10/01/13 – Ann Jones – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, so now for interview 3,000.
Welcome to the show, Ann Jones.
Thank you.
I'm honored to be number 3,000.
That's great.
Wonderful.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and back on the show, I should say, and very happy to read you at TomDispatch.com.
99.999% chance this one will be running in the archives at AntiWar.com tomorrow, under Tom's name, is how that usually works, with his little introduction there.
But this is called, Americans Can't Remember, Afghans Will Never Forget.
And I like the way you start this thing, reminding us about ancient history here, and American intervention in Afghanistan, dating all the way back to Ike Eisenhower.
And the 1950s.
Can you tell us about that?
Well, you know, that was the raging Cold War, and so there was immense competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for influence in many parts of the world.
But Afghanistan was seen as a particularly strategic part of Central Asia there.
So there used to be jokes about the Afghan leaders would light their Cuban cigars, courtesy of the U.S., and drink their Russian vodka along with it.
So both sides were actively campaigning there.
And the U.S. had an enormous project in Helmand Province, where your listeners may remember some of the most desperate fighting of the U.S. Marines took place just in the last couple of years.
So we go back a long way in history, though, in Helmand Province.
I guess in my imagination, Ann, I guess I always just figured that Stalin and the Soviets took over all of those states, Tajikistan and Afghanistan and the rest of them after World War II, no?
It was an independent country in the 50s, huh?
Well, yeah, they were working in all of those countries at that time.
But, of course, Afghanistan was independent.
It was not part of the Soviet Union.
So there was the competition between the outside superpowers for influence there, and it was strategically important to both of them.
But the U.S. at that time was trying to exert peaceful influence by developing agricultural projects, and it helped to develop the university and so on.
And there were various European countries also providing aid at that time.
But each country was trying to remake Afghanistan in its own image a bit, and it's never been successful, either when we've tried it peaceably or, more recently, when we've tried it through war.
Well, now, to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski tell it now, it was his bright idea to deliberately initiate covert action against the Soviet-backed regime in the late 1970s in order to provoke them into full-scale intervention on his behalf, on the communist dictator's behalf, that way to give them, quote, their own Vietnam, sort of like we're giving ourselves right now.
But I wonder if you buy that.
Some people have said that they think that that's just kind of revisionism.
He's trying to take credit for how, you know, supposedly well it worked out in bankrupting the Soviet Union, et cetera.
Well, he did have to have some sort of presidential binding from Carter, who was president at the time.
So I think there is documentation, although I haven't seen it myself, but I think there is documentation to support his claim.
He made that claim only a long time after the fact in an interview with a French magazine.
But I believe it's generally accepted now that, yes, the CIA was active in trying to engage in activities in Afghanistan that provoked the Soviets to come in because there had been, there was an indigenous Afghan communist government in power at the time, and we were trying to subvert them, Soviets, according to Brzezinski.
He was trying to draw the Soviets in to save that communist government.
And the rest is history, that long proxy war that we fought against the Soviets or that the Afghans fought against the Soviets and that the U.S. and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia financed for a decade.
Well, isn't it interesting how Zbigniew Brzezinski, and he's not the only one, you don't have to be as smart as old Zbigniew to figure out that, you know, Vietnam makes a great kind of saying, a byword for disastrous, no-win quagmire that you shouldn't have done in the first place and didn't do you any good at all and cost you a bunch of money and really wish you hadn't have done that, right?
Pack all that into the word Vietnam.
We'll give them their own Vietnam.
And the logic of it is perfect, right?
What better way to weaken the Soviet Union, never mind containing them, go ahead and encourage them to overexpand and weaken themselves.
But then this is exactly what we're doing to ourselves.
We call ourselves so smart for learning the lesson of Vietnam, and then we do it to the Russians.
Ha ha, how do you like that, spy versus spy, we're so smart, we got you.
And then we do it to ourselves, Ann.
Well, I believe that's a classic case of somebody else's history being repeated by ourselves.
You know, there were some very amusing statements made by the more recent Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, who kept talking to the press about how his American friends were now repeating every mistake that the Soviets had made in Afghanistan.
And he was saying precisely what the Soviets had done wrong.
And it got to be quite ironic when he started mentioning mistakes the Soviets had made that the U.S. hadn't quite made yet, and then very shortly thereafter the U.S. would be sure to make them.
So, yeah, we followed right in their footsteps and did all the same things wrong.
All right, now, so part of this whole war that's gone on so long now, but part of it is to hear the Americans talk about it.
There's just the Afghan people.
And I'm a melting pot kind of guy, and I don't want to encourage any sort of chauvinism or whatever, but it seems to me that the old world is just lousy with this kind of ethnic, sectarian, tribal separatism, and that really there is no Afghanistan unless there's some British-backed king ruling the place with an iron fist or something like that.
Really, there's Pashtunistan that the Brits divided in half with their Duran line, and then there are Tajiks and Uzbeks and whatever different Hazaras in the coalition that backs the government in Kabul.
But the Americans seem, at least to elementary eyes, to approach this thing as though none of that stuff is true.
