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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to The Thing here.
I'm Scott.
First up on the show today is the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
He's also a historian.
He wrote The Perils of Dominance about the Vietnam War.
He's writing one about the fake threat of the pretended Iranian nuclear weapons program right now.
You can find his full archive at IPSNews.net and at AntiWar.com/Porter.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you?
Hello again, Scott.
I'm glad to be back.
Thanks.
OK, good deal.
Happy to have you here.
OK, so latest piece is SOF, that's Special Operations Forces Troops, still in Wardak as joint U.S.
-Afghan probe continues.
Sorry if I said Wardak wrong.
I don't know.
I'm not from Afghanistan.
I think that's about right.
OK, good.
So, yeah, a few things in the news here.
But basically, I guess, go ahead.
It was, what, two weeks ago, maybe three, that Ahmed Karzai, the sock puppet dictator of Afghanistan, ordered U.S. troops, U.S.
Special Operations Troops, at least, out of the Wardak province completely.
What's all that about?
Well, you know, it's certainly an indication of the reality, as you put it, that he's a sock puppet.
But, you know, sock puppets can also do things that the United States doesn't approve of.
And that's what's happening right now, because Karzai feels very strongly, clearly, about the Special Operations Forces, not just in Wardak, but across the country.
But Wardak seems to be a particularly acute case where the special forces have been carrying out operations, and they've had some kind of relationship, apparently, with some still unidentified Afghan militia forces, which have been carrying out some awful atrocities, torture, murder, and just general reign of terror in the province for the last five months or so.
And so there's an acute conflict here between Karzai and the U.S. government in general, and the U.S. military command there in Kabul, in particular, over this issue.
And it really is part of the broader tapestry of conflicts that still have not been resolved between Karzai and the U.S. government over this transition in 2014.
And what the U.S. military presence is going to be like after that transition, and also even what the Karzai government or the Afghan government is going to be able to control in terms of detention centers.
The main U.S. detention center was supposed to have been turned over to the Afghan government already, a long time ago, in fact, and the U.S. keeps basically putting it off.
And it appears to be something the United States is holding over its head as a kind of inducement for him to be more cooperative, but it's not working.
So I mean, that's a little bit of the answer to the question, but there's a lot more, of course, that's still to be said.
All right.
Well, let's get back into the details of all of that in a sec, but let's stick with the kind of upfront politics of the thing as far as the dispute between Karzai and the American politicians and all of that.
Over the weekend, the new Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, went there and they canceled the meeting.
They called it security concerns, but it seems more like the problem was that Karzai was accusing the Americans of deliberately backing the Taliban so we'd have somebody to fight so we could stay longer.
Right.
This apparently developed, it became clear after my story was filed that Karzai had made these statements about basically accusing the United States of collaborating or conniving with the Taliban to create insecurity.
And specifically, he suggested that the bomb that had gone off while Hagel was there, soon after Hagel arrived, was in fact done deliberately by the United States, or at least they had some connivance in this, to basically to put more pressure.
I mean, I think the idea here that Karzai is trying to suggest is that the United States has an interest in making security as bad as possible for the immediate future in order to put pressure on Karzai to give in on a series of issues that are still under negotiation between him and the United States.
It's a bit far-fetched in terms of suggesting that the United States is actually consciously collaborating with the Taliban, but one can understand where Karzai's coming from, because in fact, of course, it is true that the United States is interested in anything that's going to enhance its position in terms of the negotiations with Karzai.
So basically, what you have is a situation that is ripe for the kind of theories that Karzai's talking about.
And in fact, in our story that I wrote with my colleague, Sean Nouri, we talk about the fact that he interviewed some people in Wardak province, including one police official there, local police officer who's in charge of a checkpoint, also a village elder, and so, you know, one of the influential people locally who is in fact convinced of the same thing, that in fact the United States is deliberately encouraging these marauders who, by the way, they think are, you know, people in the province, many of them believe that these are people from outside the province brought in by the United States to create insecurity.
And so, you know, this is the kind of theory that people are coming up with to explain what otherwise seems to them difficult to explain, why in the last five months there's been so much of a reign of terror created by these Afghan militiamen who nobody knows exactly who they represent, what organization they're from, but they're pretty clear that they're sponsored by the United States.
So, in other words, the Americans see a problem and their answer is hit it with a hammer, and that makes everything worse, and then the Afghans conclude that that's why they hit it with the hammer, is to make everything worse.
And it might as well be the case because it works that well at continuing to create jobs to do over there.
Yeah, but one does have to understand that in the Afghan political and cultural context, I mean, it's very easy for Afghans to believe that everything that happens is as a result of a conscious plan by the United States.
Hey, the American one, too!
Well, that's right, exactly.
But, you know, I mean, the idea is that the Americans are so powerful that nothing really can happen there that doesn't have their conscious plan behind it.
And, of course, I don't believe that that's the case, but I do think that there is really genuine belief, very broadly based belief in Afghanistan that this is true, and so I think that that is part of the explanation for Karzai's remarks here.
