All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, on the line again, I've got the greatest, the best, my good friend, Gareth Porter.
He is the author of Manufacture Crisis and co-author with John Kiriakou of the CIA Insider's Guide to Trump's Horrible Iran Policy or whatever the hell it was called.
And he writes regularly at the Gray Zone.
And we rerun everything and store in his archives everything he's written for 20 years or something, 15 anyway, at antiwar.com.
And welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing, sir?
Thanks so much for having me again, Scott.
And I just you're way too fulsome in your praise, as always.
No, not at all.
You got those x-ray eyes and and you're the most valuable player on the antiwar team.
Always have been.
So listen here.
So they've announced that the May 1st deadline for the withdrawal from Afghanistan is canceled.
It's now September 11th.
And on one hand, it looks like the generals rolled Biden and canceled the withdrawal.
On the other hand, everybody's saying, hey, we're leaving.
And in fact, even the Hawks are really mad and say, no, we can't leave.
So what's the truth of all this?
Yeah, I think the I think the Hawks are upset because they really are, you know, leaving militarily and and in a way that is very substantially, you know, putting at risk the future of this government that the United States has been propping up for so long, for so many years.
Yeah, this is this is a serious decision.
There's no doubt about that.
I mean, it doesn't mean that the government collapses immediately, obviously, but it does mean that they are under very, very severe pressure from now on.
And so now in terms of withdrawal, I mean, The New York Times even said kind of right away, well, don't worry, we're going to have some forces in Tajikistan and we're going to, you know, I don't think they addressed are we really leaving the Bagram airbase or are we not?
But they did say that CIA and contractors and top tier special operations forces will be staying indefinitely, right?
I'm not sure exactly about all of those categories staying indefinitely.
We'd have to go through them one by one.
But I can tell you that there's no doubt that the U.S. is going to be leaving Bagram airbase.
There's no longer going to be any military assets of the United States remaining in any base in Afghanistan.
That is certainly part of this decision.
There's no way around that.
There's no way to sort of have a slight, you know, exception to it at this point, I don't think.
And the only question is contractors, obviously, there will be some contractors remaining.
And the question is, how many will remain?
How many are going to be willing, Americans particularly, are going to be willing to remain under the circumstances that we're going to see under this decision?
My understanding is that less than a thousand American contractors remain.
And I would expect that to thin out further.
So I mean, it's a very serious change in the profile militarily of the United States remaining in Afghanistan.
And from my point of view, at least, clearly insufficient to have a decisive impact on the ability of the Afghan government to survive for very long.
Well, and that's the real trick, isn't it?
And that, of course, is the argument of the Hawks that if we leave, the government will fall.
And on one hand, well, look, if you guys can't set up a government that can stand on its own in 20 years, then when can you?
Right.
But at the same time, and especially I saw a quote from essentially like a liberal democratic female point of view this morning going around on Twitter that, look, if we really believe in universal rights, including for Afghan women, don't we have to stay to protect the Afghan women?
Because look, the Taliban are a bunch of, you know, medieval cretins and whatever.
And so we've got to use force to keep them at bay.
And as you're saying, at the point that we stop and the presumption here is that there's a very enlightened progressive government in Kabul, never mind.
But the moment we stop, they're going to be replaced by someone even worse than General Dostum.
Gareth, what about that?
And so we have to prevent that.
Yeah, I don't know if your listeners, how many of them are familiar with that name, but he was a famous Afghan war criminal in the, you know, days before the present administration, the present Afghan government was in power.
And, you know, there was a lot of wanton killing going on, clearly, at the time the United States was involved in Afghanistan before, again, this present government or the recent governments of Afghanistan took power.
But definitely, you know, we are in a situation where there will be some some increased military pressure against this government and, you know, how long it's going to be able to last is an open question.
Yeah.
And that's the way I put it in my book about Afghanistan was you don't hear me saying it'll all work out and it'll be a nice compromise.
The argument is more like, yeah, well, same thing is if we try this again 10 years from now or 20 and we wouldn't last that long.
In fact, I wanted to bring this up to you, this piece by Brett Stevens in The New York Times that Bill Kristol was retweeting that said, look, the cost of us staying is so low.
You know, we haven't lost a guy in a year.
We might only lose a few guys a year.
We lose a lot more than that in training accidents, hell.
And the cost is not that much.
