For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's time for Pepe Escobar.
He's a journalist based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, writes a column entitled The Roving Eye for the Asia Times Online, and is an analyst and correspondent for the Real News Network.
And, in fact, I'll just finish reading this little Wikipedia entry here.
His Prussian article, Get Osama Now or Else, was published by Asia Times Online two weeks before the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe.
How have you been?
Thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I guess, first of all, let's talk about Iran and this article here.
Oh, I guess this is from today, May 7th, 2010, at the Asia Times.
Time for a nuclear samba.
What does that mean?
Well, it's basically what the Brazilian government is trying to do for the past year or so, in coordination with the BRIC countries, of course.
There was the BRIC country summit in Brazil last month, and they evolved their common...
Wait, wait, wait.
Tell us what a BRIC country is.
Oh, yeah, of course.
This was American economist John O'Neill's prediction that the future counter-power in geopolitics would be the BRIC countries.
Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
It's very interesting, because the Goldman Sachs evolved the concept in 2001.
Nine years later, they would barely...
They could not even conceive the fact that the BRICs nowadays, are actually articulating themselves as a counter-power to U.S., I would say, not hegemonic, but militaristic designs over the planet.
Let's put it this way.
So, the BRICs, they had a summit in Brazil last month.
It was very important, especially because, in terms of coordinating their position on Iran.
This means dialogue, no new sanctions.
We can understand this from the point of view of China, because of the oil, gas, and the energy game involved.
And from the point of Russia, because they sell technology for nuclear reactors, and they sell weapons to Iran.
From Brazil, it's different.
The Lula government, Lula, let's not forget.
I've been following Lula since the 70s.
He started as a metal worker.
He's a man of the people.
He's from the Global South.
He's from the West.
And he's a wonderful negotiator.
So, he was born to negotiate.
He's a very good mediator.
And he understood that maybe there was an opening for somebody from the West, from the Global South, to be the mediator between the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. and European powers, and the developing world, trying to solve the Iranian nuclear dossier.
The Iranians, in the beginning, they thought this would not work.
This past few months, they changed their position radically.
And now we come to the point that when Lula visits Tehran, end of next week, he'll talk to Ahmadinejad.
He might even be received by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, trying to unblock the Iranian nuclear dossier in terms of Brazil mediating between European powers in the U.S. and Iran.
And on behalf, not only of Brazil, but on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement, 118 countries, at the moment, the chair of the Non-Aligned Movement is Egypt.
And everybody's saying the same thing.
Look, we've got to find a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier.
They subscribe to the NPT.
They have a civilian nuclear program.
There's no evidence, even admitted by U.S. intelligence agencies, that they have a military program.
So let's try to find a solution.
The Iranians even agreed to enrich Iran outside of Iran's borders, which for them would be a huge step, because in terms of being a nationalistic regime in Iran, they would never conceive doing this outside of Iran.
They might even explore this possibility when Lula talks to Ahmadinejad.
So in terms of the power of BRIC countries, the Non-Aligned countries, countering what is the wish of, I would say, parts of the U.S. establishment, I'm not sure this is the wish of the Obama administration per se, and this very powerful Israeli mob in the U.S. to attack Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement and the emerging counterpowers are saying, no, the solution is not another Iraq.
The solution is dialogue.
Right, well, and here's the thing, too.
As you said, the American intelligence agencies say there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Everyone who's bothered to look into this knows good and well that the American government and the Israeli government know that they're lying when they pretend that there's some nuclear weapons threat from Iran.
The best that they could do if they had to stick to actual facts is that, well, someday there could be, if they withdrew from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country and declared to the world, yeah, we're making bombs now, try and stop us.
You know, it's a race to see whether America can launch airstrikes before they get a Hiroshima-type bomb put together or something.
Absolutely.
And so they know they're liars.
They know that none of this is about a real nuclear weapons threat.
I guess the question is whether, you know, in terms of whether the U.S. and or Israel would ever tolerate a deal like what you're talking about with the Russians, the Turks, the Brazilians, whatever, being middlemen and trying to work out a deal here, whether they're just, I guess the question is whether they're just simply lying because they want a war, regime change at all costs, or whether maybe they're just so paranoid about Iranian nuclear technology at all that perhaps they would be willing to work out a deal that would accept Iranian uranium enrichment as long as anything above 3.6% was being enriched outside of the country rather than inside.
Look, this is the $1 trillion question for the next few months.
Who wants war?
