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I'm in LA, and I'm an assistant editor at Antiwar.com, and I host Antiwar Radio for them and the Liberty Radio Network as well.
You can hear me on KUCR 88.3 in Riverside.
And I have archives of over 1,500 interviews going back to 2003 at ScottHortonShow.com, and there's roughly that many at Antiwar.com/radio.
Today we'll be speaking with Anand Gopal from the Christian Science Monitor and many other publications about the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We'll be talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy and John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus about the possible conflict in Korea this weekend.
First we go to Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
He's the author of the books Spy Trade, Foreign Agents, America's Defense Line, Deadly Dogma, and Visa Denied, and he is also a contributor at Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
It's my pleasure.
I really appreciate you joining us, especially on a holiday weekend like this.
It's absolutely no problem.
All right, so your most recent article at Antiwar.com is about this most interesting story.
There's a defamation suit against a group called AIPAC in Washington, D.C., by a guy named Steve Rosen.
Right.
And I guess I'll just let you go ahead and set up the story of this lawsuit.
It's a defamation suit, correct?
Absolutely, and it's brewing beneath the surface here in Washington.
This is probably one of the most intriguing and biggest scandals ever to hit the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
I inadvertently broke this story because I happened to be at the courthouse when AIPAC's legal counsel filed 260 pages of extremely incriminating information, both to the organization and to one of its former top officials.
But just to back up a little bit, AIPAC is generally considered here in Washington to be one of the most powerful lobbies in the formulation of policy towards the Middle East.
And it's had a few run-ins with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Steve Rosen's March 2, 2009 defamation lawsuit is extremely interesting because, as some people are aware, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fired two analysts after they were indicted for espionage in 2004-2005.
And Rosen filed a lawsuit again in March of 2009 stating that the organization defamed him because they made him look as though he wasn't, and stated to the press that he wasn't upholding AIPAC's standards by going out and collecting very sensitive information from the U.S. government.
Now, he sued the organization for $20 million, and he's basically saying that when they threw him overboard in an attempt to save the organization when federal prosecutors are breathing down their necks during the Larry Franklin espionage scandal, that they shouldn't have done that, that he wasn't doing anything that normal AIPAC employees were doing at the time.
And some insiders, such as M.J. Rosenberg, who's a great reporter and a blogger, has come out with some postings about this scandal saying that if there were any daylight between AIPAC's activity and Rosen, he certainly never saw it.
So it's a huge scandal.
It still hasn't broken the surface in the mainstream media.
Okay, so let me get this right.
This guy was under indictment for espionage.
AIPAC threw him under the bus, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and said, oh, well, whatever it was this guy was doing is certainly not the way we operate around here.
And he's saying, oh, yes, it is.
And you're defaming me by saying that I was disobeying the rules or going off rogue on my own.
I was doing exactly what AIPAC does all day.
And that's the cudgel that he's using against them in court.
And then now you're saying that M.J. Rosenberg, the peace activist, former AIPAC official, is siding with Rosen and saying, no, he's really right, that they do this all the time.
Yeah, that's basically it.
And if you look carefully at the recent court filings, it really looks more like they threw him under the bus because he got caught more than anything else.
And again, because under the so-called Thompson guidelines that the DOJ, if they made some amends and said they weren't going to do it again, they could keep their organization from being indicted.
But again, the blogosphere is doing quite well on this issue.
In fact, Jeff Stein at the Washington Post spy talk blog had Rosen elaborate a little bit more on this in a previous posting and recently.
And Rosen's basically saying that he's got 180 documents that he's going to be filing unless they can come to a settlement, which basically shows that there is this infrastructure at AIPAC, which is actively gathering classified information.
Again, the front-run policy and that he's going to name names and he's going to show that many people were involved in this, that there was nothing unique about what he was doing.
All right.
Now, another indication of that, I would think, would be the interviews that Larry Franklin gave to, I guess, the forward and to Haaretz, where he said that the FBI was after, in his words, every Jew in the Pentagon.
Which, of course, was really a reference to Douglas Fyfe and the Office of Special Plans and the Counterterrorism Policy Evaluation Group that came up with the weapons mass destruction and the Iraq-Al Qaeda lies and so forth.
The leaks to Amit Chalabi about breaking the Iranian codes and so forth.
But that goes to show that the FBI was certainly concerned with a lot more than just any documents that Larry Franklin had attempted to steal.
Which really leads us to the question, if you could go back to us and actually go back and tell us about the Franklin case in general.
This is what Rosen is saying we did all the time.
What exactly was it that, I mean, Franklin, after all, pled guilty and was sentenced to a dozen years in prison?
Right.
Franklin was concerned about U.S. policy not being tough enough toward Iran.
And so he became the ideal low to mid-level Pentagon official for Rosen and Weissman to cultivate.
And they did receive information, classified information, which he provided to them and also which he provided to Israelis who were not entitled to have it.
And so Rosen got himself in a heap of trouble.
