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And now for tonight's interview, we turn to Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writer for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And of course, we rerun virtually everything he writes at antiwar.com/Porter.
The latest piece is Slane Rider's book, says U.S.
-NATO war served al-Qaeda strategy.
Slane Rider, of course, being Syed Salim Shahzad, the Pakistani journalist for the Asia Times who was murdered last week, apparently by the ISI, the intelligence service over there in Pakistan.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So first of all, tell us about Salim Shahzad.
Well, Salim Shahzad was somebody with a unique position in the journalistic world because he had been focusing exclusively on the militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years, going back to the early period after the 9-11 attacks.
He had, I think, unique access to the al-Qaeda and other associated groups' leaders in this period, in the last several years.
That means that he was meeting regularly with some of their top strategists, people who were actually planning the operations both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and also, I must say, beyond Pakistan, in India as well.
And so he was in a unique position to have an overview of what their thinking was, how they viewed the different pieces and how they fit together.
And that's why his book, the book is called Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban Beyond 9-11, why that book is such a valuable source for anyone really interested in understanding the thinking of the al-Qaeda organization.
Because I think he did have unique access and he was able to, he took the trouble to really fill out how they viewed the war in Afghanistan, how they related it to the bigger picture of their global strategy as well as their strategy in Pakistan.
Well now, anybody who goes back and looks at Salim Shahzad's archives at the Asia Times, any of those articles, will see immediately the depth of knowledge that he brings to bear.
Even if it's reporting a particular story, it has the background narrative that he paints in order that we understand the new fact that he's uncovering or something.
It's so vivid you can tell that he's got incredible experience and access and insight into the situation there.
I only interviewed him the one time about a year and a half ago, and I wish I'd made a better habit out of interviewing him, but I certainly read him on a regular basis there at the Asia Times.
Right, and of course his last story, the story that he'd been working on most recently before he was killed, clearly was a breakthrough in terms of the kind of knowledge that he was acquiring, because it had to do with the penetration by Al-Qaeda of the Pakistani military, in this case the Pakistani Navy.
He had been acquiring information that Al-Qaeda had in fact been able to get some people within the Navy to help them plan their attack over the last few months, and the Pakistani military was clearly very upset about this.
They were quite concerned about having been penetrated, and this of course is the theory behind why he was killed.
I mean the most prominent theory is that ISI had picked him up or detained him.
I shouldn't say detained him, they brought him in for questioning, to try to find out who his sources were, presumably.
And being a very good journalist and somebody with a great deal of integrity, it's clear that he did not give the secrets of who his sources were.
And so that would at least provide one theory about why he was killed, why he was tortured and killed.
Well according to someone at Human Rights Watch, I don't know their name, but they claim that he came in a couple of days before he disappeared and said, listen the ISI threatened to kill me, so if I wind up dead, they're the ones that did it, basically.
That does look very incriminating, for sure.
We don't have all the information we'd like to have, obviously, about this, but this is a very unusual set of circumstances where indeed he did feel threatened, and felt that he had been threatened by the ISI, and it certainly looks very much incriminating as far as the murder of Shehzad is concerned.
And the story that they apparently murdered him over certainly changes my understanding of how powerful Al-Qaeda could possibly be inside of Pakistan.
I mean, when we say Al-Qaeda there, we're talking about people who are the Saudi and Egyptian friends of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, mostly, right?
And now here, in his last story, not only had they infiltrated the Navy, but when higher level Navy people clamped down and arrested some of them, they apparently still had enough people in the Navy that they were getting the highest level intelligence about where the people were being held, I think.
And the story says the infiltrators who had been arrested were taken to a house out in back of the chief of the Navy's house to be interrogated, and they got a threat from Al-Qaeda there, that we know where you are and we're coming for you.
Then they moved him to this base, and then Al-Qaeda led an attack on this base that lasted all day, and with this huge humiliation, you know, what am I learning here?
Tell me how much more powerful Al-Qaeda in Pakistan is than I thought.
Well, I think that's correct in terms of the comparison between the mainstream media's coverage of Al-Qaeda and the reality that emerges in Shehzad's book.
