I'm looking through a hole in the sky, until you know it through the eyes of a lie.
Alright, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
Introducing Eric Margulies, he is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, and is the author of War at the Top of the World, and the brand new one, American Raj.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Well, it's good to have you back on the show.
I like turning to you and your expertise.
You have such a wealth of knowledge about the politics of the old world.
It's really incredible, and that seems to encompass all of Eurasia.
It's amazing the answers to the questions that you know.
So I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
The first sort of business I'd like to discuss is what's going on in the border region, between the Durand Line, I guess, between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I thought it was interesting during the debates, John McCain, quite rightly, I think, criticized Barack Obama for his belligerent talk about violating the sovereignty of Pakistan and bombing inside the country.
And yet, all three of them, the two candidates and the moderator, too, decided to ignore the fact that this is what Bush has been doing for the past few months, is strikes inside Pakistan and in that border region.
I'm not sure whether he's trying to get Osama bin Laden in his last days in office or what exactly is going on.
But I was hoping you could tell us about the politics of Pakistan and Afghanistan and how the people there are reacting, how dangerous this kind of activity on the border region and inside Pakistan really is or isn't.
Scott, it's an extremely dangerous and increasingly confusing, complex situation.
First of all, up north in Afghanistan, the U.S.
-backed government, imposed government, steadily losing ground.
NATO forces are increasingly on the defensive as Taliban and its allies, both inside Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, increasingly focus their attacks on NATO's Achilles heel, which is its supply lines, because of all NATO-heavy materials like fuel and ammo and water and food, have to be trucked in from the port of Karachi, way in the south of Pakistan, all the way up north through the tribal territory and into Afghanistan.
And the Afghans are doing what they've always done best, and that is interdict their enemy supply lines.
And the NATO generals are really, really frightened about this.
Against this background, you have now U.S. increasingly staging incursions at the urging of Defense Secretary Gates, who may stay on.
That's the buzz here in Washington, anyway, where I am, at least for the moment.
Increased U.S. attacks on so-called Taliban targets within the tribal, the autonomous Pashtun tribal zone along the border called Fatah, F-A-T-A.
There have been, oh, probably close, well over 25 American predator attacks.
That's an assassination from the air by these drone aircraft.
A lot of civilians have been killed.
There's been at least one, probably more, American ground attacks into Pakistan to the fury of the Pakistani government.
And finally, General Petraeus, who's the new regional commander, CINCPAC commander, he is starting to bring a policy he developed in Iraq.
Well, actually, the British did it hundreds of years ago, the old divide and rule, which is to start paying local tribesmen to raise their own little militias to go and fight the pro-Taliban tribes.
So what we have is a growing mess in that area where you've got these new tribal levies being paid by the U.S. to fight, as in Iraq, and you have the Pakistani army paid by Washington, which is waging a full-scale military campaign against pro-Taliban tribesmen.
Well, and we've seen historically, just in our experience, never mind what happened with the Russians there and that kind of thing, that you can't buy loyalty from these Afghan warlord types.
They might help you out to your face, but, well, like that guy Hekmatyar, who I guess you know him from back in the days.
He accepted a bunch of money back in 2001, 2002, and then last year he bragged that he helped Osama bin Laden escape.
Thanks for the cash flow.
That's right.
Well, the Soviets found the same thing in Afghanistan.
You can only rent people there.
You can't buy them.
They're first loyalties to themselves, and the Afghans have much more honor than the Iraqis do, and they're not as easily bought.
The Americans are not going to be able to duplicate.
We Americans are not going to be able to duplicate the relative tactical successes, temporary ones that we had in Iraq, and the danger is that by cultivating and raising all these tribal levies to go and fight the pro-Taliban Pashtun tribes, you're laying the basis for chaos in the area, sort of a Lebanese type of free-for-all situation where everybody's shooting at everybody else, all these different tribes and groups and little militias of the Pakistani army with Taliban thrown in the mixture, and the more the situation gets chaotic, the biggest danger is the more India will be tempted to intervene.
I mean, the Indians are very close by.
They've got over 1,000 intelligence agents in Afghanistan stirring the pot.
They've got their eye on Afghanistan, which they dearly love to take away from Pakistan's sphere of influence.
India might intervene directly.
Very dangerous.
India and Pakistan, of course, are both nuclear-armed powers.
Well, when you talk about India stirring the pot inside Afghanistan, I guess that's the first time I've heard that number, 1,000 intelligence agents or more.
What exactly are they doing there?
They're trying to shore up the Karzai government, right, rather than stir up trouble?
That's correct.
They're shoring up the Karzai government.
The Indians are building a new air base.
I believe it's in Kyrgyzstan or maybe Tajikistan.
I can't remember which, which is unprecedented.
And the Indians are also stirring up anti-Pakistani groups, helping the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, who are bitterly anti-Pashtun, and just trying to expand the influence of the Indians through government, through money and arms.
