05/07/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest on the show today, it's Eric Margulies.
He's foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, and he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargulies.com, to spell it like Margolis, like I used to say it before I finally learned how to say it right, ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you?
Oh, it's great to be back with you, Scott.
Well, it's great to have you here.
And, you know, the Western reporters who can really explain what's going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan are few and far between.
You happen to be not only one of them, but one of them who spent decades really reporting on that part of the world.
And you have vast experience through all that geography and all the different factions and players and all the different things.
And you always do such a great job helping me, if not the audience, I'm pretty sure them too, understand, you know, what's going on.
So let's start there.
What the hell is going on over there in Pakistan right now?
Well, one huge mess.
What happened is that there is a combination of tribal, the Pashtun tribes, the Pashtuns, as they used to be known in the days of Richard Kipling, the Pashtun tribal uprising on Pakistan's northwest frontier province, combined with a popular revolution, almost, of poor people who were fed up with Pakistan's income disparity.
People are desperately poor.
They live on less than $1.15 a day.
There are countries that more than 60% of the people are illiterate.
And a tiny minority of people owns everything there.
That's the pro-Western minority.
So there are two distinct types of revolution.
There's an Islamic militancy.
There are Pashtuns who are supporting their fellow Pashtuns in Afghanistan.
There are people who are angry at the Islamabad government.
And then there's this popular social uprising.
So it's very complicated.
And you can't tell one kind of militant from another because they don't each wear different colored turbans.
Yeah, well, that does make it very difficult for an American.
Well, okay, but so all the news was that the terrible terrorist Taliban from the federally administered tribal areas almost took over some major city.
They got within 30 miles, I think they said, on MSNBC.
Oh, my God, look at the map.
The crazies got only this far away from a major city before Hillary Clinton was finally able to, I guess, somehow convince the Pakistani military to actually go in there and take them on.
What was going on in Washington was a crazy coax with Muslim mooks.
There was hysteria, indeed, in Washington, and Mrs. Clinton obviously has not had a chance to really study foreign affairs yet.
And she does need some summer school.
What happened was a few hundred guys on motorbikes wandered down the road, squiffy tribesmen with AK-47s, panic erupted as part of this national revolt.
The wealthy and the government and Islamabad feared there was going to be the, you know, like another French Revolution was coming.
Not true.
They were soon left.
Well, what's happening now is that the president of Pakistan, Qadari, was ordered to Washington and given a tongue-lashing by President Obama and told that his army better stop fighting or else there'll be no more cash from Washington.
So the Pakistani army has launched a major coup d'etat against these local militants, and they've created 500,000 refugees.
They're killing a lot of local tribesmen.
The Pakistani army doesn't want to do this.
Their heart's not in it.
They hate doing it, in fact.
But Pakistan is bankrupt.
All its money was stolen by the last regimes in Pakistan, and Pakistan is now forced to live on cash handouts, on the Yankee dollar.
And as I said the other day, it's bankrupt leading to bankrupt.
So Pakistan lives on American money, and Washington's calling the tune and is telling Qadari, get with the program, you ass-packs, or pack-assies, or whatever they're calling them.
Get with the program, fight those militants, even though you can't tell one militant from another, and do what we say, support our war effort in Afghanistan, or there'll be no more money, and if you really get out of line, we may try and grab your nukes and bomb Islamabad back to the Stone Age.
Well, so I'm confused here.
I mean, I'm trying to put myself in the position of the imperialists in the Obama administration.
Are they basically weighing the equation, saying, well, we can push it this far, as long as we don't completely collapse the Pakistani state, we can basically have our war as long as we keep it within a certain level?
Or have they decided, yeah, screw it, let's just go ahead and radicalize the entire population, and then we can invade Pakistan, too?
Well, Scott, I think your first analysis is more appropriate.
Washington needs a token government in Islamabad that represents interest, and it needs to look at the Pakistani army.
After all, we in the U.S. are paying over a billion dollars a year to rent the Pakistani army.
We're feeding it, we're transporting it.
There are all kinds of secret CIA payments going in there.
There's another $7.5 billion coming down the pike, if they're good.
So that's how things are.
So the U.S. wants to use the Pakistani army to fight not only in Pakistan's northwest frontier province, but also in Afghanistan.
But, of course, as I was saying, the Pakistani army doesn't want to fight.
Ninety percent of Pakistanis are bitterly opposed to the war in Afghanistan.
