12/29/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm stoked today because I'm only reading the first half of headlines before they get to the point, like this one at antiwar.com today, NATO touts Afghan war end.
All right.
On the line, I got Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination.
By top of the world, he's referring to, yeah, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, kind of really high mountains area over there.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How's it going?
As you say, we're in news rich day, and much of it is baloney today.
Well, I'm sticking with the first half of this headline as long as I can.
It's the end of the Afghan war.
So hip, hip, hooray, right?
Right.
And Santa's coming around next week, too.
You know, the press, the media has been sickeningly, sickeningly subservient and obsequious to the official government line.
Wait, wait, wait.
Go back to Second Christmas here, because I'm interested in that.
When is that again?
Oh, next week.
Next week.
We get Second Christmas, everybody.
You heard him.
OK.
No, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, the media is describing the Afghan war, which has raged for over 11 years, as a mission.
And it's a end of Afghan mission.
Well, it's a mission.
When people hear the word mission, they think of missionaries and crusades and helping people with Ebola and helping the needy or rescue missions.
Afghan war was not a mission.
It was a good old fashioned colonial war.
And what makes it worse, of course, is that in spite of what the president says, the war has not ended.
It is not over.
And I predict it's going to drag on for years longer.
Now, when you say good old fashioned colonial war, I know you're speaking as a guy who knows a lot about a lot of wars and a lot of history, even before all the wars that you've been to, which is a hell of a lot.
So now how apt is that comparison, really?
Because isn't this a brave new world and era?
And isn't the empire just an empire of bases and not really a British style empire where we, you know, colonize places like Afghanistan with our own people?
Although I don't know if the Brits ever really tried that there.
But anyway, no, this is altogether different than when Belgium kills people and takes over things.
Right or not?
It's it's it's a different shape.
It's we don't stay we don't have imperial governors and imperial troops.
And what we do is we use the local guys who we have suborned or bought or bribed or offered power to.
And they run the show for us.
Just in fact, in my book, War at the Top of the World, I spent much time comparing and I called the the compared the British rule in India to what's going on in Afghanistan, because the British came in and they played footsie with the local potentates or created new ones.
And they ruled for the British.
You know, the British only ruled ruled India.
The maximum amount of British troops in India at any time was then a country of about 350 million people were 100, about 120,000 troops to rule all of India.
So obviously they did it with the natives.
And what we have in this modern form of colonialism is that we use these the locals and they become our representatives.
We don't have governors with feathers in their hats running around, but the locals do actually do our job for us.
And now, so the thing about the Afghan war, though, is that unlike Japan or Korea, we have our piece of paper.
I mean, I know it's just a ceasefire in Korea, but it's held for decades.
So more or less a piece there.
And then we stay and we stay with the permission of the government.
And we have our Okinawa.
And of course, the people of Okinawa's opinion doesn't count what their elected local representatives want don't count.
But we have the fig leaf, at least of, you know, the government in Tokyo says it's OK that we stay there.
And we certainly don't have a violent insurgency in Okinawa or in South Korea against our forces there.
But things haven't quite worked out that way in Afghanistan.
But if I remember right, the promise was that it was going to and they were going to clear, hold and build and they were going to replace, I guess, all governmental structures in Afghanistan with theirs, the government in a box with their chosen leaders to run the security forces.
And they're going to build a government here where, yeah, they could stay forever, but not have to fight forever.
They could say that the war was over and and just keep bases there on the Korean model, as George W.
Bush might have called it.
That's what he called it in reference to Iraq.
But anyway, just how bad are things when they're saying the NATO war is over?
I guess the Brits are all finally leaving, that kind of thing.
And yet just a couple of weeks ago, Obama says the American troops are staying.
Well, we dragged our NATO so-called allies, critics call them vassal states, and I would include Japan in that list into the Afghan war where NATO had absolutely no business and the European populations were largely against this military adventure.
There's no sympathy for it.
But we are.
The interesting point is, yeah, we said we were going to get out, but we're not.
And as I speak, more U.S. forces or mercenary forces are going into Afghanistan.
And we have what we have done is the old British imperial or Roman imperial system of divide and rule.
That is that we have since 2001, we've allied ourselves with two obstreperous minorities, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks, against their blood enemies, the Pashtun.
And today the situation is still the same.
And they are our allies holding Afghanistan for us.
But the Pashtuns will not accept it.
And so, OK, say, for example, I don't know, I was the president and I said, everybody pack up your stuff and go.
That's it.
There's no more money, no more military support for the government in Kabul.
Could they hold the parts of Afghanistan?