And they're also, according to the Pakistanis at least, also staging bombing attacks and other forms of attacks inside the tribal belt to further stir the pot.
Well, and so this has got to be driving the Pakistanis crazy.
I've got to tell you, I'm trying to sort of, you know, play make-pretend imperialist here and figure out what I would do or something like that, and I have no idea.
I mean, we're friends with the Pakistanis.
We're friends with the Indians.
We're friends with Karzai, the mayor of Kabul.
And for that matter, we're friends with the Tajiks and the Uzbeks.
And are there any Pashtun tribes that America's allied with?
And then regardless of that, how is anybody supposed to make sense out of future policy here beyond just cut and run?
Well, it is very complicated.
And let's remember that many of the Pashtuns who are terrorists today used to be our freedom fighters back when they were fighting the Soviets.
So particularly some of the veteran leaders, like my old friend Hikmatyar and Jalal Haqqani, two legendary guerrilla fighters against the Soviets, they're terrorists now because they are fighting the American influence rather than Soviet influence.
So we weren't once friends with everybody there.
Now the problem is that we've got our eggs in the basket of the Karzai regime, which is up to its turbans and drug dealing.
It's supported by the two most unsavory groups in Afghanistan.
First of all, the oldest drug dealing warlords.
And secondly, the Northern Alliance, which is really the rump, the Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance, which is the rump of the old Afghan Communist Party.
So here we're backing the communists and the drug dealers against the Pashtuns who used to be our allies.
And meanwhile, we're sitting on top of a volcano in Pakistan because its new government under Asif Ali Zardari is fading fast.
It's bankrupt.
It's going to run out of money any day.
It's on financial, economic life support.
People detest it.
All the money that the U.S. has been giving has been stolen.
The army is furious, and it's just a huge mess.
Well, let's see.
I guess the greatest danger that I could think of would be the disillusion of what there actually is of a Pakistani state there.
I mean, I guess you've talked to me before about how there's really kind of four mini-states combined within Pakistan.
The government there always is in a precarious situation.
Really, the only thing national about the government there, truly national about it, is the military, which, of course, possesses nuclear weapons.
Is there a danger that the Pakistani government could really just fall apart and then perhaps nightmare upon nightmare scenarios, that those nuclear weapons would get loose and into the hands of who knows who?
Definitely, Scott.
In my new book, The American Raj, in fact, I go quite into detail on this danger.
As you say, Pakistan is made up of four pretty much unfriendly regions ruled by a central government whose power really doesn't extend into many of these regions.
And the danger that we're looking at is the northwest frontier province, which is next to these embattled tribal areas.
The more the Americans stir the pot there, the more they're raising the specter of one of the big bugaboos of Pakistan, and that is Pashtun tribal nationalism.
And there was a movement when Pakistan was founded in 1947 to create an independent Pashtun state, straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, because half of Afghanistan's people are Pashtuns down in the south, and probably 15 to 20 percent of Pakistan's people are Pashtuns.
Now, if these people decide, as they have tried to do in the past, to get together and say, to hell with the border, we've never accepted we're going to form greater Pashtunistan and create our own state, just the way the Kurds are calling for their own independent state, well, this would tear apart Pakistan, and it would make the threat of Indian intervention much, much greater, because you will recall that in 1971, when there was an uprising in Bangladesh, which was then part of East Pakistan, the Indian army intervened, tore it away from Pakistan, created the independent state of Bangladesh, and occupied the country.
Oh yes, of course, I remember that well.
But no, I mean, I did know that Bangladesh had broken off from Pakistan, but I didn't understand about Indian intervention on their behalf.
I'm sorry, I may be a bit obscure here, but that is what happened, and it presents the danger that India, which is feeling its oats, and very powerful, and pretty well off now, and in alliance with Washington, may decide, if that area becomes very unstable, to put an end to Pakistan once and for all, which is an enormous thorn in its side, and go in, if there's turbulence there, and intervene, and preside over the dissolution of the Pakistani state.
All right, well, so if I had my magic wish, and I could somehow convince Barack Obama to, I don't know, make you his national security advisor, instead of one of these crazies that he's sure to pick, what would you have him do here?
Well, Scott, I would say that, in regard to Afghanistan, that it is urgent, and it is critical that that war be stopped.
The war is inevitably oozing into Pakistan.
It is infecting Pakistan with what we call terrorism.
You know, we get the Pakistani army to bomb these tribesmen on the frontier, because they're backing Taliban.
The tribesmen then go and shoot off bombs in Islamabad, as they did recently in the hotel where I've stayed for 25 years.
And we call it terrorism.
When we get the Pakistani army to bomb them, this is anti-terrorism.
But the fact is that we're destabilizing Pakistan.
Every day the war in Afghanistan goes on, Pakistan is becoming more unstable.
If it blows apart, as you just noted, you will have a huge mess and a state with 60 to 100 nuclear weapons that could be up for grabs in a worst-case scenario.
So it is essential.
