11/28/08 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Eric Margulies is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and the brand new American Raj.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Great to be back.
It's good to have you here.
And when it comes to what the hell is going on in Central Asia or anywhere around there, I always turn to you first, Eric, because, well, tell me, how long have you covered this?
I know you covered the Afghan war against the Russians in Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
How far does your experience in this part of the world go back?
Back to 1975, Scott, when I first started traveling through India, and early 80s in Pakistan, mid-80s in Afghanistan.
I guess, you know, obviously the big story is the attacks, coordinated attacks all across Mumbai.
Can you basically just kind of take us through what happened as far as we know so far, at least what was attacked, and then maybe we can get around to, you know, who and why and that kind of thing as best you can tell?
Young extremists belonging to we don't know what group yet.
They claimed they were from a group called the Deccan Mujahideen, which nobody's ever heard of.
So we're heavily armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers, grenades.
They attacked two of the premier hotels in Mumbai or Bombay, as it was called, in which I've stayed regularly, the Oberoi and the old Taj Mahal.
They were frequented by Western visitors, Bollywood, movie stars.
They were very famous.
They attacked these two hotels.
They attacked a Jewish center, Lubavitcher Jewish Center, in a very particularly cowardly attack.
They attacked apparently a restaurant for reasons I don't understand, and even less so a hospital.
But this was in the most heavily guarded, most secure part of Mumbai on a peninsula, which is very heavily policed, where there are all kinds of security patrols and things.
There was very little security at any of the targets that were attacked, but the whole area was considered secure.
So it was a huge surprise for the Indians and a huge slap in the face, because there have been regular bombings over the last decade in Mumbai, one that killed 200 people, all kinds of violence from different groups, not just Muslims, but also from Hindu extremists attacking Christians and Muslims.
It's a very violent city, but the police were caught flat-footed.
And casualties, as of today, we're heading towards 140 dead and over 300 wounded.
But I expect these figures to change, and I think some of the shooting may still be going on.
We don't know how many attackers there were.
I suspect that the number has been exaggerated.
Well, and now, how many different targets were there across the city?
Well, there were the two hotels, there was the Jewish center, there was a hospital, and there was a restaurant.
That's five targets.
Apparently there was one other target somewhere in northern Mumbai, but I'm not clear on that.
Yeah, I saw one report where they said that at one point there were just men walking down the streets just shooting anybody.
It was a complete failure of Indian security, and the Indians have a huge security establishment.
You know, up in Kashmir, they have 500,000 soldiers and paramilitary troops deployed, so they don't lack for manpower, but this attack was wholly unprecedented, and it's the first time we've seen foreigners singled out in attacks in India.
Attackers went after Americans, Britons, Canadians.
All people, coincidentally, were waging war in Afghanistan.
So my first thought as I watched this is that, you know, all the chickens are coming home to roost.
Multiple crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Kashmir and in western India are all starting to sort of blend together.
Well, you know, it was kind of all over the media, but the London Times, I think, was the worst about it, or maybe the best, who knows, I don't know, probably the worst, in saying, oh, this is obviously Al-Qaeda did this.
Well, the British would, I guess, like to think that, but there are many people who are seething with violence, and Al-Qaeda, as I've said before in this program, is a tiny organization and never had more than 300 men.
It's probably down to 100 by now.
It's an inspirational movement rather than an organization.
And, in fact, can I stop you there for a second?
Because I heard you mention to Lew Rockwell in your interview with him the other day that you were there actually covering Al-Qaeda, or at least for a time you were there, when there were about 300 of these guys, which I guess means sometime in the late 90s or early 2000 or something?
That's correct.
Yes.
That's right.
Well, I was there at the birth of Taliban, when that happened, during the civil war in Afghanistan, and I was there in Peshawar, in southern Afghanistan, with some of the people who were members of Al-Qaeda, or later became members of Al-Qaeda, and I was, of course, I spent a lot of time with the spiritual advisor of Osama bin Laden, who taught, who gave bin Laden his world view and strategy.
That's Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.
Right, the guy who told you that as soon as we're done kicking out the Russians, you're next, pal.
Good memory.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, I think, you know, that's an important point, that Al-Qaeda never meant, you know, anybody with a rifle or, you know, explosives who ever was in Afghanistan, or any Arab who ever was in Afghanistan.
