08/05/15 – Anand Gopal – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back.
Check it out, man.
I got Anand Gopal on the line.
He is a great reporter, formerly with the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal, and I'm not exactly sure who all he's writing for nowadays, but he wrote the book No Good Men Among the Living about the war in Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Anand.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, who are you currently working for these days, by the way?
I'm doing freelance work, mostly for magazines.
My last piece was in Harper's Magazine.
Oh, okay.
Good deal.
All right.
Oh, yeah.
You co-wrote the thing with Akins about the election in Afghanistan last year, right?
That's right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Good deal.
All right.
So, yeah.
Now, I found this at the Diplomat, where they interviewed you, so that helped me out a little bit, reading some of your answers here.
But, of course, Afghanistan, it's out of the news, mostly, but it's still a huge deal going on over there, and it's in a real state of flux right now, it seems like.
All the headlines were saying that the Taliban were making major gains and sacking this base and that base, and kidnapping and killing policemen, and all this stuff, and then the news breaks that it turns out Mullah Omar is dead, confirmed dead, has been dead for two years.
So, what does it all mean?
Well, on the one hand, it shows that on the ground, the organization, the Taliban, doesn't really need Mullah Omar to be physically present, and really, since 2001, he hasn't been involved in the insurgency.
So, he's kind of just existed as a figurehead, and, yeah, this year is a banner year, militarily speaking.
There's a record number of civilians that have been killed, it's been really gruesome on the ground.
Politically, for the Taliban, however, the death of Mullah Omar means there's the possibility of real splits and fissures.
Oh, that's good.
Well, it could be bad, I guess, depending, because some of the other headlines, other than their major military victories lately, was about negotiations for peace.
And so, I guess a split, you know, right now, could be real bad tidings.
Exactly.
You know, almost paradoxically, the death of Mullah Omar might actually be a bad thing for the possibility of peace, because it opens up the space for some of the elements within the Taliban leadership who are opposed to peace talks, or are skeptical of peace talks.
It opens up space for them to make a play for power in the movement.
Right now, there is a power struggle that is going on to determine the successor to Mullah Omar.
There's one individual who has essentially claimed the leadership of the movement and has the backing of large portions of the organization, but there are other individuals, including Mullah Omar's family, who reject him, or at least reject the process by which he declared himself to be the leader.
And so, this means we've seen the worst-case scenario would be down the line some sort of split, in which case the more extreme forces, such as ISIS, could benefit.
Right.
Now, so that was something that I was reading this morning that Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent, put out about how al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, really had a lot kind of hanging around loyalty, continued pledges of loyalty to Mullah Omar as the legitimate caliph.
And that this was a big part of the reason why he would argue that al-Qaeda guys who'd previously been with him had to stay and not switch to supporting ISIS, because they had pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar.
But now that he's dead, that throws all that into question as far as the people who have stayed with al-Qaeda, and it also makes Zawahiri look like a clown, because he's been citing Mullah Omar for the last couple of years when he's been dead, which means either Zawahiri was lying or didn't even know.
Well, definitely Zawahiri didn't know.
In fact, most people in the Taliban didn't know.
It was a closely kept secret.
Maybe three or four people in the entire world, actually, probably had access to Mullah Omar.
So yeah, almost nobody knew.
And certainly it's true that the allegiances to Mullah Omar as the supposed commander of the Faithful is something that has kept some people in al-Qaeda, staying in al-Qaeda.
It doesn't make a huge difference in Afghanistan, where the insurgency in Afghanistan is local.
I mean, the foreign elements are there, but they're not a major part of the insurgency.
So groups like al-Qaeda aren't a major part of the insurgency.
And globally speaking, ISIS has just become such a phenomenon that al-Qaeda has felt like it needed to find a way to keep recruits and keep members.
And one of the ways they were doing that is try to point to the historical legitimacy in their eyes of Mullah Omar.
Well, now, so yeah, I guess I was even thinking as I was trying to figure out a way to ask that question in the form of a question about, you know, like you were saying, there's not really a bunch of Arab Afghans fighting with the Taliban right now, like back in the 80s or anything like that.
So who does this really have an effect on, you know, where it counts as far as the ISIS al-Qaeda split?
It seems like it'd be among the financiers in Saudi Arabia, but I don't really know how that works, whether they themselves had pledged loyalty to Mullah Omar before.
And does that mean that now they'll be free to donate to ISIS instead?
No, I think you've been seeing a shift to some extent in some of the donation patterns.
But, you know, I think that we're overplaying perhaps the significance of people's adherence to al-Qaeda because of Mullah Omar.
What we've seen instead in the last couple of years is that people who are drawn to these sorts of causes are moving more and more towards the direction of ISIS.
So in Afghanistan, for instance, you had, for the last four or five years, a number of Taliban splinter groups that have emerged for various reasons, the most common of which was that they opposed the idea of peace talks, which is the mainstream Taliban leadership is pushing the idea of negotiated settlement.
