All right guys, check it out.
The book is done, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find it at foolserrand.us.
Got all the good blurbs for you there and all of that, and it'll forward you on to the Amazon page.
It's doing well, number one in the war and peace section there on amazon.com so far now.
So check it out, foolserrand.us.
And listen, we're starting a fundraising drive at the Libertarian Institute right now.
Anybody who donates $50 or more to the Libertarian Institute gets a signed copy of the book.
For those of you who are interested in that, check us out at libertarianinstitute.org.
Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing, they are.
He died.
We ain't killing, they are, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Introducing our friend Eric Margulies.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And he gave me a great blurb for my new book, Fool's Errand.
Thank you, Eric.
Especially coming from you, that means a lot to me.
Ericmargulies.com is the website.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And you can find him at unz.com and LRC.
And we re-ran this one at the Libertarian Institute website as well.
Escape from the Aleppo Zoo.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Eric?
Happy to be back, Scott.
Just still suffering from jet lag from my recent Mideast trip, but I think I'm back in North America.
Good deal.
Well, I'm glad you're feeling it there.
Toronto, that's almost like the USA.
Pretty close.
All right, so tell me this.
How is it that you came to write such a great story?
Usually, if I'm gonna interview you about a trip to the Middle East, it's all just gonna be nothing but death and dying and predictions of worse coming soon.
But here, you had an opportunity to do something nice for somebody, huh?
Yeah, the somebodies were 13 wild animals.
Lions, tigers, great big bears.
Lions and tigers and great big bears, really?
Yes, and well, I have a great compassion and affection for animals, Scott.
Always have.
And I've labored over the years to help as many animal charities and causes as I can to alleviate the suffering of our oppressed and enslaved animals, particularly in the farm factory area.
And so I read that there were these poor animals, there were 13 animals have been left in the Aleppo Zoo.
And Aleppo was the epicenter of fighting in Syria, as we know, and they had been abandoned and they were starving to death in their cages.
This has happened before in Kabul and in Mosul.
And it was just horrifying and I couldn't bear it.
Anyway, I teamed up with a wonderful group from Austria called Four Paws.
They have an outpost in Boston as well for tax deductible donations.
Four Paws is a real professional dedicated animal rescuers.
And they decided and we decided to go in and bust these poor abandoned animals out of Aleppo because nobody wanted them.
Nobody wanted to feed them, it was too dangerous.
Nobody cared about them.
So we did, Four Paws went in and staged this quite daring rescue.
Awesome, and then, so how do they do it?
I mean, get a chair and a whip or?
Well, they went, oh, they staged out of Turkey and they hired a, quote, security, unquote, firm, a bunch of gunmen to go into Syria and to bring the animals out of Aleppo.
Very dangerous because Aleppo is surrounded by all kinds of competing jihadist factions.
There's Al-Qaeda, there are American-backed groups, there are Israeli-backed groups, there are Iranian-backed groups.
I mean, you name it, it's a crazy quilt of murderous people.
Everybody's shooting at everybody else with the poor animals caught in the middle.
There had been 4,000 animals at this sort of zoo, home game park.
Now there are only 16 left.
The rest had either been killed by the shooting or had starved to death in their cages.
Man, and so this group then, they just went in with trucks and sticks and forced these animals, these, even bears, you say, lions, tigers, and bears, and forced them into trucks and drove them out to Turkey then?
Big bears.
I had one of them sort of come at me.
And yes, they managed to hoist them to get them out of the zoo, hoist them on flatbed trucks with cranes.
And then the hard part was moving them out of north of Aleppo into Turkey because there were so many rival factions controlling the checkpoints.
And they had tried once earlier and had failed.
They had to bring the animals back to Aleppo, which was heartbreaking.
This time it worked.
They got, this convoy got to the Turkish border and without any major shooting incidents.
And then the Turks then opened the border wall, they have a Trump-like border wall there, late at night, and the convoy passed into Turkey where it was met by other Turkish volunteers.
And by the way, all these four-plus people are volunteers.
