For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest on the show today, it's Eric Margulies.
The website is EricMargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, it'll come up for you there.
You can find his archives at LeeRockwell.com, we often feature him at Antiwar.com as we are today.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, though he is an American.
Welcome to the show, Eric, how are you?
I'm great to be back with you, Scott.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
Lots of things to talk about, and you know what, somewhere in this interview, I need to get from you a list of recommendations of other good people to interview about Pakistan besides you.
Because, I don't know, I guess I need to just try to get more reporters on to talk about what's going on there.
But I need to get from you, the audience needs to understand, and I certainly need to understand, what's the situation going on over there.
I read this headline that says America and Britain are scrambling to shore up and keep the Pakistani government from falling.
But then, two headlines away is U.S. drone strike kills 24 in Karam.
And that's in Pakistan, right?
Yes.
And so, is that how you shore up the Pakistani government?
Is the Pakistani government going to fall, and would that just mean it would be replaced by another one?
Or does that mean maybe the country would break apart, or what's going on over there?
Well, I can tell you, the curry pot is boiling.
We've got ourselves in one of these impossible messes, as you have just pointed out.
We're bombing them on one hand.
On the second hand, we're blasting them for not being good enough allies.
And here's the situation, Scott.
To wage war in Afghanistan, the U.S. absolutely has to rely on Pakistani air bases, ports, communication facilities, and equally important, logistic support, not to mention 120,000 troops of the Pakistani army that the U.S. is renting every month, and the intelligence agency ISI.
So the U.S. has put Pakistan in a stranglehold and said, you've got to cooperate with us.
Pakistan is bankrupt, so it has to go along begrudgingly, because 90% of Pakistanis are dead set against the U.S.
-led war in Afghanistan.
Well, and this has been a major problem with the supply line there.
And I don't really know exactly how this works, or even really the basic geography, but there's the port of Karachi, and then the supply line is supposed to go up through Peshawar and then over the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
And it's been, I guess for months and months, it's been brewing and getting worse and worse, the supply lines have been cut, trucks hijacked, and then I guess just not too long ago a bridge blown up and destroyed.
And does it take the kind of willing forbearance of the average Pakistani along that route to allow that kind of disruption to go on?
Because I'm sure the American government, I know they try to say that, well, you know, this is Taliban militants or whatever, but it seems like if people can disrupt a supply line that long, they have basically the tacit approval of the locals to get away with, you know, carrying out hijacking American trucks, stuff like that, right in their neighborhoods.
Well, they do indeed, because the area up around the Afghan border, the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, is very heavily Pashtun ethnic.
We have to understand this Pashtun business, it's the world's largest tribe, there are 15 million of these wild and woolly guys in Pakistan along the Afghan border, in both the tribal agencies that where all the fighting is going on, Waziristan, for example, there are a lot of them around Peshawar, the capital of the northwest frontier, and there are also another 15 or 20 million Pashtun tribes inside of Afghanistan, and they were divided by an artificial border drawn by the British imperialists called the McMahon Line, which I've never recognized, and what's happened is we, the United States, have gotten ourselves into a war, not with terrorists and Taliban and all this stuff, but with the Pashtun tribes.
Now is the McMahon Line, that's different than the Durand Line?
And I'm sorry, excuse me, you're quite right, I stand corrected, it is the Durand Line, I was in the McMahon Line that runs through the Himalayas, but also an artificial line, you're quite right, Durand Line, and the tribes are now fighting the United States, so the tribesmen, the Pashtuns on the Pakistani side of the border, are aiding their Pashtun compatriots in Afghanistan, who are mainly in the Taliban movement, by attacking the American supply lines, but they're also doing it because the U.S. is constantly bombing and killing tribesmen in the tribal agencies, just today there was another attack where 22 odd people were killed, a lot of them civilians, and now the tribesmen are mad as hornets about that, and they're attacking the U.S. and Pakistani government targets.
Well, you know, the whole thing in the American media is framed as a war against the Taliban, and I guess I don't really know how many the Taliban were, and how many of them, I mean, I guess when America invaded, they basically just fled Kabul, it wasn't that they were annihilated, or anything like that, but it seems like they've gotten stronger and stronger, or is it just that the American Pentagon calls more and more people Taliban, as more and more people dare to resist?
Well, Scott, you're quite right, it's the latter case.
