6/17/17 Gareth Porter on the Next Big ‘Surge’ Into Afghanistan

For Pacifica Radio, June 18th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica, KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.
I'm sorry I've been gone for a few weeks.
It was fundraising time and then I've been out sick with the chicken pox, believe it or not.
But I'm back for you today and I'm very happy to welcome back to the show our good friend Gareth Porter, my very favorite reporter.
He writes for truthout.org, among other places.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam, which really changed the game as far as Vietnam War histories go in academic Vietnam study in circles, really Perils of Dominance by the great historian and reporter Gareth Porter.
And then also my favorite, Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare, which is absolutely what it says.
The proof that Iran was never making nuclear weapons.
The whole thing was a big fake hoax in the first place and that they're no nuclear threat to the West whatsoever.
All right.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Glad to be back on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
And yeah, now listen, we got bad news to discuss here.
The Forgotten War, you know, they didn't really call Korea the Forgotten War until it was overshadowed by Vietnam, right?
It was pretty well remembered through the 50s anyway, right?
But Afghanistan is the Forgotten War and Gareth, we're still in the middle of it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely right.
I mean, this is this is one of the signs of the times that we live in, just just how serious this problem of permanent war has has become an infection in the in the U.S. political system that that it's not going to go away.
I mean, it's just there.
It's embedded and it's it's it's here to stay until there is sufficient opposition to to drive it drive it away somehow.
You know, there are people who are plenty old enough to listen to this show who have known nothing but war their whole life.
And you know, since September 11th, 2001, at the dawn of the 21st century, we've had a state of just, as you say, permanent war as the default.
And instead of peacetime even being the object of our government to keep us safe by maintaining a state of peace as much as possible, war only being the desperate exception is completely turned on its head.
And you know, in complaining about the trial balloons for the latest escalation in Afghanistan, I got quite a few replies on Twitter that said we have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here.
We're keeping terrorists at bay in Afghanistan so that they're not killing us on our own soil.
And Mattis needs to the tools that he needs.
Secretary of Defense Mattis.
He needs the tools available to finally win this war for us, Garrett.
I can't believe that people are talking about fighting them over there so we don't fight them here.
I mean, that, of course, is the original sort of rationale that was used during the Vietnam War.
I mean, it was it was said, you know, at the most simplistic level.
And I I had not actually heard that.
I mean, yeah, occasionally I've heard it, but but I didn't know that it was being, you know, still talked about in the context of Afghanistan.
Well, that's, of course, what George Bush and this really wasn't a slogan of the Obama government, but it was the Bush government that we have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here.
That's true.
That's true.
And yet.
But so, yeah.
Anyway, point being that Afghanistan never did wind down.
Obama never did end the war.
He halted the drawdown at eighty five hundred troops and as his critics would at least half correctly say, he left the place in a mess.
The surge didn't work.
And so now Donald Trump's administration is nothing but hawks.
And in fact, they say Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the the more right wing nationalist members of the administration, are the only ones reluctant, while all of the generals that Trump has filled his administration with are determined to now double down and expand the war in Afghanistan and start it all over again for a third time.
Yeah, there's no surprise that the generals are pushing this war more than anything else.
The hardest the hardest push of all is is to make sure that the that the U.S. military can continue to to be able to claim that we're we're fighting for a stalemate at the at the very least.
But but what is surprising to me a little bit is that there is not more resistance on the part of Trump who, you know, basically campaigned on the idea that he was against going, you know, keep continuing to to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan year after year.
So so that's that's really, to me, the the story that needs to be probed in this in this whole situation with regard to Afghanistan.
I mean, why is he he had a great partisan incentive to attack Obama for staying in Afghanistan?
In fact, if anyone searches Twitter and and Donald Trump's handle in Afghanistan, you'll find literally dozens, scores of tweets going back five years saying we should be out of Afghanistan.
Obama is wrong to escalate in Afghanistan.
Look, another insider attack.
These are supposed to be our allies.
We're training.
We need that money for infrastructure here at home.
He said that for five years straight and criticism.
Now he's given the power to determine, according to the reports coming out of the White House, he's given the power to determine the levels of U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan to Mattis.
