05/01/14 – Anand Gopal – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and right now I'm very happy to welcome Anand Gopal back to the show.
He used to write, this is off the top of my head, but I think The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor, and I've interviewed him many times in the past about the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and here he is at Tom Dispatch with a great new piece, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There, and I guess it's based in part on his book, and you can find different excerpts published in different places.
It's a brand new book out, which I don't have my copy yet, but I'm getting it today, and it's No Good Men Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, and the pieces I've read of it so far are just great, and all the praise on Twitter is through the roof, and so I think people will be very interested.
And from what I know of Anand's journalism, and from what I've read in this piece right here, I think it's a pretty good reason to run out and get the book, No Good Men Among the Living.
Welcome back to the show, Anand, how are you doing?
Good, thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here, and this article right here, not having read the book yet, but just this article is really great.
Again, it's at TomDispatch.com.
It's also under Tom Engelhardt's name there at AntiWar.com.
How to Lose a War That Wasn't There, The Unreported Story of How the Haqqani Network Became America's Greatest Enemy.
So I guess before we get to 2001 and the invasion after September 11th, can you take us back in history a little bit to just basically who the Haqqanis are, and perhaps what was their relationship with the Reagan administration, those kind of questions?
Well, sure.
Jalal ad-Din Haqqani was a major warlord who fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and at that time he was a very close ally of the CIA.
He was one of the people that Reagan was referring to when he called them freedom fighters.
And through that relationship and cultural relationship with the Pakistani ISI, Haqqani became very powerful in his region, in a little corner of Afghanistan.
And that was sort of something that some U.S. officials had kept in mind in 2001 when the invasion took place, but very quickly that changed.
Right.
And so why was that?
Did Haqqani just call some old guys from Ghost Warrior's days?
Well, you know, he was looking for a face-saving way to cut a deal with the U.S. in 2001, and these were his old friends, so it wasn't that far-fetched that that would be the case.
But very quickly the U.S. found other allies in the region, and that was sort of the mood at the time, which was you're either with us or against us.
So when Haqqani wasn't committing to them immediately, they went and found another warlord there, and that's what started a lot of problems.
And so now, was he a different network than the Taliban at the time?
I mean, the way they refer to them now, they're very different, I guess, but you refer to him, you say Haqqani and other top Taliban figures, so was he just basically one of Mullah Omar's men in the late 90s, 2000, 2001 era?
Well, he joined the Taliban, but he was really always distinct.
The Taliban mostly came from the rural south.
He came from a different part of the country, from the east.
And when the Taliban took power, they gave him basically sort of a cabinet position that didn't have much power, so he had a very nominal authority under the Taliban regime.
So he was allied with the Taliban, but he was distinct.
All right, now, I'm not one really to ever advocate invasions or then propping up mean old warlords in power after invading countries either, but it sort of sounds here like they made an enemy out of this guy where they didn't have to, but was the only other option giving him power that, you know, after all, he hadn't really necessarily earned from the people he was ruling at the time?
Well, I mean, there's a question of whether the U.S. should be giving anybody power or not, right?
That's a broader, deeper question.
Once the U.S. did commit to fighting the war and going into Afghanistan, then the remarkable thing was there was really nobody for them to actually fight because people like this guy, Haqqani, were actually wanting to join sides with the U.S.
But, you know, there was this idea of a set of guys who were bad guys who are always going to be opposed to the U.S., and this, again, is a with us or against us mentality, and that sort of ideological perspective did not allow these sorts of deals to take place.
Instead, the very people who tried to join the Hamid Karzai government, like Haqqani, were actually attacked and driven to the Taliban.
Yeah, I mean, the way you talk about it in the article, it sure seems like he tried quite a few times to come and suck up to the Americans or whatever you call it, you know, make peace with them, and not just did the Americans bomb them, but bombed kids, bombed, you know, anybody who could have possibly, you know, really killed the families of anybody who might have been associated with him, who might have agreed with him to go and try to work with the Americans at all.
They basically just chased him out of the country, but they didn't defeat him.
They just made him more and more powerful by driving him safe across the border into Pakistan, at least for a while, right?
Well, that's what makes it even more of a tragedy, because they didn't end up killing him or anything.
He became stronger than the other people who were killed in this process.
As you said, there were civilians.
