07/28/09 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Juan Cole back to the show.
How are you doing, Juan?
Just fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, thanks for joining us again.
Everybody, you know Juan Cole.
He writes the great blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan and is the author of the new book, Engaging the Muslim World, which, I'm sorry, it's on my still-to-read list pile of books, I guess I should say, Juan.
But I'll get to it soon.
Well, I'm told it's a real page-turner.
Oh, well, there you go.
I'm willing to buy that.
Although I got it for free, but, you know, that's different.
Okay, I think my first question for you here is, what exactly is the definition of Taliban?
Then, now, however you want to address it, what does Taliban mean, Juan?
Right.
So the Taliban, you know, the word means seminary students.
It means people are going to a religious seminary and are students there.
And the Taliban were the children of the Afghan refugees who were displaced from Afghanistan by the Soviet invasion and occupation of the 1980s.
And it was an enormous movement of population.
Afghanistan in the 80s, you know, probably had a population of something like 16 million.
And 2 million Afghans went to Iran and 3 million went to Pakistan.
Another 2 million were displaced inside the country.
So, you know, this is like half the country is out of their home.
And the ones who went to Pakistan, they were living in tents, they had bad sewage, they didn't plan to stay, nobody wanted them to stay.
A lot of the people who went there had also lost a lot of family members.
You know, they were orphans and had seen family members killed and so forth.
So the young men, some of the young men went to these seminaries on scholarships.
Some of the money for the scholarships was supplied by the Arab Gulf states like Saudi Arabia.
And they went through those seminaries.
You know, the Muslim seminaries in northern Pakistan are not touchy-feely.
You get beaten with sticks if you don't recite the Koran right.
And so they were formed in a kind of discipline and esprit de corps.
And I think the classroom really became their family.
The friends they made there and so forth replaced the family and the village that they had been displaced from.
They were refugees.
A lot of them were orphans.
And then the Pakistani military intelligence gave them money and arms.
And at some point in the 90s started sending them back across the border into Afghanistan.
And so Afghanistan, after the Soviets left, had fallen into civil war and warlordism.
And these Taliban, these seminary students, were disciplined.
They weren't corrupt.
They wouldn't take bribes.
And people felt about them like they felt about Mussolini, that they made the trains run on time.
There aren't, I think, very many trains in Afghanistan.
But they were a force for a kind of severe social order in the wake of massive disruption of society.
And then they were overthrown by the Bush administration in 2001-2002 and replaced by the Northern Alliance, which was kind of the old warlords that had fought the Soviets.
And so that's the Taliban.
And many of the people that are now being called Taliban in the U.S. military by the Pentagon and so forth are not seminary students and don't have anything to do with that group.
Well, see, that's what it seems to me, is that ever since 2001, anybody...
Well, first of all, they conflated Al-Qaeda with the Taliban in a day or something.
And then ever since then, they've conflated the Taliban with anyone who resists the American occupation in Afghanistan.
Simple as that.
And I guess that's mostly the Pashtun tribesmen because the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, maybe, are on the upswing under the American occupation.
Is that about right?
That's right.
It's largely ethnic.
Although it should be pointed out, just to be fair, that a substantial number of Pashtuns, the people of southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, a substantial number of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan support the Karzai government and don't mind so much the U.S. and NATO being in Afghanistan.
Really?
Yeah, there's a kind of civil conflict within the Pashtuns over these issues.
Well, and so what percentage, then, of the...
I guess not necessarily in raw numbers of people, but in terms of actual power in the region, what about the actual Taliban as compared to the non-Taliban, you know, whatever, political leaders or warlords or whatever among the Pashtuns?
Yeah.
Tribal chiefs or whatever.
The U.S. intelligence estimates that what they're calling the Taliban control about 10% of the country, and I think that's also about the popular support for them, because 5% of Afghans say in polls that they have a favorable view of Taliban, and the Pashtuns are roughly 44%, and almost all of the Taliban are Pashtun, so that would come to about 10% too, right?
So both with regard to public support and with regard to territory control.
It's about 10% of the country.
Well, so is it the case that the reason they were able to come to power in the first place was just because Bill Clinton's government and later George Bush's government was paying the Pakistanis to pay them and make them the government of the country?
I mean, they hadn't ever, I guess, really conquered the whole place, but they were winning their civil war at the time that we invaded, right?
Oh, they had 90% of the country at the time we invaded.
