04/28/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And he's also the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media up there in Canada.
But he is an American, so don't get it confused.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Great to be back with you.
Well, it's good to have you here.
You're the world expert on what's going on in Pakistan.
And also you have anti-American empire bent, which is nice.
I'm tired of having to hear all my news from people saying, well, General Petraeus says today.
So, anyway, it's great to talk to you again.
Great to have you on the show.
And I guess this is continuing the theme of today's show, or maybe every show, which is the government causes a lot more violence than it prevents, and certainly our government does.
Tell us the lowdown, Eric.
What's been going on in Afghanistan, in Pakistan?
Tell me a bunch of stuff, and I'll find places to ask you questions about what you said.
Okay, Scott.
Well, the mess is getting bigger.
The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, going after Taliban, supposedly after Al Qaeda, etc., has not only generated a stalemate or losing war for the U.S. and NATO allies in Afghanistan, and screams for more troops by the commanders there, not only has it turned a large part of the Afghan population against us, but it's now spread into Pakistan, and we have two simultaneous events going on in Pakistan.
First, a tribal uprising on the northwest frontier that Rudyard Kipling would have understood perfectly, and that is we've been bombing Pashtun, or Patans, as they used to be called, tribesmen, with predator aircraft, killing a lot, killing ten times more civilians, and launching raids into the area.
We've been bribing the Pakistani army to bomb their own people, their own tribesmen, who were first cousins of Taliban in Afghanistan.
And finally, a revolution is brewing in Pakistan, as its poor people, it's one of the poorest countries in the world, are getting restive and talking about rebelling against the feudal structure which rules them, and which we back.
It seems like every policy that this government, that this Pentagon takes in these wars, is based on the premise that history began yesterday.
And it's almost like watching the Israel-Palestinian conflict, where any time the Israelis kill a Palestinian, it's only retribution for what the Palestinians did to us, even if they got a point at something that happened four months ago, or something.
It's sort of like that, where here we have militancy rising in Pakistan, threatening, according to the MSNBC guy with the map, getting pretty close to some major cities there in Pakistan, in terms of ground that they control, with their boots on the ground and AK-47s, gaining territory.
This is not...
I guess the average American, or the average imperialist in DC, says, well, we just have to war against them more.
Because, look, they're making gains.
We gotta send in more troops, we gotta drop more bombs.
And yet, this is what we've been doing the whole time.
All the bombs we've dropped is what's created this catastrophe as a reaction to it.
Am I right, or what?
You're absolutely right, Scott.
And I've spent a lot of time there.
These people used to be our friends.
They were the mujahideen, they were our freedom fighters, and we have turned them against us.
You know, I was talking to Karl Rove, and I said, you know, how are you going to get out of this mess?
And he said, more predators and more special forces.
Well, they've already stirred up a hornet's nest along the northwest frontier.
These are the same tribes whose great-great-grandfathers were fighting the British Imperial Army, the armies of the Raj.
But this is one issue.
It's on the northwest frontier.
We had all this hysteria this and last week by Hillary Clinton saying it's a global threat.
She has a lot of studying to do on this area.
But what we have, in fact, are a bunch of raggedy tribesmen on motorbikes who came down within a hundred kilometers of Islamabad, and they hung around for a while, and then they left.
This is not a Taliban invasion.
It's an incursion, certainly.
But this is confined to the Pashtun tribal area of the northwest frontier province, one of four parts that make up Pakistan.
And Taliban is not going to take over the rest of Pakistan by any leap of the imagination.
So all these alarms in Washington were wildly overblown.
But as I was saying earlier, you have this simmering revolt.
You have a government that is collapsing, really, that has less and less authority.
And you have a lot of desperately poor and very angry people in Pakistan.
So here are a bunch of people who really want nothing to do with being ruled by Talibs, and never would, and can't even conceive of that.
And yet it seems like the more we support weak puppets like Zardari, our support for him while we bomb their country, even if it is tribesmen in a different state or whatever, that's what is weakening him so badly.
I mean, if we want this guy really to be an effective American puppet, we ought to back off and let him pretend to be a little bit independent, right?
They don't have your subtlety in Washington.
We may keep making two mistakes.
And I go way back on this, back to Vietnam days when I was in the U.S. Army.
We keep demanding that our puppets actually be leaders and strong men.
You can't make a puppet be more than a puppet.
This is problem one.
So we're demanding our puppet in Afghanistan, Karzai, and our puppets in Pakistan, to, you know, take charge, take the lead, go with the program and all this kind of stuff.
