All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Malou Innocent.
She's got a piece at CatoAtLiberty.org, the blog there.
And we're running it in the Viewpoint section today at AntiWar.com.
It's called Protests in Afghanistan, our excuse to get out.
Well, jeez, I was completely out of excuses to get out of Afghanistan.
Thank goodness we have one now, huh, Malou?
Right, I mean, honestly, I don't think we need any excuse.
But I think for a lot of the political and military elites within Washington, they really need to start narrowing the objectives of this mission and really begin to reduce our troop presence.
Because this war is in no way winnable, just given the problems with the Afghan government, our own problems with our competing bureaucracies, sort of the aims that we have for the mission.
Really, I mean, this is far and away the worst government program imaginable.
From 2001, we were supposed to punish al-Qaeda.
Now, 10 years later, we're mandating the number of Afghan women that can serve in the parliament.
I mean, this is mission creep on steroids.
And Americans really need to wake up and understand that this is a war that is not worth fighting.
Yeah, it's funny to see the polls basically show that the American people agree with you.
I mean, just the fact that it's going on for 10 years and there's no real end in sight, I think, is apparent to the average person.
But they don't seem to care very much about it as the problem.
Right, I mean, we're sort of, you know, thousands of miles away on the other side of the Earth.
And so we don't really live with the cost in terms of not just simply money, but in terms of human costs.
And in fact, civilian casualties have skyrocketed over the past year, year and a half, with the number of nighttime raids have increased, the number of airstrikes have increased.
And certainly there's a great deal of intercultural tension between the local Afghans and the foreigners that's been bubbling out of the surface for so long.
And really it was just touched off recently with the Florida pastor, Terry Jones, burning a Quran.
We saw that sort of touch off a wave of demonstrations, some in case violent demonstrations in several cities throughout Afghanistan.
But really that reflected a lot of the animosity that locals have been feeling as a result of this 10 year occupation.
And something that Americans really just either ignore or they remain willfully blind to.
Well, and you know, you just think about the situation reversed.
If it was the giant Muslim, Islamo-fascist caliphate that had conquered North America, that would really be bad.
But then they went around burning everybody's King James version of the New Testament, boy, would it be on.
Absolutely, I mean, we get angry when our government redistributes our taxes.
Now imagine for a moment, if you were an Afghan and outsiders kept changing your mayor, changing your governor, changing your customs, telling you how to dress your women, what is culturally acceptable, what is culturally backwards.
We would be incredibly angry, but yet we forget how intrusive our own government is to foreign societies and that's really appalling.
Yeah, it's that whole insult to injury thing too.
You know, we saw this back with the protests and then I guess eventually a murder, right?
Over the Danish cartoons and all that.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And you know, it's pretty easy to see the counterfactual, you know, like if they hadn't waged a giant global war on terrorism, invaded Iraq and all these other things had maybe gone in and gotten right the hell back out of Afghanistan back in 2001, something like that.
It wouldn't have been a big deal, right?
But it's, you know, NATO's occupying Muslim countries, people are dying every day and then you come out and insult the prophet, that kind of thing.
Now you're getting to, like you say, not just occupying the place, but trying to change their way of life, insulting their very core beliefs and that kind of thing.
That's how you, you know, make matters much worse.
Absolutely, and I think even when you sort of, when you led into the interview, you mentioned the piece that I had on Cato at Liberty.
I think really that the recent violence that we've seen in Afghanistan really epitomizes the problems and the dangers inherent when we try to forcibly export our liberal values onto illiberal societies.
And unfortunately, a lot of people say, don't call Afghanistan illiberal, but I mean, in many cases, I mean, it's a very conservative society, it's very religiously focused, but so many people in the West, though it's almost unconscionable to think that societies still run on religion, that their entire lives are surrounded by religion, and we think it's archaic and silly, but this is the way of their life.
This is their life on a daily basis.
And yet policymakers in Washington truly believe that people around the world want to adopt our liberal values and institutions and practices, and that they should embrace these values because they embody, in some ways, the most enlightened and most civilized way of thinking.
