For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton from Antiwar.com filling in for Gustavo Arellano, who's off today.
I appreciate you all tuning in to the show, we've got a good one lined up for you.
Andy Worthington will be here to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the trial of Omar Khadr and more.
Also, Michael Hastings will be here to talk with us about Afghanistan.
That'll be in about 20 minutes from now, but first, we will go to the great Patrick Coburn.
He is the Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent, that's independent.co.uk, and he is the author of the book, Muqtada, about Muqtada al-Sadr and the future of Iraq.
Welcome to the show, Patrick, how are you doing?
Good to be back.
I'm very happy to have you here and I really do appreciate you joining me on such short notice today.
As you well know, the biggest story of the whole week in 100 different facets is the, at least proclaimed, end of the Iraq war.
I wonder, just kind of first impressions, what you think of this narrative being pushed this week?
Well I think that it's being portrayed as sort of a semi-success, but I find it difficult to take it seriously.
When I look around Baghdad and you have 1,500 checkpoints, half the city in ruins, you climb on top of, I go up on top of my hotel and look around for cranes, there's no cranes, nothing's been rebuilt, and just this last month when everybody's declaring, or some people are declaring how well things went, I think we had 430 dead in Iraq, that's an awful lot of people.
Indeed, well we've spoken before and I think you referred to Mogadishu in Somalia as the only city on earth that you know of that's more dangerous than Baghdad, is that still correct?
Basically, yeah, I mean I know Kabul, I feel much safer walking around Kabul than I do feel walking around Baghdad these days.
And so what about the 50,000 infantrymen left behind, they're saying that they're not combat forces, but they're transitional forces, does that make any difference?
Maybe it does, right, in terms of just the PR?
I think once you go, the US forces are pushing out, are pulling out, there used to be 170,000 troops there now, it's 50,000, they're mostly in the bases, US troops haven't been in the cities or towns since June last year, so they're pulling out, but they're leaving a country behind, which is really a wreck, you know, and you can tell that, don't take my word for it, but 2 million refugees in Jordan and Syria, another 1.5 million Iraqis, this is a country of 27 million population, another 1.5 million Iraqis who have fled within Iraq and don't dare go home, that's the real indicator to my mind of the state of violence, the state of fear.
Well, of course, as you said, they're trying to spin this as at least a partial victory, I guess they try to call it a success more than a victory, sometimes the V word sneaks into the rhetoric, is that why America's leaving?
Because they won and the mission is finished, basically?
No, I think, you know, this was a disaster, whatever way you look at it, you know, there was an attempt, you know, the surge was portrayed as a success, but you know, I just mentioned 400 plus dead, you know, the surge was really more to do with PR than the reality on the ground in Iraq, could be, you know, this was originally going to be a demonstration of strength for the U.S. as the world's single superpower, and it became a demonstration of weakness, a demonstration of chaos, you know, it's very, I find it very difficult to see how anybody can look at Iraq today and say, you know, what a great success we made at this place.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Patrick Coburn, Middle Eastern correspondent for the Independent in the U.K. and author of the book, Muqtada, and what about Muqtada?
There was a very in-depth piece over at foreignpolicy.com last week called The King of Iraq, is that who Muqtada al-Sadr is, the king of Iraq?
Well, he's the one, you know, he's a nationalist and a Shia and a cleric, and you know, that really counts at the moment.
You know, he did well in the recent election, he's, you know, much regarded with some horror by the Pentagon and the White House, and personally, I think they make a mistake, because he's a sort of genuine Iraqi nationalist, and I think in the long term, he's in the pockets of the Iranians or anybody else, I think we'd be much better if the U.S. looked at genuine nationalists rather than people who, you know, espouse a lot of patriotic rhetoric, but are seen by Iraqis as being in the pocket of foreign powers, whether it's, you know, the U.S. or anybody else.
Well, you know, oftentimes in your reporting and a lot of other places, I've read and heard Sunni Iraqis talking about how the Shiite government in Baghdad is not a government of Shiite Iraqis, but that's the Iranians.
Do you think that if Muqtada al-Sadr really, say if they formed the government and he was the real power by whoever was prime minister, that the Sunni Iraqis who've pretty much lost power in this war would be able to see him more as an Iraqi than a front for the Iranians the way that they look at Nouri al-Maliki?
I mean, you know, one of the unfortunate things about Iraq, you know, it is a deeply divided society, and it's got more since in recent years, is, you know, you talk to a Sunni and, you know, many Sunni friends, and they say, oh, I'm not sectarian at all, you know, I know the Shiite, I don't care, some of these Shiite.
And then you mention specific people like Muqtada or the Grand Ayatollah Sistani or the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and they say, oh, he's an Iranian spy, he's an Iranian spy.
So they kind of think of themselves as accepting Shiite, but when you mention any specific Shiite leader, they say, oh, he's an Iranian spy, in fact, it's all a form of sectarianism, and they don't really accept the Shiite being in power.
Well, you know, back in the early days of the war, I'm thinking of the first battle, it was kind of a simultaneous battle right in the spring of 2004 in Fallujah and in Najaf at the same time, and Sauter had filled pickup trucks full of men to send them up to Fallujah to help them fight as a kind of show of nationalist solidarity and that kind of thing, and yet, I guess he spent the past few years in Iran.
Have we pushed him really closer to Iran, or is he simply hiding out there where we can't get to him?