Their people hate them.
They're totally discredited.
They're regarded as corrupt stooges of the U.S.
They don't have loyalty in their armies and police forces.
They need more training.
We used to say this in Vietnam, as you were just saying earlier, Scott.
We need more training.
They don't need training.
They need loyalty.
So it's pathetic.
The other mistake we keep making is our reporters and our political people go to Pakistan, and the only people they talk to belong to Pakistan's elite, who tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Oh, please send more troops.
We love you Americans.
Liberate us from the horrible Muslims, et cetera, et cetera.
But we're talking to ourselves, in effect, and we're just reconfirming our own prejudices and mistaken beliefs.
Pardon me.
I'm going to talk for a minute here to explain my best understanding of some of what's going on here and then have you correct me and or fill in details and these kinds of things here.
I'm looking at the reporting of Dr. Gareth Porter and quite a few others, I guess just regular news stories from around the world over the past couple of months, and they say basically the strategy, they have a few different choices.
Obama has said publicly, although apparently he didn't mean it.
In fact, he narrowly defined the mission, Eric.
He said the mission is stopping al Qaeda and whatever.
He dropped all the pretense about creating a wonderful new haven in democracy in Afghanistan, at least publicly.
And yet the choices for how to go about, if we assume that the last mission is to just finally drop a bomb on Zawahiri and finally get the hell out of there or whatever, the way to do that, there are different choices of strategy that they're looking at.
And one of them is split the Taliban between the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban and try to work some differences there.
Another is to split the hardcore Taliban from just the stringers on who maybe signed up because the Americans slaughtered their mother and sister, and so they grabbed a rifle and decided to join.
And then the plan that would seem to me to make sense would be the one that the Saudis were trying to work out there a month or two ago or get started along these lines, which is separate the Taliban from the al Qaeda guys, whatever, if there's a dozen of them left or whatever, the Egyptians and Saudis that are being protected, presumably, I guess, in the federally administered tribal areas up there in the Hindu Kush mountains.
And that's the deal that we need to make is with all of the Taliban to separate themselves from the Arab Afghan army remnants there.
And then mission's over and we can go.
Well, but we don't want to go.
We certainly have examined all these different approaches.
The one that's missing is the most obvious one of all, and that is let's bury the hatchet with Taliban.
It was a mistake to go to war with the Taliban to begin with.
As I said in 2001, Taliban had nothing to do with 9-11.
They had no idea what bin Laden was doing, if it was he who was in fact really running al Qaeda or if al Qaeda even exists.
And we should simply have paid them to go after al Qaeda then.
They would have done it.
The only reason they were defending them was because al Qaeda was their guest.
But they said to us, to the Americans, show us.
Give us a document that shows that bin Laden was behind this attack, and we'll arrest him and hand him over to another Muslim country for trial.
We didn't do any of this.
We just swaggered and beat our chest and invaded Afghanistan.
Well, we're paying the price for arrogance and stupidity and ignorance right now because we're up to our neck in a bigger and growing mess there.
As you said, Scott, al Qaeda, if it exists at all, is down to a handful of people.
It has no influence in Afghanistan.
And yes, we'll try and split al Qaeda the way they think they split the Iraqi resistance by buying off the Sunnis and browbeating the Shias, the Mahdi army, into being quiet.
That's a temporary measure.
I don't think it's going to work with the Afghans.
They're much more stubborn people.
You may get some defections, but by and large the resistance of the Americans is going on because they are looking at themselves as freedom fighters, and we are the new Soviets.
And we have invaded their country.
We've got the whole Pashtun tribe, half the population of the country against us, and they're not going to give up easily.
So it's a futile policy.
And expanding the war we can't win in Afghanistan into Pakistan is a mistake, but it's five orders of magnitude bigger.
And we've talked about before, and I guess I'd like to give you an opportunity, and I guess you sort of mentioned it, but you could expand on the idea that they don't want to leave.
If they can come up with a strategy that's a worse strategy because it'll last longer, then they'll go ahead and go for that because that's what's really a winning strategy in the eyes of the guys that run the Pentagon, that run the whole national security state.
They want to treat Eurasia like it's America's Old West, and all these people are just the red Indians in the way of our progress here.
Well, that's right.
You know, the proper word for these people is the imperialist camp in Washington, but I can't use this term because I sound like some European communist or socialist.
The term has been discredited, but it is le majuste, as the French say.
