Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Next up is my buddy Gareth Porter.
He writes for Interpress Service.
He wrote a book called Perils of Dominance about Vietnam.
I gotta read that.
I never did get a hold of that thing.
Also, you can find pretty much all his IPS news stuff.
I'm certain.
All of it.
At original.antiwar.com/porter.
His gains in Kandahar came with more brutal U.S. tactics.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's things?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm doing great, man.
Thanks a lot for joining us today.
You know, I was just talking with Patrick Coburn about what the people of Afghanistan think of the American occupation of their country.
And he said, as I guess could be expected, same was true in Iraq.
That at the very beginning, at least, it wasn't so bad that the Americans came and got rid of the guys that they hated before.
The problem is the staying and all the killing and all the escalating.
And Coburn said that beginning really in 2006, five years after the occupation began.
And especially in the last year, the tide of Afghan opinion is really turning.
And now more than ever before, do they really see the Americans as occupiers, just like the Soviet Union?
Yeah, I think that's a very good sort of timeline sense of the phases that the U.S. occupation has gone through, U.S.
-NATO occupation has gone through, and the responses of the population, generally speaking.
Because it coincides with, you know, the major shift geographically of the occupation from Kabul itself, originally from the first five years, it was really confined to the Kabul capital area.
And then only after 2005 did U.S. troops and then NATO troops begin to spread into other parts of the country, particularly the south.
And that's when you have all these major frictions because of knocking down doors, taking people away much more than ever before.
And then, of course, a big, huge step up when McChrystal comes in, the former head of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, comes in to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
And guess what?
He tripled the number of night raids as soon as he arrives.
And then we have, of course, the events of 2010, which I think people are much more familiar with.
Well, which include McChrystal getting fired and replaced by Petraeus, who then...
Who does even more of the same stuff.
Right, yeah, and took away, like, any of the nice part of the thing, which it was supposed to be as we kill him, we pat them on the head, and he's taken away the pat on the head, too.
And it's his counterinsurgency doctrine, Gareth, I don't understand.
Pat on the head, of course, was far more in the propaganda, public propaganda of the United States military than it was in practice.
And, of course, that is...
Well, I mean, they did have sort of the restrained rules of engagement, which Petraeus has loosened again.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, the rules of engagement were changed on use of air power by McChrystal.
That apparently is the case.
He deserves the limited credit that...
He deserves some credit for what he did in that regard, while at the same time, of course, he was making far more, far larger numbers of Afghans very angry by his stepping up the night raid.
But you're absolutely right that Petraeus has reversed even the limited change in the right direction for rules of engagement that were carried out by McChrystal and has then added some new touches, which apparently involve the policy of house demolition, as well as, it appears to me, I can't prove this yet, but I'm guessing that he gave his approval to a rather wide use of what is generally called collective punishment.
That is to say, allowing commanders the power to essentially punish entire villages for the refusal to either turn in IEDs, to identify where IEDs are buried in the ground, or for having received small arm fires from the village.
So collective punishment, which is an outright violation of the laws of war without any ifs, ands, or buts, has seemingly become a much more central part of U.S. military policy in Afghanistan than ever before.
I can't say that there was never any of this practice before.
I don't know that that's the case, but clearly it has increased, if it was ever used before.
Well, what the hell is this, East Jerusalem or something?
Tell me they don't have IDF advisors over there telling them what to do.
Well, that, of course, has got to be the suspicion, because collective punishment, as you are suggesting, is a very long-established Israeli policy against the Palestinians.
Then again, who burnt Tokyo to the ground?
That's right.
Then, of course, the Israelis also used it against Hezbollah, against the Lebanese, southern Lebanese, in that war and in previous excursions into Lebanon as well.
So it is a very firm Israeli policy, and one can't help but believe that the U.S. military has indeed been influenced by its Israeli allies in this regard.
Well, and I think there were stories from Iraq back a few years ago where some of the collective punishment in some of the villages were directly tied to Israeli advice, no?
Sure, absolutely.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
Nice.
Well, it's nice to know that they're helping give us the leg up here in this great war.
Well, so now here's the thing.
Coburn and I discussed about how the generals must realize that everything they're doing is making things worse.
Their giant escalation of 30,000 and then 30,000 more troops has only made things worse.
Their night raids and their collective punishment only make people hate them more.
And Coburn said, well, you know, and I know that you would agree, generals have their incentives to keep wars going, and so what's the big problem?
I mean, to stay in a small war, especially as they would consider this, is really the best of all worlds.
You don't risk hydrogen bombs going off in your own cities, but you get to continue spending the money and expanding your power and influence and that kind of thing.
