06/24/14 – John Knefel – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Hey, it worked out.
I got John Neffel on the line.
Hey, Scott.
How's it going?
Hey, John.
Good to talk to you again.
Yeah, yeah.
Glad to be back here.
All right, so the article is that Rolling Stone, the US, is still waging a forever war in Pakistan and Yemen, two countries where, you know, I guess everybody takes it for granted that we're still bombing them all the time, but I admit I haven't even been paying much attention to either of those in at least a few weeks.
I guess I was reading up on some Yemen strikes a few weeks back, but other than that, you got me.
So thanks for keeping your eye on the ball here.
Why don't you let us know what's up?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'm as guilty of this as anyone else.
I mean, with the headlines in Iraq and ISIS sort of dominating everyone's attention, it's pretty easy to forget that these sort of quieter wars are continuing.
And one of the things that made it even easier to forget was that in Pakistan, the Obama administration and the CIA put the drone program there on pause back on Christmas Day.
So there had been about a five and a half month pause in these CIA led drone strikes in Pakistan.
And that ended a little bit over a week ago when we saw the program resume with three strikes targeting members of the Haqqani network and possibly targeting some Uzbekistan militants, which is important and that's something that we can get to in a minute.
And then the drone strikes in Yemen have continued at a slow pace, but they've never really gone away, even though they have decreased in number since last year.
All right.
And now, can you talk a little bit about the attack at the Karachi airport?
Yeah, so the attack in Karachi, which was one of the major factors that led to the breakdown in peace talks between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban, was carried out by these Uzbekistan militants, the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, in coordination with the Taliban in Pakistan.
And what's really important about that is that the Pakistani government, as near as we can tell, had asked the CIA to stop drone strikes while the government conducted these peace talks with the Taliban.
And once those peace talks fell apart after the deadly attack in Karachi that resulted in 36 people, including, I believe, 10 militants dying, it seems that the CIA either explicitly or implicitly got the go-ahead to go after some of the militants that they had been wanting to go after.
And what's also really interesting about the timing is that the Haqqani Network was the group that had control of Sergeant Bo Bergdahl until very recently.
And so some commentators were suggesting that now that Bergdahl wasn't, you know, being held by the Haqqani Network anymore, that the CIA would feel a little bit freer to strike them because they didn't have an American that they could kill.
But many people pointed out that Bergdahl has been a POW for about five years, and that over that time, the CIA certainly was not shy about striking militants in these tribal regions in Pakistan when they wanted to.
Right.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
Well, it is funny, though, that Kerry and Rand, Paul, both, and I'm sure probably some others talked about, well, maybe we'll just go ahead and do drone strikes against the five guys that they released from Pakistan.
Of all the no-good, dirty, rotten double-crosses, they don't even know how bad that sounds.
Maybe we'll just kill these guys that we just made a deal for.
I know.
You have to imagine that those kind of statements are going to make any future POW swaps more difficult.
The five guys that were released, at least one of them, there are very, very serious and very credible allegations that he's committed war crimes.
But this idea that all five of those released from Guantanamo were high-level Taliban commanders who are going to all substantially change the reality, quote-unquote, on the battlefield, that really doesn't play out.
When you look at the claims that the U.S. intelligence agencies used to justify detaining these guys, a lot of them really fall apart.
Some of these guys, in fact, I think most of them, were actually double-crossed in 2002 when they tried to surrender to U.S. forces or to Afghan forces.
Instead of surrendering and being given a deal to work with, they were instead sent to Guantanamo.
There's, I think, been a lot of heightening of the threat that releasing those five guys posed.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, Anand Gopal wrote a thing for CNN, and I think there are some other articles, too, but Anand really knew all about these guys' backstories and really debunked all the hype about it back a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, and his book, I actually just finished reading his book, No Good Men Among the Living.
Oh, yeah, I have it right here, but I'm the worst.
I would really, really recommend all your listeners take a look at that if they want to actually learn what the Taliban actually is, what U.S.-backed warlords actually are, and what the occupation in Afghanistan actually looked like on the ground.
It's a really, really amazing resource.
Yeah, I need to just get a chain of word around my neck until I finally get it done or something.
I'm the worst about reading books nowadays.
It sucks because I got so many great ones here, beginning with that one, to follow up on with these journalists.
Anyway, so now what about the fact that America's had a drone war going on against the Pakistani Taliban for years now, which I guess was portrayed, at least originally, as sort of doing a favor to the Pakistanis as payback for them letting the Americans target Arabs hiding out in Afghanistan.
