10/08/12 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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Our next guest is John Glaser from www.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy that you're here.
Your headline from the other day, but might as well be from today.
It's Hamid Karzai.
U.S. war in Afghanistan, quote, will not succeed.
And this is America's sock puppet.
This is the guy in the fancy cape over there that's been America's pretended democratically elected government since 2004 or three or two or something.
That's right.
Occasionally Karzai likes to do this.
Once in a while he'll say something that goes against the U.S. line, and the media who obediently follow the U.S. line always get a little shocked and they put it in a headline like this disobedient puppet over here.
But, yeah, in fact, that's what Afghan President Hamid Karzai said.
So the U.S. war against the militants in Afghanistan will not succeed.
And generally that's not a very radical thing to say.
I mean, a 2-year-old looking at the situation could see that.
In fact, a military report was just released.
It was an ISAF report.
That's NATO's training effort in Afghanistan.
ISAF said that they presented graphs and figures showing the extent to which enemy attacks, insurgent attacks against foreign troops have either gone down or gone up since the 2009 surge that the Obama administration imposed.
And, in fact, there has been no marked difference at all.
The Taliban insurgency is as strong as ever.
Afghanistan on the whole is as violent as it's ever been.
The insurgency is very strong.
The bulwark of Obama's, the forefront, the strong part of Obama's counterinsurgency strategy was supposedly propping up a government in Kabul that could maintain control over the country and then supporting domestic security forces that could fight against the Taliban and their affiliates once the U.S. leaves.
That is a complete and total failure.
There's not one single measure that the Obama administration on an objective metric has been able to point to to say, hey, look, we've made progress.
The whole thing is an utter failure.
And the President of Afghanistan merely looked and observed and said exactly what he saw and what everybody sees, that Afghanistan is a complete failure.
You know what?
I admit at this point I'm confused.
I mean, clearly there's a policy of collect more ribbons and stay as long as you can and these kinds of goals that are, you know, open ended kind of things for military men and whoever's, you know, selling them clothes and bullets and tanks or whatever.
But it seems like somebody, you know, I don't know, whoever's in Michelle Flournoy's spot now, somebody in the policy department at the Pentagon, somebody's supposed to have a strategy here.
So like bigger than, you know, a surge strategy.
I'll still call that a tactic.
I mean, what is it that they're even actually trying to do?
It seems like, you know, from all the all the journalism I read that comes from the real, you know, establishment level, you know, top down functionary types, they never seem to really take into account the actual country.
Right.
You never hear.
I never hear them say, OK, look, we're fighting for the commies.
We're fighting for the warlords that were the sock puppets of the Soviets who are not necessarily representative of, but at least the people who have the power among the Hazaras, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks.
And, you know, basically the Pashtun status of Karzai, the sock puppet, is seemingly meaningless here as it's really a war of these minorities, the Northern Alliance minorities against the Pashtun majority.
And with no attempt to integrate them into this government at all.
None of this, you know, Wolfowitzian social engineering project is really even being attempted.
And it's what is that what they're doing?
They're sitting at a table and saying, how do we help the people who were, you know, a day from losing the day we intervened 11 years ago?
How do we help them take over the whole country and rule over the Pashtuns, who are the majority, who all have rifles, who have already said hell no, and who are backed by the Pakistanis across the border still?
And what in the hell do they even think that they're trying to accomplish?
I mean, if they were trying to break apart commie Northern Alliance stand and fine.
OK, then that would at least be an attainable.
I don't know if it'd be possible, really, but it would be a conceivable goal.
You know what I mean?
But what are they even actually trying to do in this in this war?
I can't figure out other than just keep fighting, John.
I think, you know, first of all, if you think back to when the Obama administration decided it was going to perform a Bush-like surge in Afghanistan, I think there was two things going on.
I think there was naivete, extreme naivete, that members of the administration actually thought that they could eliminate the Taliban from Afghanistan.
That's basically a fantasy, by the way.
But there was some naivete that that goal was achievable.