Okay, let's say the people that subscribe to the full-spectrum dominance Pentagon doctrine, parts of the industrial-military complex.
Let's say the Israeli lobby aligned with AIPAC, the Likudniks, the settler faction in Israel.
These people want war.
And the people, they say that we run constitutional existential threat to Israel, which is absolutely nonsense.
Who wants this war?
Maybe parts of the American corporate media because it sells papers.
You know, at least papers would not flounder completely if they can peddle a war for a few months.
Oh, yeah, TV ads, too.
I'm sorry?
Yeah, TV ads, too.
I mean, that was clearly the interest.
War, as we all know, is very, very good for business.
Who doesn't want war?
The whole developing world.
They're discussing this month in New York City the additional protocol to the NPT.
Brazil and Turkey, for instance, they are adamantly against this additional protocol, which is being more or less imposed by the U.S.
Yeah, well, and this is pretty obvious.
When you mentioned the media there, I guess I've got to jump on the opportunity to point out that, you know, when I think back to 2002, 2003, and all the MSNBC anchors playing with their little toy airplanes, they had like a toy model like G.I.
Joe version of each and every kind of plane in the U.S. Air Force, and they'd sit there playing with them, you know, on air as they're asking the generals what the truth is and stuff in the run-up to the war.
And, you know, they didn't have none of those news people really had their own reason to want to murder Iraqis, but they knew that, boy, more people are watching MSNBC this week than ever before.
Let's bring on more generals and more model airplanes.
Let's sell this thing.
There's money in it.
It's like the Washington Post, their ombudsman said, that the attitude at the Washington Post was, hey, look, we're going to war.
Why even worry about all this contrary stuff?
Because that's the name of the game.
Go along with the state.
That's where the money's at.
You know, these are huge corporations.
They have a TV station here, a newspaper, a magazine over there.
You know, this is just a cog in their whole machine.
So information nowadays, as we all know, is on the net.
So back to the real point here, Pepe, is the U.N.
Security Council has said that Iran may not enrich uranium.
And then, again, Obama, he's seemed to kind of imply that he's willing to accept enrichment up to 3.6 percent, as long as they're not doing the enriching up to 20 percent.
He wanted to make them a deal where, look, you give us your 3.6 percent, U-235, and we'll give you some 20 percent.
And it seemed like the deal broke down because the Iranians said, well, how about we swap?
You give us 20 at the same time we give you our 3.6 percent.
That way we know that you're not just going to have the French steal it from us and never give us our uranium back.
And then the Americans said, nope, you've got to give up all you've got, and then we'll enrich it to 20 percent for your medical reactor.
You can trust us.
And that's where the deal broke down.
Am I right?
Yes, you're totally right.
And, in fact, three countries were considered for the swap, Brazil, Turkey, and Japan.
And Brazil's Lula proposed to the Iranians, look, why don't you try to do it with Turkey?
They are your neighbors, and you have very good relations for the past few years.
Introducing Brazil is too far away is too complicated.
And the Iranians, they also like the Turkish option.
So, you know, they are negotiating developing countries among themselves.
And this is what's startling in terms of geopolitics.
They are totally bypassing the U.N.
Security Council.
Okay, even if Turkey, Brazil, and Lebanon are non-permanent members at the time, but they are discussing among themselves in coordination with an unaligned movement.
So it's a collision.
I don't think it's a soft collision course between the Obama administration, especially Merkel and Sarkozy and Brown up to today in England, and the whole developing world.
Because they say, look, if you subscribe to the NPT, you have a civilian nuclear program.
You are entitled to the provisions of the NPT.
And now we're not even entitled to follow the NPT like Iran is following up to now.
So it's a question that concerns not only Iran, but the whole developing world in terms of civilian nuclear research.
And this brings to the point I was talking before about additional protocol to the NPT.
That forbids even civilian nuclear research.
And the major developing countries like Turkey, Brazil, they're saying, no, this is absolutely unacceptable.
Okay, if we just accept that maybe Netanyahu is a paranoid schizophrenic or something, and he just can't stand the idea of 3.7.
That's his agenda.
Don't forget that.
He may be a clinical case, but with a very clear agenda.
Well, what I'm interested in is why would any American factions, other than just the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and so forth, what interest does any American political faction have in war?
Other than real kind of simple stuff like the media people want to make money.
But obviously this is a terrible risk.
What's it about?
It's not about nukes, Pepe.
What is it about?
You're totally right.
The whole thing is not about nukes.
