Alright y'all Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio and like I was telling you earlier Sheldon Richman.
I've been talking About just what is the real history Of America's intervention in Afghanistan in the era at the end of the 1980s and Into the 1990s leading up to and including the time the Taliban took over It's a very important part of the war parties Propaganda that 9-11 happened as John McCain said in the well of the US Senate the other day yesterday the day before yesterday that 9-11 happened that if only we had stayed in Afghanistan and not abandoned those poor people then None of this would have ever happened.
That's the lesson to be learned from Charlie Wilson's war the movie, etc Etc like that you hear it all the time and the lesson then of course is so we have to stay forever now and see it through no matter what and So Sheldon I were talking and he went and found a piece by Michael Shoyer at anti-war calm about it He mentioned that Anand Gopal the great reporter from the Christian Science Monitor had mentioned this history on the show Either last interview or interview before that Robert Perry has written about it for Consortium News and yet I'm not sure that it's really clear exactly who was being backed and what exactly it meant But I know that Eric Margulies knows for sure and so he's on the line right now His website is Eric Margulies calm his books available at all those book selling websites in the bookstores and so forth is There's two of them war at the top of the world and American Raj liberation or domination.
Welcome to show Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine Scott.
It's great to have you here.
Okay.
So now first of all before you tell us what you know Tell us how you know.
I Started writing about the The great jihad in Afghanistan it is the resistance of the Soviet occupation in the early 1980s met all the leaders of the seven mujahideen Groups who were then touring around trying to get money from Muslim communities I urged the Canadian and American governments to start backing the mujahideen Against the Soviets were committing terrible atrocities.
They and their Afghan communist allies I was then I wrote wrote about Pakistan's role in Sustaining the resistance.
I was invited in 1985 by President Zia Will hawk of Pakistan to interview him to meet him I was then briefed on the war by the head of Pakistani intelligence ISI went into the field and on subsequent trips Went up Into Afghanistan with the mujahideen fighting in the field against the Soviets and their communist allies met nearly all the mujahideen leaders And became very immersed in the subject in 1982.
I was invited to China by their intelligence service to Talk to them about Afghanistan and to ask they wanted to know from me if they should open arms supply lines to the mujahideen I said yes, I like to think that I played a small role in that so I was deeply involved Right up through the early 1990s Okay now so the Soviet Union Was beginning to fall apart.
They pulled out the last of their major forces anyway I don't know about their you know special groups and intelligence assets and whatever But they pulled out their forces toward the end of 1989, right?
That's right And then it was about two years later that the final dissolution of the Soviet Union took place And then at this point like John McCain says America Turned its cold shoulder to the poor Afghans when we should have stayed, right?
Well, I respect mr.
McCain as a war hero, but not as a strategist or a historian.
He's dead wrong on this the United States indeed wanted to wash its hands of the full of the Of this area, but it wouldn't have made any difference regarding 9-eleven if it had stayed there and built Basketball arenas and things because 9-eleven was hatched out of Saudi Arabia and Spain and Europe not out of Afghanistan Maybe with some Pakistani help thrown in so that was that was a nonsense and the CIA were stayed there training Afghan or militant Islamic groups to attack China and for use in other areas in Central Asia possibly, but there was no No reason for the u.s.
To have stayed there wouldn't have done any good And there's a widespread belief in Pakistan that the u.s In fact played a role in the assassination of President Zia who was the man who really won that war In some kind of sordid deal with the Soviets Alright now help us understand the different factions among the mujahideen fighters of the 80s and 90s because you got obviously different ethnic This that the other thing Important double agents like you talked about before on the show that Massoud who I think was the guy America was back and more than Anybody else was really KGB pretending to fight and You know Michael Shoyer had this piece that Sheldon Richmond, and I were looking at where he says that the Americans basically even backed pro-communists after the Soviets left they were back basically anyone who wasn't carrying an ak-47 and who didn't have a beard and who Hadn't really fought the Soviets That's that's quite right.
It's when the u.s.
Decided to invade Afghanistan It allied itself with the two two Modalities the Tajiks and the Uzbeks who had formerly been allies of the Soviets and who formed the core of the Afghan Communist Party Even today the Afghan intelligence service run by members of the old Afghan Communist Party war criminals without a doubt And you so we're hand in glove with the old Afghan communists Why well our former allies?
