For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
You know what?
I'm really glad.
It's time to welcome Eric Margulies back to the show.
Hey, Eric.
Hello, Scott.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm just dandy, thank you.
Well, that's good.
Everybody, you know Eric Margulies.
He's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada there.
He's covered, I don't know, a hundred wars or something.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
You can also often find what he writes at LewRockwell.com and at Antiwar.com.
His own website is EricMargulies.com.
And I guess let's start here with this, I guess, the effect of the election.
It's been, I forget how long, a few weeks anyway, since this bogus election.
According to the London Times, the United Nations and associated groups have thrown out a million bogus votes that went to D.M., pardon me, Karzai at the American Quizzling.
And they're going to do some kind of runoff.
And now the choice is going to be between Hamid Karzai and his main competition, a guy named Abdullah Abdullah.
So I guess let me know what you think about the runoff, whether there's any reason to think it'll be any more legit than the original one.
And then maybe if you can tell us about this Abdullah Abdullah guy and why we should, I don't know, be pleased or not if he's the guy that comes to replace Karzai.
Sure, Scott.
Well, as I wrote back last August when the first election was held, I just wanted to stage an election to give legitimacy to Karzai's government to make it look kosher.
And really this was done not for the Afghans, but for American public opinion and European public opinion.
And what happened was that the election was rigged from the beginning.
It was rigged in the sense that while there was an election between Karzai and I think with 30 other candidates, all of them had been vetted and approved by the U.S.
And the chief arrival to Karzai was the head of the Tajik-dominated, that's one of Afghanistan's ethnic groups, Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance.
More about that in a minute.
Abdullah Abdullah.
But Abdullah Abdullah is also Washington's man.
And Karzai's an old CIA asset, and I wouldn't be surprised if Abdullah Abdullah and his boys were also working for the CIA because it was they and CIA officers who originally overthrew the Taliban.
So what happened was with this rigged election, really even worse than what the Soviets used to do, is that no political parties were allowed to run.
Can you imagine this?
Only individuals.
Well, now see, that's funny because that's the exact opposite of how they did it in Iraq, right?
Where no individuals can run, only the parties.
Which helped make sure that the Supremes on the Council and the Dala Party came out on top.
Exactly.
Well, in this case, they were worried, so they said no, only individuals.
And only individuals, apparently, this wasn't in writing, but it was understood, only individuals who support the continued Western occupation of Afghanistan.
We would, if it were the Soviets who were occupying Afghanistan, we would call them collaborators.
But because they're on our side, these are Democrats.
But in any event, they backed the Westerns.
So what this was was really a beauty contest the first time around between US-backed parties.
And the US funded this, it ran the electoral commission, our troops were supervising polling stations from a distance.
A complete violation of international law.
To no surprise, Karzai won.
But what happened was his supporters were so eager to make sure that Abdullah Abdullah didn't win because they were fighting over the distribution of US aid and drug money that they went ahead and stuffed all kinds of additional ballot boxes, which they didn't need to do.
So there was a big scandal, and the election was ruled fraudulent.
Now they're going to do the same thing again.
Same rules, same exclusion of parties, same only pro-US candidates.
And I tell you, if it were a real free election, who would win?
The Taliban.
They're the most popular party and movement in Pakistan, but of course they're not allowed to run.
It's really strange, and it's kind of hard.
Even if you were in charge of the American empire, it's hard to be America and an empire because, at least in terms of making your lives make any sense, how do you deny it's an occupation?
How do you call it a liberation?
How do you even occupy a country if all your propaganda is about liberation and democracy?
You end up shooting yourself in the foot and handing power over to people you didn't want to hand over power to.
For example, if Bush had just invaded Iraq and said, look, we're going to continue to back the Ba'athist dictatorship, just not the Hussein family, anybody who stands up, we'll kill you.
They didn't say that, which they probably could have gotten away with that.
Instead they said, oh, we're here to liberate you and give you a democracy and whatever, whatever, which meant that the Dala Party and the Supreme Islamic Council came out ahead.
Same kind of thing in Afghanistan, where here we're America, the land of the Declaration of Independence and all that, and here we are acting like the Redcoats.
Well, while you're quoting great American political thinkers, I should also mention Vice President Cheney, who said in 2002 about Taliban in Afghanistan, quote, they are out of business permanently.
Yeah, they're in the last throes of resistance.
He's the man who's criticizing President Obama for being wrong about Afghanistan.
Yet this forward-seeing Mr. Cheney had all the answers back in 2000.
Well, you know, my latest book, American Raj, was subtitled Liberation or Domination, because this is exactly my point.
We're in a contradictory state that you just made, that we are a country of great political strength and worth, and we've brought democracy forward and we're a champion of democracy, and yet we're going around the world like an imperial giant.
And, you know, the British Empire had the same thing, too.
They were a democracy at home, yet abroad it was a ruthless, rapacious empire that had no respect for democracy of brown-skinned people or black-skinned people.
Well, at least they were honest with, you know, the Brits who lived back in England that, oh, yeah, we're an empire, we're going to murder as many Indians as it takes for us to get their stuff.
