Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Getting the heroic Patrick Coburn on the phone.
He's the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, of course, in London.
That's independent.co.uk.
He's the author of quite a few books about the Middle East, the most recent of which is Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Future of Iraq.
And I highly recommend you read that book if you want to understand what's going on in Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Fine, thank you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And the reason I call Patrick heroic is not just because I like his journalism.
It's because he really does go to the world's most dangerous places by himself to do this reporting.
And it's really some of the best insight that you can find from a Westerner about what's going on with American and British policy, for that matter, in the Middle East.
And so I really mean that.
Now, there's a couple of articles I issue here.
History is repeating itself in Afghanistan and dying of starvation at The Independent.
I want to start with the latter there.
You are writing here in The Independent about your recent time in Kabul and the starving and the dying on the streets of Kabul, which is, I would think, the most occupied, westernized, Western aid-funded city in all of Afghanistan.
And you describe the conditions there as absolutely horrific, Patrick.
Yes, it seems to be one of the most astonishing and horrific things about Afghanistan.
There are about 30 million people in Afghanistan, and half of them earn under $43 a month.
Many of them are on the edge of starvation or maybe on the wrong side of that edge.
And the U.S., according to President Obama, is spending $113 billion a year in this country.
And aside from other aid money, and yet, from the Afghan point of view, what good is it doing them if there is their children starving in the streets?
Well, what's happening to all the money?
Well, a lot of the money gets spent on the military.
Then you get money that goes supposedly on aid, and it sort of disappears.
What happens is, for instance, in a number of different ways, some of it never leaves the U.S.
It goes on consultants there.
Then you might have a big U.S. company, which has got a contract from the donors, let's say USAID or somebody, but they don't actually go and do the contract, build a school or a hospital themselves, because it's too dangerous for them to do that.
So then it goes to another company, an Afghan company.
It might be a foreign company, but let's say it's an Afghan company.
Ultimately, the kind of shadowy who own that Afghan company, usually when people find out it turns out somebody connected with the Karzai government, some minister, a relative of a minister, a powerful local governor or his relatives.
But they don't build that school either.
Then they pass it on to another company, and usually about the fourth or fifth company down the line is actually in charge of building a hospital or something like that.
But by then, half, two-thirds of the money has already disappeared.
So if that hospital gets built at all, maybe the walls don't stand up too well, or maybe the roof isn't too good at keeping out rain.
So when you're walking down the street in Kabul, how bad is it?
Worse than L.A.?
No, L.A.
I mean, if you're walking down the street in the center, you look up on the, Kabul is surrounded by mountains.
I mean, mountains have intruded into the city, and you see housing creeping up the mountains.
And this is people who can't get houses.
Often people are living, you know, eight, ten to a room.
Afghans have big houses, big families.
Housing is very expensive, and they go and build houses usually on government land, usually without permission.
And these sort of houses are creeping up the mountainside like, you know, favelas, like hilltop slums in Rio.
But they don't have electricity.
They don't have running water.
They don't have any roads.
And that's where you see the poorest people.
But that's a big chunk of the population, even a place like Kabul, which is better off than the other cities.
Well, there was some report.
I'm sorry I don't have the footnote on me, but it came out recently that had it where Afghanistan is the most corrupt country in the world, even more corrupt than the United States, I guess, which seems impossible.
I think it's a Berlin-based organization that does these massive surveys on corrupt states.
Yeah, it studied 178 states, and Afghanistan was the third most corrupt.
I think the others were places like Somalia.
I can't quite remember where the other was.
But it is, I mean, nothing gets done without a bribe.
And, of course, again, this is not sort of – this is – when you have a system that only works through bribery, the people who suffer most are the people who don't have the money to pay a bribe.
These surveys are sort of Afghan farmers, you know, and the poorest of the poor.
It shows that the worst things in their lives are partly insecurity, but sometimes even ahead of that is the necessity of paying a bribe to get absolutely anything.
Well, and also you portray in your article that maybe even the people who mean well among the NGOs and aid distributors, perhaps even State Department people, that they can't do anything right anyway.
You talk about a giant school that was equipped with computers in – or maybe more than one, I guess here, I'm reading plurals – in districts where there is no electric power or fresh water for all I know, even kids, to attend them.
Yeah, you know, it's kind of – I mean, some aid people I was talking to said, look, you can't really do this kind of development aid in the middle of a war.
And remember, too, you know, if the U.S. is sort of – Army is – you know, military commanders have funds at their disposal to build bridges, to build schools, things like that.
But then that school is labeled as an American school.
So parents are frightened of sending their children there because maybe it's going to attack, because it's an American entity.
I mean, all this money is spent for amazingly little benefit to ordinary Afghans.
All right.
All right.
Well, now, so I wonder if you could comment on the effect that the drug war has on the famine in Afghanistan.
I mean, they've had a problem for a long time with famine there, I guess, not least of all due to the perpetual state of warfare in that society.
But it seems like with the drug wars it just makes the heroin, the opium products more expensive and therefore creates the incentive for people to grow that instead of food and that that would have a disastrous effect, you know, on the supply of homegrown crops in that country for people to eat.
