06/05/12 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott.
Next up is Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And actually, the title goes on from there.
I don't usually read the whole thing.
Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.
His website is ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis.
And it'll come right up for you there.
In fact, Google will probably correct you if you spelled it wrong.
Just try it. ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going, foreign correspondent?
Just fine, Scott.
Lots of news going on out there.
Yeah, it's way too many wars for any of us to really cover.
But I'm very happy that I have you here because I want to ask you about something that hardly anybody really knows too much about, and that is Pakistan.
We've talked before, we've talked for years about how America's war in Afghanistan and the way that we play the politics of it in Pakistan and the way we force them to wage their own civil war and clamp down in the tribal regions now and then and the different things that we do, the way that we invite India into Afghanistan, which just encourages the Pakistanis to support our enemies in Afghanistan the same time we're fighting our common enemies in Pakistan.
And all of these riddles are basically an equation for over the long term, anyway, for the ultimate destabilization and disillusion of Pakistan.
That's the danger that we're playing with, at least.
And I just wonder, how dangerous is that?
How close do you think we are to that?
Because I keep reading things where people say, man, Pakistan is unraveling.
And the more you attack it with drones, the faster it falls.
Well, it is shaking and shuddering.
That's that's for sure.
Our Pakistan was a mess before 9-11 and before the U.S. got so deeply involved there, an unstable mess, too.
But since the U.S. semi-occupied Afghanistan after 9-11 and in recent years, we have just come, we've tormented Pakistan, we've exacerbated all of its, many of its problems.
What we're doing there by forcing it into a war its people don't want to fight in Afghanistan is really shaking apart the country.
It's turned everybody against the government that Washington had stalled in Islamabad.
And according to surveys, over 95 percent of Pakistanis are now violently anti-American.
We've done a lot of this to ourselves.
All right.
Now, you know, I'm looking at what's going on in Syria.
And boy, we heard a down note from Patrick Coburn on the show yesterday about how, boy, it sure does feel like right before the Lebanese civil war broke out over there, like the worst is yet to come and it's going to take a long time.
But, you know, the nightmare, right, the part that people are predicting and and are so worried about is the vacuum of power once if Assad falls there in Syria, people are going to be fighting like mad over the power.
But will they even take over the form of the government that exists?
Probably not.
Right.
There's going to be a horrible civil war as people fight over creating a brand new government of their faction, Uber Alice or whatever.
And that's the same kind of and that's why people are so pessimistic about the future of Syria.
Right.
And that's the same kind of thing in Pakistan.
Right.
Where if the government falls.
Well, I guess that's really the question.
Sorry, I'm kind of rambling.
Well, you do the people of Pakistan.
Is there a super duper majority consensus for we want to keep this parliament?
We just hate who's a member of it.
Or is it possible that the entire state is going to completely fall apart and be replaced with a war for who's going to get to create the next one?
No, I think the majority of Pakistanis are very patriotic.
They want to retain their country as is.
They're very frightened of being taken over by India.
Much bigger India right next door.
And let's remember that Pakistan is really its biggest provinces, Punjab, its most prosperous and populous province.
And the Punjabis also fill the Pakistani army.
So it should be really called Punjabistan.
And the Punjabis are dedicated to the continued existence of Pakistan.
A nuclear power now, we should add.
There are secessionist tendencies in Balochistan, for example, that are being fanned by American conservatives.
But by and large, Pakistan is still there.
It does exist as a credible idea amongst its people.
All right.
Well, now, you know, like I was saying, I'm just fearful of like, you know, the chaos that could follow.
Not that I'm a supporter of the existence of any state necessarily.
Just, well, you know, seriously, we've been at this, you a lot longer than me, but I've been doing this show and interviewing you for so long.
Seems like we've really been lucky because the analogy is obvious to Vietnam and Cambodia, where, you know, especially Nixon's intervention in Cambodia set the stage for the fall of the puppet regime and the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
And, of course, you have something like that happen in Pakistan, where, you know, we hire the Quisling government to wage war against their own people.
And we wage war against their people and to allow us to wage war against their people for long enough.
Their system becomes destabilized, falls apart.
Then some kook not only can take over the government, he can take over the nukes.
And by kook, I mean somebody who would use them.
And that's the danger, especially, is not just that there would be, you know, horrible consequences for the people of different regions of Pakistan, but that it could quickly spread into, you know, obviously the biggest danger would be a nuclear war with India.
But and then who knows what after that, if atom bombs start going off.
Well, we have many unexpected or unintended consequences.
The Syria situation is extremely grave.
