05/16/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Over at AIPAC, the leaders of the Israel Lobby in Washington, D.C., they're constantly proclaiming unrivaled influence on Capitol Hill.
And they should be proud.
The NRA and AARP's efforts make them look like puppy dogs in comparison to the campaigns of intimidation regularly run by the neoconservatives and Israel-firsters against their political enemies.
But the Israel Lobby does not remain unopposed.
At the Council for the National Interest, they put America first, insisting on an end to the Empire's unjustified support for Israel's aggression against its neighbors.and those whose land it occupies, and pushing back against the Lobby's determined campaign in favor of U.S. attacks against Israel's enemies.
CNI also does groundbreaking work on the trouble with evangelical Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia and drumming up support for this costly and counterproductive policy.
Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
Just go to councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
And thanks.
So, listen, I want to know all about what's going on in Pakistani politics.
And yet, I don't want to go to Pakistan and walk around asking people.
I figure I'll just call you.
Well, as always, Pakistani politics are very murky.
But what we know so far is that, and this is on the positive side, that Pakistan had its first national election since I can remember where power was peacefully passed from one government to another.
Right, they've had elections from time to time, but there's always a coup before the thing is transferred to the next election.
That's right.
I think half of Pakistan's governments have been overthrown by coups.
Some have been kicked out of office, suspended by the courts, as Benazir Bhutto was.
And on and on.
So it's constantly, it's like tribal warfare conducted on the political level.
But what happened this time is that the expected victors, that is the Muslim League led by former, twice former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, won a landslide victory.
And we don't know quite yet, but it appears they may, they're close to having an absolute majority.
The former government led by the People's Party, that's the Zardari and Bhutto party, was just crushed and left as a minor, a regional party in southern Sindh, where the Bhuttos come from.
And finally, the new upstart, up-and-coming party, the Justice Party led by cricket star Imran Khan, as far as we know, didn't do as well as expected.
This was the party of youth and rebellion.
Captured the northwest frontier province, but that's it.
So as of now, Pakistan has an elected government and it looks very stable.
And so, now Imran Khan, the cricket star, at least from the little media I had seen, he really was the rising star and was expected to do pretty well.
And he's now complaining that he thinks he got the shaft, but you sound like you don't think so, huh?
Well, no, I wouldn't be surprised if there were vote rigging, particularly in southern Pakistan.
He's saying particularly so in Karachi and Lahore, which is the home base of the Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shabazz.
Enough to make a difference, you think?
Probably not.
Because the Nawaz party won so many seats that it's unlikely even if the Justice Party of Imran Khan won a few more seats, it wouldn't make that much difference.
But the only, the important difference is that if Imran Khan could gather a few more votes, he now is vying for second place with the People's Party.
It was the government.
And if he can get a few more votes, he would become the official opposition, which is very important in a parliamentary democracy.
Because he would speak as the opposition to the government.
If he doesn't, then it'll be the People's Party and he will sort of slip back into a much lesser position.
Well, you know, he's the real interesting story because if he's independently successful and famous due to being a sports legend, then he could be possibly incorruptible in a sense and truly be a man of his word and the man of the people and all that kind of thing.
That's the idea anyway, right?
Rather than being the son of an industrialist who's tied to global oil power or something?
That's right.
Nawaz Sharif, the winner...
I interviewed him, by the way, in...
I don't remember when it was.
I think it was probably the early 1990s when he was prime minister.
And I found him...
He was a businessman, originally.
A millionaire businessman.
He's no fiery politician.
And after some of the other Pakistani leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq that I had met, he seemed pretty bland.
But he is competent.
But younger Pakistanis particularly, and I, too, as an old friend of Pakistan, had hoped that Imran Khan would do a lot better because, you're right, his anti-corruption crusade or jihad, if we can use the word, resonated with Pakistanis.
Khan said that...charged that 80% of Pakistani politicians were crooks, which is probably about right.
Pakistan is steeped in corruption, which has been even encouraged by the United States by handing out billions in secret bribes all over the place.
It's a nasty situation.
So Imran Khan had the aura of being incorruptible.
