03/09/10 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We're going to start right off with our first guest, Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and Antiwar.com, independent historian and journalist, my favorite.
Hey, Doc, how's it going?
It's going well, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
I'm looking at your latest piece here.
It's at the very top headline of Antiwar.com today, Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Misinformation.
So this is the big new offensive, the biggest offensive in Afghanistan by the coalition of the bribed or whatever, the NATO forces and whoever else, since 2001, and I guess we have heard all these news stories about this giant invasion of this city of Marja in the Helmand province, and this was step one in the brand new escalated Obama strategy for fixing Afghanistan, I guess they would say.
So what about that was misinformation?
The point is that the idea that it was a city of 80,000 people is so far from reality that it is a bizarre example of how the military plants stories that basically are useful for its narrative but which have nothing to do with reality.
And in this case we can trace this notion of Marja as a fairly good-sized city to briefings that were done or a briefing that was done at Camp Leatherneck in southern Helmand province, which is the U.S. Marine base there.
We don't know exactly.
There was a name of a colonel mentioned in the story, but there's no quote for the person who actually gave the briefing, so all we know is that this was the origin of the story.
And clearly the idea here was to simply pump up the volume, if you will, on the significance of this target of Marja.
And it's really sort of appealing to those in the U.S. public who respond to the idea that, oh boy, we're going to take this big city.
In other words, it's targeted at those people who really have no understanding of counterinsurgency war and who still see this in very simplified black-and-white terms and think that capturing a city is really a splendid thing to do and therefore would give the offensive that the United States is now getting started under the new Obama strategy off to a splendid start.
Well, you know, for fun this morning I went to Google Maps and I got the satellite picture of Marja and I zoomed in there and my God, it's less developed than the town of Bedrock on the Flintstones, man.
I mean, you're talking about mud walls without roofs.
Well, that's about right.
I mean, there are homes, obviously, of farmers there which are actually better off than the average Afghan farmer.
I think there's no question about that.
If you've seen some of the pictures taken there right on the spot in what is now being called Marja, the little dot on the map there, you know, these farmhouses are better than most Afghan farmers, but nevertheless they're still just farmhouses out there on the desert.
And, of course, there are irrigation ditches or irrigation facilities there, which is why there's any farm population at all in that area.
Otherwise, it's simply a desert.
Yeah, in fact, if you go and look, you can see the farmland there, I guess mostly to the south of what's supposed to be, I guess, downtown Marja.
So when we're talking about this counterinsurgency warfare, and the whole thing, right, is that Petraeus is brilliant and really smart and he's a genius, and Tom Ricks will tell you all about it, and what he knows that the previous generals did not understand is that rather than just going out there to seek and destroy Gareth, you have to clear, hold, and build.
So even if they inflated the numbers of the population of Marja and made it sound like a bigger town than it is, wouldn't this be actually what they claim it to be in the rest of the narrative, which is we're going to deliver these people a government in a box and develop and revitalize their part of Afghanistan and use it to serve as a model to the rest of the country of how good it could be if you only work with the occupation?
I'm not contesting that that is indeed the strategy and the plan, but in fact this is clearly part of that overall strategy to clear, hold, and build.
There's no question that they will go ahead with all of the activities that they talk about in counterinsurgency strategy.
My point is simply that the way it was portrayed before it started by its description of Marja as a pretty good-sized city conjuring up just sort of the images of urban street fighting such as in Fallujah or even Hue or something like that, that was a way of getting the public excited about this, getting them involved, which has really nothing to do with the objective characteristics of the strategy itself.
It was simply a way of focusing the public on this, convincing them that this is big, and that when it's successful it would reverberate much more than it would have otherwise.
And again, I think what this is really all about in the overall context of Afghanistan, this huge country with a vast swath of territory that is dominated by Pashtun ethnic group, and therefore for the most part sympathetic to the Taliban for obvious reasons, or not so obvious reasons, but clearly in part due to ethnic ties and in part to their resistance to and bitterness over the control of the Afghan state and Tajik and other ethnic groups that have been at odds with the Pashtuns for decades now.