But they said they were doing it in the name of Christianity to bring enlightenment to the darker areas of the world, and we are doing it for the sake of democracy.
Well, you know, I don't know if you saw this, it's on the antiwar.com blog today, and it's this lady named Malala Joia, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce her name, but she's a former member of the Afghanistan parliament.
Yeah, I know who she is.
Yeah, yeah, and she was kicked out for insulting fellow members of parliament.
So she did two interviews on CNN yesterday.
The first one, or I'm not sure exactly which order they came in, but anyway, if you go look at the antiwar.com blog today, you see the first interview is with American regular CNN, and she starts off with how bad the Taliban are, and the CNN lady is going, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then she says, but you've got to end the occupation.
The occupation is making everything worse.
The occupation is as bad as the Taliban, et cetera, et cetera.
And Heidi Collins, the CNN lady, just interrupts her and walks all over and says, oh, well, occupation is your word.
A lot of people would take issue with your calling the U.S. presence in your country a, quote, occupation.
But then CNN International interviewed the same lady, and they're like, this lady says we need to get the hell out of there.
There you go, and it was just perfectly honest.
Everybody's allowed to see a real debate, a real discussion, except for the American people.
In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in one more.
When I first moved to L.A., I turned on CNN, and this is in January, and there they were showing literally like when I turned it on, there was a white phosphorus bomb exploding over Gaza, burning women and children to death.
And the news girl behind the counter was blonde and pretty, but she was an actual journalist.
She knew what she was talking about.
She was asking important questions, and I guess that's just because they had, you know, such a terrible time trying to cover it at all at regular CNN.
They had to switch over to CNN International.
But when they switched it back, straight back to the missing blonde from Aruba and whatever garbage again.
I remember that.
Well, Scott, I broadcast regularly every week for CNN International out of London.
You do?
I do, and I must say I have great respect for the quality of their broadcasting and for my being free to say exactly what I think on air.
I would kill a man to have you on CNN regular for Americans to see.
Well, I used to be on CNN, Scott.
I used to be on CNN two or three times a week.
Oh, yeah, back before September 11th.
No, after September 11th, but up until the 2003 Iraq invasion.
And then apparently I was not sufficiently supportive of the president's program and no longer on CNN.
Well, once in a while.
Well, wait a minute.
I want to let you get to your point here, but they're asking in the chat room, how can we hear Eric Margulies' CNN International dispatches?
I don't know.
I'm sorry.
I know you can find it on the Internet somewhere, but I'm not quite sure where.
It's on a program called Connect the World, which comes on every night at 9 p.m.
London time.
But I'm not on a regular slide.
I just come when the stories demand my… Well, now, are they just propagandizing us and lying to us, or is it that the rest of the population of Earth will not settle for the kind of news that Americans, in fact, demand?
We won't settle for actual news.
We want to see pictures of white phosphorus bombs exploding over Gaza, but everybody else in the world is interested.
We want Pablum.
But, you know, the problem is that the American troops are involved in the fighting, and the media, all media, is definitely afraid that they're going to be accused of lack of patriotism and of not supporting our boys, and the American Legion is going to accuse them of treason, etc., etc.
And then their advertisers are going to start getting a huge amount of static.
And, I mean, this is business news, and they just can't afford to get themselves in that, or they're too scared to get themselves in that position.
A few independents like me, who have other sources of income, thank God, can afford to do that.
But the media is corporate media.
That's why they call it that.
If it weren't for programs like yours and other people on the Internet, radio programs, we would be getting homogenized corporatist news that goes along with the government's big picture.
Well, you know, in this case, and maybe this is just me, but it seems like if they just treated this lady with a little bit more respect and then just let her go, people would forget about it.
The way they treated her makes it memorable, makes it worth blogging.
That here the CNN lady interrupts her to challenge her use of the word occupation.
Like, look, American soldiers have been in Afghanistan longer than both World Wars combined took, you know, in terms of time frame here.
To say it's not an occupation, you would have to be absolutely insane, or, I don't know, an agent of the Democratic Party, or something terrible like that.
That's pretty bad.
Scott, you'll be even more horrified when I tell you that I appear from time to time on Fox News, and particularly Fox Radio.
I do sometimes 8, 10, 12 cities in the morning commenting on terrorism or Afghanistan or stuff like that.
And if you want to talk about getting irate responses, you should listen to Fox.
Well, I'm sure you have.
And any hints of heresy on that station provoked very strong reactions.
Yeah, I'm amazed.
They let you do Fox Radio that often?
I think they have me on because whenever they're criticized for being too far to the right and a mouthpiece for the Republican Party and racist and anti-Muslim or whatever you want to call them, they say, yes, but we've got Eric Margulies.
Well, thank God for that.
That's what I say about anti-war radio, too.
Well, we've got Eric Margulies.
And they go, oh, okay, good.
I'm just a punching bag for everyone.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
So here's the thing.
This occupation, because that is what it is, unless you're a propagandist at CNN, I don't even understand, I guess, what the game plan is.
I'm always trying to climb inside the mind of the empire and figure out what the hell they're up to.
But I don't know if they really understand the situation in Afghanistan any better than I do, the people making these plans.
