All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Larry Wilkerson.
He was a colonel in the U.S. Army and was Secretary of State Colin Powell's right hand man in the first Bush junior administration.
And he's been making up for it ever since.
And he was teaching college at William & Mary, but now, congratulations, I hear you've retired, Larry.
Is that right?
Fifteen years.
Done.
Great.
Well, good for you.
I hope you're having a great time taking it easy for a little bit.
Well, I'm still being harassed by my students.
All right.
Well, good.
We all have a lot to learn from you.
You know, so and I don't even know where to begin.
There's so many things I want to discuss with you.
Subject matter here is staying in Afghanistan.
But obviously, there's, you know, a lot of controversy lately about this one aspect of a speech you gave on this issue to the Ron Paul Institute back in 2018.
And that was about well, and I'll let you characterize it however you want.
But it was in reference to American intelligence thinking it was a good idea to use the Uyghurs to destabilize China.
And I was just wondering if you could tell us what all exactly you meant by that and everything you know about it and what should we know about it?
First of all, it was the Ron Paul Institute's conference.
So, you know, they didn't invite me to talk about expanding war.
As a matter of fact, they invited me to talk about how the United States has no strategy, grand or otherwise.
With reference to Afghanistan, that was essentially what I got to in that August speech, 2018, I believe it was, when I got to that region of the world, Southwest Asia.
I talked about there being a blatant display of no strategy, that we were there at that time for about 17 years, 17 times, much the way we used to criticize our presence in Korea.
We hadn't been there 30 years.
We'd been there 30 times.
And that was the way Afghanistan was looking.
And I suggested what a genuine strategy with respect to Afghanistan might look like.
And I said it would have three components.
The first would be to have military hard power in an extraordinarily inaccessible region of the world, asked Donald Rumsfeld.
He was furious with the army for taking so long to get any meaningful assets into Afghanistan in 2001.
It's hard.
Look at it.
It's landlocked.
To have hard power in that region, to keep it there in the center, as it were, of China's principal land-based road initiative.
The second reason I said was to be next to the world's potentially most unstable nuclear stockpile, that of Pakistan's.
And the third reason, which got all the Chinese all interested in it because they misinterpreted it on purpose, I said, was to have military force to help protect any CIA operations, covert operations, into Xinjiang province, where 12 to 13 million Uyghurs live, who don't like the Han Chinese at all, to destabilize China, the government in Beijing, if in fact we went to hot war with China.
But my speculation was on the U.S. having no strategy at all, particularly with regard to Afghanistan, and second, what a meaningful strategy might look like.
So in other words, it was misinterpreted, what you kind of meant to say, and I'll have the exact quote in front of me here, but the point you were trying to make was, if we had a real war with China, then the idea would be to try to stir up trouble with the Uyghurs, but not that they had the idea to begin operations along those lines before any real war broke out.
Is that correct?
Exactly.
Now, complicating this, of course, and what the Chinese spokesperson was aiming at in her less than accurate reading of my words, was the fact that there's speculation right now, hard speculation in some areas, and by hard, I mean it's coming from official sources, that the United States is already involved in this, that it's already joined Erdogan in Turkey, for example.
You may recall, back up for a moment, Erdogan used Uyghurs passing through Turkey, and some say receiving some training in Turkey, to fight those elements in Syria that he was not happy with, including the Kurds.
A lot of those Uyghurs now, I'm told, by pretty good authority, have returned to Xinjiang province, and are worrying the Chinese, as you might imagine, because they're trained and they're, you might say in China's eyes, hardcore Islamic terrorists to them.
That joined by the United States trying to get back in with a NATO partner, after all, Turkey, on the side, you might say, makes some sense.
Not good sense in my view, but it might make some sense in somebody else's perverted view.
That complicates things, and I think that's really what the Chinese spokesperson was aiming at.
These rumors that the United States and Turkey, perhaps others, are actually using that route to implement some sort of unrest in that vast, that province is bigger than France.
That province in China, it's huge.
Okay, so when you say official sources there, can you describe that at all?
This has been published somewhere.
You're talking about people that you know told you this?