But really, it's profoundly flawed and incredibly arrogant to believe that we can not only impose these values, but to believe that people will be willing to accept them when they are coerced.
Really, I mean, the best example of this is Afghanistan, but also you see this in Iraq, you see this in Pakistan, you see this wherever our foreign policy is intruding into the lives of everyday people around the world.
Yep, and on it goes.
Well, now, so the backlash over this particular incident where this pastor burned the Quran there down in Gainesville, why am I not surprised it's Gainesville, anyway?
That's sort of an inside joke.
I mean, there were big demonstrations.
As you write in here, eight non-American aid workers were killed when a United Nations base was stormed.
And I guess I saw something too that said that Hamid Karzai himself was going out and announcing this and basically trying to fan the flames and was being criticized for that.
Do you know much about that?
Oh, yes.
I wonder how big is, like, this doesn't seem like it's going away anytime soon.
Right, right.
And interestingly enough, President Obama and President Karzai talked on the phone this morning.
I'm sure President Obama tried to stress to Karzai the importance of keeping up appearances and not condemning the external occupiers.
But really, Karzai has been exploiting this incident to gain some political capital.
And that shows almost really how deeply unpopular the occupation has become.
And the fact that Karzai is condemning the West, he's not calling Terry Jones the Florida pastor, he's not calling him a kook or someone who's out there at the mainstream.
Karzai has been really using this to enhance his stature within the Afghan populace because he remains incredibly unpopular, very much unaccountable, is widely despised and distrusted.
So the way he sort of allows himself to garner influence is to condemn us.
And that's, again, I mean, it just sort of shows how unpopular, how deeply unpopular the occupation has become.
And interestingly enough, even last month there were nine Afghan children gathering firewood in the northern province of Kunar and they were killed in a NATO airstrike.
And yet again, we have Karzai going out and condemning the violence and of course the airstrikes and everything.
And General David Petraeus, the commander of international forces, he apologized profusely.
And Karzai publicly said that his apology was not enough.
So this sort of reflects the toxic relationship that has developed between Karzai and the West.
And again, a great deal of the mounting tension between the international occupation forces and the civilian government of Hamid Karzai.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, if you work for the State Department or the Defense Department, this is more or less perfect, right?
If the mission creep has the mission so expansive now that never even mind the impossibility of permanently propping up the Karzai government, which they've not been able to accomplish, really installing him in power in the country this whole time, but liberalizing everything, changing the rules for everything, as you say, and having as a policy, trying to westernize the place, especially when you have, you know, right-wing lunatics like this guy, Jones burning Korans back in America and whatever.
It's the perfect impossible mission to carry on forever.
You know, all we need is another, however many hundred thousand bureaucrats and a hundred billion dollars, and we can pull this off with promise.
They can do this basically forever, I guess.
Right, in fact, there was a news report earlier this week that Al-Qaeda is re-establishing its presence in the northeast of Afghanistan.
Perfect.
Exactly, I mean, my immediate response is like, oh my gosh, the 10-year occupation has worked out swimmingly.
I mean, really, and the notion that we have to occupy a foreign country to sort of, you know, deter the Al-Qaeda attacks, I mean, it's just simply preposterous.
We had, you know, the Detroit airline, the foiled Detroit airline bomber, Abu Muttalib, just last year.
We had the Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber.
We had Richard Reed, the shoe bomber.
None of our occupations deter terrorism.
In fact, it inflames it, and yet we still believe that you can simply just change the world.
You can socially engineer these foreign societies, and that's the way to sort of correct sort of our problems in the world, but we essentially just gloss over why it is that Al-Qaeda attacked us.
They attacked us because we support tyranny.
We support the oppressive police states of Saudi Arabia, of Egypt, of Algeria, of Jordan, and these are the reasons, and our occupation of foreign countries is why.
Yeah, but as far as the Afghanistan war goes now, anyway, it seems worth mentioning that, you know, the September 11th attacks were basically launched from Florida and Maryland and New Jersey and Hamburg, Germany, and I forgot the city in Spain, whatever they, it wasn't from Afghanistan.