This was a very small group of people that, well, I remember Loretta Napoleone told the story of how Zarqawi met with bin Laden, and bin Laden said, yeah, you know, we're going to, we're all coming together to attack America, and Zarqawi said, nah, forget that, I want to, you know, fight the king of Jordan, and basically left.
You know what I mean?
So you have people who were, you know, so-called Arab Afghans or whatever, who were traveling to Afghanistan, maybe training in the camps or whatever, and the reason is, though, you know, everyone who ever went to an Afghan camp was part of this, you know, giant global jihadist movement of tens of thousands of people or anything like that.
In fact, you know, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they claimed that there were over 20 terrorist training camps, as they called them.
They were all training terrorists to go and attack America.
Well, this was an absolute lie, one among many.
Most of the training camps, 90% of the people in the training camps, were either Kashmiris being trained by Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, with full American knowledge, to go and fight in Kashmir against Indian rule.
That was the biggest group.
And the second biggest group were people from Central Asia, mainly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, who were being organized and trained to go and fight the dreadful communist regimes of Central Asia.
Again, with full American knowledge.
And finally, there were a group of Uyghurs, Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang province in western China, who were being trained by bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang.
And this was not only with knowledge, but with the support of CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.
As late as when?
Oh, this is in 2001.
In 2001, with CIA backing, bin Laden himself, not just ISI types or whatever, but actually al-Qaeda was working with the CIA in training these anti-Chinese Muslims?
Well, no, I wouldn't go that far.
I would say that they knew what bin Laden was doing, and they were encouraging him through third parties, probably the Saudis.
But the minute 9-11, well, you remember, Washington was giving money to Taliban until four months before 9-11.
The reason for that was they thought they would enlist Taliban to go and overthrow the Central Asian communist regimes, and even attack China.
But of course, when 9-11 happened, this dirty little secret was covered up.
The files were burned, and anybody involved in it was sent off to purgatory.
Yeah, I think there was even a plot somewhere in 2000 or something by the British to use bin Laden types to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya.
That's exactly right.
And in fact, the British used them to shoot off a bomb in Tripoli that killed about 80 civilians.
So a lot of dirty hands there.
And the point was that Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism.
There were commando groups, guerrilla groups being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia, but there are no more left.
And when you hear people, including President-elect Obama, saying we're going off to fight terrorist al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, this is simply not true.
There are hardly any al-Qaeda left, not that there were very many to begin with.
Well, and the story has really been told.
Robert Dreyfuss did one in Rolling Stone called The Bogus War on Terrorism or The Phony War on Terrorism, something like that, where he talked with all these Air Force and CIA guys, and they explained that, listen, we decimated what was left of al-Qaeda, the few hundred people who were al-Qaeda, in November of 2001.
They pointed their laser designators at them, and the Air Force obliterated them.
They said if you want a body count, you're going to need Q-tips.
Well, that's exactly right.
In fact, the U.S. Air Force bought 2,500 copies of my first book, War at the Top of the World, which is all about Afghanistan.
Clearly they're planning a long stay in the region.
Interesting.
I didn't know that.
What did you do with the royalty check for that one?
First revealed here.
Writers don't make any money.
All right.
Now, okay, so you hit on the ISI connection here.
This is the intelligence agency in Pakistan, and we've talked before about how basically the view of the Pakistani military is that they have to have, in one way or another, their western border with Afghanistan settled and peaceful so that they can focus their attention on India, and in fact even have a place to retreat to in case India ever invades.
So all that's been kind of thrown out and back in the window a few different directions, I guess, since September 11th, with America backing, it seems like, all sides and all disputes in the region.
Well, Pakistan is in a dreadful mess.
Strategically, it's very much on the defensive.
India's sealing its oaths.
They know they've got Pakistan on the run.
They're trying to find a strategic, crazy strategic nuclear agreement with America that's going to help them build nuclear weapons pointed at North America, for one thing.
They just hit the moon, right?
Well, yeah, and an Indian rocket that can hit, deliver a probe to the moon can also deliver a warhead to Chicago.
Sputnik!
Yes, Indian Sputnik.
So the Indians are feeling cock-a-hoop over the fact that they're American allies now, and their economy wasn't doing well until recently, but Pakistan's in a mess.
It's bankrupt.
