Hey, I'm Scott, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio.
One of the things that's fun about doing this show, of course I have access to all the expertise of Eric Garris and Jason Fitz and Justin Raimondo and Matt Barganier and everybody, Jeremy Sapienza and everyone at AntiWar.com and of course I have access to all these wonderful journalists and experts from around the world, I get to ask them all these questions and so what that means in effect really is that I'm always years ahead of everybody and then it's fun and it's a little frustrating but kind of fun to see things that I say, you know, years in the past I quit saying because I got tired of saying them or forgot to say them anymore and then other people will finally come up with them.
Like Daphne Eviatar has an article about what America is doing to Omar Kader down at Guantanamo Bay is a war crime, they're charging him with a war crime and the case is so bogus and the whole structure of the thing is so bogus and he was a kid at the time and he was innocent anyway and etc. etc. that it's a war crime what they're doing to him.
Well haven't I put that to Daphne Eviatar on this show over and over again?
Because I'm armed with the kinds of things that she teaches me, the other Scott Wharton I learned from him about the laws of war and isn't that my point that I've been making for years that they're committing a war crime by holding these bogus trials in Guantanamo and of course the other big one from recent history is, oh goodness, Pakistan is intervening on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, why in the world would they ever do that?
Well I've been explaining to you why in the world they would ever do that this whole time and the reason I know is because I learned it from Eric Margulies and he's on the phone right now.
His website is ericmargulies.com and he's been a journalist covering wars around the world for decades and he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination and you can find virtually everything he writes I believe at lourockwell.com certainly all of it at ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margulies.
Welcome back to the show Eric, thank you very much for joining us today.
Good to be back Scott.
And so here's the deal, we talked about this with Michael Sawyer on the show yesterday, he wrote a great article about it and it's one of the most important things and it has gone unsaid until this WikiLeaks thing and then of course they just put stupid war party spin on it but that is that and they left out the India part which is the most important part.
India keeps insisting really that India take the side of the Northern Alliance, Vichy government that we've installed in Kabul in Afghanistan and therefore the Pakistani military must and intelligence agencies must intervene on the side of the Afghan Taliban resistance or Taliban based at least resistance there in order to prevent the Northern Alliance from ever maintaining a real monopoly government on that land because then the Indians would have them surrounded because of American stupid policy that invited the Indians in and you've been explaining this for years and Michael Sawyer's piece is really great on it.
Do you think that this, the idea that we're funding both sides of the war against us all the time in this perpetual motion machine of bankruptcy and death is actually possibly beginning to sink into the larger debate Eric?
No, I don't think so Scott, unfortunately we Americans continue to do self-defeating actions, we shoot ourselves in the foot, we work at cross-purposes as you just mentioned where we're supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan which is really the old Afghan Communist Party which is bizarre in itself and we don't seem to be gaining any understanding of the situation there.
We have, you know, we have like one month, we've been there for nine years but we have one month's experience times nine years.
It's very distressing and there are no signs in Washington in spite of rumbles that you hear that there is going to be a significant change of policy.
Yeah, well you know what, that's such an important point.
I remember Gareth Porter wrote an article just, oh I don't know, maybe a dozen articles ago or so where it's McChrystal, I think it was just before he was fired and the Rolling Stone piece came out and all that, and it's McChrystal talking about the upcoming clear holding and building of Kandahar and he's saying, yes we're going to begin figuring out who's who here like real soon and then we're going to start our mission and whatever and basically admitting that they had no idea who any of the people in Afghanistan were, who has power, what any of their last names are or whatever.
It reminds me of something I read about Vietnam where in the DM coup and they replaced DM with the other guy that they didn't even, they called everybody by their first name because they didn't want to remember anybody's name and they didn't realize that this was a family dynasty dispute and they were getting rid of the one that had a tiny bit of legitimacy in favor of the one that had none and they didn't even understand at all the dynamics of the people in power in South Vietnam and they just admit it with a straight face that we have no idea from valley to valley in Afghanistan what the hell is going on on any given day.
You just said you got to relearn every time, every month, I think you said.
That's the fault of Americans, you know, we don't have a good, we have a lousy education system, we don't know geography, we don't know history, doesn't need to be taught in schools anymore and we don't even know the history of 25 years ago, Vietnam, the Vietnam experience has been completely forgotten.
By the way, did I get that right about DM and the other guy?
Yes, yes you did.
It was, you know, I remember before the invasion of Iraq I was having dinner with a group of very senior Republicans, very close to the Bush family and they were asking me my opinion and I said, well, what's going to happen if we invade Iraq and I started talking, I talked about Shiites and Kurds and Sunnis and the Iranians and their eyes glazed over after about three minutes and one of them turned to me, he said, never mind all that stuff, he said, just give me the bottom line.
