Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Now let me tell you about Jon Pfeffer.
He is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
He's the author of several books and numerous articles.
He's been a writing fellow at Provisions Library in Washington, D.C. and Pantech Fellow in Korean Studies at Stanford University.
He's a former associate editor of the World Policy Journal.
Has worked as an international affairs representative in Eastern Europe and East Asia for the American Friends Service Committee.
Yay!
I love those guys.
He has also worked for the AFSC on such issues as the global economy, gun control, women in the workplace, and domestic politics.
He has served as a consultant for Foreign Policy in Focus, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, among other organizations.
And I am very happy to welcome him back to the show.
Welcome back to the show, Jon.
Thanks for having me on again, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now you have this great piece, Afghanistan Under the Knife, at Foreign Policy in Focus.
And now the website there is fpif, foreignpolicyinfocus.org.
And I love this site.
I was just musing out loud to the audience about how I ought to have this as one of my permanent tabs open, like Lew Rockwell's blog on antiwar.com.
You have so much great stuff from so many great writers on so many of the most important issues to me at this website.
It's really something else.
But anyway, so let's talk about this article here.
You're basically saying, OK, Osama's dead, let's wrap it up and come home, huh?
Basically, I compare the situation in Afghanistan to someone with a knife stuck into them.
And the debate right now is whether to take that knife out.
And some people say, look, you take the knife out, the argument coming from the Pentagon, you take the knife out and the patient's going to bleed out.
You know, it's just going to be an absolute chaos.
We can't do it.
The worst possible thing to do.
And those of us in the peace movement, you know, say, hey, we've got to take the knife out because this is the problem.
You know, the knife is causing a problem.
And the debate now is how to take the knife out.
And I think sometimes there's a caricature of the peace movement's position of saying, you know, we take the knife out immediately and we don't care about what happens afterwards.
But in fact, we have a lot more sophisticated arguments about what to do with that about Afghanistan right now.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm glad that in the article you brought up McClatchy newspapers, Jonathan Landay.
He's such an interesting character to me because he and his partner, William Strobel, especially at Knight Ridder newspapers, did the very best in the mainstream media of knocking down the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war.
And he is such an incredible investigative journalist.
I mean, I can't even begin to count the list of important stories that have been very important to me and my understanding of the way things work in this world.
He's just one of the very top handful of investigative reporters on this planet.
And I had a conversation with him about Afghanistan where I really should go back and listen to it.
It was just incredible how well-versed he is in exactly who's who and their relationships with each other and so forth.
And he told me, as he apparently told you in this radio interview you all did together last week as you write in the article here, that we can't leave because everything will fall down.
You pull that knife out, it really is going to bleed the patient to death in a way that is just not tolerable.
I'm not sure I really understood exactly what the prescription for success was, but he is among the most well-informed Westerners that you could possibly find about the situation there.
And he thinks, contrary to you, we cannot leave.
It would be so bad if we left.
We've got to accomplish something different.
We've got to make the balance of power some way different before we can ever really entertain the possibility of leaving that country.
You're absolutely right.
He's a very smart guy.
He has spent an enormous amount of time on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He knows the lay of the land.
The challenge is that I think in some sense his knowledge is a barrier to his understanding of what we can do at this point, at this junction.
In other words, he knows very well that there is essentially a civil war going on in Afghanistan, that there was a civil war prior to our intervention in 2001.
He knows very well that there are a lot of other countries on the borders of Afghanistan that basically have intervened in much the same way that the United States has.
They've either intervened covertly with economic assistance or covertly with military assistance, and they have their own agenda in Afghanistan.
And to a certain extent they are kind of like vultures that are poised to see what will happen if the United States pulls out and they can then go in and seize what kind of influence they want to seize.
But I think what he misunderstands is that the current American presence in Afghanistan doesn't in fact prevent all of these players from having already gone into Afghanistan and tried to influence the situation on the ground.
And to a certain extent our presence in Afghanistan, our military presence, exacerbates the situation, actually encourages other countries to think in terms of military ways of dealing with the situation.
The United States has not invested as much time or energy into the kind of diplomatic or economic solutions that are necessary at this point to substitute for American military presence.
So that's one of his arguments.
Another argument has to do with the very specific competition between India and Pakistan.
And he points out rightly that the Pakistani military and the ISI, the intelligence services, have basically made it their raison d'etre to oppose India at every point, whether it's in Kashmir, a contested territory between the two countries, or it's in other countries like Afghanistan.
Pakistan sees its role, the military and the intelligence services, see their role as stopping India.
And Landay's concern that if the United States pulls out its military forces from Afghanistan, basically India and Pakistan will go right at each other, go right at each other's throats, and they won't stop, and they'll escalate even to the point of a nuclear exchange.
