10/20/10 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

First, let's go ahead and go to Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And right now he's on the phone from Paris, France.
How's it going, Eric?
It's just fine, Scott.
We're, French are rioting.
Everybody's in a big uproar here, but Paris is still beautiful.
Oh, that's good.
I'm glad to know somebody's rioting about something.
I don't know.
Americans never riot when I think they ought to be rioting, you know?
Well, that's right.
Well, the French have a tradition of street theater and taking politics to the street, and all the left-wing unions are on the warpath here against President Sarkozy and his right-wing coalition.
And things have been very tense here with the cutoffs of fuel supplies, cancellations of flights, trains, buses, the metro in Paris.
We don't know which way things are going to go right now.
They could get ugly or things could sort of die down.
I always think the French are a great example of how you can absolutely, completely destroy your government, and you can still be France, Paris is still Paris.
As Richard Mayberry said, the wheat still grows in the fields outside of Paris, and they're on their fifth republic.
So we could absolutely and completely destroy Washington, D.C.
We could tear down that obscene Washington monument and the White House and the rest of it, and we could still be the USA.
Scott, you know, I have to say that our founding fathers, who look wiser and wiser as time goes on, meant the government to be a part-time job.
The senators and congressmen and things were supposed to be businessmen and farmers, and they would go to Washington occasionally and transact the business that had to be done, and then pack up and go back home.
Strictly part-time job.
Instead, we've ended up with a class of mandarins who spend their whole time fundraising and doing not much else.
Yeah.
Well, it is.
It's just an imperial court, is all it is.
You know, I have a bumper sticker on my truck that's a quote of Thomas Jefferson saying, the spirit of this country is totally adverse to a permanent standing army.
And I remember somebody walking by my truck and didn't know I could hear him, completely stumped and literally scratching their head and saying, as this woman says to the guy she's walking her dog with, well, maybe it's meant to be ironic or something.
Well, before we get to Pakistan, I have one other Thomas Jefferson quote that I always think of here, and I'm talking to you as I look at the Eiffel Tower, and that is, every man has two countries, has two homelands, his own and France.
Yeah, I'm sure he did say something like that, old Thomas Jefferson.
Crazy old slave rapist that he was.
All right.
So, yeah, let's talk about Pakistan.
You know what?
Teach me about Pakistan.
Give me kind of a broad something or other about the country.
Then we can go back and talk about the last ten years of war against them and where we are now and all that.
But, you know, George Carlin has that joke about it.
You're listening and you're cleaning up around the house and the news is on and something blows up in Pakistan, which actually I think he was referring to the Union Carbide explosion.
There's 6,000 people killed in an explosion today, and you say, where, where?
And the news guy says, in Pakistan.
And you say, ah, screw Pakistan.
That's too far away to be any fun.
And it's too far away really for people to care about at all, I think.
So I was hoping you could bring it a little bit closer to us, Eric.
Well, we Americans, you know, we suffer terribly from geographical and historical illiteracy and our very poor educational system, watching too much television, reading too little.
So Americans have a faint grasp, many Americans have a faint grasp of foreign affairs.
Pakistan was created in 1947.
The British took their Indian empire, pulled out because they'd gone bankrupt, the British empire.
And India was divided by the British at the request of its Muslim minority into two countries, India and Pakistan, which was in two parts, East and West Pakistan.
And Pakistan has been under military rule ever since, for half of its life, since 1947.
It was founded as to be a beacon of purity and moral rectitude for the Muslim world.
And it turned out to be an absolute god-awful mess, corrupt.
It's run by a feudal aristocracy, feudal landlords.
Politicians are bought and sold.
There was never real democracy in Pakistan.
It does have a very good, free, loud, strong media press, I must say.
It used to write for one of the Pakistani newspapers, Dawn.
And it's a very vibrant, boisterous country, but it's barely a country.
It's made up of different regions, four main regions, which is Punjab, which is the largest, most important, Sindh in the south, northwest frontier province, as it used to be called, Pashtun area, and then Balochistan, which is often towards the Iranian border.
They speak different languages and they have different cultures in these areas.
It's a tough call, holding the country together.
Well, I guess one part of the legacy of the British disaster there is they do have a strong tradition now of a parliamentary government, of somewhat independent judiciary and western forms of law.
It seems like, actually, a lot of times, the worst terrorists get put on trial there.
They have a better dedication to the rule of law than we do, a lot of times, it seems.
Well, I wouldn't say much good about the Pakistani legal system.
It's totally corrupt.
And one of the reasons that militants who've been advocating Islamic law are so popular, not only in Pakistan but across the Muslim world, is that under Islamic law you get fair, speedy trials, often with draconian results, but you have swift justice that can't be bought.
Pakistan, hitherto, everything was bought.
However, under the last military dictator, General Musharraf, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court staged a revolution, literally, and had demanded that the rule of law be imposed.
