Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, 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, introducing our friend Khan Halanan from Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org.
John Pfeffer and all the great writers there at Foreign Policy in Focus.
And he's got this brand new article.
It's extremely important.
Asia's other nuclear standoff.
By roping India and Japan into its standoff with China, the U.S. is raising the nuclear stakes in Asia, reads the subhead here.
What a complicated mess.
Everybody get your map of Asia out if you don't have a good one in your brain for paying attention to this one.
Welcome back to the show, Khan.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
I appreciate you joining us here.
Sure.
Where's the Malacca Strait?
The Malacca Strait is the strait that runs between Malaysia and Indonesia.
And it basically is the way that you enter the South China Sea.
Otherwise, you have to go way, way, way down to the south and up that way.
So something like 60% of the world's shipping at one point or other transverses the Malacca Strait.
It's very narrow.
It's extremely narrow.
And I think something like 50,000 ships or 70,000 ships a year traverse it.
And it's the way that China gets about 80% of its energy supplies.
Because China buys oil and gas from West Africa, from Sudan.
So it comes from the Red Sea and then also from the Persian Gulf.
So basically, Chinese energy supplies pass through that strait.
It's a very, very highly strategic strait.
Well, and you know, Khan, one of the things is this is something that's come up a lot in discussions of America's policy in Africa and in the Middle East.
It's contrary to pro and anti-war propaganda that says that all this is about a cheap gallon of gas so that we can get to work in the morning kind of thing.
That really, more than anything else, control of the Middle East is about having the ability in some unforeseen or foreseen future conflict with China to cut off their supplies.
Here's this massive, you know, I guess tied with India for the biggest country by population in the world.
And yet they have virtually no oil resources of their own, right?
Right.
Very low energy resources.
So if you're the American world hegemon, then the ability to turn off the spigot, whether in Sudan or in Iran or in the Malacca Strait, is everything.
It's enormously important.
It's also one of the reasons why the Chinese are trying to build as many pipelines as possible, you know, land-based pipelines, so that that doesn't happen.
The Chinese have a – as part of their One Belt, One Road, which is the oddest definition of a trade apparatus.
As part of One Belt, One Road, the Chinese are building a series of bases across Southeast Asia, Southern Asia, all the way to Africa.
And the idea is that you would have ports, like in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan, right before the entrance to the Persian Gulf, in Djibouti, which is right on the critical strait that goes between Africa and the Middle East that the Red Sea comes out of.
And the Chinese are starting to build bases in all of these areas.
So this is also an effort to kind of counter that.
And the basic idea behind it is very similar to what happened in the 1950s with the Soviet Union, which is that this is a policy of containment.
And it involves the United States, India, and Japan, and to a certain extent, Australia, although Australia is not exactly a major player simply because it's relatively small and its military is relatively small.
But the Japanese military is quite large.
It has one of the largest fleets in the world.
And it currently has a prime minister who really didn't think that Japan did anything wrong in World War II and sort of refuses to apologize for it and has caused a lot of tension in the region.
And then you throw in things like the Philippines and South Korea and Vietnam and everything.
And as you said at the beginning of the show, it's really a mess.
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Well, so I mean, I guess I just want to throw in here real quick that they've said outright repeatedly, the Defense Department and the think tanks and everybody that we got to stop this one belt one road thing.
This is part of why we have to stay in Afghanistan.
Forget the Afghan Taliban where the Chinese are going to build a highway through here.
And we got to make sure to be in the way of that, I guess.
But so what do we have to lose, really?
They make this whole thing sound like such a zero sum game.
And I guess from the point of view of politicians in Washington, D.C., you know, maybe they have power and influence to lose.
But what do the American people have to lose from China getting richer and more powerful?
What they lose is a kind of illusion of imperial hegemony.
But that was always to a certain extent an illusion.
I think what you have to – and the United States not only is trying to block this one belt one road kind of thing.
They also – the U.S. told all its allies that they didn't want any of its allies to join the Chinese Asian Development Bank.
And this was a development bank not dissimilar from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, only without kind of all the restrictions that the IMF and the World Bank put on loans and things.
And with the exception of Japan, all of our allies, including Britain, have signed up for this development bank.
Well, from the Chinese point of view, they just see the United States trying to stymie them at every point.
And of course, there is a strong nationalist streak in the Chinese right now.
They feel that they were humiliated for about 100 years starting with the first opium war in 1831, I think.
And that they have been pushed around, pushed around.
And now it's time for them to once again exert their size and power in the world economy.
And part of that means that they want to have a big navy that's capable of sort of defending their interests.
And that's going to bump up against the largest of the U.S. navies, which is the 7th Fleet based in the Pacific.
