Hey everybody, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, and I'm your host Scott Horton.
And I'm joined on the phone by the great Eric Margulies, he's the author of the book War at the Top of the World, and also American Raj, Liberation or Domination, he writes for lourockwell.com, and you can find his website at ericmargulies.com, that's M-A-R-G-O-L-I-S, ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric, how are you?
I'm glad to be back with you, Scott, lots of interesting news today.
Well, I'm looking at the Guardian right now, Afghanistan, the war logs, and in the headline they call this the biggest leak in intelligence history.
Bigger even than the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
So I hope that got the listeners' attention, if they weren't paying attention to the news over the weekend, the biggest leak in intelligence history happened over the weekend, and apparently this is the heroic Bradley Manning, this is some of what he turned over to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks then turned it over to the New York Times, the Guardian, and the German Weekly Dezit in order to make sure that it would get real attention, and then everybody put it on their website at the same time, including over at wikileaks.org right now.
92,000 documents, Eric, and so I don't know how much time you've had to dig through them so far, but you obviously, well, for people who don't know, you're an expert in this region, you covered firsthand the war against the Russians in the 1980s, and you know all these different players and different militia leaders and all these things, so what have you learned from, well, first of all, just describe, what are these 92,000 documents?
Well, they cover a wide range of topics, but the most important are, first of all, that there have been much higher civilian casualties in this war than have been reported by the controlled media, and the military, of course, refuses to release any casualty figures, very high casualty figures, also civilians killed by Taliban bombs as well, but mainly by U.S. and other NATO forces.
This is a story that's been very much covered up, downplayed.
Secondly, the WikiLeaks people are saying that there are many cases of war crimes.
I don't know about this, I don't really know the definition or the exact cases, there may be.
Third, that there was at least one case in 2008, I think it was, of a Taliban unit using a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile, which would be very important if it was true, if the Taliban can get any kind of effective anti-aircraft weapon, it will win the war, just as the Mujahideen did when I was there and I saw it happen, helped to turn the war against the Soviets, the minute Soviet airpower couldn't come into play very easily, had to keep at a high altitude, it changed the rules on the ground.
And finally, what we're seeing is Pakistani, what the Americans would call duplicity in supporting both Taliban and taking a billion dollars from the U.S. and claiming they're fighting to support the U.S. I've been saying this for years, perfectly understandable, and much more stuff.
But the bottom line, Scott, is that the governments in Washington and Ottawa and Paris and London are screaming bloody murder, saying, oh, these revelations endanger our boys in the field, which is utter BS, because these reports stop in 2009, there's nothing of operational significance in them, what they do endanger are the politicians who've been promoting this war.
And putting those boys in harm's way.
That's right.
That part always goes unsaid, for some reason.
Anyway, so okay, now, first of all, on civilian casualties, are there any kind of totals in here?
Or it's just that, wow, look, day after day after day, they're killing innocent people at checkpoints, just like Iraq.
I think it's the latter case.
There are, you know, cars filled and buses filled with civilians that are fired out, particularly when they get too close to U.S. or NATO convoys, because they're terrified of bomb attacks.
So there's a constant attrition killing of civilians that's always cut and covered up either didn't happen, or they were enemy insurgents.
Well, now, it's different from Iraq in the sense of, you know, how the Civil War has played out.
And both of these wars, America's taken one side.
But in this war, I mean, really, the, they helped the Northern Alliance beat the Taliban back, really, with relatively few casualties for either side back in 2001.
And relatively few, right.
And then so but there hasn't been, you know, the kind of, you know, the taking of Baghdad and the Shiite militias versus the Sunni insurgency kind of game that went on in Iraq, which ended up, you know, leading to, you know, with American deaths inflicted by Americans added in there, over a million excess deaths, as they call it, from the Iraq War of the last decade.
But it's been, I guess, the common understanding, right, that, well, maybe in Afghanistan, we're talking 10s of 1000s, but we're not talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of people.
But I guess now that's in question, isn't it?
What the real casualty numbers are there?
It is indeed in question.
I don't think we'll ever get the answers.
What I can tell you, again, I saw it firsthand, is that in the 10 years that the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan, and our American occupation is looking increasingly like the Soviet one, that the Soviets killed at least 1.5 million Afghans.
Now, weren't they just carpet bombing the hell out of them or not?
They were.
Any village that helped the mujahideen would be flattened by bombing, airstrikes, artillery.
We're not as savage as that, thank goodness.
