08/20/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
First we're going to turn to my favorite political analyst, and yours, not really political analyst, war analyst, and yours, Dr. Gareth Porter from IPS News.
He's an independent historian and researcher and journalist.
He writes IPS News as IPSNews.org, right?
IPSNews.net.
Oh, is it .net?
Yeah, I knew there was something screwy in there.
IPSNews.net, and then you can find his stuff at Antiwar.com at Original.
Antiwar.com slash Porter.
So welcome back to the show.
Thanks again, Scott.
Great to have you here.
So what's the top headline?
I guess the second headline now is Karzai and Warlords Mount Massive Vote Fraud Scheme.
But let's start with the top headline, which is Jason Ditz's news article, Afghan Election Marred by Low Turnout Violence Reports of Fraud.
He says, Polls in Afghanistan close today at 5 p.m. local time, 830 a.m.
Eastern, following a one-hour extension announced by authorities, hoping to get the reportedly anemic turnout to a more respectable number.
It does not appear to have been very effective, however, as the turnout has been quite a bit lower than officials had hoped.
At least 26 people were killed in 73 different attacks on polling places, and apparently the Taliban managed to shoot down a Chinook transport helicopter belonging to British forces in Helmand.
There's Election Day Afghanistan 2009.
How do you like that, Gareth?
You know, it seems to me that this is a snapshot of the war to come, in that there are clearly going to be more challenges militarily from the Taliban than I think the U.S. has anticipated in its war planning.
And, you know, the political instability question, the whole question of the viability of the Afghan government is going to be much more front and center, it seems to me, in the coming months than it has been in the past.
Well, I'm interested in that because I've read that in a few different places.
But what credibility does Karzai have?
I guess if I'm trying to use my imagination, I could sort of maybe see how some Afghans would think, well, he's going to be the interim president and he's going to be the first appointed puppet of the American occupation, but maybe this time the election will actually be more of an actual election and we'll really have a choice or something like that.
Is that why you're saying he'll have less legitimacy the day after tomorrow than he had yesterday?
That is indeed the assertion that underlies my story about the election fraud planned by Karzai and his allies.
And, indeed, I do think that there is an anticipation, not of a free election, but of quite the opposite, in fact.
The reason is that everyone knows who's following Afghan politics that Karzai's four-, five-year period as president has been an utter and complete failure, and he has made a mess of what has passed for a government there.
In other words, he has played his own role in that.
Obviously, he has had little power over the major factors that govern whether there is a viable government in Kabul or not.
So, in other words, holding the election is just sort of rubbing it in the face of the people of Afghanistan that you don't have a choice, when they already knew they didn't have one.
I think that's about right.
I mean, in other words, people who have any political consciousness or awareness there understand that, indeed, Karzai is not just a puppet because he's personally weak or something like that.
He's a puppet because of the nature of the beast, because of the political forces that were at work in the post-Taliban period, and the fact that it was really up to the external forces, the United States in particular, to construct something in Afghanistan.
If it was going to be constructed, if there was going to be a new regime that was different from the warlords who had the guns, then it would have to be imposed from outside, and that was not done.
It was quite the opposite, in fact.
We know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was very chummy with the warlords, because that's the way he talked.
They were his friends, and he wasn't going to brook any opposition to them on the part of Karzai or anyone else in the Afghan government.
As a result, the United States, in fact, fostered the prevalence, the domination of warlordism in that country.
At their own puppet's expense, you're saying?
At their own puppet's expense, exactly.
And they indeed have been in bed with the very forces that now really have threatened to make it impossible for the United States to make any headway against the Taliban.
Arguably, it's warlordism and its political and social impact on the civilian population, particularly in the Pashtun areas, alienates that population to the point where they're ready to support the Taliban, despite many of its faults and, in some cases, its brutality and violence.
They regard the Taliban as preferable to the kind of anarchy in which the warlords and their paid thugs can simply rob, pillage, rape, I mean literally rape and pillage in the villages, and get away with it because there is no justice.
No one's going to call them to account.
So that's a very long answer by way of saying that I think people did not expect very much of an election, thought that it would simply be an exercise in fraud, and they're going to get what they expected.
Yeah.
Well, so I wonder why you even have it.
