All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
He's an independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service, regular guest on this show, and of course, we run all his archives at antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How's it going?
Hello, Scott.
How are you again?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us.
So listen, before I ask you about your journalism here, Obama leaves door open to long-term U.S.
-Afghan combat.
Love that headline.
I want to ask the historian in you about what you think about what's going on in the House of Representatives right now, the debate over the Libya war and the political shake-up, if not realignment, going on right now over these war issues.
It's a very important development for sure.
When you see the Washington Times crusading against the use of executive power to carry out war without regard to the will of Congress, you know something's up.
You know, the Times is crusading.
I mean, they've got a front-page story every day about this.
This is the most interesting development.
I think that it's a sign that there's something much deeper going on in the country with regard to the degree to which the president has taken on the power to go to war in such a nonchalant manner, really.
And I think that it's taken sort of the right-wing Republicans, if you will, to lead the way, partly for partisan reasons, but partly simply because, you know, they are freer from the scourge of, you know, having to pay obeisance to Obama than others in the political elite at this point.
Right.
So, I mean, that's my very brief take on what's happening with regard to the revolt in Congress against the war powers, or the refusal to invoke the War Powers Act on Libya.
Well, you know, far be it from me to promote democracy, but I saw one of these right-wing lunatics up there who, I think it was on MSNBC or something the other day, he said that they introduced him as having been re-elected last fall on the, we must win in Afghanistan ticket as a Republican, and he was saying, you know what, last fall, my constituents were on the fence, so I took the kill them all view, but this spring, this summer, forget about it, man.
I go home to my district and everybody is telling me, end this thing now.
Bin Laden's dead, we're done.
And so here's this right-wing, warmongering, Republican, ignorant lunatic saying, all right, so I'm against the Afghan war now, that's all.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, I think what you've done is effectively framed the issue that my story was about, which is Obama's speech and the withdrawal dates that he gave us yesterday.
Sorry, Wednesday night.
I mean, I, you know, I think that this is a story that really does need to be framed by the degree to which the public has now turned decisively against the war in Afghanistan.
And I mean, that suggests to me that, you know, what we've been talking about over the months that about Obama's having become a war president and that indeed that, you know, he's revealed that this is his dominant political persona, his dominant political identity, if you will.
Hey, it always was since, well, I mean, maybe it used to have two faces on it, but from 2006 or at least the January 2007, I think was the first time I ever heard of the guy.
And already he was doing nothing but accuse George Bush of not doing the real job on the real war because he got distracted in Iraq and we needed to double down in Afghanistan.
It was always a convenient position to take for a democratic political personality who had designs on the White House.
No question about it.
And I think, you know, now we have a very clearer, a much clearer picture of Obama as somebody who buys in fully to the empire and the rationale for the use of military force on a wide scale, regardless of the cost to the American people in terms of antagonism towards the United States and the Americans and the inevitable boost that that gives to people who want to carry out terrorist attacks against the United States.
Yeah, I mean, it's true that despite the fact that, you know, in reality, the guy's nothing but Bill Clinton.
He he ran as, you know, a black guy with a Muslim sounding name and as the opposite party as George Bush and as basically, if not a repudiation, at least, you know, sorry, we're taking it back of the Bush era.
That was his mandate from the American people was, you know, we're sorry we did that, especially sorry, got reelected.
But now we're going to try to make it right by putting this guy up there to say sorry for us all and smooth things over, work things out, wind these wars down, etc.
That's what the American people thought that they were getting.
And, you know, around the world, I don't know how long anybody really believed in this in the Muslim world or whatever, but I think they held out hope that maybe there could be a real change in policy here.
Yeah, I think the Muslim world caught on pretty fast.
Yeah, a lot faster than the American people, probably.
Exactly.
And so my point here is that, you know, had Obama, had he been somebody who was concerned with the welfare of the American people, had he been concerned primarily with the economy, he would have made a different set of decisions.
He would have announced a different set of decisions Wednesday night.
He would have said that we are rapidly phasing out our military presence in Afghanistan and we will seek to reach an agreement that will end this war as quickly as possible.
He could have done so to the acclaim of the vast majority of the American people.
Politically, it would have been a wise thing to do.
I think that's clear.
And instead, what he did was to clearly accommodate once again the desires of the U.S. military commander, in this case, the departing David Petraeus, who wanted, of course, he wanted the whole the whole thing.