The whole thing is about full-spectrum dominance and having a beachhead in Iran and controlling an extremely important regional power.
The relationship ever since Khomeini took power has been mega-antagonistic.
They lost their prophet, the Shah.
They need that oil and gas.
They want to be there because they want to prevent the Pentagon, CIA, and most of the West's military intelligence services.
They need to be in Iran to prevent deals between Iran and China, deals between Iran and Russia.
It's still about who's going to rule over Eurasia.
So this is the ideal question to be posed to our friend Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who came up with the whole concept in the 90s.
The United States has to control Eurasia, and for it he has to bypass Russia and China, and it has to be frontally against Iran.
So it's still the same game that has been playing for the past decade.
Well, now let me ask you this.
Different terminology, of course.
Here's the problem I have with that, though, is it seems like it makes sense.
It seems like it's based on some sort of rational interest.
Maybe they don't want to be honest with average Americans about it, but maybe Brzezinski has figured out some real good idea about, or at least plausible theory as to why this land, between Canada and Mexico over here in the North American island, why we ought to dominate all of Eurasia.
It's like the Mackinder thesis or something from 100 years ago.
The Mackinder thesis adapted to Cold War thinking, you bet.
Yeah, but it seems to me like we're doing nothing but just blast trillions of dollars off into space, turn trillions of dollars into the form of high explosives for killing people with.
It seems like the Iranians and the Chinese have never been closer, and it seems like this whole thing is absolutely stupid.
It is, but that's the whole point.
You cannot sell a stupid proposition like that to the whole world, and not even to a great deal of the American people, if they have access to information, if they know the facts, if they know the background, and if they know who the major players are.
Brzezinski is still advising Obama in the shadow.
Would you agree with me then, Pepe, that if I said it doesn't matter who the Iranians sell their oil to, what if they built all their pipelines across Afghanistan straight into China?
Why should I care?
Should I care?
No, of course not.
First of all, because Iran has an energy corridor, as a producer of energy, the natural affinity for them is to trade with Asia, with parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and to sell what they have more to Europe.
And this is what, if you talk to politicians in Brussels, at least those who think beyond their steak frites, they'll tell you, look, we need to deal with Iran badly.
We cannot do it because the Americans won't let us.
We want to be there, we want to upgrade their technology, because they are 30 years behind in many aspects, and we want to buy their oil and gas, because we don't want to be dependent on Gazprom.
But Europeans, as you know, they cannot even organize themselves to rescue one of their own, like they were doing with Greece these past few days.
Can you imagine developing an energy policy that is sound, and that will benefit European Union members?
The whole thing is stupid.
It makes absolutely no sense.
It only profits the war profiteers, of course, the industrial military complex, the parts of the Israeli lobby, the parts of the European elite allied with the American elite, and obviously the logic of the world in chaos.
So we can profit from chaos, because nobody is aligned against us, the elite.
Okay, now, I think I'm up against sort of a conflict of explanations here, but I think maybe we're going to be able to split the difference and kind of work this out here, if I hear you right.
Okay.
Well, now let me see if I can stumble through this in a way that will make sense to you.
Basically, Gareth Porter, who's my very, very favorite.
He doesn't really...
Oh, yeah, he's also one of my very favorites.
Yeah, yeah, good.
Everybody agrees about Gareth Porter.
All right, now, his whole way of looking at this is that, eh, forget about the oil, or at least certainly forget about the oil companies.
This is all about the Pentagon, and that these generals and their job description and their incentive structure, the way it's built, they are a dirty snowball rolling downhill, and there's nothing that can stop them.
And they don't know anything about pipelines.
They don't care about pipelines.
All they know is, hey, I'm in charge of a new base in Kyrgyzstan, and I want to keep it.
Hey, I'm in charge of a division of soldiers in Afghanistan.
I want to go shoot at whoever's shooting at me, and that they basically just, you know, follow their own bullets, whichever direction they're headed, and they just keep going and going without really any rational policy behind it at all, other than expanding their own power and influence, making some money for their military-industrial-complex friends, but that as far as whether the pipeline goes to the port of Karachi or whether it goes to China or whether it goes from Iran or from Turkmenistan or whatever, that, nah, none of that is really what this is about.
And so I just wonder, you know, how you weigh the different considerations here and how important you think these various considerations are in perpetuating a policy which, after all, is killing Afghans and Pakistanis every day for reasons that most Americans can't even put their finger on.
We're not still hunting Ayman al-Zawahiri, I don't think.
You're right.
