Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, where I interview Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist for IPS News.
That's IPSnews.net.
We run all of it at antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's things, man?
Hello again, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Listen, so, uh...
Got a very important story here.
Actually, there's quite a bit of Afghan news here.
I wanted to mention here real quick in the introduction.
A poll, more Americans disapprove of Obama's management of Afghan war.
And of course, those numbers are, you know, you break them down, they say all different things.
But anyway, that's the headline from the Washington Post.
Pilot kills eight U.S. soldiers, one contractor in Kabul airport attack.
And of course, then there was the hundreds of prisoners that escaped the other day, as far as that kind of thing.
But then I think here's the most important story of the day from news.antiwar.com by Jason Gates.
U.S. has made no decision on July Afghan drawdown.
And then your piece today, also at antiwar.com, is called why U.S. and NATO forces fed detainees to Afghan torture system.
If it's okay with you, I'd like to put that off for a second and ask you to address this July 2011 deadline, which is now just a couple of months away.
What deadline is that?
And what does Gates mean?
He hasn't made a decision.
I thought it was a decision.
I'm not sure what Gates means by that.
Except, you know, I assume, okay, this is only an assumption at this at this moment without knowing more, that what he means is that no decisions have been made about how many troops will be drawn down in July of this year.
That is what we've been hearing before.
And so that would be the most the most logical interpretation of what he's saying here.
But Gates is a very reliable representative of the national security state.
He is, you know, invariably trying to do what he can to protect the interests of the national security state.
And that, in this instance, means trying to minimize the drawdown.
We know that David Petraeus has said that he wants to have as few troops be withdrawn as possible.
We know that that is the Pentagon's basic interest.
And so, you know, it's fair to say that that what you're seeing in Gates here is an effort to have as few troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2011 as possible.
I mean, that's built into the structure of the situation.
So when Obama announced the surge, I guess first when he first came into power in 2009, he put 30,000 more troops.
There were already 30,000-35,000, right?
Then a few months later, he put another 30,000 troops.
He announced his surge and he said, but this is just so we can whoop them real bad so that we can force them to the table and we're gonna begin to end this war and start pulling our troops out in July of 2011.
The only reason I've agreed to escalate this thing is because the military's agreed that they'll have the work done by then and we're gonna get this thing done.
And so now, basically, they're doing everything they can to say, well, you know, that's all dependent on this, that, and the other thing in order to get away with either one, not withdraw any troops at all, or just give us a little bit of window dressing, 5,000 or 10,000 troops moved around here or there, that kind of thing.
Exactly, or even less.
I mean, I would not at all be surprised if, in fact, what we're now seeing behind the scenes, and that this statement is a hint of this, is yet another episode in which the White House is under very strong pressure to essentially reverse a decision that was really made much earlier or had been adumbrated earlier by the president on Afghanistan.
I mean, this is high-stakes politics.
The situation in Afghanistan clearly does not support the notion that the military strategy there is going to succeed in tamping down Taliban offenses in the coming months.
And there's no question that, you know, what the military leadership wants and what Gates is prepared to support is trying to absolutely minimize or even suspend the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but suspend any withdrawal until a later date.
Now, whether that's going to work or not is another question.
I mean, we know that Obama feels that it's very important for his re-election prospects to be able to say that we're on our way out, that we're beginning a process of withdrawal.
He really has a very strong political interest in having a substantial withdrawal, or at least what he can argue is a substantial withdrawal.
It may not be substantial.
So, I mean, you know, I think we're, again, you know, in a situation where there's a very strong conflict here between what the national security state wants and what the interests of the president are in this situation.
Well, and you know, it's just like during Iraq, too.
Whether things are on the upswing or on the downswing, that's always the reason that we can't go now, we can't go ever.
Well, as far as the national security state is concerned, I agree.
I mean, they don't want to contemplate any withdrawal for the foreseeable future.
I mean, they're talking about this war going on well beyond 2014.
I mean, we are in the territory here of permanent war, and Well, it really is kind of remarkable, isn't it, that after 10 years, this thing can be a complete disaster.
500 prisoners escape out of a tunnel like some silly cartoon or, you know, some TV show.
You got Hamid Karzai, who still doesn't even rule Kabul, really.
You have a government in a box all over the country that has failed to take hold in any meaningful sense.
I guess there's some towns in the north where certain warlords, non-Taliban warlords, have control, you know, up there.
But that's nothing to do with the American democracy functioning or anything like that.
And the rest of the country is still just people dying all over the place and there's no end in sight to any of this.
I mean, at least in Iraq, we could say, well, we're fighting a civil war on behalf of the majority.
At some point, they'll win, you know.
In this case, we're not helping anybody who could possibly win at any time.
And so after 10 years, we're looking at another 10 years, another 20, another 30 years of war forever.
And yet, this is the consensus in D.C., I guess.
There's no wisdom being, you know, put into play against this policy on the east coast of this country anywhere, it doesn't seem like.
