Interviewed in the Fiscal Times

David Francis of The Fiscal Times interviewed me for an article about the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Joshua Foust, a fellow with the American Security Project, says that funding the Afghan military is throwing money at an ineffective fighting force.

“The International Security Assistance Force [the NATO umbrella] ranked only one of the 20 brigades as being effectively independent. The rest can’t function without U.S. input,” he said. “We’re putting a band aid over an artery wound.”

But Foust also warned that the U.S. presence must be robust enough to prevent the violence that has historically occurred there.

“From a high level, there’s still a lot of things the U.S. has a stake in there. We still have a stake in preventing the kind of carnage that happened in the 1990s,” he said. “And we have to prevent terrorists from returning.”

I wish he’d not publicly associated me with my former employer (or dragged out the tired old “graveyard of empires” meme) but such is life. Read the rest over at The Fiscal Times.