

End the conventional war in Afghanistan. Free up Special Forces to hunt terrorists in Pakistan – and maybe in Yemen and Somalia, too. Get Iraq to pay for its own defense. Rein in the President's broad powers in wartime.

Those are just a few of the controversial positions taken by Tommy Sowers, a former Green Beret waging a longshot campaign to unseat an entrenched, rural Red State Republican congresswoman in this Republican-friendly year.

Running as a Democrat in Rush Limbaugh's hometown isn't the first unorthodox move Sowers has made. Back in 2008, Sowers – then a West Point professor – took cadets to Dharmsala, India, and spent time with the Dalai Lama. Later, he made the even-odder move of inviting me to speak to some of his students.

Sowers and I spoke by phone last week – part of our week-long series on the new Congress.

An edited transcript follows.

__Danger Room: __A lot of people have soured on the war in Afghanistan. In August, you wrote maybe the most sour assessment I've read yet, that "America will lose in Afghanistan even if the current training mission succeeds." What did you mean by that?

__Tommy Sowers: __You start analyzing what is the stated objective for Afghanistan. It is to train, arm and equip the Afghan military and police, so that, one day, we can hand things over and leave. But let’s think through that objective. Let’s think through accomplishing that and set aside all the challenges we see on a day-to-day basis, most of which we didn’t have to the same degree in Iraq – the level of corruption, the level of illiteracy, the lack of centralized government.

Use Gen. [David] Petraeus’ own ratio which is one counterinsurgent for every 50 members of the populace. That’s 600,000, which is bigger than the active U.S. Army. But of course we’re not doing that, we’re training hopefully 400,000. So we’re already building a force that’s too small to secure. But then if you think through it even further and you say, "OK let’s just assume we’re going to do it." One day we’ve got 400,000-600,000 trained, armed and equipped Afghan tribesman and we leave. The central question – and this is a logistical question which Congress should be asking now – becomes: "Who’s going to pay for the Afghan military?"

So we’re building a force that’s too small to secure and too expensive to maintain. So training arming and equipping an army the size of our army in Afghanistan that will one day not be paid and will seek employment is not in our long term strategic interest.

__DR: __But what’s the alternative? We’ve tried just leaving Afghanistan before. We know how that movie ends.

__TS: __Well, we’re essentially fighting an ideology and you do not do that through terrain denial. You do that through something that we’re actually very good at: isolation, containment, deterrence, using proxies and using guys like me to occasionally kill and capture the real bad folks. There are enough rifts and fissures in Afghanistan that we can make sure that we have a presence there and an ability to operate in a counterterrorism posture.

DR: So this is basically the counterterrorism plan for Afghanistan – the one credited to Joe Biden's camp?

__TS: __It is focused more on counterterrorism and less on counterinsurgency. My perspective is [focused on] finite resources that we have. Every Special Forces team that we have training up an Afghan tribesman is a Special Forces team that can’t be with the Frontier Corps in Pakistan or with the Yemen counterinsurgency forces. Every CIA agent that we have analyzing the tribal structure in Afghanistan is one that can’t be focused on Iran or Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen. So I would much rather have our national strategic forces focused on where the terrorists actually are instead of where they were.

__DR: __Wait a sec. You think there should be more American ground troops in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?

__TS: __It’s not as simple as that. If I’m al-Qaeda right now and I’m in the al-Qaeda command center, they have a large "fix" symbol on Afghanistan. They’ve fixed our forces and our attention on Afghanistan, which allows them freedom of maneuver in other areas of the world. I want to deny them freedom of maneuver and you can’t do that if all your forces are tied up in Afghanistan.

DR: So what’s the end game? How do you actually beat al Qaeda – or reduce it to a semi-relevant minimum?

TS: We recognize that we’re combating an ideology and you don’t do that by terrain denial. You do that with a relentless approach. I use the cold war model often, which is there was another ideology – and, frankly, much more of a threat. I mean 30,000 nuclear-tipped weapons and submarines and bombers – and what did we do? We did not send the National Guard and the Reserves to everywhere we saw that ideology. We isolated it. We contained it. Where the populace there wanted a communist ideology, you isolate it, you contain it and let that system collapse in on itself.

DR: You think that if Afghanistan became a Taliban haven once again, as long as you contain it, it’ll eventually collapse, and that’s fine?

TS: Well, Afghanistan as a whole – I wouldn’t see that as a potential because the Taliban didn’t control all of Afghanistan when they were in power. But I think you have to learn the lessons from the 80s and the 90s and have a much more active presence than we did have in that area. But that doesn’t mean over 100,000 conventional troops.

[Now], ending the conventional war is not ending engagement in that region. There needs to be an active engagement in that region. But we need to focus our efforts on where the strategic threat is and have clear objectives.