Well, this is the theme that I'm, you know, developing for my book, The Permanent War State, which is that the interests of the national security state since the beginning of, not the beginning of, but since 2005, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq both, for the first time, became clearly you know, failed wars in the sense that they did not deliver on the initial promise of being able to quickly sort of quell any adversaries of violence, and, you know, became sort of the long war, which was announced in 2005.
And I think there's a relationship between those two things that when Gates and the Pentagon, sorry, Rumsfeld, excuse me, at that point, and the Pentagon announced the long war doctrine, the long war concept, it was at least in large part to cover the fact that both Afghanistan and Iraq had turned into long wars that they could see no end in sight, certainly no end that would be successful.
And so I think the interests of the military and the Pentagon ever since then have been to find a way to cover for the failure of the U.S. military in both Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Well, you know, I mean, the headline today is General Petraeus, who just finished losing two wars, is being promoted to Director of Central Intelligence.
Well, I guess Director of the CIA.
They don't have Director of Central Intelligence.
Right, right, exactly.
And this guy just lost two wars, and that's what makes him our greatest hero in this country.
Well, of course, what makes him the greatest hero is the fact that he was so successful in manipulating public opinion through the news media and through visiting congressional delegations that he, in fact, was successful in selling exactly the opposite of what actually happened in Iraq.
Which I guess will make him a really good head of the CIA, you know?
Well, I mean, that's a very interesting question, isn't it?
We'll have to talk about that some more.
I'm pretty sure that's what's important on the resume there.
All right.
And also, don't run for president yet is somewhere in there, too.
And you know what?
I want to ask you one more thing before we start talking about your article, which is extremely important.
I want to let you explain it.
And I got a couple questions about it, too, I think.
It's getting harder and harder, I think, for anyone in this country to believe that that Osama bin Laden dude is still running around out there somewhere.
I guess I thought for a long time he must just be chilling in the guest house in back of some tribal leader's place up there in, you know, some valley between some mountains the Americans can't find in the northwestern territories of Pakistan or something.
But now I'm thinking, you know what?
He must be dead by now.
I don't believe all the stuff about he died at Tora Bora in December 2001, because there's an Al Jazeera video of him and Zawahiri from the spring of 2002.
But he can't still be alive, do you think?
And what about Zawahiri?
We don't ever hear from these guys anymore.
I'll tell you the truth.
I mean, I don't have any firm view on that.
Yeah, because you've got to have a gut feeling.
That's what I'm after.
It's possible that the whole, you know, the surveillance from the sky, the drones and everything, has changed the calculation that the al-Qaeda people have become much more cautious about anything having to do with bin Laden.
It's also possible that he's dead.
I don't know.
I mean, I just have no feel for that, to tell you the truth.
But I'd like to make one comment, though, about the Petraeus for the CIA issue before we leave it.
Sure.
Because, you know, I just did this story a few weeks ago, as you know, about how Petraeus really demanded of the last NIE relating to Afghanistan, that the intelligence community basically defer to him in terms of the whole question of whether the Taliban was indeed growing or not.
And so I find this extremely interesting development that he's now going to be head of the CIA because, you know, I know that people in the intelligence community must have some strong feelings about the fact that he basically demanded the right to have the CIA and the intelligence community defer to him on this issue rather than allowing what I think would normally be the practice of having the intelligence analysts themselves make a judgment about that.
So I think this is a bit of a military coup over the CIA in a way.
It was, exactly.
But as I said in my article, it sort of harkens back to the situation that existed during the Vietnam War when, you know, the U.S. military in Vietnam demanded that the CIA not go ahead with any estimate that would suggest that they weren't succeeding.
I mean, it was like history really going the same route again, the same thing happening.
Well, you know, in the last administration, especially, I guess, in the first Bush Jr. administration, they worked real hard to put as much covert operations under JSOC instead of CIA as they could because they don't even have to pretend to answer to Congress at all about any of that, any of what they're doing.
And I guess that led to a big turf battle.
I thought I'd read that the CIA had pushed back quite a bit on that.
But this is the Trump card here, if they put Petraeus in charge of the CIA, huh?
Yeah, I think that's going to be a very interesting mix.
I don't know how that's going to work.
Well, it'll be interesting to watch, especially through your eyes and out loud on this show.
All right.
So tell us now about why the United States and NATO fed detainees, fed past tense, detainees to Afghan torture system.
Yeah, two major points here.
One is that there's a difference between the U.S. and Canada on one side and the Brits and the Dutch on the other.
The British and Dutch, you know, went along with or even initiated a process that stopped feeding their detainees to the United States military, which had been the repository of detainees up to that time in late 2005 when this happened.
And that's because, of course, the publicity was given, starting with the New York Times piece, but other articles as well were publicizing the fact that the U.S. military had been guilty of torture of its own detainees and in some cases torturing them to death.
And so, of course, the British and the Dutch were saying to themselves, well, we can't afford to be associated with the United States detention policies.
So we're going to insist that from now on detainees be given to the Afghan government.
Unfortunately, of course, that meant in practice that they were going to be given to the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan Intelligence Agency, which was well known to practice torture on its detainees.
So it was from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.
