06/10/09 – Bill Kelsey – The Scott Horton Show

I'm happy to welcome back to the show my friend Bill Kelsey, he's a libertarian activist from Austin and is a relief pilot for, I guess we'll leave it unnamed, an international non-governmental organization and as a relief pilot he goes on adventures all over the old world and knows all kinds of different languages and different people and interesting things and so it's always my pleasure to catch back up with what's been going on.
Welcome back to the show Bill, how are you?
Oh I'm real good, real good, great to be back in Austin.
Well I wish I was there, give me a couple weeks.
Alright.
And maybe you'll be gone again by then.
I will.
Well that's too bad, but anyway I'm glad we get to talk on the show and I'm glad I'm going to get to go back to Austin soon.
Anyway that's a precise point.
So where have you been?
Well most recently I've been working in Algeria and I'm not actually with the same relief and development and humanitarian aid company that I was with.
I'm flying around the Sahara these days with doing nothing more than fly workers between oil rigs and oil refineries, but I had about an 11 year career flying in war zones in Sudan and Chad and Congo and took several trips to Afghanistan and that's what's on my mind right now.
Well and you grew up in Jordan right?
Yeah.
Until what age?
I was there until I was 15 and then I went back quite often.
I've worked as an adult in the Middle East and Bahrain and in Yemen and in Jordan itself for brief periods and so I stay in close touch with what's going on in the Middle East.
Okay now at what point did you first begin going into Afghanistan?
You were flying in what food aid and stuff?
Well I made four trips.
I was a chief pilot and one of my jobs was just to check out my pilots and make sure they're doing the job right and also just be a substitute.
So I had four trips that were four months each one was about a month and which isn't a very long time at all.
And this is when?
Like in 2001?
2006 and 2007.
Oh I see.
So what'd you learn there?
What do you know?
What do you think when you look at the newspaper saying that we're doubling down?
We're going to win that war after all?
Well I think some people are in for a disappointment and it could be the ungluing of the present administration and the terrible bankrupting of lots of people around the world.
Of course others will be made rich profiteering off the war.
It could really suck the blood out of the United States.
It could go on for a long time.
And I just I had some encounter with people who were involved with the opium eradication.
I was fortunate enough to be studying Farsi and Dari there and I saw a lot of the lifestyle of the contractors and the aid workers and the people that are going to develop.
You know there's a strong push from many quarters in the United States to send more people over to do development work and aid work.
And yeah you know we've been so horrified over the years Bill by the neocons and their absolute disregard for life in the name of protecting it but it's kind of at least you know helped me to forget how bad humanitarian do-gooders can be.
They can be really just as dangerous.
Unfortunately yes.
I mean people mean to do well and then they go out and start messing with things that they don't understand and all sorts of unanticipated consequences.
I mean even just within the development field itself.
I compiled a list of about 10 things for example the once in Sudan there was an NGO that heard that there were slaves still available in remote parts of the country and they thought well what better thing to do than to buy freedom for these slaves and they set up an organization to do that and the net result was to revive the slave trade.
And a lot of them were swindlers people who did this gathered up street Well you know it does seem doesn't it that you know Peace Corps types generally know nothing about economics.
So I read something not too long ago about one of these countries in Africa where they said oh you know what you people need is a bunch of vegetable oil and of course this is just a favor for a politically connected vegetable oil company here in America.
Archer Daniels Mellon or something gets to sell off some of their excess to the government and keep their prices high.
And then all they do is completely destroy the local market for these kinds of things and you know bankrupt people who are actually already in the vegetable oil business.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's a real tough one to figure out all of the ways in which things can come unglued and I'll get back to Afghanistan.
But another typical thing along what you're talking about is if there's famine and you dump a bunch of wheat in a country and it's to be given out for free.
It puts the local farmers out of business.
But I mean it's hard to compete with free food.
Right.
And then the state ends up getting all the aid anyway not the weakest people that it's supposedly meant for.
That's that's that's true.
A lot of the wheat will be sold by profiteers.
All right.
Now we get into Afghanistan here before we get too far into all the wonderful humanitarian goodness.