And I said, there is no bottom line, except don't get involved in this mess because you're never going to figure it out, you don't have the patience.
The British were very good at understanding such things, so were the French, they made much better colonialists than we do.
We're like impatient children, we want to re-engineer things, move on, get with the program and we don't want to take the time to really sit down there and learn.
Yes, another thing that Michael Shoyer said was that, and you know, he's been kind of high profile, they invite him on TV news sometimes still and he says some things I disagree with, but at least his bottom line has been since he came public as anonymous, the CIA made him be anonymous, it wasn't his choice, the book Imperial Hubris, his point has been that the history began before 9-11, American policies are the things that drive this insurgency against us, that caused the September 11th attacks against us.
And he even says, look, maybe you say that's the price of empire, maybe you say you want to keep these policies, but let's at least be honest about it.
This is a pretty basic, honest discussion to have, come on.
And he said there's only one person on all of Capitol Hill who's ever paid any attention to him whatsoever, and that's Ron Paul.
None of them have, like he said, their eyes glaze over, they're not even interested.
You know, it's not just that he's telling them what they don't want to hear, it's that even if he was telling them what they wanted to hear, they don't have an attention span that long.
You know, all they know about is how to get re-elected or whatever.
Well, you know, Scott, I wrote my second book, American Rage, precisely on this point trying to show North Americans how the flow of history in that region, that what's happening today, what we call terrorism and anti-Americanism, is part of a long process that began in the 18 and 1900s, and it's still going on, and we just, we don't have that understanding.
But look, we're going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot, and we're beefing up military operations, we're staying in Iraq, we're sending troops into Yemen, more troops into Yemen, and Somalia, and West Africa, and God knows where else.
So I am very negative on this.
I have this clip here that I got from the TV news yesterday from downtown Kabul, I wanted you to hear this.
What do you mean the bank is out of money?
Insolvent!
You'll be out of cash for the next three customers!
Hey!
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alright, so we're going to get started with Eric Margot.
He's going to do this.
What's up next?
Visit the Liberty Radio Network program guide to find out at shows dot LRN dot FM.
That shows dot LRN dot FM.
I'm not a cool guy anymore.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margolies.
He wrote a book called American Raj, Liberation or Domination, Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.
And we're talking about a young Afghan, Bart Simpson, causing a run on the bank yesterday simply by walking into the lobby and saying, what do you mean there's no money?
And everybody went, and guess what?
The bank didn't have the cash.
What's going on over there, man?
Well, Scott, the Afghans have been truly blessed now that we have liberated them from the stygian medieval Islamic darkness into which they have been plunged, that they were, part of the liberation process was bringing American bankers in to advise them.
And so they had some of the finest minds of Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, et cetera, to advise them on this banking, which a lot of the Afghan-American backed Afghan bigwigs kept their money.
Oh, you're bumming me out, man.
Is that really true?
Yes.
And the...
Well, I guess it has to be, right?
Yeah, the bank invested a lot of its ill-gotten gains, because there's a huge outflow of money from Afghanistan.
The aid money that we're pouring in there, the bribes that we're paying the Afghan warlords, plus the opium money, I mean, that's the billions of dollars is flowing, there's more money going out of Afghanistan than into Afghanistan.
So this bank was handling a lot of this money, as well as local deposits, and was channeling a lot to Dubai, which is really the first stop out of Afghanistan.
And these financial wizards who were running the bank put a lot of money in Dubai property just before it crashed, and word got out that there weren't no money in the bank, not that there ever is, mind you, and so a run is started on the bank.
But it looks very bad for the American-run government, because, you know, they're supposed to be bringing stability.
Man, you know, in the larger sense, too, it reminds me of this thing, you know, kind of a broader look at history or whatever going on.
I saw this still, and it kind of goes to what we were talking about with the other Scott Horton a little while ago, but where, you know, a lot of people miss the Soviet Union.
They see the American way, and they say, that's your freedom and capitalism, we don't want your way, things used to be better for us back the old way.
And, you know, I see Muslims protesting with signs sometimes that say, you know, damn freedom or something or, you know, like, because the freedom that we provide, what we call freedom is really this fascist imperialist betrayal of all that America's supposed to be about.
And so, same reason everyone in South America likes socialism so much, you know, because all they've ever seen of capitalism is a bunch of, you know, basically fascist oligarchs, you know, with guns, not with free markets, you know?
Well, that's too often true, but I've got to say, the Soviet Union life there was pretty miserable, too, I covered it, the only people who liked it well were the Communist Party bigwigs, they lived like Turkish Pashas, and retirees who had a steady pension and a roof over their head.
That was ripped away when the Communist system collapsed, and there is nostalgia, but there's nostalgia for Taliban, too, because I have to say two things about Taliban.
