03/09/12 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Okay, welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm your fill-in host, Zoe Greif, and I am pleased to have on the phone Mr. Jason Ditz.
Howdy, Jason.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Okay, I'm doing great, thank you.
I want to make sure I get this right.
You are the senior editor of Antiwar.com, I'm asking you, is that correct?
I'm not sure what my title is.
I think news editor.
News editor, and of course you don't do it alone, but you are certainly very much responsible for the quality and quantity of the information at Antiwar.com, is that correct?
Right.
Okay, well you do a great job, and I certainly have been enjoying it for years.
Well, thank you.
You're welcome.
All right, I'm looking at your latest article here at Antiwar.com/news.
U.S. drone strike kills 13 in South Waziristan.
So, that's pretty self-explanatory, but maybe for the viewers who aren't so familiar with Pakistan and what's going on there, maybe why don't you explain a little bit.
What is South Waziristan, and why would a drone be there killing 13 people?
Jason?
Well, South Waziristan is one of several tribal areas in Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, and it's one of the two areas along with North Waziristan which have been repeatedly targeted by U.S. drones.
This was the eighth strike of the year, according to my count, and that's actually down quite a bit from what we saw in the last couple of years when we were having hundreds of strikes over the course of a year.
They sort of came to a halt in November of last year after the U.S. attack helicopters and warplanes attacked the Pakistani military bases along the border, and Pakistan got really mad about having U.S. forces crossing into their airspace.
So they stopped the drone strikes for a couple of months there, but now they seem to be back, and if not at full force yet, they're certainly escalating.
Well, I'm just sitting here in Austin, Texas staring at computer screens trying to host a radio show and wondering, how does a drone think that it knows who it's blowing up?
Was this drone targeting 13 people, I'm wondering, or not?
Does anyone know?
Well, we don't know for sure, but it seems to have been targeting a specific house and a car that was seen leaving that house.
Quite often with these strikes in either Waziristan, their targeting is based on tips from other tribesmen which have been extremely unreliable, which is why large numbers of civilians end up getting killed in these strikes.
And quite often we see tribesmen sending tips that one of their rival houses happens to be a terrorist hiding place.
I guess all they have to do is scream, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, and the U.S. drones will blow up whoever it is that slighted them at the market that day, or something like that.
Right, exactly.
So we see that quite a bit with these strikes.
They're not very reliable at all with who they target.
Everybody gets termed a suspected militant, but out of the eight strikes this year, they've only got one confirmed Al-Qaeda member that they have a name for out of almost 100 killed.
Well, I mean, I'm no mathematician here, but I remember General McChrystal's quote-unquote insurgent math saying for every person you kill, and I don't think he even specified whether they're actual insurgents or just collateral damage, but for every one you kill, you make 10 more people your enemy.
So what's the thinking there?
Now we have 130 people who are more antagonistic towards the United States and the West than were before, according to the General's math, right?
Right, and that seems to be holding pretty true in Pakistan.
In fact, it might be even worse than 10 to 1, because these attacks have been enormously unpopular.
Pretty much every week now, there's at least one anti-U.S. rally that draws tens of thousands of people in one of Pakistan's major cities.
Tens of thousands, you say?
Right.
Last week, it was Islamabad.
The week before that, it was in Karachi.
There's increasingly a coalition among religious and secular conservatives in Pakistan who are the opposition party right now in Parliament, and they are trying to use anger at the U.S. as a major election point, because, of course, the Zardari government has been very friendly to the United States.
Gosh, Pakistan.
What a hornet's nest of tribal, ethnic rivalries and ancient beefs going way back in ways that we Westerners just can't understand.
And that's a good point that I am curious about, and maybe some of the other listeners are curious about.
Can we talk a little bit about just sort of the differences between the West in general and the old world like Pakistan about how it's not totally federated?
You know, you can actually go hide out in the mountains and the state soldiers can't get you kind of thing, unlike here in the West where you can't go hide out in the mountains.
The FBI, whoever will come get you, you know, it's different like that, right?
Oh, absolutely.
The tribal areas are very nominally controlled by the Pakistani military.
And even if theoretically they reserve the right to go into any of these places in practice, a lot of the parts of the tribal areas are no-go areas for Pakistan's government and for their ground troops.
They're under the control of various tribal leaders, some of which have agreements with the central government, some of which don't.
Traditionally they've been seen as very little value to the tribal areas, so they've more or less been left alone.
Since the war with Afghanistan, though, there's been a lot of pressure brought to bear by the U.S. and NATO to try to get these areas under control because, of course, they're right along the Afghanistan border.
