04/04/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I got Eric Margulies on the line.
He writes at ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com, and also at unz.com and at lourockwell.com.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
I'm gearing up to watch this latest Afghan election carnival coming up.
Well, you know, I was reading about that in the Google News earlier, and I thought, poor Eric Margulies got egg all over his face as the American mission, the surge and counterinsurgency mission to create a modern Westphalian democratic nation state there in Afghanistan takes firm hold.
And everything you've ever said about Afghanistan over the last decade has proven wrong.
So I figured I'd bring you on and make fun of you, you know?
Well, thank you, Scott.
There are a lot of people who would like to.
You know, one thing that my fellow people in the media will never forgive is when you're right and they're wrong.
So a lot of people are unhappy with me.
Yeah, well, all right.
So now who's running?
They got I I read some was always Robert Dreyfuss had a good rundown of the different guys running together, the different running mate groups, and it's one warlord that I've heard of for each pair.
And there's five or six pairs, I guess it's yeah, this is what's known in Washington as democracy.
But I can tell you, when I was in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the Soviets were occupying it, they actually ran more democratic elections than we Americans have been running.
I'm not proud to say, really?
Yeah.
And that's not speaking highly of their process at all.
I don't think.
No, it isn't.
No, it isn't.
But at least the Soviets allowed some real opposition parties, whereas the election that will occur on Saturday is it's just Afghan Kabuki directed by the Americans in that all the candidates have been approved by Washington.
Some of them are out of CIA central casting.
And the rest are a bunch of drug dealing warlords, which we should really have nothing to do with.
We should be ashamed of dealing with them.
And the outcome has been predetermined.
I don't know who it's going to be yet, but I can tell you that it's whoever Washington wants it to be.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know, because I seem to remember that the last time they did this back in the fall of 2009, they tried to steal the election from Karzai and give it to Abdullah Abdullah.
And they even outed Karzai's brother as a CIA agent and a dope dealer.
Not that those two things would ever go together or anything on the front pages of The New York Times to try to make Karzai look bad.
But then Karzai stole the election out from under him anyway, right?
That's correct.
They flub, they flubbed the effort to rig the election, but he stole it better than they stole it.
That's exactly right.
Karzai is an interesting person.
You know, he was he was a CIA asset, that is, as I said, in CIA central casting, being held in reserve whenever they needed a leader for Afghanistan.
You can always tell who the U.S. vetted people are because they speak flawless English and wear shirts and ties and don't have long beards.
But Karzai, the problem is he's been a disobedient puppet as time's gone by and he's seen what's happening with the war.
He's tried to create a separate identity for himself as an Afghan nationalist rather than as somebody subservient to Washington.
And he said, in fact, a while back, he said the only thing that NATO has achieved in Afghanistan is to kill civilians.
So and he's doing it now.
So he's positioning himself that behind the scenes, he'll still wield a lot of influence.
Oh, so you don't think he's just going to hop on the first Learjet out of town and go live on a hillside in Switzerland somewhere?
He might do that.
He might do that, too.
There are a lot of people who are gunning for him.
I wouldn't like to be his life insurer.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, when it comes to Afghan democracy, the person of Hamid Karzai, I like to sometimes just pretend about what it's going to be like, say, you know, I don't know, 50 or 100 years in the future, looking back on the history of this, where, you know, all in the name of democracy from the very beginning, they install this guy in power.
And I remember back from the very get go on NPR, they're talking about, well, you know, he's just here as the placeholder until the first elections are held.
He's been in there the whole time.
And in 04, the BBC was reporting how his men were going around and threatening these villagers.
Vote Karzai or we'll burn your house down.
This is talk about Soviet style elections.
You got one name on the ballot, this guy.
And then it was even the American sock puppeteers in charge of him who are complaining about all he does is sit around shooting junk all day.
And and that's their complaint about him, about him is that he doesn't have enough authority to rule the country.
He's not even the mayor of Kabul.
He's a mayor of his own damn palace.
Well, that's so because he has been surrounded by American bodyguards for a long time.
They wouldn't even trust their own Afghans.
There were many plots to kill him.
But the whole thing is a sordid snake pit with Karzai and the other so-called Western backed Afghan politicians.
None of them have any credibility except for the warlords from the Uzbek and Tajik north.
And they at least Karzai is a Pashtun, which is the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan.
