All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos Radio Austin, antiwar.com/radio, lrn.fm.
Our next guest is Jonathan Landy, or Landay, I'm not sure how to say it, from McClatchy Newspapers.
You might remember him from that PBS special, Buying the War.
He was featured with his partner, Warren Strobel, as being two reporters who got Iraq's weapons of mass destruction right.
As in, they ain't there, before the war.
Writing for Knight Ridder Newspapers, and now for McClatchy.
And he's been covering Afghanistan recently.
He's the national security and intelligence reporter for McClatchy.
Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
Thanks very much, thanks for having me.
And how do I say your last name?
Landay.
Landay, okay, just making sure there.
That's what I thought.
All right, so, well, let's start with your most recent piece.
It's, I'm looking at McClatchyDC.com, and it's about these peace talks in Afghanistan.
And it's funny, I think just a few, maybe a week ago or so, you had a thing about Karzai choking back tears, announcing the creation of these peace talks.
And then now you have this piece saying that they're all just a information strategy, a psychological operation.
Yeah, well, Karzai, I mean, there's no doubt that both the United States and the Karzai government are really want to start some kind of peace talks, but of course they have their criteria.
And those criteria are that at this point, they're not ready to talk to, or not willing to talk to the Qaeda Shura, which is the leadership of the main Taliban insurgency, or the so-called Haqqani Network, run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, who's an old-time jihadi, very, once upon a time, very close to bin Laden and the, and al-Qaeda, and may well, very well still be, and his son, who really is sort of the effective leader of that particular part of the insurgency, Sirajuddin Haqqani.
That's kind of their red lines.
And the United States seems to think, as does President Karzai, that they can find some more moderate Taliban insurgent leaders with whom, who are tired of fighting, that who can command a lot of respect among the largest Afghan ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who dominate the insurgency, in a way that could bring them over and divide the insurgency, and basically cripple the hardliners who continue to want to fight.
And I'm not sure that that's something that is really realistic.
Nevertheless, that's what the objective is.
That's what the strategy is.
There were reports that there were high-level peace talks going on, negotiations going on with the Quetta Shura.
And it's that part, it's that idea that I've been told, I was told was basically an information operation.
There certainly have been what they were referred to as contacts between the Afghan government and insurgent leaders.
Those have been going on for quite a long time, but those are, as President Karzai himself has acknowledged, are more talks about talks about talks.
Can they identify issues that they can begin negotiating on?
Are there grounds on which they can start talking?
And those do not seem to be, at this point, realistic.
Well, now, when you talk about a possible alternative to the Taliban to deal with among the Pashtun tribesmen, I mean, they don't really have any organized political leadership but the Taliban, do they?
Well, that's what the big question is.
Are there people who can represent the Pashtuns and the conservative traits among the Pashtuns, among Pashtuns who, in fact, the majority of whom are tired of war, don't want to live under the Taliban, but don't want to live or at least oppose the American presence, very much oppose the American presence because of civilian casualties and also because of the idea that's been sown by Taliban propaganda that the United States is there to convert Afghans to Christianity, that the United States has been, you know, the U.S. soldiers have been raping Pashtun women, et cetera, et cetera, none of that is true.
Nevertheless, there's a great question as to whether or not these people exist, these so-called moderate Taliban leaders.
Now, the United States kind of would, I think, would like, is interested in talking to the kind of, if you would, Taliban leader as represented by a guy with the name of Mullah Baradar.
Now, this is a member of, the number two man on the Quetta Shura who was arrested earlier this year in Pakistan by the Pakistanis and the CIA in a joint operation, but nevertheless, there have been some reports in recent days in the Pakistani media that Baradar has, in fact, been released and that there was some speculation that he is the guy who's been to Kabul to explore the idea of talks with Karzai and his government, but there doesn't seem to be much accuracy to those reports.
I was told as recently as yesterday that Baradar is still very much a quote-unquote guest of the ISI, that's the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani, the premier Pakistani espionage agency.
Well, and that's a very important part of this.
And when the Afghan war logs came out, there was a lot of spin about Pakistan's role in Afghanistan, but it's nothing that was a surprise to the listeners of this show.
We've been talking with Eric Margulies the whole time, for example, and he's explained that the Pakistanis must back the Taliban and or other insurgent groups in Afghanistan because they cannot let the Northern Alliance have a real monopoly government in that country in alliance with India.
They need that backyard for their strategy.