And yet all it takes, according to Brett Stevens, which I don't know, maybe true, seems to have been true.
All it takes to keep the Taliban from seizing the provincial capitals and overrunning the entire country is enough American air power to be able to bomb their fixed positions.
And so how can we possibly quit when the cost of keeping at least the status quo with a capital city doesn't fall is so low, Gareth?
Well, I think there are a couple of things involved in this problem that that you're dealing with with Brett Stevens.
Is that his name, Brett Stevens?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, that guy from The New York Times, oh, which bad guy?
One of the bad guys from The New York Times.
Yeah.
I mean, look, this this situation is such that if the United States were to reverse its course and begin to start intervening once again militarily, there would be U.S. deaths.
Absolutely.
I mean, the fact that there's been no U.S. deaths is because the Taliban made a political decision based on the agreement of the United States that that they were not going to continue to participate in the war and or at least not not at the same level.
And there would immediately be American casualties.
And the the Afghan rebels, the the people who are increasingly in charge of much of the country, have the capability to impose far greater casualties on the United States if it were to try to intervene once again.
So the guy just doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's also I got to say about this, and this has been the same story since 2001, is he says in this essay that he quotes Osama bin Laden essentially taunting the Americans saying, oh, the Americans always turn tail and run.
The U.S. Empire is such a paper tiger.
Look at what cowards they are.
And so this obvious taunt is taken at face value that, no, see, that means we can never ever give in.
We have to stay forever when anybody who's looked into this at all knows that bin Laden always said was that he was trying to drag us in, bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy.
The same thing we help the Mujahideen do to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, to do it to us again, to push us out the long way, the hard way.
So we finally really leave when our empire completely collapses a long game, not scare us away with a truck bomb or two.
You are one of the very few people who has discerned that fundamental truth about this conflict in the Middle East.
I mean, this is very important and it is simply virtually unknown in Washington.
It's simply one of those truths that was conveniently overlooked.
Yeah.
And from the very beginning, they've all said the same thing that Bret Stevens says now.
Oh, they said we're weak.
They said we'll run away.
And that means we have to double down forever and ever and ever.
And just, you know, in fact, as long as I'm writing about this, bin Laden's son was laughing and said, you know, it was smart.
You know, Bill Clinton sent some cruise missiles and missed, but you guys have been in Afghanistan for 10 years.
You still hadn't caught him yet.
This was in 2010.
He said America was a lot smarter then, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf.
You should have saved that money for your economy anyway.
And he said his dad wanted W. Bush to win in 2000 because he saw him as the perfect mark.
A fake guy who would exploit the crisis to overdo it and blow up America over the medium term here.
Yeah, it's too bad that that was not well covered in the media and well known politically.
Right there in the Rolling Stone.
Everybody can read it.
Guy Lawson interviewed him.
It's Omar bin Laden is his name and everybody can read it.
2010.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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So now about those contractors and about these rapid reaction forces.
A huge part of why we got to stay is because I heard that somebody said that someone was reported to have overheard some intelligence that possibly there are some members of Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent running around in Afghanistan somewhere, Gareth.
And so we can't just abandon Afghanistan to them because everyone knows about the magic portal directly to Boston Logan Airport and the ability to attack the United States if we leave.
Now, the fact that America and our Turkish allies still protect Al Qaeda in the Idlib province in Syria, 2000 miles to the west.
Forget about that.
We're not talking about that.
And the fact that we're fighting for Al Qaeda still in the war in Yemen for the last six years.
That's also irrelevant.
In this case, there's some members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba or ISIS-K, as they call it.
And so that's why we can't leave, because otherwise they're going to get us.
And that was what they were saying in The New York Times about.
In fact, Biden said a year ago before he was president, I think maybe if we pull out of Afghanistan, we'll at least have to build a new base in Pakistan where we can strike back across the border, wherever we find that there's bad guys there.
And so I hear what you're saying about you think that there really is a change here and that they're essentially announcing they are no longer going to prop up the Afghan government with force and they're willing to let it fall, but they're not willing to be accused of letting terrorists run wild there.
So they're going to keep drone assets and keep some kind of assets there to continue to kill people for, I don't know, indefinitely, I guess.
Look, I mean, you are correct in general, but there's more to that part of the story.