And I think it's important to point out that, yes, the two countries are on a knife's edge, and they have been on a knife's edge for a very long time, particularly after they both acquired nuclear weapons.
But the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is not something that can prevent India and Pakistan from going nuclear.
If that is the goal, if we want to prevent these two countries from having a nuclear exchange, we have to address that directly.
We cannot address it in Afghanistan by keeping 100,000 troops there.
It is indirect, it's ineffectual, and it ultimately skirts the real issue.
Well, and of course the occupation there is always encouraging the Indians to make deals with the Northern Alliance types we've installed in Kabul, or tried to.
And, you know, as Eric Margulies has been saying on this show for years, this is the number one reason why the Pakistani government supports the Afghan, Taliban, and Haqqani-based resistance against the United States is because of even the possibility that the Karzai government really could become the government of that country in alliance with the Indians, you know, and then they'd be surrounded.
Yep, yep, which makes it all the more important for the Obama administration to do what it essentially has begun to do, which is finally to have some serious conversations with the Taliban and actual representatives of the Taliban as opposed to fictitious representatives of the Taliban that it previously had been in touch with, and actually to have this in conjunction with real offers on the table to stop bombing them, to stop taking out their leaders with targeted assassination, because who is going to negotiate in good faith with that kind of a death sentence on their head?
Now, should I see it as a really bright silver lining on a dark cloud here that Leslie Gelb, who I think is the president or the chairman emeritus or something, very, like, used to be the leader of the Council on Foreign Relations there in New York, which at least formerly was an extremely influential group of people up there, when he says it's time to get out, John Pfeffer is right, does that mean that policy could possibly change?
I mean, after all, they're supposed to begin winding the war down in a month and a half.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is a sea change, and we're seeing not only a shift in public opinion, a majority of Americans support withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in fact a near majority now believes that our intervention in the first place was a mistake, which is an incredible change over the last ten years.
So it's not just the public opinion level, it's at the level of Congress.
We're seeing a larger number of people in Congress finally coming around to this position, and I think we're finally seeing the Mandarin class, the elite like Leslie Gelb, saying, you know, this is the Vietnam that we feared, that others feared it would be, and now we realize that it has become, and we don't want to get stuck in this quagmire more than we already are.
Yeah, well, and you know what, that's even in my notes today here, the Vietnam-Cambodia analogy, and this is something I'm not sure if you and I have talked about on the show before, but it's something I've been saying for, I don't know, a long time, years and years anyway, that if you make the parallel between, you know, now we're giving the Russians their own Vietnam and Afghanistan, well, if Afghanistan is another Vietnam, and we're doing this to ourselves now, then what does that make Pakistan, other than Cambodia, where we've got our own little Ho Chi Minh Trail that we've got to keep bombing all the time, we've got a civil war inside the country we've got to force the government to wage all the time, and then what did that lead to back in the 1970s, but Pol Pot and the worst nightmare in the world, where when the communists in Vietnam invaded Cambodia, it was to save the people from their own government, gone the worst, you know, nightmare that human beings could imagine over there, and you know, when you talk about the danger of nuclear war with India, that's pretty much on the same level of complete and total nightmare, genocide levels of innocents killed, and what more could be, or what could be more destabilizing to Pakistan than our intervention inside their country, and this civil war that we've been forcing their government to wage there all these years, when it turns out Osama was in Islamabad?
I think it's a very, very good analogy, and fortunately I think we're not at the point of no return, I think we could reconfigure our relationship with Pakistan so that it doesn't turn into a Cambodia, so we don't see, for instance, the Talibanization of the country completely, right now, you know, the Pakistani government has been ambivalent about its relationship with the United States, and you see that reflected both in the civilian government, you also see it obviously in the intelligence services, with some of the folks in the ISI supporting, you know, the U.S. counterterrorism campaigns, and others obviously having a much closer relationship to the Pakistan version of the Taliban, as well as perhaps Al Qaeda as well.
But I think if we change our relationship with Pakistan, we've been sending billions of dollars to the country, much of it has gone to the military, much of it has gone to the intelligence services, the portion that has gone to so-called civilian uses has not been monitored, and any attempt that we've had tried to put into place to see that the money goes to actual civilian projects have been voted down essentially, vetoed by the Pakistani government itself.
We have to basically transform that relationship.
I mean, we can no longer support this kind of military approach to not only counterterrorism within Pakistan, but, you know, our own self-serving needs in Afghanistan.
Yeah, well, and I guess we'll see how it goes.
You know, it's interesting, the part we were talking about, you know, elite opinion is finally starting to come around on this subject, too.
I still wonder what that means for the future of policy, really.
