08/22/14 – Justin Pavoni – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
Our first guest today is Justin Pavone.
He's in the US Air Force.
And he's got an article here at antiwar.com slash blog Iraq, a mirror for Afghanistan's future.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Justin?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on your show.
Good to have you back.
And I'm sorry, I don't have your bio here.
You're a what rank in the Air Force and how are you writing for antiwar.com?
You're still in the Air Force.
Okay, so I'm a captain in the Air Force.
I was a 15 evaluator pilot for a while and my wife and I both put in conscientious objective packages.
So we're working on the process of getting out of the military for moral reasons.
So they still have you fly missions in the meantime?
No, they do not.
They put you kind of in a holding pen while they process your paperwork.
Right.
I see.
And all right.
Well, that's good.
So you're not AWOL.
You're trying to get out of the service and prison at the same time.
That's good.
I sure hope that you guys both get your conscientious objective status.
Do you want to talk about how that's going so far or you want to maybe not?
You know, it's taking a long time.
That's all I'll say.
It's just a long legal process and it's running its course.
So that's about all I can tell you at this point.
Okay.
Good enough for me.
All right.
So yeah, let's talk about this.
First of all, could you give us a little bit of background on your experience in flying in Afghanistan?
Okay.
So my first time in Afghanistan was 2009.
I did a four-month deployment out there from about September through January.
I was a part of the Battle of Kamdash.
That was probably the highlight of the tour.
That's when a cop, a small outpost out in northern Afghanistan got attacked.
It was named Cop Keating.
Then I went back a second time in 2011, 2012, kind of between September of 11 and March of 2012.
I started to really change my beliefs about what we were doing over there and whether or not it was morally sound.
And I decided to put in a conscientious objector package because I came to the conclusion that it was not.
And then at what point did you meet and marry your wife?
What about her views?
Did they change along with yours or already before you all got together?
How did that work?
Yes.
So my wife, Jessica, and I met at the Air Force Academy.
We were 2006 grads, so we actually met in basic training back in 2002.
We never dated until pilot training in 2008, and then we've been married since 2010, kind of been going through a change in beliefs and all that stuff, a whole number of deployments together over the last six or seven years since 2008 or so.
Great.
And then, I guess it was yesterday, I think, right, she had an article at LewRockwell.com about Ron Paul is the gateway drug here.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So for us, we found out about kind of a different ideology from Ron Paul.
Not only just an ideology, but more importantly, kind of the moral, basic moral principles that most people grow up with, you know, the golden rule or the silver rule, don't hurt other people unless you're actually being attacked.
So kind of came to the conclusion that self-defense was the only morally justifiable use of force, that what we're doing overseas is not self-defense, and it therefore doesn't qualify as something that we should be doing.
In fact, I'd say it's something that we should be, you know, speaking out against, so that's what my wife and I are trying to do, at least our small part, to contribute to the message of peace and hopefully make a small difference in one or two other people's lives, you know?
It's virtually guaranteed that what Ron Paul did for you, you are already right now doing for other people, Justin, so it's absolutely the right thing, and I'm proud of you.
I think it's great.
Okay, so now talk to us about Afghanistan.
What do you know about it?
What's your point of this article here that you're trying to get across?
Yeah, I mean, so, man, Afghanistan, that's a really long subject, and it kind of depends on what your frame of reference is, but the point of the article is kind of just to put out a forecast of what my opinion is on what you can expect to see in the next couple of years as the U.S. either draws down or doesn't draw down in the region, so...
Well, we're hearing a lot from the war parties saying, well, we see we should have never left Iraq, and because Obama got us out of Iraq, all this bad stuff happened, so that proves that we better stay forever in Afghanistan.
What about that?
Right.
So, of course, you know, unfortunately, we hear a lot about that on the media, and they never fail to forget to mention that all that stuff's a problem in the first place because we invaded a foreign country that we had no business invading, so the real lesson to be drawn is that you should not intervene in foreign countries that are none of your business.
You know, the purpose of the military, at least morally, is to defend the United States, and that means the United States' territory, and none of these countries actually attacked us.
You can make the case that there's a legitimate reason to go after Osama bin Laden because he, no kidding, did violently attack the United States.
