Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Michael Hastings.
His piece, The Runaway General in Rolling Stone, a little more than a year ago, cost the general at the time, Stanley McChrystal, his job running that war.
That was a year ago, right, Michael?
About a year ago, almost to this day.
There you go.
Award-winning piece.
Very good piece.
Not just because it quotes Stanley McChrystal in ways that got him in trouble, but there's all kinds of substance in that piece that I think people ought to really know about, most important of which, I think, is that the American soldiers over there know as well as you and I do that that war is a bunch of bogus nonsense and it's going nowhere and that they're accomplishing nothing.
Am I right?
That was the biggest takeaway for me.
In fact, outside of what the top brass sort of was saying, that was considered very disrespectful, you had these guys on the ground who basically felt that all their efforts were going to waste.
And we've seen that.
And it was sort of the kind of morale, like it was a low point in morale, I believe, in the course of the war.
I had never seen, after all, I've been covering these wars for five years, and that was about the lowest point in morale I'd seen with American soldiers.
And now, it wasn't just that, well, we don't like this coin doctrine, right?
Were they making the case that if only they could do it their way, that they would win, no problem?
Not necessarily.
I think at this stage of the game, anyone who's spent any time over there realizes that this effort to try to nation-build is somewhat a complete waste of time.
Now, part of it is that, yeah, they would like, if they're going to be there, they want to be able to shoot who they want to shoot and bomb who they want to bomb.
But even that, there's not much confidence that that's going to create anything kind of stable or acceptable to the West in the long run.
All right, now, I want to ask you about Iraq, really.
Sure.
Well, jeez, as long as I'm on Afghanistan, people, you should know, Michael spent years and years covering both of these wars in-country.
And, jeez, I guess I wonder whether you could give us your take just on the relative power of the Karzai government versus the Taliban, so-called Taliban resistance or whatever insurgency, the effect of the surge.
Are we making progress?
Are we making progress?
Because, after all, the Army and the Marines, they can put firepower on targets and destroy things.
Sure.
So I don't want to underestimate their ability to, you know, assuming they can find the ones they're looking for to kill them, you know, maybe they can win this thing.
Sure.
Well, win, I mean, win is always, you know, look, we know that American forces, concentrated in these areas in Afghanistan, can stabilize things for a short period of time.
I mean, and as they should, I mean, look at it this way, we have billions of dollars, we're spending a million dollars per soldier over there to do this when the Taliban guy has, you know, an AK-47 and, you know, manure and wood that he makes bombs with.
I mean, we vastly, we're spending so much more money than, and we're so much better trained that, yes, we can kind of accomplish these kind of short-term tactical things.
And we have seen that to a certain degree over the past year, where there's been a lot of American troops, violence has, oh, actually, it's kind of interesting, they claim there's progress in these areas, and they pinpoint to sort of violence going down, certain kinds of violence going down, but overall violence is up.
The question is, if there's been this progress, why does the violence continue to rise?
Only recently, I think it was General Petraeus recently said violence was down 5% off last year, something like that.
That's the first time they put a number to it, and that's significant because, look, if there was a real drop in violence that they could point to, they would be putting these numbers in our faces all the time, but there hasn't been.
And this has been going on two years of this new surge strategy.
So, yeah, there's definitely no question that in small pockets of the country, when enough U.S. troops are there, they can make the Taliban run to other parts of the country, but that's not, it doesn't seem to be sustainable.
And I don't think anyone really thinks it's very sustainable, even the people on the ground over there.
Well, does it even entail actually bringing the Kabul government out to the land that they stabilize and trying to keep it there at all at this point?
I mean, how does that work?
Well, that's what they're trying.
I mean, in Kandahar, I was in Kandahar in December, and I interviewed the mayor of the city there.
And he swore that this summer was going to be less violent than the last summer, and that doesn't look like it's going to be true.
But yeah, you have this mayor who's a technocrat, he's a guy who really doesn't have too much power.
You know, the West has kind of put him in there to kind of do this government-in-a-box thing, when that's not the real power.
You know, the real power is going to work itself out through different tribal affiliations, different drug-running networks, different warlords and military commanders who are on the ground there.
Maybe they're not Taliban, but they're also very closely linked to Taliban as well.