I think there's a huge difference here, and the difference is this, that the conventional way of covering and thinking about Al-Qaeda is that this is a small group of people who organize and carry out terrorist attacks.
And if we eliminate some significant percentage of the leadership of Al-Qaeda over a given period of time, that means we've weakened them, we've got them on the run.
And indeed, I just saw a piece within the last 48 hours, I believe it was posted on antiwar.com, another story that suggests, based on sort of the one expert's take on what he's being told by people within the U.S. intelligence community or counterterrorism community about the materials picked up in the Bin Laden raid, that they now believe that Bin Laden, that Al-Qaeda is much weaker based on their reading of the materials that they've collected.
I still don't know what that means, though, because that is weaker than in their propaganda or weaker than I've thought all this time, which was not very powerful.
The point here is that they're suggesting that the materials that they're reading indicate that Al-Qaeda has all kinds of internal problems, that there are quarrels among the people who are trying or vying for the attention of Bin Laden.
That was one of the things that was mentioned in the story.
But really, the point I'm trying to make is that the focus here is on a few individuals and what they're planning at any particular moment, whereas in fact, what Shehzad shows in his book is that Al-Qaeda had much larger ambitions, and indeed, its impact was much broader than is suggested by this approach to understanding of Al-Qaeda.
And what he shows in his book is that the whole phenomenon of a jihadist movement arising in the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan is, in fact, an accomplishment that has to be credited to Al-Qaeda.
That is to say, they organized and inculcated in the movement, which eventually was called Tariq-e-Taliban, or the Neo-Taliban of Pakistan, but which was in fact a very broad activist movement, an Islamist activist movement in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the tribal zone of Pakistan.
This is really a huge accomplishment, because it represents a political-military base for not just the Afghan Taliban to cross the border going back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but for a movement that is obviously a threat to the Pakistani state.
This is a major change in the situation, and clearly represents a much broader influence on the part of Al-Qaeda than can be judged on the basis of the very small number of people who are actual members of it.
Well, how?
How have they been able to do this?
Yeah, I mean, this is the headline and the lead in my story this week, which is that what Shehzad was being told by the strategists of Al-Qaeda over the last few years revealed that the Al-Qaeda leadership really wanted the war in Afghanistan to go on as long as possible.
They wanted the U.S. and NATO troops to continue to occupy Afghanistan, because this gives them the best propaganda they could possibly imagine in order to sell what they are trying to sell, not just in Afghanistan, not just in Pakistan, but beyond in the Islamic world in general.
They are aiming at trying to turn as many Islamic populations, the population of as many Islamic countries in the world as possible against their rulers, against the regimes who in Al-Qaeda's view, of course, are not truly Islamic at all, but really takfiri, they are impostors, they are people who are pretending to be Islamic, but are not really Islamic at all and need to be overthrown.
And so the idea that Al-Qaeda really has been pursuing for the last decade and a little bit beyond is this worldwide, basically an Islamic insurgency is the way they view it.
And so they have extremely broad ambitions, and they view the war in Afghanistan as an enabler for those ambitions.
And the United States, in effect, has played into their hands.
And it's very difficult to judge on a worldwide basis how much success they've had, but it's certainly not something that can be dismissed out of hand.
And certainly in Pakistan, as I've just said, they have been quite successful.
And that, of course, represents a very important issue in terms of the potential for a threat to the Pakistani state.
Well, and region-wide, I'm reminded of Michael Scheuer's book that came out under the name Anonymous.
The CIA wouldn't let him say his name yet, I guess.
It was at the very end of 2004, beginning of 2005, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism.
And in that book, he begins by saying, the United States is now helping to complete the radicalization of the Muslim world, something that bin Laden and his friends have been trying to do this whole time.
We're now doing it for them by basically acting out the script that they wrote for us.
You're absolutely right.
They say, look at these American imperialists.
They're at war against any Muslim state.
They don't care if it's run by a socialist like Saddam Hussein or pure-of-heart Taliban like here in Afghanistan.
Just watch them, and there we go, doing just like they said we would.
And Scheuer deserves a great deal of credit for having understood that very clearly and articulated it in an incredibly capable way in that book.
I think that this is a huge accomplishment, and of course not very many people read it and listened to his advice, unfortunately.
It was more or less ignored.
