07/08/11 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

This free program is paid for by the listener members of KPFK.
If you're not already a member, consider joining with us and keep free speech alive.
For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Introducing Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And we have a lot to talk about.
There's been a lot going on in the world.
I figure we'll start over in Afghanistan.
First of all, there were numerous incidents with civilian casualties this week in Afghanistan, correct?
Right.
There have been at least three strikes by NATO forces this week.
And we also learned that British troops, in an attack that happened a few weeks ago, were responsible for what is so far the first civilian casualties of their drone program.
Now, of course, the U.S. drone program has killed quite a few people, but this is the first time Britain's own rapidly growing drone program has been responsible for killing four civilians.
Well, and tell us about the others as well, please.
Well, the others are in the nation's southeast.
The U.S. killed, estimates are between 11 and 13 people on Tuesday.
And the official report was originally that they were all militants.
And then it was, well, militants and members of their family that were involved.
But then Thursday came along, and in the same tiny little province, we had another strike that killed another 14, including a large number of children.
And the U.S. hasn't said anything yet about that, except that they're looking into it.
Well, was there much reaction on the ground?
Well, there was.
Of course, there's always protesting out of these small villages.
After these attacks, they'll bring the bodies to the provincial capital and march through the streets and complain about the deaths.
And I think the surprising thing, though, is the lack of reaction from Hamid Karzai's office, because usually the Afghan president's really keen on making a big deal about any civilian casualties, because it's a pretty popular issue.
You know, most Afghans are pretty outraged by the fact that this war's been going on 10 years, and they're still not able to avoid killing large numbers of civilians in airstrikes.
And this time, these last few killings, his office has been so far completely quiet about it.
Well, he's got his own problems this week in Parliament, right?
Well, he does, but that's sort of been the case.
Of course, he's got his election issues with Parliament, which still stem from a disastrous parliamentary election.
The 2009 presidential election was called one of the most crooked elections in recent history, and the parliamentary election, which happened a few months later, was dramatically worse, somehow.
So, really, that whole election mess, the real bad part about it is, there really is no good answer for how to solve it, because virtually every candidate is guilty of stuffing the ballot boxes, and some stuffed them better than others, and some got caught, but there weren't a ton of honest candidates that were getting screwed out of seats here, and we really don't have any idea what the actual voters wanted.
Yeah, I mean, their only choices, at least in 2009, were between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who was, at that time, the CIA's pick, right?
And then the only question was, who can rig the election better, and Karzai could.
Right, and there were some other minor candidates that really didn't get any attention, because they weren't in a position to rig the election well enough.
But the parliamentary vote ended up even more ridiculous, because we had situations like a hugely populated Pashtun district having absolutely no representation, because every vote cast there was thrown out as fraudulent, and then other less densely populated ones having one person handpicked by the election commission over the other, even though the evidence of fraud was pretty strong on both sides, just because it was who the election commission decided should be the winner.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about what's going on in Pakistan this week as well?
A major offensive launched up in Waziristan, yeah?
Well, yes, there's been an offensive in Waziristan and in Khurram Agency, which is right next to Waziristan.
But I think the really interesting thing that's going on in Pakistan right now is not so much the offensive as what's going on in Karachi.
The city has been on and off going through some very ugly politically motivated violence between the two major political factions in the city.
You have the MQM, which is sort of the traditional dominant political power there, and then you have the ANP, which is allied with the ruling party, and they've got the support of a lot of Pashtun immigrants coming out of the tribal areas.
And these two sides fairly regularly kill one another.
If there's an election coming up, the campaigners for both sides are pretty safe that a few of them are going to get shot, but in the last few days it's just spiraled completely out of control, and we've got dozens of people being killed every single day.
And President Zardari has announced a shoot-on-sight order for anyone that the military believes is a miscreant involved in this violence, which seems like it's only going to make matters worse, because of course the problem here is that you've got factions shooting each other, and now you're adding the military, which all these soldiers have their own alliances within the city, and they're going to be shooting people now, too.
Now, does Zardari's faction already have a dog in the fight, or he's now joining it?
Oh, he absolutely does, and it's a little more complex than that, because on a provincial basis he's nominally allied with the MQM, but on a national level he's also very closely allied with the ANP, which is one of the few political factions outside of his own that's still backing his government, and the loss of them could be catastrophic for what's already a pretty flimsy civilian government that's constantly at risk of losing a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
Well, and speaking of which, what about the American and Pakistani relationship this week?