So yeah, I think we've almost even given up on the idea that Kabul is going to be this strong central government.
And in fact, we've moved to this idea that everyone's going to have their own kind of little warlord fiefdom, and then somehow, you know, we're going to pretend that they're part of this larger Afghanistan government.
But that's not actually what's going on.
What's going on is we're empowering warlords, empowering drug dealers, empowering, you know, the occasional maybe Western technocrat, empowering corrupt businessmen, to let them kind of do their things.
And just as long as, you know, they can say they're not Taliban, then that's good enough for us.
Well, I don't know if you saw this one in, oh, it was two days ago in the Wall Street Journal.
Panetta slips up on troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Leon Panetta, on his first day here as U.S. Defense Secretary, made what appeared to be his first big policy announcement, the U.S. would keep 70,000 troops in the country until the end of 2014, when the Afghans are scheduled to assume full responsibility for security.
Turned out to be his first major public gaffe in his new job.
We're going to have 70,000 there through 2014.
And obviously, as we get to 2014, we'll develop a plan as to how we reduce that force at that time, for at least the next two years, we're going to have a pretty significant force in place to try to deal with the challenges we face.
Seems a little bit inconsistent from what the president promised us just, what, a week and a half ago or something?
Right.
The president promised us that there'd be 68,000 by the end of 2012.
But, you know, it was a gaffe, but it was also what the Pentagon has wanted this entire time.
The Pentagon has wanted 70,000 troops there until 2014.
So though it was, you know, they're saying, oh, no, there's no difference between the Pentagon and the White House's policy, it was sort of one of these Freudian flips where, in fact, the Pentagon had been pushing hard to keep that many troops there for that long.
I mean, you know, I've gotten to a point, I have to say, listening to President Obama's speech, I was surprised that he even was going to bring, start withdrawing a number of troops.
He is withdrawing.
And the fact that he even said the tide of war is receding, even if that's just rhetoric, that to me was sort of shocking.
And I think my analysis of it is that rather than fighting 10 more years in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon wants, you know, Obama is shoring the war to maybe just only five more years of pretty significant fighting.
So, you know, but I guess when you get just sort of thrown scraps, doesn't take much to do.
I was just so shocked that he would even say the wars are coming to an end.
Well, you know, Gareth Porter said it sounds to him, the way he calculated out or whatever, was that the Pentagon got 80 percent of what they wanted in Obama's speech, and now here they are going, well, we're taking the other 30 percent too.
Who's zooming who here?
Come on.
Yeah, well, and I think there will be a fight for each one of those.
I mean, look at Iraq, you know.
We were told that by the end of 2012, which is, let's see, we are in July, by December 2012 there will be zero combat troops in Iraq.
There are now 47,000.
And we were told that, and now they're saying there's going to be 10,000, we're going to keep 10,000 there, or maybe even 20,000.
So, you know, you can't put much faith in these numbers, especially when you're talking the difference of 10,000 and 20,000.
I mean, the main thing is how credible are those numbers, and will the White House be able to continue the political pressure to actually keep the Pentagon sticking to its timeline of withdrawal?
I mean, because remember, the Pentagon has moved this bar before.
When they originally sold Obama on the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009, they promised that it would all be done in 18 months.
Okay, we're 18 months later, and now they're promising, oh no, they just need one more year.
So I don't have much faith in their numbers.
That being said, I would find it, I think it's almost politically impossible for Obama, or if he loses, if it was someone else, to escalate again in Afghanistan.
I don't think that's possible.
But I could see a scenario where there are 70,000 troops until 2014, or maybe 60,000.
You know, it's going to be something like that.
Because like I said, they're going to do it.
Sure.
The variable here is that Cambodia next door to our Vietnam and Afghanistan, and that's Pakistan.
Right.
The border's picking right back up on the border again, as just Raimondo's pointing out in his column today.
More and more demonization of the Pakistanis.
They must have been hiding Osama bin Laden from us, and all this kind of thing.
Withholding money and fighting over CIA and JSOC inside their country and all these things.
So that's a pretty big why in this equation, isn't it?
Yeah.
And there's certainly the war in that we've been fighting in Pakistan has been this sort of war in slow motion.
I mean, I've always wanted to go over and do the story about the not-so-secret war in Pakistan.