Tell me a little bit about the drug war.
You say you were you had a job ferrying around some of the guys who were involved in the opium eradication project.
I'm not even sure what all of the people we are ferrying around we're doing.
Some of them were honorable people and some were quite unsavory.
And I would I did live in a crew house with somebody on a subcontract with DynCorp who was setting up their communications.
And first thing I discovered which confirmed a suspicion they're very open about it.
And this could have changed but it's something for people to be asking about.
To the extent they were eradicating fields they were only eradicating certain ones.
They would be given assignments to eradicate this field but not that one.
And basically as much as you hear noise that the opium supports the Taliban.
Well it's supporting everybody.
It's supporting the National Police National Army.
And I wouldn't be surprised if five or 10 years from now when people start writing their memoirs you'll find that secret American units who needed quick cash were also involved as was the case in Laos during the Vietnam War and also with the Nicaraguan Contra.
Yeah it's sort of the flip side of the vegetable oil thing there.
Go around eradicating poppies and you just drive up the value of the fields that are that you know you're in business with.
Yeah.
And but the bigger thing on opium.
I was hearing a review on the radio recently.
Somebody wrote a book talking about how important it is to eradicate the opium so that we can stop all the funding for the Taliban.
It's backwards.
The opium exists because there's a war.
You don't end the war by getting rid of the opium when the war ends.
Then we will be in a position to deal with opium.
But when there's combat going on when people think they're unstable.
The nice thing about opium is that it's a low maintenance crop.
It's low maintenance and quick cash.
And except the time of the harvest when you're actually taking the sap out of the poppy you can leave it all all year and it doesn't need a lot of fertilizer doesn't need irrigation doesn't need pruning and so on and so forth.
So when a lot of the men are away fighting for one side or another or in hiding or mobile you can plant your field and leave it and come back.
You know there was news recently about a U.N. plan to they're going to seal the border.
They said they're going to stop any exporting and that way you know a little bit of understanding of supply and demand here.
Apparently their plan is to destroy the value of the opium by flooding the Afghan market with it.
And then that way it'll drive everybody out of the opium market and into the wheat market.
Yeah I did these things.
I think it would be like trying to tie a string around Jell-O to do something like that.
It's no I mean you can destroy one field or stop one one route here but get another close one door.
Good Lord will open another door and if they close the route into Pakistan it'll probably be a route into Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan.
There'll be a way.
Money speaks all languages and there's a lot of money involved with the with opium.
So the thing is it's always associated with oh this is the Taliban fundraising.
Well everybody people are growing it.
This is a you shake them down.
So sure the Taliban will tax it and get protection money but so will the Afghan police.
So will Afghan army units and probably so will anybody from the U.N. or DynCorp who's charged with eradicating it.
And the guy who was talking to me about the opium it was interesting because he had made peace with his own cynicism.
He said they're not eradicating opium and that we're protecting it for certain people.
There's a war going on.
I get paid lots of money and I don't expect that the war the people I'm with are going to win this.
But by then I will be gone with all my money.
And that was and I agreed with his analysis.
So I had a little problem with it.
Isn't it great when the truth just comes out in honest language like that.
It's it's rare.
It's few and far between.
My favorite is and I've seen this one a few times is American soldiers young American soldiers home from Iraq explaining to reporters you see we call them Haji's.
That way it's sort of like we can pretend they're not really human.
So it's OK to kill them.
Well you do need another word to call people that you want to kill.
Yeah.
But anyway I just like it when people come right out and say like hey look obviously this whole thing's a disaster but I'm cashing my taxpayer funded check my my opium money check and I'll be gone before the whole thing collapses.
Right.
You know the other thing that gets my hackles up when we discuss the opium is that OK heroin is a bad drug.
Let's list all of the reasons why it's bad.
So we can start up our little list of you get addicted to it.
It causes a lot of corruption and lots of people get killed in the long run.
And it messes up society.
OK.
Well it's terrible.
It's like inflation in the currency.
It completely destroys the body.
Yeah it's nasty.
So now let's talk about the weapons trade and the munitions trade.
You know I'm sorry.