And the convoy was then taken for reasons I don't yet understand, all the way to the Western end of Turkey, near Istanbul to Bursa.
And there they were given emergency medical treatment.
And as the last part of their escape, but there was still paperwork and they four-plus, had to go to the ministry of this and the ministry of that and the bureaucratic problems.
They finally, finally got the permits to export the animals.
And they were put on the planes in Istanbul.
The wheels were cut off the bottoms of the cages because they couldn't fit in the planes.
This wonderful surgeon named Dr. Khalil who supervised the operation, he was a veterinary surgeon, managed to find some machine in the middle of the night in Istanbul to cut the wheels off the cages and load them on the planes.
And he flew and we greeted them at 5.30 in the morning in Amman, Jordan.
Man, that is something.
And then you say here too, that a tiger had a heart attack and this vet went in there and gave him, not mouth to mouth, but gave him CPR and rescued him, huh?
Exactly, he was a big tiger.
And as part of doing his physical on him, they sedated him, but the sedation process caused him to have heart failure.
So the vet got in there and started giving him CPR.
And I had said to one of his assistants, be sure to leave the gate open in case he has to flee quickly.
He was a German vet, a very capable man.
They resuscitated the animal, fortunately.
And one of the other lions was pregnant.
So we were very concerned about that.
But anyway, after many thrills and spills, I mean, this operation cost a huge amount of money, a huge amount of effort, because it had been mounted over months that it took to get it going.
We were sitting in North America waiting for the green light, never knew when we were gonna fly or not, stop, start.
It was a real military style, hurry up and wait operation.
Man, well, sounds like a huge one anyway.
And then you say, yeah, the lioness ended up giving birth at the end, huh?
Are you sure you're not making up this story?
I've got it on film.
I got a picture of you here outside a tiger cage.
Yes, that's right.
The Daily Mail from England were there photographing it all.
And- You're a real hero, man, good for you.
Well, thank you.
I like saving animals.
It's God's work.
And I'm glad to be able to participate.
I'm so impressed by the Four Paws people.
They're really great people, humanitarians.
Anyway, we got the, we then we got all the animals by flatbed truck.
We drove North from Amman into the hills near the Israeli and Syrian borders to a wildlife sanctuary called Al-Mawwa, which means the refuge, that was presided over by Princess Alia of Jordan, who was the sister of the late King Hussein, a lovely lady, and dedicated to helping animals, which is very unusual and rare in the Middle East.
And we went to two different refuges.
We saw a wonderful lion who had been rescued from Mosul, from Mosul Zoo, named Simba, and a delightful bear who had come with him, and really a King of the Beasts lion.
And then we went up to Al-Mawwa in the North, where we unloaded the animals and put them in their cages, or their new enclosures, not cages.
And it was an epic movement.
We started at 5.30 in the morning.
We ended up about six o'clock at night with this exhaust that covered with dust.
It was like 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
But we did it, and everybody was moved safely.
And it was crazy going, driving up the highway, the road in Jordan, with all these lions and tigers and motorists going by, thinking they were having hallucinations.
It's not the Ringling Brothers.
What is going on there?
Man, this is such a story.
This is just incredible.
Well, it's a little good news out of the Middle East.
I thought we'd make some.
Yeah.
Nah, man, I'm with you.
All right, so tell us again about Four Paws, and what people can do to help them.
Well, Four Paws, they're based in Vienna, Austria, but they have a Boston office, and you can find them on the internet.
And they are real commandos of the animal rescue area.
They've done all kinds of other rescues, particularly with bears, because bears are terribly oppressed and tortured animals in Europe.
And they've rescued a lot of bears.
I gotta say, I mean, I can see the argument.
People sitting around in an office and saying, there's lions and tigers and bears in a terrible situation in Aleppo, but, I mean, what are you gonna do?
It's Aleppo.
It's a terrible war zone, or near there is.
I guess, you know, it's not as bad as it was a year ago, but still, I mean, geez, what are you gonna do, right?
Shrug, and yet, no.