And just after there was another insider attack, which killed killed two and injured one, as I recall, U.S. military personnel and which represents roughly half.
Maybe it's not a little less than half of the total U.S. casualties in Afghanistan this year.
So, you know, this is a remarkable situation.
And one has to believe that this is all about the pressure that has been effectively imposed on, imposed on the White House from the news media and the basically the war lobby to to show his anti-Russian and sort of pro-military bona fides.
And that started, of course, with his his Syria Tomahawk attack, but has really continued since then, I think.
And so here we are, Gareth, where.
The last two, three days, we've had, as you say, the announcement that the number of troops, the decision on the number of troops has been delegated by Trump to the secretary of defense.
Then they float a trial balloon while we're going to send 4000.
Then they float another trial balloon on Friday night.
Jack Keane, who is the mentor of Petraeus, who is the mentor of General McMaster, the National Security Advisor.
And I guess I assume Keane is is good buddies with General Mattis as well.
And he put out a trial balloon saying, forget four.
What difference is that going to make?
We need 10 or 20000 more troops in Afghanistan.
And there's no one organized to oppose them.
Yeah, of course, it's possible here that that what we're seeing with with the Jack Keane trial balloon, if you want to call it that, is a counter pressure from the the Afghanistan war lobby, that is the people who who really were determined to have a much larger troop commitment all along from last from last fall up to the present, who are extremely disappointed with what they see happening in the White House.
I don't think it's clear exactly what the lines are here.
I would guess, in fact, that what you're seeing from Keane represents a an emanation from that Afghanistan war lobby that is associated with with Petraeus and a lot of people who are close to Petraeus who have been in the past.
That's my guess, although, you know, I can't say for sure.
Well, and I mean, it is the case that every one of these guys in the war cabinet are heavily invested in some sort of spin that they won or are winning or that there's some kind of positive light at the end of the tunnel or some kind of thing, because each and every one of them is wrapped up in it.
And Mattis was in the original war and was the head of CENTCOM for a time in charge of the war.
McMaster was in charge of counter corruption during the Petraeus Obama surge.
In 2009 through 12 there, you have the secretary of Homeland Security who apparently has quite a bit of sway.
Kelly, whose son died in Helmand Province in Petraeus's surge there.
And they're not going to want to admit that that was a sunk cost loss, you know, for understandable reasons.
Right.
And then Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well, has been in charge of the Afghan war.
So these men have everything to lose by admitting that they lost.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm just wondering why is it that it seems like every incoming president names key national security advisers who represent positions that are far more hawkish and clearly far more hawkish than their own views on the key issues.
I mean, this is true of both Obama and of Trump.
Yeah.
It's quite an interesting phenomenon.
That's all I know.
Yeah, you know, I don't know either.
I mean, Trump started out with Mike Flynn, who was McChrystal's right hand man.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you this, Gareth, how come the American Army and Marine Corps hadn't won this war anyway?
I mean, they're just fighting guerrillas and they're the Marines and the army.
Right.
Well, this is this is the subject of my piece in Truthout just just published this past week.
And and in that piece, I basically review the the short history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan from 2001 to the present and show that the reason that the U.S. military has never had any traction really in that country is that from the very beginning, the United States allied itself with the wrong side.
I mean, it allied itself with a group of warlords, meaning the former commanders, the Mujahideen commanders who had been involved in the fight against the Soviet Union when it was occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s.
And in some cases there were some of the Tajiks who had been actually on the Soviet side who were commanders.
So so it was a combination of people who had been who had their own commands during that war that the CIA had ginned up with the help of the the support of the Pakistanis and the Saudis against the Soviets and and who came out of that war in control of military units in a situation of chaos.
And of course, that made them essentially warlords in the sense that they had total control over particular parts of Afghanistan.
And then there were dozens of these warlords in almost more than one in each province of Afghanistan.
So they were the ones who were basically in alliance with the United States beginning in 2001.
The CIA basically enabled them to even be more powerful by, in some cases, signing them up, giving them a stipend to to be part of the effort to identify Taliban Taliban fighters or leaders, basically use their militia as part of their of their fight against the Taliban, turned the militia into the police force, the national police force of Afghanistan beginning in 2001.
