Danny Sjursen discusses America’s absurd Afghan War strategy for the last nearly two decades. Sjursen served in Afghanistan during the Obama surge, seeing firsthand the utter futility of America’s attempt to conquer and rule a country that for centuries has been the graveyard of empires. Scott and Sjursen are hopeful that President Trump will follow through on some of his rhetoric and instincts and actually try to end this war, though they realize how difficult it will be even for a president who seems ready to leave, given all the entrenched interests that would like to stay forever.

Discussed on the show:

“SIGAR: The Boys Who Cry About Actual Wolves” (Antiwar.com Original)

“Red Dawn (1984)” (IMDb)

BringOurTroopsHome.us

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. army major and former history instructor at West Point. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and he’s the author of “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.

The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:10

All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow.

All right, you guys introducing Danny Sjursen. Again, a regular writer for antiwar.com and a lot of other places too. He wrote the book Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and of course was in the Iraq surge and the Afghan surge both And so yeah, anyway. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Danny?

Danny Sjursen 1:01

I'm great, man. Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 1:03

Yeah, happy to have you here. Hey, listen, um, would you give us a short rundown of the different places where you are writing these days? We try to publish everything republish everything linked to everything we can at antiwar.com but Eric complains that he just can't keep up we have a de luge of Danny Sjursen and pieces constantly. And you're doing more and more radio interviews and this and that kind of thing all over the place too, which is great. But where can people find your writings on a regular basis, sir? Well, you know so first of all, my website skeptical that calm is a pretty good place just to grab everything that comes in. But you know, since truth dig fell apart. That was my other regular weekly column. I've branched out even more so monthly. I'm at Tom dispatch. I'm pretty regular at popular resistance, which is kind of picking up some of the truth dig mantle. Mother Jones more recently. You

Danny Sjursen 2:00

You know that as well as common dreams and other other spots, I've really kind of been thrown my work a lot of different places. And I also work with something called the independent media Institute. And what they do is, I don't know, kind of like syndicate in the left, Alt left circuits. So it's actually difficult to say where stuff's gonna show up. But uh, but those are sort of my regulars. But if you check out the site, pretty much everything kind of bumps over there. And it's, it's a decent PR, you know, it's kind of gathering ground but it's, it's a busy world and you know, how it works. You know, if, if,