05/27/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, thanks for tuning in to the show, this is Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott, thanks for tuning in to the show today.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Got a good show lined up for you today, I got plenty of news I want to cover, but first hour we have two interviews, so we're going to start here with the great Eric Margulies from Sun National Media.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, you can find his website at ericmargulies.com.
Hey Eric, how are you?
I'm just fine, thank you.
Lots of news going on today.
Yeah, incredible stuff.
Now, you're on the phone from Paris, France today, is that right?
Yes, I am.
But keeping a very close eye on the situation in Pakistan, I'm sure.
Yes, I am.
But keeping a very close eye on the situation in Pakistan, I'm sure.
Yes, I am.
But keeping a very close eye on the situation in Pakistan, I'm sure.
Yes, I am.
But keeping a very close eye on the situation in Pakistan, I'm sure.
But keeping a very close eye on the situation in Pakistan, I'm sure.
Very much so, and North Korea at the same time, too.
Right, well, let's see if we can get to North Korea a little bit toward the end.
I certainly have plenty I want to get to about that, but I think what's really worrying me right now is Pakistan, and I don't really know, well, let me ask you about larger strategy and so forth later.
Just tell us, what exactly is going on in Pakistan?
The Northwest Territories, the national government has really invaded that tribal area, right?
Yes, the Northwest Frontier Province is traditionally the land of the Pashtun tribes, or Patans, as they were once known.
These are mountain people, they live in the world's biggest tribe, they're very independent-minded, they're very fierce, and what they really want is to be left alone.
They are not liberals or moderates or anything like that, they're very conservative people, and they've been caught now by the expanding U.S. war in Afghanistan, and the unintended consequence of increasing U.S. military operations in Afghanistan is they've spilled over the border into Pashtun tribal territory of the Northwest Frontier, which is 25 percent of Pakistan, and they've inflamed the Pashtun tribes, who our media mistakenly keeps calling Taliban, and what's happened is that the U.S. now has been demanding that Pakistan, which is bankrupt and it lives on American money, send its army to attack these Pashtun tribesmen who are supporting their first cousins over the border in Afghanistan, and the result is that we have a huge mess in Pakistan right now.
Let's talk about that mess in Pakistan.
I want to talk, obviously, about how the Afghan surge is pushing all these people into Pakistan and making the problem in Pakistan worse, apparently necessitating this, according to the iron law of continuing to escalate wars that you start, but what is happening?
I'm reading that there's, what, a million and a half refugees, that there's full-scale war going on, and yet at the same time, I'm reading that it's completely ineffective, and that what we're talking about, again, there's not a professional army of the Northwestern Frontier or something that's being fought against.
It's civilians and militiamen, basically, who are being fought against, and they just go home and put their rifle in their closet when the real force comes, and then when they can, I guess, do a little rear-guard sniping, they grab their rifle and go back to work.
Well, that's exactly right, and all the civilians who are being killed by the Pakistani army at the behest of Washington are described as suspected Taliban militants.
Well, in fact, most of them are just civilians, as is the case in Afghanistan, too.
But what's happened is that the regime of Asif Zardari in Pakistan, who the U.S. we shoehorned into power there, the U.S. is losing the war in Afghanistan, very frustrated, so the Pentagon has been launching attacks across the border into Pakistani tribal territory, where they have been supporting Afghan Taliban, and these drone attacks have caused an uproar, killed a lot of civilians, and have caused the mountain tribes now to erupt in anger against the central government.
These are these predator drone attacks.
And the Pakistanis sat back and didn't do anything.
They said, well, we want to leave these Pashtun tribes alone.
We know that traditionally that that's the best way to do it, and we'll settle it diplomatically.
But Washington, Hillary Clinton, the new expert on foreign affairs who threatened to obliterate Iran just recently, demanded that Pakistan, with President Obama's help, I'm sad to say, that the Pakistani army launch its full strength against these rebellious tribesmen.
And as I said, Washington, Pakistan is bankrupt.
It lives only on American money.