__DR: __But how do you do counterterrorism if you can’t get tips from people, if you’re not living with them?

__TS: __Well, I mean, it’s how we do it everywhere else in the world where we don’t have 100,000 conventional troops.

DR: So more like the drone-heavy approach that’s being taken in Pakistan?

__TS: __I come at this with an old-school Green Beret approach: small groups of teams, paired up with indigenous forces that are effective at countering terrorism. There is some air component to that. Whether that’s manned or unmanned is less important to me. What’s more important is that our forces aren’t tied down on a long term objective that is not in our nation’s long term strategic interest. And we’ve got the capacity and frankly the funds to fight terrorism.

I mean, I’m not approaching it from the side of the [Democratic] party that just wants to hug the world. I’m approaching it from kind of the ass-kicking side of the party.

__DR: __We seem to get all kinds of mixed messages from the Pakistani government: they want to help us, they don’t want to help us, they’re aiding the insurgents, they’re going after 'em. And we seem to be sending a lot of mixed messages, too: they’re our enemies, they’re our friends. What would be the clearer approach to take with Pakistan? Is there one?

__TS: __Well you know, I think the limited approach right now with Special Operations should be expanded. And I think they’re concerned about our objective in Afghanistan, as well. They know that a 400,000-600,000 [man] force that is not being paid is very destabilizing for that region. I think in Pakistan that their main concern is on borders and border security. I’m for expanding that portion of the operation. Really, every resource that we have tied up in building in Afghanistan can and should be freed up. And it doesn’t all go to Pakistan. A lot of it should go to paying down the debt and investing in infrastructure here in America.

__DR: __So you’re saying expand the number of U.S. Special Forces units operating in Pakistan?

__TS: __I think that that is one of the options that can be presented. But right now we don’t have that option because our Special Forces teams are tied up predominately training Afghan tribesman.

DR: And what, just get out of Afghanistan as much and as soon as possible?

__TS: __It’s time to end the conventional approach. It’s time to end this idea that we’re going to train up an Afghan military to a degree that is not corrupt, that is loyal to a central government, that is effective and we need to establish a new objective in Afghanistan.

__DR: __But you can't just pull out troops overnight. It'd be a shitstorm there.

__TS: __You’ve got to set some timeline and just say, “Afghans, it’s time for you to sit up. You will no longer have 100,000 forces a year from now. It’s going to be some number less than that.” That will be a cathartic moment. I’m not saying it’s going to be absolutely pretty in Afghanistan. But we’ve got to be much more realistic in our foreign policy, and right now we don’t have a realistic or accomplishable goal in Afghanistan.

__DR: __You talk a lot about wasting money and wasting resources. Some of that extends to the Pentagon budget, right? What would you cut there?

__TS: __Congress I think has abdicated their Constitutional responsibility. Oversight of spending, whether it’s military spending or otherwise, is something that Congress increasingly is not doing. And with the lowest number of veterans in Congress since World War II, we’ve got a dramatic shift in the civil-military balance of power, where it seems Congress is just saluting the generals and it’s supposed to be the other way around.

__DR: __And so what does that mean practically? What are some programs you’d want to cut back on or get rid of?

__TS: __Well, you know, I think you’ve got to look hard at the spending overseas. I think that is the greatest discretionary spending right now that can be cut. When we’re spending $400 a gallon for a gallon of gas in Kabul – which is what the CRS [Congressional Research Service] estimate is – we need less vehicles in Kabul. It’s pretty simple. You don’t have to scratch the surface very deep to see the waste, fraud and abuse that’s happened in the military contracting system, especially in theaters of war.

__DR: __And how about in the core Pentagon budget, and the weapons systems?

TS: Frankly, I’ve got to spend some more time on the programs. It's one of the things I’ve really admired about Secretary Gates. He’s taken a hard look at some programs like the second [Joint Strike Fighter] engine. But again, it’s Congress waiting for the executive to make these decisions – the leadership really should be coming from Congress.

DR: I was surprised how early you came out against "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." Why'd you do it?

__TS: __I think there’s only really one right side of history here. The exact same arguments that are being used now are the arguments that were used in 1948 to prevent the integration of forces and in 1976 to keep women out of academies. And I think most people believe we’ve got the greatest fighting force ever assembled. My thing is I just think it’s an insult to the professionalism of the military. Simple as that. My country has asked me to work with people that I knew two weeks before were actively trying to kill me and had a price on my head. And they trusted that I was professional enough to do that. So that’s my approach to that issue.

__DR: __Another hot button issue. Over the summer there was a lot of talk about mosque-building and the president’s religion and stuff like that. Do you think that kind of talk is helpful in this counterterrorism mission?

__TS: __Well, you know, I just always come back to something that a sheikh told me once, which was that "you Americans have never lost a tactical battle but with Abu Ghraib you lost the people and then the war." What I saw out on the ground was that things like Abu Ghraib definitely are losses for us.

Photo: Tommy Sowers Facebook Fan Page