Of course, they didn't have to, but the CIA and the intelligence agencies, I guess, decided to leak to the New York Times, again, what everybody already knows, that the ISI murdered our friend Salim Shahzad, and then I know that there was a controversy back and forth about the maintenance of, is it a CIA or a JSOC base inside Pakistan this week?
Well, it's not really clear whose base it is, but it's under the control of some U.S. government organization, and last week Pakistan's defense minister, apparently they've been talking about this for a few months behind the scenes, but he became public with Pakistan's demand that the U.S. leave this airbase in Pakistan, and incredibly enough, less than 24 hours later, the Obama administration just said, no, we're not leaving.
We like this base, we're going to keep it.
And the news has continued this week that the base is still under U.S. control, it's still fully operational, and still conducting drone flights.
Well, where do we stand as far as all the CIA agents and JSOC guys that have been kicked out of the country, their visas denied and all that, do they iron that out and let those guys back in or not?
Well, it hasn't been completely ironed out yet, but it's in the process of being ironed out, because Pakistan's government has promised to give the CIA a whole bunch of extra visas, over 100 extra visas in the near future, but exactly when that's going to happen we don't know.
There's going to be an influx of spies back into the country at some point, presumably in the next month or two.
All right, everybody, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at Antiwar.com, that's news.antiwar.com, and I know there are a lot of developments in Iraq this week, a war that people like to pretend is over, but is not.
Can you give us the latest from there?
The latest from there is that Admiral Michael Mullen announced yesterday that the United States is already in talks with the Maliki government about the terms of continuing the U.S. military presence in the nation beyond December.
Of course, people may remember in the last few months of the Bush administration, there was a status of forces agreement signed with the Iraqi government that the U.S. would keep troops there through the end of 2011 and that all the troops would be out by then.
At the time, of course, President Obama and the other candidates on the Democratic side were saying that, oh, this was way too long and suggesting that they were going to get the troops out sooner.
They never, of course, actually gave concrete dates, but they certainly hinted that they would have the troops out much sooner than that.
And now President Obama is pretty clear on keeping the troops there well beyond this deadline, and the talks are already ongoing for exactly how long and in what fashion they're going to do so.
I wonder whether he thinks he really needs the Americans.
Really the question is, does he need us or Mottad al-Sadr more, isn't it?
Well, it definitely does seem to be the case, and the fact seems to be that he can only have one or the other, not both, which right now he's sort of had the best of both worlds, where he's got the Sadrist faction and all of the political power they wield behind him, and he's also got the United States behind him with 50,000 troops.
But it seems like that's going to come to an end with pretty serious pressure from both sides.
Of course, Mottad al-Sadr has made it clear that if the U.S. is still there on January 1, 2012, when the deadline says they're supposed to be gone, he's going to start calling the Mahdi army back up and getting ready to return to a civil war and trying to expel the U.S.
But at the same time, the U.S. is saying they're not too happy with Maliki being so close to Iran, and they're not too happy with Iran having so much influence in the country, which, of course, isn't a real surprise, because Maliki's faction, as well as the Sadr faction, both have strong ties to Iran.
Many of those people have been in exile in Iran before the U.S. invaded, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to the Americans that they maintain ties with Iran years later.
But it seems like the U.S. is demanding, in essence, that Maliki break off his relationship with the Sadr faction, which might not be politically sustainable for him, and in fact probably wouldn't be, because he's already made pretty serious enemies with the Iraqi faction, which is the Sunni-dominated faction in Iraq.
Prime Minister Maliki's sort of stuck between Iraq and a hard place here, and whichever side he goes with, it seems like he's going to have an awful lot to deal with in the next year.
Well, now, Americans have been killed in some violence over there recently.
Are the headlines right, that these attacks basically are attributable to the Sadrists, and then further, that must mean that the Iranians are behind it?
Well, I think they're jumping to a lot of conclusions.
Most of these attacks are happening in Shiite-controlled areas.
They're happening probably by militias that are Shiite in nature.
Whether you can jump from that to concluding that Sadr is directly behind it isn't clear, and the conclusion beyond that, that this is the Iranian government somehow, seems just completely far-fetched, because despite Admiral Mullen's claim that they have proof, the only evidence they've presented is that some of the weapons that these militias are using contain some parts that you could buy in Iran.
Now, that may well be the case, but Iran's a big country, and those are some pretty big borders between those two countries.
I think drawing the conclusion that this is direct Iranian government intervention in this war, as opposed to just commerce across borders, seems a little bit far-fetched.
