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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, 98.7 in Santa Barbara, 93.7 in San Diego, and 99.5 FM in Ridgecrest, China Lake, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Merry Christmas.
Welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm the new guy up here, so I'm paying my dues Christmas Eve.
Hope y'all are having a good time, hanging out with family, or on your way to do so.
I got a couple good interviews for you tonight.
We're going to start with an interview I recorded earlier today with the great Gareth Porter on the subject of the expansion of America's war into Pakistan.
Gareth Porter is an independent historian and journalist.
He's the author of the book Perils of Dominance.
He writes for Interpress Service at IPSNews.net.
We feature virtually all of what he writes at AntiWar.com/Porter.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks very much for having me.
Well, Merry Christmas to you.
I really appreciate you joining me on Christmas Eve like this.
Merry Christmas to you, Scott.
All right, so there was an article in the New York Times, made big headlines all over the place, on December the 20th, U.S. military seeks to expand raids in Pakistan.
And then you have this analysis piece at IPS News, U.S. plan for high-risk raids into Pakistan is more than psi-war.
And so I was wondering if you could take us through, I guess, the Times piece and your take on it.
Well, the original piece, as you say, is a story about, well, it's really a leaked story.
And the leak clearly, you know, as clearly as anything could be, comes from the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the U.S. NATO command.
And that means, of course, General David Petraeus.
And the leak is that the U.S. military is proposing a new kind of cross-border raid into Pakistan from the Afghanistan side of the border of special operations forces for the purpose of trying to grab Taliban commanders and leaders and to take them back into Afghanistan to interrogate them, to find out what the Taliban is planning in terms of its military operations in the future.
That sounds pretty strange, of course, to the ordinary person, the idea that they think they could actually get these people and take them back across the border and actually get information from them that it's going to change the war.
But it's not incredible that that is the way the U.S. military leadership actually thinks.
And then the question arises, of course, is this for real or is it psi-war?
And most people who I talk with, one retired intelligence analyst, an intelligence official who worked on Pakistan, and Ashutosh Nawaz, who is a Pakistani in the United States, works for the Atlantic Council, heads the South Asia Center, and is a leading specialist on the Pakistani military, both of those people who I spoke with from my story believe that this is, in fact, a psi-war operation to put pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against the Taliban in North Waziristan, where they have their major sanctuaries, and where the Pakistani military has not yet ventured in, in any significant way, to try to capture or kill Taliban, that is, the Afghan Taliban.
The problem with that thesis, I mean, I don't think that there's any doubt that the U.S. military and the Obama administration would hope that this story would put some pressure on the Pakistani military, but there are two problems with this.
First of all, the U.S. intelligence community just put out a national intelligence estimate a week or so ago, a little more than a week ago now, essentially concluding that the Pakistani military is not going to change its policy, regardless of what we say to them.
And we've tried all kinds of things, that is, the Obama administration has tried all kinds of things to put pressure on the Pakistanis to get them to change their policy toward the Taliban, so far without that much effect.
And so it's doubtful that that's going to work.
And the second point is that even if the idea were to put pressure on the Pakistanis, the timing is really off because they can't do anything, even if they wanted to, until next spring or, you know, certainly February at the very earliest.
And, in fact, they don't even have the helicopters they need yet to take that sort of operation, to take out the Afghan Taliban in North Waziristan.
So there are some problems with the idea that this is simply a civil war operation.
All right.
Well, so in other words, the Americans are saying they recognize that the Pakistanis won't and or can't do it, and so they're serious.
David Petraeus is serious about bringing the Joint Special Operations Command in full force into Pakistan, which we know that they've been there, from Jeremy Scahill's writing in The Nation and other places, Blackwater being outsourced, and, of course, the CIA and JSOC both have been running an increasing number of drone strikes there, in fact.
Right.
I mean, there's no doubt that the JSOC has run operations in Pakistan.
They have people operating covertly in the Fafa region, in the tribal region of northwest Pakistan.
But my source, the main source for this story that I've just published, says that it is absolutely clear that there were discussions as early as last spring.
He says that it was in March of this year.
In the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF headquarters, in which the leadership there, and that presumably means Petraeus and his subordinates, were talking about the necessity to step up the number of special operations forces operating in north Waziristan because they couldn't accomplish what they felt needed to be accomplished without a major increase in cross-border operations.
And, again, the purpose being supposedly to actually capture some of these leadership people, leadership cadres, and take them back into Afghanistan.
So there is evidence, based on at least my source, who is very well informed about special operations affairs, particularly in Afghanistan, that indeed the military is serious about wanting to do this.
