08/12/16 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, so introducing the great Eric Margulies.
He is the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
I think you know the answer to that, at least attempted murder it is, about America's empire in the terror war era.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm fine, thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us.
And you wrote this article, America's Longest War Gets Longer, for UNS.com.
And I'm glad you did because of the very point that you make in it, that at the Democratic National Convention there was no mention of the Afghan war at all, I don't think.
It's certainly not a topic of politics in America right now in this presidential election campaign, Afghanistan.
I think somebody asked Trump about it once and he said, oh yeah, you got to stay there because Pakistan has nukes, so got to stay.
But I don't remember anyone asking Hillary about it at all.
And yet it's still a war going on.
We still have almost 10,000 soldiers there, right?
Yes, and it's cost us a trillion dollars here to date.
And the meter is still running.
Man, a trillion just on Afghanistan, everybody.
You hear that?
Yes.
All right, now, well, that's only a thousand billion.
So what could you do with that instead?
I can't imagine.
All right, now, so the state of the war, Obama announced recently, Eric, that he was abandoning the previous target, basically, of his drawdown of 5,500 troops.
And he was going to stick with, I think it was 8,800 instead.
He dared not go lower than that.
But then again, 8,000 isn't many troops either.
Is that enough for them to even provide force protection for themselves in a country that is, at least at night, mostly dominated by the Taliban and probably most of it in the daytime too?
Well, that's a good question.
No, it's not enough to impose American military will over all of Afghanistan.
You're right, large parts of it at night just go over to the Taliban and other groups.
And the Americans are just defending, really, two targets.
They're defending downtown Kabul, a famous green zone with a huge American embassy, and Bagram Air Base.
Because what America's power is expressed in Afghanistan through the Air Force.
And most of the fighting is done by U.S. air power.
And there are constant air attacks every day.
So this is apparently the American plan.
They're going to defend the useful real estate that keeps the government in power and let the Taliban run over the rest of the country.
All right, now, and so it's not even, I mean, I guess, is it fair to say then that the Taliban rules not just the Pashtun areas, but they're encroaching steadily into, like, General Dostum's area and other, you know, where the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazaras live and that kind of thing too?
Well, to a much smaller degree.
They are expanding in the north towards Mazar-e-Sharif and not doing well in the Hazara or Tajik areas.
But these are always considered, these are minority Afghan minority areas that are always against the government, whoever is the government in Kabul.
But they are bending towards Kandahar and towards other major cities to the point, as you said, where the roads are all extremely dangerous.
Now, if Americans want to go anywhere in Afghanistan, they have to go by helicopter.
That's not a sign of military progress.
Yeah, I was just reading they can't even travel around Kabul in cars and trucks.
They need helicopters just to go from place to place in the capital city for crying out loud.
And then, yeah, I mean, I've been reading about all kinds of gains, Taliban gains in Helmand province and in Kandahar province as well.
But now, I mean, this raises the whole question of not just is it a fool's errand to have a strong central government over Afghanistan, but is there, I mean, it seems like the question is, is there really such a place as Afghanistan at all?
Why is it not, I mean, I know the Duran line is a real border with the nation state of Pakistan there, right?
I wouldn't take that from them.
But isn't it basically Afghan Pashtunistan and then the rest of the country as a totally separate chain of command, right?
That used to be the way, but somehow before the Soviet invasion, the things were sort of loosey-goosey.
The Afghans had reached a modus vivendi where they more or less got along and everybody had their own territory, like gangs in New York.
Everybody had their own neighborhood and their own rackets going and their own fields that they would cultivate.
And it was sort of a tenuous arrangement.
And there was the old king, and he was the head of state.
And as long as he was there, everybody was fine.
It was like the emperor of Japan.
Nobody would try for the position.
But that all changed after the Soviet invasion.
Afghanistan got broken, and it remains so.
Well, you know, I've been trying to wrap up this far overly long chapter about Afghanistan myself, and the part that really gets me is, as we talked about, of course, at the time on this show, that the surge and the escalation that Obama committed to in 2009 and 2010, I guess lasted through 2012, where they really accomplished nothing.