Yeah, there have been people who have been writing about it in some of the more esoteric places on social media and elsewhere, but where I've heard about it is in ...
Let me just back up for a minute and tell you that I was on a webinar sponsored by Princeton and a certain institute that is allied both with Princeton and the university, and with the Prince of Liechtenstein in Europe, whom I've worked with before.
I was on a panel, a webinar, not a panel but a webinar this morning, listening to the Afghan permanent representative to the United Nations and the EU's representative on Afghanistan essentially talk about the peace talks, where they are, and the status of Afghanistan.
One of the things that I asked in the chat column was a question similar to the one you're asking now, and just to tell you that I got no response.
The fact that there are rumors of it out there is what the Chinese picked up on, and I don't blame them really, because let's just look at the United States record with covert operations.
Hell, we tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002.
We tried again under President Trump and failed abysmally.
We've been trying to overthrow the regime in Iran through combined covert operations with Israel for years.
We tried the same thing with Iraq, and I could cite you chapter and verse for all the governments we have successfully overthrown in the past 50 some odd years.
The fact that someone would say we were doing this is not unbelievable at all.
Sure.
It's obviously an honest question, and based on reasonable background, as you said, for example, Uyghurs fighting, widely reported to have fought in Syria on the CIA and Al Qaeda side there, and Turkey side against the government there.
But then just to clarify, because you did say official sources, so I was wondering if you could say exactly what you meant by that, and exactly to what degree they were saying that America's, what, helping these guys go home to China from Syria, or?
Well, I'm not going to name any sources because I'd be getting them in trouble and they would never speak to me again.
But I will say that this was the gist of it, that some of those people whom Erdogan trained or his people trained and put into Syria are headed home, and they are being expedited in that journey through Afghanistan.
And they're not headed home to bake cake.
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And thanks.
All right, let me go back in history for a minute.
There's a great journalist named Eric Margulies who told me that he knew of, and there's other reporting about this apparently, I recently read Peter Lee referenced this, in part, anyway, that there were Uyghurs in training camps in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001.
And then, of course, some Uyghurs ended up rounded up and in Guantanamo Bay, and presumably these same guys.
But in Eric Margulies' telling, these were CIA sponsored camps, and that this was a program that apparently would have been inherited from the Clinton government to go ahead and support Taliban camps for Uyghurs, as long as they're for use against China back then.
So you would have been around during at least part of that.
Colonel, can you tell us what you know about that, if anything?
Well, I'm not going to cast doubt on Eric's assertions.
You may know more than I do, but I will say this, I was in the government at the time.
And as a matter of fact, in the summer of 2001, Richard Haass, Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, and I were conducting policy planning talks in Beijing with Wang Yi, who is now the Minister-Counselor of Foreign Affairs guy for the Plenipotentiary, really.
He's just a step from the Politburo now.
He's a really competent guy.
He was the head of the North American Division at that time, so we had conversations with him.
Also, with Shui-Teng Kai, who was subsequently the ambassador to the United States.
Very influential Chinese.
And one of the things that happened with those talks and with relations with China post the attack on 9-11, the terrorist attack on the United States, was in order to gain Chinese cooperation, the fullest cooperation we could get out of China, we had to tit for tat.
The tat with China was, leave us alone with regard to our handling our terrorist problem.
And we knew exactly what they meant.
Their terrorist problem, principally, was the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province and elsewhere in China, but principally in that province.
So at that particular point, we assured the Chinese, in order to get their help in the so-called global war on terror, we assured the Chinese that we understood that they had a problem and that we would not make too many untoward comments about their dealing with that problem.
So we didn't publish that.
You can imagine we didn't publish that, but that was part of the deal for us to get cooperation from China in the global war on terror.
That said, as things rolled out later in Afghanistan, I can't imagine that we would have taken our eye off the ball in that country so badly, so incompetently, that we would have started another fracas with China by training Uyghurs who had slipped into Afghanistan to probably participate in either the Northern Alliance's opposition to the Taliban, or more likely the Taliban's opposition to the Northern Alliance, and would be there for that reason, and would have nothing to do with U.S. forces or anything having to do with the U.S. until we introduced troops there.