And one of the problems with doing that story is that it seems it's so incremental that at one point at the tipping point do we sort of acknowledge actually we're in a pretty serious war in Afghanistan.
For sure, I mean, in terms of military bases, they're going to want to keep the military bases in Afghanistan for as long as they can in case they want to bomb Pakistan.
That's pretty obvious.
And that's implied.
We're building this one new military base right down on the border of Pakistan in the south of the country, and that seems to be the kind of implication behind that.
Maybe that's conspiratorial, but it's also been pretty clear in terms of comments that the senior officials in the White House have made.
It's basically saying, you know, if Pakistan's linked in another terrorist attack, we're going to bomb them to the stone age.
And then it's also peculiar.
You had Admiral Mullen, who's retiring in a couple months, he's the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointing the finger at the Pakistani intelligence services for killing a Pakistani journalist, which, again, this is a guy which just shows how far our relationship has fallen with Pakistan, that you had the guy who was Pakistan's biggest booster within the administration, Mullen, who would, you know, brag about his great relationship he had with these Pakistani military leaders.
Once he has publicly turned against Pakistan, then, yes, I think that makes it much easier to justify any sort of significant future military action against Pakistan.
Well, you'd like to think.
I mean, basically what we're talking about here is the difference between a war inside Pakistan with the permission of the Pakistani military leadership and their, you know, so-called Mr. Ten Percent over their civilian government there, versus a war against the state of Pakistan, which would be absolute madness, and a war on order of magnitudes that, you know, I wouldn't know how to count them, different and worse than what we have now.
Sure, and how do we avoid that tipping point?
You know, when you're launching, you know, airstrikes, essentially, drone strikes, you know, drone strikes are airstrikes.
I mean, when you're launching, you know, 30 airstrikes against a country, inside a country, I mean, that's a pretty significant, you know, military escalation, but you're exactly right.
At what point do we stop becoming at, are we at war within Pakistan versus at war with Pakistan?
And I think we've been sort of inching up to that boundary for quite a while now.
And you're going to, as you said, in terms of how it impacts Afghanistan, you know, exactly, it's going to be this justification that we can't actually ever leave Afghanistan because, you know, we're worried about Pakistan.
And that's been the sort of strange logic of the entire war, which is that in order to save Pakistan, you have to save Afghanistan.
In order to save Afghanistan, you have to save Pakistan.
I mean, it's very, very strange.
The thing is, you know, I mean, obviously it's a very complicated situation inside Pakistan between different factions inside the military and inside their intelligence services and whatever.
But, I mean, all things being equal, we couldn't have possibly, our empire, couldn't have possibly asked for better cooperation from them.
I mean, yeah, it's true, supposedly, that they support the insurgency in Afghanistan to some degree, but that's only because we're trying to surround them with the Indians and the Northern Alliance, which is completely against their interests.
We're basically making them do it, but they let us wage whatever war we want inside their country.
They launch civil war invasions of the Swat Valley or Waziristan or whatever whenever we say so.
And it's just amazing to me that they think that any war against the Pakistani military, any turning on the government of Pakistan itself, would in any way improve the situation inside Afghanistan or anywhere.
It would certainly be hell on earth inside Pakistan.
Yeah, and the Pakistani army has lost more soldiers fighting militants on our behalf.
And their behalf as well than we have in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, and you look at Faisal Shahzad who tried to blow up the Times Square thing.
He did it as a direct result of, you know, here's this Pakistani American who likes being an American, who's got a good job and a wife and a house and all these things.
He goes to Pakistan to visit family, and he sees drone strikes.
And he joins up the war on the other side and comes back and tries to blow up Times Square.
That wasn't the Pakistani military waged an attack against us.
That's just blowback by a civilian.
Yeah, and it's not like we're going to go invade Connecticut to get them.
You know what I mean?
No, I think it's clear.
And I just wrote a recent essay for Rolling Stone after bin Laden was killed.
And I think my takeaway from all of that was that it's clear that our entire strategy, grand strategy of the past decade has been a failure.
And it's so obvious that of the trillions we've spent, of the tens of thousands of lives lost, we have not accomplished what we said we were going to accomplish, which is defeat terrorism, which is probably not possible.
And then when we actually have sort of degraded these al-Qaeda networks and whatnot, we still say, well, there's still another decade's worth of stuff to do.
