All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
I urge you to check out FCNL.org, that's the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby in the public interest.
My first guest on the show today, Jim Fine, is the Legislative Secretary for Foreign Policy there at the Friends Committee.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jim?
Thanks very much, Scott.
I'm doing fine and good to have a chance to talk to you.
Yeah, it's great to have you back on the show.
I really like, well, I don't know much about Quakerism, but I know that you guys are always, always antiwar, unless you're Richard Nixon, but all of the rest of you always oppose war no matter what, and so I know I like you.
Well, you know, Scott, we have a slogan that we adopted right after 9-11.
It's war is not the answer.
And that's really a double entendre.
On the one hand, it's a statement of our Quaker faith that war is against our religious views, but it's also a very practical, hard-headed, realist statement.
The things that we have done in response to 9-11, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, prospect of another war with Iran, simply are not the hard-headed, practical ways to guarantee our security.
Well, you know, I just can't disagree with that whatsoever, but, you know, what the problem is, is that you don't get to set the terms of the debate, Jim, and so the way that they set it up is, well, like on Iran, for example, they said, well, are we just going to deal with, you know, live with them being armed with nuclear weapons, or are we going to bomb them first?
And no one ever gets to dispute whether they're making nukes, or no one gets to say, who cares if they have nuclear weapons anyway, we got thousands of them, and what are they going to do, attack us?
You know, there is no, all the different objections that you or I could come up with to the foreign policy debate and the way it's framed are almost always just excluded, you know, they're on the cutting room floor, and the narrative goes on unabated.
Well, Scott, you know, there's an old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
We're certainly looking at something like that now with the Iran nuclear weapons issue.
If you conduct a public opinion poll here in the U.S., you'll find that a substantial percentage of people believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons, which is, of course, totally false.
There's not even any reliable intelligence that suggests that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, although it's clear that they are moving towards a capacity that would enable them to if they chose to.
But the U.S. intelligence says there is no evidence that they have decided to pursue a nuclear weapon at this point, and yet, because of the media buzz and because of the way administrations in the past have framed all of this, and are framing it now, the impression is created in the public that the sky is falling and we have to do something.
But in fact, if you look closely, even at the mainstream media, if you read it closely and carefully and analytically, you'll see that the danger is grossly exaggerated.
Yeah, it really is amazing the way that a narrative just went out.
And even if we all kind of have our own internal narrative, which is the last time that they had us invade a country that started with IRA because of the nuclear weapons that they were making, that it was all not true.
That it was the worst strategic disaster in American history, as General Odom called it.
It got a million Iraqis killed for nothing, created 5 million refugees, over 4,000 dead Americans and bankruptcy, and for nothing.
We all have that narrative in our head a little bit, but somehow they give us the same story again about Iran next door, and we all just roll right over for it, I guess.
So let's talk about the work you guys are doing this week, specifically in the Congress to try to affect the debate over the new supplemental spending bill for the war in Afghanistan.
And I noticed, I'm not sure if this actually has anything to do with what you guys have been working on there, but I noticed that there was a Republican Senator, I'm sorry, I don't have the story in front of me right now, but there was a Republican Senator who was saying that he was going to hold up the war appropriation until the Democrats could find out a way to pay for it, either with a new war tax, or by taking the money out of food stamps, or something else.
That's right.
I don't think that that's going to happen in the end, but it raises the key question of funding, and I don't think anyone except that one Republican Senator really wants to look seriously at the consequences of the magnitude of the funding.
This supplemental is going to be for $63 billion, $33 billion of which is for the war in Afghanistan, and FCNL has opposed consistently all funding for this war and for the war in Iraq, but we have also said if you're going to do it, you should certainly impose a tax to pay for it.
You shouldn't allow future generations to bear this burden.
We certainly would not be in favor of cutting back funding for human needs, and in fact there's another war-related element in this supplemental that we would actually support.
It's the second largest element.
It's $13.4 billion to compensate our Vietnam War veterans for exposure to Agent Orange.
So even there, we're still paying the cost.
This is a cost we certainly need to bear, but we're still paying the cost of the Vietnam War.
Yeah.
How do you like that?