I mean, it's got to be the generals who agree, not the Council on Foreign Relations at this point, right?
Well, that's absolutely true.
And I do think that, you know, we're going to see the generals come around to this.
I mean, it's in their interest as well.
It's just, for them, it's difficult for them to turn a battleship so quickly.
It takes them a while to figure out, well, you know, what does this mean for our deployments?
What does this mean for overall strategy?
What does this mean for our overall commitment to the region?
The future of their own individual careers.
Exactly.
But I think we're going to see, you know, an inevitable push.
It's going to come probably start from the civilian sector, but it will ultimately transform military policy.
Now, right now, we're talking only about, you know, a handful of troops coming home.
I mean, before the attack on Osama bin Laden, the plan was to bring back about 5,000 troops in July and another 5,000 by the end of the year, and obviously it's not very much at all, and they were going to be taken from the margins of the conflict anyway.
But the bottom line is that all of our allies are basically jump and ship.
We're going to soon see much stronger push from Congress, and the military is going to be caught in between the civilians on this side and the lack of resolve, if you like, from the NATO allies.
All right.
Well, let's see if we can change gears here a little bit.
There's so much going on in the world that I'd like your opinion on.
Maybe, first of all, if we could talk about the goings-on in Syria.
Do you know much, and can you tell me how serious these coups in D.C. are about intervening in this thing, trying to force a regime change one way or the other there?
Well, as you know, the Obama administration was rather reluctant about getting involved in Libya.
This was something that the administration felt compelled to do, in part because of pressure from allies in Europe, felt compelled to do in part because of pressure from some members of Congress and some elite opinion here in the United States.
And once they did get involved in Libya, then they pretty much accelerated the efforts to turn things over to NATO.
Now, of course, we're still involved there, but our capacity to get involved anywhere else is limited.
I think the Pentagon recognizes this.
But perhaps more importantly, I think there's a recognition that there's simply no way that the U.S. could get involved militarily in Syria.
I mean, this is a much bigger country, a much more involved situation, a government that has more support among the population, or at least among a portion of the population, than the Qaddafi government does within Libya.
So I think there is a recognition, at least in the Obama administration, of course there are exceptions within the administration, there are exceptions among neoconservatives, but I think there's a recognition in the Obama administration that the Syria intervention would be a bridge too far.
Well, I sure hope that's true, and I guess a lot of it depends on what Benjamin Netanyahu thinks, and what the neocons in America, who oftentimes are to the right of him, want.
Which is, that's pretty hard, to be worse than Netanyahu on something.
But I guess he figures, hey, I've got the Baathists and the Alawite minority, you know, secularist types, more or less, ruling Syria.
How could I do better than that, right?
Yeah, I mean, a lot has been made of this argument that the devil we know is better than the devil we don't know.
And there is a certain predictability, or there has been a certain predictability, with the Assad regime in Syria.
And, you know, the Obama administration, and people like John Kerry, of course, were even interested in trying to find some kind of engagement policy with the regime before, of course, these protests broke out.
So I think that also tempers any considerations of going beyond economic sanctions, beyond condemnations, which, of course, the Obama administration is engaged in.
But military intervention, that's really not on the table.
Well, that's good.
You think maybe they'd try to do a coup d'etat, or have some assassins intervene, something like that?
Or are they no better even than that, you think?
Well, you never know.
You never know what is being cooked up here in Washington.
It's not the most transparent of places.
My guess, though, is that, frankly, you know, they take a look around and see what the different options are.
A military coup, perhaps, but the situation right now hasn't gone beyond the intolerable point.
I mean, obviously, from the point of view of human rights, from the point of view of, you know, wanting to see democracy in Syria, yes, it has obviously become intolerable.
But from the point of view of realpolitik here in Washington, D.C., which judges these things according to different standards, it hasn't gone beyond the tolerable level.
Right.
Well, that's good to know, I guess.
I mean, like you, I would like to see Syrians be free.
They shouldn't have to suffer the dictatorship of Assad or anybody else.
But I just don't want it to be the Americans or really any foreign country being the ones intervening over there making it that way.
That's all.
Exactly.
And it's going to be a tough fight for the Syrians.
I mean, there's no question about it, because it's not just a clear-cut case of the people versus, you know, an autocratic leader.
We're talking about some significant, as you pointed out, some significant ethno-religious dynamics within the country, the Alawite minority representing about 12 percent of the population allied to a certain extent with the Christian minority.
Those folks have a vested interest in seeing the Assad regime continue because, of course, they've benefited in myriad ways over the years.
That is not an easy dynamic to overturn simply through street protests.
All right.
Now let's get back into – well, you brought up Libya there a minute ago.
