All right, folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio and Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest is Matthew Cole.
He's a freelance writer.
You can find him in GQ, Wired, Salon.com, and other places.
Currently working on a book about the 2003 CIA rendition of Abu Omar in Milan that promises to be interesting.
Welcome to the show, Matthew.
Thank you for having me, Phil.
Well, it's very good to have you on here, and you wrote this very interesting article for Salon.com, Killing Ourselves in Afghanistan.
And now, I'm not sure whether Afghanistan is the good war or the forgotten war, or maybe a little bit of both, but it does seem to be the one most ignored in favor of the occupation of Iraq.
And your reporting from Afghanistan here is, in a sense, I guess not too surprising, but it's still shocking.
You say that the United States of America is financing both sides of the war that we're fighting on one side of over there.
Yeah, I think that I traveled for the first time to Afghanistan a little more than a year ago for an embed, and I'd already been to Pakistan and spent time along the border, and I thought it was interesting that when I was briefed, when reporters are briefed off the record by military intelligence and military officials, they'll privately acknowledge that Pakistan is a problem, but publicly they'll tell you that Pakistan is a very close ally in the war on terror.
And I just kept pressing the issue the entire time I was embedded, and what I found was that everything sort of led back to Pakistan, which was all of the attacks that were happening on U.S. and Afghan bases along the border had their genesis on the Pakistan side of the border, which isn't to say that all of the attacks were being perpetrated by Pakistanis, but that they began on Pakistani soil.
And so from there, I just tried to, as best I could, follow the thread, so to speak.
Okay, now I guess before we get too far into this, could you please kind of give us a kind of a loose description of the different ethnic factions, because it seems like it's not so much ideology there, it's tribalism and ethnic divisions that separate who's on which side of which lines there.
It's actually a little more complicated than that, but we'll just start with the ethnicity.
So you have the predominant ethnicity in Afghanistan is Pashtun.
They're about 40% of the population.
They represent the largest single group, ethnic group.
On the Pakistan side of the border, Pakistan only has, I think their Pashtuns represent a much smaller percentage, I think only about a quarter or maybe a little bit less, but they happen to be the predominant ethnic group within one of the provinces, which is called the Northwest Frontier Province, which takes up a good stretch of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And so what you have is that where the line divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, it's almost entirely Pashtun.
And historically, there was no international border between them, and so you have a lot of people refer to that area as Pashtunistan, the land of the Pashtun.
And so when you talk about trying to figure out what's happening on the Pakistan side of the border, what you have is a relatively autonomous zone that the Pakistani government has virtually no control of, and it's from these areas that attacks into Afghanistan are staged, as well as now the areas in which terrorist attacks that have been striking inside of Pakistan have been staged, and where the training camps have been.
Well, if most of the Taliban and so forth are the Pashtuns, does that mean that the American-created and backed government there is mostly made up of Tajiks and Uzbeks?
Not entirely, but when we toppled Kabul, we came in with the Northern Alliance, which was formerly led by Massoud, and they're predominantly Tajik, and we tried to strike a balance as best we could, but with that balance, we had to recognize that the Pashtuns still were the predominant ethnic group, and historically, they had always led.
It had always been a Pashtun who had been king of Afghanistan, and so there is a lot of...
Karzai, for instance, is a Pashtun, and so that was, in a sense, the deal that a lot of the government was going to be comprised of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and a smattering of other ethnic groups, Hazaras, but they had to make some kind of deal with the Pashtuns, and it's arguable whether that deal was something that was for the better or not in the end, because the government, the lack of Afghan government functioning, is in part because there are a lot of ethnic tensions in Kabul now.
Because if there's going to be, I mean, if the U.S.
-backed government is going to be the permanent government at some point, they stand up, we stand down, that kind of thing, then it has to be a coalition of all the different tribes and forces within the country.
You can't just exclude some giant percentage of people.
I mean, it seems like, from the little media we get here, most of the time, it seems like anybody who's a Pashtun is the Taliban, and are excluded.
That's partially true, but it's also a bit of a generalization, and there is plenty of representation of Pashtuns in the Afghan government.
The real issue is that the Taliban is almost exclusively Pashtun, and so it's a question of how do we deal with the Afghan Taliban that we're fighting inside Afghanistan right now?