And so these groups are sort of operating on their own in the last three or four years.
But after ISIS became a phenomenon, they sort of rebranded themselves as ISIS and sort of economists of ISIS.
And they did that in a way of, you know, attracting attention and perhaps money.
And the concern is with the death of Mullah Omar and the sort of debate splits over peace talks, those those groups, those splinter groups that are economists of ISIS, may get more recruits or may sort of grow more prominent.
Yeah, sorry to change the subject, but it's worth pointing out in the middle of all this hype about Iran, that the ayatollahs there in Persia are the biggest obstacle standing between an eventual Islamic state between, you know, the one in former Iraq and Syria and the one that the Taliban were trying to create in Afghanistan.
So just remember who's serving who all's agendas here, they overlap sometimes.
But anyway, so when it comes down to the sons of Mullah Omar versus is it Mansour is the guy who is Mansour, some Mullah Mansour, he's the self-proclaimed leader.
And now, is that the split, the sons and him, are they just fighting over the power itself or they're fighting over the agenda, whether to participate in peace talks or not?
Well, it's a little complicated.
It's actually a three way split.
And I think the simplest way to understand it would be that there are first the people who are opposed to peace talks and people who are in favor of peace talks.
And then within the camp that's in favor of peace talks, they're also split between those who want to allow Pakistan to play a major role in the peace talks and those who are suspicious of Pakistan and don't want Pakistan to have any role.
So that's kind of the way the split has sort of come about.
And Mullah Mansour is the official leader now of the Taliban.
He was the deputy of Mullah Omar.
He was one of the few, supposedly, who actually even knew that Mullah Omar was dead.
And he was writing statements in Mullah Omar's name over the last few years.
So he's essentially running things day to day.
And that was fine for people.
But now that Mullah Omar is officially dead, you know, there's a growing chorus of voices saying, well, hold on, you can't just declare yourself the commander of the faithful.
You need to have some sort of selection process and you need to call in all the scholars, all the clerics to come and anoint you and so on and so forth.
OK, great.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Anand Gopal right after this.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton and I got Anand Gopal on.
He wrote the book on the Afghan war men.
No good men among the living.
Embedded within the Taliban.
I assume he won a million awards for it.
Pretty sure that's.
Yeah, most of.
Yeah.
So we're talking about the death of Mullah Omar.
What it means for the Afghan war.
It means a lot.
So now when we talk about talks here, talks toward the having of talks or talks toward real issues.
I know the Americans, at least according to the New York Times, I think it was the Post, the Times, the Americans negotiated for nine months with a Taliban leader who turned out was an imposter and was just taking their money and screwing them, which is kind of hilarious, but also a little bit tragic.
And so I'm assuming that within the talks that are going on, that it's actual Taliban representatives, even if it's only from smaller and smaller factions now.
But they're negotiating directly with the government in Kabul.
And and to what end they're going to.
I mean, does anyone think I mean, the allies or anything like an idea of how this is supposed to work, where they're going to recognize autonomy in Pashtunistan or that Pashtunistan and the Taliban will ultimately recognize the authority of Kabul over their lands in exchange for this or that, because these things are sounding very fanciful to me already, just trying to barely, you know, think from the top of my head of of what a deal could even look like.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine any of these things coming to pass.
We should note, by the way, that the peace talks process, which was going ahead, has been suspended completely in the last week because of Muammar's death.
You know, as long as there's this power battle within the Taliban leadership, nothing's going to happen.
So I don't expect any movement on that front for quite some time.
But, you know, in talking to I can tell you what Taliban leadership wants to see, which probably won't be the most realistic thing.
But, you know, what they're looking for is essentially they don't want nobody's interested in power sharing.
Nobody wants a few ministries or the governorships of a few provinces.
What they're asking for is really just a reimagining of the post 2001 order, sort of redrawing, redrawing up the state.
They actually accept, surprisingly to me, accept the Afghan constitution.
But they're looking for something, you know, with the troops out, by the way, as long as any troops remain on the ground in Afghanistan, there could be no sort of settlement.
That's sort of a sort of a main point that gets raised again and again.
Yeah, and there still are how many, 10,000?
Yeah, 10,000.
And they're not just trainers, they're also special forces operatives who are conducting raids, they're droning people.
So it's actually, you know, President Obama said the war in Afghanistan is over.
But that's false.
The war in Afghanistan is continuing with these soldiers and with the hundreds of thousands of proxy fighters who are fighting on behalf of the U.S. and and also those who are fighting on behalf of Pakistan.
And who are armed and led by the U.S.
Yeah, the American proxy forces, I remember referring to militias and warlords who are armed and created by the U.S. and deployed by the U.S.
Yeah, so-called cops and and even worse than that.
All right.
Now, yeah, OK, but so if the 10,000 left, would the Taliban just walk right into Kabul and say, we're back?