So if you're going to do that, you've got to target some Taliban leaders for us.
So how's that working out when the Karachi airport's being attacked and all this is going on?
I have to admit, I'm trying to play devil's advocate a little bit here with my own self, that like, hey, if this guy's a really bad Taliban enemy of the Pakistani government and you hellfire missile him to death, well, he ain't alive anymore.
Now maybe you'll create 10 more, but maybe they won't be quite as bad as this terrible mastermind or whatever.
It's within the realm of possibility, is what I'm trying to say, that putting firepower on targets could destroy enemies, but it doesn't seem like there's any fewer of them or that they're any less capable than the prior generation.
Right.
Well, and I mean, you're absolutely right in the way that you characterized the beginning of the program 10 years ago, which started when the Pakistani government wanted the U.S. to off this guy, Nek Mohammad, who was a local insurgent, basically.
He had been declared an enemy of the state by the government, by the Pakistani government.
And they said, you know what, CIA, we know that you want to fly these drones over our skies and take out some al-Qaeda types.
So we'll let you do that.
We'll scratch your back if you scratch ours.
And so this program in Pakistan began with what a human rights attorney that I talked to described as a bargain ship killing.
And it's essentially, it's not that different from something that, you know, the mob might do where somebody is giving you a hard time.
So you off them and then all of a sudden you curry favor with the host government.
And so that's how this program started.
All right.
Now we're going to have to go out to this break, but when we get back, we'll talk with John a little bit more about what's going on with the drone war in Pakistan and then on to Yemen and maybe a little Somalia intervention as well.
Again, it's John Neffel writing in Rolling Stone, three troubling lessons from the latest U.S. drone strikes.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with John Neffel from Rolling Stone magazine, and we're talking about the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen and, well, there's so many damn wars going on, you got to limit the discussions to one region or another or two.
Okay, so now I guess I need to let you talk about the drone war in Yemen and then also give you time to speak about your different conclusions that you've come to about what's going on here, which I think are quite astute and worth mentioning.
So I guess, can you update us on the situation in Yemen, unless there was anything left untied about Pakistan you want to nail down before we go?
Yeah, well, I just wanted to add one other thought about Pakistan that ties into Yemen.
So before the break, we were talking about the program starting by targeting this militant who wasn't a threat to the United States, but was an enemy of Pakistan.
And that may have been the case in one of the three strikes that we've recently seen in Pakistan about a week ago.
Some of the people I spoke with think that one of the strikes actually targeted Uzbek militants who were responsible for the attack on the airport in Karachi.
And if that's true, that means that the United States is targeting, you know, enemies of the Pakistani government, but not people who are direct threats to the U.S., which would mean that, you know, that in some ways the United States is engaging in putting down a local insurgency or perhaps less generously engaged in this sort of like low level civil war that's going on between, you know, enemies of the government and the Pakistani government.
And that's similar to what's happening in Yemen.
Now, let me let me interrupt you for just a sec to mention to people that it was the drone strikes against the Pakistani government's enemies in the Pakistani Taliban that drove Faisal Shahzad into joining up with the Taliban and attempting to blow up Times Square back in 2010.
And he explained in court exactly why he did it.
Here was a Pakistani American who was an American citizen, had a wife and a professional job and a good salary and a house and everything going for him.
But when he went home to Pakistan to visit relatives, he saw the aftermath of a drone strike and joined up as a soldier on their side of the war.
Simple as that.
Almost blew up Times Square.
And so I'm not saying in and of itself that makes none of this worth it or whatever, but it's something for people to keep in mind.
And Brian Williams ain't going to bring it up.
So I got to now.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, it absolutely is worth bringing it up.
And it's it's something that, you know, as citizens, when our taxpayer dollars are being used to to blow up people who don't pose any threat to the United States, are we you know, is the country going to see blowback from that?
And what we're seeing in Yemen is similar.
One of the researchers from Human Rights Watch, who wrote a really amazing report last year on the drone wars in in Yemen, told me that the United States is essentially functioning as the Yemeni government's air force in trying to put down this insurgency that's that's, you know, being led in part by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And so what you have, certainly in Yemen and arguably in Pakistan, is the this sort of shift from attacking militants who have explicitly said they want to attack U.S. people on U.S. soil to militants who are attacking host governments.
And I think that when you look at Obama's speech the other day on Iraq, he was actually saying something very similar.
