All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest is Anand Gopal.
His website is anandgopal.com.
He is a reporter who covers Afghanistan from Afghanistan.
He's written for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as a number of other outlets.
And he's got an article that blew my mind at foreign policy called Missed Opportunities in Kandahar.
And I hope we can talk about that in just a minute, Anand.
But first, I wanted to ask you about this thing in the New York Times yesterday.
Taliban leader in secret talks was an imposter.
You've got to have something probably funny to say about this.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
OK, thanks for having me.
You can't even make this sort of stuff up, I think.
It's pretty incredible that the IPAC and the Afghans are sitting and talking to somebody that's I'm sorry, wait, wait, tell the people what an IPAC is.
IPAC, the foreign forces in Afghanistan.
NATO.
NATO, right, right, NATO.
We're talking to somebody they thought was a senior Taliban leader who turned out to be an imposter.
And really, the question is, do they even know who they're talking to?
Do they know who they're capturing?
Do they know who they're killing?
It's pretty remarkable.
Yeah, it's sort of like the entire national security state is being run by kids who are graduating from college right around the time of September 11th.
You know, like the kids that helped Paul Bremer destroy Iraq, you know, they're like some daughter of a Republican donor or something like that.
And they get a cushy intelligence post over there, I guess.
At best, yeah.
Well, so in your reporting from Afghanistan, you must have talked with a lot of these people, intelligence officials and generals and so forth.
I mean, is this really just complete nincompoopery going on over there, or what?
Is this the most keystone empire you've ever reported on?
Well, it is.
I mean, there's just such a low level of knowledge about what's actually happening on the ground.
And there's pretty pernicious effects to that, because coalition forces end up detaining people who are the wrong people.
Sometimes they'll detain somebody who has the same name as a major Taliban figure, but it turns out to be somebody completely different.
And this has been going on since day one, and it's been continuing.
So in this case, now, I'm kind of confused about this, too, because I think people had said, you know, there were a lot of very mainstream press, obvious the administration was behind putting out a bunch of trial balloons and leaked stories about, yeah, we're going to negotiate with the Taliban, which I guess is supposed to be interpreted as their intent on trying to end this thing somehow at some point.
But then it pretty much came out that, no, they're not really doing that.
It's a psychological warfare game to try to split the Taliban and make them not trust each other and whatever.
Now I find out there were talks going on, and it was with a guy who, they say in this New York Times article, left with giant, probably, pallets full of cash money.
But it wasn't even the Taliban figure they thought that they were dealing with.
It's like Alice in Wonderland going on over here.
It's really unbelievable.
Oh, yeah, one more thing.
At the same time, they're announcing that, yeah, we're not trying to get out.
We're going to stay until 2015, at the least.
Well, I mean, part of the problem is we're assuming that they actually know what they want to do.
Or there's some sort of strategic coherence, which doesn't appear to be the case.
They give out different messages every couple of weeks, 2011, 2014, that they're negotiating, they're not negotiating.
I think different elements of the government have different points of view on all this, and nobody's really come together with one unified strategy.
And that really is clear in what we're seeing.
Well, yeah, but what about our great leader, David Petraeus?
Well, I think Petraeus came into Afghanistan trying to replicate what he was doing in Iraq, and I think he's seen very quickly that it's a very different place.
And so, very early on, by August or September, he completely shifted course, and he did away with some of the finer points of counterinsurgency doctrine that they were playing up all this time when he was coming in, sort of did away with that, did away with saying that we are never going to negotiate with anybody in the Taliban, completely reversed course, and started saying, now we're going to negotiate, now we're going to use more strong men and not concern ourselves so much with coin strategy.
And then again, two, three weeks later, switching course once more.
So now it's back to the clear hold and build.
That had gone away, but now it's back to the counterinsurgency doctrine?
At least in their message.
In practice, they've been doing very much the same thing, but the way they're trying to message it has been changing a lot.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, because it seems like it's either got to be stupidity or the plan, one or the other, and I guess it's got to be maybe a little bit of both in there too, but maybe the plan is to be stupid and to just keep the thing going forever, and it doesn't matter that they don't know how to work anything out there, because they don't want to work anything out there.
They want to stay and kill people, blow things up and spend money.
Well, at least that's a plan there.
Add flags to their little lapels, you know?
Right.
I mean, well, I don't know.
I'm sorry to kind of put it to you that way.
You can make up a third or fourth choice if you want or something, but doesn't it seem strange that the war be fought in such an incompetent manner?
I mean, it doesn't sound like you're differentiating when you're saying they're very confused about what they're telling us their plan is versus what they think their plan is.
Is it possible that stupidity is the plan here, do you think?
I think stupidity is, but beyond that- I mean, they call it the long war.
It sounds like that's right.
They want to make sure it is one.
Well, I mean, I don't want to say that anybody is smarter than they are.
There's certainly a lot of stupidity to go around, I think, but beyond that, there is certain political points of view from the very beginning, I think, that have been problematic.
One is seeing that the Taliban represent a national security problem, or a problem here in the United States, and then pulling from that over the last 10 years, we've been enabling people on the ground that have been going after real or imagined Taliban and causing all sorts of problems and really causing the insurgency.
