10/08/09 – Melvin A. Goodman – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We're going to start off with Mel Goodman.
You might remember he was on the show last week or the week before that.
He's the author of what I remember as being a very interesting book, Failure of Intelligence, the Decline and Fall of the CIA, and he's Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and Adjunct Professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University.
He's got more than 40 years of experience in the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Department of Defense.
He's the author or co-author of six books, including Bush Lee Diplomacy, How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk, and The Phantom Defense America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion, 2001.
Welcome back to the show, Mel.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm sorry, I meant to go back and listen to my first interview of you from about a year and a few months ago after I read this book, but I didn't have time to do so.
But you did mention toward the end of the last interview just a couple of weeks ago about how you were at the CIA and apparently, I don't know exactly how deeply involved in the covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and so I have a couple of Google search results lists here of articles you've written about our current policy in Afghanistan, what we ought to be doing, and so forth.
But I was hoping that maybe we could get a little bit of insider history about the war in Afghanistan as it was then.
Good.
I would love to go there, because I think there are lessons from the 1980s and mistakes that were made in the 1980s by both the United States and the Soviet Union, for that matter, that I think the Obama administration should pay attention to.
They should not be concerned with the myths of Afghanistan, and I think the military has bought into some of those myths about the Taliban, about Al-Qaeda, about what the Pakistani army might do if we do not increase our presence.
There's so much mythology and so little interest given to context and history, so yes, I would like to do that.
Okay, great.
Well, let's start with this.
Zbigniew Brzezinski says, after the fact, that it was all his idea.
Not only did the U.S. respond to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up their sock puppet communist dictatorship there, but that the CIA, under his direction, began funding the Mujahideen in order to provoke the Soviet Union into invading.
He claims, I think, I forget whether this is a matter of record or not, that he sent a memo to President Jimmy Carter the day that the Soviet troops crossed the border saying, it worked, now we're going to give the Russians their own Vietnam.
Is that right?
Well, that is true, and there's no question, and Brzezinski, I think in an interview he gave in France, that ended up in a French magazine or newspaper and it was never picked up in the United States, remarked about the success of his covert action scheme, which was carried out with the use of the CIA, which was designed to draw the Soviets in to Afghanistan.
Now, I'm not convinced that the Soviets wouldn't have gone in anyway, because there were two concerns in Moscow's mind, regardless of what we were doing.
One was the concern that there was a civil war situation in Afghanistan that started in 1973, and there was great fear in the Soviet Union that this would spill across the border into Central Asia, where the Soviets have always worried about the security of Central Asia.
The other thing that's important is the collapse of the Iranian government in 1979, and the emergence of Khomeini convinced the Soviets that we would not accept our defeat in Iran, which was a strategic setback, and we would find a way to get back into Iran.
And Moscow felt if the United States were to get back into Iran, it would be important for the Soviet Union to have some kind of geopolitical or military position in Afghanistan.
Those were the two driving factors, as well as Brzezinski thinking, and by the way, Brzezinski was all wrong about why the Soviets went into Afghanistan in the first place.
We had major arguments with the CIA and the policy community and the intelligence community about this.
Brzezinski was convinced, like an old-school anti-Soviet that he was, because he was a cold warrior.
He has since, I think, really leavened a lot of his ideas.
But in the 1970s, Brzezinski was a typical anti-Soviet, almost pre-neocon thinker about the Soviet Union, and he felt the Soviet Union was going to build a greater base of operations throughout South Asia as part of the old thesis regarding the drive of the Soviet Union and the Russians to a warm water port on the Indian Ocean.
He did not recognize the danger that the Civil War situation in Afghanistan created for the Soviet Union.
Well, you know, John Mueller, the author of Overblown, makes the case that it was really the end of containment that destroyed the Soviet Union, that after the Vietnam War, the American people had just had it, basically, and with things like this policy encouraging the Soviet Empire to expand into Afghanistan and not really countering them as they extended their obligations further into Latin America and into Africa and so forth.
