07/23/09 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, Chaos Radio, Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Introducing our next guest today.
It's Kelly B. Vallejos.
She is a regular writer at Antiwar.com.
And her newest article is called Coin Meets Reality in Hindu Kush.
Before that, the Africa Obama didn't visit.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Good.
How are you today?
I'm doing great.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so let's talk about the last week's first here.
The Africa Obama didn't visit.
I was so thankful to see some good writing about what has happened in Somalia since Christmas 2006.
It's a story that I kind of have to usually look around really hard to find anything on.
And it was great to read your take on it, which I thought was very comprehensive.
And I just thought wouldn't it be a good idea to bring you on the show to explain to people who haven't even heard of it, which I think is probably most people driving their truck who happen to be listening to this show right now.
What has happened in Somalia?
What responsibility does America bear for what we all know now are the absolutely miserable conditions in that country?
Well, I became interested in this subject a couple of years back because the news, and not many people recall this back in 2006, was that there was an Islamic radical, quote, unquote, Islamic movement taking hold in Somalia.
And basically it had all of the elements of being the sort of, you know, al-Qaeda petri dish that we are always being warned about by the Bush administration.
And you hear these news reports trickling in that the Bush administration was concerned about this group and that, you know, they were looking to, you know, ensure that this didn't happen, that they didn't become this haven for al-Qaeda.
And so I started paying a little bit more attention and found out that this group, the Islamic Courts Union, was actually a movement that had risen over time.
They were a collection of courts throughout the country that had actually been probably establishing the only security that that country had had since, you know, what we all know as the Black Hawk Down days of the early 1990s when all the tribal warlords had fought and then we went in there and then they dragged our troops through the streets and then we basically got out of there and didn't have a U.S. foreign policy for a while.
But anyway, so these courts had finally come together as a union and it's known as the Islamic Courts Union.
And there were, yes, some radical elements to the Islamic Courts Union that's not to be denied.
Were there some al-Qaeda connections?
That is to be debated.
But there were some radical elements, but on the most part, from what I'm hearing and what I've read, is that the Islamists that were running these courts were more hewed to the more moderate Islam practiced by Somalians.
Anyway, the Bush administration at the time, as you remember, any connection with al-Qaeda, we're in there, this is our global war on terror, we can't have this.
And what had come out eventually was that either the CIA or the military had been covertly funding the Islamic Courts Union's opposition.
Well, their opposition turned out to be some really creepy, corrupt warlords who could or could not have been the same guys involved in dragging our troops through the streets or the same bad guys, quote-unquote, on the ground back in the early 90s.
Well, it was even Adid's son, right, was the guy who was receiving a lot of the money?
Well, I'm not sure about that, not to deny it, but I'm not sure.
I had read that there were different accounts, but that it was never confirmed by our government that they were giving anything, but you probably read some of the things that I was reading at the time, that there were some British papers that had broke it, and I know I think it was Newsweek here that wrote a lot about it, but yeah, I had read that, I just can't confirm it.
Well, in the larger sense, do you think it's basically fair to say that the Somali people, basically through the Islamic Courts Union, were finally succeeding in throwing these warlords out?
It's what the people of Somalia wanted, this was a pretty grassroots, bottom-up, not very extremist sort of Islamic Courts Union here, and it was the people of Somalia finally getting rid of these evil guys that had been fighting among them all this time.
And we came and took the side of the bad guys.
Exactly.
We came in, took the side of the bad guys, and then we encouraged the fledgling, inoperative transitional government there to bring the Ethiopians in, to get rid of these Islamic Court Union leaders once and for all.
Now, the Ethiopians and the Somalis have a long history, and it's not a good one, there's a lot of bad blood there.
Now, the Ethiopians came in, the plan was the Ethiopians come in, help get rid of the ICU, and then get out.
Which, you know, festered a lot more bad blood for us than for the transitional government.
So the transitional government was the next to go.
And that form had dissolved, and guess what?
We turned to the Islamic Courts Union guys, eventually, and bring them back into power, because what took the place in the vacuum was even more radical Islamist takeover.
So the radicals that had been sort of at the margins of the Islamic Courts Union movement basically saw an opportunity.
They broke ranks, and I'm probably oversimplifying it just to get through the narrative, but they broke ranks, and they are what we see now as the Al-Shabaab, the group that's recruiting young Somalis in Minnesota, that's involved in all sorts of hardcore Sharia law going on there, amputating limbs, basically threatening to war on the neighbors.
But yeah, so we eventually turned around and got those quote-unquote bad guys back to head the government, because we blew it.
We created a huge vacuum there.
And so if there wasn't radicals leading the charge before, there's certainly radicals there now, and they're bringing in all sorts of foreign fighters.
