05/31/16 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me back on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
A good piece that you wrote here, we ran on Antiwar.com the other day.
The coming drone blowback focused this time really on Pakistan.
And so you start off here with the targeted assassination of the Taliban leader, Mansoor.
So I guess, first of all, remind us a little bit about Mansoor, and then tell us about the drone strike there.
Sure.
Well, he has been the leader only for a short period of time after the death of Omar.
And it hasn't been entirely clear what his political sympathies are.
Although, of course, it's a relatively narrow range if you're the head of the Taliban.
But the key question really was whether Mansoor supported negotiations with the current Afghan government or not.
And the United States government had concluded that he was not supportive of those negotiations.
In fact, that he was a major obstacle to any negotiations going forward.
And those negotiations are not just with Afghanistan.
It's kind of a quadrilateral set of discussions with the United States, China, and Russia.
And the United States decided that this was an opportune time to remove what it considered an obstacle, and that is to take him out in a drone attack.
All right.
And then as you say here, well, I guess the question is, I mean, you say we don't know what's going to happen, but is there any reason that you know of from open source intelligence, John, to think, oh, well, good, this actually, I mean, maybe we have our problems with drone strikes, but maybe the second or third guy in line to run the Taliban now is somebody that we could negotiate with, right?
The government must have had a good reason for doing what they did, argument, theory of foreign policy there.
Correct.
Yes, it would be nice to believe that.
And I, of course, don't have any access to anything that would suggest that the United States was proceeding along that theory.
The immediate reactions fell into two different categories, roughly two different categories.
One was that the drone strike removing Mansour would throw the organization into complete chaos, that it already is an organization that's barely held together.
It has numerous contending factions, all of which have different approaches to what they believe to be the future trajectory of Afghanistan, and that this chaos will, could be, you know, from the point of view of the Pentagon, a good thing, because it would diminish the Taliban's success on the ground, or it could produce a new leader who was even more opposed to negotiation.
So that's one category.
The other category is that Mansour was really not much of a leader, that he was incapable of uniting all these disparate factions, but that removing him will suddenly be a wake-up call to the Taliban that they have to get their act together and unify behind a single leader.
Toward what goal?
Well, that's hard to know.
Are they going to unify in the interests of pursuing negotiations now with the Afghan government, or are they going to unify with the purpose of continuing to fight even more assiduously on the ground in order to gain as much of an edge now as possible to have a stronger position at the negotiating table?
So no one said, yeah, we really think that we have somebody we can work with, you know, coming up in line at all.
That wasn't even part of the argument.
Well, you know, in the past, what we've seen is that the United States drone attacks have done two things.
One, they've eliminated an experienced cadre of Taliban leaders who might in fact be more conducive to negotiations and brought up a much younger cohort that tend to be more radical, tend to be more committed to fighting on the ground.
So that's been one immediate effect.
And then there has been the case where they've actually, and this one would imagine be by accident, actually killed negotiators either on their way to or coming back from negotiations.
Oh, we hope accidentally, right?
Yes.
And that, of course, sends all the wrong signals about...
And then when they negotiate, they're negotiating with an imposter for nine months and then blew that whole thing, right?
Exactly.
So, I mean, I tend to think that, you know, these drone strikes, for the most part, are crapshoots.
In other words, we don't really know what the consequences will be.
However, we're not happy with the status quo.
So we'll roll the dice and see what will happen.
You know, you reminded me about Andrew Coburn's work in Kill Chain.
He talks about, you know, taking out the leaders of the IED brigades in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
And every time they did that, it just got worse as the younger, wilder guys.
Same thing with taking out the drug kingpins in Latin America.
It just makes all the violence worse and prices higher and the incentives for everybody to get worse that much greater and vicious cycle with the decapitation strikes always backfires.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, it points to an obvious and understandable frustration on the part of any negotiators on the U.S. side or the Pakistani side or the Chinese side.
I mean, it is frustrating to obviously sit down with Taliban leaders or North Korean leaders or whatever.
And I'm sure there is the temptation as you sit there day after day, getting nowhere in negotiations to say, well, damn, if only this person across the table from me did not exist.