Well, and it's also the case that the Americans have been, this whole time, right, or at least for the last, what, six, seven years or something, been paying protection money to the Taliban so that they can get their supplies through.
And so, really, they have been financing their enemy this whole time.
Not so that they have won, but just so that they can fight him.
Yeah, yeah, and I mean, that's part of the price of doing business in Afghanistan, clearly.
And, you know, that goes along with, of course, making deals with warlords all the way back to 2001, from the very beginning.
The U.S. military presence has been dependent on these warlords who stand outside the formal structure, in many cases, not in all cases, of the Afghan government.
So, you know, what you have is a structure of private deals the U.S. makes that have undermined any possible authority by the Afghan government.
And so all of that is, again, in the background of this current situation.
And now, you talk about how the Afghan forces who are, you know, being led by the U.S. Special Forces guys and doing these raids, they're not from this province.
They've been brought in from Kandahar, from somewhere else, kind of thing.
So, well, it just happens to be good timing, right?
This recent Guardian story about the El Salvador option of 2005, which supposedly was going to, you know, hit that Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq with a hammer and nip it in the bud.
And what it really did was it created the sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, of course, you can find some very significant parallels there between what the United States did in Iraq in 2004, 2005, at a time when they were particularly desperate because they really didn't have a functioning Iraqi army yet.
And so what they did was to rely on our old friends, the Badr Brigade militiamen, you know, in the form of this Wolf Brigade, which I started writing about in 2005 and have, again, written about in my Petraeus series, which talked about, you know, this very story about Petraeus sponsoring the Wolf Brigade in order to go into these Sunni areas and resist, quote unquote, the Sunni resistance.
But they knew that they were carrying out torture.
These stories were passed on to the U.S. embassy and the U.S. military had access to it.
And we know that the Guardian has an on-camera denial by Petraeus, which is clearly a lie and really deserves to be given a lot of attention.
But, you know, I'm suggesting that there is a parallel here between that situation and the situation in Afghanistan where, let's face it, I mean, the Afghan government does not have the wherewithal or the will to really oppose the Taliban effectively, particularly in a place like Wardak.
And so the U.S. is relying on militias that it trained, it equipped.
And basically, you know, this is, these are forces that the United States controls, not the Afghan government.
And I suggest in the story here, by the way, that it may well be that this is not, in fact, you know, a locally based force, but maybe the counterterrorism pursuit teams.
It may not even be, you know, the special operations forces, baby.
It may be the CIA, which is behind these marauders from outside the province.
The counterterrorism pursuit teams are highly secretive, much more secretive than even the special operations forces and have very seldom been written about.
But Woodward talks about them in his book.
And there are about 3,000 of these Afghans who are under the control of the CIA and who are sent into the most difficult spots.
And, of course, Wardak is one of those places.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if we don't find out that these, this reign of terror has been created by the CIA rather than by special forces.
All right.
Now, you talked about how the L.A.
Times confirmed at least one part of this story that the U.S. had denied when local Afghans had named the names of some of the missing.
And these are not people who are arrested.
These are people who are disappeared somewhere.
Yeah.
Look, let's be clear on this.
There are two things going on, I think.
There's some marauders from outside the province who still have not been identified, which I again, I suspect are, you know, may well be CIA sponsored outfit.
But also, the special operations forces are continuing to carry out night raids in Wardak province.
And what they're doing, as usual, is, you know, relying on cell phone traffic, not vetting this sort of data to find out who these people really are.
And they're just sweeping in, you know, sort of arresting, detaining lots of people who they really have no idea who they are.
And eventually they'll let them go because they'll find out that the vast majority are not are not Taliban insurgents, but simply people who happen to know them and may be in touch with them for some reason.
And so, you know, this is an additional grievance that villagers throughout Wardak province have been complaining about.
And so you've really got a mix of things going on there, which is why this is an extremely volatile situation in Wardak province.
Now, is, you know, with the Iraq parallel there, is there a sectarian parallel here as well, as far as ethnic or religious groups?
Well, it's not a sectarian parallel in the same sense that Iraq was, clearly.
You know, what you do have, though, is, and then I didn't write about this in the story because we didn't have the length to do so.
But in a longer piece, I would have talked about this.
There's a political party called Hezbi Islam, which is associated with Gulbuddin.
And he's one of the early Mujahideen people who, you know, has continued to resist.
He's got armed forces in the field, as well as this party that he's associated with and continues to oppose U.S.
-NATO troops.
They've been trying to, I mean, the U.S. and NATO have been trying to get him to negotiate with them.
It hasn't happened, or if it has happened, he certainly hasn't agreed to their terms.
But apparently now they're going after his people, or the folks that they think are aligned with or associated with this Hezbi Islam party.
And this is, I think, part of the story, storyline that really hasn't been written about yet.
Yeah, well, good.
Then I guess you just sort of broke the story on the show, kind of.
You broke the analysis.
You did that analysis for the first time here.
Yeah, you heard it here first.
All right.
And now, did you read this thing about, or by Vali Nasser, who used to work in the State Department, about how if only Holbrook had been given free reign, everything would have worked out?
Yes, I have.
I did read the excerpts which related to that.
