All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Okay, so first guest on the show today is AntiWar.com's news editor, Jason Ditz.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How's it going, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Now, listen, I want to ask you all about what you found in the WikiLeaks document dump over the weekend, but there's so much more important stuff, or not more important, but so much more important stuff to talk about as well regarding especially the AfPak war.
I was wondering if we could start with Richard Holbrook.
The special envoy apparently has gone ahead and admitted that the United States cannot win a military victory in Afghanistan.
That's pretty big news from Hillary Clinton's little smithers there, isn't it?
Yeah, it would certainly seem like it, and he's insisting, in fact, that the U.S. isn't even trying to win a military victory anymore, which seems to me warrants further explanation of why there are 150,000 NATO troops there.
Yeah, what exactly are they doing?
Because didn't they announce last week that they've suspended all reconstruction there until you agree to hire Halliburton to do it, I guess, or something like that?
A lot of the construction has slowed down or been canceled because of the contractor ban, although President Karzai says he's going to look at those on a case-by-case basis, and it sounds like he's going to back down on a lot of those bans anyway.
Here's the other thing, too, regarding – well, I'm kind of confused about that, actually.
I mean, they have to have one excuse for war or another in order to keep it going, don't they?
If it's not a military victory we're after and all the reconstruction is banned for the time being, it's not a State Department war, it's not a Pentagon war, whose war is it?
Just the JSOC?
Well, it seems to me that what he's arguing is that the war is basically going on right now just to get better terms out of the Taliban for some sort of peace negotiation, but at the same time he insisted in the same interview that the talks that are going on right now don't really rise to the level of peace talks to begin with.
I mean, there was a lot of hype about these peace talks with the Taliban, but as Gareth was pointing out on the show last week, the Saudis and the Pakistanis have been talking with the Taliban all along.
Really, I think Gareth was saying it's the Haqqani Network that we're really talking about, not Mullah Omar and them.
Right, and even the Report the Guardian quoted some unnamed administration officials saying that these peace talks are being hyped deliberately as part of a misinformation campaign against Mullah Omar and trying to drive down morale among the Taliban forces because they'll think that a peace deal is imminent, when of course it just isn't.
Right, which just goes to show you their mindset, that they figure the best way that they can weaken Mullah Omar is make it look like he's willing to deal with us.
I mean, what does that say about their recognition of what at least the Pashtun population of Afghanistan think of this occupation, that that would hurt him?
And then second of all, doesn't that just make him look strong?
I mean, after all, it's a guerrilla war.
He doesn't have to win.
All he has to do is not lose.
And the reported release of Mullah Baradar from Pakistani custody also sort of fits into that theme, because he of course was one of the more moderate Taliban and one of the ones that was more in favor of negotiations in the first place.
All right, now in the country next door, it's really a big fake Duran line left over from the days of the British Empire.
But over there in Pakistan, this is your top headline right now at news.antiwar.com, Jason, reports, U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional on North Waziristan invasion.
Pakistan foreign minister insists government will set its own timeline on offensive.
How long have they really been pushing for this reinvasion of Waziristan?
And how hard are they pushing, do you think?
They've been pushing for North Waziristan offensive for years.
I mean, well into the Bush administration, they were pushing for that.
And it seems like it only gets louder and more public as time goes on.
But at the same time, Pakistan seems really to not want to get into this.
They launched the South Waziristan offensive last year around this time.
It was a little bit earlier in the fall.
And it really didn't accomplish much of anything, even though South Waziristan was of course the home territory of the major Taliban faction in Pakistan.
Basically, they all just moved on to Aurakhzai and North Waziristan and other places.
And then the offensive spread to Aurakhzai and they moved back to South Waziristan.
So mostly what these offenses managed to do is chase hundreds of thousands of tribesmen out of their homes, rile up everybody about the Pakistani military bombing villages and then not leading to any captures of any Taliban leadership.
Well, you know, I'm sure you saw Raimondo's article about that guy Headley, the American agent of the DEA and or CIA or who knows exactly there, who apparently was embedded with the Pakistani Taliban.