How do we offer them an olive branch and try to bring them into the government?
Which has happened with certain people.
For the story that I did for Salon.com, I interviewed a former commander who was a Pashtun, and who, because of his tribal and family connections, had been persuaded to come over and work with the Afghan government, and work to help the Afghan intelligence agency.
And that's one method that has worked to some extent, but there is still a large Pashtun population, especially along the borders, East, Central, and the South, who...
It's not as much...
I mean, there are ethnic and tribal divisions without fail, but the largest issue is that as far as they're concerned, the U.S.
-backed government in Kabul has failed them.
They've seen no increase in any of the things that the Americans promised when they entered nearly seven years ago now.
So that's the real motivating factor, is that there's very little electricity, and there's virtually no jobs.
There's no economy beyond opium and the poppy field.
And so that drives a lot of the insurgency, more than just the ethnic component.
So basically, the state, such as it is, doesn't really have anything to offer them in offering an olive branch, even if they want to.
No, I mean, that's...
Yeah.
You know, every time I try to sift through, and Scott, it's important to remember that the trying to understand Afghanistan, like trying to understand Iraq, requires an enormous amount of education.
I mean, it requires an enormous amount of learning to understand the various factions at the local level and how they build up into a larger picture to see where the policy failings are, where things need to be fixed, how things could be better.
And one of the components that the U.S. has really failed miserably on, frankly, is they haven't spent the time learning these things.
So everything from language to culture, we rely almost entirely, the military, the CIA, relies almost entirely on Afghan-Americans that they've brought over from the U.S. to do their translating.
I mean, there's no one who speaks...
No one in the U.S. government, virtually no one, who speaks Dari.
I think someone told me, one of my sources told me that in the history of the CIA, there's only been two Pashtun speakers, two people that learned.
One of them is retired, he's now 85, and the other one may perhaps be still in.
But, you know, that's dangerously low.
I mean, it gets to...
You can sort of look...
I've used that number and that understanding as a way of seeing why we're struggling so badly in the area.
Well, it reminds me of the stories with the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, and they talk about how the estimates of the cost of the war being just a couple of billion dollars.
That wasn't completely dishonest.
It was that they weren't even taking into account the idea of a permanent occupation.
They were basically coming up with numbers that represented going in and then leaving again.
And it sort of sounds like the occupation of Afghanistan is the same way.
It's a permanent occupation, but it's never really had more than an in-and-out kind of plan backing it up.
Yeah, you know, sadly, you know, I think you started off by saying you weren't sure if this is the good war or the forgotten war.
I like to think of it as just being the other war.
You know, I think that the U.S. actually had, and it's important to remember that when we went in in 2001, the U.S. actually had an enormous amount of international support for taking down the Taliban.
There was not a whole lot of love lost for the Taliban because of their ideology and the way they ruled.
But there was very little thought given to how to function and stand up a government in a place that had, one, had been war-torn for 30 years, and two, prior to that, it still had an enormous amount of issues with national identity.
You know, again, remember that people will identify themselves first as Pashtun, and then, you know, they're which tribe within that ethnic group, and then they'll identify themselves as being Muslim, sometimes it's reversed, and then maybe then they'll identify themselves as being, you know, from Afghanistan.
And so that's a difficult scenario for any country to come in and try to adjust and try to adjust to a Western-style, if you will, government and democracy.
And there was very little thought put into how to create that, what it takes to create that.
It certainly takes more than 30,000 troops, which is roughly where we're at now.
I mean, you know, you could argue that it takes half a million troops.
Well, and as you're talking about the ethnic splits along the border there and so forth, it kind of reminds us that these countries were created by the British Empire in order to divide and conquer them.
And here we are, we can't, in these days of political correctness and live video feed around the world, that can't be our official policy, to divide and conquer.
Our policy has to be to unify these people for their own good and all these things.
And yet we're dealing with people who've been divided and conquered for a long, long time.
Yeah, well, you know, it's always a frustrating subject because it requires you to acknowledge, it requires, you know, U.S. officials, when you try to interview them, to acknowledge that a good portion of the strife is geopolitical.
And that comes from the fact that the British drew a relatively arbitrary line through the Hindu Kush Mountains and then down towards the sea, the Indian Ocean, and in creating, dividing what was then British India from Afghanistan.