And increasingly India, not so much South Korea, but increasingly India, and of course Japan.
Scott, the thing that kind of concerns me the most, is not that I think that the Chinese and the Americans are going to start shooting nuclear weapons at each other.
I hope that doesn't happen.
What bothers me is that in order to get the Indians to come on board this containment strategy, the United States has turned a blind eye to the tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
And there's really been no mention, not only by the Trump administration, but also by the Obama administration.
About resolving the tensions in Kashmir.
And the reason why those are dangerous is because you have two nuclear armed powers, Pakistan and India, faced off against each other.
They fought three wars over Kashmir.
The Trump administration is, and the Obama administration did to a certain extent, encouraging India to put military forces in Afghanistan, supposedly to fight terrorism.
But from the point of Pakistan, they look like they're surrounded.
They get Indian troops to the south of them, they get Indian troops to the north of them.
And the danger here is that the tensions between India and Pakistan develop into a nuclear exchange.
And that almost happened in 1999 during the Kargil incident.
The other development, which I find very scary, and as scary as I am afraid of the North Korea situation, one of the scary things that's happened is that the Pakistani military has given front line commanders facing the Indians the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in case of a war with India.
You're saying the colonels, not even the generals, the colonels actually in the field.
Yeah, in the field.
Already, okay.
And the thing that's bad about that, Scott, is that the Pakistanis have tactical nuclear weapons.
The Indians do not.
They just have strategic nuclear weapons, you know, big ones.
And so if there's a use of tactical nuclear weapons, the only response the Indians have are strategic nuclear weapons.
So they would start nuking Pakistani cities and military formations.
And, of course, Pakistan would respond.
Scientific America did a study of what would happen if there was an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And it would have devastating effects worldwide.
It would create a partial nuclear winter that would not only, of course, devastate the local region, that is both Pakistan and India, but it would also spread radiation throughout Southeast Asia and Asia, certainly in China, et cetera.
But it would create enough smoke that it would be impossible or very difficult to grow wheat in northern Canada and in large parts of Russia and even in some of the northern areas of the United States, which would result in a worldwide famine.
So at one point, the study found that you could literally have the starvation of close to a billion people from such an exchange.
And I think that, you know, one of the reasons why this is difficult to sort of think about is that people really just don't think, you know, that you can have a nuclear war.
They're just so crazy.
You know, no one's going to have a nuclear war.
It's not going to happen.
That's what I'm thinking right now.
And yet at the same time, if you talk to the militaries, Pakistani military, Indian military, U.S. military for that matter, nuclear weapons are just part of the game.
And in the case of Pakistan, as a much smaller army than India, would not be a match for India in terms of conventional forces.
So Pakistan would have to then make a choice.
Do we surrender to the Indians or do we escalate to nuclear weapons?
And, you know, the chances of escalating to nuclear weapons are very real.
And that's what I think concerns me here because my way of thinking is that we should be focusing on this very volatile situation with India and Pakistan.
But, in fact, we're doing the opposite.
We're giving the Indians basically a free hand in Kashmir in order to get them tied in to our campaign to contain China.
And as I said, as dangerous as I think the situation in Korea is, and yesterday Tillerson, Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Secretary of State, said that he had come to an agreement with China that an event of military action in North Korea that the United States or its allies in South Korea and Japan would seize nuclear sites in North Korea but would agree to remove those troops as soon as the conflict was over.
Which to me sounds like people are actually talking, really making plans for a possibility of a war in North Korea.
And I think everybody is kind of ignoring this situation with India and Pakistan.
Keep in mind the present government of India is very right-wing and filled with Hindu fundamentalists, etc., and who are very anti-Muslim.
And they see Pakistan as a great evil.
And as we know, Pakistan has its own problems when it comes to the role of the military and the Secret Service.
So, Con, let me ask you because I think most people probably know very little about the Kashmir conflict.
I think what you're saying, if I hear you right, is that really India holds all the cards in Kashmir.
So if there's going to be peace in Kashmir, it's going to be because America puts pressure on India to go ahead and come to some kind of reasonable accommodation with the Kashmiris and with the Pakistanis.
And that is the lowest ranking priority because of the empire's interest in bolstering India as a hedge against China.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
And the situation in Kashmir is really awful.
Since last summer, there have been these demonstrations that have not very few of them been covered by Western media.
But they're not the kinds of things that have gone on in the past.
In the past, what has happened is that the Pakistanis have facilitated and sometimes trained and armed, etc., sort of infiltrators to go into Kashmir and attack the Indians.
But this is really native Kashmiris.
And Kashmir has gotten a bad rap right from the beginning.
