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I got the great Eric Margulies again.
Lucky me.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination, both of which will just absolutely blow your mind.
They're so good.
And of course, he writes regular articles all the time at Eric Margulies dot com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine, Scott.
Glad to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
And there's some huge news to cover today.
Imran Khan won the election.
So tell us, who's he and what's it matter?
Well, he's a very interesting man.
He started off as a cricket star for Pakistan.
He was a very fine cricket player.
That's all I know about cricket.
But he was renowned and a national celebrity.
He has spent a lot of time in England.
He married a lovely looking woman named Jemima Goldsmith, who was the daughter of Mr. Goldsmith, an incredibly wealthy, upper class Englishman, divorced, married a second time, went back to Pakistan.
And for the last 20 years, Imran Khan has been playing some cricket.
But his main effort is he founded a political party called Tarek-e-Isat.
And he has been campaigning politically to throw out the dynastic political groups that had been ruling Pakistan since anyone can remember.
And he's been laboring away.
And finally, after this election last couple of days, he appears to have actually put himself in a position to form a, to lead a coalition government.
Amazing.
I see here the headline in the BBC is that ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has conceded to Imran Khan.
Yes, that's amazing.
Nawaz, who I interviewed a number of times, is in jail as far as I know.
He returned to- This is a good place for a prime minister to be.
Certainly is.
He was convicted in court of corruption for owning luxury apartments in London.
Keep coming back to England.
And Nawaz was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He actually, everybody thought he would stay in England, but very bravely, he got on the airplane, flew back to Pakistan, where he was promptly arrested and now is in jail.
Now remind me, is he the guy that they call Mr. 10% for his kickback scheme?
No, that was, no.
On the Bhutto side, that's the other dynastic element there.
The Bhuttos, and of course referring particularly to Benazir Bhutto and her cronies in the People's Party were notorious for corruption.
And one of her in-laws was known as Mr. 10%.
Actually, I met him once years ago in London.
It was scandalous.
He was put in charge, if my memory is correct, of authenticating the honesty of all of Pakistan's foreign contracts, which is like putting the fox in the hen house.
Oh, it was Zardari.
That was Mr. 10%, right?
Yes.
And she married Zardari because her political party felt that a single woman was not appropriate to lead Pakistan.
Oh, I see.
And of course, she was famously assassinated by the Taliban, right, as the CIA was attempting to put her back in power in what, 2010, something like that?
That's right.
We don't, to this day, really have the full story on who killed her.
She claimed, well, we knew each other pretty well, and I'd been in contact with her in the last days before she was killed.
And in fact, I was advising her to wear a bulletproof vest and not to go into public.
And she said to me, Eric, if you're going to be in politics in Pakistan, you have to show yourself to the people.
That's the only way it's done here.
And so she bravely went ahead and did it, even though there have been death threats against her.
Her cortege convoy was bombed.
She was killed.
She hit her head against part of the door or the roof.
But she did die.
But before she died, she told me that if she was killed, to look at the brother of Nawaz Sharif.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And but who knows?
It's a mystery within a mystery.
And at the time, they certainly blamed the Tariqi Taliban.
But I guess maybe not, huh?
Yeah, I guess it could have been them.
But under the control of ISI, do you think the ISI has its fingers in many pies in Pakistan?
But the really the initial charges were blamed on the Pakistani Taliban.
Not to be confused with Imran Khan's party, but they were generally they weren't the ones who did it.
It was it was a palace assassination done within ruling circles in Islamabad or Lahore.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
So what's the big deal about Imran Khan?
I know he's been running for a long time.
He's a, as you say, a former sports star.
He doesn't come from, you know, the different factions of this palace intrigue.
This is in a sense like a Donald Trump type character from outside of power coming into power.
Is that right?
Yes, except he's been around for so long that he's almost not an outsider anymore.
There was skepticism that his party would ever win enough support to to take power.
But apparently it's happened.
Not total support, but it will form, it will have to form a coalition with other parties.
One small party, the Mutahidakumi movement, Mutahidakumi movement, it's already announced it would join in his coalition, but he will have to go through the problem of fractious problem of dealing with irksome coalition partners.