The Taliban or the fathers of the Taliban the mujahideen Became our enemies Well, so I always like oversimplifying so you can help make it more complicated And you know accurate for us you have this kind of ethnic split to the Northern Alliance basically was the Uzbeks the Tajiks and the Hazaras Versus the posh tomb backed Taliban in the 1990s, right?
That's right, and so where are all the communists there all the communists are on the Northern Alliance side in the Northern Alliance So they were also the main drug dealers to Taliban stamped out the opium trade in Afghanistan largely the Northern Allies Northern Alliance became our allies.
We're running the drug trade and today They still dominate the drug trade the Northern Alliance was backed by the Russians very heavily the kg of Russian KGB And it was backed by Iran and India Was you know, maybe a silly kind of footnote, but it's sort of a side issue kind of thing I don't know mine might as well bring it up in the movie Rambo 3 It's my suit who is the hero that Sylvester Stallone is helping to to fight against the communists.
That's right he was built up he was a French fell in love with him because he could speak French and He was handsome and dashing and the Lion of the Pinscher Valley And he was the leading mujahideen leader against the Soviets In fact, it was all a big lie He was an KGB asset working for the Soviets secretly because they promised they would make him president of Afghanistan and And that they would crush the the Pashtuns who were his bitter enemies So he pretended to fight the Soviets, but he did not most of the fight I would say 80% of the fight the anti-soviet fighting was done by the the mujahideen of Gulbuddin Hikmachar in his group the Hizbi Islami They were then made declared enemies of the u.s.
And today u.s.
Drones are trying to kill Hikmachar Yeah, and they tried to bribe him and he actually laughed in the in the Pakistani paper a few years back and said, yeah I took all the CIA's money and then I helped Osama bin Laden escape.
How do you like that?
I don't know if he really did that or not.
I don't have any direct knowledge I do know Hikmachar, I've known him for a long time and He's a nationalist figure He never expressed any sympathy any anti-american feelings to me when I knew him So perhaps it's true certainly Bin Laden escaped through Pashtun tribal territory.
So he may have had a role.
All right now We're almost up against the commercial break here, so I guess I'll just tell everybody what's going on here It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm on the line with Eric Margulies He spent the 1980s as he was saying at the beginning of this interview watching reporting on and apparently intervening in the covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and he knows about all these players and we're trying to get to the details here about the period between the Soviet Union leaving and the Taliban taking over in 1996 and just how accurate John McCain is in his statement that we should have just stayed that that's the lesson of 9-11 It's Eric Margulies comm for the website and check out his books war the top of the world and American Raj What you see here Are the mujahideen soldiers Holy warriors To us this war is a holy war and there's no true death for the mujahideen because we have taken our last rites And we consider ourselves dead already To us death for our land and God is an honor All right that's an actor in Rambo three back when the mujahideen warriors were the good guys and That was supposed to be my suit who supposedly was a good guy But actually was on the side of the Reds the whole time anyway But anyway, so all right flesh out our understanding here Eric Margulies the most expert Westerner on these subjects certainly Who's who and and who was fighting in all the Civil War of the warlords in?
The early 90s and who was America and France and whoever intervening on the side of did they ever leave Afghanistan alone?
Did they intervene all the way up until the Taliban took over and did they in fact?
Make a deal with the Pakistanis.
Yeah, you're right Go ahead and install the Taliban in here by the time we get to 1996 Well, there was some lingering Western involvement for sure But it was not heavy and as for you Go back to McCain's statement that we should have stayed on well, we weren't there.
We didn't have troops there The Western presence was expressed through Saudi intelligence and CIA and British intelligence Working with the Pakistanis and the people who were running the war against the Soviets primarily replying logistics heavy weapons and instructors from combat radio Communications all of that was done by Pakistan and all the supplies for the mujahideen came in through Pakistan So it was Pakistan not the West that did it after the Soviet withdrawal in 89 The Soviets still maintained the communist government in Kabul I was there with the mujahideen fighting against their troops in Jalalabad and after Najibullah the Soviets man fell Then Afghanistan Dissolved in chaos as the seven mujahideen groups started fighting with each other for control and each one had links to outside powers and arms and cash links and then the neighbors of Afghanistan this Uzbekistan particularly in Kazakhstan Tajikistan started getting involved with their ethnic friends in Afghanistan their cousins So became a very murky involved situation the Indians played a major role and yet the u.s.
