04/29/09 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm very happy to welcome back to the show Patrick Coburn.
He recently won the Orwell Prize for his journalism.
I keep telling you, he's the best western reporter we have in Iraq.
And right now he's on the phone from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
Patrick Coburn, welcome back to the show, sir.
Thank you.
It's very good to talk to you today.
How are things in Kabul?
Today they're fairly quiet.
There was one shooting, but it's fairly quiet here.
Very heavy security everywhere because it was Independence Day yesterday.
And a year ago, the Taliban tried to assassinate the president, Hamid Karzai, during the Independence Day celebration.
So that means that they're really policing at every corner.
So it's a particular clant down this week as compared to how things normally are.
Yeah, I can hardly get back to my hotel this evening.
Somehow they've sealed it off.
I have to have someone to sleep.
Well, I guess before we get into your recent article, can you give us sort of an overview about the relative success of the occupation so far?
How much of the country?
You know, people jokingly say that Hamid Karzai is merely the mayor of Kabul, that he doesn't really rule the country at all.
Is that accurate?
It's pretty well completely accurate.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm in Kabul, and, you know, the road south to Kandahar is really sort of a checkpoint, Taliban checkpoints on it, you know, about 30 miles south of Kabul.
They're sort of mobile checkpoints.
I mean, six or eight Taliban turn up on their motorbikes and establish a checkpoint on the road.
If they find anybody with any connection with the government, any document which shows they're connected with the government, they even look at people's mobile phones and ring some of the numbers.
And it turns out that, you know, one of them is a government ministry.
They kill whoever has the phone.
And the same is true of the road to the east going through the Pakistani border.
And really the only safe road, if I were, or Hamid Karzai were to leave the city, So, yeah, I mean, it is true to say that the government really has its grip is really on Kabul.
There's lots of the country which is contested.
The Taliban are strong in the country areas of southern Afghanistan.
The cities they generally don't hold.
And they're strong in Pashtun areas, the Pashtun ethnic group, but not whether Tajiks or Uzbeks, which is mainly the northern and central Afghanistan.
But, yeah, I mean, Kabul is pretty quiet, but the government's rate only runs sort of maybe 20 miles around the city.
Well, now, your most recent article, I believe it is, at the Independent, is to achieve peace we must break the Taliban support base in Pakistan.
That's what all the people that you've been interviewing there are saying, is that there's really no point in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as all their reinforcements and supplies and financing and weapons and everything are still coming in through Pakistan all the time via the ISI, actually, the Pakistani's intelligence services.
Is that it?
Yeah, I do.
I mean, I think one of the most amazing things about the previous administration, the Bush administration, was they claimed to be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but everybody knew, I mean, every Afghan knew and every Pakistani knew, that the people who kept the Taliban in business was the Pakistani government, was General Musharraf, who was meant to be George Bush's main ally against terrorism.
So we had, really, from 2001 to the present day, this amazing policy that the U.S. was allied, was fighting the Taliban in one country and allied to the main support of the Taliban in another.
And, you know, that's the Afghan, the perception of ordinary Afghans is, yes, exactly that, that the Taliban will never be defeated while they've got bases in Pakistan, while they get support in terms of money and weapons from Pakistan.
And I think that that's probably true.
Well, it sounds pretty Orwellian, speaking of Orwell, but, I mean, do you think that this is deliberate so they can consistently have an enemy to fight in Afghanistan or they just don't have a choice?
They can only deal with the Pakistani military as it is, and the Pakistani military is dependent on having friendly relations with the government next door.
They don't want the Karzai government.
They need the Taliban there.
Yeah, I mean, I think Pakistan sees the Taliban as their one sort of big ally.
They're fighting just like India.
They're a big enemy, becoming powerful in Afghanistan.
I don't think they're going to give up on this.
I mean, they kind of created the Taliban to begin with in the 1990s.
There, the ISI, Pakistani military intelligence, really created it and still support it.
And it's difficult to see that ending.
And you've got this enormous common border between the two countries.
In fact, there isn't a border recognized by Afghanistan because the line, the border, so-called Duran line, was brought up by British officials cutting right through the homeland of the Pashtun ethnic groups.
So there really is no, maybe a geographical border, but there isn't a political one and there isn't an ethnic one or a tribal one.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
That reality, as you describe it, seems just miles away from what the imperial court in Washington, D.C. is talking about.
Because they're saying, well, and there's a few different proposals here, but they talk about splitting the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban from each other.
And they talk about splitting the hardcore from the new recruits who, you know, only joined up in reaction to their family getting bombed or something, and are the new guys.
