01/10/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and hey, look, it's Eric Margulies, our good friend.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric, how are you doing?
I'm doing just fine, Scott.
That's very good.
Very happy to have you here.
Everybody, y'all know Eric, ericmargulies.com is the website.
He's also writing regularly at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, that's U-N-Z dot com.
And he's author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And I actually want to, well, I want to talk to you about a bunch of stuff today.
But I want to start with this recent article here at ericmargulies.com, World Danger Spots 2014, that starts with, as you call it, mostly forgotten, but the highly dangerous Indian controlled portion of disputed Kashmir.
And you know, one thing that I learned about the India-Pakistan standoff over Kashmir in the last couple of years, I guess, was about this study that Daniel Ellsberg pointed out.
This study that says even if there was a very limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, where they didn't even use all their arsenals and then never even mind whether China would be brought in or not, and these kinds of questions, that just a very limited nuclear exchange between the two countries there could eventually kill billions of people.
That could be enough to cause a severe enough nuclear winter as to cause massive proportions of the world's crops to fail and massive starvation and war and upheaval and tumult for centuries to come, you know, coming out of something like that.
And then, yet, as you say, it's mostly forgotten.
Hardly anyone ever talks about Kashmir ever, and they certainly don't talk like, yeah, we need to make sure to have a peace summit and solve these difficulties or anything like that.
I mean, slow down, because I don't want to see humankind extinct over, you know, some nonsense.
And truth, again, is part of the way to solving the problem.
We worry about countries like Iran that have no nuclear weapons, and yet we completely ignore the very dangerous nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan.
In my book, War at the Top of the World, which has come out, I think, of four editions, which is about this very subject, and it came out almost 20 years ago now, I cite a RAND Corporation – that's a U.S. military think tank – RAND Corporation study that a very limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would immediately kill 2 million people, would end up gravely injuring or killing up to 100 million.
This is just in India and Pakistan, and send radioactive dust around the globe that you just referred to as a nuclear winter, and also pollute all the groundwater and rainwater upon which 1.6, 1.7 billion Indians and Pakistanis live.
So even a limited war would be a terrible catastrophe.
But the ingredients are all there, and it could happen tomorrow.
Now I have a dream that one day, America, the nation-state, which I can't make it go away, but if I can't make it go away, I have a dream that one day it would live up to its creed, and it would have no overseas forces anywhere other than diplomats, and they would do things like hold summits in third countries, fourth countries, that have nothing to do with any of these conflicts, and just try to work it out.
And I don't mean by offering each side $3 billion a year from now on, and that kind of thing either, but just, there's got to be a solution.
I actually one time had software engineers in my cab, one Indian and one Pakistani, and I said, come on guys, can't we work out this Kashmir thing?
And they both were like, yes, of course we can work this out.
This is just stupid politicians don't want to work it out.
Well, it's complicated, Scott, I really didn't give you the background on it, but when the British divided India in 1947, the western regions, which were predominantly Pakistani, wanted their own separate state, Pakistan.
But the independent mountain state of Kashmir, which was ruled by a Hindu Maharaja, but mostly about 70-80% Muslim people, voted after lots of exchange of money and heavy persuasion from Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, to go to join India.
Riots erupted amongst the Muslims, the Indians and Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis and the Indians rushed up troops, and fighting ensued, and at the end of the fighting, the state of Kashmir was left divided, two-thirds ruled by India, one-third by Pakistan.
The Kashmiri Muslims have been rebelling on and off against Indian rule ever since, fighting now goes on, but the Indians call it terrorism, cross-border terrorism, the Pakistanis call it liberation.
I've been there, I've been there with the Pakistani guerrillas going across the border into Indian-ruled Kashmir, it's a bloody war somewhere, we don't know, 60-70-80,000 people have died.
Indian repression in its portion of Kashmir has been extremely brutal, marked by torture and mass punishments of villages and executions of people.
Human rights groups in India have denounced the government there, and this thing drags on and on.