And traditional tribal hospitality says that if other Pashtuns show up, it doesn't matter who they are, you just have to let them hang out for a while.
It would be rude and discourteous and bad behavior to do otherwise, you're saying, traditionally.
Right.
So when people cross into Pakistan's tribal areas from southern Afghanistan, they're ethnic Pashtuns, too.
There's usually just no questions asked.
Some of them may be Taliban, some of them may be refugees.
They don't really know and they don't really care in those areas.
Not asking too many questions kind of thing?
Right.
Well, it's also my understanding that in that part of the world, you don't have little red, I'm sorry, orange-roof Howard Johnsons all over the place.
They don't do hotels sort of the way that we do, and it's more tradition to stay in someone else's house, even if you don't necessarily know them that well.
Is that right?
Right.
And since these tribes are so enormous, there are a lot of links that are sort of family links, but extremely distant cousins and things like that, which would still theoretically be part of the same tribe.
One of the tribes themselves, Waziristan, is over 150,000 people, so you can imagine that these can be just enormous tribal groups, which chances are if you're a Pashtun in that area, you've got some relative or other in that tribe, even if it's just by marriage a few generations back.
So there's always some link there.
All right.
Well, is it okay, Jason, if I switch gears on you and ask you a completely different question about a completely different country?
Sure.
Okay.
John Glazier has an article talking about how – or a news summary about U.S. gives control of prisons back to the Afghans, and I know that that was a big, hairy sticking point that Afghan President Karzai was saying was these American-run detentions are so humiliating and it's so bad for me politically.
You've got to quit it.
Gosh darn it.
Listen to me.
I'm about to ask you a question, and then we're going to be interrupted by the break.
My bad.
But on the other side, I'll try to get my act together and ask Jason Ditz a coherent question, and we can benefit from his wisdom.
Antiwar Radio, Jason Ditz, next after the break.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio, talking with Jason Ditz, editor of Antiwar.com, and I was trying to ask you, Jason, a question about Afghanistan, and apparently the Pentagon has cried uncle and given control, at least limited control, of the prisons to the Afghans with some kind of veto power or something like that.
But my question is, what about the other big sticking point, which is, of course, the night raids?
That's the other thing that President Karzai has just been screaming about as just making him look so bad and is so intolerable to the Afghan people and the proud Pashtuns.
So do you know anything about the negotiations or the controversy regarding the night raids?
Well, I'm not sure they're making much progress with that, because NATO's been very firm about not wanting to abandon the night raids.
They insist that it's a viable strategy, even though, of course, just like the drone strikes, we see quite often raiding entirely irrelevant houses, killing innocent people, and just generally causing a lot of mischief and raising a lot of anti-Afghanism.
And there have been times in the past where, when the Karzai government has demanded that they stop, U.S. officials have said that the U.N. mandate doesn't give Karzai any authority to say whether or not they can do night raids.
So they're really sticking to their guns there and saying that they're not going to abandon this.
Well, I'll tell you, I one time interviewed a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, an army guy who was in a combat role, and he said that they would do house raids in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq, and in his words, it was always the wrong house.
The intelligence was always bad.
They always ended up just sort of terrorizing and humiliating people who were not who they were even supposedly looking for.
And I can't imagine it's any different in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Can you, Jason Ditz?
No.
And in fact, it's probably even worse, because Iraq is sort of an urbanized, semi-modern country with a lot more infrastructure and a lot better ideas of who lives where, where a lot of Afghanistan and Pakistan are very rural areas.
Most of them don't even have paved roads yet.
So a lot of these places, they really don't have any idea who's living in these houses before they raid them, except for one or two anonymous tips.
Wow.
Well, I know, or I'm vaguely familiar with American police SWAT teams and how horrible an experience that might be.
Not that it's ever happened to me, but I can sort of imagine that.
But when it's the U.S. Marines, I can only imagine it would be ten times worse or a hundred times worse.
Oh, certainly.
And we've seen quite often in these raids, you know, they don't announce who they are.
They just kick in the door in the middle of the night.
Somebody gets up to get a gun thinking it's robbers or militants or whoever, and they end up killing half the people in the house.
In fact, we've had occasions where they've killed members of the Afghan police, relatives of members of parliament, just breaking into these houses and startling people in the middle of the night, and then they end up shooting them.
Wow.
You know, I sleep in my bed warm and snug, and I don't have to worry about any of that.
I'm grateful, but boy, I just don't think that human beings deserve that in Pakistan or anywhere else is what I think.
That's just my personal opinion.
