12/14/09 – Tom Engelhardt – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to introduce Tom Englehart.
He runs TomDispatch.com, writes for us regularly at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
He's a publisher for 25 years.
He's the author of The End of Victory Culture, The World According to Tom Dispatch, and Mission Unaccomplished, a fellow of the Nation Institute.
And again, the website is TomDispatch.com.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm okay.
That's good to know.
Now, listen, I've been trying my very best to keep track of this Afghan war.
And I read, I guess, an article before last of yours up here in the archives at Antiwar.com, the nine surges of Obama's war.
And I thought, man, I must have lost count in there somewhere.
I didn't realize there was nine of them.
Tom, why don't you help take us through?
We know that in March of 2009, he signed an order or whatever to let Gates put another 20,000 American troops there, and now he's just announced another 34,000 on their way over there to the AfPak region, as they call it now.
But still, that's one to skip a few.
What am I missing here?
Okay, well, before we even get to the other six, seven, or eight, just starting with the troop surge, the first thing to know, because one of the things is we've focused on Obama's recent decision to send 30,000 more troops as if it were the decision, the crucial moment, the main moment.
In fact, the surge, however you define it, has really been going on since the last days of the Bush administration.
The first 11,000 troops of the surge before Obama in March and in 21,000, there were 11,000 troops that went in in the early days of the Obama administration that had actually been approved by the Bush administration, which probably means actually by Robert Gates.
So in a way, you could already think of this as Gates' war, and Gates' surge.
So you really have a process that's been going on for a year now, let's say.
The surge is not something that started in March.
It's not something that really just started when the president gave a speech at West Point.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is we think of the surge only in terms of troops, but it's actually a much broader phenomenon.
I mean, it's bigger.
Our surge is much larger than we imagine, because we don't put all the different things that are surging together.
So for instance, there's a contractor surge, these private contractors that basically the Pentagon hires, the State Department hires them too, that do a lot of stuff that once was military.
So they drive the supply trucks, sometimes they're guarding bases or they're policing on bases.
They do KP, they deliver the mail, they do the meals, and various other things.
Between June and September, the number of contractors in Iraq rose by 40%.
I mean, that's a surge in itself.
Now, a lot of those are local Afghans hired by these companies.
They're out of the...
What percentage of those are mercenaries, Dino?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, the problem is I don't even know.
There's no way to know.
And the figure we have is there are now about 104,000 private contractors, hired private contractors in Iraq.
And that is more than the number of troops that will be there, U.S. troops when the surge reaches its height in seven or eight or nine months.
But what they're all doing, we don't know.
Some of them are armed Afghans, some of them are armed Americans.
There are about 10,000, a little less than 10,000 Americans.
There are another maybe 16,000 third world nationals.
That's the category that the Pentagon uses anyway.
People not Afghan, and then there are 70-odd thousand Afghans among this.
So that's a surge.
You have a civilian surge.
The State Department will, by this January, have tripled the number of its people in Afghanistan since last January.
So that's a surge.
You know, they're sending in new, I don't know, diplomats, agricultural experts, et cetera.
And by the way, they're doing the same thing in Pakistan.
So there's a double civilian surge there.
There's a CIA and special ops surge, and that's mostly across the border.
The CIA part of it is probably mostly across the border in Pakistan.
You know, they evidently, I mean, again, we know less about this, but we do know they're sending out more, the CIA runs the drone program in Pakistan that missiles and bombs in the tribal border.
Well, let me elaborate for a second there while you take a sip of water.
I'd like to mention, you know, for the sake of argument here, Jeremy Scahill's recent great work at The Nation magazine on this, and there's a great interview of him on Democracy Now!
as well, talking about Blackwater working with the CIA inside Pakistan.
It's a continually developing story, and we're trying to get a hold of Jeremy Scahill to get him on the show to help fill out the details there.
But it looks like The Washington Post and The New York Times are now playing catch-up to Jeremy Scahill on this very issue, right?
It's absolutely true.
One of his latest pieces, he mentions that, in addition to the CIA over there, that the Joint Special Operations Command, which is the kind of special ops command that McChrystal, our war commander there, once ran in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They're the guys who go out and, you know, snatch Taliban and al-Qaeda types.
You know, basically they usually have assassination programs and so on.
