All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, starting the third hour anti-war radio here.
And joined on the phone by Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And of course, Egypt is all the biggest headlines, but we got a war going on over there in Afghanistan, and I don't want to fall behind on covering that thing for you, so Jason, tell us what's going on in Afghanistan this week.
Well, right now the focus in Afghanistan is on some talks going on in Munich amongst the NATO leaders and Afghan President Karzai.
And the announcement yesterday from President Karzai, well, there were a couple of things.
For one, he's angry about efforts by NATO to rout their reconstruction efforts around the Afghan government because of his government's ridiculous level of corruption.
And also, he announced that there's going to be some sort of handover ceremony on March 21st.
Handover ceremony of what?
It's supposed to be the beginning of the handover to Afghan control of the war effort.
Right at the time that they're having to finance all of the domestic projects by going around the government because it's too corrupt to have them do it.
Right.
And he's complaining about that because he says that, well, it's making his government look bad.
And it is doing that, but it's hard to blame the NATO member nations for wanting to try this because they've been pumping billions upon billions of dollars into these projects in Afghanistan.
And they either don't get completed or they get completed in a sort of half-assed way or they just, the money just goes missing and nothing ever happens.
Well, is there an Afghan army to say, look, we created one and now we're turning it over to you guys and we're just supporting you or whatever, like in what the PR they're trying to push here?
Well, there's certainly guys wearing uniforms in Afghanistan, but for the most part they're not, I don't think they're what anyone would call a modern army.
They're just people that were brought in off the streets for the promise of some poorly paid jobs and a few hot meals and dress them up in uniforms and give them a couple of days of training and send them out there with a gun.
So I mean, as we saw in Iraq, it's possible for the Americans to create an army, although obviously they had the fact that they were installing the majority in power anyway and kind of ready-made armies in the form of the barter corps and that kind of thing.
Is it really the case that the level of training up of the Afghan army is the same as, sounds like you're describing Iraq 2004 rather than 2008 or something, you know?
Well, it's ridiculous and I think a lot of the problem is that they keep raising the bar for how big they want this Afghan military to be and they constantly have these metrics where in 18 months we're going to add another 100,000 troops or however many troops they want to add.
And they keep adding troops and there's not really time to train them or, you know, worry about if they're qualified for the job or anything like that.
And they also have to deal with the fact that an awful lot of these recruits, because the pay is so horrible and the job is so dangerous, I mean, a lot of these people show up for training and wait until they get their first paycheck and then they just disappear.
With their rifle.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, it would seem, and maybe I'm just speculating too much here or whatever, but it would seem like if they were going on missions and there was anything that we could, that the military command could portray to the press as some kind of military success or benchmark test being passed by the Afghan army, we would have heard of that, right?
I mean, that's the kind of thing.
It's not like we're not hearing that because they keep that secret.
We're not hearing that because it just doesn't exist.
Right.
They would want to trumpet that and talk and use it as an example of their success.
But like in the recent DOD report or to the Congress or the Petraeus report to the president, they don't talk about any real successes that they're having other than maybe counting numbers of people uniformed, right?
Right.
And the only discussion of any benchmark for them is just the sheer size of this military, which is going to create another problem in the future because really Afghanistan is such a poor country and made all the poorer by decades of war that they can't support this ridiculously unwieldy military.
I mean, we're talking a military that as they keep increasing their eventual goal, it's going to be a reasonably large chunk of the population of the male population of the country.
Well, it's I guess we just keep rolling on the road to nowhere.
You know, Robert Bear was on the show earlier, the former CIA officer, and he called Petraeus a liar.
Petraeus says we're winning, there's light at the end of the tunnel, you know, we're making progress.
So it's hard work, but we're making progress.
And that just ain't true, that he must know that this war cannot be won.
You know, what you brought up at the beginning about the corruption of the Karzai administration as for just one example, the failure to create any kind of military force and certainly one, as you point out, that would be sustainable beyond the time that America is occupying the place and financing the whole thing, you know, it's really over.
And they just won't admit it.
They'll just stay as long as they can, I guess, until all the money runs out.
But there, you know, it's like sprinting full out on a treadmill, you know, 100,000 troops over there doing nothing, getting killed, but accomplishing nothing.