Look, I agree with, I discussed this with Garrett in 2008 when I was in Washington.
We discussed this extensively.
I agree with him completely.
The only thing that I don't exactly disagree, I think it's about full-spectrum dominance and implied in all this is the conquest of Eurasia or controlling Eurasia or subduing the main Eurasian partners, China and Russia, and also about energy, and especially during the Bush administration.
Maybe there's not so much of an emphasis on energy nowadays with the Obama administration, even though they have one of the best American diplomats, Richard Morningstar, he's Obama's envoy to Central Asia.
He's dealing with Turkmenistan all the time, for instance.
But it's a mix of both, the three of it, in fact.
Full-spectrum dominance, conquest of Eurasia, and access to sources of energy and controlling sources of energy.
For that to happen, they would need regime change in Iran.
They would need a pro-Western government, which would never, by the way, give the US control of the Iranian oil and gas field.
So in other words, what you're saying is that perhaps what you're saying is it's not so much about what Houston wants, it's about the Pentagon's strategy to control the world depends on controlling the energy resources.
It's because everything is intertwined.
Controlling Eurasia means controlling, direct control over sources of energy.
They failed miserably in Iraq, because the best contracts went to Chinese companies and even to Gazprom, and to some Europeans as well, Japanese.
I think only Chevron got a substantial contract in Iraq.
They failed.
So the next best option, in fact the best option around, is Iran.
The only way to get it is through regime change, and they know it's not going to happen.
And if they attack Iran, even the Green Movement, even the Mousavi supporters, they will rally behind the flag.
Iranians, don't forget, Persians especially, they're extremely nationalistic.
They're very proud of their 2,500-year civilization.
And they will know when they are attacked by a foreign power.
And they'll remember what happened to Mossadegh in 1953, which is very much present in Iranians' memories.
Even the new generation, to go to Iran, they talk about Mossadegh like this thing happened yesterday.
And they all tell you, look, the whole wall of mistrust between Iran and the U.S., we have to go back 50 years to explain it.
We didn't have a socialist prime minister.
He was just trying to preserve the gains of Iran in terms of dealing with a foreign oil multinational, which was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company at the time.
You see?
We are facing what was done 50 years ago by the CIA, basically.
It's still the same story.
Well, that's actually where they coined the phrase blowback, was in one of their after-action reports.
So we're going to have some blowback coming down the lines on this one.
Oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't hear what I was talking about.
No, our friend Chalmers Johnson will explain it much better than me.
Right, yeah, exactly.
In fact, by the way, Angela, put down Chalmers Johnson for next week.
He's got a great new article about Japan I want to interview him about.
And now here's the thing, too.
You talk about, you know, they failed in Iraq.
I actually read something maybe two or three weeks ago that said, oh, come on, oil obviously had nothing to do with the Iraq war, because just look at the fact, like you just mentioned.
Everybody except America benefited from the Iraqi oil.
And of course I wasn't able to yell back at the idiot who wrote the thing I was reading, because he wouldn't have been able to hear me, that, yeah, that's just because you lost.
And maybe you should have paid attention to that war going on for seven years there.
But America lost the Iraq war.
And anybody can go to news.antiwar.com right now and read about how the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah Sistani, and might as well call them the Ayatollah Muqtada al-Sadr, they are the winners of the American war in Iraq.
Absolutely.
This is, we could call it the revised Wolfowitz position.
Remember, Wolfowitz was saying that it's not about the oil.
He was saying that in the late 2002, early 2003.
Of course.
They're saying that now because they lost.
They didn't even know how to conduct a war.
They were dominating a country.
I remember Iraq in late 2003, early 2004.
The Americans ruled the place.
But they could not even control a street in Baghdad.
And they were nominally in charge of the whole country, the whole administration, how to remake a country.
It was actually year zero in Baghdad in 2003.
And I remember the Sunni Iraqi insurgents saying, look, they can control the whole thing.
But it was a little bit like a hip-hop image.
Oh, yeah, they control the day, but we control the night.
And look what happened.
They control the night, and they won.
Not the Sunnis, but the Shiites, including Muqtada al-Sadr.
Is there at least the silver lining?
I mean, this is absolutely horrible for the people of Iraq, especially the 51 percent of them that are women under the control of these ayatollahs now.
They're far from better off than they were under Saddam Hussein.
But if there is a silver lining that I can see here, Pepe, it would be that this guy, Muqtada al-Sadr, is about as serious as a man can be about kicking the United States out of his country.