It is now being kept alive by loans from the International Monetary Fund, which really come from Uncle Sam, and the U.S. has rented out now about 130,000 men of Pakistan's army to go and fight up in the tribal area, and to try and protect NATO's increasingly endangered supply lines that run from Karachi up into Afghanistan.
The government of Pakistan, the Nuzar Dari government, is completely discredited.
It's very unpopular.
It's about 22% support.
People are furious at the government for bombing their own people in the tribal area, and there's fury at the United States across, in every Muslim part of South Asia, for the bombing in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's tribal area, and that's one of the reasons, in my view, that the attackers in Mumbai were going after Americans.
And so it's been the strategy of the ISI, and not that I'm accusing them of being behind this attack or anything necessarily, but they have been backing the very same kind of groups that did this attack today, at least in the general sense, using kind of stateless, quote-unquote, terrorist groups against India as part of their state strategy there in Pakistan.
That is correct.
Particularly in years past, Pakistan, which is militarily outnumbered by India by a factor of four or five to one, has tried to keep India on the defensive by secretly funding some of these guerrilla groups, violent militant groups, terrorist groups, call them what you want in India.
They certainly did it in Kashmir, because I was there and I was in the Kashmiri camps where the Pakistani ISI was training Kashmiris to go and fight in Indian-ruled Kashmir.
Two of these groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, have sort of broken out of Kashmir and launched actual attacks in India, including in 2001 a very, very high-level attack on India's parliament building.
So they were definitely supported by Pakistan.
Whether the group that attacked yesterday was supported, we don't know.
And I doubt that there was any official Pakistani government support for such an attack, because they'd be scared to death that the Indians would invade Pakistan.
But we don't know.
There may be rogue elements within ISI.
There certainly are anti-government and anti-American elements there.
But it may be an indigenous Indian event as well.
Well, and that's the thing, is there's still a gigantic Muslim population within India.
I was reading this thing that Michael Shoyer wrote for the Jamestown Foundation about some of this, and he said that over the past, really, I don't know, 15 years or maybe more than that, that there's really been a lot of inroads in some of the Kashmir-type militant groups into India, where it's really a domestic affair now.
They don't even really need outside help for this kind of thing, maybe.
Well, we've seen that.
Michael's quite right.
But also that the Bush administration forced General Musharraf, when he was running Pakistan, to cut links to the Kashmiri militants and denounce them as terrorists.
This enraged Pakistanis.
They said, you know, bomb the Indians, not your own people.
But Musharraf was forced to go along with this, denouncing them as terrorists.
So now Pakistan has very little influence over some of these groups, where it had significant one before, and they are now just literally running amok.
But at the same time, there's a group that's emerged called the Indian Mujahideen, a new group of very young Indians, 20-something Indian Muslims, and there are 155 million Muslims just in India, who feel that Muslims in India are downtrodden, persecuted, and they've adopted a jihadist, bin Ladenist philosophy, and they've started a series of attacks in India.
So these groups are not, in my view, linked to Pakistan in any way.
They're just local angry people.
Can you kind of refresh the details for me on this massive pogrom that happened, I guess, in late 2001 or early 2002?
The only reason I know about it is because, in fact, I guess it was Michael Shoyer pointed out that bin Laden harped on it, because what happened was, the way I remember it was something along the lines of the way he told it, was that there was basically an attack by some Indian Muslims on some Hindus, and a few dozen were killed or something, and then the Hindus responded by killing tens of thousands of people in some massive pogrom.
And bin Laden, I think in one of his first statements that he released after September 11, said, see, the Americans didn't say one word.
The Americans don't care at all about human rights.
All they care about is killing Muslims.
You must have a camera in my office, because I'm just writing about this for my Sunday column.
I'm the electric eye.
Your eyes are everywhere.
Yes, I think it was 2001 or 2002 now, in Gujarat province, which is north of Mumbai, up the coast, there was an incident over a train, and some people were killed and shooting and things.
Anyway, it turned into a horrible pogrom, as you say, in which up to 3,000 Muslims were killed, massacred, many burned alive.
Well, that's still many less than the way I remembered it, but still 3,000 is a lot.
Or it could have been more.
My memory was 3,000, but it was a terrible event.
It received no publicity in the Western world at all.
Nobody cared anything at all about it.