This is what finally destroyed the Soviet Union, because, as everybody ought to be learning right now, all empires fall.
Containment was what protected the Soviet Union.
They'd have fallen probably earlier.
Well, I'm not sure about that.
The Soviet Union fell like a house of cards, because it was a house of cards.
And I think you have to go back to the expansion of the European empires.
Remember, all of the European empires were set up abroad.
When you look at the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese.
So, empires create great weaknesses.
But in the case of all of these powers, the weaknesses were a long distance overseas, and they eventually could abandon these spots.
The Russian expansion was entirely different.
It was a continental expansion.
So, in picking up countries in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in the Baltics, they were picking up non-Russians.
So, by the time you got to the 1980s, half the population of the country was not even Russian.
It was a non-Russian population, at the very least 50-50 in terms of the demographic breakdown between Russians and non-Russians.
And then you add to that the fact that the Soviet Union was never, ever an economic player in the international economic markets.
And today, by the way, it is tied to some of the international markets, which is a huge difference.
The Soviets couldn't play a serious economic role.
And then when you do look at certain areas of technology, militarily they were falling far behind the United States.
And this notion that somehow the Warsaw Pact was a very impressive military alliance against the West, well, it wasn't.
And in fact, if you look at the so-called Soviet allies in Eastern Europe, they all hated the Soviets.
The Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, all of them detested the Soviets, detested the Russians.
So, there were a lot of reasons for the collapse, and I wouldn't point to any one reason.
There's no single causal explanation.
I mean, the neocons say that Reagan announced the Star Wars scheme in 1983, and then it was all over for the Soviet Union.
Or that they drained themselves in Afghanistan, and that was the reason.
Well, that's too simplistic as well.
There were multiple reasons, but mainly the Soviet Union, as I said earlier, collapsed like a house of cards.
Well, as Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1921, this whole project is doomed.
You can't have communism, prices.
You have to have prices, and value is determined subjectively by the customer.
There's no way to run an empire out of Moscow, where virtually every decision is up to some bureaucrat's whim.
Well, exactly.
And if you look at the effort to have centralization, what it did was create great cynicism, because when you got outside of Moscow, no one believed what the Kremlin said.
There was a total breakdown in credibility and a great emergence of cynicism, particularly by the non-Russians, but Russians as well, who didn't live in Moscow.
So, in many ways, the entire country was just one big Pechengin village.
Well, you know, when I was a little kid, I told my dad I wanted to be a king, you know, like in the storybooks and stuff.
He said, well, the thing about being a king is everybody loves you when things are good, but everybody blames you when things don't go right, so it's not always a good thing to be the king.
The dangerous mantle.
All right.
Now, what exactly was your role at the CIA during this time, at the beginning of the Afghan war?
I was doing the political analysis of the Director of Intelligence on why the Soviets went in, what the Soviets were confronting, and then why they would get out.
And actually, I wrote the paper in March 1979.
The invasion was in December, but in March 1979, I wrote the first paper in the intelligence community on the reasons why the Soviets would go into Afghanistan.
And believe me, that was before any of the covert action started.
The covert action started, I think, in the summer.
So maybe Brzezinski read your memo and said, hey, this is...
Well, I don't know about that.
I'm not willing to take credit for that.
But it wasn't a popular memo to begin with.
It didn't have the support of the CIA hierarchy, but it went out to the entire community.
It went over to the Pentagon.
It went over to the White House, the National Security Council.
But then I started writing in 1985 when Gorbachev came in and called, in a secret speech, he called Afghanistan a bleeding wound and then a bleeding sore, and then he went public with this line in 1986.
And then something that I talked about in my book on Edward Shevardnadze, in 1987, Shevardnadze said to the Secretary of State, George Shultz, at the State Department, that we're getting out.
We're not telling anybody yet.