In case of an atomic war with India, they need to be able to escape basically across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
And so they've had this interest the whole time in playing both sides of the fence, fighting the Taliban inside Pakistan, backing the Taliban inside Afghanistan.
Well, you have to make differentiate also between the quote-unquote Taliban, the Pakistanis have been quote-unquote fighting inside of their own country.
They have been going after insurgent groups who call themselves collectively the Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban movement, who have been threatening, who are at war against the Pakistani government.
They have been leaving alone and continuing to back in the belief of many U.S. officials, the insurgent groups that, yes, who they see as being their instruments for reducing or eliminating Indian influence in Afghanistan itself.
The thing is, though, that the Pakistanis, I think, have a very exaggerated view as to what India's objectives are in Afghanistan in maintaining close relations with the Karzai government or any Afghan government.
The Indians, the Pakistanis see a conspiracy, if you will, between India, the United States, the Afghan government, Israel, the European Union, throw in anyone else you want to into that mix.
A conspiracy to, as they put it, encircle and disintegrate Pakistan, which is about as far from the truth as you can get.
The fact is, India, yes, India does want to contain what they see as being Pakistani adventurism.
Let's not forget that when the Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan through the patronage of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan used that to establish training camps in Afghanistan for insurgent groups that they have been sponsoring on the Indian side of Kashmir and other insurgent groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has become more, which was the group that launched the attack, the three-day terrorist attack on Mumbai.
The fact is that India does not want and cannot politically risk that kind of Pakistani adventurism anymore.
A pack, an Indian government that would not survive politically another kind of Mumbai terrorist attack by a Pakistani-sponsored terrorist group without having to retaliate.
And India does not want to have to see that kind of circumstance again.
And therefore, they want to contain Pakistani adventurism, but they do not want to, as the Pakistanis believe, disintegrate Pakistan.
All right, now hold it right there, everybody.
It's Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, Santa War Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santa War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
And Jonathan, before we get back to Afghanistan, I want to tell you, I was reading you in 2002, and primarily that's because your stories for Knight Ridder that were mostly buried and ignored in Washington, D.C. were always the top headline on antiwar.com when you guys were talking to the CIA agents who were telling you that, man, there ain't no new weapons, anything in Iraq.
And so your reporting was appreciated even though the war wasn't stopped because of it, unfortunately.
But it matters to lots of people, and you should know that.
Thanks so much.
Yeah, sure.
Well, and Strobel, too, and the rest of you guys.
And I like Nancy Youssef, and I always read McClatchy.
Great, well, Warren's about to go off to Afghanistan.
So we'll see what, stay tuned to his reporting.
Yeah, absolutely will.
All right, now, there's so many things to discuss here, but I guess the bottom line and kind of the large view of this thing about talks with the, well, jeez, I don't know.
I'll go to this.
Malai Joya pointed out that even though, as you and I talked about before, there really is no organized political movement among the Pashtuns other than the Taliban, that they're not really naturally representative of those people, that they really were installed there by the Pakistanis back in the 1990s, and that America shouldn't be doing talks.
We should just go, she said.
Stop backing anyone.
We don't wanna choose between Dostum and Hekmatyar and Haqqani and the Taliban.
Let the Afghan people figure it out, and maybe they'll be able to reject all of these warlords.
Well, I highly respect Malala.
I saw her when I was in Kabul this last trip.
I try to see her every time I go.
But I think that it's a mistake to think simply by pulling U.S. troops out and ISAF out, the rest of the coalition, that the situation is simply gonna sort of solve itself with the Afghans coming together and finding a government that they can all agree upon and singing Kumbaya.
That, in fact, I don't think would happen at all.
In fact, I think the opposite would happen, I think.
And it's starting to happen, too, I believe.
And that is the idea that the United States is going to leave, has a lot of people on the fence in Afghanistan.
And if they see our troops starting to leave, a lot of Pashtuns who have been sitting on the fence, simply because, as she points out and other people point out, they don't want the Taliban back.
Nevertheless, a lot of people want to be on the quote-unquote winning side.
And if the United States starts a major pullout, the fact is that those Pashtuns will jump to the side they perceive as being the winners, and that will be the Taliban.
And you will see what another colleague has referred to as Somalia on steroids develop in Afghanistan.
That will be a resumption of an ethnic war pitting the Pashtuns backed by Pakistan against the non-Pashtuns backed by India in what would be a proxy war between two nuclear powers in South Asia.
Beyond that, I think that this would have reverberations throughout the entire region.
