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If I don't find a way out of here, I'm gonna go to jail cause I'm crazy and I'm hurt.
Let off my shoulder.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show is Anand Gopal.
He formerly was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and has also written for the Christian Science Monitor and a number of other outlets of that stature.
His website is anandgopal.com.
Welcome back to the show, Anand.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, thanks.
Thanks very much for joining us.
I forgot to mention, you're on the phone live from Kabul, Afghanistan today.
That's right.
Well, I sure appreciate you taking time out of what must be the middle of the night there or something to talk with us.
It's getting late, but happy to join you.
Okay, so where I'd like to start today, if possible, would be your analysis of the different paradoxes of the Afghan war.
And I'm thinking specifically in terms of all the various different reports about NATO forces having to pay the Taliban protection money in order to get their supplies around.
They're basically funding their own insurgency against them directly, it seems like.
And then also there seem to be financing and backing the insurgency against themselves indirectly by way of backing the Pakistanis, who, as per my understanding, pretty much feel like they must back the Taliban in Afghanistan to prevent the Karzai government from ever really ruling that country and forming an alliance with India.
And so this thing seems like a perpetual motion machine, other than the blood of innocence that it continues to consume, of course.
And I was just wondering if you can maybe set me straight if that isn't right, or, you know, tell us what this all really means or something smart.
Well, you're right.
I mean, this place is riddled with paradoxes of this sort.
The U.S. is directly supporting the Taliban insurgency because they're paying private security companies or they're paying the logistics companies to bring their materials to the bases.
And the materials are coming in from Pakistan and going across Afghanistan to the various bases.
And the Taliban are so strong in most of the countryside that it's almost impossible for these companies to actually be able to deliver these goods without actually paying the Taliban.
So the Taliban get protection money, as it were, to allow these trucks and these convoys to pass through their area.
So that's the first paradox.
The second one, as you mentioned, is that one of the biggest allies of the Americans in the region is the Pakistanis.
But the Pakistanis have been supporting the Taliban essentially since day one.
The leadership of the Taliban moved in Pakistan.
They organized indirect insurgencies from Pakistan.
And if Pakistan wanted to, tomorrow they could arrest the entire leadership of the Taliban and it would really do a lot of damage to the movement.
Another way in which they're actually indirectly supporting the insurgency, they're supporting the warlords and power brokers here in Afghanistan who are really hated and are in large part the reason why the insurgency was able to grow in the first place.
I mean, there's a headline the other day where I guess one or two Pakistani sources quote-unquote admitted that, yes, we arrested the Taliban leaders that the Afghan government was trying to negotiate with.
We don't want negotiations there.
It's not even a secret.
Well, that's right.
Or at least what they don't want is they don't want the Taliban to negotiate on their own.
What Pakistan appears to want is to have a seat at the table.
So whatever happens in the next couple of years, Pakistan wants to have a say.
And what happened in this case was there were some senior Taliban leaders who were going and secretly meeting with Afghan government officials and seeing if there's a way they could strike a deal.
That's what Pakistan does not want.
Now why would the Karzai government want to put the Pakistani government in such a bind in the sense of allying closely with India there?
I mean, I guess I've read a few things that said it was America insisting that Karzai ally with India.
Maybe it was part of the nuclear deal or who knows what.
I don't know.
Well, there's a lot of issues starting from day one.
To start with, the Americans decided to back the Northern Alliance, which are warlords and commanders from the north who are largely non-Pashtun and who have traditionally been the enemy of Pakistan and vice versa.
The Americans backed them pretty early on, and this is something that really alienated Pakistan and got Pakistan to start thinking about supporting the other side, supporting some Pashtun groups, and the most obvious one for them was the Taliban since they already had ties and connections to that group.
And coming out of that environment when Karzai was inaugurated as president, he also was very closely aligned to India, just like the rest of the Northern Alliance was aligned to India.
He was very suspicious of Pakistan because, again, from day one they were friendly with the Taliban.
So they sort of started off at the wrong foot at the very beginning, and that relationship really hasn't healed since day one.
You know, it was funny.
I had completely forgotten about this, or maybe I never even knew this, but I went back and I was reading an article by Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com from the end of September 2001, and it was titled, Kill Him and Get Out.
And it was about, particularly, it was about a fight between Colin Powell, the Secretary of State at the time, and the neoconservatives.
And Colin Powell, I had no idea about this, but he had apparently said, I'm not interested, as though he was the president, I'm not interested in who rules Kabul.
We're going after Osama bin Laden and those guys.
We're going to have our international coalition.
We're not going to get bogged down doing regime change like the Russians in Rambo III.
We're going to get the bad guys and get the hell out of here.
And then Bill Kristol led the charge of all the neoconservatives saying, you know, traitor, terrorism, and whatever.