All of that is in the background of this, and it's really not going to be feasible in my view to succeed in using U.S. troops to really change the overall situation to the point that they can succeed in this.
And therefore I think what we're really seeing here is a war that is more aimed at the U.S. public than it is aimed at the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
And just to buy us off, to give us another Friedman unit or two on our clock?
Well, it does obviously offer them time in which to try to shift public opinion in the United States, and I think that as was reported in the Washington Post, and which I reported on a couple of weeks ago, that is clearly what they have in mind.
They do hope to change what they fear is a strong tendency on the part of public opinion now not to give the military that much time and to support a beginning of a drawdown by mid-2011, and the hope that that would really bring U.S. troops out of Afghanistan within a relatively short period of time.
The military doesn't want that.
I think that was the indication of the Washington Post reporters in the Post story that first pointed out that the reason for picking Marjah was that they wanted a big, loud victory in a place where it would be relatively easy, very simple, very straightforward to take control of this very small place, which they call Marjah, but which is part of a much larger district-sized area, which is also called Marjah.
I'm sorry I've tried to bring in several thoughts there, but I hope that's clear.
Wow.
So let me just complete the thought by saying that what's really at stake here is that Petraeus has put together a concept of counterinsurgency warfare that is very much about influencing the public opinion in the United States, domestic U.S. public opinion.
He lists in the counterinsurgency manual influencing target audiences, all relevant target audiences, and of course including the audience in the United States as the primary one, as one of the five major requirements for success in a counterinsurgency war.
And he goes on to discuss in rather great detail how this should be done, the idea of information warfare, the idea that it's necessary to create a counterinsurgency narrative, that it is up to the commander of the headquarters, as it's put in the counterinsurgency manual, it's up to the headquarters to establish the broad outlines of that counterinsurgency narrative.
And therefore that has to be one of the key guiding lights for the way the information war is carried out, is to support that overall counterinsurgency narrative.
And I think that's exactly what we're seeing in the case of Marjah.
We're seeing the Marines put out this story about this city of 80,000 people to support the overall narrative, counterinsurgency narrative, which in this case is all about convincing the American people that we can be successful, we can score a big victory very quickly, very convincingly, and we're on the road to success.
But what about those rural posh toons?
Is this at all about convincing them of anything?
Well, obviously they do.
Maybe the hopelessness of resisting?
They are going to do things which are aimed at convincing posh toons, no question about that.
But if I had to bet, I would bet that McChrystal understands that in the end, it is not going to be possible to convince most posh toons of the case that they want to make.
But it's too late in the game.
They don't have enough troops to hold down a sufficient part of the posh toon population to do that.
Posh toons make up something like 45% of a country of 28 million people, or maybe it's more than 28, maybe it's over 30 now.
And as I say, spread out over many provinces in an area that is far too great for the U.S. military to even make much of a dent on.
And so they're talking about dominating Kandahar and Helmand provinces.
Those are the two biggest posh toon provinces, no question about it.
But they are only perhaps 10%, maybe 15, 20% of the posh toon population.
So they have such a stone to push up the hill that I really don't believe that they realistically believe that they can accomplish what they are claiming that they want to accomplish.
So ultimately they want us to believe that they're kicking a lot of ass over there for the next year and a half or so before they cut and run, basically?
Before it's possible that not only will they begin a small withdrawal, which it's accepted now that there will be some withdrawal by mid-2011.
That, I think, there's no question about that part of it.
What they hope is that then there will be an agreement by the administration, supported by strong public opinion, to maintain a U.S. troop presence for the foreseeable future.
Now, this is, again, we're looking at something that happened under Petraeus' overall command as chief of central command in Tampa, Florida.
He's the guy who's setting the overall strategy for McChrystal.
And I think McChrystal understands that what Petraeus did in Iraq is the model.
Petraeus did not succeed in taming the insurgents.
He did not succeed in doing what Jack Keane and the Bush administration said he was going to do, which was to use military force to put a stop to the violence.
