All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're now joined on the phone by Anand Gopal.
He's an investigative reporter, covers the Afghanistan and Pakistan wars, has written for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.
He has a piece at, I'm sorry, his website, I mean to say, is anandgopal.com.
Welcome back to the show, Anand.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'll tell you, I was reading last night this new piece in the Washington Post, this new Senate report, Afghan Nation Building Programs Not Sustainable.
And I immediately thought of you.
And I think a conversation that we had before on the show about building up an Afghan government under the American occupation that can't possibly exist without us, a gigantic investment bubble in the building up of a giant army, at least an attempt to build up a giant army that the nation-state of Afghanistan could never pay for.
Yeah, and I'm really glad to see that they're coming around to this, although that it's taken ten years for them to figure this out is a little worrying.
But the report mentions that what we've essentially done in Afghanistan is create a conflict economy where we've incentivized certain behaviors which perpetuate insecurity, meaning we're paying warlords and commanders, we're paying off government officials and requiring massive amounts of money to be pumped into the Afghan government system for it to stay afloat.
The moment that money stops, then everything sort of collapses.
And so this is the real problem that's going to come down the line.
Well, now, of course, in the Washington Post and among the warlords of Washington, the lesson here is obvious.
We have to stay until at least 2017 when they'll be able to stand up and we can stand down and yada yada.
So just push back all the timelines.
They're not ready yet is the only conclusion to be drawn here.
Right.
And of course, with this sort of reasoning, one can say that you're never going to be ready because there's certain structural problems with what we're doing there.
And that doesn't seem to have changed or will change any time in the future.
So I think with that kind of logic, we're just going to be stuck there for a very long time.
You know, I think since I don't know why not, let's celebrate we're halfway through the year 2011.
Once you kind of start over and give us a good who's who, who's fighting who and who's supporting who in the north and the south and the east and the west and the border.
And what the heck is going on over there?
There's probably a lot of people who've fallen quite out of touch with the Afghanistan war over the years, but they want to know.
Well, broadly speaking, there's insurgency that's now in most of the country that this is the Taliban reconstituted Taliban movement, which is fighting against U.S. troops and its allies.
But alongside that, there are other insurgent groups that have popped up in the last 10 years.
They're also fighting against the U.S. And then at the same time, there are a number of warlords and militias and commanders that are allied to the U.S. that are supposed to be at least fighting against the Taliban in this war.
So there's a lot of different actors, a lot of different people with guns.
The war is becoming more and more violent every year.
It's more violent than the year before.
And it looks like that trend is going to continue this summer as well.
I read this article by Graham Smith in the Globe and Mail, the Globe and Mail dot com, wedded to the warlords, NATO's unholy Afghan alliance.
And these guys seems like more than any State Department official could keep track of who all these guys are anyway.
But they're talking all about first and second generation warlords.
And some of them go back to fighting on the side of the communists and some of them to fighting for Massoud, who turns out was KGB, whether they knew it or not.
And and on and on and how it's all about, you know, the American NATO game of trying to figure out which are the best warlords to back in which regions.
Just because the only short term goal they can even put their sights on at all is a modicum of security.
And they hope that if they can get one really strong gangster in charge of a certain district, that they'll be able to at least have law and order for their maybe limit Taliban influence in in one little area at a time.
That's still where they're at.
Is it 2002 over there or something?
Well, that's right.
And that's what they're trying to do.
Find that strong man who can keep a lid on things for the time being.
Now, this is actually very similar to what the Russians did towards the end of their stay, is that they armed warlords and militias with the same idea of trying to beat back their insurgency.
And what happened is once the Russians left, they had militarized society to such a point that you just had a bunch of armed factions running around.
And it led to civil war.
There's a real concern amongst Afghans today that this sort of thing could happen again, that the longer the U.S. stays there and continue these policies, the more likely they're making the prospect of a civil war.
Well, now, and I don't want to oversimplify it, so make it more complicated for me.
But is it not right that a lot of this breaks down to the old northern alliance of the Hazaras and Uzbeks and Tajiks as versus the Pashtuns and America's just switched sides in the war since the 1980s?
Well, there's some of that, particularly in the north, where you have much more of an ethnic melting pot.
But if you go to the south, it's not necessarily that, because there's no northern alliance down there, of course.
There it's more of a tribal thing.
There's tribes connected to President Karzai that the U.S. has worked with since 2001.
And then there's tribes that have sort of been left out of the resources and left out of the access to government, and those are the ones who are more likely to side with the Taliban.
And so the conflict takes on that dynamic down in the south.