But, you know, this war is, we're not getting the facts on this war, because the military has put it in or sealed off and controlled all the news.
So we don't know how much of this is happening.
And you have no Western correspondents who are out there in the field reporting independent of the military.
Well, you know, some people would say that that's the cost of doing business.
And that's what happens.
And hey, that's why they call it war.
You know, people die.
And after all, we're Americans, and Afghan lives aren't worth the same as ours.
And so we don't have to pay attention to that.
Most people don't say that out loud.
But that's what they think.
That's how we're raised to believe in this country, as you know.
And so I say, fine, then I don't want to hear it about how this is all to save the women and children of Afghanistan, and how much we all care about them.
Well, I would never think that the US would do something like that in the past.
But as we learn more about history, and starting with the Korean War, and through Vietnam and Iraq, we see the US inflicting very large numbers of civilian casualties, Soviet style, not quite as bad, but we're headed in that direction.
And it's going to blot our national honor and change our whole national personality.
That's not what I think America is about.
It horrifies me personally as a former soldier.
But this is exactly what's happening.
Because when you fight these kind of colonial wars, they're dirty.
They mean splitting up countries, allying yourself with with minorities, like the Northern Alliance, you just mentioned, and killing large numbers of civilians, torture, very brutal police action.
That's the nature of this kind of war.
Right?
Yeah, the torture.
I mean, that's one of the biggest parts of it is the effect that that has.
I mean, what does that mean?
It means in our society from here on, let's say Ron Paul wins the next election, the empire ends, it means we still live in a society with 10s of 1000s of former special forces guys, former CIA guys, former torturers, former kidnappers, former Marines who did God knows what.
And it's just, you know, this is the the society that we live in is one where, you know, pretty much it's the only thing we have in common anymore is that all our fathers all fought in the same wars together.
Well, Scott, you know, the Washington Post ran a blockbuster special last week about how under the Bush administration, you may have discussed this already on your show, I don't know how the this huge sort of shadow intelligence national security apparatus was created that doubled the number of people working in intelligence, all private enterprise.
And they're literally hundreds of different private contractors, as they're called running around doing everything from torture to bombing to assassination.
Even the Defense Secretary said he can't keep track of them all.
So yes, we've created this kind of really scary killer USA.
Yeah, indeed.
All right, we'll get back right after this break with Eric Margulies.
We got a lot more to discuss about the WikiLeaks document dump here.
92,000 documents at the Times at the Guardian-Dizit right now.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Anti-war radio.
I think I'll coin a phrase here.
We're calling the Central Command papers.
The heroic Bradley Manning has sacrificed himself, has put himself at risk of being imprisoned for 60 years, for the rest of his life, basically, until he's 82 years old.
If Barack Obama gets his way, which he's likely to, in order to bring you this information.
92,000 documents that he sent to Julian Assange and the rest of the crew at Wikileaks.org, which has put them all online.
The Pentagon Papers of our era.
The secret history of the Afghan war.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He's covered this region for decades.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And he knows a little something about it.
And he's been digging through what are being called the Afghanistan war logs.
They're at The Guardian, at The New York Times, and at Dizit, as well as Wikileaks.org right now.
OK, so now let's talk about this.
Well, the surface to air missile thing, it was just one occasion.
Is there an understanding?
Yes.
OK, so we don't have really, you know, there's no reason why the Russians are secretly supplying their version of the Stinger to these guys, playing that mirror image game here.
It could have been bought on the open market, too.
Yeah, well, but I mean, really good ones of those shoulder fired missiles are not available really on the open market, are they?
And if they are, then that's like the invention of the musket right there.
That's the end of the empire right there.
Well, that's right.
Effective anti-aircraft would end the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in months.
But no, I think it may be just one flash in the pan.
You know, Richard Mayberry, back when the Stingers first got in the hands of the Mujahideen back in the 1980s, he said, that's it, games up, game set match, Mujahideen win.
And by the way, this is the end of empires.
From now on, if ragtag militias can get their hands on these kind of advanced shoulder fired weapons, then that's it.
How are you ever going to occupy anyone again?
They got AKs and now they got missiles.
So I guess we'll see.
Yeah, that's right.
The two things would be a shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile and a way to disrupt satellite transmissions, because the whole imperial forces are based on satellites, drones, all this kind of stuff goes by satellite communications.
It's some cheap disruptor thing from China costing a dollar twenty nine could put the kibosh on a lot of our operations.
Well, yeah.
Now I saw one of these headlines.
I forget now whether it was part of this massive document dump or it was just something else.