The problem is that the Indian army is poised on the border there, there's fighting a couple of times a week, I've been under fire in Kashmir on the ceasefire line, known as the Line of Control, and the Pakistani army's drawn up there, their pistol shots away from each other, and now the two sides both have nuclear weapons and the bombs on aircraft and missiles armed with nuclear warheads pointed at each other, and their early warning system gives them only three to four minutes of warning, so they're on a hair-trigger early warning alert, you have a part of the world where the phones don't work and the trains don't work and not much else works properly, and yet their early warning system has said that just one false report could trigger a nuclear exchange, because it's the use-em or lose-em threat that we sometimes saw back in the Cold War days.
You know, I just read this thing, and I thought it was in foreignpolicy.com, but now I can't find it.
But it was about how the Pakistani general in charge of their nukes, that he's a world-renowned guy for being just ultra-competent, and that, man, if the Pakistanis are going to have nukes, at least General What's-His-Name is the one in charge of them, but now he's gone, and everybody's scared as hell, because even under him, it was a situation where, you know, like you're saying, the way a lot of people live, and you're talking dirt roads, you're talking nukes in the back of flatbed trucks stuck in traffic, you know, with everybody else.
Talking about very low-tech command and control over these nukes.
And I remember in 98 when they were testing them, one Pakistani general telling the CNN cameraman to tell the Indians, we're not afraid of you, bring it on, atom bombs don't scare us.
Like they're meant to just scare you to death.
Well, you know, fortunately, both of the Indian-Pakistani generals are a pretty conservative, level-headed bunch.
They are not wild-eyed fanatics, they're very aware of the dangers that they have.
The Indian command and control authority is run through civilian upper echelons of the government, which gives it even more, let's say, pause, period, in the event of a crisis, where the Pakistani generals can probably trigger a nuclear attack if the prime minister backs them.
But it's, you know, it's probably in a crisis, or a huge bombing, or a major terrorist incident like we've seen, for example, in Bombay, people's good sense quickly evaporates.
Right.
All right, and now, so, if I'm President Horton and I send you a special envoy Margulies over there, what would you have to honestly arrange for the Indians to make it okay for them to give up their control, or, you know, at least, I don't know, one of the two-thirds they control, or something, to help heal these wounds and move on, move forward from here?
Mr. President, the United Nations has called for a plebiscite in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir since 1948, and the Indians have refused.
They won't allow the people there to vote.
They know perfectly well that the people there will probably vote to join Pakistan, even though India is now comparatively booming, Pakistan is a big, fat mess, still, they would probably join, because there's this deep, cultural, religious enmity between Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs.
But what the United States has completely avoided the issue, but what we should be doing is really pressing the two sides very hard to come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.
And really, what this should be based on is the integration of the two Kashmirs, Indian and Pakistani side, erase the border between them, make it a demilitarized state.
Kind of a semi-autonomous zone, or something?
That's right.
I mean, that seems a clear way, but India won't do it.
And then there's another...
Well, what if we sent Connolly's rice over there to give them more nuclear weapons technology?
Would they do the same?
God help us.
But there are more issues to cloud it.
Number one, the Pakistanis gave a big chunk of plateau around 14,000 feet altitude called Aksai Chin to China, a close ally of Pakistan, so the Chinese could build a road there that links Tibet with Xinjiang province.
So that was part of Kashmir.
Ladakh, Indian-ruled Ladakh, what's sometimes called Little Tibet, was also part of Kashmir.
Those have to be resolved.
Then there's all of the northern province of Baltistan, where the mountain climbing expeditions go to K2, for example, were also historically part of Kashmir.
So the Indians are saying, oh, you have to give it back, too.
If we give anything up, you Pakistanis have to give up the north of Pakistan.
The Qatar-Pakistanis are going, no, no, no, no.
So there are deep complexities there, very hard to untangle.
The most important question is to get both sides to de-target their nuclear weapons.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's start with baby steps here, you know?
All right.
Everybody hang tight.
We've got to take a short break, but we'll be right back with Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com is his website.
Spelt like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com, World Danger Hotspots 2014.
The books are American Raj and War at the Top of the World, and the brand new one running at LRC tomorrow is Al-Qaeda.
Just won't go away.
We're going to ask him about that right after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Next week, this weekend, I'll get it all fixed up for you, new spots and everything.
