All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
All right, now on to the Arab Spring, Arab Summer now, with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe.
Thanks, Scott, for having me.
It's a great pleasure.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And let's see, you're the author of Globalistan.
And what's the other one?
I don't even know anymore.
Globalistan came out in early 2009.
But that was a long time ago, right?
Right, yeah, I think I read the first one, not the second one.
Anyway, so welcome to the show.
How's that Libya war going?
Look, Scott, this is the war of acronyms.
I wrote about this, I think, two weeks ago.
Now we have on one side AFRICOM, NATO, and the G7, basically, without Russia, that would be the G8.
And on the other side, we have basically the African Union, AU, and the BRICS countries.
So this is a war conducted by NATO, by the Atlantic Alliance.
And the major opposition party against this NATO alliance and on an American-European war is the emerging economies, basically, plus Africa.
BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
South Africa is also a key member of the African Union.
So that means it's just a last-ditch effort to try to, on behalf of the old powers, to try to seize these resources before the new powers get them?
The thing is, you know, the African Union, they had the initiative that nobody had since day one and since day zero, in fact, before the UN Resolution 973, to go to Tripoli and talk to Gaddafi and say, look, let's try to find a way out of this.
Let's, you know, establish a ceasefire.
We get Tripoli to talk to Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, and we find a peaceful way out without NATO bombing.
And this was spurned by the U.S., by the NATO powers, and by France and England, who started the war in the first place when they were drafting UN Resolution 973.
So this is a war of the Atlanticist alliance, and it's being opposed by the emerging powers and the Africans.
And the Africans themselves, they had a plan to end the war, which has been spurned over and over again for the past three months, in fact.
You know, the African Union has been trying to mediate this conflict for the past three months.
We need unconditional surrender, regime change, that's it, right?
Exactly.
Because the agenda of Africa, NATO, and especially France and England, with the help from the United States, is we only accept regime change.
This is not part of UN Resolution 1973 from the beginning.
And that's the main reason why the BRIC group, apart from South Africa, who got a last-minute phone call from Obama exercising enormous pressure, like the Africans told me, the BRIC, the four core BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, they coordinated their vote at the UN at the time.
They said, no, we're going to abstain from this, we're not going to vote against it, because it's not our interest to pick a fight with NATO and the U.S. at this moment, for a number of reasons.
For instance, Brazil has no presence in the Middle East to speak of.
You know, they are trying to act in the long run as mediators.
Same with India.
Russia, they knew that they would pick a fight with Washington if they vetoed the resolution.
Although they have interest, and they would have many more interest in terms of exploitation of oil and gas via Gazprom in Libya, they said, okay, let's postpone this conflict if there ever is a conflict.
And China, they already had interest in Libya.
They had 30,000 workers in Libya.
They were evacuated in two days with cargo planes from Libya to Xinjiang.
It was an amazing evacuation operation.
They said, okay, we're not going to antagonize the Americas at this moment.
It's not interesting.
Libya is very important for us, but it's not as important as Angola, for instance, which is one of the top three providers of energy for China.
But they, the four of them, they decided, this resolution is absurd.
It's an American Atlanticist NATO conspiracy.
This is not going to solve anything.
It's open-ended.
And it could lead, you know, we could have grounds in the long run for a ground invasion by Western European powers in Libya.
In other words, another colonial, new colonial war.
And on top of it, Germany also aligned with the four BRIC, apart from South Africa, because they knew, the Germans knew that antagonizing a government in Libya that could even be a further partner in terms of energy exploitation would be a total suicide.
So this was part of an internal European war between Germany and France for more influence over Libya.
So this whole thing from the beginning was absurd.
And even if we backtrack and we see how the war was launched, which was basically a defection from the chief of protocol of Gaddafi to France in October 2010, when he got in touch with French intelligence and they organized a sort of white coup, they developed the program, and this started playing out from January to February 2011.
And all the interest that the British and the French wanted to defend further on is they got rid of Gaddafi.
And all the promises that Gaddafi made to the French to buy their Rafales, and then he said, no, I'm not going to buy your French fighters anymore, neither am I going to buy them from the Chinese or the Russians.
And then, after the pressure increased from the Europeans, Gaddafi said, look, if you attack me, I'm going to transfer the energy contracts that I have at the moment to Russian, Indian, and Chinese companies.
So when you add it all up, you see why the alliance U.S.