However, no, the Taliban project in the 90s really was a Pakistani project, and the U.S. wasn't involved in it, to my knowledge.
The wrap is quite the opposite, which is that Bush Sr. made a deal with the Soviets, with Gorbachev, that if the Soviets would leave, the U.S. would also just completely get out of Afghanistan and stop supplying the warlords and so forth.
And so by the last year of the Bush Sr. administration, in 1991, there just was no U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and then it stayed that way in the Clinton administration.
And then the Pakistanis got going with their nuclear weapons program, and Congress cut them off from U.S. aid because they were angry over the nuclear weapons.
Well, Colin Powell brought the millions of dollars in the spring of 2001, right?
I'm sorry?
I'm sorry, because I don't have any good footnotes right in front of me here, but I thought that the Americans had at least encouraged or turned a blind eye toward Pakistani support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, but also it was part of the irony of the September 11th attack was that the Bush crew was basically trying to buy off the Afghans, the Taliban anyway, in the lead-up to the September 11th attacks, right?
And Colin Powell brought them a pile of money around May or June of 2001?
Well, the Bush administration was eager to reassert itself in that area, but it just wasn't on any kind of scale.
Basically, the U.S. was the non-entity in Pakistan and Afghanistan at that moment, and the most that they could hope for was job-owning people, and there wasn't a lot of U.S. money flushing around.
So, of course, what changed was September 11th focused U.S. attention on Afghanistan like a laser, and at that point the U.S. threatened Musharraf, the dictator of Pakistan at that point, and made him switch around to support the overthrow of the Taliban, which had been his project to support the Taliban.
And even though he was a secular man, you know, and Musharraf wasn't interested in fundamentalist religion at all, but it was just the Pakistani military supporting the Taliban because they were a projection of Pakistani power in Afghanistan.
So, you know, now what are called the old Taliban of Mullah Omar, the old seminary students from the 90s, they're just one of four or five groups that are being called Taliban, and the others are mostly the warlord groups that had been allies of the CIA and Washington in the 80s, like the Hizb-e-Islami or Islamic Party of Golbadeen Hekmatyar.
He had been the recipient of the lion's share of CIA money in the 80s.
He's now against the U.S. and attacking U.S. troops, and he's one of the leaders with whom the Karzai government and the U.S. military is kind of negotiating behind the scenes to see if they can bring him back in from the cold.
But he and his group are being called Taliban, and they're not.
They have nothing to do with the Taliban.
I don't think there's probably even any operational cooperation.
Well, you know, at the time when the Obama administration was just coming into power, they had all these think tank people leaking all these different trawl balloons about the future of their plans for Afghanistan, and they talked about, well, maybe we could split al-Qaeda from the Taliban and say, look, just hand us over the Arab-Afghan, you know, last couple of dozen friends of Osama at the most, or whoever's left up there, and then we'll leave everybody alone.
And then the other people said, no, we need to separate the Afghan Taliban from the Pakistani Taliban.
And then the other guys said, no, we need to separate the extremist Taliban from the not-so-committed Taliban.
And, you know, then the Washington Post says, oh, no, we're accidentally chasing them up into Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Maybe we need to bomb them, too.
And, you know, do you think that the people running the occupation, the re-invasion, I guess, the doubling down of the war there, know what they're doing at all?
Have they picked one of these strategies or another one?
No, I think that the U.S. military in Afghanistan is quite confused as to what its mission is.
And you see them say all kinds of things that seem contradictory.
So, you know, President Obama has more than once said that we're in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
He kind of just couples the two.
But then I've seen reports from anthropologists and others working in Afghanistan, security people and so forth, which question whether there really is any al-Qaeda to speak of left in Afghanistan.
And, you know, there might be a couple hundred Arab fighters at most of those.
But it's not, you know, what we would typically think of as al-Qaeda.
It's an international organization plotting out attacks internationally.
It's just some guys have ended up in Afghanistan and, you know, they're joining in with Hikmet Yar and the other dissidents who don't like the new Karzai government.
But, you know, so General Petraeus about a month ago gave a statement in which he acknowledged that there is virtually no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But that's directly contradictory to the rationale for President Obama in having U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which was to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban there.
So, you know, when you've got your highest officials not on the same page about what is the urgency of a war, this is a very bad thing.
Well, you know, George Bush famously said back when he was the governor of Texas somehow that victory means exit strategy.