I mean, what did they accomplish?
The major target was Kandahar City, right?
We're going to clear hold and build Kandahar City, and we're going to make it a loyal American satrapy there as part of this Afghan system under Kabul, whatever.
And they couldn't even decide whether they wanted to keep Karzai's brother there or not, and they never took over the city even at all.
But they tried.
I mean, this was years after they'd already failed in their war.
They doubled it and then still lost anyway.
Eric?
Well, that's the bungling Pentagon, but you have to, to be fair, you have to say that the Pentagon keeps getting contradictory orders from the White House.
And Barack Obama and these ladies who run his military policy have got to be the worst, most incompetent collection of strategists since Louis XV of France gave Madame de Pompadour control of the French army.
It's just ludicrous.
And Obama can't say no to the demands of the U.S. military, but he won't have the courage to get out of Afghanistan, and they don't know what they're doing.
It's just typical of the overall U.S. policy in the Middle East, bumbling and stumbling.
Yeah.
Well, so now what do you make of the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Afghanistan as competition to the Taliban now that Mullah Omar is dead and then Mansoor, his successor, has been killed in a drone strike recently as well, and that seems to have opened up the, you know, the gang warfare over who's going to be the new head Don.
And, you know, I don't know.
Maybe it's better to have them divided, but what do you think?
I'm not proud being a citizen of a country that operates like old Murder, Inc.from the 1930s and just bumps people off.
That's not the way civilized states should behave.
Unfortunately, we are doing it, and the American government has never been able to set up even a remotely viable or credible puppet state in Afghanistan.
Yes, the Afghans, the Pashtuns, who are at the heart of the resistance, are squabbling amongst themselves, as they always have done and will continue to do.
But look at the stooges that we have in Kabul who are mainly supported by the major drug dealers in Afghanistan.
I mean, that's really embarrassing.
Opium, heroin output from Afghanistan is up this year.
It is the only source of revenue in Afghanistan, and those are our boys.
And I remember the Taliban had squashed the drug business in Afghanistan and taken it down to almost zero, except in areas controlled by the pro-Soviet Tajiks in the north.
You know what's funny?
Because people ask me, Eric, about, hey, what about secret CIA heroin running and that kind of thing?
And the real answer, I guess, is, no, there's no secret CIA conspiracy about it at all.
That's exactly who our allies are there.
There's just no denying it.
The best spin you could put on it is that, well, the Americans must tolerate all this heroin running because these are the only people they have to deal with there, other than the Taliban.
Those are their boys.
But we have precedent for this.
We saw during the first Indochina war in the 1950s that the French intelligence services and special forces, they tried to mobilize the Mao mountain tribesmen in Laos and Vietnam against the communists.
The only currency that these people used was opium.
So the French government got involved in the opium business to pay these people, and they flew it in, and that's how they fueled this whole operation.
Well, we've done the same thing in Afghanistan.
People want opium and they want other drugs there.
That's what they use.
Paper money in Afghanistan is not worth very much.
So, yes, we've gotten sucked into the local culture big time.
And, you know, it's funny because I was just reading a quote about who was murdered apparently by a Taliban agent later, but President Karzai's brother, who was the warlord over Kandahar City.
I don't know if he ever had an official title other than warlord or not, but it was General Mike Flynn of recent support Trump, pal around with Michael Ledeen fame, and DIA document confirmer fame on the Islamic State in Syria bit.
But Michael Flynn says, Hey, look, you know, Wally Karzai, he's a heroin dealer.
We've got to run this guy out of town.
You can't clean up corruption in Chicago without getting rid of Al Capone.
But then he was immediately overruled because, hey, we get all of our information from Wally Karzai, the heroin dealer, and he's a loyal CIA agent, and he gives us all our intelligence about who we're supposed to capture and who we're supposed to kill.
And so that was their best spin on it was that, geez, yeah, heroin really is a problem, isn't it?
But what are you going to do?
Everybody uses it.
It's more than that.
The whole government structure in Afghanistan, what we call the government, protected by American bayonets, runs on drug money.