By the way, that footnote that I couldn't remember or find, it's one more reason to worry about Pakistan's nukes.
It's in the nationalinterest.org by Michael Kugelman, talking about this general who's now retired and been replaced and whatever, whatever.
Anyway, so now, yeah, we're talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
I wanted to ask him, sorry, I meant to ask him before we went on the air, Eric, whether you had seen this article in Foreign Policy Today by Yochai Dreesen, Gates, U.S. tried to oust Karzai in failed putsch, and this is about how they tried to rig the election for Abdullah Abdullah back in 2009 in the fall.
Remember that?
Well, I do remember it.
I haven't seen the article to which you refer, but I know that the U.S. have written many times that the U.S. rigged the elections, all the elections in Afghanistan, and rigged them much more crudely than even the Soviets did.
Yeah, I mean, they failed miserably then, and it couldn't have been more obvious when the New York Times is running front-page stories saying CIA agent Karzai's brother is a heroin dealer.
Uh, really?
And that's how you discredit him, huh?
You're accusing him of being a CIA agent, or you're accusing him of being a heroin dealer?
That's right.
Pretty sordid.
And then, I don't know about Abdullah Abdullah, do you know much about him?
Yes.
He is a very, you know, I have an old saying, beware any Afghan who speaks flawless English and wears a well-tailored suit, because they're always the CIA boys, or crooks.
And Abdullah Abdullah, one of the more intelligent, better spoken of the Afghan senior people, was a leading member of the Northern Alliance that was founded by Ahmad Shah Massoud.
And the Northern Alliance, a Tajik group that is very close to the Russians, was more or less managed by the KGB, and during the whole Afghan war against the Soviets, sided and fought with the Soviets to undermine the U.S.-backed Afghan resistance.
And now they're the biggest heroin and opium dealers in Afghanistan, this Northern Alliance, was a close American ally.
With them, we overthrew the Taliban government in Kabul.
But he's the nice, soft-spoken, corporate face of these thugs and drug-dealing warlords from the North.
So these were the guys who were outright fighting on the side of the Communists back in the 80s?
They were the fake opposition?
That's right.
They claimed to be fighting, but they actually weren't.
Fighting the Soviets, they were not.
And then, boy, I mean, they really botched that thing, right?
Why couldn't they install them in power?
They were outmatched by Karzai, the CIA was?
Well the Taliban, the CIA, suddenly got frightened when they realized that the Northern Alliance was completely run by the KGB, and very close to the Russians.
Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm talking about in 1909.
And they were trying to win the election for Abdullah Abdullah against Karzai.
And then they gave up, basically.
Well I think it was a combination of poorly rigging the election, and maybe they ran out of money, who knows, or poorly rigging the election.
And also, there was great resistance amongst the Pashtuns, who still make up the majority there, to sort of see the CIA pulling all the strings.
Anyway, they didn't succeed, and they were unsure about who to put in his place.
Yeah.
Well, the way that Gates is portraying it in his new memoir, apparently, is that this was all Richard Holbrook's idea, and he tried to stop them, and you're right, I don't know.
Well, I take what Gates says with a couple of grains of salt.
He doesn't have an illustrious record, either, and was more of a politician than a strategist.
Yeah, yeah, from the very beginning, too, yeah.
Of his career, I mean.
Now, not just his beginning of the Afghan war, his role in the Afghan war, or anything like that.
There's a new NIE that says that if we leave, everything will fall apart, so does that mean we gotta stay?
Well, that's the standard colonial response.
You know, the Soviets used to say, I remember vividly when I was in the Caucasus in the 1980s, if we leave, they're gonna be at each other's throats.
The Soviet Union's the only thing that's kept peace here.
Well, now we Americans are using the exact same argument.
I suppose it's true, if you keep a colonial garrison large enough to be effective in Afghanistan, or Iraq, for that matter, eventually it will sort of help keep the peace the way the British did, but do we wanna be there for the next 20 years?
The Afghans are not gonna help us do it.
They're gonna be sniping away at us, and it's, you know, garrisoning Afghanistan is extraordinarily expensive.