The key to this is to stopping the war in Afghanistan and making a political settlement, as the Secretary General of NATO and the British generals have been calling for recently.
The problem is that our politicians have so demonized Taliban, and the media too, that it's very difficult to make any kind of peace overtures to these people or to be seen to be talking to them.
But eventually we will.
Yeah, well, and that really is the thing.
When, I guess it was just a few weeks ago, they had peace talks in Saudi Arabia where they were trying to come up with a settlement with the Taliban.
And, you know, I don't know about demonization and all that.
I mean, clearly, or I do, but these guys were pretty bad guys, if I remember from even back in the 90s, you know, throwing women down the wells and pretty kind of medieval thinking and that kind of thing.
But they weren't really the international problem.
They weren't al-Qaeda.
They were really dependent on al-Qaeda as sort of an auxiliary militia to help them fight the Northern Alliance.
But they weren't an external threat to anyone.
None whatsoever.
And even the role of al-Qaeda was greatly exaggerated.
You know, we take, these were primitive hillbillies, medieval hillbillies.
However, they were not any more miserable or medieval or backwards than most of the other tribesmen in that whole region, whether it's in Pakistan or whether it's in India or in Nepal.
And we have focused exclusively on Taliban while ignoring the other social customs of that whole area.
And, you know, when, as I keep saying, when Taliban, when the Pashtun tribes, who are Taliban in effect, were fighting the Soviets, we couldn't say enough wonderful things about them.
You never heard about wife-beating and atrocities and not letting girls go to school.
And when the Soviets killed 2.5 million Afghans, there was no uproar in U.S. campuses.
About half of those people who were women, a million, over a million Afghan women who were killed by the Soviets, nobody cared.
But all of a sudden now, because this whole Taliban has been turned into a symbol of male brutality and everything that women don't like about men, Taliban has been singled out.
Yes, they're a miserable, tough bunch, but so are Tajik and Uzbek allies.
In fact, they're probably considerably worse.
Well, and so, but that does bring us back, though, to, as you said, the demonization, the hype.
It's sort of the same thing about Saddam Hussein.
They had to say he was Hitler in order to justify the war to get him out of Kuwait.
But then, man, they told everybody he was Hitler.
So now how could they justify leaving him in power?
Now we've got to bomb him and do all these sanctions and occupy Saudi Arabia so we can have an Air Force base from which to bomb him and bring on all this blowback simply because of all the hype that they created in the first place.
But now, so here we are on the eve of the incoming Obama administration, where, first of all, he's a Democrat, so he has to prove what a tough guy he is.
Second of all, he's promised two new divisions into Afghanistan.
And third, you and I can both hear the right wing screaming on the radio right now, oh, this guy, we told you he was a Muslim.
We told you he was a traitor.
Here he is trying to talk to the Taliban.
He can't go anywhere near that.
Eric?
Well, I know that is exactly the problem.
In fact, I just wrote my Sunday column about this.
They felt World War I or World War II, where the allied leaders again painted themselves into a corner and saying, you know, by all this overinflated rhetoric and hysteria and that prevented them from heading off a war.
Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it to our allies, the British and French certainly, and Germans, who take a much more logical view of these things, to start dealing with the Taliban and to let the Pakistanis guide us through there and to be more discreet about it.
But what we've got to do, which is really important, is the first thing Obama should do is to return the conduct of foreign policy to the State Department rather than to the Pentagon, because these days the Pentagon is running all their foreign policy, sending troops, assassins, secret prisons, you name it, between the Pentagon and CIA.
They have really hijacked U.S. foreign policy, and the Bush administration encouraged it.
Obama's got to get a strong Secretary of State in there who's going to pull this back into the hands of the professional diplomats.
Then at least we can make some kind of positive start.
Right now we have these extreme fundamentalists, Protestant fundamentalists in the Special Operations Command, who seem to think that they're still running a medieval crusade in the Muslim world.
Yeah, they're fighting against Satan.
My God is bigger than your God and all that crap.
Exactly.
Boy, that was real, too.
That wasn't just some made-up left-wing propaganda.
That really is the case, that you have a bunch of end-timer lunatics running the Air Force, running the Special Operations Command of this country.
It's pretty scary.
Even the movie Dr. Strangelove wouldn't have gone that far.
But here we are, and I think once there's a change of regime here in Washington that we're going to be hearing a lot more hair-raising stories.
Yeah, well, okay, so I saw this in the news, that Barack Obama's considering sending Bill Clinton to be an envoy to try to work out some sort of settlement over Kashmir to put an end to that perpetual conflict there.
Is that just a farce, or what do you think?
Well, he does impress a lot of people in that part of the world, and I think Clinton would make a good negotiator.
Clinton did not do a good job with the Arab-Israeli, with those wine negotiations that were held.
But certainly there's a chance he could.
But underlying any hope of solving the Kashmir issue, which has been going on since 1947, it's as old as the Arab-Israeli dispute, and much more dangerous because it pits India against nuclear-armed Pakistan.
