Alright folks, it's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott, you can check out the website, chaosradioaustin.org, when you get too far away to hear our little signal.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet, chaosradioaustin.org, and also from antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm going to go ahead and get started this Monday morning with our first guest, Eric Margolis, from Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and the new one, American Raj, and basically for decades has covered all the wars of, I don't know, as far as I know, all of Asia, at least all of Central Asia, and is an expert on that part of the world, and as all this current fighting heats up in Pakistan, I'll turn to Eric Margolis to set us straight and let us know what's really going on over there.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Well, it's good to have you here, and all I know is that, I don't really know the context, Eric, other than America's been bombing Pakistan, Hamid Karzai is threatening to invade Pakistan, the Pakistanis are saying, you better not, and what's going on?
Well, Scott, we're stumbling into a bigger and bigger mess by the month in that turbulent part of the world.
You know, one of the unintended consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which I had warned about in 2001, was that the U.S. would eventually come into conflict with Pakistan, and this is just what's happening for some very, very complex reasons.
Just suffice it to say that the U.S. is increasingly frustrated by its inability to defeat Taliban inside of Afghanistan, and is now claiming, with the prodding of Secretary Robert Gates, that all they have to do is invade the tribal regions along the border inside Pakistan and clean out this swamp, as they call it, and knock out Taliban bases and everything will be fine.
Well, this is the next step into a wider disaster.
Are you sure that you're not talking about Iraq and how it's all the country to the east, Iran's fault, and how all we've got to do is take out some training bases inside Iran and everything will be fine in Iraq?
Touché, Scott.
You're absolutely right.
We've heard this before, and I heard it when I was in the U.S., serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, where the same argument was made about Cambodia.
You know, oh, the V.C., the North Vietnamese, they've all got their bases in Cambodia, which they did, and all we have to do is invade and knock out those bases in Cambodia.
So the U.S. Armed Forces went into Cambodia, widened the war, but simply ended up getting overextended, overstretched, and destroyed Cambodia, and didn't produce any military benefits.
Yeah, well, it's just because they didn't clear and hold and use the right strategy.
What we need is a 17-year-old American with a machine gun on every street corner on earth, and in that way, we won't have this thing where we keep having to chase our war across borders like this.
Well, that's true.
Anyone who knew the region of Afghanistan knew that this kind of clash that's building up between the U.S. and Pakistan was pretty inevitable, and here's why.
Most of the Taliban come from the Pashtun tribe, which is half of Afghanistan's population.
It's also 15% of Pakistan's population, just on the other side of an artificial border drawn by Britain in the 19th century.
The Pashtun in Pakistan are first cousins of the Pashtun in Afghanistan.
They're very close, and they usually move back and forth, and of course, the Pashtun in the tribal areas of Pakistan are supporting Taliban and giving them shelter.
The U.S. war there drove a lot of the Taliban across the border, so now what's happening is, as the U.S. gets more involved and launches more attacks with special forces and predator drones, it's getting into a little border war with the Pashtun tribes of Pakistan, as well as the Pashtuns of Afghanistan.
Well, now, do the Pashtun tribesmen basically accept the Taliban as the ultimate threat to the political manifestation of their tribal governments, or do they consider the Taliban themselves to be the alien creations of the Pakistanis, or how exactly does that work?
Well, that's a very sophisticated question.
Most Pashtuns, in my experience, view the Taliban with favor.
Not all, by many means.
But right now, the Taliban is considered the premier force that is fighting to defend Pashtun rights.
What's happened, after the U.S. invasion, the U.S. allied itself with the blood enemies of the Pashtuns, who are the Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north.
They were also the heart of the Afghan Communist Party, and the bitter enemies of Taliban.
So the Pashtun have been largely shut out of the current Afghan government run by the U.S. and stalled Hamid Karzai.
Even though he's a Pashtun, he has no basis of strength of the Pashtun tribes.
So the Pashtuns see themselves excluded from power.
