12/20/13 – Robert Naiman – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
All right.
Robert Naiman is on the line.
He's from Just Foreign Policy at justforeignpolicy.org.
And he also writes for truthout.org as well.
How's it going, Robert?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
So you're in Athens, huh?
Birthplace of Western democracy and all that.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
Are there temples all around you and all that cool stuff like on TV?
No, actually there are cars all around me.
Well, that's not quite the same.
It's a kind of temple.
You can see the Acropolis from there or whatever, right?
Yeah, I know.
The Acropolis is here right by downtown Athens.
It's very beautiful.
Oh, that's cool.
All right.
Well, I'm going to get an airplane one day.
Hey, listen.
So thanks for writing great stuff all the time.
I really like this thing that you put together about President Karzai stand tall against U.S. pressure to sign the troop deal.
What kind of treacherous treason do you mean by that there, Robert?
Well, you know, it was a reporting in the New York Times that just drove me mad because they reported what's going on upside down from the point of view of the way that most Americans would see it.
From the point of view of this New York Times reporting, it's a big, terrible tragedy that President Karzai is refusing to sign the deal that would allow thousands of U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after 2014.
And it's the opposite of the way most Americans would do because most Americans don't want U.S. troops to stay in Afghanistan.
The big disaster that the New York Times reporter is afraid of is that the deal might break down, Karzai might refuse to sign it and not be able to agree, and then all U.S. troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Oh, my God, how terrible would that be?
But it's even worse than that.
The thing that the New York Times is hiding is that Karzai hasn't even said, no, I don't want a deal.
He said, I have conditions.
What are the two conditions?
The two conditions are that the U.S. transfer Afghan prisoners from Guantanamo to Afghanistan as condition number one.
Condition number two is that the U.S. start peace talks with the Afghan Taliban to end the war.
Now, what's striking about these two conditions is that they're both stated U.S. policy.
First of all, it's stated U.S. policy to try and close Guantanamo.
Secondly, the Obama administration itself tried to transfer Afghan Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to Qatar as part of trying to start the peace talks with the Taliban, as well as free Bo Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who's in Taliban captivity in a prisoner swap.
And it's U.S. policy to start, stated U.S. policy to start peace talks with the Afghan Taliban.
So everything that Karzai is demanding are things that the U.S. government says it wants to do, but hasn't done, because it hasn't had the political will yet to follow through with its own policies in the face of some Republican opposition in Congress.
And if the U.S. did these things, release the Afghan prisoners or transfer them to Afghanistan, start the peace talks, ideally that would lead to ending the war, which means that either way it's win-win from the point of view of the interest of the majority of Americans.
Either the deal breaks down, in which case the U.S. troops come home, or Karzai gets what he wants, in which case the peace process starts and the war starts to wind down, the war ends, the U.S. troops come home.
And meanwhile, if there's a political deal, the U.S. troops are much less likely to get blown up as long as they stay.
So either way, Karzai stands in the interest of U.S. troops not getting blown up, U.S. troops coming home.
Therefore, the interests of the majority of Americans are odd to many degrees, from the way the New York Times is reporting the story.
The interests of the majority of Americans are for Karzai to stand tall.
Well, it seems to me, well, let me ask you, so what's the Obama administration's policy?
Nothing?
I mean, they're going to get one or the other of those answers anyway.
What are they doing?
What do they think they're doing?
Well, as always, you know, the U.S. government is a big base.
What Obama says and what he does are not always exactly the same thing.
And even, you know, when the U.S. government policy is moving in a certain direction, that doesn't tell you whether it's going to get there next week or next year.
So, yes, it's the policy of the U.S. to try to have peace talks and get a political deal.
But the question is, how hard are they going to try to do that?
What Karzai is doing is putting pressure on them to make it more of a priority.
Now, something just happened in Congress which should make it easier.
The National Defense Authorization Act just passed Congress.