Number one, Taliban were the only honest people in the region, and they remain so.
All the other Afghans' governments and its henchmen are deeply corrupt.
Well, the Taliban were mean as hell, though, weren't they?
They were mean tribesmen from the mountains, but they were honest, and the Taliban government was pretty much incorruptible, and just the way a lot of these Islamic governments, like in Hamas and Hezbollah, they are honest, and that's why people support them, because they want honesty, honest officials, honest government services.
The other point that's important to remember is, you know, we're always talking about democracy, democracy, people want democracy, no.
In the Islamic world, what they want more than democracy is justice, and there is no justice today under the dictators, the U.S.
-backed dictators who run most of the Muslim world.
There's no justice for many of its people.
There's no justice in Afghanistan, for example, or in Iraq, and the only people who did have just courts were, once again, these terrible people, the Taliban and Hamas and Hezbollah, who brought quick and honest justice to the people.
So this kid started chatting with me on the Facebook, and it turned out he was in Karachi, and so I started asking him a bunch of things instead of him asking me a bunch of things, and one of the things that he said, Eric, was that he's just counting the days until the coup d'etat, that the Zardari government and the parliament are such a joke, and especially with the flooding, it's Hurricane Katrina, if people remember what that did for George Bush's credibility, finally it broke it.
You know, the Iraq war wasn't bad enough, it was too far away, it was really Katrina that did it.
Well, this is Katrina times a million or something, like we talked about on the show last week, Eric, and he was saying the military's going to take charge, and it's a matter of days or weeks.
Well, I think, Scott, in my view, the military already has taken charge, as quite some time ago.
This all went almost unnoticed in the American media, but Washington just engineered the promotion, the extension of the term of the chief of staff of the army, General Kiani, and the head of ISI intelligence, General Shuja Pasha.
These two men were due to retire, their term of duty had retired, and they were supposed to rotate out and retire, and open up the way for younger officers to be promoted and come up the ranks.
Well, Washington violated Pakistani precedent and internal policy by getting these people's terms extended by three years, which is just unprecedented.
What it means is that they are the real government of Pakistan, nobody's paying any attention to Zardari or to Prime Minister Gilani, who are just sort of paper cutouts.
The real power's with the army, we've engineered another coup d'etat in Pakistan, and the military men are calling the shots now.
Well, now, I think you told me before that the absolute worst-case scenario, which you did not see as something coming soon, but was the kind of thing that we could end up making happen, would be the military and the intelligence services falling apart, dividing between themselves and going to war, and Pakistan coming apart, because after all, just like any other state, it's a big artificial mess, a pretend line on the ground enforced by mobsters with rifles at the least, and so there's nothing really natural about it.
It's held together with force, and if the people doing the holding together with force can't hold themselves together, then it gets better or worse, I guess, is the question.
They got nukes, that's the big deal here.
Which are very carefully controlled and well-guarded, but no doubt Islam is the glue that holds Pakistan together.
It's made from disparate provinces that have nothing in common, don't like each other, speak different languages, are traditionally not one, and the hope when Pakistan was created in 1947 was that the sense of Islam would be a unifying factor.
There's another concern, Scott, that we have to worry about beside everything falling apart, and that is that, go back to 1970, a huge typhoon hit what was then East Pakistan, today Bangladesh.
That's just on the right side of India, between India and Burma, near Calcutta, and tens or hundreds of thousands of people were killed by this cyclone.
And there was huge unrest, and the Indians created a bogus, fake anti-Pakistani resistance movement called the Mukhti Bahini, and that started fighting with the Pakistani garrison of East Pakistan, and that again, the Indian army then intervened to restore order, and the net result of it was that East Pakistan, which had been an integral part of Pakistan, was broken away from Pakistan, became the independent state of Bangladesh.
The reason I recall this is because if Pakistan goes wobbly and there's turmoil inside Pakistan, the same scenario could happen.
India would certainly be tempted to do the same thing.
Which means that the generals would be tempted to use atomic weapons to stop them.
If they got sufficiently frightened.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons are really for last-ditch defense of the country, because India is seven times bigger than Pakistan.
They'd use it if Indian tanks were rolling across the border to the Indus River.
All right, so what's the future of this conflict?
Well, inside Pakistan, what's the future?
More deterioration.
Pakistan is totally bankrupt now.
It has no money to repair the bridges and the dams and the electrical lines, and everything was destroyed by these terrible inundations.
They're going to have to rely more.
They just got a $450 million loan from the International Monetary Fund, or World Bank.
They're going to be beggars again, living on American handouts, more dependent on the U.S. than ever.
All right, well, thanks again for all your insight and information.
I always appreciate it very much.
You're welcome, Scott.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com is his website.
American Raj is the book.
It's at Amazon.com.
