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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Cathy Kelly.
She coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and she spent a lot of time in Afghanistan.
And in fact, just this month, she visited Kabul as a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.
Welcome back to the show, Cathy.
How are you doing?
Well, thank you, Scott.
I'm grateful for the chance to be talking with you.
Really happy to have you back on the show here.
And we run so much of what you write at antiwar.com because I learned so much from it.
I really appreciate the fact that you're willing to go and, and spend time really doing everything you can to help try to make peace and to try to help people who are living in the poorest of circumstances over there in Afghanistan.
So I don't know, I guess before we get too far into, you know, all the news and what's going on with the peace march and all these other things, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what Afghanistan means to you, and maybe tell us a little bit about the time you've spent there and that kind of thing.
I have to confess that for a long time over the course of the 17 year United States war against Afghanistan, I paid barely no attention.
I and others in my group were so focused on Iraq as was necessary, because hardly anyone was, I think, ever really grasping the impact of the economic sanctions against Iraq.
But at one point, we had decided to do a walk from Chicago to the Republican National Convention in Minnesota in Minneapolis.
And we asked an imam locally to, to kind of commission us to send us forth.
And this was after the 2003 Gulf War.
And we were pretty focused on what was happening to Iraqis as refugees and what was happening inside of Iraq.
And he said, well, you may not want to hear this, but I think I must say to all of you, in all of these years, never once have we heard you mention the United States war against Afghanistan, or what is happening to people in Pakistan.
So we had a long walk to think about that.
And that's when we realized, well, we also haven't really fully understood what's happening with drone warfare.
And these are all affecting the capacity of the United States to inflict ever increasing harm on other people.
And as you have said, a fool's errand.
So we decided it would be a good idea, believing that, you know, where you stand determines what you see, if we could hear from people in Afghanistan who can't escape.
And we very, very fortunately, were also being contacted by a group of teenagers who said, we're fasting with you when you do this fast about Guantanamo.
And we were kind of puzzled.
It was wintertime, they're in a pup tent on a mountainside.
But they were in fact, holding a fast alongside us, freezing out there in this pup tent.
And when we were able finally to connect with them by Skype, one of our friends mentioned that it was Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday and was going to explain who King was.
And there was a commotion at their end.
And it was one of the youngsters trying to say, I'll do the quote, because they had memorized quotes from Dr. King's speeches.
So we have so much to learn from young people in Afghanistan, trying to cope with an inescapable situation, as the Taliban now control more and more of their country, even though they'd been told that the United States was there to sort of fight against the Taliban in this terrible, seemingly endless, relentless war.
I would say the only ones who benefit are the weapon makers, and the people who somehow can lay claim to promotions as either corporate execs or generals in what has been such a cruel infliction of suffering on average, ordinary Afghan people.
Can you tell us a little bit about what life is like for the women and children, the men for that matter, in Kabul there?
Well, for instance, the last time I was there, I was staying in a pretty simple place, but much better off than say people in refugee camps or people who are without food, but the well went dry.
And when the water's gone, what do you do?
Well, this was the landlord's problem.
And fortunately, this landlord started to dig deeper.
But I was at a refugee camp where people are kind of newly poor.
They had some resources through herding or through farming out in the more rural areas.
But when their wells go dry or when their livestock thirst to death, what can they do?
They come into the cities and there's no room for them.
There's no infrastructure to accommodate them.
So one woman I'd gotten to know, Gulbek, was terrified that she might end up in a refugee camp.
And she's a widow, but she has just tried so hard to raise five children.
She wants to keep them out of the military and somehow get them a skill.
But every month, she wonders, can she afford to pay for the water?
And the prices go up and up.
And she doesn't have enough money for food.
So they go without.
They don't have bread often.
And, you know, what is she to do?
I said, well, does the government help you at all?
And she said, they have no idea how we live.
So there are many, many people struggling just to get by.
I know so many women who send their children to the marketplace to kind of scavenge the ground for scraps of potatoes and turnips.
And they don't want to live that way.
And they wish they could stay clean, but they can't, you know, devote vitally needed water for cooking in order to clean.
Those are the kinds of choices people have to make.
And people do value education, but the education system in Afghanistan has crumbled.
The health care delivery is almost absent.
It's a very, very desperate country.
And I suppose, you know, it sounds so cold to say it, but it's a failed narco state and you can't eat opium.
And now, I mean, would it be right to guess that in Kabul is actually probably where people have the highest standard of living in the country?
Well, it used to be called Kabul.
Not only was it a higher standard of living, but it was the safest place.
But now Kabul has become the most dangerous place in Afghanistan because of explosions.
And that's kind of like the great leveler.
You know, you don't know the day or the hour and you can't predict what district there will be a suicide bomber or an attack.
