10/21/09 – Martin Smith – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Thanks for tuning in, we've got an action-packed, interview-filled show for you today.
Beginning with Martin Smith, it's been a while since we've talked to him.
I guess I should have done my research, I think his production company is called Raintree, at least it was the last I checked.
He is, of course, behind the new Frontline documentary, Obama's War, which ran last week.
And I guess I know these interviews are supposed to take place the day it's going to air, or the day before, but anyway, it's on the website, and it's a very important Frontline.
I urge you all to go and check it out.
Welcome back to the show, Martin, how are you doing?
Thank you very much.
It's Rain Media, by the way.
Rain Media, there you go.
I don't know what Raintree, where I got that from, that's something else.
That's alright, that's alright.
You know what it was?
That was the lawnmower repair shop in my neighborhood as a kid.
Well, there's always a future for me in lawnmower repair, perhaps.
Well, actually, you keep doing work like this, you might be thrown right out of American media, because it's great.
I guess you called it Obama's War because Mad Men was already taken, huh?
You know, it is Obama's War, unfortunately, now that he's President.
That just comes with the job.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and, alright, there's so much stuff in here that I want to talk about, but I want to start with sort of the bigger question, you know, not to ruin the ending for anybody or anything, but these people are crazy, right?
I mean, they really are mad.
When they talk about what seems to be, they're prescribing an endless war to fight an enemy they can hardly define, to an end that they can't describe, and it's going to take from now until apparently forever, and we're all just supposed to go with this.
Am I missing something here?
Well, it's called the Global War on Terror, and those who believe that counterinsurgency is the way to go, say what's necessary, is a global counterinsurgency, and that means going everywhere and anywhere you need to go to fight, to build nations, really, in ungoverned spaces, because the idea is, well, John Noggle is a proponent of this, who was one of the co-authors of the counterinsurgency manual that the Army put out, which says basically in ungoverned spaces we can have terrorist organizations take root and threaten us, so his solution is to deploy wherever necessary to fight with this kind of, this idea of counterinsurgency.
Did you ask him what we're doing to get rid of universities in Germany where grad students might go?
Yeah, or Florida, for that matter.
I mean, it's true that you're referring, of course, to 9-11, where the suicide attackers were living in Hamburg and in Florida and other places.
None of them were Afghans, of course.
It is a very, you know, and this is why the president is sitting with his war council, and they're all scratching their heads and thinking, you know, what are we getting into here, and is this the way to go?
Well, you know, Martin, I think it's so important, just the way you describe it, and I don't know if that was supposed to be an exact quote or you're kind of paraphrasing or what, I'd like to let you address it, but the phrase global counterinsurgency, well, to me that means this is something different than a war against, I don't know, like some communist red brigades blowing up cop cars or even, you know, what's that guy, Nidal, the terrorist, the jackal or whatever?
Yeah, Abu Nidal.
It is very different.
It is very different, and it's not my word, global counterinsurgency.
That's what those who believe that it's necessary call it.
Now, everybody who's counseling counterinsurgency in Afghanistan doesn't necessarily believe that we have to go to, you know, Somalia, Nigeria and, you know, any other place on the planet to pursue this, but there are those that say, you know, it is necessary that we be on alert everywhere.
Well, what it implies to me, what is important about it to me is that, well, it reminds me of Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
That's what he called it.
He said this isn't really a war on terrorism.
It's a global Islamic insurgency, but to me an insurgency can only come, and maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe I don't understand the term exactly, but it seems to me that an insurgency can only be a reaction to a foreign empire that is already trespassing.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be called an insurgency.
It would be called, you know, their aggression against us somehow.
Well, you can have revolutions within countries, and that's an insurgency.
And it is an interesting distinction that you make me think of here, because one point that I think is important to get across is that when there is a revolt, let's say, by Pashtuns, you know, that call themselves the Taliban in Afghanistan, fighting against the government of Afghanistan, the U.S.
-supported government, it's one thing for a government in Afghanistan to put down its own insurgency.
It's quite another for a third party to come in, the United States or NATO, and put that down.
And if you look at the history of successful insurgencies or successful counterinsurgencies, it's hard to find too many of them where a third party can come in to another country that's having a civil war and put down the insurgents.