They have a program in Pakistan, coming out of Karachi, in connection with Z, that's Blackwater, which renamed itself Z.
That's another, probably, little part of the surge.
It's important to note, I think, isn't it, that the Joint Special Operations Command has gotten more and more of what would usually, I guess, be the CIA's authority, because they don't have to answer to the intelligence committees.
They don't need a presidential finding authorizing them to break the law.
They just do whatever they want.
That's right.
I think that's true.
And you've got a training surge.
We're upping our, massively, attempting to massively up our training program for the Afghan army and police.
This is, you know, this is something that's talked about quite separately, but not exactly thought of as a surge.
And with all this, you've got an enormous surge in costs.
I mean, the president's been paying $30 billion for the, I mean, that was in his West Point speech, you know, to get the extra troops there and so on for a year.
His estimate in that speech is $30 billion.
That's way under, I mean, they're now talking about, you know, I mean, we've already spent, between the Afghan police and army, at least $25 billion in training and mentoring, I mean, to produce a kind of disaster.
And obviously, if you're going to send in 10,000 more people or so to just to train up the Afghan security forces, you're talking about another enormous cost.
You know, and when you, that $30 billion can't include, for instance, there's been another kind of surge that's been going on in this period, has been a base buildup.
The Pentagon's been building bases all over southern Afghanistan and elsewhere, too.
And it's been building up the bases.
It has.
It's got a big base at Bagram Air Force Base, the old Russian site.
It's got a base at Kandahar, another Russian site, actually, from the war in the 80s.
And both of those, it's expanding significantly.
It's interesting to me, Tom, that, you know, a lot of the criticism of the surge has pointed out that, well, for example, Patrick Coburn, in his piece over at Counterpunch the other day, was saying, listen, you know, the whole Iraqi surge being a success was a myth in the first place.
So now, if your entire goal is to recreate that myth in Afghanistan, you're up against a major problem.
And I think, you know, for somebody like me, who's not a real expert, I can still tell just right off the bat that in Iraq, we were installing the majority, who ultimately doesn't need us.
Here, we're installing, what, the Hazaras and the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and attempting to set them up to dominate the Pashtuns.
And I guess the Pashtuns are not the majority, but they're certainly a pretty darn big minority.
They may even be the plurality of a certain kind of, that certain ethnicity inside Afghanistan.
There are a few people, usually the estimate that's given is that the Pashtuns make up about 42%.
Oh, yeah.
So they're by far the plurality there.
And yet we're just putting, as Gareth Porter was reporting last week, we're just putting the Tajiks in charge of the army and basically, you know, staying with all the lines of the old civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, even though Karzai himself is a Pashtun.
He doesn't seem to have much in common with the tribesmen that were bombing.
I guess what I'd say is that, you know, I mean, you've got two things at once.
On the one hand, and the point I guess I was trying to make in that nine surges piece, you've got a much larger operation.
You've got a much, the surge is a much larger thing than Americans have been told, that has been explained to Americans, than Americans think.
And on the other hand, it's likely to be much smaller than what would theoretically be necessary, you know, to, you know, do whatever the Obama, the Bush administration, now the Obama administration actually wants to do in Afghanistan.
So the answer is, you know, we don't know.
I mean, the future is always unknown, but it's a reasonable guess that this will not work particularly well.
It may work fairly brutally, but not particularly well.
Well, and even in Iraq, it didn't work well.
We just helped one side finish the civil war against the other side that they were almost done winning by then anyway.
And you had, you had other factors in Iraq that were, that, that, that, I mean, I mean, the sectarian war had reached its height.
Baghdad had been largely ethnically cleansed of Sunnis in a lot of its key neighborhoods.
And you had in Anbar province in particular, you had this, this, this, what became to be called the Sunni awakening movement, which was really a movement against the, the Al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
It was really a movement that started quite separately from the American surge, probably the smartest thing that General Perseus did in purely technical terms.
And it's something we're often good at, is he, he, he threw money at that, you know, paying for friendship, bribery, and so on and so forth.
We have historically been pretty good at that.
It's one of the things that we, we've been most skilled at.
And in this case, it was probably the key thing in what happened rather than the literal surge in troops itself.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, if you go back and check all the reporting, the, you know, nominally Sunni insurgency had tried to cut that same deal with the Americans in the summer of 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, finally portray us, put, took them up on it.