Essentially, they enabled the warlords to be to continue to be the power within their territories from then on.
And and of course, what happened then was that the militias associated with loyal to these warlords became marauding bands who with with utter impunity carried out crimes against the population or at least large parts of the population.
Now, you know, there was this element, which I know you know, you understand better than I do, of tribal and clan loyalties, which was part of the the way in which they decided who to carry out their depredations against the local populations that were not part of the in group of the tribe or clan which was represented by these militias or which these militias represented, I should say, were the victims of of the of the robbery, the rapes of of women, of of girls and of underage boys that that were carried out by the commanders and their troops associated with the warlords beginning in 2001.
And this has been a continued theme year after year in Afghanistan, which guaranteed that the vast majority of the population, particularly in the Pashtun regions, but not limited to them, would be opposed to the U.S. military presence and the NATO presence, which were part of the problem as well.
Now, this became even more serious a problem when in 2008, 2009, the U.S. military decided that in order to be able to to support a much larger troop presence, which was what they were beginning to to accumulate in Afghanistan, both under Bush and then under Obama, they had to have troops to provide security for the convoys to actually supply American and NATO troops, because without these convoys to carry out very, very heavy supply operations, they would not be able to continue to have the military presence.
They couldn't continue to carry out military operations.
So what did they do?
They turned to the warlords and their militias to provide security for these convoys to make it possible to continue a supply operations.
And that meant that they had no choice.
They had to continue their alliance with the warlords and their militias.
And as a result of that, then U.S. strategy in this war was locked into place.
And ever since then, McChrystal knew perfectly well.
And he said so in his initial commander's assessment in 2009 that that the U.S. had a serious problem politically because the population was was very upset, very angry at the association of the United States with these warlords.
But by that time, they had no choice.
And so there was nothing they could do about it.
I mean, there could they could do something about it, which was to end the war.
But they weren't willing to do that.
And so that in a nutshell is the is the story of the war that I tell in my piece.
McChrystal understood that that there was a serious problem here of association with the warlords.
And and I think that he he had the idea that somehow he would do something to try to break that alliance.
But as soon as he got there, he began to pivot in a totally different direction.
I mean, and I remember I wrote about stories about this in 2009, you know, at the time that McChrystal was just beginning to carry out a strategy in Afghanistan.
And what happened was, you know, that he was going he was targeting Kandahar province.
And and of course, that meant dealing with the question of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the warlord of Kandahar.
That that's President Karzai's half brother.
And that that was a decision that was fundamental, that that reflected the question of whether he could, in fact, move in a different direction.
And what happened, as many people may recall, is that he changed his mind right away.
And instead of going ahead with a policy of breaking the alliance with with Ahmed Wali Karzai and really moving against the warlord rule in Kandahar, he went in the opposite direction and actually openly went to to work personally with Karzai in Kandahar and used him as an integral part of the effort to try to to target the Taliban in his province.
And so instead of a political strategy that began to recognize in some fundamental way that we had to break the alliance with with the warlords, which was impossible, really, they couldn't do it structurally.
He continued to consolidate that that alliance with Karzai and with the warlords in Kandahar in in specifically and in Afghanistan in general.
And that really was the signal that that that was there was nothing was really going to change, that it was structurally impossible.
And so what they did, of course, was to simply try to kill and capture as many Taliban as they could instead of trying to win over the population.
There was never any possibility of winning over the population.
And they really didn't do anything fundamentally that was different with regard to winning over the population.
And the other the other element here that I didn't talk about in the first answer to your question is that the Taliban began.
The reason the Taliban existed was precisely because of the depredations of the warlords and their their militias on the population, particularly in the Pashtun south of the country.
And the population was was basically demanding that the Taliban who'd gone into hiding and and had really, you know, given up the fight after the U.S. had driven the Taliban government out of power, they brought them back because and once before the Taliban arose during the 1990s, around 1994, because the same thing had happened, the population was demanding help in having somehow driving away the militias who were raping their sons and daughters and imposing other, you know, horrible atrocities on on the people who were suffering this.
And so the Taliban arose in the mid 1990s as a as a specific response to the excesses of the impunity of of the warlords and their militias.
