Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is John Glazer, assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
And I'm very lucky that I have him to help me catch up on what I've missed over the last week or so, especially the major war that we have going on.
There are plenty of covert wars and possible wars, but there's the big war, as of now, which is Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, appreciate you joining us today.
So what have I missed?
Can you give us an update on the most important news out of Afghanistan over the past week or so?
Well, unfortunately, it's more of the same.
I wish you had missed something, because then it would have been perhaps a change from the norm.
Of course, you know, the big news that got a lot of people in America to actually pay attention to the war that normally don't, which is far too many, was the video that was released of U.S. Marines urinating on the dead Afghan corpses.
And of course, that's all very terrible and so on and so forth.
But what I think is important about it is the reaction from the promise by the military that this would be investigated.
Of course, you and I know that's their reaction when anything like this happens.
And of course, that happens all too often.
That's what we heard with the kill team who slaughtered Afghan children for the fun of it and, you know, cut off their fingers for trophies and took pictures next to their bodies as if they were, you know, dead deer or they caught a big fish or something.
I will investigate this.
Don't you worry about it.
Go on supporting the troops.
Go on supporting the war.
And a lot of other things that are even more obscure, like a couple months ago when U.S.
Marines had Afghan civilians march in front of them on a field that they thought was filled with landmines.
Oh, like John Kerry and the Mekong Delta.
Cool.
I hadn't heard that one.
Yeah, this was a couple months ago.
I can send you the report I wrote up on it.
NPR actually wrote the story.
And that's as clear of a war crime as can happen.
And of course, what we heard was, we'll investigate this.
Of course, we take all these allegations seriously.
And then everybody forgot about it.
It vanished into the nothingness of the backwater media, which is anything but the presidential election is not worth talking about.
So yes, we hear about these things all the time.
Nothing ever happens.
And if something does happen, then lower-level people get punished for it.
And this seems to be, of course, not something that was ordered from the top levels of the military brass.
But of course, it's indicative of the war in general.
I think it opens a window into what the war actually is, which is a war that is failing on every single front.
It's costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's costing thousands of lives.
We know how many American lives and NATO lives have been lost, but nobody bothers to count how many Afghans have died.
We are training the Afghan military and police.
And that's an utter failure.
That's actually the primary mission we have, because according to the Obama administration, that will give us some leeway in pulling out or drawing down a little bit.
But it's going terribly.
The Afghan military and police consist of illiterate drug addicts and criminals who sometimes attack NATO soldiers, and the attrition rate is about 10% who quit by the hundreds every single month.
And no, this is not a rerun from 2005.
This is just the same conversation we've been having this whole time.
I read somewhere recently somebody cataloged all of the instances since 2001 in which the presidential administration or the top military officials said, the Afghan war is going brilliantly.
We're making tons of progress, so and so forth.
I think I read it.
I'm reading it in the middle of The Operators by Michael Hastings, his book on Afghanistan.
I think I read it there.
And that sort of corresponds to something that Jason Ditz reported on last week, I believe, which was that a new national intelligence estimate was partially released.
Some bits of it were released.
On Afghanistan, there's a new NIE?
On Afghanistan, that's correct.
And the parts that were released, of course, parts of it are classified, but parts that were released and reported in the media said that it is a quagmire.
It remains a quagmire.
And despite all of these constant tellings of how much progress we're making, it is still a quagmire that has no end in sight unless America sort of gets its FHIT together and elects someone like Ron Paul and we get the hell out of there.
Yeah.
Well, it's amazing, too, to just think, never mind 2005, but just the last couple of years, Obama years with this giant surge that was supposed to clear hold and build not just an Iraqi army, but Afghan society.
We were going to give them a government in a box and our allies in their local governments were going to create such great systems of doing things that it was going to stick and it was all going to be awesome.
Well, whatever happened to that?
I mean, how goes Kandahar?
Are we at least can we can they claim success in Kandahar, John, at all?
No, they can't.
And in fact, there's a number of cases where the Taliban have regrouped and attained territory and somewhat control over territory that is even closer and closer to Kabul.
Look, we have there is security in some parts of Afghanistan, but that means absolutely nothing.
And of course, what's what's totally when we talk about the strategy of the war, it's always totally discounted what it's like, what what the war actually means for the people that are experiencing it.
And that's another reason this pissing on dead Afghan bodies is a window into what the war is like.
I blogged about a McClatchy report last week that interviewed a number of, you know, ordinary farmers in southern Afghanistan and things like this.
I'm quoting now, one of them said, I know a lot of horrible things happen in the south and nobody but the locals know about it.