Yeah.
I mean, it's – you know, you've got small farmers.
They don't have much land.
They're often in hock to moneylenders.
You know, the only way they can really make decent money is by growing opium poppies and selling the product on to the dealers and then that goes to the laboratories that turn it into heroin.
But I mean, that's – I mean, the only people who actually did anything about the drugs, opium, was the Taliban in 2001.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Let's leave it right there.
We'll come back to the Taliban and the drug war with Patrick Coburn from The Independent, author of Muqtada, and a great many important articles.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm reading $52 billion of American aid and still Afghans are dying of starvation.
And I also have here history repeating itself in Afghanistan.
One's reporting, one's an opinion piece.
Both are at independent.co.uk and by our guest Patrick Coburn, author of the book Muqtada.
And you were saying right when the music so rudely interrupted us there, Patrick, that the Taliban were the last ones to actually do anything about the heroin trade in that country.
I guess I sort of have to assume without really knowing that the intelligence agencies of the West, particularly the CIA and, for all I know, the military types, are up to their eyeballs in the heroin trade there as well.
But that's just because that's the Golden Crescent.
That's what that land is for, right, is the heroin trade.
That's tens of billions, maybe more, in black market liquid money vital to the world economy every year.
The CIA's got to be involved in all this, right?
No?
I don't know.
I mean, it's sort of – well, you know, what happened was that the Taliban, first of all, Omar said that you couldn't sell it to Muslims.
Then just before, in 2000, just the year before they fell, he put out a statement saying it was forbidden for everybody.
Then they started sort of plowing it up.
I was outside Kandahar just after the fall of the Taliban.
I was talking to farmers, and they were telling me as soon as the first bombing started against the Taliban, they started raking up all the cauliflowers and seedlings that they'd planted and putting down opium poppies on the grounds they thought the Taliban was going to fall, and even if they didn't, they'd have a place to think about it.
But the farmers were telling me at that stage, and I think it's still true, that they can make good money on this.
They can get credit on this.
They can pay off the moneylenders.
So there's a big incentive to plant this stuff.
Then it goes.
I mean, there are all sorts of ways you can get it out of the country, and pretty well everybody's sort of involved in this, in the government, the police chiefs and so forth.
After nine years of occupation, I mean, there's been plenty of stories about soldiers ordered to turn a blind eye because, hey, these are the locals we're trying to win over.
Let them grow their poppies or whatever.
But what about the intelligence agencies?
I mean, I guess at one point about a year ago, the CIA leaked a story to the New York Times accusing Karzai's brother of being a heroin dealer, which is undoubtedly true.
So what about my assumption that they must be heroin dealers too?
It's been almost a decade.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I mean, I don't know any evidence of that.
What tends to happen is, you know, that Karzai's brother, they say somebody's a heroin dealer in the drugs trade.
Yeah, that's probably true.
But then, you know, they've also got relationships with this guy.
You know, this guy sort of rents them land for an airport, you know, for bases and so forth.
So once you start dealing with the Afghan government, you're also dipping your finger into the drugs trade as well.
Right, yeah, it's kind of unavoidable.
It's just throughout the entire society, they're one way or the other backing one side or the other.
Well, you know, it's not every Afghan, but it's any Afghan, you know, in authority.
Well, you're a police chief on the border, and you're paid to let these shipments through, or your guys are protecting convoys.
You know, there's money there, and there's a network of militias of police and everybody else bringing the drugs out, particularly up to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
It's not something that would be easy to eliminate, and it's something that has its tentacles everywhere.
Right.
Well, now, there's been a couple of stories lately about Russia coming in with the United States.
At least part of the story was in drug raids, which I guess Russia does have an interest in trying to limit the amount of heroin traffic into their country.
But there was some more discussion about maybe bringing in Russian troops to help with the occupation of Afghanistan.
I don't think they were going that far.
I think the media got excited at the idea that the Russians were going to be involved in Afghanistan again.
You know, there wasn't much the Russians could do about it then or now.
The Russians are probably worried about the amount of drugs that come into Russia from Afghanistan, the spread of drug-taking in Russia.
And also, it's sort of places like Tajikistan, the government tends to be on the take, they tend to be involved in this drugs business.
Well, what does that say to the average Afghan about the American occupation, if we're willing to bring the Russians back into their country to any extent?
It seems like pretty bad PR for the counterinsurgency doctrine here.
Well, yeah, I don't think so.
You know, ordinary Afghans, I don't think that concerns them too much.
I mean, they tend to see more and more U.S. presence as being a sort of foreign occupation.
I mean, the Soviet presence from 1979, when they first came in, they were sort of hated immediately.
This wasn't true of the U.S. in 2001.
It's been a gradual, incremental business with the failure to provide security, the failure to establish any sort of justice system, the return of the old warlords allied to the U.S. and NATO.
But it's been a sort of gradual process.