Was in there, but not in a big way Until and they didn't care that the Soviets or communists took over Afghanistan that may have been okay with the with the CIA finally after 9-11 suddenly the attitude changed us became involved big-time and The u.s.
Went into alliance with the Indians and the communist regimes of Central Asia To go and try and overthrow Taliban and now tentatively allied with the Russians All right.
Well now rewinding a little bit the way Sawyer puts it was that the Americans and I'm sorry don't have the article in front of me We're reading from yesterday on the show.
You know, it's article that he wrote for anti-war comm and he talked about how They really wanted and really pushed that whole State Department fantasy about a westernized secularized central state run Afghanistan and that you know, they would bankroll basically anyone but the good guys during the 80s war And that that period lasted I guess he doesn't say how long exactly that lasted after the Soviets left But it wasn't too long before then the Taliban came in.
I'm curious as to the Clinton administration's opinion during that transition when the Pakistanis sent the Talibs in to take over the place in 95 and 96 the Afghanistan was in chaos and the Pakistanis decided to take action and They were losing their influence in Afghanistan as they saw the Indians and the Iranians and the Russians Reasserting their influence there during this period of chaos trying to put my you know Like my food into power as the leader.
So the Pakistani interior ministry not ISI formed They got a bunch of these religious students who were Banded together to try and fight banditry and rape mass rape of women that was going on and a local Religious teacher Mullah Omar who was a hero of the war against the Soviets and Suddenly they armed them and they formed this small army of religious students Supposedly and they marched and they started fighting the bandits who were all over the place and the Afghan drug-dealing Afghan communists and gradually the Pakistanis applied more and more support the u.s Gave them their blessing to the Taliban and the Taliban then gradually pushed the communists By the mid-1990s out of Kabul and all the way into a tiny northern region mm-hmm, and then you know at the dawn of the terror war after 9-11 a lot was made of how Tommy Frank's just couldn't get It together and Donald Rumsfeld's head almost exploded over it and George Tenet was ready to say Hey, I already got CIA in Afghanistan.
We're already buddies with my suit We already know who to pay off and who to give laser designators to for our Air Force to bomb So let's get this show on the road and that was how the war really started was the Air Force in the CIA so how involved were the CIA with the Northern Alliance in the Time leading up to or even with the Taliban for that matter in the time leading up to you know Between 96 and September 11 2001 they kept they kept links open to them and the CIA Certainly kept an eye on my suit and send him some money to keep him on side and as a possible asset That's perfectly understandable policy, but what the Americans did not understand was that The Taliban had nothing to do with al-qaeda in an anti-american sense I'll all bin Laden was only an ally of Taliban because he was fighting the communists and his soldiers He had few of the very small organization were heavily involved in fighting the communists and pushing them north After 9-11 Taliban said to the United States show us your proof that bin Laden was guilty of this awful crime Send us an extradition request and we'll hand him over to an international court or to an Islamic court Well, they eventually even dropped that demand.
They just said we'll turn him over to any Muslim country That wasn't good enough either That's right Had been smart if we had if we had had any savvy for the area We would have simply hired Taliban to go and uproot The al-qaeda Taliban were the sons of our former mujahideen allies.
So it was a dreadful mistake We didn't need to bomb Afghanistan We didn't need to go to war effect in 2001 just before we invaded I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times saying, you know, don't attack Afghanistan For God's sake if you have to invade and attack what you call al-qaeda camps, then get the hell out as quickly as possible Otherwise, you're gonna get stuck in Afghanistan in its murderous politics Rumsfeld understood that although maybe he was just in a hurry to turn around and invade Iraq But he didn't seem to want to get bogged down in Afghanistan or Iraq really for that matter He wanted to go in Use the Northern Alliance as proxies let Osama escape and then get the hell out of there rather than get bogged down into you know Now a hundred thousand troops there forever and ever if that's the case He he knew more than most of the other people But it turned out a trap for us and you know Just the way the Brzezinski claims that we trapped the Soviets.
