04/21/09 – Michael Hastings – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
So now on to our next guest.
It's Michael Hastings.
He's a reporter who's got a new article in GQ Magazine.
You can find it at men.style.com.
It's called Obama's War.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're very welcome.
I'm really glad you're here.
And I'm sorry, I did not take sufficient notes.
I know that you wrote a book about Lost My Heart in Baghdad or something.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, I wrote a book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, a modern war story.
It came out last year.
It was about my girlfriend and fiancé, Andy Prohomovich, who worked for the National Democratic Institute.
And she had joined me while I was the Newsweek correspondent in Baghdad.
She was unfortunately and obviously tragically killed there.
So it was a waste.
After that happened, I decided, you know, screw it all, I'm going to write the truth about what the war is really like and what the actual cost is.
So that's what that book was about.
And that's why you're not at Newsweek anymore?
Well, you know, I had a great time at Newsweek.
It was a great place to sort of come up as a reporter.
But one of the things I felt was the stuff that I wanted to say, I needed a different sort of venue for that, so to speak.
Well, I think it's kind of been true over the years that places like Vanity Fair or GQ, Rolling Stone, are places where you can find some of the best journalism because that's really where the best journalists have to go in order to write what they really want to write.
I hope so.
And I feel very privileged to be writing for GQ because they're really, I think, pushing the envelope on a lot of serious stories out there that you just don't, you know, in your sort of mainstream journalism, you just don't see.
And this is the perfect example.
I mean, here's an article that's about a reporter who went and spent some real time in Afghanistan writing about what's really going on there, the kind of thing that we don't read in Reuters.
I mean, Reuters gives us headlines about what Karzai says on any particular day or an airstrike that the military admits to or something like that, but this is some real reporting and you should be congratulated for it.
In fact, here it goes.
Congratulations for this.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
And one of the things I wanted to do with this story was, what startled me was the absolute lack of debate about our Afghanistan policy.
And this was even, I was there at the end of last year, but this was quite clear that, you know, the Obama administration was going to institute one of the largest increase in troops we've seen since the invasion of Iraq, and really there was no debate going on about it.
So I wanted to go over there and see what was really going on.
And one of the things I found from talking to military officials and soldiers on the ground was there's a significant amount of skepticism for the course that we're taking in Afghanistan.
And that even included, I spoke to one of the military planners involved in the planning of the Obama administration's new strategy.
And he said to me, he said, well, you have to ask yourself, is it in our vital national interest to be there?
And he left it as a question mark.
And I said, well, do you think it is?
He's like, I don't know.
You know, I'm just, I'm telling them where they need the troops, if they need the troops.
I think we really have to ask ourselves that question.
This was the same guy that called What's Going On Now an existential presence.
Well, it's actually a different, that's the thing, that's even a different official.
And now these are civilian people in the Pentagon or they're military officers, generals or colonels or what?
Military, senior ranking military officials, colonels and above.
The point is, they talk to you, they're as skeptical as the average grunt out there with the M-16.
I think a lot of them, a lot of them are.
The reality is this sort of counterinsurgency Kool-Aid that the officer corps has been drinking, thanks to General Petraeus, there's been some pushback.
And unfortunately, the guys who are pushing back aren't necessarily the people who are now calling the shots.
Indeed.
Well, and in your article, you describe these troops out there, these firebases as they basically sound like Sisyphus out there pushing a boulder up a hill.
And they know that all they're doing is just going through the motions.
They're not doing anything really other than putting themselves at risk and putting other people at risk.
Sure, and you know, of course, on a soldier by soldier basis, the political perspective ranges from people who believe that they should be there, people who want to be there, to people who are calling the mission into question.
But certainly, the unit I was with, it was about 25 guys had something like 350 square miles to cover, a good stretch of it along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
They're not even going to be able to see most of the area they're responsible for.
And essentially, a lot of it is, as you know, this is a familiar story, riding around and waiting until they get hit.
Which a lot of the guys actually, that's what they're there for.
They're there to get out of action of it.
Well, yeah, and I guess that's kind of a whole different point.