Yeah.
Well, and so now what's his agenda and how different is it?
Just I want to be the one in charge or he really has a bunch of different policies in mind here, do you think?
He appears to have significantly different policies from his predecessors.
That is the Nawaz Sharif group and before that the the Bhutto family.
He said that he wants to turn Pakistan into a genuine Islamic welfare state.
You hear all the screams in the US about the dangers of Islam, but it's profoundly ignorant.
What Islam is really about on a social and political level is welfare schemes, taking care of the old, the young, a better education, etc.
And he is very popular because of advocating this position.
People who don't like Islamic welfare schemes are the very rich rulers of places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait who put all the money from the country and the oil revenue into their own pockets.
He also said he wants to clean up the corrupt mess that Pakistan is and has been for a long time and to bring about more social order.
And there is talk that he wants to adopt a less confrontational policy vis-a-vis India.
That remains to be seen.
I actually read a quote from him yesterday saying that, hey man, you know, the more we trade with India, the better we are and the more peace we'll have and all this talking like Bastiat.
Well, that's right, right.
And of course, the other thing that Imran Khan has advocated is that he will not support the United States war against Afghanistan.
And this is very significant because all of the U.S. supply lines, as we've talked about many times on this show, run from Karachi port up north through the mountains to Afghanistan.
Thousands and thousands of U.S. trucks going all the time to support the U.S. expeditionary colonial army in Afghanistan.
And he's threatening to pinch these supply routes or to certainly tax them.
He's not in favor of the war in Afghanistan.
And as most Pakistanis are very much against it.
Would you think, you know, he'd be interested in trying to use Pakistanis government's influence with the Afghan Taliban to push for real peace talks, this kind of thing, or he's just going to double down on supporting them against the U.S. there?
No, I think, Scott, that he's aiming for some kind of diplomatic solution.
This war is being fought on the back of Pakistan.
The U.S. must have a cooperative Pakistan to continue waging the war.
And now suddenly one hears talk of peace talks between the U.S. and Taliban.
In other words, there's a general sense in Washington that this war is unwinnable, our longest war in U.S. history, can't defeat the Taliban.
I mean, we're using B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers to bomb these medieval tribesmen who keep fighting us off.
It's shameful.
It is no honor to American arms to be fighting these lightly armed tribesmen up on the northwest frontier.
So there is a faction in the U.S. and certainly in the U.S. military, there is that wants to say, let's get the hell out of there.
Let's sign some kind of peace and skedaddle.
Man, you know, it really seems like something and, you know, they don't seem to be making too much of this in the American media.
But a year ago, National Security Advisor McMaster said the plan was we're going to do this escalation of another 10,000 troops or so.
And then what we're going to do is we're going to fight for another four years.
In other words, Petraeus promised Obama, give me 18 months, boss, and I'll bring him to the table.
And McMaster didn't want to make that same mistake of promising any kind of result on any kind of timeline.
He said, well, give us four more years to keep fighting, and then maybe we'll be in a better position of strength that we'll be able to deal with the Taliban and force them to come to the table on our terms.
And now, of course, McMaster's gone.
And the fact that the Trump administration, I guess Pompeo announced they want to do direct talks with the Taliban.
In fact, there's even a headline on antiwar.com about how they have met with the Taliban in Qatar this week in order to set up for future peace talks.
That really sounds to me like maybe that McMaster plan is out the window now, and that Trump maybe really means to negotiate with the Taliban, which we know that their condition all along has been all of you get the hell out.
So you think it's possible, it's really possible that Trump and I guess you're saying a faction inside the U.S. military as well, that they would settle for that?
You know what, let's just go ahead and cut and run because what the hell are we doing there anyway?
Well, I'm mildly hopeful that some that that good sense will prevail.
But the problem is in politics and in the U.S., it prevailed.
First of all, there are there are all these imperial generals like Petraeus, who was much better at doing public relations for himself than than waging war.
And now the other ones who are all beating their chests and saying, we'll blow them back to the Stone Age, we'll bomb them.