It seemed to me – I'm not so sure how reluctant Obama was to get into it, but one way or the other, I guess, if there's one thing that's certainly true, is they really didn't have a plan for what they're going to do.
And now we're almost two months into the thing, and Qaddafi ain't going anywhere, and yet the UN and NATO and D.C. all claim that they don't want to split the country in half, and the territorial integrity of this United Nations member state must be maintained at all costs and so forth, and yet what are they going to do?
They either got the biggest bay of pigs since 1991 on their hands, or they're going to have to send in the Marine Corps into Tripoli, right?
I mean, what's the other way out of this thing?
Well, you're right.
They really expected Qaddafi to fold pretty early on, and this was supposed to set an example for the rest of the region, for other autocratic leaders, to see what happened to Qaddafi and mend their ways accordingly.
The Chinese have a saying, they say, you kill the chicken to scare the monkeys, and I think this was at least the implied motivation behind going after Qaddafi in this way.
But the chicken is still not dead, and the monkeys, such as Assad in Syria, are not particularly scared, at least of the threat of U.S. intervention.
What can happen now?
Well, I think, you know, Washington is still holding out the hope that Qaddafi will still fold, that we see perhaps the defection of his top minister recently.
We see, you know, possibilities of weakening within Tripoli itself.
I don't think there's an expectation that the rebels will necessarily be able to have a military victory in Tripoli.
I mean, they remain relatively weak, sustained by outside military support.
But I think that there's a hope that Qaddafi will see the writing on the wall and that he will try to make a somewhat graceful exit in some kind of a deal.
But that's what I think Washington is hoping for.
The prospects of, you know, an increased military intervention from the United States, I don't think there's much desire for that, much support for that.
I mean, already, you know, Congress has already raised enough, a lot of fuss about the Obama administration doing this without authorization, ignoring the War Powers Act, to increase U.S. military commitment to kind of go back on what the U.S. has already done, which is hand things over to a large extent to NATO.
That doesn't seem politically viable at this point.
Well, so does that mean we're going to end up with the Iraq model from the 90s, permanent blockade if he doesn't go?
You're just going to bomb him and strangle him and fly droids around in the sky, killing their kids and their wives?
Some version of that, frankly, yeah.
I mean, I think that there will be this continued no-fly zone, which isn't really a – it sounds benign to a certain extent, no-fly zone, but obviously as we've seen it involves a great deal of military bombardment and in some cases even bombarding civilian targets, what turn out to be civilian targets.
I think we'll see a continuation of that and a tightening of the stranglehold at that level, and then, you know, whatever small incremental advances that the rebels make with the expectation that those two as a pincer movement will pressure Qaddafi to fold.
How long that lasts, well, that's anybody's guess.
I mean, Qaddafi has obviously a certain amount of firepower, a certain amount of termination, a certain amount of elite political support and some tribal support.
So it's hard to say how long this kind of deadlock could last.
Well, you know, I'm not quite in line with Michael Scheuer on this.
I saw kind of the worst interpretation of the way he puts it when he was on the Bill O'Reilly show, I think yesterday, maybe the day before, but basically saying, in effect, you know, bin Laden won.
They show us pictures on TV of him looking all sad watching TV or whatever, but he must have, you know, pretty early, you know, not very much time before he finally got a bullet in the head, he must have thought how well he's doing.
As Scheuer said back in 2005, we are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world that he was trying to accomplish.
Of course, you know, the people of the Middle East never rose up to make him their new, you know, caliphate king or whatever, sultan in charge of everyone or anything like that, but, you know, they've made great strides in at least overthrowing the American-backed dictatorships.
It seems like the Arab Spring isn't going away.
It might last, you know, a few years before it actually is, you know, finished getting rid of all these autocracies, but it seems like it's on now, and it still remains to be seen, you know, who exactly is going to take power there, but I don't guess bin Laden ever thought it would just be a bunch of bin Ladenites who would come to power.
What he wanted to see more than anything, though, was America and Britain's friends, those kingdoms, you know, especially on the Arabian Peninsula fall, and, you know, I guess it'll be a while before the Saudi kingdom itself falls, but, you know, I don't know, it just seems like the American empire is on the run, fell right into the trap of overreacting and bankrupting ourselves and invading all over the place, and that had to have, you know, our relationship with Israel and our relationship with the dictatorships of Egypt and Tunisia and Jordan, et cetera, has got a lot to do, and the Iraq war going on right in their midst and all that has a lot to do with the radicalization of the people who have risen up to overthrow their countries, right?
I mean, it's like Dick Cheney secretly worked for bin Laden all along, instead of the other way around, like the truth are said all day.
Well, I agree with part of that.
I mean, I think that we have seen certain of bin Laden's objectives achieved.