These are imperial people.
They want to keep American domination of the region.
They want to keep America's grip on the Caspian oil basin that's just to the north of Afghanistan, through which this long-planned pipeline, which is going ahead, by the way, is going to pass right through Pashtun Taliban territory, down through Pakistan, down to the Arabian Sea.
This will be the world's newest and last undiscovered major energy resource, or unexploited will flow, be under American control, and they can't get away from this pipeline.
It's the mirage.
It's the allure of these pipelines.
And, of course, it also means keeping bases in Russia's soft underbelly and surrounding Iran with bases, and also having bases there in case something happens with the Chinese.
So all of the Pentagon people love this idea.
The people of the Treasury, however, are not so happy about it.
And we really get to the heart of just the absolute falsehood of the war on terrorism, the war against Islamofascism, and whatever we call it, because we can see where the neocons, hell, they ran the Committee for Peace in Chechnya and support jihadists in Chechnya against Russia there in the Caucasus regions.
And, in fact, I'd like to ask you if you could expand on something that you've mentioned on this show before, which was that the Americans, I don't know, the military, the CIA, or both, or what, during maybe the late part of the Clinton term, early part of the Bush term, were either turning a blind eye or were actually helping the Uyghurs, the Chinese Islamic dissidents that were training in the camps in Afghanistan and going back to China.
They're famous now because they're being held, some of them, in Guantanamo Bay and won't be released even though there's no charges against them and what have you.
But here, again, was America backing jihadists, apparently, against the Chinese.
Well, yes, that illustrates Henry Kissinger's Balmault, that the only thing more dangerous than being an enemy of America is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the U.S., these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, its most western province, or Xinjiang, and the CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama bin Laden's collaboration.
And the Americans rubbed their ears with this, but talking about supporting jihadist movements, my God, look at the whole Afghan conflict in the 1980s when they were our freedom fighters.
Well, the people we're fighting today are their sons, and they've simply, as I said, we've simply switched roles with the Soviets.
And we're being called the modern Soviet Union, increasingly, as a great lumbering imperial power that just casts aside its allies for its imperial interests.
Well, we even have our whole domino theory, where everyone we overthrow will inspire all the countries next door to try to create a democracy, too, and all these things.
And we have, as we've talked about before, the parallels between the Afghan war and the Vietnam war, especially in the sense of Pakistan next door and the kind of covert war inside the neighboring country and comparing that to Laos and Cambodia and all that.
In fact, this is something that goes back, as I know you're well aware, to the beginning of the Afghan war.
And I don't know whether this is exactly true, but Zbigniew Brzezinski claims credit, and I guess I'm trying to remember now whether you've said you agreed with this before on the show, that the deliberate policy was to bait the Russians into invading Afghanistan in 1979, to give them their own Vietnam.
And that meant that Vietnam was so destructive to us that if we could trick the Russians into having one of those of their own, then it would destroy them or help to destroy them.
Well, I interviewed Brzezinski on this point, Scott, and he made that claim to me, too.
I don't buy it, frankly.
What he organized was a very small group of people who went in, and from my understanding from covering Russia, as I did in the late 80s, that's not why the Politburo made the decision.
They weren't lured into, baited into a bear trap, as some people said.
But they did it for other reasons which are too complicated to go into right now.
You know, victory, the old Roman saying, victory is a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan, and this is the case.
I have a very nice little quote, a reader just, no, I just came across it, I'm using it in a column, by Rudyard Kipling, right?
The poet laureate of the British Raj, British Empire, written over a century ago, and talking about our civilizing mission to bring democracy and light to the peoples of the Muslim world.
Quote, Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West.
There is too much Asia, and she is too old.
Unquote.
So, which basically means, give it up, or kill them all?
Well, General MacArthur said that never fight a land war in Asia.
And MacArthur is absolutely right.
We're fighting where it costs a minimum $330,000 a year to keep one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, and that doesn't include air cover and supplies and all the other stuff that goes with it.
We're just being bled dry by this war which is now, I don't know, $3, $4, $5 billion a month in Afghanistan, and it's going to get much bigger thanks to President Obama, who, for reasons that elude me, is charging deeper into this quagmire.
Well, and now back to the whole conflict in Pakistan.
What do you think could happen if they basically just keep doing what they're doing now, which is mostly bombing from the sky, I guess, into Pakistan?
There's been a raid or two, but it doesn't seem like there's been much of that, but it looks like maybe there may be some more.
