09/25/09 – Jean MacKenzie – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We're going to start the show right now with our first guest today.
It's Jean McKenzie from the Global Post.
The website is GlobalPost.com.
She's got two great articles I will attempt to direct your attention to.
The first is from August called Funding the Afghan Taliban.
And the follow-up is Are U.S. Taxpayers Funding the Taliban?
From September.
She is live on the phone from Kabul, Afghanistan right now.
Welcome back to the show, Jean.
How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
No problem.
All right.
Now, this is one heck of a story that you have here.
I guess it's the kind of thing we all should have guessed, but it sure sounds like it makes perfect sense just at first glance.
Apparently, it's American reconstruction money that is the primary mechanism of the financing of our military's enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban resistance there.
Is that right?
Well, it's certainly a major source of financing for them.
I don't think that we understand quite yet enough about how the Taliban works and how much money they're actually receiving to say that it is the primary mechanism.
I think we're still scratching the surface on that one.
Okay.
Well, so I guess explain to us what it is that you have figured out about this or how much you have been able to report, if not in terms of the percentage of the total that the Taliban has, but at least as much as you can figure out how much money they are making from the American taxpayer in order to spend resisting our occupation.
Well, as you know, increasing areas of Afghanistan are now under the control of the Taliban or various insurgent groups.
A conservative estimate has it at 50 percent.
Some estimates are putting it much higher than that.
And what that means is any kind of assistance that is going into or through those areas is subject to Taliban control.
And rather than attacking every convoy that goes through or every truck that goes through, the Taliban are taxing the convoys or the trucks that are going through.
So some organizations or many organizations, as far as we know, rather than paying on a case-by-case basis are entering into long-term agreements with the Taliban to give them a percentage of the project funding and then to be left alone, to be allowed to proceed with their project activities.
It's a very difficult area to pin down as far as money goes.
And we know that over a billion dollars a year is coming in to Afghanistan from your CID and assistance money.
But it's very difficult to isolate exactly how much of that money is coming to Afghanistan, which is the problem in identifying the funding that's actually ended up in Taliban hands.
Much of the assistance money that we give goes to salaries for foreign contractors, security for those contractors, housing and transportation for those contractors.
And we're talking about a percentage, a fairly healthy percentage, 20% at a reasonable estimate of the money that is actually going to Afghanistan for goods and services.
Well, actually, let me ask you this before we get too far into the details.
What exactly does Taliban mean?
Because on one hand, I guess the history is that these were Afghan refugees, these students living in Pakistan in the 1980s, and they were basically sent by the Pakistani intelligence services to take over the country back in 1995.
They weren't really necessarily like the homegrown political representatives of the Pashtun tribesmen, really.
They were sort of this, in a sense, kind of separate.
It sort of seems like from here, which I'm a world away.
You spent five years there, but Gene McKenzie has been in Afghanistan for five years now reporting on this.
It sort of seems like any Afghan who resists the occupation at all, and particularly the Pashtun tribes, are basically all just considered the Taliban.
That's the enemy there.
Is that accurate, really?
Well, it is accurate that we are applying the term Taliban to anyone who is resisting the presence of foreign forces.
As to the origin of the Taliban, there are many differences of opinion.
Certainly, there is a large portion of the Taliban movement that was born in the refugee camps of Pakistan.
They're also part of the Taliban movement.
A non-significant part of the Taliban movement was homegrown, specifically in Kandahar.
But as to where we are now, we are using the term Taliban as a blanket label for basically anyone who doesn't like us.
That is a pool that is growing almost daily.
I'm very sorry to report that if we keep using this terminology, the Taliban are going to very soon be the majority of the country.
Right.
Well, and does it really break down along ethnic lines, or is it much more complicated than that?
Well, if we're talking about the Taliban proper, they are overwhelmingly Pashtun.
Not 100% Pashtun.
Therefore, when we see pockets of Pashtuns in parts of Afghanistan that are not the south, the south is the Pashtun area.
But there are pockets of Pashtuns in the north, the west, and certainly, of course, the east.