It's the only viable currency in Afghanistan.
The government collapsed completely without the support, the wealth it gets from the drug trade.
Yeah.
All right, so now I guess the Afghan National Army never really could, unless they were palling around directly with the Marine Corps.
They never really had, you know, sway in the Pashtun areas.
They had to create this whole separate chain of command of the Afghan National Police, supposedly, I guess, handpicked, mostly blindly handpicked Pashtuns at random to be the local police officers to try to keep the Taliban at bay.
But I wonder if you've even heard recently if that organization even exists anymore out in, say, Helmand or in Kandahar province in these villages.
Did that build a police force mission ever even take after?
Or at least has it lasted through the last couple of years?
It is there, but it's not being effective at all.
It's doing guard duty and trying to protect convoys and root out Taliban supporters.
And don't forget there's also the Afghan National Intelligence Directorate, whatever they call themselves, who are left over from the days of the Afghan communists, and they hate the Taliban.
They're bitter enemies.
And they work for the CIA now, huh?
Yes, they do.
They do.
They're all former communists who are now our boys.
It's pretty sleazy, the whole thing.
And look, most of the Afghan army, police, you call them what you will, are thugs who are there for money.
They're paid with the Yankee dollar.
And if we stopped paying them, I can assure you they would go home.
Yeah.
And here's the R-rated part for parents listening or whatever.
The American-backed forces in Pashtunistan seem to basically be a bunch of child rapists too, these warlords.
And I guess that's a crazy part of Pashtun culture, but I guess my understanding was that the Taliban had outlawed that kind of thing, and that was part of what had helped the rise of the Taliban in the first place, was they rode into town and lynched a bunch of child rapists, and people cheered and said, welcome to power, you can be our mayor now, or whatever it was, you know?
But is that really right, or did the Taliban have that same problem too?
No, it is true.
There was a malevolent custom in Afghanistan of dancing boys.
And Afghanistan is a place where you never see women.
They're completely availed, they're kept away in purdah.
So your only option for sex there if you're an Afghan is young boys.
And they used to have these dancing boys who were, in effect, male prostitutes who grew up.
They were very not with the Taliban.
The Taliban put the ixnay on dancing boys and on drugs.
The Tajiks and the Uzbeks and some of the Hazaras still follow this custom and use these child prostitutes.
Apparently, the Afghan National Police have a real problem in the Pashtun areas as well.
I don't know if you ever saw that documentary from Vice back in 2014 called This Is What Victory Looks Like.
In fact, one guy got prosecuted.
He got in a fist fight and beat the crap out of the head of the Afghan National Police who was raping a kid on his base.
He was being court-martialed for it, but he got such publicity that they let him go.
But in that documentary, they show the local sergeant is just beside himself.
He's just, yeah, this is my job.
No, really, yeah, that's what's going on in that building back there right now with these guys.
My job is making them the police of this county or whatever it is.
He's not allowed to shoot them.
He's not allowed to do anything to them.
Scott, I've been following colonial wars since the 1950s, starting with Algeria and the French.
I can tell you they're all the same in the sense that they're dirty, filthy, vile conflicts in which abominable things happen where torture is universal.
Rape is common.
It's awful, and you wonder why so many American soldiers are coming back from having served in Afghanistan or Iraq or now Syria, and they go berserk, and they commit outrages in the States and shoot people.
Under mental care, it's because they have become completely horrified, traumatized, and destabilized by serving as colonial soldiers.
And you've been in the U.S. Army yourself, correct?
Yes, that's correct.
Remind me again when and where you served.
Proud of it, too.
Was that in Vietnam or in that era?
No, I was on the way to Vietnam when I enlisted in the Army, by the way, during the Vietnam War.
Unlike some of our more warlike candidates now.
And opinion makers, too.
And opinion makers.
They're all chicken hawks.
No, I enlisted.
I thought it was my duty.
I quickly realized how wrong the war was.
But I was headed that way, and then my orders were changed, and I was kept stateside.
But I did serve two full years of my life to the military, and now I am a veteran.