Well, and General Petraeus came in with this ridiculous reputation of being the man who won Iraq, when he sort of got this reputation in spite of himself that he just happened to be in charge at the time when the sectarian cleansing had calmed the violence down a little bit and he got all the credit for it.
So I'm not so sure that he's a liar so much as he might be believing the hype himself and thinking that, you know, maybe if he just keeps plugging forward, he's just going to somehow stumble into success in Afghanistan.
Yeah, that's the only thing that ever worked for him in the past.
Peace meaning when all the people who used to live here are gone and so we don't have to kill them and run them off anymore because we already did.
But of course, there's nothing like that sectarian split in Afghanistan, so there's nothing that's going to let him stumble into a success this time.
Well, you know, just in the most basic sense, if you disregard the characters of Hamid Karzai and all that for a minute, but just identity-wise, he is a Pashtun in a government of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras, basically.
But it seems like if there was, you know, the will to try to do the right thing here, that maybe that could be the first step of some kind of, you know, real coalition state, whether stay loyal to America or not, you know, it doesn't matter to me.
But, you know, I guess when America leaves, I'd hate to see the war continue on, you know, Why not see if these guys could be put in a situation to shake hands and make up?
Well, and that's sort of the thing is, Afghanistan doesn't really have a cohesive majority that's going to form some sort of stable nation.
It's basically spent its last 40 or 50 years alternating between foreign occupation and being dominated by either corrupt local governments or corrupt and brutal religious local governments.
I mean, there hasn't really been anything resembling a strong national government that's anywhere near reliable in Afghanistan.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that one is going to crop up, whether the U.S. puts billions of dollars in or not.
Right.
Well, at some point, though, as you say, we kind of have distorted the power and built up this army that's not sustainable without us.
So whatever degree there's bloodshed after this, it's mostly on us, seems to me.
Anyway, hold it right there.
It's Jason Ditz.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's the managing news editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
What's going on in Iraq?
Well, what's going on in Iraq is sort of the same thing that's been going on all across the region.
There's a high level of unemployment and increasing concern about a leader of the government that's taking more and more power for himself, and there's starting to be some pretty big protests.
Well, be more specific about more power for himself.
Well, right now, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, is also Nouri al-Maliki the interior minister and Nouri al-Maliki the defense minister and the national security minister.
And I believe he might have another title or two in there, too.
But basically, when he announced his new unity cabinet, he kept every single cabinet position that has any police or military forces or even some of the smaller law enforcement groups are all under his control.
He literally controls, as the leader, every single non-foreign force in Iraq now.
But that's unconstitutional according to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iraq from 2005, right?
Well, it certainly is.
He's sort of skirting that by claiming that he's the interim defense minister and the interim interior minister and the interim all these other ministers, and that he's going to appoint somebody.
But it's been a while now, and he certainly doesn't seem to be moving forward with it.
Well, now, so tell me about the reaction to this now, too, because across the Middle East there have been protests.
What's the effect of the Egyptian virus, as John McCain called it, in Iraq?
Well, there have been some protests, particularly in some of the poorer Shiite cities in the south.
There have been some pretty good-sized protests demanding economic improvement, criticizing the government, and we've had police reacting, as they have in a lot of countries, just by opening fire on the protesters.
Do you know if there are any reports about Iraqi reaction to the international reports?
I guess it was Amnesty, or no, it was Human Rights Watch, and I guess CBS News followed up on all this about Nouri al-Maliki and his secret prisons and torture and all that.
Is that part of the narrative in Iraq about the protests in the south, for example?
That I'm not sure about.
It seems like the protests are pretty nonspecific to the extent they're reported in the media.
They're more angry at the general situation, that they've got this not particularly elected government.
I mean, Maliki's party came in second in last year's election, and he ended up dominating the situation even more than he had before, and that the economy is getting worse and worse.
It seems like the specifics of torture, the specifics of his policies are sort of being drowned out by just the overwhelming annoyance at the situation and the hope that something similar to what happened in Egypt might happen in Iraq, too.
Yeah.
You know, I was going to try to interview the people from Human Rights Watch about that report, but they were MIA in Egypt, conducted by the secret police there, and I saw a headline that a couple of people had been released, but I don't think they were the names I was looking for from HRW there.