All right, Jason, as long as I've got you for a few more minutes and we're bouncing around the globe, would you like to talk about your next most recent article about the Egypt parliament poised to oust the Junta-appointed prime minister and cabinet?
I didn't hear anything about that.
Would you like to tell our listeners and me what's going on in Egypt with this?
Well, they're hoping to oust them.
It seems virtually a foregone conclusion that they're going to pass a vote of no confidence, which in any other country where the parliament would mean the prime minister and the cabinet are ousted.
The problem here in Egypt is, since the Junta appointed the prime minister and he appointed the cabinet, they're saying, well, what does parliament have to do with anything?
So they're saying parliament doesn't really have any power to oust them in the first place.
But given the parliamentary election, the overwhelming victory of the Muslim Brotherhood Party, the Freedom and Justice Party, it seems like it's going to be awfully hard to just completely ignore this vote.
Oh, wow.
You're talking Muslim Brotherhood, Freedom and Justice Party, internal Egyptian politics.
Man, I wish I knew more to ask you a smarter question, but I'm just going to say, Jason, please continue to talk more about the parliament and all the stuff that's going on in Egypt.
I'm curious, how's the revolution going these days kind of thing?
Well, it's sort of a work in progress now.
It seems like the military junta, when the parliamentary elections first started up and the Muslim Brotherhood first started winning overwhelming numbers of seats, the junta basically condemned the election that they'd organized and said that, well, this parliament isn't going to be representative, so we're not going to let them have any power.
Which seems ridiculous, since there was very high turnout across the country, and certainly parliament has to be more representative than the military.
I would think.
I would hope.
Increasingly, it seems like if they're not happy about it, they're at least resigned to the fact that this parliament is going to have some influence, if not legally, then just by the sheer popularity of the Freedom and Justice Party.
How popular is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?
I know the name translates bad and it sounds scary to Western ears, but is it true that they're pretty much the only closest thing to an organized political body that Egypt has?
Thanks to the dictatorship, they don't have the infrastructure of party politics and such like we're used to over here?
Well, there are some other parties that are trying to get organized, but certainly none of them are anywhere near as big or anywhere near as accepted.
We've seen some other somewhat more extreme Islamist factions trying to crop up and compete with them.
We've also seen a few liberal parties that are heavily US and Western backed trying to get themselves off the ground, but none of them has the existing structure that the Muslim Brotherhood has had.
So it was probably unsurprising that they did so well in the election.
Speaking of the West, what about the NGOs?
I'm sure that Western intelligence of every stripe is trying to get the nose of their camel into the Egyptian tent, so to speak.
What's up with that?
Do you know anything about the NGOs or anyone trying to stir up trouble or co-opt the revolution or stuff like that?
Jason Ditz?
Well, certainly the US was heavily involved in trying to back certain liberal parties, so-called liberal parties.
The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute both had large numbers of people on the ground in Egypt, and there was a lot of US government funding for supposedly pro-democracy initiatives, but in practice just supporting certain political parties that were seen as pro-US.
And the Egyptian military, of course, conducted some raids back in December of some of these NGOs, and started an enormous diplomatic row with the US over it.
But that seems to have settled down now, and they let the- Do you have any insight at all as to what sort of backroom dealing may have or may not have occurred with regard to releasing their NGO workers, the American ones?
Not entirely, but it does seem like some pretty hefty bail money was involved, and even though they're saying, well, this bail is on condition that these people come back, I don't think anybody really expects any of the US NGO workers to come back for their trials.
It's basically a couple hundred thousand dollar fines for each of them, and that's probably going to be the end of it.
Well, I'd pay it if I was them, in their position.
Okay, well, we're about to wrap up the week here.
Jason Ditz, I'll give you the last word.
Is there any topic or anything that you want to introduce or reiterate in this last couple of minutes here before the end of the show?
Well, maybe one more thing on Afghanistan, on the handover of the prison.
The Karzai government isn't really getting everything they want here, because they wanted a more or less immediate handover of the prisons, where what the US has agreed to is to hand them over by the end of 2014.
Oh, that's an important point, yes.
So what is being negotiated here is what the US is going to have control over and what they're not going to have control over after 2014, which of course is being presented to the American public as the end of the war, but is really just another stage of the war.
And there have been negotiations already to keep US troops on the ground through 2024.
All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there, but I want to thank you very much, Jason Ditz, for sharing your expertise with us.
That's the show, Anti-War Radio.
Tune in again Monday.
We'll be doing it, all the bad news, all the time.
Thanks again, Jason, really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
You got it.