Yeah, you know, if you're a militia, you know, you need to, we've got to fight the U.S., you're going to go to the end of the enemy of my enemy as my friend.
I think that's a cliche, but it's true in Iraq, it's true in most places, but it's particularly true in Iraq.
It looked hard, and one didn't ever, you know, historically, he and his family had very bad relations with Iran, the Iranians always closed down their offices, they didn't like the way they were Iraqi nationalists, but when he was going to be fighting U.S. forces, then he looked for allies, you know, going to supply them with ammunition and so forth, so he looked to the Iranians, but I think this is mostly tactical.
I think that, you know, Iraqi, the different communities in Iraq, Kurds, Shia, Sunni, you know, weren't really under pressure, they looked to their foreign allies.
So, you know, you were saying that he at least has a reputation of being much more nationalist than say the old Bata Brigade and the Supreme Islamic Council, and of course in your book you point out that he was among the only Shia with real influence who did not flee to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and the worst times of Saddam Hussein's oppression against the Shia, so he really did have a lot of street credibility, but not at all anymore with the Sunni.
You can see where I'm going with this, I'm hoping that this society can heal once America finally does leave, that the killing will finally stop.
I think it will, but how long, you know, I mean the problem is that, you know, you've had a pretty bitter sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni, one time we had 3,000 dead bodies turning up every month, most of them tortured, you know, it takes a long time for people to forgive or forget that sort of thing, you know, there's talk, you know, I see stuff in the papers saying sectarianism is dying away, but hold on a minute, you know, if your relatives have been murdered, you know, you don't forget about that in a few months because of something nice you've read in the newspaper, you know, how long did it take America, I mean the United States, to forget about civil war, you know, these things imprint themselves on the collective memory of a people and take decades to, you know, even to mitigate, and not, you know, and even then they're remembered.
Well, and I guess we've kind of alluded to this in this interview, Patrick, again everybody, it's Patrick Coburn from the Independent in England, we've kind of alluded to the failure so far of the political factions in Iraq to resolve who's going to be the Prime Minister, who's going to be able to form a government, here we are beginning September and the election was last March, well I guess my question though is, I think you've explained to me before really the reason that even though the violence is still horrible compared to anywhere else on earth, the reason it's so much less than it was in the worst days of 2006 and 2007 is because the Shiites really won that civil war, and the balance of power in Iraq is more or less where equal armed force on the ground would have it, so I wonder if even with this political impasse, do you think that really still means, or do you think that there's much possibility that it would break out into real open warfare again like it was in those worst days?
I don't think so, because as you said there are kind of winners and losers, you know the Shia are 60% of Iraqis, Kurds are 20%, the people who are most sort of angry at the moment are the Sunni, they're another 20%, so you know I think that you're achieving a kind of stability, but it's a pretty sort of grisly type of stability, it's a stability when you have extreme violence, you know we talked about I think 430 killed over the last month, this is a very large number of people, you have stability when the different communities all hate and fear each other, and that might go on for quite a long time, not getting worse necessarily, turning into a real civil war, but perhaps not getting better either, so you have a country which is, you know it exists, it hangs on, there's oil money, there's some positive things, but it's still not a country that most of us would want to live in, and most Iraqis would like to leave.
Well you know I was talking with Aaron Glantz the other day, another great unembedded reporter from especially the early days of the Iraq war, and he was saying that you know for what it's worth he's actually pretty surprised that we are down to 50,000 troops, of course there's still a lot of mercenaries in the country, and Hillary Clinton wants to bring in even more, and that kind of thing, but he said you know, he thought Barack Obama would have found an excuse to back out of the deadline for getting down to 50,000 infantry men, and he stuck with it, do you think that, I mean of course there's all these leaks all over the media Patrick about the guys in the Pentagon want to stay, they do not want to give up that country at all, what do you think is going to happen there?
I think the U.S. is going to pull out, and I think it's a smart thing to do, you know why is it not you know, at a certain point in 2008, you know Iraq stopped being covered by most of the American media, why did that happen, because American soldiers are no longer being shot dead or being blown up, but on the other hand if they keep troops there, you know that those casualties will start rising again, and again Iraq will become an issue, now I think you know the smart move for the White House is to get out, not to allow that to happen, it's all very well at the moment, they say well hold on a minute, no American soldiers are not being killed, one of the reasons that's happening is that various forces in Iraq know the Americans are leaving, tell them that the Americans are going to stay, and they may take a different attitude.
Well so what about Kurdistan, this is almost always left out of the discussion, it doesn't seem like the status of Kirkuk is resolved, and how all important is that?
Yeah but it's, I mean this is, you know it's negative in some ways, the Kurds are really so terrified that at some point they'll be, you know as one Kurd put it to me, their nightmare he said was they'd be you know once again alone faced by Baghdad, faced by an Iraqi Arab army, so you know what are they going to do, well they're getting, you know they want to get in close relations with the Turks, you know they form part of the government in Baghdad, they don't want to fight another war, you know it's doing better than the rest of Iraq, but that's maybe not too difficult to do.
Well is Kurdistan the place most likely for permanent American bases to be?
I'm not so sure, you know you put permanent American bases, but hold on, maybe that does you good, but you've got the Americans around, they might defend you, on the other hand you just made a lot of enemies, the Iranians aren't going to like that, maybe the, you know, Baghdad isn't going to like that, you know that's not something you can just sort of dream up on the moment and suddenly plonk down a lot of big bases, how do you defend those bases when people first start shooting at them, so I'm not so sure that's going to happen.