And Raimondo mentions in there that apparently Zalmay Khalilzad, who's the former puppet master of Karzai there and then was the ambassador in Iraq for a while, that he reported that these high level members of the ISI and Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Afghanistan, both believe this conspiracy theory so-called that America is actually helping to back at least parts of the Pakistani Taliban.
This guy was apparently part of, I forgot how you say it, the LAT, the Kashmir, one of the Kashmir groups.
And, you know, I wonder if because the language, you know, it's just like during the worst days of the Iraq war, they would always say, you know, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, as though anyone who was part of the Sunni resistance at all was working for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when he wasn't even al-Qaeda till the very end of December 2004.
So but anyway, it's the same kind of thing in Afghanistan, right, where everybody who dares to fight us is the Taliban.
But really, we could try to break it down a little bit more.
Like I was mentioning earlier, the Haqqani group, they seem to be the ones that the Americans are most concerned about fighting as opposed to the Taliban in general, which does exist on both sides of the border.
Is that pretty much your read?
Yeah, the term Taliban in general is awfully common among groups, especially in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
There are dozens of groups that call themselves something with the word Taliban in it.
And groups like the Haqqani network that don't even do it also get labeled Taliban.
Basically, every patch to an organization that has any sort of religious component is going to get labeled the Taliban at some point along the line.
And all of these groups, of course, have different ideologies, different goals.
Some of them aren't even violent groups.
But they still get labeled Taliban just because of where they are and who they are.
As you mentioned before, every time that America insists that the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military invade Waziristan or these northwestern territories, it never really accomplishes, for example, the destruction of the Haqqani clan or anything.
All it ever does is help recruit more people of their cause.
So I wonder whether this is really just deliberate to have a long war or whether America's foreign policy is actually run by a bunch of nimcompoops who still have no idea who they're fighting for or against.
Well, I don't think it's deliberate.
I think it's more an act of desperation.
But violence keeps getting worse.
Over the weekend, we just passed the 600 mark for NATO troops killed in Afghanistan this year.
And that's, of course, the worst since the war started.
Early on, it was a few dozen people would get killed a year.
Now it's gone from a few hundred to several hundred, and it seems to get worse and worse and worse as time goes on.
And I think they're just hoping some random offensive somewhere along the line is going to turn the corner.
We just saw the occupation of a village in Kandahar.
The name of it escapes me right now, but it's the sixth time NATO troops have occupied that village.
Are you talking about March or something else?
No, this is the one that was Mullah Omar's home village originally.
And it's just outside of Kandahar City.
And they've occupied it six times since the war began, and every time they occupy it, they say this is the turning point.
And a few months later, the troops, I guess, they get bored or they decide something else would be a more productive target, and they just leave, and then the Taliban comes back.
I know that the media has been making a lot of big noises about the clear hold build mission in Kandahar itself.
You mentioned the little town next door they've occupied and failed to hold six times over the years.
And now never mind the failure of Marja, which was supposed to be this major turning point last spring.
And I guess, Jason, never mind the fact that they put off this massive invasion of Kandahar until just a few weeks ago.
But now that it's supposedly on in Kandahar, what's happening there?
Are the good guys winning?
Are the good guys the Americans?
Well, that's certainly the way it's being reported.
The media has been talking about this as being a rout and that the Taliban are in retreat.
None of that, of course, is really new, because the Taliban have basically been in retreat since 2001.
They're forever changing locations.
They're an insurgency.
They're not a military, so they're not fighting the NATO troops head-on.
They're always wandering off into different regions when it suits their purposes.
And right now that's being touted as proof that there's a big turning point on the horizon.
But I think that's more about the upcoming reviews.
I mean, we've got a NATO conference next month and the Obama administration's official year-end review in December.
And right now the groundwork is sort of being laid for this story that there's actually major progress on the ground.
And, of course, death tolls are going to start dropping in the next few weeks when the snowfall hits.
I mean, every year when the frost hits, Afghanistan, by and large, doesn't even have roads.
So snowfall means everyone is stuck in their own village until the next spring.
Right.
So I guess I don't really mind at this point, Jason, if they lie and try to claim that wintertime and the facts of guerrilla warfare indicate that they're winning, whatever.
They have to tell us whatever they can, I guess.
What would really bother me is if they can believe that.
I mean, after all these years, do they really think that invading a city with the Marine Corps and having the guerrillas flee for the time being is a mark of progress?