And the threat of a cutoff in USAID finally forced the Pakistanis reluctantly to unleash their full-arm forces against their own people.
And now we have seen, according to the U.N., Scott, the latest figures I just saw were that this attack has created 2.3 million refugees.
It's absolutely mind-boggling.
Thank you very much, American foreign policy and Pakistan army.
That's how many Iraqis have fled to Jordan and Syria.
I mean, that's...
That's quite right.
Actually, there are 4 million refugees in Iraq, 2 million internally, and you're quite right, 2 million externally.
My God, we seem to, the U.S., we seem to be in the creating the refugee business, and that we're doing extremely well.
But the problem is we've thrown a bomb into this hornet's nest in northwest Pakistan, and it's just completely undermining the whole area, destabilizing Pakistan.
All right, well, now listen, I guess this excuse is wearing thin.
I want to know how thin the excuse really is.
It seems like politically, if we try to pretend that what Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing is, you know, trying to get the last of the bad guys so they can try to claim a victory and get out of there or whatever, they could never do that unless bin Laden and Zawahiri are officially dead.
Because the Republicans, if only because of the Republicans, you know, if we try to believe Obama's a peacenik, he's got to kill the last few Saudis and Egyptians hiding out there in those territories.
My question for you, Eric Margulies, is are there any Saudis and Egyptians hiding out there?
Do you believe that that's where Osama bin Laden is?
Is he alive?
Is he dead?
Where is Ayman al-Zawahiri?
We have to get, Goldstein's got to be dead for the war to end.
He's the permanent excuse for the war, the two of those guys.
Well, I believe that if bin Laden is alive and Zawahiri, that they are there in that northwest frontier tribal territory, called Fatah, a federally administered tribal area.
And it's quite possible that I think there are a handful of Egyptians and Saudis, but al-Qaeda barely exists.
It is the biggest ghost and boogeyman of our era.
It never had more than 300 men to begin with.
It's not a worldwide global conspiracy, as we keep hearing from propaganda organs in the West.
It was just a handful of men.
Now, most are dead or in prison or under deep cover.
It is a nuisance at most, not a major existential threat to the West or anybody else.
And President Obama is sending more U.S. troops into this war in Afghanistan.
He announced it's because we have to crush al-Qaeda and they must not have room to train attacks.
Well, the 9-11 attacks were organized in apartments in Hamburg, Germany, and in Florida.
They don't need a country to do this.
But al-Qaeda is a non-issue at this point, but it's being used by the Obama administration right now to justify expanding the war into Afghanistan.
Well, you know, when we talk about the war on terrorism, obviously the bright thing is to try to look through our enemies' eyes to figure out what they're doing.
So that's what I'm trying to do now, through my enemies' eyes.
What is Hillary Clinton up to here?
Do these people want to create a situation, an excuse, for actually trying to invade Pakistan?
They've got to know better than that, really putting American ground forces in there.
It sort of seems like Hillary Clinton and Holbrooke and Obama and these people come to power, Jim Jones, you've got to love that, running the National Security Council, that they're looking at the situation and they're saying, look, Dick Cheney paid Musharraf to sit there and do nothing.
He outsourced the war to a do-nothing dictator who let the problem get worse and worse and worse.
And so, as bad as this is, it's the least bad of our limited imperialist options here, we've got to escalate this violence in the Northwest Territories, so that we can claim that we finally took the last of the wind out of the al-Qaeda terrorist guys or whatever, so that then we can go, maybe.
Well, I hope so.
I hope that's what they're going to do.
I'm not really that naive.
I'm trying hard, you know?
But as I've been saying for a long time, it would be much cheaper to pay the Taliban to say, okay, here, guys, here's the $50 million, you go and hunt what's left of al-Qaeda.
You know, al-Qaeda and Taliban were never on the same wavelength, and Taliban was very annoyed by al-Qaeda when they were there.
They didn't know what they were doing, and they knew that they were creating trouble abroad.
They're not the same thing, and there are many solutions.