In 1947, when there was the partition, there was an agreement that Kashmir would have the right to have a referendum to decide whether they wanted to go with India, whether they wanted to go to Pakistan, or whether they wanted to be independent and autonomous.
That agreement has never been put into place.
And there isn't any pressure on India to do so.
And I'm not absolving Pakistan here.
Pakistan has its own form of aggression in the region.
But it's a really volatile one.
And with this decision, as you said, colonels can make a decision as to whether or not there's going to be a nuclear war.
That's something that should really, really deeply concern people, certainly as much, if not more, than the situation with Korea.
Although, as I commented, Rex Tillerson's comments the day before yesterday are a little scary.
Yeah, about them talking about having serious plans to go ahead and invade.
But I saw a story too that said, like you're saying, it sounds like they really are having these discussions where they would have some limited strikes against North Korea's nuclear capability and bet on them not retaliating.
Like, what?
What are you going to do?
You're going to call them and tell them this is not a regime change?
Can't you just picture the tanks knocking down the Branch Davidians church?
This is not an assault.
This is not an assault.
As they attack his country, oh yeah, he'll probably just sit there and take it.
Yeah, I mean, just think about that for a minute, Scott.
We're going to take out the nuclear sites, and we're going to depend on the calm, good nature of the North Korean regime not to respond.
I mean, that's a gamble.
It's a gamble that we just cannot take, particularly since there certainly is a way to get through the North Korean situation.
Talk more about that.
Go ahead.
Please.
Well, you know, look, we have what they call this, the Chinese are pushing this position which goes freeze on freeze.
And freeze on the U.S., South Korean, and Japanese military war games, which practice every year the overthrow of the North Korean regime.
So the North Koreans are always accused of being paranoid, but in this case, paranoids have enemies.
And the North Koreans would agree to not test any more nuclear weapons and to alert people about the firing of missiles.
Now, you're not going to get rid of the missiles, and you're not going to get rid of the nuclear weapons.
That genie is out of the bottle.
But what you can do is that you can agree not to test any more, no more nuclear tests, and to tell people when you're shooting off a rocket.
That's a simple enough thing.
Then I think if you get that agreement, then what you do is you start to reduce the sanctions.
Because right now the sanctions are not having any effect on North Korean behavior, but of course they are impoverishing the people of North Korea, and they also allow the North Korean regime to say things are so bad because of these sanctions, so we have to hold out.
I mean, you know, sanctions never worked on Cuba.
Why do we think they're going to work on North Korea?
That's the way out here.
I don't know if the Trump administration is capable of that.
Tillerson seems to want to do it, as you pointed out.
He did make a statement about the fact that we have to talk.
But there's also these contingency plans for a war, and after Tillerson made his comment about the fact that we're going to have negotiations, the White House said you can't talk with these people until they get rid of the nuclear weapons and their missiles, and that's not going to happen, period.
Right.
Man, well, so yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, when he comes out and says, listen, we're going to do this without preconditions, and then the White House immediately undercuts him and says, you know, well, I forgot exactly what they added, but it was something.
This is really the craziest government we've ever had, Scott.
It's pretty bonkers, man.
I'm telling you.
Well, okay, so let me go back to the beat the dead horse on India-Pakistan here for a second.
Yeah.
A couple of things.
First of all, I just kind of want to reiterate what you were saying.
I really always thought the word was reiterate.
I only just recently learned not when I was writing a book.
I wanted to reiterate the part about how easy it would be for the war to break out there, where, as you put it, although not exactly in this order, India has a far greater and more advanced conventional force.
They move on Pakistan.
They don't have the ability to repel that without tactical nukes.
So at that point, they either say, okay, uncle, you guys win.
Let's not fight.
You rule our territory now and we're your slaves.
Or they fight back.
But there's only really one way to fight back, and that's with atom bombs.
And if they unleash one little Hiroshima-sized atom bomb against an armored column of Indian forces, then that means that they lose Islamabad or they lose Peshawar.
Do you know why it is that the Indians have decided to not make tactical nukes only H-bombs?
Or are they H-bombs?
Are there at least multi tens of kilotons city killers here?
Well, their take on nuclear weapons was that they had two foes, Pakistan and China.
Now with China, of course, you need strategic nuclear weapons.
You need the big ones.
And so the Indians, up until recently, have had a very limited ability to build nuclear weapons.
The Indians have virtually no natural uranium, unlike the Pakistanis.
And because they violated the nonproliferation agreement by setting off a nuclear weapon in 1973, they've been banned from buying uranium on the international market.
But what happened is that the Bush administration and the Obama administration set up this agreement called the 1-2-3 agreement, which allowed India to bypass that ban.