I think that's legitimate use of the police powers to go and arrest that kind of person, put him on trial for what he did, and otherwise acquit or convict him based on the evidence, but beyond that, there's just no justification for what they're doing overseas.
And the answer to your question is that, not that we shouldn't have left, but that we should never have gone in, and that going in further is only going to make it much, much worse.
And, you know, you're seeing that in Iraq right now with ISIS, and I expect you'll see the same kind of thing in Afghanistan whenever the United States leaves, and what you'll probably hear is the same kind of rhetoric that we need to get back in Afghanistan and start bombing them again and reinstalling another puppet government, and unfortunately that is the wrong answer, you know?
What's done is done, but the best thing to do from this point forward would be to come home, start, you know, showing people what it's like to live in a free society through example, not through bombs, and, you know, expect that that's going to spread the message much better.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it seems like in Iraq, for all the years of violence, that basically the situation before was the minority rule, and with the American war it was overthrown, and the majority, the Shiites, who are more than 60% of the country, they wanted Baghdad, but they never really wanted to go much further than that.
So, in essence, the Americans stayed long enough for a new kind of permanent status quo to be reached, and what's going on now is kind of the final declaration of independence of Sunnistan there and the caliphate, but the lines aren't much different than they were when America left.
I mean, Maliki's out, but he's been replaced by another guy from the same Dawah party, of course.
That kind of thing.
In Afghanistan, though, America's been fighting against the majority this whole time for this coalition of minorities and very corrupt, you know, warlords who have a lot of resentments against them going way back to the 90s and the 80s, even before, and I wonder if, you know, it's going to be much more like the fall of Saigon type situation in Afghanistan than we've seen in Baghdad.
You know, Baghdad is still pretty much safe for the Shiites, if not for Maliki himself, right?
But, I mean, it's safe for their power to hold on to for the long term.
I don't mean security-wise on a daily basis, you understand what I'm saying.
But in Afghanistan, it seems like it's just, it's America, and without America propping up the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazaras, that they got to run like hell from the Taliban army coming their way, no?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
So, you know, the United States provided support via the CIA in the 80s to oppose what was happening with the Soviets in Afghanistan, and, you know, those guys were, as you know, called the Mujahideen, and they had two different factions, kind of the different factions that interpret Islam in two polar opposite ways.
You know, you've got what we would call the extreme fundamentalist Islam faction that became kind of the Taliban, and then you have the little bit more peaceful interpretation, and that was kind of headed up by a guy named Massoud, who was the leader of what became the Northern Alliance.
And, yeah, that's the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, and all those guys that you're talking about.
You know, I wouldn't say that we're necessarily supporting the minorities out there.
Yes, we were allied with them when we first invaded the country, but, you know, the president of Afghanistan has been a Tajikian, you know, this whole time, and that's the ethnic majority of the country, and that's also where the Taliban kind of find a lot of their support from.
I think what they're trying to do is install someone who is palatable to the majority of the population.
All right.
Hold it right there, Justin.
We've got to take this break.
That's a good place to pick it up on the other side, though, is the Pashtuns and the new prime minister and everything.
So hold it.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, Joe, I'm just posting today's show up on Liberty.me.
Speaking of Liberty.me, we're running a Jeff Tucker piece at Antiwar.com today.
He doesn't usually write about Antiwar.com-y type stuff, but today he did.
Antiwar.com-y.
I should be more careful.
Hey, I wonder if that's a web address.
We should get that and make sure it forwards.
All right, I'm talking with Justin Pavoni.
He's in the U.S. Air Force.
He's done a few tours in Afghanistan, over Afghanistan.
We're talking about the situation there.
One anecdote, Justin, the great war reporter Eric Margulies, who's actually going to be on the show about Ukraine later, he says that Massoud was KGB all along.
He wasn't really a Mujahideen.
He was the guy that pretended to fight while the Pashtun tribesmen were the ones who did all the real killing and dying in the war against the Russians.
But anyway, oh yeah, so yeah, no, you're right, Hamid Karzai is in fact a Pashtun, although I don't know how closely he has much of a relationship with the people of the South and the East and the tribal leaders there who do seem to support the Taliban.
I just don't know, really.
I need to read Anand Gopal's book is what I really need to do.
But I guess I wonder if you can comment on the guys that are working on this power sharing deal now from the last election.
What tribes are they part of and what relationships do they have?
