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 the great Jason Ditz, our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
That's good, man.
I appreciate you joining us today.
I'm doing alright.
Teach me about Afghanistan.
What's going on over there these days, anyway?
Victory?
Well, it depends who you listen to.
If you listen to the Pentagon, certainly the tide has turned and everything is going to be great in a few years.
Well, that sounds good.
Although it depends how many years on who you're listening to.
But the reality, of course, is that the level of violence in Afghanistan is still enormous.
We just had a massive death toll in August, and yesterday, well, not yesterday, but late the night before, over the weekend, a bombing at a military base in Wardak province.
Right, at an American military base.
Is that right?
Right.
Yeah.
And this was five Afghans dead, another 108 people, 77 of them U.S. troops were wounded, you write, at news.antiwar.com.
Right.
And this was a forward operating base that was in the middle of a town in Wardak province.
The Taliban drove a truckload of explosives up to the front gate and detonated it.
It's really incredible that there weren't more people killed, because they said the force of the blast did damage to some 100 shops in a nearby marketplace.
Jeez, you know, that sounds like a Beirut type situation.
Put him out there, and then, you know, I guess if he's at the checkpoint, that's the explanation, right?
He was right at the point where they would have stopped him.
They went ahead and blew up that point.
Right, but in this case, the checkpoint was right in front of the base, so it didn't really do any good.
I guess it kept him from getting inside, but...
It's kind of the war on terrorism in a nutshell, isn't it?
Make a bunch of enemies and then do nothing to protect the people that are the targets of the enemies.
Oh, man, all right, well, I mean, this really, this means something, right?
This indicates something, or it's just a thing that happened?
I mean, is this part of a trend that things are just getting worse and worse, and the Taliban's getting stronger and stronger?
Or, eh, maybe they just got lucky this one time.
Well, this is definitely a trend.
Of course there's always the claim from officials that this was an isolated incident, but you combine enough isolated incidents and you have a pattern, so the reality is there have been a lot of pre-major attacks on U.S. and NATO troops across Afghanistan over the past, well, over the past several years, and they're not really slowing down in any meaningful manner.
Well, they're getting into Kabul these days, too, right?
Occasionally attack, there was that hotel attack, what, a month ago?
Right.
And elaborate about that a little bit, because that was a big deal.
It's just one of many attacks around all of Afghanistan.
But, I mean, how many people were killed?
Was it high-level politicians and, you know, this was, what, like the biggest, the most ritzy Western hotel in Baghdad kind of thing, or, I mean, in Kabul?
Right, it was the Intercontinental Hotel.
I don't know exactly how many it ended up being.
It was several people that were killed, and it was a popular hotel for Western officials.
I mean, that to me has a little bit of that Ted Offensive flavor to it, right, where, no, they can't defeat NATO on the ground.
I mean, ultimately, we can carpet bomb them off the face of the earth if it comes to that.
So, no, it's not like the Americans can be defeated.
But they just cannot win this thing.
After years and years and years, if the VC and the NVA can wage Ted at all, that means that none of the things they said about how well the war was going up until then were true.
And that's kind of the same thing here.
If the Taliban can get into Kabul, if they can get into our military bases and blow people up like this and wage attacks like this, that doesn't sound like they're on the run, like in the propaganda.
Right, and incredibly, both sides, both NATO and the Taliban, are predicting imminent victory here.
They're both saying that the other side is on the run, they're going to have this cleared up shortly, although they never give a real date.
But the reality, of course, is that neither side is close to a victory.
NATO seems determined to continue occupying this country no matter what the cost, and that probably means that it's going to continue until it outright bankrupts a lot of the member nations.
But NATO certainly isn't winning either.
Well, you know, I don't think you and I had a chance to speak about this, but I think you wrote about this.
A few weeks back there were a spate of stories about how they were basically just calling off all the so-called State Department rebuilding and civilian reconstruction and civil society building efforts after that was supposedly the basis of the counterinsurgency doctrine, was to clear hold and build so that these people can come in and build up this westernized Afghan state.
They've basically thrown in the towel on that, am I right?
Well, they haven't really thrown in the towel on it.
I mean, they're still stealing the money, but...
Right.
The money's still going, it's just not...
Although I guess realistically it wasn't doing any good before, because most of it was either being stolen or spent on projects that nobody in Afghanistan wanted anyway.