Now, when you go to the United States and Canada, on the other hand, there's a different dynamic at work, and that is that, you know, they were picking up lots of detainees in major military sweeps in 2004 and 2005.
They knew that they didn't have enough information to pick these people up as Taliban fighters.
And the reason that they were detaining so many people, it's now clear, is that they needed to interrogate these people to get some intelligence about the Taliban.
They were hoping that they could pick up intelligence from large numbers of detainees.
Now, the problem is, as we find out from this very interesting interview between James Farron, the Canadian head of the NATO Commands Intelligence outfit in 2007, in May 2007, with a Canadian newspaper, he says, you know, the problem is that these detainees don't tell us the truth when we interrogate them.
And they're giving us misleading information.
So he says, essentially, he implies very strongly that we need to have the Taliban, excuse me, the Afghan Intelligence Service interrogate these people so they can find out the truth.
And so what, and the U.S. ambassador at that time to Afghanistan told me that yes, he recalls that the reasons that the United States decided to turn these detainees over to the Afghan Intelligence Agency was, first of all, for the intelligence benefits, and secondly, because there was a revolving door with local officials getting the detainees that they would soon be released.
So, you know, it's very interesting that I think we now know for, you know, with great certainty that the United States military was turning over detainees to be tortured, knowing they'd be tortured, in the belief that they could get more intelligence that way.
Yeah.
Well, and what's funny about that, too, is even if they ever did get any good actionable intelligence out of somebody aware to bomb, Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus's guy, admitted, you know, a year ago, it was published in the Rolling Stone.
Michael Hastings told me he heard this from McChrystal himself personally.
Insurgent math.
For every one we kill, we get 10 more.
So that's assuming that they're not just getting bad intelligence and completely obliterating villages full of innocent people, you know?
Yeah, I mean, this is obviously a contradiction built into the role being played by these people like Petraeus and McChrystal that, you know, on one hand they acknowledge that the strategies that they're applying in Afghanistan and also in Iraq were generating more resistance, more people who would be unalterably opposed to the foreign troops' presence in the country.
And at the same time, you know, they embrace these strategies because, you know, really, it's the only game in town.
It's the only thing that they have going for them.
Nothing else works.
And so at least I argue, I have argued in the past, that at least from the point of view of McChrystal and Petraeus, they can toad up the numbers, which are very impressive unless you really look at them very closely and start breaking them down, the numbers of people that they capture and kill and say that this represents progress.
And, you know, in a situation where nothing else clearly is succeeding, that is a way of putting pressure on the administration to give them more time.
Well, I'm sorry, we don't really have too much more time here to address this, but, you know, I should try to play Petraeus' advocate here and say, come on, man, we're talking about the U.S. Army, the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force in the history of the world.
Surely they can take the fight to these ragtag insurgents and whoop them good some, right?
Well, apparently they couldn't get any information out of them, which was the real reason for the detaining operations.
So, I mean, basically...
So they don't know who to whoop?
They didn't know who to whoop, exactly.
Except the guys that they had tied up in their jail.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the irony here, as I was told by Michael Semple, the second-ranking European Union official in Afghanistan during this period of 2006-2007, it was well known that the higher up you were in the Taliban, the easier it was to get out of detention under the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, because they, you know, they had a policy of paying bribes to these officials, and they were quite prodigal, and they could get high-ranking people out.
It was the poor souls who were not even associated with the Taliban who had to stay in jail.
Crazy.
I wanted to clarify here.
You know, this article does have the past tense there, and the story begins back in, what, 2005, right, when they started handing over all these detainees to the Afghan sock puppet regime there.
But is all this just continuing on, or they're just all being tortured by the Americans now at the wink-wink real Bagram prison?
It's more complicated now because of the Task Force 435, which took over detainee policy in 2010, in late 2010, in Afghanistan, has instituted some changes which involve basically, the United States now has full-time monitoring of the detainees in custody, at least in, at least in the major facility in Parwan.
Now, that still leaves open the question of whether, you know, in the provinces, in Kandahar in particular, the Americans know what's going on.
I don't think they do.
So, you know, I mean, one could still probably use the present tense, but I wanted to confine this to the documentation that I actually had, so I did use the past tense.
Sure.
Yeah, I just wanted to see, you know, whether there's any indication that there's been any, you know, real change for the positive here.
I think it would be very difficult to say that we can be sure that there's no longer any torture of detainees, particularly in the first few days when they're picked up by the NDS, but compared with the earlier period when they were being given...
Well, we know they're still being tortured by the Americans at Bagram, at least within the rules of Appendix M of the rewritten Army Field Manual, right?
Well, I mean, certainly within the past year, year and a half, there's been evidence that that's still going on.
You're right.
Today, whether they've managed to stop that, I don't know, but certainly it has happened within the recent months.
All right, cool.
Well, we'll have to leave it there, but I really appreciate your time as always, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott, as always.
Everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Inter Press Service, author of the book Perils of Dominance, about strategy as they like to pretend it is, at least during Vietnam.
And writer for Inter Press Service, ipsnews.net, antiwar.com, Porter, and we'll be right back after this.