Like, for example, here's a point of confusion for me.
This guy Karzai is a Pashtun.
He's not part of the Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras and whatever.
And apparently there's a lot of ethnically-based conflict in terms of the separations between people.
Of course, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan was drawn by the Brits to separate the Pashtuns from themselves and that kind of thing.
But, you know, I don't know.
A lot of the fighting is characterized as basically Pashtun Taliban people versus the American-backed factions who are the other ethnic factions.
And yet Karzai himself is Pashtun.
He's a Pashtun, but he's a Pashtun-lite.
He has no tribal roots, and he is sort of a deracinated Pashtun.
So does that mean that the construct there, that it really kind of is an ethnic divide between Hazaras and Tajiks on one side and Pashtuns on the other, is still right?
That he's just the exception, proves the rule, or what?
That is absolutely the rule in Afghanistan.
It's a dominant factor there.
Ethnicity, tribal ethnicity.
The Pashtun are 55% of the population.
The next biggest group, about 20-something, are the Tajiks from the north who speak a Persian-based language, Dari.
And then the Uzbeks in the northwest who speak something close to Mongol language.
Now, is the resistance almost entirely Pashtun?
I mean, they characterize all resistance as Taliban.
But is it even all from one ethnic group against the others?
Nearly all Taliban are Pashtun.
And nearly all the resistance is coming from the Pashtun, who also straddle the border with Pakistan because 15% of Pakistan's population are Pashtun, too.
The ones who the Pakistani government is fighting in the mountains right now.
But what's important is that the Pashtun were the traditional rulers of Afghanistan.
And they despised the Tajiks and vice versa.
The Tajiks looked down on them as crude mountaineers.
More important, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks immediately allied themselves with the Soviets.
And they formed one of the bases of the Afghan Communist Party.
Well, wait a minute.
Confuse me even more here.
Because it sort of seems like every faction in Afghanistan is described as people who fought against the Russians.
Even if they're different factions.
Who exactly are the collaborators?
This guy Dostum and the Haqqani faction, those guys, weren't they the resistance?
Or they were the puppets?
They were the quislings of the communists?
Let me clarify it, because I was there and I can tell you if I saw it firsthand.
Dostum, the Uzbek leader, Dostum, major war criminal, brute man, was a mainstay of the Afghan Communist Party and the Soviets.
The Tajik leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, pretended to be part of the anti-Soviet resistance.
But we have now learned, and I saw firsthand, that he spent most of his time sabotaging the Afghan anti-communist resistance.
And he and the KGB, he is a secret KGB asset.
The Soviets had promised to make him the next leader of Afghanistan.
So he was absolutely in the pocket of the Soviets.
Even though today the legend is the Lion of the Panjshir and this great nationalist blah blah blah.
Mr. Abdullah Abdullah was an aide to Massoud.
So he comes from that Northern Alliance Tajik faction that was in bed, not only with the communists, but with the Indians and the Iranians.
And also ended up as running the major part of the drug trade in Afghanistan.
The real resistance to the Soviets came from the Pashtun tribes.
And primarily from the most important Pashtun movement, which was called the Hizbi Islami, run by an engineer named Gulbadin Hekmatyar.
He's known for skinning people alive, right?
Well, he's a very ruthless man, but they did most of the fighting.
His men did most of the fighting against the Soviets.
I was with them, I saw.
Not only that, but now he's on America's death list.
And the U.S., he says, tried to assassinate him three times before 2001, and has been trying to kill him with drone, predator drones ever since.
So the real Mujahideen were the Pashtun warriors from the South.
Today, they used to be our allies.
We armed them, we helped them, financed them.
Today, we are fighting them, and we have allied ourselves with their blood enemies, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, who were the former allies of the Communists.
All right.
Well, now, let me ask you about this.
I want to get back into the current crisis in Pakistan and all these kinds of things, but I'm trying to really understand the story.
I know we've talked about this in the past before, but there are so many kind of missing puzzle pieces in my understanding here.
I'd like to see what you can fill in for me, Eric.
And that is about American cooperation, covert support, financing, training, arming, I don't know exactly, of the Mujahideen in the time after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and then fell apart.
And I'm thinking particularly about some of what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s, which I know you have your own very strong opinions about all that as well.
But then I just did this interview of Sabelle Edmonds and John M. Cole last Friday.
And the archive is there at antiwar.com slash radio.
And Edmonds, she didn't really say exactly how she knew, but John M. Cole, the former FBI agent, certainly was vouching for her credibility.
And she said that there was, in fact, she didn't even say the CIA.
She said as far as she could tell, it was the State Department.
Although, you know, how that stuff is all convoluted.
But that they were working with bin Ladens, not just with the Mujahideen, but with actual Osama relatives, basically using, ferrying Mujahideen warriors around, giving them a lift to Chechnya to go fight the Russians.
And then something that we've touched on before here on this show, which is a plan at least, to whatever degree exactly this was all done, I'm not exactly sure, but a plan, some cooperation between the Americans and like actually Al-Qaeda maybe, in terms of training the ethnic Turkic Uyghurs in western China for use against the Communist Party there.
As we all know, the neocons have a big hobby horse thing going on against China.