Do you think that that's a likely scenario, that America's going to be able to...
I'm sure they'll try that, but I just wonder, I doubt if it's going to work.
Also, a lot of Afghans wonder, who are these moderate Taliban?
Do they really exist?
There are probably warlords who are allies of the Taliban and always have been, who might be lured into changing sides if they're given enough money.
But I think it's a bit dubious.
I think it's drawing lessons from Iraq, which is a very different place, and probably the lessons that they think they learned from Iraq really didn't happen.
Well now, I believe my understanding is that Karzai himself is Pashtun, but from here it sort of looks like what we're looking at is really just a civil war with the Uzbeks and Tajiks versus the Pashtun tribes, basically.
And our government sort of just calls the Pashtun tribes the Taliban, but they're basically the ones fighting the occupation.
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
One of the things that's happened was that originally, one Afghan I was talking to today was saying one of the terrible things about Afghanistan is that you still see the same faces.
The Taliban came in at the end of the 90s.
There's a reaction to the warlords, but they don't deal with the warlords.
Then the Taliban get kicked out by their enemies back by the U.S. in 2001, but somehow the same old faces are still there, the same warlords, the same guys who have always been around.
So I think that it isn't just the Pashtun.
What is noticeable here coming back here is that when the Taliban were first kicked out, they're pretty unpopular.
The support for the U.S. has, you know, held up quite a long time, but that's diminishing very much now.
The latest polls show this and anecdotal evidence show this, that there's increasing support for armed action against Western forces here, but this is particularly high, whether it be in casualties caused by the U.S. Air Force.
So, you know, over the last three years the situation has been deteriorating, and over the last year it's been deteriorating quite fast.
Well, all morality aside, do you think as a military mission that it makes sense or is doable for the Obama administration to add another 20,000 troops or what have you and really crank up the war against the Taliban and defeat them, or is that just a pipe dream?
I think they can crank it up, you know.
I think you've got more troops and most of these are going to go into sort of free provinces in the south.
You know, what Afghans tell me is, you know, they think there'll be more fighting, but they don't think there'll be decisive fighting.
They don't think it's going to defeat the Taliban, but they do think there are going to be a lot more casualties, a lot more dead bodies around the place.
You know, any occupation force, yeah, militarily, you know, it's good news in one way from the point of view of the Army that they have more feet on the ground, but also the reaction you cause is also much greater.
If you use air power more, you know, it's infinitely greater because of the very high number of civilian casualties.
Well, and it seems like that's what we're dealing with in Pakistan right now, where especially for the last, I don't know, eight months or so, the last few months of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration, they've been doing more and more airstrikes on the Pakistani side of the border, and I guess there was a raid or two that made it into the public anyway, but it's mostly airstrikes, and now apparently this is just spreading.
The non-government controlled areas of Pakistan are basically getting bigger, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, you know, this use of drones, usually also, I mean, it's pretty clear that they have a pretty, sort of, the U.S., that is, has a pretty big intelligence network there to identify buildings that are going to be attacked, but, you know, they pay, the U.S. pays a pretty heavy political price for that in terms of unpopularity in all the other areas of Pakistan, who, you know, feel that, you know, that letting part of that territory be a free fire zone for a foreign power is something that they really can't accept.
Well, so, when the people that you're talking to in Afghanistan there say, listen, you know, something's got to be done about the Pakistani Taliban, or else, you know, this whole thing, or at least, you know, the Taliban on that side of the Durand Line, whatever you want to call them, or else the war in Afghanistan is pointless, it's a hamster on a wheel.
What is it that they want?
They want to see America expand more violence across the border into Pakistan, or they're talking about negotiations, and they want to see America put pressure on the ISI to cease backing the Taliban.
Well, the Afghans would like, you know, pressure to be put on Pakistan.
They see that much of what's happened to Afghanistan over the last ten years or more has been a responsibility, having bad things that have happened to the responsibility of Pakistan.
They don't want more troops here, because they think that will provoke more violence.
I mean, this isn't just anecdotal evidence, but there was quite a good polling here conducted by the ABC, BBC, and others, and they show an increasing unpopularity of the U.S. and foreign forces here, greater support for armed action against them.
And it doesn't show that the Taliban are popular, but it shows that there's more acceptance of what the Taliban does than there was a few years ago.
All right, now, when was the last time you were in Iraq, Patrick?
Oh, a few weeks ago, yeah.
I can't quite remember, actually.
I think it was six weeks ago.