It's a good thing we don't let them write the policy.
Yeah, that's a little off track.
Well, actually, it is relevant.
I mean, there's a quote actually in the article there.
That's a topic to discuss, I think.
There's a quote in there of a guy saying he doesn't even care who wins the war.
He just wants to go get his adrenaline thing.
Like, this is all skydiving rather than killing people.
Yeah, I think that actually, it's an overlooked sort of mentality in the military that every once in a while, a general will say something like, you know, shooting people is fun, or, oh, our guys are bored in Iraq.
That's why they want to get to Afghanistan.
And they get criticized fairly quickly for saying that.
You're not supposed to admit it.
But the fact of the matter is, there are a significant number of folks who they like the adventure of it.
And unfortunately, the sort of how promotions work and things like that, there's no incentive really for anyone in the Army to say, oh, we should leave.
And one of the things I found while being in Afghanistan was there was this no sense of urgency at all.
No sense that we'd been there eight years and just the sense, you know, we're going to have years and years more of this, which doesn't really bode well to try to be more efficient or to complete any kind of mission.
Or whatever they're trying to do.
Well, you know, when you mention the Petraeus Kool-Aid about the counterinsurgency and all that, is that basically what, I guess you said the skeptics are there, but they're not the ones calling the shots.
The people calling the shots are basically, they want to do, just pretend to replicate the whole Anbar awakening somehow in Afghanistan.
Is that it?
That's basically the line.
You know, you go into these bases there and the guys will have this sort of, you know, what do they call them, inspirational quotes and whatnot up on the walls of their bases.
And the big thing is this counterinsurgency, you know, separate the population from the enemy, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think what gets missed in all this is that, you know, the counterinsurgency doctrine was sort of forced on the military in Iraq as the best strategy to fulfill a really important mission.
It was the best strategy to fulfill a really bad policy, which was the invasion of Iraq.
Now what's happened in Afghanistan, we've taken counterinsurgency, oh, let's apply it to Afghanistan, a place that we were only supposed to go to get the bad guys and be ready to get out.
So we've now decided to up our nation building significantly.
It is sort of just mission creep in a way.
Like you said, there's no incentive to leave on the part, especially of the higher level officers or whatever.
In most cases, more command and more power for them in their personal career or whatever.
Sure, and you have, you know, we're building a $101 million road in the area of Afghanistan I was in.
We're spending $500,000 per kilometer on other roads, building a $20,000 mosque down the road from the base I was at.
I mean, you go on with these numbers and you realize there is no real incentive to leave.
It's a sort of comfortable system that's been set up.
Well, and also, you know, like when you talk about the best strategy for a bad policy and all that, do you think that the people there know what exactly their policy is?
For example, there's been a lot of coverage, or at least some coverage, about proposals by the Saudis to try to split the Taliban of Afghanistan and of Pakistan away from the Arab, Egyptian, and Saudi friends of Osama and somehow put an end to that conflict.
Then there's others who say, no, we need to split the Taliban in half by Pakistan and Afghan factions.
And then others say, no, we need to split the hardcore Taliban from the people who are just the tag-alongs.
Have any of these policies actually been decided on, or do you know what's going on with that stuff?
Well, certainly the U.S. military leadership will say there is no military solution, which means that they're going to have to negotiate.
And every Afghan official I spoke to said, no matter how many troops you send, it doesn't matter.
We don't even want more troops, really.
What you guys need to do is start negotiating with the Taliban.
So essentially what this escalation is is that we are going to be fighting over the next two years.
It's going to be heavy fighting.
Make no doubt about that.
In the last three months I have shown that.
We're going to be fighting and be in a stronger position to negotiate with the Taliban eventually.
That's what we're fighting for.
Wonderful.
Well, that makes perfect sense, right?
Yeah, of course.
And that's what the surge in Iraq was consolidating Prime Minister Maliki's power.
And so they're in a stronger position to negotiate with the Sunnis.
I think when we actually talk about what's actually happening in language that sort of lays it out clearly rather than the rhetoric that often all these issues get discussed.