Is it because Bush promised a couple of years back or something that they'd have an election by this time?
Well, there's no doubt that U.S. policymakers get hoisted by their own petard many, many ways, and this is one of them.
Yeah, definitely, the U.S. has been committed to the idea of free elections as the way in which we legitimize the Afghan regime, the Afghan government.
The 2004 election, of course, was hailed by Vice President Dick Cheney as a signal event in the history of democracy, I believe is roughly what he said in his hailing the result of that election.
Well, and you know, it was in the BBC that I even made a bumper sticker out of it, that the guys were going around telling the villagers, you vote Karzai or we'll burn your house down.
And that was how he got elected in the first place, this guy who was appointed the interim president just until we can have an election, who promised not to even run back then.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the point is that this is kind of a trope that the United States almost automatically turns to as a way of legitimizing its position in a country.
It did it in Vietnam, it did it in Iraq, now it's doing it in Afghanistan.
And partly because, you know, there's a genuine belief that somehow having been elected, regardless of the circumstances, will in fact confer legitimacy.
And we had Richard Holbrook just a few days ago making a similar statement, that, you know, for this administration, nothing else is more important than getting an elected government, because that is a legitimization of its power, and that's what's most important.
And this is someone who ought to know better in terms of understanding the realities politically in Afghanistan today, and I know that it's far more complicated than that, but it's very likely that this election will have the opposite effect.
But, you know, publicly these people are almost forced to make obeisance to the god of democracy.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing about, you know, democracy.
The only thing democracy is good for is if you're free, and you can maybe keep your freedom by way of whatever power you do have over your government that way.
But the idea that you're going to somehow engineer from the top down some sort of Western society, I guess that's all just propaganda anyway, that they're even really trying to do that, right?
What they want is just a permanent, low-level war there forever, I guess.
Well, we know from the reading of the history of U.S. wars of occupation in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan, that policymakers are indeed not really very caring about the true nature of elections, that what they want primarily is to use elections to promote the candidate that they want to empower, or to serve the broader war strategy that they have in mind.
For example, in the case of Vietnam, I was just rereading Psy Hersh's account of the 1971 presidential election there, and in that case, we know from documentation which was available later on, that the ambassador in South Vietnam, Ambassador Bunker, essentially offered $3 million to Thieu to carry out his election campaign if he would change the electoral law so that he would have big men be brought into the election campaign, because the United States thought that would be neat to have two candidates rather than one.
And they did so in the firm belief, of course, that Thieu was going to win, and that this would be essentially a show of democracy without really being a choice.
And, of course, big men didn't cooperate, and it was in fact a one-man show, but we know from Psy Hersh's account that the discussion of this was on an extremely cynical level, rather than a genuine devotion to democracy.
And I think we can say the same thing about Iraq.
The United States never really wanted to have an elected government for many years in Iraq.
It was forced to do so by the threat of an overwhelming force of Shia in the streets of Baghdad by the hundreds of thousands.
So that's why they went along with the election of a Shia government, which they knew would be a representative of people who were close to Iran.
So in that case, we know that they didn't want it, but they succumbed to the pressures of the majority of Iraqis, who they depended upon to help them fight the war against the Sunni insurgency.
All right.
Now, everybody, we're talking with Gareth Porter.
He's got an article on antiwar.com today called Karzai and Warlords Mount Massive Vote Fraud Scheme.
And he's talking here about some of Karzai's alliances that he's made, new alliances, I gather, with some of these warlords to the end of helping him stuff ballot boxes.
How important are these alliances?
Where are these guys from?
Well, I think the real key here, just to cut to the chase, there are warlords all across the country in every province of Afghanistan.
Former jihadist commanders against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, who kept their control over armed bands, their private militias, after the end of that war, and have never given that up.
And, in fact, have had that confirmed through various kinds of relationships with the Afghan government, with the Ministry of Interior in particular, and with the United States and other NATO countries, military contingents there.
They have contracts to provide security with the Ministry of Interior and with various NATO contingents.
And so they have the ability to basically control the electoral process, because they will have physical control of the ballot centers, the balloting centers and the counting centers.