Well now the Turks and the Iranians both have done cross-border assaults and raids on the PKK and the PJAK rebels up there in the mountains, at least they've tried to, is that the kind of thing that's likely to escalate much, or that'll stay sort of the lowest level kind of warfare?
I guess the real question there is how powerful, I'm sorry?
The team might have some more fighting, but you know the kind of these are little sort of pressure points that everybody has in that area, you know, and one of the problems about Iraq is that, you know, somebody, people express themselves politically, personally by violence, now up in the mountains you have these Turkish Kurd guerrillas, you know, who exactly are they allied to, they're making forays into Iran, Iran blames the US for that, the Turks want to get them, but they, you know, it's difficult to do, there's a lot of sort of maneuvering and shadow boxing, but actually it's very difficult to get to pursue these rebels, you know, these are the mountains in that area, very rugged, there are no roads, there are deep gorges, they're very experienced, you know, and there aren't that number of them, so they're really difficult to wipe out.
It's Patrick Coburn from the London Independent, author of Muqtada, an excellent book, highly recommended to everyone, and I think you've told me before, Patrick, that you think that inevitably, someday anyway, Kurdistan will break away from Iraq and attempt to form an independent Kurdistan and then everybody look out, but is that the kind of thing you think is imminent?
I'm not sure I say it so forthrightly as that, you know, they don't have a bad situation at the moment, they're part of the government in Baghdad, yet they have a great local autonomy, they have more strength while they're part of the Iraqi government, rather than a sort of tiny, sort of, you know, sort of dwarf-like state in northern Iraq that nobody quite recognizes as an independent state, so I think they'll stay as they are.
On the other hand, the Kurds at the moment have that degree of autonomy which is greater than many independent countries, they have a larger army than most members of the UN and a more experienced army, so, you know, they'll probably stick with what they've got at the moment.
Well now, I think this goes back to even the early days of the war, I remember talking about this with Juan Cole long ago, that almost all the oil, I guess they say they found some now in the middle regions, but pretty much all the oil is in the north and in the south, and of course it was more or less in the war, a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunnis, and then, so there's always been debate as to whether the national government of Iraq, such as it is, would be willing to share the revenues more or less equally with the Sunnis who, after all, don't live on top of it.
Is that still really a crucial issue?
It's not a central issue, but it sort of relates to an issue of how much the Sunni gets, you know, what proportion of the national income do they get, do they get the proportion of jobs that they think they deserve, and maybe they've got exaggerated ideas, but, you know, that's a source of tension of, you know, are they getting enough, and it's not just Sunni, but Shia people in Basra, and most of the oil is around Basra, the port city in the south, say, hold on a minute, you know, most of this oil is pretty close to us, and it's exported everywhere else, and we never seem to see the money.
So there are lots of Iraqis who kind of wonder what happens to this money, and why it doesn't do them all good.
Well, you know, it's a country that I think a lot of times people forget was under blockade and suffered a war even before the blockade, a couple of wars before the blockade, and then that lasted ten years, and then another seven years of war now.
This is a country that's been beaten down pretty low.
I wonder if we can just spend the last couple of minutes with you, you know, describing, you know, the best way you can, what life is like for the average resident, I don't know, Baghdad or Mosul, in terms of their standard of living, even compared to during the sanctions, in terms of potable water and et cetera.
It depends who you are.
Some people are doing better, like the Kurds, you know, we're talking about some people who got a good job in the government, that's not badly paid, the government gets about sixty billion dollars in income a year, but you still have a big chunk of the population that depends on government rations, otherwise they'd starve, they wouldn't get enough to eat.
You know, it's still a very violent place, you know, there's still, Baghdad is a city full of people who don't dare send their children to school because they just think they might be kidnapped on the way, but you know, it's not just the bombs, there's much more violence that just doesn't get reported.
So you know, there are Iraqis who've done better since Saddam, but an awful lot of Iraqis that have also done worse.
And even today, you know, you have this sort of, things are a bit better, but people are very edgy, they're very nervous, you know, anything that happens, the shops close, they don't have much confidence in the future, and they're kind of right, I think.
All right, well, thank you so much for your insight, all your work on the Iraq War, and the rest too, and your time on the show today, Patrick, I really do appreciate it very much.
Oh, thank you very much.
Everybody, that is the great Patrick Cockburn from the London Independent, where he's Middle East correspondent, and he is the author of the book Muqtada, among others, which of course you can find at any bookstore or website that sells books.
I am Scott Horton from Antiwar.com, I'm filling in for Gustavo Arellano, we're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back with Michael Hastings, contributing editor to Rolling Stone Magazine.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Gustavo Arellano's show, I'm Scott Horton filling in for him here on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara, and I'm happy to welcome Michael Hastings to the show.
He is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone Magazine, and is of course the author of the very famous Rolling Stone piece from a couple of months back, The Runaway General, which ended up costing Stanley McChrystal his job as the top general in Afghanistan.
Welcome to the show, how are you?
Hey, Scott, how are you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing great, I really appreciate you joining us today.
So, let's talk about the Af-Pak war, as they call it, and I guess, you know, I think I've asked this question of others, but I think I'll ask it of you, too.
Why do they call it that?
Are they trying to make it one big war in those two countries, or what?