And that's what we're trying to do, of course, in Afghanistan.
And it's very tough to accomplish.
Well, but it kind of begs the question about where September 11th came from in the first place.
I mean, to hear Scheuer tell that, he says that was part of this global Islamist insurgency against us.
We were already, at least by proxy, through the local dictatorships in the region and so forth, we already were the dominant power in that region of the world.
Yeah.
The whole thing started as an insurgency against us, rather than history beginning the day of the plane crashes.
Right.
Well, I don't...
I mean, I'm not trying to just assess blame for morality purposes or whatever, point fingers.
I'm just saying that to understand exactly what we're doing, it seems like these guys recognize that the longer we stay, the more resistance we create against us and that kind of thing, but they sort of seem to think that there was this...
September 11th was this original sin, which means we just have no choice.
We have to be here.
We have to win it one way or another, etc.
Instead of asking the question, well, why is it we were attacked in the first place?
And is more occupation, you know, the prescription for what ails us here?
Well, if you go back to bin Laden and what he was saying all the way through the 90s was that his cause, I mean, his number one cause was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of, as he called it, the land of the two holy mosques.
He won't even refer to it as Saudi Arabia because he doesn't want to credit the family, the Saud family.
So it was the presence of U.S. troops that was the primary motivation for Al-Qaeda's declared war on crusaders, as he termed them.
So you're right.
It was the presence of U.S. troops there in the Middle East.
And, you know, I would, well, some paranoia on his part that fed into paranoia on the part of the United States that led to, you know, an ever-increasing conflict in the area.
Well, and it kind of makes me wonder whether what we're doing is really what they wanted.
I mean, if what they were trying to get was a reaction and an invasion, like at least he claimed after the fact.
I don't know if he really said this is what we're doing before September 11th, but certainly in his October 2004 speech, he says, ha ha, we baited you into our trap and now you're going to come and bleed your empire to death, radicalize more people to follow us by the time you're done, et cetera, like that.
It seems like we're doing exactly what the enemy wants, what's beneficial for them, rather than acting in a way that actually is, you know, best geared to undermine them.
You get a good argument on that point, because was he attacking the United States on 9-11 in order to get the United States to pull out of Saudi Arabia?
Or was he doing it to bait the United States into a war, into a long war that he desired for his own...
Well, it's kind of both, right?
It's drag us in to bleed us all the way to bankruptcy and then force us all the way out.
Well, that's the way Sawyer puts it anyway.
Yeah, some people think he miscalculated, that actually he thought the coup de grace would be to attack the United States on his own soil and that that would lead to the United States pulling out of the Middle East.
I tend to think that he actually was trying to, you know, declare a war, a long war, and was not unhappy to see the United States come into Afghanistan and come in certainly to Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, especially when you look in hindsight at the Khobar Towers attack, at the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, and then September 11th, it's pretty clear he was trying to bait us.
He wasn't trying to push us out, he was trying to, well, he was trying to bait us into bogging down so then he could really push us out in the end, basically.
It does seem that way.
I mean, I can't get inside that guy's head, but it does seem that way.
And in fact, the United States wasn't responding too strongly to the African embassy attacks in 98 or the Cole bombing.
Well, at least now he claims that's his strategy.
Whether that's really what he meant back in 2000 or not, I guess, is up for debate.
But, okay, so let me ask you about John Nagel from the Center for New American Security.
You interviewed him and he tells you that in order to wage a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, it would take 600,000 troops, he told you.
Well, that's right.
I mean, what he said was by classic counterinsurgency measures, and it's a proportion of the size of the country, the population and whatnot, you'd need 600,000 troops.
So we've got 68,000 American troops on the ground now, and if you add NATO troops plus Afghan troops, you've got about 300,000, so you're half of what you need.
But he is not prescribing, nor is anyone that I know, saying that we have to get enough American and NATO troops in there to bring that total to 600,000.
They're saying that by classic measures you'd need that, but if you can't get that, what you have to do is triage.
You have to move troops around, you have to decide what are the important parts of the country, and this whole ink spot strategy of concentrating your forces here, creating a kind of security for people in one area that convinces people in another area that siding with their government or with NATO and the American troops is the way to go.
That's what he's proposing.