So does that mean that the sofa is actually going to stick and the U.S. is really going to have to leave if he's now the one running that society?
Or that government, anyway?
Look, Muqtada and the Sadrists, they have extremely competent politicians.
I was very impressed.
I was not expecting that.
When I was in Baghdad, last time I was there in 2007, I talked to a lot of Sadrists, and I was very impressed, because they knew exactly what they were doing.
They knew that they had popular support, not only in Baghdad and the Shiite south, but in other parts of Iraq as well, even in some parts of the north.
And the Kurds, more or less, some Kurds, at least, supported them.
And it's a popular thing.
Look, we want our country back.
This is what they were saying years ago, and they were saying it now.
And Muqtada is very clever.
He's studying to become an ayatollah, to be not only a political force, but also a spiritual force.
And he's going to do it.
And if you are a political and spiritual force in a Shiite-dominated society as Iraq, you cannot do no wrong.
You are unquestionable.
And he wants to become a marja, a source of inspiration, which for Shiites, even secular Shiites, is extremely important.
So his political strategy, his spiritual strategy, is faultless.
And the Americans didn't even try to understand why Muqtada was so important.
I remember in 2003, 2004, he was branded just like Hekmatyar or bin Laden, by the Pentagon people.
They didn't even care to study him as a sociological phenomenon, as a political phenomenon.
And now, that's what we're seeing.
He's the kingmaker for the next government, and he's going to be a future leader of Iraq, not only politically, but spiritually as well.
One more thing.
There's a new documentary out where this guy claims that from calculating the telemetry of the Falcons, that he has traced Osama bin Laden to Tehran.
And, of course, a lot of people, I think...
Bullshit.
No.
This is beyond...
I have no words in any language that I speak to express my astonishment.
Well, now tell me, how many different languages do you speak, Pepe?
Five.
Five different languages, and bullshit is the best you can come up with for that?
And bullshit is the best I can come up with.
Okay, so what you're telling me is that you could not be made to believe, ever, that the Ayatollahs in Iran are protecting Osama bin Laden?
Is that what you're telling me?
No, but if you know the basics about Sunni Shiites, about the opposition between Wahhabis and Iranian Shiites, the opposition between the Taliban and Iran, it's cultural, it's sociological, it's political, it's spiritual, it's economic, you name it.
It's absolutely absurd.
What happened, sometime, I would say, punctually, sporadic fashion, is some sectors of Iranian intelligence helping, for instance, an al-Qaeda operative escape from Afghanistan, going to the Middle East and crossing Iranian territory.
Yes, this happened before.
Not many times, but it did.
And the fact that they apprehended one of Osama bin Laden's sons, who was living in a prison near Tehran for a while.
That's also true.
But helping al-Qaeda, or strands of al-Qaeda, or al-Qaeda-affiliated movements, or the Taliban themselves, it's absolutely out of the question.
It's totally absurd.
And by the way, Osama bin Laden is dead, as we all know.
Oh, really?
Well, let's talk about that.
When do you think he died?
Look, everybody thinks...
Like, you know, my sources were from the ISI, which used to track Osama on a, I would say, hourly basis for years.
And then one day they said, look, we lost track of him.
There's nothing, there's no chatter.
We don't know if he's in North Waziristan or South Waziristan.
He could even be in Karachi, for all we know.
He disappeared completely.
He vanished from any sort of detection.
And these are the ISI people who know every single major al-Qaeda operative in the tribal areas and in Afghanistan.
Well, maybe Ahmadinejad is right, and he's at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
In fact, a lot of people in the U.S. could take it seriously.
Well, you know, the thing is about that is...
My friend Eric Margulies says that he believes that Osama bin Laden is still alive, and the reason why is because his ISI sources tell him that they believe that he is.
Oh, so I think Margulies and I were talking to different ISI sources, but at a level.
Like, you know, the people I used to speak to, they are basic, they are some Pashtuns officers.
There are a lot of Pashtuns, middle-ranking officers in the ISI, and they know the tribal areas much better than the people who are in the Islamabad or Rawalpindi all the time.
So these are, I would say, the foot soldiers of ISI.
And we rely on these guys a lot, because they always give us fabulous information.
I'll give an example.
Once, in 2002, in September, October, I was in Kunar.
I was trying to track Osama in Kunar at that time.
I was with two Pakistanis, and we got information that there had been a meeting with Osama, and when I was in Kunar, everybody together in Kunar, plotting the next step.