Yes, I think if you talk to any of the policy makers, they're quick to say that Afghanistan can't be solved without Pakistan, and they view the problems, or what they view as the problems there as one, and that became the acronym Af-Pak, or as I heard one story, where the Pakistanis prefer to call it Pak-Af, rather than Af-Pak.
Yeah, that's funny.
Well, yeah, it's funny how, you know, newspeak and military speak, I guess, and semantics can really change the character of a whole situation.
I mean, after all, there's, you know, kind of a phony border in there, the old British Duran line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but then again, the Pakistan government is not really trying to be the government on the other side of the line, or vice versa.
I mean, there is a real difference in who has a monopoly power where, and it seems kind of foolish to blur that line and combine the things.
Seems like it would obviously just make matters worse.
Well, I think one of the sort of interesting policy questions that we look at here is sort of this moving target, where essentially the original Obama policy was, look, we're just going to focus on Al-Qaeda, and that's why we need to focus on Afghanistan.
But then it comes, it turns out, oh, well, there's less than 100 Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.
So then you have to say, well, actually, no, the real problem is Pakistan.
Okay, so if the real problem is Pakistan, I think it raises some questions, then why have we spent $300 billion in Afghanistan if the real problem, quote-unquote, is the country next door?
And I think one of the other issues it also brings to the table, I think this has come with this horrendous flood that had been in Pakistan recently, is that we view Pakistan solely through the lens of this war on terror, when in fact, you know, it's a huge country, it's multi-ethnic.
In some ways, you know, Pakistan could be an ally to the United States, but unfortunately, the way we sort of view Pakistan and treat Pakistan, we treat it as, you know, the most dangerous country in the world and this enemy, and as a problem rather than as, you know, a potential ally that we could work with.
But you look at, you know, I mean, talk about expanding the war on terror, I've been going through and looking at the drone strike numbers recently, and in the past two years, the Obama administration has launched something like 114 drone strikes, which is three or four times more than the Bush administration had launched in the previous eight years.
So there's a real, so essentially, you know, what's important about Pakistan now is that essentially, it's this other front, essentially another front in the war that we've opened.
Well, and the thing is, too, it seems like we've taken what's really a lot of local issues and sort of combined them all as though anyone with a rifle over there is Ayman al-Zawahiri.
No, exactly.
That's exactly one of the major problems we have, you know.
I mean, the threat in Pakistan along the border region isn't all from al-Qaeda.
That's actually a small percentage of it's from the Pakistani Taliban, which is, again, it's a local indigenous group that we're fighting.
We see the same thing happen in Afghanistan.
Most of the people we're fighting pose no threat to the United States homeland at all.
We saw the same thing in Iraq.
Most of the people we fought over there are either from, you know, Sunni or Shiite militias who never actually pose a threat to the United States.
So, you know, and as we get more and more involved in Pakistan, I think the question we have to ask ourselves are, you know, these drone strikes that were, the sort of war we're waging there with drone strikes, are we just targeting al-Qaeda or are we sort of, are we targeting these other local indigenous groups that have other agendas that actually don't, you know, threaten us?
Well, you know, I saw some old propaganda replayed the other day, not that old, but it was the movie of the Pat Tillman story.
So they were replaying clips of right around the time that he died and when the media was trying to, you know, use him as a poster boy for more recruiting and all of these things.
And a couple of the clips of the news people, they used the phrase that, yeah, he went up the mountain to engage the terrorists, the terrorists.
And I thought that, you know, here in 2010, they're not quite as blatant, I guess, with their propaganda.
And they don't really refer to anyone with a rifle in Afghanistan as a terrorist.
They're all Taliban, maybe.
But the way it sounded in that clip from 2004, right, was that we're talking about armies and armies and armies worth of al-Qaeda guys that our guys were doing battle against, which of course wasn't the case.
In fact, that was a friendly fire thing anyway.
But you know what I mean.
It seems like it was kind of a nice contrast, like watching a really old commercial that feels out of time, you know, and seeing just how blatant and dare I say ridiculous the lie was.
No, I think I think the sort of the use of the word terrorist has, I mean, it's still, you know, it still comes in.
It comes in handy when, you know, essentially, as you said, as a propaganda function, when in fact, as I said, most of the people were fighting, you know, our insurgents.
And I think it is, you know, through insurgents are involved in their own own local struggles.
But yeah, I mean, I think with the Pat Tillman case, especially, you know, when you have to ask yourself, okay, he signed up to want to go actually fight these al-Qaeda types.
And then I think from from my reading of things, at least that he'd written, he seemed to be fairly disillusioned with everything that happened.
Well, yeah, in that movie, they certainly make it seem as though it was his time in Iraq that really changed his mind about it.
Well, so now, you know, looking at the headlines, it's already the most deadly year for Americans, or at least casualties wise, that may be including wounded, but still at least one of the most violent years already, with a few months to go in the entire war so far.
And I guess I've heard this refrain in the Afghan war, as well as the Iraq war over the years from the generals, which is that, yes, it's true, we're taking a lot more casualties.
But that's because we're bringing the fight to the enemy.
And the more violence means that we're really making progress, and we're getting closer toward a victory here.
Is that right?
I mean, you've spent a lot of time on the ground in Afghanistan, you've, you've, of course, talked with these soldiers for, you know, days on end, right?
How are things really going there?
Well, it's one of those catch 22s.
And certainly, the idea that this this has happened in Iraq during the surge period, you know, you do, you put an influx of troops in, you're going into areas where there are people who are not going to want you there, so they're going to start fighting you.