They see their hated Tajik and Uzbek communists really the power behind the throne, with U.S. support, ironically, in Kabul.
And therefore, they're backing Taliban.
And I've been saying all along, just on French TV saying this, too, that until the Pashtun are included in the political process and enfranchised, and given their rightful share of power, they are going to be fighting the U.S. and stalled government.
Well, so let me see if I got this right.
In November of 2001, when the fight was against some Saudis and Egyptians holed up around Osama bin Laden, they escaped to Pakistan, the mission, the guys who were behind the attacks of September 11th.
They got away, and meanwhile, we did a regime change, and now we're fighting a civil war on behalf of the Soviets' former allies, the Tajiks and the Uzbek communists, against the people who were our allies in the 1980s, back when you were covering that war.
And now the war's spreading into Pakistan, because the side that we're warring against in the civil war there is, basically, their whole tribal area crosses these artificial borders drawn by the United Kingdom back in the day, and we can't, as you're saying, Robert Gates' assertion, we can't go in there and clean up the base of support for these guys, or whatever, without invading our allied state, Pakistan, which could lead to what kind of consequences?
They are armed with nuclear weapons, after all.
They are.
Pakistan is a country of 165 million people.
It's not a country that one trifles with, by any means.
Pakistanis are very, very furious at the United States.
We're very, very unpopular there.
And Pakistanis are furious at our support for the dictator Musharraf, who's hated.
The United States is hated.
And it's a tinderbox there.
And what's happening, you know, the stupidity of this plan of Secretary Gates to invade the, it's called the federally administered tribal areas along the border, is that if U.S. troops go in there, as he's urging, what'll happen is that the militants will simply retreat further into Pakistan.
And what happens then?
Are the U.S. going to follow them all the way down to Karachi?
It's a crazy situation.
You summed it up brilliantly.
It is a lunatic situation that we're allied with the Afghan communists, who also are running the drug trade out of Afghanistan that supplies 90% of the world heroin, against our former allies, who were anti-communist fighters, not terrorists, and looking for bin Laden, who's long gone.
It is a crazy situation.
It's a sort of a black comedy.
Yeah, well, but we're educating the little girls and building electric lines.
That makes us a lot different and better than the Soviets in Afghanistan, right?
Well, you know, it was funny.
I'm always amused by the irony of the situation, because when I was covering the war there and in Afghanistan, the Soviets kept claiming that they were fighting Islamic terrorism, that's the word they used, and medievalism, and that they were bringing education and they were liberating Afghan women and they were bringing education and prosperity and economic development to Afghanistan.
They were the exact same words as the U.S. is using, and the Soviet attempts were no more successful than ours are.
What a bummer.
We're the Reds, aren't we?
We have become the Soviet Union in many ways.
You know, there's an old Taoist expression I always quote, you become what you hate.
And certainly the U.S., particularly in the last eight years, has become very much Sovietized.
I think I've said this before on your show, but I used to cover Moscow in the 1980s.
I have a vivid sense for the old Soviet Union, and I see so many Soviet tendencies in Washington now.
I mean, the last being in Guantanamo, I think it was last week or two weeks ago, where one of the accused was put in a glass booth, and he was testifying, and he started saying that he had been tortured, and suddenly the sound was cut off at the trial.
This was worthy of the 1936 Soviet purge trial.
But let me not go astray.
Well, no, I mean, I think that's really important, because it's very hard for people, you know, especially, I don't know, I have a friend, Eric, who complains that Americans will never believe that they live in an empire unless the president wears a dark cloak and shoots lightning from his hands, or wears a funny little mustache and speaks in German with his arm in the air, or marches around like Joe Stalin with goons marching down the street all day, that kind of thing.
They can't see it, because all of our enemies are always such cartoonish supervillains that they cannot recognize the fact that they're living in the suburbs of Moscow, as our evil empire conquers the world here.