I think it puts things in perspective somewhat.
Well, and Afghanistan is not Iraq.
And I don't know that...
Is it even possible really to make a parallel between, say, the minority Sunni insurgents in Iraq and the majority Pashtun insurgents in Afghanistan?
I don't think it is.
And the American general...
A lot of them are smart guys and they'll say, oh, you know, Afghanistan is more complex than Iraq.
They don't really know exactly who they'd have to pay off and what sort of tribal disputes they're going to have to get involved in to kind of secure some sort of peace, which leads me to believe that I don't think that the chance of success for any of this is quite dubious.
The Obama administration's pitch has been, we have more realistic goals than the Bush administration.
But if you actually look at what the Obama administration wants to do, they want to get us into some sort of democracy in Afghanistan still.
They want to transform its economy off of sort of an opium, drug economy to some sort of other economy.
And then they want to go to Pakistan and tell Pakistan, look, yeah, we know you have a long history with your army and ISI and the army and their intelligence service and their connection to these Islamic extremists, but we want you to change your entire culture and start helping us out rather than worrying about India.
And that's fundamentally, we're also now added on this attempt to really fundamentally change the government of Pakistan.
Well, and isn't that an interesting point?
Because on one hand, we're actually also, I mean, we're arming both sides, but there's this whole new nuclear deal with the Indians who are still outside the nonproliferation treaty but got a nuclear deal anyway.
And from what Eric Margulies tells me, the Pakistani military point of view or Pakistani intelligence point of view is that if Pakistan fall into the hands of, or not completely at least, into the hands of a pro-Indian president like Karzai, they have to continue to make sure there's no real monopoly state there because that's their retreating ground in the event of a nuclear war there.
And I think that's critical for us to remember that Pakistan's main foreign policy worry, and almost certainly will always be India, they're not too concerned about the Islamic extremists.
In fact, they're friends with a lot of the Islamic extremists.
And for Americans, it's a sort of strange, common sense thing where if you reverse the situation, if you said to our most conservative members of American society, our right wing, or even left wing, or people who really have strong principles of belief, and if the Pakistani military came over here and said, hey guys, you know, gay rights and Mexico, we'd laugh in their faces and say, what are you guys talking about?
But in fact, we think we can do that to Pakistan if that makes any sense.
Well, I guess, according to your article, you spent at least quite a bit of your time right there near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
In your wildest dreams, could you see maybe sending in some special forces guys or friends of Osama type excuses for the continuation of this occupation?
Because that's the only end game, right?
Is to get Goldstein, and that way you don't have the permanent excuse to stay forever.
Sure, and I think that is the most sensible plan would be to get our guys out and hit these safe havens, the so-called safe havens that they have there.
But I literally was right on the border, spent the night on the border at this Afghan border outpost with the border police, and you could see the Pakistani military checkpoint about a mile or so away.
And what the Afghan captain told me who ran this border post, he said, oh yeah, Pakistan wants to keep us destabilized, Pakistan wants to destroy us, and in fact, Pakistan not only is involved in the attacks on that particular outpost, and I said, okay, maybe he's this Afghan captain, what does he know, etc.
But the people who attacked us must have walked right in front of the Pakistani border outpost.
So there's this, the question of sort of untangling all these alliances and what side people are really on becomes extremely difficult, but near impossible for Americans to get involved in.
And I think it certainly makes more sense to go after people we know or we think we can go after rather than try to reshape tribal areas and things that have never really been governed in this hope to sort of get rid of these base agents.
Well, you know, I don't know exactly what the opinion polls say.
I guess I'd have to imagine that my position of get all forces out yesterday is probably a minority one.
But, you know, when we talk about, well, I guess I brought it up, but the different kind of plans for negotiation of whether to split the Taliban from the Arab Afghans or whatever, those kinds of things, it seems like, you know, just kind of basic common sense, what the average American would favor there is go after Osama and Zawahiri and their, what, couple of dozen friends that are left that are from the actual Middle East and forget the Taliban and then get out of there.