It would just be two countries then with a new name and you'd have Pashtunistan and then you'd have, you know, the rest of the parts of Afghanistan would break off and maybe even join with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan or or, you know, without the American distortion in power there, would it be that the Taliban would would march right in and we'd be right back to where we were on September 10th, 2001, when they had the Northern Alliance completely cornered and on their last leg?
It's possible that's the worst case scenario for Afghanistan.
Taliban remains the most popular and authentic Afghan political party, even though we don't like it, call them terrorists.
They call us terrorists, too.
The Taliban probably would overthrow the government, the puppet government in Kabul underline the word puppet, because we just changed Afghan rulers the way we changed socks, kicked out Karzai and brought in a new guy from a former banker.
And, you know, rule of thumb, any Afghan who dresses in Western suits and speaks impeccable English is a graduate of CIAU.
It's one of our guys who we've changed.
This I'm referring to Ashraf Ghani, the new president, who's a decent fellow, but he doesn't represent Afghanistan any more than I do.
Maybe not even as much.
Yeah.
Well, now, so I was reading this thing in the London Review of Books and it was actually a book review of five or six different books about the British war in Afghanistan.
It's really interesting.
And talked about, you know, the replicating their their antique failure from the 19th century in the Helmand province and all that kind of thing.
And and I forgot what my point was going to be.
Margalise, I'm sorry.
It was going to be good, Scott, whatever it was going to be.
Let's see.
Is the Brits in Helmand and their massive failure and leaving?
And oh, I know what it was.
I don't remember exactly how I was going to get there, but it was going to be some kind of reference to the terrible civil war of the 1990s that lasted from the end of the Soviet occupation, basically, until anyway, I'm sorry, music's playing.
We got to take this break.
But I'll come up with a question about that on the other side of this.
If you'll bear with me.
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And Tom Scott sent you.
All right, so.
Well, I had all that time and I couldn't think of a good question, only the one that I was going to ask.
Which was, do you think that right now, to whatever degree, the Americans are some kind of cork on a bottle holding violence down, in fact, and that if they leave, it'll, quote unquote, prove the hawks right that we have to stay.
Of course, they'll never examine the question of whether they should ever invade these countries and destroy them in the first place.
But just like Max Boot wrote about Libya, the lesson of Libya is when you invade a country, you've got to invade the son of a bitch and stay there forever and ever with one hundred thousand troops to make sure that nothing bad ever happens there.
I don't think he mentioned the word Iraq in his article anywhere.
But anyway, I didn't notice that he was enlisting in the army to go and garrison Libya either.
Oh, yeah.
All Silver Star Max Boot.
Yeah, no, he's got all his purple hearts.
Don't worry.
No, no, he doesn't.
But so anyway, do you think that's right, though, that that horrible, much worse civil war will break out when if America ever finally does leave there?
It sort of seems like the same thing with Iraq.
We could reinvade Iraq and drive the Islamic State out of Mosul.
But then when we leave in 15 more years or eight more years or whatever it is, then we'll have more or less the same situation to, you know, be an excuse to go back to again and again.
Scott, as you noted, I've covered 14 wars, many of them third world conflicts.
And I've one of my rules that I learned from this is never, never go to war against the people where they live.
You know, the Afghans, they they're part time fighters.
They don't do it around the clock like we do fight for.
Well, they go home, they have lunch, they rest, they siesta, then they come back and they fight some more.
That's their tempo of war.
Very medieval.
But they can keep this up, as an Afghan said.
Wonderful line.
He said, you Americans have watches.
We have time and they're perfectly happy to fight for the next 50 or 60 years.
What what we're doing is we've been defeated militarily in Afghanistan.
We will not admit it and nobody will admit it.
So the the U.S. forces are being thinned out and they are withdrawing to more easily protected perimeters around Kabul, the capital, Bagram, the U.S. air base, maybe Kandahar in the other part of Afghanistan.
And this garrison, it's will be will overwatch the Afghan puppet army, which we pay for and will and the U.S. Air Force Naval Aviation will fly overhead to keep this garrison in power.
The British did the same thing in the late in the eighteen hundreds.
And it's just going to be like that until they bring Jimmy Carter back to power or something.
That's right.
What we're looking at really something in Iraq, by the way, is native troops under white officers, the old British French colonial model.
Well, let me ask you, as long as you bring that up for PR purposes, and I'm not encouraging this, but it's my fear is that for PR purposes, that they can't just rely on local forces with white officers and air power in Iraq because it'll take too long to get Baghdadi and drive the Islamic State out of power, Mosul that way for their PR timetables and that they're going to end up sending in the Marines.
Am I wrong about that?
Well, we don't need that many troops.
