08/18/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Eric Margulies.
He writes at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And also he writes at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
That's unz.com.
His latest piece is They Pulled Me Back In, which I think we're running at antiwar.com today, too.
Anyway.
Hey, welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Just fine, thanks.
Dealing with this flood of news.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a lot of wars and the war at home, too, and a hell of a lot to keep track of.
But, you know, the one that nobody pays any attention to whatsoever, the proof of that is I tried to put it in Google News and hardly got anything back at all is the war in Afghanistan.
And, of course, the related interventions and sock puppetry and the rest of what goes on in Pakistan as well.
And, you know, I understand why people, you know, the demand for news about Afghanistan has dried up over here.
But I still have some.
I still want to know what the hell's going on.
And apparently there's a lot going on in Pakistan right now with two different major groups marching and demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.
What can you tell us about the leaders of these groups, their numbers, their demands and what you expect to happen and et cetera like that, sir?
Takes a wise man to understand what's going on in Pakistan.
My former beat where I was even a newspaper columnist.
It's murky to me, too.
Here is the simplest explanation.
The government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif been in power for almost a year.
It has proved a major disappointment to most Pakistanis because it really hasn't achieved anything.
And it is regarded as being up to its ears in corruption because they're most Pakistani governments.
So Sharif, who's not the most inspired leader in the world, I've interviewed him a couple of times, is just sort of holding on his business as usual.
Meanwhile, the two opposition groups, one led by a political firebrand who's been living in Toronto, gone back to Pakistan, stirred up angry marchers, and they're marching on Islamabad, the capital.
And the other more important group, in my view, is led by a former cricket star.
Imran Khan.
Imran Khan, thank you, who is a very intelligent, attractive character who's accusing the Pakistani government of being totally under America's thumb, of waging, of being part of the war in Afghanistan in the north, as well as its own tribal territories.
And they're calling for the ouster of Nawaz Sharif, too, and his friends.
So whether they're going to accomplish anything or not, we don't know.
But I tend to be a bit skeptical.
All right.
So now I guess my understanding is that, like you're saying, Khan seems to be the more important one.
He has more followers.
But then, am I right that Qadri, is that how you say it, the guy that's been living in Toronto, that he's got the more fanatical followers because he's more religiously based than cricket star based?
The Qadri is a strange, political, religious movement.
You know, it reminds me a bit of the movement in Turkey, which is run by a political exile who lives in Pennsylvania of all places and is challenging the rule of the current AK party.
Well, here you have Pakistan, which is rent by religious problems and rivalries with this relatively unknown group led by Qadri, who may have some local popularities around the country, but is by no means, it might be a national figure.
All right.
And then so what about the possibility that the military will just do like their normal tradition and cancel the whole damn mess and just put a new general in charge?
It's always there.
But the military has not done this in a long time and for a good reason, because Pakistan's very efficient, very high esprit de corps, very strict military.
I say this as a former soldier.
I've been with them a lot.
They're an impressive bunch.
Benazir Bhutto always used to tease me, saying, oh, Eric, you and your beloved Pakistani generals.
Well, I do love them.
I like them.
They're fierce and warlike.
But they've learned that they can't run the government effectively and they certainly can't solve Pakistan's huge problems.
So they really don't want to be saddled with this.
Or let me say he's a different matter.
I handed this poison chalice because it will only end up blackening the name of the army, which remains practically the sole respected institution in Pakistan.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about Kashmir a little bit here.
And I guess sort of in the broad strokes, the prospects for peace with India, because, well, I'll tell you a story here.
I was going to be brief, but I decided, no, I won't be brief.
I had a couple of computer engineers in my cab and one was Pakistani and one was Indian.
And so I said, now, what exactly is the dispute over there?
And they both yelled land.
That's it.
It's got nothing to do with sectarian anything other than land ownership.
Gimme, gimme.
It belongs to me, not to you.
That's what the fight is over Kashmir.
And I wonder whether you could see any kind of reasonable political settlement within, say, I don't know, our lifetimes.
Well, you know, part of my first book, War at the Top of the World, is about the Kashmir dispute where I've spent some time.