It will be announced by Gorbachev next year in 1988.
And, of course, he announced it and set up a timetable.
And people like Robert Gates at the CIA and a lot of leading players in the intelligence community said, oh, typical disdain for the Soviets, oh, they're lying to us, they're dissembling.
And I made some money betting on whether or not the Soviets would indeed get out of Afghanistan.
Of course, they got out in 1989, just as their timetable said they would.
They adhered to it almost to the day, if anything, they were several days early to complete a withdrawal.
All right.
Well, now let's rewind back to the beginning of this intervention here.
You talked about Brzezinski as almost a proto-neocon there in the sense that, I guess, in context, you had the Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and then Brzezinski kind of in alliance with the neocons or separately from them, sort of pushed this more of a Team B view that the Soviet Union is on the rise and it's the bear in the woods that Reagan has to protect us from, that kind of thing, right?
Well, the battle, and here was the weakness of the Jimmy Carter administration.
Jimmy Carter was a very bright man.
He wasn't well schooled in international affairs, but he was smart.
But the problem was he could not make up his mind, and he liked to hear both points of view.
Harry Truman did the same thing, but after listening to both points of view, he made a decision.
Carter had trouble making a decision.
So he had a dove on his team.
The dove was Marshall Shulman, a professor of Soviet studies at Columbia, who was the assistant to the Secretary of State on Soviet matters.
And then at the National Security Council, of course, he had Brzezinski.
Brzezinski was a hardliner on the Soviet Union.
Marshall Shulman was someone who believed in détente.
He wanted to continue the policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to move arms control along and to move the Soviet-American relationship along.
But Carter could never make up his mind over which policy he should adhere to.
So a lot of time was lost so that in 1979, when Iran took over the U.S. Embassy, it really brought a halt to the international role of the United States and the Carter administration because they just became completely preoccupied with the problem in Tehran.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst.
We're talking about the earlier Afghan war, the Russian one, at least for now here.
Tell me, what is the arc of crisis?
The arc of crisis was a term that I think Brzezinski coined in the 1970s.
The book either had that title or it was the theme of the book.
And it was the danger of Soviet manipulation.
Of course, he highly exaggerated the Soviet threat and it went in an arc from the Middle East to the Persian Gulf into Southwest Asia.
And the fact of the matter is this is much more of an arc of crisis for the – well, it was for the Soviet Union than it was for us because this was near the Soviet borders.
And the Soviets geopolitically always referred to that southern border where the arc of crisis was as their sensitive southern border because traditionally that was the invasion route of all sorts of outsiders.
Genghis Khan, the Mongols, the so-called Golden Horde of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, the problems that grew up over Afghanistan and the great game with the British.
Here's where the Soviets and the Russians have been incredibly vulnerable.
And that's why this argument today that the Russians don't care if Iran develops nuclear weapons and that's the position of the neocon editors of the Washington Post, by the way.
Well, of course, the Russians care about this.
The last thing they want is more neighbors with medium-range missiles that could reach Russia having sophisticated nuclear weapons.
They're more concerned about proliferation than we are.
They were the inspiration for the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1969, 1970.
So the arc of crisis is really not a crisis for the United States unless we shoot ourselves in the foot, which we've done over and over again.
The Iraq War is a perfect example of creating an arc of crisis where one didn't exist.
And now I think Obama is making the same mistake his predecessors did and creating his own briar patch in Afghanistan by considering whether or not he's going to add another huge troop increment, as the military wants, as General McChrystal is appealing for and even campaigning and lobbying for in the public arena, which I think is a classic case of insubordination, in my own opinion.
Oh, yeah, well, we'll definitely have to get to that.
It's an arc of crisis we can create for ourselves if we want to do it.
It really should be a Russian problem more than it is an American problem.
Well, now, Mel, you know they say that there's only 16 different stories and they just tell them over and over again in every book and movie, that kind of thing.
