Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Eric Margulies.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And he writes regularly at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm just great.
In fact, I've just been writing a new column about Kashmir.
Oh, good.
Well, I was hoping I'd get a chance to read your new piece about Kashmir before the interview.
But you'll just have to tell me what all's in it.
I'll be glad to do that.
All right.
So the big news is that the government of India, which has had essential dominance over Kashmir, but has granted it autonomy and statehood to a degree, has now unilaterally changed that status over the dead body of the Pakistanis who are now stark raving mad about it.
So what's the deal?
Well, the so-called autonomy for Indian-ruled Kashmir never amounted to very much.
But it did have one important element, and that was that non-Kashmiris were not allowed to buy land in Kashmir.
Now India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is new best friends with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
And guess what?
Modi has dropped this ban on non-Kashmiris owning land there and is allowing Indians everywhere to buy land in Kashmir.
And that means that wealthy Indians, government-backed Indians, will come and start buying up whatever there is in Kashmir, and with an ultimate objective of ousting or shoving aside the Muslim majority.
Yeah.
Well, and by majority, what's the division there inside Kashmir?
Do you know?
Well, it's hard to tell.
There are roughly 12 million Kashmiris.
About two-thirds of them are Muslims.
The rest are Hindus and Sikhs.
And then, so the real threat then is that they'll be able to, what, just seize land in the name of buying it under the new version of the law?
And move in settlers, Israeli style, from the rest of India with offering them cheap land and cheap mortgages, etc.
So it's a very serious threat.
Yeah.
And then, so now the Pakistanis immediately recalled their ambassador and cut off all trade and stopped the railway that goes between the two countries.
I don't know.
On a scale of one to ten, how big of a crisis is this?
Because they do get into it from time to time over there.
Well, it's another of the endless crises that have gone on within India and Pakistan over Kashmir since 1947.
However, it is serious because these dust-ups over Kashmir often result in military confrontation.
I've been on the border between Indian and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, known as the Line of Control, and under fire by the Indians three times.
It is serious.
The Indians are very eager to go to war because they outnumber the Pakistanis in military power by about five to one.
And they would like to see a military solution for it.
That is very dangerous, of course, because both sides are now nuclear-armed.
Yeah.
Well, and this is something that Con Hallinan at Foreign Policy and Focus has emphasized, is that the Pakistanis essentially have smaller atom bombs, tactical nuclear weapons, and that they've even devolved control over them to the colonels in the field.
So any one of them, if he thinks that he's being attacked by an Indian armored column, might just break out an A-bomb before he does anything else.
So it's funny because you have these conflicting points of view, right, where on one hand it's just another bomb.
You've got to do what you've got to do as a military leader or whatever.
That's the way they look at it.
But on the other hand, once you cross that threshold, it's pretty easy to imagine India retaliating with a multi-megaton thermonuclear bomb and erase Islamabad or Peshawar or whatever right off the face of the earth.
Quite right, Scott.
It's very, very risky.
This is the ultimate risky nuclear situation.
What makes it even worse is that the nuclear forces of both sides, particularly the tactical ones, are on hair trigger alerts.
They have about three minutes warning.
And when they get incoming aircraft or incoming missiles, and as we know from the U.S.-Soviet confrontations, such false alarms are not infrequent.
They have only three minutes to decide.
The phones don't work very well there.
People are off at lunch.
Things go wrong.
And it's a use them or lose them situation, which is exceptionally dangerous.
And there's kickbacks for you, books when they come out, that kind of thing at both of those sites there.
On the other hand, it's Fund Drive Week at AntiWar.com right now, too.
So if you're feeling extra generous this week, there's matching funds going on over there as well.
Thanks again, y'all.
Now, I guess the difference is here, in terms of the regular kind of conflicts of different levels, that because this is such an official change in the very status of the state itself or the region, that that's essentially almost impossible for the Indians to take back fully anyway, but also impossible for the Pakistanis to accept.
So there's got to be some kind of, I mean, now that this has already happened, and boy, probably should not have, but there's got to be a way for these guys to reconcile and find some kind of middle ground short of hurling atoms at each other, right?
Well, Scott, I've been watching this for 25 years, and the best they've come up with is a cold truce where they don't shoot at each other for a while.
Neither side is going to accept the other's position.
The danger, of course, is that India is feeling sort of nuclear Viagra now.
It's got very powerful armed forces.
It apparently has the backing of the United States and Israel in its quest to bash the Muslims or grab more land.