Unemployment is very high and the infrastructure is such that it can't accommodate the soaring, rising populations, particularly in the refugee camps, but then throughout the city.
So there are long stretches without electricity.
And what's coming down the mountainside is no longer the pure snow melt, but quite honestly, sewage.
And so everybody's water is contaminated.
You have to boil your water for 20 minutes.
Well, a lot of people don't have fuel for 20 minutes of boiling water.
And in the winter, it's just wretched.
People are cold in the camps.
The mud huts aren't at all insulated from the harsh elements.
And when it rains and everybody's slogging around in, you know, mud, the living conditions are very, very difficult.
Every single sidewalk has open sewage going on either side of the walkway.
And then because it's a bit of a valley surrounded by high mountains, the smog gets trapped.
And so people have very, very bad respiratory problems.
And as I say, the health care is pretty negligible.
It's a hard place in which to live.
But what a sturdy, strong group of people.
I mean, I am amazed at the readiness of young people and widows whom I know to try to find a way to help one another, eke out a living, share resources, and imagine something that would be alternative and better.
So the young people and some of the older ones were together learning permaculture for an entire month when I was there during February.
And there are people who, when I was most recently there, have formed a shoemaking cooperative and a seamstress cooperative.
And then I was so impressed because the young people went out to the day laborers who stand on street corners and wait all day, hoping someone might let them haul rocks or move equipment for a day.
And that's backbreaking labor.
And they said, you know, we could set you up with a cart that you could sell fruit from.
And that's another vision they have of forming a cooperative.
Oh, that's cool to hear.
And they've done it.
Yeah, people really working hard to get by.
But so, you know, it's got to sound strange even to you when you read that America has spent more than the entire Marshall Plan for rebuilding Western Europe after World War II in Afghanistan, and yet still there's sewage running in the gutters on the side of every street in the capital city, never mind how things are out in the hinterlands and this kind of thing.
So what accounts for that?
How do you explain all this money?
Where did it go, if not to create a modern sewage system for the capital here?
Mm-hmm.
Well, I think war always causes chaos and also corruption.
And who knows?
Maybe it's deliberate, that if you can keep people undereducated and chaotic and desperate, then it's easier to gain control eventually.
But I think that the corruption almost is on, it spirals without end.
I mean, for instance, the United States AID, U.S. Aid for International Development, had reported to the SEAGAR, the Special Inspector General on Afghanistan, a report to John Sopko, who's in charge of that, that they were going to be responsible for health care delivery that would cost something like $615 million to fund clinics in faraway places and to build new hospitals or to keep other hospitals going.
Well, okay, $615 million is not a huge sum of money.
But Sopko, the guy in charge of the SEAGAR report, is very, very careful about tracking where the money goes as best he can.
Well, in faraway places, you can't really, because it's too dangerous.
You can't just get in a Jeep and start driving down roads where there are checkpoints and people would kidnap or kill Westerners.
So people who are, you know, less than honest, realize, hey, they're never going to be able to track this money.
So let's pretend there is a hospital or a health care facility or a clinic, when in fact, there's nothing there.
And John Sopko was able to prove that because he used spatial imaging.
You know, basically any of us could do it with Google Earth these days.
And they realized that of the number of places that were supposed to be bona fide health care delivery facilities, 80% were questionable because when they checked out where the X is in terms of the coordinates of this place's location, there wasn't even a building for 400 yards in any direction.
And so Sopko wrote a letter and said, how do you explain this?
You know, six of your so-called hospitals are marked by Xs that actually are in Tajikistan or Pakistan or ones in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
And so there are not only ghost hospitals, there are ghost schools, there are ghost police lists, there are ghost military lists.
And sometimes people, they're desperate.
You know, they sign up and say, yeah, I'm part of the military, get the gun, leave and sell the gun and at least they can feed their family for a while.
So the levels of corruption are very, very established and high.
And it's difficult to uproot that when, you know, people have their funding for their families coming through these corrupt routes.
And then, of course, you know, with opium being such a major, major production in the country, the Taliban have figured out ways to benefit from the opium production.
And, you know, there's the United States with these extremely sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles or drones able to do surveillance of every inch of the land.
Are we to believe that the United States doesn't know what the transport routes are for moving the opium from production to refineries and heroin?
No, we're not to believe that.
I mean, hell, even the New York Times version of this story is that, yes, it's true that everybody on our side is also a heroin dealer, because what are you going to do?
The whole economy is basically based on it.
And so, yes, the governors, the mayors, the police chiefs.
The Taliban that control those roads also require kickbacks from the United States in order to get fuel and supplies and water and food to their own forward operating bases and their own major bases.