But there there's an opposition to losing a war in the U.S. military, as well as people say, let's get out.
But losing the war and particularly losing the war to to lightly armed Muslim tribesmen at the top of the world in the end of nowhere.
What a humiliation for U.S. arms, really.
And the generals are worried about their own careers.
You know, all the body was involved in this, as long as Congress is uneasy.
But Trump keeps and his allies, his neocon allies, keep beating the drums for it to build up anti-Muslim sentiments, saying these people are Muslims in Afghanistan.
And can they really bear losing a war to a bunch of Muslim mountain fighters?
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right, is if he pulled out a year ago, he could have just said, look, Bush and Obama screwed this war up beyond repair and I'm just cutting and running.
But now he's kind of taking ownership of it.
And it seems like he's still Donald Trump.
He could flip flop around if he wanted to.
But the question is, how bad does he really want to?
Well, that's right.
Another factor involved is that China is becoming increasingly influential in the region.
And the U.S. now doesn't want to see China take over Afghanistan.
You know, it's like someone said about Eritrea some years ago, where the Ethiopians were fighting the Eritreans for this stretch of desert, a largely uninhabited desert.
And an Italian diplomat said it's like two bald men fighting over a comb, which is an excellent analogy.
I like that.
That's funny.
Yeah, man.
So but then so back to Pakistan now, they've got to be, you know, really sick and tired of the war going on next door.
And of course, they're allies with the Chinese there.
And therefore, even though they're nominally America's allies, their interests are quite a bit different than ours in Afghanistan now.
So what what difference do you really think it's going to make for the Afghan war there or for for his policy?
I mean, Imran Khan, do you think he's got the courage to really shut down the port of Karachi to the American military or what do you think?
Well, probably it's more likely that he will squeeze more money out of the Americans for passage rights of their logistics there.
It would be a huge step for Imran Khan to do that, first of all, with a coalition government.
And also, we have to take into account the real power of the Afghan in Pakistan, which is the army.
And it's it's uncertain what the army generals want, because we're nobody in Pakistan likes having the Americans in Afghanistan and being ordered around by the Americans.
On the other hand, the U.S. has been lavishing billions of dollars on this very poor country.
And particularly a lot of it's got to the military and they are reluctant to derail the gravy train.
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Yeah, I could see that.
Now, so tell me this, you've explained to me before, I forgot exactly what it was, but that Pakistan itself is like kind of an acronym for these four different countries that are held together by the military there since the since independence from the British Empire.
That's right.
They're very distinct regions.
The heartland of Pakistan is, of course, Punjab, the land of the five rivers.
It is where most people live, where the industry is, and the heart of Pakistani agriculture.
And now, is that where Khan is from as well?
Yes.
And that's basically all the different rulers are always from Punjab.
Is that right?
Always Punjabis.
President Zia, before that, the other generals, they're all Punjabis.
Punjab dominates the Pakistani army, and the rest of them are from the ethnic Afghan region in the north.
So that's it.
The other parts of Pakistan, well, there's Sindh in the south, S-I-N-D, which is agricultural, very feudal, very backwards.
That was the heartland, the bailiwick of the Bhutto family, who were like medieval rulers.
I remember I used to go around with Benazir to visit Pakistani families, and they were in such awe of her that they would press themselves against the wall of the living room because they wouldn't come near this living goddess.
History on Islamic.
And then off to the west, there's the Balochistan province, which is dirt poor, makes the rest of the Pakistani look wealthy.
The Balochi tribesmen are very fractious and warlike and difficult to deal with.
There's been a resistance movement going on for decades against Pakistani control of Balochistan, which has become sort of very strategic because it abuts Iran.
And then there's the north of Pakistan, whose status is uncertain.
It's called Northern Territories.
Nobody knows.
I've been there.
I've studied this.
Nobody knows whether it's part of Pakistan proper or it's the Northern Territories, as it's called, or whether it's part of disputed Kashmir, which is another big can of worms.
So Pakistan is a difficult and fragile country.
Yeah, you know, I used to have a friend of mine who was, I guess he was a Punjabi.
And he said, oh, yeah, the Northwest Territories, all those guys are crazy.