The other factor that influenced Obama, specifically, to take the decision to actually perform this military surge in Afghanistan was because he was doing other things like opening up diplomatic relations with Iran and supposedly, even though we found out that this wasn't true, supposedly trying to ease up on Iraq.
He didn't want to be perceived as wimpy.
He didn't want the Republicans to be able to call him a wimp.
So he took the politically expedient decision to surge in Afghanistan and prove that he was a warrior, too.
But again, the naivete mixed with this chest-pumping, warrior-like talk about surges, these are a mixture that is a recipe for utter disaster.
I think if you ask the Obama administration today, what's the goal, why are we there, it's to eliminate the Taliban and their affiliates.
Again, not going to happen, especially with what you mentioned over the border in Pakistan.
It's just a fantasy.
It can't happen.
So technically, I think that the strategy, if you ever got an honest opening with someone in the Obama administration, because I think this is recognized throughout the establishment, and this is why, like you said, you don't hear anyone talking about strategy.
You hear them talking about tactics.
You hear them talking about the next month, the next few weeks.
You don't hear anyone talking about long-term strategy, and that is because the strategy is get the hell out of there with doing as little damage as possible from now until 2014 and not seeming like we retreated with our tail between our legs.
That's the policy.
The policy is to quit while still managing somehow to seem like we're walking away with a torch.
So everyone realizes the failure that's taken place.
Everyone realizes that we cannot eliminate or do anything to really shape the realities on the ground from military realities to cultural realities to economic realities.
We cannot do that through the administration's counterinsurgency strategy.
And this is evident in the fact that Romney won't say anything about Afghanistan.
Sometimes he tries to present himself as saying something different and arguing a different policy on Afghanistan, but all he really says, he reiterates Obama's precise position, and he says, well, he shouldn't keep saying the word 2014 because then it signals to our enemies that we're leaving.
And you know what?
That's the one part of his speech that I saw this morning is he said 2014 and I will have the troops out by the end of 2014, and then he went on about how you should never say that like you're talking about.
But the one thing is that, well, I'll change my mind if there's any bad guys left because the last thing I'm going to do is pull America out of there if there's any bad guys left.
Right.
Look, when the opposition, when the Republican Party, who's out of power, tries everything that they can to try and point out missteps in the Obama administration's policy, try to get anything, grab its straws, anything they can do to criticize Obama, when they're shutting up a lot of Afghanistan, it's pretty clear that the consensus is we've lost and we need to get out.
And this is why you're hearing such a gaping void in the realm of policy prescriptions and strategy for Afghanistan.
Everyone recognizes that it's an utter failure.
That's why.
Yeah.
Well, now, the thing is, too, well, I don't know if anybody could have ever figured out a way to really be a foreign power and dominate Pashtunistan there or whatever, but it seems like for the last, what, six, seven, maybe more years than that, there's been an American policy to partner directly with the Indians in Afghanistan.
You know, what we could really use is your guys' help in patrolling and training and, you know what, just setting up a base here to be a provocation to our friends, the Pakistanis across the border, to make sure that they continue backing our allies.
And I don't mean to make it sound as purposeful as all that, but it's basically as simple as all that.
Funding our enemies, I meant to say.
See, I didn't make it so simple.
I screwed it up.
But the point being that the reason the Haqqanis and the Taliban, I mean, they would be there anyway, but the reason that they continue to kick the so-called Afghan government's forces behind and continue to be able to resist the Americans is because they have a lot of help from the Pakistanis, but we're making them do it.
I mean, we're basically holding the gun to their head and making them back our enemies.
That's right.
There's two things to say about this tribal border region where the Haqqanis and other groups exist and, you know, perform cross-border attacks, and it's sort of helping the insurgency keep up all of its energy and performance.
The first thing is that the fact that there is this major sanctuary is not all in Pakistan's hands.
It's the making of the United States as well.
In Afghanistan, when we went in to try and oust the Taliban and get bin Laden in 2001, 2002, the effect of those initial years was to push all of these fighters across the border into Pakistan for safe hiding so that they could regroup and then come again.