It's only really since 2006, and particularly over the last year, that I've noticed that Afghans more and more talk about the U.S. presence as being an occupation, very much like the Russian occupation, and in some ways worse.
They keep saying, oh, at least the Russians built something.
But it's been a sort of incremental thing.
It didn't happen from the beginning.
Well, that's interesting because, you know, the president and General Petraeus, they say that, you know, in this last year in particular, that they're doing what it takes to finally win this war and to beat the Taliban back.
And you're saying that that's turning, perhaps, is there a correlation, I guess I should ask, between that and the attitude of the Afghan people, as you just described it?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, anything like this, you know, you've got a heavily armed foreign force there with artillery, with tanks, with aircraft.
As soon as they sort of move into an area, and Afghans have a lot of experience of this, they know there's going to be more fighting, there's going to be more violence.
I mean, what I find extraordinary is that, you know, this is all happening under General Petraeus, who was the advocate of counterinsurgency when he said, you know, counterinsurgency is 80 percent politics and only 20 percent military action.
What's happening at the moment is sort of about 90 percent military action and about 10 percent politics.
So it's very much like, you know, the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s.
You know, what is U.S. policy?
It's basically to eliminate the Taliban as a military force.
There's a military policy there.
There isn't really a political approach.
Well, and it seems like Petraeus has undone some of the things that McChrystal was trying to do in terms of toning down the war against everyone and focusing the war more on, I guess, Delta Force night raids on targeted individuals, not that they always got the right guy or anything, but that was a change, wasn't it, from the previous generals who were more indiscriminate in who they were targeting, no?
Yeah.
I mean, this sort of keeps on being produced as evidence that the U.S. is getting somewhere, these night raids on mid-level Taliban commanders.
You know, they kill a lot of people.
That's probably, you know, does it have an effect?
Well, you know, I don't suppose the Taliban like it much.
On the other hand, as you say, a lot of innocent people get killed, and it frightens the general population, you know.
Although, you know, one is always causal, is very discredited.
You know, a lot of what he says to foreign diplomats and leaders about, you know, the Afghans really don't like these night raids and he wants them stopped.
You know, it's true.
A lot of these things he says he does represent Afghan opinion.
It's rather extraordinary that the U.S. and NATO, that they keep on trumpeting how Karzai is the elected representative of the Afghan people.
Now, that's a bit dubious because every election has been more fraudulent than the last.
Right.
But then when he actually says something which actually does represent Afghan opinion, they completely ignore him.
You know, so the Karzai, what he's been saying is, you know, Afghans don't want, don't like the night raids.
They don't want these airstrikes.
And I'm a bit dubious about opinion polls taken in Afghanistan because of the violence.
I'm not sure people answer honestly, but there was one taken by ABC television in combination with the BBC and German television recently.
And it showed in the southern provinces where they're most fighting over the last year.
The proportion of the population who would say to pollsters that they were in favor of armed attacks on the Americans had tripled from 12 to 40 percent.
You know, maybe the real figure is higher.
It's very interesting that where they're moving in more troops, that the hostility of the Afghans and the approval ratings for attacks on those troops has shot up.
It's more than tripled in one year.
I think this is a very significant fact.
Well, I don't know.
I guess I wasn't alive in Vietnam to know the parallel here, but it seems like Petraeus has got to be noticing that this isn't working, that it's all counterproductive, that rather than clear holding and building and creating an Afghan government in a box that the people there want or whatever, that all this escalation is simply making matters worse.
Is that what they want?
It seems like he repudiated the 2014 deadline that replaced the 2011 deadline for the beginning of the end of this thing.
It sounds like they just want war forever.
I wonder whether it's just stupidity or the plan.
Well, I think armies are like that.
Most generals in history will say, give me another 10,000 troops and I'll hand you a victory.
Generals have been saying that since the time of the Romans.
Also, you and I and a lot of the rest of the world may be against a war going on, but armies have a certain investment in wars going on, small wars.
They can get their good budgets.
That's the business they're in.
So it's not entirely against their interest for this war to continue.
Indeed.
And it's amazing, too, isn't it?
I don't know.
Maybe you can tell me how it is in the United Kingdom, but here in America when they repudiated the 2011 deadline for the beginning of the end and replaced it with a 2014 deadline for the beginning of the end and then repudiated that, nobody even cared.
They didn't even make TV.
I mean, this war is not even an issue.
The fact that they're renouncing the beginning of the end of it ever isn't even an issue in the media here.
Yeah, it's funny.
I mean, you'd know more about that than I do.
But, you know, there are 700 dead allies, U.S. and allies, foreign troops this year.
You know, it's creeping up.
The year which the Russians, the Soviet Union, lost the most troops was 1984.
They lost 2,000 troops.
The U.S. and allies, you know, it's only a third of that, but it's creeping up towards the same total, and, you know, the conflict is getting more and more intense.
It really is escalating.
All right.
Well, listen, it's always bad news, but I do appreciate your insight on this show, as always, Patrick.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's the heroic Patrick Cockburn from TheIndependent.co.uk.
The book is Muqtada, and it's extremely valuable.