This is just a place with a bunch of people on it, and we're going to have a democracy now, basically trying to implement the program as we sell it to the people kind of a thing.
The shtick that they give us about how we're creating a democracy and taking care of women's rights and all these things that they tell the American people to get us to support it, that actually sort of kind of becomes the program for the occupation, even though it's not taking into reality who's who and what they want.
Am I making sense, and am I even right at all, do you think?
I think you are right, yes, of course.
Following that proxy war we talked about was an enormous civil war between these seven Mujahideen factions that we had been backing.
They represented, although they were all Islamist extremists, they also came from the various different ethnic groups.
So they represented different ethnicities, different parts of the country, and they went to war with each other.
They were aligned together against the Soviets, but when that was over they started battling one another, and that still continues.
It still persists.
So that today, well, President Karzai, of course, is Pashtun, and he has a Tajik first vice president and a Hazara second vice president.
Now at this particular period the candidates for the 2014 election to succeed President Karzai are registering.
They have to be registered by the 6th, and so they're all busy scurrying around behind the scenes trying to make their ethnic alliances with candidates for first and second vice presidents to strike just the kind of balance that you were talking about.
And is there any hope for that?
I mean, I don't mean to be too cynical about this.
If democracy means power sharing between different factions, working together in a parliament or something, and they can really figure out a way to do it, I'm all for that.
It's certainly better than everybody just bombing each other all day.
Well, we're talking about among the candidates, of course, it's all the usual suspects.
It's all the same old warlords.
Afghans would call most of them, or a great many of them, war criminals.
So it's a lot of the same guys who destroyed the country in the Civil War in the early 1990s who are now making these alliances to try to gain control of the government.
So I don't know that I would go so far as to call it democracy, but it is a kind of power sharing in which you have to get guys from the other side into your little group to put yourself forward for the election.
And then we have that.
Presumably we will have that election, and things are lining up, so there's room for a great deal of fraud.
There will be millions more election cards, voter cards floating around the country than there are eligible voters, so they will be for sale and people will be out stuffing ballot boxes.
And then after the election we will have another kind of jockeying for position, and that is trying to determine whether the candidates who have lost will actually accept the results of the election and maintain peace with a government that they may not be part of, or whether, as they have done in the past, they will just have another round, this time with weapons.
Yeah.
Well, and so, yeah, the power sharing that we're talking about basically is the compromise between Karzai and General Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and these guys.
This doesn't include the Afghan people at all, or even the Taliban, right?
Well, yes, many of the people in the government now are Taliban sympathizers or former Taliban people.
I mean, many former Taliban officials are part of Karzai's appointed High Peace Commission, so they sort of maintain this myth that this government is one side and the Taliban is another side, but there are lots of Talibs in the government already.
They just changed their turbans and don't call themselves that anymore.
And yet, as you write in your article, the Taliban fighting force out there in the field continues killing so-called Afghan army guys at pretty high rates out there.
Well, what's happening with the Afghan army now is really kind of a tragic slaughter, I think.
I mean, the U.S. has supposedly trained this army up to defend the government, and now the Taliban is really going for them, and they're being killed at a terrible rate, hundreds.
And, of course, they don't have the medical facilities that the American soldiers had.
They don't have the benefit of that to the extent that the Americans have it.
So the rates at which the celebrated Afghan National Army is dying now are certainly not sustainable.
So that's another bad indicator that things can't go on like this.
Well, now, so what do you think Obama's policy is, or does he have one at all?
Because, you know, he tells us, he said again on TV last night, in a message to the troops, I think, the war in Afghanistan is going to end next year, but then he works a deal, he signs a deal, right, saying we'll stay and help you at least through 2024.
Well, that hasn't been signed.
I'm sorry?
No, he's trying to get what he calls a bilateral security agreement.
They want to leave.
The U.S. wants to maintain control of nine or ten of their most important bases, and they want to have several thousand.
The usual figure that's repeated is 10,000 trainers in the country.
A lot of that, of course, will be special forces and CIA and goodness knows what else.
But Karzai is being very coy about it, and he has kept postponing signing such an agreement.
And you remember, if you remember the war in Iraq, you'll recognize this scenario where the U.S. is trying to sign an agreement to keep troops in the country, and the leader keeps kicking the can down the road and putting it off.
We wanted to have this agreement before the election so that we wouldn't have to run the risk of having to renegotiate it after a different president is elected.
But Karzai has not agreed to that.
And so now I see today that Chuck Hagel is saying he wants that agreement signed by the end of next October.
So he's put it off for a year, but that's cutting it pretty close to the time that the troops are supposed to exit altogether.
Although, I mean, it seems like the major difference is what you just said about the soldiers out there, that their casualty rates are unsustainable, whereas, I mean, really the entire situation is different, where in Iraq, once the Iraqi National Alliance and their, you know, bomber brigades basically became the Iraqi army and, you know, so-called cleansed all the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad, they didn't need us anymore.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Bye.
Thanks for, you know, everything, but now you can leave.
Whereas, it sounds to me like whatever you call this government in Karzai is going to need America to continue being the government.
You know, otherwise, Mullah Omar is going to come riding back into town standing up in a Jeep or something, right?