And the policy, of course, went Kristol and Cheney's way there with the regime change.
But I hadn't even really realized that at the highest level, at Colin Powell's level, they considered doing the war on terror smart for a minute there.
That's right.
You know, the problem is from day one, there's been a conflation between the Taliban and al-Qaida, and there's sections of the Bush administration and large other parts of the government, which saw the Taliban and al-Qaida as essentially the same thing.
And to defeat al-Qaida or to catch al-Qaida, they had to defeat the Taliban.
What we're learning now in the last 10 years is that that's actually not the case.
The Taliban and al-Qaida are actually two very different things.
The war on terror, finding bin Laden and defeating al-Qaida is actually a very different thing than what's happening right now in Afghanistan, which is a homegrown insurgency comprised almost entirely of Afghans fighting for Afghan issues.
And it's completely not the sort of global jihadist concerns that al-Qaida or other transnational terrorist groups have.
Well, and isn't it even the case that over the last couple of years anyway that the Taliban have offered deals where they said, look, if you'll just deal with us, we will give you a guarantee that no Arab Afghan army will be allowed here, no al-Qaida will be allowed here?
They have.
In fact, they were even saying that before 2001, you know, there's a history there before 2001 that's largely been untold, which is the various backroom negotiations that are happening between the U.S. and the Taliban.
We're talking even in the 90s to figure out a way to get them to hand over bin Laden.
And if you look back at that history, what you'll see is that the Taliban were largely trying to get leverage to, for example, extract concessions from the United States.
They wanted recognition, diplomatic recognition.
They wanted an official seat at the United Nations.
They wanted aid, these sorts of things.
And they were using the bin Laden card as a way to get leverage of that.
So it was very different from an ideological position where they felt that bin Laden had a right to be there and attack other countries.
All right.
Well, we're going to pick up right there when we come back from this break with Anand Gopal, live on the phone from Kabul.anandgopal.com, Antiwar Radio.
Listen to LRN.
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760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
All right, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and very happily, I have Anand Gopal on the phone.
He's in Kabul, Afghanistan, covering the war there right now.
His website is anandgopal.com.
And who are you writing for presently, Anand?
Well, at the moment, I'm doing some work with the Christian Science Monitor, but mostly I'm working on a book on Afghanistan.
Oh, OK, great.
Can't wait to read that.
All right.
So let's talk about well, where we left off.
We're talking about the could be past and future relationship of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
And I noticed that there's this piece in The Washington Post from Monday facing Afghan mistrust.
Al Qaeda fighters take a limited role in insurgency.
I think you told me last time you were on this show that it was maybe 200 or was it 300 al Qaeda on both sides of the borders?
If and I think maybe that's even generally defining al Qaeda is pretty much any Arab Afghan people who were ever had ever met or something.
But it sounds like, well, even according to the post here, if that makes it more true, that the people of Afghanistan view these leftover Arab Afghan warriors from the 80s when they were our friends as a liability and not an asset at all.
Well, that's right.
And there's actually a lot of cultural differences between Arabs and Afghans in general.
I mean, Afghans have a very different way of practicing Islam.
For instance, there are Arab graves, graves of fallen al Qaeda fighters that some Afghans have gone to and and seen as a sort of source of spiritual or spiritual light.
They would go there for good luck or for healing.
Now, the ironic thing is that the Arabs themselves actually disavow this practice.
They say not allowed in Islam.
So just to give you a sense of the sort of cultural differences that exist here, Arabs have never really been able to fit in.
That's why when they do attach themselves to the Taliban and it's very small numbers, they usually keep themselves hidden.
They don't interact with the population and they have no real support or anything from the local populace.
All right.
Now, I think also the last time that we spoke, you said that you believe that Osama bin Laden was still alive.
And I think maybe it was kind of a Rumsfeld thing about the absence of evidence and the evidence of absence.
People would have made a big deal about it if he had died.
Like when Mohammed Attaf died back in 2001, they held a big ceremony and they would have said, ha ha, the empire never got him and he died in natural causes and and that kind of thing.
Otherwise, he must still be alive somewhere.
Is that basically it?
Yeah, I think so.
And we do get every once in a while some audio recordings.
And in the early years, we got some video tapes as well from bin Laden.
And I think the experts generally tend to agree that those are accurate.
Those are authentic.
I mean, those are from bin Laden.
So I think I'd be very surprised if he were actually dead.
Now, the thing is, you know, you mentioned earlier that you think Pakistan could just arrest all the leaders of the Taliban in a day if they felt like it.
And, you know, Hillary Clinton has accused the Pakistanis of deliberately harboring Osama bin Laden.
Could they not just arrest him at a moment's notice, too?