But the important the crazy thing with this election, the reason I say it's fraud, I don't even know that need to know the details.
It's a fraud because Taliban and its smaller ally, Hizb Islami, have been banned from the election.
And they're, in fact, boycotting it as well.
And, you know, that's like running an election in the in the U.S. and banning Democrats and saying it's a fair and square election.
So if if they could hold a fair election today, I would be willing to bet the Taliban would probably win.
Or at least substantially, they would they would win.
They would benefit tremendously, you know, at some level anyway.
And you know what?
Here's I don't understand.
I mean, even if they're not leaving and I know they don't want to leave, they want whoever wins to sign a new immunity deal and keep at least, I don't know, you know, 20 or 40,000 troops till 2024 or whenever, as long as they can, that kind of thing.
But it seems like, hey, if you're going to keep 20 or 40,000 troops there, you have to make a deal.
And that was actually the plan all along.
Right.
Of the surge was we're going to beat on them real bad for a year and a half and then we're going to bring them to the table.
I know they never really did that.
That was supposed to happen in the middle of 11.
After all, here we are still, you know, three years after that almost.
But it seems like, you know, some level they recognize right.
Holbrook recognize all these guys recognize that in order to even stay, never mind declare victory and leave in order to even stay.
They're going to have to compromise with these guys now.
Maybe they don't want to let them win elections, but they're going to have to make some kind of serious concessions to the Taliban at some point.
Right.
Because they're not going to leave themselves with the ability to really wage war against so many more.
Don't sound like that's exactly right, Scott.
The Taliban represent the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan.
They're the majority in the country.
And the problem is that the U.S. demonized Taliban from day one.
And their wife beaters and baby burners and God knows what.
And they demonized them so much that they excluded the ability to negotiate with them.
And now no American politician has the guts to come out and say we ought to make a deal with Taliban.
But you're quite right.
They're going to have to.
And the Taliban knows it.
And I can tell you what's going on right now in Afghanistan, because I saw it in the last days of the Soviet occupation.
All the Afghans who were working for the Soviets, collaborating with the Soviets, are frantically making side deals with then the mujahideen.
And today it will be with Taliban, trying to protect themselves, because they fear that when the U.S. withdraws, and particularly when the spigot of the American money is cut off, that the whole rotten apparatus in Kabul will collapse.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, they must be all cutting side deals all along.
And speaking of that, by the way, you mentioned on the show many times how Massoud, who always has you know, he's the legend in Rambo 3 and all this, what people remember as the leader of the mujahideen, that he had made a side deal with the Soviets going back I don't know how far.
And I read a thing just the other day where, was it his son or his brother or somebody like this is now one of these candidates?
That's correct.
He's tied up with the Tajik candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, easy name to remember.
Yeah.
He's actually half Pashtun too, but he's representing the northern Tajiks, what they call in Afghanistan the Panjshir Valley Mafia.
And they are very tied in with Russian, with Russian intelligence and this Northern Alliance, which we, we, the United States used to help overthrow the Taliban, are the biggest drug dealers in Afghanistan.
And not only were they the biggest then, but now they've grown even bigger because the only progress made in Afghanistan is it's increased its exports of drugs under our control.
Is there an American foreign policy there?
That's just a compromise with these guys because they have the ability to maintain some order through their criminal networks and that kind of thing or what?
They're useful as enemies of the Taliban and the Pashtun.
But you know, I think American policy has been driven by the military, by the Pentagon and the Pentagon wants to keep the Tajiks, I'm sorry, and the Uzbeks, led by the major war criminal General Rashid Dostum, who has been much in evidence, he's also involved in the electoral race, wants to keep them as valuable allies because during the Soviet occupation the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, minorities who hate the Pashtuns, collaborated with the Soviet invaders, then they collaborated with the American invaders and today the U.S. is counting on them to sustain the American presence.
Well, and geez, I'm sorry, we don't have too much time before we got to break here, but the Americans in all this time, I mean, other than the fact that Karzai is a Pashtun, have they really done anything to try to help to cultivate some sort of political representation for the Pashtun tribesmen other than the Taliban?
Have they really done anything to try to twist the arms of the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazars that they've been backing in Kabul, in power there, to try to make them really compromise?