Well, obviously you're keeping track of the news, and you have contacts inside the country you're talking to and the rest of that, and clearly you have a wide and deep understanding of the situation in the larger context to help all these things make sense to you as the news reports come in.
I wonder if you can give us your analysis of the situation.
I fear, from what it looks like, that basically the deal made between Petraeus and the Sunni insurgency to stop fighting in exchange for money is really falling apart, and it looks more and more like the old civil war is starting back up again.
Tell me that's going too far.
You know, I wish it was.
I mean, the thing is, you know, we had, as you may have seen, more than three big car bombs today, 41 people killed, you know, at the end of last week.
I think we had 150 or 160 people killed over a couple of days.
You know, very high casualties.
I think one thing to bear in mind, you know, a few months ago, the media, television, newspapers in the U.S. and other places were all sort of talking as if peace was breaking out.
You know, this was always pretty exaggerated.
You know, there were bombs going off all the time.
There were assassinations happening all the time.
The government, the Afghan government and the U.S. government, were very keen to pump out good news stories, you know.
You know, suddenly the government announced, you know, we are reopening the things are so good we're reopening the Baghdad Museum, you know.
And then, of course, we discovered that, you know, the prime minister's office had decided to do this as a bit of propaganda.
They hadn't put the guys in the museum, you know, were painting the ceiling all night just to open up a couple of rooms to receive the press.
You have a continual grip, grip, grip of propaganda on how good things have got.
You know, what you can say, yeah, are they better?
If you are in Iraq, are they better?
Sure they're better than the bloodbath we had two or three years ago when we were getting 3,000 dead every month.
But, you know, it's still a pretty violent place.
Now the question is, is everything falling apart?
I'm a little dubious on this.
Yeah, to some extent, you know, the deal between the so-called Awakening Council, that is the Sunni who turned against al-Qaeda, was with the U.S.
It wasn't with the Iraqi government, but the Iraqi government is predominantly sure.
And these guys hate and detest it.
I mean, I was talking to some of them last year, and they were saying what we want is jobs and the priests and so forth.
And I said, well, what do you, you know, what's your attitude to the Iraqi government?
And they said, oh, they're all Iranian spies and so forth.
So it's always peculiar that these guys were looking for jobs with the government, which they barely recognize as legitimate.
Well, I think that, yeah, they will, you know, they're getting, the Sunni are getting more and more arrested.
But at the same time, we really did have a very heavy fighting in 2005-2007 where it really amounted to a Shia-Sunni civil war.
And the Shia won that civil war.
You know, the Sunni are very much on the margins in Baghdad.
So I don't think they can go back to a war against the government as they did a few years ago.
I don't think they've really got the strength to do that.
They might have a go.
But I think it could be, I can't see the scale of fighting that we had a few years ago resuming, which doesn't mean that we aren't going to have a great deal of bloodshed.
Well, now, back in those worst days of that civil war, you and a lot of other real journalists argued that al-Qaeda in Iraq, such as it was, and of course we all know that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn't even start calling himself al-Qaeda until the end, the very end, December 2004, long after the war had been raging.
But, you know, you argued and many other journalists argued that they were the smallest percentage of the Sunni insurgency, that the Sunni insurgency was really run by former Ba'athists and local religious leaders and basically the leaders of the Sunni community, former government officials and so forth, and that al-Qaeda were kind of, you know, the sidekicks who were allowed in, the pilgrims from other places, other countries who would come to fight and be suicide bombers and that kind of thing.
But I wonder, what is the effect of buying off the Awakening Council for what I guess is going on a couple of years now almost, it seems like that leaves al-Qaeda in Iraq, such as it is, as the only game in town for local Iraqis who still want to resist, as opposed to going along with the Awakening Councils.
I wonder whether that strengthened them, or, you know, to what degree does al-Qaeda in Iraq even still exist, or what can you tell me about that?
Well, you know, to some extent it does.
And the Awakening Council and sort of falling apart are very disunited.
They were never sort of single movements.
They were sort of groups in different areas.
And what weakened the Sunni, whether they're al-Qaeda or Awakening Council, is, you know, as I said, they kind of lost out against the Shia.
The Shia are 60% of the population, the Sunni are 20%.
You know, the government is controlled by the Shia.
So they've kind of been weakened.
But, you know, Iraq is such a, you know, differs so much from place to place.
Somebody was saying to me in Baghdad, OK, you know that these Awakening Councils are opposed to al-Qaeda, but he said he thought that no, and this is a guy who was a member of Awakening Council, said I don't think any officer, one of our officers, goes home without, an officer in the Awakening Councils goes home without having arrangements with al-Qaeda, because otherwise it would just be too dangerous.