The original Taliban, from the early 1990s, I was there with them when they were founded, was a religious anti-communist movement that was created to stop chaos inside Afghanistan.
They hosted bin Laden, not because they agreed with his anti-Western rhetoric, but because he was the hero of the war against the Soviets.
They had nothing to do with 9-11, they knew nothing about it, and the U.S. has declared them terrorists.
Well, they're not terrorists, they still remain violently anti-communist religious organizations, but the Taliban has expanded from its original tribal base in the Pashtuns to include all kinds of groups, non-religious groups, like the Hizb-e-Islami, who are fighting Western occupation.
And so in my columns, I always refer to them as the Afghan resistance.
We always use this deceptive term, insurgents or terrorists.
Well, is it a self-fulfilling thing, in that more and more people actually are joining the Taliban, or that's only in the semantics of the Americans?
Oh, no, no, they are joining, they're increasing in numbers very rapidly, over anger of Western bombing, U.S. Air Force bombing of their villages, and the presence of Western troops, which they find very offensive.
And the fact that there's so many Afghans who are unemployed, and they love to fight, so this is the perfect equation for national resistance.
Well, and they love to fight.
Is that really like a cultural thing, they're different than other people in the world?
Because, you know, men like to fight.
Well, Pashtun boys at the age of six get their first gun.
And they even make their own weapons from a piece of iron and a block of wood.
I've seen them do it.
They're a real old-style warrior tribesman.
And they'll fight forever, they're fearless, they're absolutely ferocious.
I was with them in the field fighting against the Soviets.
They are renowned people.
You don't want to fight a war against the Pashtun, because, first of all, they never stop.
And secondly, they love vengeance.
They never forgive the bad people to fight.
And, of course, sir, they live there.
Well, yeah, that's the whole thing, too, is that we're the foreigners.
And you know me, I don't approve of the U.S. military going anywhere, except maybe halfway across the Atlantic to sink the Spanish Armada, if that day ever comes or something.
But otherwise, all of our military ought to be at home.
But, of course, if America leaves Afghanistan and Pakistan, then, well, this is what they say, right?
The war party now says, well, the problem is we ever left Afghanistan, we should have replaced the Soviets as the empire there and never left and paid more attention, they call it, and cared more for Afghanistan and stayed forever.
But if we leave, then there's that big power vacuum, and that means that the Taliban, who, you know, they throw acid in little girls' faces and all kinds of crazy things, they get the power back, right?
Well, this is the war drums of the war party.
We just read last week, Lance, at the Journal of the British Medical Association, just published a study showing that in India, 100,000 young women are burned alive every year for their dowries.
How many?
100,000 is their estimate.
And we don't care about this.
You hear all the things about the wicked Taliban, and throwing acid is a custom in that part of the world.
It happens in Pakistan, it happens in India.
I've been threatened with having acid thrown in my face in Pakistan.
It's a nasty custom of the area.
Well, so if we got rid of the Taliban, you know, I don't know, killed all the last ones of them and then left, then whoever took power in Afghanistan would be just as brutal, is that what you're saying?
That's exactly right, because the Taliban, these are tribal customs that are very ingrained and hard to change.
We're our army, the U.S. Army, are not uniformed social workers.
We can't go and change a people's way of life any more than the Taliban could come to Southern California and teach them to live in a simple Islamic manner.
It's just not doable, and this is propaganda.
We're not there for Afghan schoolgirls.
We're there to build a pipeline to Uzbekistan.
That's what this war is really about, and the pipeline politics are still dominating American policy.
If we withdrew, yes, there would be a void there, but so what?
There was always a void there before, and until we got involved there, we never cared about it, and it never affected us.
Well, you know the big problem is Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden are still podcasting from the mountains up there somewhere.
Well, they're probably in Pakistan, and so let's invade Pakistan then.
It's only 165 million people.
With nuclear weapons.
With nuclear weapons.
God knows we have troops to spare.
Well, and I know that you've spent a lot of time there.
What are those mountains like?
Is this comparable to invading the Rocky Mountains, something like that?
Pretty much so.
They're not quite as high as the Rockies, but they're very wild and rugged.
There are very few roads.
It's dusty.
It's cold.
It's hot.
It's a very rough terrain.
It lends itself very nicely to ambush, and we Americans, we're spending billions and billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan.
