11/13/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Next on the show is Eric Margulies, you can find his website at ericmargulies.com, he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, he writes for Sun National Media in Canada.
Welcome back to the show Eric, how are you doing?
I'm great, great to be back with you Scott.
What's going on over there, where are you at?
Well I'm sitting here in Paris, so I should say bonsoir to you and the listeners, I'm looking at the Eiffel Tower sparkling outside the window and Paris is about 65 degrees today and it just couldn't be nicer.
Well that sounds like a great time, I appreciate you taking a little time out for us on the show again.
Great always a pleasure to be with you Scott.
Okay now here's what I want to know, everything that you know about Pakistan, maybe we could start with the Prime Minister, Zardari, Mr. 10% or is it 20% now?
His father used to be called Mr. 20% as I recall, Junior is only Mr. 10%.
That's how he got that name, he's criminal the lesser there.
That's right, but he has been dogged for decades, this is Aziz Zardari, the widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, who I knew very well, he's been dogged for decades by really serious charges of corruption both in Pakistan and Europe.
He has stoutly denied them, he says they're all politically motivated by his enemies, it's hard to tell because Pakistan's courts are so utterly corrupt that you don't know what's justice and what's injustice, but most Pakistanis believe that he has very serious corruption to his name.
Okay now but he is a Prime Minister right, so there's this parliament and he's the head of it.
No, the President, the President Scott.
Oh is he the President, I'm sorry, what the hell do I know about it?
But so how is it that he's the President if he's got what, 10% in the opinion polls?
Well what happened was that when Musharraf, the military dictator who was backed by the U.S. and Britain, just sort of lost all credibility and was eased out of office and Zardari and his long-term rival Nawaz Sharif, who was a former Prime Minister, they were the last so-called democratic politicians standing.
The U.S. planned to engineer Benazir Bhutto into power as a sort of shop window dressing for democracy while having General Musharraf still running everything in Pakistan as a dictator fell apart when she was assassinated.
So there was some sort of parliamentary maneuvering, a lot of American money was spread around and in the end Mr. 10% Zardari and his bunch of cronies, he became President but he was also leader of the largest political party in Pakistan, the People's Party of Pakistan, People's National Party.
And because of that he was considered to be the front-runner and it made a certain amount of sense.
So he became almost by default the President and then he appointed a faceless, colorless Prime Minister nobody's ever heard of and he's in power but he's totally unpopular as you just said.
His popularity ratings are down around 10%, most of those people are his family and he's still a big feudal, part of the big feudal landowning structure from South Pakistan.
He's very much disliked, he commands no respect in Pakistan but as we used to say in the States about General Somoza in Nicaragua, he's an SOB but he's our SOB.
Well and how'd that turn out, pretty well?
Not so great.
Oh okay, that may be another interview altogether there.
Alright well, this doesn't sound like the kind of guy who I would choose to start a civil war.
I guess you've explained before that Pakistan is a pretty federal collection of really what amounts to four states and so now I guess the best I can tell the American government has Zardari's government invading one-fourth of that country, kind of in the name of the other three, is that it?
Or just in the name of these 50 states over here?
Well, sending the Pakistani army into the northwest frontier province, one of the four provinces, you're quite right, he really is invading a part of Pakistan and a part of which by the unwritten Pakistani constitution is technically autonomous, government troops who were never to be allowed in there, that was one of the reasons, the stipulations under which this region joined Pakistan when it was created in 1947, so the U.S. has forced Zardari to violate the Pakistani constitution and it's very serious because that very important province, not the most populous by far and one of the poorest, but still it has a lot of very angry Pashtun tribesmen up there who are raising hell and the Pakistani army is now waging full-scale war against its own people which has caused great distress in Pakistan amongst the public and in the ranks of the army, you imagine they're not happy bombing and shelling and killing their own people, however obstreperous they may be.
And now there's this whole cycle too where the more America insists that the Pakistani government kill Pakistanis with their army and engage in what amounts to a civil war and to some extent I guess major internal battles or whatever, I guess it's not so much that the Taliban or those tribesmen are trying to seize the capital or anything, despite what the right-wingers say, but to have all this going on it seems like becomes the excuse for further intervention because now we're scared that Pakistan might fall apart and of course I'm sure you're familiar with the recent Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker magazine about how the plans that they have to go in there and seize those Pakistani nukes so they don't end up in the hands of Mullah Omar.