A country that our nation a government that's involved in the biggest arms dealer around the world selling weapons.
And let's list a little bit of their people are addicted to war.
People spend lots of money on the water.
War kills a lot of people.
It messes things up so I'm I'm a little more concerned about the arms trade internationally than opium which at least has the benefit of killing the pain of a lot of disturbed people.
Right.
And you know that's the whole thing too is you can make a lot of different products out of poppies besides heroin.
This is true.
Yeah.
I mean Afghanistan could be the the medicine cabinet of the world there and have a prosperous above board open market in opium.
But I've been unsuccessful.
I've tried in trying to get an answer to one question though is I don't know how much of the international opium goes to licensed pharmaceuticals for regular medicine and I don't know how much goes to street addicts.
But and from that I don't know.
I mean if you were a factor if you were a drug factory in India if you were the owner of one.
In India and you were cranking out the the medicine and you had to buy licensed opium from either Turkey or France which are the two countries that are allowed to grow opium legally.
Let's say you have a price on them.
Then a pickup truck shows up in your parking lot with a nice load of opium at a much cheaper price that is not licensed.
You would have an incentive to buy that now.
I don't know.
Just think of all the different alternative pain medicines that have been come up with that are threatened by too much opium on the market as well.
Possibly.
Possibly.
I mean these are all questions for people who are better connected than myself to be asking or people whose field it is to look into it.
Yeah.
There's always the police employee unions and all kinds of things to take into account.
Yeah.
But anyway the main point I'd get across is that the huge opium harvest is a consequence of the war.
The war is not a consequence of the opium.
And for people to think they'll end the war by ending opium that that's not going to work.
Well now there's also been news recently that well one story was just the army just the funding for the army or the size of the Afghan army that's been created is you know 15 times the gross national product of Afghanistan.
Never mind you know whatever other parts of the government they've created.
The U.S. has is attempting to establish a state there that only the U.S. can continue to fund and keep in existence.
That is just not going to work.
It's just not couldn't possibly be sustainable by the efforts of the people of Afghanistan themselves that I would tend to agree.
I don't believe there's any oil that's been found in Afghanistan.
And the economy is very subsistence even without the war.
It's one of the poorest countries in the world.
I've flown all over it looking down at it from the sky.
I'm quite familiar with the geography at least in that regard.
And it's pretty barren.
And there are a few pockets there are oases here and there and just different pockets where you have a little bit of water and people are growing orchards for palm and pistachios and some fruits raisins and so on.
But it's not it's not a well-developed industry.
And I regret that fighting seems to be the most in war profiteering for me.
Mainstay of the economy now.
You know Naomi Klein has that book The Shock Doctrine about how the Republicans wanted to destroy Iraq basically raise the whole damn country to the ground so that then it'd be like a new frontier and they could build up the entire industry from the bottom up and make all the money kind of thing.
And all the government contracts welfare for rich Republican corporations that kind of thing.
It sort of seems like Afghanistan is the place where all the dreams can come true for State Department flunkies and social engineers and do-gooders of more liberal descriptions.
They get to have their own little nation building from the ground up project here.
Well there are.
I mean it appeals to a lot of psyches.
I mean I left a piece of my own heart there and I'd like to go back and I'm certainly engaged in Afghanistan and it inspired in me a desire to stay in touch.
Even here I keep studying the language.
Naomi Klein specifically I don't know but my response would be to any grand plans is that old expression when you're up to your butt in alligators it's hard to remember your original intention was to drain the swamp.
So whatever schemes the neocons have right now or had in the beginning for Afghanistan or whatever the original idea was to go in after the Taliban to root out al Qaeda it's fought for different reasons.
I mean there are people fighting against the Americans who had nothing to do with the Taliban but this is their isolated valley and all of a sudden some foreigners are there and what do the young men of the village do who have guns.
Well they're foreigners let's go shoot them.
They're foreigners with guns in our valley let's shoot them.
That has nothing to do with the dynamic between Taliban and the U.S. but now it's become more and more a certain part of the population mainly the Pakhtun population are defending their turf against foreign invaders.