I've been under fire from the Indians.
It's a very complex, fascinating dispute.
It's the world's oldest current dispute.
It goes back to 1947.
It even somewhat a little bit predates the Palestinian problem.
But I don't see any solution for Kashmir in the near horizon.
It is about land, yes, but it's more than that.
It's very psychological.
Pakistan holds about a third of historic Kashmir.
India holds two-thirds and the better, more fertile part.
But then there's another part that everybody's forgotten or nobody knows, and that is that China holds a chunk of former Kashmiri territory called Aksai Chin, which is way in the north at about 15,000 feet altitude, arid windswept plateau, but very strategic because it allows, it allowed the Chinese to build a road from Tibet to Xinjiang province, or Xinjiang as we used to call it.
India's claiming that that's part of Kashmir and they want it back.
And adding to the confusion, India claims also that what Pakistan calls its northern territories, that is right up high on these very, very high mountains where the mountain climbing expeditions go from, Baltistan is the region, very beautiful, that that should be part of Kashmir too.
So it's really confused and it's a tremendously emotional issue.
It's the Alsace Lorraine of our era and neither side is really willing to make any compromise.
Yeah.
Well, and apparently the consensus is among people who ask questions like this, it's the most likely place for a nuclear war to start.
Although, you know, America's new eastern border with Russia and Ukraine may have, you know, taken that place recently.
Well, yeah, the U.S. and its European satraps are working hard to push to develop a war scenario there.
And one could develop very quickly.
I wake up every morning, I turn on the news, I want to know if World War III has begun.
Yeah.
But this, there we go.
That's the music.
It's Eric Margulies.
He writes at ericmargulies.com as well as lewrockwell.com and unz.com, that's unz.com.
And we're going to take a short break.
And when we get back, we're going to switch gears back over to Pakistan's other border with Afghanistan and the recent regime changes going on there.
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Thank you.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And yeah, like I was saying, I put Afghanistan in Google News and almost all the stories are just about how this Marine who was caught on video desecrating the corpses of his victims over there was found dead, possibly of a suicide or something.
Anyway, that's most of the news.
There's hardly anything coming out.
Of course, there are important politics.
Obviously, if you go to antiwar.com, you can find some stuff.
But just looking at Google News, you're not going to find very much.
There's some very important political processes being carried out right now as the American occupation, I guess, quote unquote, winds down.
They're going to leave, I think, what, 20,000 troops for at least another two years there.
But so they've had an election and they've had a runoff election and they've had some recounts and Kerry's gone back and forth.
And I wonder, I guess, first of all, if you can update us on the status of the current Karzai government and the coming government of the two from the runoff, Abdullah Abdullah and what's his name, Eric, and what you see happening over there.
Well, it's a Karzai has proven to be a naughty puppet.
He came from central casting, CIA central casting.
He was put in power, but as he stayed in power, he started adopting policies that were more nationalistic than obedient for the U.S. And the main thing was that the U.S. wanted what's called the status of forces agreement.
It's a fancy word for colonial agreement that would allow the U.S. troops to stay on in Afghanistan indefinitely and exempt them from any kind of legal restraints.
The Karzai wouldn't agree with this because he wanted to carve himself out a future as a genuine Afghan nationalist leader rather than a cat's paw of Washington.
So now watch, but his term is expiring.
So Washington has come up with two candidates, two other candidates who are both also from central casting.
And they fought ostensibly an election, which turned out to be rigged and unfair.
And they're disputing, Washington's trying to bang their heads together to create some kind of ostensibly legitimate Afghan government that will then sign this new document, allowing the U.S. to stay on for a number of years or forever.
Well, you know, they're going to have to figure out something because it seems from here like, well, I don't even think it seems from here.
I think it's a scientific fact agreed upon by all that the search failed, that the goals that they set, that they were going to whoop the Taliban so bad that they were going to come to heel and negotiate on our terms back in this time, 2011, never did come true.
And everything that you just said didn't even mention the Taliban because it doesn't incorporate them really in any way.
