Matthew Hoh, a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, discusses the Pakistani Taliban’s killing of over 130 children in an attack in Peshawar, and how the US drone war upset relations between Pakistan’s military and the northwest tribal regions – ultimately leading to the Peshawar attack.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
So our first guest on the show today is Matthew Ho.
He's formerly an official in the State Department and before that was a Marine.
He's now at the Center for International Policy, and he writes regularly also at The Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us back on the show today.
So lots of things to talk about with you.
I guess most I want to talk about Afghanistan, but if we could please start with the horrible tragedy, the massacre, terrorist attack by the Taliban in Pakistan this morning.
Latest, I have 141 killed, 132 of them children.
Yes, it's really quite horrific, but we can't let this be seen as a singular event.
We have to look at it against the scale of horrors that have been taking part in that country for many years now, and we have to view it as such as this is the consequences of war.
This is what occurs when we help foster, when we commit to policies that are going to play one group of people off against another group for our own political aims.
Organizations like the Pakistani Taliban win.
These extremist, murderous groups are the ones that profit from us playing Punjabis versus Pashtuns or Shia versus Sunni or whatever, you know, sect you want to play off against one another.
This is the consequence.
Yes, 132 dead children.
It is.
It's quite horrific.
I will say one thing, though, Scott, that maybe your listeners have noticed this too, just having had CNN on this morning and then even Al Jazeera America and a couple other stations, is the level of attention this story is getting compared to the story of the previous day in Australia with the lone gunman there who held up.
And I find that, you know, nothing was on television yesterday besides the Australian gunman.
And today this story, it's leading off the news, but it's done after three minutes.
Right.
And I think that's really instructive, too, for how we see the world.
And I have to come back to it.
Is it because the Australian two Australian victims were white, but these 132 children are brown?
Yeah.
It stokes up this.
It really is quite amazing to me that the difference in the coverage.
Yeah.
You know, if you haven't seen the new movie Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal, you'll really like it.
OK.
I won't spoil it for you, but it's yeah.
And yes, of course, that's exactly what it is, is Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, the former empire, our empire now.
They're sort of like Canada or whatever, a kind of America junior.
And so, yeah, Americans are expected to to put themselves in Australian shoes, but into the shoes of Pakistanis, even even schoolchildren.
Yeah.
Not so much.
It's terrific and it's scary.
It's true.
It doesn't it doesn't merit the attention and the sympathy that the Australian occurrence did.
Right.
But or nor is anything else.
You just had a guy kill five of his family members in Pennsylvania.
He's on the loose right now.
And, you know, that doesn't really merit that much attention.
Well, but they're underplaying that one for a different reason.
It's because he's a PTSD case, a consequence blowback from this war back draft blowing up in America's face.
Just like was predicted before the wars ever started.
Matt Bargainer wrote, how many Timothy McVeigh's are going to come home from this Iraq war?
You know, about just the level of crisis these guys are going through.
A lot of times, you know, I live a hundred miles south of Fort Hood, the real capital of Texas.
And mostly they just die on their motorcycles at one hundred and fifty miles an hour rather than killing other people.
But still, you know, these guys are wrecked, man.
I know you know a lot about that, too.
But this guy's one of them.
You know, that point about motorcycles, Scott, you are absolutely correct.
In the months after our Marines returned home from the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
So the Marine Corps sent troops over there.
After a few months, the invasion was over.
We brought all the Marines back in the Army state.
We had more Marines die in motorcycle accidents in those first few months coming home from the war than died in combat in Iraq.
It is.
These guys are wrecked.
They're absolutely there.
Absolutely.
You can't you can't go back to the way it was.
And that's what you want to do.
And it's just so difficult.
And unfortunately, you see these occurrences like you see in this defective war.
Right.
And whether it's whether it's a former American who's come home from war, kills, massacres his family in Pennsylvania or the consequences of war in Pakistan where, you know, 132 children are now dead.
After whatever happened in the rest of that country since the Pakistani army has been on the offensive the last few weeks.
God knows what type of atrocities have occurred because of that.
I mean, these are the consequences of war.
And so the fact that we act on, you know, CNN or Fox or MSNBC, they act aghast and surprised that these things is just it's really quite silly.
Well, now, so talk about the the Taliban and how much difference it makes.
I mean, there already was a Pakistani Taliban.