But I've got to wonder about some of the civilians in Washington, D.C., who are embarking on this policy.
I mean, are they really that crazy?
They want to bankrupt America on the rocks of Afghanistan like every other empire?
I don't have to go to anti-war radio for this kind of insight about how back asswards this policy is, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth making the distinction definitely between military commanders.
I mean, it depends on how close you are to the action and what your immediate bureaucratic interests are, the degree to which you either accept or are perfectly well aware of the self-defeating aspect of the policy we're following right now.
I think, you know, the soldiers, the grunts who are bearing the brunt of this, who are getting their legs blown off, to a very great extent, are very well aware that there's something wrong here.
Even if they don't have a sophisticated analysis of the issue, they intuitively, of course, realize that they are being sacrificed here for reasons which are not at all clear.
And that problem comes through if you read some of the coverage that has been, some of the writing by meta-journalists in southern Afghanistan over the last several months.
You find a number of references to GIs who are clearly unhappy with what's going on.
Now, when you get to the level of unit commander, when you talk about a brigade commander or even a battalion commander, they have a different perspective.
I mean, their perspective is, first of all, this idea of counterinsurgency is all well and good, but it doesn't apply in places like Kandahar, where what we're dealing with here is hardcore Taliban.
These are not people who are going to give up.
They're not people who are going to be won over.
Therefore, we have to take a much harder line.
And these are the people who carry out such things as, you know, house demolitions and other forms of collective punishment for things that happen in the village that they don't like.
Well, look, I mean, that's nothing but admitting defeat again.
The adoption of the coin strategy was, well, look, we've lost, so we've got to have a new strategy.
And now they're saying, well, this strategy doesn't count for the city that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the strategy, because it's too difficult.
Hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
We'll be right back.
It's Gareth Porter, everybody, Antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Ward.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter, original.antiwar.com/Porter.
Gaines and Kandahar came with more brutal U.S. tactics, and we're going out to break.
You were explaining, Gareth, or I was recapping what you said, only with outrage, that they outright abandoned their bogus counterinsurgency strategy for Kandahar, because in this case there's actual people to fight, and so our bogus counterterrorism strategy doesn't work.
We're defeated, so we have to resort to raising their villages, like the IDF in the West Bank.
Yeah, well, we're talking about the brigade and battalion commander-level people and what their calculus is.
And I just said that they're the ones who are making the argument, hey, counterinsurgency stuff doesn't work here.
We've got to do something very different, something much tougher.
And at the same time, what I discern from my reading of interviews with these people is that they also understand that in the end it's probably not going to work, because the same guy, Colonel Flynn, who is quoted in my article, which is from an article in the Daily Mail, saying that if the people of this village in Kandahar, one of the rural areas of Kandahar, do not tell us where the IEDs are buried, we're going to destroy their houses, basically destroy the village.
He is also quoted as saying, you know, in the end you can't kill your way out of this, and we know they're going to be back because they're not going to give up.
And so these people, at the same time that they are ready to rationalize these sorts of tactics, also are much more aware that this is probably not going to work.
So then you come to the level of the commander in the field, Petraeus himself, and he clearly is prepared to believe that this may or may not work.
He knows it may not work, and he's dancing around the issues in order to prepare for that possibility.
And that's where he uses his manipulation of the media to try to wiggle out of the reality.
Then you go back to Washington, and then I think you have a different set of players, some of whom are in complete denial, and others were against the surge in the first place, and are trying to figure out politically how they can come out against the continuation of the war for three more years after next year.
But in the end, I mean, the Washington scene is dominated by, what, domestic politics, not about what's happening in the country, in Afghanistan.
None of these people is equipped, essentially, to recognize and to articulate the truth.
Everybody has their own set of interests which stand in the way, except for those who are suffering the brunt of it, as I say, the soldiers who are being killed and losing their limbs.
Well, you know, it seems like you could make the very same analysis of the entire terror war in general.
That, of course, is my analysis.
It's all George Bush Sr.'s fault, really, for getting us into the first Iraq war, which he promised would not be another Vietnam, which has now lasted 20 years since then, and created this entire...
You know, Al-Qaeda didn't have a... there was no Al-Qaeda, and they certainly didn't have a fight with America until the occupation of Saudi Arabia in order to enforce that blockade on Iraq, and now we've done nothing since September 11th.
The reaction to that, but cracked down in ways that create more and more and more enemies across the Muslim world.
According to the WikiLeaks, now we're fighting in Algeria, fighting everywhere between, you know, Morocco and the Philippines.