We're putting all kinds of new high-tech radars and radio towers and all kinds of search gizmos and stuff like that.
We're depleting everything in this war against a few lightly armed tribesmen.
We can make our way to felt, but, I mean, my God, who can wage a war at this expense when the United States has gone bankrupt?
Yeah.
Well, and as far as the pipeline, how's that going?
I mean, the one that they were trying to negotiate with the Taliban back in the late 1990s, that pipeline still doesn't exist, does it, after all these years of occupation?
No, it didn't.
Osama bin Laden advised Taliban, because they really didn't know anything about business, not to take the American deal, which he said was a bad deal, but to go with an Argentinian consortium, which they did, but then nothing ever came of it.
But now, as far as I understand, the pipeline deal was signed last year and will begin construction next year, and that is going to bring energy from the Caspian Basin south through Afghanistan, right through Taliban territory to Pakistan and the coast.
Well, and, you know, as you talk about all the gold-plating gizmos everywhere, the idea that this is somehow profitable to America is getting really thin over here.
I mean, how much does it cost to put a soldier, you know, every half a mile up and down a pipeline forever, compared to how much money do you make off of the pipeline itself?
It couldn't possibly balance out there.
I just saw the figure of $330,000.
I'm not sure whether it's a month or a year for U.S. troops, but it's a lot of money, too much money.
We can't afford to send troops abroad.
Well, and, you know, I'm probably a little bit better than most about this, but I'm really still pretty fuzzy when it comes to imagining what Central Asia looks like in my head.
But basically, America's got bases not just in Afghanistan, but really all throughout that land between Russia and Islamic South Asia, right?
Iran is really the only exception, and Syria are basically the only places where we don't have military bases.
Is that right?
We have pretty much surrounded Iran.
We have three bases now in Pakistan, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
We are negotiating on Central Asian bases.
There was an iffy question with Manas where the U.S. was going to be thrown out, but we have bases in Turkey.
We have bases all through the Gulf in Bahrain, Qatar, et cetera, now in Iraq.
So there are lots and lots of bases.
Well, what about all the stands?
Azerbaijan, do we have bases in Azerbaijan?
Not yet, but there's talk of building a big base in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a supply depot also for the war in Afghanistan, because the U.S. is considering alternative supply routes through Russia and even through Iran.
Well, and I'm trying to remember now, but didn't Karamov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, kick the Americans out a few years back?
Were trying to negotiate to get back in there?
That's right, he did, and their human rights violations were so bad by the communist government in Uzbekistan that even the U.S. couldn't take it, and they criticized him, and he then closed down the U.S. air base there.
And the other air base in Manas is, I don't know, the Russians apparently bribed the locals to kick out the Americans, they're trying to up the bribes from the locals, and the situation, as diplomats say, is fluid.
Well, that one's the crazy one in Kyrgyzstan, where there's a Russian and American base not too far from each other in this third country.
I know, it's almost worthy of Peter Sellers.
Well, what about Turkmenistan?
I don't even know these places, really.
I just wonder, because I hear there's 750 military bases in the world, and I'm thinking, well, our so-called enemy in Central Asia, or that part of the world at all, I guess, is Iran, but other than that, there's a whole bunch of other countries there besides Iran and Russia, and I just wonder the extent of American basing in that Central Asian...
I mean, hell, that's the heroin pipeline, never mind oil, that's where all the heroin gets to Europe, right?
You know, Scott, the U.S. Air Force, God bless them, bought 2,500 copies of my first book, War at the Top of the World, which is all about Central Asia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
I guess they were planning a long stay.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, and we've heard, and I guess we've probably talked before about the long war, and Central Asia as Indian country, like it's the Old West, all of the old world somehow is part of America's manifest destiny kind of thing going on there, although maybe the bank is broken enough that that's not going to happen.
Well, that's what I think, but our anti-war president, or who was an anti-war candidate, now that he's president, appears to be keeping the U.S. in Iraq, he's sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, there are all kinds of defense talks going on with India, there are threats against Korea, it sounds like the old days of George Bush to me.
Yeah, well, me too.
You know, announcing all gobbledygook and rhetoric aside that we're going to have at least, bare minimum, 50,000 troops for another two years is, you might as well just say in plain English, within the next two years we're going to find a reason to stay longer than that, okay?
So don't get your hopes up.
I mean, and anybody who thinks otherwise, to me, is just crazy.