And they've been to war three times already over Kashmir.
But to underline it, American policy under the Bush administration is tilted so far towards India with this nuclear deal that it's made, that the Indians are feeling full of beans now, and they are not likely to make any concessions.
Right, and then the only reason that we made that nuclear deal, which itself is a big deal and something that, you know, I don't know how much detail you really know about this, but I know for certain that it's completely outside of the global nonproliferation regime, the nonproliferation treaty and the IAEA statutes and all that.
They've made a hundred special exceptions for the Indians at the same time that they're bludgeoning the Iranians over the head with the nonproliferation regime that they're cooperating with in every way.
Well, this double standard, it's a screamer, has caused outrage across the Muslim world.
India is being given carte blanche.
They've been made kosher to do everything the U.S. has been telling everybody else not to, and even India.
And there are two reasons for it.
Number one, the Bush administration wanted to enlist India in its sort of anti-Muslim jihad, but also they saw three reasons.
Number two, they saw India as a counterweight to China, and with these Republican fantasies of, you know, encircling China or fighting a war against China.
And number three, that India, they thought, was, you know, a potentially $17 to $20 billion defense market.
Well, it's not going to be, but those were the reasons.
But what is really crazy, Scott, and as I've been a voice in the wilderness on this, we are now helping India develop its nuclear programs and doing business with India in a big way, and yet India is building, under cover of their space program, India is building intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles that can have only one target, in my view, and that's the United States.
So we are really helping a new strategic, not a threat, but certainly a new strategic rival come onto the scene and helping India develop the missiles that are going to end up being pointed at us.
And why is it that you think that their concern would be the U.S. rather than China next door?
Well, India, because India already has an entire range of missiles that can cover almost all of China and all of Pakistan and Iran and large parts of Russia and all of Southeast Asia, so the only thing they need an intercontinental missile for is to attack either Europe, Australia, or South America, or the United States.
Well, we can look at this in a more charitable fashion, too, which is that they're just creating a nuclear deterrent to keep us out, not that they're, what, India's going to threaten global domination or something?
Well, you've got to wonder why a country where two-thirds of the people live in poverty and a good more than a similar number doesn't even have indoor plumbing and millions sleep in the street every night, that they're spending this kind of money.
You know, the Russian nuclear submarine, the Akula class, that just got into trouble in recent days reputedly was being sold to India.
So India is really hell-bent on developing it as a world power.
Yes, it has many arms against China, its primary rival, but again I say, you know, why does India need ICBMs?
It's not going to bomb Berlin.
It's not going to attack Australia.
There's really only one other target, and I know it's for big power prestige, but it seems unnecessary and overdone.
Yeah, well, three-stage rocket technology, that's the key.
That's what, I guess, that's what our government would have us believe the Iranians are working on as their excuse to put missiles in Eastern Europe to somehow protect the Europeans from the Iranians, even though the Iranians don't have three-stage rockets.
And the Iranians have absolutely no reason to attack Europeans either.
So the whole thing is crazy, and what it's done is by putting an anti-ballistic missile system 184 kilometers from the Russian border.
Can you imagine if the Russians came and set up an anti-ballistic missile system in Montreal?
Well, we saw what happened when they put a couple of nukes in Cuba.
Everybody completely freaked out, and there was almost a worldwide hydrogen bomb war over it.
Exactly.
These are very dangerous.
And I keep saying, Scott, that America's number one foreign policy priority is to maintain, restore, and then maintain good relations with Russia, proper, correct relations with Russia.
And we have just been doing the opposite ever since the Bush administration took power, which is expanding NATO right up to Russia's borders after Bush's father had vowed to Gorbachev that this would not be done by extending NATO bases very far east, then by sticking America's nose into the Caucasus, into Georgia, which was Russian for 300 years, and now all sorts of intrigues in Ukraine, talking about bringing it into NATO.
And now this anti-ballistic missile system, McCain's fulminations against Moscow, this has been really the most provocative possible kind of behavior, and it's got to stop before we really get into a fight with Russia.
Well, and it's been like this for 20 years.
I mean, this is a really bipartisan foreign policy.
Was it even Bill Clinton, or was it George Bush Sr. himself who broke the pledge and started expanding NATO, or at least moved in that direction?
Well, it certainly began under the Clinton administration.
That's quite true.
You know, the powers that be here in Washington, as I keep saying, what the Soviets used to call imperialist ruling circles.
Accurately.
We used to laugh at all this Soviet terminology.
I thought it was a scream, but it wasn't until the Soviet Union collapsed that we realized that a lot of what they said about Washington was true, because a lot of what we said about them was true, too.
All these blood-curdling accusations.
But in effect, what's happening is that the military-industrial-petroleum complex here in Washington has already got its hooks into Obama.
It's been steering policy vis-à-vis Russia and certainly the Middle East for a long time.
And I'm really worrying that the new president, who was eagerly awaited here, is going to be almost half a prisoner by the time he takes office.
