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I am Scott Horton from AntiWar.com, and I'm a big fan of Eric Margulies.
He's one of the best reporters in the world, as far as I can tell.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
You can find his website at EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis.
And you can also find his archive at LouRockwald.com as well.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
Good to be back with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, sir.
And, you know, I actually took a couple of days, I think for the first time in six years or something, without looking at the news, and then I came back and I went to review it, and I saw they had the Afghan election went as scheduled, although I'm not so sure it went as planned.
What can you tell us about it?
Well, Scott, I'm not sure you missed very much.
And the election was another effort by Washington to add some kind of apparent legitimacy to the Karzai government.
But it's feared, even by many in Washington, the exercise turned out to be another fiasco.
According to foreign vote watchers, reported all kinds of frauds and bad behavior.
The Taliban staged some attacks, frightened a lot of voters away.
There were charges of corruption and fraud and miscounting.
In other words, a big waste of time and money, and it proved absolutely nothing.
In fact, it wasn't even a real election to begin with, because it didn't include Taliban or its allies who represent over half of the population of Afghanistan.
Well, now, I saw where Jason Ditz, our news editor at Antiwar.com, had written about the turnout and how, for some reason, I guess they'd done a poll last week, or the week before last, predicting that there was going to be the 70% turnout rate.
And then they said, well, it was a disappointing 40.
And Jason said, yeah, right, try 10 or less.
And, of course, there were, as you said, reports of ballot boxes being stuffed and things like that, other irregularities like that.
But I wonder whether the breakdown in who really had a chance to vote or not was along the same sort of ethnic lines that we've seen, really, the old civil war, the 30-year civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Mujahideen, the Pashtun tribesmen.
You're so right.
You should be talking to them in Washington.
You're one of the few people who really understands what's going on there.
Yes, it is the ethnic divide between the major ethnic groups.
And the minorities vote for or back the government, and the United States and the majority Pashtuns are opposed.
Well, and so what does that mean, then, for the future of the counterinsurgency campaign if the majority is excluded?
They're trying to build a government in Kabul, aren't they?
Well, they're trying to, but the government only represents its own interests and not the wider interests of the Afghan people.
If there isn't Afghan people left anymore, I'm not sure about that.
The major problem that the U.S. government is having, or the military, is that it cannot cobble together an effective or loyal Afghan army.
In fact, the Soviets did a much better job when they had their own Afghan communist puppet army, as we used to call it.
Now, the Afghan army is made up of largely mercenaries who come from the Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara minorities, who are blood enemies of the majority Pashtun.
And so whenever the army comes into the southern Afghanistan, Pashtun territory, they're the enemies, and they fight, and they're not getting any Pashtun members.
Their officers and the intelligence service are drawn from the Tajik mafia, the sort of northern alliance, which is dominated by the old Afghan communist party and the drug-dealing warlords.
So it's a really messy, lousy situation.
It will never be legitimate, constituted like this.
Well, even if the Americans weren't involved, was there ever really a kind of Afghan patriotism or Afghan nationalism in this country?
Or is it even really a country?
Is it just lines on a map drawn by some British imperialist generations ago?
Well, you know, there was a certain Afghan national sense and national identity, even though there's strong centrifugal forces in the country that pull it towards its neighboring countries.
But there was some pride, and Afghanistan seemed to creak along under the old regime with a king in Kabul who really didn't control much or do much, and just everybody was left alone to do their own thing.
But at least there were Afghans, because it's a question of what they were not.
They didn't want to be Pakistanis, they didn't want to be Tajiks or Uzbeks or Indians, for sure.
So there was a sort of pride, but now it's broken down.
And you know, when the Soviets were there, the KGB, I saw this firsthand, had special units designed to stir up ethnic unrest and hatred, launching attacks against different ethnic groups, blaming it on the other.
And it created ethnic conflict, and it continues to this day.
It's not the sole fault of the Soviets, but they played an important role.
Well, something that's always puzzling to me is that Hamid Karzai, which, after all, he is just an individual, but they say that he's a posh-tuned tribesman, maybe more of a city type than a town and country boy or something like most of the resistance.
But why is it that he is the prime minister of this government that's made up of all Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras and is determined on excluding the rest of the posh-tunes?
I don't understand.
Well, because the CIA did a little bit of homework for a change, and they realized that they had to put a posh-tune as head of the government because otherwise the posh-tune people would never have compromised or agreed with it.
And they would certainly never have gone along with a Tajik or an Uzbek as the head of the government.
So they found Karzai.
He would have been a consultant to U.S. oil companies.
He was suave.
He was an amiable chap, a decent man, and a CIA asset like so many other rulers across the Muslim world.
And he was put into power, he and his brother, and a couple of others.
You know, whenever you see these Afghans on American television speaking flawless English in wonderful shirts and ties, clean-shaven and everything else, well, these are the Afghans who were sent to American universities, and many of them were recruited by the American intelligence agencies to follow the American party line.
Well, now, I've read some reports about Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai's brother, who you mentioned there, and they said that he actually is a pretty powerful warlord himself in Kandahar.
