09/21/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest on the show today is the great Gareth Porter from interpress service, ipsnews.net, and also has done some award-winning reporting for truthout.org.
You can find virtually everything that he writes at antiwar.com/porter.
And this one is called Taliban Outflank, U.S. War Strategy with Insider Attacks.
It's co-written with Shah Nouri.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Well, you're welcome, and I'm very happy to have you here.
Okay, so even TV is talking about the fraggings of American soldiers.
They keep trying to come up with jargon other than fraggings because everybody knows what that is, I guess, left over from Vietnam, and that's not good.
So they're trying to call it this, that, or the other thing.
The green on blue attack, I guess, is the most common one so far.
Well, that's been actually replaced by insider attacks.
Insider attacks, right.
That's the one I was thinking of.
Which is more descriptive, I think, actually, yeah.
Right, insider attacks.
I guess that doesn't hurt as bad when you get shot in the back of the head in an insider attack compared to a green on blue.
Well, I think it just telegraphs that it's being done by our supposedly allies in Afghanistan as opposed to some oddly colored outfit.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah, I would think they must have tested it in front of a focus group and it actually sounds, you know, green on blue maybe sounds worse or something.
That would be my guess.
I don't know the ideology of that phrase, but it's a good question.
It would be worth somebody trying to check out.
That's just a minor detail anyway.
Anyway, the point being that 60% of the population of Afghanistan is Pashtun, so forget them.
They're not welcome.
They have nothing to do with it.
As you've proven before, the entire Afghan army, quote unquote, such as it is, is made up of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras, and the Pashtuns aren't welcome or at least they don't want to join.
And so this is the Northern Alliance, the communists that were the bad guys in the 1980s or the guys we're fighting for now, the guys who were on the eve of complete and total defeat when we intervened on their behalf 11 years ago.
And so now they're the ones shooting our guys in the back of the head.
Well, you know, you've raised an interesting question, Scott, to what extent the insider attacks can be traced to Pashtuns versus non-Pashtun troops in the ANA.
It's an interesting fact that nobody has seen fit to include any such data in any of the official reporting.
You know, it's not quite true that there are no Pashtuns in the ANA, but they are definitely underrepresented.
And you're correct that the reason they're underrepresented is that Pashtuns have generally not been interested in signing up for the ANA, particularly in the last three or four years.
So they are definitely having a hard time getting recruits within the Pashtun regions of southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The fact is that we don't really know to what extent these are Pashtuns, Pashtun recruits, who are doing the insider shootings.
My guess is that they are probably overrepresented in the total shootings compared with their representation in the ANA.
They are the ones who are clearly being more influenced by the Taliban in the last couple of years, particularly.
Right.
Okay, and now, so on that question, of course the Taliban, it's in their interest to say, yeah, we keep sending guys to infiltrate the army and shoot you in the back of the head, ha ha, and you can't stop us.
But then again, it's easy to imagine, too, without, I'm not saying particular information on any given anecdotal example or whatever, but just it's pretty easy to see, too, that maybe just some recruit would be humiliated in one way or another or would be angry or change his mind about what he's doing there or whatever and just pull out his gun and shoot somebody in a way that is planned only by himself.
So I wonder what you think, what's the majority of these?
Is this really a giant Taliban war strategy or is it just guys in the Afghan army are saying, you know what, screw you guys, bang.
I think both things have happened, no question about it.
But you have to believe that because of this phenomenon of insider attacks has increased so dramatically in 2012 that it does reflect increasingly a Taliban strategy.
And as I point out in my story, there is evidence that the Taliban have indeed welcomed people who may not have been infiltrated deliberately into the ANA, the specific individuals who did the shooting may not have been infiltrated into the ANA originally, but who were then clearly, through some influence of the Taliban, whether it was direct or indirect, had gotten the ANA people to decide to shoot their NATO, their 12 allies, if you will, and then abscond from the unit to the Taliban.
I mean, there are at least a couple of videos that show the Taliban commanders welcoming two of these former ANA troops who said that they had killed the NATO troops and it coincides with specific examples.