Well, you know, my new book, American Raj, that you kindly noted, is exactly about this question, that we Americans don't really understand what we've done abroad, that we do have an empire, and that what we call terrorism is actually the natives fighting back, what the British used to call the cost of empire.
And we do, we do have an empire, inadvertently in many ways, almost by accident, but we do have an empire.
Well, I wasn't suggesting that we've, internally in the States, that we've reached the stage of Stalinist or Communist Russia, but we have tendencies, as the unchecked power, the ultimate power corrupted ultimately in behaving very much like the Soviets did.
Right, I mean, this is what Chris Hedges talks about when he says, you know, we outsource torture to the Egyptians.
At some point, the Egyptian government is simply a part of the Department of Justice.
Their law becomes our law, and vice versa.
This is what happens when you have an empire, is you do end up corrupting back home.
Well, that for sure, and it's certainly one of the most shameful periods in our history, that we've been engaged in such base practices, and using ghastly regimes like Morocco and Algeria and Egypt, Uzbekistan, for torturing people while we fulminate against Iran and Syria for being nasty regimes.
All right, well, let's see if we can do a little bit of predicting about consequences.
If they get their way and they actually expand this war into Pakistan, how likely is it that the crazies are going to get their hands on the nuclear bombs, Eric?
Well, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is very tightly controlled by the Pakistani military and intelligence service, and Pakistan does not have any long-range missiles equipped with nuclear warheads, so there's no danger that Pakistan will get in a direct nuclear war with the United States, or even use its nuclear weapons locally.
They're useless for this tiny thing.
What is more dangerous is that U.S. attacks into the federally administered tribal agencies will develop into a huge mess, and spread into Pakistan.
The Pakistan's regular army, which is 600,000 men strong and very tough, will end up fighting American troops, or will be sucked into a kind of a crazy tribal war in the region, plus Pakistani troops thrown in.
And that will have created a worse situation than Iraq, where we'll be promoting a bloodbath in the area.
Afghanistan will not be solved.
They'll have the Taliban still fighting the U.S., and the U.S. simply doesn't have the men or the money to wage another war.
This has all the classic examples of a small war that can grow out of control.
I was absolutely floored when I saw in your article the quote of General Dan McNeil, who I note is resigning and getting the hell out of there before everything goes completely to pot in Afghanistan.
Of course, my favorite Dan McNeil story is when he explained to the reporters in detail, repeatedly, over and over and over again, that he wanted to make sure that they understood that just because they found some bombs that may have come from Iran, that doesn't mean the Iranian government did it.
But anyway, you quote him in here saying he would need 400,000 troops.
We're not even talking about Pakistan now.
He would need 400,000 troops to quote-unquote pacify Afghanistan.
I guess we just have to withdraw and admit we lost yesterday.
Well, that's right.
You know, it's good to hear an honest general.
Unfortunately, every general who's had the guts to speak up has been fired, and we're left with the yes-men like General Petraeus in Iraq, who all he does is say what the President wants him to say.
But McNeil is right.
O'Neill, rather, is right.
Oh, my bad.
NATO and the U.S. together have around 60,000 troops.
He said they need 400,000 to really control Afghanistan, so the war is not going to be won.
And of those 60,000 troops, probably less than a third are actual combat troops.
So there will be no military solution to this war, and U.S. hopes of cobbling together what I call a sepoy army, that is, native troops like the British used to use, is not working.
The Afghans have no loyalty to the puppet government in Kabul, and while the U.S. pays about 60,000 or 70,000 mercenaries, which it calls the Afghan army, they don't want to fight.
They have no loyalty, and they're in cahoots with Taliban.
So it is a hopeless military situation.
Well, the American people are going to support the indefinite occupation of that land.
I mean, we hear everybody talk about, oh, Iraq is the distraction from the real war on terrorism, which is in Afghanistan, and that kind of thing.
And it seems like as long as Osama bin Laden lives, these people in the war party are going to have carte blanche to continue this, no matter how bad it gets, it seems like.
