TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So, Afghanistan, the president apparently is considering sending more US troops there. You've spent a lot of time there and in that region, and you have an idea for what we should do with Afghanistan. What is it?
ERIK PRINCE: So, we're spending as, as a country, $42 billion there this year. There's 8,000 troops, three quarters of them never actually leave the base. If you look back in history, the way the English operated in India for 250 years, they had a army that was largely run by companies, and no English soldiers. So, very cheap, very low cost, very simple, very adaptable. The president needs to appoint one person in charge in Afghanistan. We've been through 17 commanders in 15 years. That's not even counting the ambassadors and all the other officials. so you put one person in charge and allow them to negotiate with the Afghans the rules of engagement, because right now, the rules of engagement are so tight that when you have soldiers is in contact fighting for their lives, they have to talk to a lawyer 500 miles away sitting in air conditioning to drop a bomb. That's not a serious --
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So you would replace the military occupation with the American South Asia company, or something like that?
ERIK PRINCE: Something like that, sure. You already have a 300,000 person Afghan Security Force, but they fall down because they lack logistics, they lack the professional enabling functions because we rushed into this, into people that were largely illiterate and not capable of doing those functions, and now, they are corrupted, and they fall short of fuel supply, on air support, on all these basic things that the home team should have been fighting against the Taliban.
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We've fought for the last fifteen years with the First Infantry Division model, now we should fight with an East India Company model and do it much cheaper. There's a trillion dollars of value in the ground. Mining -- minerals, and another trillion of oil and gas, and that's the U.S. Geological Survey estimates, but yet, you don't have a mining law and Afghanistan.
