07/13/12 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Welcome back to the show, John, how are you doing?
Very good, thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, uh, I'm very happy to have you here.
Uh, very important story that...
You know, I don't know, man.
Seems like everybody should have already known this, but you and I both know they already don't.
So go ahead and tell us about the safe haven myth.
Well, yeah.
I think it's important to go back a little bit and give this context.
Because there's still a fundamental misunderstanding.
Among the public and many in Congress.
About the distinction between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Uh, there were two very different organizations.
The Taliban is a domestically focused, you know, insurgent group.
Without any broader goals outside their own Afghan borders.
Whereas Al-Qaeda, of course, is a loosely affiliated group of Islamic extremists.
Who want to commit acts of violence against the United States and their client states in the Middle East.
In response to decades of aggressive imperialist foreign policy.
You know, which has led to the suffering of millions of Muslims.
Now, according to the Taliban...
Well, and it's important to note, too, that when you're talking about Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
You know, from, you know, before 2001 or now.
You're talking about Saudis and Egyptians in Afghanistan.
You're not talking about actual Afghans at all.
Well, that's right.
They're basically, you know, out of work jihadists from the 80s.
That's right.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And according to the Taliban's Pashtun cultural code.
You know, welcoming guests is a very important sign of respect.
No matter who they are.
And so prior to 9-11, the Taliban did welcome bin Laden and other top Al-Qaeda guys to Afghanistan.
We know now that this was a strategic decision on bin Laden's part.
You know, bin Laden was shaped very much by his experiences with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
And so, you know, when they ousted the Soviets and then subsequently the Soviet Union disintegrated.
You know, Afghans like to take credit for that, true or not.
Bin Laden similarly wanted to draw the United States into a long and bloody war in Afghanistan.
Because the asymmetries in power and military capability.
Drawing us into a draining quagmire in Afghanistan.
With what bin Laden knew would be a fierce insurgency was his best effort to really get at us.
Now the war in Afghanistan that was going on in the Bush administration as well as the Obama administration.
In his 2009 decision to surge.
Has been framed as a necessary war.
Because it's supposedly important to deny the Taliban rule.
As to prevent them from hosting Al-Qaeda again.
And thus giving them what's called a safe haven from which they can plan terrorist attacks against the U.S. like 9-11.
But the truth is these organizations were different from the beginning.
And the rifts between them have only grown.
I posted on the blog an interview with a top Taliban commander recently.
It was published in the New York Times but there was another magazine that actually did the interview.
The Taliban commander said that at least 70% of the Taliban are angry at Al-Qaeda.
He said originally the Taliban were naive and ignorant about politics and welcomed Al-Qaeda into their homes.
Because of you know the posh toon cultural demands.
And then he says to tell you the truth I was relieved at the death of Osama.
I'm quoting.
Through his policies he destroyed Afghanistan.
If he really believed in Jihad he should have gone to Saudi Arabia and done Jihad there rather than wrecking our country.
So this is the sentiment that most Taliban members feel.
They want their primary aim is to oust the occupier.
And they don't want all this trouble that the Al-Qaeda has brought them over the years.
And by the way this is not news.
Like we've known about this rift for a very long time.
Ahmed Rashid who's a Pakistani journalist and you know wrote many good books.
Sent into chaos and others.
And he also wrote a book on the Taliban in 2000 one year before 9-11.
He spoke to Mullah Omar the top Taliban leader.
The top one.
Nobody supersedes him.
And he says Afghanistan would pose no threat to neighboring countries after a pullout.
He implied that Al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan.
Yeah well and there's been a few quotes from them along those same lines.
You know there's a whole other safe haven myth too.
Which is that somehow Afghanistan.
Afghanistan represents easy access to attacks on the United States.
We're not supposed to learn from September 11th that wow they had to find some Egyptian grad students in Hamburg.
Who had student visa access to the US.
And they had to steal our planes in order to crash them into the buildings that they attacked.
We're supposed to believe that if you're in exile in no man's land on the other side of the planet.
That that somehow is like being in the parking lot at Boston Logan Airport or something.
I don't understand how that's supposed to work.
That's why they exiled him to Afghanistan in the first place.
Clinton went along with Sudan kicking him out.