And those areas are being identified as potential insurgency prone areas.
And therefore, they are being targeted and identified as being kind of incentivizers when that might not necessarily be true.
All right.
Now, so basically, if I understand your reporting in a nutshell, basically what you're saying is, or you're identifying what seems to be part of, you know, a major part of the strategy for the occupation, which is all this nation building and turning Afghanistan into a proper, stable, western-style democracy for the ages or something.
And the way to accomplish that is by building up a bunch of brick and mortar and infrastructure, highways and buildings and who knows what.
But in order to do any of that, enough protection money has to be paid to the resistance that it's basically a hopeless task, because the resistance ends up strong enough to thwart any effort to do all of this nation building in the first place.
Am I right?
Well, it does seem to be a bit of a vicious cycle here.
As you pointed out, the more we try to do, paradoxically, the more money seems to end up in the hands of the people who are fighting us.
And that is not a happy prospect.
The problem with what you're calling nation building or infrastructure building is that very little of it is actually taking place.
What we keep saying is that we have to have security before we can have development.
But unless we have real development, it's very unlikely that we're really going to see security anytime soon.
So we're in sort of more than one vicious cycle, if you will.
The security development cycle and then, as you pointed out, this money cycle, where the more that comes in to rebuild the country, the stronger the insurgency seems to get financially.
Well, now, after your first article came out, you got a little bit of response, right?
Representative Bill Delahunt, it says here in your follow-up article, has vowed to hold hearings and do an official investigation about this.
Have you heard anything more about that?
Not anymore.
Not too much more.
From the Washington side, USAID has launched an investigation.
I have spoken to several representatives of USAID here in Kabul who are looking for as much information as they can find about how this works and what they could try to do to counteract it.
Well, now, I've got to try to be a bit critical here.
I had the opportunity, thankfully, to participate in this conference call that you did last week, and I didn't really join in the conversation, but I was listening attentively.
And it seemed like, if I remember right, Gene, you kind of concluded at the end of that discussion that the only solution is more building, more aid, more infrastructure, more helping the civilians.
But it seems like, again, when we refer back to that vicious cycle, that maybe that's not necessarily the right way to go.
Are we just completely stuck between a rock and a hard place here, or what?
Well, it does sometimes seem that way.
But I think we have to look at this strategically and look at what we hope to accomplish and how we are trying to get there.
It seems that all too often we are not identifying our priorities or going on some kind of rote policy that is not getting us where we want to go.
If we really want to do development and we want to increase the number of troops in the country, it might make sense to use those troops to establish a secure area where development can take place without the Taliban, without the Taliban having control over what is actually going on there.
Instead, we keep fighting offensive military operations against the Taliban that are not effective and continually failing to provide the kind of secure environment that could foster development.
So I think what we need is a major rethink of what we're trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and an even more major rethink of how we're going to try to get there.
I saw an interesting episode of the Bill O'Reilly Factor the other day.
Believe it or not, I actually watched an episode of that.
He was saying that, listen, quite unlike the Russians, the Americans are in a completely different position in Afghanistan.
The Afghans like Americans.
The Russians came in and killed a million people mercilessly or more and were the evil, godless communists.
America has come in and they like us.
It's just that they're scared of the Taliban.
If we can't protect them from the Taliban, then they have to go ahead and err on the side of whose display of force is more regular in their neighborhood.
They've got a side with that.
And so I guess I wonder if that's really true at all, that the average Afghan appreciates an American occupation better than a Soviet one.
Well, with all due deference to Bill O'Reilly, that is not my experience.
Perhaps he has had a different five years since Afghanistan.
Right, yeah.
Well, he was there once at Army Base.
Yeah, well, there you go.
I think the average Afghan at this point, I grant that the Russians did a lot more damage in many parts of the South and many, many more civilians were killed during the Soviet occupation and have been killed during an almost equivalent amount of time under the international forces.
But your average Afghan does not have great fondness for the American military and great hatred for the Russian.
In fact, I would say that they see very little difference.