And it's important for the president to tell us what the exit strategy is.
And yet it doesn't seem like any of this is about an exit strategy.
And you and I are sort of discussing things from the point of view of wouldn't it be nice if somebody could shoot Zawahiri and then we could end this thing or something like that.
But that's not the game here.
The game here is to stay forever under one plan or another.
If they've got to keep switching them back and forth, that's fine too, right?
Well, you know, I think it's just mission creep, Scott.
I think, you know, NATO is there and the U.S. is there, and altogether there are now 90,000 foreign troops.
The Soviets had 150,000 and they couldn't win.
So what are you going to do with those 90,000 troops?
And as you say, the number is growing.
Well, the Europeans won out.
But the thing I think that weighs on everybody's mind in Washington and Brussels is if you pull all the foreign troops out and then Gulbuddin Hekmatyar takes over Afghanistan and he invites Zawahiri to be his main man there in Kabul, then, you know, you've got an international problem on your hands.
Yeah, you have to start the war all over again.
Yeah.
So I think what they would like is to find a way to shore up the Kabul government to the point where they could leave and be fairly confident it just wouldn't collapse in their wake.
Sort of, you know, to get with Afghanistan to the point that they probably are at in Iraq.
And so, you know, ultimately I think that's what's going on, is that it's just to shore up the foundations of the new state to the point where they can leave.
And that's why Obama and the Europeans are now putting such a big emphasis on civilian aid and provincial reconstruction teams.
And they just want to get the infrastructure going and so on.
The problem is that Iraq, you know, is an oil country and it has very substantial resources of its own, so that if you left, the government that controls those resources probably can make itself stick.
But Afghanistan, after all these years of war, is just a basket case.
So its gross domestic product is $9 billion a year.
I mean, that's a rounding error in our bailout plan.
It's nothing for a country.
And its budget is like a billion dollars a year.
And it would cost $2 billion a year just to have a proper army.
So, you know, I look at the numbers and I don't see the point at which the U.S. and NATO could withdraw and the place doesn't fall apart.
Right.
And here their plan is to, I think it was the Washington Post I was reading last week where they were talking about, well, you know, it's going to take 10 years because we just don't have an awakening to buy off.
I mean, we're going to have to make one from the ground up.
And it's so clear that what they're describing is building up an Afghan state that couldn't possibly pay for itself.
That would have to be on American welfare and under American occupation, if you call it invited bases or whatever, fine.
But it would have to be something propped up by America forever.
There's no legitimacy to the Karzai government.
They can't rule that country.
I mean, I'm from Texas and I've driven across it a bunch of times.
And Texas is huge.
And that's how big Afghanistan is.
And if there is a government that the people of Texas considered to be some foreign puppet that was attempting to control them, it would be absolutely impossible.
And it's as simple as that.
The same thing applies there.
Right.
Well, yeah, I hear your governor's not very happy about being in the union as it is.
Oh, well, come on.
That's a bunch of you know, let me tell you about Rick Perry.
OK, Rick Perry doesn't know nothing.
Rick Perry is simply hairspray on top of a skull being, you know, walking around making criminals money.
He's not.
Ask Ron Paul for a principal take on secession.
Don't ask Rick Perry.
My dad used to say about Rick Perry.
Here's a Democrat turned Republican, never had a job in his entire life.
And he walks around in two thousand dollar suits.
How can this be?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's the point.
You know, I think your analogy is absolutely right.
And people should understand that, you know, 90,000 NATO troops in a place like Afghanistan, it's just never going to really be acceptable to the push to the south.
You know, traditionally, the rulers of the country, they're 44 percent of the population.
They're very nationalistic.
And so, you know, it's just not I I don't see the exit strategy.
And I also don't see that the hope of building up a stable government is a very realistic one.
But, you know, with regard to just paying for their foreign army, I think that could be done.
You know, we give the United States gives each of two billion dollars a year, half of it in military aid.
And if we could get out of Afghanistan with that cost of just ponying up two billion a year from now on, I'd take it.
I think that would be all right.
You know, it would be a really it wouldn't even be a big percentage of our foreign aid budget.
And their foreign aid budget is tiny.
Most people think it's huge.
I mean, yes, most Americans, they think it's 25 percent of our budget or something.
Actually, it's just the pennies that we spend abroad.
So I hear you right that you would think that's perfectly fine for the long term.