And that fundamental point of view hasn't changed since the beginning, and I think that's sort of underlining all of this that's been happening.
Well, you know, I think there've been reports, right, that back in 2001, some of the old CIA hands from Afghanistan in the 1980s came and said, hey, look, here's what you want to do.
You want to go after al-Qaeda and ignore the rest of Afghanistan.
You don't want to get bogged down here.
And their advice was ignored, and instead they went ahead and focused on regime change.
We may have spoken about this before, in fact.
I was reminded by an old Justin Romano article, Kill Him and Get Out.
He talks about how Colin Powell had said publicly at a State Department conference that, no, we're not interested in who rules Kabul.
We're interested in getting the Arab-Afghan friends of Osama and getting the hell out of here.
And then Paul Wolfowitz contradicted him the next day.
And that was in November of 2001, nine years ago.
That's right, yeah.
They were pretty vigorous debates very early on, but I think by the end, certainly by the fall of Kabul in early November, the fate was sealed, and that wing of Washington that wanted to push ahead and have a full-scale invasion won out.
And we're still seeing the consequences of that today.
Well, I mean, the fact that it was Colin Powell taking that stand would show how mainstream that position ought to be or is available to be.
You don't have to be Mr. Anti-War Radio to say it's none of our business who rules Afghanistan.
That was the point of view of Mr. Establishment himself.
Right, exactly.
And I think there's still some people in the establishment who think that, but now they feel they're stuck and can't find a safe-saving way out.
You know, I saw a poll the other day, and when we get back from this break, I wanna go back in history and talk about your new article here, but I saw a thing the other day.
So they did a survey in Afghanistan.
92% of people in Afghanistan have never even heard of 9-11.
They have no idea why the United States is waging a war against their country.
Well, that doesn't surprise me.
I mean, most people think, in Afghanistan, if you talk to them, most people think that the Americans are there to steal resources or to conquer the country and set up bases permanently or whatever other reasons.
The link to 9-11 is lost upon most Afghans.
Yeah, I mean, not even knowing that that's the excuse for building permanent bases has gotta be frustrating.
You know, I don't know.
I'm trying to think if the Afghan superpower military had military bases in my county where I live, how I would feel about that and not even, you know, I'd like to know at least what their excuse they were telling the people back home was or something.
You know, I don't know.
And that is what's going on, too, right?
The building of massive new bases from hither to yon all across that country.
All across the country.
It's gonna be there for a while.
A long time.
All right, well, now, we'll get back to the history of how some of this began again when we get back from this break with Anand Gopal, he's got one.
It's called Missed Opportunities in Kandahar.
It's at afpac.foreignpolicy.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up anti-war radio for the day.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm on the line with Anand Gopal.
He's a journalist, covers Afghanistan.
He's written for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor.
He's got one called Missed Opportunities in Kandahar at foreignpolicy.com, afpac.foreignpolicy.com, in fact.
And before we get to that, I wanna rewind a little bit further in time.
This is a historical article about the very beginning of the war.
But I wanted to ask you about before the war.
And Ron Paul was on the show earlier today and he said that the purpose of the September 11th attack and Al-Qaeda attacks on America before that was to lure us into war in Afghanistan in order to bankrupt our empire and destroy us and to make us create a police state at home.
And that Osama Bin Laden is probably sitting there laughing at what we're doing to ourselves with the TSA and the Homeland Security and the rest of this madness.
Is he right about that?
You know, there was a letter that was written from Bin Laden to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, right after the bombing started in 2001.
And the essence of the letter was, well, you know, I know this looks really bad right now, but just bear with me, give me 10 years or so.
The Americans are gonna be drawn in here.
They're gonna be stuck here spending millions of dollars.
It's gonna bankrupt the empire and the Islamic resistance will be victorious.
So that was Bin Laden's vision at least after 2001.
It's probably something similar before too.
Well, you know, I was actually talking with Dr. Paul about the fact that Bin Laden's son gave an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine just a couple of months back.
And he's sitting in a nightclub in Damascus with his girlfriend talking to this Rolling Stone reporter.
And he says, yeah, my father's dream was to attack the United States, to humiliate them and lure them into Afghanistan so that they would be bogged down and bled to death just like the Soviet Union.
So I thought that was pretty telling.
This was his son who, you know, is very unhappy with the path his father's taken apparently.
But he's saying that's just the fact, Jack.
I heard him say it.
Right, and he lived in Afghanistan with his father for a couple of years, so he would know.
Yeah.
All right, so I guess, would then you agree with Dr. Paul that this is basically what's going on now is exactly what they had hoped for?
And are we really giving ourselves our own Vietnam again just like we were giving the Soviets in the 1980s?
I think so.
The problem right now is that people don't know how to get out, right?
Which is a classic case of a quagmire where we're stuck here, pulling out would cause problems for some people in the establishment, but staying there will cause a whole host of other problems.
And so we're kind of sort of just waddling through it.
Well, so what if we just left?
Would that be much worse?
How would you advise getting out?
I guess is the better question.
I think we should look toward the political settlement and pulling to the South.
