Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and the first guest on our show today is Anand Gopal.
Everybody, Anand Gopal is a freelance journalist.
He's covered the Afghan war for the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Tom Dispatch, a number of other outlets.
His website is anandgopal.com and you may have heard him here on the show in the past.
I learned from the first time I talked to him that, wow, this guy really knows what he's talking about and that makes him a lot different than me.
I've never even been to Afghanistan, I hope to never go to Afghanistan.
I don't really want to know that much about it, but I sure like asking about it from people who are willing to go and frankly risk their lives.
It's one of the most dangerous places on Earth still after almost a decade of occupation, Anand, isn't it?
Yeah, I would say that, especially for journalists as well.
A number of journalists have been killed recently.
Right, in fact, I think I read that 2010 was one of the worst years for journalists in quite some time.
Yeah, that's right, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
Alright, now, so I guess the most important thing that I want to understand is about the clear hold build strategy.
My only interest, obviously, and the interest of my listeners is how and when can we get out of Afghanistan, get our troops out of there.
And the generals say we have to basically fix Afghanistan before we can leave it.
As they stand up, we'll stand down and that might be a while.
The president, on the other hand, has said, although I guess he's been forced to back down on this, but he had said that July this year would be the beginning of the end of this thing.
It's always been some pretty big conflict, right?
One big nation building effort, but you only have 18 months to get it accomplished and then we're gone.
So, I guess I just kind of want to understand, well, I guess really whether the counterinsurgency strategy is working at all.
I mean, after all, the army does have a lot of guns that can kill lots of bad guys and whatever.
Are they making progress?
Can we leave on any timetable ever?
Is there a light at the end of this tunnel?
Well, I think if you look at counterinsurgency strategy as it's playing out in Afghanistan, it reminds me a bit about what they used to say about communism, that it works really nicely in theory, but not in practice.
And that's the case in Afghanistan with COIN, or counterinsurgency theory, because there's a whole robust set of theories or practices on how to apply counterinsurgency doctrine in a place like Afghanistan.
But when people actually get on the ground, they tend to throw all those theories out the window.
What we've seen, there was an offensive in Kandahar this past fall, a pretty major offensive.
And in that offensive, they pretty much threw out every major tenant of counterinsurgency, which had to do with winning hearts and minds.
So, for example, they've gone into villages and flattened whole villages.
There's a story on Tom Rick's blog on foreign policy that has a photograph, before and after, of a village in Kandahar.
And the village is completely flattened in the aftermath of the clearing part of the Clearhold build.
Oh, I didn't see that.
Did Tom Rick say, see, it's working?
Yeah, they do.
That is evidence that it's working, exactly.
But it's a startling picture, because the village is completely flattened.
It's a startling picture, because the village is completely wiped off the map.
And it really brings to mind the old Vietnam saying that they had to destroy the village to save it.
Right.
I was talking with Jason Ditz about this the other day, and he was saying, well, you know what, I think they haven't really done the Kandahar thing at all.
They've just been picking on the people in the villages around the outskirts.
But this Kandahar thing was supposed to be the, I guess you're saying, they've thrown coin out the window.
This is the proof of that.
They haven't even tried to clear hold and build Kandahar.
Am I right?
Yeah, they haven't tried it in the way that they talked about doing it, at least.
They have gone in there.
There has been a lot of fighting.
But what it has been is pretty much destroying villages or a lot of raids.
On the one hand, it has been effective in eliminating some of the Taliban presence.
So a lot of the Taliban field commanders and leadership on that level have actually fled to Pakistan because of the pressure, the military pressure.
But on the other hand, it's also, I think, upsetting a lot of the locals because it's causing a significant disruption in their daily lives.
It says here, Anand, well, his website is anandgopal.com.
It says here in this Gareth Porter piece, and I think he told me that you all are friends.
He says that you speak the Pashtun language, and I don't even know what it is.
Pashto or Pashtu, or what is it called?
Well, it's called Pashto.
I actually speak Farsi, which is the other major language in Afghanistan, and enough Pashto to get by.
Can you tell us how much time have you spent in Afghanistan and or Pakistan in the last decade?
I first got there at the end of 2007, and I've lived there pretty continuously since then until a couple of months ago.