He wanted two more full years of combat in Afghanistan against the Taliban with nearly all of the surge troops that were given to him in 2010.
He got roughly 80 percent of what he asked for in terms of the timing and slightly less than that in terms of the total number of troops.
But clearly the big losers in this transaction were those in the Obama administration led by Joe Biden, who had been leaking to the press in their very urgent concern that the United States start to pull out of Afghanistan because of the high cost of the war and the damage that it was doing to the domestic agenda.
I mean, they're really very well aware of the direct tradeoff between the cost of the war in Afghanistan and the Democratic Party's domestic agenda.
And in the end, it's very clear that Obama gave Biden very little and gave Petraeus the bulk of the rewards that he had to offer.
It's an amazing thing when Biden is the dove that we all got to count on and whatever.
But anyway, and a dove, quote unquote, who, you know, is a big fan of special operations forces raids, as I've written about in the past.
And indeed, you know, I have one line that's in a war in Iraq for George Bush from his chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, who's been horrible on every war for 25 years.
Right, right.
And even so, I mean, he gets it that that this that we're broke and we can't afford this war.
Yeah, well, and it seems like the politics of this are horrible.
I saw Jon Stewart this morning on the rerun had a little montage of Fox News clips of them saying, oh, he's betrayed Petraeus and and the policy and he's a peacenik and he's just appeasing his far left supporters and whatever.
And anyone who slightly leans peacenik is horribly disappointed.
All he's done is make himself the bad guy to everybody again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Not a very good politician as far as that goes, it seems like to me.
But first things first, I guess.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Gareth Porter, IPSnews.net, antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net and of course, antiwar.com/radio.
And we're talking about the politics of the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.
Next month is the day that or next month is the month that Barack Obama promised would be the beginning of the end of the surge and of the Afghan war.
And of course, David Petraeus, the general in charge, has been fighting against any kind of drawdown whatsoever.
And Gareth, you said that Petraeus got 80 percent of what he wanted here?
Well, I base that on the fact that he wanted two full fighting seasons.
I consider that to be basically through the end of 2012, as well as 2013, the end of 2013, as well as 2012.
What he got was the fighting up to 2000 to September 2013.
So I considered that he got 20 out of 24 months at 80 percent, 80 percent of what he asked for.
But he also, of course, wanted to minimize the withdrawals to like 5000 that would somehow be fuzzed over, that they wouldn't really be combat troops.
I mean, that that, of course, is such an extreme demand on the part of Petraeus that it cannot be taken seriously.
I mean, he obviously didn't expect to get anything like that.
So, you know, I think it's fair to say that Petraeus got pretty much what he expected to get, what was the minimum that that was possible for for a president to to give up in terms of, you know, his his need to at least give some indication to the American people that he was moving toward toward withdrawal, but that he did very well for himself.
That's for sure.
Well, and I mean, come on, it's not really like there's a battle going on between Petraeus and Obama on this.
They just have their little false dichotomy.
You say this and then I'll say that and we'll move on from there.
That's all right.
Well, I think that's I mean, they do have different positions.
The president obviously has to make certain concessions or at least appear to make concessions to the desire of the American people for getting out of Afghanistan.
And Petraeus and Gates don't give a rat's ass about that, as Gates famously now put it in this interview with Newsweek over the last weekend.
You know, he he's so accustomed to being the high official of a superpower that didn't need to worry about cost that he cannot really accept the idea that cost should make any difference under any circumstances.
I mean, this is an extraordinary sort of piece of information to pass on to the to the media that that the interests of the national security elite, the high level officials of the national security state, are so detached from the interests of the American people that he could say that I think is really quite revealing.
Yeah.
And here's the quote.
It's in your article today.
I've spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position.
Gates added, frankly, I can't imagine being part of a nation, part of a government that's being forced to dramatically scale back our engagement with the rest of the world.
And, you know, the end of that is due to economic concerns.
And and wow, really, I mean, you just think how long Gates has been in government lying about the strength of the Soviet Union when he is at the head of the CIA and all this madness going back decades.
It's never occurred to him that there could ever be a monetary limit on the ambitions of the Pentagon and the national security state to do what they think they must.
And the idea that, you know, we're a rich country and we can always just sacrifice other things.
I mean, you know, to the to what's really important.