And we've seen that this year, I mean, look, the reason Americans are being killed in Helmand province, because Americans are now in Helmand province.
It's not because it's so there is this sort of catch 22.
And what what military officials hope is that it reaches this kind of inflection point of violence, you could call it, where eventually, the casualties are going to start going down.
But that's certainly not guaranteed.
And what we've seen very troublingly in Afghanistan is that balance has been on the rise over the past five years.
And I think if you look at what Ambassador Eikenberry, who's the American ambassador to Kabul, warned in a memo that was leaked earlier this year, he said, Look, if we put more troops in, it's just going to cause more violence and destabilize the situation even further.
And he was not even sold on this idea that that we will hit this point where it stabilizes in every conflict.
Eventually, the violence starts going down.
So the question is, will that be because we fight it to get down or that because we withdraw?
You know, once we start, you know, drawing down troops, yeah, the violence is going to go down because we have less troops there who are who are fighting.
So it's a weird I don't know if catch 22 is exactly the right phrase to call it.
But certainly, it's it's it's not positive.
It's definitely not a positive development.
And I think sort of equating, you know, having more Americans killed as progress is somewhat dubious.
Hmm.
Well, tell me more about this mission to Kandahar, because the test case for the new surge, right?
Forget everything you learned from the WikiLeaks dump, because that ends in the in December of 2009.
And so none of that counts, because the real surge got underway and General McChrystal's night raid slash beat cop strategy really got put into place after that.
And so but here we are at the beginning of September.
We've had Marjorie.
We've had the beginning of Kandahar.
Help us understand exactly what's going on in those towns right now.
Well, I think one of the issues with Kandahar is this sort of confusion surrounding what we're trying to accomplish there and what it what's actually possible to accomplish there with General McChrystal.
That was one of one of the main sort of criticisms of his command was that they didn't really have a handle on what they were doing in Kandahar.
Part of the problem is, is that, you know, on the one hand, you have military officials saying the war is going to be won or lost in Kandahar.
And there's a question.
Well, is that true?
And if so, what does it mean?
You have local warlords who are allies.
You know, you have Taliban there, but the local warlords don't want to give up power.
The Taliban don't want to give up power.
So, you know, so, OK, what are we going to do now?
What it looks like is that there's now these these new Afghan surge troops.
The Americans who've gone over there for the surge are going to be fighting in and around mostly around Kandahar City over the next few months.
So look to that fighting to get to get to get pretty bad.
But what's the idea?
The idea is to sort of clear hold build.
You know, they call the rising tide of security.
It's just it's the exact same language we heard from from the Iraq surge.
Now, the question is, and I heard a pundit say this the other night, I think this is true.
He said the problem with Afghanistan is that you have the surge without the awakening and the awakening, meaning the Sunni awakening movement, where essentially we started we started paying off the guys we've been fighting for a couple of years to get them to stop fighting us.
The question is, can we kind of figure out that same kind of dynamic in Kandahar?
And so far, I don't I don't know if we if we can.
And if you look at the people of Kandahar, one of the problems there was that we went down earlier this year and said, hey, Karzai and McChrystal did and said, hey, you know, we want to launch this operation here.
Is that OK with with with the folks, so to speak?
And the folks said, no way.
You know, we don't want we don't want your operation here, but we're trying to go ahead with it anyway.
So that's what's that's going to be a real test case about whether Obama's strategy is going to work or whether they can even convince us that it's working is probably more accurate.
I'm Scott Horton.
Yeah.
Well, good point.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Michael Hastings.
He is contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.
And you know, when you talk about the Anbar awakening and whether that can be replicated in Afghanistan, I guess I can't really say this without oversimplifying it, but it sure seems to me that in Iraq, America was fighting at least from, say, 2004 on one Sistani call for a one man, one vote election.
America was fighting on the side of the obvious winning side of the majority to expel the old minority out of the capital city.
They succeeded in doing that.
I guess the surge helped put the finishing touches on that.
And the Sunni insurgency had been begging to become the awakening and the concerned local citizens for six years, five years or three or four years, at least before Petraeus finally accepted their offer.
And so that is the complete opposite of Afghanistan, where we're backing the losers.
We're backing the KGB guys, the Northern Alliance that has the support of, I don't know what percentage of the population, but not enough to sustain it.
Yeah.
The government has very little popular support, especially the local governments, they're viewed as corrupt and predatory.
And you know, and there's a tendency to say, well, the Taliban can give us law and order.
These warlords don't give us that.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting.
You know, there's always this thing in military history about we're trying to always fight the last war.
And we might be making that same mistake with Afghanistan this time around, in that if you look at the specific dynamics of what changed in Iraq, well, for one thing, we shouldn't pat ourselves.
You know, we shouldn't throw our arms out patting ourselves too much on the back about the surge.
Remember, why did the Sunnis and Anbar eventually turn against Al Qaeda?
Well, that's because we had invaded, totally destroyed their tribal structure, which allowed for this sort of power vacuum where, you know, Al Qaeda-linked terrorists and other, you know, folks from the region sort of flooded in.
They turned out to be even more brutal than the Americans.
So the Sunni tribal leaders were like, well, geez, we got the Shiite government in Baghdad that's against us.
We got these Al Qaeda guys who aren't really doing what we want them to do, and we're fighting the Americans.
You know, so it was not a tenable situation.
They had to figure out, just for their own survival, they had to make a deal.