You know, at that time, this was 2002 and 2003, anybody who was even remotely associated with him would be targeted and sent to Guantanamo or just outright killed.
And even if you weren't associated with him, even if somebody could accuse you of being associated with him, such as, let's say, you came from a village that was a mile away from his village, that was enough in 2002 to get you rolled up and sent to prison.
So that was sort of the atmosphere that was created by targeting this one person.
Right.
Well, and then I guess, to what degree is it the case that the Taliban, I mean, I don't know the history really of how that actually played out in terms of percentages and numbers of the Taliban and their fighters, their foot soldiers, their political leadership.
You know, in that era, 2001, how many of them were killed?
Was there even really any such thing as the Taliban at that point, other than, you know, Mullah Omar and his six closest friends cowering somewhere over the line in Pakistan?
Because it doesn't seem like the trouble with them started back up again until, what, 04, 05?
That's right.
And, in fact, during the invasion itself, there were thousands of people who were killed, many of them were Taliban foot soldiers.
But after that, there was no more Taliban.
The Taliban ceased to exist as an organized entity.
And most of those people who had been in the Taliban, they basically just went back to their homes.
And this is sort of, if you look at Afghan history, this is not surprising.
After the Russians had left in 1989, a lot of those Afghans who were communists switched sides and called themselves mujahideen or holy warriors.
And, you know, this is when you're in a country that's been at war for 30 years, you see a lot of this kind of side-switching to survive.
And that's what happened after 2001.
So all of these Taliban fighters, even the leadership, even people who are close friends of Mullah Omar, were coming to the American and to the Karzai government and saying, you know, look, we surrender here our weapons.
Maybe we can join the Karzai government, or maybe we consider it home.
But the U.S. wasn't prepared for that.
Instead, anybody who is seen as being a Taliban or somebody who wasn't even a member of the Taliban, but, you know, somebody could accuse them of being a member of the Taliban, those people were arrested or, in many cases, killed.
Well, yeah, and so many escaped, too.
There's a whole airlift.
I don't know what were the raw numbers there, but the Seymour Hersh report of the airlift, and plus a lot of people just, I guess, fled across the border on foot and motorcycles and whatever they could do to get into Pakistan.
But I remember, you know, there's footage in that movie The Power of Nightmares where the Americans are going, and Brits, too, I guess, going up and down mountains looking for al-Qaeda when there never really were more than a few hundred of them, and most of them got bombed by the CIA with their laser designators and all that.
So, I mean, my best understanding, Anand, was that maybe Osama and a few dozen of his closest buddies were able to escape across the border into Pakistan.
And then, like you say, the Taliban basically, after being overthrown, the ones that weren't killed basically melted away.
So here you had a giant army of occupation and nobody to kill.
So they just went around basically fighting enemies and, you know, a man with a hammer and all of that, and they ended up creating a gigantic war where they didn't even have one before.
Right, Zach.
I think man with a hammer is probably the most apt way of putting this.
And, you know, for three years all you saw was one-sided killing, more or less.
I mean, there was very little fighting against the Americans.
It was all of the U.S. forces killing people who were more often than not innocent civilians.
And that is what created the space for the Taliban to reconstitute itself.
And by 2004 and 2005, it had become a strong insurgency.
All right.
I want to talk about that a little bit more on the other side of the break.
But for now, tell us a little bit about your new book.
The book follows the lives of three Afghans.
One is a Taliban fighter, one is a warlord who's backed by the U.S., and one is a housewife, a village housewife.
And it charts their lives from 2001 until very recently.
And it uses their story to try to illuminate how this war looked like from the eyes of Afghans.
And it turns out it looks very, very differently than it does from the point of view of people here, of course.
Right.
Well, and I guess one of the excerpts that I read was part of the story of the housewife there.
And it was very interesting.
And I just have to assume that that's the least interesting story compared to the U.S.-backed warlord and the Taliban warlord, the Pakistani, or ally, the Pakistani-backed one.
But anyway, I can't wait to read that.
Again, the book is No Good Men Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.
It's just out.
It's on all your bookshelves.
And it's reviewed in all your newspapers.
Find it at Amazon.com, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
So please go and check that out.
No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal.
And so now the bumper music is going to play, and we've got to head out to this break, the insufferable break.
But that's how we do a radio show, commercials.