So this is a uniquely dangerous situation.
It is apparently, we think, intent on dividing up Indian occupied Kashmir into two or three different states, which would make it even harder to resolve once it's done.
And in the background, of course, is China, which owns, holds a part of Kashmir called Aksai Chin.
And the Chinese are Pakistan's best buddies, and they've been warned India repeatedly not to attack Pakistan.
So if there is a war, it could be at least a three way war.
All right.
Now, part of this, of course, is the American role where, you know, we could be a republic that just hosts peace conferences, doesn't make promises, but tries to get people together.
Instead, Reagan helped arm the Pakistanis with nukes.
And then, I don't know exactly the role Bill Clinton played in arming the Indians, but I know that in the Bush Jr. years, after they got nukes, that Connellisa Rice went over there and made a great deal with them to help provide them with even more nuclear technology and resources and so forth, even though they're not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and an undeclared nuclear weapon state, which America is forbidden by that treaty from doing.
But anyway, and so, you know, we sell arms to both sides.
They got to be nuclear arms.
I mean, they didn't really sell nukes to Pakistan, but they let AQ Khan steal all those blueprints.
And then they sat back and cooperated with the rise of the Pakistani bomb, as long as they were cooperating in supporting the Mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 80s, right?
That's correct.
Pakistan feels having nuclear weapons is absolutely vital to its survival.
And that's probably true.
Don't forget the U.S. has been turning a blind eye to what India has been doing in acquiring nuclear weapons.
There's a fair amount of Israeli inputs into the Indian nuclear program, which came from the United States originally.
So it's a messy situation, not easily unraveled.
Yeah.
Interesting side point there.
At the same time that Condoleezza Rice is hooking the Indians up in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they're beating the Iranians over the head with it all day long, even though they were within the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its safeguards agreement all along.
And the entire trumped up charge against them was exactly that, a hoax.
Its own Russiagate, the Iranian bomb.
Another bit of fake news that went on for 20 years that was never an issue.
You'd think they'd have a few bombs by now if they were really trying, you know?
Quite right.
So the law means absolutely nothing other than to serve, just like with cops here in America.
It's a billy club in their hand.
That's all it is.
It's not anything written on paper that applies to everyone.
And domestic politics play a role, too.
The Indians are tight as ticks with the Israelis.
Israel is India's second largest arms supplier now.
And the ever-growing Indian population in the United States, which is well over 3 million, as I understand, and who are a very hardworking, productive, wealthy group, are contributing to the political situation and supporting India.
So the American presidents take that into account.
Yeah, that's an important point.
I guess I hadn't really thought too much about the Indian lobby in America, but...
It's big and growing.
Yeah.
There's a long-form article for some enterprising young journalists to take on there.
And of course, as you say, their relationship with the Israelis...
The Indian government's relationship with the Israeli government means their lobby's relationship with the Israel lobby in the U.S., too, as we've seen with Turkey in the past and other countries.
They're smart.
They say, hey, look, who's the most powerful foreign lobby in D.C.?
Israel.
So what do we do to make friends with them?
Same as the Saudis and the UAE and whatever.
That's the path to Congress right there.
That's right.
Too bad the Pakistanis are a little late on catching on that bus.
They could have been at the forefront.
There's also, with this guy Modi...
I mean, just how right-wing is this guy?
I'm reading a couple of things here trying to prepare for the show today about how there's this state in northern India where they're going to strip the citizenship of essentially everybody up there and claim that they're Bangladesh's problem and kick them out, even though Bangladesh doesn't want them either.
And I think essentially it's because they're Muslims and they're trying to reestablish a higher percentage, super majority of Hindu voters to Muslims.
Is that it?
Well, I'm not sure which state this is that you're referring to.
It's Assam is what it's called here.
Oh, Assam.
Yeah, Assam has been unrest there for decades.
That's where a lot of our tea comes from.
And northeast hill states used to be known.
And there's tribal unrest there against Indian rules.
Not the Muslims so much of a problem.
It's the Assamese tribesmen.
Also in the other states around there, too.
Nagpur, for example.
But they're also, they've started this process in the mountain state of Ladakh on the other side of the Himalayas.
And it's a very wild place.
It used to be called Little Tibet.
I've been there.
There's not much air.
It's very, very high air.
No air and lots of yaks.
But it's very strategic.
And it's right underneath Chinese Sinkiang.
And the Indians are now saying that they are going to detach Ladakh from their Kashmir region.
