All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at antiwar.comnews.antiwar.com.
And I forget if we talked about this the last time or not, but there was a recent benchmark.
Jason, you wrote your 5,000th article.
Is that right?
Yeah.
My God, man, 5,000 articles.
That's more than Raimondo's written.
And he's been writing for antiwar.com since 1998.
Man, all right.
Well, that's a hell of a thing.
And they're great.
Of course, I don't know how much you ever listen to this show when you're not on it, but I read from what you write every single day on this show, of course.
It's absolutely indispensable.
All right, so there's so much to talk about here, but I want to start with Afghanistan.
What's the most important thing going on in Afghanistan this week, Jason?
Well, I guess it would be the vice president's visit to Afghanistan yesterday.
Yeah, and how'd that go?
Well, he had just come off of some media appearances in the U.S. promising that come hell or high water, the U.S. is going to have all troops out of Afghanistan by 2014.
And then he talked to Hamid Karzai, and he promised that U.S. troops would be in Afghanistan well beyond 2014.
So that was all it took was Karzai talking to the vice president to completely change the president's policy, huh?
Yeah.
Karzai said, I can't imagine that I'd be ready to take over for the occupation in three years.
I'm not sure they really have a policy at this point.
It seems like they just say whatever their current audience wants to hear.
Yeah, it's sort of like that old tape of LBJ.
I forget, he's on the phone with some senator or congressman, and he says, well, you know, I know we can't win, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be the first American president to lose a war.
So he'd rather just, you know, muddle on and then not run for re-election and get out of there while the getting's good, let Richard Nixon lose it.
So I guess that's Obama's strategy is to play like LBJ.
So now about this 2014, can you kind of help lay out for us exactly how this debate's going?
Because, you know, I know it's hard to keep track, probably even for you, but, you know, we have what the White House says, what the Pentagon says, what the generals over in Afghanistan say, and all the think tank kooks and who knows what.
And, you know, last November, or November before last, the end of 2009, Obama said, as we all know, that the beginning of the end of the Afghan war will be in July of 2011.
And now there's been this big push, basically, by somebody to change that date to 2014.
Now, of course, on top of that, Biden is saying 2014 is at minimum.
But what is this?
Is it just Petraeus versus Obama?
Or is it Obama versus himself, or what?
It seems to me it's Obama against the clock.
It seems like he's always going to want to have a withdrawal strategy that's just far enough in the future that you can't blame him for not withdrawing troops yet, but that's not so far away that it's going to make anybody angry.
When 2011 started getting dangerously close, it was pretty quickly disavowed and replaced with 2014.
And now there are already people laying the groundwork for disavowing 2014 and moving on to something else.
They haven't really said what the new date after that's going to be, but it's going to be something else later.
Yeah, you know, I wish I had been paying closer attention, because I think there's kind of a narrative to be drawn out here about who said which dates on which date.
You know what I mean?
Because I think somebody threw in, somebody said 2014, Petraeus, or one of these guys at a news conference or to the New York Times or something, and then the next day somebody else was talking about 2015, where we're already scratching out 2014.
Just add one more year on it, but just to prove that we're not bound by that 14 either.
Yeah, well, NATO was the first one that came up with 2014, and they were coming up with that even when the administration was still talking about 2011, because no one really took the 2011 thing all that seriously.
It was more something to announce the escalation while claiming that it wasn't just ratcheting up the war, it was a prelude to a withdrawal.
But nobody really believed that it was ever going to happen.
And NATO was already just months later talking about 2014, which now seems to be the official date.
But even as it was being announced, there were people at NATO openly talking about 2020, beyond then, decades.
There really is no firm date anyone's ever going to want to set on this.
Yeah, well, the day the dollar breaks, I guess.
Place your bets, everybody.
All right, well, so what's this story, Petraeus?
A deal that didn't include Taliban proves that the Taliban is weaker.
What deal is that?
Well, they announced last week that they made a deal with a pretty insignificant little tribe that lives...
Well, it was the elders of the tribe that live in a village of a couple thousand people in Sangin District, Helmand Province.
And they promised that they would do their best to keep the Taliban out of their village in return for some unspecified but apparently pretty significant U.S. aid projects going to their village.
And now Petraeus is saying that that deal with those elders proves that the war is going well because the elders were comfortable making a deal with the U.S.
Oh, please.
That's the same story for the hundredth time on a different day, and none of that has ever indicated permanence in any situation, you know?
Hell, they had their little firebase out in the Korngal Valley for seven years or something, and then they gave it up and left.