And there is an enormous amount of strife because of that, because Pakistan was created with five provinces, almost entirely divided ethnically.
Two of them never had any interest in being part of Pakistan, the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan, which, surprise, surprise, are the two that sit on the Afghan border.
They see themselves as their own people.
And we take the approach of dealing with, and to some extent, because we have to, in terms, for diplomacy's sake, with Islamabad as the capital of Pakistan and Pakistan as this one entity.
Well, Pakistan isn't one entity.
Pakistan is at least five, if not more.
And Afghanistan has a very similar issue, not least of which is affected by the fact that topographically, geographically, Afghanistan is a very divided country.
You have mountainous areas, you've got desert, you've got lush valleys, and as is true in the history of civilization, people fight over those resources as a means to survive.
And, you know, it's important to remember that a good portion of what we look at in that part of the world was created by the British Empire.
And trying to sort of fix it is, there's a certain level of, a certain bit of it is futile because the fixing would probably be to erase some of those borders and redraw them along the lines that are more natural to the different ethnic groups.
But, you know, that doesn't appear to be anything that's on the table right now.
Yeah, or even really doable without a whole lot more bloodshed, because people are staking their claims all over the place under the borders as they exist now.
So that's the kind of thing that can't be fixed without who knows what kind of catastrophes down the line.
Well, you know, one of the interesting things about the Northwest Frontier Province, the area that the Pashtuns have, within there you have the tribal areas called the FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
And there has been for, since the creation of Pakistan and since the British drew the border between British India and Afghanistan, there's always been talk about Pashtunistan, about creating an independent nation of the Pashtuns, which would incorporate sections of what is now Pakistan, as well as sections of what is now Afghanistan.
I've talked to people at the State Department, U.S. government, the White House, CIA, no one thinks that that's a truly feasible possibility right now for exactly the reason you said, which is that the bloodshed that would stem from that could be even worse.
And so then you have to sort of ask yourself, well, what are the alternatives?
And I think the real problem with the invasion of Afghanistan was that we didn't think about those alternatives and how they might play out for a variety of reasons, including just not having the manpower or the people power, if you will, to understand what the problems are and what, to understand what the ethnic and political divisions are on the ground.
Well, now, some cynical people among us, perhaps even me, might argue that, well, there actually is a plan and not having a plan, that if you keep the place weak and you keep the place at war, then you have the excuse to occupy them forever.
Well, certainly I would consider that a cynical view.
You know, my experience has been reporting that sometimes the easiest answer in trying to understand the complexities is, the answer usually is ineptitude rather than malice.
Now, you could certainly argue that by not being prepared and not thinking something through, there is a maliciousness in that.
And I think that certainly this administration, the current administration and the political class in Washington in general, is guilty of that.
But I think that what you find is Afghanistan probably was doable before we went into Iraq.
I think everyone now understands and concedes that by invading Iraq and having two fronts, we took away the best people we had in a country that I think was much more doable, much more conducive to being fixed, in part because the local population was by and large supportive of the U.S. troops.
And you had a, although the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, neither of them were the most charming of regimes.
Certainly the Taliban was at best, I mean, it wasn't even a regional threat.
They didn't have any ability to threaten anyone within their own region, but it was rather that it was a power vacuum.
And that wasn't too hard to fill.
Somehow, all we've done is really push that vacuum over the border to the east just slightly into another area that has little or no official control.
And we've sort of just kind of pushed the problem to the other side.
We haven't swept it under the carpet, but we didn't clean it up.
Well, at the end of 2001, do you think if they hadn't already been beginning to divert resources toward Iraq and so forth, do you think they could have gone ahead and even after Tora Bora followed the Arab Afghans into Pakistan and cleaned that up if they had been willing?
I mean, nowadays they say you just can't go into Pakistan.
It's just too late.
That ship has sailed.
If you're going to do it, it would have had to been in December 2001.
Well, I mean, I I think that the difficulties are going in December 2001 and the difficulties going into in March of 2008 are the same, which is that it is a extremely difficult region.
I mean, we just you know, you can't express I can't express this enough.
And it's difficult to have Americans understand what fighting a war or looking for terrorists, the difficulties of doing that in a place like the Hindu Kush Mountain.
We're talking about the the western edge of the Himalayas.
