All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and it's Bob Perry time again.
Y'all know Robert Perry keeps the website ConsortiumNews.com and is an investigative reporter, won the George Polk Award for national reporting back in 84 for his work with the Associated Press on the Iran-Contra story and uncovered Oliver North's involvement in it as a Washington-based correspondent for Newsweek.
As I was telling y'all before the break, he's got the goods on the Republicans going back to before the October surprise of 1980.
In 1995, he established Consortium News, and he's also written several books including Neck Deep, Lost History, and Secrecy and Privilege.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you?
Pretty good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing all right.
Welcome back.
It's good to have you here.
Thanks.
All right.
So I'm furiously clicking on tabs, trying to find the one that was your piece this morning about echoes of the Afghan war.
Here it is.
Libyan war recalls Afghan pitfalls, but you're not talking about the war we've been waging for the last nine and a half years in Afghanistan.
You're talking about an entirely different Afghanistan war.
Well, they all sort of blend together, as you know, Scott, the poor people of Afghanistan.
But basically, yeah, the point I was making in the piece is that the Obama administration is worried about the Libyan operation in part because of lessons that came from the 1980 effort by the Reagan administration to support these Islamic jihadists, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, when they were fighting the Soviet Union and its troops.
They were in Afghanistan trying to protect a communist regime in Kabul at the time.
That regime had made a lot of changes in Afghanistan, including allowing women to have a great many more freedoms.
Women were allowed to dress as they chose and take part in normal activities.
And that had upset some of the more traditional Islamic fundamentalists in the countryside in Afghanistan.
And they moved to get rid of that government by force.
The Soviets back in 1979, 1980 intervened militarily.
And then, especially under the Reagan administration, although this sort of begins a bit under Carter, the Reagan administration dramatically escalates the U.S. support for the Mujahideen and even encourages through the CIA Islamic fundamentalism.
The thinking at the time was that it was so important to bloody the Soviet Union that it would be a cool idea to use Islam as one of the means to rally people against the atheistic communists.
And the point that sort of bears on today is that this effort to build up these forces, these Islamic forces in Afghanistan, which also included bringing in jihadists from other Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden joins the effort, that this had unintended consequences.
There was the blowback from this, included the expansion of these Islamic fundamentalist movements, the Taliban taking over Afghanistan in 96 and providing a safe haven for al-Qaeda and for bin Laden and providing that base, which was then enabled the al-Qaeda to attack the United States.
So you have, which then, of course, brought about the second phase of the war in Afghanistan.
And the invasion of Iraq and all the mayhem that has followed.
So you had this effort, this sort of sorcerer's apprentice situation where the Reagan people thought they were very cool in stirring up this trouble, supposedly hurt the Soviets, but ended up having this tremendous blowback for the United States in these wars that were still fighting in the Middle East.
Well, I think you got to admit that if it was on purpose, it would be pretty smart, right?
Like, hey, we can use these guys and then use them as an enemy for later on.
Well, I suppose there's that point.
Another interesting point, though, relating to Libya is that there's always this tendency in Washington to be the most macho person speaking or posturing.
We see it not only with politicians, but we see it with the pundits.
They compete with each other almost on some of these talk shows to be the most belligerent.
And in some ways, they help frame the debate, which only allows for a military response or the most violent response.
We've seen that happen.
So you also saw that effect when you get to the latter part of the 1980s, when the Soviets, under Gorbachev, said they are going to withdraw their troops and do so in February of 89.
They proposed, at that point, a negotiated settlement.
Gorbachev wants to have a coalition government of some kind.
There was the communist leader, Najibullah, and Gorbachev was interested in having some of the Mujahideen come in and have a kind of national unity government and try to bring some peace to Afghanistan.
This was in 89.
And the new Bush 1 administration, at that point, felt that that wasn't what they wanted.
They wanted a total triumph.
They wanted to rub the Soviets' face in this.
They wanted to be as macho as possible.
At that point, I was with Newsweek, and I was talking to some of my CIA sources about, well, you achieved what you wanted.
You wanted to get the Soviets out.
They're gone.
Why do you want to continue this thing?
And one of them told me, he said, we want to see Najibullah strung up by a light pole.
This is in 89.
And I thought, that's kind of an odd thing to want.
But it turned out that what I was hearing was, there was this internal debate inside the Bush 1 administration, which focused on this idea that this would be a great way to sort of, the beginning of the triumphalism that sort of ended the Cold War, that feeling that America could do anything.
It was so powerful, it didn't have to listen to anybody else.