And apparently this was sort of kind of part of that.
I don't really know.
And Sebel says it lasted all the way up until September 11th.
Of course, all the truthers in the comment section are saying, see, Osama bin Laden is a CIA agent and the whole thing's a put on.
But, you know, what's the truth here, Eric?
Help me out.
Well, things are very murky and convoluted.
The truth is, I understand it.
I've been quoted in the Internet in stories about Sebel Edmond saying that the CIA was in cahoots with bin Laden.
Now, that's wrong.
I never said that.
And as far as I know, the CIA was never, I underline the word, never involved with Osama bin Laden.
I can't say that it didn't happen.
But as far as I know, and my sources in the region, that I never heard of such a thing.
But remember, bin Laden never had more than a couple of hundred men, if that many.
Right.
And that's the thing.
Mujahideen means anybody who is a veteran of the 80s war in Russia or in Afghanistan against the Russians.
But al-Qaeda is a much more specific definition there.
Al-Qaeda didn't really turn itself against the United States until after the Soviets, until the 1990s.
OK, so we're talking about the 1980s.
At that time, bin Laden was there with other Arab volunteers, some of whom had indeed been brought by the United States, paid for by Saudi money, who were fighting the Soviets.
They were working with Pakistani intelligence, which provide a kind of a backbone for the war logistically.
But they were not agents of the CIA.
And bin Laden was never, that I heard, in any way involved in the CIA.
Now, what I did say about the Uyghurs and the CIA was I heard from the highest level Pakistani intelligence source that the CIA had been looking at these Uyghurs, these from Chinese Turkestan, who had been exiled in Afghanistan and were being in some kind of training program, and possibly considering them for use against China in the case of a war with China.
They would send them back into, just the way they had done with Tibetans, where we had trained Tibetans in the United States in the 1950s.
But nothing ever came of this.
And that was the extent.
Well, so, well, like the training camps in Afghanistan where Uyghurs were being trained, you know, some of these guys got rounded up and taken off to Guantanamo Bay.
It's funny, it kind of goes along with what you say in your most recent article, the Henry Kissinger quote there about, it's better to be our enemy than our friend, because then you don't see the knife coming to stab you in the back.
So this did happen, or they were looking at it, but then September 11th happened, or what?
That's correct.
They were exactly what happened.
They were looking at it at September 11th.
And they were also considering using exiled Uzbeks who were in Afghanistan for use in overthrowing the communist government of Uzbekistan.
But that's the CIA's job.
They're supposed to evaluate these kind of things and look at possible assets for use against possible enemies.
But once 9-11 came, there was panic in CIA, as I understand it.
I've seen this once before over Angola, the same type of thing.
And all these sort of covert projects where suddenly they say, burn the files, shut down, terminate the people involved, destroy all the phone records and everything else, because here was a bureaucracy caught doing hanky-panky with the people who allegedly attacked the United States.
So that's what happened.
And now, oh no, we didn't have any context.
Well, of course they did.
There must have been.
The CIA would have taken thieves on the ground during the Afghan war.
They met a lot of people.
But they were not involved with bin Laden.
They were not involved with bin Laden's teacher, who I knew personally, Sheikh Azam, who was assassinated in 1989, possibly by the CIA.
We don't know.
Well, you seem to really emphasize allegedly there, and of course if there's one comment in this entire interview that will be of importance to the audience, apparently it will be that.
Eric Margulies, you're basically admitting that you know the CIA did 9-11 and that Osama worked for them.
Or else, why would you say allegedly, and why else would they burn the files even though you just explained why they burned the files?
Listeners, please don't send me mail about burning buildings and melting steel and airplanes.
I get deluged by this.
I said allegedly because we have never seen final proof positive that al-Qaeda was behind the 9-11 attack.
Well, there's footage of Mohammed Atta and them hanging out in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden, and you've got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh bragging to Yusuf Fauda, the Al Jazeera reporter, and Osama's speeches where he says why he did it and all the rest of that, right?
Well, Osama denied it, and the one tape that is often cited as proof of his kill was an out-and-out forgery, probably forged by the Russians.
But to this day, I suspect it was al-Qaeda that did it, of course.
All roads lead to their tent or their cave.
But on the other hand, the U.S. government, Colin Powell, after 9-11, said the U.S. would issue a white paper showing conclusively al-Qaeda's guilt, and it was never forthcoming.
Well, it seems to me like a big part of the theories about it is that there was all this prior knowledge, and then they allowed it to happen anyway at the very least, that kind of thing.
But what's all the prior knowledge about?
All the prior knowledge is about we're way overdue for an al-Qaeda attack real soon.
That's what John O'Neill said.
That's what all these people, they said they blamed Osama immediately, because they knew all summer long there was an attack coming and that they were the ones doing it.
Who else could it have been?
Well, Scott, I think I'm just looking for the quote here in one of my columns that I wrote, which I think was just, let's see, I wrote on September 2.
I said America's strategic and economic interests in the Mideast and Muslim world are being threatened by the agony in Palestine, which inevitably invites terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens and property.
That was a week before the 9-11 attack.
So I also could make a good estimation of what was coming.
