03/16/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist from IPS News, that's Interpret Service, IPSNews.org, and also we keep his archives at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back, as always.
Well, this is a very interesting article you have here.
I'm sorry, I don't have the title in front of me anymore.
What is it called again?
It's a plan to split Taliban, lures Obama deeper into war.
Ah, yes.
That sounds like the one.
And it'll be at Antiwar.com slash Porter by the time anybody hears this.
So, let's talk about General David Petraeus.
He is the commander of CENTCOM, Central Command, which I think stretches from Morocco to India, something like that?
Something like that, yes.
And so, basically what you're reporting here, if I have it right, is he's decided he's going to try to replicate what he's done in Iraq and create a Taliban awakening movement of concerned local citizens.
Well, I don't know if it's exactly going to look like the awakening movement in Iraq, but certainly Petraeus is well known to have suggested all along that one of the things that would be applicable in Afghanistan was the idea of outreach to the reconcilables, as he likes to call them, in the insurgency, as he says he practiced in Iraq.
Now, you know, that, of course, can mean a variety of things, but in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it's obviously believed to be feasible to split off significant elements of the insurgency who are supposed to be reconcilable.
And this appears to be the idea that the Obama administration is now adopting as the centerpiece, if not the centerpiece, of its new policy towards Afghanistan, the result of its policy review, which apparently is going to be announced one of these days very shortly.
Well, where does this number come from?
I've heard this a couple of times, that 70% of the people fighting us are doing it just for the money.
They're not really the irreconcilable types.
It's a very interesting figure.
And, of course, it was made public by Vice President Joe Biden in a speech that he made in Brussels last week, basically suggesting that, you know, this is going to be a cakewalk because all we have to do is have the 70% of the insurgents who really are only doing this because they're getting paid.
All we have to do is buy them off and we're in free.
Well, you know what they say about Joe Biden.
He's the very smartest.
He knows more about foreign policy than anybody in D.C.
He's brilliant.
He does appear sometimes to be suggesting that.
This is one of those moments when he's sort of revealing, I think, his essential lack of judgment on foreign policy, which I think has characterized his approach in many ways.
Well, look, Gareth, I'm sorry.
I'm spoiled rotten over here because I talk with Eric Margulies, who's spent all this time with the Mujahideen over there and has explained to me how, oh, no, they love killing foreigners on their land.
In fact, with such high unemployment, there's for them nothing better to do than, you know, there are warrior people there and they always have been and they will fight forever.
They will never tolerate foreign occupation of their land.
I think that represents the consensus view of those who do not have an ax to grind, who have become observers of or experts on the insurgency in Afghanistan.
Yeah, so this isn't that I'm just lucky that I get to talk with Eric Margulies, who knows all this.
Pretty much everybody knows that.
Pretty much everybody knows that who is trying to be reasonably objective about it, yes.
In other words, the fundamental problem of the insurgency is not a bunch of kids out there who need a job and who are ready to accept money from the highest bidder, but Pashtun fighters who are well-known, according to what is called Pashtun Wallah, the sort of code of conduct of the Pashtun people, to hold grudges when foreigners or, for that matter, you know, Afghans come into their valley and do harm to people who are in their family or in their clan or their tribe, then they are committed to taking revenge.
That is the real problem that foreign troops face in Afghanistan, particularly in the Pashtun areas of the country.
Well, is it possible at all that the Taliban Pashtun types could reasonably perceive that harboring Egyptians and Saudis and whatever few Al-Qaeda guys are actually, you know, supposedly left up there in the mountains under their protection are more harm than good and that maybe if not separate the Taliban from each other, perhaps it's possible that America could bribe the Taliban into separating themselves from the Arabs?
I'm not sure that Americans, that the United States would be very successful in making its own deal with the Taliban in terms of support or, you know, financial assistance to the Taliban, but I do think that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who have enjoyed close relations with the Taliban over the years, could indeed have a reasonable chance to strike a deal with the Taliban leadership that would involve basically separating themselves from Al-Qaeda in return for assurances of support, recognition, and getting the United States and the NATO countries to withdraw their troops from the country.
That, of course, is where the United States and NATO would come into the deal, basically promising to withdraw and essentially putting forward a publicly announced timetable for withdrawal as part of the deal.
Yeah, but your title says this is a plan to draw us further in.