Well, because one of the reasons to keep troops there was for training, and for anti-terrorism operations, and to protect American interests.
Well, what does that mean?
That means anything you like it to.
Exactly.
For any amount of time.
Right.
Well, and now you've got this great article at the Huffington Post about the threat of conflict with Iran.
Here it is, you know, years and years later, we're still talking about, and as far as I can tell, really nothing substantive has changed.
The IAEA is still in Iran, the centrifuges at Natanz are still turning out, a measly 3.6 percent U-235 that you can't make a bomb out of, and the Americans, apparently regardless of which party is in power, still continue pretending that the rest of the world just doesn't know that those things are true.
Well, we're getting a repeat of the old Iraq story.
Prove that you don't have them.
You're guilty until you can prove you don't have any nuclear weapons.
Well, here we have it.
Iran is the most heavily inspected nuclear country anywhere, and it's got inspectors coming out of the kazooty, and yet the International Atomic Energy Agency says no, they're not enriching uranium, it's only rich to 2 percent for fuel purposes, and the combined American intelligence agencies, with their annual intelligence statement, came out and said, and reaffirmed the statement this year that Iran is not producing any kind of fuel for nuclear weapons.
It's interesting, some critics, myself included, are suggesting or observing that the recent huge uproar over the appointment of a new...
Charles Freeman.
Freeman story, thank you.
Was in fact linked to Director Admiral Blair's refusal to say that Iran had nuclear weapons.
Yeah, well, clearly, this is the number one thing that jumped out at me.
If there's a conflict over, especially between the Israel lobby and the run-of-the-mill American imperialists like Freeman and his faction over who's going to chair the National Intelligence Council, well, what's the big story about the National Intelligence Council?
They took all the wind out of Cheney's sails back in November 2007.
They came out with a giant trumpet on top of the castle wall and said, Iran is not making nuclear weapons, we can all chill out now.
And then the drive for war was basically done for them, for that moment, and so if the Israel lobby can have their guy on the National Intelligence Council, well, they'll revise their estimate and realize that the Iranians are in fact making nukes, and so we need to nuke them.
Exactly.
You put it very well.
It's crazy to think that all this can just play out in such a public way.
I guess the Times and the Post didn't really decide to cover it until after the fact, but it still is amazing.
And you know, here's the thing that really strikes me.
This is something that you point out at the beginning of your article here, is kind of the problem in trying to remember what the lie is.
See, I told Eric Margulies this lie, and I'm trying to remember how to say it right again, but it's hard because it's not true.
I can only try to remember what I said before, not what really is the situation.
And that's what's going on with Obama, Panetta, Mullen, Blair, and Gates, and the whole national security crew.
Every time anybody asks them about Iran's nuclear program, nobody knows what to say, whether there's a secret one or whether the public one is worse than they say it is, or whether the IAEA exists or not, or, you know, any of these things.
They have no idea what they're supposed to say.
They haven't held that one meeting.
They're like, okay, here's the official lie on Iran, and here's how we're going to phrase it.
That's very true, and meanwhile supporters of Israel are beating the war drums and trying to keep hysteria going about Iran.
And what I find so ironic is, and I think I've said this before on your show, is that, you know, while everywhere we're all in hysteria over Iran, India, our new best friend, is quietly building, has built up a very large nuclear arsenal illegally with no safeguards, and is now building intercontinental ballistic missiles that will be capable of reaching North America and have absolutely no use.
A use in a country where 42% of the children suffer from malnutrition, why are they building ICBMs?
Well, India is a much more immediate concern to us than Iran, which has no long-range delivery systems of any kind and no nuclear warheads.
Well, and all of India's enemies are right next door, right?
That's right.
I mean, India, I don't understand why India needs these long-range weapons except for a sort of nuclear Viagra to be a big shot and, you know, to sit at the table with the Americans and the Red Chinese.
Yeah, well, and, you know, as a deterrent to keep America out, I mean, if there's a lesson from the Axis of Evil crusade, it's that if you don't have nukes or you don't even have the capability anywhere near coming up with nuclear technology, then we'll invade you.
If you can defend yourself, we'll figure out a way to negotiate.
Absolutely.
Colin Powell put it very well.
Inadvertently, he said, he let slip in an interview, he said, you know, if, well, what happens if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, he said it would limit America's options in the Middle East.
Right.