The West has been fueling the uprising against the Assad regime.
In today's New York Times, in fact, there is a picture of knocked out Syrian government tanks.
They're T-72 tanks, very strong tanks.
These tanks were obviously knocked out by modern anti-tank weapons.
I would suspect they're French anti-tank missiles.
And the West, the French, the Americans have been, the British have been fueling, sending arms into these groups.
It's really become a civil war at this point.
And being a very ethnically divided country, Syria could, as you said, fly apart.
I was in Lebanon for the first day of the civil war in 1975.
I was driving into Beirut.
The tracers were going over the top of my taxi.
And I said, what the hell is going on?
I was coming to Beirut to have a good time.
And there's a civil war here.
It's like going to Geneva, Switzerland and fighting a civil war.
But it was horrible.
And for 15 years, this bloody civil war raged with the most abominable atrocities and violence and sadism.
And I have seen the, this is the doppelganger of what's going on in Syria.
Now, what could happen in Syria?
Okay.
Well, and it's already spreading back into Lebanon, too.
That's correct.
And Lebanon itself is a tinderbox.
I was with the Israeli army when they invaded the south of Lebanon as a journalist.
And I was with them when the day they drove through the market town of Nabatea during a Shiite day.
It was Ashura, the day of Shiite mourning.
And the Israeli convoy just drove roughshod right through the mourners, firing their guns to scatter them.
Some started shooting back.
And the next thing you know, the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who were considered potential allies of the Israelis, turned violently against them and produced the Hezbollah movement, which is a major thorn in Israel's side today.
Right.
Yeah.
And then, of course, the existence of Hezbollah became the excuse for the occupation for 20 years.
Exactly.
It was a terrible- Because they just invaded to rout Arafat, which they did, right, at some point.
They did.
They were trying to, Sharon's plan was to crush the PLO once and for all.
He failed.
There were these horrible massacres as a result.
It was a very ugly period.
All right.
Well, we got to take this stupid break.
When we get back, we'll have Eric Margulies.
We're going to talk about Pakistan some more.
But then, hell, why not Syria and all kinds of things, too?
Lebanon.
History.
He was there in 82.
How do you like that?
In 75.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Worden.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
And there's so many different wars to cover, and he knows so much about all the different countries that America is killing right now.
It's kind of hard to figure out, you know, which direction to go.
But I guess I want to know more about Pakistan.
And let's see.
I'm trying to think of the scariest stuff you ever said to me about Pakistan before.
I think one of them was that you could have some kind of faction fight inside the military where at some point somebody decides they've had enough of this crap.
And there's a coup against, you know, not necessarily the entire system or whatever, but a coup against America's puppets there.
And real hardliners could take over the country if we continue to provoke them, that kind of thing.
That could very well happen.
It would certainly express a widely held view amongst the Pakistani public, which regards their government, the Zardari government, as tools of the Americans.
And even though there's respect for the army and its current leadership, there's a feeling that even the top generals have been bought off by the Yankee dollar and should be replaced by more nationalist-leaning officers.
At the same time, though, what's happening now, you see Leon Panetta, our defense secretary, is in India and is urging India to take a more active role in Afghanistan.
Well, if anything was to drive the Pakistanis crazy, it's this, because they regard Afghanistan as their backyard, what they call it, strategic depth.
The Indians already have a very large intelligence operation going into Afghanistan.
They're involved in many different ways.
And the Pakistanis are very worried.
Now the U.S. is asking the Indians to start training, so-called training, the Afghan army, which is really code for sending troops and advisors into Afghanistan.
This is going to produce, almost certain to produce, a war between India and Pakistan.
It's a crazy policy.
It's an act of desperation by the current administration, which is finding, desperately looking for a way to back out of the war without appearing to have lost it.
Is that what it is, that they want to turn over, they really just need somebody to train the Afghan army instead of us?
And so they're getting the Indians?
Because that's what I was going to ask.
Why?
Why in the world, if the Pakistani government, I don't know, whatever, if you're supposed to call them friends or whatever, they're our loyal servants, why in the world would we be stabbing them in the back like this?
And as you explain it, it's not like we're talking about chess here, we're just talking about checkers.
Maybe once your checker has been kinged and it can now move backwards too or something, but it's still not that complicated that we are forcing our friends, the Pakistanis, into a position where they have to be our enemies in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from falling too far under the influence of their enemies, the Indians, who we are bringing in and trying to put in some kind of position of power and influence there.
It's ridiculous.
It's a short-sighted policy, and as I said, it's a policy of desperation.
Now, under the Bush administration also tried to get India to send troops to fight in Afghanistan.