The trucking industry is controlled by the Taliban.
I actually didn't realize until after my book was done that there's an entire book about America financing the Taliban pseudo-unwittingly, you know, where, I mean, it's not that that's a big conspiracy to back the Taliban so they have someone to fight.
It's just that that's the only way to get resources to their side, is they have to bribe the Taliban protection money, pay them taxes, basically, to allow the American supplies to travel to and fro across the country.
And so they end up financing their enemy to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now even a young Afghan teenager understands that.
And they're posing very stark questions.
How can it be that the United States has been here supposedly fighting the Taliban since 2001, and yet the Taliban now control, as you mention in your book, a large swath of the countryside and the roadways leading into the cities?
And, you know, when the walk that I'm so, so impressed by happened from the province of Kandahar to Kabul, previously, people following a suicide attack in Las Cargadas, the Helmand province, the most recent was from Kandahar, the people in Helmand had had a two month vigil, begging the Taliban and the Afghan government to talk with each other.
But the Taliban said, look, if you want a vigil and you want to walk, let's go on over to the United States military base, because they're the ones who call on and exacerbate this war.
Well, the Taliban aren't angels, that's for sure.
But I think that the continuance of the war is so beneficial for so many powerful groups, elites, individuals, warlords, that they're not really interested in shutting it down.
Right.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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And that's the way that this has to be looked at, because there's this huge question mark over this whole thing.
Why is America still in Afghanistan?
But that's the whole thing about it.
It's not America, the people, or any interest of ours.
It's just these generals, and those generals, and those spies, and those State Department weenies, and those think tank mongers, and those bomb salesmen, and these particular Republicans and Democrats, they have their interest in prolonging the conflict.
Just as, as you're saying, on the ground in Afghanistan, there are people who have their interest in prolonging the conflict as well, and it's about them as individuals and their economic incentives inside or outside the government to continue perpetuating the thing.
And then the question of what's good for the Americans or what's good for the Afghans in general is hardly ever even asked, except for naive people like you and me who frame it that way, because that's the way we think of it.
What about the Afghan people?
What about the American people?
As Donald Trump might say, what are we getting out of this?
You know?
Well, I think Donald Trump does have his eye on possibly lucrative extractions.
It's possible that under the Hindu Kush mountains, it would someday be feasible to extract some of the rare earth minerals that we use in our computers and our cell phones.
And, you know, I'm excited about the idea of solar-powered batteries that could power cars or even larger transportation vehicles.
But eventually, you've got to get a lot of those minerals out from underneath the ground.
And I'm not excited at all about the idea of, you know, huge mines being set up that would further lower the water table in Afghanistan.
And the worst thing for Afghanistan, I think, would be extraction.
What Afghanistan needs is rehabilitation of its agricultural infrastructure.
But it will never be as satisfying to somebody like Donald Trump to have apricot orchards and mulberry trees growing on mountainsides of Afghanistan as it would be to set up a big mine and start extracting very, very valuable ores like copper or iron and then, of course, the rare earth minerals.
Yeah.
You know, I've seen a lot of discussion about that.
Those are rent-free, those bases.
And the United States likes having a base close to the border of China.
Afghanistan actually shares a little tiny border with China and close to Iran, relatively close to Russia.
So I don't think the United States wants to say, OK, we're leaving and let China or another country benefit from transport routes and from possible domination of what could someday be a very valuable piece of land.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, I think that's totally right.
And people bring that up all the time, and it's barely ever mentioned.
There's one great Forbes article about this, I think, that you can't set up a mine in Afghanistan.
Not really.
You need highways, you need railroads, you need billion-dollar, I mean, huge, multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments to develop those kinds of industries.
And there's just never going to be a security situation in Afghanistan that lends itself to that.
You know, the highways that the U.S. has built there are in absolute tatters, according to CIGAR and all that kind of thing.
So, it seems to me like this is a great way for warmongers to kind of fool somebody like Trump into thinking that someday there's something in it for us.
But I think it's much more like you finished up there saying that, well, let's make sure the Chinese don't get a chance to do it.
And, you know, Colonel Larry Wilkerson was on the show, Colin Powell's former aide, who helped liaise in a war in Iraq, but has felt really bad about it since and has become a really good guy since.
And he says this is all about trying to block the Chinese Belt and Road initiative here.
This is all about, as you're saying, staying adjacent to Iran, Russia, and China.
And it's funny, right, how being near Russia and China, two nuclear-armed powers, by having a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, that doesn't really enhance the American people's security at all.
In fact, it's just laying down tripwires far away from home to create situations for possible conflict that could get our hometowns nuked.
And for what?
Just so that we can say we're there and that we're keeping it from the Russians because we're there instead?
That kind of thing?
