03/01/12 – Kathy Kelly – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Our next guest is Kathy Kelly from Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
That's VCNV.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Kathy, how are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
It's good to be back on your show.
Oh, it's great to talk to you again.
A very important piece you have written here.
I don't know.
I had to come up with some kind of adjective.
That wasn't a very good one, but it's called the ghost and the machine, not the ghost in the machine, the ghost and the machine.
And I guess the machines means reaper drones going around, making ghosts out of former human beings, huh?
Yeah, I suppose that's one way to look at it.
Also, in a way, I think sometimes the United States foreign policy and military policy elites are like a machine churning out war after war after war.
And, you know, you could hope that we might be guided by the better ghosts of our past, some of the people who have strongly, strongly tried to situate the U.S. in a different path so that we wouldn't be so addicted to war.
Well, how long ago was it that you were there?
This seems like a very recently written story.
Yeah, I was over in Kabul.
Gosh, I came back on the 22nd.
I'd gotten snowed in.
The planes weren't going anywhere for a few days, but then the sun came out and I was able to get a plane back on time for the Hancock 38, well, court appearance, which was late last night.
And while I was in Kabul, I was there just before the riots began because of the desecration of the Koran.
And also I was there during a very, very severe cold spell when very horribly 40 children have frozen to death since January 1st.
Yeah, they originally came out and said that that was just anti-regime propaganda.
But then they, I guess, you know, gave a little bit of a mea culpa and delivered some blankets, they claimed anyway in the press.
Well, I think civil society here in the United States raised at least one hundred eighteen million dollars.
But it's very, very troubling that there's nothing that's been done that's commensurate to the need as regards these sprawling refugee camps, you know, blankets, sure.
But when the rains and the snow come, they need to have wood so that they can begin to get some cooking, some source of fuel for cooking and a source of fuel for heat.
And the children are neglected horribly.
And part of it is because the government in Afghanistan doesn't want to acknowledge that they have this new problem on their hands with four hundred refugees every day coming to the larger cities because they've been displaced by the war and the fighting.
And there are thirty five thousand refugees just in Kabul alone in ten thousand families in one camp, which is, I think, and this to me is a hideous scandal.
It's right across the road from a huge military base.
And there are three hundred truck convoys that travel, you know, there is sometimes between four thousand and eight thousand trucks that enter into Afghanistan every day.
I mean, the numbers have changed right now because the supply convoys are being prevented from entering into Afghanistan through the normal routes they had used crossing Pakistan because drones had been crossing into Pakistan's airspace and the United States Special Operations Forces killed something like twenty four Pakistani military.
And so the Pakistani government said, that's it.
We're not going to facilitate your travel through our border crossings to go into Afghanistan.
So they've had to do more bringing supplies in through the north, through places that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
It's awful to think that the United States would be spending two billion dollars per week on its own military occupation of Afghanistan while children are literally freezing to death and two hundred fifty infants every day succumb to death from starvation.
Well, you know, Americans especially, I guess, or maybe all people could be convinced somehow if there was, you know, a credible narrative to listen to that.
Well, yes, things are bad now, but just wait until we're done defeating the bad guys and we create a wonderful paradise there and a government in a box that'll take good, good care of those refugees and all this wonderful future that's going to happen.
Except that nobody believes that that's true anymore, do they?
Well, you know, it certainly has been the pattern for the United States government to try and persuade people that they're engaged in humanitarian wars.
It's hard for me to believe that anyone would think that at the end of the day, people in Iraq should be grateful because the United States, after we invaded and occupied their country, have left behind a better situation.
And yet that is certainly what I think the United States tried to say in the withdrawal of a good number of troops, even though we're still leaving behind the world's largest embassy.
And when you count in the contractors, a pretty strong US presence and many companies that are involved still in trying to rebuild Iraq's oil refineries and the means of extracting the oil from Iraq.
But with Afghanistan, I mean, it's not like they have even the oil refineries to rely on.
It's a country that's been so badly devastated by three decades of warfare that I don't think the US public believes that the United States is there for humanitarian concerns.
And certainly the polls have shown that well over 50 percent of the US public, sometimes as high as 73 percent on some polls, want the troops to return.
I don't know that the administration is going to at all want to try to deal with reconstruction in Afghanistan following the devastation that we've caused.
It seems to me that reparations are in order and that I mean, under international law and occupying power bears responsibility for all of those refugees, every single one of them who've been displaced by the war that's been happening while we're the occupying force.
And again, that's something I'm sure the Obama administration doesn't want to touch.
Right.
Well, I hate to speak for him or anything, but if I was them, I'd be happy to just y'all go and we'll worry.
We'll make our own reparations without you.
Thanks.
But, you know, I bet they'd settle.
That was the offer.
Many people are saying that if the United States goes out, they'll still have two warring parties to deal with the warlords and the Taliban, but at least they won't have three.