And the question then is whether the Obama administration is going to agree to it.
Well, and now back to the ability of the Pakistanis or the Americans to actually do anything about the Haqqani Network, or for that matter, anyone hiding in the mountains of north Waziristan.
Well, again, they're not talking about destroying the network.
Let's be clear on this.
What they're talking about in this case is not thousands or even many hundreds of special operations forces going in with their guns blazing to try to kill a lot of people.
They're simply hoping to grab some people and get intelligence from them.
And this, of course, is the problem that they're saying is inherent in the drone strikes, that they're killing a lot of people, but they're not getting any intelligence.
And this sort of operation is aimed, supposedly, at filling that gap.
So, again, this is, on a smaller scale, talking about relatively small units, but presumably a number of these small units going into north Waziristan, and trying to get out, again, covertly, without being spotted, without being caught.
Which brings up the question of the Americans or the Pakistanis being able to go into north Waziristan, into those mountains, and abduct people or target certain people in night raids in an effective way.
They haven't seemed to have been able to do that even in Afghanistan.
Well, I mean, they certainly have arrested, or I should say seized and taken in for detention, a number of Taliban commanders.
I think that what they're talking about, however, is people who are at the top level of the organization, who have strategic intelligence, that they seem to think would somehow give them an edge in preparing for the coming year.
And, of course, what this gives away, I mean, this is a serious indication of the reality that Petraeus and his command there in Afghanistan understand that all of the operations that are carried out in Kandahar are not going to make any strategic difference, because the Taliban will be back in Kandahar, and they will be back in force next spring and summer, in particular.
And they will be able, once again, to put very strong pressure on certainly the government and on foreign troops as well in Kandahar and elsewhere in the south.
And so this is, in a way, an admission that they have to do something much more than they've done in the past.
Well, and it also sounds like they can't think of what.
Oh, I think that's right.
I mean, this is obviously a desperate idea.
I think it's a bit of a cockamamie idea.
I don't think it's going to work, even if they're given the go-ahead, the green light to do this.
I don't think it's going to be successful in terms of grabbing sufficient numbers or high-level officials that it's going to make any difference, even if they did grab them and take them back.
You know, let's say they waterboard them, and I presume they would do that.
The obvious result of that would be that these Taliban leaders are going to give them bad information.
And how are they going to know it's bad information?
They have no way of telling.
If they were able to distinguish good information from bad information, they wouldn't need to do it.
Yeah.
Well, and the other thing here, and this, I'm sure, goes without mention whatsoever at the State Department, but seems important to me, would be public opinion inside Pakistan.
But we haven't even talked about the consequences of, if they are given the green light, what the consequences would be in Pakistan, and they would be devastated.
I mean, everybody that I talk to understands that, and says quite openly, that this would be the worst thing that could happen to Pakistan, the worst thing that could happen to any effort to contain the militants that is already a serious problem in Pakistan.
It's going to destabilize the government.
The present civilian government would certainly fall.
It might be well taken over by the Pakistani military, and thus severely affect the legitimacy of the Pakistani government for much of the Pakistani population.
And, you know, you're going to inflame anti-Americanism and delegitimize efforts to use the Pakistani military to try to operate against any of the Taliban, whether Afghan or Pakistani Taliban.
So, however you slice it, this is going to negatively affect the future of stability, and an anti-jihadi extremist government in Pakistan.
Well, and it's a nuclear weapon state.
And in Obama's wars, Joe Biden, who I guess half the time they listen to and half the time they don't, or I hope none of the time, I don't know.
But the vice president said our most important goal in Pakistan is fighting Al-Qaeda, the perfunctory fighting Al-Qaeda, and securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
It looks like, you know, they could take advantage of the deterioration of the Pakistani state to say, hey, look, now we need to intervene and seize this one Islamic country's nuclear weapons.
Well, there's a lot to be said about that storyline.
First of all, you know, the fact is that Vice President Joe Biden and all of the figures, high figures of the Obama administration have zero credibility about anything that they're going to say about this issue, or indeed about Afghanistan at this point.
In light of the Washington Post story of last week, which quoted a senior official of the Obama administration as saying that they, well, it didn't explicitly state it, but the implication was that they understand that the military counterinsurgency strategy being pursued in Afghanistan is not really working, but they nevertheless find that it's less politically, it's less politically threatening for them to say publicly that the strategy is working, that it's successful, so that they can then push for earlier withdrawal of U.S. forces, rather than to say that it's a failure strategically and call for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
So, in other words, they're basically telling a lie to the American people on the basis of their notion of what is politically more advantageous to them.