He was discovered by the FBI, which, you know, people have tried to spin it as a witch hunt.
But at the same time that they were, that they found Franklin was in this sort of situation, they were also running all sorts of other counter-espionage operations against, at this time they were setting up Stuart Novetti, who was passing NASA information, Doxer from Akamai, who was also trying to sell information.
So they had a whole string of counter-espionage operations going on.
And Franklin happened to fall into it.
But basically what happened was that they turned Franklin and then wanted to roll up this wider network that Franklin was communicating with that gave him some planted information, which Rosen and Weissman then passed on to the Washington Post, to Glenn Kessler.
And, you know, the 260 pages, which just broke the light of day a couple weeks ago, really show how Rosen was trying to spin that even sort of boring information that the FBI gave him into, as he says it, total warfare on the United States on the part of Iran.
So this sort of, you know, hyping up information to get the U.S. to militarily confront Iran is something that they were working very hard to do before Bush left office.
But, of course, they failed.
And these indictments put the kibosh on that.
And now you say that these documents were going not just to the Washington Post, but to Israeli officials.
Who were they?
Well, near, excuse me, Barack, who is the second in command over at the Israeli embassy, and near Gilan, who is another person who actually fled the United States when he found out that they had uncovered the, you know, sending of information between Franklin and the Israelis.
You know, the interesting thing is, in the court documents that AIPAC filed, it makes it look as though the real driver in this whole situation was the Israeli embassy, because as soon as he found out that the FBI was on his tail, Rosen, in depositions to the court, outlines this story of calling the second in command at the Israeli embassy to say basically, hey, you know, they're on to us, meeting him at a restaurant where he typically met with him on Fridays, which is a whole other thing that's very interesting.
Why is a high-level AIPAC official meeting with an Israeli official every Friday at a particular time and place?
To warn him.
And he specifically uses the case of Jonathan Pollard to say, you know, this is what's going down.
And, of course, the Israeli official fled, and some people left the United States because of this.
So it reveals AIPAC as, again, as M.J. Rosenberg would say, as something that does not resemble any sort of normal domestic lobby, which is what it's always been trying to portray itself as.
Well, and let's get back to that in a second, the real nature of whether it's the kind of thing that should have to be registered under the Foreign Registration Act and all that.
But, you know, I wanted to point out about Larry Franklin, the guy that was recruited by Rosen and Weissman to bring them this information, I guess, as you say, accusing the Iranians of nefarious interference in Iraq.
He was the top Iran expert at the Pentagon and was the guy that, I guess, it must have been Douglas Pfeiffer, I'm not sure, who sent him along with Michael Ledeen to the secret meetings in Rome right after the September 11th attack, where they were meeting with Manjoor Ghorbanifar and with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, etc., where many people are suspicious that these meetings were the genesis of the Niger uranium forgeries that were used to implicate Saddam Hussein in a nuclear weapons program.
Right, that's exactly what the FBI was concerned about.
They have released, under Freedom of Information Act, a news clipping file that shows that they were following intensely all of the investigative reporters, such as, you know, Nation Magazine and Mother Jones articles about Iran Contra II and Laura Rosen's article about how Lawrence Franklin was, again, with Ledeen and moving through all of these previous channels that have been used for nefarious purposes and to thwart, you know, the Boland amendments back in the 80s.
They were on to it, they were interested in getting some sort of criminal proceeding going, and it looks as though they could have gone further except for the fact that the media was tipped and they had to roll up their operations and be satisfied with Franklin, who was, you know, a lower-level guy and certainly not the one who was setting up all of these meetings with the armed smugglers and so on and so forth.
That's an important point from when the FBI investigation into AIPAC broke, that it seemed that the leak came from AIPAC themselves to try to short-circuit any further investigation.
I guess the feeling that the media coverage would change the nature of how far the FBI would be allowed to go in investigating.
And you juxtapose that very useful purpose of the media in service to AIPAC with the almost total mainstream media blackout on these recent court documents, which, you know, in addition to painting the organization as, you know, somewhat nefarious, also revealed that there was all sorts of trafficking and pornography in the office, all sorts of improper board activities.
Well, that ought to at least give it media legs, right?
Right.
Because it's not something I like to write about, and in fact I really didn't.
But other people have gone mad with this, saying, geez, if this were the NRA or the Council on American Islamic Affairs, you know, the media would be all over this stuff.
Fox News would be running a ticker on this constantly, 24-7.
But as MJ and some others have put, you know, because it's AIPAC, nobody in the mainstream media wants to mess with it.
And that's a real disservice, I think, to people who want to understand how this lobby works.
Because, again, when you look at what's really going on, it doesn't look like any sort of non-profit tax exempts, you know, that populate this town.
It's quite different.
Well, now, speaking of MJ Rosenberg, I mean, he's also said that this represents a real crisis for AIPAC, their worst crisis ever.