Yeah, there doesn't really seem much debate or real difference in Russia policy among the foreign policy establishment.
I guess the neoconservatives, of course, beat their chest loudest about it, but it really seems like the so-called liberal or realist establishment is exactly on the same page as far as policy.
Well, you know, this stupid fracas over Georgia some months back, which was completely, in my view, engineered by the neocons in Washington as a way to boost McCain's electoral chances and cooked up with the Israelis, too, was a perfect example of how a war can break out inadvertently.
I just finished reading Pat Buchanan's new book called Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War.
I don't agree with all of it, but he makes some really very good points that I've made in my columns, too, about how foolish guarantees, like the British with Belgium and then with Poland in 1939, led Europe into war even though it didn't want to go.
And by offering NATO guarantees to Georgia, which started a war on its own and sending U.S. warships into the Black Sea, we could very well have ended up with a shooting confrontation with Russia that could have escalated completely out of hand.
What can you tell us about policy in terms of relations in terms of Russia and Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, all these countries that we all kind of know are there, but none of us can memorize the names of them.
I'm sure I left out a couple.
Obviously, we're intervening all over the place in the Caspian Basin, Azerbaijan and Georgia, et cetera.
But what about the rest of Russia's southern border?
There's been talk about bases in this country or that one at certain times, but I don't know the current status of any of it.
The U.S. lost the base temporarily in Uzbekistan because the U.S. had to criticize the Uzbek government for boiling its political opponents alive.
We do have some other bases scattered around the area.
The whole key to this area, the Caspian Basin, great energy reserve, the newest and maybe the last big energy field we find, is Afghanistan.
To come back to that, to get the energy out of these Central Asian states, which the U.S. and Russia are now vying to control in a sort of a great game type, low-grade competition, the way to get their energy out has to be through Afghanistan.
A pipeline has been authorized to be built finally.
It's been discussed for two decades that will go from southern Uzbekistan through Afghanistan right to the Pashtun tribal territory down to Karachi and the Arabian Sea and Pakistan.
That is what the U.S. has wanted.
That's one of the reasons the U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, as Kevin Phillips calls them, pipeline protection troops, is to build this pipeline to get the oil out because the only other route is through either China, we don't want that, or through Iran, and we don't want that even more.
So Afghanistan is the most important.
But these patrolist stands are flirting with both sides.
They're run by nasty little communist dictators.
I've always called them red sultans.
And one of Osama bin Laden's plans was to go and overthrow these little communist tyrants and bring in some kind of Muslim rule in the region.
Well, and this whole pipeline thing, I'd like to actually get back to bin Laden and that region of the world, but the pipeline was part of the deal with India, right, was that this is what sent Rice scrambling to India was because they were going to make a deal with I forget exactly who for the pipeline to go this direction instead of that one.
And that was why we said, okay, look, we'll help you with your nuclear weapons program if you'll only make the pipeline go this way instead of that.
That was one of the quid pro quos, no doubt.
The Iranians wanted some of the pipeline to go off in their area, or no, I'm sorry, they wanted to build a pipeline to India to supply India with gas and oil, and the U.S. had been furiously resisting that.
So they got the Indians to say no, at least temporarily, in exchange for this pipeline which will go to India.
But that makes the Indian interest in Afghanistan, through which the pipeline will pass, all the more vivid and interesting.
You know, these pipelines have become what railroads were in the 19th century, the conduits of the strategic as well as economic power.
Which is just a fantasy anyway.
I can't help but think that somebody has got to send all these Republicans to some sort of re-education camp and teach them a little bit about capitalist economics.
Don't they know that oil is a liquid, and it doesn't matter really which way it flows, that as long as there's a price and a market, people will get petroleum?
Well, the Republicans had drilled into their heads, largely by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, that oil from Arabs is evil, and it threatens the United States.
Why Arab oil is a great danger?
Well, they can cut it off to us.
Actually, the number one supplier of the U.S. is Canada.
And the U.S. is still happy buying oil from the loudmouth Colonel Chavez in Venezuela.
So it's a fatuous policy.
It has a lot to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
It's certainly not logical.
Right.
I mean, if you look at it simply, if you pretend America is a business, and this is our spreadsheet, and we're spending this much money on our Marine Corps and U.S. Army in Afghanistan, we're spending this much bombing Pakistan, we're spending this much bribing the Indians, we're spending this much doing this and that, and then you compare that to any sort of benefit from, I mean, like we get to lower the price somehow by having a pipeline there?
I mean, it doesn't even make any sense that there's any profit in this other than if, like you said, you're part of this oil military industrial complex situation, you want to guarantee that it's your particular American corporation that gets a cut off the top for doing the pumping, you know, maybe a very large cut off the top.
Other than that, if we're talking about America as a whole as though America is the company, this is a net loss way, way deep, deep into the red here.
This is ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
Oil, you know, it's amazing that all these people who are beloved of the free market, suddenly when it comes to the oil, they turn into 16th, 17th century mercantilists.
