Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
Real quick before the interview, business, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Stop by foolserrand.us, look it up on amazon.com.
Sign up for the podcast feeds for this show and share them with your friends.
Donations of 50 or more at scotthorton.org or at the Libertarian Institute.
Get a signed copy of the book, $200 or more, and you get a lifetime subscription to listen and think Libertarian audiobooks if you're interested in that.
And hey, give me a good review.
If you've read the book on Amazon, if you like the show over there on iTunes, Stitcher, things like that, give me some stars and help promote the show.
Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
Clausewitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of arms in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Eric Margulies.
He is the author of War at the Top of the World, An American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He writes at ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com, and then you can read him also at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com.
We run them all the time, of course, at antiwar.com and at the Libertarian Institute, and you know, it's Eric.
Hey, man, welcome back to the show.
How are you, sir?
Oh, I'm just delighted to be back, Scott, full of beans and ready to talk about the utterly obscure topic of the Indian-Chinese-Bhutanese border.
Oh, man, all right, wait, before we get to that, I wanna ask you one more thing.
I says to my assistant, Nico, this morning, I says to him, yeah, man, I wanna get Margolis on to talk about this India-China thing, you know?
And he says to me, he says, who is Eric Margolis anyway, you know?
And I says, oh, well, you know, he's this really interesting character, right?
His mother was friends with Ernest Hemingway and traveled the whole Middle East reporting on what in the world was going on after World War II, and he is this world adventurer and journalist and global traveler and language speaker and people knower and event witnesser, and he's written these incredible books that if you like his articles, his books blow his articles away about war in the center of your, man, and you know, and then I realized, oh, jeez, I'm kinda going on too much.
I really like this guy.
You're a really talented and experienced and incredible person, Eric Margolis, you realize that?
Thank you, great, Scott.
You could add to my many morals the fact that I am now an animal rescuer.
And he's an animal rescuer, and you know, I actually told that story to my mom.
I said this to my mom.
You know, a friend of mine, because she doesn't like hearing about my show, because it's all about starving you many babies to death and stuff.
What does she wanna know about that?
But I says, hey, here's something that you'd like to hear about my show.
My friend Eric Margolis rescued some literal lions and tigers and bears from the zoo in Aleppo.
Where's Aleppo, she says.
She's not running for the Libertarian Party presidential campaign, though.
So I told her, in Syria, in the war zone.
Got her out, got them out, surrounded by Al-Qaeda guys, and worked it out anyway.
And what a great story.
So yeah.
And listen, the books, I am such a poor sport about this.
Here, I've been interviewing you for like 12, 13 years, and I've only read the Afghanistan parts of the books.
I just put those off and put those off, and Twitter and Facebook have just melted my brain.
I barely even read books at all anymore.
I'll say, absolutely have to.
And then, when I read the Afghanistan sections of your books, in preparation for writing my book, oh my God, I just feel like such a heel.
I can't wait to get on to reading all of the rest of that, including this stuff.
Because this is what you write about here.
The top of the world, war at the top of the world.
This is where China, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, you said?
And Nepal, and Afghanistan, did I say Afghanistan already?
All come together here, and constant conflict.
Kashmir, I'll throw in Kashmir, it's sort of a semi-autonomous something or other in the middle there, in dispute.
So now, this brings us to the latest news, which is, there was a battle between two nuclear-armed, I think both H-bomb-armed powers, China and India, at Ladakh Lake.
Where is that, and what do you know?
Well, I've been there, I'm just trying to remember exactly where it is.
It's very high, Scott.
Ladakh is around 15,000 feet, if I recall correctly.
It is in the high Himalayas, between Pakistani and Indian-controlled territory.
It is controlled by India today, and it is known widely in the region as Little Tibet, because ethnographically, and geographically, historically, Ladakh used to be part of Tibet.
And as I remark in my book, that Ladakh looks like Tibet.
There are priests running around in the big red hats, and blowing horns, and these weird temples in the mountains.
And in fact, it is, ironically, Indian-controlled Ladakh, is where Tibetan Buddhism is still flourishing, as opposed to Chinese-ruled Tibet, where it is suppressed.
I see.
Well, I put the word Ladakh into Google Images, and it sure is a beautiful place.
A vast wilderness, mostly it looks like here.
But I'm not doing very good on maps.
I need, this is the crossroads.
Did I get it right of what all countries, this is the crossroads of?
I must have left some out, too.
Well, it's in this very strategic zone, which, by the way, includes Kashmir.
But it's very high, and the trouble is that it's sparsely populated.