Bin Laden, you're right, did bring it up, and that is probably what triggered the rise of these Indian Mujahideen, these youth, saying, you know, we can't, we have to defend ourselves in Muslim India.
I mean, Hindu India.
The worst part was that the governor of Gujarat state was a member of the Bharata Janata Party, which is the right-wing chauvinist Hindu party, which many of his critics accused of being a sort of almost semi-fascist party.
Same party, same people who assassinated Gandhi.
He encouraged the riots and was led by political leaders of the BJP.
Terrible event.
But look, also there's the, in Kashmir, I think a moderate estimate of Muslim deaths in Kashmir for the last 19 years of uprising against Indian rule is 40,000 dead, mostly Muslims.
Muslim groups there claim that the total number is 80,000.
Nobody has ever paid attention to this.
You know, when Muslims kill five people, it's front-page news, but when thousands of Muslims or tens of thousands of Muslims die, nobody cares.
Yeah, well, and it's this cycle of violence that seems like we really have no part of.
I mean, Hindus versus Muslims, and based primarily, I mean, obviously we're talking about human beings with earthly human politics and power that they're fighting over, but that's how they define their split, apparently, is based on who believes what.
Well, there's, you know, there's historical antipathy and animosity that goes on on cultural and religious reasons, and it's very, very deep.
And the problem in India is that the Muslims there live on the knife's edge because communal violence can break out, you know, with a traffic accident, for example.
That's how they often start.
Or a pig's head is thrown into a mosque or something like that.
And then these riots develop, and people are doused with kerosene and burned alive, and it's absolutely horrible.
After Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, thousands of Sikhs, maybe up to 5,000 Sikhs, were massacred by Hindus in revenge.
So India is very volatile.
It's very dangerous.
It's extreme violence in its cities.
There are now Hindu extremist groups that consider attacking Christians and Muslims.
And then there are gangsters who play a major role, too.
And they all staged a whole series of bombings in Bombay, Mumbai, some years back.
Well, and it's easy to see how this guy, I forgot what you said his name was, the kind of right-wing fascist-leaning...
Oh, the Bharata Janata Party in Bombay, Mumbai.
Well, Bal Thackeray, who leads this group called the Shiv Sena there, is a self-professed great admirer of Adolf Hitler.
That's his hero.
So you can imagine what kind of people we're talking about.
Yeah, well, and then, of course, the more Muslims shoot things up, the more people like him gain credibility and authority and justify what they're doing.
And it becomes, you know, we talk about, often when we talk about terrorism, we talk about how the strategy is, you know, getting a reaction.
But really, the terrorism itself is a reaction.
And you get this thing going back and forth, same as sort of in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip in Israel, where everybody is killing everybody, but all sides call it retaliation when they do it, and nobody can ever remember who hit first.
It just goes around and around and around and around.
Exactly.
And the war hawks get stronger and stronger on either side.
Bin Laden also mentioned, said that the attack on the World Trade Center was in part developed in revenge for the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, in which at least 18,000 Lebanese were killed by the Israelis.
And there were the awful Shatila and Sabra massacres of about 2,000 Palestinian civilians by troops allied to Israel.
But once again, we in the West paid no attention to this destruction of Beirut and these extremely high losses.
And, in fact, Alexander Haig, who was then Secretary of State, even gave a green light for the Israeli attack.
So chickens are coming home to roost.
Well, so what do you expect to happen in India?
I mean, I guess there's a lot of variables, whether they decide they want to try to pin it on the Pakistani state or not.
This could mean war.
Scott, the Indians immediately blame Pakistan, but they always do.
And Pakistan immediately denied it, which they do.
And, frankly, both intelligence agencies on either side have been staging attacks inside the other countries.
The Indians have been staging bombing attacks in the tribal areas along the Afghan border and in Karachi.
The Pakistanis have been quietly supporting all kinds of rebel groups in India, including an eastern Indian, near Assam, near the Burmese border.
So nobody's hands are clean.
The new Pakistani intelligence director has rushed to Delhi, which is unprecedented, to assure the Indians that the Pakistanis had nothing to do with it.
The Indians are steaming mad.
The Indian people are calling for revenge.
But it's like after 9-11, it's not quick to hear who did it and who we can take revenge against.
It's a danger, of course.
When I wrote my first book, War at the Top of the World, this was the reason I wrote the book, that the confrontation between India and Pakistan, who are both nuclear-armed powers with large nuclear arsenals, is the most dangerous nuclear issue on Earth.
