12/17/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Time again to talk to Eric Margulies.
Thank goodness.
Hey, Eric, how are you?
I'm fine.
I'm watching these events in Pakistan with shock and dismay, to put it politely.
And, you know, it seems there's always some kind of horror show before Christmas.
In Pakistan?
Not in Pakistan, because they don't celebrate Christmas, but at least for our...
No, I don't mean Christmas in Pakistan, but I mean a horror show in Pakistan before our Christmas, you're saying.
It certainly is.
Yeah, it is an absolute horror show over there.
And so I think the numbers today, the latest I saw at antiwar.com is 160 killed.
Almost all of them children, 100 and I don't know how many children were killed.
Were killed.
I guess everyone agrees by the Taliban.
Now, let me ask you, I had Matthew Ho on the show yesterday, former Marine and State Department official turned Peace Nick.
And he was saying, hey, listen, you know, a lot of this can be chalked right up to American intervention there.
There already was, you know, the basically the Pakistani Taliban was there, but they had basically autonomy.
They had a deal worked out with the central state.
You leave us alone and we'll leave you alone.
And the Americans are the ones who insisted that, no, you must wage a civil war against these guys under Bush and under Obama.
Both.
You must pick this never ending fight that apparently the Pakistani military only fights half heartedly.
One, because it's hard and two, because they kind of like these guys and don't really want to fight them anyway.
And so all they've done is just made them mad and, you know, stirred up a hornet's nest, but with no radar around.
Well, I agree with, oh, I hate to keep blaming America for everything.
But certainly we have we have played an indirect role in this in this horrible situation.
I know the area of the Pakistan's East-Northwest Frontier Agency very well.
I've walked through a lot of it without guards or anything else way back when in the 1980s.
And this is a Pakhtun or Pashtun tribal territory.
It was it's really part of Afghanistan because the Pakhtuns there are the same as the Pakhtuns on the other side of the artificial border that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The British just drew this Durand line, as they call it, across the area.
But in 1947, 48, when Pakistan and India were divided by the British, the state of Pakistan was created.
Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Agency, as it was called the territory, was added onto Pakistan, even though its people were, by history and ethnicity, part of Afghanistan.
But the Pakistanis got it.
But the provision was that they would join Pakistan reluctantly, provided that they had complete autonomy in Pakistan.
No Pakistani army, no Pakistani police, no officials, just a tiny, tiny representation, a few border forts and some agency officials, as they were known.
And I walked through this whole area perfectly safe.
The Pashtun tribesmen there ran their own business.
And they went on merrily on their own way.
All this changed when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
And this sort of back area of the Northwest Frontier Province Agency, as it was known, became a staging area for the Afghan Taliban, who were the first cousins of the other Taliban, the other Afghans, just across on the other side of the border, Pakistan.
Then that result was that the U.S. started scheming, well, sanctuaries, we've got to attack the sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The same story we heard with Cambodia during the 1970s.
And as a result, the U.S. organized, began organizing attacks by U.S. forces, by drones, and by the Pakistani army, which was paid billions of dollars to act as American mercenaries to start attacking Pashtun villages inside the tribal territory.
Our predators and reapers went over, blowing up tribal compounds and killing thousands of civilians, some militants, but thousands of civilians, including many, many children.
And so now, this week, the Pakistani Taliban, which has really very little to do with the Afghan Taliban, they're just really a loose collection of tribes, decided they were going to go and get revenge, which is as Afghan, as American, as apple pie as American, go and get revenge against the Pakistanis for killing their children by attacking the school.
And now, there's just been a recent crackdown by the Pakistani military.
I think even American mainstream media, like NBC, are saying this was a retaliatory strike for an offensive that was launched in June.
And now, Sanford and Son plan means we've got to take a break.
So let me tell the people, like I failed to do at the beginning of this interview, Eric, that your website is ericmargulis.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Ericmargulis.com.
A great bunch of articles there, especially his last one, Torturers Are Not Patriots, is so great.
And his books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And we'll be right back after this.
So I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All technical difficulties aside, we got Eric Margulis on the line.
Plain old telephone service that you can bet your bottom dollar on.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you?
It's nice to be back via old-fashioned telephone.
There we go.
All right.
So you were talking about how the British made it this way and about this sort of, you know, like a Kurdistan type situation, this Pashtunistan, which doesn't really exist, which kind of brings up the question about what the hell is America's policy in Afghanistan after all these years?
Are they trying to just basically forge a minority Uzbek, Tajik, who am I leaving out, Hazara alliance against the Pashtuns?
And then that minority coalition with American backing is supposed to just rule all of Afghanistan forever, whether the Pashtuns and like it or not, and whether the Taliban exists or not.