You and they decided, yeah, we're gonna go, and we're gonna find these tigers, and we're gonna get them the hell out of there.
That's right, call Four Paws if you need.
It's a real mission impossible.
That's incredible.
But for animals, and these people work like dogs, by means that they're, to make it all happen, we were all exhausted, blitzed, bleary-eyed to work.
There you go.
My contribution certainly was worth two Aston Martins that I was gonna get for my garage.
I'm now back on foot, but smiling.
Good for you, man.
That's awesome.
We'll get you a skateboard.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Hey, all right, listen.
One of the reasons that I'm so good on Syria is that I know you.
I mean, I've never been there.
I don't speak a lick of Arabic.
Same thing for Afghanistan.
I don't speak Pashto, and I've never been there.
I'm not a reporter.
I'm not a veteran, but I know Eric Margulies, and I've been interviewing you for, I don't know, what, a dozen, 13, 14 years now, something like this, and asking you all these things, and so one of the reasons that I knew it was an important question, I mean, come on, it's pretty obvious, right?
But one of the reasons I had an idea what the answer was to the important question, what if they did overthrow the Ba'athist government in Damascus and finish their clean break policy, as David Wilmser and Richard Perle and Douglas Fyfe wrote back in 1996 for Netanyahu, that we need regime change in Damascus.
I mean, once I heard that, I asked you, well, so who would come next?
And then you said what I thought you would say, and this is going back from memory 13, 14 years ago, you said, well, there's really no one organized to replace them, right?
The only ones to come to mind, obviously, would be the Muslim Brotherhood, and in fact, you were there when Bashar al-Assad's father killed, I don't know how many people, thousands anyway, in order to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in, I'm sorry, was it 1984?
I think so, I don't remember the year exactly, in Hama.
Yeah, uh-huh, and so, I mean, I remember back in the 2000s saying, so Eric, I mean, that tells me, that's like a clue that geez, if we did some kind of coup or overthrow or regime change invasion type war or something in Syria, that those guys would be the most likely ones to inherit the power, if that's what it took to keep them away from power back then, and I've certainly never heard of any other major organized groups ready to take over ruling the country in the capital city there, and then, so we had that conversation, and yeah, and then we saw this whole policy take place in slow motion, and in 2011, you were one of the very first to report that, oh, NATO is intervening in this pseudo, so-called Arab Spring, this hijacking of the Arab Spring, that you'd been to France and talked with spies and diplomats and military men at the highest levels who told you that they were intervening under auspices of NATO, cooperating with the United States, and this conversation took place, I believe, in the summer of 2011 there, one of the very first to provide the context necessary for people to understand what we're seeing before our eyes, so now I say all that just to set up for the big question of, will you please tell me everything that you know and think about Syria right now?
Well, it's a heartbreaking subject, Scott, I've been covering Syria for 35 years, and it's a beautiful, fascinating, very cultivated country, multi-religious, sort of ethnic mosaic, the beating heart of the Arab world is really Syria, and Syria was targeted for this reason to smash any hopes of any kind of real Arab nationalism or independent action, and to have as the first step of attacking Syria's main ally, which is Iran.
So the problem is this, this allegedly an uprising against the Assad regime took place, it was 2011, and it was entirely fueled from Lebanon by mercenary groups, hired by the CIA and the Saudis, the Syrians reacted, Syrian government reacted brutally and foolishly, same thing that happened in Libya, and we started screaming, oh my God, they're massacring the civilians who we paid to start shooting, and this is a well-established pattern of behavior with these color revolutions, so what happened was the uprising spread, there was a lot of hostility to the Assad regime, no doubt about it, particularly amongst Sunni Muslims, and they were, their groups, jihadist groups were backed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states, and by Turkey, and in the hope of overthrowing Assad, and the war spread and became an absolute nightmare, half the country became refugees, 400,000, maybe more died, but the beautiful city of Aleppo and parts of old Damascus were destroyed, and it's like somebody went through Syria with a giant plow, and so the war drags on, but now thanks to Russian and Iranian intervention, which was perfectly predictable, but Washington never thought of it, the Syrian rebels, the jihadists, are on the back foot, and the government is expanding its control, and some sort of law and order is returning to Syria, but it's been a terrible, terrible tragedy.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right, now, I know that you've been busy rescuing tigers and everything, but can you give us a sort of ballpark sketch, you know, somewhat of an estimate of just how much power the Al-Qaeda guys have now?