And it doesn't take much, as we've seen, a bunch of armed guys stage an outrage to possibly provoke India and Pakistan into a full-scale war.
Well, you know, I guess the worse the outrage is, the more important it is that things like that happen, where, like you said, a head of the ISI hopped on a plane and went straight to India to say, no, really, this wasn't us this time, or whatever.
But, I mean, this certainly is playing with fire.
It could be, well, I don't know, a couple things.
First of all, like you're saying, you have the people of India are calling for somebody's blood.
But also I wanted to say that, or remark that, I saw at least one short clip of the prime minister of India on TV, and he was saying, you know, the perpetrators, people behind this, will be prosecuted.
And so that seemed to me like, as far as I could tell, he was talking like I wish George Bush had talked after 9-11, which was, everybody be cool, you know, rather than freaking out and overreacting, we're going to, you know, do this right.
Yes, you can imagine, because if he had done a Bush, he could have proclaimed a crusade against all the Muslims in the region, and started launching, I mean, India is a huge power.
It's got a 1.1 million man army.
India certainly has the means.
But you're quite right to draw the analogy.
But India took a much wiser step.
You know, India's government, particularly its Congress party, has been very conservative, very cautious, has not responded to a lot of provocations.
And the Indian military, even though a few times it's wanted to go in and really give the Pakistanis a beating, the civilian leaders have held it back and said, no, calm, we don't want to fight a major war.
So the Indians are to be commended for this.
And I'm sure the Pakistani government has no interest in provoking India right now, even though the two countries are really at scimitars drawn in Afghanistan, because India is trying to muscle its way into Afghanistan, which the Pakistanis regard as their backyard.
Right.
But with the Pakistanis saying, listen, we had nothing to do with it, the Indians will say, okay, maybe you had nothing to do with it, but how do you know other people in ISI intelligence didn't have anything to do with it, because there are all kinds of different factions within the military and the intelligence services that are not necessarily under control of the new government of Asif Zardari.
Well, and I just said the precedence there.
I mean, these guys, these intelligence agencies, have used these less-than-state-type terrorist groups to commit attacks in each other's countries in the past.
That's exactly right.
And India's got large numbers of them.
You know, we don't think that India is a federal state and that the state, for example, of Camel Nadu, where there's been significant uprisings, I think it's got 60 or 80 million people alone in it.
So there's, as I said, that whole subcontinent is seething with violence.
But the fact is the Pakistani government is not really in control of its own country.
It's not in control of the armed forces at all.
They're a government within the government.
So it's very hard knowing who to deal with.
What's so damn important about Kashmir that they can't work it out?
Kashmir, I call it the Alsace-Lorraine of the Himalayas.
It's a place that is beautiful.
It has very attractive people.
It has great food, just like Alsace and Lorraine.
And everybody is willing to fight to the death for it, but very few people have ever been there.
It's an entirely emotive issue.
It's strategic, yes.
It's up in the Himalayas, so it's at the nexus of Russia and China and India and Pakistan.
But largely it's a beautiful area of forests and lakes in a continent that's bone dry and searing hot.
So it has the role of a sort of an earthly paradise in popular legend.
And the Indians and Pakistanis hate each other so much that they have been willing to go to war, destroy the area just to prevent the other side from getting it.
I was with the Pakistani army at the Siachen Glacier, which is at the top of Kashmir right next to China in the middle of nowhere at 15,000 feet altitude, frigid, almost no air.
And they've been fighting there for over a decade using climbing ropes and mountaineers' gear and things like that for this frozen hell.
It's crazy.
It is just bitter hatred, and one side won't let the other get away with anything.
You know, one time I met a Pakistani and an Indian at the same time, and I asked them, guys, what is the deal?
Why are you fighting?
Is it a religious thing, or is it just about land?
And they both said in unison, it's just about land.
Well, it's religious, too, because Kashmir is the only majority Muslim state in India.
And the Muslim Kashmiris, most of them want independence from India, or they want to be independent and then join Pakistan.
They're split on the issue.
The minority Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir want to stay with India.
But India has said that if Kashmir is allowed to secede from the Indian Union, because India is a voluntary union of states, that it will begin unraveling of the whole Indian Union.
And states like I just mentioned, Tamil Nadu in the south, they want to go their own way.