And the question is, are similar dynamics going to work in Afghanistan?
I don't see those dynamics taking place right now.
I think the Pashtun population is going to be much harder to convince to get on our side versus, you know, the marginalized Sunni tribal leaders.
Well, which is not to say that they would prefer to have Mullah Omar back in charge, is it?
No.
Yeah, I think that's correct.
I think that's right.
And this gets to one of these other sort of points about this sort of glaringly obvious points about the sort of strategy that I sort of enjoy, or not enjoy pointing out, but just sort of point out.
It's like, look, you know, one of the major players in Kandahar, if not the major player, is Hamid Karzai's half-brother, Ahmed Waleed Karzai.
The military, they call him AWK.
If you're a real bad guy, you get a three-letter acronym.
So AWK, you know, he's linked, he's a CIA guy, he's linked to drug trafficking, he's linked to, you know, targeted killings, all these kinds of things.
And there was a discussion throughout the year about whether or not AWK, we could work with him, or whether or not we should try to kill him.
Now, this is our ally we're talking about, right?
He's a DM in Vietnam.
Yeah, exactly.
But the endgame of our strategy is, eventually, we are going to negotiate with the Taliban.
We are going to have to figure out a way to bring the Taliban into the government.
So the question I always ask is, look, if we're having this much trouble deciding whether or not we want to deal with our ally, being AWK or Hamid Karzai, how are we going to feel when we actually have to negotiate with the Taliban?
How is that really going to work?
Is that palatable at all?
And so we should go into this, you know, if we can't negotiate, if we can barely, you know, if we have to hold our nose to work with our ally, it's going to be much more difficult to finally negotiate with our enemy.
Well, Don Rumsfeld called it a long, hard slog.
I guess we're just getting started.
Thank you very much, Michael Hastings.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
Everybody, Michael Hastings is contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
We'll be right back with Annie Worthington after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton from Antiwar dot com.
I'm filling in for Gustavo Arellano, who's off today.
And I'm happy to welcome to the show Andy Worthington.
His website is Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
And he's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, and is the producer of the movie, the documentary Outside the Law on the same subject there, the prison, the American prison down in Cuba.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Good to talk.
I'm very happy to have you here and I really appreciate you staying up late.
I know it's late in England right now.
It is.
It's it's getting on for midnight here and I'm always happy to talk to you, Scott.
You know that.
Well, I appreciate that.
And, you know, it's not my fault that there are no Americans that do this work.
That's why I need you.
And well, and I mean that because it is the comprehensive, incomparable, comprehensive study of the victims of the Guantanamo kangaroo process from 2001 on.
And you know, the book is called The Guantanamo Files.
Well, let's talk about some of these Guantanamo trials.
What's the scorecard so far after years and years of pseudo law down there at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, Andy?
So how many how many convictions have we had?
Yeah.
How bad got how bad of guys were these and how many more can we get before the end of the year?
And and how wonderful is it all?
Well, it all seems to be grinding to a halt, actually, doesn't it, Scott?
We've had four, four convictions in the military commission trial system at Guantanamo.
One under under President Obama.
That was back in July when a man who had been a cook in a compound that Osama bin Laden sometimes stayed in, accepted a secretive plea deal.
And we still don't quite know what the terms of that are.
He was given a 14 year sentence by the military jury, which also wasn't told what the deal was.
So that looks like that's the cover to make it look like, you know, the system's working.
And all the stories behind the scenes are that he gets a couple of years.
The administration avoids a messy court trial.
The actual process of going through prosecuting the guy.
And of course, now they're stuck with a marketer which they should never have embarked upon in the first place.
And reports in the media at the weekend is suggesting that there are no more trials set up that are in the pipeline for the imminent future.
So, you know, they're left with prosecuting a former juvenile prisoner, allegedly a child soldier for war crimes that have been invented.
And nothing else is going to happen until the midterm elections.
I think everything's ground to a halt.
No progress will be made on where to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the alleged conspirators for 9-11.
Very few prisoners are being released.
There's painfully slow progress as usual, but it is some kind of progress in the habeas petitions in the courts.
It's pretty much ground to a halt, Scott.
And you know, are the midterm elections going to make things any better?
It doesn't seem to me that they are.
If the Democrats lose some power there, as people are anticipating, then that puts the ball more back into the courts of the Republicans, and they've been firing themselves up like crazy for the last 20 months, getting hysterical about how Guantanamo is full of terrorists when it's no such thing.
They're pretty gloomy, really.
Yeah, well, and that's really too bad, especially when you look back on how much so-called political capital Obama had when he took power and announced that he was going to close Guantanamo.
He could have taken on those Republicans in Congress and won then, but he didn't put the effort into it.
And now look at him.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the behavior of, you know, of Republicans and of a large number of Democrats is thoroughly reprehensible.
But you know, he has lacked the courage.
This is a guy who, you know, he does urbane, but he doesn't do shouting people down.
And on these issues, on this cleaning up the mess, he's called it a mess, he knows it's a mess, cleaning up what was left from the Bush administration, he hasn't stood up and shouted down his critics.
And it seems to me the way that things are going with detention and with all the kind of war issues, really the Pentagon's leaving.
It doesn't seem to me as though he's in charge.
And, you know, why would we think that he is when his defense secretary, although clearly not a neocon and clearly not, you know, a man like Don Rumsfeld, is a Republican.
You know, a Republican is running a Democratic president's Pentagon.
