Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I am your guest host, the assistant around here.
My name is Zoe Greif, and it's my pleasure to welcome to the show, John Glazer.
Hello, Mr. John Glazer, are you there?
Yes, I'm here.
Okay, well thank you so much for graciously agreeing to be interviewed by me for the benefit of the listeners in this show.
John Glazer is assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
You can read his stuff at Antiwar.com/blog, or news/Antiwar.com, or just type it into the search engine, you'll find it.
So, yes, Mr. Glazer, thanks again for being with the show.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about your latest article comforting Bibi, covert activity in Iran.
But if I may, can we go back a little bit and talk about your previous one, called Lindsey Graham loses hope as Kabul impedes U.S. occupation.
So I read the article, maybe you would be good enough to summarize the contents for the viewers, but it sounds to me like a warmonger like Lindsey Graham has decided that these ungrateful Pashtuns don't deserve our shining light and our help anymore, and we should just take our toys and come home.
Is that kind of the deal?
I think that's a perfect summation, actually.
Yeah, so there are currently going on right now negotiations between the Karzai government and the Obama administration, and those negotiations are meant to decide a future, an agreement, a strategic arrangement, if you will, for what the U.S. will be in Afghanistan post-2014.
Post-2014 is, of course, the date that the Obama administration claims that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from the country.
Now, two things that the Obama administration has said will go on past 2014 is, number one, night raids of Afghan homes all throughout the country by Joint Special Operations Forces.
So these have been one of the primary efforts in Afghanistan.
They're also one of the primary grievances that Afghans have with the occupation, because they involve breaking and entering with the guns and the blazing.
Oftentimes, civilians get killed.
Even more often, civilians get captured and taken to Afghan prisons.
They are an incredible embarrassment to the Afghan people, and Karzai has numerous times requested that they come to an end, and the U.S. has resisted.
And yet, Lindsey Graham, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Glazer, but Lindsey Graham claims that these night raids, which sound terrifying to me, are one of the great successes of this so-called war in Afghanistan, or whatever he calls it.
Is that not correct?
He does say that, and so do the other warmongers, including the Obama administration.
They claim that this is integral to the fight against so-called terrorists in Afghanistan, but it wasn't so long ago that there was a study done by the Open Society Institute, which said that night raids are the primary issue that Afghans have against the U.S.
So this whole winning hearts and minds thing is really being impeded by terrorizing the entire country with night raids.
That study concluded that 12 to 20 night raids now occur every night across Afghanistan.
That's an insane amount.
And previous high-profile incidents in Afghanistan have included just straight-up murdering of innocent people.
One time, JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, ended up killing two pregnant women and one teenage girl, and when they realized their mistake, they forged evidence on the ground, and then claimed that the Afghan Taliban committed an honor killing.
It was only later that reports came out that figured out that those were false, and then the Pentagon retracted their initial story and had to apologize.
So that gives you a picture of how brutal these night raids are.
But going back to the negotiations, the other thing that the Obama administration has demanded is that it continue to have control over Afghan prisons, which sort of flies in the face of the notion that you're going to withdraw, because it says you still don't have sovereignty over your own country.
And these two issues, the president of Afghanistan, Karzai, has pushed back on, and he says, you know, I won't agree to any strategic deal unless, you know, Afghan prisons are under our control and the night raids stop.
And Lindsey Graham responds to Karzai by saying, basically, if you expect us to do those two things, it's not worth being in your country at all, which is sort of an interesting comment.
First of all, it's interesting because, you know, I applaud when anyone says, let's get out of Afghanistan, no matter how twisted his reasoning.
Like I said in the blog post, whenever someone loses hope for the war in Afghanistan, an angel gets his wings.
Yeah, I love that reference to the classic Frank Capra movie.
Right, which is a great movie.
But it's interesting in the other sense because it's a way of saying, look, if you won't agree to be militarily dominated and abused by the United States, how dare you suggest that we stick around and help you?
And it's a twisted illustration of how messed up Lindsey Graham's mind is, but in one sense it's encouraging because even warmongers that have been behind this war the whole time are getting sick of it.
And even if it's for the wrong reason, you know, whatever, I'll take it, like you said.
Precisely.
Okay, well, speaking of turning over the prisons to the care and control of the Afghans, it's my understanding, John Glazer, that many of these Afghan soldiers are illiterate and couldn't even read the law, and the same with the police.
I'm not sure exactly what the difference is.
Maybe you can help me out with that a little bit.