Hey, can I give you one more segment?
Sure.
All right.
Good deal.
It's okay if you got to go.
No, I'll do one more segment All right, we're talking with Eric Margulies About the war in Afghanistan.
It's been going on for a long long time now and Eric I forget whether I asked you too many questions at once or I forgot to ask you this one or if you forgot to answer It but I wonder if maybe you said it and I wasn't listening What was the Clinton administration's attitude toward?
Pakistan's installation of the Taliban in 1995 1996 Initially it was It was just a minor issue Didn't get much attention in Washington the Pakistan with that that whole region was completely forgotten in fact until 2001 came There was an amnesia I know because I was trying to get articles published on the area and nobody wanted to publish them so the Previous administration Though in Washington President Zia ul Haq of Pakistan had voiced plans to build a sort of Pakistan dominated Muslim Area in Central Asia, this was a greeted with great alarm in Washington.
They felt he was growing too big for his britches That ended of course when his airplane crashed Mm-hmm.
And was that accident or everybody thought CIA did that?
Well Scott I've been looking at that for years and I don't have the answers to it I would say most people in Pakistan believe his plane was sabotaged by by Unfortunately by us the Americans, but it could have been done by the KGB Could have been done by his political opponents in Pakistan, including the Bhutos.
It was a very very sophisticated assassination All right, and now They weren't entirely ignored you've talked with us before on the show about How the Taliban was going to make a deal they were in the process of talks with UNICAL about building a pipeline Hey they were it was the first time there'd ever been a more or less a monopoly on force and enough security in the country to build a pipeline across it in a long long time and then As you have written and have said on the show was Osama bin Laden who convinced Mullah Omar to give that contract to an Argentine?
Company instead and so this is why you could see the motive would be there to instead of saying hey Taliban Let's get rid of Osama bin Laden together after 9-11 that they would prefer to go ahead and worry about taking Kabul and let Osama bin Laden get away over the horizon Quite right Scott they enter the as a pipeline issue Which was really the main interest for for the United States after the Soviets were driven out the oil companies raised hell about it, you know Colin Certainly after that Taliban was put on America's blacklist for punishment well, and so That's too bad because then as you say They made the very bad decision to try to fight against the majority or at least the most powerful Force in Afghanistan as far as natural power goes now They've got this giant bubble of power under the Northern Alliance called NATO and the United States That is a completely unnatural situation that can't last It's the ethnic Mathematics of Afghanistan are against the United States We have done exactly what the Soviets did we've allied ourselves with two minorities groups Against the majority of Afghan the Pashtuns are about 50% maybe 55% of the population and very fierce people and very independent minded and so and they hate to look down on the Tajiks and the Uzbeks who hate the Pashtuns as wild mountain hillbillies and So we we set ourselves up for failure by doing this and we're still stuck in this problem And that's why they can't cobble together an army a puppet army in Afghanistan because most of the members are Pashtuns I'm sorry Uzbeks and Tajiks and they're regarded as as foreign as enemies by the majority Pashtun Well, so is there even such a thing as Afghanistan at all?
Well in notationally, yeah as a geographical area like to talk about the Balkans or something like that But Afghanistan never had a strong central government was never a completely unified country But the problem of the old world is just ethnicity is the border basically or if it's not the border It's what they're fighting over.
That's quite right.
And and then add what the British did which was to truncate the Pashtun tribal people by creating the drawing the Duran line which became the Afghan Pakistan border and they cut in half the whole of Pakistan The Pashtun tribes so who don't recognize this border to this day.
So it was a built-in instability Now, I think the first place now, maybe it was a news story, but the first good opinion piece I read at the first good review.
I read of Michael Sawyer's book imperial hubris was yours He's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit the guy that gave Bill Clinton ten chances to kill him before 9-11 and in his book He makes the case that they're trying to lure us into a trap and you picked up that book and immediately put down this article Saying everyone listen to this guy.
It's a trap That's right, but I've been writing for a long time.