So there wasn't this great sort of Chinese war dividing them.
Certainly in Baghdad, people would sort of shift backwards and forwards.
And, you know, the danger probably is now that, you know, you've got these big bombs going off in mostly in Shia civilian areas.
Is there going to be a retaliation?
Are the people going to suddenly be dragged out of cars again, you know, and murdered in the streets or driven off somewhere and killed?
That isn't happening yet, but it might.
Well, and there have been attacks by al-Qaeda, or supposedly at least, you know, big bombs going off that have killed leaders of the Awakening Councils, it seems like.
There's a vying for power, and the Awakening Councils are then, I guess they have a deal with the Americans for now, but they're still worried, on one hand, fighting Shiite militias, and, you know, the Iraqi government trying to deal with them, but also being attacked on the other flank by al-Qaeda in Iraq, who basically consider them sellouts to the occupation, right?
Yeah, they're being attacked, you know, by al-Qaeda, as you say, on one side, and they're being attacked by the government, or increasingly attacked by the government on the other.
You know, people who are leaving the Awakening Group suddenly get arrested, thrown in jail, you know, some being killed, and so forth.
And they couldn't sort of kind of reflect the way, you know, the Shia have already taken over the government.
And I'm not sure there's a great deal the Sunni can do about it.
Well, now, we've discussed before, and it would be a good time to get an update here to wrap up the interview, about almost a year ago, you broke the story about the Status of Forces Agreement being negotiated.
It started out, had 58 bases, and a permanent American empire occupation forever.
And over the course of almost a year, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, stood his ground.
And in the end, they didn't go with a continuing U.N. resolution.
They negotiated a final Status of Forces Agreement with the Bush administration that said, get out.
By 2012, we want you out.
And your interpretation of this, as I understand it from reading your writings and what you've said on this show in the past, is that Maliki really means it, that this guy is not just an American puppet who's pretending that the handover of sovereignty we're talking about now is not the same as the bogus handover of sovereignty to, say, Alawi in 2004 or anything like that.
Maliki believes he's in a position that his government is strong enough that it can stand on its own without us, and therefore he really wants us gone.
And, of course, we hear lots in the press about the American generals saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, we're going to find all the loopholes we can, and we're going to figure out how to stay forever anyway.
And I wonder whether you are still of the opinion that Maliki is strong enough or at least believes he is strong enough or will be by 2012 or whatever to really force the American occupation to get out of that country.
I think that Maliki has to keep on proving this, one, because the occupation is unpopular.
Secondly, the polls show that most Iraqis think that their government is still controlled by the U.S., so he has to keep showing independence.
I mean, a few days ago there was a raid, an American raid in a city called Kut on the Taqus River south of Baghdad in which some civilians were killed, and Maliki was making a big fuss over that the Iraqi government hadn't been informed about this.
Then it turned out some Iraqi officers had known about the American action that had occurred without telling the rest of the government, and they immediately got fired.
I think one of them has been arrested.
So Maliki is quite tough in trying to prove that he's independent.
They've got 600,000 people in the security forces there, so he's got quite a lot of assets on his side.
And I think it's pretty clear that the status of forces is going to happen.
This was signed by Bush, and when Obama first came forward with his policy, he kept on referring to the status of forces.
I think it's fairly clear that he doesn't want to be portrayed in future by the right of the man who's filled out a potential victory in Iraq.
He's doing very much what Bush had already signed up for.
Now, will this loophole be found?
I doubt it.
I really don't think that.
The odd thing might change, but I don't think somehow this is going to be pushed to one side.
I think the stuff you occasionally hear from American generals, and actually more frequently from American journalists, is really baloney.
Bush was pulling out for a reason, and so is Obama, but it's not a great place to stay.
So I think that's really going to happen.
Well, I mean, I would think that Bush and Obama both would very much like to stay, if at all possible, and the only thing that would really keep them from staying forever would be the absolute insistence of the government that they've accidentally created there to defy them.
Yeah, but I just think that one of the last years, since 2003, that you stick around in Iraq, something nasty happens to you.
So I think it will be difficult.
From the end of June, the troops are meant to leave the cities.
I think this will generally happen.
Maybe not in Mosul in the north, but this will generally happen.
So I think that what Obama said at the beginning of the year isn't really going to change.
I think the U.S. is going to be out of there militarily.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Coburn.
He is the Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, that's independent.co.uk, and recent recipient of the Orwell Prize for his journalism.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Patrick.
Thanks very much.