What hope do they have of staving off a fall of Saigon type moment here from an attack by the Taliban?
Right.
So I'm trying to partially answer your question.
I'm not an expert on the current peace sharing agreement that you just referred to.
But I think the theme that you can see in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and this is sort of one of the points in my article, is that you've got foreign governments, that being the United States principally, trying to support the central governments in foreign countries.
And these areas are not designed to be, they're not organically subject to centralized control.
You've got different factions in different parts of the country that have no business living under the same label of nation state.
And it's, in my opinion, going to be inevitably something that will fall apart, just like you've seen in Iraq.
The best thing to do at this point, in my opinion, is to let the thing organically play out with the local population.
In Iraq, that means allow the central government to fall apart.
It's unsustainable.
Let the Kurdish people develop their own cultural identity.
If the Islamic State is going to become something, then it's only going to become something because the local population allows it to.
And I don't think that you're going to see them take over all of Baghdad.
You've got some serious Shia militia in the south of Iraq, and I don't think they'll put up with the kind of stuff that you're seeing in the Northwest.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, you know, the fact of the matter, in my opinion, is that you're going to see the Taliban run roughshod over this central government in Kabul one way or another, eventually.
They're hardened fighters, they're ideologically driven, and they've been fighting the Soviets and the Americans for the last two decades.
And, you know, they're already hopelessly integrated with the Afghan National Army.
And it's a matter of time, in my opinion, before you see, you know, these units falling apart and Taliban guys driving around in American military hardware.
Wow, that's a very important part there.
Integrated into the army just because they've just sent their foot soldiers to go and join it basically to await the day.
Is that it?
Well, you've been seeing a lot of these guys over the past, like, four or five years, you know, doing what's called a green-on-blue murder, essentially, where they're not really a loyalist to the Kabul government.
You know, they just join up, and they do so to get themselves close to either American soldiers or, you know, to, you know, leadership in the Afghan army.
And, you know, that's why every once in a while on the news you're seeing, you know, some officer or general even get murdered in Kabul, or, you know, so many U.S. soldiers get shot in the back.
Reality is that it would take 100 years to kind of change the culture over there, and it's not going to happen.
You know, economically, staying in Afghanistan for 100 years is just simply not sustainable.
So we'd be better off cutting our losses, stop pretending that we can enforce our type of lifestyle on foreign countries, and get back to being a peaceful country that minds its own business.
Right.
Yeah, and we don't have to split them apart, either.
You know, they can, like you're saying, I think you implied there in your previous answer that they can be a country, but they can't have a central government in Kabul that rules the whole place, not, you know, in any sustainable way, you know?
They can if that's really what the people want, but I think the only reason that that's going to sustain itself is with foreign intervention and being propped up artificially.
So once you take away the props, I think what you'll see is that that is, in fact, not going to last.
Yeah.
You know, Richard Mayberry used to always say, you know, with all the millions of enemies in the world that the U.S. government has created, at some point somebody's going to nuke D.C., and then it'll be all right.
I mean, it'll be sad, all the innocent people who died and all that, but at the end, though, we could still be the U.S.A. without Washington, D.C.
We could still be the same country.
We just wouldn't have a central government anymore, and then things would be better.
You know, not to go the other direction on your joke, I know you're joking, but you know, there's a lot of decent people in D.C. as well as a lot of, you know, what we joke around about as crooked politicians, but gosh, man, on the topic of nuclear weapons, all I really can say is that nuclear weapons are a real huge danger to humanity, and you know, it is, in fact, dangerous for, you know, any country to have them, whether it's Iran or the United States, and we'd be better off, again, leading by example and getting rid of our own stuff, pretending that we'll actually use the things again, because frankly, if it comes to that point, you know, I would go back with two wrongs don't make a right.
You know, you're not going to do any good by nuking someone back and killing another hundred thousand people or whatever it would be.
I mean, the whole idea of nuclear weapons is just insane, so you know, in my plane, we train for nuclear weapons, and I can just tell you that most guys probably, you know, they train for it.
They think that they'd never actually use it, but I think, you know, I can tell you I would absolutely never drop one of those things.
I think it's insane and criminal, and you know, hopefully none of that stuff ever happens.
The best way to prevent that would be to start leading by example and getting rid of them.
Yeah, nah, that's such an important point.
