All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Jason Ditz.
He is the managing news editor at AntiWar.com.
News.
AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How's it going?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good, man.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
I appreciate it.
So here's what I think's funny.
Washington Post, progress in Afghan war called uneven.
Here's the New York Times.
Pentagon report cites gains in Afghanistan.
And so what report?
And what does the report actually say?
What's the AntiWar.com headline for this one?
What is the AntiWar.com headline for this one?
Waste deep in the big muddy?
Something like that?
The AntiWar.com headline for this one was U.S. Afghan violence at all-time high.
Oh, right.
So that's the same thing as gains, right?
Right.
Body counts high.
We're doing good.
It's hard work, but we're making progress.
Well, the incredible thing is all three headlines from this report are perfectly valid headlines.
It's a 105-page report that the Pentagon released yesterday.
It's their biannual report on Afghanistan.
And it's just incredible.
Simultaneously claims progress and keeps reporting how much worse everything is getting.
Well, so this is, there's like politics behind this, right?
Everybody just wait for the report and all that kind of thing.
Is this that one, the progress report on Afghanistan?
No, that one's still coming and it's probably going to be coming next month.
This is just every six months they send a report to Congress on how the war is going.
Oh, I get it.
This is just to Congress, not to the president, the one who matters.
All right.
This is a different report, but it's a fascinating read.
Every little independent section of a few paragraphs starts the same way with a claim of nonspecific progress that isn't backed up by anything.
And then it's just paragraph after paragraph of bad news.
And it reports that, well, they call them kinetic events, which is their odd euphemism for militant attacks.
Kinetic events, huh?
Kinetic events.
Sweet.
55% over the previous report.
George Carlin's doing his little cheer in his grave right now.
Yeah, 55% increase in attacks by insurgents.
The report also says that the efforts to reduce insurgent capacity have not provided any measurable results.
And yet every section starts with the momentum starting to shift, progress is starting to be made, but it's uneven.
It really isn't uneven.
It's evenly bad on all accounts.
Amazing.
Well, what do they say about the elections in there?
Do they talk about the elections?
No, they don't really go into the elections.
The report really covers up to the end of September.
It would cover the actual election itself, but not the evidence of all the fraud came out sort of in early and mid-October.
So that will probably be in the next report.
So did they go into detail about the different attacks and the different provinces and that kind of thing?
What's the form of this?
How is it written?
I'm trying to find the link right to it, and I don't seem to find it.
You know, there's a lot of regional coverage.
There's a lot of specific details about international coordination.
What's this group likely thinking about Afghanistan?
Is Pakistan going to be able to help more?
Things like that.
There are a few mentions of Marjah in there, which is fascinating but kind of brief.
And their final conclusion is that there are signs of progress in Marjah, because there is increased activity in the local marketplaces, even though there are as many attacks now as there were when the troops got there six or seven months prior.
And now for people just tuning in late to this war, Marjah last spring was supposed to be the big debut of the counterinsurgency strategy.
This is going to prove how good at this we really are.
We're going to clear, hold, and build Marjah.
We're going to give them a government in a box, and they're going to love it.
And then they're going to become our friends because of how good the deal is that we give them.
And here we are, wrapping up November.
There's just as many attacks as before.
And so, yeah, I mean, I guess in a guerrilla war, the imperial force can hold the land as long as they stand there.
But if they leave, there is no government in a box that's being created there.
Does it say in there that we've secured Marjah, now we can move on?
Now the Afghan forces are going to take care of it for us?
They certainly haven't secured Marjah in any way.
And they cite, not specifically in Marjah, but in general around southern Afghanistan, how little the Afghan government is able to take those provinces over and take those districts over after the clear, hold, build strategy is at the hold point.
They seem to get to the hold point, and it just stays there for months and months until they either get sick or move on.
Well, now, I love reading the New York Times version of everything.
It's so much fun.
The report said that the growth and development of the Afghan security forces, quote, are among Afghanistan's most promising areas of progress.
And they just say that like, yeah, and that's great.
And here's some things that make that sound good, too.
The increase in the numbers of cops or whatever, without the recognition that, hey, I was just reading the McClatchy newspapers, I think, two days ago.
Maybe it was even in the New York Times or the Washington Post that I was reading, that the soldiers, the American soldiers, hate the Afghan army guys and think that they are the absolute worst and there's nothing but bitterness and mistrust.
You know, they would rather be training the Iraqi army or the Bata Brigade over there, I guess.
Right.