And the last one is to send more American troops at the other end of the world into a world with no end, where our presence just creates more and more enemies.
But there's another major point in this, and that is, I think, that the main reason Obama is sending more troops there is that the U.S. cannot afford to be seen to be losing this war.
We can't let a bunch of mountain hillbillies and turbans defeat the great United States.
We dragged NATO into this war.
I'll tell you, Canada, the Canadian cabinet minister told me that when Washington called, they said, you either send troops to Afghanistan, or else don't ever try and ship any goods south of the border.
And Canada does 85% of its trade with the United States.
I mean, NATO was arms-wisted and dragooned into sending troops to Afghanistan.
People here in Europe, for example, are totally against it.
They think it's a colonial war.
But NATO was forced into this war.
If the U.S. gets whipped in Afghanistan and has to make a shameful retreat, NATO is going to say, who the hell needs the United States?
Europe will say, who the hell needs NATO?
Let's get rid of NATO.
Let's bring our own united European force.
And NATO is the primary expression of American geopolitical control of Western Europe, as Dr. Brzezinski has often pointed out.
So a defeat in Afghanistan would be a catastrophe for American great power ambitions.
Well, now, fill me in on the details of this threat to Canada.
There was an actual threat of sanctions, or what?
Yes, the Canadian cabinet minister said, her name was Sheila Kopp said at the time she was in the cabinet, that the U.S. said either send troops to Iraq or send troops to Afghanistan or don't plan on shipping anything south of the border.
Which would destroy the American economy anyway.
What kind of empty threat is that?
I mean, seriously.
Well, they scare the hell out of the Canadians, I can tell you that, because any blockage of trade going south would wreck the entire Canadian economy.
Yeah, well, and ours too.
I mean, Canada's our biggest trading partner.
That's right.
Ah, jeez.
Well, yeah, well, and you do get right to the heart of the matter, too, is the centralization or the decentralization of power on Earth.
And this was a debate they used to have back in the 1990s.
There was a push for a European army, I remember Margaret Thatcher giving a speech angrily denouncing the people on the continent who wanted to focus more on creating a European Union standing army.
And she was saying, absolutely not.
The Atlantic alliance with America is the most important thing, and there's no way we can let a continental army come between us.
But that was a real disagreement, I think, that was going on there between the British and at least some of the factions in France and Germany, huh?
Well, that's quite right, Scott.
The Americans have never wanted a united Europe.
They certainly don't want a united European army.
That's why they're so anti-French, because France led the call for that.
And Britain was used as a Trojan horse to try and thwart European unity.
You know, the British have become pretty much of an American protectorate and a faithful servant, for sure.
And the British have been determined to try and wreck European unity ever since, well, for the last thousand years, and they continue to do so, though I must say, this is not on our topic, but with the collapse of the British economy, they would do well to go into Europe seriously and adopt the euro.
Yeah, well, I don't know the particulars of what would be healthy there, but it sure seems like grasping onto America as their benefactor and protector right now is a bad idea, as this empire is clearly on its way to self-immolation.
Well, the British army has become like the Gurkhas to the American armies as the Gurkhas were to the British army during the colonial era.
And who were they?
The Gurkhas?
The Gurkhas were Nepalese troops, mercenaries, ferocious fighters who were used by the British army to fight in all their wars, right up until recently.
And they were paid mercenaries in the British army, a long tradition of fighting for the British, just the way the British have a long tradition now of fighting for the Americans.
Yeah, well, turnabout's fair play, I guess.
And now to the point that you brought up about what an illusion this war on terrorism really is.
Philip Giral, who writes for us at Antiwar.com, he's a former CIA counterterrorism officer who was stationed in Turkey, was a DIA guy as well, he told me on this show that, Scott, there's no more than a couple of thousand terrorists in this whole planet.
That's what a real, somebody who's not lying but is actually just trying to tell you the truth from the State Department or the CIA, that's what they'll tell you.
That if you take the actual terrorists from Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Al-Qaeda and what's left of the Tamil Tigers and whatever, people who are, you know, use terrorist tactics, killing civilians, whatever like that, there's a couple of thousand of these guys on the whole planet.