And maybe if it's not getting attention on, you know, daytime TV or whatever, it's still a very big deal inside Washington, D.C., that, you know, of course they're having to spend a lot of money on legal fees.
Right.
And on both sides, they're donors, same donors paying both sides in this suit here.
He calls it an existential crisis, and Jacob Helbrun has called it that as well.
And it really is an existential crisis to the extent that they are.
They're spending tens of millions of dollars, and they have, you know, to divert their resources, they've already spent $4.9 billion on Rosen, who's now suing them to get him out of the criminal predicament.
Right.
All right.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith, the author of Spy Trade, and he runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy at IRMEP.org, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
Can I just mention one other thought here?
Sure.
That I didn't remember.
You know, basically Rosen is saying, quote, I will introduce documentary evidence that AIPAC approved of the receipt of classified information, unquote.
This is a statement he gave to Washington Post reporter for his blog.
And so the big overriding issue is, why isn't there a refocus on sort of the criminal nature of this?
Right.
Where's the FBI?
Isn't this their job?
Yeah.
Is it not the job?
And, you know, he states that he's going to be able to convince a jury.
Again, Rosen says, quote, AIPAC, he says, quote, will make denials.
The jury will have to decide who's telling the truth.
I am, unquote.
But the question is, well, after the jury says yes, you weren't the only one trafficking in classified information to, you know, implement what I would say and what many people would say are absolutely horrible policies that, you know, really have kept the U.S. mired and, in fact, have thwarted peace proposals over and over again.
Well, what happens then?
What happens when the jury says, yeah, you know what?
This place really is trafficking classified information and we've never seen anything like it.
What happens then?
And so there is a big overhang here about the whole question of law enforcement.
Where are the attorneys on this?
Well, now, when you talk about the Israel lobby having to register, AIPAC specifically having to register as agents of a foreign power, I see also on your site that you're pushing for them to have their tax exempt status repealed.
Is that on the basis of the theory that they are agents of a foreign power and the same theory as to why they should have to register as foreign agents?
Or is there a different technicality you're working there?
It's really a different technicality.
You know, we've been a watchdog of this group for many years and have studied it since its genesis in 1951.
And I was on a phone call with Douglas Schulman, who's an IRS commissioner on National Public Radio, back in January 11.
And I put to him the fact that there were so many legal questions and violations and FBI investigations of some of these organizations, and he didn't say anything.
And caller after caller made a phone call into the station saying, can you answer the question about enforcement of IRS regulations over some of these organizations that have caused so much angst with the law enforcement community and seem to be violating IRS regulations.
And he certainly made a very cogent statement in which he said, quote, if a charity is breaking tax laws, engage in activities that they're not supposed to engage in, we will certainly go after them, unquote.
So we took that as a challenge and put together a 1,400-page catalog of every single violation.
And I can tell you that, you know, we've publicized it, it's been downloaded thousands of times.
But it really is, this ball is really in the IRS's court as much as it is in the D.C. Superior Court for them to decide whether they're going to actually apply IRS regulations to this sort of behavior.
Because, you know, just based on the court documents and the filings that have been made in the civil suit, you can make a strong argument that this is not an organization that should be benefiting from a tax exemption.
Yeah.
Well, of course, the IRS has the luxury of picking and choosing friends and enemies, don't they?
It does, and, you know, it is interesting that although they do seem to be becoming more concerned about this, they're concerned about funding flows of West Bank settlement financing from the U.S., they've apparently set up a new unit in Washington, D.C., to review some of these activities.
So, I mean, again, particularly for people who would like to see a more peace-oriented policy approach and not see so many valid initiatives thwarted, it is somewhat comforting to know that the IRS is at least beginning to look at what's happening with these vast amounts of tax-deductible funds that are raised in the U.S.
All right, everybody, that is Grant F. Smith.
You can find him at IRMEP.org.
That's the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And his books are Spy Trade, Foreign Agents, America's Defense Line, Deadly Dogma, and Visa Denied.
You can also find his writings at Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much, Grant.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, folks, and now we're on to John Pfeffer.
He is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's FPIF.org, which is part of the Institute for Policy Studies.
That's IPS-DC.org.
And he's the author of the book North Korea, South Korea, U.S. Policy, and the Korean Peninsula.
He's a Pantech Fellow in Korean Studies at Stanford University, a member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned About Korea.
And he writes for his own website, johnpfeffer.com, The Huffington Post, Tom Dispatch, Alternet, and I believe a great many of his Foreign Policy in Focus articles can be found at Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Fine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us this evening.
No problem.
Good to be on the show.
All right.
Well, the station is called Pacifica, and it's not named after the ocean.
It's named after peace, and in other words, opposition to empire, opposition to warfare, and the mass death and the infringement on individual liberty that warfare entails.
John Pfeffer, as you could tell from the introduction, is an expert on Korea, and that's one of our big stories this week is the killing of four people by the North Koreans hit by artillery.