But I guess, say, if all things stay basically the way they are, and America just keeps bombing with predator drones up there and that kind of thing, what kind of danger is there really?
If the Zardari government fell, I guess you've already said, there's no way it would be actually replaced by jihadists.
They would never really be able to take over the country.
But it does seem like they get more and more powerful the more we bomb them.
So what would be, other than the pipe dream of just getting out of there completely, what would be the strategy you would recommend to the president, or at least what would be the consequences of his actions that he's taking now that you would try to explain to him, get him to cease, in order to stop what he's doing?
Scott, General Petraeus is now trying to duplicate what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is by arming tribes in Afghanistan and inside Pakistan, sub-tribes, clans, bribing them into fighting against their neighbors, who are described as Taliban tribes.
It's a very dangerous tactic, because it threatens to create chaos and spread it around, chaos that could begin the disintegration of the Pakistani state, which is very, very frail, which could invite Indian intervention, as India intervened in East Pakistan in 1970 and 71.
India has a thousand intelligence agents operating in Afghanistan.
It supplied over a billion dollars to the current Karzai regime.
It's built a new air base in Tajikistan, first air base outside of India.
So India is stirring the pot, and so is Iran.
So this is a very dangerous situation.
That's one issue.
The second is what to do in Pakistan.
We supported a military dictator, claiming we were fighting for democracy.
That was General Musharraf.
He and his people stole whatever money there was.
Pakistan is now bankrupt.
We've got the incompetent Zardari there.
He has no popular support.
Probably about 8% of the public supports him.
The army is stepping on the side, watching what's going on very unhappily.
But if the Zardari government crumbles, then the army may have to step in.
Now the U.S. has turned to Zardari's political rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and thinking that he might be a good guy.
Or they've been grooming some other people in the background, the CIA has.
The problem is that there are no democratic institutions.
We have contributed to undermining them in Pakistan.
We've got to start rebuilding democratic institutions like courts and democratic parties, and stop forcing Pakistan to support our war in Afghanistan, because it's essentially that.
Forcing Pakistan to use its troops to fight tribesmen who are supporting Taliban, and using Pakistani air bases, and massive bribery in Pakistan.
We've corrupted the whole establishment there with about $1.5 billion a year of bribe money.
We've got to stop doing that, otherwise we're wrecking and polluting Pakistan, worse than it already is, and it's never going to be stable.
Well, the thing is too, you've explained on the show before, that the ISI basically has to continue to back the Taliban, if only to keep Afghanistan from ever being stable under the Karzai puppet regime, not that that would really be possible anyway, but that they basically, strategically in their military plans, need to be able to retreat into Afghanistan in the event of war with India.
And that is their primary concern, and there's nothing that we can do to make that their secondary concern.
That is their primary concern.
And so really, America is between a rock and a hard place, as long as the policy is to limit, with violent means, any influence that the Taliban has.
We have a policy that butts up heads against the Pakistani policy, and there's no way around it other than us saying, fine, the Taliban are legit, just kick the Arabs out, or something like that.
Well, we are forcing Pakistan to go against its own national interest, and to do things that violate its own interest.
And we've done it through bribery, as I said.
And the Islamists are accusing us, and I think it's very true, that the West brings corruption to the Muslim world, because it does, it bribes all these Muslim leaders, Pakistan being a leading example.
The problem in Pakistan is that you won't get any authentic leadership with a popular following if we keep doing this.
And we're really doing in Pakistan just what we've done across the entire Middle East as well, as I relate in my new book.
This is a ruling pattern, it's a short-sighted ruling pattern, and it's designed to generate enemies for the U.S. rather than long-term supporters.
Well, and again, maybe that's the policy.
The more enemies, the better, really.
Osama Bin Laden's going to die of old age someday, and they'll need a new Goldstein at that point to point out, to justify even more intervention and the creation of even more enemies, right?
Well, I hope it's not true of the sort of Orwellian prospect of permanent war, but it's sure looking that way.
In fact, even President Obama, who was supposed to be the savior of the United States and bring peace and the anti-war president, is now talking about a long war.
And look at Secretary Gates' new budget.
The U.S. military is being reconfigured to fight colonial wars, we call them expeditionary warfare, in the Muslim world.
And at the same time, Obama went to Turkey and said, we hold out the hand of friendship to the Muslim world, which is the right thing to do, except that over in the Pentagon, they're planning for wars in exactly the same area.
Talk about contradictory policy.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, and he's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure to be back with you, Scott.