But in the north, yeah, a lot of the old northern alliance networks are still active, and they're still the ones that we're largely allied to.
Did you know Salim Shahzad?
I did, yeah.
I was very disappointed and saddened to hear about his death.
And is it as simple as it seems that he told Human Rights Watch, hey, listen, ISI threatened to kill me, and so if I end up dead, they were the ones who did it, and then he ended up dead a couple of days later, tortured to death, apparently?
Well, I mean, you know as much as I do in this case, but, I mean, I would not be surprised if it was the ISI.
It sort of fits their MO.
His last article at the Asia Times was about al-Qaeda infiltrating the Navy, and then the Pakistani Navy officers, higher-ups, had clamped down, and al-Qaeda apparently was strong enough to take revenge and target them.
They were trying to move their captives that they had clamped down on to different locations, and al-Qaeda had sent them threatening messages and attacked a base in an attack that lasted all day long.
It was a huge humiliation for the government over there.
And then the article promised part two about the training of these guys coming up next, and then he never wrote again.
Yeah, and you know, he's been writing these sorts of things for years, and he had been kidnapped by the ISI before, and I think it's possibly just the straw that broke the camel's back in this case, but they had it out for him for a while, I think.
Yeah, well, he seemed to be a hell of a good reporter.
I interviewed him the one time, I think.
I should go back and check and at least go back and listen to that one.
I always meant to have him back on, especially after the death of Osama bin Laden.
I couldn't wait to hear what he had to say about that, but I never got around to it in time.
Well, what do you have to say about that?
Do you think that, well, I don't even want to narrow it down any more than that.
What do you think about the death of Osama bin Laden, where we go from here, maybe?
Well, you know, I was in Afghanistan when the news came out that bin Laden was killed, and a number of people were calling me and asking me what the reaction was in Afghanistan.
And it was remarkable because most people really didn't care, because there was a sense in Afghanistan that bin Laden and his kids had really nothing to do with the war in Afghanistan, that the war there was very much a local thing.
It was locals fighting against foreigners.
It had nothing to do with the sort of global jihad that bin Laden and al-Qaeda people talk about.
So it's something that's, I think, useful to keep in mind when we talk about the war in Afghanistan, that how little this has to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.
Yeah, well, he sure did spend a long time in Pakistan, so it would seem on the surface they got a point.
So what else did you learn when you were there in Afghanistan last?
Well, I was there last month and went partly because I heard a lot of good news stories coming out about how the war is going and how the Taliban is being beaten back, and it doesn't necessarily seem to be the case.
There's still a lot of violence.
When I was there, there were a pretty high level of attacks, and it looks like they're really gearing up to have a major push this summer, the Taliban is, that is, have a major push this summer for a lot of violence.
Well, I mean, I've got to say it makes sense on the face of it that, yes, for the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps to go find targets and put fire on them, they can do that.
Well, it seems possible that they could deliver such a shellacking to the bad guys that then they're in a good position to force them to come to our terms and all those kinds of things, like in the fantasy of the Pentagon, right?
No?
Is it too far-fetched?
Well, no, it's possible militarily, and they've been able to do that to an extent in certain places.
The problem, of course, is politically.
You know, you can push out the Taliban from an area, but the conditions which gave rise to the Taliban are still in place, you know, the warlords, the corruption, all of that.
And so what, instead, you end up having is the Taliban maybe get pushed out of an area for a while, then they just come back to what the U.S. forces refer to as whack-a-mole, and that's what we've seen in the last few years.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I'm just reading about how, well, they're tearing up the counterinsurgency doctrine.
This is Tacoma News Tribune.
Army training shifts from counterinsurgency warfare, and basically, yeah, nuts to all that.
And so here they're fighting an insurgency, but they're going back to, I guess, French World War I tactics, you know, take it French and defend it or something.
Well, in some cases, they're even raiding villages, especially six months ago in Kandahar, a number of villages they couldn't find an effective way to push the Taliban out, so they just leveled the whole villages.
What about all the complicated involvement of the Pakistani government?
Because I guess, you know, best I understand, they wage a civil war in their country against the Pakistani Taliban, which they fear anyway, but mostly because we want them to.
But then they really do a lot to support, apparently, or at least some parts of their government do a lot to support various insurgents against, various insurgent groups against the American occupation of Afghanistan.
Is that really even right?
And if so, why?
And what's going on?
Well, it's complicated because you do have the Pakistani Taliban who are in Pakistan and are generally fighting against the Pakistani state.
But you have to view them as Taliban who have kind of spun out of control of Islamabad, of the government, and are now doing their own thing.