At this point, they see very little difference between the two occupations.
I've been hearing for years now, oh, during the Soviet years, we had this, we had that.
They built schools.
They sent teachers.
They sent hundreds of thousands of Afghans to the Soviet Union for training.
If you meet a certain class of Afghans now, people over 50, all of them speak Russian because they were sent to the Soviet Union to become doctors and engineers and lawyers and teachers.
So there are people, of course, with very bitter memories of the Soviet occupation, but there are also many, many people whose experience of that occupation was not as negative as we think it was.
And while we like to think that we are the kinder, gentler occupation, if you will, that we're here to help, that we are here to do good for the country, that is not the perception of the average Afghan out there.
They see foreigners on their soil.
They see a military occupation.
They see people that do not treat them with difference and respect in many, many cases, and they just don't like us.
Well, you know, I guess I'd heard that the Russians did a lot of so-called nation-building while they were there, but I'd never heard of taking all those people back to Russia for training.
It sounds like they put a lot more effort into nation-building than the United States, while at the same time their occupation was more brutal in terms of the way that they fought the war.
But it sounds like if the Russians couldn't win with that much nation-building, I mean, what are we making, one-tenth of that effort or less, right?
Or less, yes.
And I think that the perception is beginning to emerge that we are not winning here, that we are not creating a nation.
I think that the elections that were just held illustrated that very, very clearly, that nine years or eight years, almost eight years after we got here, we are not able to see this nation hold a free, fair and credible election.
And that is a very sad commentary on what we've been doing here.
Well, you know, there's a new story breaking today.
I don't know if you've had a chance to see this yet.
I'm looking at the Huffington Post here.
It has a report.
It's Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe, has reported that they got a copy of the classified version of McChrystal's assessment of the war in Afghanistan.
And he concludes in there that we will need 500,000 troops over five years.
And so, you know, I think the last time we spoke you were saying we just can't leave now because we have all these people who've invested in our occupation.
Basically, they'll be left high and dry, right?
They'll be like the bloodbath left behind in South Vietnam.
And, you know, the locals will take revenge against them for working with the occupiers and all that.
We can't just abandon them.
And yet, if the alternative is 500,000 troops over five years, I wonder whether you think it's time now to go ahead and cut our losses there, Jean.
Well, it's certainly time to think about what happens after we leave.
I don't think that 500,000 troops is going to be sustainable from our point of view.
Afghanistan, which is a country that means quite a bit to me, I've invested a lot personally in terms of time and effort over the past five years.
It's very important to me.
But I do not think that Afghanistan per se is that important to the American public or to the security of the United States of America, that we are going to be prepared in the long run to invest that kind of time and effort here.
What 500,000 troops would actually do here, I cannot begin to fathom.
What we've seen is increases in troop strength, gender increases in hostility among the population, and therefore strength in the insurgency.
So 500,000 troops, is that going to make things five times worse?
I don't know, but I think that that's a question that we would have to answer before we start investing that kind of time, that kind of effort, and that kind of blood and treasure in a country that strategically may not be that valuable for us.
Apparently there's a big fight, or at least a big discussion going on within the administration.
According to the New York Times, Joe Biden wants to scale down the effort in Afghanistan, particularly since the disaster of the election.
And instead just try to find Arab Afghans to bomb in the mountains of Pakistan somewhere, I guess.
And Hillary Clinton and her people, I guess, basically, the people who would have been her administration over there at the State Department, are saying, oh no, we can't leave because then Al-Qaeda will come back.
Even if Al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan now, they will, so we have to continue to stay and wage this war.
Obama so far, I guess, is saying, well, he's still waiting to decide and he's taking his time.
What do you make of all that?
It seems pretty strange to have that much open infighting on these kinds of issues in the papers like this, right?
I think that it's a good sign.
It may be uncomfortable for the administration that this debate is so open, but I think it is a very good sign that this debate is taking place.
These questions have got to be asked, they've got to be aired, and the American people have got to begin to ask themselves why we are investing this kind of time and effort in a small country of 30 million people to keep it safe, to keep ourselves safe from Al-Qaeda, when as of November 2001, what Al-Qaeda forces were in Afghanistan had already gone over the border to Pakistan.