I mean, you could perhaps argue that the territory that ISIS has taken, you know, at some point in the future might pose a threat to the United States.
You know, I think that that's it's a reasonable point, if not one that I would agree with.
But nobody has put forth any evidence that ISIS itself is at this point attempting to launch attacks on the United States.
And so getting involved in what looks to be an increasingly increasingly like a civil war in Iraq might be the same kind of policies that we're already seeing in Yemen and Pakistan.
And I think that, you know, there is a real danger from ISIS.
I think the fact that an American did a suicide attack there a few weeks back and that ISIS, the French veteran of ISIS, killed two Jews at a museum in Brussels, I think a week before that is are the early indications that they are coming west.
But I still think that's all the more reason to not get involved, because it's intervention for and against these kooks over there, against them, but accidentally for them under Bush and then deliberately for them in Libya and Syria under Obama that has got us to this.
So non-intervention is still the best policy there.
But I think that they are more dangerous than a lot of people realize.
I think they would they probably think they could benefit from dragging us back into the war there.
You know, I think I think that that is true.
That last point, I definitely agree with.
And you see statements that ISIS has made where they have sort of been beating their chest and say, essentially, come at me to the United States.
And so I think that and if you look at where ISIS came from, which was a group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, their goal was not only to mire the U.S. in a civil war, but to kill Shiite Muslims.
And so so ISIS's goal has long been just massive destabilization and and and civil war.
I am not entirely sure, though, that the extent to what to, you know, to which they are a threat to the United States is entirely clear.
I mean, we've been hearing the the FBI talk about the threat that Syrian fighters, you know, coming coming to the United States pose.
And that's something that they've been talking about for at least a year, if not more.
And when you actually look at the people who have been arrested and charged because they wanted to go to Syria and come back, you actually see goofballs.
You see, for the most part, people mostly right.
Most people who are being entrapped.
And I mean, you know, for anyone out there who says somebody there's a there's a case in Long Island not too long ago.
You know, for anyone who says some somebody in Long Island is going to go to Syria and get radicalized and come back and shoot up a mall.
Look, you don't have to go to Syria to shoot up a mall in the United States.
There are so many mass shootings in this country.
And there are so there there anyone who wants to wage violence against the United States if they're already in the United States, I think, has more than enough opportunity to do it.
And that's just to say that that we should I think when when officials tell us tell citizens that the threat from foreign fighters means that we should, you know, turn the other way if if our neighbors are entrapped or that we should, you know, fear this group that really, I don't think, poses an imminent threat to the United States.
I just think that those are claims we should be very, very skeptical before we before we should ever listen.
I'm only trying to look at it from the point of view of the strategic logic from from their side of why they would want to to maybe do things like that.
And so I won't argue about that with you, but I will now shut up and let you talk about Yemen because we're running low on time and there's a lot to cover here.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, just a sort of final thought on Yemen is that at that same press conference that I was just talking about where Obama was talking about Iraq, he pointed to Yemen as the sort of standard for what counterterrorism operations could look like.
And he said, we want to pursue the Yemen model.
Well, the Yemen model has been a complete failure.
And when you look at activists in Yemen who responded to to that press conference, they said this what the United States is doing in Yemen is is terrible policy.
It's it's empowering a government that has barely any legitimacy.
It's, you know, carrying out drone strikes that only make al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula more powerful and more sympathetic to the local population.
And all that happens in complete secrecy with no oversight, with no accountability and with no, you know, money or any sort of other reparations given to people who are whose family members are accidentally killed.
And so I think that the fact that that Obama is talking about Yemen as this this model that should be, you know, pursued and replicated in other countries is incredibly troubling.
And, you know, if that's what his goal is in Iraq, I think that that's just going to result in a in a terrible, terrible policy that that's that's going to be completely secret.
Right.
When you can see the benefit from from his point of view, like Bill Clinton, Bob Obama, and all this stuff that's going on in Syria for miles in the sky is it keeps Americans safe.
And so why send in the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Infantry Division, all this George W.
Bush and madness when you can just send fleets of Reaper drones?
And so and then you get to argue that at least you're killing people from a Democrat point of view.
That makes good politics, I guess.
And I think you're right.
You say this is what the at least near term future military force looks like.
It's a sad story.
Thanks very much for your time, John.
Great to have you back on the show.
My pleasure.
All right.
But that is John Neffel from Rolling Stone magazine.
The article is Three Troubling Lessons from the Latest U.S. Drone Strikes.
Right back.
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