Yes, the policy is working splendidly for those folks who are carrying out anti-terrorist and counterinsurgency programs, isn't it?
It's a marvelous policy.
You see, you know, as I think we've said more than once on your show, the hardliners always win, don't they?
I mean, you know, the failure of their policies is not really a failure, it's a success in terms of their own interests, because they're not running out of enemies, and in fact it's exactly the opposite.
Right, and they're not running out of money either.
That was another thing Patrick Coburn was talking about, was $52 billion spent, and people are starving on the streets of Kabul, never mind in the rest of the country, and they don't care, they just give money away and take their cut, like the Taylor Panama or whatever.
They don't care what actually happens.
One thing that caught my eye, though, this past week, in the aftermath of the December review report, there was an article in Politico, which I happened to read, normally I don't read that newspaper, that rag, but this time I happened to pick it up, and guess who was quoted as pointing out that there's some serious problems here, including the fact that our policy in Afghanistan is contributing to homegrown jihadism.
Not some lefty anti-war type, but Jane Harman.
I mean, Jane Harman is certainly one of the more conservative, pro-war, certainly pro-Israeli people in the U.S. Congress, and yet here she is being quoted with an observation that goes to really the heart of the problem.
Now that to me is another signal that this whole system is very vulnerable politically, that its support is a mile wide, but it's thinner than I think people generally realize.
Well, it is, after all, a really bogus and stupid lie that somehow this is about Islam, rather than the American empire occupying people's countries and propping up their kings and cut their heads off.
This is a slight, but I think a telling exception to the generalization that I just made a few moments ago, that people in Washington are so deep in denial that they're not prepared to come to grips with the reality that all of these crimes that are being committed in Afghanistan are not going to work, that's simply going to, in the end, generate more resistance and make it inevitable that the United States will be kicked out of the country.
And here we have somebody saying, look, the cost of this is that we are making ourselves less secure.
That's a very dangerous thing for the permanent war system, as I like to call it.
It shows that there is, in fact, some chinks in the armor through which some of the truth is getting.
Well, and you know, there have been a lot of bogus terrorism cases, but then there have also been some actual attempts, like Faisal Shahzad.
He wasn't Al-Qaeda, he was an American citizen, I think, or at least had lived here, had a great job and a wife and a kid and everything.
He went to Pakistan, he saw some drone strikes, he came back and tried to blow up Times Square.
And the same goes for the Fort Hood shooter.
Not that he'd gone back to a country, but he was terribly upset about American foreign policy, clearly.
This should be the headline.
I've got no question about it.
This should be the major headline about this whole policy, that that's what's happening.
Now, before we forget it, I do want to point out the other thing that impresses me, is that the whole contradiction between the administration saying that we have to have Pakistan help us get rid of the sanctuary...
Oh, hell, hey, stay ten more minutes with us, Gareth.
All right, ten more minutes.
All right, hang tight.
All right.
Santai War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Santai War Radio.
We've got Gareth Porter on the line here.
And you were so rudely interrupted by the break, Gareth.
I'll just let you pick up where you left off.
Yeah, this is about Pakistan, which, I mean, that's really, I think, what I'm going to write about next.
Because, as I think most of your listeners know, last week, not only was there a review of the Afghanistan war by the administration, a kind of five-page dummy report, which didn't tell us anything, but there were two national intelligence estimates, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan.
And, of course, these have not been published.
Not even any excerpt or summary of these estimates has been published.
But the story has leaked out now that, in fact, what the Afghanistan estimate says is that the United States can't win, cannot defeat the Taliban, cannot prevent the Taliban from continuing to be strong enough to take over.
Without Pakistan changing its policy, its whole policy toward the Taliban, and essentially kicking them out of their safe haven on the Pakistani side of the border.
So that has been reported.
That's not new.
But I think what has not been reported, except, interestingly, in the Washington Post, buried far down in a story about the coming debate in Washington and across the country about withdrawal of troops, there's a paragraph which I'm sure only 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 of the Post readers will have picked up and appreciated.
But it says that the Pakistan estimate concludes that it is unlikely, I'm reading from it now, I'm quoting from it, the Pakistan estimate concludes that it is unlikely that the government in Islamabad will do so.
In other words, that it will cooperate with the United States to root out militant groups that take sanctuary within its borders, as the Post puts it.
So, and they then quote an unnamed official saying, so you're left with the question, is the conclusion that we're going to lose?
Now, that's pretty powerful stuff.
That means that within the higher realms of the Obama administration, they know that they're being told by the intelligence community that the policy is cooked, it's finished, there's no possible way that they're going to succeed.
And I'm not sure that this is entirely new.