Shortly after, the South Koreans were doing an exercise, or perhaps during a South Korean exercise, in disputed waters, so it was not just a blind attack.
It was provoked, at least partially.
So now, the USS Washington, plus four other battleships, are on their way to the Yellow Sea, that's off the western coast of Korea, to escalate the war games, apparently.
And now, Barack Obama says that the purpose of dispatching this aircraft carrier, and plus four more battleships that they've admitted to, at least, or said, is to guarantee stability in the region, to reinforce the proposition that South Korea will be fought for by the United States, no matter what.
And so now, we have John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus, that's fpif.org, back on the line here, and I think you heard the last little bit of that, at least.
John, I wonder if you can tell us whether you think that sending the USS George Washington and four more ships to participate in more war games this weekend, in those, I believe, disputed waters off the western coast of Korea, is actually something that would contribute to stability in the region, or maybe not?
Well, I can certainly understand why the United States does something like that.
I mean, after all, we have an alliance with South Korea, but generally speaking, no.
I think that that contributes to rising tensions.
I mean, this is a disputed area, I think, as you were telling your listeners.
The northern limit line, the maritime boundary between North and South Korea, the two sides don't agree on where it runs, which is in comparison to the DMZ, the kind of territorial limit, which there is some agreement on.
But this maritime boundary, no.
And in fact, North Korea has, in the past, claimed possession over several islands, including the one that it shelled earlier this week.
So when South Korea and South Korea and the United States hold military exercises there, you can imagine that North Korea doesn't get all that excited about it.
And China, too, actually, since the exercises are very close to China, and within its territorial waters, as identified under the international law of the seas, China, too, is not extremely enthusiastic either.
So, no, I don't think sending the aircraft carrier and upping the exercises, the level of military exercises, is a particularly good idea at this point.
All right, well, to go ahead and skip to the end of the interview at the beginning here, John, are you optimistic that this really isn't going to go anywhere?
I mean, really, when these generals on both sides and politicians are beating their chests, they're secretly on the phone with each other saying, all right, be cool, we're not really going to escalate this thing into another holocaust, right?
Well, I'd like to believe that.
And in fact, at certain points in the past, certainly North and South Korean military have been in close contact with one another.
And there have even been contacts between the United States and North Korea.
In fact, one of the most successful programs prior to the recent escalation was the Pentagon program inside North Korea, which was looking for missing in action from the Korean War.
That was probably the best cooperation between the United States and North Korea.
But at a time like this, unfortunately, I'd say that there isn't a lot of communication, and it's the risk of misperceptions and of miscommunication that could lead to greater escalation.
I mean, I'm relatively optimistic that both sides recognizing the sheer risk of escalation.
I mean, we're talking about 20 million people just on South Korean side who live in and around Seoul, who are within the artillery range of North Korea.
And we're talking about an equal, not as many, but several million on the North Korean side.
And should war break out, we're talking about huge casualties.
And the Pentagon, frankly, does not really want this to happen because it has thousands of American soldiers as well in South Korea within shooting distance.
So generally speaking, I think both sides are relatively risk averse.
But unfortunately, the logic of war sometimes leads both sides to escalate even if they don't want to.
Well, they say that no battle plan ever outlives the first engagement, right?
I mean, the first casualty of war is the truth.
The second casualty is good enough information to even lie about as things are chaotic when people are getting blown up.
Exactly, exactly.
And recently, actually, North Korea held another set of test firings of artillery on its side of the northern limit line.
And it was rather scrupulous this time about having it on its side.
But that still freaked out the South Koreans.
Now, the South Koreans, of course, prior to North Korea's shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, held their own military exercises on their own side of the northern limit line.
And they said, hey, we were scrupulous about, you know, making sure that our shells didn't fall over the other side of the line.
And then they were surprised when North Korea freaked out.
So the other side is always freaked out when, you know, our side or their side does something which they consider defensive, purely defensive.
And it turns out the other side doesn't see it as defensive.
And that's the risk of misperception in this case.
Well, you know, I don't like to be alarmist about these kinds of things.
I would really like to hope for the best.
But one, you know, part of this story that really kind of put the fright into me for a minute, John, was the South Korean defense minister apparently resigned over his shame of not bombing the North in retaliation.
He restrained himself, he said, because he did not want to risk escalating into a full-scale war.
But he's been forced to resign.
Is that the nature of South Korean politics right now, that he's not a national hero this minute?
Well, you've got to remember that the current administration in Seoul, Im Young-bak, came into office promising a harder line against North Korea.
That's a pretty hard line.
That is.
I mean, they didn't come into office promising that.
But they did say, look, we're tired of an asymmetrical relationship in which there's no quid pro quo.
We give stuff to North Korea, in other words, food, fertilizer, etc.
And North Korea doesn't give us anything back.
That was the perception from Im Young-bak administration, conservative party taking over a couple years ago.
Now, after the Cheonan sinking, so last March, there was a South Korean ship that sank, and there were about 46 South Korean naval personnel who died in that sinking.