So one of the best arguments against the war in Iraq back in 2002-2003 came from Colonel David Hackworth, who I guess he was a very decorated, they say the highest, most decorated Vietnam non-officer, non-commissioned officer, anyway, something.
And anyway, after he got out of the military, Hackworth basically lived his entire life in defense of the enlisted man from his officers.
That was his deal.
It was protecting the Americans from the government, right?
The soldiers from the officers and from the civilians who make the decisions about what these soldiers go and do.
And his whole thing was protecting them.
And that was why he opposed the Iraq War, because he said it was going to be a terrible disaster.
It was going to be, you know, their lives ruined for no reason whatsoever.
And that was really the main basis of his opposition to the war.
And the reason that he's not here with you and I opposing the war now is because he died of bladder cancer that he got from Agent Blue, that the U.S. government sprayed all over him.
Well, you know, you saw the same phenomenon in the late Jack Murtha, a congressman from Pennsylvania who was the chair of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
Murtha was an early opponent of the Iraq War, because he saw precisely the same reason.
He saw what it was doing to U.S. troops.
And we respect that outlook.
I mean, Jack Murtha obviously was not a pacifist, but he recognized that you don't send troops into battle and expose them to those horrific risks unless there is absolutely no alternative from a conventional standpoint.
And that clearly was not the case with Iraq.
And although he was considered a leading supporter of the U.S. military, he was one of the most effective and one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War.
Yeah, you know, I think that's so important.
And people, I guess, they sort of minimize that.
It doesn't get too much play in the media, but, you know, we idealize our soldiers so much in this society that we kind of dehumanize them in a way where it's like they're such heroes that they're so different from us that then we don't have to really kind of keep track of what happens to them.
And we don't even I don't know, we all this we I'm not included in this, but the American Society in general seems to just kind of ignore the soldiers and whatever happens to them.
We, you know, knowing that at the very least, this is the neighbor kid, if not our own kids that we're sending over there.
None of this should be iffy at all.
None of this should ever be.
We have our troops lined up on a border and now the president says go.
I mean, this is just wrong on its face that we would ever put our kids in a situation of fighting a war, dying in a war, losing their legs in a war.
That is not worth it.
That's not good enough.
I mean, you want to say, OK, Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, fine, go sink the Japanese Navy or something.
But this ain't that.
That's right.
And it will not be that with Iran either if we're moved into military action.
And I'm very worried right now that that's where things could be going unless the U.S. can turn around and take a much more constructive position towards the nuclear fuel swap that was negotiated by Turkey and Brazil just last week.
Secretary of State Clinton's response to that on Tuesday at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was just appalling, not only announcing that the U.S. was moving ahead right away with sanctions in the Security Council, but saying that that was the best possible answer to, quote, what had gone on, unquote, in Tehran over the last weekend, insulting Brazil, Turkey, as well as Iran.
And if we have those sanctions, almost all the experts from the right and the left, from John Bolton on to the left, agree that the sanctions aren't going to work.
And then what are you left with then?
You're left with mounting pressure.
We're already beginning to hear a chorus of support for it in Congress for military action.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Let's talk about the war we got now.
I can't even, I don't want to imagine what a war with Iran would end up looking like.
I guess the danger now is that the Central Front in the war on terrorism, as they call it over there in Afghanistan, is going to stay that way indefinitely.
The head general over there, McChrystal, said the other day, well, so far it's a draw.
May 2010, the Afghan war is a draw.
Well, Scott, I think when you hear the commanding officer of U.S. forces saying that it's a draw, that that should tell you that the reality is much worse than that.
When the commander of U.S. forces is not able or willing to say it's any more than a draw, I think you need to multiply that by a coefficient and come to the conclusion that what he's really telling you is that things are not going well at all.
And if you read even the mainstream media, if you listen to the folks in the think tanks, I think that's quite clearly the case.
The Marja Offensive begun in February was to be the big demonstration of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.
But what's happened, even the initial clear phase of clear hold and build, even the initial clear phase has not gone well, and the Taliban still control large swaths of the Marja area at night.
There's a steady flow of farmers leaving the area because of Taliban threats over cooperation with the coalition forces that are there.
Even the military aspect of the Marja operation has not gone well, and that really bodes very ill for the much larger operation that's planned for Kandahar.