Do they really believe their own nonsense about that, or that's just for the rubes?
Well, it's sort of hard to say, but the WikiLeaks documents about Afghanistan that we saw earlier in the year suggest that they're pretty much aware of how bad this war is going, and I guess maybe things have changed since those documents were released, but it doesn't sound like they really have.
So these people know full well how bad this war is going, and the official story is more about trying to keep public support for the war from cratering out any more than it already has.
Well, think about if you were an American soldier over there risking your life for this sucker's game when these guys, the average Army soldier there has got to know, at least his sergeant has got to know, that we lost.
We're on the side of the Northern Alliance that's been losing a civil war for 30 years.
They're not going to win, and we can't stay forever.
It's like John Kerry said back in the 1970s, 1973, 1974, how do you ask an American son to be the last one to die for a lie?
What does it mean to be patrolling around Afghanistan knowing that you're basically risking dying for nothing?
It's not like this is...
I don't know.
I guess in Iraq at least they were fighting for the majority that could win, and they could try to claim success by installing McDonnell Soldiers in power or something, but here there's just nothing but failure for them to have.
Well, and speaking of the Northern Alliance, there have been some reports over the weekend that a lot of the warlords that made up the old Northern Alliance forces that were fighting against the Taliban before the U.S. invasion are starting to rearm based on those reports of those peace talks that aren't really going on, that they're preparing for the possibility that the U.S. makes peace with the Taliban and puts them back in power, and then they're going to restart their own insurgency.
Yeah, well, and why shouldn't they?
Why should we expect anything different than that?
And it's like I talked with that lady Malalai Joya on the show, the first woman elected to the Afghan parliament and now a peace activist who's demanding that America leave, but she said on this show, look, we don't want you to negotiate a surrender, okay?
We don't want you to bring in the Iranians and the Russians and the Indians and whoever and work out some kind of deal, and the Pakistanis.
We don't want you to cut a deal with Mullah Omar, this butcher, this monster.
We don't want you to protect us from him anymore either.
We just want you to go.
And yet, I mean, hell, if we do leave, it will be a negotiated surrender, right?
It will be more or less helicopters fleeing the roof of the embassy in Saigon kind of a situation.
And whoever takes over, whoever's going to take over, you know, if our side wants to save face, they're going to have to sign on the dotted line, you know, call it peace with honor or whatever.
But ultimately, no matter what happens, whether it's the Americans, the Northern Alliance, or the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan are screwed.
They're not going to have anything like liberty for a long, long time.
Well, and the Northern Alliance rearming underscores that even these negotiated surrender sort of terms that would reinstall the Taliban aren't going to bring peace to Afghanistan.
Right, and we'll be the ones rearming the Northern Alliance, so they'll have a better shot than they've had at least since Massoud got killed.
Either that, or we're going to end up on the side of the Taliban fighting the Northern Alliance like we were before the 2001 invasion.
Right.
Yeah, we'll just switch back and forth again.
Sometimes people are surprised to find out Saddam Hussein used to be Ronald Reagan's bag man, but I guess that's what people get for being young.
But yeah, you're right, we could just be on the side of Mullah Omar talking about, well, you know, these Northern Alliance guys, they were the ones who fought for the communists during the 80s.
We've always been friends with the Mujahideen.
We've always been at war with East Asia.
Well, and after nine years of pretty disastrous attempts to fight the Taliban, there probably is some appeal to being on their side, if for no other reason, than to join the side that seems to be winning that war.
Yeah, and getting the American people to get over the cognitive dissonance of, wait a minute, you mean we're switching sides in this thing again or whatever?is still probably easier than actually winning a war against the Pashtun majority in that country.
Well, certainly in Somalia, the rhetoric against the Islamic Courts Union certainly dried up after top people in the Islamic Courts Union took over the transitional government there.
Yeah, what an interesting point that is.
Hey, let me ask you, you got time?
Can I keep you ten more minutes here?
Sure.
Well, I want to ask you a little bit about Somalia.
Maybe we can do a little bit on the Iraq war logs that have just come out as well.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Now back to Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at Antiwar.com.