And yet, I think that at some point, the United States people have to be held accountable for what we've done in war after war after war in terms of unloading our weapons, creating horrific pollution and devastation, destruction, animosity, instability.
Yeah, you think about, you know, the allied troops made German citizens march through the death camps and look at what had happened on, you know, in their society.
If they didn't outright take part in it directly, it was still, you know, they knew that this was going on just outside of town or, you know, that kind of thing.
You think about that kind of accountability in some way for all the war cheerleaders to at least have to face what they've done.
Think about, you know, you brought up Iraq to just completely shattering that society and killing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million people.
There are, you know, four million refugees, whatever.
And I guess we're almost up at this first break here, this break, Kathy.
But on the other side of it, I'd like to give you a chance to tell the story that you tell in this article about this family, these few families devastated by this one drone attack back in 2007.
And also, I want to give you a chance to highlight the point that you really make in this piece, too, about the ghost and the machine, the ghost being the thing that takes the responsibility for getting it wrong.
And that is just, you know, some electrons shooting back and forth inside some Windows personal computer somewhere.
You know, just like when your flight is late or, you know, you got bumped or whatever, and they say, I'm sorry, sir, the computer says, right, there is no human decision maker to take responsibility for the crime, that kind of thing.
Fun stuff.
I mean, horrible, horrible stuff.
Kathy Kelly, the ghost and the machine said antiwar.com today.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Talking with Kathy Kelly about the war in Afghanistan.
And she's got this piece, the ghost and the machine, and it's got ghosts and machines and everything.
Really, I like this article.
It's got a great kind of dichotomy to it, because instead of dead Afghan being this anonymous statistic type thing that you might see on the back page of the newspaper somewhere, she actually humanizes these individuals by telling their names and telling their story and bringing their life and what happened in their neighborhood into a reality in one's imagination where you see it happening in your own neighborhood and put yourself in their shoes and understand the humanity that they actually do have, regardless of what the Democrats tell you as they kill them.
And then, but on the other hand, it's also the method of their execution is the Reaper drone, the Reaper drone that nobody knows who's the one who pulled the trigger.
Nobody really did.
It was all just automated, and the responsibility is gone.
And so then the impunity reigns.
And, you know, I mean, I guess I don't know how many drones at any given time, they just have a sky full of these killer robots in Afghanistan all day and all night, terrorizing these people, this entire population at all times.
Is that pretty much what life is like there, Kathy?
Well, I think particularly near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, there are two areas on the Pakistani side called North and South Waziristan, and one major city would be Maranshah.
And yes, yes, yes, people say that they hear the drones getting closer and they don't know if they'll live through the night.
And then in the Maidan Wardak area, we've gotten to know a young man whose sister is the one that I wrote about in this story, Fazila, and she says that, you know, her husband and his four friends were sipping tea in a garden, and the family members are bewildered.
Why were they marked out for execution?
The mother-in-law is particularly angry, she says.
They don't stop to ask, who is this?
Who was that?
There's no accountability.
She said that this now has left her in her old age without a breadwinner in the family because her son was killed.
And of course, Fazila has a five-year-old child, Aymal.
And by the code, you know, the traditional code, the man who is killed, his family is responsible for taking care of the wife and the child, and also the mother-in-law.
But it's very difficult.
You know, people are just eking out existences in many cases, and then, you know, a family that already can't make their own ends meet has to somehow make sure that they remember to bring bread and some sustenance to another family.
And then she mentioned that, as things go, she was more fortunate because there was another family that didn't have any relatives at all, and then they're left completely bereft.
You quote her saying, what kind of democracy is America?
Where people do not ask these questions, democracy meaning a place that supposedly values the life of an individual and has precepts of justice and fairness and things like that.
Here, you know, our whole excuse, our government's excuse for waging this war is to civilize these backward savages.
And then who's schooling who on human rights, you know, and who's taking them away?
Well, and I think also many people would counter that, Scott, by saying, well, look, if US troops are going to be sent into Afghanistan, it's much, much safer if the drones are doing surveillance than if, in fact, it's drones who make it that are used.
Well, sure, yeah.
If you can send in armies of battle droids, you don't have to risk one American life.
Well, I wonder, though, are we really ensuring future security?
Because the proliferation of the drone warfare is beginning in earnest.
Now you've got Israel selling drones to China and China equipping Pakistan with drones and various non-state entities are surely going to begin to equip themselves with the capacity for drone warfare.
I mean, a real estate agent out on the West Coast wanted to get a panoramic view of houses he wished to sell.
He built his own drone and he was actually arrested.
And this drone that he had launched, which was flying in the air, could easily have been equipped with some kind of a dirty bomb.
So as we, in the United States, or maybe not we, as the military and the foreign policy elites, create conditions elsewhere where there's so much antagonism and anger toward the United States, how long will it be before people think, well, look, if the United States can engage in death squads and assassinations and through aerial bombardments using remote controlled aircraft, then if that's done in return, if we manage to do that to people in the United States, this is fairness.
This is tit for tat.