-NATO, which NATO is basically a weaponized arm of the Pentagon, as we all know, why they needed to go after Libya.
So then we fulfilled the agenda of AFRICOM, launching its first African war, of NATO who wants to turn the Mediterranean into a NATO lake, and getting rid of the dictator we cannot trust, the our bastard that is not totally our bastard, which is Muammar Gaddafi and his family.
But this does not justify a new colonial war, by all means.
Whatever merits Gaddafi has or doesn't have in terms of improving the lives of Libyans, which is something that he did over the past 40 years, if you compare Libya to any sub-Saharan African country.
So, but the war is a giant failure.
It's been months and months, and they don't look like they're any closer to winning.
I mean, there are battles closer and closer to Tripoli, but there doesn't seem to be anything like a force that could invade Tripoli and sack the capital.
I'm still waiting for that lucky JDAM strike that happens to get Gaddafi.
But then, as you said, even then, all it does is open up the door to a full-scale occupation.
You're right, Scott, because you know why nothing is happening at the moment in Libya, if you analyze the past three months?
Because NATO is incapable of winning an air war.
And if you go to Brussels, like I had the dreadful experience of covering NATO in Brussels for a while, during the mid to late 1990s.
So I got in touch with how NATO works and how these corridors of bureaucrats speaking 25 different languages, how do they work or not work in Brussels?
How do they make their decisions or don't make their decisions?
The thing is, they still believe that in 1999 they won the war to topple Milosevic in Yugoslavia, the 78-day bombing of Belgrade and other installations in the former Yugoslavia.
Because of the air war.
And they didn't, because the war was won when the Russians decided that, no, we're not going to support Milosevic anymore.
And then, you know, he had no more external support and the whole thing collapsed.
It's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, everybody.
What's really at stake in Libya?
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
Author of Obama Does Globalistan and 10,000 articles.
He travels all over the world all day long.
That's why I can never get a hold of him because he's reporting from everywhere all the time.
Today he's in Bangkok in Thailand and through the miracle of NSAT&T.
We can talk to him right here in real time from the other side of Earth.
That's pretty cool.
Hey, so when we were going out to break there, you said you were covering NATO, Pepe.
At the end, during the Kosovo War in 1999, Bill Clinton's victory lap after his acquittal in the Senate, he went to slaughter some people based on lies about genocide that wasn't even really happening.
But you say that the Russians basically told Milosevic, that's it, give it up, we're tired of supporting you.
At that point, he gave it up.
And at that point, everybody at NATO headquarters in Brussels all pat each other on the back and said, yay, we did it with our awesome air power.
Exactly.
And this is what they think is going to happen in Afghanistan, where, of course, according to officials, they're winning, and what they think is going to happen in Libya.
And it's completely absurd because NATO now turned into an operational arm of the Pentagon organizing wars in Europe to a global robocop.
So now they have a war in Central Asia, the intersection of Central Asia and South Asia in Afghanistan, and they have a war in Northern Africa.
And they're absolutely incapable of finishing off both wars for a number of reasons.
In Northern Africa, it's impossible because an air war is not going to win against Qaddafi.
Qaddafi, he can morph his army into doing guerrilla war on the ground.
And the only way to win a war against Qaddafi forces, doing guerrilla war against a bunch of guerrillas, in fact, from Eastern Libya, would be to have boots on the ground by NATO and the U.S.
Obviously, public opinion in Europe would be totally against it.
And even public opinion in the U.S. would also be against it in case the Obama administration would say, okay, let's throw our boots on the ground in Libya.
In Afghanistan, which has been falling closer these past three or four days because very, very important developments going on.
Today, for instance, the Taliban, they said that they had killed the brother of Hamid Karzai.
I met this guy before in 2011 when he was running, basically, a drunk ring in Kandahar and was waiting for Hamid Karzai to be parachuted inside Afghanistan to be the next leader of Afghanistan.
This was the time when I had a long interview with Hamid Karzai and it was explained that he was going to be and his family was going to be the next leaders in Afghanistan.
This was ten years ago.
Can you imagine?
What year was that?
That was exactly in October 2001 in Kandahar.
This is when I interviewed his brother and he gave me a very, very long interview talking about how they were going to be back in power.
This was two months before the Karzai government was designated by a direct agreement between the Americans and the Northern Alliance.