There were a number of people in the Im Young-bak administration and then other conservatives in South Korean society who said, hey, we have to retaliate against North Korea.
Now, initially, the Im Young-bak administration said, well, we actually don't know what happened in this situation.
So for the first couple of days, there was speculation.
Maybe it was a mine, for instance, or maybe the ship ran aground.
So no one knew exactly.
And then only gradually did the South Korean government actually put the blame on North Korea.
But by that point, it was too late to have the kind of retaliation that some of the hardliners were calling for.
So now, come this week, those hardliners are like, hey, we didn't retaliate back in March when the Cheonan was sunk.
And now you have this opportunity and you blew it a second time.
So that's the perception of the hardliners in South Korea.
Well, you know, I saw an article that you had back in August at the Huffington Post, sharply critical of Barack Obama for, I think what you say is tightening screws on the North Koreans and really being very provocative with all these war games.
And that was August 3rd, a few months back.
That's right.
I mean, Obama...
Well, and I think you say in that article, too, a lot of this is because for domestic political reasons, the president of South Korea is insisting so as well.
That's correct.
And basically, the Obama administration has said, we're going to support the South Korean government on all this.
And for the most part, the Obama administration has not wanted to deal with North Korea.
I mean, North Korea has been a kind of a pain in the butt for the Obama administration.
They're focusing on Afghanistan, on Iraq, on Iran in ways we often find objectionable.
But nevertheless, that's what they're focusing on.
And for the most part, the policy they've pursued with North Korea has been what they call strategic patience.
And that's kind of a euphemism for ignoring North Korea.
I mean, because obviously to say we're ignoring North Korea, that doesn't sound so good when North Korea is pursuing a nuclear program.
Because then conservatives here in this country say, hey, you're ignoring this country that has a nuclear program and you're paying attention to countries that don't have nuclear weapons.
So what gives there?
And so the Obama administration came up with this policy of strategic patience where they basically say, we're not going to engage North Korea until they jump through a couple of hoops.
Now, that's actually quite different from the Bush administration.
Bush administration, that is the last two years of the Bush administration, when they reversed their North Korea policy and said, hey, we got to engage this country.
We have to sit down in the six-party talks.
We have to talk to them.
We have to come up with some kind of a package deal with this country.
And although the Obama administration said, okay, we're open to negotiations, basically they've been sitting put.
Now, that's the kind of ignoring the country part of it.
The other part, of course, as I said in the article, is they have ratcheted up sanctions.
They ratcheted up sanctions after North Korea's second nuclear test, which happened just a few months after Obama took office.
And that, in part, was done with consent and the encouragement of our allies.
But then after the Cheonan sinking in March, South Korea really pushed hard for a kind of upgrading of military exercises, especially in this sensitive region.
And I think you could draw a direct line between that kind of intensification of military exercises and what's happened this week.
Now, I guess it was just last week that this scientist, Siegfried Hecker, and some colleagues went to North Korea, were invited to go to North Korea.
And the North Koreans apparently, I don't know how to say it in Korean, but said something like, hey, look at this.
We had a giant room full of spinning centrifuges enriching uranium, apparently only up to industrial grade, not weapons-grade uranium yet.
But I wondered whether you were able to find in any of the reporting or anything you know about that, whether there's any indication of when that began.
And I guess maybe I can elaborate why that's so important in a minute.
Yeah, well, it is a tough question because the listeners might remember that it was the Bush administration back in 2003, which essentially accused North Korea of having a covert uranium enrichment facility.
And that was their explicit reason for pulling out of multilateral discussion.
Well, and breaking the agreed framework and creating the proliferation security initiative and adding more sanctions and really driving the North Koreans out of the nonproliferation treaty.
Yeah, I mean, that was the Bush administration's reason.
And I think there was evidence, and the Clinton administration said that they had evidence of a covert uranium enrichment facility back in the 1990s, but they didn't think it was big enough to warrant non-engagement with North Korea.
But the facility that Siegfried Hecker saw, it was pretty sophisticated, suggests that they've been accumulating these centrifuges for a couple of years.
But not back to 2002.
Well, let me ask you this, specifically on that, because this was really, as Dr. Prather says, this is how Bush pushed the North Koreans to nukes.
They were within the nonproliferation treaty, not perfect, but they had their safeguards agreement, and they had international inspectors and monitors and seals and all these things.
And it was based on the theory that a North Korean diplomat admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment program.
That became the thing that they used as the excuse to break the deal.
And is there, I guess, what I want to know, is there any indication that that's true other than these guys said that they heard that at a cocktail party?
We don't have any independent evidence that this program emerged in the early...
And you would say that this newly found uranium enrichment program doesn't seem to be an indication that that old accusation was true then.
No, at least not at the level that the Bush administration asserted that it was a national security risk.
And we have to remember that Siegfried Hecker in his report said, look, this program doesn't in fact change the geopolitical calculus on the peninsula.