There's Sawyer was right Margolis is right Bin Laden had enunciated a strategy in the early 90s.
I think was 1992 Where he said that we cannot defeat America militarily It's too powerful The only way we can beat of defeat America drive it out of the Muslim world not defeat it But just drive it out of our part of the world And stop it from raping our resources is to draw draw America trap America to lots of little Conflicts and wars bleed them and drain their economy that is their Achilles heel well We fell right into the strategic trap set by bin Laden That's why I wrote recently that you know bin Laden is dead But his ghost is still haunting us because here we are trapped in lots of these nasty little wars and President Obama is Spreading this and going into new ones in West Africa and Yemen and in East Africa So that will prove our undoing well, and you know it's amazing because it wasn't just you and Ron Paul and Me and others before this thing ever happened who had it right?it was the the general public the the conventional wisdom before the you know before Al Qaeda ever came into existence before the war in the Persian Gulf and the occupation of Afghan land it was the American strategy again 30 seconds from Rambo 3 You started this damn war now you have to deal with it And we will it is just a matter of time before we achieve a complete victory.
You know there won't be a victory Every day your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed poorly equipped freedom fighters The fact is that you underestimated your competition if you'd studied your history You know that these people have never given up to anyone They'd rather die than be slaves to an invading army.
You can't defeat a people like that We tried we already had our Vietnam Now you're gonna have yours And you know Eric it's actually part of the lore that's a big new Brzezinski wrote a memo to Jimmy Carter in 1979 saying now we're going to give them their own Vietnam Afghanistan will be the swamp where they drown the the mountains where they break their back Brzezinski told me that too And so here we are giving ourselves our own Vietnam again.
Just according to the script he overrates his role in that Vietnam and and this is the latest graveyard of empires because from President Obama's speech Yesterday, it's clear that this is the high-water point of American imperial adventures And the u.s..
Is now going to start withdrawing the first thing.
I thought it was Kipling's wonderful poem called Recessional where he writes about the fall of empires Yeah, well you know it.
It really is interesting I wonder whether there's some magic religious thing about Afghanistan that I just don't understand that makes it where every Empire wants to go and commit suicide there It has mountains it has the two of the brave the two bravest people in the world I said ever saw in combat the Chechens and the Afghans The Pashtun Afghans, so you don't fight them It's crazy to do so and there's an old saying beware the vengeance of the Afghans.
They will never forget So we were stupid to go in that country of a very Freedom-loving people The original freedom fighters if you want to who don't want any foreigners And they will continue fighting until they drive foreign influence out and yet here We are using b1 bombers and tanks and white phosphorus and cluster munitions and the whole weight of the US Army Air Force and Naval aviation Against these people I I find it as a former GI.
I can find it kind of shameful Yeah, well you know bin Laden said in the 2004 speech People don't you know can't remember back to 1992 like you on this and in the o4 please reelect George Bush speech He said all I have to do is send two generals or two mujahideen to the furthest point east With a piece of cloth upon which it is written al-qaeda And you'll send all your generals and all your billions of dollars racing until finally yours entire society is broken And you leave us the hell alone While a plain English, I mean plain Arabic we have we have so over Exaggerated al-qaeda that we've now believe our own fake Propaganda on this issue and we've become hysterical Pavlovian response al-qaeda rush bomb money Look at the billions that we have wasted.
It's just the latest report on 18 billion dollars disappeared in Iraq The billions in Afghanistan you know these all the local leaders in these places are laughing at us Because they are also waving the al-qaeda banner because they know when they do that The money falls from the skies yeah well And you know that Vladimir Putin is just sitting back laughing Oh, you guys need to use our territory to supply your guys sure go right ahead.
We'll give you your own Vietnam again We'll just play this game back and forth until everybody's poor and you're gonna have to give us various concessions Which you you don't want to discuss publicly exactly well?
Do you know any of those off the top of your head before we cut this off?
No?
I don't okay good, but I'm sure there are some how you find out for us Eric and let us know we'll do Scott alright everybody That's the great Eric Margulies Eric Margulies calm the books are war at the top of the world and American Raj You can also find them at Lou Rockwell calm appreciate it again Cheers Scott