And therefore, you simply cannot trust anything that they say on this whole subject of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The second point, however, is that the United States is not going to seize any nuclear weapon, regardless of the situation in Pakistan.
They do not have the ability to do that.
There's absolutely no reason to think that there's any way that U.S. military forces would be successful in doing that.
All they can do is get involved in a major ground war in Pakistan, which would make matters infinitely worse than they're going to be otherwise.
And, in fact, you know, the only real danger with regard to nuclear weapons in Pakistan is that the U.S. would pursue this kind of provocative, aggressive military policy in Pakistan, and in thus doing, divide the Pakistani army, and for the first time cause a significant number of Pakistani military officers to go over to the side of the Pakistani Taliban, the neo-Taliban.
That would be the only scenario under which you can really imagine any realistic possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of those who would be sympathetic to jihadi interests in Pakistan.
Right.
Well, yeah, exactly my point.
Pick a fight, make matters worse, and then you get to make matters more worse.
And I guess, as Eric Margulies has said, the state of Pakistan is really quite an artificial thing.
The four major provinces are basically held together by their single military, and their single military is dominated by ethnic Pashtuns and tribal Pashtuns, who, after all, are being made to fight a civil war against their own tribesmen in those northern territories.
Well, they don't dominate nationally, but they do dominate in terms of the Pakistani military's presence in the Fatah region, and that's really what's significant here.
So, then, why doesn't, after all these years, why haven't the Pakistanis just gone and gotten rid of the Haqqani network and hunted down Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri and put an end to all this so that we quit messing around in their country?
Well, because the Pakistani military has a very firmly established strategic concept of Afghanistan constituting a strategic depth for Pakistan in terms of its security, and that means simply that they need to have a friendly regime controlling Afghanistan so that they can ward off the influence of India, particularly, in Afghanistan.
What they're afraid of is being surrounded, of course, by Indian pressures and losing Afghanistan to India as a sort of strategic issue.
And that's not going to change.
That's really why the U.S. intelligence agencies agreed unanimously that Pakistan is not likely to change its attitude and its policy toward the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
They're not going to agree to cooperate with the United States aimed there because of their fundamental strategic notion about the role that Afghanistan plays in their defense against India.
Well, you know, that was something the major media spin when the Afghan war logs came out, was, oh, no wonder that the war's not going well.
The Pakistanis have been stabbing us in the back the whole time, and I guess the only motive would be because they're Muslims or something terrible like that, but instead you're saying it's because of Indian influence in Afghanistan, but are the Indians close with Karzai and the Northern Alliance types that the Americans have put in power there?
Yes, they are.
They are very closely aligned with precisely those interests and have been for a long time.
Indeed, I once spoke with an Indian who had been involved as an advisor to a covert Indian military unit operating in Afghanistan who talked about how, you know, this was regarded as a high priority interest of India.
This is not a well-known fact, but the Indians have indeed been very aggressive, very active in Afghanistan.
They've not showed their hand that much, but they are very much involved, have been involved for a long time on behalf of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, which of course they recognized as a strategic asset of Pakistan within Afghanistan.
So the United States has really put Pakistan in a rock-and-hard-place type situation where we demand that they fight the people in Pakistan who they're relying on to support the insurgency against us in Afghanistan because they need that insurgency to prevent America from being successful, not like we could be anyway, I guess, against the, I guess, Pashtun-based resistance on behalf of the Northern Alliance and the Hamid Karzai regime, which is allied with India.
And so instead we just keep bombing them on sort of this low-scale, so-called low-scale warfare kind of effort for years and years on end.
We just keep bombing them, never seem to accomplish anything except making the population of that country hate our guts.
Right, and of course, as we both know, what really makes the national security state of the United States tick is to have perpetual warfare, and this fits the bill pretty well.
The only problem, the only flaw in that ointment is that it's costing too much money, and the U.S. military knows it, and they understand that this is going to have to come to an end.
And so what's happening then is that they're trying to step up, you know, they're trying to find a way to have a much shorter timeline than they would otherwise to show progress.
Otherwise, I think they understand that the clock is going to run out on them.
We don't know exactly when, but much sooner than they would like.
So that's why I think you have this, again, rather desperate proposal by Petraeus and his command to go in and carry out this cockamamie scheme of grabbing high-level Taliban and taking them back across the border to interrogate them.
And what we haven't talked about then is whether the Obama administration is going to go along with that.
And as I suggest in my article, if you look at the people in the administration who are pushing for a rapid withdrawal, and I think those people have the upper hand at this point for a whole raft of reasons politically.