I willingly take my chances with whoever would replace him, because this is just not going anywhere, especially when, you know, all you have to do is literally press a button and kill that guy on the other side of the world.
Simple as that.
Precisely.
Now, the negotiators on our side tend not to reexamine their own negotiating assumptions about what we can or cannot give at the negotiating table.
So that ultimately is the major problem, not who we're negotiating with.
But I certainly understand the frustration and I understand why they resort to this, even if I condemn this tactic.
Well, now, so I interviewed this guy.
You may have seen it was a pretty big deal when it came out a few weeks back, a month back or so.
A guy from Waziristan who published an article in The Guardian saying, hey, I'm on the kill list and this is what it's like.
So I interviewed that guy and I did think to ask him, seen any Arabs around, you know, friends of Osama Hayden in Waziristan?
And he's telling me, no, I haven't seen any damn Arabs, you know, and that was pretty clear.
But what I should have asked him, too, was what about leaders of the Afghan Taliban?
Because, you know, I would really like to do a lot of research on this.
I think I will, because I'm kind of writing about it.
But just on the surface, it seems to me, John, like all the reports of the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in Pakistan seem to have them in the south of the country, in the big cities, this kind of thing.
Whereas America's war in Waziristan that is supposedly against al Qaeda targets there.
And I guess I believe that in 2009 and 10, they were killing some al Qaeda guys there, although I don't really know.
But most of that is against the Pakistani Taliban, the enemy of the Pakistani government.
But so I'm sorry, I'm saying a lot here.
But what I'm really getting at is, does it kind of seem like the Pakistani government and even the Americans have been letting the leaders of the Afghan Taliban have safe haven in Quetta or in the Balochistan region?
It's been hands off them this whole time, up until very recently.
Yeah, well, that's a good question.
And I mean, partly, I think it's because, you know, the Pakistani government, you know, it lodges its protests about drone strikes in the tribal areas.
But, you know, as you said, it's we're basically taking out their enemies as well often.
And so they're going to look the other way.
Drone strikes elsewhere in the country in Balochistan.
Now, that's another matter.
And I mean, it's hard to know exactly what, you know, the relationship is between the US government and the Pakistan government.
And there obviously were tensions around the removal of Osama bin Laden.
There have been tensions over all sorts of issues.
So it's hard to know what kind of agreements, informal or otherwise, exist that permit the Afghan Taliban to relocate outside these kill zones.
But it's also possible that the kill zones have, as of this last drone strike, been expanded.
It will be interesting to see if the US begins, you know, a much more concerted effort at targeting the Afghan Taliban in the southern regions of Pakistan.
But do you think that they could have just reached out and touched Mullah Omar all this time?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, you know, as I said, especially in the last year or so, and probably after Mullah's death, but I'm sure the United States is concerned about the other forces that are contending with the Taliban for influence in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And that, of course, would primarily be not so much Al Qaeda, but the Islamic State.
So there will be an interesting balancing act where the United States may well decide that, except for this or that Taliban leader, the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, as well as the Pakistani Taliban, are far more, shall we say, responsible interlocutors than the Islamic State's going to be.
These are folks who one can imagine being, perhaps a little far-fetched, but one could imagine them being in a coalition government in Kabul.
One could imagine them at some point, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, transforming themselves into some kind of a political force, even if they retain some paramilitary structures.
Islamic State?
No, that's not a possibility.
Well, you know, the same thing is going on in Yemen right now, where I was talking with this guy, Nasser Arabi, there in Sana'a, and he's going on and on and on about the growth of Al Qaeda and how the leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen are embedded inside the Hadi government at the highest level, and that any supposed proxy fight between them is a total lie.
And then I said, yeah, but what about the Islamic State?
And he more or less said, everything that I just said, forget that I ever said Al Qaeda.
It's all basically the Islamic State now, because all the older guys are old and dying or been killed and whatever, and the younger guys, oh, and all the leaders, the older leaders of Al Qaeda in Pakistan have all been killed off too.
And so now these young guys are basically off their leash and are able to make their own decisions about who they want to ally with.