Anyway, I just wanted to make it clear where your sympathies are, that you're an American patriot type, and you're not hating the troops.
You're just explaining what's happening to them kind of thing, because you know how people get about that.
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That's right.
No, I used to wear my uniform to Boston University.
I remember I would go to night classes because I was proud to wear the uniform.
And people would spit at me, call me names.
But no, I was very proud of the service.
Still am.
Well, and it's always fluctuating.
Somewhere between 18 to 22 people a day, veterans a day, commit suicide in this country.
And I don't know what percentage of them are combat vets, but apparently a pretty large percent.
And they even came up with a new term.
I don't know how new it is.
But in the military, they always have to have new speak for everything, their own kind of jargon for everything.
And so guilt is now called moral injury.
So it's different from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is, I can't stop thinking about that time I had to scoop up my dead buddy's body parts or that kind of thing.
But this is realizing later kind of all at once, oh, my God, all those doors I kicked in.
I was the bad guy.
And then that's a lot of pressure all at once to kind of have to face.
And so now they're working so hard on coming up with drugs or coming up with brain stem treatments and all different things to try to help these guys recover from the guilt of what it was that they've done, because they sign up for the war on TV, the war in the army ad.
And then the war that they fight in real life is the war against men, women and children in some village they've never heard of.
That's right.
And as in all colonial wars, the people who are smiling and waving at you as you drive by, then turn around and shoot you in the back.
Very demoralizing.
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely part of it.
And, you know, they say even some of it is just the just the adrenaline, the adjustment to the lack.
You know, when you're on full adrenaline all the time looking for IEDs on the side of the road all the time, and then you come back to the States where everything is, you know, birds chirping and crickets and sunshine.
Other than the killer cops all around you, but otherwise you're more or less safe.
There's nothing to be that amped up about, you know, unless you go skydiving, you know, 10 times a day or whatever.
A lot of these guys at Fort Hood, they end up crashing their motorcycles.
I think maybe, you know, some percent of them obviously are real suicides, but some of them are just taking that ultimate risk of opening up that crotch rocket to 130 or 140 or whatever they can do on the damn thing until they hit a bridge or hit another car.
Scott, we've seen it in other colonial wars with the French in Indochina and Algeria, for example.
Very common occurrence and very terrible.
All right, so now, but now what's the deal?
Because Hillary Clinton is going to come in and what choice does she have, Eric, other than to surge back into Afghanistan and win this war?
What's she going to do, not win it and leave and say, yeah, look, the Clintons are losing a war, everyone?
If she's smart, she'll proclaim victory and get the hell out.
Find some face-saving adjustment to make.
But she will certainly be tempted to, as she is so much influenced by the neocons and by Wall Street, to pursue the war.
Oh, all we need is another 10,000 troops.
The surge, another surge from this fantasy.
And to me, it looks like we're going to be in Afghanistan forever.
Just don't want to let go of that hell hole.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, Trump used to get it right when he would say, yeah, Hillary and Obama, they created the Islamic State by doing the regime change in Libya and Syria after Iraq and ended up with that.
Now he's settled for the stupid old Republican Ted Cruz talking point that it was leaving Iraq.
It wasn't knocking over Saddam and fighting an eight-year civil war for the Dawa party that, you know, created the rise of al-Qaeda in opposition to them and all of that, al-Qaeda in Iraq, I mean, and all of that.
And it wasn't the interventions in Libya and Syria.
It was that time Obama wimped out and withdrew.
And so now that is, you know, once it's both party gospel doctrine or whatever, then, you know, there's basically no going back from that.
Their intervention, they'll never take responsibility for their intervention.
It's always a lack.
So that same kind of mythology will be permanent now.
Never should have left Iraq.
Can't leave Afghanistan, especially now that there's ISIS there.
Now you want to leave now that there's ISIS there?
Never mind that us being there is what brought ISIS there.
But anyway.
Oh, yeah.
And I never answered your question about ISIS in Afghanistan.
ISIS has been, I believe, is a fiction in Afghanistan.
It's being used by the U.S. to justify another reason to stay there.
Because the U.S. has been looking for something to split the Taliban for a long time.