Right, and I think that is what some of the military officials that I've spoken to would agree with, in that what we've found out, especially in Afghanistan, is that, you know, we went over on this justification of this is the best way to fight terrorism, but 98, 99% of the people we fought in both those places, they're not the 9-11 kind of terrorist.
You know, they're local, they're the local militias, warlords, their own militaristic group.
So you end up, you know, we're engaged in all the, like most of the fighting is not with, you know, the guys you mentioned, not with the high-value targets but with the big lie, so to speak, and what I think needs to be talked about more.
Well, what about the drug wars there?
I guess, you know, my baseline is to assume that, wow, America invades a country and all of a sudden there's heroin being produced there and a bunch of money made by who knows who, but I wonder if that's just my cynical imagination or do you know whether there's any kind of American complicity with this giant drug trade I doubt there's much, much real complicity because I don't believe we're that close, we're not close enough to the population to be able to pull off those kinds of things.
I can tell you one story about the drug trade.
I was in Kabul and I went to a wedding there and I met a kid in his 20s and he was introduced to me as, oh, this kid is a drug smuggler and he said, oh yeah, this kid is a drug smuggler and his older siblings in parliament, you know, he's an Afghan government official as this drug smuggler's older sibling and I asked this gentleman, I said, oh, you know, don't the police give you trouble or the Taliban give you trouble?
He said, no, one brother police, one brother Taliban, no trouble at all.
So I think what we have to recognize is that the drug culture there is so ingrained in the society and we can't fight the war on drugs here.
To do it in Afghanistan would be more difficult.
15% of new Afghan police recruits tested positive for drugs and I'm sure that's on the low side, that number.
And even the guys I was with at the border, the Afghan guys were smoking hash while on duty and whatnot.
Well, it's got to be the best hash in the world up there, huh?
Yeah, not a bad place to get high if one was so inclined.
It's a nice location up in the Hindu Kush, that's for sure.
Yeah, in fact, you describe it in the article as a really beautiful scene, right?
All the shooting stars and everything up there at the roof of the world.
There was the shooting stars, there was all the flares, the Americans were shooting to taunt the Taliban to attack.
It is a very scenic, I've always thought, and I say this cynically and in jest, that at least in Afghanistan it's a scenic war, there's beautiful sunsets there.
Yeah, it just looks like Houston or something.
Yeah, Houston with more concrete.
Now, one of the things that you wrote about in your article that was pretty shocking is the kind of reporting that we don't usually hear, not in this kind of detail anyway in real narrative form, but the story of a suicide bombing at what I guess was the gate of the base that you were staying at?
Yeah, yeah.
I got off the phone, I was standing outside this base we were at about eight miles from the border, from the Pakistan border, and it was a beautiful sunny day and all of a sudden there's this loud boom and I see over my shoulder about 75 feet away this plume of smoke comes up.
The kid who was on guard due to the American yells, oh my God, we've been hit by a suicide bomber.
And there was some shooting but what had happened was, and this was sort of a really disturbing thing, was that the suicide bomber had used local Afghan kids, seven and eight year olds, who used to hang out at the base and hang out at the base with the Americans, as cover to walk right up to the gate.
And the kids ran away a few seconds before the suicide bomber detonated.
And luckily no one was actually killed in the suicide bombing attack.
Two Afghan security guards who worked with the Americans were injured quite badly.
But the disturbing, the more disturbing part was afterwards the cleanup.
They had to clean up the suicide bomber because his body had been spread all throughout the base.
And to clean up, literally they call it a police crawl where all the soldiers, all the Americans sort of walk one step by another step trying to pick up different parts of the body and to put it in this sort of plastic bag to bury it.
And what I remembered about this moment was I saw the guy's leg laying near one of the barbed wire fences and on his foot was this nice high top with a yellow stripe.
And later that day when the suicide bomber's remains were buried, they had put his high top on top of his grave about a hundred yards from the base.
About an hour after that a couple guys from the village came over to the grave to pay their respects I guess, looked both ways, then grabbed the guy's high top and left.
Nice.