You know, Obama, the way I understand it, they made a deal that the CIA can target Al-Qaeda refugees hiding in Pakistan.
If you'll target the Pakistani Taliban leaders that we want, you know, they kill their enemies for them and they'll let us kill our own enemies there.
That kind of thing.
But so can you explain a little more about how you think that's really made matters worse?
Because there already was a Pakistani Taliban anyway, right up there in the Swat Valley in the tribal territories.
Yeah.
But if you go back 2001, if you were to talk to, you know, a Pakistani army officer in 2001, prior to 9-11, and you ask him, do you have insurgencies in your country?
He would say, yeah, we have two active, ongoing insurgencies that we're fighting.
And, you know, but they're in Sindh and in Baluchistan.
And what's happening in the Pashtun areas in Western Pakistan with the Pakistani Taliban are from where they get their base support, where they operate, where they live.
That was the, you know, that was the Pashtun, that's the tribal areas.
And we don't go in there.
We don't bother them.
They don't bother us.
And then you dig after 9-11, after Al-Qaeda left Afghanistan and went to Pakistan, they went to those areas.
And so the U.S. government put a lot of pressure on Pakistan to go into those areas where they had for decades had this agreement with the people who lived there that basically you don't bother us.
We don't bother you.
We stay out of your affairs and everything is good.
And that worked for many, many decades, for several decades.
But then at our behest, at our coercement, we sent the Pakistani army and the army of the Punjab basically into these Pashtun areas.
And so you're right.
You always had these Pakistani Taliban.
You had these people who were aligned with this uber religious jihadist worldview.
But you know what?
The way I describe it, Scott, is say you've got one of those got one of those people live down the street from you and you hear him rant and rave about these things.
He's like your drunk uncle who screams about whatever at Thanksgiving dinner.
But then what he starts preaching starts coming true.
Right.
And now the Pakistani army is there and they start harassing your family.
And now I got to stop you because of the dang break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Matthew.
We're talking about making matters worse in Pakistan here all over the TV from time to time today.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Matthew Ho.
That's H.O.H.
You can find him at the Huffington Post at Matthew Ho dot com.
I think it is right here somewhere.
Yep.
Dot com.
And and at the Huffington Post and what I said, I already said that it was the center for whatever the hell I was looking for here.
I got too many tabs.
The Center for International Policy, that's CIP online dot org.
Boy, what a shoddy introduction that was.
Reintroduction.
OK, so where we left off, the break interrupted us.
Matthew, we were talking about how the the government of the so-called government of Pakistan really is kind of a federated state.
How they kind of had a balance worked out with the federally administrated tribal areas, as they call them, for pretty much autonomy.
You leave us alone, we'll leave you alone.
And then somehow the Americans screwed that up.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sorry being so long winded there, but absolutely.
You know, they had this policy for decades, this balance, as you described.
And we forced the Pakistanis basically to break that balance.
We at our behest, the pack, you know, and strong on behest.
The Pakistani army violated that decades long pact between the Pashtuns in the West and the government in Islamabad.
And so what then occurred then was you had the Pakistani government interfering in these local affairs.
And that began a whole series of issues and problems, many of them tribal, many of them ethnic.
But from which an organization like the Pakistani Taliban benefit.
And then once that begins, the cycle of violence begins.
And the Pakistani army takes action as a Pakistani Taliban.
They kill innocent Pashtuns.
That adds to more support for the Pakistani Taliban.
Commits some barbaric act and the Pakistani army is now forced to go on the offensive again.
And so it just becomes a cycle where the only ones who are benefiting are, you know, the extremists.
In this case, the American government and the the Pakistani Taliban.
And now here we are, you know, basically 10, 11, 12 years later after this started with 132 dead children in a school in Pakistan.
Right.
Well, and, you know, we got there's two Shahzads I want to mention to you here.
There's Salim Shahzad.
Get his name right.
I think that's it.
The writer for Asia Times, who I interviewed him on the show.
And he was writing about how the war was Al-Qaeda, Ising, the Taliban, because the Arabs around, they had some experience.
So they became, you know, got real top leadership roles.
And then but kind of forced their more radical ideology on these more conservative Taliban types, you know, who tend to be older and and with with less wild dreams of grandeur or whatever, whereas the Al-Qaeda guys really want to get work done and build a little caliphate there in Central Asia someday if they can.
And all this kind of agenda that they kind of you know, that all that bled together through the years of fighting together kind of thing.