I thought it was quite interesting.
There are two parts of that I wanted to ask you about.
The first part was, I thought the most important part of it was General Kiani, who's really the head warlord of Pakistan.
He said, stop building an Afghan army, because all you're doing really is making new warlords that are just going to be more people to fight in the multi-sided civil war that's coming up when you guys leave.
So you're just making everything worse.
Don't you ever look more than two feet in front of where you're running, you dummies.
And that was one thing.
And then the other thing was just the petty, stupid politics of it all.
Not that I had the slightest bit of faith in Richard Holbrook to accomplish anything, but the part just about how Hillary and Obama don't get along because their little smitherses, their little secretaries and aides are afraid that, you know, they didn't want Hillary to overshadow the president a little bit on this, that these are how the decisions are made.
How is this going to look in the lunch room later?
Yes, I agree with you entirely that that was indeed the bottom line story about this whole matter of Holbrook's diplomacy really being undermined, undercut by White House officials.
And part of the story, you know, is in fact a bit of petty jealousy within the national security elite there between those folks in the White House who don't like Holbrook and don't like, particularly don't like Holbrook to get too much attention.
And they were constantly, you know, leaking stories about Holbrook's bad behavior from their point of view about how he screwed up in meeting with Karzai and so on and so forth.
And what was really going on was just petty jealousy and personal rivalry.
And as you say, I think there was definitely another element there about the White House versus Hillary Clinton as well.
So all of that is, you know, in my view is of the essence of what really goes on in U.S. national security policy.
It's the striving for power and prestige of personalities who sit in these positions in the National Security Council, the State Department, CIA, and the Pentagon who really make our lives so difficult.
Yeah.
Well, it's a couple things there.
First of all, it is exactly what you and I diagnosed at the time.
Almost the exact words are in there, I think, that Obama didn't want to look weak by saying no on the search.
So he got down there on his belly before the generals and said, OK, whatever you want.
And so and and, you know, politically, that was the right thing to do to look tough was to give in and send other people's kids to be maimed rather than stand up to the generals and be so tough.
He can even stand up to generals, which would have been plenty tough.
And I think that, you know, this is part of the culture of the national security state that you don't stand up to generals, that no Democrat in particular can afford politically to be perceived as refusing to do what the generals demand, because after all, we don't really have national security credentials.
That's for the Republicans, because we're we're wimps.
So so that's that's in the background of all that as well.
But but you're right that that this was that this was the basis, political basis for the decision that Obama made.
He knew perfectly well that this was a terrible idea, that it was a failing endeavor for all kinds of reasons.
And if you read Woodward's book, you can see that he was not convinced by their arguments.
He knew that they were wrong, really, from the beginning, and that this was a purely political decision.
Yeah.
Now, the way you describe that, that this is how it all works, really, I think is I don't want to put words right in your mouth, but that was pretty much your reaction to what we're talking about, the the weird politics or the silly politics that led to these terrible policies.
It really is.
And I'm no expert on this because I'm more of a foreign policy guy.
But this is what they call the public choice theory.
And I'm not sure why it's called that.
It's a very strange name, but it's just the theory that when somebody gets a government job, they're still Jim or Dave or Bob.
They don't become these selfless, selfless, national interested beings.
They still are themselves and they seek what's good for them.
And mostly that's, you know, they want attention and they want a promotion.
Scott, that is the not the theory, but but the reality that I am pledging for the rest of my life to hammer away at that will be the primary theme of my writing for the rest of my life.
That everybody's an individual and they ask for what they think is their own interest, even if they have a government job.
No, it's not.
National security politics are, you know, the politics of special interest par excellence.
No, no other endeavor, no other political bureaucratic endeavor is so clearly, so completely a matter of special interest as as the national security field.
And that's the that's the point that I will hammer away at.
It's it's not well understood, unfortunately, by particularly by the left in this country.
They have no concept that matches this.
They believe that everything's about economic interests and they have no sense of the power of the of the role that power plays.
But the the the striving for power on the part of, you know, high ranking senior bureaucrats in the national security state.
And then that's what's missing in this in the politics of this whole issue area.
You're right.
It's a hate to say it.
You know, I don't mean it in a mean way, but it's that pseudo Marxist bias that that just sees the love of money as the root of all evil, when really power is the ultimate end to any good student of Orwell.
This is why O'Brien teaches Winston Smith as he's torturing him to death.
I'm doing this because I like it, you know.
Right now, I hate to say it, but you're absolutely right that that that the the traditional left antiwar movement has simply not grasped the importance of power.
And that's one thing, you know, along with that, that reality that, you know, all national security politics is special interest politics.
That is something that I'm going to continue to to write about.
Well, that's good.
I'm going to keep interviewing you about it, too.
Thanks very much for your time, Gareth.
All right.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Gareth Porter from Inter Press Service.
That's IPS news dot net IPS news dot net.
And you can find him, of course, at antiwar.com/Porter.
Oh, and also over at Truthout dot org, where he did have a lot a lot of award winning work on civilian casualties in the night raids in Afghanistan, etc.
Like that.
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