Since the fall of Afghanistan, a handful of politicians who served in that country have lamented the withdrawal and the implications for the Afghan people. None of them have said anything like this: “For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan … What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.”
But that was the assessment of Lucas Kunce in a much talked-about op-ed in The Kansas City Star. Kunce, a first-time candidate, is running for U.S. Senate in Missouri, in an open seat replacing the retiring incumbent, Republican Roy Blunt. His op-ed reflects a no-nonsense style that challenges the war hawks and makes the case that our energy and resources tied up with imperial adventures would be better spent at home, where Missouri had the worst economic recovery following the Great Recession of any state. Prospect co-founder and senior editor Robert Kuttner talked to Kunce about the realities of the war in Afghanistan, the limitations of military intervention, and how to run as a populist progressive in a red state.
The conversation was taped before the attack on the Kabul airport. A transcript of their conversation follows.
Robert Kuttner: I’m Bob Kuttner, one of the editors of The American Prospect. It’s a pleasure to be here with Lucas Kunce, who has written several pieces for the Prospect on national security, on decarbonization, on China, and is now running for the U.S. Senate from Missouri. Lucas, welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Lucas Kunce: Thanks, Bob. It’s good to be here.
Let me ask you first to talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and then whether we should have been there in the first place, and your criteria for where, if ever, we should do military interventions. And then let’s talk about your Senate race, which is really exciting. So, to begin, given the fact that Trump and then Biden gave a date certain for a pullout, was there any way this wasn’t going to be kind of a mess once we got into the endgame, or might it have been done somewhat better?
I think what we’re seeing is that the Taliban takeover was inevitable and, and the reason that, you know, the messiness or whatever you want to call the withdrawal is shocking to so many people is actually rooted in the fact that they didn’t realize that the Taliban would overrun that country. And so a lot of people that, you know—some people, maybe—didn’t think it would happen that fast. But I mean a lot of people didn’t even realize this at all. Like, the American public was essentially lied to for 20 years about what we were supposedly accomplishing over there. And you know, I know that because I was there, and I realized quite early on that the Taliban taking over was inevitable. But I think had people expected that this was going to be the Taliban just, you know, mission running roughshod over the Afghan national security forces, then the, you know, sort of hyper focus on what we’re seeing right now and just the sort of shock that everybody feels wouldn’t have been the same.
You did two tours of duty as a Marine officer in Afghanistan. You learned Pashto. What did you see there that the State Department, the CIA, or the top military brass did not see?
Yeah, I’m not gonna give them enough credit to say that they didn’t see it. And so, I’ll give you—because most people who are on the ground there—most, you know, pretty much all the vets I talk to right now—all saw this coming and what was going to happen.
So, you’re right, I was a Marine officer. I had previously deployed to Iraq, and I sort of saw a deep systematic, institutional lie about the Iraqi security forces then. And so, when I went to Afghanistan, you know, I hoped that it was different. And I believed that maybe it was, and then, like you said, I had learned Pashto, which is the language of southern Afghanistan. I deployed on special-operations task forces, and I can give you a quick story about the first time where I really thought, “Oh boy, this is, this is not going to end well.”
It was my first tour there. I was at the Herat city penitentiary in western Afghanistan, and I was interviewing a member of the Taliban. It was my first Taliban interview. So I sit down, and I begin the interview by asking the guy, “Do you know why you’re in here?” And he just looks me firmly in the eye and says with pride, “Yes, because I was trying to kill you.”
And I say, “OK, well, you know, where do you think it goes from here?” And he looks at me again with the same sort of resolution and he says, “Well, you can either let me out of here, and I’m going to keep trying to kill you until you’re gone. Or you can keep me in here, and eventually you guys are going to be out of here. I’m going to have my country back, and I’ll be out of here, and I’ll be out of the penitentiary. So I’m getting out either way.”
And you know what, when I saw his firm resolve, and then I spent the rest of those tours working with Afghan national security forces who are underequipped, underfed, unable to do some of the most basic things after 13 years. Like, it’s not like I was there at the beginning, right. This is 2014, so it’s been 13 years. And like, one of the hot missions I got was this, “Oh no, the Afghans aren’t able to get their food, their equipment, or their ammunition in time for when the fighting season is about to begin. So Lucas, your job is to go to Kabul, go to Camp Morehead, go to all these other places, and make sure that their logistics supply chain works.”