And the report goes into, you know, trying to claim there's progress on that front because recruitment is up among the national police and the Afghan army.
But at the same time, attrition is up among them, too.
So you have a lot of people that are signing up, getting one or two paychecks, sitting through their couple of days training and just bolting.
Right.
Yeah.
A couple of hot meals and some American-bought firearms and off you go.
So now what about Pakistan?
Because, you know, the military is really in a rock-and-hard-place type situation with Pakistan, right?
Because there are, you know, the people who are fighting the Americans a lot of time, a lot of time hide on the other side of the border.
It's the roughest terrain on the face of the earth to try to fight in.
And the Pakistani state is our friend and continues to wage this civil war against their own lands, their own people on our behalf.
And I guess the New York Times version, anyway, says that this report says, well, you know, the Pakistanis are really trying, but they can't really do anything about it.
I mean, I guess I sort of like the idea, if that's the case, if that's your reading of the report, I like the idea that the military has a positive spin on what the Pakistani government is trying to do.
I don't want to, you know, I hate it when they get blamed, like in all the propaganda after the WikiLeaks dump, where they go, oh, yeah, everything's Pakistan's fault and that kind of thing.
I want to hear that everybody's getting along.
We don't need more wars.
It is pretty upbeat on Pakistan.
It seems to be mostly looking for ways to make excuses for Pakistan not having won what's probably an unwinnable tribal war along the north.
And, of course, they haven't been winning it for the last several years, but now the new excuses, because of the flooding, that's really making it hard to carry out those offensives.
Yeah, well, ain't it funny to think, I don't know, I guess, unless you heard the show yesterday live, the post isn't up there yet, but Anand Gopal wrote that piece at Foreign Policy about how not only did they try to give up Bin Laden before all this, but as soon as the invasion started, the Taliban completely offered to surrender and go along with whatever the Americans wanted, including all the leaders of the insurgency we're dealing with now.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Man, I was just reading the most ridiculous things that Mark Ames has ever written.
I can't really believe it, but I'll make fun of him later.
We're talking with Jason Ditz about the disastrous war.
Oh, here, thanks, Jason.
I got the link for this Pentagon report in the email from you here.
I only just now noticed it.
Report on progress towards security and stability in Afghanistan.
I guess we were talking about Pakistan and the Pentagon's spin on their continuing civil war, and they just launched a brand-new offensive in Waziristan or somewhere up there in the northwestern tribal territories or something.
Right, they just launched an offensive in Urukzai today, or yesterday.
Where's that?
It's right next to south Waziristan.
Oh, okay.
Jason, he got an A in geography.
But anyway, I think we were interrupted by the break.
You were making some kind of point or another there about the spin on the Pakistanis' cooperation or lack thereof here.
Well, mostly it's just that they blame the flood now for why the Pakistani military isn't making any progress in the tribal areas.
But of course the Pakistani military has been launching these offensives at Obama and previously Bush's behest for years, and they'll declare victory in a district and move on, and it never seems to make any lasting progress because a few months later they're reinvading the same place.
But now the flood is the official reason it's not working, and it's nice that they're not trying to scapegoat Pakistan this time, like they did in the wake of the WikiLeaks report, but at the same time they're not really looking at whether or not the strategy is viable.
They're just saying that, well, the flood makes it a special case, and that's why the war isn't working.
Yeah.
Well, it's sort of like David Swanson was just talking about how he never, all the original research he's been doing for his new book, he's never found anywhere where the guys in charge say to each other, gee, we have to keep fighting out of our duty to the fallen or whatever, like they care about the cannon fodder at all, but it's sort of the same thing on the higher level.
They never talk to each other either about whether any of this makes sense, right?
The premise of this entire report is that, yep, this is what we're doing, all right, and that's it.
And this is what we're doing, and it's not working, and we're hoping it's going to start working in the future, but none of the indications are that it actually will.
Man, I wish I had this soundbite.
I one time saw Hillary Clinton say, and I think it was in reference to Afghanistan, when you're in a hole, you've got to grab a shovel and dig.
She really said that, you know?
Oh, man.
Well, now what about the election then?
I guess, you know, as you said, this isn't in the report, but is it just ethnic lines is the way this thing broke down, and some tribal or ethnic clans were able to stuff the ballots and the others weren't allowed to vote at all, typical sort of attempted old world democracy there, or what?
Well, it's sort of even more complicated than that.
Pretty much every candidate that I've heard of had a bunch of fake ballots cast on his behalf, at least every candidate that mattered or had any hope of winning.