And, you know, this is quite credible that increasingly this is what has happened, that a combination of people who were infiltrated into the ANA and people who were not infiltrated by the Taliban but who were influenced by the Taliban directly or indirectly to carry out these insider attacks, have accounted for the very sharp increase to a total of 51, at least the last count that I saw in 2012, which is on a pace to be twice as high, roughly, as the figure from last year.
Well, you know, I don't know if I have a real source for this or if this is just sort of conventional wisdom that I learned as a kid.
I think it is, probably.
I just learned this as a kid and sort of always knew that this was what really ended the Vietnam War.
It wasn't the pinkos in the Congress or Walter Cronkite or any of that.
It was American privates tossing grenades into their officers' tents and saying, you know what, I'm going home.
I'm not dying out there in that jungle.
Well, I think that played a role.
But, of course, in the Vietnam War, I think the Vietnamese communists did have a role in making it impossible for the United States to continue to maintain its position in South Vietnam.
In other words, it was the offensive of 1972 that really created the pressure on the Nixon administration to actually negotiate an agreement.
Well, and on those soldiers to toss those grenades, too, right?
Well, I think that the tossing of grenades by U.S. troops and other fraggings that took place took place over a much longer period of time, obviously, from 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970, 1971, a period when, after, let's say between 1968 and 1972, there was a period of a relative lull in the fighting because the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese made a deliberate decision to lower the level of military pressure by reducing their own troop strength in the South.
And so, despite that fact, you still had those fraggings taking place, or maybe because of that fact you had fraggings taking place.
So I think there are two very distinct situations there, both contributed, but I think, you know, because of the timeline here that we can see, it was the 1972 offensive that created the pressure for the 1973 negotiations that resulted in the United States pulling its troops out, you know, decisively.
All right, well, so what do I know about parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan?
You're telling me that this level of insider attacks, see how easy it is?
They got me using their new lingo that quickly, that this is way beyond the way it was in Vietnam, in terms of the rate of these attacks.
Well, I mean, obviously, the insider attacks here are being done by the allies of the United States, the troops that we're supposed to be training and partnering with.
This did not really happen, at least it was never reported, to my knowledge, in the Vietnam War, and it constitutes a very interesting non-parallel, a sharp discontinuity between these two wars.
And I have to say that, you know, the more I see of Taliban strategists and the way they have managed their hand, the hand that they have to play with regard to the U.S.
-NATO forces in their country, compared with the way the Vietnamese manage their hand, you know, one has to pay tribute to the Taliban as military political strategists.
I think that they have handled their hand really more brilliantly than the Vietnamese did.
I think the Vietnamese perhaps made more mistakes tactically, strategically, than the Taliban have.
And the Taliban have perhaps done a more brilliant job of forcing the United States, ultimately, to call in its hand, and I think ultimately the United States is going to leave that war, although they spent more years in Afghanistan than the United States spent with large-scale troops in Vietnam.
I think that the period of U.S. escalation from 2009 on is the relevant period here, and I think the Taliban have really managed their war of resistance more brilliantly than the Vietnamese did.
Yeah, well, they certainly melt away when they need to melt away.
I don't know, I mean, I didn't live through the Vietnam War era the way you did, you know, to make all those parallels month for month, year for year kind of thing.
This reminds me of early 71 or that kind of deal.
But I can see where, you know, the Americans surge into Marjah, they surge into Kandahar or whatever.
The Taliban don't meet them there.
The Taliban are nowhere to be found.
And the Americans, of course, always just pat themselves on the back like they must have done a great job, but it's just because their resistance took off.
What are you going to do, face the Marine Corps head-on?
No, you snipe them from far away.
And that is indeed the primary difference between Taliban strategy and the Vietnamese strategy.
The Vietnamese did, in fact, make a very serious error of exposing their forces to the full brunt of U.S. air power, which was used in ways that make, I must say, the so-called war crimes of the Syrian regime look like child's play, look like kindergarten play, you know, given the number, the tens of thousands of troops and, I must say, certainly thousands if not tens of thousands of civilians who were killed in the airstrikes that were used to essentially destroy the Tet Offensive and then the May Offensive of 1968, both in Hue and in Saigon in particular, but in other Vietnamese cities.