Because it seems like Karzai is the one Pashtun with power in the city and he's just sort of, it's just ornamental or whatever that he's actually a Pashtun, no?
Well, Karzai has some support, not very broad and certainly not deep, but the Americans have frustrated attempts by Karzai to bring the Taliban into the political process.
Yeah.
We'll be right back in just a sec after this, y'all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies about these bogus elections in Afghanistan, this wonderful democracy, the Republicans and Democrats have built over there.
And I'm sure you probably saw Eric about this Associated Press photographer who was murdered this morning while covering the fake election.
Come on.
We're going to pass out the ballots to the tribesmen.
It'll be a great photo op for the AP.
And this lady lost her life reporting on it.
And when the whole thing might as well be taking place on a stage somewhere for as real as it all is.
Oh, I'm sorry.
And we can get back to that in just a second.
But I wanted to follow up a little bit on that where we left it hanging was, is there anything the Americans could have done?
I mean, assuming the decade long occupation here to try to cultivate any kind of political representation for the Pashtuns other than the Taliban?
It seems like as long as you and I've been talking, which is this whole time pretty much they don't have anybody with any force with any, you know, actual ability to fight for, you know, literally fight for them other than the Taliban.
So it's not that anybody really loves these guys.
They're pretty bad guys, but they're not as bad as like Al Qaeda types, you know, really.
And they don't have anywhere else to turn, basically, seems to be the order of the day.
All these many, many days now, the we, the United States could have tried to establish some links with the Pashtun people.
By the way, a large chunk of the Pashtun people are also on the other side of the border in Pakistan.
So they're very, very politically important.
But efforts to talk to Taliban, which were started in Qatar and then in Dubai, were failed.
They were shut down, thwarted by the U.S. efforts.
But Pakistan, to talk to its Taliban insurgents in the tribal territories, were also thwarted by the Americans who killed the Pakistani Taliban leader at the time.
So the U.S. has not wanted talks, except talks of more or less, you know, we'll do whatever you say, buanna, that kind of thing.
But they want no recognition of Taliban.
They prefer to deal with the quislings from drug dealers from the Tajiks and the Uzbeks.
And yeah, all I was getting at earlier about the drugs, too, was, you know, in the 80s, the CIA needed the money, right, for the secret wars in Central America because of the Bolan Amendment and all that.
So they had to do the covert drug dealing in order to pay for the covert machete wielding.
But in this case, they've got a blank check to do whatever the hell they want.
So I mean, although I guess I can see why their sock puppet still, you know, would like a permission slip to make as much money as they can selling heroin.
So that makes sense.
You know.
Well, drug money fuels all these warlords, plus U.S. cash that's handed over in big bags of hundred dollar bills.
But the drug trade, drug money is the only source of commerce and income in Afghanistan.
So it's very important.
Yeah.
Well, I think we remember from 08, it even broke into USA Today and the New York Times and everybody else had to admit, I think, at some point there that, boy, you know, all the cash from the global drug black market sure saved a lot of our banks from failure.
When we needed a quick injection of funds, we went to our drug cartels and said, please give us some cash.
Tens of billions of dollars a year, maybe more than that, right?
That's exactly what J.P. Morgan used to do.
Yeah, exactly.
The Fed's job.
But what I find particularly distressing, I mean, you know, I go way back into the 1980s in Afghanistan and covered two of the wars there and I was at the birth of Taliban, too.
The American media has learned nothing and continues to give support worthy of the old Soviet media to these current elections.
And I haven't seen anybody really questioning the whole process of fake elections any more than the American media questioned the fake elections across the Arab world, like in Egypt and Tunisia.
What about Saudi Arabia?
Right.
Well, you know, I think maybe part of that is that they're hopeful that the war's going to be over by the end of the year anyway, so who cares if it's on the way out anyway kind of thing?
And of course, the real worry is that, no, they're running an election of fake sock puppets against each other so that whoever wins will sign on the piece of paper that says you can stay.
You're invited to stay, please.
Well, I know it's so transparent, it's pathetic.
You know, the Roman Empire used to keep a stable of kings and monarchs in Rome for whenever they needed to send somebody out to set up a new Roman sphere of influence, they'd send one of these guys out.
We're doing the same.
But the idea of these guys who have a gun to their heads and whose total income comes from the U.S., that they're going to represent the interests of Afghanistan?
Not likely.