In other words, he did, I think, want to lure the United States into a kind of trap of debt and overextension in much the same way that he was able to lure the Soviet Union into military overstretch.
We've seen the United States spend upwards of $3 trillion over the last decade on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that price tag is still probably a minimal number.
We don't know the full cost yet.
We've seen over that period of time China become the number two economy in the world and will overtake us, according to the latest predictions, in 2016, which is a pretty remarkable thing.
So at that level, yes, I think bin Laden's objective of seeing the United States following the steps, the imperial steps, if you will, of the Soviet Union, that objective was realized.
The other objective of radicalizing the Islamic world, well, I'm not sure that was achieved.
I mean, certainly we have seen certain groups within the Islamic world become radicalized, but Al-Qaeda as an outfit was marginal in the late 1990s, and it's even more marginal today, at least in terms of the influence it has over the Muslim world.
And what we see in the Arab Spring, I think, is in many ways a repudiation of Al-Qaeda.
It's in favor of democratic societies, transparent societies, anti-corruption, and it is not about achieving a global caliphate.
It's not about achieving hierarchical societies that are patriarchal and devoted to Sharia law, a very strict and conservative 13th century interpretation of Sharia law.
So at that level, I don't think bin Laden was successful, and I think the Arab Spring is in many ways a very satisfying repudiation of his legacy.
Well, you know, I pretty much agree with that.
I'm not always too clear, but yeah, I mean, I guess I meant to describe it as a partial victory as well, not like a bunch of the people in the Middle East aren't moving toward bin Ladenite, Ayman al-Zawahiri-style government or whatever they would have it.
But then again, first things first, really.
I mean, what they wanted to see was these autocracies fail, and it really remains to be seen who comes out on top as far as organized forces.
Well, that is true.
But even if, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood would prevail in Egypt, and if there were an election, it's hard to know who would win, but let's just say for the purpose of argument that the Muslim Brotherhood would prevail.
I don't see the Muslim Brotherhood as being in the same category as al-Qaeda.
In fact, al-Qaeda has at times rejected the Muslim Brotherhood as being simply a kind of reformist and accommodationist wing of Islamism because it participates in democratic elections, because it has rejected the notion of Islamic caliphate, because it is, you know, thoroughly in the modern world in terms of modern society, not just the use of modern technology like al-Qaeda.
So even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to win in Egypt or elsewhere in the region, I think even that too would be a repudiation of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda's vision of what the Islamic world should look like.
Well, and that's all to the good.
I mean, after all, it is the 21st century, and demographically speaking, I think from Morocco to Pakistan, you've got majorities under 30, right?
You bet.
It is a completely new generation out there.
Yeah, and we've got, you know, 4G phones and broadband, and that goes for, you know, pretty much each and every little village in all these places.
Somebody's got broadband, you know?
They've got to share it.
Absolutely, and I think that has a profound impact on the kinds of societies that folks are asking for.
I mean, they're not looking for, you know, something that looks like Mecca of the 8th century.
They're looking for something that is modern, that's part of the modern world.
Yeah, well, and, you know, that's why, I don't know if this is too far afield or what, but it's kind of funny to me.
The neocons and the libertarians are sort of cousins in a way.
A lot of former leftists in both movements, a lot of Jews and Catholics and kind of middle-class people rather than, you know, the old, very rich, waspy establishment types and whatever.
And a lot of agreement back in history about certain issues, you know, between these two movements, wrote for a lot of, say, magazines, these kinds of things.
But where the libertarians eschew power and just, you know, write articles all day or whatever, the neocons go and seize power and they sort of use our libertarian rhetoric about, you know, the future of mankind on this planet and how, you know, hey, I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of, well, I'm an anarchist, so I'm not the biggest fan of liberal democracy.
But as far as, you know, its comparison to dictatorships and kingdoms and the ways of the old world, like, I guess I am sort of an end-of-history kind of guy.
I just think that, you know, what we need to be doing is selling people and suggesting to them these superior Western ideas and spreading our American-style revolutionary spirit around the world by way of our example.
You know, who wants to see a world where giant populations are stuck in ancient religions that, you know, tell them the way they're supposed to live is a long time ago or whatever.
It is the 21st century.
Everybody could read John Locke on their Kindle, no matter where in the world they are.
You know what I mean?
So we ought to be pushing liberty.
That's the only thing I think is worth pushing, really.
But it just shouldn't be our state doing it, you know, killing people and calling it liberty.
But, you know, that is, I hope, the future of the Middle East is at least somewhat representative governments and fair trials and accountability for corrupt politicians and, you know, long-term peace and all those kinds of things.
And we should remember that the principles that we fought for in the American Revolution, I mean, that was an interpretation in many ways of texts that were produced in other societies at other times.