Well, and this is just a continuation of that.
There's always some group that's going to be willing to play ball with the U.S. so long as there's the prospect of millions and millions of dollars in aid projects coming in.
It seems like, for the most part, those aid projects never amount to much, except for a chance for the taxpayers to waste a whole lot of money.
But everyone seems to be willing to give it a shot if it means getting some contractors in there to build something.
Well, and speaking of building, or pretending to and collecting the money for building anyway, how goes the fight in Kandahar?
This was supposed to be the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency strategy, and General Percrystal's insurgent math aside for the moment, I don't think anybody ever underestimated the power or the ability of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to kill people.
I don't know, maybe we could argue about how talented they are at targeting their actual enemies, but certainly nobody can stop them from marching into Kandahar if that's what they want to do, so they have done that, right?
And so how's things going?
The Taliban turn tail and run from there?
Well, they haven't really, from the sound of things, invaded the actual city of Kandahar.
They're more invading some of these smaller villages that they claim are really significant, but that they've occupied over and over without much permanency in the past.
And really, they've sort of been downplaying Kandahar lately, even though it was throughout last year the big offensive that was supposed to change everything.
Now they're more talking about, you know, minor deals in Helmand or some offensive up in the north or things like that, and Kandahar is really sort of going on the back burner.
Well, is there any indication why that is?
Is it they just don't have the number of troops that they need to do it or they are afraid?
Well, they took villages, but it doesn't seem like they accomplished anything.
Most of the villages were empty, both of civilians that fled the anticipated fighting and the Taliban.
Well, maybe the local government in Kandahar is working so well they don't need any help.
Hang on one second.
I'll ask you that again when we get back from this break.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
All right, kiddos, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm on the line with Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
He's our news editor there at the most important website in the whole world, and I know it sounds like we're a bunch of patchouli-stinking hippies there, but we're not.
No, we're libertarians.
All right, news.antiwar.com.
We're talking about the Afghanistan war with Jason Ditz here, and I was being a smart aleck on the way out to the break there, Jason asking if, well, maybe the local government in Kandahar is doing so well that they don't need our help to clear and hold and build it, and so probably that's why the war there is off.
Sound right?
Maybe?
Well, it's not so much that the war there is off.
It's that it's not being hyped anymore.
I mean, the last big thing that NATO was eager to talk about in Kandahar was the occupation of the Zari district, which was a pretty small, pretty trivial district that NATO's occupied.
Well, that was the sixth time they'd occupied it since 2001.
And then the story started breaking that some of the residents that were still there were complaining, well, NATO's just going around bulldozing homes in the Zari district.
And that, of course, I'm not sure if you remember, we had the Stars and Stripes article about how great the NATO occupation is because they're paying the people for the homes that they bulldoze.
Right.
Yeah, if they kill your daughter, you get $1,500.
Yeah.
But after that, they sort of clammed up about the whole situation.
Here's the thing, too.
Take a larger view of this.
Step back from the situation going on there right now to the policy in general and how it got this way.
Well, we've got Michelle Flournoy there in Doug Fyfe's position and Eric Edelman's position as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
And over at the Center for a New American Security, you have all these guys, John Nagel and Tom Ricks, and the rest of them are really, to me, more and more, they feel like Michael Ledeen and William Crystal and the neocons.
Their theories of how wars are to be conducted have been completely bankrupted in Afghanistan, just the same as Doug Fyfe's theory that you could take over Iraq with 5,000 troops or whatever.
They're no more credible saying, well, you can take over Afghanistan with 100,000.
Well, and I think that more and more their strategies are aimed at keeping the Western voters from being too outraged about the war than they are about actually accomplishing anything.
I don't think much of anybody believes that there's some military goal that can still be achieved in Afghanistan.
It's more about keeping the public from just completely revolting over the idea of continuing the war.
That's why we're constantly seeing Marjah being hyped for months before they invaded it about what a giant city it was.
And then it was the Kandahar province was going to be the big game-changer, and then once it started, everyone just kind of clammed up about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I saw where you wrote up a piece, what, last week, right, about where the American people hold the Afghan war in the most contempt they ever have.
They're over it completely, right?
60-something percent?
Oh, right.
It's progressively gotten worse.
But at the same time, and this was a couple of weeks ago, Obama administration was insisting, well, American popular opinion doesn't matter, that the American public can't end the war just by being opposed to it.
Right.
Like Dick Cheney said to Martha Raddatz when she said, but the American people are against the war in Iraq, and he said, so?