All right, so now I guess I'm trying to get sort of a big-picture understanding here, for example, of the legitimacy of the government that we're trying to create there.
I mean, we can see in Iraq that the, well, at least the government that took shape during the occupation, if not the one Paul Bremer was exactly trying to create, has taken over there, and the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr say, yes, I will support this government, this parliament, this constitution, this system, and Nouri al-Maliki.
As prime minister for the time being, as long as he promises to stick by the timeline of kicking America out, etc.
But you could say, if you want to call it that, a success, that the government that was created during the American occupation is going to last apparently for a little while anyway, and I wonder if that's within the realm of possibility in Afghanistan, that they could even, you know, not necessarily with war, but by working out deals with the Taliban and maybe the Haqqani Network and whoever, whether they could create a government that really would be the government of that country.
Not that I'm saying that's what I want, but I'm just saying, you know, I'm looking for a way out of here, and if Petraeus can call a failure a victory and go, then that would be, I guess, good enough for me.
You know, I don't care what he calls it, if he'll go.
I think it's possible.
Everything depends on the details.
If there's a negotiated settlement between the various sides, the Taliban, Haqqani, the Afghan government, and the U.S., it's possible to cobble together some sort of agreement.
Of course, there's a lot of challenges there.
For example, Pakistan has to have a seat at the table.
They are a country that has interest in Afghanistan, and without acknowledging that, it'll be difficult.
But it is possible for that sort of thing to happen, if there's political will from Washington for that to happen.
Well, you know, that's really the crux of the thing.
I saw a thing the other day where General Petraeus is saying, hey, look, you know, we found these old men and we gave them a bunch of money, and they said that they would be against the Taliban for us.
See, we're making progress, and I thought, you've got to be kidding.
I mean, if that's his standard of it's really working, and he's willing to, you know, promote a little anecdote like that, as though something has changed on the ground there, then I wonder, you know, what kind of even intelligence, never mind political will, is behind the plan and the implementation of it.
I mean, does he even know what he's doing at all over there, this guy?
Well, especially in that example that you mentioned, where the Americans have cut the deal with this tribe in Helmand, and it turns out that the tribe that they've cut the deal with is only one of four or five tribes in this area.
And the other three or four tribes that aren't part of this deal are most likely going to turn even more towards the Taliban.
The deal that the Americans cut was with a tribe that had been in power in that area for a number of years, and it was their power and their abuse of their power which actually marginalized some of the other tribes and led them to turn towards the Taliban.
So even in trying to reach for a solution, they seem to be digging their own grave.
And now, the way Gareth Porter portrayed it was, well, we've got two choices.
We can either stay forever and clear hold and build, well, this is what he's saying, they're talking about in D.C., right?
We can clear hold and build and stay in Afghanistan forever, or we can go with more limited night raids and counter-terrorism operations.
But in that case, we have to invade Pakistan.
And these are the two policy options that we get to choose from in D.C. right now.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Anything other than that, I think, would be construed by people in the administration as a defeat.
So that's something they're trying to avoid at all costs.
But you don't hear the third option of actually negotiating and pulling troops out at all.
Well, now, how dangerous is all this messing around in Pakistan?
For years and years, we've been kind of having them fight a civil war in their own country and plus forcing them to turn a blind eye and let us have our troops and CIA and drone strikes inside their country.
And this has been going on for a long time.
Of course, there's big floods and a pretty weak political system over there anyway.
They just finished having a dictatorship a couple of years back.
And I wonder, you know, what kind of fire they're playing with as far as all this intervention in Pakistan and even the threats of more.
You know, it was in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago and everything about Petraeus pushing.
I don't know which doctrine he's signed on to now, but he wants to go further into Pakistan now.
Well, it's a tinderbox over there, and I think an argument could be made just as people say that Pakistan helps destabilize Afghanistan.
I think what's happening in Afghanistan and the war the U.S. is fighting is also destabilizing Pakistan.
And this is not just in the last few years, but going back in history, if you go back to the early 80s when we were funding the Mujahideen, the Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting against the Soviet Union, we were allied with Pakistan, with the secret services, the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, and helped promote some of the worst sort of offenders of human rights, some of the worst fundamentalists who are people who shaped the course of the next 20 or 30 years in Afghanistan and in Pakistan as well.