And he's still fighting, as we speak today, against the current US-installed government of Asif Zardari, trying to bring these corrupt politicians to book and charge them with massive corruption, of which they are egregiously guilty.
Now, when we talked a few weeks back, we were counting the days until the military coup d'etat.
It hasn't happened yet, huh?
No, well, it has, and as I think I said on your program, it's a sort of slow motion coup d'etat, in the sense that the real power in Pakistan, power has shifted to the military, run by Chief of Staff General Kiani, who was engineered into the position by the US.
His tenure was just extended, an unprecedented act for the Pakistani army, which is a very, very disciplined force, engineered under pressure from Washington.
And that's the real government.
The foolish, the bumbling, corrupt politicians in Islamabad have no respect.
They have almost no power, but they're still carrying on the pretense that Pakistan is a democratic government.
Here's the thing.
Well, what I was going to ask you was, this guy, Zardari, the current Prime Minister, is it true they've really renamed him from Mr. 10% to Mr. 20%?
That's his cut of any business deal that goes on in the country?
If memory's correct, his father used to be called Mr. 20%, and he's 10%, but 10% is an awful lot.
Hold it there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Eric Margulies after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He's a regular guest on this show.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargulies.com, just spelled like Margolis, and it'll come right up for you there.
He also writes at lourockwell.com, and you can find him all over the place.
And now, Eric, we're talking about the current American puppet prime minister of Pakistan, Zardari.
I know he's got no public support, but does he have any actual authority as prime minister, or really the ISI and the military just run the country?
He has very little authority.
In fact, what he had legally as president was he gave up fairly recently under public pressure.
Many people believe he has mental problems, too.
In fact, he said as much when he was in a legal deposition a few years ago.
He'd spent a lot of time in jail under the Musharraf regime, and he suffered consequently.
But he has very little power.
But he's being kept there in office until Washington can confect another democratic government that looks fairly kosher.
And we'll meet the bill of having a democracy there, because Washington doesn't want to be seen operating through a purely military regime in Pakistan, which of course it is, because almost all the money that Washington is giving, the billions that we're giving Pakistan, much of it is being filtered through the military and going for military projects or equipment.
All right.
Now, so something that's been on my mind, especially since the Bob Woodward book came out, there's a, and I haven't read the whole thing, but one of the quotes in the Washington Post was from Joe Biden, who oftentimes seems to really get what he wants, especially look at Iraq, for example, and how that played out as compared to his goals.
And anyway, he says, forget the counterinsurgency doctrine.
Everybody knows that that's stupid.
For the war in Afghanistan, we're not going to build a nation there.
What we need to do is do counterterrorism only, focus more like a laser.
And our two top priorities, he said, are getting al-Qaeda, which we all know there ain't no more than a couple of dozen of them anywhere in the entire region anyway, but getting al-Qaeda and securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
Now, I think it was Gareth Porter told me on the show yesterday, look, man, trust me, nobody in D.C. is talking really about invading Pakistan and taking their nukes.
Of course, Robert Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon wrote that thing back a few years ago, and yeah, it was Gareth said, ah, come on, they were just pushing for an increase in military spending, that kind of thing.
But I think about some of the things I've learned from you, such as you mentioned in the first segment here, that Pakistan in many ways is really four separate nations there held together by a single military.
And I guess you've told me before that the military there is really cohesive, and it would take a hell of some kind of catastrophe for there to really be a break in the military and a fight over who controls the nukes or something like that.
But, you know, part of me figures even if Biden isn't even if that isn't really the policy to destabilize Pakistan so badly that it creates the excuse to go ahead and invade and try to seize those nukes, it seems to me like we're on that path anyway.
This country is supposedly an ally of ours, and yet we continually are forcing them to wage a civil war inside their own country, which has tremendous consequences.
And it's going on right now.
They're pushing for a new reinvasion of the northwestern territories right now.
And I just wonder whether at some point we're going to end up with, you know, Barack Obama becoming a great president after all, you know, meaning draft everybody and finally make everyone contribute to the war effort because he gets us into one so big over there.
Well, let's talk about contributing.
How all Americans should be contributing to the two wars that we're waging is by paying taxes to pay for them, which we're not.
The costs of these go to Iraq and Afghanistan and now Somalia and Yemen and North Africa, et cetera, are all going on the national credit card being hidden in the national debt.
And it is iniquitous, it's undemocratic, and it's just illogical that Americans not be asked to contribute and to pay the costs of these wars, which are now at probably $1.2, $1.3 trillion.
And my feeling is that if every American had to fork out to pay the real cost of these wars, they would be ended very quickly, but they won't.
And Washington keeps hiding this.
It's very undemocratic.
Yeah, well, the central bank is the tool.
I mean, they can send everybody a check in the mail for $300 and say, not only is the war in Iraq free, but we're all making money, too.
It's all good.