So when the Electoral Complaints Commission announced they were banning 21 of the candidates who won from serving because they were involved in ballot stuffing, it's sort of hypocritical because, really, everybody that's going to wind up in the Afghan parliament was a beneficiary of ballot stuffing in some way, shape, or form.
But a lot of the people that they banned seem to be Pashtuns, and it's really making it so that the Pashtuns, they're not quite a majority of the population of Afghanistan, but they're pretty close, and they have comparatively little representation in the Afghan parliament and no representation in certain provinces where they're the majority of the province.
Right, and they're the community base of the insurgency.
So we disallow them or we create a situation where they're not allowed to participate in the government and distribute the state's violence through democratic means.
We give them no representation whatsoever but the Taliban and the Haqqani Network and whatever to provide them their services, particularly security, right?
Right, and some of them are being very open about the fact that, well, if we're not going to have any say in the Afghan government, we're going to just get closer with the Taliban because we'll at least have a say with them.
Hell, that's what Ahmed Karzai said.
If you don't quit, I'm going to join the Taliban.
How do you like that?
Boy, I think that guy's going crazy in that job, huh?
Well, it's got to be a maddening position because he's constantly talking about NATO's civilian casualties and criticizing them and demanding that they stop, and they never stop, and nobody really listens to what he says except to report that he complained about them, and now even the fact that he's complaining about them is making Petraeus mad.
So recently we had Petraeus dressing down a number of Afghan officials because Karzai had complained that the night raids were causing too many civilian deaths.
Right.
Well, and when Petraeus, his hand-picked chosen guy that he's now replaced because he got fired, General McChrystal, he has what he calls insurgent math.
It says for everybody that you kill there, and anybody can read this in Rolling Stone, for everybody we kill there, we create ten new enemies.
And so, you know, this is what we talk about.
You find yourself in a hole, keep digging.
And so, you know, Petraeus must recognize this.
He's got this pseudo-counterinsurgency strategy that says, target only the bad guys and protect everybody else.
But, you know, the more bad guys he kills, the more everybody else is the bad guys.
You know?
It's kind of insane.
I think General Petraeus is also sort of...his viewpoint is sort of skewed by his fictional victory in Iraq, where he did a bunch of stuff, and then some stuff that wasn't really related to what he did dropped the level of violence in Iraq, and then he got credit for it.
So he's trying that same strategy and hoping that lightning will strike twice and he'll get lucky again.
But it doesn't seem like there's anything similar about these two wars except that there's U.S. troops occupying a nation.
And there's no reason to believe that sectarian cleansing or anything like that would quiet down the fighting in Afghanistan the way it did in Iraq.
Right.
And, heck, we were talking with Gareth Porter on the show a week or two ago about how really the fight that Petraeus picked with the Saudis in 2007, particularly, was totally unnecessary.
Really, the most violence in the country at that time was no longer against the insurgency, which had mostly lost and quit and been bought off.
He picked a brand-new fight against the Saudis that really he was fighting to empower all along anyway.
And so, if anything, all he did was make things worse.
And, in fact, I'm glad you brought up Iraq as the example for what a brilliant hero this guy Petraeus isn't.
You have an article today in the viewpoint section at antiwar.com, and it's at summitdaily.com.
It's the newspaper's website here.
I'm not sure which town this newspaper's in, Jason.
Maybe you can fill us in.
But it's called U.S. Should Leave Iraq Before It Blows Up Again.
And your point here being, yeah, they never did achieve those benchmarks and work out all their differences by way of their parliamentary democracy, and so we may be just in the eye of the storm awaiting another pseudo-civil war one way or the other inside Iraq.
Well, and I don't think they'll have to wait too awful long, because it seems like an awful lot of these groups that joined the broad coalition government in Iraq aren't too happy with what's happening since it was formed.
I mean, Iraqia, which is the largest faction, openly claimed to have left the coalition just a day after it was formed.
And now they've come back sort of nominally, but it doesn't seem like they're going to stay very long.
And the other factions are all fighting over which ministries they're going to get in the cabinet, to the point where the cabinet's been delayed open-endedly just to avoid that conflict.
We've still got the conflict over who's going to control Kirkuk brewing, too.
Yeah, well, there you go, everybody.
News.antiwar.com.
For much more of this, Jason Ditz keeps track of the news for you all day, every day.
And it's news.antiwar.com.
And also check the viewpoint section today for US should leave Iraq before it blows up again.
Thanks very much for your time, Jason.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