Well, not only that, but they failed on their ulterior motives, too.
I mean, Lockheed made a bunch of money or whatever, but hey, they handed the south of Iraq over to Iran, which really I'm going to beg you now to stay in this segment with me and talk about Iraq.
They didn't even accomplish.
The neocon fifth columnists inside the Pentagon completely failed to benefit Israel and to get a Hashemite king for Iraq, which is what they were after.
Even the sort of economic motives have not really panned out.
That is truly, truly bizarre.
We haven't even got the oil from Iraq.
Yeah, and the Israelis now have Iran increased in power by one third, just to their east there.
Yeah, and Iran is clearly not going to back down.
I mean, there's another country.
The arc of instability has not been helped by our presence there, but Iran certainly is another country we're on a closing course with.
Well, and back on Pakistan, real quick to wrap up before we end this segment, and I beg you again to stay on for one more to talk about Iraq.
Is this not all about the Israelis are scared of what they call the Islamic bomb and they want the neocons in America and the pro-Israel factions in America, they're the ones who are trying to push us into a conflict with the Pakistanis.
They want us to use that contingency plan they say they got to seize their nukes.
Yeah, I mean, I could see something like that happening.
As for the motives of it, I don't, you know, I'm sure that's a part of it.
Like any of these things, there's a lot of interest that benefit from, you know, to wage war far away from our own backyard.
All right, now, so are you down with staying in one more segment with me, please?
Sure.
Okay, great.
So it's Michael Hastings, everybody, from Rolling Stone magazine.
He covered the Iraq and Afghan wars, still does, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is chaosradioaustin.org and lrn.fm.
And we're talking with Michael Hastings from Rolling Stone magazine, now about Iraq.
Tell me, Michael, everything's going great, and just like in The Promise, the war is over, and already all the combat forces are out, and now just whoever's left, they're going to be out by the end of the year, and hooray for Barack Obama, right?
It's something close to that.
We've had the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers, I believe it was last month, the deadliest month in over two years.
We've had regular catastrophic terrorist attacks.
I got a security report recently that said violence was significantly up in terms of bombings, assassinations, those sorts of things.
We have the government of Maliki, Prime Minister Nouriel Maliki, promising to fill the, I believe something along the lines of fill the streets with blood if the western Anbar province decides to exercise any independent rights.
So, yeah, things are going along.
Oh, yeah, and Maqtada al-Sadr has promised to start killing more Americans if we decide to stay after the end of the year.
And isn't Panetta there, on his way there, something to twist arms, to invite us to stay longer, too?
Yeah, exactly.
He said they should make their damn minds up or something along those lines.
Oh, he's just sick and tired of waiting around, huh?
He's sick and tired of waiting around for the Iraqis to make up their minds, which is a familiar, actually, response that most Americans have experienced as well, trying to force the Iraqis to do things that may or may not be for their interest.
All right, well, so I've got to ask you, then, right now, to read Nouriel Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister's mind, and tell us what's going to happen there on that question.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, look, we've been writing about this for years, that the fact that the Iraqi security forces are going to need a significant backing from the American military for the next decade.
And Maliki wants, as long as Maliki can keep, you know, power and support from U.S. troops there, he's going to want to keep that.
But, you know, he is under pressure to sort of pretend that the Americans are gone.
I mean, I think, in the end, he's going to cut some kind of deal.
They won't call them troops.
I mean, they already called them advisers.
They'll call them even, I don't know, smaller advisers or support troops or something like that.
But I suspect that Maliki is not going to want all the Americans to leave.
He just has to figure out a way to sell that to Stoddard.
Right.
That's the guy who's got to get fooled, right?
And if he's not fooled, then what?
What I think is going to happen is that we will end up keeping 10,000 there, and Maliki will look the other way while Stoddard, you know, attacks them.
You know, I can't see a big crackdown happening on the Muqtada al-Sadr's followers because, A, they support Maliki's government.
You know, the reason Maliki is prime minister again, big reason, is because the Sadrites supported him.
So what I think, again, this is my read of it, is that Maliki is totally willing to accept Maliki doesn't care if Americans are getting killed or if Stoddard's just attacking the Americans.
I mean, that's not a concern of his.
So that's what I think will happen.