I think you already see Tajiks and Uzbeks and Chechens affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban up in Northern Afghanistan.
And they are looking across the border into Central Asia, into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where the post-Soviet governments have been repressing moderate Islam for the last 20 years.
And we are already seeing very disturbing signs of an insurgency, the Islamic insurgency reasserting itself in Tajikistan.
Earlier this month, there was an ambush of government forces in a place called the Rasht Valley.
More than two dozen government forces killed there by people who were affiliated with the Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan.
And so, as I said, you're already seeing a disturbing trend there.
Beyond that, if there was a resurgence of Taliban rule in any part of Afghanistan without the presence of foreign forces being there, that will naturally, I think, the Pashtun insurgents on the other side of the border in Pakistan will gravitate to that.
You will see, I think, a Pashtun revival of a Pashtunistan movement.
This is a movement that, once upon a time, was actually funded by the Soviets way back when.
But this would be an Islamic movement.
And you will see the destabilization of Pakistan.
So I think, and yet, at the same time, you're seeing a situation where the U.S. presence generates recruits for the Taliban, where Afghan government corruption and nepotism and mismanagement generates recruits and support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
The way I put it is the United States can't afford to stay, and yet the United States can't afford to leave.
You know, peace agreements require the correct timing and the correct circumstances.
And I don't think this moment is the correct one, simply because neither side has a military advantage.
There are no identifiable figures in Afghanistan to whom all of the ethnic groups can gravitate in terms of a new leader, a leader who can carry them into a new era of reconciliation.
And therefore, I kind of look at the U.S.
-led military presence as being somewhat of a dam.
And that is, it's holding back this, what I see as being an incredibly destructive resumption of an ethnic war in Afghanistan, which could degenerate into a proxy war between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers that actually could, in fact, then degenerate into a direct conflict between these two powers.
They've had four wars between them.
In the last 60 years, I think that the danger of a fifth war is very, very real.
Well, the thing is about it, though, is when you sort of look at it from an economic point of view, the government intervention here has created a major distortion, which is that the Northern Alliance, which was creamed on September 10th and even lost their leader on September 10th and controlled a tiny little bit of the country and had no real natural power in the country, has had the benefit of this giant American government program and raised their price, basically, and made them more valuable than they really are in the natural state of things.
And so it seems like if we're holding back a dam, we're the ones who caused the flood on the other side in the first place.
I disagree with that entirely.
In fact, first of all, the Northern Alliance is no more.
As an organized force, it doesn't exist anymore.
And in fact, several of its leaders are very much part of the government.
For the, to begin with, the Interior Minister, Bismillah Khan, was a top general in the Northern Alliance, is probably the top, is the second most senior former Northern Alliance person who remains inside the government.
And the first vice president of Afghanistan, Qasim Khan, is in fact the former defense minister and was, and took over from, took over from Ahmad Shah Massoud, after Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance, I should say, Fahim Khan, I beg your pardon, and became the first defense minister of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
He's the first vice president of Afghanistan.
Finally, the fact is that if you take the groups that comprise the Northern Alliance, they are actually a majority of the people in Afghanistan.
If you take the Tajiks and you combine them with the Hazaras and the Uzbeks, and there were in fact, Heratis, who some people consider Pashtuns, and there were Pashtun groups that all belong to the Northern Alliance, they actually represent 60% of Afghanistan.
And you have to add to that the fact that most Pashtuns don't want the Taliban back either.
And so I have to disagree with your contention that we're holding back this natural evolution.
The fact is that the Taliban are who they are with the support of Pakistan, did have the support of Saudi Arabia, and the fact that they were able to take over Afghanistan in 19, between 1994 and 1996, was only because of the support they received from these two countries, including vehicles that allowed them, 400 vehicles that they received from the Saudis that allowed them to take over Afghanistan.
So no, I don't believe that they are a natural, they would be a natural evolution.
Some people cast the Taliban in particular, with quite a Shura, as being Pashtun nationalists.
I dispute that.
The fact is that if they were Pashtun nationalists, most Pashtuns would support them.
And they wouldn't- Well, the thing is, Jonathan, I didn't say that the Taliban were the natural government of Afghanistan.
We already agreed that that wasn't the case.
I was just saying that Karzai and Dostum and their buddies aren't either.
Dostum still controls a great deal of support up in his area in Sher-Bur-Ghan in the North of Afghanistan.