So is there anything that can be done to just finally somebody, you know, put their knife across the throat of Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and we can end this thing?
Well, you know, the Pakistanis, who may very well be sheltering, they might be tempted to do that, to avoid a direct clash with the United States.
There is a full-court press going on right now in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is having its troops intensifying, looking and sending more CIA teams and other things to find him before the November elections to boost the results for the Republicans.
And it would probably result in a Republican victory if he were captured or killed before the election.
But aside from that, we just don't know.
And the Americans, unfortunately, do not understand the complexities of the area.
They don't understand that Taliban was not a terrorist movement, but an anti-communist movement that was indeed created by Pakistan, and that to which the U.S. gave aid.
We gave them millions and millions of dollars until four months before 9-11.
And they had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks.
Yes, they hosted bin Laden, but no, they knew nothing about these attacks.
And to this day, we're not even sure that these attacks were planned in Afghanistan or came from Afghanistan.
So they've been given a bum rap.
They've been inept, stupid in many ways, and a bunch of hillbillies.
But they're not guilty as charged, and yet they still remain.
They've been so demonized that no politician can dare suggesting opening talks with them, lest he be accused of being soft on terrorism.
Well, those kinds of rhetorical problems aside, among the politicians' difficulties in being honest with the American people here, is there, what is it, oil politics, pipeline politics behind this?
Or is that it, just nobody can ever lose a war?
They're like LBJ, I can't lose a war, we'll just have to kill another couple million people.
Well, no, there are pipeline, there were pipeline politics.
The U.S., of course, through UNICAL and then Chevron, was intent on building a pipeline that would run from southern Uzbekistan, that is, the southern terminus of the whole Caspian Basin oil field, the most recent oil discovery area in the world, and would carry out this black gold, south through Afghanistan to Pakistan, to the coast of Karachi, where tankers would pick it up and take it out to the west.
Afghanistan was the linchpin for this operation, because it's the only way they could get the oil out except going through Iran, which was an absolute no-no.
And the U.S. tried to build this pipeline, but the Taliban government, finally, under, apparently with advice from Osama bin Laden, gave the deal to an Argentine consortium.
The Taliban was immediately put in Washington's black books after that, and my understanding is that the U.S. began to prepare invading Afghanistan before 9-11 to overthrow the Taliban regime.
This is very much about oil.
And I guess it's pretty convenient that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had a place to stay at the same time.
Well, that's right, because it allowed the demonization of Taliban and to make it public enemy number one in the U.S. You remember, after the 9-11 attacks, the U.S. Washington didn't know who to blame.
Al-Qaeda was shadowing, nobody knew where it was.
The only people there who were a target were the poor bumbling Taliban, who didn't have the brains to realize that they were going to become the target for American attack.
And meanwhile, as the CIA and the Northern Alliance had the actual al-Qaeda guys, the Arab Afghans who were loyal to bin Laden pinned down at Tora Bora, when they asked for the Marine Corps to come and help them, the general was turned down.
He had 4,000 marines 10 miles away or something like that.
And even in the New York Times, lost at Tora Bora, they say he called Tampa, Florida, and said, all right, we got him surrounded on three sides.
The CIA has triangulated his last CB radio call or whatever, and we got him.
Permission to engage, sir?
And the Secretary of Defense in Washington, D.C., I don't know if on orders from the president, I assume on orders from the president, said no and refused to allow the general to use his marines, to help the CIA and the Northern Alliance finish these guys off once and for all in November of 2001.
Well, there are two theories on that.
Number one is that Washington didn't want to send American troops in to fight these very tough al-Qaeda troops.
There weren't many of them, but they didn't want to risk the American casualties.
Yeah, they care a lot about the casualties there in Dick Cheney's office, I'm sure.
The other theory, which is common in Pakistan, of course, is that the U.S. absolutely needs bin Laden.
They wanted him to escape.
They helped him to escape, and they've been aiding in his hiding ever since, because without bin Laden, the U.S. would have no longer a reason to stay in Afghanistan and be there to protect the future oil pipelines.