So eight years later, we're still fighting Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, when they are very happily establishing themselves across the border.
So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense logically, if you think about it.
We're fighting in Afghanistan, which is a nation of 30 million people, because we really cannot do all that much about Pakistan, which is a nation of 160 million people with nuclear weapons.
So are we doing this to make ourselves feel like we're doing something about Al-Qaeda, or what we used to call the global war on terror?
I don't know.
But we've got to resolve that question before we completely eliminate this country.
Well, it's a good point that at least we're finally having a discussion that's honest enough to take into account that Al-Qaeda fled Afghanistan back in 2001, and as long as we're discussing the truth and everything, they never were more than a couple of hundred guys anyway.
A couple of hundred Egyptian and Saudi friends of Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri couldn't have probably been more than 150 guys, right, in the first place.
Well, those are the estimates, that it was a couple of hundred people.
But Al-Qaeda is also an expandable term, much like Taliban is.
So we are now applying the term Al-Qaeda to these bands of foreign fighters that are coming in, and they are coming back to Afghanistan because the foreign troops are here.
They are in Pakistan.
These are Saudi, these are Chechens, we're seeing people coming in, fighters coming in from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan now, and we want to call all of them Al-Qaeda.
But they are here, or they are coming here to fight the foreign occupier.
And I think that it's dangerous, again, to lump them all into one ideological basket with what was a very small band of people.
Yeah.
Wow, a whole new generation of Mujahideen.
Wonderful.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, alright, so let me ask you about heroin.
They say that Afghanistan is where most of the heroin on earth comes from, and it occurs to me that the place has been under the American government's occupation for quite a few years in a row now, Gene, and I was wondering if you could explain which all different factions are responsible for the heroin trade and the degree of complicity or at least negligence on the part of the occupation in allowing this to take place.
I recall that the Taliban had virtually eradicated, through their right-wing totalitarian drug war that they waged there in that country, they had virtually eradicated poppies back when they were in power.
Well, that is true, but only technically true.
The Taliban were very supportive of poppies for the first four years of their government, and then suddenly in 2000 announced that next year no one would grow poppies.
And they were extremely effective.
People knew that the Taliban kept their word, the Taliban were fairly brutal about these things, they said no poppy, and people did not grow poppy.
One of the ways they did this is by telling local leaders that if any poppy was grown in their district, they would be the ones to answer, most likely with their heads.
So in one year they managed to virtually wipe out the poppy crop.
Again, this was not an ideological decision, since they had been supportive of poppy before that.
The cynics among us say that just as has happened now, there was so much overproduction of poppy that the price had fallen, and they wanted to, as OPEC, they wanted to try to manipulate the world price.
But certainly since the Taliban left, poppy growing has gone up and up and up and up.
It's only been over the past two years that there's been a significant decrease in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
And many people again attribute that to the fact that there's been so much overproduction since 2001, specifically since 2004, that the price has more than halved, and people just are not producing it because it's no longer in their economic interest.
But as to extractions, more than half of the 60% of the opium poppy grown in Afghanistan comes from one province, which is Helmand in the south.
Helmand is almost completely controlled by the Taliban.
It's been extremely difficult to do anything about it, and it's a very difficult dilemma for the U.S. forces, for the U.S. in general.
If they're too aggressive about eradication, then it alienates the local population, the farmers go to the Taliban for protection, and again you're strengthening the insurgency.
And it is no secret that there are many layers of the Afghan government that are also complicit in the narcotics industry.
It's a $4 billion industry.
It would not exist if layers of police and district governors and provincial governors and ministers were not involved in protecting that industry.
So it's a very, very difficult nut to crack as far as what to do about it.
Well, the generals have got to be turning a blind eye to the warlords that are their allies that are responsible for this, at least the trafficking and, if not, the actual growing of the stuff too, right?
I mean, there's an occupation going on here.
Well, there is.