But you know, the fact is that, yes- Well, and as you said, it's the occupation that drives recruitment into the Taliban anyway.
They become the only game in town for resistance against the American occupation, the NATO occupation there.
Well, I think that if you ask most Afghans, they will say they don't like the presence of the foreign troops, but they will also tell you that they don't want the foreign troops to leave at the moment, simply because they understand what that means.
If you talk to even senior Afghan officials, they will tell you that if the U.S. was to withdraw, it would only take maybe a week for the Taliban to take over Kabul simply with the support of the Pakistanis.
Well, but you know, there's the McChrystal Ratio is what we're dealing with here.
Every time you kill one, you create 10.
So how does killing them until they're weak enough that then we can deal with them and make them do it our way, how is that achievable by killing people?
Well, I agree with you there.
The thing is, though, that you also have to understand that it's not simply the foreign presence that creates Taliban recruits.
That's only one driver.
It's a major driver, but it's not the only one.
The fact is that government corruption and mismanagement and nepotism and utter mismanagement by the government at the local level is a driver of recruitment by people who don't necessarily want to join the Taliban but have no choice simply because that's the only place they can go to get sort of quote unquote justice.
But another thing is driving that, and it's a very important consideration, and that is intimidation, pressure, and terrorism by the Taliban itself at the local level that forces Afghans to give up their, for instance, their eldest son to the insurgents or risk retaliation themselves.
And so that in and of itself is also a major driver of recruitment for the Taliban.
All right, now, we're already a little bit over time, but is it all right if I ask you one more question here?
Absolutely, no problem.
Okay, great, so this is about, you know, I guess some kind of end game here would seem to involve negotiating with, well, it's funny, because there was, I just interviewed a guy about some state departments that got FOIA'd by George Washington University, I believe it was, about the state department talking about maybe they could do a regime change in Afghanistan and work with the Iranians, the Indians, and the Russians in order to do so before September 11th.
And now it seems like more and more people are talking about just that kind of thing, and I should be shocked, I'm pretty sure, for some reason I'm not, that this headline in The Guardian, Russian military could be drawn back into Afghanistan, and they're going to expand the NATO-Russia Council, and one of the things they're talking about is bringing Russian troops and advisors and trainers and bringing them in, talking, you know, on one hand we're accusing the Iranians of sending cash to basically our guys, Karzai, and our allies in Afghanistan, and of course the Indians have been there at America's invitation and or insistence in at least small numbers pretty much this whole time, I believe.
So I just wonder, you know, how much of a role all these massive foreign states that surround this basically stateless land is going to have at the end of the game here?
If it's obviously, like you say, it's an unresolvable conflict, apparently, between the people inside Afghanistan and their political leadership, for lack of a better term, but so what about these foreign states?
America and Russia together in Afghanistan, John?
It's interesting you should ask that because actually today there were Russian agents who accompanied American agents on a major drug bust inside Afghanistan itself.
There was a raid on drug laboratories close to the border with Pakistan, and there were four Russian counter-narcotics agents who accompanied, I believe, members of the DEA on these raids because the fact is that Russia is being inundated by heroin coming from Afghanistan.
But the idea of a major Russian military presence in Afghanistan, I have a hard time accepting, although I have to say that there are Afghans who don't remember that time who believe that it was a much better time simply because at least they hear that, they look at what's going on there today and they hear about, you know, how women, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan while the Russians were there.
I can tell you that it wasn't, that the Russians were not the magnanimous occupiers that some Afghans think they were.
In fact, it was pretty awful under the Russians.
Well, they killed a million people, didn't they?
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And I saw some of their handiwork firsthand.
But I do have to say that I think that a solution to Afghanistan lies at two levels.
There has to be at the Afghan level some kind of agreement.
There can't be any, there's no substitute for an agreement between Afghan protagonists.
And at some point, that's going to have to take place.
I'm not saying it's impossible and I'm not saying it's not going to happen.
What I'm saying is now is not the time.
The conditions don't exist.
But that's on the Afghan level.
There's also going to have to be a agreement on the international/regional level.
Because as you point out, there are states there that have major interests in seeing a return of stability to Afghanistan.
That includes Iran, which is also being heavily impacted by heroin and drugs coming out of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan, India, the European community because of the threat of terrorism emanating from that part of the world, even the United States, because of the threat of new terrorist attacks, and also because we're so heavily, we've been so heavily invested there.
The Chinese are walking in with a briefcase full of cash buying up mineral rights.