It was about the drone strikes and about the guys sitting in these metal trailers in Nevada playing Nintendo like a George Carlin routine and they push a button and kill these people and they show it too.
They showed quite a few clips of people being blown apart with these high explosives falling from the sky and the qualification for the go ahead was well there's a man and he's got a gun in his hand and so go ahead and fire.
The guy pulling the trigger it's perfectly okay for him to murder whichever guy he's looking at from his little air droid there because the guy like the Milgram experiment is standing behind him and has more medals and says do it pull the trigger kill this guy and yet they have no idea who they're even killing.
You can tell in the clip they have no idea who they're killing.
They're like oh look a tribesman with a rifle somewhere you know in the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan he must be a bad guy.
Take his life.
Bland.
Simple as that.
Right.
I mean I suspect they do use some of this in combat.
It's instructive how far we've gone.
There was a time when soldiers had to face soldiers on the battlefield and then in order to save lives of our own soldiers particularly the latter half of the Vietnam War then instead of actually fighting to capture a village and losing soldiers lives he would bomb that village from the air.
Saving our own soldiers lives but killing a lot more civilians in the process and now it's evolved further where they don't want to risk the lives of pilots and so we use drones.
I had a drone come up and check me out in the air it was rather spooky to see this thing fly with no pilot in it.
And now there's a backlash against that.
There is one woman who Sarah Chase who is very well informed on Afghanistan has had more years there than I've had months there speaks Pakhto very well and knows very much about the politics of the country.
She's the former NPR reporter right?
Yeah.
I disagree with her but I have to respect the quality of what she did in Afghanistan.
She really wants to be one of the people who fix it in a grand way.
She has the ear of President Obama and she talks to Karzai and works with Karzai's brother so she's a big player on the scene.
She is urging because of her angst about the drones that you mentioned she would like more soldiers to come in because she thinks she agrees that these drones are causing a lot of damage.
Well hey that's both sides of the argument what do you want?
So she would like soldiers to come in so they can be more discreet and prevent us from having to use so many drones and having misunderstandings with long range artillery or airstrikes.
I'm sorry for interrupting go ahead.
No I'm just saying that there will be a push now for more and more humanitarian because there are a lot of people involved in sincerely intending to do good things for Afghanistan and people who are not evil are lending their names.
Sometimes even people who might have demonstrated against the Iraq war people who might have been traditionally anti-war folks and social liberals and so on they feel that they're really doing a good thing in Afghanistan if we can do some social engineering backed up with a few bombs and guns and change the society for the better and meanwhile send in lots of humanitarian aid.
Well you can see why the frame of the narrative of the Afghan war is so powerful because obviously I mean I don't think anybody really would argue that the Taliban were some pretty medieval characters they might have brought more peace and security to the country than anybody had in a while or whatever but they'd throw a woman down a well if she broke their moral codes and whatever too.
It's a pretty backward society that you know Western values you know I guess in the 1990s they were trying to do business with them whatever but anyway you can see why the liberals the liberal social engineer types are saying well listen the people that we've got in power are far more educated and they're more interested in the rights of women I don't know if that's really true but that's you know at least the claim that these you know little boys can fly kites again and people can go to the movies again.
And UN employees can get all the coke and whores they want and cobble and it's great it's becoming a free society and that if we abandon the good westernized people we put in power there then the terrible medieval people will come and take back over again you know.
There is that fear and it's a very powerful argument.
Now what I would say myself is that okay on social engineering if you look at the changes that have happened in the United States or just in the west in the last 50 years in terms of women's status and in men and women trying to figure out what each other want and what legal rights are and what etiquette should be and what the woman's duties in the house should be and so forth.
I mean we're working on these in our own society.
It's complex it's not easy and it's something that gets transformed over many decades.
To drop bombs I mean let's say women were not pleased here in the states with the way they're getting treated by men to have foreigners blow the village up isn't exactly the most sophisticated way to change people's lives.
It changes people's attitudes and so what I see happening is even though there have been advances for women's emancipation in the big cities or wherever there is a Kabul government control or warlord control in places like Herat or Mazar-e-Sharif when the United States goes or leaves eventually there could be a backlash.