But I wonder if that means that, or does that imply at all, that he has any kind of real constituency there, or he's just been able to, you know, through force of arms, be able to create himself that little pocket of power?
He's the boss tweed of Kandahar.
He's the chief bag man there.
He controls some of the police and some of the military units, so he's the man with the guns.
But he doesn't control the region, because it's Pashtun, it's Taliban heartland, but he sits atop of it as the government's overseer.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm helping Alan Minsky fill in for Ian Masters today on the show.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And now, I want your assessment of this counterinsurgency strategy that the Center for a New American Security, John Nagel, and all these guys came up with to, I guess they said, install a government in a box in Afghanistan.
They're going to clear, hold, and build, just like would have worked fine in the Vietnam War if the liberals hadn't stabbed us in the back, Eric.
What a joke.
You know, when I first heard that government in a box, I couldn't believe it.
We're not in a pizza delivery system in Afghanistan.
The idea that they could package up a bunch of stooges and ship them into Kandahar and the people would respect them so totally misreads the nature of the Afghans.
You have to wonder, what the hell are these people thinking and doing?
Any child in Afghanistan would know that this wouldn't work.
Pashtuns are very proud people.
Nobody's going to tell them what to do and certainly nobody's going to threaten or push them around.
I've spent so much time with them in the field.
I know what they think and how tough they are.
And you just don't push a Pashtun.
Tell them you've got to be a Democrat, obey orders, or else.
But that's exactly what they tried to do.
And they brought in people who the Pashtun majority regarded as traitors and quislings.
And of course they got this response.
And then they even had the foolishness to say, well, our troops will mix with the people in this sort of Maoist statement and we'll teach them to trust us.
But how is a Pashtun tribesman who lives in the Middle Ages going to learn anything from an 18-year-old from Alabama or Georgia?
I cannot imagine.
Well, and that is part of the big strategy, isn't it, is trying to recruit militias, basically private death squads of Afghans to just turn against other Afghans.
Well, we've been doing that, and the American Special Forces, this will be a big scandal one of these days, Scott, if the story is going to come out of our death squads what they've been doing.
We learned this originally in Central America.
I was covering the wars down there and I saw these death squads, particularly in El Salvador, also Nicaragua, very bloody, very deadly.
You just go and kill all your enemies in the middle of the night.
This is what we're doing.
We'll commit all kinds of atrocities, kill the wrong people, it doesn't matter, wipe them out, the old line from Vietnam, kill them all, let God sort them out.
Well, this is what we're doing, and we're also following Israeli policy because the Israelis have been advising us in a very big way in Iraq and Afghanistan in counterinsurgency, as they call it, meaning beating down local uprisings.
Right, how to occupy someone in six easy steps, right?
You invade his country, he fights back and you call him a terrorist or an insurgent.
It's butchering the English language, that's for sure.
But anyway, we've taken this very violent policy and I think it's generating us far more enemies than it's killing foes.
Well, that's sort of the mystery here.
I guess it's not too much of one, but General McChrystal, before he lost his job, told Michael Hastings at Rolling Stone Magazine that he figures the ratio is about 10 to 1, that is, every time the Joint Special Operations Command sends the Delta Force out to kill somebody, they create 10 new enemies.
And so he says, we're just going to keep on like this, but we're going to target very specifically, which still sounds to me like digging a hole to get out of it.
Well, that's what the Israelis have been doing on the West Bank now for decades, and it hasn't worked for them.
It's not working for us in Afghanistan or Iraq.
We've killed a lot of people.
We managed to suppress the resistance in certain areas, but it generally comes back.
And when you hear these American generals talking about, oh, we've driven the Taliban out of the area, it's hallucinogenic.
Well, of course, they're guerrillas.
Now, what, are they going to sit still and wait to be hit by F-16s and tanks?
Of course not.
They're going to fade away and come back and fight another day.
That's the essence of guerrilla warfare.
But we're hearing again the echoes of the body counts in Vietnam and the search and destroy and clear and hold and strategic hamlets and all those other words that led us straight to defeat.
Well, you know, to pick up on the Vietnam analogy, we have Pakistan next door, the safe haven.
If only we could extend the war into Cambodia, Mr. President, then we can get rid of the safe havens where the Viet Cong are hiding.
And here we are, you know, spreading the war across this Duran line, this old border that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan.
It seems like the war party's intent on turning it into one big war, even as you wrote on your website, ericmargulise.com, this country is experiencing biblical level floods, one of the worst natural disasters since ancient times is going on in Pakistan right now, and we're still bombing them.
We are.
In fact, the level of attacks and killing by American predators and reaper drones has sharply escalated.
And every time you hear one of these attacks, they're attacking compounds, big mud-walled houses that shelter women and children and entire extended families, and in an attempt to kill one or two so-called militants, they're killing generally 10 to 20 civilians, according to Pakistani press studies.
So it's a very bloody and very counterproductive.
Here we're generating 20 enemies rather than 10, as McChrystal said.