You know, does it seem to you like he's in charge?
It doesn't to me.
And, you know, and in the last couple of days, of course, we've had the end of combat operations in Iraq, which doesn't signify much.
I think the thing that bothers me is I don't think he minds that he's not in charge.
I don't think, I think it might as well be George Bush up there.
But in fact, you know, there was a story, I think it was the New York Times, it was certainly highlighted by Glenn Greenwald over on his blog, where Obama's political advisors, and I don't think it was Rahm Emanuel, but it was one of the political advisor types from the White House, who went ahead and basically just plain admitted to the paper that, well, what we want to do is make it seem like we're trying to close Guantanamo so that that'll placate all the people of the world, but we're not really trying to.
No big deal.
They just admit it like that.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if that is the case, then the problem with that is that nobody's, you know, nobody's looking into it closely enough.
And that was certainly my impression with the review that was undertaken last year by the Guantanamo Review Task Force, which, you know, was representatives of government departments and other agencies.
And you know, their overall approach was clearly erring on the side of extreme caution.
I mean, it really was, you know, it was a disappointment to, obviously, a huge disappointment to the lawyers for these men who had hoped that there would be, you know, an openness of mind, really, when Obama came in.
And, you know, the review task force is actually, obviously, a bunch of people in the establishment who, you know, everybody's terrified about making a mistake, as they've always been.
So the issue isn't really how can we get this closed, how can we, you know, wickle this down to the real, small, hardcore, genuinely dangerous people.
It's what they did was they looked at the cases.
They apparently spent ages looking at them.
But you know, their overall results have erred on the extremely cautious, I think.
So they ended up recommending to the president, look, there are 48 guys there that you're going to have to continue holding indefinitely without charge or trial, the centerpiece of what President Bush did.
You know, no, no, you can't do that.
That's not acceptable.
You either have a case against these guys or you don't.
And that's where the that's where I think the courage that has been lacking should have come in, because this is not going to come to an end unless somebody says, let's all stop really overreacting about everything.
You know, they've they've looked at the cases of guys who, yeah, they were out there.
They were fighting with a Taliban.
They trained in a camp.
They may have heard a speech from Osama bin Laden.
Do they like America?
Probably not.
Is that to do with foreign policy?
Yes.
You know, send these guys home.
They're they're they're the kind of exaggerated victims of something that was set in in progress nearly nine years ago.
And without without anything substantial happening, it isn't going to go away.
You know, Guantanamo will have been open for nine years in January.
How long are we going to talk about this, Scott?
You know what I mean?
It's like nobody wants to push ahead with it because it's too difficult, because they haven't taken any bold action.
So we could really seriously be, you know, be be talking about this in five years time.
We could be talking about this in 10 years time.
Somebody has to be bold at some point, otherwise it stays open forever.
And the fact that nobody seems to care.
I know that a significant, you know, a significant number of Americans don't care.
The political elite doesn't care.
Most of the pundits don't care that that can keep going on.
But it doesn't really end up making America look to the outside world as though it's addressed these problems.
And nor does it, of course, to the significant number of Americans who who actually are appalled by what's going on.
Well, you know, if there's one thing to care about, if not innocent people spending a decade, you know, not knowing if they're ever going to get a single hearing or a chance to prove their innocence as though the burden should be on them anyway.
But one thing is that the war comes home when we do things like this.
And as you talked about, they came up with this as the panel recommended to Obama or whatever.
And he went ahead and gave in or maybe he liked it.
And the idea was we'll have three different ways of doing this.
We'll have some Guantanamo trial still.
And then we'll maybe we'll bring the Guantanamo prison to Illinois and keep the same basic kangaroo process from Guantanamo.
But now it'll be on American soil.
And then we'll have a trial for Ramzi bin al-Shib and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
But no, we won't.
But if we do.
Even if they're acquitted, we'll still hold them as enemy combatants.
And I get very confused as to whether any of this makes any sense to anyone really in the Justice Department or anywhere else, Andy, and what it portends for, you know, the average guy who gets accused of a regular crime in America in the future.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the difference between regular crimes and the hysteria that's built up around terrorism is that, you know, it's probably business as usual as far as regular crimes go.
But, you know, this has been inflated so much that, you know, so many people are oversensitive about it.
I mean, you know, I must return to that.
But everything he tries to do, he's up against, you know, an insane amount of criticism.
But yeah, pretty much everything that they say they're going to do or end up doing or end up not doing just seems to be confused and confusing.
They sway in the wind.
They see how things are going.
They back down.
None of it's very logical.
I mean, they shouldn't have revived the military commissions.
They know full well they shouldn't have revived the military commissions.
They were told by experts that these were invented war crimes that weren't war crimes at all.
The senior figures in the Defense Department and in the Justice Department conceded in congressional testimony that one of the key allegations that they're using, which is material support to terrorism, has nothing to do with war crimes, has no place in these military commission trials.
But it's perfectly good to to prosecute people for that in federal courts.
But they didn't do it and they didn't put their foot down and they didn't say no.
So now they're left with this shambolic system.
And it's just like this with everything.
You know, I mean, let's look at the men who have been cleared for release, approved for transfer, is what the task force referred to that.
They didn't say anybody was actually cleared for release, but they approved over half of the prisoners who are still left, you know, nearly half of them.
About 95 men it is now, out of the 176, they approved them to leave.
But 58 of these guys are Yemenis.