But then when we get back, we're going to continue this interview with the great Anand Gopal, author of this great article at TomDispatch.com, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
We're talking with Anand Gopal, and he's at TomDispatch.com right now with this great article, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There.
How America picked a fight with what's-his-name, Haqqani, and his network, where they completely didn't need to and had to wage years of war against him.
And he's also, of course, the author of the new book, No Good Men Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.
So now, we talked about, Anand, how they refused to accept this guy's surrender, basically, repeatedly, and kept bombing him and bombing him, but sort of like Sadr, they didn't ever kill him.
They just made an enemy out of him and chased him out of the country, where he's safe, on the other side of the line.
And then, eventually, they ended up chasing him.
Thank goodness they didn't do this in Iraq and chase Sadr to Iran.
Anyway, they ended up chasing Haqqani and his son and their network into Pakistan.
And that's basically who the drone war in Waziristan and the northern-administered tribal territories and all that are, right?
That's who the war's been against.
That's right.
I mean, the drone war that we've seen in the last four years pretty much started because of the Haqqanis.
There were a few drone strikes before then, but it was the Haqqani network sitting there in north and south of Waziristan and Pakistan, which has really been the recipient of these drones.
And then I think you say in the article that by now they've basically won that drone war.
They bombed so many of these guys, they even killed Haqqani's son, right?
And that now they've moved on to find other enemies to kill?
Yeah, I mean, they've killed most people in the Haqqani family, but the terrible thing about this is that even that doesn't mean the war is over, because now it's just spawned off new groups, even more radical groups than the Haqqanis, that are now in the crosshairs that we're going to continue fighting the war against.
And the way this looks, it looks like fighting in perpetuity with no end in sight.
Well, they say they're going to leave 10,000 troops.
I mean, I guess they assume they'll have an immunity deal from whoever replaces Karzai, and then they'll keep 10,000 troops there in order to continue waging the drone war.
Do you think that's about what's going to happen?
Yeah, that's right.
The drone war and night raids, targeted killings.
There are CIA paramilitary groups, either Afghans that are being armed and trained and paid by the CIA, that are running around Afghanistan, and they're going to continue doing that.
I think it's going to look a lot like some of the things we've seen in the 1980s, El Salvador and Nicaragua, these kinds of dirty wars that are just going to continue for a very long time.
Well, and then do they have anyone to fight other than the Taliban?
And who even is the Taliban?
Of course, they always lump.
I mean, here we're differentiating between Haqqani and the larger Taliban movement, or the smaller one, whatever the case may be.
But, of course, the government and the newspapers always just want to say anyone who resists American occupation, there is the Taliban.
But, well, for example, if America left, could they come back to power?
How much authority, how much manpower do they really have there?
It's not likely they can come back to power.
I mean, they're pretty strong in their areas, which is deep in the countryside.
They're not going to be able to march into the cities.
They're not going to be able to take over Kabul.
And the reason for that is because we, the U.S., is paying for the Afghan government and paying for the Afghan army.
And so the Afghan government, the Afghan army, and various other security forces are more well-funded and more well-equipped and have greater manpower than do the Taliban.
So that doesn't mean, on the other hand, though, that the Taliban are going to be defeated because these groups such as the Afghan army are not going to be able to go into these villages and try to eradicate the Taliban.
That's not going to happen either.
So it's really going to be two entrenched sides for a very long time.
Yeah, I wonder about the new Afghan army.
I've had a joke for so long, but I guess I can't deny the possibility that the special forces or whoever have been able, the contractors, have been able to figure out how to train a corps of a few tens of thousands of guys to actually be an army?
Or are they still just a joke, or what?
Well, look, you know, it doesn't take much here to hold the city because you don't need to be the most sophisticated army in the world.
You're fighting against the Taliban who are fighting in sandals and have, you know, RPGs, and that's about it.
So, you know, what it takes is you need to keep the money flowing so that most people who join the Afghan army are doing it because they need a job.
And so as long as they're in the process of getting a paycheck, there's going to be Afghans who are going to sign up for that, and so that's what's happening.
And so as long as that continues, as long as you keep pouring billions upon billions of dollars into the country, I think the Afghan army is going to hold together, and they're going to be able to defend the city.
And then, so is there any chance that we can declare victory and go ahead and leave and just keep bankrolling the government there?
