Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com/donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio and now time for congratulations to Michael Hastings, contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for winning the Polk Award for his article, The Runaway General, last June in the Rolling Stone.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How's it going?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate the support.
I know I talked to you guys right after that story came out and talked to you regularly and I appreciate you having me back on.
Yeah, well, I think you deserve it.
I don't know what the Polk Award is, but it sounds great.
And certainly your article was not just, you know, very important for getting McChrystal fired for he and his staff running their big mouths and disrespecting the chain of command and so forth, but was also very instructive in a lot of other ways as well.
And I really highly urge people to go back and read it if they haven't had a chance to.
But there's quite a bit of insight into the, I guess, already abandoned counterinsurgency strategy and so forth in there.
Yeah.
And in terms of the George Polk Award, it's named after CBS, the news correspondent who was killed, I believe, in 1948, covering the Greek Civil War, because he was getting too close to the people in power in Greece at the time and they had him killed.
And the other people who won this year, it's really an honor for me to be even mentioned with them, because they've done great.
Dana Priest from The Washington Post talked about another story worth reading, her whole series on Top Secret America, some great stuff from the L.A. Times about corruption.
So actually, when I found out about this and looked through the other people who won, I was humbled as well as inspired that there's actually journalists out there who are doing great work still, investigative work, and holding people to account.
Well, you continue to hold them to account yourself.
You've written, I think, one more since The Runaway General for Rolling Stone, and you have a brand new one coming out, right?
Yeah, I just had a piece on General Petraeus that came out about two weeks ago now, and also working on a story right now, and we'll see if we can get it out there.
But that should be interesting to your listeners as well.
I mean, I think it's so hard to get people to focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh, here's some news I heard your listeners will probably appreciate.
I've heard through the grapevine that there's going to be a request for 20,000 more troops to stay in Iraq at the end of this year.
Oh, of course there is, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Except that what they left out was, what's Murtad al-Sadr going to have to say about that?
Well, what I've heard from sources is that the military's gone to the White House, pushed for 20,000 more, and now in Iraq it's up to the Americans to sell it to the Iraqis.
Yeah, well, so there's already 50,000 combat troops there.
They want another 20,000 when the 50,000 are supposed to be gone by the end of December of this year, according to the deal.
Yeah, I think the idea would actually be just to leave 20,000 there and so take out 30,000.
Oh, I see.
But it's a significant...
If this is true, and again, it's unconfirmed right now, it's just a congressman had mentioned it last week, but I think it's legit.
If it's confirmed, it would show that all the promises to have zero troops at Iraq after December 2011 were false, which we all assumed, but they were pretty adamant that all of them were going to be gone.
Right.
Well, and Obama continues to insist, at least as late as the State of the Union address last month, that 2011 will be the beginning of the end of the Afghan war sometime this summer.
What do you think about that?
I think that the Pentagon and the White House are not on the same page on this, and that's the story I'm watching most closely right now, is what's the number of troops that actually come home in July 2011?
And that's going to be a good indicator of who has the upper hand.
I've heard estimates that maybe it's going to be about 9,000 troops coming home.
Well, I don't know, is that enough to satisfy the liberal base?
I mean, that's the calculation, right?
Well, they're up to 100,000 now.
Yeah, 100,000, 150,000 total with NATO.
So, you know, 10,000 to drop in the bucket, but it might be enough to sort of say, hey, you know, we're serious.
But yeah, I mean, that's the next big story.
I mean, there was an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday from two think tank guys who are very supportive of the whole strategy, and they suggested that it's no longer a long war because it's only going to last at least four or five more years.
So, already you can see the sort of, you know, Petraeus think tank media nexus preparing the groundwork to make July 2011 almost meaningless.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you could see it last fall, they talked about 2013, 2014, 2015, just to basically, I think, make the point that it's still up in the air and that's not changing.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, 2014 is the new 2011.
And, you know, and unless the White House sort of decides to say no, we're pretty serious about this.
And I don't know, I honestly don't know how that's going to play out right now.
All right.
Well, can you give us a taste of what your next story is coming out?
And when is it coming out?
Next story hopefully will be out online in the next few days.
It will be about some interesting, I'll leave it at, it's going to be about spin and how the generals are spinning in a way that is actually quite surprising.
About the Afghan war?
About the Afghan war.
Yeah, yeah.
So I can't go into more detail right now and hopefully we'll get it out by Sunday.
But look for that online at Rollingstone.com.
All right.
And, you know, I didn't even know, I'm sorry, Michael, that you had this new piece out in Rollingstone, King David's War from the second of this month.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
More than you already said?
Oh, no.
Basically, it's not a profile of General Petraeus.
It's just looking at what he's done since taking over the command of the Afghan war.
And what I found out, it was that he's A, cutting deals with the country's most unsavory characters.
B, spinning away to saying, you know, we're actually winning.
And then most significantly, really upping the level of violence in a pretty significant way that we hadn't seen in quite a while.
A number of airstrikes his way up, even destroying and then, of course, rebuilding or trying to rebuild or claiming to rebuild villages and giving President Karzai a much harder time than any general before.
I mean, just yesterday, there's a report in the Washington Post that Petraeus was basically calling Karzai a liar and saying that these 50 civilians who were just allegedly killed in the eastern Afghanistan weren't actually killed.
Petraeus apparently, according to the story, said that it was the Afghans were making it up.
You know, so this is a pretty significant development in terms of how Petraeus is trying to deal with Karzai.
Well, and in fact, he even basically at least implied the way the post piece read that these people had burned their own children just to say that he'd done it to make him look bad or to make his troops look bad.
Yeah.
I mean, what the hell kind of outrage is that?
It's it's it's a wild story.
You know, it's I read that story and, you know, I would think the Americans wouldn't make that kind of accusation without having, you know, some real, real evidence.
You know, so so that's what I'll say.
But but also, I think it's not very politically wise to say that to Karzai unless General Petraeus is trying to take away the weapon that that civilian casualties has been for Karzai to use politically.
So in other words, Karzai is often used civilian casualties as a political political tool in Afghanistan.
And by discrediting Karzai's civilian casualty claims, you are taking away one of his weapons to influence the discussion.
But this is our ally.
This is the guy we're relying on.
Remember, we don't even trust him when he tells us that 50 of his people were killed.
We say that, no, their parents killed, you know, their parents burned them.
I mean, it's it's you can't make it up.
You really can't.
Well, I mean, is it possible that even if it's a really bad idea, that the purpose of something like that, maybe even the same as the purpose in increasing the number of airstrikes that lead to mass casualty attacks like this or, you know, that are these mass casualty attacks is really just to stir the dissent up and keep the war going.
If you want to make sure that 2011 gets moved to 2014 or 15 or 2030 or whatever, why not make sure to make it worse by increasing airstrikes and saying outrageous things like this?
Well, they feel they have to keep fighting in order to get the Taliban to the negotiating table.
And we'll see if that actually works out or not.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
But congratulations again on winning that award.
Michael, you did great work.
It's Michael Hasen's everybody contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
Appreciate that.
Thanks.