And after that, as I said, I can't imagine that we would have thought that would have been a productive enterprise while we were trying to handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and incidentally doing, really in the long sense, a very poor job of that.
Al-Qaeda escaped primarily, including their leader, bin Laden.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Margulies was talking about, I don't know exactly if he was saying June, July, or August, but it would have been preceding the September 11th attack, certainly not after.
Yeah, I could see them being there as volunteers with either side, principally, I suspect the Taliban side, but I don't think we were doing anything with them.
And I don't see anything in CI reporting that I could talk about, or even that I couldn't talk about that was highly classified that reflected that.
Okay.
And I guess the Taliban would have a major conflict of interest there, too, since the Chinese and the Pakistanis support them, right?
The Pakistanis certainly, to an extent, because the Pakistanis see a destabilized Afghanistan as strategic depth against their principal enemy, India, so they're going to do whatever they need to do to keep stability from coming to Afghanistan, particularly stability backed by somebody that they don't like.
Yeah, I could see that, but it wouldn't make much sense to me other than just, here's an extra fighter.
I don't think there would be anything in it like, oh, everybody come, we're recruiting you.
Come on out of Xinjiang and come over here and learn how to do things, and then you can go back and destabilize China.
They would be recruiting them for the wider Islamist movement.
All right.
And then- The Uyghurs, as I understand it, I'm no expert on the Uyghurs, but as I understand it, they are very much looking for an autonomous, and in that case, Muslim entity, state, republic, whatever you want to call it, maybe even independence, some of them, within the Chinese borders.
And as I said, they're bigger than France.
You can understand why the Beijing authorities don't appreciate that.
Yeah.
Well, and also why the Americans would think that that's their major Achilles heel, too.
Well, that's what I was pointing out in that third part of my strategy, were it to be adopted with regard to China and in the middle of a hot war.
I think it would be counterproductive to the maximum to start that if there weren't a war.
What you would be doing would be inviting that war.
Now, this whole, you know, I know I wrote this in my first book, Fool's Errand, but I forget now if I was quoting you then or not.
We may just be going in a circle here.
But this whole idea of staying in Afghanistan, holding on to dear life for that Bagram Air Base in order to block the Belt and Road Initiative.
I mean, the road is supposed to go far north of Afghanistan anyway, because the Chinese wouldn't be foolish enough to build a road through Afghanistan where the security situation is never secure.
So what good is the bot?
We're going to fly sorties out of there and bomb a railway.
Is that it?
You're reading it all in a tactical sense, not a geostrategic sense.
First, the great game is back on.
Many would say it was never all.
In the past, it involved other characters, principally Britain.
Britain's gone.
Britain is a middling nation now, as Jeremy Greenstock called it, and God bless them for being so.
The big giants in that game right now are China and the United States, and to a slightly lesser extent, because it's really a gas station with a capital called Moscow, Russia.
So you've got three predominant powers.
I don't call them near-peer powers like my stupid friends at the Pentagon.
They are peer powers, period.
As long as Russia has 4,000-plus nuclear warheads, you better believe she's a peer power.
And China is not just a peer power.
She's a peer power that may, in the next decade, indeed surpass us in all measurements of power.
So you've got three huge, powerful nations competing in Central Asia, and it involves everything from the Chinese land-based road initiative.
And don't put concrete on the road and curbs on the side.
This is all regional, territorial movement of produce and influence and cash, which the Chinese have to the maximum, in order to influence people.
In this case, the entire Turkic-speaking corridor, which, incidentally, extends from Beijing to Ankara.
You can do business in that entire corridor if you speak any Turkish dialect.
It's incredible.
Read the book that the Oxford guy wrote on it.
The linguistic commonality is incredible.
This region is replete with pipelines, pumping, under construction, and contemplated.
They run north-south, east-west, and they have incredible capacity, such capacity that I would say you need to look at ExxonMobil's war room in New York City to see where the future of warfare, at least until fossil fuels are driven off the planet, which they will be, inevitably.
But in the next 30 years, they're going to be the cockpit of warfare, and that is the principal cockpit, along with the Red Sea.