In fact, all the Americans bypassing the Northern Alliance and bypassing King Zahir Shah and appointing Hamid Karzai basically as the American puppet government in Afghanistan.
Obviously, the real government in Afghanistan at the time, if he was alive, would have been led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, who was killed two days before 9-11 and in a plot that was organized between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
It was a sort of gift from Al-Qaeda directed to Mullah Omar and the Taliban two days before 9-11.
Now that he's out of the picture, this doesn't mean that the drug, heroin smuggling connection of Hamid Karzai and his brother is smashed.
No.
We know that the man who's in power in Kabul, who the people in Kabul themselves say, look, he's not even the owner of his own throne in the Kabul palace and his connection in Kandahar, his brother, he used to run this enormous drug ring going from Kandahar towards Turkmenistan, towards Central Asia, then to Turkey, and then to Europe, distributing drugs from Afghanistan directly to European countries, especially arriving in Antwerp and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
This is not going to be smashed.
And the Americans know it.
Everybody knows this drug ring is essential to the functioning of the so-called Karzai government in Kabul.
And the Taliban, at the same time, they struck an outstanding coup exactly when the Americans have decided to cut off $800 million from military help from Washington to Islamabad.
And the timing of the whole thing is outstanding.
So we have in three days, you have NATO always saying, OK, we're making progress in Afghanistan.
We're going to win this war eventually.
We have the Americans saying to the Pakistanis, look, we're going to withdraw more than a third of the annual military aid that we've been giving to you, and you've been doing nothing that we want, which is basically more counterterrorism and more counterinsurgency.
We have the Taliban attacking the brother of the puppet leader of the Afghan government, which is in theory supported by the Americans, and saying, look, look who's in charge of the whole country.
It's us.
We can attack anybody we want, the time we want, at our own choosing.
And we control 75% to 80% of Afghanistan, just like we did in 1996 when we took over Kabul.
So it's amazing.
How can you spin this from a Washington point of view?
Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do.
Maybe surge again?
In fact, it's even crazier, Scott, because they have just been spinning that the surge has to keep on going.
Robert Gates has been saying it on the record.
Admiral Mike Mullen has been saying it on the record.
Look, we cannot do a drawdown before the fall of 2012.
The drawdown was supposed to start now in the summer of 2011.
And the Pentagon, even before all these developments of the past two or three days, they were saying, no, we have to keep on.
We cannot draw down 30,000 U.S. troops from here.
We have to keep on having our 100,000-plus U.S. troops plus NATO, because we're fighting the Taliban.
We are winning, but we still have to definitely win.
And we're not definitely winning.
So this is so completely absurd, because it ignores the realities on the ground in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And for this, I really have to backtrack a little bit.
And I don't like to plug anything, but refer your listeners to the book written by my former colleague, slain colleague, Salim Shahzad of Asia Times Online.
He wrote an absolutely outstanding book.
It's a very difficult read, but Americans must read this book to understand what's going on, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, but especially in the tribal areas.
In this book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, written by Salim, he explains in infinite detail.
Like, it would take most people, like, weeks or even months to read the book and decipher all the details inside it.
He explains in a nutshell how Al-Qaeda's strategy was to transfer the war from Afghanistan to the tribal areas, to trap the Americans in a war inside the tribal areas of Pakistan.
And it would be a war between the Pakistani Taliban against the Pakistani army and against the Americans as well.
And meanwhile, this was a diversionist tactic.
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda would be concentrating and exporting its jihadi revolution from the Afpak gumbo to Central Asia and beyond.
And this is exactly what happens, because the Americans, not only they are trapped inside Afghanistan in a war, not against Al-Qaeda, but the Taliban, which is a nationalist resistance movement, as Mullah Omar himself has qualified over and over again.
But they're also trapped in a war against the militants in the tribal areas, but now against the Pakistani army as well, which is doing the war that the Americans should be doing against the Pakistani Taliban.
So the Americans have two strategies.
The counterinsurgent, David Petraeus-style counterterrorism strategy is to go against the Pakistani Taliban inside the tribal areas.
They can't do that, because they don't have local support, they don't have people who speak fluent Pashto, or even Urdu for that matter.
They don't have inside informants inside the tribal areas.
And this is one of the most difficult areas in the bloody world to do any kind of job for any kind of Western agent, for any kind of agency.