That's right and there's no way that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are going to end up in the arms hands of anybody but the ones who control them which is the army and the intelligence service.
They're nowhere near the northwest frontier province but as you say, Scott, this has become a favorite shibboleth and rallying cry for right-wingers in Washington who know nothing about Pakistan.
What they're concerned about is Israel.
They're petrified that somehow these nuclear weapons may find their way into the hands of people who don't like Israel and that's what that issue is all about.
But the point is, what the U.S. is doing is tearing Pakistan apart, literally.
I mean the whole country is shaking, forcing its army to fight against its own people to support the U.S.
-led war in Afghanistan because that's what that's all about.
Otherwise the Americans wouldn't care so much about these tribespeople who by the way have been revolting for hundreds of years.
The Americans, but to support the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. must have the cooperation of the Pakistani army and it must have supply lines that run through these tribal territories which have been under attack.
So what we're seeing is what we used to call back in Vietnam days, mission creep.
You start a war in the badlands of Afghanistan to support, now you have to start a war in the badlands of Pakistan.
Where it's going to stop, nobody knows.
Yeah, you know it's funny, I think years ago we talked about the parallel with Vietnam where Pakistan is Cambodian.
If only we can get them in their safe haven across the border and bomb them there, then everything will be fine and of course that just leads to the rise of Pol Pot and God knows what.
Well that's right, what we're doing is radicalizing all these tribes, these so-called terrorist Taliban in Pakistan, whatever names we give them.
All they are are wild and wooly tribes and the only thing they want is to be left alone.
And we're not leaving them alone, we're bombing them, we're shelling them, we're sending vehicles and units through their territory.
The U.S. is now, with these predator aircraft and an undeclared law that's totally illegal under international law, these predator attacks, we say they're terrorists, we have a right to kill them.
We have killed, according to Pakistani media, over 800 civilians in Pakistan, in the tribal territory, and about four or five people who might be called, related to Taliban or Al Qaeda or anything like that.
Yeah, but life is cheap over there, they don't mind being murdered so much.
Collateral damage, collateral damage, and who cares, but they're mad.
We're getting the tribes riled up and as the British imperial rulers knew, don't rile up the Pashtun tribes, you'll be sorry.
Alright, well so, we have a major problem then with this war going on.
I mean, what do you think is going to happen with this government, basically the Pakistani government invasion?
Does their military, I remember in the days of Musharraf, they would go in there and surrender, or turn around and go home, but it looks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have gotten their way in the sense of being able to get Zardari to order the military to really bring war to those tribesmen, to those two, I guess what they define as the Taliban, maybe they are the Taliban in those parts of Waziristan, is it actually going to be the case that at the end of this that the Pakistani government will have boots on the ground in that, throughout that mountainous area that they never controlled before, or is this just, the bad guys are just going to run away into the hills and come back tomorrow, or what is going on?
That's right, unless the Pakistani army keeps a couple of army divisions permanently based in those areas, these guerrilla fighters will just, you know, merge into the mountains and then come right back.
But, you know, the tribes, the Pashtun tribes, particularly the Masud tribe, who are at the heart of all this problem, a very warlike bunch, they committed a grave error, and that is that they launched these suicide raids against Pakistani army targets.
For example, the army headquarters in Peshawar, in Rawalpindi, and they assassinated some ranking army officers and shot off bombs.
Well, this was a red line that the army could not tolerate, and so these tribesmen foolishly rashly drove the army now into an attack, and the army couldn't just sit still and do nothing about it.
So they've sort of, this is a self-generating crisis, and it's very bad because there's great dissent within the army about doing that, and it's radicalizing the tribesmen, and as this goes on, we're now seeing in other parts of Pakistan, that is in Punjab, the largest province, most populous, we're starting to see extremist groups sticking their heads up there and launching attacks on government targets, as well as in Sindh in the south, and there's been an uprising going in the remote western province of Balochistan now for decades.
So there's all the pots boiling in Pakistan, and we are about, we the Americans, we are about now to send more troops into this mess on faith-based policy, hoping that somehow it will all work out.