So if you could imagine an area that, you know, the western part of the United States entirely mountainous with, you know, the Rockies, as though they extended all the way to the sea, you have an idea of the difficulties of fighting of any kind in there.
And, you know, it's just not very practical.
And that's why the Pashtuns have essentially been on the same piece of land for about twenty five hundred years and has never been fully occupied.
They've never been defeated.
And it's because they have the high ground.
So there has always been difficulties in that.
The real issue was the total manpower.
I mean, Tora Bora was a disaster, not because we had bad intelligence.
We knew where they were.
We had them.
And we had a CIA officer, Gary Bernson, who wrote about it in a book, who cabled back to Washington to get five thousand troops.
I think actually he wanted only about six hundred, but, you know, a thousand troops or so on the ground to fill out some of these the foothills where bin Laden would have had to come out of.
And they said no.
And, you know, the rest has been history.
We didn't make the effort because we were afraid of the losses that we were going to sustain.
And, you know, you could argue that by saving the American soldiers' lives and what cost we're taking them now.
Well, I wonder if you think that the Pakistani government is to blame for any of this.
I mean, in a sense, your article and I'm way overgeneralizing here because it's a long article, but in a sense, basically what you're saying is here we are backing the Pakistanis as our best allies in the war on terrorism.
And yet the ISI is still buddies with the Taliban and and aren't doing anything about the terror, the terrorists in their country.
Do they really have a choice?
Does who have a choice, Pakistanis or the Pakistanis?
Is there even anything they could do about it?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that at the at the very least, I think that they're one of the things that I reported in the article is that CIA deals with the ISI, the ISI, like any large government bureaucracy is divided and they have two main sections of the of the organization.
One is called Directorate C and that is the counterterrorism section of the of the organization.
And from from everything that I've understood and reported, that part of the ISI is very helpful and works very well with us in the search for terrorists inside of Pakistan.
Very committed.
We've, by all accounts, penetrated them and vetted their their leadership.
And that's not an issue.
There is a larger group or part of the organization called Directorate S and they're responsible for all of Pakistan's external affairs.
So they deal with all of the government's policy and intelligence regarding Kashmir, India, Afghanistan.
We have, I've been told, no contact whatsoever with that section of the ISI.
So you literally have a, you know, you've got two hands.
One is much longer, bigger and stronger.
That's the Directorate S, which we have no relationship with.
And the other is a smaller but committed group, Directorate C, that we do get along with very well.
You can see right away that there's a problem with that.
And so at the very least, the Pakistanis, the Pakistan government, if they had more control or were more committed to going after terrorists inside of Pakistan, and by going after, I mean actually looking rather than sending men to the border.
And they have taken losses, but partly they've taken losses because they're not trained for it.
So, you know, to get back to what you said to your question, the United States, frankly, didn't have a choice.
They didn't.
They had to be partners with Pakistan because we couldn't invade Pakistan.
And there's been always the assumption at the senior levels of U.S. government that Musharraf and the Pakistani government was going to do everything that they possibly could within reason.
And within reason is the issue.
The issue is whether or not they have committed themselves, whether there's enough domestic will to support the fact that they do operations on our behalf.
And then there is the part that I think is less known, but I've tried to chip away at it, is that I think that there is an official policy, which is to continue to help the Taliban because they anticipate the day that the United States won't be here.
And when that happens, they want to have a pliable regime in Kabul.
And so they help them.
They continue to you know, the idea is to destabilize Afghanistan and be a force in Afghanistan.
I don't think it's directly to kill Americans, but that is what happens nonetheless.
And so that's where I think the real problem is, is that ultimately money that we fund and give to the Pakistani military and government trickles itself down indirectly and aids the Taliban.
And now the directorate C or whatever, are those the guys, the ISI faction that's close to the CIA, are they the ones who keep attempting to send army soldiers to Waziristan?
Because it's happened a few times and I've read reports about basically Pakistani regular army troops surrendering, being overmatched or or perhaps not even really trying and basically surrendering and in some cases turning around and joining the people that they've been sent to fight there.
Yeah, those are different.
And that's part of the problem is there's essentially three different elements of the Pakistani government that that work on these issues of the ISI.
There's the army and then there's the Frontier Corps, which is a sort of a rowdy band of paramilitary organizations that are made up of the local military fraud.