So the Indians have a point there.
It's not a totally good one, but they're afraid.
The other thing is that Kashmir, nobody knows where the borders are.
It may include a large chunk of northern Pakistan.
And if Kashmir goes independent, there goes a lot of Pakistani territory, too.
It's a very mixed-up, convoluted situation.
And there's been no progress on this since 1947 when it began.
I forget if I asked you this last time.
I did read this in a paper that Barack Obama was talking about maybe sending Bill Clinton over there to try to work out a deal between these warring factions.
Do you have any hope for something like that?
Well, I did hear that President-elect Obama says he will take up the Kashmir issue, for which he's to be applauded, because no American president has tried to do this so far.
Bush simply ordered Musharraf to declare all the Kashmiri independence fighters terrorists and told Pakistan to cut it out and put his support behind India.
This didn't worsen the problem rather than solve it.
If Obama tackles it, as I was saying earlier, this is the world's most dangerous nuclear issue.
In 1999, when the Pakistanis grabbed some Indian territory in northern Kashmir, the two sides' nuclear forces went on to full red alert.
They were starting to put nuclear weapons on their strike fighters and missiles.
This is the closest we've been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis and since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Israelis started deploying their nuclear weapons.
So it is very dangerous.
The president is absolutely right.
Rand Corporation estimated that if there were a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, it would kill 2 million people initially, and eventually 100 million would be injured or die and would pollute the entire planet with clouds of radioactive dust.
So something has to be done.
It's about time.
It's the world's oldest diplomatic issue.
It predates the Arabs and the Israelis by a couple of months.
I just hope that Obama does it and doesn't get distracted.
I have not heard, though, that Clinton is going to be sent over there.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they certainly haven't announced it for sure or anything, but it was at least one...
I forget where I read it, but it seemed like a trial balloon kind of a thing from inside their camp somewhere, if I remember it right.
Well, so when he talks about...
I'm sure you've seen it.
As Obama's talked about sending in two more divisions into Afghanistan, Robert Gates has said, that's right, we're going to send five more.
And, of course, he's keeping Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, they say.
And so how does that play into this?
I know that, well, as you mentioned, this is where it gets really complicated, is that India now has major interests inside Afghanistan because they want to prevent the Pakistanis from having a calm western border, where we started.
They want to reassert their influence there.
In fact, the Indians have just opened the first air base outside of India in Tajikistan, which is just to the north of Afghanistan.
It has the Pakistanis in an uproar.
But India is really slowly spreading its power in the area.
One of the reasons for the instability of this whole area is this ongoing war in Afghanistan.
NATO and the US and NATO are on the defensive.
They've lost the initiative.
They're being beaten by a bunch of tribesmen with Kalashnikov rifles and grenade launchers.
In spite of the constant, the overwhelming might of the US Air Force that blasts anything that moves, mostly civilians, it's enraged the whole Muslim world over civilian casualties.
Even the American puppet in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, denounced America and told them to stop their bombing campaign.
But, of course, without American bombing, the American and NATO troops would be quickly defeated in Afghanistan.
So, now into this quagmire, which is spreading poison into Pakistan and is destabilizing all of Pakistan and has produced another war in the tribal area.
Now Obama, very wrongly in my view, wants to send a lot more troops.
I'm sorry he kept Gates on.
I think it sends the wrong message to everyone.
He's kept some very hawkish figures.
He's kept people who voted for the Iraq war.
Big Iraq war boosters are being kept on.
This is not the man, in my view, who said he was going to bring change.
But it looks like more of the same, or worse, because if more troops go into Afghanistan, we're going to have a bigger problem.
And I guarantee you that war is going to put Pakistan into turmoil, which controls the supply lines of the American forces in Afghanistan.
And I wonder if Afghanistan won't become for Obama what Iraq became for Bush.
Well, you know, Hamid Karzai, the puppet, in that same statement that he gave earlier this week, I think it was, where he was denouncing the airstrikes, or one of these speeches where he's denouncing the airstrikes, he also said, hey, look, oh, this was a speech he gave to some representatives from the United Nations, I think.
He said, look, this coalition can't defeat these tribesmen with a case.
At some point, maybe we should just give up and have a peace deal and work things out with the Taliban.
Do you think, I mean, I guess there's really no chance politically, is there, that Barack Obama could come to office and say, wow, well, things have changed since I got elected.