All right, well, and now that goes back to your article that's at foreignpolicy.com, which is basically, I think, that we could have had a political settlement all along.
That's right.
Right after 2001, after the fall of the Taliban government, many of the senior leaders of the Taliban, and these are people who are today leading the insurgency, they had come and surrendered to Khamenei Karzai and to the Americans.
Basically just saying that they agreed to put their weapons down, accept the constitution, or accept Afghan government's rule and live at home.
But what ended up happening is that there was a pretty vicious campaign of reprisals against them.
There were special forces raids, militia men going and capturing them and torturing them, et cetera.
And so one by one, they started fleeing back into Pakistan and then began to regroup and reorganize the insurgency.
I noticed that Haqqani was on here and he and his son are among America's main enemies in Afghanistan right now.
Are there other household names on this list of, these are really the leaders of the insurgency this whole time against us?
Are the same people who signed this thing saying, we surrender to you, basically we'll work with you?
These are the very same people.
In fact, the New York Times article today mentioned the person who was impersonating the Taliban leader, well, that actual leader who was being impersonated, he himself had surrendered back in 2001 and was living at home until about 2003, until he fled back.
So the biggest people, the people who are actually running this thing are the ones who had surrendered.
Well, am I right that the people of Afghanistan, you know, the Taliban basically came from the refugee camps in Pakistan and directed by Pakistani intelligence.
They're not really kind of a grassroots, you know, bottom-up government of the Pashtun tribesmen, really other than the fact that they're the only organized fighting force, you know, fighting back against the Americans, right?
So I wonder if we left, would Haqqani and those guys necessarily take power or would not the, you know, traditional leaders of the Pashtun tribes work out their own new government, at least for their part of Afghanistan?
Well, the problem is a lot of the traditional tribal structures have been eroded so much over the last 30 years of war that there's really not that many other alternatives in the Pashtun areas to the Taliban.
So I think once we leave, at least in the Pashtun areas, most Muslims in the Taliban would very quickly take power.
Outside of the Pashtun areas, you have a different group of warlords and strongmen and other people who would take power.
Well, now, this guy, General Dostum, he's now the Secretary of Defense or whatever they call it in the Karzai government, right?
Maybe the Chief of Staff of the Army, which is largely a ceremonial title.
Okay, so he doesn't have much real power or does he?
No, he doesn't.
Nowadays, Karzai and the clique of people right around him are the ones that have the most power.
I mean, through his relatives and through his close advisors, he's been able to very expertly maneuver so that he's pushed out a lot of the old warlords like Dostum and others who had some power in the early years.
Well, so that's good, at least.
He's been co-opted rather than brought on board, you're saying?
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
I mean, now Dostum needs somebody like Karzai to survive because Karzai is the real, is really the most powerful person in the government.
And now you talked before about how the message and the policy are so muddled as to whether we're trying to do this counterinsurgency strategy, which after all is based on like a 30-year plan or something, I think, or whether we're doing a short-term counterinsurgency strategy while at the same time, we're gonna do a bunch of targeted killings and take out the Taliban, weaken the Taliban leadership until then we'll bring them to the table in a few years, maybe something like that.
But then the centerpiece this whole year, there really been two, I guess, first the campaign in Marjah and then now the re-invasion of Kandahar.
These were the set pieces of the counterinsurgency strategy.
And now that we're almost wrapping up 2010 here, can you tell us whether either of them have worked out at all?
I mean, Marjah was the small one, Kandahar's the big test case.
Can they clear hold and build?
Are they clear holding and building in Kandahar?
Kandahar is an interesting case because the idea was to use counterinsurgency strategies, which means trying to win over the population, bring good governance, bring security.
Instead, what's happened is this invasion or this offensive that's taken place in the last two months, they've relied on some local strongmen.
In particular, one border police commander who's very notorious for abuse, whose actions have pushed a lot of people in the past towards the insurgency.
They're actually using him to go in clear areas.
There's also all sorts of stories coming out of the areas in which they've cleared.
They've been razing houses.
They've been enacting collective punishment upon villages.
It's really a stark departure from protecting the population or bringing good governance.
It's just the opposite.
So they're just saying, I think a lot of it's just talking about things like counterinsurgency, but in practice, it's very much old school military offenses that have the possibility of really upsetting or disillusioning a lot of people, a lot of Afghans.
Tell me more about this collective punishment against entire villages.
There were stories that came out in some villages in Kandahar where Afghan army and U.S. troops had gone in and somebody had thrown a grenade at the troops, and so they went and rounded up every male in the village.
These sorts of stories.
As I mentioned before, there's also stories of them just razing houses across the board because they're not sure if these houses are booby trapped or not.
So they're destroying the houses and then asking the people who live in the houses to go and get compensation.
Well, according to General McChrystal, before he left, his insurgent math, he called it, for every one we kill, we create 10 more.
Is that right?
Is that the path we're on?
That's right.
All right, well, there you have it, everybody.
From Anand Gopal.
You can find him at foreignpolicy.com and anandgopal.com.
We'll see you all tomorrow.
Thanks very much for your time.
No problem.