And then the other Shahzad I wanted to mention was Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who was extremely Americanized, was, you know, had a good job and a house and a wife and a car and a great education and all these things going for him.
Went to Pakistan, saw the aftermath of a drone strike on some of his extended family or at least their neighborhood, I guess.
I don't I don't think any of his family were in it.
But but when he went to visit family, he saw the results of the drone strike and he joined up the war on their side and he tried and luckily failed.
But he tried to blow up Times Square full of innocent men, women and children in response.
So that's another way that this drone war has already blown back on us.
And like I said, luckily, we got away with his bomb being a fizzle, but it didn't have to be that way.
Yeah.
And, you know, and I want to want to encourage people to look up and read about Salim Shahzad.
You know, he was murdered several years ago, I think, 2010.
Yeah, I think that's right.
By, reputedly by the Pakistani intelligence service.
And I credit Shahzad with most of my understanding of what is occurring there.
The book that was published after his death really needed an editor.
It wasn't that well edited, a book.
But again, it's same as you, Scott.
The understanding of how you now have Al-Qaeda in these areas.
You had this Pakistani Taliban.
You then had the Pakistani army come in and you had this perfect, perfect brew.
This stew that allowed for Al-Qaeda to basically create this Pakistani Taliban into an organization to have popular support.
And then we come along and we keep bombing them.
We keep sending more non-posturing troops in the area.
And again, now here we are, almost 2015.
And the situation is as bad as it ever was and with no resolution in sight.
And this will continue to go on, I believe, for as long as we feel we have to be somehow trying to win over there, somehow trying to get one group to be victorious over another for some type of geopolitical strategy that eludes most people in terms of what the whole purpose of it is.
Well, of course, if there's any sense in it, if there's any deliberate planning in it, it's completely stupid.
I think the best interpretation would be it's an accident when they never really did try to force the Pakistanis to stop backing the Afghan Taliban at the same time that we're just radicalizing the Pakistani Taliban and we're backing the Indians and all of Pakistan's enemies in Afghanistan, which only gives them all the reason to go ahead and continue backing the Haqqani Network.
I mean, the whole thing, it makes sense as a perpetual motion machine for war, if that's what you want.
And maybe that is what it is, but it seems more like they just don't know what the hell to do.
I saw John Bolton on Fox News today, and the only lesson from all of this, from Iraq and Afghanistan, is, see, you can't stay and you can't leave, ever.
And Obama's learned that lesson now.
See what happened?
He left Iraq and it blew up in his face.
So now he knows he can never leave Afghanistan, and that's why he's canceled the withdrawal by the end of the year and we're staying for, as we already know, until 2024 and beyond.
Yeah, my attitude is that they had no idea what they were doing in the early parts of the last decade.
No idea what they were doing.
And now at this point, there are organizations making so much money off of this that it would be such a blow to them to leave, that they're doing everything they can to convince policymakers this is the right thing, or to go on the media and say, we need to keep doing this.
It would be interesting to see what boards John Bolton sits on, where he gets his money from.
But then also, too, the other part, then, is that we can't leave, we can't change our policy, because we would be admitting a mistake.
We would be, if Barack Obama leaves, that means he is wrong, and that means the Republicans win.
You know, and so on and so forth.
So, yeah, this was accidental, we didn't know what we were doing, and now it's such a calamity that there are some groups making a ton of money off of it, and others just don't want to leave for the sake of saving face.
Right.
Yeah, of course, it's the same thing with the surge, too, where Petraeus admitted at one point, at least, that the success of the surge was to be measured in how much time could they add to what he called the Washington Clock.
So, in other words, they weren't really nation-building over there, they were just trying to stay longer.
That was the end, was the means.
Well, and that's what we saw in Afghanistan, too.
You know, maybe we'll see a smoking gun come out, but that's also a lot of what I believe went into the calculus behind Barack Obama's decision to escalate the Afghan war in 2009 was exactly that, was that I have to make it look like I'm trying.
I have to make it look like we're putting forth an effort.
So let's put forth this effort, let's go spend these lives, spend this money, spend this treasure, and then we can say we did it, and then we can leave.
We can declare victory and go home.
All right, we've got to go.
Thanks very much.
Matthew Ho, everybody.
Hey, have a good one, Scott.
Thanks.
Read him at the Huffington Post.
We'll be right back.
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