But anyway, that illiteracy and drug abuse are rampant over there, and how's anyone even going to read the law to enforce it in the first place?
I mean, what do they think they're doing?
What are they trying to accomplish is what I want to know.
Well, that's right.
I mean, if we think about the training process that is one of the main aspects of the war effort right now to train Afghan security forces to sort of, you know, quote-unquote, fend for themselves.
I mean, it's a ridiculous notion if you take into account Afghanistan as a country, the history of that country, and, you know, the tribal society that it actually is.
Yes, most of the security forces that are being trained by the U.S. are illiterate, or have drug abuse problems.
The rate at which they quit the security forces, the army, the police, is extreme.
They, you know, thousands by the month quit, and then new ones come up.
It's a wasted effort.
It's a failure, and it's not going to become effective by 2014, which is part of the reason that the Obama administration has insisted that JSOC is allowed to continue to terrorize the country, because he knows that the Afghan, his nation-building project, essentially, is going to be a failure even by that time.
Well, it's my understanding also that the so-called ruling government of Afghanistan couldn't possibly exist without U.S. funding, and that only 4% of its operations are funded internally.
I believe I read that somewhere.
I'm the bad radio host for not knowing the citation.
But maybe you can help me out, John Glazer.
Maybe you wrote about it yourself.
Right.
No, it's an extreme amount of money that the Afghan government gets from outside sources.
Foreign aid, mostly from the U.S., is in the order of $7 billion a year, and it's going to continue on like that past 2014, because, as you said, they have no internal source of revenue.
I mean, taxes can't be paid by most of the people there.
They're living in abject poverty.
Sometimes they basically extort farmers and other people for some sort of payment, and that occurs.
But they have no real internal revenue structure, and it's one of the most corrupt governments on the planet, so we shouldn't expect it to be anything much other than a U.S. client.
All right.
We were speaking with Mr. John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
We're talking about his second-to-latest article, as Kabul impedes U.S. occupation.
You know, bad guy coming up with the right answer for the wrong reason.
That's good.
Please stay tuned.
We'll have more on the other side, just like this.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio.
I'm your fill-in guest host for now, Zoe Greif, and I'm talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com, and we're talking about a recent article, as Kabul impedes U.S. occupation.
You can find that at Antiwar.com/blog.
And before we get to your latest article about Iran and Israel and U.S., I just wanted to ask you one more question about Afghanistan, if I may, Mr. John Glazer, and that is about the poppies.
What is going on with the poppies?
I'm looking out the corner of my eye a New York Times article from October of 2011, so it's not the freshest news out there, but it's the latest I could find in a five-second search.
But it says that poppy production is on the rise in Afghanistan.
If the U.S. troops are occupying Afghanistan and they're trying to eradicate poppies, how is poppy production on the rise?
Right.
So the drug aspect to the Afghan war is a bit peripheral, but just as much as anything else, it ends up in equal capacity of horror and terror at the hands of the U.S.
First of all, what the U.S. has been doing has been eradicating a lot of the poppy fields or paying Afghan thugs associated with the Kabul government to eradicate poppy fields.
And this, first of all, takes away the livelihood of various otherwise innocent Afghans who just want to make a crop and get some money for themselves and get them food.
So that's horrible enough.
But even with the poppy fields that have been destroyed, the poppy production of the country has gone way, way up.
We increased 61% in 2011 over the previous year, over 2010.
That's a lot.
Right.
It's a lot.
It's a ton.
It provides something like 80% of the world's opium production.
So this is a lot going on.
And basically the issue should be, just to finish up on Afghanistan, for the U.S. to get out of the drug business.
We've seen over the years that our interventions in Central America under the pretext of the drug war have led to tens of thousands of deaths.
In Mexico alone, just in past 2006, up to 50,000 deaths have occurred because the prohibitionist policies have increased the profits for the cartels and our sort of focus on law enforcement and the war aspect, the very martial proclivity to deal with drugs, has only led to cartels arming up more and strengthening more and solidifying themselves even more.
It leads to an increase to a bubble of drug production and trafficking, and it ends in terrible horror, as it is in Afghanistan.
Absolutely.
Once you create...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Did I interrupt you?
No, I was just going to finish up by saying that the failure of the drug war in Afghanistan is just a small indication of the broader failure of the war in Afghanistan.
Absolutely.
I was just going to say, once you create a black market for something, anything, you're going to have a mafia growing up around it.
There's a movie out right now about an illegal cow growth hormone mafia in Belgium and their wicked deeds.