But now they're pretty much just stealing the money outright.
There is very little expectation that it's actually going to accomplish anything anymore.
Well, I mean, and that's really a big deal.
I mean, I don't know, maybe I should watch the Lara News Hour, because I just assume that they just don't discuss that, like, hey, guess what?
The second major pillar of the entire excuse for escalating the war there has crumbled.
And now there's only the one excuse, which is training up an army that could never afford its own existence, building up a central state and just a military force that could never last without us supporting it anyway.
Because that's the only pillar of this so-called coin doctrine left standing at this point, basically.
And it is, and even that isn't going very well, because we have these reports that desertion levels in both the police and the army are just soaring.
I mean, they were already ridiculously high to the point where you were having double-digit percentages of people defecting in a given year.
But now they're getting to the point where it's like a quarter of their recruits are gone within six months.
It's really incredible.
And Afghanistan's military chief of staff blamed it on the fact that Karzai isn't enforcing the laws against defecting.
Well, and by that defense minister, you're referring to General Dostum?
No, this was the army chief of staff.
I'm not sure his name, but it's not Dostum.
Yeah, Dostum's subordinate then, yeah.
But of course, the reason a lot of people are willing to join the Afghan military is because you can just leave.
It really is sort of a temp job, in a sense.
Well, it sounds like the Taliban would be fools if they weren't sending all of their new recruits to go join the army, get a little bit of boot camp and some boots and a rifle, and then come back.
And that certainly does happen a lot.
Yeah, it's not just deserters, it's actual Taliban doing this, you said.
Right, it's both.
But in the agricultural communities around Afghanistan, a lot of people would join the military, take off when it's harvest season and never come back.
Amazing.
All right, everybody, it's Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Just make it one of your homepages in your tabs.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and since I know that most people that listen to this show don't hear the whole show, but just the interview podcast from Antiwar.com, I want to go ahead and say for this part of the show, in the middle of this interview so people will get a chance to hear it, that I had a great time at the Liberty Fest in New York City over the weekend, and I was very happy to meet all the fans of the show who came up and said hi and whatever.
It was really great to see everybody and to put some faces to the ears that I imagine are out there.
So thanks a lot for having me, and it was awesome.
Never seen the Statue of Liberty before except on TV.
It was really cool.
All right.
So now back to Jason Ditz, our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And, hey, if you people like me so much, then you ought to be just like me and have one of your homepage tabs open up to news.antiwar.com.
That's what you need.
He's got it all for you right there.
Like this, for example.
Watch this.
What's going on in Pakistan these days, Jason?
Oh, the same thing that's always going on in Pakistan.
More drone strikes, more violence in Karachi, and recently some pretty major suicide bombings in Quetta.
All right.
Well, let's do them in order there.
Talk about the drone strikes.
Where?
That's up in Waziristan and the federally administered tribal areas?
North Waziristan got its, I think it's its 40th drone strike of the year, which is 55 nationwide.
It killed five people.
Four of them were people they were apparently targeting in a pickup truck, but they also knocked down a house that was near where they hit the pickup truck, and nobody seems to know who all was inside except that apparently one of them was dead.
Did they say why the guys in the truck were wanted just because they were men with rifles on the ground, or they supposedly knew who they were and why they were killing them?
They didn't really say who they were, but they called them suspects.
So they were suspected militants.
People in the house aren't suspected militants yet.
Bomb them with a droid.
I love it.
Sorry.
It sounds like a comic book or something.
Look, there goes the suspect.
Hellfire missile, right?
Right.
All right.
Well, and now, you know, I have to say that the Orange Alert, whatever they call them nowadays over the weekend about a possible, serious, credible, but unconfirmed threat to New York or Washington, a truck bomb might go off or whatever.
There was a hint of plausibility in that to me because they said that they're informant.
They claimed that their informant was from the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan and that this is where the attack was emanating from.
And I thought, well, either they're just making this up so that they have further excuse to bomb that part of Pakistan or maybe bombing Pakistan all this time has engendered a plot to get somebody into the country to pull off something like that.
It almost worked for Faisal Shahzad.
That certainly sounds plausible, but of course, U.S. intelligence in the tribal areas has never been anything but atrocious and it seems to have gotten worse over the past several months since the whole Raymond Davis fiasco because he was one of the ones that was doing a lot of traveling to the tribal areas.