I mean, I don't understand.
Well, that's what we've done since 2001.
We allied ourselves with the minority Uzbeks and Tajiks, who, by the way, were mainly Afghan Communist Party.
They were the core of the Afghan communists.
So we allied ourselves with the communists to overthrow an anti-communist government, which was Taliban.
And we're still doing that now.
We've just, the latest rigged elections have produced a very influential Tajik candidate.
The head of the vice president there is a monster, a Uzbek warlord, war criminal.
So we're still in bed with the same nasty people.
And now because of this foolish war in Afghanistan, it is having all kinds of nefarious repercussions inside Pakistan.
And then now the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, you know, you say Taliban, it's really kind of these loose tribal confederations.
Well, so can you describe maybe to some degree, ballpark, the relative power?
Because it sort of seems like in a sense, almost to echo of what's happening in Iraq, where you have a tribal system, but then you have this, you know, would be Islamist state on top of it.
And they don't necessarily have to coincide together.
It seems like maybe they do coincide together in the Afghan-Pakistan situation more, where at least I've never heard of the Pashtuns having any other representation than the Taliban when it comes to dealing with any outside powers anyway.
Well, there are a couple of other Pashtuns.
And I mean, since the 90s, sorry.
There are organizations, the Haqqani group, the Hizb-e-Islami, which is run by my old acquaintance, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, who the U.S. has been trying to kill for years, years.
There are different groups.
It's not monolithic.
But by and large, you know, what they call the Taliban really isn't even a standing military force.
It's just a bunch of mountain hillbillies.
And when they get riled up enough, they grab their guns and they go and shoot and fight for a while and then go back home.
That's how things work in that part of the world.
War is a part-time practice, undertaking.
And they but they only adopted the name Taliban to get notoriety from the Afghan Taliban, which I think was a big mistake because their problems and issues and goals were somewhat different from those of the Afghan group.
All right, well, so now what do you expect to happen as a result of this massacre?
Is that going to be proof that they should back off the tribal territories?
Are they going to reinvade double now or what?
Oh, no.
Well, the U.S. will increase payments to the Pakistani government, which are running over at one and a half billion dollars a year in a dirt poor country.
That's a lot of money.
They will pay them more to bomb and attack these Pashtun inside of Pakistan.
The Pakistani army, very angry now that their children have been killed, are going to redouble efforts to attack.
There will be more atrocities and more bombings and more killings.
It's just a horrible situation.
It's going to inflame the whole Northwest frontier and lead to more fighting.
Nothing good.
Now, so John Bolton, sorry, John Bolton was on TV on the Fox News.
I'm trying to watch only Fox now because what the hell get it straight from the Pentagon, right?
So John Bolton is saying, and of course, everybody on Fox News knows this.
The lesson of Iraq is you can never leave a place after you invade it.
Like Max Boot said about Libya, the only problem is we didn't do a full scale Iraq sized invasion and training and purple fingered everything and all of that and build up a nation and never leave ever, ever like Japan and Korea.
And so obviously this is at least politically the thinking behind Obama saying, never mind all that, whatever I said about leaving by the end of this year, it turns out that we're staying for more.
And that means combat troops are staying longer.
And just like he had made a deal to stay till 2024 back a couple of years ago.
So it's not like we didn't really see this coming, but that seems to be the consensus now in DC of the rise of the Islamic state.
If only the US army had been here, this would have never happened.
And so I wonder if you think that that's really the policy and how long do you expect that to last?
For Iraq or Afghanistan?
Afghanistan, I guess, first.
Yeah, well, I've been I've written a couple of articles on this subject, which call the phony pull out from Afghanistan.
I don't think there ever was a real plan to completely pull out of Afghanistan, but simply to make it look like we're reducing troops to almost nothing like Iraq, where, you know, 5,000 American troops were covertly left inside of Iraq.
We had about five or 10,000 mercenaries.
We had 20,000 odd troops just south of the border in Kuwait.
So there was, you know, the American presence is not we're gone, but we're still there.
And the same thing will happen in Afghanistan, too, because they know that the minute if the US pulls all of its troops out, the Afghan puppet government, and I underline the word puppet because that's what it is, will be overthrown.
And it won't last any longer than the Soviet imposed public government under Najibullah did.
So, you know, and nobody in Washington can face a defeat in Afghanistan.
The military careers will be ruined.
The politicians will be asked, well, why did you send our boys in to get killed in a stupid war like this with no obvious benefit to the US?
Why did you do it?
So nobody wants to admit, you know, the bankruptcy of the policy.
And so they're going to temporize and keep small amounts of troops there just enough to keep this puppet government in power.