But he understood exactly what al-Qaeda was trying to do, and what they did in fact succeed in doing, essentially in the period just about the time he was writing his book, was when they were hard at work reorganizing the tribal zone of Pakistan and essentially turning it into an Islamic republic or a pair of Islamic republics in north and south Waziristan, which electrified the Islamic activists of Pakistan and certainly reverberated beyond Pakistan.
There's no doubt about that.
He was right all along, and the U.S. government, which pointedly ignored that advice because of the vested interests of the U.S. military and their allies in the bureaucracy and beyond, they have played into the hands of al-Qaeda, just as Scheuer said and just as Shehzad now has documented in retrospect.
It was Hosni Mubarak, our loyal puppet dictator in Egypt, who on the eve of the Iraq war said, you're going to create 10,000 bin Ladens, don't do this.
It's interesting too that when bin Laden was mocking the United States in his October 2004 speech, where he says, you're playing right into our hands, I'm telling you, the whole game here, and you're going to continue to do it anyway, because as he said, it's in the interest of your generals and your politically connected corporations to do so, but my plan here is to bleed you to bankruptcy, and it's the bankruptcy as well that has helped the cost of the wars, and the bankruptcy from that, that has helped lead to the Arab Spring and now the Arab Summer of revolutions that we're witnessing here, because as the American government debases our money in order to pay for the war, we and all the other countries have to inflate their currencies as well to keep the balance in order for their exports to not be hurt and that kind of thing, and so all of a sudden people who are living on $2 a day, their $2 is only worth 75 cents or something they can't afford to eat, and so this has helped to cause all these rebellions across the Middle East, and I would note that the democratic youth in Egypt are not what Ayman al-Zawahiri would hope for, I don't think, but the fact that they're overthrowing Hosni Mubarak is at least half credit to him.
They're probably not what bin Laden was hoping for, or Ayman al-Zawahiri is hoping for, but I think it's also true they're not what the United States was hoping for either.
No, certainly not.
I think it's fair to say that it's more ambiguous than that.
Let me go back to what you said about Mubarak, actually.
I think it's a very interesting and important point.
What that statement indicated was a broader phenomenon in the Arab world, which is that the potentates, the power elite in these Sunni Arab countries, specifically Egypt, mostly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but not limited to them, were very, very worried about Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
Particularly Afghanistan, I think it's fair to say, was a great worry to them, precisely because they understood the fact that bin Laden and al-Qaeda could take advantage of this to be more successful in organizing, or rather propagandizing and drawing into the radical Islamic movement the populations of their own countries.
And so what they were really trying to do later on, particularly the Saudis were trying to do, was to end that war.
They were trying to bring about the beginning of a dialogue between the Taliban and the United States and the Karzai regime, which they started in, I believe it was October 2008, with a meeting hosted by the king of Saudi Arabia, in which they had invited, and apparently the person who they invited attended, a person who was close to Mullah Omar, who was his office manager, the person who helped him organize his personal office, and was regarded as a close advisor to Mullah Omar.
And so somebody who really could represent his interests went to Saudi Arabia.
And when this was reported, soon after that, a few weeks after that, there was great consternation in the United States and elsewhere, but mostly there was consternation in al-Qaeda itself, because this was what they were most worried about.
They were worried about the Saudis, the Egyptians, people like that, getting into the mode of peacemaking and getting the United States to talk to the Taliban and vice versa, so that there could be a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, which is the worst possible thing that could happen from the point of view of Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
Well, Zawahiri said also about Iraq that, no, we want the Americans to stay for decades, until tens of thousands of their guys have been killed, until they're completely bankrupt and forced out.
We don't want them to go.
Do what you can to keep them.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so you think it's possible that anybody's going to learn the lesson in Washington, D.C. here?
No, it's not possible.
I mean, I think that we've seen, over the last decade, enough evidence pile up, year after year, to know that the people who run the national security policy of the United States, the Pentagon, the military services, the National Security Council staff headed by the National Security Advisor, the head of the CIA, and particularly the operations directorate of the CIA, the people who have the greatest stake in what they call the long war, have no incentive to learn the lesson that both Scheuer and Shehzad have pointed out about the relationship between these wars and the radicalization of Islamic populations around the world.