I hope those people are okay.
Yeah, call the Egyptian military, they probably have them somewhere.
Maybe you can interview them while they're in custody.
So what's the most important aspect this morning, you think, about the situation in Egypt that we need to highlight here, Jason?
Well, I think something that's really gone unreported that's incredibly important is the Egyptian military itself.
They were sort of treated as a neutral party at the start, they started arresting a lot of human rights activists, like you say, a lot of journalists, nominally for their own protection, but of course they're holding them without charges and in many cases without letting them contact anybody, so I don't know that they're being protected all that well.
But the other big problem is the Egyptian military, just the sheer dominance it has over the economy there is incredible.
And that's really been kind of the unreported story, as they talk about food riots in Egypt, people are angry at the price of food being so high, well the Egyptian military grows some 20% of the food in Egypt.
Really?
I actually saw your headline, but I didn't get a chance to read it this morning about that.
Yeah, I didn't recall it.
Here, the Egypt's Military Industrial Bottled Water Farming Complex.
Yeah, they have the largest bottled water company in Egypt, which was also supplying bottled water to the U.S. Embassy, although a couple of years ago they had to stop supplying bottled water to the embassy when one of their samples tested positive for too high a level of radiation.
And they make appliances, they make cars, they make virtually everything in Egypt.
They dominate that economy in a way that's really unprecedented in a Western economy.
It's more of a command economy like the Soviet Union, where they've got this overwhelming economic force and all these conscripts that are being paid trivial amounts of money to work in factories as soldiers.
Well, you know, I was talking with Bob Bair, I think, as I mentioned earlier, and he was talking about short-term pessimism as far as the success of this revolution, because as you say, the military virtually runs the whole society, and that's not going to change it probably will just be Suleiman instead for a while, and if the people don't like it, it's going to be, I guess, more like Iran, where the revolution starts but sputters out, you know, can't maintain in the face of overwhelming power that over the long term this may signify a real change for the entire region.
But in the short term, he was saying, it looks to him like, you know, the Egyptian military isn't going anywhere, the revolution isn't going to win until this apparatus that you're describing falls, not just Hosni Mubarak.
Right, and it seems like the protesters, at least from what I've seen from the coverage on CNN and Al Jazeera, don't really get that yet, they don't really see the connection between the military's stranglehold over most of the economy and the disastrous situation in their economy, that it mostly is focused on Mubarak right now, but if you just swap him out for Suleiman, nothing's really going to have changed.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it really does, of course, I guess, come down to those conscripts that you mentioned there, and if Suleiman takes over and the people refuse to accept that as good enough and continue to protest, and they just want to consolidate their power, then the question is whether the conscript soldiers at the bottom are willing to carry out those orders and put the insurrection down, you know?
It's not really an armed one yet, but I don't know, I've got short-term pessimism too, Jason.
Well, it's such an economic boon in Egypt for those top military people to have the military dominating their economy like this, all those profits from all those companies that they own go completely off-budget, they're not reported at all.
So we don't really know how big the Egyptian military is, we don't know how much money they spend in a given year, all we know is the $1.3 billion that the U.S. gives them and the $3 billion or so that the Egyptian government gives them, but that's probably actually a fairly small portion of their overall budget.
A lot of that money, since it's completely off-budget, can just go into building expensive villas for the commanders and into their private bank accounts without anyone outside of the military being any the wiser.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, that system certainly is built in a way that guarantees its own destruction, but the question is when?
And people might really be sick and tired of Hosni Mubarak, but that seems like a pretty powerful apparatus to overthrow.
Not Tunisia.
Right, there's a lot of money behind it and a lot of people that stand to lose quite a bit if it falls, but inevitably it's going to fall because it's destroying the free market in Egypt.
How can you compete against a military that has the ability to conscript its own employees, pay them below-market wages, doesn't pay taxes, and doesn't have to comply with any regulations?
Right, and takes over every aspect of production that they can.
Yeah, that really is a sad state of affairs.
You can definitely understand why people in Tahrir Square would be sick and tired of it.
All right, well, thanks.
I'm sorry for talking so much, but thanks very much for your time and your review of this news with us, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, News Director of Antiwar.com, or News Editor, News.
Antiwar.com.