I mean, not that I'm in favor of that, but it's better than occupying the place still.
Or do they really need the Americans' help to keep the Taliban and whoever else at bay?
No, I don't think they actually need U.S. soldiers on the ground to do that.
And even just last year, there have been actually very few instances of the U.S. military actually going outside the wire and fighting.
It's been almost all Afghan army and Afghan police.
As long as they're funded, as long as they keep getting weapons, they'll keep fighting.
Of course, the problem with that as well is there's no end game for that, because are we just going to pay them forever?
This is something that needs to be thought about.
But it is true that if we keep paying them, I think it will hold together, and the Taliban won't be able to take them out.
Well, of course, that is a big problem.
So let me ask you this.
That's one example of it, right?
Foreign, very high-dollar funding of their army that could not be sustainable from just domestic sources.
I wonder about the power of those who are, say, for example, fighting over the recounts and the runoffs in the recent elections and the different warlords in Kabul and all of that, and how natural any of their power is if it didn't have American firepower.
Not necessarily the whole regime, but the individuals within it, the different working parts of it.
How much power any of those warlords might have, et cetera, without American money and weapons backing them up?
Oh, they would have no power.
I would even go further and say the entire regime wouldn't last a day without American firepower and weapons and money backing it up.
The moment we pull the plug on funding, I think the government collapses.
So it's not necessarily that because the Taliban is so powerful and we're holding them off and they will sack Kabul, it's just that nobody else wants them either.
They don't have any support outside the foreigners, basically.
Yeah, and the thing is, if you look at the Afghan government, it has no revenue.
There's no taxes that are collected, there's no industry, there's nothing.
So the only way the government stays together, I mean, how do you even pay police officers?
Where do you get the money to pay the police?
It has to come from the U.S.
There's no way for this government to get money domestically.
So this is the problem.
As long as that's the case, it's a really weak government and we're propping up against an insurgency that isn't that strong, but compared to this really weak government, looks strong.
So what about characters like Dostum and Hekmatyar and some of these guys?
Aren't they the notorious warlords of the massive slaughter of the 1990s before the Taliban came to power?
That's how the Taliban came to power, was because of how horrible these guys were, that people were even willing to accept the Taliban if they would get rid of Dostum and Hekmatyar for them, right?
But now these are our guys over there, no?
Well, those are our guys, but something interesting has happened in the last 10 years where these guys like Dostum, they're in Kabul.
They're not that powerful.
But in the course of fighting the war on terror, we've created 20 new Dostums that people haven't even heard about necessarily outside of Afghanistan who are in the countryside, who hold sway over parts of the country, and are very brutal.
And they're one of the main reasons why even to this day we see poor villagers sometimes turn towards the Taliban, because there are some pretty outrageous human rights abuses that are happening daily, and a lot of those stories don't come out.
I do describe some of them in my book and sort of profile some of these new warlords that we've created in the last 10 years.
Yeah, so the only endgame is no endgame.
They can scale it down, but they can't call it quits without the whole thing falling apart, huh?
That's right.
I know it's a bleak assessment, but unfortunately that's the consequence of our policies in the last 10 years.
All right.
Well, what if I had the power, and I just made it that way anyway, would it be a matter then of Iran and Russia and India and Pakistan fighting over who rules what in a whole other era of war?
You mean if the U.S. money stopped?
Yeah, if I had my way and I forced a complete American withdrawal, what would happen instead?
A complete American withdrawal and cutting off all money would lead to the government collapsing.
You would see a repeat of the 1990s with various militias and warlords fighting against each other.
There probably would be heavy fighting in Kabul.
You may see the surrounding neighboring countries like Iran getting more involved.
Pakistan, of course, is already very involved.
So I think civil war is a short answer for what would happen.
Well, that sort of goes to show that what we've done isn't really create a democracy where people have anything like proportional representation in the country.
What we've created is massive distortions of power.
Listen, I'm going to read your book.
I can't wait to read it, Anand.
It's so great to talk to you again.
This article at TomDispatch is actually absolutely mind-blowing, I mean to say.
So thank you very much for your time on the show again.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, that's Anand Gopal, everybody, anandgopal.com, and he's also at tomdispatch.com, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There.
The new book is No Good Men Among the Living.
Buy it.
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