07/28/09 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And next guest on the show today is Pepe Escobar.
He writes for the Asia Times.
He's got a book called Globalistan, Red Zone Blues.
And his newest one is Obama Does Globalistan.
And, if I can just page down to the right page here, he's got two new essays at Asia Times Online, part one and two.
Iran and Russia, Scorpions in a Bottle.
And Iran, China, and the New Silk Road.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe.
How are you doing?
How are you doing, Scott?
Thanks for having me.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
And you're on the phone from where today?
I'm in Paris.
There are worse places to be in the world nowadays, I would say.
Well, you do nothing but travel around the world writing these articles.
Is that about right?
More or less, yes.
I was trying to get a visa to Iran for obvious reasons.
They denied it.
And it was not a good idea to go to Kabul and be stuck in Kabul without being able to go anywhere.
You cannot travel in Kabul.
For foreign journalists, it's the thing, you have to stay in Kabul.
And if you travel, you have to travel with the U.S. Army.
And by principle, I don't do that.
I understand.
No embedded status for you, huh?
Definitely not.
Unlike many of my American colleagues.
Okay, so basically, let me tell you this.
The first part of the show today, I talked with Juan Cole.
And basically, we were dissecting all the myth-making about the terrible boogeyman that is the Pashtun tribesmen in the world.
And what a phony excuse they are for occupying the place.
The fact that they resist becomes the excuse for occupying in the first place somehow around in the circle.
And so I was hoping that maybe we could talk about a little bit larger picture of the real motivation for what on its face is such a nonsensical foreign policy in Central Asia.
And of course, apparently, by a lot of the writing that I've read, the name of the game to you here is energy pipelines.
From here, there, to everywhere, I guess from Paris to Tokyo.
Absolutely.
Look, it happens to be the arc of instability drawn by the Pentagon from the Middle East to Central Asia is the map of pipelines basically.
You just have to look at the map.
And you have to backtrack a little bit to the war on terror in 2001.
What was the number one unstated aim of the war on terror?
Was to put the American flag on Central Asia.
And that was the former Soviet sphere of influence.
Then Russia sphere of influence.
But Russia was very weak at the time.
But it all changed for the past seven, eight years.
Especially because of one man, Vladimir Putin.
And that's the guy who turned the whole thing around.
And he struck an alliance with Iran.
And also China was very, very, very clever to see the way the wind was blowing since, in fact, 1999.
When NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
They thought, look, this is not going to stop.
This means the Americans are coming.
So Russia and China, via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and via their different foreign policy strategies, which in terms of preventing American influence in Central Asia, they are very much in tandem.
They are unified.
They start the ball rolling after 9-11.
And obviously the Bush administration, they were always thinking, okay, we have to separate Russia from China.
And you have to separate both from Iran.
What happened in 2009?
Iran, Russia, and China are closer together than ever in the past 10-15 years, I would say.
Now, is that as a direct result of the American policy of pushing them together in an attempt to drive them apart?
Yes.
It was.
It was Russia's and China's reaction to the war on terror framework, in fact.
Which, for them, if you talk to Russian officials, Minister of Foreign Relations, and Chinese scholars in Beijing, they're going to tell you the same thing.
For them, basically, the war on terror framework still stands.
Obama, for them, it's on a test-trial tube.
And this past six months, as far as they are concerned, nothing has changed.
In fact, they are always pointing out, look, there's another war on the map.
Exactly what you were discussing with Juan Cole.
And the framework for extending the war from AFT to PAK is still war on terror.
And it's still trying to drive a wedge between, let's say, China and Pakistan.
And between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It's always a divide-and-rule, British great game, 19th century framework.
And, you know, nothing has changed in Russia for the past six months, when you look at it.
Well, I'm kind of confused, because it seems like the guys at the Pentagon must know that if they establish this network of bases, all of Rumsfeld's lily pads, as he called them, and all of this, you know, from Azerbaijan, or what have you, all the way over into Kyrgyzstan, if that's all true, then they've got to expect that Russia and China are going to react by, you know, healing up their Sino-Soviet split there, so to speak.