And so, you know, the reason that it didn’t work is because—you know, this is kind of a sad thing—but the elites in that country were just basically taking everything. You know really like the elites in our country who benefited from the war, just like every war. Like, the people at the top aren’t going to be the losers. It’s the normal, everyday Americans; the normal, everyday Afghans. And so, you know, that was kind of during my deployments, but that specific conversation is when I really thought, “This is not going to end well whenever it ends.”
Well, so two questions. I mean, what everybody is pointing out now is that not only was there corruption in the civilian government. This is a tribal society. But the Afghan military, no matter how much logistical support, no matter how many supplies they got, they were really not motivated to fight well because their government lacked any legitimacy.
So, given that fact, which must have been known to intelligence officers on the ground there and to some diplomatic people on the ground there—I mean there was this back-channel cable that we reported on on Thursday that wasn’t even read by the national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, where two dozen diplomats used this special back channel to the State Department to warn that the extraction was going to be a complete mess. So I guess let me stay for one moment on how the endgame could have been bungled so badly, and then let’s talk about what your view is for when we should be intervening, if ever, in a military fashion in places like Afghanistan or places that are not as messed up as Afghanistan.
So my thoughts on the endgame the last week or the last two weeks is primarily that it’s hard to tell what could have been done better or done different. And so what the military is going to do—you know right now they’re working 24/7, around the clock, in a fairly dangerous situation, trying to get as many people out as they can. We need to focus on that for now.
And then afterwards, you know, the military is going to do an after-action on this. We do them all the time. We did them for every operation I was a part of. Every exercise, we try to learn from it. We package that material so that we do better the next time if God forbid we’re ever evacuating a country again when a hostile force has taken over. And so we’ll learn from that, but, like my biggest concern—and this is what I mean like with all of the focus on the last couple weeks in the news—is that the people who want us focusing on this week, and on the last two weeks, on the takeover, on the evacuation and the conditions around that are the same people who would say one more month, just one more month, because they benefit from that and because they profit from that, you know, one more month in Afghanistan. You know, we heard about one more month for 20 years, or one more year for 20 years, and we saw what happened, right.
And my other concern is that this hyper-focus on what’s going on right now—people are saying, “Investigate what’s happening right now. Investigate the evacuation. Investigate how all this was botched”—well, that’s really great for them, because they don’t want you to investigate the last 20 years, where they were lying to us and where they had a complete system of institutional dishonesty that deceived the American people and tried to convince us that, you know, 2,500 American lives lost, $2.25 trillion, and 20 years building up a country that fell in just a matter of weeks was somehow worthwhile. And so it’s almost, you know, it’s a huge distraction.
And if all we learn from this in this entire ordeal is how to do a better evacuation, then our country has absolutely failed, and, you know, the military-industrial complex and everyone who benefits from it have won, because what we need to learn is that in Afghanistan the military did its mission. They knocked out the Taliban, they booted out from that country very, very quickly, and we should have left in 2002 or 2003 instead of trying to build that country up for 20 years.
And the real irony here is that had we left then—the Taliban was very weak, they were in shambles, and most of their leadership was scattered or killed—maybe Afghanistan would have had a fighting chance of cobbling together some sort of government that worked.
And instead—you know, if you want to be the best at something, what you do is you practice against the best, right—and so the Taliban spent 20 years refining their fighting skills; refining their organizational skills; you know, working on their PR; working on their alliance-building, the relationship-building against the greatest fighting force in the world—the United States military. And so when they’ve gotten a practice against us for 20 years, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that they take a Sun Tzu principle, which is, you know, the greatest military victory is one that’s won without fighting a battle, and they spend the last year and a half convincing everybody in Afghanistan at lower governmental levels that, you know, the best thing you can do is just capitulate because the alternative is a 12-month civil war, where you’re going to lose anyway, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to die. And they were able to do that. And so you know what we have now is we have an Afghanistan with a much stronger Taliban than it ever was in the past. So we should have just left a long time ago, when we’d accomplished the military mission. Like military nation-building doesn’t work. It’s not what we’re made for. We need to use other tools of statecraft.