You know, Islamic State has been wildly exaggerated.
It's probably at most twenty five thousand guys in pickup trucks with the automatic rifles scattered like the wind by U.S. special forces.
There may be some marine units by Kurds, other mercenary forces.
It's not a military challenge.
The Afghans are a bigger military challenge because they know how to fight.
They've been fighting us for a long time, since 2001.
They fought the Soviets from 1979 to 1989.
And Scott, I was in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen in the field during the Civil War period that you mentioned.
Two things, two points from that.
Number one, the the communist government in Kabul that had been abandoned by the Soviets and the Najibullah government actually stayed on much longer than anyone, including myself, expected and held on till finally the Taliban stormed into Kabul.
Secondly, the the civil war will be backed by outsiders.
And we must not forget new players in this conflict, which would be Russia or a renewed player, Russia and India, which is taking a very prominent role in Afghanistan, encouraged by the U.S.
The U.S. is hoping that the Indians will eventually send in troops there to keep the Pax Americana.
Hmm.
And now, if it's fair, I'm sorry, I didn't warn you or anything, but can I ask you real quick about what's going on in Libya?
Of course.
It seems like there's a pretty big split, you know, fighting between East and West and presumably some sort of Mujahideen type factions versus CIA, CIA backed, at least, you know, ostensible, moderate, secular types in alliance with Egypt.
But I don't really know.
What do you know?
What's the status of that conflict right now?
It's a big fat mess and even the Libyans don't understand it.
But what happened was that Libya is breaking up, dissolving into its constituent tribal and regional parts.
Libya was never really a united country until until the days of Gaddafi.
Western and Eastern Libya was pretty much independent of each other.
I remember Gaddafi telling me when I interviewed him, he said that if I am overthrown or the Western powers try and get me out, he said Libya is just going to disintegrate into chaos.
And, you know, he was absolutely right.
So you have you have local groups who are called Islamists, for want of a better term, fighting groups who are backed by Egypt's military dictatorship, backed by the Western powers.
There are probably some Western special forces still there.
Everybody's shooting at everybody else.
And as of now, there's no real government in sight.
I think we're going to be left with Libya and chaos for a long time.
Well, I guess the good news is that nobody's paying any attention to it, because if they were, then all the pressure would just be more trainers, more special forces, more CIA laser pointers or whatever.
Well, that's because the main reason for that is that there's a glut of oil on the market.
If the oil price supplies were very tight and prices were very high at one hundred and twenty dollars a barrel or something like that, an oil tank in Libya being knocked out by a rocket would be a major international story.
Right now, nobody cares.
And the French and the Americans and the Egyptians hold the whip hand over the useful part of the Libyan economy.
And that's funny because that's one of the stories that I have here.
And it's in the French media is the only one I have at France24.com about them blowing up an oil tank there.
Well, you know, when the French ruled Chad, which is just to the south of Libya, a very interesting country, the French colonial rule over Chad, Chad was divided into two regions, Chad utile and Chad inutile, which was useful, Chad and useless.
And the French would pay attention only to Chad utile.
We could end up that way with Libya, too.
Yeah, they just never really had American style public relations to help them with stuff like that, I guess.
They just go ahead and call it exactly how they see it.
All right, well, so well, so worse war for how long that I mean, you say that I mean, it sounds nobody wants this war forever, right?
Is it going to be civil war for the capital forever or is it going to be much more like, well, the the tribes sort out who's who and who has how much, you know, natural power on the ground?
And then they move forward like that.
Yeah, talk about Libya.
They'll they'll eventually sort out some kind of modus vivendi there, I would think, or maybe another colonel will emerge to consolidate power.
It is also there's always the threat of an Egyptian invasion.
Egypt has long coveted Libya's oil, but Libya's oil was controlled by the Western powers.
So Egypt didn't dare barge in.
Now, Egypt's military junta is eyeing Libya's oil hungrily.
And if things get too chaotic, Washington and Paris may give Egypt the OK to go ahead and invade Libya to restore order, of course, to restore order.
Yeah.
And yeah, they've proven the new Egyptian regime has certainly proven they can get away with anything as far as the Americans are concerned.
Not that I would advocate punishment, but they go ahead with all the carrots, too.
Here's all your fighters.
Here's all your weapons.
Here's all your money.
It's it's really one of the paramount examples of hypocrisy that I've seen in the land of hypocrisy, which is the Middle East.
All right, so that's the great Eric Margulies.
He's at Eric Margulies dot com at UNZ dot com, UNZ dot com.
And of course, at Lew Rockwell dot com as well.
Thanks for coming back on the show.
Cheers, Scott.
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