Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Inter Press Service, discusses Obama’s decision to send another 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, the inevitability of a negotiated settlement with the Taliban despite military escalation, how bureaucratic propagation and policy momentum keep the Afghanistan disaster moving along and the RAND Corporation’s role as think tank and cheerleader for the U.S. Air Force.
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For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Well, it's Chaos Radio, 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I've got a couple of important articles in front of me here.
The first one is by three of the best reporters in America, in terms of mainstream newspaper journalism anyway.
Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott, and Nancy A. Youssef at McClatchy Newspapers.
The headline reads, Obama Plans to Send 34,000 More Troops to Afghanistan.
And the other one is by my personal favorite reporter in America, Gareth Porter.
Afghan Army Turnover Rate Threatens U.S. War Plans at IPSnews.net, soon enough, at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Thanks as always, Scott.
It's good to be back.
All right, so bad news here.
We've been waiting, and I guess there have been different leaks.
CBS News reported it was going to be 40,000 a week and a half ago, something like that.
Looks like the very credible Landay, Walcott, and Youssef are bearing the bad news today.
34,000 more troops to surge into Afghanistan.
What do you say?
Do you think it'll work?
I don't think it'll work.
What would work mean, anyway?
I have no idea what working would mean, but I can tell you what not working means.
Okay.
Not working means we will be in Afghanistan indefinitely unless they change their tune, unless they change their policy dramatically and start reversing the process and pulling the troops out.
I mean, I think unofficially the idea is that we are, in fact, going to be there for many years.
That that is the premise of what the president's going to announce.
This is where I think inevitably the United States is going to end up having to look at a negotiated settlement.
I don't think that that is really on the president's mind at this point, unfortunately.
But I do think that six months, 12 months, 18 months from now, it's inevitable that he's going to have to start looking at the negotiating option.
Negotiating with the Qatar Shura, the Taliban, as well as the other two major insurgent groups for a peace settlement.
Well, now, I guess so this gets to the question, again, of like what working would look like.
What is the actual goal there?
And, of course, you know, maybe this should go at the end of the interview to sum up or something, but it sort of seems like the premise, too.
I mean, everybody knows that there's oil pipeline politics at play, although I'm pretty certain I agree with you that Houston is not driving this policy.
This is, you know, maybe a strategery, as George Bush liked to call it, about somehow checking Russia and China and making sure that the pipeline doesn't go to them or whatever.
Obviously, there's the Caspian Basin and all that.
But, you know, what the hell is the point?
Is the point to try to build a state so that we can have a pipeline?
Or is the point to turn the place upside down in perpetuity so that the Chinese can't build a pipeline?
Or what the hell are they even trying to do?
Garrett, please help me out here.
Again, yeah, the problem is trying to put forward, you know, strategic notions about how this fits into the great game and so on and so forth.
Although understandable, you know, I mean, that's what everybody, I think, who is well-educated on international politics automatically tries to do.
It's useless because in the end, you know, Barack Obama is simply Lyndon Baines Johnson all over again.
He's a president who is handed a war by his national security state before he even sets foot in the Oval Office.
And, you know, he's also compromised himself, of course, by having, just like, sorry, not LBJ in this case, but JFK having a run on a platform that said, you know, the problem is that the incumbents have not done enough to protect our security interests abroad.
In this case, he was saying they haven't done enough in Afghanistan.
And that's the real problem.
You know, we now understand that Barack Obama needed a war to support in order to look tough so that he couldn't be bullied easily, or at least more easily, by the Republicans.
And so, you know, that was a natural, in the American political context, was a natural thing for him to do.
But then, you know, he made himself really vulnerable to his national security advisors to get him to sign on to the war that they already had planned, that they already had underway, in fact.
Just as JFK had to sign on to a war that was handed to him by his national security state in 1961.
And, you know, what's the reason for it?
Well, it's kind of like the old joke.
There is no reason for it.
It's just company policy.