It sort of seems like there's a lack of imagination in the views of the people who make foreign policy or even conceive it, whatever.
Your average counsel on foreign relations weenie, if you take my meaning.
Because, well, at least I've read that there is this guy, I believe his name is Mackinder, who had this theory that whoever controls the heart of Asia rules the world.
Where, in fact, even then, all the evidence really was, no, whoever controls that part of Asia is a sitting duck ready to be invaded from all sides and can never be secure.
But it seems like they're, even to this day, just kind of sticking with the idea that, well, America is the most powerful nation in the world, so now it's our turn to occupy this bread basket or whatever it is, these indefensible steps of the old world.
Well, I always go back to George Kennan, who I think is, well, he's certainly my favorite realist on this issue.
And his concentration, geopolitically, was on the five major areas of the world.
And, of course, Afghanistan has no geopolitical influence whatsoever.
What happens in Afghanistan should stay in Afghanistan.
It's like Las Vegas, I guess.
Afghanistan has no reach.
There are no issues even of proximity to Afghanistan that are going to really be affected by what happens in Afghanistan.
So Kennan's argument had always been, and this was the key to detente, that the major interests are in Western Europe, particularly Britain, France, and Germany, in China, Japan, and, of course, Russia.
So if we had lined up China and Japan, and, of course, we had Japan after World War II, and Nixon sort of flipped the switch on China, which was a brilliant strategic move in 1972, which was finished by Carter with recognition in 1978 and 1979, and, of course, our traditional NATO alliance, eventually the Russians were going to become extremely weak.
And, actually, Kennan predicted that containment would succeed and the Soviet Union would collapse.
And, of course, he was right.
But to squander our resources, our treasure, our blood, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, as we did in Vietnam, makes no sense whatsoever.
So I think the international rivals that we do have, whether you're talking about people in China or in Russia or in India, who wonder about the United States, must wonder why in the world are we squandering all of our treasure and our influence in these nondescript places that have no impact on the international community.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
Well, isn't it all about continuing the Cold War against Russia?
Well, I think it's continuing the Cold War in the sense that the United States doesn't know how to justify itself as a superpower, and it loves this insidious notion of being a superpower.
And the only way you can define yourself as a superpower is if you have some other rival out there.
And with Russia gone, I mean, we can continue to harbor the notion that Russia is a threat, and the neocons continue to do that.
That's why they protest the possibility of a reset button with Russia that would get us back to arms control and a detente relationship.
So you have to find something.
You have to find a war on terror, which makes no sense, or a war against the Taliban that makes no sense, or using 150,000 troops in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, which didn't make any sense, or 550,000 troops against the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese, which of course made no sense.
And we've paid a terrible price for all of the stupid decisions that have been made, going back to Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon in the 60s and early 70s.
And again, here is Obama, who I think, though, is a very rational man and a very bright man.
And I think now he's probably questioning his own logic about why he talked about Afghanistan during the campaign as a war of necessity, a war that we must win and that we can win.
I think he knows now, well, we don't have to win that war, we can't win that war, and this is hardly a war of necessity.
Now, let me ask you about the era between the end of the covert war and the support for the Mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s, and then their pullout in 1989 and September 11.
It seems like, and I'm not the best on this issue, there are people who are, but there was varying support.
Was there not covert support for Mujahideen warrior types in Bosnia, in Chechnya, even in the Kosovo War?
The Kosovo Liberation Army is just another subset of the Mujahideen, isn't it?
And isn't that kind of how we got took on September 11th, as here they were plotting to use these Egyptian graduate students to do suicide attacks in our country, while our government basically is believing that they can play these guys and just use them to destabilize the Central Asian countries at Russia's expense and think they can get away with it without getting Americans killed in the process.
Well, I think it's very dangerous to try to throw all of these issues, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, into the same bag with Afghanistan.
There were definitely policy decisions with regard to Afghanistan that were wrong, that created the kind of support for international terrorism that we're seeing today.