There's no better example of free trade than oil, so that the people who make oil better exchange it to the people who raise food more efficiently.
We supply half of the entire Middle East's food consumption.
Yes, they could cut off oil to us, but we would cut off food to them.
Guess who's going to give in first?
It makes no sense.
And it's part, you know, we see, look what's happening in the states now.
Our whole economy's becoming Sovietized.
Banks, corporations, now they're talking about General Motors, and this foreign oil policy, trade policy.
It's weird.
We seem to be taking a giant leap back into the past with state control of all kinds of areas.
Right, and then we'll continue, or not you and I, but the rest of them will continue to blame capitalism for all the failures of this central planning.
Exactly.
You know, I don't want to get off the topic now, but I'm just saying, you know, the rescue packages that are being mounted now for the economic collapse is a medicine that is probably worse than the disease.
Well, and this is an off topic, because the broader theme here really is that we're the evil empire.
We're acting just like the Reds, and down to the details of backing the people who used to be backed by the Reds in Afghanistan against the guys who were our heroes.
In fact, as we wrap this interview up here, back to the battlefield in Afghanistan, I have these three clips from Rambo 3, from back when the Mujahideen were the good guys and the heroes, that I just love playing.
You know, just for entertainment's sake, to try to drive home the irony that we have our own domino theory, we have more and more, like you say, Soviet economics here, and an empire abroad, in fact, in the former Warsaw Pact, and more and more in Central Asia.
Oh, that's exactly right.
You know, when I was covering the first war in Afghanistan, I remember the Soviets used to denounce the Mujahideen, our boys, the freedom fighters, as Islamic terrorist oppressors of women, medievalists, and they claimed they had invaded Afghanistan to bring education, to stop the abuse of women, to help bring Afghanistan into the modern world, to rebuild it.
We are using the exact same script that the Soviets used.
Do they even have a thing about the little boys can fly a kite now?
I believe there was some kite flying thing before.
Are you serious?
Yeah, there was all this kind of sappy kind of stuff, and these stories about little kids and soldiers giving out lollipops.
Oh, God, I would love to get that propaganda video from the Soviets, of like, look at our kite flying that is going on in Kabul because of our benevolence.
You know that the Taliban stopped kite flying because the custom there was to attach all kinds of razor blades onto the kite wire, and to come and slice other people's kite wires, and in the process, large numbers of young boys had their hands sliced, and it was a very dangerous sport.
That's why it was banned, but it's been turned into some kind of cultural oppression now, and it just shows how steeped we are in war propaganda and how much our media has cooperated with this process.
Wait, so you're telling me like they would, for sport, it was a game, they would battle kites with razor blade strings?
That's correct.
It was a very dangerous and pretty vicious sport.
Wow, yeah, well, don't say that too loud on the radio.
I don't know, that might become a fad around here.
I need to start one.
I don't know that we're much less barbaric than them these days.
That's right.
All right, now, so wait a minute, bottom line now, Obama wants two more divisions in Afghanistan to surge and win and all these things.
Are we facing helicopters on the embassy of Saigon thing in the future here?
We're talking about the graveyard of empires here.
That's what they call it.
Afghanistan is where great powers go to die.
Well, it could happen, but I think the process will be slower.
I think they'll send more troops in, not enough U.S. troops to really win this war.
If you can win a war against the whole people, the outgoing U.S. commander, General McNeil, said we would need 400,000 troops to pacify Afghanistan.
He used an old colonial term.
That ain't going to happen.
So the war is just going to drag on.
They're going to do a mission creep.
It's going to get bigger.
Like in Vietnam, it was exactly the same thing.
Oh, all I need is 50,000 more troops, and then another 50,000.
And then they'll spread the war into Pakistan, just the way the U.S. invaded Cambodia and Laos.
You know, got to get at the enemy bases, and so the war gets bigger, and they have even less troops to deal with a much larger area.
And I just wonder how deep are U.S. troops going to get sucked eventually into Pakistan?
How long is it before Pakistan blows up and there's a military coup, and a really anti-American government comes to power there with nuclear weapons?
I'm very concerned that Obama has not been properly briefed on the Afghan situation, that the defense industry has got to him and the neocons.
You're right, he's got to show that he's not a wimp to the Republicans.
But coming from this intelligent man who's pretty knowledgeable, it's disturbing that he has such a shallow view of the deep complexities of that region.
Hey, just in geography terms, how big is Afghanistan compared to Texas, for example?
You know, that's a good question.
I don't know.
I'm a New York City boy, and I can only measure by New York City blocks.
But Afghanistan, I can tell you, is about 31 million people.
And it's a pretty big – I don't think it's as big as Texas, but it's pretty big.
Nothing's as big as Texas.
Yeah, Texas is pretty big, but, I mean, that is kind of what we're dealing – I mean, there's no doubt if you've ever driven across Texas, it's pretty easy to see why this was its own nation.
It has, you know, four or five regions of its own.