It has provisions to loosen the congressional restrictions on President Obama's transfer of detainees from Guantanamo.
So some people are saying, OK, now the ball's really in Obama's court.
He could transfer these guys.
He could get the whole ball rolling.
Transfer the Afghan prisoners.
Bring home Bo Bergdahl.
Get the peace talks started and therefore get the agreements on.
We could see that in the next couple months.
It's more likely that we would see it if there starts to be some public pressure and congressional pressure from the other side.
You know, there's a Million Cards campaign now.
People are sending Christmas cards for Bo Bergdahl to the White House to dramatize the fact that, you know, we still want to bring home.
We still we're still pushing to bring our guy home.
This kind of pressure could help move the Obama administration to get off its butt and get this process moving.
Yeah.
Did you see the thing where Dana Rohrabacher asked the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Afghan War at the Pentagon and his counterparts about how many American casualties we've had in the last year and how much money is spent?
And they had no idea.
Yeah, they're not focused on these numbers and they're not in control of these numbers.
And there's a tendency to just, you know, keep doing what they're doing and not be willing to, you know, take decisive steps to make something else happen.
You know, Richard Holbrook, the U.N. special ambassador for Afghanistan, he was asked, how will you know when it's good enough?
What's the goal?
And he said, we'll know it when we see it.
So, you know, that's your answer.
Like, what's the goal?
Well, you know, we'll tell you when we've reached it.
We'll tell you what the goal was.
That's their ideal world, where they're not accountable for telling you what the goal is and then meeting the goal.
I think the main thing, you know, they want to be able to bring out most of the troops and say they had some kind of success and have the thing not blow up.
But in order for that to happen, there has to be a political process.
And in order for there to be a political process, they've got to put some skin in the game.
They've got to make things happen, like, you know, making the Afghan Taliban prisoners go home.
That's an objective, concrete thing everybody could see.
When that happens, everybody's going to say, OK, wow, now the Obama administration's really doing something.
Right.
Well, meanwhile, the Taliban just walked right in and took over some large part of Kandahar and the government forces just walked away.
Well, that's a foregone conclusion.
There is no question that as U.S. forces leave, large parts of Afghanistan will be taken over by the Afghan Taliban.
That is a given.
That's another reason why there should be a political process.
As U.S. forces leave, Afghan Taliban are going to come back.
Do you want that to happen in a chaotic, messy way?
Or do you want to have that happen in an agreed way where, you know, you have some control over how this is happening and it's not like, you know, U.S. forces lifting off of the Vietnamese embassy in Vietnam?
So, yeah, exactly.
Nobody wants that, right?
It seems like they're sort of sleepwalking towards that if they don't get out in a deliberate fashion.
But so it sounds like to me what you're saying, Robert, is that there's really no chance that they're staying until 2024.
That if there's no deal for immunity, then they have to go.
And if they're going to have a deal, it's going to have to be, well, I don't know, that would be two different deals, right?
One with the government of the so-called government of Hamid Karzai and then another with the Taliban and see if they're going to let Karzai live while we leave kind of a thing.
Um, but but you're saying if they have any deal with the Taliban, that's going to necessarily include the withdrawal of all forces.
Well, look, we don't know at the end of the day what's possible.
Nobody can predict.
But I think there's good reason to believe.
I lose you.
Good reason to believe.
That's good enough for me.
Hey, I'll Scott here for my heroes think dot com.
They sell beautiful seven inch busts of libertarian heroes Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul and Harry Brown.
I've got the Harry Brown one on the bookshelf now.
Makes me smile every time it catches my eye.
These finely crafted statues for my heroes think dot com make excellent decorations for your desktop at work, bookends for your shelves or gifts for that special individualist in your life.
They're also all available in colors now, too.
Of course, gold, silver, bronze coming soon.
Hayek, Hazlitt, Carlin use promo code Scott Horton and save five dollars at my heroes think dot com.