I think it's got more yaks than people, and nobody really wants to go up there, because there isn't enough air.
It's very inhospitable, and freezing cold in the winter.
So then what are the Indians and the Chinese armies fighting about at this lake?
We're watching a slow-motion war between India and China.
I wrote about it in my first book, War at the Top of the World.
That was the premise of the book, that India and China were destined to go to war.
I still believe this earnestly.
These two great Asian superpowers, like tectonic plates, grinding against each other.
And they want to control this remote Himalayan region for two reasons.
Number one, that controlling it gives the country that does it dominance over the region further down, i.e.
Chinese forces in Tibet now look down over the Great Plains of India, and they can fly their planes down there and see what the Indians are doing.
But even more important, that region, Ladakh, Tibet, controls many of the headwaters of India-Pakistan's great rivers.
So it's very sensitive.
And then, you know, it's funny, because around here, America's the center of every crisis.
It's been so long since something horrible was happening, and it wasn't all Uncle Sam's fault here.
And I'm thinking, wow, what if the world ended, and it was a conflict between the H-bomb powers, India and China, which would probably draw in Pakistan, of course, right?
And then who knows what from there?
And what if this is the way the world ends, and it's not even America's fault at all?
I've been saying this for decades, Scott, but the problem is that unless it involves Donald Trump, nobody's paying any attention.
Well, you gotta admit, the Americans kill a lot of people, so it's hard to imagine somebody else being the one who starts a war, usually nowadays.
If there is a war there, it's gonna be a hell of a bloody one.
Well, now, so what about cooler heads prevailing and everything?
Because if both of these countries can figure out how to fuse hydrogen atoms together, then that means they also know what happens when you do.
Well, they do.
So far, the Indians and the Chinese have been cautious.
Thank goodness.
There have been times when tensions were quite high, as well as between Pakistan and India.
Parenthetically, Pakistan remains a close ally of China.
But the ruling elites in India and Pakistan and China have stepped back and have not allowed small confrontations and obscure places to bring about a scenario where they're poised to go directly to war.
I remember back in the early 1960s, India and Pakistan did fight a war.
I think it was 63.
I'm relying on my always defective memory.
They fought a war in the Himalayas in a very strategic area that overlooked Calcutta in India.
And the Indians provoked the Chinese, I think, and the Mao said he was gonna teach India a lesson.
And he did.
He sent the People's Liberation Army and they beat up the Indians badly and they drove them south and they drove them so far south into the mountains that they were practically into the Indian Ocean.
Into the Indian, Eastern Indian Hill States of Manipur and Tripura.
And there was fear that the Chinese army might keep going and end up taking Calcutta, the main Eastern Indian port.
Fortunately, the Chinese and the Indians backed off and there was no, it was a ceasefire.
But to this day, India has remained hypersensitive about the threat from China, as it calls it, and the fact that China's looming over India.
And just to quote a final piece that I did in my book, one day, Indian Prime Minister Nehru complained to Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.
He said, you're threatening India where we could destroy India.
And Zhou Enlai laughed and he said, if I wanted to destroy India, I'd march 100 million Chinese soldiers up to the border and tell them to piss downhill and wash you into the ocean.
But Indians are very, very sensitive that they have this huge Asian dragon menacingly on their northern border.
Yeah, well, you know, another part of just being really Texas-centric in my outlook, but also just American-centric, you know, in terms of all this.
It was interesting to me, I saw some Kung Fu movie recently where it was all the actors in the whole plot was all India and China and, you know, ancient Buddhism and how, you know, this and that, how the Buddhism had started in India, but it moved to China.
And then the Indians had adopted Hinduism instead, but then there's all these ancient relics.
And so this is all lots of reasons for Kung Fu fist fights over who controls the relics and this and that was the cool movie.
But it's just interesting to see that there's this whole frame of reference and a whole way of looking at things that's this ancient history between these different cultures and countries and peoples and everything.
And Lord knows how many wars and different conflicts.
And as you keep emphasizing this incredible geography that separates them and, you know, also unites them and puts them in conflict with each other and all this.
You could spend your whole education learning about this stuff, right?
Yes, that's right.
But, you know, traditionally there have not, as I remember, been many conflicts between Buddhists and Hindus.
The chain of the Himalayas and the Karakorams really does, as you just said, separate these groups.
There's not been much conflict.
The major conflict that we can think of is Kashmir, which the independent mountain state now mostly controlled by India.
And that really pits Pakistan against India with China watching from the sideline because we have to remember that along this border there are a couple of regions that are controlled by China that were not traditionally Chinese.