They're calling their government in Islamabad a bunch of stooges.
And they're disgusted with the ruling order, which we are backing, and that's leading a lot of regional experts with long memories to say, my God, we're creating another Iran here in Pakistan.
I don't think so yet, but we're certainly sowing the seeds of what's going to be whirlwind down the line.
Okay, well, you know, I'm kind of confused.
I talked with Patrick Coburn last week, and he was in Kabul, and he was saying that everyone he's talking to in Afghanistan is saying that this is ridiculous.
We're fighting a war against the Taliban here, you know, as broadly or loosely as you want to define it, against Pashtun rebels, against the imperial occupation or whatever.
And yet the ISI is still backing the Pakistani side of the Taliban, even if the army is fighting them.
And what a ridiculous way to fight a war.
We're trying to, you know, again, this is before my time, but I've read some books.
In Vietnam, well, you know, we have to start bombing into Laos and Cambodia.
Otherwise, you know, the Viet Cong have a safe haven on the other side of the line, and so the war will just go on forever.
I guess there was, you know, a little bit of truth to that, you know, not necessarily that we needed to bomb them, but that it made it basically impossible to defeat them.
And that's basically the same situation.
Then I read the New York Times, but, you know, who knows what they're talking about.
But they say that Obama basically agrees with those critics that Coburn was talking to in Kabul, and they were saying that's what they really need to do is have, you know, identify all these groups as one and take it as one big war and basically ignore the Duran line the same way that the Taliban do.
Well, I did a group of senior Republicans before the invasion of Iraq in Washington, and they said, well, tell us about Iraq.
And I started explaining it.
It's funny, that sort of thing.
One of them, I could see their eyes glaze over, and one of them said, don't bother with all these details, just give us the executive summary.
And I said, well, there is no executive summary with Iraq, and it's even doubly so with Afghanistan.
There are no simple answers.
There is no Taliban in Afghanistan.
It's a misnomer.
It's different tribal groups with different political and religious objectives.
Washington really is flying blind there.
They don't know what they do.
Overthrow Pakistan or invade it.
America doesn't have enough troops.
We're bankrupt.
We need somebody else to fight our next war.
But the Obama administration has just as poor a grasp of what's going on there as the Bush administration does, and it's making many of the same mistakes, and it's very worrisome.
Well, you know, I don't know if you saw the clip, but there was a great little exchange the other day between Dr. Ron Paul on the House Foreign Relations Committee and Richard Holbrook, who's in charge of AFPAC, as you say, the new newspeak term for the region.
And he said, you know, what are we doing there?
All we're doing is making matters worse.
We're killing women and children from the sky and recruiting more and more people against us.
And what are we even doing there anyway?
And, you know, that kind of Ron Paulian sort of argument.
And Holbrook said, well, they attacked us.
And, of course, he used the ultimately vague they in order to state his claim.
But basically, no matter what anybody believes the purpose of any of this is in terms of, you know, the long war and turning Asia into America's backyard or some kind of thing over the next hundred years or whatever their project for a new American security or century or whichever it is, basically, at least politically, in this country, as long as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are on the loose, presumably, they say, in that tribal region, there is no way that this war is going to end.
I mean, you can't get, I don't know, a tenth of the liberals who used to be so anti-Iraq war to stand up proudly against the war in Afghanistan because, after all, you know, nobody got Osama yet.
That's quite right.
And there's, you know, cynical Pakistanis say, well, you know, the U.S. is using Obama.
Many of them believe he doesn't even exist to justify its presence in the Caspian oil basin.
One certainly has suspicions about that.
And Americans wrongly believe that this is a good war.
I was really surprised to hear President Obama describe it that way.
He's an intelligent man.
He's educated.
He should know better.
He should remember Benjamin Franklin's wonderful words.
He said, there is no good war or bad peace.
And America has achieved nothing there.
You know, the so-called war on terrorism that started to go after Osama bin Laden has cost the U.S. a trillion dollars.
We destroyed Iraq.
We're now in the process of destroying Afghanistan.
And we may get sucked into a major war in Pakistan.
And there is no good objective.
And I was really disturbed when I saw President Obama's speech last night with Karzai and Zardari, constantly referring to al Qaeda and the threat of al Qaeda and we've got to fight al Qaeda.
Well, my God, al Qaeda barely exists anymore.
If it exists at all, it's down to a handful of people living under deep cover.
It has very little influence.
But what we're doing is every expression of opposition to American power around the world is described as terrorist and al Qaeda.