I mean, the people who normally would have objected to the Taliban, who were more, you know, liberal, if you will, believed in, you know, at least the advancement of women, education of women and so forth, were ready to support the Taliban because of the dire straits that that the country was in because of the chaos and impunity that had been created by the war situation.
And and and that that that's really just just how serious the structural factors are in determining the outcome of this war.
And I really do believe that both McChrystal and Petraeus had at least at some rudimentary level an understanding of those realities.
They knew that it was not possible to defeat the Taliban.
They were particularly in the case of Petraeus, I would I feel confident of this statement.
He was simply serving out his time in Afghanistan and trying to do the best to make it look like he was successful by his by his his particular abilities of managing the news media, particularly.
And I wrote stories about that at the time.
But but he knew perfectly well that the United States could not prevail over the Taliban.
And I doubt that any of the commanders who have served since then seriously believe that they could win this war and and knew that that they were simply serving out their time, getting their, you know, additional stars if they were generals, getting their promotions if they were majors or whatever.
That's what this war has really been about for for many years, I believe.
All right.
Now, and you mentioned in here and I think this is almost above all, as you put in here in your article at Truthout, the political cost of admitting it was a futile effort from the start.
If there was ever a time, Gareth, where the USA could have pretended that they won and said, OK, we won.
We're coming home.
It would have been in 2001 or maybe, I mean, it would have been a lie, but they could have pretended for a minute in 2011 or 12.
OK.
Petraeus did his job.
We wrapped up the war.
We really, you know, we didn't quite negotiate the exit we wanted, but we still brought a lot of violence to the Taliban and made them feel it.
And so, come on, guys, let's call it a victory and come home.
That time is over now.
Everybody knows when when General Nicholson called it a stalemate, everybody wiped sweat from their brow.
They hope it's a stalemate.
They hope the Taliban doesn't march right into Kabul right now.
And so on the flip side of that, Gareth Porter, really what that means is that for the antiwar position to prevail and for this war to end, we're going to have to have politicians who are willing to admit that they lost, just like in Vietnam.
Sorry, you lost.
The war is over.
You're not going to be able to spin it as a victory.
You lost.
And that is absolutely politically impossible to ask of anyone in D.C., a general, a Republican or a Democrat of any description.
And especially when we don't have the N.V.A. and the Viet Cong who who really can do that level of damage as an enemy.
In other words, our guys are safe at Bagram Air Base, as Michael O'Hanlon recently put it.
So maybe there is no end in sight, but maybe so what?
Maybe that doesn't matter.
We can just stay and do the thing on kind of a low level forever.
And then we never have to admit we've been defeated.
I think that your analysis is is pretty, pretty right on, Scott.
I'm, you know, two or three years ago, I guess it was three years ago, there was a poll of a national opinion on the Afghanistan war.
And of course, that was at the end, toward the end of the Obama administration, when Obama was was talking about sort of a minimal footprint to be left behind.
And the result of the opinion poll was that 85 percent of the American people were opposed to this war, believed that it was not worth fighting.
Now, that was the highest level of opposition to an American war in in the history.
As far as I know, as far as I've been able to to establish now, now that may have somehow eroded since then because of the factor that you've just mentioned, that that U.S. casualties are now minimal, that that makes a difference, of course, in the in the level of concern and the level of opposition.
So maybe it's now no longer 85 percent that would oppose.
Maybe it's 75 percent or 70 percent.
I have no idea.
But we do know that the vast majority of Americans still have no use for this war.
They know that it's really not worth fighting.
And and in my view, that leaves the United States in a kind of Orwellian position, you know, in an Orwellian mode where the government is determined to carry out a war that it knows is against the will of the American people.
Now, that's not the first time that's happened, but I think this is the most egregious case in history.
So, I mean, that is a challenge that it seems to me people who are anti-war need to take up and come together and think about what they can do to raise their voices up collectively, to to put pressure on the Trump administration on this at this point.
All right, you guys, that is the great Gareth Porter.
His latest at Truthout.org is called Why Afghanistan?
Fighting a war for the war system itself.
I'm Scott Horton and this has been Anti-War Radio.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.