One of them is Aksai Chin, which is near Kashmir, Kashmir, again, 15,000 feet, no air, lots of yaks, nothing much else.
There's an area that Pakistan gave China to allow it to link up its, put a military road there.
And then there's Ladakh, which Pakistan claims belongs to Pakistan.
And India scoffs and says, no, this is India.
So there are plenty of border things.
And then the big overall question, when the British were responsible for almost all of the problems in today's world, when they drew the northern border of the British Raj in India, they used the thick nibbed pen and the map and they didn't have any accurate surveys.
It was all very approximate.
And they drew this line and the line is so wide that it includes all kinds of valleys and passes and things like that that are now in dispute.
All right, hang on just one second.
Listen, guys, I got a new sponsor.
It's Hussain Badakhshani.
He wrote this great book, No Dev, No Ops, No IT, Principles Governing the Ideology, Methodology, and Praxeology of Informed IT Decision Making.
It's about how to run your computer business.
Right, that's what it is.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
It's on Amazon.com right now, right there with The War State by Mike Swanson, who also does investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
And then when he tells you so, you buy your medals from Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.at rrbi.co, right?
Get it, RBI, easy to remember, run, bat it in.
Rrbi.co for Roberts & Roberts.
Get your anti-government propaganda at libertystickers.com.
Get pro-band or business propaganda at thebumpersticker.com.
And get your book edited at 3tediting.com.
Well, now, speaking of Kashmir, you know, one time, look, I'm just some guy.
I'm driving my taxi cab, and I pick up some high-tech workers, and one of them's a Pakistani, and one of them's an Indian.
They're riding in the back of my cab, and I'm saying, guys, can we not solve this Kashmir conflict now, or what?
Work this out.
And they both thought it was the stupidest thing in the world, as simply a fight over land and control and tax money for the bureaucrats and whatever stupid to them historical grievances that absolutely should not stand in the way of a permanent peace and a power-sharing arrangement and whatever it is.
So can you please, you know, outline a little bit of, you agree with them that it should be easy, but it's not anyway, or what's the deal here?
Well, I don't agree that it's easy, because there are lots of politics and lots of emotions and lots of history involved.
And what you have essentially is the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, known as the Vale of Kashmir, has a Muslim minority, excuse me, majority, but it's ruled by the Indians, and the Indians keep 500,000 army troops in Kashmir, plus another very large number of paramilitary troops who very brutally repress the Muslim population.
India charges Pakistan with stoking terrorism by sending guerrillas across the border.
I've been with them, I've seen it happen.
It's in my book.
And this brings out the whole question of Indian history, where the Muslim moguls ruled India for a long time, and the Hindus feel hard done by and pushed out of power.
Now they're trying to regain their power, and the new nationalist, Hindu nationalist, fundamentalist government in Delhi of Prime Minister Modi is very Hindu militants.
And this worries not only Pakistan, but India's Muslim population, which amounts to, I don't know, 160, 170 million people.
It's not inconsequential.
So there are all these tensions, and there are the Hindu militants who want to drive all of Indians out of India to establish Hindutva, which is the purely ethnic Hindu state.
There are lots of these things.
Problem could be solved, but the problem is that the politicians and the mobs in the street don't necessarily want to solve it.
Yeah.
Well, and as we've talked about many times here, this is an atomic standoff at this point.
So it's like the Korean Peninsula.
It's one of these permanent brinksmanship crises with actual nuclear weapons in play.
It's almost, I mean, I was just a kid at the time, but I think back about the end of detente and the rebirth of brinksmanship under Ronald Reagan, it wasn't this tense where you have this kind of, you know what I mean?
That was between the US and the Soviet Union, and even during the buildup of the MX missiles and everything, it wasn't as bad as the level of tension here.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.
No, you're right, Scott, but it wasn't as tense in the past, but then neither side has an extensive nuclear forces.
But what has really provoked the crisis is that India, one of the poorest countries in the world, has devoted huge amounts of money to building its conventional armed forces.
And today, India is a number of orders of magnitude more powerful than Pakistan in its ground and air forces.
There are Indian nationalists who want to recreate mother India, and they want to crush Pakistan and reabsorb Pakistan into India, as it was before the British divided India in 1947.
So the Pakistanis used to feel that they could deal with the Indian army, they had superior forces, better trained, but now the Pakistanis are so outgunned that they know that they could not stop a major Indian drive to slice Pakistan into pieces.