I mean, John Locke, as you point out, he was not an American.
I mean, he was a British person and an empire.
But we took his ideas and we transformed them in the American context.
In other words, we made them American.
And I think that's what we're going to see around the world.
We're going to see people in Tunisia take ideas from other countries, some from America, some from other parts of the world, and make them Tunisian.
See the same thing in Egypt, in Indonesia, South Africa, throughout the world.
I think that's really what we're talking about here.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly that it should not be imposed by bayonets or by gun or by drone.
That ultimately, even if it has some short-term success, as we saw with the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it doesn't really have any long-term impact.
Well, I wonder how it would be.
It's sort of like Afghanistan, pulling the knife out of the wound in Afghanistan.
We've created sort of bubbles of power out of contrast to how things would be without the occupation.
And it's sort of the same way across the Middle East.
I wonder exactly how it would look if, say, Ron Paul was sworn in and said, all right, that's it, every soldier, every airman, every marine, every Navy sailor, pack up your stuff and come home, that's it.
I wonder how things would shake out.
Got any ideas?
Well, it's a tough question.
I mean, the counterargument, which you hear all the time here in Washington, is that if there is a vacuum, in other words, if the United States withdraws all of its military forces, withdraws its military bases, suspends military assistance, then there will be chaos.
And much the same argument that we hear about Afghanistan, but applied globally.
In other words, that we, the United States, are a force for stability around the world.
But I think we can question that, because in many cases we're not a force for stability.
The presence of our military forces, in fact, encourages conflict, continues conflict.
It discourages diplomatic solutions.
I mean, if you look, for instance, on the Korean Peninsula, where we've had troops there since the Korean War of the 1950s, the presence of American troops does not necessarily lead to security at this point on the Korean Peninsula.
In many ways it discourages the two Koreas from having a fruitful dialogue with one another.
And finally coming to some form of reunification.
So I think we have to question this assumption that U.S. military forces overseas are a force for good and a force for stability.
One way of testing that, well, I mean, we just start taking them home.
And we don't have to take everybody home at once.
I mean, if we want to be good scientists, political scientists about this, then let's close a couple of bases and see what happens.
And if chaos doesn't happen the next day, then we can say, look, this is what we told you would happen.
We said the world wasn't going to end when we closed this military base.
Let's continue the process.
You know what?
As long as I'm keeping you over time here, let me keep you over time some more.
Do you think that the policy is to keep the two Koreas divided?
Well, I don't know if it's consciously to keep the two Koreas divided.
I mean, obviously, a unified Korean Peninsula will pose some difficulties for the United States, depending on, you know, how that unification took place.
So, for instance, to have been planned in the past to have a neutral Korean Peninsula, and that would be a problem considering our military alliance with South Korea.
On the other hand, at this point, you know, North Korea, its nuclear program, and the relationship it has with other countries around the world like Iran and Syria and Burma, it doesn't make the Pentagon or the Obama administration or anybody in Washington particularly happy.
And I think that if they looked at it or when they looked at it rationally, they realized that the current status quo on the Korean Peninsula doesn't help anybody and certainly doesn't help the United States if we're looking at things simply through the lens of our own national interest.
And I think that's why, in part, we've seen even the Bush administration, which had been really one of the most aggressive toward North Korea in its first term, that's why we saw the Bush administration change its position in 2006-2007 and start supporting the Six-Party Talks and some kind of regional solution to the crisis in Northeast Asia.
So I think even the Bush administration recognized that the status quo runs counter to U.S. interests.
Well, although I can see how their nightmare scenario would be the South Korean government armed with North Korean nuclear weapons and rich enough and independent enough to, as you said, just make a break with American policy, make one of their own.
Well, that certainly was a concern back in 2006 during the Noh Moo-Shun administration.
Noh Moo-Shun, president of South Korea, when he was elected, there were tremendous concerns in the Bush administration that here was going to be the most radically anti-American leader in South Korean history and that this leader was talking about, if not neutrality, then a certain kind of independence for South Korea in its military and security posture in the region.
But then what turned out to be the case?
What turned out to be the case is that actually Noh Moo-Shun, despite his heritage, his lineage in anti-American movements, turned around and said, well, actually, the alliance with the United States is really important and we're kind of really worried that the United States is going to withdraw its security guarantees and we're going to start spending a lot of money on military, even as we continue to reach out to North Korea, but we're not going to cut back on our commitments to the United States.
And so I think once the Bush administration saw that the Noh Moo-Shun administration, which was going to be the most radical administration that South Korea could elect, even this administration in South Korea was going to maintain a tie with the United States, I think that alleviated its concern that such a scenario like the one you mentioned would actually transpire.