Meaning that America couldn't threaten to bomb Iran or use military force against it.
Not that Iran would use a nuclear weapon anywhere in its area because it would blow back over Iran or be totally counterproductive.
Well, but they've, the population of that country has committed the unforgivable sin of stealing their own country back from this country.
And that can't be, that can't go unpunished.
Washington is a long memory.
Well, and, you know, Noam Chomsky was saying on this show the other day that regardless of business interests, even he agreed that, you know, he had Dick Cheney in the 1990s when he was the CEO of Halliburton was saying, let's do business with the Iranians.
We, we had a whole, you know, missile agreement with them, arms for hostages.
We can do business with these people and, and complained about Clinton sanctions.
And, and Chomsky was saying, yes, see the interests of the state itself and the empire itself in, in making an example out of Iran, trump even the interests of a Halliburton.
Well, Cheney did go to Iran under the Shah and offered to sell them 26 nuclear reactors.
And then the Iranians were very much, very close to the Israelis at that time.
And so the Israelis were, they were negotiating, we understand, for Israel to sell the medium range missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
So, but those were kosher Iranians back then.
Then came the mullahs and they became evil.
But meanwhile, as you point out, these, these Iranians and the Israelis kept playing footsie, even, you know, to the sale of arms by Israel to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
Right.
Long after the Ayatollahs took over.
Yes.
So things are obviously pure on the surface.
Well, and, you know, I remember Greg Palast saying once, look, nobody's going to bomb Iran.
Anytime anybody, any of these guys are talking tough, just think of it as they're trying to drive up the price of oil.
You know, it helps both sides.
Well, I was told at the Pentagon that there would be no bombing of Iran.
But on the other hand, there is great concern that Israel may draw the U.S. into a war.
Well, see, that's the whole thing here.
The Iranians, it's been at least quite some time before they've given any indication that they would be willing to suspend enrichment of uranium.
It's a matter of national honor.
The population at large supports it by huge majorities there.
And so they're not likely, it doesn't seem like, to give up what they're doing at Natanz and the enrichment of uranium.
And yet that is the unnegotiable position of America that they, if they're going to have a nuclear program at all, they need to import their uranium from Europe or something.
And so it's, you know, the difference between Obama and Bush on this so far, it seems like, is Bush said we will not sit at the table with you unless you give in to our every demand.
And Obama is saying we will sit at the table with you, at least at some point, so that you can give in to our every demand.
But the idea that they would be, that it would be the American policy that, oh, well, okay, fine, enrich uranium on your own land, doesn't seem to be like that line is going to move at all.
That's quite right.
And now the new wrinkle is the Obama administration's kind of ham-handed idea to say, well, listen, we won't build that anti-ballistic missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic that Bush said he was going to do to the Russkies if you put pressure on Iran not to stop enriching uranium.
And the Russians just dismissed that out of hand.
And now I'm afraid the problem is that they want, Obama can't want to go through the motions of negotiations, but as you suggest, doesn't really, it just wants to present an ultimatum.
The Iranians are not going to fall for that.
They're very tough negotiators.
You know, one thing that you talk about in your article is the fact that, I guess there are eight nuclear weapon states, but you say there are 15 that use low-enriched uranium.
I guess that probably includes all of the nuclear weapon states, but then there's, what, seven more?
Yeah, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Japan.
Because people, of course, make the case that there's no, you know, legitimate purpose in having the Natanz facility unless they're trying to wipe Israel off the face of the earth with it.
Well, Iran says that its oil reserves are declining.
Its population is growing.
It needs to produce nuclear energy.
Another argument is it could import and then re-export the spent uranium rods as it's doing out of the Bushehr facility to Russia.
But as you point out, this has become a major nationalist issue, and Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of Iran, has pointed out that he said, you know, for centuries, the West has deprived our part of the world of technology.
We weren't allowed to have technology to keep us backwards so that we would have to buy the West's technological products.
And now we are breaking the handcuffs of Western technology denial, and we are leaping forward into 21st century technology, technological freedom.
And this is really what's inspired them.
It's become a major, major nationalist issue.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
You can find his archive at ericmargulies.com, also over at lourockwell.com.
And we have a link up today at antiwar.com to his Huffington Post article, The American Rome is Burning, So Let's Attack Iran.
Thanks a lot for your time on the show, Eric.
Pleasure, Scott.