It's what we do.
It's what the national security state does.
No, I don't think that you're going to find any rational explanation, not even what is a rational explanation within the madness of the national security paradigm, you know, of projecting your power abroad.
None of those notions about, you know, screwing the Russians or the Chinese, or, you know, basically getting control of a pipeline, either require or, you know, make sense of what the United States is doing in Afghanistan.
That can only be understood, in my view, as a result of this necessity of the national security state to continue to maintain its role and function and status, prestige, once it's committed to any conflict, basically carrying it through to the end.
Even if it has serious doubts about being able to succeed, it can't let on that that's the case.
It must continue to persevere on the official assumption that whatever is required can be done.
Well, so, believe me, I'm with you that the root of all evil is the state, and it doesn't surprise me at all that your analysis is that the root of the empire is the perpetuation of the empire itself for its own sake and that kind of thing.
The Pentagon as the dirty snowball rolling downhill.
The Pentagon as the empire itself.
I understand that, but there's got to be, on some level, there's got to be something rational going on here.
I mean, when Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sit around and they say, well, you know, here's which Afghans we're going to kill and why.
I mean, they've got to be working towards something here.
Is it the complete subjugation of the Pashtuns or just the rural people?
Do they want to create a multi-ethnic thing or do they want to favor one side over the other?
Do they want to make matters better or make matters worse?
I mean, there's got to be some kind of reason in at least the little details, even if the whole thing is insane.
Not necessarily, no.
I'm sorry to disagree.
No, in fact, I think that, you know, for example, you posed a series of rational questions.
What is it that we want to do here?
This is a multi-ethnic society.
It has Pashtuns, it has Hazars, it has Tajiks, etc., etc.
How do we view the future of the various ethnic groups within the political and governmental context?
Who's going to rule?
How are we going to get Hazars and Tajiks and Pashtuns to work together?
What's the possibility that Karzai could be viewed as legitimate in terms of his having sold the state, essentially, given the state apparatus, particularly the national security apparatus of the state of Afghanistan, people from the Northern Alliance, a group mortally opposed by the Pashtuns and to the Pashtuns?
I mean, these are the kinds of questions that you would expect to be discussed in the Oval Office, but I'm willing to bet you any amount of money that that's not the case, that that's not the level of analysis or the level of discussion that's going on there.
Because for the national security state, and specifically the U.S. military, that's not the issue.
The issue is, OK, we've got a job to do, we've gotten ourselves into this now, and we just have to keep persisting at trying to get the insurgency under control.
And that becomes the end in itself, regardless of the context within Afghanistan, the context of the region, or anything else.
So, wow.
So the people with the most power of all of this have basically the narrowest view of what they're even up to, really.
And the question is only, hey, there's resistance, so we have to defeat it, or something, which is 75 links down the chain from what the hell are we doing in Afghanistan?
Yeah, it comes down to sort of very, almost animalistic logic, as opposed to any higher strategic logic, I think it's fair to say.
And I would simply remind you of something that I'm sure I must have said in your program at least a couple of times, that my favorite slogan, if you will, that I think basically expresses my political analysis, or my political philosophy, is too much power makes you stupid.
And for the U.S. military, which is in fact the most powerful institution in this society, in terms of the resources that it has control over, the number of people that they can directly manipulate, through their budget, the degree to which they force people around the world to change their behavior, to alter their behavior in light of U.S. military force.
These people are also, in a functional sense, the most stupidest of anyone, because they have all this power, and it basically does force them into the narrowest kind of thinking.
I mean, they simply have no incentive to exercise the rational faculties that they were given when they were born.
Well, as Donald Rumsfeld said in a memo that he deliberately leaked to try to make himself look good back a few years ago, was, well, gee, what are the metrics?
How would you even measure whether you were accomplishing anything or not?