Do you think six months from now, on balance, Biden is going to be credited with finally getting us out of there? Or do you think he’s going to be blamed for the manner of the pullout?
Well, that’s up to people like us to sort of frame the discussion and make sure that we continue to talk about what happened over that 20 years and that getting out was necessary. And so I’m not—you know, Bob, I’m obviously not like a career politician. I don’t know how things like this play out, but, like, my number one goal is to just speak the truth on this. Tell it like it is. Tell everyone what I saw, so that we can read—you know, so that I can be the beginning of rebuilding trust in our institutions. And this—like for me, Afghanistan is just a microcosm of a much bigger problem that has led to Americans not trusting the institutions anymore.
And like, why would they, right? I mean, we’ve been told for 20 years that the $2.25 trillion and the 2,500 lives in Afghanistan was worth it. And now the American people can see with their own eyes that the government we supposedly built just, you know, fell in two weeks. And that we spent all that money over there and our government was telling us it was worth it, right, they were telling us it was worth it. Well, how was that worth it? And they spent money there instead of spending money here. And it’s the same in Iraq, right? Like, when you take the $6.4 trillion we spent in Iraq, the Middle East, and Afghanistan together over the last 20 years and you try to tell the American people that that was worth it, and they see what they got out of it—which is essentially nothing—that hurts, right? That undermines the belief that our institutions are working for them, particularly when we’re willing to spend $6.4 trillion there and everybody’s squabbling over spending just one-sixth of that amount here. Like, why would you trust the institution after that?
And it’s even deeper than that. Like, let’s look at the economy, right. I’m from Missouri; I’m running for Senate in Missouri. And when everybody on the coast was telling us, “Oh, you know, it’s 2012, 2014, the economy has recovered; we’re doing great; everybody’s doing great.” Missouri’s economy had not recovered. We were still in the gutter. No one paid any attention to Missouri or cared about it.
And so, like, why would people in Missouri or in other places like it believe in the institution that’s telling them that everything’s great when they can see with their own eyes that it’s not. And I mean, I can see this personally. Like the first house I ever lived in was bulldozed down during that time. The one I had joined the Marine Corps out of is vacant right now. The corner store’s been boarded up. Both of the grocery stores that were local are gone. And, you know, in this small town in Jefferson City, Missouri, where I grew up—you know, go to St. Louis or go to one of these really rural centers and you see it even worse.
And so, I mean, it’s the same with the housing market. [They] told us all the housing market had recovered, and at that time in Missouri my dad tried to sell the house we grew up in. It was on the market for two years, and eventually, when it sold, he got $43,000 for a house he owed $78,000 on. And so, like, what you have is just, we have heard these things from our institutions over and over again: Afghanistan, Iraq, the economy, the housing market. And people have seen with their own eyes that it wasn’t true; it wasn’t true; it wasn’t true. And now people think that there are nanobots in the COVID vaccine because there have been so many lies and such deep institutional dishonesty that charlatans can now drive a truck through the truth and just propagate whatever lie they want. And nobody knows what to believe anymore.
And so, like, my main goal is to just do exactly what I was doing in Afghanistan and say, “Look, this is how it is; this is how it was; this is how it was always going to be.” We need to start speaking the truth because the only way that we can get people to take COVID shots or that we can survive the next disaster is if we actually rebuild trust in our institutions.
You know I want to ask you one more question about military interventions and then—
Of course, of course.
—about your campaign. If you think about American military interventions around the world over the past 20 or 30 years, it seems to me, you can think of maybe two that were successful. One was Kosovo. One was Bosnia. And the thing that both of them had in common was that the locals really wanted us in there. All the other ones blew up in our face. All the other ones were debacles one way or another. What would—if you were secretary of defense or national-security adviser—what would your criteria be for when, if at all, the United States ought to intervene militarily?
I believe that we should intervene when we have a self-defense moment, and we need to protect ourselves. And we need to accomplish that mission immediately, and then we need to leave. And I don’t believe in this, you know, this doctrine of like “preemptive self-defense” where we invade Iraq because they might have weapons of mass destruction someday.