And there's also the war in Afghanistan, which is a war against a nationalist rebellion, guerrilla movement, which is being conducted basically by NATO, and it's going absolutely nowhere.
And the proof is that they can kill the brother of the so-called king of Kabul very easily.
And that's what they're doing for the past 24 hours.
They're advertising to the whole world, look, like hip-hop people from Bronx or Brooklyn say, like, we control the night, and we also control the day.
We can do any time, what we want, any time we want.
So, you know, Washington is losing on all fronts.
And there's no possible way you can spin this as a victory, even in terms of a war against the Taliban inside Afghanistan, or a war in the tribal areas against the Pakistani Taliban.
And by the way, what the Pakistani Taliban want is different from what the African Taliban want.
The African Taliban, what they want is to go back to power in Kabul.
The Pakistani Taliban, they want a Pashtunistan.
They want a union of the Pashtuns on both sides of the border in Afghanistan and Pakistan against their central government in Islamabad.
It's a completely different story.
And al-Qaeda has an even different, more different agenda from all these two.
They want to caliphate all over the area.
The Pakistanis, basically, the central government in Islamabad, they want to control all these people inside their own areas, in the tribal areas, and in Afghanistan as a strategic theft doctrine, of Afghanistan being a strategic theft, a reserve against war against India, to counteract India.
So everybody has a different agenda.
And the only ones who are actually winning, if you look at the facts on the ground, are the Afghani Taliban.
Well, and so it seems obvious the way you paint it there, that from the point of view of the empire, the obvious solution is to deal with the Pakistani, pardon me, to deal with the Afghan Taliban right now.
And that will immediately frustrate the plans of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, which is, you know, causing such a problem there.
And which still, as much as they may disagree on some tactics, still are a major base of support for the Afghan Taliban's fight against us, right?
Look, this is what Washington is trying to do.
They are trying to strike some kind of deal with the Afghan Taliban, the historic Taliban, the Mullah Omar historic Taliban faction.
The problem is, what the Taliban will be saying to Washington, or already saying to Washington is, look, we want to go back to 1996, when we controlled 85 to 90% of the country, except for the north and the northeast, the Panjir Valley, the Badakhshan Corridor going to China.
So they control most of Afghanistan at the time.
They want to go back to power.
They want to be in power.
And then they're going to dictate the terms of how to deal with Western powers, U.S. included.
And this, you know, immediately, it's our bridge to the unspoken story in this whole thing, which is once again, pipeline is done, as I have been talking about it for the past 10 years or so.
It's the bloody pipeline.
It's the TAP pipeline, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan TAP pipeline, which may become toppy with India if India joins.
India doesn't want to join because they don't trust the Pakistanis, and they don't know if this pipeline will ever get built.
Anyway, what the Americans always wanted in terms of Afghanistan, apart from having military bases, which they were not thinking about it at the time, I'm talking about the mid-90s, I'm talking about the Clinton administration.
They started dealing with the Taliban when they came to power because they wanted to build a pipeline.
Gas from Turkmenistan crossing Afghanistan and going to Pakistan, arriving in the Arabian Sea, and then it could be distributed to Western markets and global markets.
So we are back after this never-ending war and an immense loss of life, in Afghanistan especially, and in Pakistan as well, to the same situation where the Clinton administration was, I would say, between 1996 and 1997, when we were trying to discuss with the Taliban the terms of the transit agreement of this Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline.
It's absolutely amazing.
It's beyond Kafka, what we're getting.
So we're having a never-ending war to go back to the same situation of what was happening 13, 14 years ago.
And the Taliban are going to say, OK, you can build a pipeline as long as we go back to power, you get rid of Hamid Karzai, your puppet government over here, we are the legitimate resistance movement here in Afghanistan, we are going back to power in Kabul, then we're going to discuss the terms of the pipeline, you build a pipeline, and you pay the transit rights that we demand.
Right, yeah, that's the Americans, even if, you know, politics and there were no Republicans and all that, and none of that mattered, they still, I mean, if America leaves now, then all that means is the civil war starts up again, only now we've given the Northern Alliance a big head start that the Taliban would have to beat back over the course of years probably, right?
Exactly, but the thing is...
There's not going to be enough stability for anyone to build a pipeline there for decades.
Exactly, because the notion itself of building a pipeline in a country that is as fractured as Afghanistan is absolutely out of the question, it's absolute nonsense.