Well, and in this case, well, and I guess in both cases, right, these countries, supposedly their states, are our friends, but we're still bombing the people inside the countries as though a cobble never fell, as though the war was never over.
Scott, a lot of Pakistanis, there's a growing feeling in Pakistan that Pakistan has become an occupied country.
They have a government that has been bought lock, stock, and barrel by the U.S.
They've got the military, which more or less is very responsive to Washington, and has to be because the U.S. keeps threatening to unleash the Indians on the Pakistanis if they're not good.
This is what happened in 19, after 9-11.
The Blackwater and all these other mercenary groups are running around in Pakistan.
There are American ground troops there.
There's a tremendous amount of American influence and control.
So the Pakistanis, you're hearing calls to liberate Pakistan from the Americans, never mind Afghanistan.
This is a dangerous situation.
That's funny.
There's an article in the New York Times a couple of months back, Eric, where they talked about how Islamic extremism and anti-Americanism are on the rise really bad in Pakistan, and we're thinking that maybe they just have too much free speech there, and these radicals are able to get people's ears.
But no mention of drones, no mention of a puppet dictatorship that lasted for 10 years with American help, etc., etc.
It's not in there.
There are a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists and Muslims, those Pakistanis.
That's right, and it's the Saudis with their madrasas and the Wahhabis, everything but the real reason.
And I can tell you, as having written for years for the Pakistani media, that some figures point out that 90% of Pakistanis really are hating the United States now and say that the United States is Pakistan's primary enemy.
It's moved ahead of India on the enemies list.
That's terrible.
It is an extremely strategic, important country.
We can't afford to turn Pakistan into an enemy, but the Pakistanis believe that the U.S. is determined to destroy Pakistan, relentlessly destroy Pakistan, in order to get a hold of its nuclear weapons and remove them.
Well, and that's really not that far-fetched considering the very same publication.
The New York Times ran a piece back in November of 2007 by Michael O'Hanlon from the left, well, pseudo-left, the Democratic side of the war party, and Robert Kagan from the Republican side saying, well, maybe that's what we need to do, is go ahead and invade Pakistan and take their nuclear weapons, Eric.
Yeah, well, God save us from people like that.
These were also the two great military brains, the darling of the media, who were urging that we had to rush in and invade Iraq lest Saddam Hussein unleashes fiendish weapons of mass destruction and destroy the world.
They turned out to be fools, and they remain fools at this point.
They're dead wrong.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons do not threaten anybody.
They're very well guarded, and they're designed to prevent India from overrunning Pakistan, and the American neocons are worried because they have this nightmare without substance that these nuclear weapons might get to other Arab countries facing Israel.
Well, and is that likely?
No, it's not.
I've been very close for a long time with some of the senior Pakistani generals and intelligence people, and there's no way, in my experience of use, officially that the nuclear technology or nuclear weapons would leak out.
In fact, the head of Pakistani intelligence told me years ago that Iran had offered to pay Pakistan's entire defense budget for 10 years in order to get some nuclear weapons.
Pakistan had refused.
It'll continue to refuse, but you can't discount totally that the technology may leak out as it did under Abdul Qadir Khan, the scientist.
But nevertheless, Pakistan has no interest right now in giving or selling nuclear weapons.
Now, you have a great article on your website today, Eric.
It's ericmargulis.com, everyone spelled like Margolis, about the Kashmir conflict, and I'm afraid we're not going to have time to review too much of it, but at the very end of the article, you talked about America's insistence that Pakistan get out of Kashmir and stop trying to protect their interests in Kashmir because we want them to use their military against, I don't know, chasing Ayman al-Zawahiri all over the Northwest Territories or something like that.
But at the same time, we're putting them in a real bad position by making, as George Bush did, this nuclear deal with India, empowering India in Afghanistan, etc.
And the way you kind of end your article just really revealed the stupidity of the situation where we're really backing all sides against each other and boxing ourselves into a terrible corner, it seems like there.
We are.
We're playing it counter-purposes to our own interests, supporting Pakistan, supporting India, supporting them against each other, contradictory policies, because our basic policy is flawed.
There's no coherent policy for the whole region.
Instead of talking AfPak, we're going to have to start talking about AfPak-Ka, meaning Kashmir, as well, because we are slowly being drawn into this Kashmir crisis where the Punder people have been shot down on the streets here by Indian forces in the last month.
And this is the world's oldest dispute.
It predates the Arabs and the Israelis.
It's from 1947.
It's still going on, and it's so dangerous.
And I wrote about it again, Scott, because it pits India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with their nuclear arsenals on three-minute hair alerts.
So we should be very conscious of it.
It could blow up one day.
Agreed.
I highly urge everyone to go read the article.
It's right now on the front page at ericmargulis.com, spelled like Margolis.
And you can also find his archive at lourockwell.com.
The books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Thank you very much for your time, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
Pleasure as always, Scott.
Thank you.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm helping Alan Minsky fill in for Ian Masters today.
Alan?
Ray, thank you very much, Scott.
Thank you for the interview with Eric Margolis.
And you can find a lot more of Scott Horton's work in his fantastic audio interviews on antiwar.com.