They have no incentive, and therefore they are not going to learn the lesson, and it's going to require outsiders to step in and say, no, you may not do that anymore.
Outsiders meaning the American people.
That's right.
Good luck with that.
Or, as a substitute for the American people, I would accept the American economy crashing, which would be perhaps even more effective.
Yeah.
Well, you're right that we're probably up against the economy destroying the empire before we get our head right about it and just repeal it, because it's the right thing anyway.
Yes, but I would also say that these can be synergistic in their effect.
That is to say the pressure from the economy, and specifically from the crisis of the national debt, and of course the budget deficit, can be a factor that positions, that opens up the possibility for a real serious discussion for the first time about the military intelligence national security budget, and offer an opportunity really for a well-educated attentive public to step in and have some impact on the way in which Congress responds to this crisis.
I mean, I would say that this offers the best opportunity in the history of the United States since World War II for the attentive public to actually have a chance to constrain the power of the national security state.
If they pay close attention and have a common basis of analysis, a common understanding of the situation, and can arrive at a common set of principles, then this is a golden opportunity.
Yes, well it certainly should be.
You know, the American people want to keep all the social programs, all the polls say, and the poll doesn't, I don't think, ever really put it to them, are you willing to give up the Pentagon in order to keep your favorite social programs?
But that really is the choice before us.
There are now some surveys that begin to do that, interestingly, and I have not seen one in the last few weeks, but a few months ago, the last survey that I saw, which did ask the question of people, in order to reduce the budget, what would be your priorities?
And the top priority was the defense budget.
Fifty percent, actually 49 percent of those who were surveyed, named the defense budget as the top priority for reducing spending and reducing the deficit.
And that was like two and a half times more than the second choice or the second priority.
So I think that's a very clear indication that there's going to be more and more pressure for reducing the military budget.
That's going to be where the action is going to be in the next couple of years.
Well, and back to the point, all we've got to do to win this war on terrorism is just call it off.
All we've been doing is make matters worse for the Pakistanis, for our puppet dictatorships in the region, for our own budget and everything else.
This is indeed the fundamental principle that people have to grasp.
This has to become the main argument that is made over the next few years for basically destroying, eliminating the permanent war state.
It has to be that the war on terrorism is a fundamental error.
We have to start all over again and say that we've made a fundamental mistake.
And to begin with, we're not going to invade or occupy any new Islamic countries, any new Islamic lands, and that we will get out of the countries that we are now occupying, because that is the biggest thing that we could do, single biggest thing that we could do to win the war on terrorism.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, it's been almost ten years now.
The fear has finally subsided, and I think people really are starting to realize that this whole thing was overblown, that it should have been handled by cops and at most SEAL Team 6 here and there from the very beginning.
Yeah, and I have to say that even if somebody manages to get into the country with some explosives in their underwear or in their socks or whatever, that we have to continue to tell the truth, that the problem is not primarily that you've got some individuals somewhere in the world who want to do harm to us, but that the United States is doing everything possible to add to their numbers.
And that's what we have to stop doing.
Right.
Well, it ought to be as simple as citing Stanley McChrystal, who said, for every one we kill, we create ten more.
This is one of the most interesting phenomena to me that we've seen in the past couple of years, is how these so-called counterinsurgents lay out this principle that we mustn't continue to make more enemies and then go out and just do exactly the thing that they said they shouldn't be doing.
Right.
By increasing the number of night raids by a factor of roughly, what is it, I guess six times more than it was before McChrystal took over.
Well, like you say, if the incongruity of it all doesn't kick in first, the collapse of the dollar finally will, so eventually that part of the world will have peace, at least from our end.
Economic collapse does have a way of powerfully concentrating the mind, I think.
Ask the Russians if you know any.
They'll tell you.
All right, well, we're all out of time, but I want to thank you very much for your time, Gareth.
It's been great, as always.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's the great Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
We rerun every bit of it at Antiwar.com/Porter.
And that's the show for tonight.
Appreciate everybody listening.
We're here every Friday on Antiwar Radio from 6.30 to 7 o'clock.
I'm Scott Horton.
Again, all the archives are available at Antiwar.com/Radio.
