04/02/10 – 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.
Hey, guess what?
Gareth Porter's here.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's it going?
It's fine, Scott.
Thanks once again for having me on.
Well, I appreciate you joining us, everybody.
You know Dr. Porter.
He is an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service, and we feature every bit of it at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
And he's been doing a lot of really great work on Barack Obama's war, escalation of the war in Afghanistan, especially for just the last few weeks here.
You want to start with the last one first here, Gareth?
Sure, yeah.
This is a piece that I've been working on for quite a while, and I'll tell you a little bit of the background.
This is about McChrystal's policy toward night raids by special operations forces in Afghanistan.
And, I mean, this is a major story.
It's really central to the politics of this war within Afghanistan, because it's admitted by everybody.
I mean, there's really nobody who denies this, perhaps outside the special operations forces professionals themselves, who wouldn't be expected to have an objective view of it.
That Afghans across the board from every part of the political spectrum absolutely hate these raids, and hate the Americans for carrying these raids out.
They are alienating everyone in Afghanistan, and have since the beginning.
But the anger has grown over the last year or two, as the number of raids have grown.
Well, pardon me, Gareth, for being so naive, but, I mean, I really don't know about this stuff.
I mean, really, I want to understand.
I can understand, easily, that if you send Marines and Army men into people's homes, doing sweeps, arresting fighting-aged males, humiliating people in front of their wives and kids and moms, and on and on like this, that you end up creating the insurgency you're trying to fight.
We saw it happen in Iraq.
It was easy to call it.
Hell, the very first interview that I did, in 2003, was Alan Bach.
And he said, now what's going to happen is, as people get attacked, the Americans are going to go out looking for the people who attacked them, and they're going to create more enemies and more enemies, and it becomes this cycle.
And this, look, we saw a million people get killed in Iraq with this same ridiculous Casey strategy of fighting the bad guys.
The Sanchez strategy.
And now you're telling me that we're getting restarted on the very same thing in Afghanistan.
My question is, how come they can't understand what is so easy to understand?
Why wouldn't they choose a different way to go about it?
Well, first of all, of course, the general answer to that question is very clear.
It's because the U.S. military does not operate, really, any differently.
The conventional forces set out to do counterinsurgency.
They're trained to do exactly what you're describing, and that's exactly what they did in Afghanistan for years and years.
And they created this vast population of detainees, which we're still dealing with today.
I mean, they ended up in Bagram, and then they filled up Bagram, and they mistreated them for years and years.
And then they started turning them over in 2005 to the Afghan police, and particularly the Afghan intelligence agency, which is known to torture these people, you know, as a matter of course.
That's another story entirely.
But my story is really about a subset of this totality of U.S. rampaging around the country and breaking into people's homes.
This is the part of it which is done by these specialists, these special operations forces, who do nothing but essentially targeted raids.
That's their whole point of being in Afghanistan.
And making enemies for the rest of the guys.
Yeah, and of course they think that they're doing it highly professionally and highly targeted, and not in the sort of indiscriminate way that conventional forces habitually do these sort of sweeps.
They supposedly base their raids on highly targeted information, intelligence.
But as we know, in Afghanistan, even more than in Iraq, the intelligence is terrible.
I mean, they simply do not have a sufficient understanding of the society, of the who's who in the villages, the culture, and so on and so forth, to know who is really a Taliban operative, who is a Taliban mid-level leader, who is a Taliban high-level leader.
They're subject to rumors, they're subject to ill-intentioned reports from people who want to get their enemies.
This has happened over and over again, it's well documented.
So, you know, there's a problem in the targeting.
And then beyond that, there's a problem, there are two other problems, with these special operations forces' night raids.
The first is that even if they have the right person, they break into people's private homes, and that means that they humiliate and alienate everybody in that home, not just the individual who's been targeted.
And so, again, you have the Pashtun tribal, you know, the whole pattern of Pashtun tribal behavior, which is that they take revenge against people who do that.
But then beyond that, you know, you also have the problem that in that village, everybody who hears the shots, the helicopters, all of the sounds of warfare that take place, they come out of their homes, they reach for their guns by their bed to see what's going on.
And as soon as they do that, they're shot and killed.
And so you have, in many of these raids, not all of them, but in many of these raids, you have innocent bystanders who are civilians who are killed by the raiding party.
And that's where you get the vast number of civilian casualties from these night raids.
But to the question of, you know, why is it that the Special Forces guys have no idea that people hate this, and that it makes the whole mission, such as it is, more difficult for the rest of the entire Army and Marine Corps there?
Right.
This goes to the very heart of the theme that you and I have talked about so many times, which is that...
It's like Officer Barbrady from South Park is running the thing.
The professionals who make war conflate what they do with the national interest.
And, you know, it's as simple as that.
I mean, they're not interested in knowing anything more than that.
They have no incentive to understand, because if they did understand, they would be out of business.
They would have nothing to do.
And, you know, of course, the person who is subject to that same principle, who is making the decision, is none other than General McChrystal himself.
He was, of course, the commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which was responsible for targeted raids in both Iraq and in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2008.
And now he shows up as commander of all NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and guess what?