Right.
I mean, even if it really did have just a made-in-Iran stamp on it, it still means it could have come through the black market in 600 directions.
Absolutely.
I mean, Iran is not this big, giant megalith that is all one agency operating as a single entity.
There are a lot of militant factions in Iran that don't like the Iranian government that might get involved in it as well.
And plenty of businessmen, too, in and outside of government and their ties, their circles.
Right.
I think it probably bears repeating, doesn't it, Jason, that throughout the history of the Iraq War, on the Shiite side, Muqtada al-Sadr was always the most nationalist of the Shia leaders.
It was the Supreme Islamic Council, the al-Hakim family, and the Dawah Party of Nouri al-Maliki.
They were the guys who were really the Iraqi traitors who lived in Iran for 30 years.
I don't know if it was Maliki himself who was in exile in Europe instead of Iran, but much of the Dawah Party was in Iran.
And they always pushed for a strong Federalist system, and it was Muqtada al-Sadr who always was the Iraqi nationalist first.
Right, and the Dawah Party's position has mostly gotten its way in Iraq.
We see that Federalist system in place today.
We see close ties between the Maliki government and the Iranian government.
And that's sort of the other issue with all these U.S. claims of Iranian meddling, is that we simply don't see a motive here, other than some vague assertion that Iran is keen to kill some U.S. troops, which may or may not be the case.
But why would they kill them in Iraq when they're on good terms with the Iraqi government, and that violence is only going to destabilize what's already virtually a puppet state?
Indeed.
I think the only explanation is that they want to help the Americans with their public relations.
They're trying to deny that they fought this entire war just to turn it over to the Ayatollahs in Iran.
What a nice thing for them to do.
It must be part of that faction fight between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.
All right, so one more thing on Iraq news here, Jason, other than all the violence and everything that's going on there.
There was a threat from Nouri al-Maliki, a warning of bloodshed, if some of the Sunni areas or Sunni political factions left the government or threatened to secede from the Iraqi state.
Can you elaborate on that, please?
Right, and these comments have come out of the Iraqi Sunni faction over the past several weeks.
Parliament Speaker Osama al-Najafi has repeatedly said that he doesn't think that the Maliki government is giving the nation's Sunni minority a fair shake, and he's talked about using the threat of secession not so much as a serious threat to actually do it, but as a way of guaranteeing that the government can't just ignore their demands.
And he's also put out there the idea of trying to form a semi-autonomous Sunni region, much like the Kurds have in the north, as another alternative that's a little short of secession, and Prime Minister Maliki has said that if either of these goes through, the areas are going to be drenched in blood up to their knees, I believe was his exact phrasing, and that this simply wasn't going to happen.
That's like when Andrew Jackson threatened to invade South Carolina, it sounds like.
Well, and back to the point of what a great job General Petraeus did in helping the Iranian-backed factions win their civil war against the Sunni Iraqis.
The best that they can threaten now is to try to secede from the Union, never to try to take back Baghdad.
Well, right, and of course, that probably seems like a perfectly rational solution for a lot of Sunnis, but that last election last year, the Sunni faction won.
They won the biggest plurality, and they ended up with virtually no important positions in the government.
So there doesn't seem to be a political future, at least right now, for the country's Sunni Arab minority.
The Shiites are more or less able to dominate the government with some nominal support from the Kurdistan region, but it seems like for the Sunni Arabs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to remain in a country that's going to be a Shiite-dominated country.
Well, they ought to bide their time.
It sounds to me like there's a major fight on the Shia side ready to break out, and they could find their hand worth a lot more in this game.
Well, that might well happen, too.
Of course, the U.S., after the last election, was trying to get Maliki in bed with the Sunni faction to cut the Sadrists out of the government, which I guess would have felt better from the U.S. perspective, because it would be both major religions seriously involved in the government.
But the Maliki faction, the Dawa party, the whole state of Lombok is a religious Shiite faction, and the Sadrists trend and the Iraqi National Alliance are a Shiite religious faction, so it was sort of inevitable that the two would be on the same side.
All right.
Now, let's talk about some more wars America's losing in the world here, Jason.
Let's talk about Somalia, and first of all, the drone strikes, and then maybe this secret imprisonment of this so-called al-Shabaab leader.