HTS, they call themselves now, I think, and they still have some prominence in the Idlib province, but I don't know where else.
Can you kind of flesh that out at all?
Yeah, they're pretty strong, still, the Al-Qaeda jihadists.
They're financed by the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Bahrainis, financed, by the way, to stay away from Arabia and attack other regimes.
They are the most effective and active element of Al-Qaeda that remains, but there are many other radical groups, not as strong.
And interestingly, there are a number of jihadist groups that are false fronts for the Israelis.
The Israelis are deeply involved in Syria.
They're gonna be more deeply involved.
They have their eyes on taking chunks of Syria and its water supplies.
So the Israelis are very active, as are the Russians, the Iranians.
It's like Germany's 30 years war in the 1600s.
It's just a big mess and nobody knows who's who.
All right, now, let's focus on the Israeli angle there for a minute because clearly we know that they've expressed pretty openly their motivation here in seeking to bring Iran down a peg, as you mentioned before, by attacking their last allied Arab state here, the Ba'athist regime in Damascus.
And we know from various reports over the years about their care and feeding of their aid and comfort to Al-Qaeda, that is the Al-Nusra Front, literal Al-Nusra Front, not just Mythical Moderate, but literal members of the Al-Nusra Front who've come over the border and receive all kinds of medical care.
And we know, I saw the number just the other day, and I didn't look into it deep enough, honestly, but I think the report was that there had been over 100, maybe it was over 200 Israeli strikes against Syrian government arms depots and Hezbollah targets and others in the war over the last five years.
And so, but now, you're saying it's not just that they provided medical care to jihadis who come asking for it at the border, but they're deeply involved in supporting some of these groups.
I mean, the most prominent of the so-called rebels are the Al-Qaeda groups, Al-Nusra is what I still call them, because they keep changing their name to try to confuse me, but Al-Nusra is Al-Nusra, still Jolani and his men, Zawahiri's men, and then you have Arar Al-Sham, which I guess my understanding is that's the Muslim Brotherhood these days, but also includes members of some of Osama's old original friends in Al-Qaeda.
But then, after that, there's so many different militias and different names in different places, it gets hard to keep track, but you're saying that the Mossad or whichever Israeli agencies are deeply involved.
So now tell me everything more that I don't already know.
Well, it's very murky, and don't forget that we Americans are involved very deeply.
We kicked off this whole war, and we bear primary responsibility for the destruction of Syria, as we bear responsibility for the destruction of Somalia and of Yemen that's going on, and Iraq, of course.
But how absurd things were in Syria was that we have the State Department supporting certain jihadist groups who were fighting against Pentagon-supported groups in Syria.
So this is like a catch-22.
It would require a good satirist to understand.
But the upshot is that the jihadist forces, the anti-regime forces in Syria are losing, thanks also to Hezbollah inputs, and which is the Lebanese Hezbollah, deadly enemy of Israel.
And Israel has been active in air attacks in Syria and cut off military supplies to Hezbollah, which is not fighting Israel right now, but everyone expects Israel to have another go at invading Lebanon and Hezbollah.
So it's a very messy, murky situation.
Yeah, and can you name any of the specific groups that you know of that are tied to Israel?
Not off the top of my head.
No, unlike you, they keep changing their names every week.
And I've given up- Well, at least you understand the language, man.
I've given up trying to fathom who's who.
Yeah, well, certainly they've made their point clear about what it is that they want there, and they're expanding their presence on the Golan Heights, right?
That's right.
Now, the Golan Heights, by the way, is Syrian territory that is illegally occupied by Israel, and Israel has de facto annexed the Golan Heights.