Right, and this in a way is the alternative strategy that I'm afraid is going to be passed over because of the lure, if you will, of this strategy of splitting the Taliban, which apparently it appears to offer, I should say, a kind of political route to victory in Afghanistan, which is really illusionary, illusory, and therefore basically represents a kind of obstruction to the search for a realistic exit strategy from Afghanistan, which I think setting a timetable for withdrawal and then using that as a basis for encouraging the Saudis and the Pakistanis to talk to the Taliban leadership about a deal under which they would separate themselves from Al-Qaeda and in return they would not face an attack by the United States but could be a continued peace once the U.S. troops are out of the country and NATO troops are out of the country.
Well, so is General Petraeus and Joe Biden, are they just blind to the obvious reality that a deal that separates the Taliban from Al-Qaeda would be preferable or a top priority before trying to split the Taliban apart, or they're just looking for an excuse to stay?
I think they're looking for an excuse to stay.
That is to say, I think that certain interests within the executive branch, and of course I would begin with the U.S. command in Afghanistan, but I think Petraeus at CENTCOM would be part of this as well, are looking for a rationale to continue the war.
They are simply not in the business of withdrawing their troops from a conflict without having been defeated.
And that is the nature of the beast, if you will.
They can't help themselves.
It is simply not something that the U.S. military brass can entertain, the thought of withdrawing unilaterally, because that's simply not the ethos of the U.S. military.
So you begin with the military itself.
I think the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be of two minds about this.
They're pulled in both directions for budgetary, politics reasons.
And then you get to other players.
As I say, the national security elite there, part of the Obama administration, are going to tend to want to continue something to see if they can't somehow pull it off before they give up.
And that, I think, is the temptation that propels the administration in the direction of this illusory strategy.
So you think the Pentagon itself is the major driving force?
It's not oil pipeline politics, or is that even just part of military strategy?
I don't think it's the Pentagon.
I think oil politics are so marginal to this issue that they cannot possibly exert a real influence over the result.
So it comes down to General Flagg has a new base and he doesn't ever want to leave.
That's right.
Essentially, that's the shorthand way of putting it.
I never did trust that General Flagg.
I think maybe that was a character on MASH when I was a little kid, a black and white set.
But General Flagg would work also, I think.
Oh yeah, did you know him?
Okay, well, so here's the thing, too.
There's no such thing as Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Really, these are creations of the British Empire from back in the day, and there's what's called the Durand Line that separates the so-called, pretends to separate, these Pashtun tribes across the line that divides them between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And yet, well, I guess there's a couple of things.
It means that we can war against them all day in Afghanistan.
It doesn't mean anything as long as they can escape into Pakistan.
And we see the results of limited airstrikes inside Pakistan just simply makes everything far worse there.
We still can't send ground troops in there to so-called finish the job or anything like that to root out the al-Qaeda guys.
So basically they just declared a permanent war against the Pashtun tribesmen to last forever and ever, I guess.
It could be, indeed, a permanent war without any successful result.
If you see history as any guide, which I think you have to in the case of Afghanistan, there is such a long history that is very relevant to this.
I think the situation is even worse than your rather dire description, which, as I say, I think is justified.
And that's because not only do we not have any reasonable prospect for making any successful effort against the Pashtun insurgents on both sides of the line, but we can't even be assured that we have a logistical route into Afghanistan that is secure.
Certainly the one going through the Khyber Pass is not secure.
That's been well established in the last six to nine months.
It's been attacked repeatedly.
It's been closed down.
And that's sent General Petraeus and CENTCOM scurrying into Central Asia to try to pick up an alternative route with the supposed help of the Russians, the Kazakhstan government, and the Tajikistan government.
But that route, obviously, is not terribly reliable, because it's going to be dependent on the support of the Russians, who clearly have a say in the politics of the Central Asian Republic, and have a say because their ports would be the port of entry for any use of that Central Asian route from Russia through the Central Asian Republic into northern Afghanistan.
And one would not want to be dependent on the Russians for fighting a war in Afghanistan, even though, to some extent, they share our interest in keeping the Taliban out.
But it is not an inviting proposition to be completely relying on our main power rival in that part of the world.
And then, of course, there's Iran.
And as I reported a week or so ago, a couple weeks ago, the Pentagon has already begun making sort of the contingency planning that the Pentagon has to do for using the Iranian route into Afghanistan, which would be by far the most secure and most reliable route in the physical sense, because it's the shortest.
But again, the United States certainly does not want to be, in a subjective sense, relying on Iran.