And, I don't know, make it semi-independent or autonomous or just make it any other Indian state.
Which this undermines the status of integral Kashmir.
And then, so what of, I guess, I remember that this guy Modi, before he was in power, he was the head of the party, the Hindu party, that had carried out this massive pogrom and killed like, what, 3,000 or 4,000 Muslims back in the early 2000s?
In Gujarat state, yes.
And then, so now that he's in charge, is there really a process of sectarian cleansing along those lines or not so much?
Not yet.
Inside India, I mean.
But there is a palpable hostility towards Muslims from the Modi government.
And behind Modi is this very sinister organization called the RSS that nobody in the U.S. has ever heard of.
But the RSS is a Hindu chauvinist nationalist party which wants to turn, revert India back to its original total Hindu roots, which are called Hindutva.
And Modi is a big advocate of Hindutva.
And they want to resuscitate the Hindu religions.
And these are the guys who want to tear down Muslim mosques and build Hindu temples on top of them.
And they've staged very bad pogroms, as you mentioned, against Hindus and are espousing a very extreme Hindu, rabid Hindu nationalism that is a danger to everyone.
Against Muslims, you meant to say there, just to clarify.
Against Muslims, but also they talk within Hindu nationalist circles, there's talk of recreating mother India as it originally was under the British.
And that means reabsorbing Pakistan and Bangladesh and maybe Sri Lanka as well into the greater Indian polity.
Yeah, that's a great way to keep India purely Hindu is to forcefully reabsorb tens or hundreds of millions of Muslims.
I guess you could nuke them all first and then seize the glowing landscape.
You're right, Scott.
But of course, the last thing that India needs is more Muslims who are restive and unhappy.
You know, India is one of the world's biggest Muslim nations.
People never think of this.
There are 200 million Muslims in India, but it's only about 14 percent of the population.
And it's it's not significant in having much influence.
And they're all poor and neglected people.
So but it's it's an internal problem for India.
Hang on just one second for me.
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Well, you know, you also talk about in your most recent article, and I'm pretty sure we talked about this back a couple of months ago.
Maybe not.
India's Trump wins big.
I think we did.
Should have.
And hell, now I forgot my point.
That was something great that you said in here.
People like to compare Modi to Trump because he's the same kind of flamboyant to greater India.
You know, let's make India great again.
That whole story.
Oh, yeah.
And so that goes to what I was going to say, which was this last line that you sort of end with.
That India is a modern nation of 600 million atop an ancient rural nation of 700 million.
And in other words, they've taken a not in an ironic Maoist sense, but in a legitimate sense, they've taken a great leap forward.
But they've left half their population behind, which is this entire other problem aside from and I guess probably integrated with the problem of sectarian conflict here.
As I've often written rather glibly, India is a nation of ox carts living next to a nation of nuclear reactors.
And, you know, just think of this, Scott, that 60 percent of India's population still does not have indoor plumbing.
And the people defecate right on the streets in front of you.
They just pull up their little gowns and squat.
And there they go.
And the health and sanitary conditions in India are awful.
Indians are working on landing on the moon and building ICBMs that can hit the United States and nuclear powered submarines, drones, you name it.
And yet they have this catastrophic situation of living in filth and rural backwardsness.
And then so and this is the constituency mostly of the current leader who's promised to make India great again by taking it back to when it was more like that.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of importance to regional politics in India.
It's such a big country that no one party dominates at all.
But there are and there are lots of regional parties.
But the Hindu nationalists are very influential because they appeal to the lowest denominator of the population.
And they're backed by armies of radical Hindu holy men who are always waving swords.
Just so there are similar Muslim holy men in Pakistan waving their scimitars.
It's a very volatile area.
And then so what about the caste system that I learned so much about in elementary school over there?
I guess I had learned from some Pakistani and Indian libertarians that they were actually making some changes over there and property rights were coming.
You know, it's funny like this right wing position supposedly of property rights was the radical change against the conservative old communist power in India.
Where, you know, once a guy can really own a piece of land and have that protected, then it doesn't really matter where you're from.
If you're good at improving your lot, then you can do so and keep it that way.
And that was really changing the order of things around there.
The untouchable caste, known as Dalits in modern terminology, make up something over 20% of the Indian population.
And they are a terribly racist, primitive reminder of India's Hindu past.
There was a time and even today when Hindus feel they've been defiled if a Dalit or untouchable shadow falls upon them or if they touch an eating utensil touched by a Dalit or mix with them in any way or intermarry.
