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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Again, our top headlines are Intifada from Morocco to Malaysia.
Massive protests across the Middle East, extremely violent ones breaking out apparently now in Libya.
A dozen or two shot and killed in Bahrain, hundreds wounded in a massive attack yesterday, massive rallies there today which also turned violent as they were burying their dead.
Also earlier today on the show, we talked with Joe Loria live from Cairo and you could hear the roar of the crowd of 200,000 plus people in Tahrir Square.
He was just a block away there reporting on their massive celebration today of one week without Hosni Mubarak.
Tonight on my KPFK show, I'll be talking again with Adam Morrow from Interpress Service live from Cairo.
That'll be at 630 Pacific time on KPFK 90.7 here in LA.
Now we turn to our good friend, Dr. Gareth Porter who's covering a different kind of Intifada for us today over in Afghanistan.
He, of course, is an independent historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance and reporter for Interpress Service.
We run all of it at antiwar.com/Porter and his new piece today at IPS News, it'll be on antiwar.com soon enough, says Residents of Raised Afghan Village Dispute U.S. Case for Destruction.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
It's such an exciting day to be alive and watching the history of the world unfold, man.
I'm just having the time of my life.
People are being hurt, so I don't mean to gloss over that, but it's still something.
We're in the midst of one hell of a moment historically, that's for sure.
This is going to make a big difference, no question about it.
We're on the cusp of historical change.
Well now, so can you tell me what effect this kind of region-wide upsurge has had on the situation in the ground of Afghanistan?
Any?
Well, I don't think it affects Afghanistan yet.
I mean, obviously in the longer run, I think all these things are going to be connected in indirect ways.
But no, I don't think we can see any effect of the pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East on U.S. policy in Afghanistan up to now.
Well, the Afghanistanis, they have their own uprising, and it's armed with AK-47s and homemade landmines, and they've been playing this thing for a while.
They're not about to turn Gandhi on.
Yeah, this one's been going on for a couple hundred years.
Yeah, well, at least 30, you know, my lifetime.
And yeah, before that, certainly.
All right, well, so you reported in the past about these villages on the outskirts of Kandahar, and of course people remember from last year that first the town of Marjah and then the city of Kandahar were to be the showpieces for the new counterinsurgency strategy of Petraeus and his understudy, General McChrystal.
And you talked about how basically they were engaging in collective punishment in these little Afghan villages on the outskirts of Kandahar.
And I think you said something about how this is mostly because they couldn't really go into Kandahar, so they were just messing with everybody on the outskirts, so they're, you know, like a make-work project, a New Deal kind of thing for Afghanistan.
A make-work project, but yes, I mean, they attacked the strong points of the Taliban in the outskirts of Kandahar City, that is to say, Argandab district, as well as Zahri and Panjwai districts a little further south.
And I mean, these were places where the Taliban had established pretty strong bases and where the Americans felt they had to take over in order to avoid having Kandahar City.
I mean, this was the theory, I think, to have not having Kandahar City be subject to pressure from the Taliban in the entire area.
But what happened then was that the IED war, which the Americans have recognized as really just about the most important thing going on militarily in this war, is being able to stop the Taliban from being able to lay so many IEDs that the inevitable result is high levels of severe casualties, loss of limbs or loss of life by American and NATO troops.
And so that really became the focal point of the military struggle in that part of Kandahar.
And the American special operations forces and other troops going in to try to clear these Taliban strongholds really ran into such a ferocious resistance, primarily through IEDs, that they apparently gave up and decided, to hell with it, we're just going to destroy either entire villages or large parts of villages through airstrikes, through these so-called mekliks or mine-clearing explosive charges, and I should say, and ultimately by using a bulldozer, which is what they did in the case of this one village, which is the subject of the story that I did today with an Afghan colleague who went actually into the village of Taurak Kalash, I think it's pronounced Kalasha in Afghan, in Dari or Pashto.
But in any case, he actually interviewed the villagers who had been living in that village until the time when the Taliban actually began to gird for the battle with the United States, knowing the U.S. was going to attack.
They laid more and more, the Taliban were laying more and more mines or IEDs in the area, and most of the people began then to leave, and that would have been last August, September.
And the people then were allowed to come back only after the village had been completely razed to the ground, using all of the weapons that I just referred to a few moments ago.