As I said, yeah, I said that if if you could if you could get U.S. troops and their troops out of Afghanistan and the price was just to allocate two billion dollars a year to Afghanistan, the way we do with Egypt, you know, for the medium to long term.
Well, why not?
And that would be that would be a bargain, in my view, because the alternative is going to cost a trillion.
Yeah, well, I understand what you're saying.
It's like I prefer market anarchy, but I'll settle for the U.S. Constitution if I could really get that.
Yeah.
You know, Scott, there is no market in Afghanistan.
It doesn't rise to the level of a market.
Oh, no, it certainly doesn't.
The whole thing's a big scam.
Let's talk about your article that you have.
It's on antiwar dot com today.
It's with Tom Englehardt.
I'm sure you find that Tom dispatch dot com as well.
Paranoia about the posh tunes.
Armageddon at the top of the world.
Not.
And so here's the thing.
We've been talking this whole time about, you know, what exactly it would take to subjugate these people forever or whatever it is.
And yet you're really in this article taking on the whole opposite narrative.
The Fox News way of looking at things.
Bruce Rydell, I guess it was.
You quote the CIA guy article in The Washington Times talking about how, you know, this this group of Taliban people, they really are a threat to they could take over the whole world like the bad guy in the James Bond movie or something if we don't stop them.
This is really they're going to occupy North America and convert our sons and and, you know, put burkas on our daughters and cut all our heads off and we're all going to be slaves and that kind of thing if we don't get them for that.
I mean, I'm surprised that people really even are having that conversation at all.
But I guess that's the conversation that they're having.
Well, Scott, you know, in the United States, there's just no no credentialing for for people who comment on foreign affairs.
This is any old guy.
You can put him on TV and flash up terrorism expert under his name.
People will buy what they have to say.
Hey, you're telling me.
Yeah.
I mean, I did a I did a program, a radio program there in Texas a couple of years ago.
And the the the interviewer was on the right.
And he said that those guys from think tanks to Washington came out to Texas and said that, you know, the US was going to be nuclear bombed by some Islamic terror organization within the next six months.
And, you know, it's nonsense.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And I actually told him, I said, look here, you know, I'm not a rich man, but I'll take the bet.
Yeah.
Well, I think this is something that's really important.
And it's a little hobby horse of mine, too, is how especially the right wing, but pretty much everybody in this society, they're just connected to whatever narrative they want.
And its relation to the truth can be the most tenuous or even nonexistent thing.
I mean, I did a show not long ago where the caller called and said, yeah, but everybody knows the weapons of mass destruction are in Syria and that Saddam was going to attack us if we didn't.
And, you know, people are still stuck in the talking points of 2002 out there.
Yeah, it's true.
Well, I think, you know, if they were in Syria, we should invade.
But obviously it's the only solution.
You know, the thing about the Pashtun people is that most Americans don't don't delve into British history or British imperial history.
And so they don't they don't know that the whole history of the discourse about the Pashtuns.
But those were hill people and they were armed and tribally organized.
And the British Empire in India just never really subdued them.
And there was all this anxiety about the frontier all through the British Raj in India.
And they construed them really as, you know, people who might overturn the whole thing.
And Churchill wrote about them that, you know, there's this peculiar hybrid because they had the latest in military technology.
At the turn of the last century, they had the breech loading rifles.
But, you know, you didn't have to stand up to reload those.
So they were a real advantage in guerrilla warfare.
And so Churchill said that they were, you know, these savages, but with the latest in high tech military equipment.
And that they were particularly dangerous for that reason.
And I just thought, well, gee, you know, you could lift what Churchill was saying and just put it on the front page of The Washington Post today and there would be no difference.
Because now the threat that the crazies on the right are bringing up is that the Taliban could take over Pakistan.
And then Pakistan has nuclear weapons, so you'd have nuclear armed Taliban.
And wouldn't that be like the world's worst security nightmare?
Except that, you know, the entire scenario makes no sense whatsoever.
Pakistan is a huge country.
The Pashtuns are a minority there.
The Taliban are a minority of a minority.
And the Pakistani military is over 500,000 troops.
They've got tanks.
They've got helicopter gunships.
They've got planes.
So the Taliban are not going to sweep into Islamabad and take over the Pakistani government.
It's just impossible.
And, in fact, the Pakistani military just mopped up the Swat Valley with the Taliban in the past two months.
Which, you know, supposedly this campaign in Swat was something that our national security depends vitally on.