And I think it was his idea.
Well let's at least send him to Afghanistan where he can't hurt anybody from there.
Back in Osama I mean.
Back in 1996.
Yeah this whole notion of physical haven.
Or you know base camps.
Is a lot of hogwash.
Terrorists if they want to attack us.
They can plan and organize and train from virtually anywhere.
Like in Hamburg where the 9-11 attacks were planned.
Or also like in Florida.
You know these things are not dependent on geography so much anymore.
And you know the whole reason bin Laden was in Afghanistan to begin with.
Was to attract the United States who he knew would not be able to launch a war that was not based on geography.
So the whole thing is a ruse.
But you're exactly right.
That safe haven myth still exists.
But you know what's important here is that I think that it's evident that the Obama administration knew this.
Okay this was known.
He knew.
Obama that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are different organizations.
That the chances that Al Qaeda would be able to have a safe haven in Afghanistan and launch attacks on the U.S. from there.
I mean intelligence people that are advising him know this.
So what we find is that the Bush administration was infamous for launching wars based on lies.
But the Obama administration is also lying about its war in Afghanistan.
Which by the way since 2009 has cost us $300 million every day.
I mean it's draining us of all the resources we don't have.
Not to mention the blood and suffering of Americans and Afghans and you know all the rest of it.
But you know we know now that the New York Times released this report not long ago.
That Obama refused to read a CIA report on Afghanistan prior to his implementation of the surge.
Because he knew.
So what we're faced here is the realization that Obama wanted to.
We have to think about the reasons.
And you know I hear the music so we'll talk about.
I think there's two possible reasons why Obama still launched the war in Afghanistan.
Even though he knew it would be a quagmire and a useless waste of time.
And that will include this quote that I'm always quoting you quoting this guy saying this.
But you got the actual thing right here too about from foreign policy.
From foreign policy David Rothkopf here a very important piece of news there.
We'll be back with John Glaser after this.
All right y'all welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton the website is scotthortonshow.com.
I'm talking with John Glaser assistant editor at antiwar.com.
Antiwar.com/blog.
We're going to get to Syria here in a second.
But we're talking about before the break how Obama even according to the Washington Post now.
Obama refused I guess it's a book by a post reporter is why it was in there.
Obama refused to read a CIA report about how don't do it.
Right before he announced the giant surge escalation on the bogus coin PR stunt.
Because I won't call it a doctrine of General Petraeus back what at the end of 2009.
And I've been referring people back to this.
I didn't have the original quote but I knew you'd written about it.
And it's David Rothkopf the editor of foreign policy.
That's foreign policy.com who wrote at least part of the answer John.
And then you had another part too I think.
Yeah so I think that we can boil this down to two answers.
Why the Obama administration would decide to go into Afghanistan and do a wasteful war.
Even though it knew it was not worth it and wouldn't be counterproductive anyways.
The one that David Rothkopf points to.
And he seems to have in the article he wrote he seems to have some inside information on this.
But he said that the answer is that Obama was leaving Iraq and couldn't afford to look weak in Afghanistan.
At the same time.
So he would come under political attack from the right.
And he thought he wanted to basically not get attacked from Republicans.
And also wanted to improve his relationship with the military.
So this was a purely political decision on his part says Rothkopf.
Basically launching a war hundreds of billions of dollars wasted.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians killed.
So that Obama could avoid being called a wimp by Republicans.
So that's one answer.
After the election of 2012.
Then they can call him a wimp all they want.
Right exactly.
The other possible answer is that Obama knew he was going to launch and increase and expand massively the drone war.
Particularly in Pakistan.
Now if you want to do that.
It's a lot harder to justify if you're not running a war in Afghanistan.
So the justification has been by the Obama administration.
Even though the U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay from the United Nations is putting them under investigation for this reasoning.
But their reasoning the Obama administration's reasoning for launching the expanded drone war in Pakistan.
Is that those people are hiding over the border in Pakistan and then launching attacks on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Okay.
So that's our legitimate right in a war to fight people who are fighting us.
Well the problem is that the war in Afghanistan was probably just you know to prop up this notion that the Obama administration would expand the drone war in Pakistan.