So we're creating ghosts and creating enemies where they may not even exist.
Yeah, and, you know, it's, Raul, I've felt this way all along, really, but it's wearing so thin to hear people, you know, when you talk about the torture debate or anything, Oh, well, you don't think that it would be okay to, you know, throw Osama bin Laden against the wall to get him to admit when the next plot is or that kind of thing.
You know, of course, nobody's ever tortured Osama bin Laden.
He's still free.
It's thousands and thousands and thousands of other people who aren't Osama bin Laden who've been put through the no Geneva Conventions apply treatment here.
And so, and I don't know, I just think it's silly.
At this point, he might as well be at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., like all the kooks think, you know?
Well, unfortunately, it's very hard to explain to the Americans what's going on in this horrendously complex area.
They don't have the knowledge or the history or the geography.
Try talking to congressmen from Alabama about Afghan tribal politics.
So what people who oppose this war can do is really very limited.
As long as 9-11 is brought up and the war drums are beaten about Osama bin Laden, the president and his imperial supporters will be able to justify this war, which is going to cost us with Iraq $200 billion just this year, at a time when Americans don't have jobs.
Now, what about this idea of some kind of unity government where they're going to try to install Sharif in there with Zardari and some kind of coalition or something?
Who are these guys?
Zardari's party is the People's National Party PAC-10, Benazir Bhutto's old party.
He has taken over London since her murder, and he became president because he was head of the party.
The other opposition party is the Muslim League run by Nawaz Sharif, who was former prime minister.
I've interviewed him.
He's never a stellar leader.
He charges a corruption against him, not as many as against Zardari.
But he was long held at arm's length by Washington and sidelined because it felt that he wasn't sympathetic enough to America's designs in the region.
But now Zardari is so corrupt and he's so unpopular in Pakistan, the polls show him at about 8%.
He's discredited himself, so they're now trying to refurbish Nawaz Sharif and consider him for the next leader of Pakistan, of course, after a democratic election.
At the same time, Washington is also talking about picking out Karzai in Kabul and replacing him with some other asset after, of course, a democratic election.
So Washington has really muddied the waters there, made everybody unstable, and caused great confusion.
And again, as Ron Paul pointed out in that clip from arguing with Richard Holbrooke on the House Foreign Relations Committee, this is playing really well in the Pakistani press right now.
America is sitting around on a couch, flippantly discussing who our next president ought to be, and they might be regime changing their puppet next door and give him the DM treatment too.
And boy, this is probably doing real wonders for getting the locals to help us in our war on terrorism, right?
Well, exactly.
There's profound dismay, to put it politely, throughout the region.
All our baloney about bringing democracy to this benighted region has now been downed by the board, and there are nakedly imperial plans for the region are revealed.
But once again, we're being hand-handed.
If the French were doing this, they would have replaced the guy quietly, put in their own candidate, made it look kosher.
But the Americans talk about it, they kick the guy out, he makes shots, and they discredit whoever they put in, they discredit themselves.
It's really sad.
You know, if you had a really democratic election in Afghanistan tomorrow, the winner would be the Taliban.
It is the most popular party in Afghanistan, but it's not being allowed to run, of course.
In these elections.
And the same thing in Pakistan.
I would say that other groups would come into power.
So the U.S. is seen as being really an imperial power who's just pulling strings and replacing one marionette for another.
Well, now, if they held a real open and fair election in Pakistan, how well would the Taliban do?
Well, there really isn't a Pakistani Taliban.
That's a catch-all phrase that we use.
See, wait a minute, here's what the war party's saying right now.
The war party's saying right now, if Eric Margulies has his way and America stops bombing all these people every day, then the crazies are going to take over Pakistan.
Well, they were in Iraq, and they're putting out these same stories about, you know, oh, Pakistani nuclear weapons are going to fall in the hands of these crazy people with terrorism.
Next thing you know, they're going to be bombing Washington.
This is from the same publishing house that gave us Iraq weapons of mass destruction.
Well, there are at least Pakistani nukes in discussion that do exist in time and space.
That part's not in dispute, at least.
Well, they do.
That's not in dispute.
There are about 40 to 60 nuclear weapons, but they've got very tight control of the Pakistani army and intelligence service.
With all kinds of electronic locks and things, they cannot be activated by somebody in a turbine from the northwest frontier.
What's happening in Pakistan is being confined to the northwest frontier province.
It's one of four Pakistani provinces.