And the Dalits are treated abominably in India.
The women are raped.
Villages are burned.
They are persecuted.
But the Indian government has tried hard ever since independence to uplift the untouchables.
The Dalits improve their lot.
But it's like trying to cure anti-black sentiments in the American South.
It's not something that the government can easily do.
And it's a very difficult, slow process.
Yeah.
Well, so tell us some good stuff about what's going on with India and or Pakistan right now.
Well, not much good news out of Pakistan, I'm sad to say.
And it is a wonderful country.
It's a very interesting country.
It's wild and crazy.
But it will hit 200 million one of these days, too.
So it's a very important country.
But its economy is in a mess.
And it is still gripped by rural feudalism, where big landowners control everything.
And it has a lousy ruling class, as we've seen from recent governments.
So Pakistan is going nowhere fast.
India, by contrast, its rival, is making great economic progress.
Its economy is doing well, even though we get a lot of BS about how well it's doing.
And we can't trust the figures coming from India.
Nevertheless, it is on the move.
And what made the difference was that former Indian governments ended what was called the license raj, or the licensing system that kept bureaucrats in control of the economy.
They freed the economy.
The economy is doing well.
It's making a lot of industrial progress in computer technology and medicine.
So the news is pretty good for India, even though it has huge Himalayan-sized problems to deal with.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully they'll figure out it's in their interest to keep the peace here.
I mean, I think probably most experts on this agree that this is the most likely place for nuclear conflict to break out in the world, although it seems like the Americans are trying to make Eastern Europe, or maybe the Western Pacific Ocean there, a more likely candidate at the rate they're going.
But anyway, it would be such a tragedy to see all of these countries, and Kashmir itself probably destroyed in a conflict over who's going to control this area when it belongs to the civilians who live there.
None of these governments anyway.
They ought to be able to decide their own way, and nobody ought to have to die over this at all.
Scott, when I came out with my book about India and Kashmir called War at the Top of the World, this was a good 10 years ago, my main point was trying to underline the dangers of a nuclear conflict in the region.
Most people didn't care about that, but people in North America, they didn't understand that a nuclear conflict in South Asia would not only pollute all the waters of that region, all the groundwater, it would kill millions of civilians and injure tens of millions more, and send clouds of radioactive dust around the globe.
In other words, Chernobyl times 50.
Yeah, well, and you know, I'm not exactly sure whose computer model to trust on what and what have you, but Daniel Ellsberg points it, and others have pointed at these studies that say even a limited war in just India and Pakistan, even if China stayed out, and Lord knows what would happen if China did jump in, maybe America would start issuing ultimatums to them.
I don't know.
But even if it was just India and Pakistan, that that would be enough with the burning of the cities and the forest fires and everything, that that would be enough soot to cause some level of nuclear winter that could, for all the complaints about global warming or this and that, this could be a nuclear winter that just wipes out global crops, at least in the northern hemisphere, and maybe all around the world for years.
And could lead to the death of billions of people of starvation and wars over what's left, and God knows what, just from one little limited nuclear war in this one area of the world.
Scott, if mankind is going to destroy itself, the Indian-Pakistani border is a great place to start.
You'll get maximum casualties being packed in, and the prevailing winds from there will take all of the radiation, spread it all over the place.
So it's a terrifying thing.
And these people are really playing with fire.
Thank God, up till now, the Indian prime ministers have been very cautious, and they've refused requests by the Indian military to invade Kashmir, and the Pakistanis have been also cautious.
But this can end.
We don't know what Modi is going to do in India.
Well, now, so what about the US, Russia, England, China?
Are they saying anything about this?
They're urging either side to do a thing or another thing?
Well, that great peacemaker, President Donald J. Trump, just last week offered to negotiate the Hindu, the Kashmir dispute.
Oh, deal of the century.
Deal of the century.
Deal of the century.
Did so well with the Palestinians and Israelis.
How could he not fail to do brilliantly with the Indians and the Pakistanis?
These ungrateful miscreants, however, rejected Trump's offer and told him not to get involved.
I doubt Mr. Trump really understands very much about Kashmir.
And there's not much he can do.
As a matter of fact, there's not much anybody can do.
The Pakistanis can't do much but dig in and await a possible Indian attack.
The Indians have let the genie out of the bottle on this issue.
And their people are all stirred up.
And all these poor people in the street are throwing rocks and yelling, you know, invade Kashmir, kill the Muslims.
