Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service, that's IPSNews.net, and we reprint all of it, of course, at AntiWar.com/Porter.
And the last two are, Despite Troop Surge, Taliban Attacks and U.S. Casualties Soared, and The Lies That Sold Obama's Escalation in Afghanistan.
The last one there ran originally at Truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Good morning, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show here today.
Two very important pieces, and I guess I'll just let you go ahead and go.
What were the lies that sold Obama's escalation in Afghanistan, and how dare you call them lies?
Yes, this is a line that is not normally crossed in journalism, and I remember Dan Ellsberg talking about this issue in American politics, that it is verboten to actually say that U.S. officials lie in their presentation, specifically about U.S. wars and war policy to the American people.
Yeah, I got in trouble for that once.
I did an interview on Russia Today, which, you know, what do they care?
They love it when Americans bash up the American government.
That's their whole purpose in life.
Yeah, I don't know why you would have gotten into trouble.
Yeah, yeah, I called Obama a liar for saying that Iran was in violation of their international agreements when that wasn't true, and she said, whoa, wow, I don't know about calling the president a liar, and I said, well, what he said is blatantly false, and he knows it.
What am I supposed to say?
He's mistaken?
Or he misspoke?
Well, certainly when you talk about the position taken by the U.S. military in its presentation of the fact about the surge and its success, there's no way around the fact that that's a lie, and the same thing applies to the, even more so, to the presentation of the justification for the escalation in Afghanistan.
I mean, this is the subject of my piece that you're now talking about, and there's no way around it that the justification that was presented in December 2010, excuse me, 2009, I'll get it right eventually, December 2009, after the president's speech, during the president's speech, and after the president's speech by Robert Gates and Admiral Mullen, who said that, you know, the reason we're there is that unless we keep the military pressure up on the Taliban, they will surely stick to their close alliance with Al-Qaeda, and therefore, we can't afford to let them remain in control of large areas of Afghanistan, because they'll surely invite Al-Qaeda back.
So what I did was to look at that justification in light of everything we know, just from an internet search and from my own work that I've done in the past on this subject, doing interviews with various people, and, you know, what you find from this kind of research is that the relationship between the Taliban, particularly Mullah Omar, the spiritual and political leader of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, and Al-Qaeda in general, and particularly with Osama bin Laden, was never close, it was never cordial, it was never cooperative, it was never collaborative, except in the broadest sense that bin Laden was allowed to stay there, and that what assistance he did provide in terms of training to foreign jihadists in Afghanistan was obviously accepted in the war against the Northern Alliance in the late 1990s and the 2000-2001.
But the reality was that Mullah Omar never accepted that bin Laden should be allowed to even talk to the media, to the news media, without prior clearance by the Taliban regime, that meant specifically by Mullah Omar himself, and certainly that he was not allowed to do anything to antagonize the United States.
This was quite explicitly stated to him when he was first arriving in Afghanistan, he had to accept those conditions in order to stay there.
And this is testimony coming from a jihadist collaborator with bin Laden, an Egyptian jihadist, named Abu Walid al-Masri, who has now written his memoirs about that period and has given very valuable testimony about the actual relationship.
Now we know, of course, that bin Laden violated those strictures by the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, on at least two phases, two stages of his stay, one in 1997, and then again in 1998.
In the 1997 phase of this, when he violated the rules that had been laid down by Mullah Omar and had a series of press conferences, press briefings with foreign journalists, including Pakistani journalists as well as American journalists, Mullah Omar responded by basically bringing bin Laden by helicopter from Jalalabad, where he'd been hanging out, where he'd been allowed to stay, to the Kandahar airport to have a summit meeting with Mullah Omar himself, a meeting in which Mullah Omar said, you're going to have to move from Jalalabad to Kandahar because he claimed that there was a plot that had been discovered by some tribal elements opposed to al-Qaeda to kidnap him.
Of course, the real reason was that Omar wanted to have him very close by so they could keep a close eye on him and not allow him to have press conferences with foreign journalists, which they had not cleared.
And so that was the first reaction to his violations.
The second time in 1998, after a series of press conferences, again in Jalalabad, or I'm sorry, I think it was actually in Khost province, but close by in the eastern part of Afghanistan, in this case, Mullah Omar called up a Pakistani journalist and said that there's only room for one leader, commander, in Afghanistan, is it going to be bin Laden or myself?
He was obviously beside himself with anger.
And in the subsequent period, bin Laden was told in no uncertain terms that there would be consequences if he didn't change his ways, and in fact he did then become silent and said publicly that it was clear that he would have to abide by the rules, that he could not do anything to antagonize the United States, he could not do any plotting against the United States.
So I think the record is very clear that in that period of bin Laden's violations that there were very strong efforts to pin him down and to control him.