And the only way they can do it is by using lots of tactical and perhaps strategic nuclear weapons.
That's the problem.
Pakistan needs its nuclear weapons for survival and is not likely to give them up.
Even if we got rid of all the weapons, the imbalance of forces would still be there.
So the only other hope for Pakistan is to rely on China and for China to threaten India with invasion if it attacks allied Pakistan.
Yeah.
Why are you talking about Germany and Russia and France and World War I all of a sudden?
Why are you changing the subject to that?
Oh, wait, sorry.
I got it.
Yeah, no, that's not good.
And of course, this is the news, right, is that in the last year or so, I think the Pakistani military has delegated to the battlefield colonels the authority to deploy these tactical nuclear weapons.
No time to wait for permission from Central Command if there's an armored tank division rolling in, which doesn't sound right to me.
Those things can only go, what, like 50 miles an hour or something, right?
And then the Indians don't have little A-bombs.
They only have multi tens of kilotons and even including H-bombs.
They have a strategic nuclear capacity, not so much a tactical one.
But once the Pakistanis start using tactical nukes, the Indians are gonna start using theirs no matter what size they are, right?
And that's the whole slippery slope here.
It's terrifying.
And you know, as I've written again in my book, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear forces are on hair-trigger alert.
The distances are relatively small.
Pakistan is a long, narrow, skinny country.
And with India along one side of it, the Indians can just slice into, sunder Pakistan into different parts, chop it up.
That's the Indian plan.
So the Pakistanis are almost forced to use nuclear weapons to stop India's armored strike corps, heavily mobilized, lots of tanks and self-propelled artillery, big air force that can do it.
The Pakistanis really don't have much choice.
All right, so is it okay if we move over east on the map here over to Myanmar, formerly Burma?
Sure.
This is where Rambo IV took place.
That's where you know it from, everybody.
Remember Rambo IV?
They were gonna make it about Afghanistan and how the good Mujahideen had all turned evil, but then they realized, no, it was the Americans who had switched sides and were backing the communists now, and that's not really gonna work out well.
So instead, they decided to make it about Burma, Myanmar, where Rambo goes to save the Muslims from the military dictatorship, which apparently that's a real thing, the Muslims being persecuted by the military dictatorship there, and especially lately.
Help me out, I'm sorry.
I'm pleading ignorance as hell here.
Well, yes, you know, I've been going to Burma for decades, and Burma's a beautiful, fascinating, very complicated country made up of many different ethnic groups, but at one point, it had 10 little local civil wars going on, but again, a product of British colonialism, but Burma, the majority of Burmese were Buddhists, and lovely going to Burma.
They'd go to the Burmese temples and praise the temple bells rang, and we thought of the Burmese as the incarnation of Buddhist pacifism and gentleness, humility, but something that happened that even I didn't understand initially, it started in Sri Lanka, where local Buddhist monks whipped up hatred for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.
We were brought in, by the way, as tea plant workers by the British, and these Buddhist monks who were supposed to be praying to Buddha, gentle were calling for the ethnic cleansing of Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Now, this spread to Burma, or Myanmar as it's called now, and these prominent Buddhist monks, particularly one firebrand, have been whipping up passions in Burma against Muslims.
In Western Burma, the Western Burmese Rakhine State does have a large, significant Muslim population.
I don't know when they came, sometime in the 19th century, as workers brought in from East Bengal or West Bengal by the British, but they are Muslims, they're dirt poor, and they were living there, and now these Buddhist mobs have been whipped up, turned against them, burning out their homes, aided by the Burmese army, the Tatmadaw, as it's called, and committing all kinds of horrible atrocities and genuine ethnic cleansing.
It's a crime.
There are tens of thousands of people, refugees are being driven into Bangladesh, which is about the last place in the world you want to be as a refugee, and the leader, the much-beloved, sainted leader of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, refused to do anything about it.
So, man, now, I guess, what's anybody doing about it, nothing?
Nothing.
Now, what about foreign powers guilty of helping the oppressors here, anything like that?
Lockheed or Syak or the Republican Party or anything like that?
Not yet, not yet, but- The Israelis.
It's the most important Muslim leader who's actually said something about it is Turkey's president, Erdogan, and Erdogan, who's blasted the Burmese, and I wish he would send the Turkish army to save these poor people.
This is reminiscent of the Serbs and the Muslims in the Balkans.
Well, now, didn't the current military dictator win the Nobel Peace Prize or something for making an agreement here?
She's not the military dictator.
She's the chief lady.
She can't be president, but she's some kind of chief lady.