And this is a tribal event among Pashtun tribes.
There's no way that they are going to advance south and take over Pakistan.
What is a danger is that this popular revolution of poor people in Pakistan is going to spread.
But that's going to take a long time.
It could spread and eventually overthrow totally existing order.
But what's happening now is confined to northwest frontier province.
Not a threat to Islamabad, not a threat to nuclear weapons, not a threat to anybody except in the immediate area.
Now, Eric Margulies, what in the heck is a Balochistan?
Oh, Balochistan.
Oh, there you go.
The Balochis, you know, I think it was one of the world's historians said a wonderful line, war teaches geography.
Yeah.
I need to pick up my Google map of Asia here real quick.
Google Earth.
Everybody, everybody, open up your maps.
There are four completely different provinces.
There's northwest frontier with the Pashtuns.
There's Punjab, the most populous province with Punjabis.
There is Sindh down in the south.
That's where Karachi is.
And there is Balochistan in the west, borders of Iran.
It's a desert, wild country, very thinly populated.
The Balochis have been in semi-rule against the central government for decades.
And this kind of fighting is going on.
So that's another problem that Pakistan faces.
The pro-Taliban groups, the militants, Pashtun militants, hold a very prominent position in the Baloch capital, Quetta.
All right.
Well, I actually am pulling up my map of that part of Asia right now.
So Balochistan, I guess Afghanistan is sort of a circular-shaped country in a way.
And Pakistan is kind of a crescent shape down and to the left.
And this Balochistan, I keep saying it wrong.
Pardon me.
Balochistan, which is part of Pakistan.
Yeah.
And this is the southern kind of province that curves around to the left here that actually borders, you know, hits the Arabian Sea.
It bumps up against Iran in the west and Afghanistan to its north.
And I, you know, pardon me, my ignorance here, but I think from maps I've seen that divide this region up ethnically and so forth, that's basically the Pashtuns live not just in the north in that sort of federally administered tribal area, Waziristan-type area.
They live kind of in that crescent all the way down from north to south on both sides of the phony line there.
Right?
Right, Scott.
And they're a lot, as I said, around Quetta.
In fact, some of the Afghan Taliban leadership is believed to be in Quetta, maybe even Mura Omar, the former chief.
And just above the waters even more, the Chinese have finished building a port on the Baluchi Coast called Gwadar, their strategic coast, and they're planning to build a railroad connecting Gwadar with China, giving China suddenly access onto the Indian Ocean, which has the Indians in an uproar.
Well, no wonder we need to start bombing Baluchistan, I guess.
Well, and see, here's the thing, too, and I'm just speculating, but I think I read a news reporter who actually knew something about this riding along these lines, saying that, listen, the only reason, and it is, you know, kernel of truth kind of a situation, there probably are militant leaders or whatever in Quetta, but the only reason they're there is because we keep bombing them out of the northwestern territories up there, where basically they were all in exile up there in the mountains or down there in the valleys, where they couldn't really get to anybody, and we're bombing them out of their sanctuary, so now they're moving into the major cities.
So now we're going to start bombing in Quetta and spreading the war all over Pakistan, and then where are they going to go after that, to Islamabad?
Well, that's true.
There are 2 million Afghan refugees still in Pakistan from the 1980s war with the Soviets.
Many of them are Pashtuns.
Many of them are in Quetta.
So a lot of them in Karachi as well.
So you're right, it's a great big mess, but what the U.S. is doing is inexorably getting drawn into a shooting war inside Pakistan, and I see Robert Gates, the defense secretary, you know, marching forward with this plan, sending more predators and more special forces, and General Petraeus talking about arming the tribes so they can fight each other, trying to repeat what happened in Iraq.
It all points to deepening involvement.
It's what we used to call during the days when I was in the Army, the admission creep, and this admission creep will surge.
Well, you know, I talked with a reporter from Global Post, and she said, well, we can't really leave now because we've put into power these people who can't possibly maintain themselves in power without us.
They'll all be slaughtered.
It seems like unless we undo that situation ourselves, that will be the prescription to stay just forever and ever.
Well, first of all, we can't afford to, and second, we don't know how to, and third, the last thing that battered the United States' needs at this point is to get stuck into a South Asian mess that it doesn't understand.
But we're out of soldiers, we're out of money, and the problem is that we do not have too many people in Washington who understand this situation.
They think they understand, but they really don't.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
It's funny.
It's all about the narrative, right?
