All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
He's got a brand new piece out at IPSnews.net.
It will be at antiwar.com/Porter very soon.
Slane Ryder's book says U.S.-NATO war served Al-Qaeda strategy.
And Slane Ryder, of course, is Salim Shahzad, the great reporter for the Asia Times, who was murdered quite obviously, apparently, although I can't prove it yet, I think, by the ISI for his great reporting, Gareth, welcome back to the show.
What do you have for us here?
Well, this is a story that I think is really very important that everyone needs to know about, and that is that what Salim Shahzad writes in his book is that the first of all, the major revelation, I think, is that Osama bin Laden was really a figurehead all along.
I mean, that is when I say all along.
I mean, from before 9-11, it was really Dr.
Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian who talked bin Laden into the strategic idea of attacking the United States with the explicit presumption that by doing so, he would provoke the US into a war in Afghanistan, an occupation of Afghanistan that would then be the biggest boon to Al-Qaeda global strategy that they could possibly ask for.
And that's what, of course, bin Laden then did.
And what Shahzad has been told, had been told over several years by his contacts in Al-Qaeda, and he had unique access to some of the leading strategists and commanders in Al-Qaeda, like Ilyas Kashmiri, who, again, is reported to have been killed in a drone attack in Pakistan.
This time, apparently, Al-Qaeda has confirmed that he was martyred, as they say.
And other major figures in Al-Qaeda, such as Sir Yudin Haqqani, were talking to Shahzad on a regular basis.
So he has really the inside information on what the thinking was in Al-Qaeda over the past several years.
And what he revealed is that they wanted the United States to stay in Afghanistan because they understood that that was the best way to convince Islamic people all over the world, but particularly, of course, in Pakistan, where they were most concerned with the attitudes of the population, that Al-Qaeda was the main force standing against and helping to resist the U.S. occupation of Islamic land, in this case, of course, Afghanistan.
And he points out that there had been many religious Islamic fatwas, religious orders, put out over the years about the occupation of Islamic lands, of course, Palestine being the single biggest case of that sort of problem.
But once the fatwas began to be put out on Afghanistan, this was a big turning point from the point of view of Al-Qaeda's strategy that they were able to use to their advantage.
And this is why one of the biggest worries of Al-Qaeda, the thing that worried them the most, was that there would be some kind of peace deal that would allow the United States to withdraw its troops.
That was the one thing that they wanted to avoid at all costs.
Yeah, well, of course, in other words, Michael Scheuer and Will Grigg and me and you and Ron Paul and Justin Raimondo and anybody with their head on straight about this all along have been right.
That the whole strategy here is, you know, don't throw me in the briar patch.
Please, please don't invade Afghanistan.
I mean, give me a break, man.
The action is in the reaction.
You're talking about a stateless band of a few hundred guys, a couple of hundred guys in 2001, maybe, versus a superpower.
They can't conquer America, but they can break our back on the mountains of Afghanistan.
Hell, bin Laden's son last summer told Rolling Stone, my father's dream was to bring the U.S. into Afghanistan and keep them there until they were broken, just like and repeat what they did to the Soviet Union.
Michael Scheuer told me in January or February of 2005, when he first came out after his book, Imperial Hubris, was published and he said, yeah, you know, if we could have got it and said, wow, we shouldn't be an empire.
Let's bring our troops home.
That would have been fine.
But otherwise it was a provocation.
It was smack us in the face in front of our girlfriend and get us to chase them into the dark alley where all their friends are waiting for us.
Right.
But but of course, I just want to point out, I mean, there's a distinction here between the what bin Laden's son was talking about, which is that we're going to defeat the superpower in Afghanistan by by luring him into this place that is strategically, obviously, to the disadvantage of U.S. and NATO troops.
And the idea, which was even more important in Zawahiri's mind, which was you keep the Americans there so that you can use it as a propaganda ploy to persuade Islamic populations all over the world that that this is the real threat.
There's a real threat to Islam from the United States and that Al Qaeda is there to help.
And so, you know, we need to join together as Islamic people to oppose our local regimes who are in league with the United States.
And that was exactly what Zawahiri got bin Laden to to follow as a strategy.
Well, and, you know, I said this in my speech in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, they get kind of half credit for that one, because they certainly radicalized, you know, with all these this decade of war over there and with the inflation that was all the money printed up to pay for all the war over there.
We've radicalized the Middle East and caused the Arab Spring against us.
But they don't share Zawahiri's ideology whatsoever.
So, you know, they might be getting rid of the empire, but they're certainly not going to have it their way either.
They're not going to have it their way, but I think what they have been able to do, certainly they've had a major success.
And what Shahzad says in his book really gives great credit to Al Qaeda for having accomplished this of radicalizing the tribal population of Pakistan, northwest Pakistan, and making that region a political military base for Al Qaeda's ideology, essentially, which was used not only in Afghanistan, of course, to to support the Afghan Taliban against U.S.
NATO forces, but even more important, I think, from the Al Qaeda strategy point of view, was to use that base against the Pakistani military in the Pakistani state.
That was the bigger prize that Zawahiri was after all along.
And that, of course, I mean, should they continue to be successful in Pakistan, that represents the biggest accomplishment and indeed the biggest threat to the interests of the United States and the West in general that they could have possibly brought off.
Well, and as Shahzad told me when I interviewed him, more and more we kill Taliban leadership, more and more they turn to the Egyptians and the Saudis who, after all, have battlefield experience.
And, you know, the more they turn to these guys to help them fight their war, the more they are Al Qaedaized and turn the conservatives there into radicals from all these decades of war.
And he's got a chapter and verse for that in his book.
That's really the heart of it.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time, but thank you very much for your time again on the show, Gareth.
We'll have you back soon.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right.