It looks like our local democracy there is going to work a deal with these Taliban tribesmen, and everything's going to be fine, and we can withdraw.
Well, I'm sure hope that he will do this and seize the opportunity, because the current American policy in Afghanistan is self-defeating, it's ineffective, it's foolish, and it's just getting more and more enemies against the United States.
I mean, the thought that our allies in Afghanistan are that nation's leading drug dealers and the former heads of the Afghan Communist Party is just stunning to me and unacceptable.
So Obama has, because he's new, he's got a chance to change policy.
But if he sends more troops there, he's going to get sticking his head deeper into this hornet's nest.
He will be precluding a chance for a settlement.
And the constant demonization of Taliban in the media and by our politicians who know nothing about Afghanistan is making the matters worse and preventing us from achieving what is obvious and fundamental, which is a negotiated political settlement for Afghanistan that includes some or all of Taliban and some kind of coalition government.
All right, Eric.
Well, every time we talk about what would a reasonable person do, we have to assume the opposite.
Of course, the opposite is, say, oh, I don't know, Michael O'Hanlon and Robert Kagan, who wrote in the New York Times, was it a year ago or two years ago now, that we need to consider invading Pakistan and seizing their nuclear weapons and so forth.
Well, we know that certainly in the case of Kagan, what he's worrying about is the welfare of Israel rather than the United States.
But, you know, it's amazing that these pundits who were 100 percent wrong about Iraq are still held in public esteem and pontificating now to create a new disaster in South Asia.
Well, speaking of which, you know what, we're already over time, so let me hold you a couple more minutes because I want to play you this clip and get your reaction to it, if that's all right.
This is Zbigniew Brzezinski, and I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the movie that this comes from, Eric, but recently released, maybe we can Google it and figure it out.
The point, very simple, was this.
We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan.
We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which was being made by the Soviets to take over, and we felt, therefore, it made a lot of sense to support those who were resisting, and we decided to do that.
This, of course, probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do, which was to try to make a general takeover of the country by force of arms and got them embroiled in an adventure which proved disastrous for them.
In the same interview, you were asked whether you regretted having supported Islamic fundamentalists and having armed future terrorists.
Your reply was, what is more important in the history of the world, the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War?
Do you still stand by this statement?
It sounds like a very free translation of a comment regarding the importance of the Taliban.
The Taliban itself wasn't very important.
What was important was the fact that the Soviets pulverized Afghanistan, really destroyed it and polarized it, and subsequently produced the circumstances which are still confronting us in Afghanistan and that part of the world.
But the fact that the Soviets became involved in an adventure which they could not win was positive from the standpoint of the West.
Don't forget the Soviets were busy training terrorists all over the place in the 80s.
They have camps all over the Soviet Union for terrorist activity.
Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still the Soviet Union?
So yes, compared to the Soviet Union and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant.
All right, Eric.
To be fair, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that quote, the original one that he gave to the French paper saying, well, what's more important, some stirred up Muslims or the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe, was in 1998.
So there had been some al-Qaeda attacks, but it was prior to September 11th at least.
But here he seems to continue to justify that, or I guess he would probably argue that 9-11 had nothing to do with the consequences of American support for the Afghan war in the 1980s.
Well, I agree with his view too.
I don't necessarily agree that it was his brilliant plan to lure the Russians into Afghanistan that provoked all of this.
People have very different views on the subject.
I did interview him on this.
I heard him tell me the same thing.
But he's right.
America, when it mobilized the force of Muslims there to fight against the communists, very successful operation, brought down, helped bring down the Soviet Union.
There were many other reasons as well, but it was a tremendous success.
When I was in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Soviets used to call our boys, our mujahideen who were fighting against them, Islamic terrorists.
And we used to call them freedom fighters.
And it was only when our freedom fighters suddenly decided, well, now that we've kicked out the Soviets, we're going to kick out the American colonialists from this area.
Sheikh Azam said to me that they suddenly became rebranded as Islamic terrorists.
But Brzezinski is right.
And now there's a revisionary school that says that we should never have supported these people.
But that is absolutely wrong.
And today, the so-called Islamic terrorists, such as they are, the tiny pinprick threat to the United States, just tiny, that has been blown out of all proportions.