And from all the signals that we've gotten from the State Department and others in the new administration, they don't seem to be positioning themselves politically to warm up to Iran in a way that would make it possible to rely on Iran for logistical routes into Afghanistan.
So, in the end, we're stuck with a situation of really not having any reliable route into Afghanistan at all.
Well, we'll just do a Berlin airlift kind of thing.
Wow, so, pardon me, but it seems like, if I understand this right, we've got three stooges running the American empire here.
We've got a giant outpost landlocked in the middle of Asia, and no route to fund them or equip them, keep them supplied with food and ammunition and the things that they need to be imperialist occupiers in Afghanistan, without making a deal with the Russians or the Iranians.
I'm not sure, I mean, obviously I'm disappointed in just how ridiculous this all is, but that's kind of a side issue.
I would think that maybe I should be pleased, as a silver lining kind of thing, that hey, maybe this is an opening to getting along better with Russia and Iran, and we all gang up on the poor Afghans some more.
Well, it certainly is an objective and a basis for the United States to have to make deals with one or the other or both.
And one would think that in the long run, that is going to have to be the case, that they will be forced to make some sort of an arrangement with both Russia and Iran.
But that is going to make it impossible for the Obama administration to carry out the same kind of Cold War, at the very least, that it has carried on against both of those powers.
So there is a silver lining, I think, in a sense.
And yet, the Obama administration thus far, as you suggest, has been more like the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers making foreign policy, and one wonders whether they're capable of doing even the most minimally rational thing with regard to that part of the world.
So, I mean, in the end, I really don't know what to think, because this indication that the Obama administration is attracted to this idea from Petraeus, of splitting off the so-called reconcilable elements of the Taliban or of the insurgency, as a centerpiece of their strategy, is so stunningly irrational, that you just have to wonder what they're thinking.
I really don't know the answer.
Well, and at the same time, and I don't really know, maybe you can address the degree to which, I'm sure it's a great degree to which, American intervention, particularly the airstrikes in Pakistan, are serving to completely undermine the puppet government that we've installed there, which that guy Zardari was elected with a bare plurality of the parliament there, and it looks like Pakistan's falling apart.
Is this, well, does it have anything to do with the fact that America, that he's allowing and winking and nodding and letting America bomb inside Pakistan?
Well, it certainly has something to do with it.
I mean, I can't offer a very precise judgment about the degree to which this is an underlying factor in the rapidly growing instability.
You know, I think obviously there are other factors here.
I mean, there are factors that are left over from well before that policy of accelerated airstrikes and at least one commando raid into Pakistan from across the border began.
But certainly it is a factor.
There's no question about that.
And I would simply recall to mind the story that I did last October, if I remember correctly, or perhaps it was September, that the National Intelligence Council had warned the White House in an oral briefing that if they continued to carry out ground raids by special operations forces into Pakistan from Afghanistan, that this would definitely contribute to the destabilization of the Pakistani government, that it would be likely to cause the Pakistani army to disintegrate, that more Pashtun officers who serve in the Fatah area, the frontier area, would split off from the army and begin to support the Pashtun tribesmen who are fighting the Pakistani army, that this would be a terribly destabilizing policy to pursue.
Now, we know that, at least for the time being, that the ground operations, the ground raids by special operations forces were called off because of the ferocity of the response politically within Pakistan.
So at least there were some response to the evidence that this was a terrible idea.
But they have continued to carry out the airstrikes, despite the fact that the NIC gave that warning, and despite the fact that we know that there have been continued protests, and that the military as well as civilian politicians have continued to oppose these strikes as undermining their authority and making it more difficult for them to carry out the war against the domestic Taliban, the Taliban forces within Pakistan.
Well, now, I guess it was October 2007 that Michael O'Hanlon, I think, on the so-called liberal side, and then Robert Kagan, I think, on the right, they co-wrote that article for the New York Times about how we might just have to invade Pakistan and confiscate all their nuclear weapons and regime change their government.
Oh, that's right.
I think it was Fred Kagan, if I'm not mistaken.
Was it Fred?
I think it was Fred Kagan, yes.
And then, was it Michael O'Hanlon was the co-author?
Michael O'Hanlon, exactly.
And so do you think that there's much, you know, was that, how far out was that?
I mean, obviously it sounds crazy to me, but does it sound crazy to the rest of the people in D.C.?
They're not going to go that far, are they?
I wish.
I wish that were the case.