Some people would argue with that term, but there certainly is a very significant military presence here.
At the beginning of the American military presence here, that was undeniably true.
The Americans, I've had DEA officials tell me that, yes, we got into bed with some pretty unsavory characters because we were fighting a civil war on terror, meaning if a governor of a province could deliver security to fight the Taliban for us, then we didn't care too much if he was making, you know, $15 or $20 or $50 million on the side carrying and trafficking opium coffee.
And we knew it, and we made a choice that security was more important than fighting narcotics at that point.
Then things really got out of control.
Some decisions were made in 2005-2006 to stop that.
But there are still many people in and around the government who are, in the Afghan origin and the international perception, openly associated with the drug trade who, for one reason or another, cannot be touched.
Well, let me ask you this, Jean.
If you're tuned in late here, it's Jean McKenzie from GlobalPost.com, The Global Post.
She's been in Afghanistan reporting there for five years now.
And, you know, we talked about how Bin Laden and them got away years ago.
Here we've been waging this war there the whole time.
We've had a war in Iraq that virtually everyone now finally comprehends, had nothing to do with a war against Osama and those guys and what have you.
You know, as all of this has happened over all these past years, Jean, there's a whole cottage industry of people who, including myself, I guess, are professional wanderers about what the hell is all this about anyway.
And there are people, of course, who say it's all about the oil pipelines, it's all about having an oil pipeline that goes this way or stopping the Chinese from building a pipeline that goes that way.
There are other people who say no, it's just the generals themselves.
They're a dirty snowball rolling downhill, and once they get a new base in a new country with Stan at the end of it, they're never giving it up.
And there are other people who say, you know, it's about Lockheed just wants to sell fighter planes or whatever, whatever.
In five years of covering the occupation of Afghanistan, Jean, do you have any idea why the U.S. is occupying Afghanistan?
Would that I did.
I think that there are certainly a whole lot of conspiracy theorists out there who will tell you, yes, it's all about the gas pipeline, it's all about countering Iran, it's all about defense contracts or whatever.
I'm not quite that cynical.
I think that we got in here with perhaps the best of intentions.
We were trying to exercise some national rage after 9-11.
I think that people understood that.
We went after Osama bin Laden.
We went after the people that we felt had perpetrated that violence upon the United States.
But somewhere along the line we lost sight of what we were trying to do.
Then it became we're here to bring democracy to the Afghan people.
We're here so that little girls can go to school.
We're here so that children can fly kites and have to grow beards.
Every person here has a different idea of what exactly it is we're trying to accomplish.
I don't know what is driving the United States government.
I think the United States government is finally realizing that they also don't know why they're here and what they're trying to accomplish.
As I said, although the debate is getting kind of messy, things are getting scrappy, I think it's a very good sign that we're not seeing a united and misguided rhetoric on this war anymore.
I think what we're seeing is a lot of very painful soul-searching about how we got here, why things are the way they are, and what on earth we can possibly do to get ourselves to a different place.
Gene, your most recent blog entry there says that the hatred of the occupation, as we discussed earlier, I think he said there is at its all-time peak, and that now with this failed election and Karzai, the Arvichi leader there, has no legitimacy whatsoever.
I'm not sure he ever had any really, but now he certainly has taken a major hit with all this election fraud and everything.
And I think he's saying there that kind of the word on the street is, or the feeling on the street is, that this occupation is going to end real soon, that the people of Afghanistan en masse, all different factions, are basically going to demand that the occupation ends.
Now that won't necessarily translate into the politicians making those kind of demands, but I guess you're saying that the feeling in Afghanistan, even in Kabul there, is that this thing is over.
It's got to be.
I think that...
Gene, are you there?
I guess the National Security Agency didn't like my question.
Okay, well, I'm just kidding.
Sometimes it's hard to keep a phone call going with people in Afghanistan, you know?
It's on the other side of Earth from here.
Well, I'm happy I got a pretty damn good interview out of Gene before that unfortunate incident there with the phone line.
All right, so that was Gene McKenzie, GlobalPost.com.