Well, you know, Karzai can't run, and we have no idea what this government is going to be or whether people will support it.
I mean, now large numbers of people are contributing to the support of the Taliban, giving money and supplies and so on to the Taliban.
Money is collected in, you know, from people working in the Karzai government and throughout Kabul and the cities to go to support the Taliban because this really, the Americans really are an army of occupation now in the eyes of a great many Afghans, and it's an infidel army, and they want them out of there.
So it's very difficult to predict whether Afghans will be loyal to another elected government as long as the infidels have left or whether they will oppose that elected government as well as something that is a leftover by the infidels.
I have no idea, and I think if you talk to people in Kabul, you'll hear many, many different opinions, and the upshot is that nobody has a clue what's really going to happen, and that's what makes it so scary to people there trying to figure out their own future.
Well, yeah, I mean, it seems to me like, well, from an economics point of view, it's sort of like America has inflated a power bubble where, you know, these guys, their price is a lot higher than the market would really reflect, if you understand what I mean, and that when America goes, they're going to go too, unlike Iraq where it was a minority dictatorship and America fought to install the majority in power.
So you can even call that a democracy and leave because, you know, the majority is going to get their way in the parliament and whatever, you know what I mean?
Well, let's not be too, you know, let's not overemphasize too much what happened in Iraq.
I mean, Iraq is the scene today of some of the most terrible violence since 2008.
Iraqis are dying at the rate of 6,000 so far this year, Iraqi civilians dying through suicide bombs, car bombs, sectarian cleansing.
The war continues in what lots of people on the scene are just calling a continuation of civil war.
You know, the U.S. has this habit of going in, making a war, overturning a regime, and then saying, okay, we're done now, we're leaving.
But the war doesn't end when the Americans leave.
It often just gets started.
Well, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that Iraq was some...
It's very possible that what's happening in Iraq now can happen in Afghanistan as well.
Sure, yeah, I didn't mean that the surge worked and Iraq was peace now or anything like that, just that they succeeded in kicking all the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad.
They're not about to take it back now.
I mean, there might be a lot of truck bombings, but they lost that part of the civil war anyway, the control of the capital city.
It just seems like it's not so clear in Afghanistan.
When America intervened in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance was on the verge of ceasing to exist, and this whole time they've been able to rule Kabul and whatever other parts of the country from time to time simply due to American power, whereas Maliki still has an army without us.
You're absolutely right, Scott, that Afghanistan seems in many ways much more complicated, but it's not as though the U.S. has supported one side or another at the expense of the other.
I think the Afghans have had—it's more a question of who the Afghans have attached themselves to rather than who we've picked to support, and in many cases I think the U.S. has been clueless about how to play this game in Afghanistan because it is so complicated.
So really the American influence is so little at this point that it's really not the American sock puppets that rule Kabul other than maybe Karzai that they picked way back when.
It's hard to say.
It's hard to say who's in charge of anything these days.
I mean, the situation now is really like everybody's on the edge of a cliff and sort of leaning over to see if there is any way down short of just jumping off.
People really are very edgy, very nervous, not knowing what's going to happen.
And even—look at this period we're in now of about three weeks when political candidates had to pick up their papers to register to be a candidate for president and return them.
And as I said earlier, they have to be returned by October 6.
So we're getting to the end of that period now.
Seventy-two candidates, potential candidates, including two women, picked up registration papers.
And as of yesterday, only one of them had returned the papers.
I see today that two more are said to be registering today.
That's in the press, but it's still not official.
And they're still jockeying for their vice presidential candidates.
And most of these guys are still hanging back, trying to do their deals in the back room.
And it's going to come right down to the 5th and 6th of October before we see who's actually running for president.
Whatever happened to Abdullah Abdullah, who was Obama and the CIA's pick to replace Karzai for a minute there back in 2009?
Well, he supposedly filed his papers today.
That's reported in the press, but not officially from the Election Commission.
And he has been working to form a coalition and has a lot of support.
He is actually quite popular.
And that last election, you know, the stuffing of the ballot boxes was so apparent and the corruption in the election was so apparent that a lot of people thought Abdullah had done much better than the official results showed.
And he was eligible to call for a rerun with just himself and Karzai in the race.
But he declined because he thought that would be just as fixed.
And also he was under pressure from the international community not to insist upon a rerun because of the expense of staging another election and the potential for conflict.
So he retired very gracefully in 2009 and was very vocal in urging his followers to accept the results and not make any trouble or protest in any way.
And he's probably the most civilized sort of candidate you can get.
And a lot of people are eager to see him run and see the coalition that he puts together.
He's the hope of a lot of, among the ex-warlords, he is the best hope of those who are more progressive.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
We'll have to leave it there.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show.
I appreciate it, Ann.
Well, thank you for inviting me, Scott.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That is Ann Jones.
She's reported from Afghanistan since 2002, and she's the author of Cobble in Winter.
And the new one is already come out.
It's coming out.
They were soldiers.
How the wounded return from America's wars.
The untold story.
You can read her brand new one at Tom Dispatch dot com.
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I'm sure Americans can't remember.
Afghans will never forget.
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