It's the most important point in the whole wide world, actually, that, you know, our society and a lot of the rest of the population of the world is just kind of on autopilot on this issue that, yeah, well, it's true, the politicians are sitting on these things, especially the Americans and the Russians, but, and, you know, as you say, the danger that they pose is, you know, nearly unimaginable.
And absolutely, I think, you know, even very powerful, very centrist, very establishment people have said we don't need these.
We could disarm, and we could still deter any attacker from ever coming out of the United States, any nation state with a return address from ever attacking us, and we could, like you say, just lead the world and say, look, we're just disarming.
We're not even mandating that you guys have to either.
We're just saying we are and you should, and that would be, we'd be so much better off just right there.
I couldn't agree more, man.
I could not agree more.
So no, that's me with you, dude, you absolutely nailed it.
And, you know, people just, I don't know.
It's funny.
It's like they don't even, they just figure, oh, well, you know, they'll never be used.
But it seems to me like it's a mathematical certainty that they will since there are thousands and thousands of them, you know, maybe not in your lifetime or mine, but maybe.
Whether or not they're used, there's a potential for them to be used so long as they exist.
And that's a terrible potential that is, quite frankly, not something that you should ever consider using even in self-defense, because it doesn't meet any, you know, any logical or rational standard of proportionality whatsoever.
You know, the people who would be harmed as a retribution for someone else dropping a nuke on you would be a bunch of innocent people that didn't have anything to do with it in the first place.
So, you know, they're just, they're atrocious and, yeah, like you said, they shouldn't exist and we should get rid of ours by bleeding.
Yeah.
Now, on the question of Afghanistan, we're about out of time here, Justin, but, you know, it's worked where ISIS is, hey, there are some bad guys and a few beheadings and a few atrocities, machine gunning civilians into their, you know, graves as they're laying in their shell graves, this kind of thing.
That kind of thing is plenty good enough to get a majority of the American people to support airstrikes, at least according to the polls, which are probably right.
Look, these guys are really bad guys.
I wonder if you think by the time this all goes down in Afghanistan and Kabul falls and the Taliban comes and starts throwing women down the well again and whatever madness, that they'll be able to use it to go back again.
Right.
So, you know, you're right.
These guys are terrible.
There's no question about that.
And you're also right that, you know, the media definitely uses atrocities to, you know, try and justifiably, you know, want to do something about what is a terrible thing.
Unfortunately, I don't think people have enough of an understanding that like what really leads to this stuff is all of the intervention in the first place.
Right.
You know, the Taliban came to power as a spinoff of the rebel fighters that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was supporting in Syria in the first place as a mechanism to try and overthrow yet another government.
And you know, it's not a big surprise that when you give weapons to what were called rebel fighters before that, you know, when they cross the border and start chopping heads off that now they're terrorists and they do atrocious stuff.
I mean, the best thing we could do is recognize that none of this stuff was happening before America decided to overthrow, you know, a large number of governments in the Middle East.
And, you know, unfortunately, now, like there's going to be some blowback, but it it's not going to get any better with more bombs.
So all these bombs you've seen in the last month or so are being used as a justification for more atrocity.
That's just a fact.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder, you know, I think people, for whatever reason, maybe they care a little bit more about Iraq than Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is just so far away.
I wonder when they finally get, as you describe it, the last couple of ten thousand troops out of there, whether we'll be able to be pressured into going back there again or whether the American people will finally have had it, you know.
But I guess it depends on how long it is before that happens.
Right.
We could be talking about later this year with a fall of Saigon moment.
It might not wait until the last American troops are gone.
Right.
Well, you know, Scott, that's why your show is so important.
That's why guys like Ron Paul are speaking the truth.
And it's not just Ron Paul.
You know, there's a lot of guys on the Democrat side like Dennis Kucinich, who's been promoting peace for several decades.
And, you know, the moment that the ideas change, you know, the country will change after that.
So when people hold different ideology and the predominant view does not support this intervention, then the actions will start changing, you know, in due time.
So first comes good ideas and then next comes action.
Well said.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on your show, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
All right, y'all.
That is Captain Justin Pavoni, U.S. Air Force.
In the process of getting out on conscientious objector status and here writing for antiwar.com.
Iraq, a mirror for Afghanistan's future.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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