Just the way the Israelis helped create the Palestinian extremists, Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, they were hoping it would split the existing forces.
So they're now looking towards ISIS.
ISIS is very useful because the U.S. cooperated militarily wherever the ISIS is.
Right.
And that's what Obama said was, oh, there's ISIS.
OK.
Gloves off.
Go ahead and do airstrikes, you know, and expanded the rules of engagement immediately based on that, too.
We're running out of bombs.
You know that?
We bombed so much in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan that the Air Force is dangerously low on bombs.
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Man.
So is the U.S. just naming a part of the Taliban, ISIS, or have the Saudis, or is it just some local Taliban guys have decided to call themselves that, or the Saudis are intervening somehow, or is there anything to it?
It may be a handful of people and young people, too, because even in the Taliban, now they've become old fogies and there are always disgruntled younger generation.
Yeah.
So it's perfectly comprehensible.
But it also remember American attempts to create phony guerrilla movements, terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.
This is all psychological warfare by the U.S. Army.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I've been talking with this Yemeni journalist lately named Nasser Araby, and he talks about how around there the CIA drone war has killed so many of the older leaders of al-Qaeda, and including in Pakistan, too, that basically all the young guys are on their own now.
And they find the Islamic State to be a better brand name and maybe a better source of funding to go along with that group than to go along with al-Qaeda.
And that apparently, from Araby's point of view anyway, makes them even scarier.
And he says, you know, they don't really call themselves by those exact names the Americans use for them, but they are basically the local franchise of Baghdadi's group, or they're proclaiming themselves to be.
And that's really all it takes, right?
Scott, I think the whole issue is another radio broadcast, and the whole issue of the ISIS has been wildly blown out of proportion, in part and purposefully by the U.S., and in part exaggerated.
You know, I'm just looking at a map of what territories held by ISIS this morning.
Jesus, the U.S. Marine Corps moved across the entire Pacific in a year and a half, and we still haven't moved a few miles down the road to attack them.
It's absurd.
These guys are just a bunch of kids with burp guns, with no heavy weapons, and no air force, and you tell me that U.S. military and even its Arab allies can't just get in their Jeeps and Humvees and drive down the highway to Raqqa and to Mosul?
It is absurd.
Well, but, I mean, so that is, I mean, obviously that's the question when you look at their weakness, but who's going to actually do it?
The U.S. Marines or the Peshmerga or the Iraqi Shiite militias or Assad's army?
Because America will bomb Assad's army before they get to Raqqa, I'm sure.
Well, the American plan is the old British plan of native troops led by white officers, and that's what we're seeing developing in Syria.
Well, you know, I was talking with Mark Perry, and he was saying that, you know, the Peshmerga and the Shiite Iraqi army are getting it together to try to attack Mosul in October, but, I mean, who are you imagining to do it then?
The Jordanians or who would be America's auxiliary?
Because, I mean, obviously it makes sense if you're telling me, hey, look, all we're talking about is Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
You're telling me they rule the whole state of Mosul.
I say any armed group of competently trained men can go in there and take the city from them.
I'll buy that, but which men?
The Newark, New Jersey Police Department.
Pile in there.
I'm sure the people in Newark would take that as a sigh of relief, too.
The Jordanians would be an excellent choice for the Americans, but they're a little reluctant to be seen as acting so much as errand boys for the Americans.
Other than that, you know, the Turkish army could if it wanted to.
That's another old story, but we have enough troops.
There are special forces, some marine troops.
We can go and draw them out.
6,000, yeah.
You know, this is like a little World War II war in North Africa.
These battles take place on highways, and you win one point, and the army runs down the road another 180 miles to the next town and then holds on there, and then you attack.
That's all it is, and the American Air Force, the almighty U.S. Air Force, is bombing to smithereens everything that moves in the open.
There's no cover.
Why can't U.S.-backed forces move there?
What about the useless Saudis?
We're just selling them $1.6 billion more of arms and tanks and things like that.
I don't understand that, speaking as a former war correspondent and soldier.
Yeah, I mean, nobody's calling you naive, I don't think.