Now I don't know if this originated with Hamid Karzai himself or not, here he is citing it, and I don't know the chronology here, or how this story came to develop, but have you heard these at least rumors about mystery helicopters bringing the Taliban into battle and then taking them out again, like Americans in Vietnam?
Yeah, I really don't believe them, I don't think there's much credibility to that, but weird things go on there because you're dealing with a bunch of warlords who have very mixed, in Afghanistan, with very mixed loyalties.
There are tribal loyalties, there are clan loyalties, there are drug-dealing loyalties, there's the rent warlord that the Americans are doing, you know, it's so funny, Washington screaming at Karzai about corruption, corruption, you guys love corruption, but who's bribing everybody in Afghanistan is Washington.
That's calling the little pot black.
So these guys, maybe the weird things are going on because of the different objectives that these people have, but I don't believe that the US is ferrying Taliban troops into any specific area.
Okay, so perhaps the point here is to destroy what amounts to Pakistan at this point, and to make Afghanistan worse, to just keep the place destabilized as the end in itself, Eric?
I mean, if I'm trying to pretend for a moment that these people know what they're doing, maybe they do, and they're doing this on purpose.
Well, a lot of Pakistanis, I would say most Pakistanis believe that Washington is trying to destroy Pakistan and tear it apart as a way of getting at its nuclear weapons, and of undermining an important Muslim state, and that this is being done primarily at the behest of Israel.
That's the view, that's not my view, but that's the view that most Pakistanis have.
Certainly, the US is tearing apart Pakistan.
Now, the way it has torn apart Iraq and Afghanistan, it's as they said in the days of Vietnam, we've got to destroy it to make it safe for democracy.
And that's exactly what's happening.
We're never going to put these pieces together, I'm afraid, like in Iraq, but the Pakistan mess is just at the beginning of the explosion cycle, and it's going to get a lot worse.
Yeah.
You know, the thing I can't understand, I got the map of the world on the wall, it's kind of a cool map because it's a couple of years ago borders, but it looks like it's really old, and it has ships on it, and all this cool stuff.
So I'm looking at it, and I see that there's this triangular sort of area there to the north and west of Iran, and maybe you can count Iran in it if you want to, but it's sort of this little triangle there between China and India on the right side, and then the southern border of Russia cutting across there.
And I guess I can sort of see why, or not really why, but I can see that the geniuses at the Pentagon sit around and say, okay, well, we're carving out this piece of the center of Eurasia for us, and it's our engine country, and we're going to wage a long war there, and basically, you know, there's the Caspian Basin and all this and that.
But the problem that I have is it seems really uneconomical.
I mean, we're talking, what, at the most, tens of billions of profits for a few certain companies at the expense of trillions and trillions and the implosion of our dollar and our society back here.
I mean, this isn't just Soviet stupid.
This is worse, Eric, I think.
Well, it really is.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, it's now costing $1 million per year to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan, and that doesn't include a lot of the logistics support and naval support and air transport and bases and all this.
You know, Iraq and Afghanistan are costing us, for this year, are costing $200 billion.
That makes my hair stand on end when I see Americans who, you know, don't have enough to eat and can't get medical attention, and we're spending that kind of money on a war that has absolutely no objective and we can't win.
It is really, to use a favorite liberal term, it's obscene.
But the Nobel Prize winning president of ours, who was elected as an end-of-war president, is just charging ahead.
Who knows what's going to happen in the next couple of weeks with whether he's going to deploy more troops.
I hope that the current fracas that's going on with the American ambassador, former General Aikenberry, between him and Gates and the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton, who knows nothing about that part of the world, over troops and the leaks of the memos where the U.S. ambassador is saying, don't send any more troops because the government's too corrupt and rotten.
I hope that's a sign of a subtle change in policy and the first indication that Obama may not send troops and may be trying to throttle back on this war rather than to go forward.
But that's just my personal hope, and I don't know if it's going to happen.
Yeah, it's funny.
I was just saying the exact same thing about an hour ago on the show.
There's this tiny little bit of hope that, wow, is he really possibly, is it even possible that the president is thinking, jeez, I really shouldn't do this, and that maybe he might not do it?
I don't know.
I'd hate to have faith in anything.
It doesn't seem very plausible.
But I guess, you know, I agree with you.
It's nice to at least have a little bit of hope for a day or two until he announces that he's sending 80,000 to show on the crystal what a real man does, you know?