That's not the same country.
It's some other thing.
It's nominally part of Pakistan, but they ain't got a damn thing to do with us.
We don't want anything to do with them.
He was really harsh in the way that he talked about, you know, the Swat Valley, Waziristan, etc.
Well, they're very strategic areas, particularly for Pakistan and for India.
India claims now that the Northern Territories are part of Kashmir and that Kashmir belongs entirely to India.
So that's another problem that's been festering since the 1940s.
And the north of Pakistan is largely Pashtun tribal area.
They're the first cousins of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan.
In fact, there used to be an old movement that wanted to unite northern Pakistan with Afghanistan.
Few people want that today.
But ethnically, it's a very different area.
Well, that's why the British drew the Durian line there, right, was to separate the Pashtuns from each other.
Yes, that's right.
Divide and rule.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So now talk to us a little bit more about Kashmir, because when Imran Khan says he wants to get along better with India, that must mean, you know, some kind of negotiation over Kashmir, because that is the outstanding issue of all outstanding issues between these two states.
Right.
It is.
And it's been festering since the late 1940s.
Today, Pakistan controls about a third of Kashmir and India, two thirds.
The Indians maintain almost a million troops in Kashmir, half of whom are regular army.
The other half are paramilitary troops.
And they have ferociously repressed an uprising by the Muslim Kashmiri people against Indian rule, which has often been as corrupt as it has been brutal.
Not much worse than Pakistani rule was in what was East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
But it's a very thorny problem.
It's very emotional.
Kashmir is sort of like a vision of heaven to most people who live on the hot plains of India and Pakistan.
It's got water.
It's beautiful.
So but this dispute has been going on.
They fought three wars over Kashmir.
It's a very serious issue today.
The Indian and Pakistani armies are in gunshot at one another.
There's frequent shelling along the border known as the Line of Control.
And both sides are nuclear armed.
And as I've been saying, like a broken record for a long time, that there's a real danger of a nuclear war breaking out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Yeah.
I think you've told me before, and this is in the book too, right, that Kashmir really ought to be an independent state.
As far as that goes, it's kind of a separate people.
Although here, like we're talking about, Pakistan is made up of all these different kind of smaller countries combined.
But it isn't that Kashmir really belongs to the Pakistanis but is occupied by India.
It's that it belongs to the Kashmiris and is occupied by India, but the Pakistanis want it too.
Is that right?
Well, the Pakistanis have been there in their portion of Kashmir, which is known as Azad, free Kashmir for a long time.
In fact, I was supposed to meet the prime minister, president, last week.
Unfortunately, I couldn't.
But it is, I would say, half of the Kashmiri people would like to stay with Pakistan and half would like to go independent, whatever that means.
But basically, none of them really favor rule by India.
No, absolutely not.
And it's not just Pakistan that is a fragile agglomeration of groups.
It's also India.
Let's remember that 1.1 billion people in India speak, I don't know, 40 different languages.
And you go to South India, it's totally different from North India.
It's a mosaic of the state with umpteen ethnic differences.
Yeah, man, which, you know, it should be fine if the government's only job is protecting everybody's rights equally, but usually it isn't that, right?
It's a war of all against all through taxation and so-called parliamentary processes.
It's a rough and tumble.
It's a street fight.
I would describe Indian politics of that.
But at least it tends to work better than Pakistan's, where when the politicians take over and they ruin everything and make a total mess, and then the army gets fed up and kicks them out and steps in and it makes a mess and then withdraws and calls the politicians back again.
That's been the cycle in Pakistan.
Yeah.
Now, you mentioned nukes there.
There's been four wars since independence in 49 between India and Pakistan and, you know, including the breaking off of Bangladesh there and all that.
And yet now both sides have nukes.
They tested them back 20 years ago.
Boy, time flies, 1998.
And I don't know if we've talked about this actual aspect, but Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy and Focus has made a big point about how the Pakistanis basically mostly or almost entirely, I guess, have these smaller tactical battlefield nuclear weapons, where the Indians have mostly H-bombs, strategic nuclear weapons, city killers.
