09/21/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, appreciate y'all tuning in to the show today.
And now, this is kind of sad for the position I'm in, but it is what it is, unlike Margo Kidder at the end of the lame version of Superman 2.
What's going on in the world?
Jason, welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
Everybody, it's Jason Ditz, he's the managing news editor at Anti-War.com.
He reads every paper on earth, I think 23 hours a day, and he writes up all the news summaries with links to the most important stories.
So say, for example, the New York Times, well, okay, so, I don't know, say Jeff Stein breaks a story about a traitor in the Congress, and then the New York Times and the Washington Post both confirm different parts of that story.
Well, Jason will have the news summary, and he'll say, well, today, Jeff Stein showed that Jane Harman is a traitor.
And then the Washington Post confirmed this part of the story, and the New York Times said that in that part of the story, and you'll have the three most important articles about different aspects of the same story right there in one big paragraph explaining what it all means and where you can go to find your footnotes, and it's an invaluable resource.
I don't know what in the world I would do without you, Jason, and especially today, because I've been off work for a week, and I have no idea what's going on, other than that the American government certainly is continuing to kill people everywhere.
So why don't you tell me what's up, man?
What did I miss?
Well, not much has really changed.
We had an election in Afghanistan over the weekend, but it seems to have been every bit as corrupt and illegitimate as the last one.
Now, this was for the national parliament?
Yes.
And so Hamid Karzai's group won?
How's that work?
Well, we don't really know who won, because it's going to take weeks and weeks and weeks to count the ballots, but the early indications are that whoever won, it was because they stuffed more ballots than the other side.
Well, now, did they paint the women's thumbs purple at the end?
Because that's what makes it a democracy, right?
Yeah, they did do that.
Okay, well, so they got the purple paint, that's important.
And now, okay, I guess, describe to me some of the situation, I mean, voting in Texas, where I'm from, is a disaster.
Just trying to show up for a primary or a general election in Texas is, you know, good luck if things go smooth, or if your precinct voting place is in the right place, or who knows what.
And we've been at this for a while.
How does it look in Afghanistan, Jason?
Well, in Afghanistan, you can buy extra voting cards with other people's names on them, pretty much retail at any bazaar across the country.
And the real issue, as far as voting goes, is just being lucky enough to live someplace where the polls actually opened, because about 20% of the country, they just decided not to open them at all, because they said it was too dangerous, even though they downplayed the amount of violence that actually was going to take place.
Well, yeah, I mean, there were Taliban attacks all over the place.
Were those effective at keeping people from voting?
Well, the voter turnout was ridiculously low, but whether it was the Taliban attacks or just the disillusionment of the population that kept people from voting, I don't know.
There were some polls showing right before the election that the vast majority of Afghans, about two-thirds of them, were pretty sure this was just going to be an unfair vote going in.
So it seems entirely possible to me that they just decided not to bother.
Were there any organized boycotts or declared boycotts of the election, do you know?
Not that I heard of.
Well, the Taliban, of course, urged people not to vote, but as far as the active political groups, I think they all took part.
I talked with Eric Margulies a bit about this on KPFK yesterday afternoon, and he was saying that, look, it's the same story.
It's the old ethnic division, hate to say it, but it's been a long time since there was much Afghan nationalism, and really what we have here is a Tajik-Uzbek-Khazara Northern Alliance versus the Pashtuns, who basically have no political representation whatsoever except for the Taliban.
Not that the Taliban really is of them, but kind of, sort of, anyway.
And that, there's your election breakdown.
America's on the side of the people who used to be the quislings of the Soviet Union versus the people who helped Rambo fight them off.
Well, that's pretty much it.
And there are some parties that seem to appeal to the Pashtuns, but they're mostly pretty small and, of course, the Pashtun-dominated areas seem to be quite a few of the ones that were never open for voting to begin with, so it doesn't seem like their votes counted for much.
Well, now, ultimately, you know, there's different directions I could go here.
Let me ask you about this.