The military is an entirely different issue.
They don't fight insurgencies.
They were not trained for insurgencies at all.
They've taken heavy losses and I think that the Pakistanis will never hesitate to say, you know, listen, we've lost a thousand soldiers, a thousand men in this war on behalf of the Americans.
And that's true.
And part of the reason why they've lost those is they're not very good.
And then you have the other element, which is that they don't, Pakistanis and Muslims don't want to be fighting Muslims.
And so they don't have the, they don't have the motivation on the personal level to go into places like Waziristan and get into a bloody battle with people who are of the same tribe and same, obviously the same religion and the same nationality.
It's just not in their interest.
And so that's where you see their willingness to surrender, switching sides.
The Taliban commander that I interviewed over several days in Afghanistan told me that, you know, there were dozens of former Pakistani military officers who either retired or left or switched.
They just grew a beard.
They took off their uniform and they became Mujahideen.
And that's, you know, yet another level of, another layer of problem for this region.
Part of this too is public relations, right?
Like if you can get the Pakistani government to act like they're acting on their own, then you're probably a lot better off than just outright declaring, Hey, everybody, your government is our local puppet dictatorship.
And you're going to do what you're told.
It seems like that.
If there's anything that undermines the authority of the Pakistani government, it's how much we rub in their face the fact that we choose their government, not them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of truth to that.
There's also, you know, I mean, we've continued to, the Bush administration's continued support of Musharraf even after the election results was, now here was a great opportunity for this administration to say to the Pakistani people, we hear you.
We understand that Musharraf is completely unpopular.
Part of that is because of his relationship with us.
And we see that you want a civilian government that is interested in a moderate Islamic democracy, really.
And we've shied away from that.
We didn't take that opportunity to say, we support you and we understand what you're saying.
Instead, we've said, listen, you know, the election is obviously means something, but we're still behind Musharraf and we still support him because frankly, we don't know or trust anybody else enough in your country to believe that you're going to work on our behalf.
And the argument that I'm making is that the worst part about that is, is that I don't think we're getting what we're supposed to be getting out of Musharraf, even though we think we are.
I mean, I think that the fact is, is that the situation has gotten worse and not better at all.
Pakistan's clearly gotten closer to the brink of chaos, not further away.
And Afghanistan has gotten worse.
And that's because we've had a very, you know, what the administration likes to call a long war, but we only have a very short plan.
We haven't had the attention to detail or the focus on what the long war actually requires.
And not all of a long war requires a military fight.
Yeah, I think we really do have a mistaken impression, I don't know, in the vice president's office or something that everything, the answer to every question is simply military force.
I mean, it just makes perfect sense to think that if the US is going to rely on Pakistan to be our, you know, number one ally in the war on terrorism in the region, and as we fight and do all these regime changes in the name of democracy, it seems like supporting democracy, really supporting democracy in Pakistan rather than military dictators, would be the best way to shore up support for our policy there.
And instead, we just, Dick Cheney just goes over there and tells me Sheriff, look, just continue to half ass trying to do anything about this.
And I'll keep giving you money.
Yeah, well, in addition, the money is all military aid.
So instead of, you know, you have a country that that is suffering economically, the enormous amount of population is illiterate.
They are desperate for education, jobs, all of the things that feed people into madrasas, and into the willingness to fight in Afghanistan.
We haven't actually addressed any of those issues.
What we've said is here's $10 billion since 2001.
Spend it as you wish on the military.
And what you know, the Times had a great article that that revealed that they weren't spending, they were spending it on the military, all right, but they were spending it on military items that were dedicated and focused on fighting India, for which would there isn't a current war with India.
And so we've sort of just given them a blank check and not asked them to, you know, we haven't figured out ways to spend the money wisely on things that do promote democracy that do promote moderation, that do promote peace in an area that that desperately needs it.
And I think that's the that's what I mean about the long war.
I mean, if I can buy into the idea that in trying to settle and trying to develop parts of the world that are flush with extremism, poverty, that there is a military component to it.
But it has to be the smallest component, and the least significant component.
And that's the short end.
But you know, we're seven years in, and we're still only focused on the military struggles rather than the parts of the long war that are far more important.
You know, and those are the things I've just mentioned education job.
So that, you know, Pakistanis and Afghans alike has some sense of a future, and some sense of hope.