So, in other words, but the conflict was going on, and then they had a peace agreement for a while, and then they called it off?
And she won the Nobel Peace Prize because the West wanted to ennoble her, liked her as a leader for Burma, and then all of a sudden, this kind of persecution of Burmese Muslims has been going on for decades.
Nobody noticed it before because it was small and limited in area, but now it's become too big to ignore with boatloads of people and burning villages.
It's really horrible, and the world should just put its foot down and say, stop it.
It hasn't happened yet.
The Saudi Arabians, the defenders of Islam, as they like to call themselves, haven't done a damn thing.
These people, they're starving persecuted Muslims.
That's what jihad is about.
It's to go and help oppress Muslims, it's not to blow up cafes in Paris, and the Saudis are just sitting back watching it happen.
Man, you know, you mentioned Sri Lanka there and the war.
It's little known but heavily cited in my book, fact that the Tamil Tigers there, the, I guess, Hindu Marxists in the rebels on that side of the fight there, that they were the leaders in suicide attack tactics on earth until Bush invaded Iraq in 2003.
There'd never been a suicide attack there before, but then they quickly took the lead in Iraq War II there.
But the point I wanna get to is I wonder if you know about this.
I'm sure you must have read this book, although it would have been a long time ago, By Way of Deception by Viktor Ostrovsky.
I have it right in my library here.
I'm probably looking at it.
There you go.
Now, in that book, he talks about all the Israelis did to keep that war in Sri Lanka going, arming the Tamils, arming the Buddhists, arming then the Indians to come and intervene somewhat on the side of the Tamils for a time anyway, and this and that, and they give these guys boats, and then they sell these guys the kind of missiles that you use to take out, or torpedoes or whatever, to take out those kind of boats.
And then also, I'm pretty sure it was that same book, talked about how it was basically this giant World Bank scam, that they were getting tens of billions of dollars to build some dam in the name of some economic, infrastructure building thing or something, but then they would just take the UN officials on little Potemkin tours of their construction sites and whatever while they weren't really doing anything at all when they were really what they were doing was they were using as an excuse to steal the Tamils' land to flood them out and force them out, and that's what they were fighting about actually.
Anyway, I just wonder if you remember that and whether that really comports with the way you remember it too.
Scott, I don't remember those details very well.
It's pretty murky there, but as the more details, the Soviets and the U.S. were interested in the northern port of Tricomalee, which is an excellent anchorage, and in fact was used by the Russian Imperial Navy in 1904 when it was coming around from the Baltic to go and fight off Port Arthur.
So it has strategic importance, but all that stuff died down.
There was belief that India was going to invade.
Well, in fact, they did invade for a while, but they got run out by these Tamils who had gone from being tea pickers to very excellent light infantry, and so it was a very murky situation.
Thank God it's over.
It was incredible bloodshed.
Foreigners were tempted to get in.
The Israelis were there to sell arms for sure, but also to establish some kind of base of influence in Sri Lanka.
And then you're saying basically what's happening now in Burma, Myanmar, is blowback from that.
It's the consequences of that war and the radical anti-Hindu Buddhist monks there going to Burma and spreading this sort of Buddhist solifism.
Is that it?
Well, I'm not sure, Scott.
The two things happened.
I'm not sure how linked they are.
Certainly one must have influenced the other.
What horrifies me as a great admirer of Buddhism is that how these Buddhists can turn into little fascist crazies and turn into ethnic cleansing and murder, burning people.
This is the antithesis, at least I think, of what Buddhism is all about.
It's supposed to be nonviolent and gentle and loving, and where did this come from?
These admirable Buddhists have turned really nasty.
Yeah, well, it's us versus them, so what are you gonna do?
That's the way everybody sees it, no matter whether it's the Prince of Peace or the Buddha under the tree or whatever's supposed to be their guiding light, you know?
We can't even blame Cheney for it either.
Yeah, that's what's really surprising, right?
Well, homegrown.
Yeah, because I'm looking at the map and most of these crises actually you can blame him for, but no, this one is separate from Cheney, imagine.
It's a hell of a world.
All right, well, listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming back on my show as always, Eric.
God, Scott, delighted to talk to you about really obscure subjects.
We'll talk about it again soon.
Yeah, well, I appreciate the opportunity to learn a little bit here.
Cheerio, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Eric Margulies.
He wrote War at the Top of the World, and he also wrote American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Find all his articles at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And unz.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks.
Hey, y'all, read my book.
It's Fool's Aaron.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.foolsaaron.us, foolsaaron.us.