Eric Margulies and all his details and facts and what they mean and all that stuff.
What really counts is the narrative, and here's a narrative that I think is widely accepted in America about Afghanistan, and that is that we abandoned those poor people after we helped them force the Soviet Union out, and that's why everything went to hell and the Taliban came to power and that kind of thing.
I don't know if you saw this, but Michael Shoyer had an article we ran on AntiWar.com yesterday where he says that's just simply not true, that Europe and America together continued to try to prop up basically anybody who didn't have a beard and an AK to be the new government of Afghanistan after the Soviets left, and it failed because you just can't do that.
And so this is in the movie Charlie Wilson's War.
It's in the subtext or sometimes the overt text of any statement by any congressman repeating the party line, well, we abandoned them in the 1990s, and we've learned the lesson.
I saw an interview, well, part of one, I didn't get a chance to finish it, of Zbigniew Brzezinski with Iranian TV, and this is what he's saying, too.
We abandoned those poor people, and we should have stayed.
And, of course, there's only one lesson you can draw from that.
Well, I agree with Michael Shoyer.
He's very knowledgeable on the area.
It was not our abandonment.
You're quite right.
We tried to put our local stages in power in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We always backed the wrong one.
We always learned that we wanted to put people in who obey us and who work for America's interests.
The mistake we make is we put in people who support our thinking or our way of life or democracy, whatever you want to call it.
We're primarily focused on supporting your own country's interests, and we regard it as legitimate by their people.
And we always back illegitimate people, whether it's a Shah in Iran or General Mubarak in Egypt, who are detested by their own people.
They're nasty traitors.
There are plantation overseers in the region.
We're never going to have stable government.
We're never going to have any pro-American governments, and we're going to encourage militancy as long as we keep doing that.
But we keep making the same mistake over and over again.
We didn't abandon Afghanistan.
We contributed to the mess.
Now we're paying for it.
I'm glad that you mentioned the plantation analogy there because that is the moral plane that we're dealing with here.
It's the same thing when I hear the torture debate, so-called.
These people might as well be making the case against blacks or something.
This is ridiculous.
How could anybody even listen to them?
And because we're always at war, it seems like, well, gee, there must be some kind of good argument for it or whatever.
But that is what we're talking about.
We're talking about the same moral plane as owning human chattel slaves on a plantation in the Old South, going around with Predator, Terminator, robot drones in the sky, blowing civilian lives apart.
It's no different occupying and waging a long war in Asia than it is waging a long war in the Old West to kill all the Indians and take all their land, too.
It's the same kind of thing, the kind of thing that we all regret now.
It was a terrible shame what happened to the red Indians in America and whatever.
But now we're doing the exact same thing to the people of Asia, and it's perfectly okay somehow.
Well, Scott, that's why I have a new book, American Raj.
It's subtitled Domination or Liberation, and this is exactly the point that I was trying to make, that we keep using these countries as tools to advance our own strategic policies, and we've got to stop doing this, because we've had an under-the-record failure in most cases, and start liberating them from their own backwardsness and from their own feudal governments, like in Iran, in Iraq, rather, or in Pakistan, and developing modern, mature societies.
We did this brilliantly in Europe after World War II.
It's something that nobody should ever forget.
We need another Marshall Plan for these countries, and I've got to say, parenthetically, I just read an article by a Japanese saying that they wanted to offer the U.S. a Marshall Plan to rebuild its economy.
So there's a lot we can do, but we're not doing it the right way.
Well, so you don't argue in favor of just total withdrawal right now, because you had your chance and you proved that you're an evil empire?
I mean, if you were the National Security Advisor, what would you be telling Obama right now?
I would say, Mr. President, we New Yorkers have an old saying, first loss, best loss.
Get the hell out.
Cut your losses.
Declare victory.
Do whatever you want.
Who remembers Vietnam now?
Remember the dominoes were going to fall?
The world was going to end.
We were going to lose face.
Democracy would collapse and all this.
Well, none of this happened, and nobody cares about Vietnam.
The same thing would happen in Pakistan and that region.
We have no business there.
General MacArthur said to America, never fight a land war, and if you hear Roger Kipling warned us of getting involved in Asia's affair, he says it's too big and it's too old, and yet here we are going where angels fear to tread.
That's Eric Margulies.
He's foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
The website is ericmargulies.com.
As always, I appreciate your insight on the show today.
Cheers, Scott.
Pleasure to be with you.