There's a story in AP today that quotes McKenzie, General McKenzie, who is very worried about the situation and who reveals, I believe it's McKenzie, who reveals that the United States does not yet have any agreements with neighboring countries to base our assets in to be able to carry on continuing air operations in Afghanistan.
That's a very interesting factoid that I had not been aware of.
Now, and I'm not saying that that would make it impossible, but there are apparently some further complications here to trying to carry on as we have in the past.
And the other thing that I wanted to say is that, yeah, it's true that there are a few individuals representing al-Qaeda in South Asia, but they don't have troops.
There's no real troops there.
The only sort of al-Qaeda type troops there are, of course, ISIS.
And people listening to this program should know that the Taliban carried out very successful operations against ISIS a couple of years ago with the support of the U.S. military and the CIA.
And in fact, there was a an outfit that had a small base, a CIA outfit that had a small base in that part of Afghanistan that had in its office a little sign that said Taliban Air Force.
Right.
And this is the top tier special operation, Joint Special Operations Command.
I think it was the 75th Rangers, right.
And The New York Times and Washington both.
And yes, it was not it was not CIA, it was Special Ops, of course.
Yeah, and it was New York Times and Washington Post both covered it, too.
Yeah.
They're the Taliban.
And so now the parallel here for people who are, you know, Iraq War II aficionados, right, is that, well, I know what we'll do since we can't defeat the Sunni based insurgency, a.k.a. in this situation, the Taliban.
What we'll do is we'll recruit them and turn them against the worst of their kind that we don't like.
And we'll give them a bunch of guns and money to fight the al-Qaeda guys, which in the case of the awakening in Iraq, they were already doing anyway.
Same thing here.
Taliban's already killing these ISIS guys who all they are is Pakistani Taliban refugees from the war from Obama's war in Pakistan in 2010 anyway.
But anyway, so that's how how do you stop biting the Taliban?
How about take their side against some guys who are worse and then call it the awakening or call it a victory and get the hell out?
Or just leave them alone.
Yeah, I mean, that would might be the best solution of all.
Right.
Well, and it's also brings a real irony to the or it certainly raises the question, what is really going to happen here?
And I'm sure you saw on the Taliban's website where they said, hey, listen, they're very careful the way they word it.
In principle, this means that anything bad that happens now is y'all's fault for breaking the deal.
You were supposed to leave by May 1st, not September 11th.
What's this?
And so but they seem to be being very careful and there's no Tet Offensive has broken out yet.
So that's good.
I'm going to be careful.
I agree.
But but there will be a reckoning here.
There's no doubt about that.
There will be a moment when they say, OK, time's up and, you know, begin to carry out much more aggressive actions against the government forces.
I have no doubt about that.
But so you don't think that McKenzie and Milley and everybody are going to talk Biden out of this in another few months?
I mean, if we don't have to withdraw when we have a deal, why do we have to withdraw when we don't have a deal?
Well, I mean, you never know.
I'm not going to start betting big money on the idea that Biden could not be his mind, have his mind changed.
But it does become more difficult as time goes by to go back in.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
Yeah.
I mean, never mind all the people that died in Southeast Asia.
The worst part of Vietnam War was those embarrassing photos of the Hueys taken off from the.
Roof of the embassy and the last few, you know, American loyal people trying desperately to escape and how embarrassing that was.
Right.
Who what what politician wants to live through that again?
At least in Iraq, they fought on the side of the supermajority and won the war for them.
And then it was the guys they fought the war for who told them to leave.
So it wasn't quite as humiliating as all that in terms of the scenes on TV.
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, I think there's no reason for politicians to really grasp at the opportunity to to say that this is embarrassing and this is horrible and so forth.
I mean, there's no need to do that.
I mean, this is we've given them plenty of time, plenty of money, to say the least, plenty of blood.
And you know, to to just continue it indefinitely is not it's extremely unpopular.
They all know that they're doing it against the will of the American people.
You know, there are Republicans who still you're right.
They still embrace this position of some Democrats as well.
But I think that their time is running out, frankly.
I think it was a terrible idea politically, assuming they really mean to see this through, you know, Biden and his top men.
To pick the date of September 11th here to do this.
Yeah.
It's a walking point for the Republicans.
Oh, you're surrendering on the anniversary of the strike and all that.
You know why?
I have no idea.
Democrats, man.
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So this one is about the Vienna talks.