We found out through local commanders, obviously in a very Pashtun way, you know, lateral way, that this really took place.
It was one week before we actually got there.
So we trust these people.
Well, you know, there's...
Well, I'll go ahead and say, Phil Giraldi said on this show a few interviews back, former CIA officer, that he believes that Osama bin Laden is dead.
In fact, I meant to bring this up since then, because I saw a thing on the BBC.
You know, they had that show, The Conspiracy Files, where really the purpose of the show is to debunk conspiracy theories.
I mean, that's really their bent.
They don't really pretend that it's not.
They do seem to pretty much give whatever theory they're debunking a pretty fair hearing, quite unlike what you would see on, you know, 2020 or something in the United States.
And I don't remember all the particulars, but I think by the end of that BBC show, I was convinced at least that the so-called evidence that the others were citing, saying that he was definitely dead, was not really credible, and my default was that he was possibly still alive.
And I think, you know, Michael Shoyer, you know, there's a lot of things I don't agree with him about and what have you, but one of the things that he points out over and over again is that any time that an al-Qaeda leader has died, they have trumpeted it as loud as they could, and they said, you know, when Mohamed Attef got killed, they said, we lost the great Mohamed Attef, he's a martyr, he's gone to heaven, whatever.
They weren't embarrassed.
They didn't try to keep it a secret.
It was something to celebrate, that he had died in battle heroically, et cetera, and that that's the exact same thing that would happen once Osama bin Laden finally does die.
What do you think about that?
I agree with Michael.
It's possible.
It's like Hollywood.
Nobody really knows.
I consider all the options.
He could be dead.
I said that in jest, of course, that he's dead.
Right, yeah.
Well, but I think it's an important issue.
That's why I followed up on it, because, you know, it's a question.
The guy's been missing for a long time now, right?
And the best intelligence services in the world, they still cannot come up with a plausible scenario, especially the ISI, which used to, I wouldn't say manipulate, but more or less control Osama's every movement inside Afghanistan and in Afghanistan.
And the Iranians as well, because the Iranians in western Afghanistan, they have excellent intelligence, even some parts of eastern Afghanistan as well.
They still don't know.
Plus all the satellite tracking going nowhere.
But it suits everybody that the myth of Osama is alive.
It suits everybody, because, you know, overseas contingency operations, OCO, can go on forever like this.
Sure.
Well, and once he's gone, they can just, you know, build up a PR story about the next Zarqawi or the next Zawahiri or whoever they want.
But, you know, they exist.
Last year was by Tula Massoud.
This year is Hakimullah Massoud, which was not killed, by the way.
He just showed up the other day talking to al-Jazeera.
Look, I'm here.
I'm alive.
Yeah, killed him seven times so far.
Exactly.
Seven times so far.
Just like Hekmatyar.
Hekmatyar, I think, has been killed since 1995, practically every month.
Oh, man.
Well, and, you know, I forgot if it was Jason or Jeremy.
Somebody wrote on the anti-war blog, you know, each time that they've claimed that they killed this guy Massoud, seven different times now, well, they killed somebody.
Exactly.
They killed a middle-ranking, you know, affiliated with Haqqani or a middle-ranking Taliban.
Oh, that's it.
That's the leader.
It doesn't matter because, by the way, the Massoud family is huge.
They can produce a new Massoud Taliban in Pakistan for every day.
You're going to have to exterminate the whole family, actually.
You know, as long as we're over time here and you don't seem like you're in a hurry, let me ask you about the Haqqanis.
Tell me everything you know about the Haqqanis, everything you think the audience should know about the Haqqanis, Pepe.
Look, the Haqqanis, they were very, very active during the jihad in the 1980s.
Then they disappeared from view during the 1990s.
They struck a, I would say, reluctant alliance with the Taliban late in 1999, 2000.
After the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, they resurfaced.
And Haqqani's son, in fact, resurfaced.
Haqqani was, by the time he was probably, what, 50-something, almost 60, he was frail.
So his son took over.
And in terms of Pashtun collective unconscious, let's put it this way, they are very important because they were one of the most important Mujahideen jihadi families during the 1980s.
But they are not as relevant to the 2010s than they were during the 1980s.
So they are living a little bit after their myth, the myth they built 25 years ago.
The most important element, I think, was the radicalization of the Masood clan in the Waziristan.
The Masoods are more or less out of the picture between, I would say, 2001 and 2005 or 2006.
When the states started to be, and NATO started to be much more present in Afghanistan, they radicalized because they said, look, we have to unite with our Pashtun brothers on the other side of this absurd Durand line.