So being in there when it is so inaccessible and so difficult to get in there in the first place, and being already established, which we are, is not a bad thing if you're a geostrategic, grand geostrategic thinker.
Consider this.
In 1953, we ended the Korean War.
Why didn't we come home?
Why did we stay in Korea?
Was it so South Korea could grow up to be a thriving democracy, indeed be the most incredible nation in the world in terms of one generation going from a major debtor nation to a major creditor nation?
Well, that was a nice byproduct, but it wasn't why we stayed.
We stayed because of communism, and we stayed because of the Soviet Union.
You can argue with that all day long.
I probably would join you in some of that.
But it was a reason, a strategic reason to stay.
There's a similar reason to stay in Afghanistan.
And as I was suggesting today in the talk, underneath that permanent presence, the state of Afghanistan would have a chance at least to stand up on its own and maybe become a decent, legitimate government for that country with women's rights honored and so forth and so on.
But it would have nothing to do with the grand strategic reason the United States was staying there.
And then the second reason to be close by so you could pounce on them if you had to with military power.
Pakistan's nuclear stockpile makes every bit of sense in the world to me because it is the potentially most unstable nuclear stockpile in the world.
Yeah, but you could still win.
Why couldn't you just do that from carriers at sea, though?
Ask the Navy that when they tried to do that with regard to Afghanistan from the eastern Mediterranean and the northern Indian Ocean.
Well, I mean, from the Indian Ocean, you can get you can get straight into Pakistan without having to go over the mountains.
It's not that easy.
It's not that easy.
And there are people who have guns in that region, and some of those guns will shoot you down.
Yeah, no, but I just mean, if you got guys at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, do they have special access to nukes in Pakistan that guys on carriers in the Indian Ocean could not obtain?
Come on, you're better.
You're better at military things than that.
You've got a base where you can land a million troops if you need to, along with all the accoutrements there are.
You've got an established place where you would come to just as you had in Korea, just as we have and have had since we lost it in 1950 when Mao Zedong took over mainland China in Taiwan.
So by seizing Pakistani nukes, we're not talking about sending in the Navy SEALs.
You're talking about a full scale invasion of Pakistan.
I'm talking about a full scale invasion.
Yes.
I understand.
All right.
Well, that does make sense.
I'm not saying I'm for it, but I do understand what you mean by that.
But then let me go back to this great game thing.
I mean, do you believe that America ought to be playing the great game fighting over fossil fuels in Central Asia?
Or you're just reading the tea leaves and calling the score here.
But isn't it insane that the middle part of North America is trying to be the dominant power south of Russia and west of China?
What have we been doing since 1945?
Well, I'm just saying, isn't that crazy?
Well, you know, I'm not prepared to say that the last 55 or so years were absolutely crazy, but I will say that they were close.
They were close.
I think are trying to be the I won't even use the phrase of art, policeman for the world, because we aren't.
We're lousy policemen domestically and we're lousy policemen in the world.
But we have tried to be the world's hegemon.
We have.
We have 800 bases.
The rest of the world has maybe 70 combined, including China and Russia.
We're nonsense.
We're idiots.
We're morons.
We're Rome times 10 trying to manage the world for freedom and democracy.
What we're really managing it for is Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and a host of other predatory capitalists, crony capitalist predators.
That's what we're doing.
Yeah, it really is.
It's a very small number out of the total, too.
If you look at all the giant businesses in America, not all of them are oil companies and arms dealers and bankers.
There's a lot who probably would prefer that we were a republic than an empire.
But less than you might think, though, I agree with your point.
Generally, a lot of these corporations are making money off the turmoil, off the drugs, off the trafficking and people and so forth that these wars produce because they're laundering the money.
Which companies?
Banks, investment banks, big banks.
HSBC wasn't just one of many.
It was one of a lot who are participating.
Read Mischa Glennie's book, McMafia.
We've got something like 10 trillion dollars every year going down in the black economy.
I think it's probably twice that much.
And you think someone's not financing that and laundering that money and passing it back and forth?
Probably half the big banks in the United States are involved.
Oh, I don't think they're not.