Most of their contacts in the tribal areas are just random tribesmen that are picking out targets that are their rivals.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that the intelligence coming out of there isn't necessarily spot on.
Right, yeah, I mean, if the drone strike we're just talking about, look, some guys in a pickup truck, kind of their suspect sort of thing, if that's the nature of the intelligence that would lead them to clamp down like they did in New York and D.C. over the weekend.
I actually heard someone at the airport on the little tram yesterday talk about the great success of the If You See Something, Say Something program, where in New York over the weekend, I guess in Manhattan, they got, you know, whatever, a hundred times as many calls as they usually do about a suspicious car here, a suspicious Muslim there, a box on the side of the road, this, that, and the other thing, and everybody just calling 911 about anything and everything that has nothing to do with anything.
And how this is a great success, and that's really how it should be.
And of course, were it not for this being 9-11 weekend and everyone was busy broadcasting 9-11 celebratory speeches, we probably would have been treated to constant reports of people finding a suspicious, you know, cooler that was left unattended full of beer, things like that.
I don't know.
You know, I would say what has become of us, but I kind of think maybe Americans were always like this.
We have to kill each and every last Indian, or else they'll kill us all, you know.
Right.
And if something happens in New York City because of that See Something Say Something campaign, it gets on TV before they discredit it.
But once it's discredited, we never really hear about it again.
I've seen several times where they've reportedly discovered a suspicious package or something that was just laying around, or somebody forgot a briefcase or something, and they're just freaking out and evacuating several city blocks somewhere in New York.
There was a time here where there was a hand grenade discovered in the parking lot of a store here in Saginaw, and it didn't even make the national news.
Yeah, well, here in Austin, they've had, I don't know how many times, at least a few times, a frightened daughter of a Republican UT freshman calls 911 about probable anthrax because there's a little baggie of white powder at the laundromat.
And they go, oh my God, anthrax, and they call in the hazmat team and whatever, these people.
But yeah, you know, actually, I'll say one thing funny.
Then we've got to get back to Pakistan real quick.
But a guy at the speech in New York over the weekend showed me on his phone, he had a picture of a poster that said, if you see something, skate something.
Don't call the cops.
Call your friends and have a throwdown.
Bring some beers and have a good session.
I thought that was pretty cool.
Anyway, so now tell me quickly, if you can, about the suicide bombing in Quetta, I think down in the southern part of Pakistan, and then maybe wrap up with the violence in Karachi if we have time.
But I want to hear more about the suicide bomb.
It killed somebody very important, I think, right?
Right.
They attacked the home of one of the major Frontier Corps leaders in Quetta, Colonel Khalid.
And he was killed, his wife was killed, some of his guards, 24 people ended up dead in the bombing.
The initial reports from officials were that this was revenge from Al-Qaeda for arresting some people that they said were in Al-Qaeda.
But later the Pakistani Taliban claimed credit for the attack and didn't mention arrests being a motive.
So we kind of don't know why it happened.
Now, have they been doing much in, like, as far as drones, for example, down in Quetta?
Because I remember reading that they wanted to and that there were even people inside, I forget if it was the CIA or the military, saying, you know, bombing the tribal region is one thing, bombing this city is probably a bad idea.
You know, they haven't done that yet.
There was a big push for even talk of boots on the ground in Quetta, whether it would be military or just CIA operatives.
We didn't really know.
There were a lot of calls to launch drone strikes because they said that the Afghan Taliban's leadership lives in that city, the Quetta Shura, which the Pakistani government insists doesn't even exist.
But the difference between the tribal areas and Quetta is a night-and-day difference for a lot of Pakistanis.
The reality is the tribal areas are treated a lot like Israel would treat the occupied territories, so there's really not a lot of concern for what goes on for the natives in there.
Yeah, I've heard some of that.
I knew a guy from Karachi who was like, oh, those people, they're crazy.
Yeah, do whatever you want with them, kind of attitude.
Yeah, the Pakistani government could really care less what happens in North Waziristan, except to the extent that it makes them look bad.
But if the U.S. was to start bombing an actual Pakistani city like Quetta, it would be a different matter entirely.
All right, good, so we ended it on a happy note then.
Thanks, Jason, appreciate it.
News.antiwar.com, everybody.