And, by the way, in this instance, we know that the counting will take place in each ballot, in each voting center, not in the districts, where there will be more opportunity for foreign and Afghan observers to be there.
It will be in thousands of individual voting centers, so it's going to be easier to stuff the ballot boxes.
The point being that these warlords will, in fact, have the physical control.
They also have the ability to threaten local tribal leaders, elders of villages, to make them turn out to vote for Karzai or suffer physical consequences.
And I cite one reported instance where a village elder in Herat province complained that he was forced to participate in a vote stuffing, a vote fraud scheme, simply because he was threatened that if he didn't turn out to vote, there would be very unpleasant consequences for him.
And what I want to focus on here is particularly the Pashtun region of the country.
This is where Karzai is particularly concerned with turning out a large vote.
And there, for example, in Helmand province, we know that the former governor, Sheikh Mohammed Akhundzada, is the guy who has control over the militia forces, the primary militia forces in the province.
He's not the only one, but he's the major one.
And he has been reported to have put the stiff arm on village elders and other leaders in the province to participate in the vote fraud scheme by basically buying up the voting cards that have been distributed by the millions to women and underage people and people who don't exist, so that they can then be used as the basis for stuffing the ballot boxes.
It sounds like that time Lyndon Johnson got elected to the U.S. Senate.
I'm sure there's a very similar thing that has happened in American elections as well.
And what's interesting to me, at least in this instance, is that this scheme is so much in the open because of the nature, the sort of decentralized nature of political power in Afghanistan.
You have all these village elders who have no real loyalty to Karzai and not even to the warlord there.
They happen to just be living in the province where the warlord has the guns and can threaten them.
And therefore they complain loudly to anyone who listens.
And that's why this scheme is so open and above board.
And in fact, as I point out in my article, the independent electoral monitoring organization, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, issued a report last May, which reported on its observation of four phases of the voter registration process in Afghanistan.
And it's an astonishing report in the detail in which it documents the way in which these people who are carrying out the voter registration on behalf of the Karzai regime and the warlords basically handed out millions of voter registration cards to people who they knew were not going to exercise the right to vote, that is, underage people down to the age of seven in some cases, or 12, I guess it was, 12 in some cases, and women who very seldom, in fact, actually vote, were being registered in much larger numbers, in millions of numbers greater than was the case in the past.
And clearly the intention here is hardly a secret, is to accumulate all these cards so that they can then be used as the basis for stuffing the ballot boxes.
And the fact is that after this public report was issued, nothing was really done to address the issues that were raised in it.
And of course the fact that the so-called Independent Election Commission is not independent at all, but is in fact a partisan organization which was named entirely by Karzai himself and will be in charge of everything about the election, including handling all of the evidence that has to do with any complaints about electoral fraud, means that there is absolutely no way that there is going to be any way to combat the use of these cards and the stuffing of the ballot boxes to steal the election.
Well, I think you just don't understand.
George Bush and Dick Cheney aren't the president anymore, and now Barack Obama is, and so all this is perfectly fine.
All right, wait, I want to ask you one more thing before I let you go here, Gareth.
I like the way this is phrased, too.
Finally, a reasonable headline on this subject in the New York Times.
Iranian arms seized in Iraq, officials say.
Oh, that's quite a shock, isn't it?
I mean, that must be the first time we've ever read that.
Well, it's the first time in a couple of months, anyway.
Right, right.
And they say here it's Sam Dogger.
I guess you saw this, right?
Well, I have seen that, of course.
And apparently there were some rockets which are said to have been manufactured in Iran, and that is now being touted as a mini-crisis in Iraq, which apparently calls for reconsideration of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Oh, really?
I note that my friend Bob Dreyfuss, in his own column, is expressing alarm about the new violence, the level of violence in Iraq, and indeed the rocketing of a U.S. military base with arms which were discovered to have been made in Iran.
So this is now being touted as a reason for alarm and reconsideration, whereas, in fact, I think it should be nothing of the sort.
You know, first of all, as we've talked about many times, discovering arms made in Iran says absolutely nothing about how they got there, what the route was, or who actually procured them, and from whom, and under what circumstances.