But, you know, that's Washington.
You know, we've got the greatest intelligence.
So what, did we spend $100 billion a year?
They just revealed there's something on intelligence.
And nobody can process this huge dump of information, and there's nobody on top who really is capable of evaluating it.
So, yeah, you hear all kinds of rumors and noise, but that's not turned into actionable intelligence.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the funny thing is, like, I started out a truther when it happened, and I figure, how the hell can you have a dozen or so al-Qaeda-type terrorists in the country and the feds not know about it and be keeping tabs on them?
They must have turned a blind eye.
I think anybody would be a fool to try to dispute the fact of how convenient 9-11 was for those with a project for a new American century agenda and so forth.
But then again, you know, they used the opportunity of Hurricane Katrina to pass a law that says every time there's a rainstorm from now on, the Army's in charge.
So they're going to take advantage of whatever crisis anyway.
I'm not sure whether all that Q-bono really is enough, you know?
Well, Scott, what worries me is we're using all this murky mythology and might be and could have been or might have been to justify expanding a war now in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan.
And I am dismayed to see our president, who I respect and honor, saying that we have to crush al-Qaeda in Afghanistan when he should know perfectly well that there is no al-Qaeda left there and al-Qaeda is down to a handful of people in Pakistan.
And to see him now being led in our policy in that part of the world by the neoconservatives who right in time for Halloween have risen from the grave of Iraq and are now guiding America policy in Afghanistan, particularly this Bruce Rydell from Washington, from one of the big think tanks there, and other people in the military-industrial complex is now beating the war drums.
And my inkling is that they're going to succeed in expanding this war based on the mythology that the Taliban was somehow responsible for 9-11 just the way the Iraq war was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.
Well, all good neocons know that all Muslims in the whole world are all in on it together and you can't differentiate between any of these people.
But I guess they're liars.
Here's the thing, though, too.
A lot of people, it seems like, even within the establishment are having second thoughts about this, too.
And here you've got the president of the United States.
I think the Republican talking point is dithering and refusing to decide to go ahead and escalate any more than he already has.
You've got Biden very publicly leading a push for, let's focus on just trying to find Arabs inside Pakistan to kill and scale down the rest of this stuff, which is hardly an improvement, but it's better than putting 600,000 men in there for an effective counterinsurgency like John Nagle says we would need.
So I don't know.
Do you think McChrystal's going to get his troops, basically, is what your prediction is here?
I think he's probably going to get at least half of the troops.
There's an idea going around now that U.S. forces will withdraw to the major cities and just protect those, which is exactly what the Soviets tried and got their butts whipped.
The cities got strangled.
The roads got cut.
It's incredibly stupid.
I'm amazed that an intelligent commander like McChrystal would propose such a disproven idea.
I'm going to have to go back and read some history books.
People are worried.
Nobody understands Afghanistan in Washington.
That's the problem.
I think, if anything, they're beginning to understand that they don't understand Afghanistan.
At least they're starting to be that much in there.
You're right.
There are all these different agendas.
Right now, Karen Katowski pointed this out, the Lew Rockwell blog.
There's this article by Ralph Peters in the New York Post.
I remember from just a couple of months ago was the guy who said that the American soldier that was captured by the Taliban, that he was a traitor and they ought to go ahead and save us the trouble and execute him for us.
That's what kind of a sick, freaking warmonger this guy is.
Here he is saying, and this is kind of the line I'm hearing from a lot of pro-war people, is that even if we do everything that McChrystal wants, even if we give him all the troops in the world and spend all the money that we don't have in the world to do this, we still might lose.
We could do everything exactly right, and then Afghanistan is still going to be Afghanistan when we're done anyway.
That conversation isn't only taking place on this show, but even seems like in the Washington Post and terrible places like that.
I was with Representative Ron Paul in Washington and some Republican congressman talking about Afghanistan.
I gave him this quote that they really like from Rudyard Kipling.
About, we cannot change Asia's ways.
She is too large and too old.
And he wrote that 120 years ago or something like that.
And that is the case.
You're right, they're beginning to understand that they don't understand.
And they're beginning to question what's really going on.
They have an army in Pakistan that's putting on a semi-phony war just to earn money from the U.S.
We're paying for them.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing about a semi-phony war.
The part of it that isn't phony is the part where all the people are dead.
And the people who are the refugees.
And people who, their kids are sick, but now they can't get them to a doctor because they're on a dirt road somewhere walking.
Well, people are beginning to understand in Washington that we're dealing in Afghanistan.
Our buddies, our allies, are ex-communists or current communists.
War criminals.
Drug dealers, big-time drug dealers.
And just incompetence.
And I quoted in a recent column a wonderful editorial from the New York Times, which has been a major flag waver for the war in Afghanistan, the liberal New York Times.
A 1967 editorial about the U.S. supervised 1967 election in South Vietnam saying how President Johnson was going to restore democracy in Vietnam and this was going to change the whole course of the war, and blah, blah, blah, and on and on.
The same BS that we're being told about this war.
And equally crazy.