Well, you know, anybody who opposes the Western influence or who gets on our blacklist is called a terrorist.
So, you know, the list is potentially endless.
I never use this word, I hate it, the propaganda term.
I remember in the 1980s when I was with the Afghan Mujahideen fighting the Soviets, the Soviets called them Islamic terrorists and Washington called them freedom fighters.
Fast forward 10, 15 years, the minute they turned against the U.S. and tried to kick the U.S. out of the region, then they became Islamic terrorists.
So, there are, by my recollection, I was just with a leading French terrorism expert yesterday, saying to me that the total number of people killed in terrorist attacks since 9-11 is 6,000.
You can't include Chechnya.
The State Department includes Chechnya and Sri Lanka, but those are not terrorism, those are independence or liberation struggles.
Real honest terrorism, people throwing bombs into crowds and this kind of thing, 6,000 people, of whom half, of course, were in New York and Washington, and that leaves 3,000 people, and these people, and a lot of this number are in Israel, where they're fighting with the Palestinians.
I mean, it's usually a local issue.
It's not some worldwide conspiracy to attack the West.
It's focused on a local issue, whether it's in Turkey or in Palestine or in Somalia.
This whole thing, terrorism, is a boogeyman, and we should get rid of it.
In fact, I think the Obama administration is stopping using the word terrorism, or at least anti-terrorist operations.
They're moving to something called overseas contingency operations.
They've dropped the war on terror.
Well, you know, the Bush crew tried to do that a couple of times, too.
They changed it to the global struggle against violent extremism and a couple of other different ones.
The long war.
No, that's right, and it's shaping up that way, too, now that Mr. Bush's policies apparently are being continued, more or less, by the current administration.
Yeah, you know, Dick Cheney, in his speech last week, said, you know, oh, you can change it to overseas contingency operation if you want, but a war is a war, and I thought, well, that was probably the most accurate thing he said in the whole speech.
And he's pretending that Obama's not continuing his policy, but that's basically a damned lie.
It's even worse than when Cheney was running things.
If you look at what's going on in Pakistan, for example.
Well, the United States is responsible, in large part, for the horrible situation in Pakistan now, and if Pakistan blows apart, the U.S. is going to have an incredible mess.
I mean, it's a country of 170 million people, many of whom are very, very anti-American, increasingly so.
There's this question of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, which are now completely safe under military and army control.
But who knows if the army splits and starts fighting with each other, if there's an Islamic uprising or a nationalist uprising in Pakistan.
You just remember this whole Pakistani government is run by extremely corrupt people who now have been bought lock, stock, and barrel by Washington.
And we've never learned that while we can bribe some people, we can't bribe everyone.
And the more we force countries like Pakistan or Iran or Egypt to go against the will of their people, the more we are building up a pressure cooker situation, and there will one day be a revolution.
Well, and that's the thing about all of this.
You know, the semantics really does rule, whether you're talking about, you know, especially when you're talking about terrorism.
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, as I know you're aware, says this is an insurgency.
Al-Qaeda itself is an insurgency, which implies there's something to insurge against.
You know, you say, you talk about, you know, in Somalia or in Lebanon or whatever, that these are national or Sri Lanka nationalist liberationist movements.
Well, that's really what Al-Qaeda is too.
The fact that they choose civilians to murder makes them murderers and terrorists in that sense.
But basically, that's what they're fighting is, you know, half real colonialism and half neo-colonialism of the American empire and the Islamic world.
Well, so I maintain in my new book, American Raj, but it was the American empire.
But, you know, Al-Qaeda, interestingly enough, has been largely discredited in the Muslim world.
It doesn't have much support, particularly because of its violent attacks on civilians.
But where it does, where Bin Laden's thinking still commands a following, is the idea that the American influence must be ejected from the Muslim world.
Number one, that its resources have to not be exploited by the West.