We're talking about Biden to begin with, of course, the president himself, and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright, who we know from Bob Woodward's book, Obama has been very reliant upon for his views and information and analysis about Afghanistan on the military side, and particularly on special operations forces.
And we know that Cartwright has been a very strong advocate of using special operations forces as a substitute for conventional ground forces, and pushing for what they call a counterterrorism strategy, or a combined counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategy, rather than the counterinsurgency strategy requiring 100,000-plus troops, which is what Petraeus and McChrystal were pushing.
So bottom line is that Cartwright and those people have been saying that we should go in with special operations forces into Pakistan and try to hit the Haqqani network and Taliban there, rather than relying on counterinsurgency strategy within Afghanistan to take care of the problem.
So there's some reason to believe that the folks who now have the upper hand within the administration are going to be rather sympathetic to this proposal, rather than dismissing it.
And I think that's an extremely frightening situation, because of the horrible consequences that are certainly extremely likely to take place if the U.S. approves cross-border raids into Pakistan by the special operations forces.
So the choice in the White House is between either the giant counterinsurgency strategy of 100,000-plus troops forever, I guess, in the last few weeks they were talking about, never mind 2011, in fact, never mind 2014 or 2015, this thing might last forever and ever, like in the CNAS documents and all that.
And then the other choice is just night raids, not patrols, basically, the so-called counterterrorism strategy, never mind all the clearing and holding and building, just targeted assassinations and that kind of deal.
But that includes crossing the border into Pakistan and perhaps making matters much, much worse in that country.
Indeed, I think that is the choice in a general sense that is being offered by the administration.
I mean, they're excluding simply withdrawing.
I mean, they're excluding as a matter of public policy at this point, in terms of what they allow to get into the press, at least, the option of saying, look, this is not in our interest, we've got to get out, we'll negotiate with the Taliban, an agreement under which they promise not to allow al-Qaeda to come in, and we've set up certain arrangements to verify that.
If al-Qaeda were to be allowed in, then there'd be some international, the right for the international community to go in and bomb the places where they're known to be or whatever like that.
But make an agreement with Taliban at the expense of the al-Qaeda, but with a very short timeline to get U.S. troops out of there.
That's the third alternative that nobody's talking about within the administration at this point, but obviously that has to be on the agenda in the future if there's going to be any way of really getting out of Afghanistan.
So this year, 495 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
It's almost a third of the total since the war there began nine years ago.
The U.N. says this week that civilian casualties are up 20% over last year.
Wired.com, the Danger Room blog, says that drone strikes are up by three and a half times.
The Washington Post reports that they're sending in tank divisions now to Afghanistan, basically what you're telling me is we have to figure out how to let Petraeus call this victory so that we can get out sooner, but he might make matters worse in Pakistan on the way out the door.
I'm saying that that is at present, that appears to be the bent of this administration, that's right.
All right, so the surge worked, everybody.
Memorize that and say it over and over again.
Petraeus did great.
Now let's just end this war.
At this point, Gareth, I don't care what lie they're telling anymore, as long as they'll just pack up the troops and go.
Well, yeah, I would be willing to at least forego legal action against people responsible for crime if they would do that.
That would be my offer.
Well, you know, there was a piece in the New York Times last week that said that it was really about the media and how the media just doesn't cover the Afghan war basically at all.
The TV media especially, I guess they're focusing on.
And they said that 25% of Americans in the polls say that they follow Afghanistan war news on any regular basis whatsoever.
So that's what we're up against is an American population that is so used to war all the time that it's basically peace time to them.
They just don't even care anymore.
I think that is absolutely right.
This is a serious political problem which any movement against militarism and war in this country is going to have to take seriously.
It's going to have to come up with some new ways of communicating about the severe impact of the permanent war state on that 25% of the U.S. population, which doesn't seem to realize that they have a really serious stake in this.
And, of course, I'm referring to the fact that the costs of a permanent war state are so heavy that it affects the welfare of everybody in this country in ways that people don't really quite understand.
And they need to understand this.
Well, you know, it's partisan politics that always gets us.
And you can see it especially right now with the Democrats in power.
Half the population loves the empire.
The other half of the population loves the emperor.
And so they compromise in war all the time.
Well, I mean, I'm afraid you are much too close to the truth for comfort there.
I wouldn't say that it's quite half, but certainly too large a proportion of the population is willing to give Obama a pass because they're afraid that if he is attacked or his administration is attacked for the war policy, that they will lose what little they have left to lose in terms of domestic political issues.
But I think that that's a very short-sighted viewpoint because there's no way that any meaningful domestic agenda is going to be achieved as long as Obama is a war president.