Eric Margulies has told me before that there's too much hype.
Any hype is too much hype about the danger of Pakistan nuclear weapons falling into the hands of people crazy enough to use them.
But there's one exception to that where it's possible that there could be a split inside the military, the real government of Pakistan, and if there's a real split inside the military, that that could really be the nuclear danger.
But he said, and this is a couple of years ago, I think he says we're getting closer and closer to that danger.
So I guess, first of all, do you accept that premise?
And second of all, are we really destabilizing Pakistan that much where you could have a fight in the military over who gets to, you know, these colonels versus those lieutenants or whatever the hell, which generals get to be in charge?
I agree with the premise that inherently the nukes are pretty stable unless there is some sort of split in the military.
I don't think that we're heading in that direction.
The military is still pretty unified.
There's some pressures there.
The more that the U.S. comes over and asks them to crack down on terrorists and insurgents within the border areas, that may cause some pressures within the military.
And it depends on what the U.S. does with the massive amount of aid that it's throwing at the military.
If they use that in a very blatantly political way to sort of split people in the establishment, that can cause problems.
But as it stands right now, I don't think we're there.
The Pakistani military is still pretty, or extraordinarily, unified.
Let me ask you this, Anand.
Where do you think Ayman al-Zawahiri is?
And does it even matter at all, or what?
I think he's in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the Pakistani side.
And I think it matters to the extent that he's seen as a figurehead for propaganda value.
The al-Qaeda isn't sort of a large or really even powerful organization, and it relies on people like bin Laden and Zawahiri being able to put out video messages, or put out messages on the Internet in which somebody in London or Germany or Morocco can download and use as part of their radicalization experience.
So in that extent, he's important.
But militarily speaking, I don't think he's important.
Right.
But just as a symbol there.
Propaganda value.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I wonder, you know, you look at all the damage that's been done inside Pakistan.
I mean, just damage to public opinion inside Pakistan.
Reading those polls is kind of scary to think about how the future is going to play out.
And it's funny, because you think back to 2001.
They said, well, you know, we didn't want to put too many boots on the ground there to chase after these guys when we had the chance, because, you know, it might have disrupted and angered the local tribesmen and whatever.
And so instead, we've had a decade of war against the tribesmen instead of the people that we were actually supposed to be chasing in the first place.
And I don't know.
Do you think anybody in the Pentagon even wants to get these guys?
Well, I'm sure people do.
I'm sure people do.
But there's a bit of mission creep now, and most of the concern is about the Taliban, which is a completely separate issue.
And so, you know, the effort on al-Qaeda is not the same.
But at the same time, I will say that al-Qaeda is pretty weak right now.
They're probably the weakest that they've been in the last nine or ten years.
They're not really a threat.
They're not that relevant either in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, because the reason I think that Bill Clinton told the Sudanese to kick bin Laden out and send him to Afghanistan was, I guess he was too much of a coward to just go ahead and have him killed, which is surprising, because he had so many other people killed.
But anyway, I mean, the point of sending him to Afghanistan was that he can't get to anybody from there.
That's no man's land.
You know, that's exile out there in Afghanistan.
The only reason they were able to do the 9-11 attack is because they got some grad students who had German visas and could get student visas to the United States to come and train here and everything else to do it.
There's nothing special about Afghanistan other than it's the least accessible place to get to North America.
Right?
Yeah, that's right.
And really, anything that they did there, they could do it just as well from Yemen or from the Pakistani borderlands.
There was talk in the 90s of when the Taliban were pretty upset about bin Laden, and they were trying to send him even to Chechnya to get him out of their hands.
So this stuff, it's a very diffuse network, and it's not something that necessarily needs Afghanistan to function.
Well, in fact, you know, I think you and I have talked about this a little bit on the show in the past, but I interviewed this guy, I'm sorry I can't remember his name anymore, but he wrote a piece about some documents that were released, I think Seton Hall or one of these universities, the graduate students did a Freedom of Information Act request, and they got all these documents about the State Department negotiations with the Taliban over bin Laden in the time leading up to the September 11th attack, the first nine months of the Bush administration, where the Taliban seemed pretty desperate to get rid of this guy before something really bad happened.