Right.
Yeah.
In Iraq, at least they were fighting for not the majority of the people, but the political factions and the militias that had assumed the power of the majority.
Shia.
So, you know, they're going to keep ruling the capital city anyway, whereas in Afghanistan, they've been fighting for this minority coalition that was on the eve of absolute defeat when America invaded in 2001 and could never be expected to hold Kabul.
Right.
So that's that's correct.
It was at least plausible they could get out of Iraq, even though really, you know, there is a complicated mess, but at least it was plausible that, well, we fought for the majority, so at least they can hold the ground that we help them win.
Right.
Whereas in this case, no chance.
That's right.
And for all these neocons who want us to keep troops there, they they cannot admit that the war has been lost or that these wars are lost from day one, practically.
And the whole point is to protect their interests in the Middle East by keeping US troops abroad.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm already over time here, but let me ask you real quick if you got a minute for a comment about what's going on in Cuba on the surface.
Sure.
Everything looks great, right?
It's it's Nixon goes to China, the end of the Cold War with Cuba.
Hip, hip, hooray.
But not so fast.
I don't know.
Is it all just part of the new Cold War with Russia?
Is it all just a plot to overthrow their government and install another fascist dictatorship under Batista the fourth or some crap?
Well, you're asking the right person here because I know under Batista.
I've been there all the way through the Castro era.
It's about damn time that we recognize and normalize relations with Cuba, the very important Latin country.
And the Cubans have stood up to intimidation from us for, you know, half a century.
Their country is a wreck.
They're dirt poor, but proud.
And enough, you know, called us off.
Bring them back into the Western Hemisphere nations and and and turn a lot of anti-Americanism in Latin America, turn switch it off by doing so.
Yeah, see, I totally agree with that.
I would have the U.S. government stop doing anything and everything to the Cubans.
But, you know, it was pointed out on Twitter immediately that, boy, is this a thumb in the eye of old Putin?
And it was pointed out immediately that, you know, an embassy in Havana means a CIA station in Havana.
And it's not like libertarianism just broke out across North America here.
It's something that the fascist Democrats decided to do.
So who knows what it might portend?
You know?
Well, not only that, but the U.S. government does not speak with one voice.
Sure.
In this last week of this ludicrous effort by the U.S. Agency for International Development to promote secretly promote Cuban hip hop singers to promote anti Castro messages.
Yeah, and of course, they had that kind of fake Twitter thing that they set up a couple of years ago.
That's right.
They've been messing around over there all this time.
The spies.
That's so stupid and childish.
You should stop embarrassing itself over Cuba and just set them free.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Legalize Cuba.
Absolutely.
Well, at least some steps forward.
I guess we'll have you to help us keep a very close legalized pot.
Legalize Cuba.
Yeah, exactly.
Legalize immigration to legalize Arabs.
That's right.
Stop.
Stop.
OK, now.
No, go ahead.
You get the last one.
Oh, I just stop treating our African-American Americans like Arabs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That too.
Indeed.
In fact, there's a whole thing.
Jews and Arabs say black lives matter.
And then.
Yep.
And Palestinians, too.
Boy, it's funny whenever we start talking about who matters.
It's hard to argue that anyone doesn't.
You can only get away with that if it's just implicit.
Well, they're terrorists or something like that.
But if someone says, well, yeah, but them and their wives and their kids, I mean, they are human beings, aren't they?
Then it's hard to argue that they're not if put to the test.
Right.
But terrorist children, one reads about them.
There were about 500, quote, terrorist, unquote, children killed in Gaza recently.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, on Fox again, as long as we're over time here, all the hype is about the new movie about the American sniper and what a hero he is.
This is apparently the trailer for the TV.
You know, certainly it's the Fox News trailer clip that they keep playing over and over again.
Is the sniper taking aim on this woman because she has a grenade and so therefore has sacrificed her life?
No question of who's trespassing on whose property, who's the who's the aggressor and who's the defender.
But this heroic American sniper must do what he has to do and shoot this woman in the head.
Fascist propaganda.
I just saw a poll that says that over 80 percent of America of Republicans support torture.
Oh, man.
No, it's worse.
I saw one.
I think I have it that says new poll shows.
U.S. citizens in every demographic support torture.
Republicans, Democrats, white, black, young, old.
And that's from Michael Shedlock's Global Economic Trend Analysis blog.
Being passed around there.
Certainly somebody to be proud of.
Amazing.
All right.
Listen, I've already abused the privilege and kept you over time here.
Thank you so much for coming back.
Cheers, Scott.
Top of the season to you.
Have a good one.
Happy holidays.
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