They brag about that, and there may or may not be some al-Qaeda connections.
I was interviewing somebody about this yesterday, and they said, you know, there might not be a direct connection, but there's definitely a facilitating thing going on, because they're happy to have all the foreign help they can get at this point.
So I know it sounds a bit complicated, but from what I'm saying is this is sort of a great example of the global war on terror, Bush-style, at work, because, you know, the mantra then was we will go after terrorists wherever they are in every dark corner of the earth.
And here's a situation where, you know, we put that stamp on these guys, the Islamic Court of Union, we went after them covertly, we caused all of this upheaval there, and we got worse in Somalia than we had before.
And now it's not just the Obama administration.
It's really the Bush administration that decided that, OK, well, I guess we need to try to back the Islamic Courts Union.
But now, I guess, to whatever degree, the Pentagon's policy, regardless of president, is to go ahead and back the Islamic Courts Union.
And that means whatever legitimacy they had back when they were that grassroots government that somehow attained a monopoly on authority in Somalia for such a short time there is gone.
The more we help them, the worse off they are, and the more powerful the people who are trying to overthrow them.
Yeah.
And believe me, it's even more complicated than that, because they further splintered after this all happened.
And so you still have Islamic Courts Union guys in neighboring countries with their own movements.
You have other Islamic groups that are fighting al-Shabaab there in Mogadishu right now.
I was just reading the news today.
There's all sorts of skirmishes going on.
You have the warlords are still around, and they're basically wheeling and dealing with all this Western aid money coming in and promising this and promising to help out just to grab the money, and then they take off with the guns.
And meanwhile, you have President Obama has confirmed that we're going to continue to send weapons there to the transitional government.
Tons and tons, right?
What was the number that I read?
30 tons of weapons were headed or are headed or they are now to Mogadishu to this transitional government, which basically has control of what, you know, maybe a couple blocks of the capital that day.
And, you know, the experts that I talked to are saying, you know, we don't know where those guns are going to end up.
They might just end up, you know, who knows?
They can end up in the hands of the pirates that we're dealing with on the seas there.
Well, I'm here in the Telegraph, and you can find the link from the top headlines of anti-war dot com.
I think it's from today's page.
U.S. threatens to invade Eritrea.
President Obama cannot afford to look weak on terrorism.
And apparently there are people in Eritrea who have discovered, according to the accusations here, that there's a demand for weapons and that they can make some money selling some.
And so now we have to bomb them.
Well, you know, and that, I mean, it is such a morass of, you know, history, bad blood.
I mean, the Eritreans got involved or are getting involved because the Ethiopians got involved.
It's a proxy war between the Eritreans and the Ethiopians that have been going on for years.
And I was reading one Somali writer who says, you know, if we install or we help to install a transitional government in Somalia that is, you know, preferenced with the Ethiopians, then the Eritreans are going to find a way to try to subvert, whether it's sending weapons covertly to the opposition.
If it's the other way around and the Eritreans get a foothold, then it's the Ethiopians are going to find a way to subvert.
I mean, for us to start picking sides and then going after the Eritreans because they're sending guns, I mean, it just gets us dug in deeper and deeper.
And it seems, you know, I forgot who I was reading the other day, but they said, you know, I think it was Phil Giraldi, and I'm sorry if I'm misquoting him, but he says, you know, we need to rethink our entire foreign policy.
You know, I think he called it a red team, you know, that just goes and looks at every region of the world and says, how are we doing things, what is our approach, you know, what positions have we taken at this point and let's rethink it because we get stuck in a cycle.
So, oh, we have to go after the Eritreans now because they're funding.
Well, you know, they're funding it because they're in a proxy war with the Ethiopians because the Ethiopians want territory within Somalia.
They're not just helping out because of their, you know, altruistic, you know, motivation.
They've been fighting over land in Somalia for years.
So they see this as an opening.
They see the instability in Somalia as an opening.
And the Eritreans are stupid.
It seems to me, too, that, you know, I hate to skip over to your most recent article here about the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan without stopping to mention that what America's empire has done in Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now, worse than Iraq or at least almost equal to Iraq.
I guess nobody can match the five million refugees there, but pretty close to as bad as Iraq, worse than Congo, worse than Darfur.
It's the American war in Somalia.
But, you know, when you talk about, you know, getting bogged down, I wonder if the Pentagon isn't just seeing this the same way as you're saying the Ethiopians see this, an opportunity, an opening.
Instability is an excuse to stay longer.
And your other article here is about the counterinsurgency doctrine meeting reality in the Hindu Kush mountains.
And throughout this thing, you have people saying that this war is going to be 10 years minimum, that all this failure is an excuse to double down and triple down and stay forever.
Right.
Exactly.