What he did was to come to terms, and he took advantage of the Iranian influence over the Shia.
And so what happens then is the United States continues to try to keep troops there as long as it's not forced out.
And they can keep troops in Afghanistan.
They can't be forced out very easily for some years, and the military always wants to stay where it is.
It wants to keep bases that it has.
It doesn't want to give them up.
And I'm quite convinced that's what we're going to see in the case of Afghanistan.
So just permanent low-level warfare against the occupied by a bunch of generals who know that they cannot win.
But after all, I guess if all the Marines, if they're surrounded and they all have their backs to each other, they sure can shoot out a lot of hot lead and call in airstrikes and stuff.
So they're not going to get Saigoned right out of the country or something like that.
It'll be like the West Bank over there forever and ever.
Well, I think that not forever and ever, but I think they see at this point the possibility of an indefinite stay, yes, for the foreseeable future, meaning five to ten years and possibly beyond.
Well, let me see if I can extrapolate out from kind of a base theory here, and then you correct me where I'm going off the story.
But it's my basic understanding from reading the likes of Chalmers Johnson and Robert A. Pape and others that occupying the Middle East is what gets us attacked by terrorists in the first place.
Occupying Iraq is what gets American soldiers attacked by Iraqis.
And if I understand correctly, over the past eight or nine years of occupation of Afghanistan, every time they put more troops in there, say around, I don't know, 2005 when the Taliban started fighting back more, they put more troops in.
And all that does is strengthen the Taliban.
All that is is exactly what they want, is American occupation, particularly in Afghanistan, in order to prove that they're right about us, the al-Qaeda guys, in order to bankrupt us and bleed us and radicalize people to become their supporters and to join their fight against the United States.
Absolutely right.
I mean, it seems like on one hand, this is the kind of thing that's going to get Americans killed in America, like what happened on September 11.
On the other hand, it also seems like the kind of thing that's going to get a lot more Afghans killed.
The more we escalate, the more they escalate, the more civilians are caught in the crossfire.
I agree with everything that you've said.
And I would simply add that, yes, that is the al-Qaeda strategy.
I don't think it's the Taliban strategy.
I think that they would prefer to figure out a way to have the foreign troops leave, for obvious reasons, because it is their country.
And for one thing, I mean, until the foreign troops leave, the Taliban is not going to be able to have power in Afghanistan.
So that's one of the reasons why I think that they're prepared to make a deal, at least for foreign troop withdrawal in return for throwing al-Qaeda under the bus.
But the point that you're making, the larger point that you're making, I think shows two fundamental things.
One, there are winners and losers in this so-called global war on terror.
The winners are the people who are carrying out the so-called war, the people who get their stars, the generals, the colonels who get promoted, who show that the military is still relevant, and the civilians who sort of cluster at the trough to get contracts and so forth.
The losers, of course, are the rest of us and the people in the target country.
So this is the system that we are saddled with, and the way this system works is that the military, as I said, always is looking for a way to extend its stay.
Now, here's where I'm going to admit to my initial mistake in reading the posture of the U.S. command in Kabul.
When I was over there, I had this briefing which I interpreted as a sign that they were not only seeing the writing on the wall, saw a negotiated settlement as inevitable, but felt that that was probably the best way to deal with it.
Now I'm having to take a second and third look at that, and I realize that that was premature.
It's much more complicated than that.
They may be in favor of negotiations, but that is not the same as being in favor of a settlement that would involve the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Right.
Well, there's a lot of different categories of negotiation that could be taking place, and a lot of different ways of...
I mean, I think we talked about the other day the possibility that Karzai was pushing for, which was going ahead and somehow bringing the Taliban, Mullah Omar, and whoever else into the government, into the coalition, give them seats in Parliament, or I don't know what, versus the American position, which is, yeah, we'll negotiate with you basically into deserting your side and joining ours one at a time.
That's right.
Completely different ideas entirely.
That's what Karzai actually believes is possible.