Kandahar is a city of nearly a million people, and how the U.S. is going to implement the clear hold build strategy there when they haven't succeeded in the Marja area, and that's predominantly rural area, is impossible to see.
I think the only sensible thing for the U.S. to do now, and in some ways it's not terribly palatable, but the only thing to do to de-escalate and wind the war down is to do what Ahmed Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, wants the U.S. to do, and that is to endorse the opening of talks with Afghan Taliban groups, who, all indications are, are prepared to talk not only to the Karzai government, but to the United States.
In fact, they want to talk to the United States, because they recognize that the Karzai government itself is weak.
The interesting thing is that our allies are on the same page with Karzai.
The U.N. head there, Stephan de Mistura, the British government, when David Miliband was the foreign minister three months ago, he called for immediate opening of talks with the Taliban.
Even a number of Afghan feminists, an independent member of the parliament, Shukriya Barakzai, has come to the conclusion that the Taliban are part of the population, and every war has to end with talks and negotiations, yet the Obama administration is holding out.
U.S. officials say, we have to weaken the Taliban first, then we'll talk to them.
Well, the great danger is that the military operations will only demonstrate that they're futile, and U.S. leverage and influence will decline rather than increase.
So I think one of the things that we should be encouraging the administration to do is to get on board with NATO, with Karzai, with an increasing number of Afghans, with the U.N., and get involved in talks with the Taliban.
Yeah, well, that's a very good summary of the situation as it's going down, as best I understand it as well, and I want to focus, get back to the specific issue of Marja there.
For people who don't remember, they said, we're going to invade Marja in a month, and it's a huge city of 80,000 people, and a month from now, we're going to invade it.
And they said that for a month, three weeks, two weeks, a week, up until the thing, and then they invaded it, and then it turned out that there was no 80,000 people, and Gareth Porter wrote a story about how this is a tiny little farm village, you look at it on Google Earth, and you go, well, where are 80,000 people supposed to sleep?
Doesn't look like a swinging metropolis to me.
But then, this is the place where General McChrystal said, we're bringing in a government in a box, this is going to be our template, this is going to be the new benchmark for how good we can do this wonderful population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine.
And so we're going to kick all the Taliban out of Marja, we're going to create a government in a box that then will be such a great government for the people of Marja that they will always support it and defend it, and they will have it to defend them from the Taliban, and as you say, even in the New York Times and the Washington Post, they admit that this whole thing is falling apart.
The Taliban are there at night, every day, at least, you know, the whole thing, there is no government in a box, nothing ever happened with that at all, and now they're preparing, or they say they're preparing, to go and launch the same war against Kandahar.
Yeah, we, the strategy doesn't work, and you know, the argument for it was that, well, it's what we did in Iraq, with the sons of Iraq, especially in Anbar province, and it turned the war around.
That's a really misplaced analogy.
The Taliban in southern Afghanistan are the Anbari sons of Iraq, and we're still battling them.
We persuaded the Anbaris to stop shooting at us, and stop shooting at the Iraqi government, and drive the Al-Qaeda in Iraq away from their territory, because the Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a foreign element, and they were not at all liked by the local population, so that worked.
But here, we're making the mistake in assuming that the Taliban are the equivalent of Al-Qaeda.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are the equivalent of the Anbaris, the sons of Iraq that we co-opted, not the folks that we shot up, and the whole operation has been sold on the Iraq model, the Iraq analogy, and they've got the terms of the analogy completely backwards.
Absolutely.
Well, and you got them exactly right, and the only thing you left out was that the Anbaris had lost the civil war.
The Shiite majority that America had installed in power there had whooped them good, and so they really had no choice, but, well, in fact, and I guess for PR reasons, Petraeus had no choice to accept the offer that they'd been making since 2003, which is, if you'd just let us keep our own guns and patrol our own neighborhoods, we won't fight you, and if you give us a little money, we'll go ahead and we'll fight the Al-Qaeda and Iraq guys for you.
But they were in between a rock and a hard place when they made that decision.
The Taliban has no reason whatsoever, I mean, despite the fact they don't fit in the metaphor anyway, but they got no reason whatsoever to kowtow to America, because they're not going anywhere.
They have all the time in the world.