Even, okay, let's suppose the Taliban would go back to power in Kabul, they would have to fight the Iranian influence in the west of Afghanistan, and the Indian influence in Kabul and in the north as well.
The Northern Alliance is very close, and the people in the Northern Alliance who are part of the government, they are very close to India.
And India will never relinquish its own influence in Afghanistan, as much as Iran in the western part of Afghanistan, the region of Herat especially, they built the road from, you know, you can go from Mashhad in the western Iran to Herat in the western Afghanistan in a road built by Iran.
You know, this is just a small example of how important they are at the moment.
And most of the people in the western Afghanistan, they are Shiites as well, they are not even Sunni, so that's why they have a direct political and even religious connection with Iran.
So Iran and India will never accept the Taliban back in power.
China will never accept the Taliban back in power because this would mean the Taliban supporting the Sunni Uyghur separatist movement in Xinjiang in western China as well.
So this is a no-no from the start.
What the Chinese, the Russians, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the SCO, is trying to do is to be the mediator of some sort of political arrangement for Afghanistan.
Instead of having NATO bombs, or NATO trying to impose a neo-colonial settlement over Afghanistan, the SCO, Russia, China, and the Central Asian stance, their proposal is, okay, let's get all the players, including ourselves of course, and including the United States as well, on the table, and we're going to discuss a political arrangement without NATO bombs for the future of Afghanistan.
It's very interesting because when you compare this solution by the SCO, it's very similar to the solution that the African Union and the BRIC countries, Russia and China, part of it, are proposing for Libya as well.
So instead of NATO bombing Libya, instead of NATO bombing Afghanistan, we have emerging economies, the emerging great powers of the future, especially Russia and China, proposing the same sort of political roadmap for both Afghanistan and Libya.
Let's sit down, get all the players on the table, and try to work out a political agreement.
So now the question is, why the US and NATO don't accept a political agreement for both Afghanistan and Libya?
To save face.
Well, this is a very Asian notion, Scott, absolutely.
When you live in Asia, you learn from Chinese, from Thais, from Cambodians, from Koreans, from Japanese, from Singaporeans, the notion of saving face.
And now apparently the West is learning from Asia that you simply cannot abandon a war without nothing, because you have to save your own face.
Well, you know, this is in the Pentagon papers, that the war in Vietnam, at this point, I forget exactly the numbers, but it was something like, is 10% trying to help the South Vietnamese maintain their independence from the North, and it's 10% fighting communism, and it's 80% saving face.
And that was McNamara's statement.
The Secretary of Defense at the time was telling the American people we're winning and everything's going great.
That was what he officially was saying.
Exactly.
You're right.
But the problem is, if you talk to officials in charge of policy in Washington, or in Brussels, in Paris, or in London, they simply don't understand that if you are involved in a war in an intersection of Central Asia and South Asia, and there's a no-win situation, that's exactly what's happening for the US and NATO in Afghanistan.
You have to sit down and organize what the Afghans themselves would call a loyal jirga, a tribal council, including all the superpowers as well, to sit down and find a solution that everybody would save face.
And in Afghanistan, it's possible.
And that's exactly what the STO, which is including the Russians, which learned from the Chinese and from Asians the notion of saving face as well, are supporting.
There is a political solution that has to satisfy everybody.
Not only Afghanistan, but Pakistan, India, China, Russia, and Iran, the key neighbors.
And the Central Asians as well, who don't want to have an Islamic, radical, jihadi-style caliphate, al-Qaeda revolution exported from Afghanistan to their own countries again.
And this is exactly what the Taliban, I'm not saying they will, but they might be tempted to do it, just like they did during the late 1990s.
So there are grounds for a political solution for the Afghan problem.
And this is what the STO has been pressing.
This is what they talked about in their last summit in China.
Very important.
Both India and Pakistan are observers at the STO.
And Afghanistan is now an observer as well.
So the key major players, and Iran is an observer just like Pakistan, so all the key players in the Afghan war, they are observers at the STO, and they are trying to get inside the STO as well.
So supposing in one or two years we have Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan admitted inside the STO, so the Asian body itself would be responsible for finding a political solution for the Afghan quagmire.
And only the U.S. and NATO, they would have to sit down and talk to these people, because these are the locals, and the only solution has to be a local and regional solution.
It cannot be imposed by the U.S. or by Europe.