And it's through there that the Israelis are sending a lot of supplies, as you mentioned, medical attention to medical care to wounded jihadists.
It's very cynical.
You know, the Israelis are in cahoots, at least they're in the same tent with the Al-Qaeda who are fulminating against the Israelis.
It's a real Middle Eastern backstabbing jamboree.
You know, it's funny.
I tried to look at it from the Likud party's point of view here.
It seems like they made a really bad bet.
I mean, in fact, they say, well, we don't really wanna see Assad go.
We just wanna see both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
That's what they told the New York Times, for crying out loud, front page.
Hemorrhage to death, that's your key word, everybody, to Google.
And yet it seems like both sides aren't hemorrhaging to death.
I mean, maybe the Assad regime, I guess it certainly has been weakened.
But Hezbollah, on the other hand, seems like they've just become more battle-hardened and gained more experience for their new generation.
Doesn't seem like they're probably being weakened by this exercise whatsoever and going next door to help Assad.
They're probably getting stronger, aren't they?
They are, but the Israelis will soon throw their full weight of their power against Hezbollah, which is a relatively small and lightly-armed organization, despite all the propaganda screams you hear about Israel.
Hezbollah is, of course, the only Arab force that's ever defeated the Israelis in toe-to-toe fighting.
That's waiting to happen.
The U.S. keeps calling them terrorists, the U.S. completely parrots the Israeli line on this, which is simply confusing and misleading our policymakers.
Yeah, well, and of course, Donald Trump, who can't tell his elbow from a hole in the ground to mix up a couple of metaphors for politeness, he gave a statement where he was praising the Lebanese prime minister and saying, you're doing such a great job fighting against the terrorists, ISIS and Hezbollah, and yet it was Hezbollah that was doing all the fighting against ISIS, and Hezbollah, that's, what, one-fifth of the government of Lebanon, and it's part of the current prime minister's coalition.
That's right, well, Trump only knows what he sees on Fox News, which is highly deceptive.
Look, Trump did something terrible two days ago in talking about his new misguided Afghan policy.
He said, we're going to go after and defeat the terrorists in Afghanistan.
Well, the terrorists are the Pashtun tribes, the biggest ethnic group in the region who have been fighting for all these years to expel foreigners from the country, and who used to be our, quote, freedom fighters, unquote, according to Ronald Reagan, and for Trump to call these people terrorists is just disgraceful.
Well, you know, lately they've come to start accusing the Russians of intervening and supporting the Taliban, which doesn't seem very likely to me on the face of it, and I noted, and this made it in the final edition of the book, therefore it went out, I don't know if your review copy had this part, but that one of these generals, after the original hype from the leadership, one, a two-star general testified to the Senate that actually I haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever, but, and even in the first place the accusations were, well, we think it makes sense that they might want to if they did, or, you know, this kind of weasel Clintonian talk.
But so, just going, and in fact Tillerson reiterated this again yesterday, oh, the Russians are supporting the Taliban.
If that was true, and I guess I'll let you answer whether you think maybe that is possible or even likely or whatever, but if that was true from the Empire's point of view, wouldn't that obviously mean that they're trying to bog us down and bleed us dry and pull the Ronald Reagan trick on us by backing, now we're backing the same factions that the Russians used to back, and now they're fully switching places, abandoning the Kabul government they've helped us support for the last 16 years.
Now they're backing the Taliban.
There is only one reason that they would do that, would be to make matters worse for us.
So then we should leave, right?
Isn't that the obvious conclusion there?
Well, the Russians must be very tempted to stick their finger in our eye in Afghanistan, but I don't see any evidence at all of Russian support for Taliban.
I'm sure their Russian intelligence services keep in touch and keep an open mic with Taliban.
Of course, that's their business.
They're supposed to do that, but- Yeah, they've even talked about that.
I mean, the Taliban said, yes, we talk with the Russians all the time.
That doesn't mean we're supported by them.
Give me a break.
Of course, and then let's remember the Central Asian powers, like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, et cetera, they have their finger in this pie too, and they're supporting different factions.