Well, I don't have much faith.
I have hope but not faith.
And the reason is that we saw President Obama manfully announce that he was going to get things moving in the Middle East, and he was going to order Israel to stop building settlements, and Prime Minister Netanyahu virtually slapped him in the face and said, screw you, and said we won't stop, and we went right around building settlements, and Obama backed down and shut up on the subject.
It was nowhere to be seen.
Hillary Clinton, that means that the institutional powers that be in Washington prove stronger than the president and his team.
Now we come to Afghanistan, where there's similar pressure from different organized special interests, and he may give in just as easily to them.
I think the thing that scares him the most is being called an appeaser, and they come out with all these things about Chamberlain and Munich, the favorite mantra of the right wing, of the state religion of the right wing, World War II.
You know, here's my problem with that, is if any liberal or democrat can't win an argument with these idiot neocons about Munich by now, they've got no business being up there.
This whole Harry Reid manner of operation, where a liberal is supposed to concede every single point to the warmonger, but then his argument amounts to, yeah, but I'm afraid, and I don't want to.
That's never going to win.
How easy is it to say, no, Krauthammer, you're an idiot, and here's why.
Tell me when you've had enough reasons, and I'll stop.
Come on.
Well, unfortunately, their voice is still carried by the media, and trumpeted by the media, and this whole idea of World War II.
I just wrote on my Sunday, my forthcoming column about this, about the, yesterday on the 11th of November, the Chancellor of Germany, Chancellor Merkel, was here in Paris under the Arc de Triomphe, attending the Armistice Day celebration.
This was the first.
It had never happened that a German leader had been invited by the President of France to partake in the solemn remembrance for the end of World War I. And in 1986, I think it was, German troops marched up the Champs-Elysees in the July 14th military parade, a very significant event.
This would never happen in the States.
We are so immersed, so imbued, we're reciting World War II like a mantra.
You can't turn on the TV without seeing World War II all the time.
And every political event is fitted and compared now to World War II.
Look at Bush with Iraq.
He thought he was Churchill, and he thought Iraq was somehow Normandy.
And now we're getting the same story about Afghanistan, where if we pull back the hordes, the Islamic hordes will be on us, and, you know, we don't fight a kiss on the beaches, etc., etc.
Yeah, well, and on it goes.
And, you know, of course, I guess it's possible still, isn't it, Eric, that they could turn this into a real world war.
I mean, it seems like there are enough people hell-bent on having a real, I mean, not just a pretend-in-slogan, but an actual real war of civilizations here that it's, I don't think, altogether clear that we're not going to have one.
I mean, I just finished interviewing Phil Durali about the push still to start a conflict with Iran.
I mean, what is America's relationship with the billion Muslims in the world going to look like after we've bombed Iran, too?
Well, look, the government has now announced that somebody in the government, I think it's the Treasury Department, has announced they're seizing Muslim mosques in the United States.
I mean, that's pretty brazen and extreme behavior, and there are groups in the United States who are trying to kick sand in the face of the Muslim world that would like to start a war.
But there are always these, you know, militarist groups, warlike groups in Washington who don't know much about the outside world, but are ready to fight to the last American soldier to promote their philosophy.
And we have a very warlike culture, a war party.
We've often talked about it in Washington, and they want to kill all the Muslims or go to war with the Muslims.
They want to invade Cuba.
They want to go after, they want to do something about China.
They want to keep Russia on the defensive.
So the problem is we've bitten off much more than we can chew.
We can't afford to be warlike in this manner, and we just don't know which war to fight first.
But the problem is that we're in our second war already started by Bush, and we're getting our backsides whipped, and we're broke.
We're broke.
What a great way to end the show.
Hey, everybody, no more war.
We just can't afford to slaughter these innocent people anymore, right?
That makes perfect sense to me.
That's right.
We can't afford to print any more paper.
Yeah.
Boy, have you read Charles Goyette's book?
Not yet.
Oh, Charles Goyette's got a new book called The Dollar Meltdown.
I'm taking every opportunity I can to tell everybody about it, including you just now.
Will do.
All right.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies, Sun National Media in Canada, War at the Top of the World, and American Raj are the books, and ericmargulies.com is the site.
Thanks again very much for your time, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.