And so that allowed the Indians to buy uranium on the international market, so long as they used it just for civilian purposes.
That meant that they could concentrate all of their uranium, their own native uranium, on their weapon system.
And their focus was strategic weapons.
Are they building tactical nuclear weapons?
We don't know.
Do they have hydrogen bombs?
There's a rumor out there that they do, but no one knows for certain.
But China is a major target for them, so that's why they've built these large weapons.
The other element here is that the Modi administration, the new prime minister of India, whose BJP party is this very right-wing extremist Hindu organization— Well, people might remember—let me interrupt for just a second to say— people might remember that not long after September 11, maybe it was in 2002, there was a massive pogrom where this guy's party—and he had a lot to do with it— they killed like 40,000 or 50,000 Indian Muslims.
And I remember Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst, bin Laden unit chief, pointed out that this was a huge talking point for al-Qaeda, that they said, see, the Americans don't say a word when the victims are Muslims, just like we told you.
And it was tens of thousands of innocent civilians just butchered, and this is the guy who's now the boss.
Yeah, and he was the president of the state where most of the massacres took place.
And what he's done is he's put in this odd-sounding military doctrine called Cold Start.
And what it does is it allows the Indian military to penetrate 30 kilometers into Pakistani territory.
And if the Pakistanis misinterpret Cold Start as a full-scale attack, we got a nuclear war in our hands.
Hang on just one second.
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Let me ask you one thing about Afghanistan here, because you mentioned about the Obama policy and now the Trump policy, too, is to build up India's influence in Afghanistan, which is the reason.
And Eric Margulies told me this for the first time back in 2004 or something.
Why do Pakistanis back our enemies, the Afghan Taliban, Eric Margulies?
Well, it's because we're backing India's friends in Afghanistan.
And if they ever truly create a monopoly on force there, then that is Pakistan's strategic debt.
They need to be able to retreat to Afghanistan in the event of getting nuked by India.
And if we have them completely surrounded, then we remove that very important option to them.
It's their highest priority, and so therefore they back the Taliban against us, and they always will.
And so then there's this new lady, and I only know all about this because I wrote a book about it.
There's this lady, Linda Curtis, Lisa, wait, is it Linda or Lisa?
Sorry, I always forget and screw it up.
Curtis is her name, and she wrote a thing for the Hoover Institution, and so McMaster made her the holder of the Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio on the National Security Council, as they put it.
And they basically have, if you read her big study that she wrote back in February, right after Trump was inaugurated, the one that got her the job, there's basically no recognition of Pakistan's interest in Afghanistan whatsoever, other than some kind of aside about, well, they may not like it, but anyway.
But there's certainly no recognition that we are putting them in an impossible position.
And I just wonder if you think they're really that stupid, or, you know what I mean?
Like, how could they need India's help in Afghanistan that much, when it's that counterproductive?
Right.
I mean, they've kind of demonized Pakistan to the extent that they simply don't take Pakistan's interest into account.
You know, the other thing to remember is that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is called the Durand Line, and it was established in 1896 by Sir Mortimer Durand, who at that point was the head colonial officer in India.
And he just arbitrarily drew this line.
That line is accepted.
Afghanistan doesn't accept that line.
They don't agree to that border, because what that border did was that it kind of split the Pushtun population in southern Afghanistan.
And so when people say, well, why aren't the Pakistanis controlling the Taliban on the border?
Well, actually, they can't.
You know, that's the Northern Territories.
Every army that has tried to conquer the Northern Territories ends in a disaster.
Frankly, the Pakistanis are not going to expend their whole army trying to control the Taliban in the northwest provinces, while they have to keep most of their troops on the southern border with India.
And as you said, they can no longer – if the Indians put a lot of troops into Afghanistan, it means the Pakistanis can no longer retreat into Afghanistan.
And that was – the term for that is strategic room.
And the Pakistani military absolutely depends upon the ability that they can't fight the – defeat the conventional army of India, but they have an ability to fall back into Afghanistan and essentially prevent the Indians from destroying their army.
Well, you know, if this goes through, they can't do that.
Now, do you want to make a nuclear-armed power with tactical nuclear weapons – do you want to make them more nervous and more paranoid?
It doesn't seem to me like that's the way we should go.
Yeah, well, if only the guys at FPIF were the National Security Council instead of these kooks from the Hoover Institution.
You got my vote.
All right, well, guys, that is the great Con Hallinan.
You got to read this thing, man.
It'll really open your eyes up.
It's Asia's Other Nuclear Standoff at fpif.org.
Thanks very much, Con.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
Anytime, Scott.
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