drove out the Taliban and then the hunt was on for Al Qaeda, for Bin Laden, for Al Zawahiri, for all the conspirators. And these men that I write about, and women, because there were a few women MPs there too, were put at this fire base near the Afghanistan Pakistan border to keep an eye on the terrorists crossing the border to come into Afghanistan to kill Americans. And what inevitably happened, which is what happened at the Outpost 2 outpost Keating in my other book, is you set up a base to do something and the base becomes the target. And then all of a sudden the mission is defending yourself as opposed to whatever else you're supposed to be doing. In the outpost in 2006 through 2009, they were supposedly improving the lives of the locals and giving them money for hydroelectric electric dams and building schools and this and that. But at this point at firebase shkin In 2003, they were watching the border for bad guys and that's why they were there. And you can certainly question whether it worked because obviously bin Laden, as we know, he was in Pakistan. So it wasn't crazy to be watching the Pakistan border. But I don't know that. I don't know that the people who, I don't know very many generals who would do it again if, if now, knowing then what they know now in terms of how it would all play out, maybe there would be other ways to fight the war on terror.
- [36:27]
B
That is an excellent place to leave it. Jake, thank you for joining me on the realignment. Can you shout the book out real quick? People need to hear that from the author, not the interview.
- [36:35]
C
It's Race Against Terror. Race Against Terror. And it is in bookstores today, and I think people will enjoy the read. I wrote it. Like I said, I tried to take lessons. I learned from writing fiction to make it as compelling a read as possible. And I think you'll like it.
- [36:51]
B
Thank you so much for joining me on the realignment.