And I just don't know if the American people are really listening.
It seems as though, you know, many of us are just tuned out because I think six years ago, if, you know, any of these military leaders got up, you know, on stage or behind a podium, you know, and said, you know, well, this is going to be a long slide.
We're talking five, 10 years here, a decade down the road.
I mean, I think people would have, their ears would have pricked up and say, hey, hey, that's not what we bargained for.
But now it just seems to be commonplace.
We're told, yes, it's going to take a while, but if we hang in there, we can do this thing.
And there seems to be no resistance to that.
And I think what I'm suggesting in my article that I would not be surprised if this fall, I don't know when, I'm not going to predict, but there is a request for more U.S. troops.
And I think they're already laying the groundwork.
They're saying this is going to be a long time.
You know, we have Gates, Bob Gates, Secretary of Defense out there saying, you know, listen, we need more troops, period, if we want to rotate in and out of these war zones.
Well, okay, which to me that says that we're going to be in there for a long time.
He knows that, and eventually they're going to have to ask, I believe, ask for more troops to do the counterinsurgency that they claim they need to do to, quote, unquote, win this war.
As I pointed out in the story, I mean, these counterinsurgents, if you go by the doctrine, by the book, say that you'd have to have at least 600,000 troops in Afghanistan to cover the area of Afghanistan to effectively carry out the counterinsurgency they say would be necessary to win.
We don't have a quarter of that in there now.
So, hmm.
Well, there are some optimists who say that Obama's just waiting to say we can't win.
In fact, you mentioned Phil Zaroli.
His recent article today, he points out as long as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still podcasting from up there somewhere, then that's the excuse to stay forever.
That's the he can't afford to look weak on terrorism thing kicks in there, and he has to continue the war forever, and yet it doesn't look like the Marine Corps is able to go in there and get him.
So we'll just, I guess, continue to trickle troops onto the problem for a decade like Vietnam and never win anything, never lose anything except a bunch of individual lives, and not to mention all the civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have to pay the price for this.
Right.
And what they do is they talk about the civilian surge.
They talk about the nation-building, the civilian side of this.
This isn't all a military problem.
So they keep up with this mantra of we're in there to rebuild institutions and rebuild the country.
So as to sort of soften the blow, the fact that we have more and more and more and more people going over there, whether it be troops or contractors, personnel, I don't know.
I don't know how this is going to develop, but I do think that we haven't seen the last of the troop increases there at all, at all.
And it's too bad because, like I said, it seems that the American people have tuned out, and they just might be able, like you said, to engage in a sort of trickle.
They'll wake up one morning and find out we have 100,000 troops there.
I mean, we'll have 68,000 by the end of the year.
Now, if Obama or anybody else told the American people before the election, yeah, we'll have close to 70,000 troops by the end of 2009, people probably would have been surprised by that.
We were being told, you know, sure, we've got to win the war in Afghanistan, but putting more troops in after all we've been through, I'm not sure if people would have.
Maybe.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I guess I don't know where the line is either.
People always say that you have to draft people.
You have to force their kids to go be in the war, and that will finally get them to participate at all and oppose the thing at all.
But then, of course, if you use the Vietnam War as the example for that, you got another few tens of thousands of American kids who didn't want to join the Army, who were basically enslaved and forced to, and it still took another, what, eight years after that to finally end the war.
So maybe that got their parents off the couch and joined the anti-war movement, but it sure did cost a lot of lives between here and there before that finally did the trick.
On the other hand, is there a way to collectively slap the entire American populace in the face and say, like, hey, what are we doing here?
Can you pay attention for ten minutes while we discuss whether we want to continue to try to occupy all of Africa and Central Asia or not?
Can we discuss that in one news cycle or another and then maybe let it go after that?
I don't know.
Well, and I do sense that there's a lot of disappointment because, you know, President Obama, then candidate Obama, had said a lot of things about, you know, taking a step back and trying to redefine our relationship with the rest of the world, and it was heavily suggested by him that meant our troop deployment, you know, our occupation.
And I don't see a lot of that happening.
You know, it goes back to the Somalia thing.
It seems as if there's a blueprint in place, and, you know, he is possibly listening to a lot of advisors who have been in place for a long time, and, you know, they're just pressing on with the status quo.
And as we saw in Somalia, even pressing on with the status quo means things are getting a lot more deteriorating to the point where there is, I mean, there's barely a, I mean, there is no government there to speak of.
Well, I think the same thing is we're going to have this conversation in a year or two about what happened in Pakistan and how Obama's escalation into Pakistan and Hillary Clinton's strong-arming of Zardari to force him to start a civil war over there basically and create 3 million refugees.
And you're going to be telling the story in hindsight about how it was that Pakistan fell apart because of that.