And working against this, they just measure that, well, that's part of the cost of doing business.
We could be in a better relationship with Russia right here, but, you know, they've calculated that it's better to get the Russians angry because whatever alliance they make with Iran or China can't be enough to outweigh what they think they're accomplishing by occupying all these countries, right?
It's true, but it's a very fluid situation.
Like, you know, take, for example, the whole pipeline situation in Central Asia.
Basically, until 2006, everything was too fluid, so Putin starts traveling, especially to Turkmenistan a lot, and striking deals with them, saying, look, we're going to buy all your production of gas and oil, but everything has to flow through our system.
The Russian system is basically the old Soviet pipeline system, finished in the 70s.
It's very old, but it's very complex, and it works.
There are some leaks here and there, but basically it still works.
And Gazprom is modernizing little by little.
But the thing is monopoly for Russia.
Look, Turkmenistan was our previous republic.
We're not going to let the Americans take over Turkmenistan.
So oil and gas from Turkmenistan has to go through our system.
Then Turkmenistan discovers huge gas reserves in 2008.
They hire Richard Shrum to do an audit.
They discover that these are the second largest gas reserves in the world.
And they have a new president.
The other guy, the previous guy, the fantastic Sapar Murad Niyazov, died, and his successor was still in the beginning.
But he was clever enough to say, oh, now I'm going to play the U.S. against Russia.
So he started extracting more money from Gazprom to a point where Gazprom was almost desperate.
And at the same time, the Americans are starting going back to Turkmenistan.
First with Dick Cheney, going, I think, at least twice or three times a year.
And now with a new envoy, Richard Morningstar, who's a very able American diplomat.
And they're courting the new Turkmen government to, look, why don't you deviate at least half of your production, your new production, through our pipeline, which is the Nabucco pipeline, which will go from Turkey to Austria.
So these things, they move practically on a weekly basis.
And they change, you know, the whole thing goes upside down from one week to another.
So I imagine, from the Pentagon's perspective, they would never imagine that the Russian counterattack, organized by Putin since 2004, 5 especially, would be of that magnitude.
And what the Obama administration is doing is following what the Pentagon thought in the early 2000s.
But now they are counting with, let's say, a more positive attitude from those very unstable or very repressive regimes of Central Asia towards the U.S.
But this is not a given, not at all.
They are very widely, like Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, he wants to make deals with everybody.
And that includes the U.S., of course, but especially China and Russia.
This new Turkmen guy, Dermadyakov, he wants to do deals with everybody as well, and he wants to do a very profitable deal with Europe.
And this is what the Americans are pushing for.
And Azerbaijan, of course, is more or less an American colony.
But at the same time, they are trying to get a better relationship with Russia under Medvedev, which was a previous Gazprom general director as well.
So Medvedev knows everything about oil and gas and pipelines.
It's no wonder that he was chosen by Putin to be the new prime minister.
So, the new president, actually.
So, you know, the scene moves all the time.
It is a chessboard match.
But now we can say that most of the players, they have a very, very, very strong hand.
And this includes the U.S. as well.
And the U.S. is playing the turkey card very well.
In fact, the discussion is, look, you have to be very strong with Nabucco.
Talk to Iran.
Maybe you can convince Iran to get a deal with you, Turkey.
Turkey is a transit country, in fact.
The pipeline goes to Austria.
And this is what Americans, Europeans want.
Iranian gas going through Turkey, transit to Western Europe, and eventually to the U.S. if the U.S. needs it in the long run.
And Iran, well, sorry, yeah, go ahead.
I read in the article that part of the split between Rasenjani and Mosavi on one side, the so-called pragmatists in the recent election controversy in Iran, are on another side of a business deal somehow from Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
We're talking about one pipeline goes this way, the other pipeline goes that way.
And that has so much to do with the recent controversy over power in Iran.
Is that right?
No, it's slightly different.