And more and more Islamic State is the better brand name and maybe the better group of donors out of Saudi and Qatar or wherever they're getting all their money from.
And so, you know, we could really, are we really looking at that?
Is it possible, am I a crazy kook to think that maybe the Americans are looking at the Islamic State backed by Saudi encroaching into Afghanistan and they're saying, good, let's hit the Taliban at their leadership level really hard right now in order to stay, in order to have an enemy that you could not imagine could ever turn into Hezbollah and be part of the government in Kabul?
Well, I'm not sure it would be quite so Machiavellian, but I could imagine the Pentagon or the CIA making a calculation that one or the other is in a stronger position and therefore decapitating the stronger of the forces in order to even things out on the battlefield to ensure that there was a kind of equilibrium that was favored the Afghan government and U.S. forces on the ground.
I don't, I mean, obviously, you know, in the 1950s and 1960s, and I'm sure you've had Robert Dreyfus on the show talk about this, you know, both the United States and Israel did fund Islamic fundamentalism as a tool against what was perceived as a much stronger force, which was Arab nationalism, without really thinking about what the ramifications of that would be.
So that kind of, those kinds of calculations are certainly, shall we say, inscribed in the DNA of U.S. geopolitical thinking.
It's just hard to pinpoint right now where those kinds of discussions are taking place and how they play out in U.S. policy.
Well, I guess it's pretty easy to imagine that they really feel frustrated and stuck with the situation in Afghanistan where they supposedly ended the war at the end of 2014.
And yet we all know they're staying because they can't possibly leave because Saigon will fall.
And so they're just, what are they going to do?
And like you're saying, I could see them making a very short term calculation that, you know, yeah, if it strengthens the Islamic state, oh well, but we got to weaken the Taliban right now.
Anyway, that kind of thing, that sort of short-sighted and terribly disastrous blowback inducing type of decision making is definitely their standard operating procedures.
So, and after all Obama said, we're staying until 2024 anyway, right?
Didn't he sign a document swearing that we're not leaving until then, at least?
Well, in some form or another, you know, I think it's certainly, you know, it's no longer Obama's kind of call, you know, he's already on his way out.
Was it ever really, John?
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I mean, he's thinking legacy now.
And, you know, there will be the same discussion between Obama and his successor that took place between George W. and Obama about what are the kind of, the absolutely non-negotiable U.S. positions that have to be preserved across administrations.
One of those very well will be, you know, obviously drone strikes, which was one of the two that George W. passed on to Obama.
The other might well be U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
The real question is, you know, the degree to which the United States can wait this out for something to happen that's unanticipated at the moment, whether that's, you know, greater involvement on the part of the Chinese or the Russians, or a change of perspective in Pakistan, or, you know, some almost magical transformation, economically speaking, in Afghanistan.
I mean, I'm sure that there are intelligence analysts in Langley kind of charting out what are the possible scenarios within which the United States can make a face-saving final withdrawal from the country, because I don't really think that the United States wants, and when I say United States, I mean kind of the Obama administration at this point, and probably a Hillary Clinton administration afterwards, wants to be involved in Afghanistan.
I mean, it's not, you know, it's not Iraq.
It's not a resource-rich country in the middle of things.
It's kind of on the outskirts of the arc of crisis, if you will, and it doesn't have much, although obviously the Chinese have identified some mineral wealth that they've already invested in, but that's not really what the United States has been thinking of in terms of Afghanistan.
So, you know, yes, I know that the Obama administration had decided that, you know, the Iraq war was the wrong war, and that we had to, you know, kind of focus on Afghanistan, the so-called right war, because that's, of course, where al-Qaeda was hiding out.
We had to get rid of them, etc., etc., but if you take a step back, you realize that Afghanistan is really not a major national security priority for the United States, and to get out of there, and even to focus on other parts of the Middle East, you know, much less to focus less on the Middle East and other parts of the world, including Asia-Pacific, is a priority for the geopoliticians of Obama's ilk.
Yeah.
Well, now, so, I mean, the thing is, just politically speaking, God, I hate to get into the candidates, but you did mention Hillary there.