You know, I read this thing by Carlotta Gall, the New York Times reporter there in Afghanistan all these years, and, you know, she's done some good work and whatever.
I don't want to completely, you know, trash her or whatever, but, you know, it was this long thing.
And, of course, it had the accusations about the ISI keeping Osama for whoever, I don't know, themselves, the Saudis, whatever.
But then at the end, you know, she really started, it was a pretty long article, maybe it was the Weekend Magazine or some New York Times magazine or something.
And at the end, it talks about how, well, you know, the project of creating this Westphalian democratic nation state, multi-ethnic nation state in Afghanistan, the project is only half done and really would be a tragedy to call it off now.
And, I mean, that's as far as their imagination can work, is that if it hasn't worked yet, it's simply just because it's too early to stop.
That's the only thing that they can think of, you know.
That's pathetic.
Those kind of attitudes are worthy of babes in toy land.
Well, I'm surprised that a journalist who's been there all these years would say something like that.
As someone who knows, you know, the Afghan tribes, they think there's never going to be democracy there.
They don't want it.
They're not going to do it.
All the Pashtun tribes, 60 to 70 percent of the population, wanted to be left alone and to go and do things the way they've always done, feud and fight and, you know, grow pots and just generally be miserable, be their happy, miserable selves.
And they're hillbillies.
And they don't want anybody from the outside world.
They don't need this phony democracy that we promote, because they have their own tribal system, which is much more effective, of loya jirga, as it's called, tribal councils.
They have their own.
They've been democratic in this sense forever.
We're trying to impose a fake Western construct on them.
It's not going to work, hasn't worked, and we should really give up.
But we're paying just lip service to this.
Our real intent is not to promote democracy or women's rights, as it's been falsely claimed, but to keep our military bases there and keep the Chinese out.
Well, do the Chinese even want to come in with anything more than loafers and briefcases anyway?
I don't get it.
Oh, well, the Chinese are starting to exploit some of Afghanistan's mineral wealth, which is said to be substantial.
But we, the Americans, want to keep the military there to overwatch the Caspian oil basins, to keep in play Central Asia.
It's a complicated situation.
Unfortunately, we've run out of money to support such grandiose imperial ambitions.
Yeah, yeah, fortunately.
Well, from their point of view, how come they're picking this fight, they're so concerned with picking this fight with Russia, when if they want to pivot to Asia and they want to stay in Afghanistan and do all these things simply to contain China, don't they need Russia's help for that?
That's what Dana Rohrabacher said, he was like, don't pick a fight with Putin.
I was like, hey, that's pretty good.
And he says, we need Putin for going to war with the Chinese with.
He's right.
Good old Dana, he's he's right in this sense.
But what's happening in Washington is totally irrationality in the in American ruling circles and in the in the court media.
There's bloodlust.
We want our wars.
We love this kind of thing.
And people are thrilled in Washington because suddenly you've got a big enemy coming up again who could justify aircraft carriers and, you know, billions of worth of jet fighters and all kinds of stuff that we couldn't justify with the Afghans.
So there's a thrill about it and it's visceral and it's childish nationalism that's reasserting itself.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because it seems sort of obvious.
But then again, I think most people just really don't get that.
But, you know, I'm reminded the way you put that.
I'm reminded of the polls where residents of Washington, D.C., think the economy is doing great and everybody else's economic optimism is at the lowest levels in forever.
Right.
But they they really do live in an entirely different world than us.
Like kids.
Right.
Like you could be Donald Rumsfeld and walk down the street and nobody thinks you're crazy because they're all crazy, too.
Well, thank you, George Bush, for that.
Creating the imperial government in Washington and doubling the size of government and having all these crazies running around the beltway as national security contractors and stuff like that.
Very frightening.
But unfortunately, now we are being unsophisticated.
A senior Russian said the other day, you know, we should be taking tranquilizers, not getting so whipped up.
And I have some Republican friends of mine who say, whoa, we've got to do something about Crimea.
I said, turn around and ask your best friends to name three major cities in Crimea.
Yeah.
Or even one.
Come on.
All right.
We're done here.
We got to go.
Thanks so much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He wrote American Raj, Liberation or Domination and War at the Top of the World.
And he writes at ericmargulies.com, unz.com, and lourockwell.com.
So go and read them and get smart.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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