But I do believe, you know, if we’re attacked by like—like, I’m okay with us going to Afghanistan initially, right. We were attacked by al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda had attacked us multiple times from a home base in Afghanistan, and the Taliban was refusing to kick them out. So if they’re going to refuse to take away their safe haven, then we need to do that. But we did that in just several months, right. And so we accomplish the mission, and then we leave.
And then if the Taliban regroups, and they let al-Qaeda back in, we just go back in, and we do it again. And that’s way less costly, and that’s a true military mission. The military should be doing military missions. And other missions—like, you know, statecraft or nation-building or everything else—that should be done with the other tools that we have in our tool kit: diplomacy, international alliances, maybe the United Nations or whatever other peacekeeping forces. But it shouldn’t be U.S.-led military intervention because it doesn’t work. Like, it doesn’t work and it’s very, very expensive. And frankly, the average American doesn’t want it, and they know that we would be much better off if we just spent that money in our own country, doing things right here.
Well, you know, even after this messy pullout, the latest AP poll shows that 62 percent of Americans say that the Afghan occupation or involvement was not worth it. So even with the Republicans kind of banging away at this, the American people still are with you and with me on this.
So, tell us more about this Senate campaign. This is a swing state, and Blunt only won by something like three points last time. So, tell us about the dynamics of this election, and what you’re hoping to achieve.
Yeah, what I want to achieve is that I want to fundamentally change who has power in our country. And I say that just based on, you know, how I grew up. And so, you know, I grew up paycheck to paycheck. Like, I remember going to the grocery store with my mom—you know those grocery stores that I said are gone now, well back then they were local grocery stores—and you know my mom would write a check, ask the manager not to cash it for three to five days, and he would do that for us because we had a community and it hadn’t just been gobbled up by massive, you know, corporate monopolies. And so, you know, that’s how we lived.
When my littlest sister was born, she had a heart condition. She was airlifted a couple hours away to St Louis. And you know the bills associated with that eventually made us go bankrupt. And what I learned during that time is just the way that normal everyday people can take care of each other. I mean, I remember sitting in our living room and watching more lasagna and casserole roll through our front door than we could ever eat when we needed it. I remember people down at my mom’s prayer group raising money for us.
When we recovered from that, you know, I went to Jefferson City High School. I got into Yale University, which I don’t think anybody from there had ever done before. And when I didn’t have enough money to go, I got a Pell grant from the federal government, and people around town who I didn’t even know gave me a scholarship so I could go.
And so, for me, like, I believe that that’s who should have power in our country—not massive corporations or a set of elites who have way too much money and are using that money to buy off politicians, who then write laws that strip our communities for parts and just do things to their advantage. And like, you know, a good example of that is, you know, back in the day when we have local grocers and my mom can float a check, we didn’t go bankrupt because of that. We only went bankrupt from medical bills.
Nowadays, if you’re going to the Save A Lot, or the Dollar General, or, you know, the Walmart, they’re not going to let you float a check. But they do have a great alternative for you, Bob, called the payday loan. And so, you know, that was created by people who thought, “Oh, how can we squeeze just a little bit more out of everyday working people.” And I can tell you that we’d have gone bankrupt way more than one time if we had been relying on payday loans to get through the end of the month.
And so, this is just—and you know and those exist because people who wanted to make money changed the laws on interest so that they could have such a thing. And for me, that’s just, that’s what we have to fight. And so like in my campaign, I’m not taking any corporate PAC money. In fact, I want to abolish corporate PACs altogether. I don’t think the politicians should be able to trade in stocks, because it creates a huge conflict of interest. I don’t think their family should either. Like, there are a whole number of reforms that we need to do to our democracy in order for everyday people to fundamentally have power again, versus a set of elites who do things like keep us in a war for forever, so that they can make billions, if not trillions, of dollars off of it, while the rest of us can’t have good education. You know, having a neglected education system; don’t get good roads; or whatever else we need. And so, you know, that’s what I really want to change and fight.
Wow, Lucas. Thank you so much. You’re a breath of fresh air. We’ve been talking with Lucas Kunce, who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan as a Marine officer. And Lucas, who has written frequently for the Prospect, is now running for the Senate in Missouri. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Bob. It’s been nice.