Well, and we can go halfway with that, that they just, you know, turn a blind eye and let him escape, and they don't look too hard for him now.
He doesn't have to be staying at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., for it to still have been deliberate that they let him go.
Well, that's all good.
It's just been a routine military snafu, as well.
That's true.
I mean, we are talking about socialist central planning, right?
Well, that's right.
That's right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because I don't know whether you've written about this or not, but it is relevant.
Can I ask you about the AQ Khan network?
Sure, most definitely.
Okay, I want to understand this, and I've got a few different directions I'm coming from here.
First of all, Gordon Prather thinks, you know, our in-house nuclear scientist at antiwar.com, he thinks that this is a mountain out of a molehill, that, you know, here we have AQ Khan.
What did he sell to Libya?
A bunch of junk that they left in boxes in a warehouse, never did anything with them.
They sold a bunch of junk to the Iranians that all came apart, you know, whenever they turned it on, and it's taken them forever and ever to get their centrifuges even working right at all.
Then you have North Korea, supposedly bought a bunch of stuff from this guy, but they never enriched a single atom of uranium.
They made all their nuclear bombs out of plutonium they harvested from Soviet-era reactors there.
So basically, it sounds to me, Eric, like we have this shadowy worldwide network of black market nuclear technology that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Well, there is some kind of black market underground.
The Swiss just arrested a father and two sons in Switzerland who apparently had the plans for a miniaturized or small, lightweight nuclear warhead on their computers.
And I don't doubt that this information is circling around.
I know that there's a black market for nuclear parts and components.
That's how Pakistan, for example, built its nuclear infrastructure, by evading U.S. sanctions.
And Khan, the scientist, was very instrumental in setting this up.
But having said that, I don't believe he was the spider at the center of this incredible, nefarious international web, and everything came from him.
In fact, he's been a fall guy.
I think the Pakistani government, at some very high level, was involved, and that Khan is being made the fall guy for this.
But other countries have been able to develop nuclear technology.
I think, for example, Brazil and Argentina on their own, and are now almost at the situation where Iran is.
So it's very hard to say what he did and what he didn't.
Well, it seems like now the West is, you know, here we are years later.
Again, they're beating Pakistan over the head with this guy.
And basically, it seems like using him for propaganda points.
Oh, they are, definitely.
And this is the thing where Washington is demanding he be turned over to the U.S. for interrogation.
But this is just the first step in Washington's intent to get rid of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, which the Pakistanis see as their life-and-death protection against nuclear-armed India.
And the U.S.'s intent, you know, Bush, just before the invasion of Iraq, made a hugely important statement to Tony Blair that was leaked out from the famous 10 Downing Street.
And that was that he said, when I'm finished with Iraq, he said, I'm going to go on to handle Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
And so the U.S. has Pakistan squarely in its crosshairs, and there's all kinds of talk in the neocon circles and on the crazy far right of launching preemptive attacks against Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure.
Right, yeah, we talked about this last fall when, what's his name, O'Hanlon from the liberal think tank, from Brookings, co-wrote something in the New York Times with one of the Kagan's, right?
Right, O'Hanlon, who's been wrong about practically everything having to do with Iraq, and yet it's still cited as an authority on the region.
And that's what they were talking about, is different degrees of invading Pakistan back then.
Well, you know, these are the know-nothings in Washington and New York who have never been to Pakistan, have no knowledge of the country, but are ready to launch war against these countries from a safe distance, of course.
Yeah.
Alright everybody, that's Eric Margolis, he's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media.
You can look at the viewpoint section today at Antiwar.com, we're linking to his new article, A Line Not To Be Crossed.
The books are War at the Top of the World, and the new one is American Raj.
Is that thing out yet?
No, it comes out in September, Scott.
September, alright, you keep me up to date on that.
Will do.
Alright, thank you very much for your time today, Eric.
Cheers, bye bye.