It says such things happen all the time and people talk about it, but media hardly report them.
These are Afghans talking.
Yes.
The the the horrors and the travails borne by the Afghan people on a daily basis after being subjected to 10 years of American occupation exceed the imaginations of what most Americans can fathom.
It is a terrible humanitarian disaster that this war is going on.
And of course, that is all out of discussion.
You don't hear that in the media.
Well, that was the one thing I agree with John Bolton on in the news today.
I think it was maybe it was yesterday saying that, of course, he's taking a very anti Ron Paul position.
But he said this is, you know, part of the problem is we haven't discussed foreign policy in this country in four years, you know, three and a half years now.
And so because it's the forgotten war, that means it just rolls on kind of indefinitely.
And, you know, to hear Bolton tell it, that means Ron Paul can get away with his craziness or whatever.
I would say it's the other way around, that Obama can get away with John Bolton like craziness over there and it keeps rolling on.
But I tend to think that Ron Paul is right, that, you know, the more we have this discussion, the more the American people agree with him.
And of course, there's this thing in The Washington Times you might have seen where it's almost 50 50 in this poll of self-described Republican voters, whether they're ready to just say, all right, we had our fun killing everybody for 10 years.
Let's go ahead and stop now.
Try to save a little money, you know, I guess Ron Paul's the last guy they heard discuss it or something.
And it worked on him, John.
No, I think that's right.
I mean, when you have someone like Ann Coulter, who's thieving conservative ickiness makes me nauseous to even think about, she's firmly against the war.
She says it's not worth it, that we make no progress and it's not going to give us anything.
So when conservatives like that are actually coming out and saying, you know, this is not a good war, this is not something that's worth our time, I think, yeah, there's progress being made.
I think opinions are changing.
Yep.
All right.
Good deal.
Well, we'll have to hold it right there as we go out and take this break, but we'll be back on the other side of it with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Glazer from Antiwar.com, assistant editor there.
Find him at the blog and at news.antiwar.com.
And now, John, I wanted to ask you on Afghanistan about the peace talks, or at least talks at all, communication of some kind between the occupiers and the leaders of whatever resistance they're calling the Taliban these days, whether they're loyal to the ghost of Mullah Omar or who knows what.
I don't know.
But if you could address that.
And then was there some new report about widespread torture in Afghanistan that I may have missed?
Yes.
So, sure.
As far as the negotiations go, I think that this is a case where the media is actually playing up more than actually is going on because, first of all, previous efforts at negotiations that have been going on since early 2010 have failed miserably.
And people are actually...
There was a report recently in The New Yorker where the author, I forget his name, talked about Mullah Omar and how, first of all, many, many Afghans and actually a lot of people in the American and in the U.S. administration think that Mullah Omar is in Pakistan.
By the way, for listeners, he's the head of the Taliban.
He's like the intellectual and religious father of the Taliban.
He used to do more in terms of tactical operations, but now he's sort of the figurehead.
He's supposedly in Pakistan, at least that's what the rumor is, under Pakistani house arrest with the ISI and the military, who protect him but also prevent him from going back to Pakistan, so on and so forth.
The Obama administration has wanted to have him try to get him to participate in negotiations, but the issue is split.
Richard Holbrook, who died a while ago, but he was in the thick of all this, and he told the guy back before he passed away in The New Yorker that you can't negotiate with Mullah Omar, and he said it should be the policy of the United States to kill Mullah Omar before they even kill bin Laden.
Of course, that did not happen, but as far as the negotiations go, we have to wait, and what we know is that Pakistan, who has considerable influence with the Taliban, does not want them to negotiate.
Secondly, the Taliban has refused to do a ceasefire while negotiations are rolling up into the process, so we're still going to continue to fight each other and kill each other on the battlefield while supposed negotiations are going on?
I'm not so sure.
Now, part of the sales pitch here for this surge was, well, we're going to basically beat on them for a year and a half, and then the beginning of the end of this thing will be in the summer of 2011, and we'll start drawing down toward 2014, but we'll have beat on them from 2009 to halfway through 2011 enough that then we'll try to get started on some negotiations.
Of course, they were meeting with and paying some guy who was a total imposter for a while there.
That was a whole side story, but is it possible that the administration is sort of kind of sticking with that timeline?
That they're trying to negotiate their way out of here kind of like in the lie that they told in order to get us to let them surge in the first place?
I think, to be honest, that they would want that.
I mean, one of the most ambitious proposals that actually Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, advocates is to have the Taliban build a political party, gain seats in parliament, and so long as they renounce violence and draw down the weapons.