And when you go there, and you interview people, you hear it over and over and over again.
And to us, it sounds like a cliche in the West.
But, but you know, it really does mean something.
You know, the Pakistanis, the Afghans along the border, they just want to know that they can work, they can have a decent living, and that their children are going to do better than they are, and that they have some, some future that doesn't involve, you know, military battle.
And we haven't backed that part up yet.
Yeah, you know, this is something we're just discussing with an earlier guest was that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have nothing to offer the people of the Muslim world whatsoever, other than violence in defense from the American Empire, so forth.
But in terms of, you know, hey, everybody gather around, this is the new society, I want to sell you for the future, where he doesn't have anything that anybody wants.
And really, these people could be marginalized much easier, if we would deal with the situation in an intelligent way, instead of just a militaristic way.
I mean, I couldn't agree with you more.
I think that the, the great failing of this administration, and then the post 9-11 foreign policy is that, while there, there may, there, there was some need to do certain things militarily, certainly not in Iraq, but, but in places like Afghanistan, and along the Afghan-Pakistan border, that the great failure was, it really should not be that hard to, to sway a population or a group of people away from bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, because in fact, there are very few people who were already in support of him.
And what, you know, when you're on the ground in Afghanistan, and actually, it gets back to why the Taliban have had a resurgence.
The Taliban have had a resurgence in Afghanistan, because what the Afghans have seen is that the US and the new Afghan, the Karzai government are not able to provide basic elements that, that a government should provide security, job, education, some kind of, you know, infrastructure.
And so, as a result, it's not that they support the Taliban, but they're hedging their bets.
So what you have is over time, local people were saying, we're not going to help the Americans, we're not going to fight with the Taliban, we're not going to help the Americans, because if the Taliban should win, we got to survive.
And so what we've seen is that by not, by not coming through with the various elements of nation building and, and moderation, that you would expect in going into another country and occupying it.
We've lost, we've started to lose people in the battle with groups like the Taliban, who, you know, frankly, there's no love lost when the Taliban left.
I mean, people were genuinely jubilant.
And they didn't miss, you know, no one misses the Taliban.
But when they offer the ability to do things like take away corruption, which is something they did do very well when they were in power.
You know, the man on the street, so to speak, to see that as something that's worth having, if they're not getting anything else, and right now, we're not giving them enough.
And now, the guy who's the main subject of your article here, and I guess I'm sorry, everybody, it's Matthew Cole from salon.com, killing ourselves in Afghanistan is the article.
And it seems like the guy, Haji Muhammad, I believe, is the guy that you're mostly focused on here.
And he's a guy who has decided he no longer wants to work with the Pakistani ISI.
He's a former Taliban who's now leaning our way, perhaps again.
And his view is that the Pakistanis don't really want to help Afghanistan, they want to keep Afghanistan weak.
And so he doesn't have any more love for the ISI than he has for the Americans at this point.
Is that a hopeful sign that if there was something that the Americans could come up with to offer the Taliban, that they could be, or you know, the remnants of them or something under a new name, I don't know, that they could be brought into the government and put an end to all this fighting?
Yeah, parts of it.
I mean, I think there's always going to be a hardcore group of Taliban who will not come back to Afghanistan, unless there are no infidels there.
You know, that's just a, that's an element that frankly, you know, I know that this is a, this is a show promoting peace.
But you know, so there are many solutions or alternatives, because they can't be brought in.
But there is a lot, I think there is a portion of the insurgency that very easily could be brought back in to the Afghan government to the American side.
Because there is such a strong Pakistani hand in Afghan affairs.
And, and frankly, there has been for a very long time, I mean, Pakistan is a much, much bigger country, much more powerful, much wealthier.
And, you know, Afghanistan is a very small country, it's only got about 26 million people, you know, it's very diffuse, there's only about four major cities.
And so they don't have and it goes back before they don't have such a strong national identity, as to be able to sort of withstand Pakistani influence, and interference.
So there's an enormous amount of resentment inside of Afghanistan about Pakistan.
And some of that is national, you know, some of that is nationalism, some of that is ethnic.
It's pretty normal and natural to see two, two countries that feel that way about each other, that share borders.
But, you know, I think there are elements of the Taliban that can be brought back.
I don't know.