And then everybody's paying their bills standing in the unemployment line later, but they don't make the connection between the inflation and then the consequences from the correction later on.
But back to the real point, which is, are we on the path to a full-scale intervention inside Pakistan?
I mean, bombing people inside Pakistan with a wink and a nod from our puppet government there and so forth is one thing, but an actual war in Pakistan is something else, and that's what I'm worried about.
Well, we're not looking at U.S. Army divisions pouring across the Afghan border into Pakistan the way Iraq was invaded.
We just don't have the troops there.
Pakistan's a country of 175 million people.
Pakistan has an army of nearly 600,000 very tough soldiers.
I've been out with them in the field.
I've been at war with the Pakistani army against the Indians.
They're very tough fighters.
They're no pushovers like the Iraqis would be.
So I don't think you're going to see a full-scale military conflict.
However, I think what's happening now is that we are slowly being sucked into a low-intensity war.
CIA's got its own private little army running around inside Pakistan.
U.S. Special Forces are more and more active inside Pakistan.
We've got all these Blackwater and God knows how many mercenary groups, not to be confused with private contractors, that are going around, and there are more and more cross-border raids by the U.S., both air and thing.
Now we're up to over 10,000 of these Predator and Reaper drone strikes, which are killing mostly civilians and infuriating everybody on the ground.
Yeah, the polls say that there was a poll that came out just last week that had, you know, what, 90 percent of the people of Pakistan are better against the drone strikes and a good proportion of them supportive of suicide attacks against the United States, against America.
When I was writing for the Pakistani media for Dawn, the surveys that I saw showed that over 90 percent of Pakistanis were totally against the U.S.
-led war in Afghanistan and believed that the U.S. has become Pakistan's number one enemy, even more so than the traditional foe, India, and that it's fine to attack U.S. troops and personnel, and that America is a bitter enemy of Pakistan.
It's very distressing.
I mean, we're waging this war supposedly to stop so-called terrorism, and yet here we are running this huge machine generating anti-American groups faster than we can destroy them.
Yeah, now, real quick, kind of yes or no here.
If I had my way and there just wasn't a single American soldier anywhere in the old world at all, would we be perfectly fine still, or what?
Yes, it would be okay.
We don't need American troops all over the world.
There's no need for them.
Europe certainly doesn't need them, and Asia needs them even less.
Our troops should be at home.
They have no cause to be abroad.
And I speak as a former soldier.
It's a drain on the treasury, and it's an irritant to the rest of the world, and it's provocative.
Well, and look, how many al-Qaida are in Pakistan and Afghanistan?
If we take all those northwestern Waziristans and whatever the heck up there and their version of the Rocky Mountains they got going on over there, are there any real Arab-Afghan army vets left that we've got to worry about?
CIA directors said there are probably no more than 50 in Afghanistan of low-level al-Qaida types and about a handful in Pakistan.
Al-Qaida has been so vastly exaggerated we've created our own boogeyman to scare ourselves.
There are very few.
There never were more than 300, as I've often said when I was there in the early 90s.
So, no, there are very little.
But the problem is that we are creating more of these anti-American groups.
I don't call them terrorists.
I call them anti-American groups, which is what they really are.
Well, and, you know, that's such an important point that there were only a few hundred then.
And I always think back on Robert Drives' article in Rolling Stone called The Bogus War on Terrorism, or something very close to that, where he quotes the CIA guys saying, look, man, we went in there with our laser designators and our B-52s or whatever they were, and we bombed those al-Qaida dudes off the face of the earth.
He wanted a body count, bring Q-tips.
And the only people that were left were, like, maybe two or three dozen guys that escaped from Tora Bora when they had Zawahiri and bin Laden completely cornered in one square mile and let him go.
Other than that, and the whole world hated their guts.
The whole world hated them for what they did on 9-11.
And, basically, the war was won in, you know, that fall.
Well, you know, that's kind of an arrogant blowharding.
What happened at Tora Bora was that bin Laden's people set up a phony radio transmitter that spoofed the Americans into thinking that they had bin Laden trapped there when he actually escaped two days earlier.
I heard this from Pakistani intelligence.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, you know, I saw a YouTube video of Ayman al-Zawahiri saying, You are such cowards.
You had us totally surrounded, and then you sent our friend Hekmatyar to get us.
Thanks a lot.
That's right.
Well, that is the feeling.
You know, come on, fight fair, mano a mano, you guys.
Forget the B-52s and everything else.
But this is a tiny number of people who escaped.
But al-Qaeda, as I often said, it's not an organization.
It's a movement.
And it's a movement that means anti-American everywhere.
And the more we try and smash them like an angry giant, the more we're creating enemies.
Right on.
Well, we're going to continue this very conversation with Robert A. Pape and with Kelly Vlahos and with Andrew Coburn, and for that matter with Gareth Porter all day on the show today.
Thank you very much for your time, Eric.
I really do appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Pleasure again.
Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.