Well, now, I guess what we do have, though, here is a perpetual motion machine in the sense that, as you talked about before on this show, and even made it onto PBS Frontline and things like this, is that the Pakistanis have a major interest, their government has a major interest in financing the resistance, call them Taliban or not, the violent resistance in Afghanistan, because they cannot take the chance that even for a moment, Hamid Karzai and the rest of his quizzling government could actually have a monopoly on power in that land because of Karzai's and his crew's tight relations with India.
And the Pakistanis have this strategic thing, as you've taught me before, the nuclear war breaks out and the Pakistani government's plan is to evacuate to Afghanistan.
That's their backyard backup zone for when the atom bombs start flying.
So if that's their number one priority, their very survival as a state, which of course is their number one priority since they're a state, then we are paying them, we're borrowing money from China, to pay the Pakistanis, to pay the Taliban, to fight our occupation of Afghanistan.
Which is, I guess, great if you sell bombs, but other than that, everyone in the whole world is losing on this thing, it sounds like.
Well, I understand, my understanding is the Taliban and its allies, because there are really about five different Taliban movements and they've got nationalist allies too, non-religious allies, like the Haqqani group that you mentioned, and my old friend Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
They raise most of their money by taxes locally, or by voluntary support from the Afghan people who are giving them money to fight the Western occupation.
And they get money from the Gulf too, and Saudi Arabia, from individuals who think they're doing the right thing.
And taxes, because we've seen reports that 80% of all the material that's brought in for the US occupation forces comes through tribal territory in Pakistan, and the Pakistani Taliban first levies taxes on it, and then it goes across the border with Afghanistan, and the Afghan Taliban also levies taxes on it.
So in effect, we're paying Taliban indirectly through these road taxes.
Yeah, yeah, we talked with Jean McKenzie on the show from the Global Post, she's been there reporting for the last five years from Kabul, and she's talking about how everybody pays protection money, the Taliban, not just like this recent case, the Italians, that was in the news and all that, but that virtually all the USAID money, while at the same time it's supposedly going to build all this infrastructure that's going to help us build this nation and all these things, they have to pay some 10 or 20% to the gunmen who are the resistance.
It's just another symptom of that exact same paradigm of the more we invade the place, the more resistance there is, the more excuse to keep invading, etc., until, I guess, the dollar is completely broken.
I don't know what else will stop it.
It's a dirty, sordid war.
It's going to get worse when the next big bombshell it's going to break is US involvement in the drug trade in Afghanistan.
We're just at the beginning of this story now, but the US was up to its ears in the drug trade in Indochina, where the French… Yeah, the Golden Triangle, right?
Right.
And certainly while some DEA agents were killed the other day, on the other hand, you have somebody in the US occupation in cahoots with the big drug lords in Pakistan who support the Karzai government.
Well, I think it was Martin Smith saying on Frontline where the soldiers are at least admitting that, like, hey, look, what are we going to do, man?
That's not our job.
We have to… And it isn't just the Taliban who's growing the stuff.
These are the people we're trying to win over.
So, of course, we let them grow their poppies.
That's all we can do.
The idea of the CIA taking the refined stuff and exporting it to Russia, whatever, kind of beside the point there.
Oh, that's not true, but it could be.
Yeah.
Well, and what about this Karzai's brother, this report in the New York Times that he's a CIA guy?
Of course, we all remember he's the guy from the McClatchy story where he threatened the McClatchy reporter for asking him questions about, so, you're a heroin pusher, huh?
No, he's a thug, and he's the Gowliter of Kandahar.
He's put in there supported by the American Canadians, and he's the local thug who keeps order there.
But he's a major drug dealer.
He's accused of being a major drug dealer.
And the CIA agent, of course, he's on the CIA payroll.
So is his big brother Karzai.
So was King Hussein of Jordan.
So was Anwar Sadat in Egypt.
So are practically every person in a major ruling establishment in the Arab countries, and Pakistan as well.
It would be fascinating to learn what the CIA's bribery budget is for all these foreigners.
It's huge.
And, of course, you know, all the reports were that Zalmay Khalilzad had to hold his hand and tell him what to do all day long back when he was the quote-unquote ambassador there.
So I guess I wonder whether Hamid Karzai's brother, I forget his first name here, whether he's the competent one.
He's Jeb to Hamid's George Bush, you know, and he's the one actually running things.
Well, there's a dearth of capable people right now in the leadership.
They're all on the other side shooting at us, and we have to deal increasingly with these Northern Alliance people, who are the Abdullah Abdullah crowd that we were just talking about, the Tajiks, who are totally in cahoots with the Russians.
They were a long time supported by Russian first KGB, then FSB, then by the Iranians, and we were saying by India very big time too.
So these people are very shady.
They're out to the turbans in the drug trade, and they're not necessarily the friends of the United States.
I mean, they're out there for their own, but they're some very shady characters.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I guess I'd like to focus on this some more because when I think back, I guess I must have just been born an anarchist anyway, Eric, but at some point here I learned when I was pretty young that, oh, all the drug war and all that?
No, that's just a scam.
The CIA runs all the drugs, and the drug war is there just to make it more expensive, drive up the prices so they can have their covert operations, and then the examples then were, of course, all the contra cocaine of the 1980s and the Golden Triangle in Laos and Cambodia and all that during the Vietnam War, and so therefore there is no democracy.