But anyway, let's move on to your latest article entitled Comforting Bibi, Covert Activity in Iran.
Now, I read this, Mr. John Glaser, and I got to admit, I was like, you know, baffled or, you know, totally surprised at this level of sophistication, the level of James Bond type stuff going on with replacing street signs with, you know, other replicas that have sensors in them that can detect radiation and, you know, the weight of trucks moving by and all this fantastical sounding stuff.
Is that really true?
It's true according to very good reporters, Mark Ambinder and Seymour Hersh, who have been told by people on the inside, people in the CIA or high up in the administration, that this kind of stuff is going on.
And it's a bitter pill because on the one hand, the Obama administration, the whole entire military and intelligence community thus far has stated unequivocally, and they're correct, that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, that they have demonstrated no intention to do so, and that therefore a preemptive or preventive military strike on them is not necessary.
But as much of a warmonger as Obama is and all his minions in his administration, I have to give them a reluctant, you know, heads up, because they have stood up to relentless warmongering from Israel and hawks in Congress and so forth, and they have at least held off for now on an all-out war in Iran.
But there is a covert war going on in Iran, and the information regarding sensors that detect radiation and, you know, fake stones that can be placed on ramps where trucks go in and out of nuclear facilities and they can weigh the trucks and so on and so forth, all of this intelligence gathering is one aspect of why the administration has been so sure that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, you know, there's aspects of the covert war that simply serve to escalate the tension.
For example, the fact that we're paying Saudi Arabia and giving them, you know, unparalleled military and economic support, yet they are funding, training, and arming Iranian dissident groups who are terrorists to conduct terrorist operations against Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran.
That's terrorism straightforward and no doubt about it, and the U.S. is party to it.
Furthermore, we've been conducting cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare.
The Stuxnet virus was a sabotage element that infected the Iranian nuclear facilities and broke a bunch of their equipment.
So, you know, these types of things are correctly called international aggression, and we should recognize that, and we should understand that, you know, we could perfectly find out the fact that Iran is not building nuclear weapons through peaceful means.
It doesn't have to be aggression.
Well, let me ask you, John, obviously, or it seems obvious to me, I mean, I can't delve into the soul of Benjamin Netanyahu, not that I would want to, but it seems like he wants, duh, the U.S. to attack Iran on behalf of Israel.
But here's my question is, what does Bibi Netanyahu think that's going to gain him?
I mean, all the experts say that, you know, an airstrike would kill a bunch of people and be an ugly illegal act, like you say, but it would only set back any nuclear program.
It wouldn't eliminate it.
And so what's the point here?
What is the goal?
Is this just to score political points at home?
Is there an Israeli election coming up soon?
What do you think, John?
Well, first of all, similar to the way that Lindsey Graham's mind is, you know, based in the delusional, I think that Bibi's is, too, and so are the Iran war hawks in Congress.
Yes, experts who know what they're talking about say that Iran's nuclear program is redundant and dispersed, meaning that it's repetitive throughout the country in various facilities, and it cannot be – many, many of the facilities are underground and so forth, and cannot be totally eliminated and destroyed in a couple of strikes.
Furthermore, we have historical evidence, like the Iraq 1981 Osirak attack, where Israel attacked one of Iraq's nuclear weapons facilities, and what happened then was that Saddam Hussein reconstituted his nuclear weapons program and did it in secret and kicked out international inspectors, which we could reasonably assume would be the action that Iran would take.
So it would be counterproductive, indeed, to go and strike Iran in order to take out their nuclear weapons program, which doesn't exist.
Right.
The reality is that they want to attack it before there's a breakout, but a breakout would be much more likely in the case of an attack.
And so, you know, Bibi is an aggressor.
He's prime minister of an aggressive Israel, and he wants the U.S. to be aggressive on his behalf as well.
But it would backfire considerably.
You're exactly right.
I just wonder, what does he think he's going to get out of this if he twists Obama's arm into launching, you know, daisy-cutter bunker-buster bombs or whatever?
What does he, in his febrile mind, what is his fantasy outcome?
Well, I think that he wants to be able to scare Iran.
He wants to be able to tell them, look, if you make any wrong moves that we don't like, we will bomb you at the earliest convenience.
And if that threat is gone, he thinks that, you know, his side will be weakened and Iran will be empowered.
All right.
I guess that's all the time we have for now.
That's the invaluable John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
Thank you so much for the interview.
Oh, no problem.
Thank you.
All right.
I enjoy reading your stuff.
I look forward to more.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