You know, bin Laden gave his blessing and all that, but the whole operational thing took place in Western Europe.
These guys all had visas to the United States.
They got on domestic flights to do what they did, and somehow the safe haven that supposedly exists in the Hindu Kush mountains means that we have to wage war there forever, and I think that that really, no matter what kind of window dressing about women's rights and whatever, they try to add to the, you know, list of things they must accomplish over there or whatever, as long as they can say, as Barack Obama has many times, that, hey, look, bin Laden's still on the loose out there somewhere or whatever, then they're going to be able to stay, it seems like to me.
Right, I think that the whole war is really a distraction.
I mean, when you look at the objectives that we're trying to achieve, they're totally detached from why we went in in the first place.
It was meant to sort of punish Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harbored it, but now, I mean, the mission, and really, the administration has been very explicit about what our mission is.
Our mission now is to create a US-friendly client regime in Central Asia, one that'll advance US interest against Pakistan, one that'll advance US interest against Iran, one that'll allow us to have a sphere of influence in Russia and China's backyard, and really, I mean, this is what the mission is.
It's no longer about trying to, you know, sort of attack Al-Qaeda.
That's a convenient argument when you're talking about maybe Pakistan, but even there, you don't need, you know, the hundreds of thousands of sort of foreign troop presence and also those that are under foreign command under Hamid Karzai.
You don't need this, but of course, this is, number one, a way for us to advance our interest in Central Asia, number two, a way to keep a lot of the military just allowing the special interest involved there, both in Washington and in European capitals to keep the money flowing, because there are so many vested interests in the military-industrial complex, and also, I mean, this is sort of bureaucratic inertia.
It's easy to get involved in war.
It's much more difficult to pull out, and as you know, I mean, everyone argues the sunk cost.
Oh, well, we can't leave because we've already invested so much.
We'll appear weak in the face of global jihad, and all of these sort of rhetorical claims that are laid out to sort of push us in the direction of more war, when in reality, the more we invest and the more we lose, the more people will be arguing that we can't leave Afghanistan, so I honestly am very fearful that we'll never leave Afghanistan.
They're expanding the permanent megabases there.
I thought myself, I mean, they're expanding in Mazar-e-Sharif.
They're expanding in Herat.
I mean, really, we are trying to double down, and certainly, Obama can claim by July that, okay, well, we'll begin to sort of, you know, scale down our troop presence, but there will be a lasting foreign troop presence in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, just as we see in Iraq.
Even though President Obama has promised and pledged to want to scale down from these regions, we are not leaving anytime in the near future.
Well, you know, the whole idea of the surge, well, we're gonna take the fight to the Taliban and whoop them real good for a couple of years, year and a half or so, and then we're gonna negotiate with them rather than negotiate at, say, you know, back in 2009, still makes no sense, even according to Stanley McChrystal.
The insurgent math is that for every one of these guys I kill, I create 10 more, so how is taking the fight to them?
There's not some finite number of people in Afghanistan who would dare resist.
I mean, even if you limit it to fighting-age males, you genocide all of them into gas chambers, there's still old men who can fire a Kalashnikov, and little girls that'll, you know, plant an IED on the side of the road.
Right, and also, I mean, the border with Pakistan is a sin, and we've seen it.
We've seen the radicals who are pouring over the border.
I mean, this is really an intractable cross-border issue.
We can't contain it.
We can't, and in fact, of course, our drone strikes and our policies are inflaming a lot of the terrorists and the militancy that we see in the region, and yet everything's in the direction of more war, more drone strikes, more airstrikes, more night raids, and this is the very thing that exacerbates a lot of the terrorist problem that we have, and I assume that some officials in the Obama White House understand this and they recognize it, but I'm sure they're few and far between, and the inertia of the policy is basically in the direction of doubling down and continuing on these failed policies.
Well, and what about the future, too?