Yeah, and that's a really good point.
I saw a story this morning about, you know, Richard Holbrook, you know, bragging that we're giving $175 million to help rebuild Ft.
Valley.
And, you know, at the same time, you're reading some real good journalism about how the place is a mess.
They screwed everything up.
People are going back.
There's nothing to go back to.
There's still fighting in the streets.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, it is scary, and there's a vacuum there.
And I think we're going to be hearing more and more about that, you know, as long as journalists here are still paying some semblance of attention.
You know, with Iraq, it's the same thing.
I mean, people take their focus off.
And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen there.
You know, Maliki was in town yesterday talking about this, you know, it sounded like he is going to force a unity government on that country come hell or high water, no matter what he has to do.
And on the other hand, you're reading about, you know, the Kurds, they're pretty, you know, they're ready to rumble.
And so that, who knows how that's going to, you know, transpire.
Right, yeah, the Kirkuk issue certainly has not worked out, although I was really happy to talk to Raya Jarrar and his take, at least, on the Awakening Council movement not being integrated into the army.
He said most Iraqis think that that's good and that actually Maliki is making great progress in forging alliances and relationships with Sunnis in the parliament, but that the Iraqi citizens of all descriptions, they don't really want those militias to be legitimized.
They want them to be forced out.
And it's really on the political level that those ties matter, and it's starting to work.
And I guess I'm trying to see the silver lining there.
Clearly, you know, I don't want to see further conflict in the north up there or whatever, but it looks like if he can really make the transition from, you know, Iranian Dava party puppet to nationalist prime minister with broad support there, I think that only means that, you know, possibly the sooner the American occupation of that country will end entirely.
Right.
The key is, does he get unity by bringing, you know, the factions together, or does he impose it and they just have another strongman in there, you know, with festering factions, you know, building up the resentment over time?
Who knows?
You know, I mean, I've read the other side of the coin where, you know, he is increasingly seen as an autocrat, and the Sunnis are feeling the wrath of all those years where they were on the other side of the fence.
Yeah.
And then this Kurdish thing seems, you know, it seems troublesome.
But like you said, I mean, there's, you know, there are signs, but who knows?
Well, it goes back to the continuing conflict being the excuse to just escalate and make matters worse, you know, start cranking up those numbers or scaling back how fast they're withdrawn and these kinds of things.
That's what my eye is toward, Petraeus not having any excuses to keep a single base in that country anywhere.
Right.
Right.
And I was just reading today, and I don't know if it was on our site, but there's been some comments made by Iraqi leaders, you know, suggesting that we will have, the U.S. will have troops beyond the 2011, you know, deadline.
They'll be in the advisory and training roles.
But there seems to be the subtle hint that, you know, they'll want us there.
So we just might find ourselves there for a very, very long time.
And, you know, there's plenty of Republicans out there for years that says, well, we have troops in Japan and Germany.
And somehow that doesn't really square, it doesn't rest well with me.
Well, and here we still have to deal with those who want to expand the war to include the space between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq and spread the war.
I guess we'll be fighting everywhere from Jordan to India at that point.
Right.
And Africa, too.
Yeah.
Because we do have, we have our fingers in a lot of places there.
I was interviewing one gentleman for the column and, you know, he says there is a lot going on and the American people really, if they don't do their own digging, aren't really aware of, you know, in terms of the training that we've been doing, the weapons that we've been providing to governments in Africa that we deem allies who, you know, might not be the best people.
They're having their own civil wars and skirmishes.
But we've found a way to gain a foothold there.
Not to say there are other countries that aren't doing that, like China, but the militarization of our foreign policy in places like Africa, for example, is, it is troublesome because it shows that we're not dealing with the rest, our relationship with the rest of the world has gone from this sort of diplomatic or stagecraft to, it's a militarization and it involves our troops on foreign soil, our weapons going into foreign hands, you know, our trainers training their troops or opposition leaders the way we train our troops, you know.
So you have like these special operations teams in Iraq that look just like our special operations teams or special operations teams in Colombia that look just like ours.
But they don't have to play by the same rules as ours do.
And they might not be the good guys that we sort of bless them for being.
Yeah.
Well, for people who do want to take the time to actually find out about these things, you do have to go to AntiWar.com and other places like that and read about it because it's not going to be on NBC Nightly News, it's not going to be on Jim Lehrer, not with any real context.
And I know I speak on behalf of the staff and all the fans of AntiWar.com when I say that we're really glad to have you as part of our lineup of regular contributors because you do a great job of covering all these things that people ought to be watching on TV but can't.
Well, I appreciate that and I'll try to continue to do a good job.
Great.
Thanks, Kelly, for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
Really appreciate it.