I mean if women are given their emancipation on the backs of American tanks when those American tanks leave it could be worse for them than before.
I think in my own analysis it would be much better for slow gradual evolutionary transformation.
Give scholarships to Afghan women and men but engage them with the world not be engaged in combat with them.
So what you're saying really is the means are making the proclaimed ends impossible.
You can't bring people freedom by killing them.
Now here's the thing though isn't that just all smokescreen and don't the people running this occupation understand the country at least as well as you and know good and well that they're never going to make this land the size of Texas into some wonderful the new Nevada on earth or something under American control.
You take it from the Indians who used to own it.
They've got to know that that isn't going to work that the best they can do is have a low level perpetual war against those people as long as the Americans are still willing to or I guess as long as the Chinese are still willing to loan us money to keep our troops there.
There's a variety of motivations.
Like I say there's a huge number of people that are there just as war profiteers and including some of the people that are involved in development and some of the people involved in development work I believe are very sincere.
I mean if people are really really dedicated to changing Afghanistan they need to be willing to go there on salaries that are a fraction of what they're getting now.
I mean the salaries are just humongous.
I mean $100 a day for consultants who go in and stay there for a few months and then leave and then somebody else gets to come in and make their small fortune.
They write a few reports and spreadsheets and email them to each other and come up with some designs, spend some money, hire a subcontractor, hire another consultant to give advice to another subcontractor and this money just floats around and very little of it actually gets to the Afghan people.
So all these contractors they need to live in the ones that are affiliated with the U.S. idea of economic development.
They live in huge compounds, big walls, barbed wire, okay they have to be protected from whatever's going on outside and then they need to have satellite TV, they need to live in a house where each bedroom has a bathroom, a complete bathroom.
So it's just high luxury and you don't have to be a Marxist or anything to say wait a minute there's a problem with impoverished people having to work with overpaid Americans.
The price of one of these things of water is more than the average Afghan earns in a day or two and so just from starting with drinking water the Americans are disconnected from the, they're not even involved in getting water the way Afghans get it and then having to either drink it with whatever's in the water or they have to pay for it.
They have to try to filter it and boil it themselves and what else if they go out in the field.
So it's basically like the British in India.
This is simply a colonial exercise and I mean the veneer of Sarah Chase and all the do-gooders is looking pretty thin at this point.
No somebody like Sarah Chase I would say she's in the category of people that actually move around and live close to the people and so on but the majority are people who live in these compounds who get paid lots of money and then when they go out on any of their work they have to, quite often they have to go in armored cars, they have to have protection.
They are surrounded by various mercenaries who panic if they get stuck in a traffic jam or something and generally act obnoxious with the locals if other cars get too close and start flashing their lights and pointing rifles and so on at any cars that get too close.
So it's not a situation that lends itself to easy work and like I say they leave.
I mean if you want the people who are going to transform the society there's one fellow who wrote a book Three Cups of Tea and he's been building schools around the Pakistan, some wild areas of Pakistan and it's part of a movement that's not dependent on U.S. government aid and there are people from other countries who go in and the aid should be engaging with the Taliban.
It's couched in the phrase of let's do this so that we can defeat the Taliban, let's set up a school so that we can defeat the Taliban, let's drill a well so that we can undermine the Taliban.
Well whenever you talk like that you're setting yourself up as a target when you're saying that your aid and your development is just part of the war effort so that we can outwit them.
The people who are really doing good work are the ones, well Doctors Without Borders was doing good work there, they would just treat everybody and they would engage with the Taliban in a positive way, well I shouldn't say with the Taliban but with people in villages that are suspicious or hostile to the foreign invaders.
They would work with them, they would do it and they wouldn't be necessarily trying to outwit the Taliban, it would be a more neutral, genuine thing but they wouldn't come in there surrounded by American helicopters and they wouldn't call in American helicopters any time they felt threatened and the village wouldn't get blown up if one of them got shot.
And now I guess my final question for you is what do you see for the future of this occupation, I mean Barack Obama sent in I guess 30,000 more troops there, they've obviously got the Pakistani army fighting in the northwestern territories there in Waziristan and the federally administered tribal areas and all that, 3 million refugees last I heard inside Pakistan, seems like they're escalating this whole thing, is it just a war against the Pashtuns?