I don't know about the people around him.
It would have been better.
But anyway, that's yesterday.
Nawaz Sharif is now firmly in power, and everybody's waiting to see what he's going to do.
Well, they're saying he's really good on India and wants to go ahead and settle whatever outstanding issues and have some kind of real peace agreement.
Do you take that seriously?
Not too seriously.
Hitherto in Pakistan, foreign policy has been run by the Pakistani army, which is really a state within a state, a separate government with its own rights and privileges and budgets and things like that.
And peace with India will go as fast or as slowly as the army wants.
Right now there's great concern in Pakistan that as the U.S. maybe lowers its profile in Afghanistan, that it's going to ask or encourage India, as it has been, to come in and take charge in Afghanistan so an Islamic government doesn't come to power.
This is anathema to Pakistan's military strategies.
So I don't see roses and chocolates in the near future for the Indo-Pakistani relations.
So really, in other words, whatever Sharif wants, whether his interests or his goals are in line with the Americans or not, as long as the Americans are supporting and even increasing support for the Indians in Afghanistan, they're guaranteeing that the Pakistani military is going to create a situation in Afghanistan where they really can't even lie their way out, calling it victory at all, which means they'll have their excuse to stay, sounds like to me.
Well, much of what we hear about the Pakistani Taliban fighting in this war of Pakistan since 2001 has lost 40,000 troops killed fighting the tribesmen along the northwest frontier.
Are you kidding?
Really?
A huge amount.
That's infinitely more than the U.S. has lost in Afghanistan.
Well, what happened was the U.S. went in and General Musharraf told me personally that the U.S. had put a gun to his head and said either cooperate and rent us the Pakistani army and intelligence services or we'll bomb you back to the Stone Age.
That's the term he used that he heard from Washington, Secretary Armitage, in fact.
I wasn't there.
I can't confirm it.
But the Americans then went and rented for about $1.3 billion a year, they rented about 140,000 Pakistani troops who were sent up to the border with Afghanistan and their job was to fight the rear areas of the Afghan Taliban who were taking refuge and getting supplied from Pakistan.
Well, it's all Pashtun tribal area on both sides of the border.
So the Pakistani army went into action at the behest of the U.S. army.
A lot of Pakistanis were killed, but the by-product of this was that there was an unwritten law in Pakistan's constitution and that was that no Pakistani military forces would ever be allowed into the northwest frontier tribal areas.
And it's now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but I call it by the old British name, Northwest Frontier.
The tribal belt along there, where we hear about all kinds of terrorism and things, was independently, fiercely independent Pashtun tribes.
When I went there, I had to go on my own, on foot.
The Pakistani government couldn't even take me in there.
They were, you know, it was the law.
But we forced Pakistan to break its sacred compact with the Pashtun tribes and what we call terrorism here is the fact that they're rebelling against central government rules from Islamabad.
They want their independence back.
So we've got that issue on top of it that has roiled Pakistan.
And by the way, both Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have vowed to address this major problem.
Okay, now I'm spacing out, but wasn't it Salim Shahzad that talked about, wasn't he the reporter that got murdered by the ISI two years ago or something?
Oh, I don't remember.
Sorry.
Oh, crap.
I remember the name, but I don't remember the details now.
I know he was killed.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, what he had done was he had written a couple of pieces for the Asia Times about al-Qaeda infiltrate, meaning Egyptians and Saudi, you know, Arab Afghan types, leftovers from the old war in the 80s or their offspring anyway, that they had infiltrated the Pakistani Navy.
And then he said, boy, I think the ISI is going to kill me.
And then he was killed the next day or something like that.
And anyway, so he had written this book and I haven't read the whole thing, but I have looked at parts of it.
I remember Gareth Porter reviewed it too, where he talked about the al-Qaeda-ization of the Pakistani Taliban that really had no real.
I mean, the Duran line is a big fake line, but it's sort of kind of true anyway, if only for geographic reasons, topographic reasons, maybe.
And so the Pakistani Taliban didn't really have much of a dog in America's fight in Afghanistan.