Well, that's not going to happen.
Listen, that deal, and you're talking about the INAC copper mine, it's a $3 billion deal.
That's not going to happen.
The Taliban have infected that entire area and that contract, there are allegations that that contract was awarded to the Chinese because of a $30 million bribe that was allegedly paid to the then minister of mining in Afghanistan, who was then subsequently forced to resign.
That's not going to happen.
It's just, the Chinese, the terms of that contract is just so unrealistic.
It's not to be believed, including the construction of Afghanistan's first North to South railway.
That is not going to happen.
And I don't see this copper mine deal coming off, but nevertheless, the Chinese also have a vested interest in that.
They have problems in Western China with their Turkic minority in Xinjiang, the Uyghurs.
And there are Uyghurs who have, who have been picked up in Afghanistan.
They're actually were picked up when the Americans went in.
They were put in a Guantanamo.
They were found to have been innocent and they're now living in various parts of the world, including Albania.
Which is- And Bermuda.
Yeah, and Bermuda, right, exactly.
But you know that since then, there has been more trouble in Xinjiang.
There was more trouble this year or last year.
And I have no doubt that more Uyghurs have made their way to the Pakistani tribal areas where they could be trained by Islamic groups to go fight the Chinese, the Han Chinese.
So I don't doubt that there are also, that China also has a major vested interest.
But at the same time, and here's the irony, many of the weapons that the Taliban have, that they're, where they're getting their weapons and their ammunition are coming from state-run Chinese companies and Russian companies.
And that's why I say there has to be an agreement on the international level.
I call it a security compact.
One in which all of these countries that have huge interests in seeing security return to Afghanistan get together and fight the drug trade, fight the arms smuggling to the Taliban, and fight the movement of money, of huge amounts of money that fund the Taliban that come from the drug trade, that come from the weapons trade.
They have to get together in order to fight those problems at a regional/international level.
Well, I'm sure that the Republicans and the Democrats are gonna work this out.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, hopefully within our lifetime.
Yeah, well, and with David Petraeus in there, we just can't do wrong, I heard.
Well, you know, I'm not gonna opine on that simply because I gotta go back and cover the place.
All right, well, tell me this.
Do you think that he's aware of all these implications of all these complicated things the way you're talking about and is he working on them?
Oh, absolutely.
I think he's vastly aware of all of that because don't forget that before he went out there, he was a CENTCOM commander and was dealing with all of this on a regional/international level.
I think he's painfully aware of all of this.
But I also think that, you know, as my piece pointed out, he thinks that now is the time to gin up this talk about willingness to negotiate, top level negotiations going on simply because that's where they want to go and they're opening the door to those Taliban leaders who may well be interested in this as military pressure is increased, particularly in the South.
The fact is that irrespective of the skepticism that exists and the fact that I don't believe and everybody I've talked to say there are no high level peace negotiations going on, the fact is that the United States military has been inflicting very heavy losses on the Taliban leadership and the Taliban rank and file in the South and in the East.
The Haqqanis have been taking it on the chin very, very hard over the last several months because the United States has been able to gin up the number of special forces it has there because it's closing down its military presence in Iraq.
It's been able to increase the number of intelligence gathering, as they call them, platforms that are being used in Afghanistan and over Pakistan and the guys in the form of drones and not just the ones that fire missiles, but the ones that take pictures and the ones that listen in on communications.
And the intelligence has increased quite substantially.
That doesn't mean to say that we're not still killing the wrong people.
There are raids that are going wrong.
But the fact is, as was reported in the Washington Post the other day, the most recent intelligence assessments are that the Taliban is able to regenerate its forces.
And we know that the Taliban, they're guerrillas, and guerrillas don't stand and fight conventional battles.
When they face a superior military force, they go away.
They hide their weapons.
They become farmers again.
Their commanders go back across the border to Afghanistan, I mean to Pakistan, and they wait.
And as they like to say, you know, the Americans have got the watches, but we've got the time.
Right.
Well now, so how goes the battle of Kandahar?
Are we gonna clear a hole and build that city?
I am extremely skeptical of any kind of strategy that when it comes to the build and particularly the governance aspect, because I have become convinced that finding that the Afghans, as capable and as smart as many of them are, the fact is that I don't believe they have the capacity to run government.
And that is really the Achilles heel of the entire American strategy.
All right, everybody, that's Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
You guys keep doing your craft over there.
I appreciate it.
We'll do what we can.
And thanks very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