The first thing he does, virtually, is to increase the number of night raids from 20 per month in May of 2009 to 90 per month by November 2009.
A more than fourfold increase in the number of raids per month.
And, you know, there's obviously a connection between his training, his background, his professional background, and what he was responsible for, and his belief that this was a great thing to do, and the policy that he pursued once he became commander.
Now, the other thing that he did, which I report in my story, I don't think anyone else has taken note of this, is that in his well-known August 2009 initial assessment, which had a special annex on civilian casualties, you know, supposedly from all sources, he failed to mention at all night raids as a problem in civilian casualties, despite the fact that during 2009 we now have the United Nations and Afghan government officials estimating that night raids now account for the majority of the roughly 600 civilian casualties attributable to allied, or what they call coalition forces, in Afghanistan.
Do you know, or do you hear anything about infighting at the Pentagon, or anything about this?
It seems like, from a certain point of view, the U.S. Army has been taken over by a covert operation by the Special Operations Command, and they put their guy in charge of the whole rest of the Army.
What about the regular Army generals beneath McChrystal, whose guys are getting sniped in revenge for what McChrystal's JSOC guys are doing in the middle of the night?
That's a very good question.
You know, I wish I could tell you that I have been in touch with my sources high in the Pentagon, or even mid-level sources in the Pentagon, who are telling me blah, blah, blah, but the fact is I don't really have those kinds of sources.
I wish I did, but I don't have those kinds of sources.
And so I can't tell you what I would like to be able to say about infighting within the military.
I think it must exist.
I think that there must be resentment on the part of the conventional military about the Special Operations forces, but I can't tell you that that's true.
It would make sense, but there's no specific evidence that I've seen so far that there's a real battle going on opposing these raids.
And you know, right now, some guy is giving his son a ride to the recruiter's office.
Right.
This moment.
Yeah, don't worry, son, I'm going to sign you up for this, and you can trust these guys.
They've got your best interests at heart.
They know what they're doing.
Well, I do know this, and I've reported on this, as you will recall.
The commander from 2003 to 2005, General Barnell, was somebody who was very skeptical about targeted raids and tried to limit them very severely and particularly would not allow any airstrikes in the context of targeted raids.
Here was somebody who was saying quite openly that we have a very limited fund of political goodwill in Afghanistan.
That is to say, the willingness of the Afghan people to tolerate foreign military forces in their country.
And by carrying out these sorts of raids, he was suggesting that we're using up that fund of goodwill very rapidly.
Now, you know, General Barnell, unfortunately, now is in a position where he's worrying about the future of his career, and he's now beginning to sort of muzzle himself on that issue and refuse to be honest about it when he talks in public.
But that's what he was saying when he was commander, and that's what he said to me in 2007.
So, you know, we do know that there have been commanders who were very skeptical, more than skeptical about these raids, and I assume that this has to be something that has continued in the conventional army.
All right.
Now, speaking of war crimes and incompetence, Anne McChrystal, I'm sure you saw in the New York Times the other day this quote from his news briefing in talking about the innocent civilians slaughtered at checkpoints across Afghanistan.
Quote, we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.
Yeah, this is interesting, of course.
I mean, McChrystal is very aggressive in his pursuit of this idea of limiting civilian casualties as much as possible.
As long as it doesn't touch on his favorite military tactic, which is S.O.
F. night raids.
And you're right, he's been very valuable about being very restrained.
You know, having trigger men in the army and the Marines be very restrained, and this included the Marja operation where he was telling infantrymen who were, let's face it, they were rather reluctant to be as restrained as he was suggesting in their march into the battle.
And so he's been very aggressive on those issues which don't touch on his pet project.
Well, you know, it sounds exactly like all the right-wing mythology I've heard about Vietnam my whole life, which is that our guys could have won that war in a day.
Man, they were forced to fight that war with one hand behind their back, and the limited rules of engagement and LBJ betrayed them.
These damn Democrats, you know this war in Afghanistan would go fine if Obama would let them shoot civilians.
Right, right.
Well, we do have plenty of people in this country who think that way, there's no question about it, who don't have the slightest regard for human life outside the borders of the United States.
You have a point, too, though, that you're talking about putting guys in a situation where they're getting shot at, and yet, you know, here they are in the fog of war with their heart racing and a rifle in their hand, and how carefully are they supposed to choose their targets now and whatever?
I mean, that's really the problem is putting them there in the first place.
I couldn't agree more.
They shouldn't be put in that position at all.
I mean, it's worse than mistake.
It's a fundamental result of the interests of the national security bureaucracy, and in this case, particularly the military bureaucracy, basically pursuing its own interests rather than the interests of either the American people or certainly the interests of the ordinary soldier who has been tricked into getting into the military on false pretenses, not understanding that he's going to be stuck there in circumstances which are absolutely intolerable.
Well, let me tell you what I think, and you tell me if I got this right, Gareth.
They don't have the troops to do the counterinsurgency strategy that wouldn't work anyway.
What a joke, but it would be hundreds of thousands of troops to do it Petraeus' way for decades to build Afghanistan until it looks like a Western European country and the pipelines only go the directions we want them to go and whatever.