Trump has said, and I take him on his word for it on this one, because it's a bad thing.
So, I assume he means we have to stay in Afghanistan forever, because Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
So, I'm not sure if there's any kind of sequitur in there, or if it's a complete non-one or not, but that's his position.
Hillary, I'm trying to imagine her, you know, saying peace with honor and getting out somehow, and I can't.
I think eight years of her, we'll still be there after another couple of surges, or whatever kind of thing.
Just politically speaking, and because, even though, like you say, you know, the real wonky Mandarin types, maybe some of them, despite their salaries, might appreciate that Afghanistan doesn't really matter to the U.S., and think of it as much less important than other parts of the Middle East, and all that.
But, with the Islamic State there, declaring their loyalty to Baghdadi, and all of that, as long as that's still going on in Mosul and Raqqa, then that's a political reason they can never go, and every idiot drives me crazy.
I know it must drive you crazy, too, hearing just as the common, you know, propaganda slogan that everybody repeats like a minor bird about how Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq, and that's what led to the rise of the Islamic State.
I saw Jake Tapper on CNN, you know, who I think represents that kind of perfectly moderate centrist conventional wisdom sort of newsy point of view.
He says, isn't that a fact that everybody knows?
And so, I guess we just can't never leave anywhere as long as there's a Sunni with a rifle.
Right.
Well, I mean, this is the who lost kind of China debate.
Obama doesn't want to be the, or Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, for that matter, doesn't want to be the person who is stuck with the label who lost Afghanistan, and much as they've been already labeled with who lost Iraq, or who lost Syria, or who lost Libya.
I think that, yeah, it's going to be very difficult for anybody over the next four years to affect a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
They'll stay in there for, A, face-saving reasons, B, the Islamic State, as you mentioned, C, you know, our relationship with Pakistan, or our fear of what Pakistan represents, any number of reasons why we will remain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we will consider Afghanistan a major, really consider Afghanistan a major national security priority.
So, you know, it's kind of like with North Korea, you know, the Obama administration would have preferred North Korea to just simply be quiet over the last eight years.
They didn't really want to negotiate with the country.
They really didn't want to have to deal with the bad press of North Korea's nuclear tests.
If North Korea had simply been quiet, then the so-called strategic patience doctrine of ignoring North Korea would have been successful.
And, you know, but the fact that North Korea tests a nuclear weapon forces the administration to acknowledge that it's a national security priority, even when it's really not a national security priority.
Yes, of course, because it has a nuclear weapon, it rises on the list of priorities, but effectively, you know, we don't really have any connection to North Korea.
And therefore, there's nothing we have to preserve there.
There's nothing we don't have any major long-term vision for North Korea.
So that's what I mean in terms of Afghanistan.
Yes, of course, we'll stay there in some form or another, as long as our withdrawal will produce that kind of conventional wisdom, wisdom conclusion that the withdrawal of those troops led to the victory of whatever the Taliban, the Islamic State, or whatever new formation emerges in that country.
Yeah, I guess it's really got to be as bad as Vietnam for the American people to say, we don't care, we prefer a loss.
Right?
I mean, that's the thing.
They can't leave without calling it a victory, credibly.
And it isn't bad enough.
Maybe it's long enough that the American people would just as soon take a loss at this point.
I don't know.
But well, I mean, the polls suggest, yes, that the US population is not eager to continue either US involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq.
And certainly, they don't want to start something new in terms of ground troops in Syria, or elsewhere in the region.
What the Obama administration has managed to do is kind of put, to find that middle ground, what it perceives as a middle ground of drone strikes and aerial bombing, selected aerial bombing, in lieu of major US troop commitments to the region.
And that is, you know, for the Obama administration, kind of the balance between acknowledging public fears of what extremist politics producing in that region, and public concerns about US getting involved in quagmire.
So I can't tell you how many responses I got to my article saying, you know, I don't like drone strikes, but they're much better than US body bags coming home.
So that is, you know, my guess of what will be the next four to eight years that next president will continue to try to find that balance, whether it whatever the mix happens to be drone strikes, aerial bombing, perhaps, if we're lucky, some negotiated settlements as well.