Of course, the answer to the last part is the Saudis are busy bombing the Houthis and everybody else in Yemen right now.
Yeah, so, I mean, and look, there's the famous quote from Joe Biden saying, yeah, all our allies built ISIS, although mostly not directly deliberately, but more or less it was their fault.
But we all know that was the CIA direction all along and that Obama sure as hell never told them they better knock it off when it comes to Saudi, Qatari, Turkish support for the rebellion there.
And then the other thing, of course, is the famous quote from I'm not sure which Turkey this is, not the state, the man in Saudi, I don't think it's Prince Turki al-Faisal, it's some other Turkey, but an intelligence chief over there who told John Kerry that, listen, our support for Daesh, that's ISIS, is our answer to your support for the Dawa, meaning America's eight-year war to install the Shiite parties in power in Baghdad in Iraq War II.
So I guess we're supposed to take that as like some kind of third-person thing, like, geez, this kind of just happened, even though we know America really kind of was in on it all along.
John Kerry was famously called a liar by Vladimir Putin for denying that the rebellion against Assad was mostly a jihadist rebellion and saying, oh, no, that's a very small percentage of it and all that kind of thing.
But now you're saying to me that you think that they're really taking a hands-off.
It sure looks to you, anyway, like they're taking a hands-off thing here.
They're bombing something.
But somehow the Americans just can't get it together to force these guys out of Raqqa and Mosul and to a degree that to you it's just suspicious.
I firmly believe that we in the West and the Saudis were involved in the creation of ISIS.
And it was armed and funded by us.
And it was designed to attack the other Islamic fundamentalist groups.
Somebody came up with the bright idea.
But it then got out of control.
And all these young kids flocked to its banner.
Nobody could keep control of them.
But they were seething.
They were lusting for revenge against the West for its attacks on the Muslim world.
And there it goes.
But nobody will admit that the Saudi and American, British and French hands are very dirty in the creation of ISIS.
And poor Donald Trump was trying to come to that point.
But he's so inarticulate that he couldn't express it.
And he came out claiming, oh, Obama was behind the creation of ISIS.
It's not true.
But in a way he bears some of the responsibility.
Right.
Yeah, it's really too bad that he's such a buffoon.
Because he actually had even gotten this right before in explaining how Obama had certainly helped to create the circumstances or whatever in an accurate enough way.
And pointing attention to something that ought to be the biggest scandal in the whole wide world and isn't.
So to see him blow it by going, oh, yeah, Obama's the jihadi chief or whatever and completely botch the point is really tragic to me.
I don't know.
We still got months left of this.
So maybe he'll figure out how to finally elaborate.
But again, the problem there is he's got to get closer and closer to the Republican establishment.
And they're in on every bit of this.
They all want to get rid of Assad still to this day.
I have never seen the American media fulminating as the way it is now against Trump.
It's just vitiperation at its extreme point.
Yeah, it really is funny in a way because I think it's kind of backfiring, too.
I mean, the numbers right now, you know, I guess they're having their effect.
But that could be pretty easy to turn around, too, if he would quit, you know, completely stepping on his own foot.
It seems I mean, look who he's up against.
All he has to do is get a few things right about her in a row.
And they're really there's so many completely horrible things to pick from.
And even recent stuff.
Right.
He doesn't even have to go back to her time as a senator or her time in Arkansas or Whitewater.
Crap.
All he has to do is talk about her time as secretary of state.
And he ought to be able to completely, you know, crumple her up and throw her in the garbage can.
It's an outrageous story with the Clinton Foundation.
But it is this Teapot Dome scandal type corruption.
But again, Mr. Trump has tripped over his own feet.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway, listen, man, I sure am glad that I have you to read in that.
Every time I read you, I know other people are reading you, too.
And that's exciting.
Like, hey, man, at least Margulies is churning out the truth.
Somebody's paying attention out there.
Matters.
Thanks again, sir.
Thank you.
See you in Kabul soon.
I'm sure.
Bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Eric Margulies there.
America's longest war gets longer.
It's at UNS.com and check out his great books.
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Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.