This doesn't actually change our understanding of North Korea's nuclear program.
Because essentially North Korea has a couple of nukes that it got from plutonium reprocessing.
And uranium enrichment is, as you said, not at bomb-grade level yet.
So essentially the North Koreans are saying, hey, this is the program we got.
And if you want to stop us from turning it into a military, for military purposes, then you've got to engage with us.
All right.
Now, if I was the president and I said to crazy old Kim Jong-il, hey, how about this?
I'll drop all the sanctions.
I'll give you a security guarantee, a promise never to attack you.
And all you have to do is give up the half dozen nukes or so that you have.
And then we'll all be friends.
Who cares if you're commies?
The Chinese are too, and we get along fine with them.
And really, how could you distinguish America from the old Soviet bloc these days?
Would that work?
You think he'd go for that?
Well, one of the compromises that North Korea offered just a week ago was basically they said, hey, we will give you our plutonium rods to store in a third-party country in exchange for basically the United States recommitting to no hostile intent, to basically a security guarantee for North Korea.
Well, so our peace Nobel laureate took them up on that great offer, right?
That's right.
In other words, no, not at all, right?
Obama told him what?
To forget it?
Have rocks in his ears?
Didn't notice?
They said, look, we're not going to negotiate with you on this until we kind of basically process this revelation you've given us.
This is before the attack on China.
Well, and this is the same thing.
This was the Bush policy at least back before they changed it, as you said, and pushed to be a little more open.
But back when the president of South Korea was President Roh, he wanted very badly to have a final peace negotiation instead of just a temporary ceasefire since 1953 on the DMZ there.
He wanted to have a real peace agreement and do more of the sunshine-type policy and allowing more travel and trade and opening up relations.
And Bush said, no, you can't do that until we resolve the nuclear bomb issue, the one that he'd created in the first place.
That's right.
And whether North Korea would ultimately give up the nuclear devices it has right now, that's a tough question.
I mean, I personally think that it's an unanswerable question.
I think we have to enter in negotiations with North Korea toward denuclearization, knowing that North Korea is in a very vulnerable position and it sees its nuclear program as a deterrent, in part a deterrent because of the declining kind of effectiveness of its own conventional forces.
So it's unrealistic at this point to be able to answer the question of whether North Korea would ever give up its single bargaining chip and its single major deterrent.
However, I do think that as North Korea indicated last week, it is willing to compromise, it is willing to go down the path toward denuclearization, and that's what we've got to do.
That's going to increase the chances of peace and stability in the region.
I also think that we have to put things on the table like a permanent peace treaty to replace the armistice agreement from the Korean War.
We have to think about diplomatic recognition.
I mean, North Korea is basically unrecognized, sitting there in the middle of Northeast Asia.
And I believe that change within North Korea comes only later, after this kind of process of recognition.
Well, what about if we did take that sort of, my fantasy of a completely hands-off approach and just say, we'll get all our troops out, you guys work out your own problems, North Korea, we're never going to attack you, we're lifting all our sanctions, and so now you don't need nukes because you have nothing to worry about.
Is that a good policy or not?
A little pie in the sky, but why not?
Well, we could try it, but to be honest with you, North Korea actually has a strange relationship with the United States.
Of course, we're declared enemies of each other.
Nevertheless, North Korea seriously wants to engage with the United States first before it engages with South Korea.
Why?
Because North Korea believes that the United States holds the kind of security solution for Northeast Asia.
It also sees the United States as the most advanced industrialized country, the country that's most likely to offer some kind of a deal along with its allies for North Korea.
So, I mean, from one point of view, withdrawing from the region makes a lot of sense, but honestly, I don't actually think that's what North Korea wants.
North Korea wants to engage us.
Maybe ultimately they'd like, of course, the United States to withdraw, but we also have to remember that North Korea is concerned not just about the United States.
It's not concerned just about South Korea.
It's worried about Japanese increased offensive capabilities, and in a strange way, the United States is kind of a check from North Korea's point of view on the possibility of Japan becoming even more offensive in the future.
Well, you know, that's the whole thing is the excuse for us being there since 1951 has been to protect South Korea and Japan, and yet both of them really are capable of defending themselves.
It seems like if a war does break out for, you know, premeditated reasons or, you know, an accident gets, you know, people get carried away like they often do, it seems like having the United States involved would just make matters worse for everybody, including the United States.
Well, I couldn't agree more, but let me give you an example of how kind of paradoxical the situation is.
The Roh Moo-hyun administration, as you pointed out, was probably one of the most progressive administrations that has ever been in charge in South Korea.
It wanted to pursue a very strong sunshine policy of engagement with North Korea.
It actually had a very progressive point of view toward China, toward Japan, but what else did it do?
Actually, it embarked on one of the most significant military spending increases that South Korea had seen in 20, 30 years since the authoritarian days, and the reason it did so was in part because it feared that the United States would break off the alliance, and it needed its own indigenous military capabilities.