The fact that they have a sanctuary there and they're there is partly a response to the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
The other thing is that there's been such a rapid increase in the radicalization and, you know, tribal membership and insurgent recruitment because of the U.S. drone war in this Pakistani region.
So we've been, you know, creating the sanctuary that we're supposedly trying to bomb out of existence.
So that's the first half.
The second half is that, yes, Pakistan views it as in its interest to support the Haqqanis, an element of the Afghan Taliban, so that once the Americans leave, they can have some role in governing Afghanistan because the Pakistanis, who are enemies of the Indians and vice versa, view the possibility of India having some influence in a future Afghan government as unacceptable.
They're not about to let that happen.
So, yes, when we partner with India and use them in our reconstruction efforts, as we have, use them in our training efforts, as we have, use them diplomatically speaking with the Karzai government, as we have, that pisses off the Haqqanis further and makes them dig in their heels, and so they can further support and give sanctuary to groups like Haqqani.
It's a convoluted situation where we continually walk into brick walls and do ourselves trouble and complain about problems that are of our own making, when we could just simply back out, leave, recognize no progress can be made, and allow Pakistan and India to wrestle it out themselves and leave us out of it.
Yeah, well, you know, for years and years in Iraq, this worked, and it's the same kind of thing that Romney was alluding to in his talk today, which is, we can't leave now because it'll be worse if we go.
And when you're saying to me, and I think you're right, obviously, I can't think of an argument against your position that they know they lost, but they can't leave without calling it a victory, so they're trying to figure out a way to call leaving a victory.
The thing is, they can't have that, right?
Kabul is going to fall, and somebody is going to cut Hamid Karzai's head off, and everybody who was a quizzling Vichy sock puppet of the Americans is going to have to run like hell, because they don't have any natural power there.
They've been propped up and put in power this whole time.
It's going to be like the fall of Saigon at some point.
Maybe all the Americans will be gone by then, but the people that they have put in power, it's going to be like when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh or something.
So Romney and, for that matter, Hillary and Obama too, they'll always have that to point to as a reason why we just can't leave now, because if we did, they could confidently predict that something absolutely horrible would happen.
Right, but of course that's a recipe for a forever war, and that's not palatable to the American people, no matter how nationalistic they can get sometimes, and so politicians aren't about to come out and exactly say that, but that's exactly right.
Someday some future thing will happen, and it will be worse than what we're creating now.
In fact, to recognize simply that the past 12 years, I think today is the 12th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, 12 years in Afghanistan, just to simply look at that and recognize how badly it has failed and how we've laid the groundwork for future horrors to take place if we leave, that in and of itself is a logical fallacy if we try to use that to justify further U.S. intervention and further U.S. occupation.
I mean, people have started to recognize, this is in the pages of The New Yorker, and Afghan leaders say it all the time, as soon as the Americans leave and are not trying to militarily dominate that country, there is no power center.
Kabul isn't strong enough.
The insurgents aren't strong enough.
All these tiny little tribes of Uzbeks and Tajiks all around the country have their own militias, and this is the recipe for a breakup.
This is the recipe for a civil war.
And yes, it will probably go on and on, but obviously the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan can't remedy that.
And obviously 12 years of creating that reality, that potential reality, is not going to, you know, arguing for 12 more years does not do us any good.
So again, politicians simply have to come, they already are coming to grips with the fact that it's a failure, which is why we're leaving in 2014 with our tail tucked between our legs and having accomplished zero of our actual mission statements.
But they also have to level with the American people and say, look, we're not the greatest, and we can't walk out with a torch, and we have lost.
And that will be a lesson to the American people and to politicians, that, you know, you can't simply apply American military strength and might to any problem in the world and expect you're going to get this high and mighty, you know, home from World War II kind of victory.
It's not going to happen.
These things are complicated, and you're going to create more problems than you eliminate.
All right.
Check out that and a lot of other great coverage of all of these wars by John Glazer at antiwar.com, especially antiwar.com/blogandnews.antiwar.com.
Thanks very much, John.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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