And before the break, you were making a great analogy there about, I don't know if it's an analogy, but an example you cited was the war in Somalia, where we have always been at war with Somalia, and yet we switch off which side we're at war with at any given time.
And as you said, the Islamic Courts Union that America helped the Ethiopians invade in Christmas 2006 to overthrow, they're now the side we're fighting for.
Jason, is that really right?
Absolutely, that's right.
And the justification for that is the claim that al-Shabaab and the other militant groups that have cropped up since the Ethiopian occupation are even worse.
So suddenly the Islamic Courts Union isn't seeming so bad, and we have to back them, even though at this point they don't really have any power.
Right, because they gave up all their power by shaking hands with Condoleezza Rice.
Right, what they do get is they get a nice presidential palace that gets hit with a mortar a couple times a week, they get an airport that's mostly in ruins, and they get a small port and a couple of city blocks around all of that.
Yeah, and what was legitimate about them before was that they resisted the warlords that America backed.
That's how they got their power in the first place.
Then the Ethiopian army and the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command go in there and obviously have enough fire to overthrow them from power.
But they have enough power, and especially with their new friends al-Shabaab, to successfully resist that invasion and occupation.
And so Condoleezza Rice goes ahead and says, OK, you can be the government after all.
They lose every bit of legitimacy they had by making a deal with the United States.
Now they're fighting their friends in al-Shabaab.
Well, and that's sort of the old story in Somalia, that any time the international community recognizes somebody as the government of Somalia, they lose all legitimacy and everybody rises up and starts fighting them.
Somalia hasn't had a successful government, which I guess, what is a successful government, but for decades they had their Soviet-backed dictators at one point, and that was the closest thing they had to a successful, in the sense that they were able to control the whole country, type of government.
Right, and here's the thing too.
Not that you don't know this, but I like to reiterate for the audience's sake, that Somalia is an actual place.
It's not just a shape that you don't even know on a map of East Africa.
It's actually a place where there are, or maybe I should say were, people.
But tens of thousands of them have been killed just since George Bush's war beginning in 2006.
I talked to people from Human Rights Watch on this show, so there are, I forget if it was a quarter, half a million people on the brink of starvation.
UN food aid suspended because the security situation is so bad that they can't even give away food to the starving to death.
The most powerful country ever has taken the weakest, as Jason just said, not even really a nation state, in the whole world, and smashed it, just like in the Ledeen Doctrine, just take a weak little country and just throw it up against the wall just to prove that you can, to the cost of tens of thousands of human lives.
You know, and damn, nobody even cares about that war.
People say, you know, what's your show about?
I say, well, you know, I'm keeping track of four wars and going on six.
And they go, well, you know, what are you talking about?
Iraq and Afghanistan, I heard of those.
What's these other wars you're against?
People don't even know.
Anyway, so tell me what you learned in those war logs, Jason.
Oh, I haven't even scratched the surface of what can be learned in those war logs.
I mean, the Guardian and the New York Times and Der Spiegel had ten weeks to go through these war logs before they were officially released.
And even they, it seems like, I mean, they did an admirable job, but it seems like with 400,000 documents, they really are just themselves covering sort of the bare bones minimum of what can be learned from all those documents.
It's such a massive relief.
I mean, we thought the Afghan leak was big.
And this is five or six times more documents.
It's an unfathomable amount to go through.
Yeah, it really is.
It's what, 394,000 documents, something like that?
Almost 400,000, is that right?
Yeah.
And this is the biggest leak in the history of the world, everybody.
Did you hear about this?
It's one of those things that broke late Friday night.
If you're on the typical weekend business cycle, you might not have even known that the biggest leak ever, ever, the secret history of the Iraq war from the point of view of secret level, battlefield reports and that kind of thing, from 2004 through 2009.
So there's an entire story of an El Salvador option in there.
There's an entire story of backing the Saudis and fighting them at the same time.
There's an entire story of the wars in Fallujah in the spring and in the fall of 2004.
Just go back and think about all the different things about the Iraq war you wanted to know more about this whole time.
It's going to be in there.
I hope that we can have entire branches of universities just assign grad students to just cataloging all of this in a way that we can really do some research.
I guess WikiLeaks has got a good start.
All right.
Well, anyway, we'll be back.
Thanks, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