And so Pakistan is very much interested in fighting them and using U.S. help to fight them as well.
But in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban are very different.
They're seen by the Pakistani elite as a safeguard of their interests in Afghanistan.
One of the things Pakistan's been worried about is having India have too much influence in Afghanistan.
It's also worried, to an extent, about Iran and Russia.
And so it views the Taliban as a way to safeguard against that.
Well, you know, I talked to a counterpuncher, actually, a former Pakistani general, and I think that's his name.
And anyway, he was saying, oh, come on, the Indians in Afghanistan, whether without the Americans or anybody else, they have no chance of having dominant influence in that country, now or ever.
So that that wasn't even one of their strategic worries at all, that that was overblown, he thought.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I think if you talk to a lot of these guys in the military who are there right now, they often bring up, for example, Indian consulates and embassies and how close Karzai is or at least was to the Indians.
Now, it may not be, their response may not be justified in terms of the level of involvement India has, but I think in their minds, their biggest fear is to see Afghanistan sort of come under the orbit of India and in doing so lose what they call strategic depth, which is what they consider Afghanistan to be.
Now, kind of back to the original point here about all the aid, all the money flowing into the country, is that, well, James Bovard has an article at Barron's online, and it's about, he's got one good quote in here about the veracity effect, where the more aid you put in, the more corrupt Afghanistan gets.
It's already the most corrupt country, you know, that side of the United States of America anyway, and the more money we put in there, the worse and worse it all gets, really.
This is absolutely right, and I think this is the main point to understand in terms of aid, is that the problem isn't that there's not been enough, but there's been too much money that's been poured into the country.
I mean, you have a country that's desperately poor and doesn't really have the capacity to absorb this kind of money, these large amounts of cash, and when you're going in there with that money, you're creating new power brokers, you're creating incentives to cheat the system, you're creating corruption, all of that, and that's what we've seen.
Because in Afghanistan, even before 2001, I mean, the corruption that we see now wasn't really there.
I mean, you would have your sort of run-of-the-mill corruption like you see anywhere else, but the scale of corruption that we see today is really because of a product of the last 10 years.
Yeah, well, so is there anything to be done about it?
I'm trying to remember who it was I interviewed recently talked about pulling the knife out of the wound.
There's going to be blood, but what other choice do we have?
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, the only thing that can be done is stop spending that kind of money, but you can't really do that if you have all those troops there.
So I think it would require also bringing troops out and having some sort of political settlement, or at least trying to have a political settlement alongside that.
Well, but now what would that entail, really?
To start with, I think talking to the Taliban, also trying to talk to Pakistan, talking to some of the other groups in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance, and moving from there.
And now, what's your assessment of what's going on inside the Pentagon and the White House about the deadline that's supposed to be the beginning of the end of the occupation is to start next month.
Of course, there's a lot of talk the other way as well.
Do you think that they at least share your understanding of the situation, if not your solution?
I think there are some, but there are certainly others who would disagree, particularly in the Pentagon side.
There are those who think that we need to stay the course and not pull out too many troops in July, really give a beating to the Taliban, and then start thinking about it, where there are others who are saying that, you know, we've had enough time to do that, and now we have to really start pushing forward.
There are talks now that have started between the U.S. and the Taliban.
They just met one of Willa Omar's representatives in Germany a couple of times in the last month.
So things are starting on that front, but I think my sense is it's still very divided up in Washington.
I guess it's up to us then.
Good old public pressure from the anti-war movement will make them change.
It has to.
Yeah, it seems to be the only thing historically that we can point to, so I think you're right.
Yeah, well, it's too bad it's the times that it is, because it's definitely hard going.
Although I guess you saw not just the controversy over the Libya resolutions in the Congress, but there was a get-out-of-Afghanistan resolution the Congress failed by only a handful of votes two weeks ago.
That's right, and you can imagine what that would have been like if there was an anti-war movement, if there was some pressure on the streets.
Right.
Yeah, it seems like maybe they're teetering, and all we've got to do is push them a little bit.
Right.
Sure would be nice, especially, it's interesting to note, it's like a 50-50 split in each party, too.
So you've got half of each party's for staying in the chorus, and half of each party's ready to call it quits.
Yeah, it's in the sense I get, too, when talking to people in D.C., that there is really a deep, deep split, and it's pretty even in terms of who wants to stay and go.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show as always, Zainon.
My pleasure.
All right, everybody, that's Anon Gopal, writes for the Christian Science Monitor from time to time, and you can also find his website, anongopal.com.