And so the big picture narrative is the Biden guys tried sticking with the Trump administration's overkill on all these sanctions and trying to twist the Ayatollah's arm.
And they realize that this just isn't working.
So they decided to go to Vienna.
And I guess they're not talking with the Iranians, but they've got some Europeans standing between them, negotiating reentry into the deal.
But you're writing here that, boy, I don't know.
It looks to me like the Biden team's position is intransigent and that.
It's too far and that the Ayatollah, you don't think, is going to accept it, is that right?
No way.
There's no way.
Are they going to accept this?
I mean, people should understand what the Biden people are now demanding is that the U.S. holds on to the Trump sanctions.
They're saying that, well, the sanctions that Trump put into action, into play, are not considered to be violations of the agreement.
This is the most absurd, most obviously absurd position that one could possibly take in regard to this whole situation.
I cannot imagine how they could believe that they could get away with this.
It's simply absurd to say that all of these Trump sanctions, which were put into play after the United States had withdrawn from the JCPOA, that is to say the Trump administration had withdrawn from the JCPOA, are somehow exempt from being put back into or withdrawn because they are illegal under the JCPOA.
I mean, I have no idea how they could believe that they could get away with that.
But that's what they're saying.
Now they're saying it openly for the first time.
Yeah.
And then so.
I got to say, man, I'm sorry, there's so many major stories to follow.
And plus, I got all this other work and I have not been able to follow the ins and outs of the meetings there.
I mean, they continue to meet and talk.
What do they have to talk about at this point, then?
Well, quite, quite honestly, it's not clear to me how they can sustain this.
The Iranians are staying on the sidelines talking to, you know, the Europeans.
But but they are making it clear that this is not acceptable.
There's no way that that they can accept that now, you know, maybe they're they've been given some signal that, well, this is a position that we feel somehow can be changed.
I don't know.
I don't understand it, frankly.
Well, you know, I saw the Republicans and I'm sure some Democrats, too, are working on new sanctions.
Just to make sure.
Yeah, it's always the same in the wings.
But but but what we're talking about here, people should understand we're talking about the sanctions that were which included the the Trump sanctions against the Iranian oil sale partners, the people who bought Iranian oil.
These were secondary sanctions against countries that purchased American Iranian oil.
And of course, that made it impossible for for the Iranians to sell more than a fraction of the normal amount of oil that they that they were selling and was a big hit on their economy.
So.
So this is perhaps the single biggest sanction that is at play in these negotiations.
I mean, this involves the greatest amount of money potentially.
And I'm I'm just aghast that the administration, the Biden administration, is openly talking about this as though it were, you know, there's no reason to consider these sanctions to be a violation of the JCPOA.
How can they possibly feel they can get away with it?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess the most obvious thing would just be that so much more time has passed that their economy is in much more desperate straits.
I mean, back in the era of Obama's crippling sanctions, it was terrible and the Americans never really lifted the sanctions, according to the deal in the first place.
I guess they lifted some, but not many that they were supposed to lift, even under Obama.
Then Trump canceled the thing and added even more.
And it's just been years and years of this.
And so I guess the Democrats are saying, well, look, we're in a stronger position to make the Ayatollah accept less relief because he's going to be so desperate for just a little bit of.
Well, I think you're absolutely right.
That is that is actually the rationale.
No doubt about that.
That is what the Biden administration is thinking about.
Oh, look, look what we might be able to get away with, what we probably will be able to get away with from their point of view.
But but of course, you know, I mean, Iran is not going to accept it.
And therefore there is going to be consequences.
We don't know exactly what they're going to be or exactly when they will take place, but there will be consequences.
And so we will then move on to the next stage of the crisis.
All right.
So now under the deal, and it's pretty wise of the Iranian side to work it this way.
They actually have a section that says, essentially, if the Americans quit the deal, the Iranians can quit abiding by it while still essentially staying within it, within the letter of it.
They're allowed to begin ignoring certain restrictions.
And so now they have a larger stockpile of uranium, low enriched uranium, and they say they're going to enrich up to 60 percent, which is still short of weapons grade, but is also a real provocation.
I don't know if they're really doing it or not.
But, you know, as Trita Parsi, I think you agreed with this at the time, too, that this was certainly his thesis was that it wasn't Obama's crippling sanctions that brought them to the table in 2015.
