11/12/15 – Ann Jones – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First up, Ann Jones.
She has worked with women's organizations in Afghanistan since 2002, writes regularly for Tom Dispatch, is the author of Cobble in Winter, and They Were Soldiers, How the Wounded Return from America's Wars, The Untold Story.
And here she's got a great one at TomDispatch.com.
We also ran it under Tom's name, of course, at AntiWar.com.
It's called Afghanistan After, quote-unquote, ironical quote-unquotes there, Afghanistan After the American War.
Welcome back to the show, Ann.
How are you?
I'm good, thanks very much.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And, yeah, I was going to joke something along the lines of, well, the president said the war would be over by the end of 2014, which is almost a full year ago now, so the war must be doing really good by now, if it ain't actually over, right?
Well, it's officially over, and I'm finding that a lot of Americans have forgotten all about it.
You know, we've moved on to other countries and other problems, and, of course, to this election.
But it still goes on in Afghanistan.
It hasn't ended there.
In fact, now the Taliban seem to be in possession or having what's being called heavy influence in a good half of the country.
Well, and this much was obvious back at the beginning of 2014, to pick a time on the line, that this is how it was going to be, that the Americans can't withdraw without everything they've done becoming undone once they're gone.
Yes, I think that's quite clear now.
But the problem, there's also a great problem if the military stays, in that the whole time we've been there, we have put what we call our aid and the wonderful things we've done for this country into the military.
The military has absorbed almost all the funds that we supposedly gave to the country in aid as well as all the funds that go to the military directly through the Pentagon and the defense budget.
So you can't win a war of ideology with the military.
And we should have realized that long ago, but we keep trying to do it.
And so we just keep creating more and more enemies.
And this could go on in theory indefinitely because we have not invested in the state, the nation of Afghanistan.
That's all been pretense.
You know, we put our old crony, religious fanatic, Khamuja Hadeen leaders, warlords, into office.
And the corruption has permeated both the American position there and the Afghan government's.
And so the situation just goes on and on.
All right.
Now, so as the government would have explained this thing to all of us or a third grader back in 2001 or 2002, well, what we're going to do, we're going to create a democracy.
No more of these horrible warlords and Taliban fanatics.
We're going to create a system whereby, you know, you could imagine that the people will have more or less the proper amount of representation in some form of new parliament where they don't need to fight anymore because they're all participating in the system and basically with relative amounts of power to their population, et cetera.
And yet all they've done is back these or those chosen groups in ways that have completely distorted their power.
And they have disincluded the Taliban and everybody that they represent all this time.
So now it's just a matter of all those distortions having to play themselves out and settle back down to natural amounts of power because the Americans aren't going to keep funneling.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe they will.
But assuming that the Americans don't continue to funnel tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into their military every year, they're going to have to figure out another way to do it.
Right.
Well, this is pretty complicated.
Remember that the democracy that we supposedly established there, we picked the leaders and then told the Afghans to vote for them.
Right.
And most of the people we made them vote for in these elections were people that the Afghans themselves thought should preferably be tried as war criminals or failing that since that seemed a remote possibility.
They should be excluded from holding office in Afghanistan again.
But we conveniently put them all back in the government.
And the Afghans do go out and vote.
But the elections have become increasingly corrupt, increasingly full of fraud.
And then the international community has sort of signed off on that as though, well, this is good enough for Afghans.
Right.
So the population, which really was trying to believe in that democracy and work towards rebuilding their country, has become completely disillusioned over the years.
And now this recent capture of Kunduz, the city of Kunduz by the Taliban, is kind of the last straw.
And the younger generation is now leaving Afghanistan in droves.
Well, now, as far as the elections, I remember even back in 2004, the first time that Karzai stood for election, he'd already been put in power by the Americans.
But there were quotes even in the BBC where his henchmen were going around telling people, vote Karzai or we will burn your house down.
And the whole thing was they were basically terrorized into doing it.
Entire villages basically rounded up and forced at gunpoint to vote for him.
So that's how it's always been, is picking and choosing.
Although I kind of wonder about that.
Well, let me put it this way.
Hypothetically, could they have done it better?
Or this is the best the American empire can do when it comes to nation building on the other side of the planet Earth here?
Well, let me go back to your previous question about can we keep throwing money at this place?
Because that in a way answers this question as well.
Tom Englehardt has a great piece on Tom Dispatch today about the scam of the way America makes war.
Because most of this money that has been supposedly thrown at Afghanistan, or a great part of it, has really stayed right here in the United States in the pockets of the already rich.
There are, you know, all the arms manufacturers and the military contractors, the private contractors who are called in to support the military and to build roads and do all sorts of construction.