Also then we come to 2000-2001, and what we know about that period is that there was a sense of real crisis on the part of foreign jihadists in Afghanistan, the allies and cohorts of Osama bin Laden, who were extremely upset and worried about bin Laden's failure to be more responsive to Mullah Omar's wishes, and who insisted that he had better pledge allegiance, sort of Islamic allegiance, to Mullah Omar as the leader of the Islamic world.
And we know from Abu Walid al-Masri, as well as other sources, that bin Laden was very reluctant.
He didn't want to do that.
He did not want to pledge allegiance to Mullah Omar, because he did not want to have his freedom of action limited, in fact.
And so he twisted and turned and tried to avoid it.
And even after he pledged, promised al-Masri himself that he would, in fact, go personally to bin Laden, and pledge allegiance, he didn't show up, and then finally only would agree that al-Masri would go in his place.
All right, well, it's Gareth Porter from IPSnews.net, and we're talking about the difference between al-Qaeda and the Taliban before the war, at the beginning, and then up until the time when they sold us this surge.
We'll be right back, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter, for the 10 millionth time on the show.
He's got a great new piece, The Lies That Sold Obama's Escalation in Afghanistan, and he's basically telling the history of how, yeah, okay, so bin Laden was exiled in Afghanistan.
It doesn't mean that him and Mullah Omar are the same guy, or that they ever have been.
And where we left off in the story, it was right after September 11th, I think, Gareth.
Well, actually, let me go back, Scott, to what happened in 1998, beyond the specific points that I made before.
I should have actually mentioned a critical episode in the relationship, in the Mullah Omar policy toward al-Qaeda, because, of course, in 1998, you had the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa.
And in response to that, then, the United States launched cruise missile attacks against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
And the Monica missiles.
That's what they were sometimes referred to, yes.
Well, because they were launched the day that she was testifying before the grand jury.
Yeah.
So what we now know is that before those missiles were launched, Mullah Omar had actually been agreeable to the idea that bin Laden would be turned over to a group of Islamic jurists for a trial.
This had been proposed by Saudi Arabia, actually.
And Pakistan, as well, was interested in this.
And the position that was being taken by Mullah Omar was not opposed to that in May and June of 1998.
But after the cruise missile attack, when the head of Saudi intelligence went back to Afghanistan to meet with Mullah Omar, he found that Mullah Omar's position had changed, as he put it, 180 degrees, and that he now could not agree to turning bin Laden over to a foreign country or to a set of Islamic jurists in foreign countries.
And the Pakistani head of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence services, went a little bit later, a few weeks after the cruise missile attack, and talked to Mullah Omar.
And what he found out from Mullah Omar in that conversation was that Mullah Omar wanted to get rid of bin Laden.
He said, he's a bone in my throat, which I can neither swallow nor get rid of, pull out.
And what he explained was that bin Laden had become so popular because, presumably, of the cruise missile attacks, he'd become a hero among jihadists and sort of patriots in his own country, and that it had become much more difficult for him to do what he otherwise would have been willing to do.
So I mean, this is a new insight, I think, it certainly was for me, to learn that there was this sequence of events.
So then, of course, you had this phony pledge of allegiance by bin Laden to Mullah Omar, claiming that he didn't go personally, he sent somebody else in his place to pledge allegiance to Mullah Omar without having any intention to keep it.
And the person who went in his place, again, al-Masri, the Egyptian jihadist, has said very clearly that he regards this move as a deliberate deceit of Mullah Omar.
It's doubtful Mullah Omar actually took it seriously, because their relations didn't really improve after that.
And in fact, I was just going to explain what happened in 2001, that there was talk among the foreign jihadists in Afghanistan that they were really afraid that they were going to get kicked out of the country entirely, and that the Taliban regime actually closed down some al-Qaeda or foreign jihadist training camps, expressing obvious dislike of what was going on with regard to bin Laden's behavior.
So I mean, there's so much evidence that has accumulated now that the idea that Mullah Omar and bin Laden were close allies just doesn't pass the laughter.
Well, and look, I mean, Mullah Omar is the Jerry Falwell of Afghanistan, you know, where bin Laden is like a Leninist.
He's a radical.
He wants to turn the whole world upside down.
The Taliban would have liked to maintain their monopoly on power, such as it was in the country.
It's as obvious as that.
Al-Qaeda wasn't their army.
Al-Qaeda was this separate thing that they, you know, like you're explaining, they couldn't, it was a bone in their throat.
They couldn't kick them out, and they couldn't let them get away with whatever they wanted, or else look what'll happen.
But there's more to the story, of course, and that happens after, of course, both bin Laden and Mullah Omar are forced to move to Pakistan, and the al-Qaeda does this really very interesting thing of organizing a Pakistani Taliban organization in the Fatah region, northwest Pakistan.