Well, it's very confusing to me, because on one hand, the policy is a generational commitment, basically, to build a modern, thriving nation-state there in landlocked Afghanistan, right there in the middle of Central Asia, and yet sort of a halfway approach to actually getting it done.
You're trying to blot ink while you're trying to build a whole nation.
Well, it's incredibly ambitious, and everybody that I spoke to in the military acknowledges that.
And there was a better time to take this on, and that was between 2001 and about 2005, before the Taliban really returned in great strength.
The problem now is you can't put civilians into the rural areas where you need to build, because you can't get people that are going to volunteer to go out there and get their heads chopped off, and so the whole job falls to the military.
Had the United States not been distracted by Iraq between 2001 and 2005, there was a window of opportunity, and there was great goodwill on the part of the Afghan people for help from the outside.
Much of that has disappeared.
There's no security in the countryside, and so the Taliban have filled the vacuum, and there's no civilian search to speak of.
So we really have dug a hole, and the question is now how much blood and treasure is it worth to try to fix the problem, and how should we revert to using surveillance and drone strikes and protecting our borders to prevent another 9-11 attack?
That's the question.
I'm talking with Martin Smith.
He is the guy that put together Obama's War for Frontline.
You can watch it online at pbs.org.
And you and your heroic cameraman apparently traveled all around, or at least quite a bit, around Afghanistan in this documentary, and you talk about Camp Sharp, named after a Marine who dies at the beginning of the show there, and this is the base that they set up next to the marketplace, right?
Trying to basically be the local police force so that people can feel secure in setting up their market, right?
Yeah, it's pretty interesting, because I'd gone to this conference that Noggle's think tank had put on in Washington before going off to Afghanistan, and Petraeus gave a speech, and he talked about how what we need to do here is move in next to population centers and not be on some base out in the desert or far away, well-protected and insulated from the people, but get in right next to them.
So I thought, well, that sounds pretty interesting.
Let's go see what that looks like on the ground, and we got to this place, Combat Outpost Sharp, and it was right next to this marketplace and a little population center around the market where the farmers lived, and the first day we go out in the market, and of course there's nobody there, and there hasn't been anybody there ever since the Marines came in.
So immediately it's apparent that the idea that Petraeus has in practice is a lot tougher on the ground than it was in Washington.
It's really putting the local Afghan villagers between a rock and a hard place, where the Americans are coming by and telling them, listen, don't deal with the Taliban, don't have anything to do with them, we'll be your police force, choose us over them, when really, I mean, the Taliban are at least from there, the Taliban are basically, I mean, even that term is a sort of collective term that means all uncounted numbers of individuals, and they're not going away.
At some point, I like to believe anyway, if nothing else but from the dollar breaking, the long war for 100 years in Central Asia is actually not going to happen.
The Americans are not going to be the police in Helmand Province forever, and so we're asking them to choose foreign military occupiers over their own local grassroots security forces, which not necessarily that they voted for them, but then again, I didn't vote for mine either.
Yeah, well, this is a big problem.
I mean, the Americans, you know, this goes back to what I said earlier, and that is for a third party to come in and run a counterinsurgency is really tough.
If you had Afghans out there, the farmers would look at them much differently.
They would see guys who, you know, speak their language or from their country as an alternative to the Taliban, but as it is, they're looking at these guys that, you know, by the general head of intelligence, his own sort of assessment of it, they look like they're out of Star Wars.
Right, and they don't look like the Rebel Alliance either.
Yeah, so, you know, these guys, these farmers out here are not stupid, and they're looking at these guys saying, tell the Taliban to stay away, and they're thinking, well, you know, the Taliban is going to be here tonight.
In fact, you know, my brother is in the Taliban.
It's more likely the case.
You see when they have the conversations with the villagers that the young, the men of fighting age are generally not around.
You know, so this idea of counterinsurgency, of separating the people from the Taliban, is really tough when so many of the people are the Taliban.
You know, it's almost as if we talk about the Taliban as an outside force.
We're the outside force.
The Taliban actually are native.
It's an indigenous movement with support from Pakistan, but basically very hard to sort the two.
And this is what American officials, you know, the military that I spoke to, most of them, they're not unaware of these problems.
They're acutely aware that this is a very difficult and ambitious task they're undertaking.