They're all making out like bandits.
And one reason we see such terrific inequality here at home these days is that a lot of that 1% is getting rich off the way America does wars.
So we will keep throwing money away in this war and in all the other places we're fighting or are proposing to fight in the future.
And, you know, if any of these Republican candidates wins the next election, the first thing they'll do is start a war.
Or the Democrats for that matter.
Well, I hope the Democrats have learned a little something.
And especially, you know...
Well, I'm sorry, Anne, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
Okay.
And then when we get back, we'll talk about that.
But yeah, it's certainly right what you say.
Whenever I hear people say Afghanistan is the most corrupt country in the world, I say, more corrupt than America?
Yeah, right.
Anyway, hold it right there.
It's Anne Jones from TomDispatch.com.
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Trying to get these wars ended.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Ann Jones about the never-ending war in Afghanistan.
14 years of failure and counting.
Obama, of course, announced after the Taliban took Kunduz for a while, anyway, back in October, that the 10,000 troops that are there are staying.
Like we didn't know that back when he signed a deal with Karzai to stay till 2024 back in 2012.
So here we are on our way to 2024 and talking about, well, speaking of Kunduz, you write in your article movingly about your friends who were there and what happened to some of them and what life is looking like in the seemingly near-again Taliban future there.
Well, for most of this time of war in Afghanistan, women have not been able to work very well in outlying cities.
Most of the women's movement has taken place in the capital.
But in recent years, the organization Women for Afghan Women, which opened women's shelters in Kabul, has been able to go to work in the provinces.
And they had a shelter and they also run family centers where people who have family problems can mediate and stop some of the intense domestic violence that goes on.
And they had a whole staff working in Kunduz, as they have in several different provinces in Afghanistan now.
And this was a great triumph for the work of women.
They've been at it for a decade or more trying to achieve this, and they had done it.
And they were the ones targeted by the Taliban who came into the city.
The Taliban supposedly went around with a list looking for the women they had picked out to be exterminated, to be executed because they were providing help to women.
Most of them were able to flee the city.
It's the one time a burqa comes in handy.
They managed to get out of the city and several of them made it to the capital.
And then they got calls on their cell phones in the capital.
So they're not safe even there.
And in the meantime, of course, one of the first things the Taliban who entered Kunduz did was to burn down the women's shelter and the family mediation center.
They burned or otherwise destroyed three radio stations that had been established by women to broadcast into the homes of women who were still not free to leave their homes.
So the women were the chief targets from the get-go, and it would be suicide for them to try to go back to work in those provinces.
And one thing that this makes clear after all these years of talking about negotiating with the Taliban, they don't seem to have changed one bit.
And, of course, we had another incident.
The news of this is just coming in today of a Hazara family in another part of the country that was beheaded.
Two men, two women, and a nine-year-old girl beheaded.
And the beheading of women and girls in these circumstances is something entirely new.
This was some sort of demonstration project, apparently, of ISIS, which is now operating in the country as well.
So the protests are taking place right now in Kabul to protest this, and some of the protesters are even calling for the calling upon President Ghani to step down from office.
The Ghani government has been in power for a year now, and most Afghans say it has done nothing for them.
Yeah, boy, are they in a rock and a hard place.
The Americans come, here we come to save you, and then they bomb a hospital, burn it to the ground, kill a bunch of innocent people over the rumor that maybe there was a Pakistani spy inside, or at least that's their latest excuse, Ann.
They've had a dozen different stories to try to explain this.
But the one that seems most plausible is that the special ops people who did this, they carried out the attack for between an hour and an hour and a half.
They made at least five runs at that hospital.
So the action was clearly very deliberate, and everybody knows where that hospital is.
They've been there for four or five years, and they were very careful to inform all sides in the conflict, and they do their best to remain strictly neutral.
So the most plausible explanation, or maybe the most generous explanation, is that these forces, special forces, were new in the country and just didn't have the information.
But this is a pretty poor excuse for a military that prides itself on being such a fantastic outfit.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, one of their excuses is, okay, we knew it was a hospital, but we're pretty sure there was a Pakistani spy in there.
Just the fact that, whether that's true or not, the fact that they think that that makes a good explanation, where they're going to admit that, yes, we deliberately targeted a hospital, but we were hunting after one guy we were trying to assassinate.
Well, they're burning patients alive in their beds?
It's important to recognize that attacking a hospital is a war crime, no matter who is inside it.
By international law, you are not allowed to attack a hospital.
And very often, when the U.S. has attacked the wrong people, which they do very often, have done very often all these years in Afghanistan, and they did it in Iraq as well, they use that excuse that they were being shot at from this hospital or mosque or whatever it is.