And then can you win one of those, what the hell is going on here do you think and what's going to happen?
Well my prediction as to what's going to happen is at a certain point, I cannot predict when this point will happen but at a certain point the United States will make a deal with the Taliban, it will probably be after Osama has proven dead, they will make a deal with the Taliban that will allow the United States and the other allies to extract themselves from Afghanistan and the Taliban such as it is will be in control of most of the territory.
They will be in control of most of the Pashtun speaking areas, they'll get some representatives in the national assembly, hopefully they'll allow the allies and the Americans to withdraw without getting shot at in the process and that will be how it ends.
I don't think the Taliban will be able to take over the rest of the country because there are other warlords and other fighting forces and people who are culturally indisposed to the Taliban, when the Taliban were in control they were never in control of the entire country, so that is unlikely to happen.
I'm very engaged in the education of women and so on, it is an important concern of mine.
I actually became very good friends with an Afghan woman while I was there and I was studying Dari and Persian with her and working on the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi in the original so I thought it was very privileged to be able to do that with an Afghan woman.
They're doing their best, and this Afghan woman on New Year's Eve she came over with her sister and brother to our house and began asking me questions about Nathaniel Brandon and Ayn Rand.
She was a high school graduate, she's a Hazara woman who had been a refugee in Iran, her family had been refugees in Iran during the Russian occupation and she had finished high school in Iran and I could have been knocked over with a feather when she started asking me these questions and Eric Fromm, it turns out they've read some of our advanced literature and our textbooks are translated into Farsi.
Did you say Eric Fromm, Escaped from Freedom, that guy?
To be or to have or something like that, I don't know a whole lot about him myself and I hope I didn't butcher Nathaniel Brandon or Ayn Rand, they'd already read much more on Nathaniel Brandon than I had, but in Farsi and now they were reading him in English.
They wanted my opinion and they were asking me about who the Objectivists and the Libertarians were and I thought to myself, do Americans have any idea that our literature is translated into Farsi and that there are women in Afghanistan that read it?
I'm not much of a Randian, but close enough anyway, I don't really know much about Nathaniel Brandon or any of that stuff, but this is my whole thing though, is if you agree with the neocons that you want to help spread the post-enlightenment way of looking at the world to the rest of the world, that's how you do it, you send them copies of post-enlightenment literature, dude, you sell it to them.
If it's the right thing, they ought to want to buy it, right?
Yeah, yeah, which by the way, that's a very important point you just brought up.
Now, a lot of the USAID organizations are involved, there are subcontractors and NGOs that are involved in educating Afghan women.
Now, they have to buy textbooks.
Dari is the main language in Afghanistan, which is a dialect, a variation of Farsi, so anybody who knows Farsi, the language of Iran, would be able to function in Afghanistan and people in Afghanistan, when they study quite often, they're using textbooks that are printed in Iran.
Now, in order to educate the women and give them advanced studies, they need textbooks in Dari or Farsi.
But because of the U.S. boycott against Iran, we cannot use these textbooks.
If you're working for an NGO that receives U.S. government money, you can't.
Well, Bill, you just have to learn how to put first things first.
I mean, here the United States is backing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's old terrorist group, Jandala, against Iran.
You know, the textbooks for women and whatever, that was just for Laura Bush's press conference anyway, that never meant anything.
Yeah, I think it was one of these unintended consequences when you're trying to do good and change the world.
There's these things that you didn't think about, like your boycott against Iran would prevent you from spending money on textbooks for Afghan women.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate you coming back on the show, Bill.
I hope we can do it again.
Where are you headed next?
I didn't get to ask you about Algeria and all these places, which I want to know.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll have to do that sometime soon.
All right, all right, that's where I'm going.
Okay, well, let me know when you're back.
Yeah, you take care.
All right, fly safe.
Sure.
All right, everybody, that's my friend Bill Kelsey, libertarian activist from Austin, Texas, and international relief pilot, and among other things.