There is no the system works or any of that.
The CIA are a bunch of dope pushers, man.
You know, in my view, that's not the case at all.
But the problem with the CIA is you're putting the CIA in Indochina, in the mountains of Indochina among the Humong tribesmen, and tell them raise a local army to fight the communists, and so they do.
But the Humong, their only currency that they deal with is opium, and so to run their little economy there, they have to grow opium, and the CIA then ended up flying it out for them on Air America planes.
By the way, pardon me for interrupting.
Everybody, you're listening to Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada, and he knows what he's talking about.
He was there for all these things.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
So that was the currency of the land, and the CIA agents and the French agents before them had to do that.
I recommend your listeners a fascinating book on this topic.
I happen to have it on my desk here.
It's called The Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy, who tracks the CIA's complicity in the global drug trade.
But in Central America, again, cocaine was a major local currency that was used.
And the CIA was forced into dealing with this, against a better judgment perhaps, but they couldn't avoid it.
Well, I think the lesson from the cocaine trade, the contra-cocaine of the 1980s, is that the CIA didn't care at all.
Better judgment, forget notwithstanding.
There was no better judgment.
It was, oh, what, we're selling a bunch of cocaine to a bunch of black people in Los Angeles?
What do we care about that?
Just a better excuse to lock them all up anyway.
Well, the drugs became a much lesser problem.
As in Afghanistan, where the U.S. war on drugs collided with the U.S. with the Bush's faux war on terrorism, and the drug people were told to shut their eyes in Afghanistan, so that today the major drug dealers in Afghanistan are our allies.
They're the big warlords that support Karzai, or bribed to support Karzai.
And don't you think that there's not a barrel of opium that doesn't go out of Afghanistan without the blessing and support of the Afghan central government, our ally?
Well, now, I've read, I'm trying to remember a good source for this, but I guess it doesn't matter.
It was just sort of a speculation kind of thing anyway, but it was that exporting some of this heroin to Russia is part of the operation.
As long as we're kicking them while they're down, let's export a bunch of heroin there and make it real cheap for them to all get addicted to while they've got no work to do all day.
Well, it's a horrible thing.
I hope that's not true.
It's akin to the Middle Ages where you dump an animal with smallpox or a body into the well and hope they all get poisoned with it.
It's hard for me to believe that in our modern age that we would want to do that, but I must say during the Cold War the Soviets were perfectly delayed to see American soldiers in Vietnam getting hooked on drugs there too.
Well, and you know, if the American Empire is willing to kill, I don't know, somewhere around a million people just in the first ten years of this century, then I don't know what's beyond them.
Why not, you know?
Well, I don't know about that figure.
It's impossible to pin down any figures on the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia, but a million might be right.
I don't know, but it's a very large amount.
But once again, the American public is not bothered at all by collateral damage, and surveys show it's not bothered by torture either.
So, you know, it's just a non-issue for most of us.
Did you see the poll where it's almost split about whether we should talk to Iran or have a war with them, and even 33% said, therefore a full-scale land invasion, regime change, occupation of Iran.
I'm actually wondering whether Americans have any idea even what the shape of Eurasia is on the map or anything.
No, we don't.
What are they doing?
There's a very funny Canadian comic named Rick Mercer who goes around the states with the university campuses, and he asked me, we're here from Canadian television, how do you feel about the fact that Canada has disappeared underwater due to a great flood and the melting of the ice caps?
Well, I would be concerned about that.
I mean, they're such ignorant.
Never mind Afghanistan.
They don't know anything about Canada, the next-door neighbor.
So it's pathetic, and it's dangerous, because these ignorant, misinformed people are led by dangerous demagogues, as we saw with George Bush.
Especially when we have all these brainiacs in the imperial court talking about why we need to have some kind of occupation, not just airstrikes and stuff, but a real occupation of Pakistan to take over those nukes.
I mean, for those people who have ever seen a picture of the old world before, what we're talking about here ultimately is occupying all the land from Jordan to India.
I mean, this is absolute insanity, man.
Yeah, it is.
It's imperial dementia.
But we don't have the troops, and we don't have the money, so these idiots who say things like that, like some of our congressmen from some of the more remote states, and the neocons and things, they're fantasizing.
But the danger is they will end up sending American troops to get killed.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I hate to do this to you, Eric, but as long as we already had this whole discussion, and this interview is going to get the bum rush of all the truthers in the comments section or something, I want to make one thing clear, which is that I never read the 9-11 Commission report, because I don't have time to waste my time on a bunch of crap.
But I have read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, and Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, and I've read Pretext for War and The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, and I've read two of the three Peter Lance books, and, of course, I've looked into every conspiracy thing in the world that they all, of course, assume I've never even looked at before or whatever.
And, oh, Ghost Wars by Steve Cole.
I mean, and then, oh, In Plain Sight is the thing by Yosef Fouda for Al Jazeera.
I mean, we have the connections here with the Yemen safe house switchboard, where all the phone calls went through and the Malaysia meeting and all these things.