But by forcing the civil war, by forcing Musharraf to wage the Pakistani civil war and then helping him wage it, you know, that basically what we did was we combined all these different jihads into one big steam and mess.
And we ended up as with all the drone strikes, killing all the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban.
More and more, they came to rely on the Egyptians and the Saudis for putting together their plans of actions.
And for that matter, there were more long-term goals.
And so that's ended up blowing back in the face of the American occupation in Afghanistan and also against the military in Pakistan too.
What do you think about all that?
Scott, that's one certainly possible interpretation.
My view is that al-Qaeda is practically non-existent anywhere.
It has very little influence that I've seen.
On these tribes, these Pashtun tribes, their one philosophy and credo is, Leave us alone.
Don't bother us.
Get the hell out.
They're that way in Afghanistan.
And their cousins south of this phony border, the Duran line that you mentioned, have exactly the same feeling.
And they want their autonomy back.
Sort of like the Kurds of the region.
So by waging the war in Afghanistan, what we have done, the blowback from that, and by forcing the Pakistanis to cooperate, whereas most of them didn't want to, we have contributed to the severe destabilization of Pakistan to what we call terrorism and to the big political mess there.
Hopefully we'll adopt a different policy, but that also remains to be seen.
The subtext to all this too is that Nawaz Sharif is not really a player in any of these questions.
It's all up to D.C. and General Kiani, huh?
Well, yes.
General Kiani is due to be replaced later this year.
And that's a very interesting issue.
He was kept in his position for too long by American pressure.
Now there's got to be a replacement or the army is going to go crazy.
It's interesting to recall that Nawaz Sharif was faced with the same problem, and he tried to name his own man, his own general as the head of the general staff in Pakistan.
And he got a big squabble over it with a general named General Musharraf, who was involved in the invasion of Indian Ladakh in the famous Kargil Offensive in 1999.
I know this is complicated, forgive me, but everything there is complicated.
Nawaz tried to kick out Musharraf, Nawaz the Prime Minister, and Musharraf staged a coup against him and overthrew him and had Nawaz thrown into jail.
Now Nawaz is going to face a similar problem in the late fall when he has to bring a new man, and there will be tremendous pressure on him from Washington to name a Pakistani general approved by the U.S. and also a director of ISI intelligence.
Yeah, well, and Musharraf is sitting on house arrest.
So why did he even come back from England?
Didn't he know that there was a warrant out for blowing up your friend Benazir?
I think it was just a runaway ego.
He somehow thought that Pakistan would rise up and, oh, Musharraf, lead us into the light.
Well, Mush was wrong, and the uprising never happened, and all his enemies were waiting to bounce on him, and the judges who he had had beaten up and locked up were just itching for revenge.
So it was an incredible act of folly and stupidity, but Musharraf is not a very intelligent man.
When I met him, I was amazed by what a dope he was.
And he has not learned very much, it seems, from his exile in England.
Yeah, all right, well, I guess not.
All right, so, well, here's the other thing, I guess, is that I don't know enough about Pakistan to even ask a good question, so I should ask you something more overly broad, like tell me more about Pakistan that I don't understand, that the audience might not be aware of, that important context here, you know?
Questions I don't even know to ask.
No, no, no, the more general question is a good one, because we need to step back, particularly for listeners whose eyes are becoming glazed over with all the detail.
Pakistan, we have to keep in mind, was created in 1947 out of British India, and something that India has never accepted, and ruse the loss, that's the Al-Zaaf-Lorraine of India, and Hindu nationalists, particularly on the extreme right, say we've got to reunify Mother India, so there's that danger.
Pakistan reminds the Indians of all the wars and the fighting between the Hindus and Muslims in India, the subjugation of the Hindu kingdoms by Muslim conquerors.
Pakistan was cobbled together by the British imperialists, four provinces, there's Punjab, land of the five rivers, which is very fertile, farming, wealthy, well, wealthy in South Asian terms.
It is the center of Pakistan, that's where most Pakistanis live.
Up north, there's the Northwest Frontier Province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, that goes into the tribal territories and up to the Afghan border.