You're talking about after September 11th now?
Well, that's right.
We're talking about 2003, 2004, 2005, and beyond, and as time passes, the sort of al-Qaeda supported Pakistani jihadists become stronger and stronger.
They set up essentially Islamic regimes in north Waziristan and south Waziristan, and in 2008, then, the al-Qaeda sets up this Pakistani Taliban organization, Tariq al-Taliban, which Salim Shahzad, the now-murdered, crusading Pakistani journalist, a very courageous Pakistani journalist, reveals in his book that the purpose of setting up the Tariq al-Taliban by al-Qaeda was to draw the jihadists in Afghanistan away from Mullah Omar's influence.
The hope was that they could really sort of neutralize Mullah Omar's influence on the Afghan Taliban and make them more consonant with the interests and the ideology of al-Qaeda.
So again, what you see is that Mullah Omar has been an opponent of al-Qaeda's jihadist viewpoint rather than somebody who went along with it all along.
And so now I want to make the key point here that Gates and Mullen, in their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee right after Obama's speech in December 2009, make the argument, again, that, of course, these are close allies and we have to break up the alliance through military force.
And I was told by a very good source who had been in the CIA's counterterrorism office for almost a decade, he told me in 2009, after that, that in fact it was well understood in the counterterrorism and intelligence community that Taliban and al-Qaeda were on the outs and that their relationship was much worse than it ever had been because of setting up of the Tehreek-e-Taliban, and Mullah Omar's obvious dislike for that.
And in fact, we know that Mullah Omar was trying to tell Tehreek-e-Taliban people not to pay attention, not to make war against Pakistan, which was the al-Qaeda line.
So the issue, the issues between Mullah Omar and bin Laden had actually gotten much more contentious just at the time they were making that argument.
Well, and that was what Shehzad said on this show about the Pakistani Taliban, was that just as time goes on, it turns out that these Saudis and Egyptians, these few Arab Afghans, friends of bin Laden and Zawahiri, however many, you know, dozen of them there are there, they have a lot of battle experience.
And so they end up being the battlefield commanders and therefore they lead the prayer before they go out and the rest of it too.
And this is what I think he called the al-Qaeda-ization of the Pakistani Taliban.
Yeah, and so, I mean, what we find out is that this Afghan war rationale being offered by Mullah Omar, by Mullen, and in December 2009 was one of the biggest lies, one of the biggest whoppers ever told in defense of, in this case, a major escalation of existing war or any war that the United States has fought.
And so then the other thing in my article that I point out is that Bruce Riedel, who was the guy who Obama had to do his policy review in early 2009, has published a book in which he now tries to make the case again that Mullah Omar and bin Laden were close buddies and that this is why the United States has to stay in Afghanistan to prevent Mullah Omar from letting the bin Ladenites come back into Afghanistan.
And of course, everything that he says in that passage that he devotes to the subject is a complete falsehood, one of the incomprehensibly false descriptions of a relationship that has ever been written.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
And we're talking about the history of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and their relationship with the Taliban before September 11th, during the time of the initial war and since, and how the administration and their apologists paint an entirely different picture in order that they may escalate the war.
And that's pretty much where we left off in the story, Gareth, was the report by Bruce Riedel, which was used as the justification for the surge.
So what was, first of all, describe the report, the conclusion of it and how that worked there.
The Bruce Riedel description.
Yeah, I mean, he has one remarkable paragraph in which he suggests that, first of all, that the Taliban did nothing to try to rein in bin Laden, despite his repeated obvious violations of the so-called rules.
Secondly, that bin Laden married one of the daughters of Mullah Omar and therefore, you know, sort of cemented the relationship.
And that bin Laden moved from Jalalabad to Kandahar in order to be closer to his good buddy, Mullah Omar.
So I mean, these are, these three points, of course, all three are absolutely false.
I've talked about two of the three, but the third one about bin Laden marrying one of the daughters of Mullah Omar was, of course, a rumor that was being spread around by certain people, particularly in exile circles in Pakistan, to obviously not happy with Mullah Omar.
And one of the, I mean, the source that Bruce Riedel cites for this is a book by Gilles Doransoro, a French specialist on Afghanistan.
Doransoro actually occupies a, he works for Carnegie Endowment, right next door to Bruce Riedel.
So he could have easily called him up or gone to see him in his office and said, is this really true?
Because when I called Doransoro about it, he said, yeah, I published that, but I realized after the book was published that it's not true, and that it was undoubtedly spread by So, and since then, of course, more recently, since the bin Laden hit, there have been stories about bin Laden's wives, which detail their origins, and not a single one of them clearly was from Afghanistan.
All right.