But yeah, it's just it's nice to hear from Colin Powell's former chief of staff, you know.
Mischa's book gave me some real room to think about this stuff.
Trafficking in people, you know, babies, women, a lot out of Eastern Europe.
It's heinous what's going on right now.
And it's even more heinous what legitimate concerns like banks are making out of this traffic because they turn a blind eye to it as they essentially launder the money that comes from it.
Yeah.
Hey, you guys, Scott here.
Over the next few years, I'm going to be more and more involved in Libertarian Party politics.
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Hey, do me a favor.
Would you tell the story of the spy plane shoot down in the spring of 2001?
I guess my understanding was that was the one and only time that Colin Powell took charge of the policy and got something resolved peacefully.
And that was.
Well, not the only time he basically on a weekly basis kept Rumsfeld and Cheney from starting a war with China over Taiwan.
But that was that was an indicator of how Powell did things.
And incidentally, an indicator of one of the best diplomats in the world today, Sergey Lavrov, who's still working for Moscow, of course.
Sergey and Powell essentially began what I call cell cell phone diplomacy, disregarding the crappy security protocols and everything else.
If it was serious, cell phones came out and they talked.
Well, that's how that occurred with China.
You had the Chinese leadership group traveling in South America.
April 10th, I believe it was.
You had the Chinese F-8 flown by one of its best and most veteran pilots who'd done a lot of this before and got a little too close this time, harassing this EP-3, American reconnaissance plane.
And the EP-3 was a little bit too close to Hainan Island, probably.
Here we have another four-star admiral in the Pacific making policy, getting closer and closer to a very critical area of Chinese military hardware, sub pins and such as that.
And this pilot flew up under the belly of the EP-3 and he was going to pull out, of course, and fly right in front of the cockpit and scare them to death as he'd done time after time.
And he miscalculated and hit the plane.
It killed him.
His F-8 went down in the South China Sea and the EP-3 was mortally wounded and had to land on the very island they'd been surveilling, Hainan Island, one of the most packed with military hardware areas in China.
Well, the Chinese immediately descended on it.
Incidentally, they did not have time to use their thermite grenades on the highly secretive stuff that was on that airplane.
And we don't know what the Chinese got out of it.
I suspect we still don't know even today.
And Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted that to be a crisis du jour.
They wanted it to be a crisis that produced war.
And Powell got on the phone, called the Chinese party in South America, got Chen Shichen, who was the Chinese member at that time, like Wang Yi today, who knew North America cold.
And he talked to him and the crisis was literally over in a moment.
We immediately sent Admiral Joe Pruitt, who'd been himself ambassador to Beijing before, to be our spokesperson.
The Chinese were flattered by that because such a high level person came and we worked out an agreement where we would apologize to them in Chinese in China, and they would allow us to, or we would apologize, or not apologize, I should say, in English in America, and everything would be okay.
One glitch occurred when the Chinese said, if you'll come with comparable representative, we'll give you the airplane back.
And Rumsfeld, as I remember, sent a lieutenant junior grade, and the Chinese chopped the airplane up.
I was totally sending back COD.
That's funny.
Listen, I'm so sorry that we're out of time because I have so many more questions now, especially, I'll just have to remember for next time, that on a daily basis, not just over this one incident, on a daily basis, I think I inferred in the beginning part of 2001, before September 11th, that they were, that Chen and Rumsfeld both were obsessed and determined to get us into a real war with China then?
I think what they wanted was a new Cold War.
I don't necessarily think they wanted nukes to fly because that's what would happen if we fight China.
Yeah, they already had H-bombs by that time.
Plenty.
Yeah.
We didn't want, I don't think they wanted a war, but they definitely wanted Taiwan upgraded to the point that, and Chen Shih-bian, the leader of Taiwan at the time, was looking for a referendum of independence and might've got a positive vote, and had he done that, that was a red line with Beijing.
So it was kind of like Trump.
It was sort of like Trump.
This is not, Trump was not unusual in that regard.
He was just an extension of G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Yeah.
Oh man.
All right.
I'm so sorry that we were out of time, but thank you again for your time.
Great to talk to you.
Truly.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that is retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