It's – this is – I can't imagine any occupying army from anywhere in the whole world that may be sent from Washington, D.C., that could ever pacify this land.
Scott, the whole trick to Afghanistan, the strategic – the most important strategic element is that all the supplies for an occupying army have to come by road from Pakistan along this long, torturous route, just the way the supplies for American forces in Kuwait – I mean Iraq come through Kuwait.
In April, the Russians agreed to open up a supply line overland to American forces, believe it or not, in Afghanistan because they were so concerned the Taliban was putting the NATO and the U.S. on the defensive there.
All right, now let me just check my list and make sure I asked you everything I wanted to ask you about.
I think I did.
Oh, no, I didn't.
Hey, do you have more time?
Yes, sure.
Are you always – Oh, good.
Well, thank you very much.
Hey, listen, I don't know if you know anything about it.
I scanned your new and improved website, ericmargulise.com, which is great.
It looks very nice, and I don't think I saw anything about this, but I was wondering – I guess it's worth a try – if you know anything about or can comment on the leak of this information that supposedly inspectors – or no, pardon me – supposedly the Israelis discovered traces of uranium at that site in Syria, and this is being trumpeted in a few places on the war party right side of the blogosphere, at least, as, see, this was some kind of nuclear reactor and that kind of thing.
I think – you know, I don't put much credibility in claims like this.
This is news that sounds manufactured, and it's interesting.
I read another report that the claims came from some international group.
Maybe it was the Atomic Energy Commission.
I'm not sure which.
But this coincides with leaks from the Atomic Energy Commission that the documents that it was supplied by the U.S. that allegedly came out of Iran, claiming that Iran was working on nuclear weapons, had been forged and doctored.
You're referring to Gareth Porter's story in rawstory.com?
Correct, and other stories on the subject.
They were fraudulent documents, just the way we got before the invasion of Iraq, and I suspect that this may be an effort to divert attention from this fact.
I always thought these documents were forged, and I don't give great confidence in the Iranians, but in this case I think they probably were telling the truth.
Yeah, well, that's certainly been the opinion of Gordon Prather at antiwar.com all along as well.
And Scott Ritter was great on this show.
He said, you know, in any other case, well, let's see the forensics.
Let's let some computer geniuses have a stab at this laptop and show me when were these files created and where.
There's a million different questions that you could ask the internal workings of that laptop that it could answer for you that would clear all this up, and yet somehow they won't let anyone examine the documents, especially the Iranians being accused.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Now, the Syrian story, this alleged nuclear reactor or something that the Syrians had built, never made any sense to me.
It always sounded phony as a $3 bill.
Yeah, this is the one.
I'm sorry, because I should have set this up in the question better, too.
This is the one that Israel bombed, the building that Israel bombed in September of 2007.
Right, right.
And everybody's kept mum about it ever since.
Everybody's been coy, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
The Israelis won't say anything, the U.S. won't say anything, but they're all congratulating each other.
But, in fact, it does not make sense with a building in the middle of nowhere, with no anti-aircraft protection, not connected to anything, no wires or anything else, with none of the usual accoutrements of a nuclear installation.
Why on earth would the Syrians put something like that out in the open when they know the Israelis are watching every square inch of Syria?
They can see what the president of Syria is having for breakfast from their satellites.
It just doesn't make sense.
What the hell do the Syrians need a nuclear weapon for?
If they ever fired one, if they dropped one on Israel, it would wipe them out, too.
Right, yeah, it never did make any sense.
And besides, Joe Cirincione, formerly from the Carnegie Endowment, I forget where he's at now, but he's an expert on these matters, and he explained to me right after that happened on this show that, look, the Syrian nuclear program is the kind of thing you'd find at the J.J.
Pickle nuclear facility here at U.T.
Austin.
It's right there on Burnet Road in the center of town.
There's nothing you can make a nuclear bomb out of going on there.
Well, that's exactly right.
Now, I don't know.
Maybe the Syrians were up to some other kind of nefarious activity.
Maybe this was a supply depot for, I don't know, Hezbollah or something.
We just don't know.
But, you know, we keep hearing all these cries of moral indignation.
I'm like, God, the Syrians are doing something nuclear like that?
Well, you know, let's not forget that Israel has the biggest nuclear force, not in the Middle East, but one of the very largest in the world, if not the third or fourth largest.
And, you know, nobody's bringing any pressure on Israel or pointing any fingers at them.
Right.
Yeah, it's funny, too, because even on this show, it just sort of goes as a matter of course and sort of unsaid a lot of times that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and nobody else in the region does.
That's right.
Israel was even going to sell them to Iran and to the Shah, talking about proliferation.
And Israel has been a major supplier of nuclear technology to India, and it's become India's second largest weapons supplier.
So there's a lot of hanky-panky going on behind the scenes.
We must always be cautious of these cries of international moral outrage.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as long as we're talking about Syria, how serious?
You're in D.C. today, you said, huh?