Because it can't do that if U.S. troops aren't being supposedly threatened and neighboring Afghanistan.
Now things have evolved and now and now Obama is doing a drone war without a neighboring war in Yemen and Somalia.
But for a while it was focused mainly on Pakistan.
And I don't think he could have got all that killing done without setting up a you know a false world war under false pretenses in neighboring Afghanistan.
So what we'll face is with another president the hope and change president who has lied us into war in order to reach goals that were very much separate from the war itself.
Yeah well he only kind of lied because he told us all along since 2007 that he was could not wait to relish his role as commander in chief of this military at war forever.
In each of these ways he I forgot maybe it was 2008 when he said the surge in Iraq worked like a dream.
Oh like a dream it worked that surge huh.
And of course no one in the media audience there the gaggle of reporters none of them knew enough about the surge to even ask him an informed follow-up question about it.
Like oh yeah explain you know or anything because they couldn't either.
So they just go okay I guess so we're all agreed now even Barack Obama agrees that the surge worked like a dream.
And they use that for an entirely different war an entirely different place entirely different set of circumstances.
And they say all we need is one of those surges everybody knows how well they work.
And there it goes you know it's not very complicated isn't it.
The simplest PR stunt to carry on an entire campaign of killing at how much did you say it cost a day John?
300 million.
300 million a day.
Every day that's more than most Americans make in their entire lifetime.
Yeah well yeah that's always the fun part right to think that your entire life all the money they ever took out of all your paychecks from every job you've ever had through your whole life long is just enough for them to waste on you know one aluminum Humvee that they drove into an IED somewhere.
Yeah.
You know because they're because they're paying ten times market value for each one anyway you know.
Right.
Right.
But PR is a very good description of what what this war was all about because Obama repeatedly said that the purpose of the war is to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary and deny the Taliban rule which would lead to Al Qaeda sanctuary because then that would attack the United States.
The whole thing was a lie.
That's a farce.
And Obama knew it.
So he was lying.
Lying means telling telling people something when you know it to be false.
And that's what he did.
And that's what proves he's tough enough to be our leader.
Right.
In these dangerous times.
All right listen we got to skip to the next one down on the list here at antiwar.com/blog.
Unleash the CIA in Syria.
Well everybody knows the CIA has already been unleashed in Syria for a long long time now or at least on the Turkish side of the border and wherever else they're running around.
But here's rule Margaret writing in The Wall Street Journal about how Obama should crank up the war there.
And you made some interesting observations about his article that really in effect are interesting observations about the conflict itself.
So you know I don't know.
Go ahead and ask us about blowback rhetorically speaking.
Well yeah.
So the CIA is already facilitating arms to arms deliveries to the rebel militia in Syria.
They're a lot they're placed along the Turkish border.
But this former CIA case officer rule Margaret wants to increase and expand the CIA's war.
He wants it to be a full on proxy war like the kind we had in Afghanistan and many other places to topple and replace the Assad regime.
But you know what he even admits himself is that a proxy war in Syria would need only to be four times as large as the one we fought in Afghanistan.
And you know I asked in the blog will the chaos suffering and blowback be four times as large too.
I mean Afghanistan is a perfect example of why we shouldn't launch a proxy war in Syria.
That proxy war led to Pakistani ISI who now we kind of hate in Washington to increase tenfold in size.
We have we essentially you know boosted them even more.
Not only that but it helped empower an entire generation of jihadists who eventually turned on their sights on America.
Well it was Reagan's incentive to turn his blind eye to the Pakistani bomb too and even help him.
Yeah.
I mean there's a million reasons.
But you know this guy this guy is the type of hawkish CIA guy that just refuses to consider the consequences of his actions beyond the next like year.
And so I think you know we've gone over on this show multiple times why funding a group of people who have strong ties to Al Qaeda is probably not the right way to go morally and strategically.
But this guy doesn't get it.
I don't know what to do but shrug anymore because I mean obviously these neocons are evil but their evil may very well be outmatched by their stupid.
I never thought so but maybe it's time to really reassess because you know when Michael Sawyer said that one horrible side effect of the Iraq war was that they created a new safe haven instead of the Al Qaeda types of the world being banished out there in no man's land in Afghanistan.