And in many, many cases, of course, in most cases, that proves to be untrue, but it takes a lot of investigation and people on the ground to go and find out the truth.
And very often, that doesn't happen, because it's dangerous to go into these, increasingly dangerous to go into these combat zones and try to find out what's really going on.
And, of course, most American reporters who embed with the U.S. military don't find out what's going on at all.
Right.
Well, and, you know, there was a statement in the recent Intercept series about the drone papers there, about the drone war in Afghanistan, where the expert consultant or whatever, the unnamed source, is explaining that no one even pretends that any of this has anything to do with America's national interest anymore.
It could be that we are helping, you know, more civilized Afghans and protecting them from some of the worst Taliban, although obviously that could be disputed for sure.
But nobody even thinks, nobody even tells each other inside the system that what we're doing here is keeping the American people safe.
We're talking about a war where you have people who were toddlers at the time that it started, who are now being deployed to the thing.
Well, it's certainly not in the interest of America's security.
Certainly not, because all we do is make more enemies everywhere we go in the Middle East.
And then we try to apply more military remedies.
But as I said before, it is in the interest of many Americans who make a great deal of money off this war.
War has actually become the business of the United States.
If you look at the way our military is organized, with bases in every state in the Union, and the way the arms manufacturers and the military contractors organize their businesses, so they are scattered all over the United States.
So you try to get Congress to vote against any of this or shut any of this down, and that Congress person is put into the position of costing jobs in his home community or business in his home community, his or her.
And in addition to that, he or she has probably received very handsome campaign contributions from the company or other 1% donors who are making profits on these schemes.
So the whole country, in a way, is hostage now to these military excursions that America is making all over the world, with more than 1,000 bases all over the world.
I don't know how you turn that around, but we have to wake up to it anyway, instead of all this, you know, rah-rah for our military.
And we just passed Veterans Day, you know, singing the praises of our great heroes.
And I get e-mail from soldiers who consider that a disgrace, that civilians make these people who have already been conned into going into the military and fighting in these wars, and then we make them put on their uniforms again and line up on Veterans Day so we can say thank you.
And I think most Americans are just oblivious to what our country is actually doing in the world out there.
Yes, you have to be a soldier to actually live your life as a Catch-22 Joseph Heller novel for a minute, to understand it.
Everybody else just believes the hype.
It says during the football game, rah-rah and valor and glory.
Someone's crying to me the other day.
Somebody said I stole my valor, but I didn't steal it.
It's mine because I was in the National Guard or whatever.
What are we even talking about here?
What's valorous about any of this?
Nothing.
Well, we might want to mention, too, that this story that just came out recently, that the military has spent $7 million giving that to sports teams, professional sports teams, to stage big programs to honor the veterans.
Which is so powerful for normalizing this.
In fact, I'll go ahead and commentate a little bit more on your interview than I already have.
When I was a kid and growing up watching NFL football, Army, be all you can be, and Air Force, aim high, and all those things, especially during football, that did more to normalize the idea of America and its military and its military's role in the world than that.
This is the way things are, and yes, thou shalt not kill, but if you wear green and you work for Uncle Sam, then it's okay.
It's different, and just look at the crowd.
The entire crowd of 300,000 people or whatever it is, 100,000 people watching the Super Bowl, everybody agrees.
We all agree that this is perfectly fine and perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable.
And you know what?
I think without the NFL, if you could just get I Dream of Jeannie, just get rid of the NFL and all the military propaganda that goes with it, that it would be a major change in the psyche of the men of this country.
But that is how we are raised, and I think that is what inculcates us in the normalcy of it all more than anything else.
I mean, other than if your dad is in the Army or whatever.
I'm glad to hear you say that, because it is a terrific – has a terrific normalizing effect and puts the taxpayers in the position of funding that very kind of propaganda that gets their kids into war.
And in addition, we're also funding the recruitment programs in high schools, usually in our high schools in poorer neighborhoods, starting to recruit kids into the military at the age of 14, setting their little minds in gear to join the military as soon as they reach the proper age.
So there is this kind of, it seems to me, corruption of our own society, a deep corruption of our own society, to advance this military program, which the farther it goes, the more we see it's not at all in our country's interest and certainly not in the world's interest, but is making the 1% even richer.
All right, Shell, that is the great Ann Jones.
You can find her at TomDispatch.com.
And this most recent article, The Never Ending War, is also running under Tom's name at AntiWar.com.
Check out her books, Cobble in Winter, Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, and most recently, They Were Soldiers, How the Wounded Return from America's Wars, The Untold Stories.
Thanks again.
Thank you, Scott.
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