On the other hand, they're a can-do organization, and they follow orders.
So that's what they're doing.
Well, you know, it's an interesting contradiction there.
Like you say, they're trying to separate the Taliban from the people and whatever, even though the Taliban kind of are the people.
And even though the Americans this whole time have been, you know, exactly who, whether this is the think tankers or the National Security Council or the actual military guys or Pentagon's PR department or what, I don't exactly know, but basically this whole time they've been trying to conflate anyone who resists us in Afghanistan with the Taliban and say, you know, basically they're all the Taliban.
And so now they're in the position of trying to say, trying to weed people away from it.
In fact, there was even a thing for a couple of weeks there back, I guess, at the beginning of the year, Martin, where they were saying, well, you know, we could try to separate the Afghan Taliban from the Pakistani Taliban, or we could try to separate the Taliban in general from al-Qaeda, or we could try to celebrate the kind of weekend warriors, the not very committed from the hard core, or we could try, and they're thinking all these ways to divide the Taliban when we're the ones who lumped them all together in the first place.
Yeah, but you are going to hear more and more, I think, about how there are good Taliban or bad Taliban or at least moderate Taliban, because I think they're recognizing that they've got to move towards some kind of accommodation because they can't defeat them militarily.
They can only defeat them politically.
And, of course, you have to have a legitimate government in Kabul, one, and that is a project that's in a lot of trouble.
And then you've got to have somehow a way of reaching out and making, you know, if a guy's in the countryside and he's looking at the situation on the ground and thinks he can better his life by siding with his own government, there's no reason he won't do that if he feels that he has enough security that he's not going to be attacked by the Taliban while he's sleeping.
But, you know, you've got to politically convince them to come over to the other side, and then you'll get some of these Taliban guys to come over.
But how you do that as a third party without a reliable partner in Kabul is the challenge.
Well, and, you know, it's kind of too bad.
This is Obama's war, you're right, but this is George Bush's legacy here.
I mean, they did the easy regime change instead of hunting down Osama Bin Laden.
They were so focused on Kabul that Bin Laden and Zawahiri escaped, which is by itself absolutely unforgivable.
But then they focused all their attention on waging war in Iraq the whole time, and they basically neglected, they wouldn't leave Afghanistan, and they kind of had this, I don't know what else to call it, this sort of half-assed occupation where, okay, well, Karzai's the mayor of Kabul, and that's good enough, and this is not the priority, and he's left this for Obama to try to figure out what to do with.
Well, yeah.
At the same time, if you remember, Bush was blaming lax security and attentiveness to terrorist threats prior to 9-11 on Clinton.
So everybody likes to pass the buck backwards, but the fact is that when Obama was campaigning, and even as early as 2007, he was making speeches and in the debates, and even recently said this was a necessary war.
He was saying we've got to take resources out of Iraq and put them into Afghanistan.
So there's been some kerfuffle over the title.
I think it misses the point.
The fact is he's the president, he's a big boy, it's his responsibility.
Yes, Bush shares a lot of responsibility, but at this point going forward, Bush ain't the decider.
Well, and you're right that his entire campaign, Barack Obama ran, saying that this is the right war, the real war, the must-win war.
He's completely painted himself into a corner on this.
I think he had to, in a way.
Politically, I think, at least, he felt running against John McCain, who had a strong record on defense.
And Hillary Clinton.
And Hillary Clinton, he had to, you know, he couldn't be just the anti-war guy, or he'd go down like a McGovern.
So he, some people say rhetorically backed his way into this.
Others say he believes in this.
He believes this is the project that we should take on.
On the other hand, what you see now is that he's really reassessing, I think, since the election turned out to be fraudulently manipulated, that he doesn't have a reliable partner in Kabul, which makes his whole strategy there really iffy.
Well, and the whole region and pretty much any country trying to do what we're doing in that region is going to get caught in all kinds of paradoxes, such as, for example, you have an interview with Steve Cole, in your documentary here, your front line, Obama's war.
And he talks about how our ally, the Pakistanis, are backing the Taliban, and we're backing them as the same time we're fighting the Taliban.
A little parenthesis here, we talked with Kelly Vlahos on the show about all the American tax money that's going to the Taliban in the form of protection money.
You know, big percentages out of the aid budget and all that, too.