Well, I guess that doesn't sound too much different than America.
Yeah.
But it's part of a very bleak picture of the country that you paint in the article.
And I guess it really goes to the question of whether the Center for a New American Security's plan for the relocation and the building of a nation has any credibility at all.
Sure.
I think what I'm always fascinated is the human aspect of it and the effects of the violence on the Americans who witness it, on the Afghans who witness it, whether they're children or teenagers or adults.
And yeah, this idea that we are going to buy in to ten more years.
And ten years, he's one of his advisors but who's also a major proponent of counting insurgency.
And he's a really smart guy, but what he's calling for is literally a 25-year commitment to Afghanistan and Pakistan and the region.
So even ten years is a very hopeful estimate.
Well, I don't know.
25 years, I guess there's two directions to go there really, is for the people to live another 25 years in Afghanistan.
And then the other question that's obviously raised there is whether the American Empire can maintain for 25 years in Afghanistan.
It's not like South Korea where we're basically invited or Okinawa or something we're talking about here.
This is the graveyard of empires.
Sure, and I think those questions, I think the economic element is probably our best bet in terms of the connection between the billions of dollars we're spending on Afghanistan and Iraq and how that's affecting our economy.
But I was with an American captain who actually looked out along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and said, I think this is going to be the new DMZ, is what he called it.
This idea that there will be this permanent presence.
Now, will the fighting be that bad for all those years?
I don't know.
But I think that's the radar.
If you're only losing 11 people a month, that seems to be okay.
You get up to 20, 25, 30, 40 Americans a month, then the alarm bells seem to sound.
But, yeah, I don't know what it is about Afghanistan.
I was talking with a friend about this, but there's something, it has this vortex where every empire seems to have a powerful justification to be there at the time.
And then you look back on it years later and you ask, what were we really doing there?
Yeah, well, it's no mystery why it's such a hard land to conquer.
I mean, first of all, I guess you can speak to the geography of the place and what it might be like trying to fight a war up a mountainside.
And then, secondly, as Eric Margulies, you know, much better fun than shooting a foreign occupier to death.
I mean, what else are you going to do on a Saturday?
That's the way they look at the world, you know, and always have.
And when they're not fighting foreign occupiers who for some reason are drawn there, they're fighting each other.
And so it always has been.
It is a very different thing jumping on the machine gun shooting where it would be hard to imagine any American shooting, shooting a machine gun in flip flops if they had the choice.
I mean, but that gets to this point of it's a different culture, different mindset.
And of course, you're going to attack the foreign occupier.
That's what occupations breed.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I think it was Margulies who wrote about and this would have been back in the 80s and the war against the Russians wrote about an Afghan villager who had a mortar on his back and climbed over three mountains over.
You know, it took him a whole week to walk all the way.
And then I guess he got to a place and they had the launcher there to fire this one mortar down at a Russian base and then turn around and walk back again.
And that that's just that's the kind of single minded determination that cannot be overthrown short of hydrogen bombs doesn't sound like to me anyway.
No, and it's true.
And I think we you know, if you go back and read all the Vietnam literature and you substitute Vietnam for Iraq or Afghanistan, it's the same kind of sort of official thinking that that drives our policy.
All the countries are different, but the way we think about these problems has stayed the same.
It's just common sense.
If if a foreigner is same with the Viet Cong or or insurgents in Iraq or in Afghanistan, you have a much greater stake if it's your country.
If you're defining your land, you're going to fight for you.
You'll fight forever, basically, unless like unless, as you said, like there's overwhelming forces, but politically we're not going to use overwhelming force.
So it's this it's that it's that problem of how do you face the guerrilla army?
And the answer usually is, as I think it was an Israeli military historian said, counterinsurgency usually the history of counterinsurgency is usually written by the losers.
And I think I think that's the case unfortunately here.
All right, everybody.
That is Michael Hastings.
And the article at GQ is called Obama's War.
You can find it online at men dot style dot com.
And you have your own Web site somewhere for people to.
I don't.
But if you go to the GQ article, I appreciate all the traffic there.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.