They just, you know, will stay and, you know, will allow Maliki to let Stoddard kind of attack Americans.
Well, but here's the thing.
If Stoddard starts up this war, then he's going to really mean it, right?
It's not just going to be attacks here and there.
It's going to be their very best effort to kick our guys out once and for all, no?
Well, I suppose that's a possibility.
I wouldn't, I don't know if he would go that far.
I think Maliki has enough power with his security forces that I don't think they would want to get to that point.
I don't think Stoddard wants to push it to that point.
Like the Iraqis themselves are so sick of violence that he would lose a lot of popularity really, really quickly if he really ratcheted things up to a level that we saw earlier.
And I think with the strength of, you know, Maliki's military can't defend themselves from Iran, allegedly, or Syria or other things, but they've gotten pretty good at, you know, killing other Iraqis.
So that's why I think it's more of a game of chicken.
And I wouldn't, I know Stoddard's very serious.
You know, Stoddard's been calling for Americans to leave for, you know, for 10 years now, and they haven't left, and he's still sort of managed to play in the political process.
Right, well, and I guess he wouldn't even really have to wage a full-scale insurgency.
He could just withdraw support from Maliki.
He could withdraw support from Maliki.
He could just continue his sort of guerrilla attacks on Americans.
There's all sorts of things that he can do to retain sort of his credibility among his followers and not necessarily get what he wants.
But it's that, I mean, I'm… You don't have to change Maliki's mind that he's going to lose the whole Sotiris block if he lets us stay?
I mean, I can see you're right.
Obviously, it's nice to have American JSOC guys doing your killing for you because they're better at it and got the money and whatever.
But still, if on the other side of that equation is he's going to lose a third of the parliament, then what's he going to do?
I think at the end of the day, you know, as long as he has the Americans there, that's always his ace in the hole in terms of power and stability, and that trumps, you know, electoral politics any day for these guys.
So that would be my… Maliki Democracy, they've sold us so well.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, when you have Maliki threatening, like, half his country that he's going to wipe them out if they want to secede or at least exercise their independence, and while he's, you know, shooting down protesters in the streets, I don't know, maybe we need to get NATO to intervene to protect his people from him.
Well, and you know what, speaking of the Anbar province and all that, I mean, obviously the Sunni-based insurgency lost the civil war, got kicked out of Baghdad and had to basically regroup for a while and all that, and they're probably not in any position to try to even retake Baghdad for another couple, few hundred years or something, but I wonder to what degree the Iraqi army and, you know, police forces and so forth have actually been able to extend into the Anbar province and be the monopoly government there.
Well, I don't think they have.
Yeah, I mean, the last time I was there, again, I think in January, and it's all, you know, Baghdad does not control Anbar very well.
I mean, the irony of the entire, I mean, a dark irony for sure, is that the Anbar provinces, the western provinces, had always been sort of pseudo-independent from Baghdad itself, and there was a brief period of time where we went in and wiped out the traditional power structure, and then Al-Qaeda in Iraq, you know, filled that vacuum, and then we went out and finally, you know, tried to wipe them out, what was this sort of bloody anomaly, and now it's just kind of going back to how it's always been, which is that Anbar does its own thing, but yeah, there's no central government control over Anbar, at least not very much of it.
Well, hell, as long as we're traveling around the map, then what about Kirkuk and the always upcoming vote on whether Kirkuk is a Kurdish city or an Arab one?
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is going to be one of those long-standing issues that, I mean, I think my prediction, my long-run prediction is that eventually, you know, there's going to be such a thing as Kurdistan.
There kind of already is now in Iraq.
What happens with those cities, I don't know if that is going to ever flare up into a full-blown, you know, war.
I just think there's too much at stake for a lot of people to lose.
But yeah, I mean, that's one of the justifications, certainly, that the military is using for saying, oh, we have to prevent a civil war there.
We've been overseeing a low-level civil war and ethnic cleansing of Kirkuk for this whole time.
Yeah, exactly.
So I think what you're going to have is a lot of these issues that are just going to be simmering on as they have been for years and years to come, and they'll barely make the headlines.
Yeah, well, they'll be on this show because you'll be here.
Thank you very much, Michael.
Appreciate it.
Michael Hastings, everybody.
Thanks, Adam.
I appreciate it.