And then they started to be much more present.
And they had a sort of, I would say, gentleman's, or not-so-gentleman's Pashtun-style agreement with some al-Qaeda operatives to set up training camps in the Waziristan.
So the Masood family now is much more relevant than the Haqqani family.
It's just like Hekmatyar.
Hekmatyar, his party nowadays doesn't represent much.
He's living off the fame that he accumulated in the 90s, and obviously the infamous fact that he bombed the Kabul to smithereens when he was fighting against Masood in 1994 and 1995.
So I think we have to pay attention to the Masood family, most of all.
Now, I interviewed one of your colleagues from the Asia Times.
Salim!
Right, Salim Shazad.
Salim, our Karachi man.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm saying his name wrong.
Now, the most important thing that he said on the show, I think, was that he believes that because of all the years of war that have been going on since September 11th, that when the Taliban that escaped to Pakistan basically became so reliant on the few Egyptians and Saudi friends of Osama, the couple of few dozen al-Qaeda, I guess, that escaped Afghanistan, to help run their operations for them, to organize their raids and things like that, that really what's happened over these years is that the Taliban have become very al-Qaeda-ized, as he put it, very much more intertwined with the Arab Afghans than they were even in 2001.
And to hear him tell it, if and when the United States ever leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban absolutely will take the country back over again, and they will let al-Qaeda use it as a safe haven from which to attack the United States, which is, of course, exactly what the American Enterprise Institute wants to hear.
What's your take on that?
I don't agree for two reasons.
The agendas are different.
Al-Qaeda, they want a global emirate, a caliphate, basically.
The Taliban, in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, this is why they converge, both sides of the border, they want to get rid of foreigners in their own land.
In fact, what they want is Pashtunistan.
They want greater Pashtunistan, which should have come to life at the end of the 19th, early 20th century.
The British invented the drone lights to divide Pashtuns on both sides of the border, basically.
This is in their collective unconscious.
If you talk to Pashtuns on both sides of the border, what do you want for your future?
I want to be united with my cousins across the border.
Everybody's going to tell you that.
And they see themselves as a huge tribe, of course, but it's also a huge nation that doesn't exist.
They are like the Kurdish in the Hindu Kush.
So, that's one thing.
The other thing is, in terms of military training, it's true.
The Arab Afghans, they trained the Taliban in Pakistan to be a powerful militia force and very competent at that.
They learned how to do suicide bombing, they learned how to do IEDs, you name it.
They had no idea about that in 2001, for instance.
But this does not mean that supposing the Taliban take over the country, they would take over, if they got back to government, let's put it this way, they would take over 40-50% of Afghanistan.
The north is Dari, the north is Tajik.
They would never accept the Taliban.
The northeast, the same thing.
They would have south of Kabul, between Ghazni and Kandahar, they would have the southeast, Jalalabad, Nangarhar province, they would have the south, Helmand, and they wouldn't have the west, because the west is controlled by Iran, basically.
Ismail Khan is allied with Tehran.
So, they would have, what, 50% of the country.
They wouldn't be able to rule it.
At the time of their peak, don't remember, their peak was in 2000-2001, they controlled 85% of the country.
And still, Massoud, with his ragtag army, the Panjshir, was still manning to hold the Taliban off.
Because the Taliban would never conquer the Panjshir Valley, north in Afghanistan, or northeast Afghanistan.
So, to believe that a few Arab Afghans would manage to control a Taliban government, and have Al-Qaeda bases to attack the west again, this is completely absurd.
It's impossible for political reasons, for religious reasons, even for economic reasons, and for demographic reasons, you name it.
It's out of the question.
So, I agree with Salim, only 50% of all the hostages.
You know, I always think about, if you allow me, we are preaching to the choir, actually.
All of us, you know, N2R.com, plenty of websites in the west, a few websites in Spanish, a few in Europe, or in Asia.
I think people more or less know what we're talking about, but everybody's powerless, in fact.
There's no way this structure of the world system, as our friend Emanuel Wallerstein would say, can be changed in the short run, or even medium term.
So, the feeling of the anger mounts every day, for all of us, I assume.
Yeah, well, that's such an important point, man.
I mean, I'll go ahead and ask you your take on this, the arrest of this Pakistani American for the attempted attack in Times Square.
Oh, my God.
Look, it's fantastic, because I've been reading the U.S. press non-stop for the past three or four days.