And so Russian intelligence, very influential in Central Asia.
So yeah, there's some context, but the idea that now we're trying to fight the Russians is baloney.
And what else the US government is doing is trying to portray, to drop the use of the word Taliban and replace it with ISIS, that we're really fighting the ISIS in Afghanistan because it's a much more palatable enemy as far as American's concerned, because they all know these guys here and they all hate them, rather than Taliban, which is confusing and nobody really knows about them.
It's a bait and switch job.
Yeah, absolutely right.
And you know, thanks to the Moon of Alabama, I just happened to see Moon of Alabama arguing with somebody on Twitter and linked to this great article at Afghan Analysts that explained that the original group that they call ISIS, the Islamic State, they're in Nangarhar province, that all they are is they're members of the Pakistani Taliban and they had been chased out of Pakistan by a Pakistani military offensive in 2010 during the height of the Obama drone war.
And that they were refugees basically for Pakistan who hightailed it to Afghanistan.
And then, you know, in other words, just like you're saying, they're still just local tribal fighters from whichever side of the Duran line they're on.
They're not Zawahiri's men or Baghdadi's men really.
They're still regular people from where they're from fighting to keep us off of their lawn.
But what a great just marketing strategy on their part and it works out perfect for the American military too.
Well, we have low grade officers at the Pentagon who don't know what the hell is going on in Afghanistan.
Neither, of course, to the high grade officers either.
Doing this nomenclature, remember there was a group called the Khorasan group that they came up with somewhere.
To attack in Syria, right.
This is when they were like trying to split off a small group of the Al-Nusra Front that they were basically backing by saying, well, some of them actually are trying to target the West.
So we'll just hit them, but leave the rest alone.
That was in what, 2013 or so?
So in another couple of months, we're gonna end up fighting ISIS in Afghanistan.
Mark my words, the Taliban will vanish into the back of the headlines.
And Americans will say, this is good.
Well, you know, there was actually a guy that wrote a thing for the New York Times about, and I think he was a Afghan government official.
Wrote a thing for the New York Times.
Well, maybe he wasn't a government official.
Anyway, he was an Afghan though.
Wrote a thing for the New York Times saying that when they dropped the mother of all bombs on that tunnel complex, those are the supposed ISIS fighters in Nangarhar that they hit.
And that the local radio station, the ISIS group, whatever, the local group there, that they loved it.
That this to them was the best PR imaginable.
That look at how seriously the Americans take us.
We are the vanguard of those standing up against the empire.
Join up today.
And that this was, I mean, it sounds slightly counterintuitive that, you know, get bombed by a Moab.
Join up today.
But that's, you know, that's not the message.
Resist those who would use a Moab against us.
That is good recruitment schtick.
Right into the enemy's hands there.
Quite right.
Have another pipe of hashish boys and enjoy your new prominence.
It's a mess.
Nobody understands what's going on there in Washington.
Hardly anybody understands.
The few people who do understand what had gone are not listened to.
So what can you expect?
All right, now listen.
So I am in a weird position here that I wrote a book about a place I'd never been to.
And as I said, a language I don't speak.
I originally started, I was gonna write a book where I had one chapter about each of the wars.
And then that would kind of, it would be to my advantage that I'd never been to any of the places because it's only from 10 million miles away I could see all the different things kind of deal.
But then that never happened.
I just ended up getting bogged down in the Afghan quagmire and I wrote a whole book about Afghanistan instead accidentally.
So I'm always worried that even though I got so many great blurbs from you and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and all these real experts, Daniel Davis and Matthew Ho and all these people who know and have been there and fought in this war and reported on this war that yeah, pretty much not wrong there, Scott.
Good.
I appreciate that.
But then people are interviewing me and asking me my opinion and stuff.
And I really wanna make sure I'm right.
And I know that I'm kind of oversimplifying in a way, but then again, I mean, I kind of think not really.
But isn't it just right?