So I don't think we should fool ourselves that we're going to be enjoying enhanced security.
And also, I mean, it's kind of phenomenal to me that right now 60 to 70,000 analysts are poring over the information acquired through drone surveillance of other countries, particularly right now Afghanistan.
And the Rand Corporation said, well, to really understand patterns of life in Afghanistan, we would need 100,000 analysts.
Now imagine paying salaries to 60 to 70,000 analysts to better understand patterns of life in Afghanistan.
And if you just look over the last few weeks, it's patently clear that people in the United States have precious little understanding and the analysts don't seem to have the needed understanding either, because even though they can trace the footprint of Taliban fighters back into the small huts where they may live with their families, they're not able to figure out that it's the desecration that will have lethal consequences if you burn the Quran.
And they're not able to figure out that children are not only starving to death, but freezing to death in one of the coldest winters on record in Afghanistan, while United States bases are being supplied handsomely with fuel and food and clean water, and that these bases are immediately right across the road from one of the most wretched camps.
It's almost like it sounds almost like McNamara and the whiz kids, where everything is math, everything is, you know, their fancy new network science software program and, and doing all these connections and whatever.
And so here they are drowning in data, but they don't have any information at all, much less wisdom or ideas or understanding about what the hell it is that they're trying to do over there.
They're just, you know, following this guy's cell phone has once called this other guy's cell phone.
So let's shoot him too kind of thing.
I mean, one of the most egregious instances of that happened in February of the past year, February 21st, I believe.
And it actually made it above the fold in the New York Times, because it was an instance in which there was so much information being pumped into the kill chains, computers, trying to assess whether or not a three car convoy was a threat to some reconnaissance fighters who'd been dropped down from an aircraft airborne vehicle in the Uruzgan province.
The reconnaissance fighters had already been dropped down on the ground and were being followed by the drone operators who were trying to ensure their safety.
And then a convoy came along the road and they they needed to decide, well, is this convoy possibly going to attack the United States reconnaissance fighters?
And the decision was made that, yes, this convoy is a threat.
And so they blew up the first car.
The women in the second car jumped out, were waving their long scarves, shouting into the air, civilians, civilians trying to save their lives.
Another missile was fired at the second car.
And then the people in the third car were survivors.
Well, it turned out this was a convoy of grandmothers and women and children who were going to first go to the Kandahar market and then up to Kabul for medical care.
And there was one drone operator who had figured out that there definitely was an older woman and an infant, that there were civilians, but he couldn't get his information kind of up to the top of the stack of the info going into the kill chain before they gave the orders, you know, impact to fire a missile into this convoy.
So generals are not able to compete, in a sense, with artificial intelligence.
They can't sort out the information that's coming in from multiple drones all at once.
And so they might have to rely on machines to actually make the decision.
Yeah.
The dehumanization of the entire process for the very real humans that get killed, the very real humans whose humanity is always ignored, if not outright denied, as the robots do the slaughtering.
And this is part of just the war already being over for 10 years.
This is an occupation against civilians that's being fought, a civilian insurgency.
There's no army in Afghanistan that we're at war against.
There's no battlefront.
It's just a war against anyone who looks like that stick in their hand could be a rifle, according to some nitwit in a trailer in Nevada, who's got the whole entire diameter of the earth to hide behind.
And in fact, I wonder if that was one of the subjects that was brought up by the people that you talked to there, of just the poor sportsmanship.
Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound insulting, but I don't know what else to call it.
It seems very unfair to shoot people from across the entire planet.
And especially when, as I was just saying, they're not even part of a government, they're quote unquote militants, which means a civilian who's fighting back against a foreign force occupying his land.
Well, people use the word coward.
They really take umbrage at the cowardice of using these remotely controlled planes.
And it's something that is well known.
You know, people might think, oh, well, people don't have access to radio or TV, so how could they even know that these things are going on?
But actually, I was talking with people about a drone attack, and they said Nevada.
They knew that the Creech Air Force Base was located in Nevada.
I'm very much in touch with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, and they had a Skype phone call with us the night before we went before a judge in DeWitt, New York, because we had, as a means of raising education over here, held an action in front of the Hancock Field where drones are operated that are flying.
And these are weaponized drones flying over Afghanistan that are operated inside the Hancock Field.
And the judge had listened to 41 hours of testimony.
And so we asked the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, is there anything else that you want us to try to say to this judge before he sentences us?
And they said, yes, yes, please tell the judge that we are human beings and that we wonder what would he do, how would he feel if drones were ever flying over his home and over his children.
And we did our best to bring their message before the judge, and that's also our responsibility to bring their message before the court of public opinion.
Well, the same people who denounce moral relativism also denounce moral equivalence somehow.
I don't know how they do it, Kathy, but it sure seems you're on the side of right and justice to me.
Thank you so much for all your great work.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for this time on your show.
Everybody, that's Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, vcnv.org.
Thanks for listening.
See y'all tomorrow.