Right.
In this case, it was Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton saying, well, you know, we're not going to base our foreign policy on what the American people think.
Yeah, it's funny, too, because the pro-war people are the people who would tend to hate Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the most, and they're the ones who say that you and me are against our country when our country is made up of people who mostly agree with us, not with Hillary Clinton, like these right-wingers do.
Funny how that works when Democrats are in power and at war, which I guess that's redundant, but still, you know.
All right.
Well, so what else was I going to ask you about?
Oh, well, this is maybe we could have, should have started with this.
Netanyahu demands more U.S. threats to attack Iran.
Let no Jason Ditz interview go without Netanyahu and Iran being mentioned here.
What's this about?
Well, there were some reports coming out of Israel.
Well, first, one of his officials said that the sabotage of the Iranian centrifuges had set their nuclear program back at least five years.
And reports coming out of Netanyahu's office were that he was outraged that someone had said that, because, of course, the official Israeli policy is always that Iran is just on the verge of nuclear weapons.
And that's been their policy for decades now.
Even though, of course, Iran never seems to get any closer to nuclear weapons, they're always right on the brink.
Yeah, it's just like us leaving Afghanistan.
Right.
Not too far off, but it's really no different, if you think about it, than like the end times cults.
You know, they like to have the end day be, you know, a few years from now.
Sell your house and give me your money.
Yeah, it's got to be within your lifetime so people will care, but not so close that their book has to be reduced when the date goes past.
Right.
But so Netanyahu here is saying that sanctions aren't going to work.
Never mind what the former head of Mossad, Mayor Dagan, said, which he's the same guy who was threatening Nick Burns, back in August 2007, as revealed by the WikiLeaks.
But here he says, nah, there's no nuclear weapons threat from Iran for years and years from now.
And then Netanyahu, I guess, in the same statement, was he refudeating Mayor Dagan?
Or was he just pretending that never happened and saying the situation is so dire that sanctions, we don't have time for sanctions.
Only threats of American military force can save us now.
Well, he sort of downplayed that comment.
He said that was just an estimate and all estimates are just estimates and they don't really mean anything.
Unless they come from him.
Right.
And then he went into the we need to threaten Iran more, which, of course, when he was visiting the U.S. a couple of months ago, was one of his centerpiece points when he visited with Vice President Biden in New Orleans.
That was his major talking point, was that the United States isn't threatening to attack Iran nearly often enough for his taste.
Wow.
I mean, I don't know, because, see, on one hand, I want to say that that seems like really bad PR and he should be more subtle, because if there is a war with Iran, the American people are going to know to blame him and they're going to resent him and his country and that's not in their interest.
And so why is he acting so stupid?
Then on the other hand, I think people don't notice or care, mostly.
So I guess he could get away with being that blatant about saying you must wage a war for the interests of my foreign country, just in plain English like that.
Well, and in this case, it's not even that you must wage the war, it's that you must threaten to launch the war more often.
I mean, he's not even necessarily saying that the United States needs to attack Iran right now.
He's just saying the United States, which threatens to attack Iran about once every other week from my count, needs to make it more like once a week or a couple of times a week and that that will accomplish something.
Right.
Well, I guess, see, I was kind of making the leap without saying it out loud that, you know, you threaten to get into a war with a country all the time, you might just get into a war with them, you know.
Well, sure, and it certainly doesn't help anything that we're constantly threatening to attack Iran.
It certainly doesn't help the reconciliation talks that are going to be happening in Turkey in a couple of weeks that we keep threatening to attack Iran.
Well, as always, the moderates in Iran are the enemy.
As Ali Gharib showed on the Lowe blog there and on the blog at antiwar.com, there was a lot of right-wing pressure against Ahmadinejad for making a deal with Obama.
And he only had the one caveat that you make an equal uranium swap, but still he could have gotten away with accepting even the Obama deal for the 20 percent uranium exchange there for the medical isotope reactor.
But it was the right-wing pressure, no doubt, citing the hawkish statements of even the current administration and, you know, their nonsense, you know, having to put all this pressure on Ahmadinejad that prevented him from making the deal.
Right.
And, of course, threats to attack Iran aren't really anything new.
I mean, the Bush administration was constantly threatening to attack Iran through both administrations.
All right.
Well, I don't have time to ask you about it, but I'm going to read it when I get back.
One more from news.antiwar.com.
Clinton presses Yemen for tougher military action against al-Qaeda.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, Jason.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
That's news.antiwar.com for the work of Jason Ditz.