And then also on the Pakistani side, the army has delegated authority over the use of these tactical nukes to the colonels in the field.
So a hypothetical could go very easily, like the Indians send an armored column up to Kashmir and the Pakistanis take it out with a tactical nuke and then the Indians really have no other response from there other than to unleash H-bombs and commit full-scale genocide against the people of Pakistan at that point, and that that's the danger of the war breaking out there, that it could escalate so quickly.
It could indeed, Scott.
The more evident escalation route is that fighting erupts on the Kashmir border.
Kashmir is very mountainous.
It's not good terrain for armored warfare.
So the Indian corps commanders who lead these strike corps, as they're called, very powerful, very armor and artillery heavy corps, that is two or more divisions, want to strike further south into Pakistani Punjab and towards Lahore, for example, the main city in the region.
This is what happened in previous wars, too.
The Pakistanis aren't strong enough to withstand an Indian conventional attack.
The Indians are going to split Pakistan into pieces, like cutting up a strand of spaghetti.
And the only thing the Pakistanis can do, as you pointed out, is use tactical nuclear weapons to blitz these advancing Indian armored columns.
And that is what they are set up to do.
And yes, you're right.
The Indians then are in a position where they can use, they have tactical nukes, they can use them, but they may also use them against Pakistani cities.
It's too awful to contemplate.
RAND Corporation estimates put losses of three million people for the first exchange, the initial exchange, and then tens of millions after that from radiation.
Yeah.
Well, and I know that Daniel Ellsberg would jump right in and say, yeah, and the nuclear winner that even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to crop failures all across the world and put the lives of billions of people in jeopardy.
He's right.
I just finished reading his new book, and it's very impressive.
It just makes you think deeper about the whole nuclear issue.
But as I remember, I was doing a radio program once, and I was out west somewhere, and some irate farmer called me up and said, why should I care about India and Pakistan with nuclear weapons?
And this cowboy farmer, I said to him, you know, you should care because it's going to, a nuclear war there, it's going to lift up clouds and clouds of radioactive dust, it's going to circle the globe and land right on your head.
And that is, it's a terrible danger.
The other part of that danger, Scott, as I think we've said before, is that the early warning systems on both sides are not very efficient, not very good.
Nothing electronic works in that part of the world.
And so the commanders on both sides have about three minutes notice.
If they get a report of incoming missiles, three minutes to try and call their political leaders or decide what to do or fire their weapons, use them or lose them.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, I was just reading a thing about America and Russia and how, you know, it has been that they have about 30 minutes warning for ICBMs coming over the poles.
And of course, there's still submarines and all that.
But the basic idea is if there were launches, they'd be from the silos and there'd be enough time to figure out for sure.
But that once we start putting nukes on cruise missiles, on ships in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, especially in the Baltic Sea, now we give them literally seconds to decide whether to launch everything they've got at us.
So same kind of principle here.
An accident is likely to happen one of these days.
We saw during the Cold War how many times we came close to a nuclear launch, particularly by the Russians, who are very worried that their leadership is going to be decapitated by American strikes.
And this may happen again.
It's a grave danger.
All right.
So now back to Imran Khan for a minute.
Are you hopeful?
Are you optimistic about this?
Is this a positive change overall, you think, for Pakistan and and for prospects of peace with India, most importantly?
Well, I think it is.
He is a very intelligent man.
He's modern thinking, forward thinking.
He's not a prisoner of dynastic politics.
And he has he wants to make sensible change.
He's very popular.
He's not tainted by corruption, as all of Pakistan's other rulers were after President Zia-ul-Haq, who was a very honest man, too.
The rest have been corrupt people and command no respect by the public.
So I am hopeful.
In fact, this is the only time that I felt hopeful about Pakistan for some time.
However, karma, Pakistan has a way of turning even the noblest minded politicians into wicked men.
We shall see.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Eric.
It's great to talk to you again.
A pleasure, Scott.
Cheers.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
You got to read his books, man.
They're just going to blow your mind.at the top of the world, the struggle for Afghanistan and Asia and American Raj, liberation or domination.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at Libertarian Institute dot org, Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com, Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