It was the advances in Iran's civilian nuclear program, which which was becoming more and more a turnkey weapons program if they wanted it to be one.
And so that was what really brought the Americans to the table to deal with them.
And well, I've been saying this from the beginning, Scott, that it was indeed the Iranian upping the ante by, you know, not just doing 20 percent enrichment, which is, you know, a much higher level than the, you know, the low level enrichment that they had committed themselves to before.
But they were doing so in a way that built up a a store, a stock of higher enriched uranium that potentially would give them a big advantage if they decided to go for nuclear weapons.
And of course, that was precisely the purpose of it.
It was to get the attention of the Obama administration to force them to to, you know, respond to it.
And indeed, that did have the effect.
No question about it.
It did have the effect of making them realize that they had lost the leverage on Iran, that Iran now had leverage on them.
In fact, there was a quote in The New York Times at the time acknowledging that by an official who, of course, was not named.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so.
I guess one of the latest leaks out of Vienna in terms of, like, the Europeans point of view on whether this is working at all or is the narrative now that, ah, geez, we seem to be at an impasse or they.
As far as I last heard, they seem to be acting like, well, we're having talks and not much worse than that.
I see no sign that the Europeans have any sort of notion, a strategic idea of their own as to how to handle this.
I think they went into this, you know, without without any such sort of strategy that took into account what I would have thought would be the obvious dangers that that could beset these negotiations or whatever you want to call them, these talks.
And so I think that these these talks are simply doomed.
I don't think that there is a plan B at this point.
I hope I would like to think there is, but I don't see any sign of it.
Yeah.
And now.
So what about the Israelis?
They're recently announcing that they're going to intervene.
The Israeli journalist Barak Ravid wrote in a big Twitter thread yesterday, I guess he must have written it up as an official article, too.
But he said that Netanyahu himself has instructed the Israeli delegation that's going to travel to Washington next week for strategic talks on Iran to stress Israel's objection to you to a U.S. return to the deal.
And I guess especially to pressure Congress to try to stop Biden from getting back in it.
How do you like that?
Yeah, I think that they're actually rather perceptively, perceptively, you know, involved in a an effort to strengthen the hand of those in the Biden administration who are determined to to really avoid coming to any concessions, real concessions to Iran.
I'm not sure it's necessary.
I don't think it is necessary because they're doing it on their own.
So it's kind of in a way beside the point.
But they are taking advantage of this to sort of show their their own hand and to to reinforce the determination of those in the Biden administration to avoid coming to any realistic position in negotiations with Iran.
Yeah.
You know, I bet that's part of why the Biden people think they're in such a position of strength here to keep pushing it is that after the explosion at Natanz, they didn't just recall the Iranians didn't just recall their diplomats and call all this off, at least even temporarily in protest or anything.
Right.
They're saying, aha, see, we got them right where we want them in this kind of thing.
Well, I suspect you're right that that the certainly this administration believes that it's it has a very strong hand.
I think they're wrong.
But but that is fundamentally the the optimism that has been fueling their strong, you know, their very hard line stance in these talks.
They're convinced that they've got Iran on the ropes.
And so they have no they have no reason to really soften their position at all.
In fact, they're headed in the other direction.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, at the end of the deal, at the end of the day, at least hopefully means they still stay within the nonproliferation treaty, even if the JCPOA completely fails permanently.
There's still I mean, I don't know.
I guess the narrative is going to be, oh, no, this is the only thing stopping them from making nukes.
They're going to make nukes when that wasn't the case before the JCPOA, because they've been in the NPT since 68.
Well, I mean, 72 Iran is Iran is going to be grasping at any means of strengthening its negotiating hand with the United States.
And, you know, they've already threatened at various times to leave the NPT, the nonproliferation treaty.
And I think we'll see more of that in future.
No question in my mind about that, whether they would actually do it or under what circumstances they would do it.
An open question.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's not out of the question that they would that they would do that as part of their attempt to to get the attention of the Biden administration and force it to make some concession.
But, you know, it's getting more and more difficult.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show, as always, Gareth, explain this stuff to us.
Thanks so much for having me again, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the book on Iran's nuclear program.
Everything you need to know about the history of the Iran nuclear scare there.
And also co-author with former CIA officer John Kiriakou of the CIA officer's guide to the Iran nuclear crisis or whatever.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