Well, another non-parallel here is the Iraq War, where the surge, as you explained on this show, was all about the Washington Clock and all about getting the American people to replace what they knew about the Iraq War with a slogan that said, well, just hang on a little bit longer, basically.
And it was really important that they do so, because the American people were getting pissed right around the time of the end of 06, beginning of 07, when they announced the surge.
Now, in the case of Afghanistan, I'm reading that the surge troops are leaving Afghanistan, and there doesn't seem to be any corresponding slogan.
And my best theory is because no one even cares, so they don't even have to try to lie to us about it.
They just kind of say, well, whatever, the war's going to sputter on a couple more years anyway.
I think you're right, Scott, that the degree of popular outrage and insistence or pressure on the administration that the United States get out of Afghanistan is clearly less than it was in either Iraq or Vietnam, for obvious reasons.
In the case of both Iraq and Vietnam, there were higher-level U.S. casualties than there are in Afghanistan.
And I mean, there is obviously a correlation between the level of casualties and the degree of pressure on the U.S. government to get out.
So, I mean, there is no question that there's less pressure.
Nevertheless, you know, it's very clear that this administration understands that it cannot continue to retain U.S. troops there, and it's trying to have it both ways.
It's trying to have a timetable for withdrawal of troops.
That leaves only special forces, essentially, and a few trainers, which I think are completely going to be in a non-viable situation, those trainers.
So you're talking about the proposal between 2014 and 2024?
That's right, exactly.
That's what's going to be remaining.
And then at the same time, of course, they want to have the ability to say, oh, we're still hanging in there, we're going to have a long-term presence, and we are going to continue to manage this war to be able to keep our clients in power.
Now, you know, I don't think that's going to work.
I don't think it's going to be successful.
That is the political strategy that the White House is working on at this point.
Yeah, well, I think it was Pepe Escobar on the show saying, you know, we might be facing a fall Saigon moment here, everybody holding on to the skid of a Huey, trying to, you know, not be left behind.
A cobble could fall, you know, especially with all the brand-new riots breaking out.
It's not unthinkable that you could have, indeed, not so much because of the Vietnam denouement, which was, you know, regular troops rolling into Saigon with tanks, but rather, you know, the kind of uprising, you might want to call it, of essentially ordinary people who are pissed off.
That is characterized by what's happening in both Kabul today and throughout the Middle East.
I think that that is not an entirely unrealistic scenario, that this could still happen, but it's definitely not going to be the kind of regular war, conventional war ending that we saw in Vietnam, but rather a very unconventional political ending, if it does happen that way.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, the Republicans always want to attack Obama over saying that the war is going to end at this date or whatever, but what are you going to do?
Declare victory?
Because they don't even say that.
Even John McCain is saying now, well, hell, maybe we ought to just go ahead and go.
Well, what?
I mean, don't we have to leave him behind at least then?
I would hope so, yes.
Alone without armor?
I think another another point just worth registering here, again, with regard to the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan is precisely that in Saigon, you did not have a population that was disposed by and large to participate in essentially major, violent or semi-violent protests against the occupying forces.
I mean, they were pissed off.
I was in Saigon in 1971 when the U.S. began its drawdown of troops, and the Saigonese were upset.
They were angry at the Americans for getting out rather than for staying in for the most part, but in a different situation now in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, because that population is not at all happy with the foreign presence in the country.
And it's for largely a combination of both nationalistic but also religious reasons.
And I think that's a potent combination, clearly very different from the situation in Vietnam.
So now back to 2014 and all this, that's when the drawdown, I guess the surge is over now.
They're down to 68,000 troops and they want to be down to, they say all the combat forces are going to be out by the end of 2014.
Now, in fact, I should stop there and ask you just on that point, because I heard Obama say all of them will be out by the end of 2014, but he only said it to my ears once in his life, and it was under pressure, under cross-examination by one reporter with some guts, and it wasn't an official thingamajig.