And number three, that the corrupt rulers we've implanted everywhere across the Muslim world, look at Pakistan as a prime example, be kicked out and replaced by legitimate, authentic leaders.
Whether this can really be done or not remains to be seen.
Well, I mean, I don't even know, and what the hell do I know about it, really, Eric?
But it seems to me like it doesn't even remain to be seen.
It seems to me like if the American empire wasn't dominant in that part of the world, still the last people who would be running it would be Osama Bin Laden types.
Well, you're right, Scott.
You do know a lot about it, by the way, having been on many shows with you.
But we Americans keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
We put people in power who are lackeys, who are plantation overseers, in effect, in these different countries, and then we listen to all the experts who tell us what we want to hear.
In Pakistan, there's a man named Ahmed Rashid who writes books.
He's a left-wing Pakistani, and he tells us all the stuff about the evils of Taliban.
We soak it up, oh, we're right, and confirms all our prejudices.
But we really don't know what's going on, and I'm really dismayed that Washington, still after being in Afghanistan for almost nine years now, doesn't know what's going on there, and continues to pursue really bad policies.
Well, it really does seem that way, not to toot my own horn, but it really does kind of seem like the conversations that we have on this show about these kinds of policies really are oftentimes so much more advanced than what you hear from the experts with the power when they're interviewed on TV news.
For example, something I hear from you, and I try to bring up in other conversations with people about this part of the world and what the American policy is there, but something I basically only hear you bring up kind of out of the blue is something I never talk about on TV, which is that America has these policies going on in AFPAC that are absolutely incompatible with each other, never mind with peace and liberty and good things.
But what we're doing is we're supporting India and Afghanistan.
At the same time, we're telling Pakistan to crack down and stop supporting and in fact limit the influence of people who are loyal to them in Afghanistan, when that's the last thing they're going to do.
They're up against the wall there.
They basically, because of American support for India and Afghanistan, they have to continue to support Pashtun resistance types there to prevent the Indians from solidifying power because they have their own strategic interests as far as India is concerned that are sort of, I guess, outside of Cheney and Obama's view of what's going on there.
But here we're doing all these things at the same time, demanding that they limit the influence of the people that we're forcing them to support.
Scott, they don't have your subtlety of thinking in Washington.
Well, I mean, anybody who heard me stammer through that has got to be shocked by that, because it ain't too subtle.
Well, they just don't know in Washington.
And, you know, I've asked a brief from very senior Republicans right before the Iraq invasion.
They said, you know, tell us about Iraq.
And I said, well, Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, Southerners, tribes, and their eyes glazed over.
And they said, oh, never mind all that stuff.
Just give us the executive, give us the bottom line.
And I said, there is no bottom line.
And, I mean, they just don't want to get involved.
The problem is we're seeing what, in my day, in Vietnam, during the Vietnam era was called mission creep.
And as the U.S. blunders ever deeper and deeper into this South Asian swamp, like a giant wounded and enraged mastodon, it's now getting involved in the troubles of the area that it never thought about.
India moving into Afghanistan, Pakistan trying to kick out the Indians.
Kashmir, my God, since 1947, the Indian-Pakistan has gone to war three times over Kashmir.
It's the most dangerous border in the world.
And now the U.S. is getting caught between India and Pakistan on the Kashmir issue with the Pashtun tribes, with Tajikistan, with the Russians, the Chinese.
I mean, it's crazy.
It's like the Balkans, but ten times worse.
Well, and according to the guys at the Center for a New American Security, this is just the beginning.
They have a ten-year plan.
And this is John Nagel and all these guys.
This is Obama's team, the ten-year plan team.
I don't know where all these Democratic militants came from, but maybe they're retread neocons.
But there is an imperialist camp, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, which wants to pursue these wars heedless of the military facts, heedless of all the cultural or ethnic or historical facts on the ground, and heedless of the money.
Right now, 50% of every dollar that is spent by the American government is borrowed from China.
It was borrowed money from China and Japan.
Some Chinese started beating the drums again today about this.
What kind of empire can you run?