It's like keeping a garrison on the dark side of the moon.
Very hard, very expensive.
Yeah, and I mean, the excuse that we have to stay to keep things the way we've set them up is sort of the same thing as saying we've set things up in a completely untenable house of cards kind of a way.
And so, you know, what kind of, how's it a mission worth preserving if by definition it's a failure?
Well, I, I, my hackles raise even every time I hear the word mission, we're on a mission to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, mission, a mission is something like you go on like a humanitarian mission to stay, save starving people in Uganda or something like that.
Invading Afghanistan is not a mission, it's a, it's an imperial adventure, same thing with Iraq.
And the question is, why are we still there?
What do, what do we hope to achieve?
And uh...
That is the question.
That's the, that's the debate in Washington, the Pentagon can't admit defeat.
I mean, you know, first they got their pants kicked in Vietnam when I was in the army.
And then the, uh, you know, the idea that a bunch of poorly armed, lightly armed mountain tribesmen have defeated the most powerful military force on earth with all the flash Gordon weapons that we have, uh, is just very hard to take for the Pentagon.
The Pentagon knows that if it retreats from Afghanistan, they're going to be howls from Congress to cut the defense budget.
So that's the mission is having a mission, finding something to do.
That's right.
And uh, so, uh, the counter argument as well, the U.S. must stay there to prevent the Chinese from taking, taking over.
Well, the Chinese aren't very anxious to get in there.
The people who are really looking at Afghanistan are the Indians.
And there's been on and off talk about the U.S. and India collaborating to bring in Indian troops.
But the Indians are too smart to do that too.
They're kind of, they're, they're doing a lot of stuff, but it's, it doesn't involve military adventures.
Finally, they're the U.S. wants a garrison.
You know, I keep saying we Americans react to oil like cats to my cats do to catnip.
We just, we just love that oil.
And to where there's oil, uh, there are Americans, uh, look for God's sakes, why are American troops now?
Today we read the American troops are going into, uh, Somalia again, small numbers.
There are American special forces in Uganda.
Uh, why did we just create this miserable little state of South Sudan?
Well, it's actually, it's a big state.
Uh, why are we interested in Uganda of all places?
Well, cause they've all got oil and, uh, where there's oil where we have interest.
So that's another reason to keep a garrison in Afghanistan overwatching the great Caspian oil basin.
Yeah.
You know, that just doesn't make any sense.
There's not going to be security enough to run a pipeline through Afghanistan for a hundred years.
What are we talking about here?
They couldn't even get them out of Iraq.
Uh, the, uh, the resistance kept blowing them up.
So, uh, but it's, uh, it's what the French call an E-Day fix.
You know, it's become a, uh, a mantra for the U S we've got to stay, we've got to maintain stability.
Uh, you know, we've got to protect women and children and all this kind of BS while we're bombing them every day.
Uh, it, it, it makes sense to the American imperial establishment, uh, as a jobs program.
That's right.
That's the ordinary people like me or me, although I'm not sure how ordinary I am, but I think I am extraordinary.
I think I'm the standard of what ordinary should be.
How about that?
Well, quite right.
Quite right.
Yes.
Um, yeah.
I mean, that's a lot of dead bodies for nothing.
I mean, and, and then when it comes to the so-called mission occupying and, and invading the place, um, and you know, you mentioned like women's rights and all that, they never really do claim, even at the dawn of the surge and all the counterinsurgency doctrine hype and all that.
They never really said, yes, we'll have a Western European style Westphalian nation state.
That's going to be our permanent ally from now on after this or anything like that.
They just said, well, it'd be a little better.
And a lot of Americans, particularly women, uh, believe that progress, great progress has been made to protect Afghan women.
Meanwhile, every day, horror stories about abusive women are coming out of India and nobody plays such close attention, but, oh, Taliban, wife beaters, killers of little girls, uh, that...
Be careful.
We'll be occupying the subcontinent next year.
We don't want that.
The subcontinent may be occupying us.
Oh, well, I'll look forward to that, actually, I think.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Cheers to you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
That's the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
No, I don't want the Indians to occupy North America, but I don't want America to either.
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