Nobody said that this guy is basically a freelance jihadi.
That's what he is.
And this is the profile of the modern, I would say, virtual nomad of jihad.
He was radicalized because of what he thought he saw in Pakistan, if he actually was there for a few months.
If he was in the Waziristan and he saw the drones attacking civilians in Waziristan, obviously he had to be radicalized.
But, you know, he had a normal life in the West.
He was living in the U.S.
He had consumer patterns that are totally Western.
But he felt an affiliation to the so-called virtual ummah, you know, the community of faithful, which nowadays is virtual, and everything happens on the net, and most of it happens in English, not even in Arabic.
So then one day he decided, look, I want to put my mark in all this.
I'm going to Times Square, I'm going to blow up people.
But not because he was affiliated to al-Qaeda, not because he was a convicted jihadi, not because he had studied the Koran back-to-back, or he felt that the Westerners were being aggressive towards infidels.
No.
Because he was living in the West, because he wanted to become a celebrity, that's for sure.
No wonder, if we trust his reaction after the bombing, he was expecting the NYPD or the FBI.
He started talking like crazy.
This is always a narcissistic personality.
There's no question.
And at the same time, he said that, no, I'm going to be doing something for my virtual brothers of the global ummah, whom I know only on the internet.
And I doubt if he was actually trained in a camp in Waziristan.
If you have one week of training in Waziristan, you know how to do an IED, and you know how to build a bomb very, very well, because the trainers are excellent.
And they were trained by al-Qaeda.
And they were very competent.
So I don't buy this idea of being trained in Waziristan.
The fact that the Pakistani army, they're emitting different signals.
Some are saying that he was, some are saying that he aren't.
And the fact that he was the son of an army officer in the Pakistani army is very embarrassing for them.
This also proves that even if you come from an elite in the Afghan area or in the Arab world, and you are not per se politicized, the actions of Western powers, especially the US, in your own land, they can radicalize you to a point that you don't even know what you're doing.
And perhaps he didn't even know what he was doing.
He acted out of narcissism and out of an altruistic spirit at the same time.
So very conflicting emotions in his head.
And he thought he was vindicating his brothers, that he didn't even know.
So it's a very complex phenomenon.
I wish we should study the psychology of Shahzad and not come with these knee-jerk reactions.
This was a crazy guy.
It's much more complicated than that.
Michael Schreier said for years that the vast majority of the Muslim world basically agrees with Osama bin Laden about American foreign policy.
Not about what he says needs to be done about it.
They don't want to join his jihad.
But the idea that, I think the way he puts it, is that the propaganda in America, they like to say, well, this is a twisted, most radical, evil version of Islam.
That's not the real Islam or whatever.
And at the risk of sounding like the war party, Schreier is saying, no, this is not a radical, twisted, evil form of Islam.
This is just Islam.
What's radical here are the individuals who are the first ones who are willing to fight and die over defending what they see as Islamic land.
But their perspective about the situation, in terms of America's support for Mubarak and the Kings Abdullah and whatever, is virtually universal in the Muslim world.
Michael is right, and you're totally right.
There's an enormous difference in the Muslim world between the critique of Western aggressiveness and power and interference in the Arab and Islamic world, and the method chosen by Osama, al-Qaeda, al-Zawiyah, and anybody else to confront it.
The method, their method, is the madness.
It won't accomplish anything.
But their critique is straight on the money for anybody talking the streets of Cairo, in Amman, in Tehran, in Kandahar, in Peshawar.
They'll tell you more or less the same thing.
You're totally right.
And the thing is, it's not a droning aspect of that that's going to solve it.
It would be to confront, for instance, the Pakistani elite, withholding money that would end up in the pockets of 50 families that rule Pakistan.
It's trying to isolate the Pakistani army.
It's not the Pentagon having the Pakistani army in its pocket all the time.
So basically it's a sociological question.
It's an economic question as well.
It's not a military question.
But how you're going to convince the Pentagon, or the U.S. intelligence establishment, or the people who are praying for full-spectrum dominance, or the people who still harbor the Cold War mentality, which Obama himself has denounced over and over again.
You can't.
And that's why we who write about it, we feel so angry.
Because even if our readers and our viewers know it, even if they know what we're talking about, we are still a minority.
All right.
We've got to cut it here.
I've got a million more questions, but that just means I've got to get you back on the show more often and talk about these things.
My pleasure.
As always.
I really appreciate it, Pepe.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times online.
And, man, I'm running late.
We'll be back.