No, I don't believe that the Pakistanis are actually deliberately harboring bin Laden.
I think the situation with Al-Qaeda is very different than with the Taliban.
Al-Qaeda and other Arab and foreign groups that are in Pakistan are actually at war with the Pakistani state.
They're putting bombs in cities.
They are actually fighting against the army, whereas the Afghan Taliban are not at war with the Pakistanis.
In fact, just the opposite.
They're being supported by the Pakistanis.
So the Afghan Taliban, the ISI knows exactly where their addresses are, knows how to find them.
But the Arabs and the other groups, these guys are actually in hiding.
They're in most likely the rugged mountainous tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
And it is quite difficult, I think, for the Pakistanis to actually find these people and get them.
OK, now there's all this controversy over the so-called 2011 deadline that Barack Obama set in his speech last November at West Point.
And the big controversy yesterday is this marine general.
They're even playing at the top of the hour news here on the radio station.
The marine general saying, oh, you're just telling the Taliban all they got to do is wait us out till July.
And all you're doing is handing everything over to the enemy, which makes a great war party narrative to use against Democrats, of course.
And so, you know, we've already seen all kinds of different people from the administration and the Pentagon adding caveats to this 2011 deadline.
Do you think that America is there to stay or do you think that they're really headed toward any sort of exit or what?
I think America would like to get out or at least diminish their presence.
But I don't think they know how to, which means that they will be here for a while.
I mean, one benchmark that's frequently cited is the handover of security responsibilities to the Afghan forces.
But the Afghan forces are nowhere near ready to actually take the lead in security.
Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a case where the Afghan army and some special forces units of the Afghan army decided to conduct an operation on their own in one part of the country.
And they went and targeted some Taliban cells and they got routed and had to call the foreign forces in to come save them.
I think a hundred or 150 soldiers even went missing at one point.
It was a real disaster.
So we're waiting for the U.S. forces to be able to hand over security responsibilities to the Afghans.
We're going to be waiting for quite a long time.
Well, even with the brilliant leader of the success in Iraq, David Petraeus, in charge, doesn't he have the right strategy, Anand?
Well, I think he's trying to take what seems to have worked in his mind in Iraq and bring it over here to Afghanistan.
So he's trying to create militias similar to the awakening councils in Iraq.
But these are two very different countries.
And what may have worked or appeared to have worked in Iraq may not necessarily work here.
Well, I mean, even in the most basic description, never mind.
I mean, there's a million different things you could take into account as differences.
But in Iraq, Petraeus was fighting for the majority that doesn't really need him against the minority.
And the majority won.
And he basically showed up at the end of that and bribed off the insurgency for a little while and called them the sons of Iraq and that kind of thing.
If you were to take that parallel to Iraq, that would be him fighting for the Pashtuns to install them in power in Kabul and finally bribing the Northern Alliance to stop fighting or something like that, which is the exact opposite situation, right?
Yeah, I mean, there's really no way you can translate the experience over there to here.
It's tribal society here just like there, except that here in Afghanistan, the tribes are very divided.
They're not unified in a way that you can actually get them all to all work together to, let's say, kick out al-Qaeda in the way he was able to do in Anbar.
So it's apples and oranges.
And I think we're going to see that his efforts to create militias aren't going to go too well in the coming years.
All right, well, so if they got rid of Kool-Aid drinking Jim Jones up there and they made you the national security advisor and gave you unlimited budget, is there anything that you could do to make this thing work out other than just saying pack your stuff and let's get out of here?
No, just to get on the first plane and get out, I think, would be the best course of action.
No, it's not.
So I guess that's why you don't write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, huh?
Well, so I guess we still have a couple minutes here.
Can you tell us about what's going on in Marjah and or Kandahar and whether the counterinsurgency doctrine is taking hold with the clear hold and build government in a box there at all?
Marjah is not doing well.
The insurgents still have quite a bit of influence.
They've really been going on a campaign of terror in Marjah.
They've been assassinating people.
People are even scared to come and talk to the foreigners.
They are not allowing people to even get jobs.
Also, the government that the Americans tried to put in there hasn't been working out that well.
So Marjah is not a success story, and we're, what, I think, seven or eight months into it.
That's informed the decision to delay the Kandahar offensive, I believe.
The Kandahar offensive was supposed to start earlier this summer, and they've been pushing it back and back.
Now I think it's going to start probably in October, but it's going to look very different from what Marjah looked like.
We're not going to see large numbers of troops falling into a specific area.
It's going to be more protracted, smaller engagement, and that sort of thing.
All right, everybody, that's Anand Gopal.
The website is anandgopal.com.
It's spelled just like it sounds, believe it or not.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Take care.
All right, y'all, this is Hansat War Radio.
We'll be right back.
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