Now, it says in the article here that you emailed Riedel and you got at least one response, but did you ask him about that?
Yeah, I mean, here's the interesting thing.
I mean, I'm skimming ahead here, but I wanted to know whether he responded on that question.
He's never responded, no.
He said in response to my query as to why he didn't acknowledge all these sources that I cited, which showed a very different picture of the relationship between Mullah Omar and bin Laden, he wrote back saying, well, I didn't do that because the facts are otherwise, and he said that bin Laden, that Mullah Omar never did anything, or the Taliban never did anything to rein him in, but their apologists put forward a happy face story.
So I wrote back and said, are you saying that all these sources are apologists for Mullah Omar, including the former bodyguard of bin Laden, as well as the Egyptian jihadist?
And he never wrote, he never answered my email on that.
Yeah.
So back to when Rydell was really important here, it was 2009, because, what, Petraeus got this guy on board to help sell the escalation policy, right?
Well, I don't know what the basis for choosing Bruce Rydell to do this was, but he was a former CIA official, as well as National Security Council official specializing in South Asia, and particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, of course.
And so he did have a degree of expertise, but it's clear that whatever expertise he had, once he was in a position of being the person in charge of the policy review, he was not very interested in tracking down the real facts, not in doing research and finding out the truth.
He was merely interested in carrying forward a rationale for escalation of the war, because as you can see, that's what the military wanted, that's what the Pentagon wanted.
The National Security State of the United States had spoken very clearly, and it's very clear to me that he was not going to do anything or say anything that violated the interests of the National Security State.
Right.
Well, so, and here's the real point, right, is that the reason that there's such a difference between what al-Qaeda wants and what the Taliban wants is because the Taliban wants to deal, they want to control Afghanistan again, or as much of it as they can anyway.
And basically the Americans have already decided in 2009 and through today, they've maintained their policy is still to make a deal with the Taliban, as we talked about back at the end of 2009, the beginning of 2010, as you explained it here, their plan was, well, we're going to kill as many of them as we can for a year and a half.
And then when we get to July, 2011, then we'll start to try to deal, not to leave, but to stay, but to let them have some power too.
So this is why, and the Taliban know this, this is why they see things so differently than the al-Qaeda types who just want to keep us at war as long as they can until the dollar finally breaks and we absolutely have to leave.
That's right.
Of course, the problem now is that July 15th has come and, you know, it's practically come and gone.
We know that we're not going to see a change in policy announced on July 15th or anywhere close to it.
Although they're saying they're dealing with the Taliban.
They're talking with them?
Well, they're talking with them, but the nature of those talks, I think, is quite clear that what the Taliban are talking about is, here's what you have to do in order to get us to actually negotiate with Karzai, where you have to release a long list of prisoners, drop your raids, your night raids, and agree that you're going to give us a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops.
The United States is nowhere even close to agreeing to those terms.
And so, as I've said, I think, on your program before, what the United States is doing is, what the Obama administration is doing is really trying to exploit the fact they're talking to the Taliban for political purposes, both at home and to try to divide the Taliban from Pakistan to sow distrust there.
But at this point, there's still no decision, no willingness to really negotiate with the Taliban.
And, you know, I don't know when and if that's going to happen, quite frankly.
I've now changed my view.
I'm not at all confident that we're going to get a settlement anytime soon.
I don't think we're going to see negotiations start for a while.
Maybe it's going to be during a presidential campaign.
Maybe not.
Well, and so this whole time, this surge really has been for nothing.
I mean, at some point, look, I mean, the headline of your previous article is despite troop surge, which I'm not sure if despite is the right word there, you know, during troop surge, Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties soared.
And so it's really, you know, the more the war is escalated, it's just like in the Wikileaks maps of the Afghan war logs.
The more we escalate the war on our side, the more resistance there is to us.
And so the Taliban is just getting more powerful the longer this goes on.
There is more resistance and undoubtedly, you know, in large part because of the continued night raids, which enrage Afghans across the board from one end of southern Afghanistan to the other.
And of course, in parts of other parts of Afghanistan where the raids have been carried out, the same the same strong anger is is the result.
But but I think beyond that, of course, I mean, the Taliban have shown that they're capable of continuing to increase their operations in a very well-planned, very carefully planned manner.
I think what they've been able to show is that regardless of the number of troops the United States puts in there, they will be able to continue to resist militarily and to be the strongest political military force in the country.
Well, I think I got Barack Obama's reelection slogan.
Don't change horses in midstream.
Don't cut and run.
We've got to see this thing through to the end.
You know, that kind of...
Where have I heard that before?
That sounds familiar.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, Gareth.
I really appreciate it.
Learn a lot.
Thanks as always, Scott, for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's Gareth Porter.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
IPSnews.net.