It would take 400,000-plus U.S. troops.
So the mission now is simply kill people for a while and then leave?
Of course that's what the mission is.
In fact, that's de facto the mission.
That's not formally the mission, but in point of fact, that is exactly what is going on.
When they know that they can't stay?
I think they know that.
The American people will turn against this war as they turned against Iraq until the, this is in quotes, the Petraeus miracle, unquote, took place and suddenly made it appear that the United States was successful in Iraq.
The same thing is absolutely predictable in Afghanistan.
This administration knows that it cannot be reelected or that it is much less likely to be reelected, let's put it that way, if it is still engaged in a war in Afghanistan with no clear-cut exit strategy.
And that's why you have this policy, which was proclaimed by President Obama last December, of a mid-2011 point where the exit begins.
Of course, he's not saying when it's going to end, but the beginning of the end is a very significant political fact.
There's no doubt about that.
And we have lots of evidence that General McChrystal is feeling very pinched by that.
He's feeling very nervous about it.
He knows that he has limited time to try to convince the American people that we are successful.
I think that just as in Iraq, McChrystal, just as Petraeus and Odierno in Iraq were determined to try to turn U.S. public opinion around, McChrystal would still like to do that in Afghanistan.
And that's where we have Marja being turned into a city of 80,000 people and the picking of a target, which was relatively simple, knowing that this was something that could be done in a couple of weeks.
Right.
Well, just like we talked about back in 2007, the surge is for you.
The surge worked on the American people.
That's who it was for, to buy time.
The Washington Clock and the Iraq Clock.
And we've got to slow down the Washington Clock.
We've got to make Iraq look like it's okay for us to stay forever there.
And that's what you're saying they're working on here in Afghanistan.
Well, we can hold out in a couple of cities that we've been able to conquer, maybe, for, I guess, indefinitely, right?
Yeah.
I mean, we'll now see over the next several months, you know, Kandahar will be proclaimed to be the pivotal point in the war.
Right.
And once we have gone into Kandahar and occupied it, they will declare that this shows that the U.S. military is effective in Afghanistan and should be given a longer lease on life in that country.
Like Da Nang.
Well, you know, I hesitate to liken it to any particular city in another country, but I think, you know, I think that it is, in a sense, you know, there's a uniqueness about this Kandahar situation because of the uniqueness of Afghanistan.
The political circumstances there are slightly different, of course, from Iraq.
And that's what, you know, brings about this immense pressure on McChrystal and his command to show progress, quote-unquote, spectacular progress, I think it's fair to say, is what they will claim.
Now, I'm sure you got a hoot and a half out of this the same way I did when the CIA report was leaked by WikiLeaks, there, leaked to them, that showed how to buffalo the people of France and Germany into staying in the war.
Yeah, this was a great story, a great leak, of a document with an internal CIA document that was recommending that the agency and the Obama administration use the women's rights, human rights for women as the sort of argument, the main argument for Europeans to rally to the war in Afghanistan on the basis of evidence that they had come up with that this was likely to have the greatest impact on German, particularly German, public opinion.
Well, my favorite part is where Barack Obama is simply a brand.
He's basically a CIA asset.
This is how to get your women to support aggressive warfare against women.
You put Barack Obama up there, and then they go, oh, tall, dark, and handsome, and then you have him say, yes, we've got to fight to protect the women of Afghanistan.
They go, oh, he cares so much about women, and then your country will continue to send boys to Afghanistan to kill women.
And that's how you do it.
You tell the Germans, be afraid, be very afraid.
You tell the French, oh, it's all about helping the weak.
Well, it's, of course, not just an academic question, because this tactic, I would say, of citing the issue of women's rights is already in play politically in this country.
If you read the Washington Post regularly, you cannot help but notice that their coverage of Afghanistan has a very high percentage of content that has to do with the issue of women being afraid, of women opposing negotiations, and many other sub-themes, all of which relate to the idea that this is the real issue at stake in Afghanistan.
And so there's no doubt in my mind that the editors of the Post have been informed that this is the line that they are supposed to emphasize in their coverage.
I believe that journalists...
This is one interesting case where there is concrete evidence that journalists have been given tips that they should find ways to bring this issue into their stories.
Well, it makes me wonder whether Barack Obama was a CIA plot to win over the women of America and the liberals of America, who mostly, like a bunch of Frenchmen, have given up on fighting, in this case, against the war.
Well, I don't buy the idea that Obama was put into power by the...
I'm just saying, it's all marketing.
The whole thing is marketing and BS from top to bottom.
You are correct that he is regarded as potentially a resource for this conjuries of very vested interests to be able to pursue those interests in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The question, in my mind, at this moment, is really whether Obama is willing to play their game.
I think that remains to be seen.
This is going to be the drama that will play out in the coming months.
Whether he will, in fact, say it's time to negotiate and push that forward, whether he's capable of doing that, first of all, and whether he can bring it off.
Two separate questions.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter.
You can find everything he writes at ipsnews.net and at original.antiwar.com.
Thanks a lot for your time on the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, as always, Scott.