I mean, I think that the White House was well aware of this, has been well aware of this for some time.
But the problem is, of course, that the President and his top political advisors are under the impression that they cannot come out for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, or even say, okay, we're going to make the call to the Pakistani military and say, let us talk to the Taliban about a settlement, without being mercilessly attacked by the Republicans and by the right.
And so that's what's holding them back.
But the point here is simply that there is this absolute contradiction between what they're saying publicly is the absolute necessity for succeeding in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and what they know from their own intelligence community is the reality.
Yeah, I object to your assuming good motives on the part of Obama or any of his people.
I mean, if they're not in favor of all this bloodletting, they don't have to do it.
And if they were against it, and they had to argue with Republicans of all people about it, they would win, assuming that they had any principle whatsoever.
Oh, I agree with you.
They have no principles.
No doubt about that.
It's just, I'm just describing the thought process.
I mean, it's definitely clear that there's, you know, right wing pressure to keep the war going.
But the answer to that is, so what?
That can't be, that can't, Obama can't put his responsibility onto that, you know, minor side issue.
Well, but it is not a minor part of the problem here that in doing this, in catering to the right wing, the president is ensuring that his domestic agenda, the fact is that the economy is going to just continue to go downhill.
And politically, he's a goner.
I mean, there's no way that he can prevail under the circumstances where he tries to continue this war.
I think that's very clear.
So, I mean, he's making a major, not just a gamble, but essentially sacrificing his entire presidency to this willingness to go along with the Republicans.
And so, you know, this is not just a throwaway line when you say that he's, that he's under the impression that he has no choice but to go along with Republicans.
I mean, I think that he's doing this, certainly, either he is completely in, you know, in a trance, a political trance and refusing to think about the consequences of it, or he understands that he's going down the slippery slope.
I don't know how else to understand it.
Yeah, well, how about he's just a villain like Dick Cheney?
Of course, I mean, you know, by definition he's a villain by doing what he's doing, but that doesn't tell us why he's doing it.
The point is I'm trying to understand why he's doing it, okay?
Oh, well, I just thought it was fun for politicians to murder people, because that's what makes them great.
No, no, I don't think so.
I don't think that's the fun of it.
I think that there are other things that they get fun from, but, you know, I don't think it's killing people that's giving them the fun.
Well, now back to the question about those national intelligence estimates here.
Is it even the case that if Pakistan really would stop protecting their own interests in Afghanistan and would finally try their very best to fight the Taliban in those mountains, that that would work, that they then would be able to win in Afghanistan?
I mean, it sounds like a pretty false premise to begin with.
I'm glad they reached the right conclusion that, well, this is never going to work, because at least there's a little bit of reality shining through there.
Yeah, but I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, it's very difficult to say, but the Taliban is clearly very dependent on the Pakistanis for logistical and obviously territorial support.
That is to say, having a territory to which they can repair.
My friend Anand Gopal, who knows a great deal about what's going on in Afghanistan, because he's a Dari-speaking journalist who has spent a lot of time in the hinterlands talking to a lot of Afghans, says that the Taliban has been hurt in the immediate sense.
Their command and control mechanism has been injured by the U.S. offensive, and they've had to withdraw.
They've had to pull back to Pakistan, despite the fact that at least some leaders were planning, had hoped to be able to stand against the U.S. offensive to put up much more resistance than they did, and they finally agreed they had to pull back.
So, I mean, it simply underlines the importance of those safe havens in Pakistan and the overall strategy of the Taliban against the U.S.
-NATO occupation.
Well, then again, there are still airstrikes and night raids to make plenty more enemies where the Taliban run away.
Well, no doubt about it.
I mean, the United States is doing a terrific job at alienating the Afghan population and maintaining political support for the Taliban.
But, of course, in a war against the most powerful military the world has ever known, you also need to actually be able to fight effectively against the U.S. military.
You have to have some logistical and other considerations brought to bear, and that's where this does make a difference.
Well, isn't it the case that the Pakistanis, no matter what, are going to have to keep supporting these guys because they're not going to willingly cede the country over to Karzai and his Northern Alliance pals, right?
This is very clear.
The Pakistanis are not going to change their policy, and I have to tell you...
With a big period at the end, right?
They're just not going to.
Not going to, period.
And what that leads me to is one final observation.
I am very concerned that the U.S. military will, in the end, push very, very hard for going in to clean out the sanctuaries in Pakistan.
I think we are facing another situation such as Vietnam and Cambodia, where the military insisted on going into Cambodia.
Yeah, well, we all remember who took power after that government fell.
All right.
Thanks again.
Appreciate it, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