So there was this rejection of Gorbachev's idea.
And what happened next is interesting, because instead of Najibullah's government collapsing, it actually hung on.
And the Mujahideen were not that effective.
And Najibullah's forces beat them back again and again.
And it turned out that by the time the Bush administration realized that, gee, maybe we should have taken Gorbachev up on that offer, he was no longer in a position to help out.
And the Soviet Union collapses in 91.
And Najibullah actually survives, his government survives the collapse of the Soviet Union for a while.
He then basically cuts the deal with one of the more moderate Mujahideen forces.
And see, he stays in Kabul.
He's out of power, but stays in Kabul.
This is not acceptable to the Pakistanis and the more hardline fundamentalists.
So they organized the Taliban out of the refugee camps, the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.
And they send these very hardline Islamists finally into Pakistan and they, from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
And they overthrow the more moderate Mujahideen government.
And they capture Najibullah.
They torture him, castrate him, kill him.
And they string him up by a light pole, literally.
Just as my CIA source had envisioned, although not, but it was seven years later.
And so much of the harm of the warlords having these endless battles inside Afghanistan was allowed to continue because instead of taking a deal, which may not have been a perfect deal, but it was probably the best thing that Afghanistan could have gotten at that point, where the various sides sit down together and work together or try to work together and have some kind of a civil society.
The first Bush administration thought it would be very cool to simply have this total triumph, total victory.
That's all they would accept or all they would consider.
And so they ended up messing things up even worse.
Yeah, but I saw a Julie Roberts movie that said that what America did wrong was abandon the poor Afghans when we should have stayed and tried to determine their fate.
I mean, Charlie Wilson's war was fiction.
All right, well, hold it right there, everybody.
We're talking with Bob Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Bob Perry about the Afghan war of the 1980s and a little bit of history repeating itself here in the second decade of this century.
So let's talk a little bit more, Bob, about these parallels with the Libyan war.
It is sort of an outsourced thing.
At least for now, they're not sending in the Marines, although I don't know how long they're going to be able to wait.
Well, there's been an interesting development where there's been this overture from the Qaddafi side.
One of Qaddafi's sons has proposed that the father, Muammar Qaddafi, be eased out and that a transition to a parliamentary democracy be begun.
And that would seem to be the kind of negotiated possibility that has a lot of promise.
But again, much as we saw in 89, when, as I said, the first Bush administration rebuffed Gorbachev on a peace deal for Afghanistan, we're seeing the hardliners say, no, no, no, we must have victory.
We must have it our way.
And only a wimp or a soft person would agree to even think about negotiating.
Yeah, unconditional surrender.
Right.
So it becomes a macho thing to demand things that the other side is probably not going to give you and then rely on force to get it.
There's a parallel there also, by the way, with what happened with Saddam Hussein in 2002 and 2003 when the Bush 2 administration made all these demands about him leaving the country and so forth, or they're going to be forced to invade.
And so, of course, they were forced to invade.
And the Rambouillet Accords in 1999, too.
They said, Milosevic has signed this thing that allows us to occupy every square inch of Serbia.
And that was the peace agreement that because he refused to sign it, we got to bomb him now.
Right.
You end up sometimes with the US government and its allies getting carried away with this triumphalism, this idea that America can simply dictate terms.
And first of all, it leads the United States into some disastrous decisions.
But perhaps more importantly, it makes those areas of the world places of great catastrophe.
In Afghanistan, if George H.W. Bush had simply said, OK, Gorbachev, you have an idea for a kind of a coalition government.
Let's go with it.
Let's see what we can do there.
The US had gotten its main objective, which was the Soviet Union to leave.
They had left.
Bush had to find a new intelligence finding.
Because the old intelligence finding was the US was going to support covertly the Mujahideen to get the Russians to leave.
But so the Soviets had left.
But that was a key moment.
He could have gone the other way.
And there's this myth that you referred to before the break, that in 89, as soon as the Soviets left, the United States said, oh, gee, we're no longer interested.
And then all these terrible things happened.
That's not the real history.
That's the history of Tom Hanks' movie, Charlie Wilson's War.
But it's not the real history.
The real history is that the United States and the Soviet Union both continue to support through intelligence means and through funding their two sides.
The United States continued.
Well, even in 95, they went along with the Pakistani-Saudi program to install the Taliban.
Well, right.
But the US direct aid continued through 91.
So you did not have what we all have been taught to believe, that the US has washed its hands.
And the false lesson that's been drawn from that, from the movie and this conventional wisdom of Washington, is that, gee, the real mistake was not to stay involved.
