Andrew Cockburn is the award winning journalist, documentary film producer and Harper’s Washington, DC editor. For more than four decades, he has focused on national security not just of the United States, but of the Soviet Union as well. Beginning with his Peabody Award winning 1981 PBS film, THE RED ARMY, which was the first in-depth study of deficiencies in the Soviet military, he has covered the wars in Afghanistan since the 1980s with his wife, Leslie Cockburn. In 2009, they produced the film AMERICAN CASINO on the financial collapse of 2007.

His 8th book, THE SPOILS OF WAR: POWER, PROFIT and the AMERICAN WAR MACHINE, has just been published by Verso. In it he asserts that “The record shows America’s Afghan War was nothing other than a prolonged and entirely successful operation – to loot the US Taxpayer. At least a quarter of a million Afghans, not to mention 3,500 US & allied troops paid a heavier price.”

We spoke with Andrew Cockburn on Sept. 29, 2021, as the Senate Armed Services Committee was grilling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, about the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years and trillions of dollars spent, which he characterized as “a logistical success but a strategic failure.”

To find links to articles referenced or pertinent to this interview, click on this link: https://forthright.media/2021/10/05/andrew-cockburn-the-spoils-of-war-power-profit-and-the-american-war-machine/

His ancestor, Sir George Cockburn, 10th Baronet, ordered the Burning of Washington in 1814.