About 10 or 12 days, we discovered from these interviews, after the destruction of the village, people were allowed to come back, and of course there were American troops and Afghan National Army troops who were there to conduct them back into what used to be that village, but now is just a dusty plain, nothing but dust basically, and a few personal objects still lying in the dirt.
So this story really is about what these people, these former villagers or former residents of this village of Taurak Kalash were saying about the circumstances in which they left and the circumstances which existed in the village just before the U.S. razed it to the ground.
So what is really significant here is that the direct conflict between what the official U.S. military line is on what happened and what the villagers themselves are now saying.
The official military line is that these villagers left, abandoned the village way back in June and July, and according to this woman Paula Broadwell, who is a sympathetic biographer of General David Petraeus and therefore not exactly the most objective observer of this situation, but went over there a few months ago after the destruction of the village, she reported on the blog of the Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks and on her own Facebook page that the villagers left after the Taliban paid off the village chief, or Malik, to leave to evacuate the village and the people then followed.
That was not the case at all.
That's not what the people told my colleague.
All right, well we'll have to hold it right there.
There's a lot to follow up on.
We're talking with Gareth Porter about his new piece, Residents Have Raised Afghan Village Dispute, U.S. Case for Destruction, IPSnews.net.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's inside Ward Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Gareth Porter, and I'm just putting two and two together here.
Gareth, we talked on the show, not with you, but we talked about on the show how Salon.com ran this piece, and then I forget where it originally linked to where it was reported, but we've seen the pictures of this town that you're talking about that was wiped off the face of the earth by the Obama administration, the before and after pictures of this town, Tarok Kalachi.
So now you were getting right to the part where you were contradicting Paula Broadwell, who is, what, the spokesman for the Pentagon?
She might as well be.
I mean, she's really carried their water on this, and I have to believe that it was really part of the deal of her access to Petraeus that she would, you know, volunteer to help out and get the word out to the interested readers in the United States about what they claim happened in Kandahar.
All right, now, Gareth, this is just a minor technical point, but isn't it illegal to do that?
Are you talking about international law?
I think you are talking about international law.
You know, it's generally regarded as firm international law that you cannot attack a village under any circumstances unless it is fortified.
And this is, you know, this goes back all the way to the early 20th century, the 1907 to the first convention on, you know, the laws of war.
The one exception to this is, you know, is if a town or village is fortified.
Now, of course, that...
Gareth, Gareth, your phone sounds terrible.
What happened?
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
You having trouble hearing me?
I don't know what that is.
Can you hear that?
I'm going to call you back.
It's still going on.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, OK, so we got Gareth Porter back on the line.
Line sounds good now.
I'm not sure if the problem is on my end or yours, but I think we're going to get away with continuing to talk about this massive war crime in a village that used to exist called Turok Kalachi that now doesn't exist because the army blew it up, the whole thing.
So you were just asking about international law and the law of war.
The problem is, you know, what constitutes fortification?
And during the Vietnam War, or maybe I should say after the Vietnam War, there were those people who were apologists for the war who were arguing that because the Viet Cong were, you know, had had their underground tunnels in the villages of South Vietnam, that this constituted a fortified village and therefore it was fair game.
So I'm simply sort of warning you that you're going to get an argument from the pro military or the militarist people that, oh, you know, the Taliban had fortified the village.
But I don't think that that was the original intent of the international law in question here.
So I think that we are still looking at arguably a violation of the laws of war in the case of raising a village to the ground.
Yeah, well, and, you know, for the record, we're not talking about something where, you know, the Russians and the French made this law that we're bound by or something.
This is American law.
And there's American federal laws passed by our Congress and signed by our presidents that enforce these Geneva Conventions and make them crimes to violate them in our country.
And I would just go back to the to the key point here, which is that the United States is losing, has been losing, continues to lose the IED war in Afghanistan.
I mean, the IEDs are the most potent form of resistance that the Taliban can put forward.
They are the most effective means of killing and wounding U.S. and NATO troops.
And that is why and I'm coming now to the key point here.
That is why in this village, the Americans could not vanquish, could not take over the village without essentially raising it to the ground because the Taliban had been so effectively planting the IEDs that the Americans could not get in there.
And that is really the same scene was repeated, although not necessarily with the complete destruction of the village.
It was repeated all over the three districts of Kandahar province during this period of October, November.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we have to leave it there, but we have to move on.
But I thank you very much for your time.
I urge everybody to check out antiwar.com/Porter to keep up with all your latest journalism.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