In the south is the province of Sindh, very agricultural, very poor, power base of the Bhutto family, feudal Bhutto family.
And finally in the west, there's Balochistan, the land of the Baloch tribesmen, very thinly populated, only a couple million people, mostly desert, but very strategic, it abuts Iran and its coast runs along the gulf through which pass the oil tankers.
So this is an unstable mixture, and all the rest of Pakistan always complains about Punjabi domination and bullying and things like that.
There's no guarantee that Pakistan is going to hold together because there's been rebellion in Balochistan, since I can remember.
The Northwest Frontier has been up in arms with the Pakhtunkhwa tribes.
The south is not that happy.
Karachi is in a state of armed rebellion for the last decade.
So things are very shaky.
Well, and you know, this policy, I guess I can see the rudimentary logic in it from the State Department's point of view, that well, okay, so we want to support the Indians' presence in Afghanistan so that they'll help support our sock puppets, Karzai and the Northern Alliance types in Kabul, right?
Don't want the Taliban to come back to power.
But is it guaranteed that if we didn't support the Indians there as a check on Pakistani power, which obviously just animates the Pakistanis to just intervene in Afghanistan more against us, their so-called friends, is it guaranteed that they would support the Taliban coming back to power?
Certainly we could work out an agreement.
We could threaten to bomb them back to the Stone Age or whatever you like, right?
If they would support Karzai and his friends in some kind of long-term agreement, right?
Instead of, it just seems so counterproductive and ridiculous unless the goal is either just, unless one, they're not really working toward a goal because they're just completely incompetent stooges up there, or they want an excuse to stay because as long as they back the Indians, and as you put it, even escalate their support for the Indians or support the Indians' escalation of support for the American sock puppets in Kabul, that just continues to help cause support for their enemies on the ground.
I mean, it makes sense that they're backing the Taliban now, but if we wouldn't support the Indians there, couldn't we make a deal with the Pakistanis otherwise?
I'm repeating myself now.
I think we could, Scott.
The first thing we should do is make a deal with Taliban, which had nothing to do with 9-11.
And we used to be best of friends with the fathers of the current Taliban people who were known as the Mujahideen.
I was with them in the field in Afghanistan.
They were our boys.
We armed them, we fed them, we financed them.
These are exactly the same people.
The U.S. should make a deal with Taliban, and the Taliban is the Pakhtun people, or Patans as we used to call them, which is over half the population of Afghanistan.
There are three other minority groups.
Fasten your seatbelts.
There are the Tajiks in the northeast.
There are Uzbeks in the northwest, and the Hazara, who are a small group.
They speak different languages.
Yeah, but it isn't really the case that the average Pashtun, if he had a choice, would pick the Taliban to be his political leadership.
That's just what he's stuck with, no?
Probably, probably not, though there's a lot in the rural areas.
Yeah, there's a lot of support for Taliban, because they'll remember you.
Certainly as resistance fighters, but as the next state too?
That's a moot point.
Right.
The reason that in the Muslim world, the reason that these hardline Islamic groups who want to bring in Sharia law are often popular is that with Sharia law they bring in a modicum of justice.
This is a part of the world where there's no justice of any kind.
Justice is bought, just like a pair of socks at Walmart.
And for the poor, there is no justice at all, and corruption reigns supreme.
The Islamists, whether Hamas in the Middle East or Hezbollah or Taliban, have imposed something that looks pretty close to non-corrupt societies and brought in some rudimentary justice through the Islamic law system.
So there's an attraction for that.
It's government.
It's hardline government, but there it is.
Whether Afghans continue to support it, I don't know at this point.
It depends what's on the other side, because the Tajiks and the Uzbeks' leadership, the form called the Northern Alliance, have become puppets of the Indians who financed them and the Russians to a large extent.
And during the 80s, they were the main allies of the Russians in the civil war.
And the outside powers will continue to use up the Tajiks and the Uzbeks to stir trouble in Afghanistan and advance their political interests.
Iran uses the Hazaras, who are the only Afghans who are Shias.
Ah, I see.