You know, you look back at the 80s, the children of the refugees that fled Afghanistan to Pakistan grew up to be the Taliban, and a lot of the jihadists that went, traveled from all over the Middle East to fight in Afghanistan ended up becoming the core of the Al-Qaeda network and these kinds of things, and you look at all the people killed and all the refugees, you look at the periodic wars by the Pakistani government in the tribal regions and a million or two forced out of their homes at a time, these kinds of things, I really wonder, I don't really fear, I guess, but I wonder, it seems like the consequences of this could go on for generations, you know?
Absolutely, and I mean, I almost feel that Americans have this bizarre collective amnesia, like we completely forget that the foreign forces, both foreign and domestic forces, that we funneled money to in the 1980s against the Soviets, as you say, they spread all across the region, they went back to their homes in Egypt and the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, and they started fomenting a lot of the uprisings in these countries too, and yet now we're coming again to the conflict in Libya and people are debating whether we should be arming the rebels.
It almost makes you wanna rip your hair out.
We've seen this happen before, we've seen the cost of blowback, and yet people still continue on the path toward more war, more conflict, essentially becoming the counter-revolutionaries of a foreign civil conflict, and no one seems to recognize the error of our ways.
Honestly, it's kind of sad, but 10 years after 9-11, we seem to have not learned our lesson and why it is that Osama bin Laden attacked us.
Yeah, well, I mean, here it is.
This is live, for the people listening to it live, from Tuesday, April the 5th, 2011, the Taliban has strengthened along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, report finds in the Washington Post, right here.
This is a report sent to Congress from, let's see, was it the CIA or the military, reporting on themselves, and it's an administration report to Congress.
Yeah, I mean, it's troubling, because on the one hand they say, oh, well, you know, the Taliban has, you know, is reinvigorated in the border areas, and yet in that same status report, that very same report, they claim that over the past year, their new tactics have shown progress.
So, I mean, again, you sort of have on the one hand and on the other hand, and the administration is allowed to lay claims to victory and progress, when on the ground, as you say, I mean, Southern Afghanistan has very, seemed very only limited and potentially unsustainable security improvements, while even in the northern areas, sort of the low-risk areas, those areas have shrunk considerably, so the areas that were once safe are no longer safe, and the areas where they're claiming victory are easily sort of unsustainable victories, and they'll collapse soon after those forces withdraw from the area, because we're trying to protect Afghans who look exactly and blend in just exactly what the enemies are trying to attack, and honestly, I mean, the policymakers in Washington either are just sort of willfully blind to all of this, or they simply just don't care about, really, the cost in human lives and the cost to our treasury as well.
Well, you know, we've seen the same problem in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, too, as you say, where all the bad guys and good guys look alike, and they're all mixed together and whatever, and especially when they're fighting with homemade landmines on the side of the road, and there's no one to shoot at.
When our guys get blown up, and what ends up happening is they can't distinguish between the enemies and the civilians they're supposed to protect, and racism becomes deeper than a Klan rally, where these people are just hajis, they might as well be rats with no right to their life whatsoever, and in this piece by Mark Bolin, Rolling Stone, about the kill team, where they just went around murdering Afghans for fun, he really talked about, one, the racist nature of it all, where these people are all just savages, let's just kill them all kind of attitude.
These are the people, they're there supposedly to protect and westernize and whatever, and at the same time that everybody knew about it, the whole giant platoon or brigade or whatever it was, everyone knew, and this is how it is.
Right, exactly.
I mean, the foreign forces that are there, there are over 100,000 foreign forces there, but these aren't Muslim development workers who are fluent in Pashto and Dari, and can easily adapt to the population.
These are forces that are mainly from areas in the Midwest, areas where there isn't a lot of cultural interaction and where you're sort of forced, and for understandable reasons, sort of forced and injected into this foreign society.
It's very troubling, not only to our troops, but also to the local Afghans who have to interact with these forces every single day.
Right, all right, you do great work.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you so much, Scott, take care.
That's Malou Innocent, everyone, from Cato.org.