That is their interest in having this so-called engagement in the rest of the world.
And it sounds like something Hillary Clinton would say, you know, absolutely.
I mean, one of these gaps where they accidentally say the truth.
Yeah.
And I mean, the interesting question here is, you know, if you were able to, you know, feed truth serum to to to Obama and and, you know, ask him the question, do you agree with Bob Gates?
How close would he come to that position?
I don't know the answer, but I mean, it would be an interesting experiment.
Yeah, trillion here, trillion there.
Pretty soon you're talking about real money.
That's right.
That's that's what my old senator, Everett Dirksen from Illinois, used to say.
Yeah, only it was billion back then.
It was billion back then.
But that's no good anymore.
No, I guess not.
All right.
Well, so I'm sorry for asking you the same stuff all the time, but all this makes no sense.
So I try to make sense out of it the best I can.
What is it that Petraeus wants?
They're just going to wage war forever over there.
They're fighting against, what, 10,000 guys and they can't possibly win.
And the more the 10,000 they kill, the more tens of thousands there are and whatever.
And so on it goes.
They can't possibly really create a state there under the rule of Hamid Karzai.
They're going to negotiate with the Taliban based on what?
The theory that the Taliban are going to let us stay there or so.
I don't understand.
What are they even trying to do here?
You're asking the same question, Scott, that should have been asked or and, you know, presumably was being asked in certain quarters about the Lyndon Johnson administration in 1965, 66.
You know, what do you what you expect to get out of this?
You can't possibly defeat the Vietnamese communist movement decisively.
They'll wait you out.
And this is exactly the situation that we face in Afghanistan.
It's such a fundamentally clear reality here that you have to wonder what could possibly be the maximum that, you know, Petraeus and his ilk believe they can accomplish in Afghanistan.
And, you know, one answer that I think probably helps to to understand the mentality of these people, and then I think it applied to to high level officials of the Johnson administration.
And in the case of Vietnam, as it does in the case of Afghanistan, is that they they're hoping for the breaks.
They're hoping that something will break their way.
You know, something unexpected will happen that will give them more purchase, you know, in regard to weakening the Taliban and forcing them to accept U.S. terms than one can foresee at this point.
That's precisely the mentality that was undertaken or that that accompanied the undertaking of the Vietnam War.
If you go back, as I did, and look at the documents, I mean, none of the high level officials of the Johnson administration, certainly not McNamara or Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, really believed that they could prevail militarily in Vietnam.
And yet they, you know, went along with this, supported this policy.
And, you know, they apparently believed that, you know, with all the power the United States has, something surely will break our way.
And so we just hope for the best.
And besides that, it's just it's not acceptable to refuse battle, essentially, is the other side of the picture.
That's just unacceptable for reasons which are related to the astonishing words of Robert Gates.
We're just not used to being a superpower that has to say that we can't accomplish what we set out to do.
Yeah.
It's so funny to hear that out of the mouths of these people who are supposedly the masters of the universe, when so many people in opposition of the policy over the last decade have been warning from the very beginning about the cost of this and the danger that will, you know, follow the fate of the Soviet Union and all these kinds of things.
Right.
And he's just never heard of this before 2011, that there might be a limit to how much money they can print.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is I mean, I think we just have to understand how removed from the reality of the rest of the country the national security state has has become.
Well, as far as, you know, lucky breaks going our way.
So if they drop a bomb on Mullah Omar, does that make any difference?
I read an article maybe a few months ago where they had I forgot who it was.
It must have been somebody good or in Pakistani press, somebody who's actually hanging out with the Taliban, like for real, not just, you know, call these people Taliban, but actual Taliban types.
And they were saying they hadn't heard a word from Mullah Omar in years, but they all still believe in him.
And they're all still fighting anyway.
And for all they know, he's dead.
And it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
Well, I think that's probably true, that even if they captured Mullah Omar or killed Mullah Omar, which I'm sure they would love to do, I mean, Petraeus would just love to have that feather in his cap.
This would not make a fundamental difference.
What does make a fundamental difference is Pashtun Wali, the code of the Pashtun people, which forbids, you know, allowing foreign troops to come in and, you know, treat you and your family with disdain and not have, you know, the Pashtun neighbors and family members take revenge.
Simple as that.
Has been for 10 years now.
All right.
Thanks, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