Unfortunately, we have no assurance whatsoever that that idea is not going to be pursued further by the Obama administration, despite all of the indications that that would be a travesty, that it would be the worst possible idea for the United States, and despite the fact that we can't afford even to think about increasing the size of the ground forces of the U.S. military.
But you're telling me that you have information or you believe, can you tell me specifically, that this government is entertaining the idea of invading Pakistan?
No, I'm not saying that.
What I am saying is that there is consideration being given within the Pentagon to not only increasing the size of the forces, that's already underway, but actually changing the official doctrine of the Department of Defense from two wars to, you know, many wars.
As Mao Zedong used to say, or was it Mao who said, two, three, many Vietnams?
You know, this is our equivalent of that.
We want to have two, three, many Afghanistan and Iraq going on.
And that is indeed a discussion which is now underway, a debate is going on, which is anticipating the next so-called QDR, quadrennial defense review at the Pentagon, which is supposed to revise the overall policy guidance for the Pentagon for the four-year period, to consider whether the old idea that the United States should be prepared to fight two wars at a time should be revised, so that we fight a whole bunch of wars at a time.
We should be prepared to fight a whole bunch of wars at a time.
And that's why I think it's not at all clear that they're not moving precisely in the direction that O'Hanlon was laying out in a general sense, quite apart from the question of whether we should invade Pakistan.
Well, geez, I guess you could say it is change from George W. Bush, perhaps a more belligerent policy for the next four or eight years.
That is certainly a possibility, although the forces that press against that in terms of both the realities on the ground in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and geopolitically and geographically in the Middle East, and in the U.S. economy and the world economy, are so overwhelmingly negative, so overwhelmingly against the possibility of doing anything in that direction, that one has to believe that they wouldn't get very far in trying to carry out a policy that moves further in that direction.
And yet, one has to say that the early indications are that they're trying.
Well, I think when you talk about there's an agenda by the Saudis, for example, to try to separate the Taliban from the al-Qaeda guys, and the Americans instead would rather make things worse by just splitting the Taliban apart and this, that, and the other thing to stay forever.
I think that, well, I mean, you make it pretty easy to understand, but this isn't the kind of thing that's discussed that much in public, and nobody really knows anything in the general American TV audience out there.
They don't really know anything about Afghanistan, and it seems like it wouldn't really be too hard to just continue to ignore obvious good policy proposals that would lead us toward withdrawal in favor of staying forever in the name of trying to create a situation where then we can leave.
Well, first of all, let me just point out, in terms of the initial point that you were making about the possibility of a Saudi deal with the Taliban, that there were reports over the weekend in the Sunday Times of London, which underscored the activity, the active role of the Saudis in talking with the Taliban, not just at sort of the level of senior people, but actually talking with Taliban commanders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, that this has been going on since January, involving the director of Saudi intelligence making a personal trip to both Pakistan and Afghanistan for that purpose.
And there was another story last week in Stratfor, the strategic intelligence outfit that publishes articles on what's going on in the world, and they reported last week also that the Saudi director of intelligence visited those two countries for that purpose, and also pointed out that he had been basically twisting arms and offering cash to the Taliban in return for their splitting themselves off, separating themselves from Al-Qaeda.
So that is definitely underway.
It is not just an abstract idea.
It's something that is actually going on as we speak.
And the other thing that's worth noting is that Barnett Rubin, who's probably the leading Afghanistan specialist in the United States in academia at New York University, and Ahmed Rashid, who is a Pakistani journalist, they co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs last December, January, in which they called for exactly that kind of a deal as the centerpiece of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, as an exit strategy from Afghanistan.
And I just spoke with Barnett Rubin yesterday, or rather exchanged emails with him, and he commented that the Sunday Times story, which confirmed the trip by the Saudi intelligence minister, is indeed accurate.
So he's following this situation.
We now know that Rubin and Rashid have indeed been hired by Ambassador Holbrooke as a short-term consultant in the case of Rubin, and as an advisor in the case of Rashid.
So presumably, Holbrooke is being made aware of this alternative strategy, because Rubin obviously embraces it, as does Rashid.
Yeah, the more guilty he'll be when they ignore it.
Well, indeed.
That raises the question of what Holbrooke knows, and when he knew it, and whether he is in fact rejecting that for reasons which have to do with the internal politics of the national security state.
It raises additional interesting questions about the policymaking process.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
You can find what he writes at IPSnews.org and at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Pleasure to talk to you, as always, Pat.