You know, a blind eye and prior knowledge and all that, fine, maybe, but the straight line from Ramzi Yosef and Wali Khan Amin Shah and Abdul Hakim Murad coming up with the planes operation while they were hiding out in Pakistan in 1995, straight through to the September 11th attack, seems to me pretty clear, and not based on, oh, that's what the government says, oh, that's the official story, but based on, again, the journalism of Wright and Cole and Bamford and Fouda and all these other guys who have all looked into this.
And, you know, so I don't know.
I can't go back in time and have magic, omniscient powers, and see the whole thing as it develops and whatever, but the idea that there's what George Bush says and then the real truth about all the bombs in the towers is kind of a false dichotomy, is what I'm really trying to say.
Well, Scott, you know, I'm constantly belabored by my own readers about this, and, you know, we, you know, but I tell you, the minute I see something that I consider concrete, I'm going to be all over it like a coat of paint, I can assure you.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, too.
If I thought there was real proof, Eric, the first thing I'd do is beat you over the head with it until you agreed with me, and this is what I would beat everyone over the head with all day long, because if it was an inside job and they got away with it, well then, wow, what a great way to make people hate the government, which is my overriding priority in life.
Well, I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not capable of putting together all the pieces, and there are huge doubts.
A third of Americans, by some respectable polls, don't believe the government's story.
There's the whole question of the Israeli connection in there.
There are just so many questions, but, you know, it's still hidden.
As I said once before on this program, I'm still waiting to find out what happened with the Kennedy assassination.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the way it's going to be, too.
In fact, what really freaks me out, though, is you look at all the different theories about the Kennedy assassination that still live to this day, the mob, the Russians, the, you know, LBJ or Allen Dulles and all the different things and where the fatal shot was fired from and all this stuff.
This is how it's going to be about 9-11 50 years from now, about all the bombs.
Oh, everybody knows those towers fell at free-fall speed, and that's impossible, and blah, blah, blah.
And it's going to be like this for the rest of history now.
And this is, I think, why there's such a chip on my shoulder about it, is because here's the greatest conspiracy theory ever, the greatest one ever, and it's a bunch of crap.
Well, I hope somebody will come step forward, as I've been hoping with the Kennedy assassination, which was a tighter, organized plot, but somebody who was involved in this, if there was a plot, to say, I set bombs, I did this or that, but maybe that will still come.
We don't know.
All right.
Well, so I guess let me ask you this broader question about the American empire and the policy.
I had this incredible interview with Charles Goyette the other day, and we were basically talking about the coming financial crisis, the breaking of the dollar and the end of American hegemony.
And I wonder whether you think that there's any other way to end the empire other than Soviet Union style.
It will just completely fall apart, and our own society back here at home will be destroyed, and the rest of this.
It sort of looks like you have these interest groups that push for empire, whether it's the bomb manufacturers or foreign countries, lobbies and spies, trying to get us to fight their battles for us.
It looks like there's a cinder block on the gas pedal, and it's tied to it, and there's just no stopping this thing until the car explodes.
Well, no doubt that there's a hugely powerful war party in Washington, and it seems to have arm-twisted President Obama into doing what it wants to, which is really alarming.
He is starting to look again like Bush's third term in many ways.
But there are ways.
I hope it will stop.
Number one, as you mentioned, is the economic problems that we're having.
In 2004, Osama bin Laden did a tape in which he said, the only way to defeat the United States is to bleed it financially.
Well, I don't know if he's responsible for all of this, but we are bleeding.
There's no doubt about it.
And this will undermine the American world empire and this world imperial impulse that we have.
And as Europe and Asia get stronger and stronger, we will, in measure, get weaker and weaker.
Our days are numbered in the Pacific, I can tell you that.
I was watching the Chinese military parade from Beijing on television, and they have enough anti-ship missiles right now to blow the U.S.
7th Fleet out of the water.
The days of the Yankee traders sailing up the Yangtze River are over.
So it won't happen all in one day, but it's going to be a steady erosion of American power as far as I can see.
Well, and it's already costing our standard of living here at home so much.
I wonder whether if, I don't know, say the financial meltdown had happened, the stock market crash had begun and all that had really gotten going in September of 2007 instead of 2008.
Would the people have listened to Ron Paul then?
Would we have an end-the-empire foreign policy now because he would be in the chair instead?
Or are we just going to continue on like this, electing Republicans and Democrats who are just going to continue the bipartisan foreign policy of empire and murder?
I think we are going to, unfortunately, constay the course, as President Bush used to say.
It's hard work, but we're making progress.
We are, but there's so many vested interests, as you say, we're locked into this thing.
And again, ignorance plays such a big role in promoting demagoguery and imperialism.
It's ignorance, it's whipped up patriotism, nationalism, religious hatred.
It's all there.
You've got Fox News beating the war drums constantly, the Wall Street Journal, now the New York Times.
It's going to be very hard to turn this ship around.
It's going to take a long time.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Peter Bergen earlier too.
That's another footnote.
Eric Margulies, foreign correspondent, Sun National Media.
The books are War, the Top of the World, and American Rush.
Thanks very much for your insight on the show, as always.
Great to be with you.
Really appreciate it.
Cheers.