But it was about how the generals are always afraid that the Taliban are listening to their cell phone calls.
Well, yes, they're doing that.
You know, even the ragheads, as they call them in the U.S. Army, are sometimes capable of doing some modern things.
And in fact, I think you're going to see a lot more of this as time goes on.
All right.
Now, apparently we're just so far ahead of the game here that it's like, you know, it's such a different narrative, what we talk about on this show versus what goes on on TV.
And then occasionally they catch up and we have a little bit of convergence where, for example, now it's on.
It's in the news here, as you and I have been talking about for years and years on this show, that America's put the Pakistani government, i.e. the Pakistani military, in a very tough spot because, as you taught me, the Pakistanis, in the event of an atomic war with India, their worst case scenario, they've got to be able to retreat across that Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
That's their strategic backyard.
And the Karzai government, the Northern Alliance government that America's installed in power there, is cozy with the Indians.
And so they've had to back the Afghan Taliban at the same time they're fighting their own Taliban inside Pakistan in order to make sure that Karzai never is able to create that monopoly government because it's just not in their interest.
And so we pay the Pakistanis and then they pay the Taliban that we're fighting in Afghanistan, never mind all the protection money that we pay the Taliban to let us drive our trucks through to the bases so that then we can turn around and fight them again.
But so now here's where I'm going with this is TV is going, oh goodness, look, the Pakistanis, they've betrayed us.
They've backstabbed us.
And so here they are finally telling the story that you've been telling all this time.
And yet they seem to have this spin like, wow, well, maybe the Pakistanis are our enemy and we have to do something about this.
Well, you know, the American media, as I've been saying for a long time in regards to Afghanistan, is doing a disgraceful reporting job as it did over Iraq.
But it's merely parroting U.S. government handouts and is not telling Americans the truth about what's going on.
General Musharraf, the former dictator, put it perfectly.
He said in 2001, the Americans came to him and said, and the former head of Pakistani intelligence, ISA, General Mahmoud told me this personally, said the U.S. threatened to, quote, bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age, unquote, if it did not declare war on Taliban and open up all its air bases and land bases to American forces.
Taliban was Pakistan's creation.
It was its ally, as you just so rightfully summarized it, Scott.
It was the way of fighting India in Afghanistan and also the Afghan Communist Party, with which America has become secretly allied in the form of the drug dealing Northern Alliance.
So Pakistan, but Pakistan had a gun to its head and it was being bribed.
It was a real mafia style.
We brought either bullets or silver.
You have the choice.
It was being bribed by a billion dollars in payments to fight or lend its support to the anti-Taliban war.
So the Pakistanis took a dual track.
They pretended to be fighting Taliban or did with a minimum of what they had to do, open their ports and airfields, but at the same time, quietly keeping links with Taliban alive for the day when they know the U.S. is going to pull out and the Indians are going to be left there and the Communist Party will be left there.
Pakistan has to assert its own national interests.
Now, there have been a couple of articles over the last week that say, one, Karzai is actually moving toward Pakistan and away from Iran and India, and two, Iran and India are really concerned.
Karzai is moving away from them and toward Pakistan.
Is that right?
Well, Karzai's log rolling.
He's jumping from one log to another quite deftly sometimes.
But certainly from what I hear, that Washington is on the outs with Karzai.
He's proved an ineffective puppet and he's even been disobedient at times.
Bad puppet, bad puppet, as I've written.
And Karzai knows that Washington has it in for him.
He remembers Diem in Vietnam.
So he's hedging his bets by playing footsie with the Pakistanis again, and possibly even the Iranians.
Well, now, part of this document, Dom, you know, and of course, the media is going to spin it just like you said, however, the war party wants it spun, that Iran has been intervening in Afghanistan as well.
And everybody knows that the Iranian government hated the Taliban back in the day.
But is it plausible?
Is it true that the Iranians would be backing the resistance to the Americans?
I mean, I have no doubt they're intervening there, but I would have thought they were intervening on the side of the Northern Alliance government that the Americans are backing.
That is correct.
They are.
Iran has been supporting the Northern Alliance since 2001 with money, with uniforms, with arms.
It is no way that Iran is supporting the Taliban or its allies.
It's just more propaganda being spread around.
OK, now, very quickly, is this going to change anything?
The new Pentagon papers?
It should.
It should make the American public understand what a sordid war is being fought and all the lies that they're being told.
And I hope it'll start changing some people's attitudes.
All right.
That's Eric Margulies dot com.
Cheers, Scott.