In fact, we could say that Rasenjani, Mosavi, the reformists, not really reformists, the conservative pragmatists, they would expect a better relationship with the U.S., and that would include maybe discussing terms for the U.S. big oil and big gas industry to invest in Iran for the Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Khamenei, and Revolutionary Guard faction, which won or did not win the elections or fought the elections.
They are a very, very nationalist faction.
It's out of the picture, at least for, you know, medium term, for them to discuss any kind of collaboration with foreign oil, American foreign oil companies.
They want the Europeans.
Some of the Europeans were there, like Total from France.
Because of American pressure, they're out.
But the void was filled by Gazprom from Russia and the Chinese companies, which are investing massively, billions and billions of dollars these past few months, especially refining Iran, because the refining capacities of the Iranian industry are miserable, in fact.
They haven't been updated since the 70s.
And if the money is not coming, the investment is not coming from Europe, it will come from Asia, from Iran and Russia, in fact.
This is something that the Americans would need to break.
Go ahead.
Well, you say in one of the articles there that the Iranians tried to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is, I guess, this at least pseudo alliance between Russia and China, and they were denied.
Was it the Chinese that said no?
And why?
Yes, it was the Chinese.
Yes, this is also a very complex matter.
The STO was established in 2001, especially by China.
It was basically a partnership between China and Russia with the Central Asian stance as well, as a security and anti-terrorism body.
But they have evolved these past few years, and now they are an economic body as well.
They have an economic council.
They are becoming a sort of mix between NATO and an economic council in Asian terms.
They are observers.
Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia and India, they are all observers.
And Iran, they have applied as early as 2004 as observers, but they have applied officially to join the organization as members.
For China, this is very, very complicated, because China, they are trying to pose as a responsible power.
We've seen the way they repressed the Uyghurs in Urumqi, Xinjiang last month, that sometimes they behave very irresponsibly, and always very repressively, the way they behave against the Tibetans as well.
It's always, you know, they do nothing in the beginning, then they blame the exile, and then they repress big time inside.
Was the CIA or NED involved in that Uyghur uprising at all?
I've got to ask.
Look, we all know that NED is always involved in...
Okay, fomenting subversion sounds like something from Latin America in the 60s, but it's more or less the same thing, in fact.
Helping dissidents, exile groups, journalist organizations, lawyers organizations, all over, including Iran and including Xinjiang.
But what happened in Xinjiang was spontaneous, and it was an economic problem.
It has nothing to do with Sunni Muslims against Confucianist Han Chinese.
No, it's a matter of internal migration.
They are taking Uyghur men from Xinjiang and exporting them as cheap labor to other parts of China, especially eastern provinces and the center provinces.
And there's a massive internal migration of Han Chinese.
If you go to the provinces near Xinjiang, like Gansu province, for instance, or Sichuan, enormous, where Deng Xiaoping was born, it's very easy.
If you read the papers, everybody's offering jobs in Xinjiang with huge salaries, no taxes.
So obviously, they go.
And obviously, who's deprived?
The local Uyghurs.
And the whole thing originated from maltreatment of Uyghurs in one of those eastern provinces as well.
So the Uyghurs who are still living in Xinjiang, they rebelled against it.
Just like the Tibetans last year, it's an economic problem.
Han Chinese are taking over Tibet.
And now with the Beijing-Lhasa train line, it's an enormous migration.
Before that, you need to take a plane to Chengdu in Sichuan, then board another plane to go to Lhasa.
Now it's completely different.
Well, and the whole thing is a larger economic problem in the sense that, I mean, it seems like, on its face at least, maybe there are other competing interests involved here that I'm not perceiving, but it seems like a pretty simple question is, how long can we expect the Chinese to continue to fund an American war on their western border that may or may not have anything to do with, you know, I know Eric Margulies said that at least back in the days before September 11th, that the CIA at least turned a blind eye to some of the Uyghurs training in Afghanistan.
And they were kind of for that Muslim insurgency, the same way they kind of liked the Chechen insurgency against Russia.
Absolutely.
Look, you remember Commander Morsud's prison in the Panjshir Valley before 9-11.