They were.
There were a lot of tensions between the two.
The Taliban really did not like bin Laden speaking to the media or acting out in any way.
They tried a number of times to work out a deal with the U.S. to see if they can have bin Laden have him exchanged.
A lot of it they were using bin Laden for leverage and trying to get international recognition or to get aid, and so it was a point of consternation amongst the Taliban government, but ultimately it was too late at the end.
All right, now, from time to time there are accusations that Iran is behind everything bad in the world.
Certainly any bad time we've ever had in Iraq or Afghanistan is because of them financing our enemies and arming them.
Is there any truth to the idea that the Iranian government is backing the Taliban or whichever insurgent groups against American forces, NATO forces there in Afghanistan?
There may be some support from Iran to insurgents in Afghanistan or even to other warlords, but I think it's pretty irrelevant in the long run.
If they stopped tomorrow, I don't think it would make a major difference.
So, I guess more specifically, the accusations have been that they've been providing bombs to be used against Americans to the Taliban.
Do you think that's right?
Well, we have to be careful here because a lot of weapons do come from Iran and Russia, but this is from the weapons block market.
It doesn't necessarily imply that it's the government itself that's doing it, and so there hasn't been a lot of evidence or there hasn't been a real smoking gun as far as I know that can say that the Iranian government has given this or that weapon or bomb to the Taliban.
But there is stuff coming through those channels, but again, I think this isn't a major concern.
I mean, Pakistan is really the force that's supporting the Taliban.
Well, and yeah, I was going to ask you earlier, and I spaced out and forgot.
Is there anything that America could do to convince the Pakistanis to make a deal with the Pakistanis against us in Afghanistan?
At the same time, they're letting us fight them in their own country.
Yes, I think if the U.S. changes policy towards India and perhaps gave Pakistan some concessions in Kashmir, which is what India and Pakistan have been fighting over for a number of years, that could perhaps pave the way for some sort of deal to be struck in Afghanistan.
So the Pakistanis might tolerate Karzai-style government in Afghanistan if the American relationship with India in the Afghan occupation were to change.
Is that it?
Or the relationship with India overall.
Because at the end of the day, what's happening in Afghanistan, I think you can trace it ultimately back to the conflict between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan views India as having gotten too much influence in the post-Taliban government.
And they would like to see that rolled back a bit.
And they also see the Americans, particularly over the last few years, tilting more and more towards Delhi's direction.
So I think it's possible to require a real key change in policy orientation in D.C., but it would be possible to at least give the Pakistanis some semblance that India is not going to be taking advantage of Afghanistan.
Right.
See, that's what I'm thinking is if George Bush and Obama have their nuclear deal with India and all these other things, if we left all that and just addressed Afghanistan and made a deal with the Pakistanis, we'll stop encouraging the Indians to ally with Karzai and help their inroads in Afghanistan.
Would that be enough?
Break that issue apart from the rest of Kashmir and other nuclear matters and whatever other relations with India?
It's hard to say, but at least I could say that would go very far in that direction.
That would be a serious move towards a peace settlement.
The thing I don't understand is it's been like this for years and years.
I mean, this is, to regular listeners, this is such a broken record story.
We've been talking about this specifically with Eric Margulies for, you know, I don't know, six, seven years or something like that on this show.
As long as America is encouraging the Indians to entrench themselves in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis are going to be financing the war against us in Afghanistan at the same time we're financing them and bribing them to let us fight inside their country.
It kind of seems like, you know, if a lowlife like me has his head around this, that the guys in the Pentagon must know what they're doing here and what a perfect way to just have a war forever.
Cool.
As long as we keep our chess pieces in this order, we can keep fighting forever.
And without having to risk, you know, a giant conflict with China or Russia or some great power that can actually fight back, we can just fight against people on the ground.
You think?
Well, yeah.
And there's also extraordinary tunnel vision when you're at the top.
So we can see things, I think, sometimes that they can't.
Yeah.
Well, that's really too bad.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show, Anand, as always.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Anand Gopal.
He's a freelance reporter.
He's written for the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, TomDispatch, ForeignPolicy.com.