Obama has entered into the phase of his presidency, which I guess began pretty much the beginning of his presidency, where he makes statements that are made with his fingers crossed behind his back, by which I mean that he means it in a particular sense to be interpreted as, well, I don't really mean that everybody is going to be out, but all regular combat troops will be out.
He really does out-Bill Clinton Bill Clinton, doesn't he?
He does.
I mean, if it wasn't for Maliki, we'd still be in Iraq, and he'd still be saying we held to a 16-month timetable for leaving, too.
Well, I think it was a combination of Maliki, and there was at the same time a rather clever play by Obama saying, well, we will not be able to, of course, stay unless we have a letter from the president of Iraq, which calls upon the United States, which requests the United States to remain.
And, of course, I think that Obama knew perfectly well that he was not going to get that from Maliki.
So I think both were part of that drama, that play that went on.
I don't think, in other words, that Obama really wanted to keep combat troops in Iraq, but he did not want to be in a position of being blamed for the decision, and I think he had a very clever ploy of saying, yes, we'll do that, but only if we get a letter from the president, knowing that he wouldn't get it.
It did seem like he didn't try all that hard to convince Maliki to grant the immunity and all that.
Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of clever grandstanding there going on, that's all I can say.
Well, I'll give him a half a point for that.
You know, the thing is, too, is I give credit to the American hero Bradley Manning and to Julian Assange's journalistic operation WikiLeaks, because they came out with those cables describing an atrocity by American soldiers in Iraq in 2006 where they killed a family, including babies, at point-blank range and then called in an airstrike to try to cover it up, and that came out in November of 2011.
And the people of Iraq, you know, if there ever was any leeway in Iraqi public opinion, to whatever degree it matters, that used up the last of the leeway.
There was no way he was going to be able to give American soldiers immunity and permission to stay and an invitation to stay after that.
Yeah, I don't think that was ever in the cards, but certainly that was a contribution.
Yeah, and you know what?
If the Americans don't like it, the American government doesn't like it, well, then they shouldn't have ordered Bradley Manning to participate in war crimes then, and he wouldn't have ratted on them.
Yeah, that's true, exactly.
And I don't mean that in the general sense, I mean he complained to his commanding officer, hey, these people you're having me help the Iraqi police arrest aren't guilty of anything except writing an article, and his commanding officer said, good, help them continue to do that.
Very specific criminal activity that he was being ordered to participate in that he refused to participate in, or at least got back in his own way.
So anyway, sorry to go off the point there, but I just thought that part was worth pointing out.
Nobody ever gives that kid Manning enough credit, I don't think.
We should definitely keep reminding people of the importance of what he did, absolutely.
All right, now, there's this guy that I love to read, I don't know if you've ever read him, his name's John Dolan, aka Gary Brecher, the war nerd.
Have you ever read him at Exiled?
I don't believe I have.
Okay, well, the guy's brilliant, and he's completely amoral, and that's exactly what he is, is he's the war nerd.
He's never been in a war or in the Army, but he's just obsessed with it, and he's been reading about it his whole life, and he's really a very entertaining writer, too.
I would recommend his history of the Iran-Iraq War will blow you away.
It's absolutely incredible.
But one of the things he was doing, and I think his most recent piece, was actually giving credit to Obama's assassins, basically, McChrystal, Petraeus, and Panetta, the JSOC and the CIA, for running their counterinsurgency program the way they have, that at least compared to the way the Bush people did it, they're actually hunting down and killing real bad guys with these drones, and they're doing a really good job of it, night raids and these kinds of things.
And, of course, the Democrats can't take credit because they're all blue state, East Coast liberal types who can't do too much bragging about what killers they are, but that actually they're doing a really good job.
And I was just wondering, amorally speaking here, is that true?
I mean, assuming the premise and the legitimacy of the mission and whatever, is it possible that McChrystal himself was wrong when he talked about that insurgent math, that for every one we kill, we create ten more, and that actually there is a finite number of Egyptians and Saudis and even Afghans that really, really need killing, and when we're done killing them all, we'll be fine?
And it's working well.