Okay, well, of course the U.S. has had drones flying over Somalia for quite some time now, but it's just now that they're at least admitting to the fact that they're launching drone strikes in Somalia before it was officially all just surveillance, and there have been some attacks that have been unofficially attributed to the U.S., but now they're confirming that the U.S. is just launching drone strikes into Somalia.
Well, and they claim that they're going after leaders of this group al-Shabaab.
What's al-Shabaab, Jason?
Al-Shabaab is a religious opposition faction.
They're an insurgent group that basically cropped up after Ethiopia invaded Somalia a few years ago.
Of course, the U.S. endorsed the Ethiopian invasion as a way of propping up this transitional government that elected itself in Kenya and decided that it was the official government of Somalia, and after they got thrown out of Kenya for not paying their hotel bills, they decided to come to Somalia and try to take it over.
They didn't really get very far, so Ethiopia invaded and tried to prop them up.
And of course there were already some sort of religious groups, the Islamic Courts Union and people like that, that had sort of quasi-governments of their own.
It was really more just a court system than a full-fledged government, though.
And in the face of this massive invasion from Ethiopia, it riled up a lot of people.
It got a lot of people joining extremist factions to fight against the invaders.
And so now, after all these years of war and this brand-new religious-based insurgent group al-Shabaab and its rise, how's the war going?
How far has this transitional federal government extended its reach over Somalia?
Well, they've taken over a couple of extra city blocks inside the capital city over the past six months.
Oh, that's pretty good.
They're up to two city blocks now.
Right.
They had a couple of city blocks basically around the presidential palace.
They've expanded that to add a couple of more blocks deeper into the city.
So they're on the verge of taking over part of the largest food market in the capital city.
This is, of course, with the help of the African Union and with the heavy bombardments of the marketplace, which is constantly killing large numbers of civilians.
But as far as taking over the entire country, of course, it's ridiculous to think that this would-be government is ever going to do anything like that.
Well, and so this drone strike program, is it really an attempt to- I mean, has the empire convinced itself that, uh-oh, there's, you know, scary al-Qaeda in Somalia and we have to shoot drones at it?
Or is this just part of the proxy war trying to help this bogus government take over the country?
It's not really clear to me what they hope to accomplish because, of course, this drone program isn't going to make a serious difference on the ground, much as the massive airstrike campaign in Libya isn't making a serious difference on the ground.
It's just killing people and not really accomplishing anything to speak of.
Well, I mean, then again, I think in both places probably all it's accomplishing is solidifying support for the people who are being bombed.
Sort of the same kind of thing in Yemen.
If we hadn't been drone striking them throughout this Arab Spring there, he probably would not be in as bad a trouble as he's in, Saleh the dictator over there.
And it seems like, you know, some of these pro-Qaddafi protests in western Libya would say the same thing.
I mean, what's the average Somali to do when robots are flying around killing people but join up the resistance?
Oh, absolutely.
And I think when I'm trying to guess what the U.S. reasoning for launching these drone strikes are, I can't even fathom what they hope to accomplish because they're not going to accomplish anything except for what they've accomplished in Pakistan and Yemen, which is to make the situation much, much worse.
Well, and we're real short on time here, but I wanted to ask you real briefly about the Libya war.
I saw that the rebels were getting close to Tripoli.
Does it look to you like the rebels in Libya stand a chance of being able to sack the capital city there?
No, I don't think this is going to be a...
Although at one point I thought the rebels had a good chance of just taking over the whole country.
This was months ago before NATO even got involved.
It seems like both sides are pretty well dug in and have relative support among their local populations, and I don't think a bunch of tribesmen from southwest Libya, just because they suddenly got a bunch of French weapons, are going to be welcomed with open arms marching north into the capital city and are going to be able to take it over.
Well, and we don't have time to go through all the ups and downs in the Congress, but the one positive event is that at least arms and money for the rebels was banned in the House of Representatives this week, right?
Right, right.
The coal amendment to the Defense Funding Act, which passed today and is now the latest in a long line of largest military spending bills in the history of humankind.
Yeah, another $650 billion passed today.
Right, and it was, what, a $15 billion increase over the last one?
That's what they say.
Something like that.
It's an increase, certainly.
The last one was the biggest ever, and this one's a little bigger, so once again we've got the biggest military budget ever.
Yeah, as much as the whole rest of the world combined.
Roughly as much, yes.
All right, well, job security for you, bud.
All right, everybody, that's Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com for all his original articles.
Thanks so much for your time, Jason.
Sure, thanks for having me.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this week.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 o'clock here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Of course, all the archives are available at Antiwar.com/radio.