And yet, wouldn't you agree that unless Ron Paul gets elected president or something like that, this war is going to continue like Leon Panetta and Robert Gates was saying before him, Admiral Mullen, as you mentioned before, that we're not going to begin even pretending that we're leaving here for another three, four years?
No, and probably forever, Scott, in fact.
Because once again, another important flashback, if we go back to the tenets of the Pentagon's full spectrum dominance doctrine, that implies a ring of military bases encircling, or at least keeping in check, both Russia and China.
And these military bases in Afghanistan, they're already there, they're already in place.
But Graham is a huge compound able to monitor everything that is happening from Xinjiang in Western China, to Siberia, to South Russia, to all the Central Asian states, to Western Iran, and to Northern India, and to Northern Pakistan as well.
So we are not going to get rid of these military bases.
So from a Washington standpoint, the only possible solution is a government, the next government in Kabul, that will have some kind of SOFA agreement with Washington, so the military bases will be kept, just like they wanted to do with Iraq.
And it's not going to work, because Iraq doesn't want American bases in Iraq.
Okay, they want a lily pad of bases everywhere, so that they can bomb Iran if they want to.
But if we get in a war with Russia, it's going to be nuclear missiles from submarines, and North Dakota, and whatever, and the end of mankind.
And so what difference does it make if we have a base in Tajikistan or not?
They're not storing nuclear weapons in the stands, are they?
Ready to use against the Russians?
No, exactly.
This is something that we could discuss later on.
NATO wants to make inroads into South America, and the Brazilians have already noticed, and they already said, don't even try to come here to the South Atlantic.
It's close, of course, to Tajikistan, and it's in the underbelly of the former Soviet Union.
So you can monitor everything that's happening, especially in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which are very close neighbors to Afghanistan, and in the southern part of Russia as well.
So, from the point of view of the Pentagon, they simply cannot abandon what they have already established, because of their reaction to 9-11.
And we have to remember that one of the reasons for the U.S. bombing Afghanistan after 9-11 was not only to try to eradicate al-Qaeda, go after Osama bin Laden, but especially to implant the U.S. inside the intersection, the crucial crossroads, historically, between Central Asia and South Asia, which is Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has always been a pawn in superpower games, and once again, it's the same thing.
So now, instead of being, during the Cold War, the U.S. against the Soviet Union, it's the same thing.
It's the U.S. against possible future competitors, Russia and China.
So if we have our military bases in Afghanistan and we can be surveilling at close range, why not?
And yet, it seems to me like it's simply a matter of chess and checkers.
Maybe not, but the Russians, after September 11th, said, oh yeah, you want to build military bases all over Central Asia and fight a long-term war in Afghanistan?
Go right ahead.
And I'm sure that their Zbigniew Brzezinski sent a memo saying, now we're going to give them their own Vietnam.
Because it's not just that Afghanistan is a pawn in these imperial wars going back centuries.
This is where all the empires blow it.
This is where they all go too far and get their back broken on those mountains you were talking about before.
You're absolutely right, but apparently people at the Pentagon, they haven't learned a thing from Alexander the Great, from the British, from the Soviets.
Do you think that Putin was just trying to be nice or that he was actually sitting back saying, excellent, go ahead and invade?
Of course he said it was excellent.
Putin is a chess player.
He knew that Afghanistan, if the West wanted to be in Afghanistan in the long run, Afghanistan would be, you know, it's a reverse of history, of history biting its own tail.
It would be the graveyard of the American empire, just like Afghanistan was, to a certain measure, the graveyard of the Soviet empire.
And I'm absolutely sure that Putin is saying along those lines.
Absolutely sure.
All right, now listen, I've already kept you away over time, so I'm going to keep keeping you over time.
Do you want to talk about Syria or Saudi Arabia, or you were getting at NATO expanding even further into South America under the excuse of cocaine?
I don't know.
Whichever of these topics you'd like to pick up next would be fine with me, sir.
Look, Scott, the thing is, I'll be very frank with you.
I was so dejected by the extent of the Arab counter-revolution organized especially by the House of Saud, with the total support of Washington, of course, and total support of Israel, of course.
And nowadays, especially for the past four months, total support from Qatar.
There is a Saudi Arabian-Qatar very close alliance that didn't exist until last year, because the Emir of Qatar and King Abdullah, they had some bad blood to solve.
They sold their bad blood, and now they're best friends again.