All the talk has been since last November that, ultimately, there's going to be negotiations here.
Karzai kind of wanted to negotiate with the Taliban sooner, and I guess Obama and the generals said, no, we'll kill them for a year and a half and then we'll deal with them.
But basically, everyone agrees that at some point they have to sit down at the table with the Taliban and make a deal, right?
Well, not everyone agrees.
And there are a lot of people in the U.S. government, of course, who don't like the idea, but the people who really don't like the idea seem to be in the Pakistani intelligence services.
And officials are saying that the inter-services intelligence agency pretty much openly sabotaged some of the recent talks by arresting some of the more moderate Taliban that they had been providing protection for when they found out that they were going behind their backs and talking with Karzai.
Now, why is that?
I mean, I think, you know, we've covered with Eric Margulies, especially on this show, the fact that the Pakistanis have to prevent Karzai from being able to create a government dominated by, you know, the other the Northern Alliance type factions in alliance with India because they need that as their backyard to escape in case of a war with India, that kind of thing.
But if the Taliban is working with them and they can work out a deal where the Taliban make a deal with the Americans, then why doesn't that accomplish their goals?
Why would they try to intervene and disrupt any peace talks?
Well, they seem to be concerned that this would amount to handing the country over to pro-India forces, which Karzai's got pretty good relations with India.
So they just want to be in a better position before the deal gets done, kind of thing.
Right.
It's sort of the same reason that a lot of the top US military people have been downplaying the idea of talks, because the US is in such a dreadful position right now and they figure a couple more years of killing people would change that a little bit.
Yeah, well, it seems to be working out so far.
Wait, what's the date?
Oh, never mind.
Well, let me ask you about this, man.
In Langley, Virginia, there's a satanic cult called the CIA where they sit around plotting the murder of innocent people all day long.
And their guy last fall was Abdullah Abdullah, and they tried to rig the election for him.
And then Karzai ended up rigging it for himself and beat them.
What's his role in this?
Can you tell me?
Well, he's the head of the largest opposition faction, and that faction is predicting that they're going to gain a number of seats in this election, which seems like a pipe dream to me from the indications that the pro-Karzai forces have been stuffing the ballots at least as much as they did last year in the presidential election.
Yeah, well, that's really strange, isn't it?
The way that they went from trying to marginalize Karzai that way to rolling out the red carpet for him and begging his forgiveness.
I mean, if he needed an example of Obama's spinelessness, he doesn't even stand for his own things that he really was trying to do, which was get rid of this Karzai guy who's, you know, as Michael Hastings wrote in his Rolling Stone article, quoting McChrystal's men.
He's not the mayor of Kabul.
He's the mayor of his palace.
That's it.
He's nobody in that country.
And somehow he's supposed to be the dictator.
Well, and of course, the idea that he's going to tackle corruption when a lot of the corruption flows right through his office is sort of ridiculous.
But then again, the idea that Abdullah Abdullah could have been an effective, effective reformer winning an election on the basis of vote rigging is sort of silly, too.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, if they had to rig the vote for him in the first place and it didn't even work, then it doesn't sound like he's got a very big constituency either other than in Langley, maybe.
But I guess that's the way it goes.
And I didn't mean to really imply that people at CIA believe anything.
I was just saying that they're evil killers.
That's all.
All right.
Well, geez, I wanted to ask.
I heard something about some bogus story about Iran and Venezuela making nukes together or something.
I guess we'll have to come back to that another time because we've got to move on to our next guest here, Jason.
But I really appreciate your coverage of every topic that you cover.
And especially this Afghanistan stuff is very helpful to me.
So thank you very much.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody.
That's the great Jason Ditz.
He's on news.antiwar.com.
And I'm serious, really.
He reads every paper on Earth all day, every day.
And that's the reason why you can see the headline of his last interview at the top of the page is antiwar.com news editor scares CIA.
They accused him of being an Iranian agent because he humiliates them and destroys their narrative with facts on a hourly basis.
News.antiwar.com.