That, I think, is far too ambitious and not close to reality.
I'm reminded of another thing that I've just read in Michael Hastings' book, The Operators on Afghanistan, is what Stanley McChrystal, before he was fired, said about what he calls insurgent mass, which is to say that when you kill two insurgents, when you kill two Afghans, you don't get...
If there's 10 Afghans and you kill two of them, you don't get eight.
You get 20 more, because the people of Afghanistan are fighting for their own country.
What you can call them insurgents, you can call them Taliban, but really it's no different than if China came here, was raiding your houses, and was occupying your country, and so on and so forth.
And I'm sure there'd be a lot of conservatives in Texas, for example, your home state, that took out their shotguns and went out and fought themselves.
This is largely what's happening in Afghanistan, and I think that the momentum behind ousting the occupiers is far too great for so-called negotiations to actually do much.
Yeah, well, and you know what?
I only...
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I only do so in order to emphasize how right you are about that, because I think that's so important that people understand that that insurgent math, you kill one, you get 10, that comes from Stanley McChrystal, and I actually asked Hastings about that on the show, specifically followed up on, you know, how literal are these quotes?
Is this paraphrasing?
Is this straight from him?
This is what his guys say, or how is this?
And he said, no, I saw General McChrystal on numerous occasions enunciate this principle.
You kill one, you get 10.
Well then, what are we doing?
Hillary Clinton said it during the campaign of 08.
She said, when you're in a hole, you gotta grab a shovel and get digging, and that's exactly what they're doing.
Yep.
It's amazing, actually, that you can have the truth be so official and so counter to what they're... to the policy, and then... but they just keep on going on.
Nobody even cares anymore.
Another thing that Hastings writes about is that Obama, unfortunately, is not in the thick of it in terms of the strategy in Afghanistan.
If he were, he'd be fully aware of things like insurgent math and realize that the current strategy is not working.
But instead, he's worried about domestic support.
He's worrying about the politics.
He's worrying about getting re-elected.
And so, if Afghanistan seems like a disaster, or if we pull out, he's called weak, and so on and so forth.
These are things that he has in mind, because he's a politico.
And I think that, you know, as far as the academics go, and as far as the military advisors go, I think that there's a pretty clear understanding that you can't get out of this by continuing to militarize the situation.
And I think they all know that, including him.
I think our friend Hastings is being way too generous there.
I mean, if you go back and look, for example, at Hillary Clinton's testimony to the Senate at her confirmation, you know, her confirmation hearings, she really knows her stuff.
That is one sharp lady.
And she has been on the committee of whatever the hell in the Senate for a long time.
And she apparently is really policy wonky, like her husband, more so than I would have thought.
I'm not saying she's good on anything, don't get me wrong, but you watch that confirmation hearing, she really knows what the hell.
And there's no excuse for ignorance on this team at all.
They're the ones who bragged about what geniuses they all are with their Center for a New American Security and their third-dimensional chess and all this thing, you know?
I don't want to plead ignorance for them.
The point is that they are constrained by domestic politics, and they have so little principle and so little care for the people whose lives they're ruining to actually do what's right, as opposed to do what is right to get them elected.
Sure.
Fair enough.
Well, you know, of course, it also begs the question, what are they doing there anyway?
Because everybody knows that you can't win a war in Afghanistan, not without just outright slaughter.
I mean, the Russians killed a million Afghans, and outright, you know?
Just bombed the hell out of them, carpet bombed their cities and stuff, which our politics won't allow for that much, you know?
So I mean, that's it, they already know that, but I don't think they really care about that.
It's really more like the West Bank model of just low-level warfare forever, low-level to us anyway, warfare forever, rather than trying to really win anything.
Right.
Right, a stabilization force, which equals horror for everyday Afghans.
And continuing indebtedness and impoverishment by the U.S., and they're fine with that because it'll get them re-elected.
And I'm sorry I went on so long, can you tell us a little bit about this torture report?
Sure, I'll be quick.
Well, for a long time, there were reports of torture in Afghan prisons, coming from the U.N. and other sources.
But that sort of stuff has become even clearer as of late, there have been reports, and I'm short on time, but it's important to note that it's not just Afghan prisons that have torture.
It's also Bagram Air Base, which is Obama's Guantanamo, has 3,000 detainees there, many of whom are not allowed a lawyer, and are treated very, very poorly in poor conditions and abused.
Alright, I'm sorry we've got to leave it there, but thanks very much for everything, John.
John Glazer, news.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog.