So if you turn to Al-Jazeera nowadays, the way Al-Jazeera covers the Arab spring, now Arab summer, and the counter-revolutions, depending on which country you're talking about, the differences are stark.
If it's a monarchy, and if there's some kind of pro-democracy revolution going on, there's no coverage.
If it's Libya, for instance, or if it's Syria, they are Arab republics run by dictators that the House of Saud doesn't like or has bad blood with.
Then the coverage is non-stop, and they use everything, YouTube videos, people saying they're in the middle of a conflagration when nothing is happening, you name it.
So even Al-Jazeera itself, they lost most of their reputation, and a lot of people in the Arab world are saying that out loud, and in blogs or in comment sections, they're saying, look, Al-Jazeera now they have two different standards that they didn't have until Tahrir Square in February this year in Egypt.
So I was very dejected about this, and then I started going back to my old haunts in Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all that.
But basically what's going on, it's a counter-revolution all over the Arab world mixed with the total desperation of the Atlanticist alliance, NATO and US, in Central Asia as well.
Because as much as they recovered ground in the Arab world from North and Africa to the Middle East, especially because of the House of Saud, which told America, look, we are going to coordinate the counter-revolution, we are the top dogs in the Persian Gulf, you don't interfere here.
And what we want to do in Libya is exactly what you want to do as well, even though you don't know it, which is basically to get rid of Qaddafi and have the Libyan economy be exploited by Saudi Arabian capital, especially Qatari capital, which is already doing it, because they're exporting most of the oil from Syria and Iraq.
So this is one part of the whole equation.
And at the same time in Central Asia, what's in power, the systems that are in power, they discovered, okay, this pro-democracy Arab Spring kind of shit is not going to come over here anyway, and we are protected, so we don't have to worry about it.
But in Afghanistan at the same time, NATO discovered that they couldn't do what they were trying to do in Libya, which is to finish a war in 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, they've been going for 10 years, and they knew that this could go on forever.
And at the same time, there was a counter-punch, not a counter-revolution from the Taliban, who saw the opening, because they saw that NATO was more or less, okay, what are we going to do next?
And now they recover terrain, they recover the PR war with the killing of the brother of Karzai, now they are on top of the whole thing, and they know that they have a shot of trying to recover most of Afghanistan that they lost for these past few years, and go back to the situation in 1996.
So in terms of a regression, political regression all over, we have a political regression in Central Asia, and we have a political regression from Northern Africa to the Persian Gulf as well.
So if you try to look at the whole picture, in what the Pentagon calls the arc of instability, from the Maghreb, Northern Africa, through Middle East, the Persian Gulf, into Central Asia, it's disheartening, and it's a very, very sad situation.
It makes you want to give up everything and go to a beach in Thailand and forget about politics.
Well, I can understand that.
You know, Murray Rothbard always said, short-term pessimism and long-term optimism together are the best way to look at the way the world works in these large questions.
I mean, on one hand, you're right, things look very grim right now, but on the other hand, there's no putting this genie back in the bottle, this Arab Spring is going to go on for years and years, Pepe.
Exactly, it's going to go on for years and years, and you're totally right that we have to keep the long-term perspective, and the long-term perspective would be what's going to happen in the elections in Egypt.
Depending on what happens, if the elections are not hijacked by Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Mohammed ElBaradei, for instance, or eternal opportunist Amir Moussa, the former Secretary General of the Arab League, if we have the new generation who was in Tahrir Square organizing themselves, something that they haven't done for the past five months, maybe they didn't have the wit, maybe they didn't have the organizational force to do it, but if they get together and they have political parties that can channel the anger, the grief, and the distress of the majority of the Egyptian population, and they win at the polls in the Egyptian elections, then we're going to have, I would say, the beginning of a new Middle East, and the first actual fruits of the beginning of the Arab Spring.
If the beginning of the revolution, I would say, is hijacked by these conservative or opportunist powers, then I would really say that the outlook is grimmer than it is at the moment, in fact.
And it all depends on Egypt, so we have to be very much aware, and we have to support what the people in Egypt, especially the young, connected people in Egypt, are trying to do.
And in fact, it would be great if we had political organizers from Europe, from the US, from Latin America, going to Egypt to help these people to set up political parties, and how to rebuild our civil society from zero.
It was completely destroyed by Sadat and Mubarak over 30 years.