I don't know how we would do it.
But there, there is an element of the Taliban hardcore, which are not going anywhere until they're killed.
I mean, there's no converting them, sadly.
Well, I guess then you mean that, if they're not killed, that they'll remain a permanent threat to the American back government there?
I don't know about a permanent threat, they'll, they'll, depending on their size, they can, they can be anywhere from a nuisance to a threat.
Right now, they're clearly a legitimate threat.
In the south, they have still an enormous amount of control of the southern part of Afghanistan.
If you were to diminish them down to, you know, a few hundred, they would be, relatively speaking, just a nuisance, but a lethal nuisance.
And their willingness to adapt to, you know, the Arab terrorist tactics, like suicide bombing, you know, their willingness to kill other Muslims and Afghans will remain a problem.
And I don't know that those are going to go away anytime soon, no matter how small the Taliban are.
But what you hope for is that if you can diminish their influence, you can bring people back into your side, and you can offer people things like electricity, safe roads, you know, some sort of economy that isn't based entirely on on narcotics sales, that you basically can as a classic hearts and minds, I mean, you just you give no quarter to the Taliban, then, and they sort of have to sulk away, and they may sulk away to Pakistan, but it won't really be Afghan, Afghanistan's problem anymore.
That's what you hope.
I don't know that that's what's going to happen.
I don't have a whole lot of confidence in it.
But that is what you hope for.
And now in terms of the Arab Afghans in the Pakistani mountains, the Osama bin Laden and his army was to be done about them.
Nothing.
We're just, I guess we just have to wait until they've worn out their welcome and the locals go ahead and kick them out themselves.
What?
Well, that's a difficult question.
I mean, you know, we've spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort looking for them and trying to kill them.
And in fact, for the last four years, I've tried my darndest to calculate roughly how much the US government must spend on a daily basis with all of its spy satellites, all of its CIA assets, all of the military looking for the Arab leadership of Al Qaeda inside of Pakistan.
I haven't come up with a suitable answer yet.
But certainly we've we've spent a lot of effort, a lot of money and a lot of time.
And we've come up empty and we've come up empty because there is a limit to American power.
We are the world's greatest force in insofar as we can completely topple a country.
We can destroy it.
Quite good at it.
We have all the technology in the world to, you know, fly unmanned planes and blow people up with missiles.
But what we don't have is the ability to go into areas where people do not look like us and they're not interested in us either.
I mean, you know, if you were to go to a small village in the tribal areas, you know, they're not necessarily someone who loves America.
They don't necessarily hate America either, but they their interest is not in helping us.
And I don't think we're accustomed to that idea.
You know, I've had people I've asked, why is it that no one has turned bin Laden in for the now $50 million that he's worth?
And someone said, you know, do you think that the the the local Pakistani who's in a village who has, you know, a four or five goats and a family of four or five children, first of all, if any, any who's illiterate can contemplate what that amount of money means, let's say in rupees, which is their currency.
Secondly, even if they could, do you think that if they thought that they turned bin Laden in because they knew where he was, that they'd actually see that money?
In other words, that the amount of people that the information has to pass through, the money would either be stolen, or they would be killed in response.
And so you get a sense that we can't just throw money at a problem.
And again, it's, it goes back to the thing that I feel very strongly about, which is that you need to be able to understand the region that you're in, you need to understand the people, you need to understand the language.
And we don't have any of those, we have the capacity, we're quite bright, we have all the money in the world, but we don't have the political will to do it.
And we haven't done it.
And so as a result, we don't really understand how it is that bin Laden can hide.
And by not understanding, we can't get him.
So, you know, frankly, I've come around to the idea, the possibility that maybe we should pull back and let him stick his head out again.
And sort of, you know, make him feel safe.
Because as long as we're, we have it the way now he's essentially hand in.
Yep.
All right, everybody.
That's Matthew Cole from salon.com.
Actually freelance writer, you can also find them at GQ and wired and other places.
The new article for salon is called killing ourselves in Afghanistan.
Thanks very much for your time today, Matthew.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, folks, and that's anti war radio for today.
Chaos Radio 95.
Nine in Austin, Texas.
We'll be back here tomorrow.
We have Norman Solomon, author of the book and behind the new movie war made easy.
Chaos 95.
Nine in Austin.