It's nuts.
And then, of course, in the neighborhood are nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.
And instead of setting an example for denuclearization that the United States could set by saying we're going to start dismantling our arsenal, we instead keep ratcheting up the incentive for other countries to say we better make sure we keep our weapons, our nuclear weapons, and get more.
Right.
Okay, so tell me all about this peace march, because all these politics and policies, they do tend to obscure the reality of life for the real human beings of Afghanistan.
That's what I like about your writing so much, is you focus on these very real people and you name their names and this kind of thing.
So I guess it was in the news that there was a temporary ceasefire with the Taliban.
Was that tied to this march?
I'm sure the marchers would be more than pleased if they could see themselves as having had a role.
But I think they're actually looking for something even larger.
You know, I mentioned that people had had a two-month tent vigil because they just couldn't any longer go on, and so this was normal to keep having suicide bombings.
And several other cities had tent vigils as well.
But in the other cities, they kind of wrapped it up and said, well, no one's really paying attention.
What's the point?
But nine men from Lashkar Gah, the capital of the Helmand province, said, no, we're going to strengthen our movement by walking 400 miles from our city to the capital of Kabul.
And they walked in sandals, and they walked during the month of Ramadan, when a devout Muslim will not touch a drop of water or any food from sunup till sundown.
So it was a very, very difficult walk to make.
And one of them was a high schooler, and another was a man who had lost his vision during that explosion.
And he said, you know, I know I could go to India, my eyes could be fixed, but peace is more important.
So he's blinded.
And they were really literally limping into the towns.
But when they would get to towns along the route, some of which were dominated by people of opposing tribes, Hazara tribes, for instance, people poured out, and they organized their young women to sing, well, actually the national anthem, and young boys were beating on drums, and medics came to bind their feet.
And they would have the Ramadan feast in the evening, and people would walk with them to the edge of the town.
So when they got to Kabul, I mean, I was, by that time, back in the United States, three days, and wondering, is there going to be a suicide explosion?
Will they be safe?
You know, I was almost wishing they'd just kind of disappear into the refugee camps themselves, almost for their own safety, or maybe, you know, reassemble along the Kabul River, which is another example of degradation and environmental death.
But they were received and listened to.
By that time, an Eid celebration had been declared as a ceasefire.
That's a three-day celebration.
And Taliban, who would abandon their guns, were allowed to go into the city.
One fellow said, where is the ice cream shop?
And, you know, they hugged, and they danced.
It was a wonderful, almost euphoric, sense of what life could be like if people laid aside the guns.
Sadly, the fighting has resumed.
However, people have also resumed these walks, and the idea is catching on.
So I don't think we can predict exactly what might happen, but it's good to go back in history and recall a man buried in Jalalabad, a city to the east of Kabul, named Badshah Khan, or sometimes called Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
And he's called the Muslim Gandhi.
And contemporary with Mohandas Gandhi, as Gandhi worked for national liberation of India, Badshah Khan walked from village to village and educated people to become self-reliant, not to cooperate with the Brits.
And even after there was a massacre, they held their strength.
They were called the Red Shirts.
They dyed their shirts brick red, and they managed to become a very important, necessary factor in ousting the colonizing Brits from the area which is today considered Pakistan.
So I think many people across Afghanistan are utterly war-weary, and some of those people may be among the Taliban and must be starting to ask questions about the various warlords, including the United States, who have subjected them to so much suffering and loss.
We may not be waking up very quickly here in the United States, although I think there's kind of a weariness of war now.
It used to be that the United States could market its wars by saying, oh, well, this is going to save the widows and children.
That's what they said about Afghanistan.
I don't think anybody buys that any longer.
I think there's a weariness and a certain cynicism.
But we face now the consequences of environmental degradation.
I mean, the greatest terror we face is the terror of what we're doing to our environment with climate change and rising seas and people very vulnerable to flooding and hurricanes and the ravages of climate change.
So how can we ever cope with it unless we say to the warlords in our country, the gig is up.
You have squandered our resources for far too long.
If you don't start to convert your company into companies that can provide things we need, you know, bullet speed trains and retrofitting the housing stock and care for the elderly and care for the children, if you're not up to doing that, we're not going to be up for the investment in your companies any longer.
I'm sorry, we have to leave it there.
I'm so out of time here, Kathy, but thank you so much for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate all your great work so much.
Well, thank you and all best wishes to antiwar.com.
I go to your website three times a day at least.
Right on.
Okay, great.
Talk to you again soon.
All right, you guys, that's Kathy Kelly.
She runs Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
That's vcnv.org, vcnv.org.
And her last couple of articles on antiwar.com are called On Purpose in Kabul and A Mile in Their Shoes.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys!