But the real mistake was that the US did stay involved.
And instead of negotiating a settlement, decided it wanted total victory.
That was the real failure.
And frankly, the interesting thing is that the Obama administration knows that.
They know it in part because a key figure in all those bad decisions in the 1980s and in 89 and subsequent involved a person named Robert Gates, who had been the deputy director of CIA in the 1980s.
He becomes a deputy national security advisor to President Bush, the first President Bush in 89.
And Gates is involved.
First, he's involved in saying that the Soviets will never leave.
He was supposedly this great analyst.
He always got everything wrong.
He said that the Soviets will not leave.
Gorbachev's lying.
Well, of course, the Soviets leave.
Then Gates said that immediately, if the Soviets do leave, immediately the Najibullah government will collapse in Kabul.
Didn't happen.
It was wrong again.
So he was part of this effort in 89 to spurn Gorbachev's peace proposal and help lead us into the morass that became Afghanistan in the 90s and ultimately blowing back on the United States in the last decade.
But he at least knows the history because he was there helping it happen.
And I think you've seen in some cases this, you see Gates almost acting in a somewhat dovish manner relative to, say, Hillary Clinton and some others and saying that he did not really want to get into Libya.
And part of the reason was, and the key parallel here is, the U.S. government doesn't know who the rebels really are, much as they didn't really know who the Mujahideen really were in the sense of what they might evolve into and what kind of a threat that could become to the United States.
So there's this hesitance at this point among the Obama people about how deeply they want to get involved here.
That's why the CIA has sent in officers to try to figure out who the rebels are.
What they do know, based on captured documents in Iraq, is that the largest per capita number of suicide bombers who flocked to Iraq to blow up American soldiers came from the Benghazi region of eastern Libya.
And that was one of the points that Qaddafi was making when he started to crack down.
He said, we're fighting here, we're fighting the terrorists.
And he even sent a letter to President Obama saying, what would you want me to do?
I thought you wanted me to fight the terrorists.
But the United States, of course, didn't want to play that up because there's this desire to get rid of Qaddafi.
And so there's been playing down the nature of who these people are within the rebels.
And there are surely many rebels who are just fed up with Qaddafi and are not associated with al-Qaeda in any way.
But as the U.S. government is now saying, there are flickers of these extremists.
And so there's a hesitance in terms of how deeply the U.S. government wants to get in bed with them.
Yeah, you know, I wonder about that.
They say in the New Yorker magazine, John Lee Anderson is reporting that there's only 1,000 armed fighters.
So, you know, you could have a massive protest movement against this renowned monster and torturer, Muammar Qaddafi.
But the only people who are actually fighting in this war are the people that America and NATO supposedly are fighting for in this case, are these 1,000 fighters, which apparently quite a few of their leaders, the ones that aren't from suburban Virginia, are veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars on the other side.
Right.
There's reason to be very worried about what's going on here.
But again, as far as this false history, one thing I've been working out of ConsortiumNews.com, really from its origins in the mid-90s, is how do you correct the history?
Because we keep following these false narratives.
We have all this lost real history.
And it's replaced with this nonsense that we then operate under the belief that it's real.
And there are many things that are dubious.
And one point I have made in my stories about Libya is that we've seen the New York Times, for instance, reporting as a matter of fact that Libya carried out the Pan Am 103 attack in 1988.
Well, thanks for bringing that up, because I've seen that all over the place.
And I guess I was supposed to be led to believe that, well, that was just, you know, that all the confusion about that was just wrong, that it really was them after all or something.
Well, there are obviously things we don't know.
And is it possible that Libya was involved?
Yes, it is.
However, the evidence really points in other directions.
It is certainly a point in serious dispute.
There was a conviction of a Libyan intelligence officer, McGrahe, in 1991 by the Scottish court.
I'm sorry, he was charged in 91.
He was convicted later, in 2001, I think it was.
But the problem with that case was it was extremely dubious.
There were two Libyans charged.
The evidence was extremely weak.
This idea that the narrative for how the bomb would have been placed on Pan Am 103 was ludicrous.
Basically, the bomb would have been placed in Malta, then switched in Frankfurt and switched in London.
So the evidence was quite shaky that McGrahe had anything to do with it at all.
But they just simply let one Libyan go and they convicted the other.
Well, I'm sorry, we're going to have to hopefully maybe do a whole interview about that.
Seems like you really know your stuff on that story.
But we're out of time right now.
Thanks for your time.
It's been great.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's the heroic Robert Perry, ConsortiumNews.com.