Yes.
I don't know how you can stand the stench of death in the air, but do you think anybody there is still seriously contemplating regime change in Syria?
Because it's always seemed to me that, as far as I know, and I don't know much, but if you replace the Ba'athist regime there, there's nobody to replace it with except the Muslim Brotherhood or a bunch of people who would be much harder to deal with than Assad and the Ba'athists there.
Scott, you're absolutely right.
There's what the French call an aura of fin de regime, end of regime, hanging over Washington.
I was thinking just about Louis Cator's when he said, after me, the deluge.
Well, that's what we got with President Bush.
We're up to our ears in floodwaters here with problems.
Yes, there are the neocons have burrowed in now, and they're frantically trying to burrow into the Obama administration.
But I think the idea of overthrowing Syria, as you said quite rightly, is that they wanted to do it, they were going to do it, and then somebody finally had the brains to say, wait a minute, who are we going to replace them with?
And yes, it's true, it is the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group that would overthrow the Alawites who only make up about 12% of the population in Syria.
And the Americans would not like that at all, so they decided the Assad that you know is better than these shadowy Muslim Brotherhood people.
And they let him stay, but probably certain very stern rules were put on him.
Don't mess around in Iraq, shut your border, don't make any trouble.
You know what I can't figure out?
How come Israel and Syria can't just work something out?
I mean, I know there are all kinds of issues about southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights, and there are religious issues and expansionism issues and nuclear whatever issues on one side if not the other.
There are things to be worked out, but you know, we're talking about neighboring states here.
They care about their own survival more than anything else.
They don't really want to have a war.
What is it that's such the sticking point?
Don't tell me it's the Doha farms or whatever.
No, that was Iraq.
That was where they murdered those people in Iraq trying to get Saddam Hussein.
Whatever the farms are that they don't want to give up.
The Sheba farms.
The Sheba farms, thank you, thank you.
You know what?
My reading is this, that what the Israelis have been trying to do is to lure Syria away from its very close alliance with Iran.
This worries the Israelis enormously because it serves as a conduit of Iranian power to Iran's other ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
The Israelis have just got a total bee in their bonnet about Hezbollah.
They're determined to get revenge on Hezbollah for defeating them and driving them out of Lebanon and then defeating them again in the last little war.
So the Israelis are trying to entice Syria away from Iran by talking about the offer of the Golan Heights.
The Syrians now are very weary that the Israelis are going to draw them out of the Iranian alliance.
And then on the last minute they're not going to end up getting Golan.
So they'll just be left in the middle.
And then Assad in Syria is going to have a storm of fury unleashed against him for having stabbed the Muslim cause in the back, for having abandoned Hezbollah.
The Iranians are going to be furious at him.
And he risks his throne there in Syria because, as I said, he's a very minority regime held only in power by the military.
So they have to be very, very careful.
And they know that there are a lot of people who want to overthrow the Syrian regime, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Israelis.
They've got lots of enemies.
So every peace offer is also a hand grenade.
Yeah.
Well, that's a tough situation, I guess.
Well, this is why it's so easy to be me.
I'm just for non-intervention and let these people work out their own problems.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with me.
I would hate to have to try to take one position or another about what America should do in any of these situations.
It seems to me like there is no good move in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, other than just pack up and go home and hope everything works out, you know?
Scott, you know, I've had constantly experience here in Washington, New York, that, you know, before Iraq, then I would start saying, you know, wait a minute, we've got to take out Saddam.
Wait a minute, what does that mean?
What are you going to do about the Shiites?
Who's going to balance the Shiites against the Sunnis and the Kurds in this?
And I could see these people's eyes going glazing over, and they'd say to me, don't bother me with all the details, just give me the executive summary.
And that was the Republican philosophy.
And unfortunately, we have smart people who are ignorant about the rest of the world who are moving around the checkerboard pieces for the whole rest of the world.
We've got people here in Washington deciding the fate of all these countries over there when they know nothing about them.
And it is very, very disturbing to watch it.
We don't have the experts, or at least if we do, we're not listening to them.
That's why I'm saying I hope the State Department will be brought back into play, because there are a lot of smart, knowledgeable people there.
But for God's sakes, we have had the most abominable foreign policy for the last year, worthy of idiots.
Sorry to use such a strong word, but it is.
The most incompetent foreign policy run by the most incompetent people I've ever seen in my life in 50 years as a journalist and traveler.
There are lots of smart, knowledgeable Americans.
We've got to start putting them into power now.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
The website is ericmargulies.com.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And that's available now.
Can I get my copy?
Yes, you can.
You can get it on Amazon.com or you can get it in leading bookstores.
Okay, great.
Yeah, that's next on my list, absolutely.
Can't wait to talk to you about it.
Cheers.
It'll be great, Scott.
All right.
Thank you very much, sir.
Bye-bye.
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'd 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 going to have yours.
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.
Have you not seen enough death?
Go.
Go while you can.
This is not your war.
It is now.