Because the whole future, I would say, of democracy in this arc, from Northern Africa, Persian Gulf, to Central Asia, depends on Egypt becoming a real democratic country.
So I think the forces of all, you know, the willpower in a Nietzschean sense of all the progressive forces in the whole world at the moment will have to be focused on Egypt.
Yeah, well, for people who kind of just get a little bit of a taste of what's going on over there on TV news every once in a while or something, they see that the media, at least when the Egyptian revolution was brand new, was on the side of the wonderful people there, even though Hillary Clinton wasn't until it was too late for her good family friend Hosni Mubarak.
But TV basically had it, they couldn't deny, hey look, these are the people of Egypt, and wow, they don't look like terrorists at all, they look just like that guy in your neighborhood, and look, they just want to be free, how heroic, they couldn't deny that narrative.
And then, you know, the war in Libya, it's, you know, Barack Obama swooping in like Superman, even if it's not working out that well, he's trying to save civilians and save the protesters against the evil dictator.
That narrative has power on TV here in America, I'm sure you're well aware.
I was wondering if maybe we could spend the last few minutes here talking a little bit about Bahrain and about American support for maybe Saleh, up until now anyway, in Yemen, and, you know, what it's like for the Arab Spring, for the revolutionaries on the other side of dictatorships, you know, backed by the United States.
Now, Mubarak had all the support in the world, but his army just wouldn't massacre the people like he wanted, but in Bahrain and in Yemen, it hasn't been that easy.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
In fact, we can make a comparison of Obama swooping like the angel of history, you know, like if you're re-reading Walter Benjamin's wonderful text about the angel of history, protecting history, and conducting history.
Swooping over, Libya said, well, I'm going to defend you from the possible massacre that the Qaddafi forces are going to unleash over you.
We didn't know if it would be a possible massacre.
It would be some kind of repression, internal repression, like we have, like, you know, in Myanmar, it's even worse.
Myanmar is a huge gulag.
You know, it has been a gulag for the past 30 years, and the international community, you know, between commas, never did anything to alter the situation in Myanmar.
Uzbekistan, in many aspects, is also a gulag as well.
Islam Karimov is one of the most disgusting dictators in modern history, comparable to Saddam Hussein, it's not worse.
Nobody does anything about Uzbekistan.
And in Bahrain, the repression, maybe, the number of people that were killed, maybe you cannot equate to the number of people that might have been killed by Qaddafi forces in Libya.
Don't forget that Amnesty International, they have been in Libya for three months, and they said, conclusively, in a report released a few weeks ago, that there's no evidence there's been any kind of massacre anywhere in Libya conducted by Qaddafi force.
In Bahrain, on the other hand, there was not a massacre.
They were clever enough, with the assistance of Saudi Arabian intelligence, of a few Jordanian intelligence agencies who work inside the Bahrain repression machine, to kill only a few people, let's say in the dozens, or maybe less than a hundred, instead of being in the high hundreds or the low thousands.
They destroyed the symbol of the democratic movement, which is the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, which has been there for the past 20-25 years.
The first thing that you arrive in Manama after you take the airport and the highway is the Pearl Roundabout.
It's one of the civic centers of a place that doesn't have much of civic life, of civil society acting.
So they were clever enough to go, not only in Manama, but inside Bahrain, in the small Shiite villages, and arrest people, beat up people, invade hospitals, sequestering doctors and all that.
Everything is documented.
The people who are inside Bahrain, they have been sending emails and YouTube videos all over the world.
I received thousands of messages from these people with documented abuses by the Bahrain state repression machine, based on the Saudi Arabian state repression machine.
And obviously the U.S. did absolutely nothing to condemn this on the world stage.
The Europeans did nothing to condemn this on the world stage.
It doesn't matter how many reports you have from Bahraini voices, and even Sunni Bahrainis who are part of the pro-democracy movement, nothing was done to help them.
And of course, because the U.S. and the House of Saud made a deal.
The House of Saud takes care of the Persian Gulf.
They are the top dog.
They are the leader of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is basically now the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club.
I'm sorry Pepe, we're all out of time now.
We gotta go.
But I can't thank you enough for your time on the show today.
I'm sorry it's being so bleak, Scott.
Oh no, hey man, it's worthwhile.
It's good.
Have a good rest of your day out there, man.
Pepe Escobar from Asia Times, everybody.
You too, Scott.
Thanks very much.