But you know, at the moment, those are not on the table.
Yeah.
God help me.
I saw a clip of Bill Maher arguing with Jeremy Scahill about drones and assassinations.
And of course, that's the benchmark.
Anything less than George W. Bush sending in the entire army into Mesopotamia to stay is perfectly permissible.
In fact, heroic and great and wonderful and, and how could you even waste my time complaining about it, you whiner kind of attitude.
And I think that jerk speaks for America, you know, when he's when he's confronting Scahill like that and refusing to even let him argue really.
But so let me ask you one more thing here, a couple more things about a little bit more on the on the focus of the specific article here about the blowback from bomb in Pakistan.
We've been doing this for a while.
I think you do mention in here, Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, who was an American, I think a naturalized citizen, had a big house and a wife and a professional job, a degree professional job was living the American dream man had nothing against America, didn't have a religious problem, went home to Pakistan saw firsthand with his eyeballs, the results of American drone strikes, and said, Okay, and joined up with their side of the war.
And, and, and this was an unprecedented thing, right, john, that this was the Pakistani Taliban said, here's how to make the bomb.
And here's how to do it and send him to do it.
This was a group that, of course, had nothing to do with the United States or attack in the United States.
But anyway, you also mentioned in here, well, I would say it seems like we're lucky that that's the the worst of the blowback we've suffered from the drones, the drone war in Pakistan so far, but you quote this study saying that you know what the people of Waziristan, they hate the Pakistani Taliban just as much as any reasonable person would.
And they actually don't mind the drone so much, which geez, because I've read some things about what the local population thinks about the drones that would tend to disagree with that.
But anyway, it sounded like a very, you know, interesting study.
Anyway, you seem to you seem to take it seriously on its face, but reject its conclusion.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure.
Well, so.
So basically, there, this study was published in the Washington Post by Akhil Shah, who's a professor at University in Oklahoma, that argued that the population in Waziristan was overwhelmingly, again, overwhelmingly in favor of drone strikes, by about 70% or so.
And as a result, the notion that there was blowback connected to drone strikes that people angered by these drone strikes would then turn against the United States or US targets in the region or elsewhere was simply fictitious.
So that's the study.
And that's what was published in the Washington Post.
So there are two important things that can be said about this.
One is that the survey that he conducted, Akhil Shah in Waziristan of about 100 to 200 people, he makes very clear was not a representative sample, which is important because, you know, if you're just talking to a random or not even very random group of people, they could just you could just be the 100 to 200 people you talk to who are against drone strikes or for drone strikes.
And yet, as a result of this survey that he conducted, he comes to conclusions which, frankly, if you're not dealing with a scientific sample, you shouldn't kind of stretch out to make, because, again, you haven't kind of laid the groundwork with a scientific sample.
Okay, so that's one kind of problem with the study.
The other problem with the study is this conclusion that somehow if 70% of the population that you've interviewed, or 70% of the respondents support drone strikes, and again, he said they support drone strikes, probably because they think the drone strikes are preferable to indiscriminate aerial bombardment or the activities of the Pakistani army with boots on the ground going into the tribal areas to enforce order.
So they support drone strikes as an alternative.
But even if you do find 70% support for drone strikes, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's no blowback, because of course blowback doesn't require 100% of the population to make blowback happen.
I mean, for instance, when the United States supplied weapons and support to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet army, some of those weapons and some of that support made their way via Osama bin Laden to Al Qaeda and were used against US targets.
But it's not as if all the Mujahideen engaged in blowback, it was a small portion of the Mujahideen who did that.
Blowback can be as small as one person whose family has been affected by drone strikes who decides that they will become a suicide bomber or engage in terrorism.
So blowback can't be quantified quite so easily as he would make it out to seem.
John Pfeffer, you do great work.
Thank you very much, Scott, for having me on your show.
I sure appreciate you doing it again, everybody.
That's John Pfeffer at foreign policy in focus fpif.org.
Great stable riders over there doing great work all the time.
This one's called the coming drone blowback.
Thanks again.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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