Well, I guess it wouldn't be worth anything if the United States gave the North Koreans a security guarantee now and said, look, we promise we'll never bomb you if you'll just give up your nukes to the IAEA or whatever like that, because we had a security guarantee with Muammar Gaddafi and we're bombing his grandchildren right now.
That's right.
And the North Koreans are very well aware of that.
And, I mean, they were well aware of that before.
They were very concerned, obviously, when the United States started bombing Serbia.
They were concerned when the United States bombed Baghdad.
Now they're triply concerned, to use a pun, that we're bombing Tripoli, the third in the series.
And they, I think, realize that nuclear weapons are perhaps their only guarantee that the United States doesn't attack them, and they're going to be even more reluctant to give them up.
We can imagine scenarios in which North Korea does give up those nuclear weapons, but it's going to require a great deal more than simply a paper guarantee of security from Washington or the provision of two light-water nuclear reactors, which is what the agreed framework deal was all about, or the suspension of economic sanctions and the elevation of North Korea to normal trade relations with the United States, which is what the Bush administration was, I think, aiming toward eventually.
I don't think any of those are going to be sufficient.
They may be necessary, but they won't be sufficient to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program.
All right, now there's a nuclear scientist named Sig-something-or-other who's been to North Korea a couple of times.
Mm-hmm.
Sigfried Hecker.
Sig Hecker, right.
Sig Hecker.
And he had inspected their plutonium facilities years ago and reported back what he learned.
And then I think the most recent news from him was three months ago or something, you helped me out, about he's been there and they showed him their uranium enrichment program, and it was up and running.
And I'm afraid Gordon Prather has retired, and I don't know that I've seen any significant analysis as to whether the existence of this uranium enrichment program verified by Sig Hecker in this case is or has anything to do with the claims of the Bush administration in 2002 that the North Koreans had broken the agreed framework and admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment program.
Are these one and the same thing?
Where am I missing something?
No, no, I mean, there is truth to what you say.
What Sig Hecker saw when he was in Pyongyang, I think it was in the fall, was they showed him the control room for the uranium enrichment facility, and he was surprised at two things, one, that the control room was so sophisticated, and second, that they had gotten it up and running so quickly at Yongbyon, where they had been before and hadn't seen any evidence of this.
Now, he wasn't able to verify that this had produced a lot of highly enriched uranium, but from his kind of external view of it, he said it was something to be concerned about, certainly.
Now, is this the same program that the Bush administration was talking about when it suspended its U.S. participation in the agreed framework?
Yes and no.
We have to remember that the Clinton administration said that it knew of the existence of the highly enriched uranium program as far back as 1998, but it basically dismissed it as being not a significant program.
In other words, there were some parts in place, but North Korea hadn't necessarily produced anything, and it was kind of like a low-grade insurance policy that they had taken out in case the United States reneged on its commitment to the agreed framework.
And then the Bush administration came along and basically took that same evidence, which the Clinton administration had dismissed, and said, no, this actually is a significant program and shows a violation.
Now, in my opinion, that was the Bush administration looking for an excuse to suspend our participation in the agreed framework.
And I think what happened is basically the North Koreans revved up that program after the United States suspended the agreed framework.
And they said, look, we took out this small insurance policy, and now we're going to cash it in because it's obvious that we aren't going to get what we expected, namely those two light water reactors that the United States promised to build.
And that revved up program is then what Sig Hecker saw in the fall.
At this point, you know, obviously North Korea has a certain amount of nuclear material.
We don't know exactly how much, probably enough for eight to ten nuclear weapons.
We still don't know how much it's producing on an annual basis.
We also don't know its ability to deliver those nuclear weapons.
So all of those remain question marks.
And they're question marks that we frankly won't be able to answer unless we sit down and negotiate with North Korea and at least start the process of mapping their current nuclear program with the ultimate goal of not simply closing that program but actually integrating North Korea into the world community in some significant way.
And I'm not just talking about membership in the IMF.
I'm talking about integration regionally with cross-recognition with countries in Northeast Asia and significant economic transformation inside the country.
Well, now, I'm confused.
Could you tell me what was this evidence in the 1990s?
Do you know?
Because I thought that the only evidence that John Bolton and David Wilmser and them were relying on back in 2002 when they came out with all the accusations was their claim that a North Korean diplomat had admitted to them at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment program.
I didn't think there was anything more to it than that.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, that was what the Bush administration used as their claim, in part, I think, because they didn't want to talk about the intelligence they had, not because they didn't want to reveal the intelligence but because they didn't want to reveal the source of the intelligence.
And I don't know where that information comes from.