And I don't think Bosnia and Kosovo and Chechnya had anything to do with that.
The important decisions that were made, and there were a couple that were strategic in their impact.
Certainly, when the Soviets got out of Afghanistan, and as I said, they gave us strategic warnings.
They gave us a whole year of private warning, which never leaked until it was announced publicly by Gorbachev.
A few of us knew about it, but very, very few.
When the Soviets did announce they were getting out, they came back to us and they said, you realize when we leave, if we don't find some way of supporting a stable government in Afghanistan, there's going to be chaos there.
It'll return to the Civil War situation that never really left from 1973 on.
And George Shultz gave his word initially that we would support the Russians in stabilizing the government in Kabul.
We would put some money into that and some influence.
And Shultz reneged on that because he was overruled by the White House, by Reagan and the conservatives in the National Security Council, and certainly by the George Herbert Walker Bush administration and General Scowcroft.
Then the other big mistake that was made in 9-11 is when the terrorist attacks took place.
The first head of state who reached Bush that day was Putin.
And Putin was trying to establish a new relationship with the United States.
He offered all sorts of support for the United States.
He offered the use of Russian military facilities.
He offered that he would not object to the United States getting military facilities in Central Asia, which was a real concession on his part.
He offered Russian support for American pilots if they were down in action over Afghanistan.
And he said he would play a role in logistics for Afghanistan, and logistics remained a huge problem in Afghanistan.
And one of the reasons why we're doing so poorly.
But we walked away from that by maligning Putin in the wake of that and not taking this new Russian commitment to support the United States in Afghanistan as seriously as we should have.
Let me just tell you about the third thing, because this was a real classic case of American stupidity.
And that was the famous Axis of Evil speech.
Before the Axis of Evil speech, they, of course, identified Iraq, North Korea, and Iran.
The United States and Iran were working secretly and effectively to do something about the security situation in Afghanistan, and Iran said they would help in the western part of the country.
They were as opposed to the Taliban before they were overthrown as we were.
And we were dealing extremely effectively and secretly with Iran.
Then they wake up one morning in January 2002, in the wake of all of this close support, and here's George Bush giving a speech about the Axis of Evil.
Well, what they did was release from house arrest one of the most important Mujahideen leaders, a man by the name of Hekmatyar, who was not only one of the most important, but one of the most vicious and one of the most effective.
And basically what Iran was saying to us, well, screw you, if you think we're part of the Axis of Evil, we'll stop supporting you.
They released Hekmatyar, and, of course, he went back to eastern Afghanistan and then got holed up in Pakistan.
But he's one of the leading players right now, along with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, that's causing so much trouble for the United States and Afghanistan.
So, you know, Iran tried to help us, and we slapped them in the face, and Putin tried to help us, and we slapped him in the face.
So when you look at the incredible stupidity of American decision-making over Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, it's no mystery why we're in the terrible situation we are now.
You know, Mark Ames from Exiled Online, he lived in Russia for quite a while, and he's written about how Putin actually took a great risk in terms of domestic politics.
He really had to stand up to generals and intelligence people and all other people and, you know, really assert himself to make those gestures towards the Bush administration after September 11th that you mentioned.
And according to Mark Ames, when Bush just turned around and slapped Putin in the face by, what, like a couple of weeks later, announcing that we were withdrawing from the...
The ABM Treaty.
Right.
Which treaty was it again?
Well, it was the ABM Treaty.
We abrogated the ABM Treaty and announced the National Misfits.
And apparently this really cost Putin badly at home.
Oh, yeah.
We forget there's bureaucratic politics in Russia just as there is in the United States.
Putin any more than Brezhnev or Khrushchev.
They're not totalitarian leaders.
They don't have full control of the system.
And on the thing about the Mujahideen and the time between the Soviet withdrawal and September 11th, isn't the connection the administration's support of various Mujahideen factions...