It could be Alexander Macedon, but he didn't have to borrow his way across Asia.
We're doing that.
It staggers the imagination that these people are thinking they can sustain a war where it costs $330,000 per year to keep one American soldier over there.
Basic, basic cost.
They can't afford it, and I don't know what they hope to achieve.
Well, let me grasp here at some kind of short-term optimism.
Is there any kind of short-term goal that you can identify that Hillary is having the Pakistani army pursue in those tribal areas?
Is there any?
I mean, they're not just fighting against whoever are the tribal leaders in that entire federally administered tribal area, as they call it, are they?
I mean, do they have any kind of goal that they can say, okay, well, we did it, and now we're going back to Peshawar or wherever they came from?
Well, it's the old British colonial way.
You come in, you shell the tribesmen, you bomb them from the air, you make a demonstration, you punish them, and hope they'll go back and mind their own business.
You know, these are Apaches, and they're misbehaving.
This is the only plan that they have.
The problem is, though, that these people are Pashtuns, and Pashtuns are notorious for revenge.
Before, they just wanted to be left alone.
Traditionally, this area in Pakistan where the army is operating was an independent area.
Sawat, where it's going on right now, the Sawat Valley, only joined Pakistan in 1968-69.
It was an independent mountain state.
It had Islamic law, and it joined like the other areas, the Pashtun areas, on the provision that they be left alone, and that no Pakistani troops be sent into the area.
And that the government give them almost complete autonomy.
This has been violated under American pressure.
So what we've done is we have violated the basic constitutional understanding of the Pakistani state, and we've gotten the tribes mad as hornets, and now we're going to pay the price.
There is no clear solution to this.
We can't bomb them into submission, and they're not going to give in.
I know these people.
I've been at war with them in the field.
They're very tough, and they're not easily intimidated.
Well, there you go.
So Barack Obama is like Abraham Lincoln after all.
Sounds like it.
Leading a central government's invasion of the formerly autonomous territories and all that.
Well, in that sense, yes.
I'm surprised that the intelligent and knowledgeable President Obama is being so misled by certain advisers, because Afghan advisers seem retreads, as I said, from the last administration.
They're giving him very bad advice, and nobody is putting up warning flags.
They're going to have to wait until there are more disasters before people start questioning policy.
Well, more and more I'm questioning just how intelligent this guy supposedly is, which I don't know.
I never went to Harvard.
I guess he's got to be brighter than Bush, but I don't know.
He doesn't seem possessed of much wisdom, if you ask me.
On this subject, no.
But, you know, again, sometimes I feel sorry for the president.
He's a relatively young man.
One term in the Senate, he suddenly somehow, by some incredible outcome, he becomes president.
But that's a whole other story.
He's president.
He has to know everything about everything, and he has to deal with a sinking financial ship.
He just doesn't have time at night to curl up with volumes on the history of the northwest frontier and understand what a mess they're making.
Well, he can sign up for the podcast feed at antiwar.com slash radio.
Touche.
And he can read ericmargillese.com.
What's that take, 15 minutes every couple of days?
Well, yeah, that's right.
The man's got no excuse.
He's got the same number of hours in the day as Jesus and Muhammad Ali and, you know, every great man who ever did anything.
And a hell of a lot of people working for him.
But, again, as I said, he's chosen very bad advisors.
And, once again, the White House and the Democratic establishment is listening to people who tell them what they want to hear and confirm their prejudices rather than listening to people who challenge them.
Yeah.
It just can't be more ironic than having a guy named Jim Jones running the National Security Council to sum up the whole thing.
I mean, it's too blatant to even be funny anymore, right?
It just kind of falls flat.
Like, of course, this guy's name is Jim Jones, right?
At least he's one of the smarter people in that administration.
I couldn't say the same for some of the other foreign policy people that they have in, who are hardliners, who are more interested in domestic politics than America's interests abroad.
Well, I count myself very lucky that I have access to you.
Thanks very much for your time again on the show today, Eric.
Pleasure to be with you, Scott.
Thank you.