You know, that's an absurd notion, which I think people who are knowledgeable, who've studied this and who do not have a personal or institutional stake in defending the present so-called counter-terrorism strategy of drones and special operations forces understand very well that this makes no sense whatsoever, that it is a formula not for eliminating the threat of terrorism, but rather for making this terrorist threat last for generations into the future.
And of course, as you know well, Scott, none other than General Petraeus himself declared that he expected that we were going to be involved in wars in the Middle East for a couple of generations into the future.
That is the vision, indeed, of the Petraeuses and the CIA, the John Brennans and the other people who are the professionals who are getting the work and the money and the power that goes with the present counter-terrorism strategy.
That is their vision, and they really don't care about the actual consequences.
They're always going to interpret whatever happens as good for the United States without, of course, being accountable for, in any meaningful sense, for what the actual consequences are.
Right.
Well, that's what I figured.
But that's why I asked, because the war nerd, he doesn't have an institutional interest.
He really is just an independent analyst.
Yeah, in his case, I would just have to say that he hasn't really followed it very carefully.
Fair enough.
I still recommend that you read his stuff, though, because it's hilarious, and a lot of times it's stuff that you wouldn't have thought of, but it's definitely insightful.
I would have to say that in the case of Iraq, I think the consequences of the CIA Special Forces strategy of targeted killings was not nearly as negative as it has been in Afghanistan for reasons that I wrote about in my Truthout piece, which is that in Afghanistan, the insurgents and the population all know one another.
They are people who are in constant contact with one another, and therefore the targeting strategy which they used in Iraq, when applied to Afghanistan, that is to say targeting strategy which used cell phone numbers as the absolutely central factor in trying to figure out who is in the insurgency and who should be targeted, resulted in effectively targeting a huge proportion of people who are not combatants at all.
I'm not sure that that was the case to any similar degree in Iraq.
I think that it's very clear that there's a big difference between the two situations.
And why?
Just because in Iraq more people had cell phones?
Well, I think in Iraq the insurgents were not people who were being called on their cell phone by friends and neighbors all the time.
I think there was a much clearer cut distinction between the two compared with Afghanistan.
Well, and you had the former Baathists and the Sunni Imams who had made their deal with the Petraeuses that, you know, get rid of our enemies for us and we won't fight you.
Yeah, I think that there was...
We don't have a deal like that with the Pashtuns.
In other words, we're talking about targeting to a much greater degree Al-Qaeda operatives in the case of Iraq.
And of course they did target also the Shia insurgents.
In that case, I think that the case is much cloudier.
I think it was more like Afghanistan in the case of the Shia, more likely.
But in the case of Al-Qaeda, I think they had a much clearer set of targets here compared with Afghanistan where the line between the insurgents and civilians blurred because of the nature of their targeting strategy.
All right, now we really got to go.
So I'm sorry to ask such a big question and ask for, you know, sort of short answer on it.
But I was wondering if you could just kind of chip in to my and the listeners' picture of what's going on over in Afghanistan at all really.
Because you know what?
They just don't tell us anything on TV about it.
Like for all I know, they sort of go out on patrol playing the IED lottery, getting killed all day every day.
Or maybe they don't.
Maybe their commanding officers have decided enough playing the IED lottery, everybody stay put.
Or maybe there's escalated night raids.
Or maybe there's none for a month because they're on vacation.
I have no idea what the hell's going on over there, man.
Well, I don't have any statistics on night raids.
I have not seen anything for quite a while now.
But I assure you that they are going on every night, multiple night raids going on every night.
There's no doubt about that.
As far as the disposition of U.S. ground troops, they're definitely continuing to do both mounted and foot patrols.
They're continuing to be blown up by IEDs.
And I can tell you that I have just been researching the IED war for a story on that, and that the United States has been systematically losing the IED war for the last couple of years.
I have the data on that.
I'm going to be writing about it very soon.
All right.
Well, we'll look forward to that in our own way.
All the great bad news at antiwar.com/porter, IPSnews.net, and at truthout.org by the great Gareth Porter.
Thank you very much for your time, as always.
Thanks so much, Scott.
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