It's very unclear, it's very murky how Karzai envisioned a settlement with the Taliban.
I really don't know the answer to that.
The Taliban, of course, would like to see an agreement that would basically get the troops out and have some sort of process that would go on with Karzai, which would be obviously to their advantage.
The Americans obviously would like, as you said, to have a deal under which the Taliban basically lay down their arms, or large numbers of the Taliban lay down their arms and change the overall power balance within the country.
That's not very likely to happen, clearly.
Yeah, I mean, in Iraq you had the predominantly Sunni-based insurgency offered to do an awakening deal in the summer of 2003, 4, 5, 6, and 7, before Petraeus finally took them up on it.
That is not the case here.
That's exactly right.
I mean, the Sunni insurgency had its own internal reasons.
In fact, more than one very powerful motivation for trying to come to terms with the United States.
As you say, they did try very early in the war, really, and the Americans turned them down and were not interested in having a settlement which would put the U.S. military out of business.
It would take away the rationale for the U.S. military.
And so, yeah, in the case of Afghanistan, completely different situation.
There's no powerful motivation on the part of the Taliban insurgency to make such a deal.
And even Hekmatyar, who the United States and Karzai are really angling very hard to try to dangle the offer of a position in the government to him, seems to be very clear that he will not agree to lay down his arms until there is a timetable for withdrawal, which, if I'm not mistaken, is 18 months.
So, I mean, you have...
Absolutely ridiculous.
Now, this guy Hekmatyar was the CIA's man back in the 1980s, and he's also the guy that they gave I don't know how many pallets of cash or whatever back in 2001, and who bragged just a couple of years ago, boasted that he took our money, the CIA's money, and then the American people's tax dollars, and then he turned around and helped Osama bin Laden escape, and ha-ha, how do you like that, he said.
This is the guy that they're trying to bring in, just like Dostum, who likes to skin people alive and rape people en masse and whatever, who's now the, what, Secretary of Defense over there in Karzai's government, huh?
Hekmatyar is one of the more hated people in Afghanistan, I can tell you that.
There's a very widespread hatred for him, particularly in the cities and in Kabul, because he was the one who destroyed Kabul in the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1991.
And so there's a problem involved in the whole idea that the United States is trying to negotiate, or they're trying to negotiate with Hekmatyar, as though, you know, somehow or other, you know, that is in keeping with the lofty notions of war objectives that are being put forward.
The other thing is, I just want to mention, he was the ISI's man, he was Pakistan's man all along, from the beginning.
The CIA did have contact with him, but not that intense.
I mean, they were really working through ISI.
And to a great extent, the continued support for Hekmatyar after the Soviet withdrawal reflected a kind of two things, it seems to me.
One is the decision to let Pakistan have Afghanistan, with the idea that Afghanistan's not important, we don't care about it.
Pakistan wants it, okay, sure, go ahead and have it.
And secondly, the sort of self-sustaining, self-propelling character of a major covert operation or military operation, in this case the CIA's covert operation in favor of the Mujahideen.
They simply didn't want to quit, they just wanted to keep it going.
Even after the Soviets had withdrawn, and indeed, when the Cold War was really over, and this is a point that I've just really rediscovered, having read about this period of 1989 to 1992, the Cold War was over with the Soviet Union.
It was acknowledged by the U.S. government that the Soviets were no longer the Cold War enemy, even before the Soviet Union dissolved.
And yet, the U.S. support for the Mujahideen through the Pakistanis continued.
And to me, this is one of the great historic examples of this characteristic of the self-propelling, self-sustaining quality character of these kinds of operations.
They have their own life, their own logic, because they serve the interests of the bureaucracies that started them and that managed them.
Well, if you were a general in charge of a base in Kazakhstan or something, I guess you'd want to keep it, wouldn't you?
I guess I would, yeah.
You've got your own golf course and pinball table and everything else.
All right, listen, I've already kept you over time.
I know you've got to go, and so do I.
But thanks very much, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
You can find all his rights at original.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back after this.