No, I don't think so.
You know, as long as the U.S. as long as the U.S. keeps funding its side, the Afghan government, it doesn't look like the Taliban will be able to sort of kick them out of major cities.
And you can see that even now with all the fighting and all the success of the battlefield, they've still been unable to actually capture a major urban center.
And the Afghan government has more men, more guns, more money.
So, you know, that'll just kind of continue.
But if the troops leave and there's some kind of settlement, you know, maybe we'll see, you know, a new type of government in place that has elements from all sections of Afghan society.
That's, of course, the ideal.
That's what people are hoping for.
But that's also what the Taliban are asking for.
Well, you know, if ramping up the war from 05 through 11 or 12 was supposed to get rid of these guys, but only made them more and more powerful all this time, maybe the drawdown to back down to 10,000 troops will actually, you know, work to America and its allies' advantage there in not pushing people into joining the ranks of the Taliban, who were the forefront of the resistance.
Well, definitely, you know, the less troops you have running around and killing people, you know, that's the less recruits the Taliban will have from that.
But the problem, on the other hand, is that the warlords that we've unleashed are still there running around and killing people.
And so, you know, even if you have some sort of deal between the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government, if those kinds of killings and massacres and human rights violations continue on the ground, then people will still have real grievances with which to fight for.
And so they may not call themselves Taliban anymore.
They may call themselves the Islamic State or whatever else, and they'll keep fighting.
So I think this speaks to why you actually need a truth reconciliation process.
You need to disarm the warlords.
You need a whole host of things that go beyond just having to deal with the Taliban.
And do the Pashtuns have any kind of political representation of any kind with any meaning or force other than the Taliban?
Because it's not like they're all Taliban.
It just seems like the Taliban are kind of all they have, no?
Well, no, I mean, the Afghan government is predominantly Pashtun.
And, you know, the president's Pashtun, Karzai before him was Pashtun.
So I don't think it's necessarily even an ethnic thing.
You know, if you look down the areas where the fighting is the worst, where the Taliban is strongest, are the Pashtun areas.
But those are also the areas that have an entirely Pashtun government.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I had always read that and sort of been told, I thought, that Karzai, for example, maybe things have changed.
I don't know that Karzai was sort of Pashtun in name only.
But there's a big difference between the the town Pashtun and the country Pashtun.
And he was, you know, he might as well been from London compared to the real, you know, tribal people there.
And that that the government was really the the alliance of the Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks.
Is that I'm just talking circa 2006 or something.
That's just not true anymore.
Or was it ever?
Yeah, I don't think it's true.
I mean, I think that would have been more accurate early on after the invasion.
But I think, you know, I think it's much simpler than even an ethnic question.
It's that you have warlords that are killing people and torturing people.
And they happen to be Pashtun warlords, actually.
They're the main ones who are doing it.
You know, the special forces and the CIA are allying with, created a whole host of warlords across the Pashtun areas who themselves are Pashtuns and are doing the dirty work of the war on terror.
And that's I think that more than anything else is what's upset people and has mobilized them to to fight against Taliban.
But, you know, I mean, sorry, fight against the U.S.
I mean, most of these people who are fighting now had actually, including the leadership, they had actually surrendered and quit back in 2001, 2002.
Even Mullah Mansoor, the new leader of the Taliban, he was sitting at home in Kandahar minding his own business.
But the U.S. and the warlords kept raiding his house.
So he fled to Pakistan and joined the Taliban.
Yeah, now that's, you know, very important.
And we've talked about that before.
People want to search the archives for previous interviews and certainly reading on about that.
It's not just in the book, but you've written about that before.
I think my memory is correct for the Christian Science Monitor and things like that about how they really they had even all signed on to a letter saying, hey, America, we recognize that you're the new big dogs here and we got to do what you say.
So here we are.
We've lined up for our instructions.
What do you what do you want us to do?
And the Americans simply just made enemies out of them anyway.
Exactly.
Yeah, man, it's amazing, isn't it?
And now, man, I forgot what my one last awesome question was going to be.
And I've got you over time now anyway.
So thanks very much for your time and good talk to you again.
Thank you.
All right.
So that is Anand Gopal and the article is I mean, pardon me.
His book is No Good Men Among the Living.
And you can find also this great interview of him here about the death of Mullah Omar at the diplomat.
And we'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Use coupon code Scott Horton for 10 percent off any course or set of courses at Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
Jacob Hornberg, a tireless champion of liberty and president of the FFF, brings you the best libertarian writers every month on the topics that need our treatment the most.
Read Jacob, Jim Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McIlroy, Joe Stromberg and more every month in the Future of Freedom.
It's just twenty five dollars a year for the pocket sized print edition.
Fifteen to read it online.
The Future of Freedom, FFF dot org slash subscribe.
You hate government, one of them libertarian types, maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.