Do you think that most Americans even knew what was going on?
No, clearly not.
And the part that caught my attention more than anything else, I mean, I guess I'm even mildly surprised at least to hear you term it as some sort of success.
I never saw that.
What I saw was three million refugees and, in my imagination, consequences that are to flow from that into our future that, you know, can't be named specifically but certainly will be horrible for, you know, all concerned.
Well, you know, I think there was a real danger, as you say, Scott, that sending the Pakistani infantry and air force into a populated region like the Swat Valley could have turned out really badly.
And we don't know, of course, still what the final results will be.
But what I would say, from following the Pakistani press and satellite TV and so forth, is that so far we've caught a break.
Because the Taliban in the Swat Valley were really, really unpopular, both there and in Pakistan at large, and became more unpopular, actually, over time.
So that the public really supported this thing.
And, of course, the people who were displaced, the two million you were talking about, were very upset to have to be living in tents and so forth.
On the other hand, a certain number of them, you know, were already having their lives disrupted by the Taliban, like the women were being forbidden to go shopping and stuff like that.
So now, the last couple of weeks, about 400,000 people have returned to one of the main cities in Swat, Mingora.
And, you know, they're starting to try to get their lives going again.
And it seems like the Pakistani military is going to just garrison the town to prevent the Taliban from coming back.
And so, yeah, they've had their lives disrupted in a big way.
And it's estimated that, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars will be needed to restore schools and get the economy going again.
On the other hand, the international community and the Pakistani government are saying they will do that.
So assuming that they do it, and they do it relatively efficiently, which are big assumptions, you know, we could get out of this particular one with our skin intact.
Well, it'd be nice anyway.
I won't hold my breath for that.
I wanted to note here too, and this is a really great article, Armageddon at the Top of the World, Paranoia about the Pashtuns.
It's on Antiwar.com today.
And you quote extensively from Churchill's history of a war that took place around the turn of the last century there.
And I'm sorry for laughing at this, I guess, sort of.
But I thought it was funny how in all of his writing, all of his metaphors and analogies are all to different enslaved people that the British Empire had conquered.
So he says, they're as wild as the Zulus, but crafty as the Red Men.
And they, you know, have, they aim as good as the boers.
All of his different examples of how dangerous these horrible Pashtun people are were, you know, examples of other victims of British imperialism.
And I wonder, and I think you point this out in your article too, or at least Tom does in his introduction here, something about the irony of America marching in here with the British, same in Iraq, same in Afghanistan.
These are places where the British have been over and over again.
And now instead of being the example of the people who prove that you can throw off British rule, here we are trying to reinstall it in a sense, at least probably in the eyes of a lot of our victims.
Yeah, it's really the 21st century has seen the United States increasingly throw in ideologically with empire.
And it's really a remarkable turnaround because, you know, the discourse that Churchill uses is really the discourse of the master race.
I mean, the Anglo-Saxons were supposed to rule those places because they were superior and they provided good governance.
And the savages, which he uses the word, you know, are opposing them because they're uncivilized.
And that was the discourse of the Victorian age.
And it is a racist discourse, quite frankly.
And it's now back, you know, that the Taliban are being depicted as these irrational, savage peoples who nevertheless, you know, somehow could reach out and harm us.
So they have to be subdued by our own high tech militaries.
And it makes a justification then for 90,000 U.S. and NATO troops being in a country like Afghanistan.
It's like what would George Carlin say about this?
He would cut through the jargon and say it in English.
These people are powerful enough to resist our occupation of their land.
Therefore, they're a threat to you at night in your jammies safe in Austin, Texas or wherever you live.
Yeah, exactly.
And Mark Sageman, who had been a CIA station chief in Pakistan in the late 80s, wrote a book, Understanding Terrorist Networks, in which he pointed out that there have been virtually no incidents of international terrorism conducted by Afghans.
Well, we'll see about that for the future, right?
I mean, this is how you create new enemies.
We might be able to get it going if we try hard.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's all we've got to do is work on the problem, and then we'll have another excuse to take the war to Rakhistan or whichever place is next there.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, Juan Cole, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Scott.
And just to say that there is a chapter in the book on Pakistan and Afghanistan if people want background.
Right on.
And again, that book is Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole.
The blog is Informed Comment, and of course he teaches history at the University of Michigan.
Thanks again, Juan.
Okay, thank you.
Take care.