They're being completely frozen out of the process, even though they possess what percent of what percent, Eric, would you estimate of the actual power out of the barrel of a gun, for example, that exists in the country?
I mean, they're treated like they're ghosts, but they are flesh and blood.
We're not allowed to mention their name.
The Taliban really are represent the Pashtun people, Patans, as we used to call them, Pashtun people of Afghanistan, who are close to 50% of the population.
And no doubt in my mind, the Taliban is the most popular political party in Afghanistan.
That's why I've been saying all along that the Afghan election that the U.S. is stage managing is rigged, because not only are they just dealing with two candidates, either one of whom would be acceptable to Washington, but they are excluding from this the Taliban.
It's like running an election in the U.S. and not allowing the Republicans to run.
Yeah.
Only the Republicans, all their sons have kept their weapons from all their tours of duty in the wars all this time, too, and not letting them run.
It's like excluding the Sunnis from the vote in Iraq.
How that work out for you?
Well, that's exactly right.
We're not very good at running imperial structures like this.
The British, as I keep saying, are much better at it.
We should have brought more Brits back in to run Afghanistan.
They've invaded it six or eight times, so they have a lot more experience.
Well, so what's going to happen?
We're going to have, I don't know, you know, I talked about this with Ann Jones one time and she said, Scott, the Taliban are already in Kabul.
They're in the parliament.
They're part of the government as it is right now.
So, yeah, their militia is still out there being fought against.
But as far as the, you know, them coming back to power, we're talking a few years ago now.
So, really, they're just waiting for America to be gone and then much of the country will belong to them.
You think they'll just draw a line and change the border or it'll be just like September 10th, 2001, where the Northern Alliance is, you know, cornered completely and the Pashtuns just win?
I expect on the battlefield that the Pashtuns, the Taliban, will whip the forces of the Northern Alliance, as they did in the past, unless foreigners intervene militarily.
Now, we're looking at intervention from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, both of them still post-communist dictatorships, or possibly even military intervention by India, which is keeping a weather eye on events.
And that may be America's plan B to bring in more Indian influence.
But no doubt about it, I was there during the last days of the Najibullah regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And I can tell you that Afghan being a tribal society still, and a clan society, that everybody's got secret backdoor contacts to everybody else.
And that even the top government people are talking to the Taliban.
And everybody's now making side deals, getting ready for when the Americans, or Farangi, as the Afghans call them, finally leave.
Yeah, which at this rate may really be 2024, as far as Obama's signature promises.
And if they have to declare some kind of victory, then I guess they can only just, you know, re-escalate from here or something.
Because if they go out like fleeing Saigon and with their sock puppets hanging from the helicopter skids, that's going to be a real problem politically.
Well, I think the US hope is that they'll manage to find and kill Mullah Omar, the founder of Taliban.
Oh, they're going to get a round of that now, huh?
Yeah.
And then when they nail his hide to the wall, like, ballyhoo, that would be a good reason to leave.
We won the war, we killed the wicked Mullah.
That's what they did in a certain extent with Bin Laden, too.
He was retired, minding his own business, but they went and knocked him off and declared a great historic victory.
Yeah.
Hiding in his caliphate up in the attic, even from his wife.
Leave me alone, he would cry.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
But does anybody know where Mullah Omar is?
I mean, the last thing I read about him was four years ago and it said, nobody's heard from this guy other than they know that the Taliban still believe he's alive, basically.
They do.
The Americans are dying to find him.
There's another five million dollar price on his head, too.
But the Taliban is a very diversified organization.
It's not based on one man.
It's like Al Qaeda was, you know, lots of little cells.
And the Taliban is still respected as the people who fought for Afghan independence against foreign invaders.
They are the resistance forces, even though we call them terrorists.
But the Afghans don't see them that way, nor do most Pakistanis.
And eventually they will provide a major portion of the leadership, I think, for Afghanistan.
Right.
All right.
Well, I kept you over there a minute.
Thanks very much, Eric.
I sure appreciate your time again, as always.
Cheers, Scott.
Very happy to have you on.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
He's at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.ericmargulies.com.
Also at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com.
We're going to be right back with Will Grigg in just a sec.
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