The Indians were much too smart and wily to get involved.
They took American goodies like making the Indian nuclear program, formerly a pariah program, making it kosher suddenly by allowing India to produce its nuclear weapons and giving India nuclear fuel and selling India modern arms.
Everything changed regarding Indians.
Silly Indians didn't bite, but now the Indians are torn between greed, that is the opportunity to get more advanced American arms, and also to get more American support against India's rival China, but they're also concerned that if they do, they'll fall too much under Washington's influence and end up taking orders from Washington, particularly over Iran.
So the Indians are being cautious.
Yeah, well, at least there's our horrible Iran policy to keep them from falling too far under our sway, but that's what it's really about is using from the American empire's point of view is that's why cozy up to India, say, versus Pakistan is about containing China, but I still don't really understand.
Really, just an act of desperation.
We really just need trainers.
That's why they're willing to do something so stupid as to bring in the Indians and try to cement an alliance between the Indians and the Karzai government here.
India has invested a billion dollars.
This is a country where people defecate in the streets and sleep on the streets.
It's so desperately poor, and yet India has invested a billion dollars in Afghanistan, shoring up the Karzai regime and shoring up.
It is becoming rapidly the sponsor of the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan, particularly the Tajiks and the Uzbeks, who were formerly aligned with the communists and are still, their ranks are filled with former Afghan communists.
The Indians are stepping into that role.
The U.S. is encouraging them to do so.
Afghans don't need training in fighting.
They've been at war for 30 years, for God's sake.
I can tell you Afghan children, boys, are taught to shoot at the age of six.
So the last thing they need is trainers.
Trainers are really a code word in the American sense for white officers and native troops.
Right.
Yeah.
Very well put.
We'll make sure and write that down in our brains and remember it later.
That's the proper context to understand training.
So America's making a big mess for itself there that, well, it thrashes around like a mastodon caught in a tar pit, and it's creating long-term problems for us that it's going to root.
And one of them, of course, is fueling the Chinese-Indian confrontation.
And India is feeling its oats now vis-a-vis China because it feels it has almost total American backing.
And the Chinese are very alarmed.
They won't say it publicly, but in private, Chinese are very alarmed by what they see as U.S. attempts to build up India and surround China with hostile states.
All four of us, nuclear weapon states here.
And it's, pardon me, but it's so easy to see the counter-narrative or the artificial history, how it could be or whatever.
If America was anything like America, the myth, our government's role would be making a permanent peace between these states, making sure to do everything we can to ramp down tensions over Kashmir, to ramp down tensions between India and China, whatever, instead of sitting here and acting like we're the British, dividing and conquering and playing these powers off of each other.
When, you know, again, nuclear weapon states, and this is, they say, the most likely place to have a nuclear war in the world now, and it's no longer the U.S. and Russia.
It's Pakistan and India.
I've been saying that since 1999 when I came out with my first book.
And I quoted a Rand Corporation study that said that a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would kill 2 million people initially and severely injure 80 million after that, polluting all the groundwater of the region and sending radioactive dust clouds around the world.
It would end up falling on our heads as well.
So it's a totally, it's an Armageddon kind of viewpoint.
And as you're quite right, my view of America's role in the world is the same.
It's damping down disputes, trying to educate them, bring fairness and justice to these areas where we can.
And yet we're doing exactly the opposite between the Indians and the Pakistanis.
All right.
Well, now, not to really get back into Syria, but just to use it as an example or something, are the people in the State Department really that stupid?
I mean, come on, you could be reading antiwar.com for a week or something and know better than what they are doing.
Hillary Clinton herself says, geez, are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
And then what does she do?
She continues on.
Well, you know, the State Department, I almost pointed to the U.S.
Foreign Service.
So I have a certain sympathy and understanding for them.
But it's not the State, it's not the State Department that's making policy.
There are a lot of smart people in state who know exactly what they're doing.
They're not listened to.
Hillary Clinton is not running foreign policy.
She's running for president.
If Obama takes a fall, Hillary's there and she's trying to please domestic interest groups.
So the people who are making policy, unfortunately, the Pentagon, I love them dearly.
I'm a veteran, but our Pentagon, our generals and admirals are making policy increasingly.
You could see there's articles out about how the Special Operations Forces are trying to set up worldwide posts everywhere.
Fortunately, they got turned down.
But we are, we don't know.
There are too many people, power centers, conservatives who are making policy when it should be the State Department, but it ain't.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so there we are.
Stuck with them.
Thanks very much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Scott's always a pleasure.
Indeed.
Cheers.