So can the people that America's backing now, if the Americans were to leave, somehow, magically, not because the Democrats will do it, would the foreign powers backing the same people that we're backing now, would they be able to keep them in power?
I'm trying to think of a way for the Democrats to save face and leave and call it a victory, just like they called their loss in Iraq a victory.
I figure let them have their PR if that's what they need to get the troops the hell out of there.
Well, if Taliban is smart, they would assist the American withdrawal, which Pakistan, by the way, has just agreed to do, too, and not fight very hard against the remaining American troops and mercenaries there, and let the situation stay calm for about nine months before they overthrow the American sock puppets, as you call them.
By then, American attention will have turned elsewhere, and nobody will care anything about Afghanistan.
But knowing the Pashtuns who live for revenge, I'm not sure that it'll happen.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
Well, I mean, that's my question.
Can the Iranians help Karzai stay in power, or the Taliban are going to sack Kabul after America leaves?
Simple as that.
Or maybe even before America's done leaving.
Yeah, Karzai will fall unless the Indians come in, or some other large force, maybe the Turks or something, come in to defend him.
I don't think even the Northern Alliance, Tajiks and Uzbeks, will be able to save him unless Iran intervenes.
But most of the Afghans hate the Iranians.
They stabbed the Afghan resistance in the back when the Soviets were in power.
They don't trust the Iranians at all.
The Russians might get involved again.
Who knows?
It's a mess.
Yeah, well, all I know is their plan is, oh yeah, we're going to withdraw down to about 5,000 guys or 10,000 maybe, and that'll be good enough.
I always wonder if 10,000, you know, 5,000 is enough to protect the other 5,000, or if they're going to stay at all, don't they need better than that?
Of course they do.
It's like we've done in Iraq.
We have about a 15,000-man force still in Iraq, but they're mercenaries.
They're private government contractors, they're called.
And they're ex-soldiers, and their job is to protect the embassy and our stooge government there.
I didn't realize there really was still that many of them, huh?
There are, apparently.
That's not going to be enough to protect Karzai from the vengeance of the Taliban.
All right, well, now we've got just about 30 seconds for you to remark upon, if you've heard about it, this AEI thing saying let's split off Kurdistan from Iraq.
Well, that has de facto happened a long time ago.
Iraq has been divided into three pieces, the old imperial-style divide and conquer.
Kurdistan has turned into a virtual American protectorate, where the Israelis are extremely active, as they have been since the 70s, arming and helping the Kurds.
So I don't see any way the Kurds are going to go back and put themselves under Iraqi control.
Boy, there's a future war.
We're going to have to explain that topic in much more depth.
I encourage everyone to go to Google Images and look at the shape of the region, Kurdistan, there, and the borders it crosses.
Thanks very much, Eric.
You're the best.
Cheers, Scott.
All right, everybody, ericmargulise.com, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
Admit it.
Our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Warren here for LibertyStickers.com.
I made up most of them, and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun grabbers, and the status of all stripes, go to LibertyStickers.com, and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Go to a bookstore, sell guns at the show, get the wholesaler's deal.
Buy any hundred stickers, and they drop down in price to a dollar apiece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money, too.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my- Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of R- That's right.
It's just a harmless, stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from SecurityEdition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from SecurityEdition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet and it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's SecurityEdition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Every month, Plum Line individualist editor Sheldon Richmond brings you important news and opinions on policy by heroic FFF President Jacob Hornberger, hard-hitting journalist columnist James Bovard, and others from the best of the libertarian movement.
The Future of Freedom tackles the most important issues facing our country, from the bankrupt and insane welfare and regulatory states, to foreign wars and empire, the dismal state of our economy, and ongoing assaults on civil liberties.
This society needs peace and freedom for prosperity to prevail.
Subscribe to the Future of Freedom in print for just $25 a year, or online for $15 a year at fff.org.
Subscribe.
And hurry up, because this summer they'll be running my articles about the wars in Libya, Syria, and Somalia in the Future of Freedom, too.
That's fff.org.
Subscribe for the Future of Freedom.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scott horton dot org.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow dot com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account, and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas, so Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money, and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow dot com.