I think you pretty much said at least half of this answer earlier that what's really going on here and the thing that nobody ever really says is that the US policy is to foist a Tajik army onto a Pashtun population that would rather fight.
Is that basically the bottom line here?
Yeah, that is right, Scott.
And that's the real situation now.
The majority of members of the Afghan, so-called Afghan National Army, are in fact, Tajiks from the ethnic minority, who are the blood enemies of the Pashtuns, who were the core of the Afghan Communist Party.
They are the enemies of the Pashtuns.
So they used all these Tajiks and they bought the allegiance.
And most of the soldiers in the Afghan army are mercenaries.
They're fighting them for money, not for any loyalty to the corrupt, sock puppet government in Kabul.
And that's not gonna work, unfortunately.
So that's why the government has no loyalty.
But the faux black back plan, Scott, if the Tajiks don't work, then they would turn to the Indians.
And even Trump mentioned in his speech, I think, that we would ask India to come and help.
Well, that's stupidest idea that I've ever heard of, because India has long had its eye on Afghanistan.
And that would be like shooting off a bomb under Pakistan.
The Pakistanis will go crazy and this will heighten Pakistani-Indian tensions to the boiling point.
Well, see, this is basically my cheat, right?
It's just that I've been talking about you with this for so long.
I mean, it's been years and years and years since we discussed the fact that this is why Pakistan backs the Afghan Taliban, is to prevent India's allies from gaining a true monopoly on power in that country.
Right.
In the first place.
And I'll go ahead and tell you this too.
I mean, I'm sorry, I know you gotta go, but this lady, Lisa Curtis, who wrote this thing for the Heritage Foundation and McMaster put her on the National Security Council in charge of this policy, she wrote up this whole thing about, and this is all the threats that too many, Obama gave him too many carrots, now it's time to break out the sticks for dealing with Pakistan and making the Pakistanis stop backing the Afghan Taliban.
And in there, there's hardly any reference whatsoever.
There is actually no reference to Pakistan's motive for backing the Afghan Taliban.
And the only thing that they say about Pakistan's attitude toward India in Afghanistan is, well, the Pakistanis may not like it, and that's it.
And this is the genius at the center of telling McMaster the new South Asia strategy about how we're gonna get Pakistan to do what we want.
And then if they won't, then we'll ask China to tell them to be nice for us and stop backing the Afghan Taliban, even though that's the whole reason that we back India in the first place is as a check against China.
Why would they do that?
Exactly.
These are the people who are running the American empire, the most powerful empire ever with all the H-bombs and everything.
It's unfortunate.
They're junior officers who should never have been promoted to those ranks.
But you have to remember too that half of the Pashtun people live in Pakistan because the border was divided by the British.
And so of course, Pakistan has a natural interest in that area.
Many of the leading Pakistani generals are Pashtuns.
Right.
Boy, and there was a whole different interview and I'm sorry, I know you gotta go, but was it in your book where I finally learned that Pakistan itself was an acronym that they just stuck a stand on there, but it was such an artificial country that it stands in whatever exact form.
It stands for the Pashtuns, the Punjabis, the Baluks and the whoever I'm missing.
Is that really right?
That's right.
That just explodes my brain like crazy right there.
It's just incredible.
It's a good brain, Scott.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on my show.
You do such great work, Eric, and you're a real hero for saving those tigers and teaching us all the great stuff that you do.
So thank you, sir.
A big tiger roar to you, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's our friend, Eric Margulies.
He's at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
And he wrote the books, War at the Top of the World.
That's about Reagan and the CIA and the Mujahideen's war against the Soviet Union and also the aftermath in the 1990s and then plus Kashmir and India and China and all of that stuff, man.
War at the Top of the World there.
And then American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And that's about our whole 21st century of doing everything wrong over there.ericmargulies.com.
Thanks, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
You can check out the book at amazon.com or at foolsaron.us.foolsaron.us for my new book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I think you'll like it.
Eric Margulies said it wasn't wrong, so that's pretty good.
All right, check me out.
All the archives, 4,500 something interviews there at scotthorton.org.
And follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