Now, if you're in Pyongyang and you're seeing that happen, you might say to yourself, huh, I'm not so crazy about seeing South Korea develop this amazing military capacity.
You know, in some cases, the U.S. presence, that U.S. rationale for being in the region is not such a bad thing from Pyongyang's point of view.
I personally, I'm not so crazy about the alliance structure and what it means for peace and security in the region, but what I'm trying to explain is the perspective coming out of Pyongyang.
Right, yeah, well, that's a very interesting take, but I share your point of view that from the American side of this, just imagine looking west, way over there, that far away across the ocean.
It just seems kind of strange that a border dispute on that little peninsula ought to have to involve the lives of young American soldiers from way over here, when after all, there's no more Cold War with the Chinese and no more Cold War with the Soviet Union, and there hasn't been for more than a generation and a generation and a half.
In the case of China, you know, it seems unrealistic.
We're only containing North Korea, which, as everyone knows, what, like a thousandth of the economy of the South?
Mm-hmm, oh, yeah, no, it's, but, you know, some would say, look, North Korea is actually not what the real reason is that we're in the region.
I mean, as you point out, North Korean economy is no big threat.
North Korea doesn't have any oil.
North Korea has a minimal nuclear program, and that's kind of stated reason why we're concerned about this, why we're involved in all of this, but a lot of people say, hey, North Korea is actually not the real reason here.
It's the reason we stay, but it is China that the United States is worried about, and if you look at the quadrennial defense review, not this last one, but the previous two under the Bush administration, even going back to the Clinton years, China was the kind of the threat that the Pentagon saw as the only country that had the capability of challenging the United States 10, 15, 20 years from now, challenging the U.S. preeminent military position in the world, and so the Pentagon is thinking about that in the long term.
Now, as I said, the last QDR, which just came out this year, back in the spring, the last QDR actually didn't include China as this long-term threat.
What was the reaction from some in Congress?
Well, Buck McKeon, who was on the House Armed Services Committee, said, hey, how come China's not in this QDR?
How come we're not talking about what the real threat is, which is China?
Now, that was back in the spring after the midterm elections.
Who's going to be in charge of the House Armed Services Committee?
Unfortunately, Buck McKeon.
So I think some of the arguments, some of the quote-unquote China-bashing arguments, some of the Cold War rhetoric that we associate with some of the stronger hawks in Congress are going to have an even more prominent political position here in the United States.
You think there happens to be, do you have any information about any Lockheed or Northrop Grumman factories in that guy's district?
Sounds like he's trying to sell some F-22s and F-35s to me.
Believe me, they're all well-funded by that.
But on the other side of things, the Obama administration is considering lifting our prohibitions about selling arms to, well, this would be dual-use items.
This is a C-130 transport plane that the Obama administration would like to sell to China.
So that's on the other side of the arms lobby.
Because the arms lobby, to be honest with you, frankly, they don't often care where the arms go.
As long as there's a conflict or the possibility of one.
All right.
Now, we've got to wrap this up here, John.
I think we've got the phone line fixed, and we have to move on to our next guest.
But I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today.
It doesn't sound like you're too worried about a war breaking out, so I'm going to go ahead and keep that.
If it's all right with you.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one.
Okay, great.
Thanks a lot for your time tonight.
Okay, take care.
Everybody, that is John Pfeffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org.
And author of North Korea, South Korea, U.S. Policy, and the Korean Peninsula.
And this is Anti-War Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.
And I apologize to you guys for the bad phone connection.
And so now to cover another war, Anand Gopal.
He keeps the website anandgopal.com.
He's a freelance journalist who's written for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor from Afghanistan.
And I think for Pakistan, he writes also for foreignpolicy.org and the Huffington Post.
And he has, well, first of all, today is the day that America matches the length of time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
I guess midnight tonight will have been there longer than then.
And Anand Gopal has an article at foreignpolicy.com about how really it didn't have to be this way, apparently.
It's called Missed Opportunities in Kandahar.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going, Anand?
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate you joining us.
Sorry for keeping you hanging on the line there.
No problem.
All right.
So now this article, Missed Opportunities in Kandahar, is a bit of a historical piece, taking us back to right around this time, 2001, when the CIA with their laser designators and the U.S. Air Force had basically blasted the Taliban right out of power.
The Northern Alliance had rode into Kabul.
And George Bush and Bill Kristol and all their friends were riding high on their great success and the transformation of the military.
And they were ready to move on to Iraq by, you know, Pearl Harbor Day 2001, I guess.
But so right around that time, you're saying that they had a real opportunity to wrap up that war, to make it seem like the great success that they pretended that it was.
And yet they blew it.
And that's basically the theme, I think, of this article, Missed Opportunities in Kandahar.
And I was wondering whether you could tell us a bit more about what you're talking about there.
Well, that's right.