But I believe the evidence that was available in 1998 was evidence of aluminum tubing that North Korea had bought, probably as well some information about plans that they had gotten from Pakistan from the infamous nuclear proliferation network there, and there's still a lot of open questions about where that information, exactly how it got to North Korea, what it consisted of, what North Korea did with it.
But I think it was those two things that the Clinton administration was looking at.
Well, but the IAEA inspectors were still in the country then, right?
They were, but they were in Yongbyon, and they only were monitoring the plutonium facilities there.
So if a shipment of aluminum tubing arrives at the airport in Pyongyang, IAEA is not going to be there to look at it.
If that aluminum tubing goes off to some other facility somewhere, IAEA is not going to be there.
If Benazir Bhutto visits the country and has in her pocket plans for a highly enriched uranium program, which is one of the rumors that has been floated, the IAEA is not going to be sitting in on that conversation and watching her hand that material over to the North Korean government.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess the moral of the story is that in, what, 2006 or something, Ray McGovern said they caught George Bush at 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, Connelly's arising, Christopher Hill, and maybe they had Henry Kissinger with them, and said, please, Dick Cheney's out of town and can't stop us.
Can we please go to North Korea and make a deal?
So they gave up on their whole program of picking a fight anyway.
That's right.
And they realized that for a couple of reasons, it was possible to pursue negotiations with North Korea at that time.
I mean, one is they needed a foreign policy victory to compensate for the mess they'd made in foreign policy everywhere else in the world.
Second, they had a diplomat in the person of Chris Hill who made a pretty convincing argument that he thought he could swing a deal with the North Koreans.
And I think those things combined to make a sufficient argument to convince both Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush.
Well, now, okay, just to make sure that I'm clear here, because I want to beat everybody over the head with this, but I've got to be right in order to do so.
When, at the time that they basically broke off the agreed framework deal, which they'd never lived up to in the first place back in 2002 and added all their sanctions and the PSI posse and all that stuff and basically forced the North Koreans to repudiate the nonproliferation treaty and kick the inspectors out and all that, at that time they had some form of primitive uranium enrichment program, but all of their Soviet-era nuclear reactors that produced weapons-grade plutonium were turned off.
And then after this deal was broken, then they restarted those reactors, then they turned them off, harvested the weapons-grade plutonium out of them and started making nuclear weapons with those.
As far as we know, their uranium enrichment program, even to whatever degree it existed back then and whatever degree it is now, is not capable of producing nuclear weapons that we know of, right?
They've only tested plutonium implosion bombs so far.
Right.
We don't have any evidence that they've actually produced anything with uranium enrichment.
They never showed anything to Sig Hecker.
And indeed, we know that they had, obviously, rods that could be reprocessed into plutonium, but as far as I know, no one's ever actually seen any of the reprocessed plutonium.
At one point in an earlier visit, they showed Sig Hecker a jar and they said that there was plutonium in there.
And from his best guess, it seemed like there was.
In other words, the relative weight, the warmth of the jar, et cetera, but they weren't really able to subject it to any scientific test.
So we're making extrapolations even on the plutonium side of things.
We're making those extrapolations based on the length of time that the reactors were going, the number of rods that the IAEA obviously tracked, the expectation of how long it would take to reprocess them, et cetera.
One of the partial failures of the nuclear tests tends to reveal that those were complicated implosion devices rather than a simple gun-type nuke that you'd probably make as your first-generation uranium nuke weapon, right?
Yeah, and that's the other evidence we have, that they have plutonium, and also evidence that they obviously haven't quite mastered the science of creating a bomb.
But again, this is sketchy evidence that we're working with here.
Right.
It's certainly a worse situation than it was in O2.
That's what I know.
I guess I've learned that there was more to the concept of a secret uranium enrichment program before they broke the deal than I'd ever heard of before.
Makes me want to go back and reread some Gordon Prater, too.
But very interesting stuff.
I don't know if anybody really cares about Korea to listen to this kind of inside baseball sort of thing about North Korea policy, but I think it's absolutely fascinating.
And of course, millions of people's lives hang in the balance.
It's an extremely important potential war.
Hey, they don't even have but a ceasefire from the old war.
They don't even have a peace agreement from 1953 or 1952.
That's correct.
It's still an armistice agreement.
And if the Six-Party Talks begin again, and there is a possibility that they might in a month or so, everything that we've just been talking about will be back in the headlines and back on the negotiation table.
So it's not just ancient history.
This is going to be very important material that the diplomats are going to be carrying their teeth over.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there.
We're way over time, and we went through all the breaks and everything, and I really appreciate you spending an hour with me on the show today, John.
It's been great.
I had a great time.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is John Pfeffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The website is fpif.org, and they have a stable of incredible writers and got their finger right on what's most important in the world every day.
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