They had moved a thousand miles west and what a bad move that was.
And then now we're just helping move them further into Syria and wherever literally geographically speaking they are getting closer and closer to Israel closer and closer to America's puppet state in Lebanon.
And it's not like they're going to take over anything but they sure are doing a great job of disrupting everything the Americans thought they were fighting for over there.
That's right and you know we've done on this show also about how I mentioned before there's a study done from Brandeis University and they talk about they go through the history of civil war and insurgencies that have foreign funding.
And they said it makes clear that just a catalog of those historical experiences make clear that any limited intervention of like funding rebel militias won't serve the moral impulse that animates it.
To the contrary they said it's likely to amplify the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging a stalemate.
The CIA incidentally has a terrible track record despite the fact that this guy in the Wall Street Journal wants to whitewash it all.
I mentioned someone cataloged they did a bullet count of previous such CIA backed coups.
The one in Guatemala in 54.
It launched a civil war that lasted decades.
At least 200,000 people dead.
50,000 disappeared.
All kinds of war crimes and atrocities committed by our guys and our fellows down in Guatemala.
Then there's Afghanistan which we've talked about which launched an entire generation of jihadists against us.
And also built up the Pakistani ISI which helped radicalize much of the populations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Nicaragua also launched another civil war.
60,000 died.
We basically laid waste to Nicaragua.
The CIA initially was doing its business in Vietnam and Indochina.
That obviously led to a war which cost inordinate amounts of U.S. money plus 50,000 some odd U.S. soldiers and about 3 million Vietnamese.
3 million.
They're still actually dying from chemical warfare and unexploded ordnances in their farms and shit.
That was one of the most terrible atrocities in one single war in all of post-war experience.
The CIA has a terrible track record here.
But they don't want to hear about it.
Guys like this don't want to hear about it.
What is beneficial?
What we should be thankful for is that most of the establishment recognizes that any intervention, any significant intervention in Syria is going to be terrible.
I mentioned at the very end that people like Garret have to be this radical and this psychotic about being so reckless in our foreign policy because even the hawks, and he admits this, even the hawks in Washington can go down the list of every kind of intervention from safe havens to no-fly zones to arming the Syrian opposition.
And they can reject them all as wrong or unworkable.
So, you know, at least we have that.
Yeah, well, and then they'll keep going anyway.
That's still, I think that's going to be the defining quote for me of this whole mess in Syria.
And it's only going to get worse from here.
But Hillary Clinton, of course, defending herself from the CBS reporter.
The question was framed, of course.
What's taking so long for the American superman to go save the day in Syria?
Don't we need to arm up these rebels so they can overthrow their dictator?
And Hillary Clinton, in her defense of running only kind of a covert war instead of a giant, more overt kind, said, Well, you know, we're not really sure who to back over there.
Recently, the rebellion was endorsed by the leaders of Hamas and Al Qaeda.
So, are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
And, of course, then she continued to do exactly that.
You know, finance the suicide bombers Iran.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Hamas and Hezbollah end up in a war with each other?
I want to mention, because there's one thing in that direct column, the former CIA officer.
He mentioned something that I have sort of thought for quite a while.
And, again, I've been bashing the Obama administration for deciding to facilitate the delivery of arms to rebels for a very long time.
Talking about the moral problems, the strategic problems, the practical problems, why none of it should be happening.
But this guy in this column basically says what I had sort of had a hunch about, which is that the Obama administration is really doing very little, but they're doing this sort of weapons delivery facilitating just so they can say that they're doing something.
The effect of that so-called CIA intervention has been very limited.
But they're doing it, again, for PR.
Right, and in other words, no matter how much blood he's let in Afghanistan, they're still calling him a wimp.
Right, right.
It didn't work.
All those rotten corpses, and it still didn't protect them from the likes of the AEI.
Oh, jeez.
Poor old president.
Yeah, I don't know how these guys sleep.
Oh, easy.
They don't care.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it, as always, John.
Good to talk to you.
All right.
Bye-bye, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's John Glaser from Antiwar.com, especially Antiwar.com/blog.
Helping keep track of all the different wars there.
Check out all the great writers at Antiwar.com.