I happened to go to one of these prisons.
I met a lot of Uyghurs over there.
And through translators, of course, they only spoke Uyghur.
They didn't even speak Mandarin.
They were saying that they were trained in Pakistan, in some al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan, and then they were allowed to go back to Xinjiang, but they couldn't do anything in Xinjiang because everything was extremely repressed.
So they preferred to join an international jihad instead of what's not even a jihad, instead of a local fight against the Chinese.
You see, but most of the Uyghurs, they are not jihadist-minded.
They just want better economic opportunities inside Xinjiang.
But this, then comes an element, a very important element, which many Americans will understand, racism.
Han Chinese, in general, they are extremely racist.
They consider Tibetans and Uyghurs as lower people.
And if you go to central China and you want to cross to western China, they always ask you, why do you want to go there?
It's beyond the pale.
And it has been like this for centuries.
Like, you know, the end of the Chinese empire in the Han Chinese mind is at the end of the Chinese wall.
There's no province in the center of China.
Everything west of that is no man's land.
Well, so is the policy then, well, actually, let me ask you about this.
I guess we already covered the stay forever under any excuse, creating more problems there in Afghanistan, Pakistan.
But what's behind Joe Biden's recent, quote-unquote, diatribe, where Hillary Clinton had to, all over the papers, had to come out and say, oh, geez, he didn't quite mean that.
But he went off about Russia and how pathetic they are and how weak they are and how America will not accept any sphere of influence by them anywhere in the world and all these things.
Is he supposed to do that?
Was that according to the script?
Or is this classic crazy Joe Biden saying things he's not supposed to say, but everybody else means it anyway?
Or what's going on with that?
Picking a fight with the Russians.
Classic crazy Joe Biden.
He's getting some money from Khodorkovsky's people or, you know, all those very wealthy oligarchs exiled in Britain.
Because this is ridiculous.
On the contrary, Russia is very, very strong inside Eurasia at the moment, and it's very, very strong because of its relationship with Iran.
They both feel encircled.
They have complementary oil and gas interests.
They both want to sell to Asia and to Europe as well.
And, obviously, they don't want the U.S. in Southwest Asia or in Central Asia.
So it's mutually advantageous for both of us to have a strong relationship.
And the relationship between Russia and China is the same thing.
We don't want the Americas in our neighborhood.
So, obviously, it's a very complex and very sophisticated policy on the part of the Russians.
They are allowing, for instance, transit through their territory to Afghanistan.
But not weapons.
But they know that if they allow this to the Americans, the Americans will be deeper and deeper in deep, deep trouble inside Afghanistan.
Right.
And this is the major question.
This is a way of helping the Americans to dig their own grave.
Yes?
To wrap up the last couple of minutes of the show here, if we gave it all up, would it destroy us, or we'd be saving a lot of money and effort and the oil would all still be for sale anyway?
I wonder.
I wonder.
Because the Pentagon doesn't want to, you know, we have to think always, what's the Pentagon's aim?
It's to plant the flag in Central Asia and never abandon it.
It's still the U.S. military empire of bases, which is closely connected to the pipeline.
Afghanistan has to be pacified for one specific reason.
Build this forever goddamn pipeline from Turkmenistan crossing Afghanistan to Balochistan in Pakistan.
That's the only reason.
Otherwise, Afghanistan is not important to the U.S.
It's important in terms of having forward military bases and outposts very close to Russia and nearly on the border with China.
East Afghanistan, through the Wakan Corridor, goes straight into Xinjiang in China.
So the strategic value is very important.
Otherwise, you know, Afghanistan in itself is not important.
We'll need lots of investment to get minerals, eventually oil, but nobody's able to invest in it.
Nobody's willing or interested in investing that amount of money, billions of dollars, not even the Russians.
All right, everybody, that's Pepe Escobar.
He writes at the Asia Times.
It's atimes.com.
Two recent articles, a two-part essay, really.
Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle, and Iran, China, and the new Silk Road.
And his latest book is called Obama Does Globalistan.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Pepe.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.