But the Pakistanis have a very important interest in keeping Afghanistan, if not run by the Taliban, at least destabilized, because of Karzai's alliances that he's made with the Indians.
And they can't let an Indian-allied Karzai state have a real monopoly on power in Afghanistan, then they're surrounded.
So, you know, talk about a perpetual motion machine here.
Yeah, and I think a lot of people get confused about...
I mean, it can be confusing if you're not paying close attention.
Time and time again, the Pakistanis launch these attacks on the Taliban, and everybody, you know, even in the administration will say, yeah, you see, they're really coming over to our side, they're fighting the Taliban.
And, you know, I've just been listening to it on the radio in the last couple of days.
The fact is that they're attacking the Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban that are attacking Islamabad, their capital, their state.
You know, they're not going after the Afghan Taliban that use and continue to use Afghanistan, I mean, Pakistan as their sanctuary for attacks across the border on NATO and American troops.
And until that happens, and until they really become a partner in going after them, it's very hard for the United States and NATO to defeat the Taliban over in Afghanistan.
And you're absolutely right.
They want to keep this... they're like the Afghan farmer who says, these Americans aren't going to be around forever.
So when the Americans go, we the Pakistanis want to have some insurance.
We want to have somebody that protects our interests in Afghanistan.
And that, up until now, has been and continues to be the Taliban.
Well, now, you know, don't get me wrong, because I never thought that this was actually the mission or anything, but it seems like it's at least going to remain the permanent excuse for this, as long as the Pentagon wants to continue.
And that is that bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still podcasting from somewhere in those Hindu Kush mountains, right?
Yeah, you say the Pentagon wants the excuse.
I'm not so sure the Pentagon is so happy about all this.
I mean, that's not the sense I get from talking to folks.
I think that this is more political than it is military.
The military is exhausted.
It's cracked.
And I think that they are seriously considering, at least their strong voices within the Pentagon, they're seriously considering that there are better and other methods than nation building in two countries.
You know, this started out as an attack against Osama bin Laden and has morphed or mission creeped its way to the idea that we have to build Afghanistan and re-engineer Pakistan.
I think there's many in the military that aren't so happy about it.
So what interest is there really in continuing this, other than Obama not looking weak in front of the Republicans or whatever?
I mean, I guess Pepe Escobar says it's all about keeping Iran from building a pipeline to China or something.
Yeah, I don't know.
All the pipeline arguments and stuff, I'm not convinced by it or the idea that corporate interests are behind this.
I think that politically we've got ourselves committed to Afghanistan after abandoning them twice in the past.
And there are voices, there are people who feel we have a moral obligation to remaining in this fight.
And there are those who honestly believe that there's no other means than this current occupation and nation-building project to preventing Afghanistan from becoming a host nation for Al-Qaeda again.
So, you know, I think that there's an argument.
Well, is it possible for somebody, I don't know, British SAS or Marine Force recon to go into those mountains and find these guys and kill them so that the excuse is gone and the thing can end?
Because it's those two, right?
You can't declare the war over and we won while the top two guys are still hiding out and sending out video messages every once in a while.
Yeah, but if somebody could do that, I don't think anybody's holding back from doing that.
I think if you imagine Colorado with no roads and how you go in there and find a couple of guys in one of those valleys, but it's not just Colorado.
These are bigger mountains.
These are 20,000-foot mountains.
So what you're telling me is, and this is I guess what the Marines are telling you, the Marines can't do it.
The Marines cannot go there and find these guys and kill them.
And so basically what that means, I guess, is that Tora Bora was the last shot and George Bush and Don Rumsfeld blew it.
And what are you going to do?
Well, I think there has to be political accommodation of some kind.
An insurgency is won through good politics, not through guns.
And somehow you've got to find partners within your enemies to negotiate with and find some.
I mean, the Afghans have had 30 years of war, and, yeah, there are a lot of guys that are willing to strap on a suicide vest and go kill themselves.
But I think there's a lot of others who would like to get things to settle down a little bit.
So you've got to find them.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your work and your time on the show today.
Hey, good questions.
Thank you very much for having me.
Everybody, that's Martin Smith from RAIN Media.
And you can go to pbs.org and watch his newest front line, Obama's War.