What happened right after the Taliban government fell and Northern Alliance and the Americans were riding high, the majority of the senior leadership of the Taliban, the people who today are actually running the insurgency, most of these people went and surrendered.
They surrendered to the Afghan government.
They handed over their weapons.
They asked for amnesty.
And then they agreed to stay home and not take part in any political activities.
Now, Anand, I'm sorry, is there any way I can ask you to walk outside from where you are?
We've got a lot of background noise there.
It's making it hard to hear you.
How's this?
Yes, that's much better, if that's all right with you.
No problem.
So these Taliban leaders surrendered to the Afghan government.
Now, what happened after that is that the Americans backed a series of warlords across the south and the east who saw these reconciled leaders as a chance to make money off.
So they would go and they would torture them.
They would put them in private jails.
They would extort money from them.
They would hand them over to the Americans and claim that they were still actively organizing against the U.S. presence.
And these sorts of actions over the course of two or three years started driving a lot of these guys back into Pakistan and led them to eventually organize an insurgency and fight against the Americans.
So now I think maybe the background noise might have messed us up a little bit there.
I wanted to make sure we got it clear at the beginning.
I believe there was a letter you write that Mullah Omar had written to, I guess, all of his friends in the Taliban or kind of an open letter.
And they got a lot of these other guys, names we know from our current insurgency, men like the father Haqqani and others, that they were willing to basically surrender and work with the American occupation on forming the new government and going ahead and having peace.
And then you're saying that they were targeted.
They were targeted by the American army.
And then you say after it took years of this to really turn them into the insurgent leaders that they are now.
To basically get your narrative straight there?
That's right.
And this letter you mentioned, this took place just as Hamid Karzai was coming into Kandahar with his forces.
He was being backed at that point by the CIA and special forces.
This senior leadership of the Taliban got together with Mullah Omar.
They drafted a letter and they sent a letter to Karzai in which Mullah Omar agreed to hand over the government to Karzai, agreed to hand over all of his weapons, caches, agreed to recognize the Karzai government and asked for amnesty and agreed to basically step aside from political life.
And why that's important is I think the narrative today is that these people were jihadists who just for the sake or for the principle of jihad decided to stand up against the Americans when they invaded.
But actually that wasn't the case.
They were ready to come to peace or come to terms with the U.S. government and the Northern Alliance.
But as you mentioned, the next two or three years a pretty vicious campaign targeting these leaders and many other people who were formerly associated with the Taliban left them with the feeling that they had no choice but to go back and raise arms and start fighting.
I wonder who was it that made these decisions?
I mean here we are nine years and 51 days later.
The Obama administration has now said that their July 2011 date for the beginning of the end of the war has now been pushed to 2015 and we'll see about that.
And yet at the same time they're accidentally negotiating with impostors but they're trying to negotiate with the Taliban who they think is the Taliban anyway and trying to negotiate an end.
So I remember well that Colin Powell said back in 2001 that we're not interested in who rules Kabul.
We're after Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and their buddies and that's it.
And we want to get as many people to help us as we can in as many different countries as we can.
So who was it that changed the strategy?
Don Rumsfeld?
It was specifically the Pentagon and the CIA as well.
Both of them viewed the Taliban as an enemy on equal par with Al Qaeda.
And so there was no talk of reconciliation or negotiations back then.
The Taliban were defeated and they felt that they should capture these Taliban leaders and bring them to Guantanamo.
That was the policy.
Well it was clear to everyone at the time wasn't it that the Taliban had been trying to negotiate a way to give up Osama Bin Laden in all the months of the first part of the Bush administration leading up to 9-11.
They already knew that and the George Washington University grad students got a FOIA request and posted all the State Department documents about it.
We all know now but they must have known then that the Taliban wanted rid of Osama Bin Laden.
He was nothing but trouble for them.
But I think even at that stage it wasn't just about Bin Laden.
It was about exerting influence into Afghanistan and perhaps looking ahead to places like Iraq.
Well and we know now that they're building bases all over that place as though they mean to stay for the long term.
And I guess they talk about this COIN strategy, this counterinsurgency strategy, a clear holding and building this nation the size of Texas and turning it into a modern western nation state.
Do you have any estimation as to where this ends?
And very quickly, I'm sorry we're almost out of time.
I think this is going to go on for quite a while.
We already have the 2014 date but if you look at some of these bases that are being built these are things that are not going to be dismantled anytime soon.
Alright well I appreciate all your great journalism that you're doing on and I appreciate your time on the show this evening.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Anand Gopal.
He's a freelance reporter.
He often travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan and writes really great stuff from there.
He's written for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy.
That's ForeignPolicy.com and the Huffington Post.
The article in question this evening was Missed Opportunities in Kandahar.
That's at ForeignPolicy.com.
I'm Scott Horton and this has been Anti-War Radio.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7.
Got a whole hour tonight because of Turkey Day holiday.
Hope everybody had a good one.
You'll find all the archives at AntiWar.com.
Peace.