It's sort of like Stalin, or even maybe this is like the Leninists, when they first took power in Russia, trying to figure out which way to build the railroad, and Ludwig von Mises made fun of them, because they didn't have prices to measure whether what they were doing was an efficient use of resources or not.
So their stupid railroad ended up just going all over the place due to the whims of some Politburo guy, and they're so far removed from the consequences of their actions, and the price paid, you know, by the rest of us and our tax money and everything else, that, I mean, really you could argue that the Pentagon itself is the biggest socialist big government program in America, and therefore the least functional.
Yeah, and there is a very nice, I think that's a very nice parallel that you've just drawn, in the sense that what we're looking at in both cases is precisely a bureaucracy which has its own interests, which is removed from the consequences of its actions, and doesn't have to exercise any rational management over resources at all.
I mean, there's simply no incentive for it to do that.
In fact, the incentive is quite the opposite.
That's funny.
You know, the headline, the title for this interview will be, The Empire Has No Idea What It's Doing.
And then the comments, the people are going to go crazy.
Nobody wants to hear that this thing is really as stupid as it looks.
No, I understand that, and this is true, I think, particularly on the left, that there is a very sort of stirringly fierce resistance to the idea that this is simply an emanation of bureaucratic self-interest, rather than some sort of arcane plan that is really a conspiracy of the moneyed interest to advance their fortune, somehow by manipulating the military.
That is, in fact, the sort of default position that has guided the left in this country for decades now, and I'm fighting against it, but I'm afraid I don't have sufficient power to alter the train of thinking that has continued along those lines for so long.
Well, this is so interesting.
In fact, the next interview here in about six or seven minutes is going to be Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
He, like me, is a libertarian anarchist, and we're going to be talking about the libertarian theory of class warfare as opposed to the Marxist one.
And I can think of all kinds of examples, like Greg Palast's reporting about how even though James Baker and them didn't want the neocon plan, they did want regime change of one form or another.
They wanted to keep the Ba'athists, but they wanted to basically do a coup and control Iraq, because they wanted to keep the Iraqi oil off the market, keep those prices high.
And then I think of the great libertarian writer Richard Cummings and his article for playboy.com, which is at corpwatch.org as well, called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
It was about how Bruce Jackson in the 1990s set up the Let's Expand NATO committee to come up with bogus reasons for expanding NATO, just so Lockheed could get some giant welfare payments to quote-unquote give away a bunch of fighter jets and everything to the former Warsaw Pact states.
And then he's the guy also who set up the Let's Invade Iraq committee that pushed all the propaganda about Halabja and Saddam Hussein is like David Koresh.
He's crazy and bad to his own people, and we need to save them from him and all that.
So there is some of that, right?
No, I'm willing to say that Iraq is the closest war to the kind of traditional – I'm talking about major war now – to the traditional model of financial, economic, corporate interest being the driving force.
There was certainly a relationship between the people who were pushing for war on the sidelines and even within the Bush administration and the military-industrial complex people who were going to profit from it, no doubt about that.
And Rumsfeld did have roots in the Air Force and the financial and industrial interests who were aligned with the Air Force.
So I think there is an argument to be made that ultimately you can trace back the roots of the ideas that drove the Bush administration into Iraq to real concrete private interests that were aligned with the military.
Now on the other hand, however, I think the Air Force has to be understood as an even more important driving force behind the neocon ideas for change in Iraq and the Middle East.
That's a longer subject.
I won't go into detail.
But there's an awful lot of evidence that what Rumsfeld was buying there in his idea of going to war in Iraq was the ideal Air Force war.
He bought it lock, stock and barrel because Rumsfeld got all of his strategic notions from the Rand Corporation.
And he was twice the head of the Board of Directors, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Rand Corporation.
And he was briefed twice a year on all the Rand Corporation research.
And of course the Rand Corporation fundamentally represents the interests of the Air Force.
It was created to support the Air Force and basically justified Air Force policies for many decades.
Yeah, well you know that's one thing that Richard Cummings writes about is that especially the shock and awe was basically a Lockheed promotional ad come to life.