And I think the story that I recently did, which we talked about a bit, about how the al-Maliki regime was working hand-in-hand with the very people who the U.S. military has called the special groups, points up the reality that these arms have been procured not by some renegades who are sort of in the pay of the Iranians, but by people who are very close to the al-Maliki regime itself.
Well, you know, the idea, Gareth, that there's an arms market in the Middle East where people can buy weapons and that it's possible that they could do so from anyone but government sellers, I guess that's just not supposed to occur to us, or we're supposed to believe that that has not occurred to the people at the Pentagon?
I think that's a very good summary of the supposition underlying the way in which the news media has covered this.
And, of course, you're right.
I mean, there are arms markets in every major Iraqi city and most minor cities as well.
They exist in cities on the Iranian border.
They obviously get Iranian arms, a flow of Iranian arms constantly into those arms markets, just as they get arms from other countries as well.
And as I've documented in the past, if you look at the arms which have been detailed, enumerated, found in the arms caches that have been documented by U.S. military task force over the past year and a half, two years, what you find is that Iranian arms represent only a tiny minority of the arms that have been found in the arms caches.
Well, and as we all know, if we put on our long-term memory thinking caps here, back in 2003, Don Rumsfeld didn't do a thing to secure all of the Iraqi army arms depots.
You know, whatever landmines they had and rockets they had and whatever, all that disappeared into the hands of private actors across the country, you know, over the course of that summer.
Including the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Mahdi army, no question about it.
Well, and to go ahead and beat a dead horse, why would the Iranian government, Gareth, send arms into Iraq to try to, what, undermine the Maliki government?
Is that the accusation here?
Well, look, I mean, I'm a realist about the relationship between the Iranian government and Muqtada al-Sadr, even though Sadr is, in his political essence, violently anti-Iranian, to distrust them and would never do anything to promote Iranian influence in his country.
Nevertheless, he wanted the Iranians to help train his troops, and he wanted Hezbollah to help train his troops, and he got both.
I think he undoubtedly also got some financing from Iran.
But the Iranians are not dopes.
They're not children.
Just as we've suggested a moment ago, they understand that the way in which insurgents get their arms is through arms markets.
And so they simply gave them money, and they procured those through the regular sort of usual commercial channels.
Well, but if I go and Google Maliki, Ahmadinejad, to Google Images, then I'll find a big picture of the two guys with the big George Bush grins on their faces, shaking hands, like the best of friends in the world.
Are they or aren't they?
Yeah, Maliki is the guy who shook hands with George Bush, got everything that he wanted, essentially, from Bush.
And then, as I think was always planned from the time he became prime minister, he put into effect a plan under which the American troops were going to be ousted from the country.
And he did so with the full cooperation, knowledge, and coordination with Iran, knowing that in the long run, a Shia government in Iraq, its only real friend was going to be Iran.
They were going to have no other friends in the region.
Of course.
Well, it's funny.
It almost seems, Gareth, like all this stuff that you and I have been talking about for years, and even before I ever interviewed you, we were talking about it with other people, the Supreme Islamic Council member Justin Raimondo, before the war even, said, listen, the only real organized political force other than the Ba'athists there is the Supreme Islamic Council.
They're in league with Iran.
They refuse to take money from us.
And what do you think is going to happen?
And right after the war, the Middle East escalator, he said, look, watch Skiry and watch this Ayatollah Sistani.
And this has been going this whole time.
And it really almost seems like the guys in the White House, Republicans and I guess the Democrats now, like they don't even really get it, what they're doing.
Yeah, in a very interesting way, they don't get it.
And, you know, I had an interview with someone who was in Iraq as an advisor to the commander of U.S. forces, General Casey, 2005-2006, who told me that what this official observed up close and personal over the period of those months was that U.S. officials were so dead set on believing that they could not lose, that they refused to believe the evidence of what they were seeing with their own eyes, which was that al-Maliki and the Shia forces supporting him were not on our side at all.
They were not real sort of pro-American allies at all.
But they simply could not accept that because it really meant that they could not possibly win.
And so, you know, as is always the case, you find that these officials will believe whatever is necessary to justify what they're doing.
Yeah, exactly.
And so here we are, still there.
All right.
Thanks, Gareth.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Gareth Porter.
That's IPSnews.net and also original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
We'll be right back with Greg Palast after this.