And so because this guy tried to blow up a plane at Christmas and he had been apparently trained in Yemen and Obama got a lot of criticism, he said, OK, nobody's being released to Yemen.
And he established this moratorium with no date on it.
So we're now what, nearly eight months down the line.
There are 58 guys the task force said should go home to Yemen.
Nobody is being released.
Now, when you say the task force is that that overlaps with but is different from people who have had a federal judge at a habeas corpus hearing go ahead and order them to be set free, right?
Yeah, well, some of those have also had a judge in a U.S. district court say that they should be released as well.
Some of those are Yemenis.
But only in one case a few months back, you know, it was too embarrassing for them.
They caught a guy who was sleeping the night at a university dorm and everybody, everybody agreed that there was no reason to hold him.
So they sent him home.
But they're holding all the rest of them.
You know, and the subtext of this is that is that even though the task force and everybody who's looked at these guys cases have said they're not a significant threat there, you know, they are they can be released back to their home country.
Everybody is so up in arms with suspicion about Yemen that they're basically saying the entire country of Yemen is a potential terrorist training base.
And we cannot trust ourselves to release men back to there without thinking that they're immediately going to be recruited into some terrorist organization.
You know, I think that's a really pretty deep insult to the Yemeni people, to the tens of millions of Yemeni people, most of whom are living peacefully.
Well, yeah, you know, people get convicted, innocent people get convicted of crimes all the time in America, I think usually when they get a chance in court and they can really cast substantial doubt on their guilt or maybe even prove their own innocence.
Of course, the burden is on you once you've been convicted.
But I think at that point we go ahead and turn them loose.
Right.
We're not going to sit here and hold people who we know are innocent in prison where even the prosecutors admit now, OK, Your Honor, we're not fighting about anymore.
The guy actually is innocent.
But that's what we're doing at Guantanamo, continuing to hold people after the judge has said, let him go.
Well, in most cases, you know, in most cases where they lose, they've been challenging those decisions, you know, and that leads us into a rather disturbing other part of the story, really, which is that when these cases are appealed, they come up in front of the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia, which is, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, a court that is stuffed full with rabid right wingers.
You know, there are guys and women sitting in that court who are making the kind of pronouncements that, you know, would put a big smile on Dick Cheney's face about no limits on executive power.
You know, so they're kind of overturning some of these rulings that have been made.
And the whole thing, again, is what's going on here?
We've got a huge kind of delaying tactic.
Why don't you just accept what a judge says to you?
You know, you haven't got enough evidence to hold this guy.
I don't care whether you say to me that this guy is dangerous because you don't have the basis on which to hold him and your evidence is tainted.
Torture has been used.
You've got unreliable witnesses.
You're relying on ludicrous levels of hearsay that I don't believe.
Let the guys go.
But no, you know, it's like, no, let's appeal it.
Let's keep this whole thing dragging on, dragging on.
Well, and that's the bit that gets to me.
Without people having sensitivity, Scott, I think for the prisoners who are held in this unique position, normally when you're in a prison, the judge said, I sentence you to X years and you know how long it is.
And these guys, it's open ended.
You know, that's ruinous for people's mental health.
It just goes on and on.
That's not that's not a great thing for the president, for his people, for the American people to be proud of.
But nobody wants to be bothered to try and find a resolution to this.
Well, now, on those open ended court decisions that you mentioned there, I thought that that was, you know, if anything, the one improvement of Obama's position on all this was that, no, he doesn't have the power to do this because the president has unlimited plenary authority, as in the theories of David Addington.
At least he's citing the authorization to use military force and, you know, his so-called at least constitutional powers, not these completely ridiculous John U.J.
Bybee, David Addington powers.
But it sounds like he just told me that a judge has ruled that, yeah, he does have those kind of plenary powers, which must mean that that was the position his Justice Department or Solicitor General was taking.
Right.
No, it actually got really it's actually been really quite insane over the last few months because the administration has told we have two minutes here.
The administration has told the appeals court that they don't want the powers to the extent that the that the appeals court judges are trying to give it to them.
They're saying, no, there are limits on our powers.
Their problem is that they're relying on Congress to give them the authority to do what they do.
And sadly, you know, we have to conclude that that Congress is stuffed full of idiots, idiotic people who don't know what they're doing, who are providing them with excuses for what they're doing that are not justifiable.
That's the thing with the authorization for use of military force.
These guys should be criminals or they should be prisoners of war.
But no, everybody's actually saying, oh, in the end, it's OK.
We're holding them as some third category of prisoner.
They're no longer called enemy combatants, but that's effectively what they still are.
Well, I sure appreciate your time on the show and all the effort that you put into this over the years.
And it really is important that there is at least one place that people can go if they're looking for the master resource on Guantanamo Bay and this most important chapter in American history that is not over yet.
So thank you again, and especially for your time on the show today, Andy.
Well, thanks, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
All right.
That was Andy Worthington.
His website is Andy Worthington dot c o dot UK.
The book is The Guantanamo Files and the documentary film is called Outside the Law, both of which are easily available wherever you look with your favorite search engine.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been me filling in for Gustavo Arellano on the show today.
I want to thank Patrick Coburn and Michael Hastings, as well as Andy Worthington for showing up and doing the show.
And I also want to thank Tamika for running the board and everyone for helping out.
Check out antiwar dot com for all the bad news.
All.
They don't seem to want me, but they won't admit.
I must be some kind of creature.