The Javelin missiles, the trucks, the tanks, the software, the different planes, the different bombs.
It was almost entirely a Lockheed production.
In fact, he talks a lot about how I guess in the old Yankee cowboy war or whatever, the cowboys were the military industrial complex that grew up after World War II or during and after World War II.
And they weren't really smart though.
And so they hired the Israel lobby in the form of the neocons to be their brains to come up with excuses to sell their stuff.
And so I think it was Andrew Coburn who said that the neoconservative movement is where the Israel lobby and the American military industrial complex cross.
I think it's a perfect analysis.
I agree completely, yes.
Yeah, and I think Cummings says in his article that when it comes down to Pearl and Fyfe and Hadley and Scooter Libby and John Hanna and Abram Shulsky and like virtually the entire neoconservative axis of evil in the vice president's office in the Pentagon, especially in the first term of the Bush administration, almost all these guys were tied either directly to Lockheed or Northrop Grumman.
Or you had like in the case of Stephen Hadley, he worked for the law firm that worked for Lockheed.
You know, and that kind of thing.
I mean, it really was like two men, the neocons.
You might even put aside the clean break policy and say these guys are airplane salesmen.
And so, you know, it's really, I think, necessary and important to look upon the Lockheed people and the entire sort of air power oriented national security complex.
The private industry complex has essentially fused with the Air Force.
I mean, they are one bureaucracy, essentially.
They have the same aim.
You know, it's a bit more complex than that, but they are so closely aligned that they do, in fact, and they interpenetrate, particularly Air Force generals, of course, going over to Lockheed and Boeing and so forth.
It's really one bureaucratic economic organization.
Well, I would think that one measure of the power of the Air Force would be Robert Gates's clash with them and the speeches he made where he said, listen, F-22 is for a war with China that we're never going to fight.
Our wars are against little brown people on the ground who can't possibly defend themselves.
And so we need the F-35 because it's better for ground attack.
But this was a big fight over whether it was going to be the 22 or the 35 there and the new fighter jet.
Yeah, and of course, Gates represents a different combination of socio-political forces than Rumsfeld did.
I mean, Rumsfeld, as I said, was completely committed to the Air Force, didn't really like the Army very much, was ready to sacrifice them on the altar of his strategic ideas.
And on the other hand, when Gates came in, I mean, he had a completely different set of interests.
And as Afghanistan became the primary preoccupation of the Defense Department and of the defense secretary, he clearly gave the nod to the counterinsurgency folks and Petraeus.
And therefore, his priorities were completely the reverse of those of Rumsfeld and the Air Force.
Well, so does that give us hope, then, that maybe the worst of the war parties not leading the charge on a policy now?
Well, I mean, the people who are now...
You know me, Gareth, I'm always looking for the silver lining.
I wouldn't call it a silver lining because these people are actually the ones who fight the wars on the ground.
And the Air Force war was the quick and dirty and get out, or quick and clean and get out.
And the Army and the Marine Corps fight on forever.
I mean, their idea is that this, I mean, this is the official Army doctrine now, voiced at every occasion possible by the chief of staff of the Army.
This is the era of persistent warfare, meaning that the United States will be fighting these kinds of wars in Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East for the foreseeable future, for decades to come.
Do you think that includes Iran?
Because it almost seems like a tradeoff between more wars or just the same wars we got, only they will last forever.
Iran is the Air Force war uniquely, and it's only the Air Force that supports war against Iran.
And so there is a very direct conflict there between the interest of the Army, which certainly does not want a war against Iran, and the Navy the same.
It also does not want a war against Iran and the Air Force, which at least some parts of certainly are eager to attack Iran.
Wow, what a world.
There you have it, America, the Empire circa 2009.
Thanks, Gareth.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter on the Afghan escalation, well, in a larger sense.ipsnews.net, antiwar.com, slash Porter.