And China keeps saying it's not going to let India crush its ally, Pakistan.
They're very, Pakistan and India are very close allies.
So it's, it's a big mess.
And the other powers in the region, other countries, are also deeply concerned by what's going on.
So it's, it's an evil portent.
When it's going to happen, we don't know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's really hard too in the middle of all the brinksmanship and saber rattling and whatever for anybody to propose some good solutions.
But there's sort of an interesting counterfactual to me where like say, what if the 21st century hadn't played out this way or the post Cold War era hadn't played out this way at all and America really, you know, did mind its own business and hadn't say, I don't know, killed a couple of million people recently or anything like that.
And they could really just say like, Hey guys, let's negotiate.
What if Bill Clinton had made this a priority and George Bush and Barack Obama that, you know, the Americans just never shut up about how badly they would like Pakistan and India to negotiate over Kashmir and try to come up with some creative ideas to solve it.
And it does seem kind of impossible, but you know, they saw the Northern Ireland thing.
I mean, essentially, I don't know about permanently.
And certainly you know a hell of a lot more about that than me.
But I know that when I was a kid, there was constant fighting there and people dying all the time and now there's not.
And it's been a long time, right?
It's been 20 years or something since peace broke out there.
And so, you know, it seems like if America wasn't up to no good all the time and they were actually up to good trying that, you know, maybe some creative people could have come up with a way to prevent it from even getting to the crisis where it's at right now.
And instead, we're either, you know, benefiting all the malefactors directly or we're ignoring the situation entirely, you know?
Kashmir is too complicated for most Americans to understand.
It is a really thorny issue and it requires the knowledge of geography and history, both subjects which have vanished from the curriculum in the United States.
So I've been trying to get people, senior officials, interested in this, in this Kashmir, dangerous Kashmir dispute for 20 years and have gotten nowhere.
They really think, I don't bother with all this stuff.
You know, when they land in Brooklyn, we'll worry about it, but not until then.
And it's a shame.
You know, in 1949, the UN mandated that a referendum be held under its supervision in Kashmir to determine if the Kashmiris wanted to join India or Pakistan.
Well, the Indians thwarted the referendum because they knew perfectly well that most Kashmiris would vote to join Pakistan.
And that was the closest we've ever come to any kind of understanding.
So it's, it's very discouraging.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, if you could get them to care at all, they just find a reason to launch a war, intervene, assassinate somebody, or start backing al-Qaeda, suicide bombers, or some insane thing in the name of caring and trying to fix it.
So.
That's right.
We should be careful what we wish for, you know?
You ask them to host a peace conference, you get, you know, a billion dollars a year for Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
It's a problem.
And Pakistan has a bunch of Islamic crazies who like to attack India and goad them and declare jihad against the Indians.
And that provokes India to make some crazy.
And that's the probable next step here, right?
Is we'll see some suicide attacks and the Indians will say, well, what brought this on?
See, we have to clamp down.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's a really discouraging situation.
I mean, I guess we like to think that the ISI is in control of all those suicide bombers, because what if they're not?
And they're just allowed to, or, you know, they're unable to stop them from just doing whatever they want on their own agendas chosen at the lowest level.
They're not.
You know, in India and Pakistan, we look at them as great, you know, central states.
But in fact, nobody's in charge in these countries in a lot of places.
People run around, do whatever they want.
And there's not that much government control in some parts of it.
So it's extremely difficult.
And then the governments use some of these local fanatics to advance their own programs or to needle their enemies.
And they've gotten used to it.
It works very well.
I know, man.
All right.
Well, listen, hopefully there won't be a nuclear war and we'll get to talk again soon.
I'm waiting for your new book on Kashmir to come out, Scott.
Yeah.
You know what?
That's not going to be in my new book.
I got every war except that.
However, I have read at least major portions of both of your books and I cannot recommend them more highly to anyone.
They are just absolutely fantastic.
And for anyone who's, you know, loves your articles, they have not even the slightest taste of what you really have in store for them in those great books.
War at the Top of the World and American Rush.
So I'm happy to say that every chance I get, for real.
Thank you, Scott Saeed.
Okay.
You guys, that's the great Eric Margulies.
He's at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
And this one is called India's Trump Wins Big.
That's from back at the beginning of June.
But he's going to have a brand new one coming out about the conflict in Kashmir.
Probably by the time you guys hear this, it'll be there at ericmargulies.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