We do have one thing that they want very badly, and that's our presence, and they want it out.
I think the Taliban recognize that they can't return to the pre-2001 days and rule the entire country again.
I think they recognize that they need, as well as the Afghan government and the other ethnic groups there, besides the Pashtuns, where the Taliban are based, they need to come to some kind of national reconciliation process.
The great incentive for them is the withdrawal of foreign forces, which all Afghans want in the end.
I think the US does have leverage there to broker a stable, reasonable agreement, a power-sharing agreement among all Afghan factions, if it will be willing to put its military presence and the NATO military presence on the negotiating table, and declare a ceasefire, cease all offensive operations, and negotiate a rapid and phased withdrawal of US and foreign forces from the country.
Well, you know, ever since the attempted bombing at Times Square in New York City a few weeks ago, Eric Holder and other anonymous sources, I guess, in the newspaper, have attempted to paint a situation where this guy was, rather than being some kind of lone nut, was working either for the Pakistani Taliban, or in fact, I think there was even an LA Times story today where they're trying to say that he was working for a certain part of the Pakistani ISI.
There was some general that put him up to it or something.
Hillary Clinton, again, has implied, I guess, or even said kind of outright that the Pakistani government knows good and well where Osama Bin Laden is hiding, and they're keeping him safe from us.
And these things together sound like the kind of thing that could be used as an excuse for war.
Now, on one hand, I've got to tell you, Jim, I can't imagine even the craziest psychopaths in Washington, D.C., thinking that they want to have a war of any kind in Pakistan, I mean, other than the low-level warfare in the northern territories where they have been this whole time.
But they want to take on the Pakistani army?
They want to invade that country now?
It seems like they're building this up as an excuse.
I mean, General Petraeus said the first day, this guy was just a lone wolf.
He was a nobody and whatever.
And they haven't given any evidence for why we ought to disbelieve that.
But they keep making these assertions.
They're not quite on the order of the lies that they tell against Iran, but I don't know.
They sort of seem to be building up the case for war with Pakistan, with the actual state of Pakistan.
Well, Scott, those are troubling, worrisome statements.
But like you, I think that any prospect of a major operation against Pakistan, even a major air operation, is very unlikely and certainly not a wholesale military ground attack on Pakistan.
There are different factions within the Pakistani intelligence service.
They obviously have ties with the Pakistani and with the Afghan Taliban, but they have also in recent months taken a much more aggressive posture towards the Pakistani Taliban.
I don't think Pakistani politics is a very diverse thing, but I don't think there is any official sanction for training of American terrorists in Pakistan, and I don't think there's any prospect that the U.S. is contemplating an invasion of Pakistan.
What do you think that the Obama team is up to in making these assertions?
I mean, they're setting them up for something.
I mean, this is just speculation, but it's possible that they think that there are elements within the Pakistani intelligence services that are not rogue elements, that aren't working in line with the government's policy and dictates, and they may be trying to put pressure on the higher-level officials to clean house inside their own ranks.
There's no evidence of that, but that's the only plausible and rational explanation I can come up with.
Ah, geez, look at the time.
I wish I had more so I could interview you more about more things, but I'm going to have to let you go with one last question, which is, how can people help you, Jim, at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, fcnl.org?
What can they do to help you convince the Senate to not pass this new appropriation?
That's the project this week, right?
Scott, I think what folks can do now, and it's very important and very timely, is to write to their senators, tell them no more funding for war, and tell them at the same time, if you see this bill going through to vote $33 billion more for Afghanistan, and frankly, we expect that it will be approved, the Senate must insist on a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has got a resolution that we are pretty certain he's going to introduce as an amendment to the supplemental.
It requires the administration by the end of this year to prepare an exit strategy and a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Very important that people hear from their, that senators hear from their constituents in support of the exit strategy for Afghanistan, and in opposition to more funds for war.
And if they go to our homepage, our website, they'll see a link that they can use to send messages to their senators right now.
It's important to do it today, tomorrow, next week, the Senate, on Monday, will begin consideration of the war supplemental.
All right, great, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jim, I really appreciate it.
Scott, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Jim Fine, he is the Legislative Secretary for Foreign Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, that's FCNL.org.
And they need your help.
We'll be right back with Phil Giraldi.