I just, my recent issue of Aviation Week in Space Technology magazine, front cover article, radar versus the Taliban.
And the military industrial complex is churning away, bringing out, you know, $25 million radar sets to look for one guy walking with a goat along a path in Afghanistan.
It's ludicrous.
We've created a boogeyman, a Fu Manchu in the mountains of Afghanistan that I hope is going to die down under the Obama administration.
But I feel it won't because there are too many vested interests in keeping it going.
Well, now, see, I would agree with you.
I couldn't care less about the Taliban.
As soon as they invade America, I'll care about the Taliban.
But the problem is the Arab-Afghan army and the rise of, well, the taking of credit by them for the defeat of the Soviet Union and their belief that if only they kill enough American civilians, they can get rid of the American empire around there.
Well, Scott, in my new book, which you were kind enough to mention, American Raj, is all about this subject.
And my contention in the book is that these people, these Islamic militants or political militants, not all of them are motivated by Islam.
I would say the majority are not, in fact.
But these militants, call them, they're set on overthrowing the dictatorial governments that rule almost the entire Muslim world that are kept in power by the United States.
That is their objective.
It is not to kill Americans.
It is to drive American power out of the Muslim world.
I call this an anti-colonial struggle.
And I say terrorism is what the British used to call, in their empire, in the British Raj, the natives fighting back or the cost of empire.
So we have to understand what motivates these people.
They don't want to come and destroy Newark or Austin, Texas.
They don't want to impose Islam on the United States.
They just want to kick the Americans out.
And that is a minority view, even in the Muslim world.
So basically what you're saying then is if we had really called it quits after the fall of the Soviet Union and left the Middle East and stopped backing these dictators and whatever, then we wouldn't have a problem.
It would have been fine to declare our wonderful victory in Afghanistan against the Soviets.
And then we wouldn't be dealing with all the blowback we're suffering now if we just stayed out of, say, for example, the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait.
Well, that may have been overly simplifying the problem, but in effect, yes.
We have become – the reason I call my book American Raj is because our – the way we dominate the Muslim world is just the way the British Raj dominated India, using local rulers and playing them off against each other and intervening militarily when necessary.
And I don't know if America would have been able to completely withdraw from the Muslim world, but it certainly could have lowered its profile.
And it certainly could have cultivated a new generation of leaders.
You know, here we are proudly saying, oh, we're helping the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, which I've produced at Idiot.
But anyway, we're promoting the democratic revolutions there yet.
In the Muslim world, you have the king of Morocco.
You've got our new pal Qaddafi.
You've got the pharaoh in Egypt, General Mubarak, who's been there for as long as everybody can remember.
Kings, you know, in traditional Islam, kings are verboten.
There aren't supposed to be any kings.
You've got kings in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, etc.
So we support a little tin-pot dictator in Pakistan and now a new leader.
We support unsavory people who are really what a lot of critics call them plantation overseers, who are working for the West and keeping their own people in bondage.
Yeah, well, that's a pretty good analogy for it, too.
You know, I think I'm going to steal your language and borrow that.
The natives biting back, where does that come from?
My new book, American Raj.
Well, that's the thing, too, is when you put it that way, the natives, then that really kind of lays bare the fact that we're the redcoats.
We're the colonialists.
That's right.
There's a great line from a British poet that I quote in there about how on the morality of the British Empire saying that what really matters is that we have the Maxim gun and they have not.
And that's the Maxim gun was the predecessor of the machine gun.
And that's really how we exercise our power there through the air.
The Air Force is the new version of the British Navy.
And they teach our army guys to consider this all Central Asia.
I guess all the stands engine country.
That's what they call it.
We're out here like it's a fort, you know, out west in engine country.
And it's just, I guess, a matter of manifest destiny before the whole continent belongs to us.
Well, you know, speaking as a former member of the U.S. Army and a voluntary one, I must say that it's unfortunate that so many of our army soldiers and officers are drawn from some of the less well-educated areas of the states.
We need some smarter officers.
We have some in the Pentagon.
But we need some more down in the lower ranks that don't fall for this kind of baloney.
All right.
I'm sorry for keeping you so much longer than I asked for here, Eric.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies.
Website is Eric Margulies dot com.
It's spelled just like Margolis, Eric Margulies dot com.
And the books are War at the Top of the World and the brand new American Raj.
We'll be right back.