I'm not saying every holy warrior ever worked for Osama Bin Laden or anything like that necessarily, but didn't Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earn his stripes fighting in Bosnia on the same side that the Clinton administration took?
Well, you know, there were leaders who went back and forth.
I think to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned his stripes in Bosnia is probably a bit of a stretch.
You know, the important thing when you look at Bosnia from geopolitical distances, we were supporting Muslims against the Serbs.
We were taking pro-Islamic positions.
The problems we created for ourselves was throwing so much money and support to Mujahideen leaders who in most cases were extreme Islamic fundamentalists and were not doing a major part of the fighting because they were based in Pakistan, which is why the Taliban in Pakistan is as powerful as it is today because a lot of the money and support we tried to get to the Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets actually went to the Pakistan Taliban and built up a problem now for the Pakistan government.
So we never really paid any attention in terms of logistics of this aid, who it was going to.
The Pakistani government siphoned a lot off for themselves.
We paid no attention to the fact that Pakistan was developing a nuclear program and had support from AQ...
I don't know if it's right, AQ Khan, but was involved with North Korea and with secret efforts that were going on elsewhere to build up nuclear capabilities that caught us off guard.
And then when we learned about it, we refused to step in to do anything about it because we needed Pakistani support to get aid to the Mujahideen.
So many decisions were made that made no sense for long-term American interests and then created serious long-term problems for United States decision-makers.
And we're dealing with that now, and we're not dealing with it very well.
You know, what comes out of the Afghan situation, as you look at it, is the Taliban clearly has a strategic direction.
They know exactly what they're doing.
We've been in Afghanistan for eight years now.
The eighth anniversary was yesterday.
We still have no idea what we're doing, and we're still holding meetings at the White House eight years later, and it's going to take the rest of this month to make a decision about this strategic moment that General James Jones, the head of the National Security Council, says that we're in.
Eight years into the war, we're in for a strategic moment.
I'm sorry, we're just right up against the time wall, but I wanted to give you a chance to elaborate on what you said about McChrystal, and I think you used the term insubordination here.
Well, I'm talking about McChrystal's lobbying and campaigning for his proposal to add another 40,000 to 50,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.
I think when he went off to London and spoke at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, not only to defend his proposal, but to malign the proposals of others, particularly Vice President Joseph Biden, who is turning out to be somewhat more dovish than the rest of the Obama team and the Obama administration.
That was a step too far.
That's the kind of advice that should come up to the chain of command.
You shouldn't be hitting the face with headlines about a four-star general giving speeches in London in a speech that wasn't even vetted to the White House.
In all of my years as the CIA, when major officials at any agency, whether it's the Pentagon or the CIA or the State Department, give policy speeches, it has to be cleared through the right public affairs office in the White House.
This was not done by McChrystal.
And frankly, when he went off to Copenhagen to sit on Air Force One to talk to President Obama, and we still don't have any details on that discussion, I have a feeling it wasn't all that frank and friendly.
There was McChrystal looking like the page out of the General Douglas MacArthur Ego songbook.
There he was in his camouflage guerrilla uniform and his desert boots and not in a full-dressed uniform to meet the President of the United States.
Well, he was certainly in his full-dressed uniform to address the leaders of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in a speech that garnered all that attention.
And now here is the military pushing back because they don't like the criticism that McChrystal is now getting from the President, from the National Security Advisor, and even from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has said, we want our generals to speak candidly, but we want them to speak privately.
Now, he claimed that wasn't aimed at any specific general, but of course it was aimed at one general, General Stanley McChrystal.
All right, I'm sorry, we're just all out of time here.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Good, Scott, good to be with you.
All right, everybody, that is Melvin A. Goodman.
He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
You can find him in association with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can read the article How the Soviet Menace Was Hyped at ConsortiumNews.com.
He has an article archive at the Daily Kos as well as at Larry Johnson's blog, No Quarter.