But I guess the parallel in Afghanistan would be if McChrystal was to bribe all the Taliban to fight against the, you know, assuming we can believe that there's a single Arab anywhere in that country, call them Al-Qaeda and fight against them.
That would be the parallel if we were to make it, but that's not what we're doing.
We're paying the Tajiks and Uzbeks to fight against the Pashtuns, right?
You know, looked at another way, if, if the figures being used by, you know, top American officials for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan are correct, which is that there, there are a hundred, approximately a hundred operatives or fighters somewhere in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda.
And in fact, there may be less, you know, if you think of it this way, and if it turns out that the Afghan war in the end comes close to being in itself over many years, a trillion dollar war, I mean, can you imagine, this is like Osama bin Laden's, this would be like Osama bin Laden's dream to hold down American power, make it spend a trillion dollars for a few scattered fighters.
You know, I mean, it's a, it's a remarkable story thought of that way.
Story of folly.
Well, you know, since you brought that up, let me ask you what you think about this.
You know, I always just sort of assumed, I mean, not too strongly, but I guess my default position, Tom, was that if Osama bin Laden died, then Ayman al-Zawahiri and all the rest of those guys would put out videos with them, you know, shooting off streamers and firing guns in the air and celebrating and laughing at us and saying, haha, our great hero died and you people were never able to get ahold of him.
And yet, as Phil Giraldi wrote for his article last week on antiwar.com, you know, it's getting harder and harder to believe that this guy is just holed up in those mountains somewhere and has been all this time.
I mean, it seemed plausible enough for a few years there, but we're starting to get to the point where not just kooks, but reasonable people are asking whether Osama bin Laden is even still alive on this earth.
What do you think about that?
I have no opinion on this because how can anybody know?
I mean, anything could be true.
He could be, he could be in Bolivia or waiting on tables in Soho in London.
I think he's in the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
I honestly don't, you know, literally, I mean, all we know is that as far as we know, nobody we know has spotted him in years.
Oh, well, let's escalate the war then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but, you know, I, you know, so, but this whole thing, you know, I, I, the cost, I mean, this is, I suppose what I was getting at in that piece, that the cost of this war, what will break us?
It won't be, you know, it won't be casualties because the, you know, even if casualties rise, they have, you know, they still, in comparison with, I don't know, you can compare it to anything, traffic accidents, you know, deaths from cigarettes or whatever it might be.
I mean, compared to Vietnam, compared to whatever, relatively speaking, if you aren't a member of a certain community and a certain family and so on and so forth, these are relatively small scale casualties in terms of what a great power theoretically can take.
But, but the real drain, not, I mean, I'm not talking about emotionally and I'm not talking, I'm not, the real drain is the drain on our monies.
I mean, this is staggering sums of money to be fighting a war halfway around the world when what was at stake was, you know, our so-called defense department actually playing defense and somebody locking some doors on plane cabins.
I mean, very little was really at stake here.
You know, and I think the dangers while they're there in the world remain relatively modest and yet we're in this staggering war.
I mean, there are various explanations for it in addition to Osama bin Laden.
I mean, the desire to be based in Afghanistan, which is obviously there, the desire to be in Central Asia, oil.
I mean, there are all these different explanations, but it's still, it's still staggers the imagination.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what staggers my imagination is that people's imaginations were really that pliable.
I mean, when September 11th happened, anybody who actually, you know, was interested in foreign policy as a matter of course, sought for what it was, a desperate move to try to provoke a response.
That's what terrorism's for, is to try to get a reaction out of you and to try to, you know, it's asymmetric warfare and all that.
But when the war party went on TV and told the American people that this is just a portent of things to come, this is just the razor's edge, the leading vanguard of the Islamo-fascist caliphate that's bent on taking over the world, including America, converting us all and you know, raping our daughters and cutting our son's heads off and all these things.
The American people bought it.
They didn't say, oh, okay, a couple of hundred people got lucky and did one big attack.
They really believed the Republicans who said that, you know, I guess the Afghanistan Air Force was going to parachute down and take over our country like Red Dawn or something.
You know, I watched George Bush, I mean, people have forgotten this, but I watched him on television when he claimed, for instance, that Saddam Hussein was capable of sending small planes over the East Coast that could spray, you know, chemical, biological, I mean, this was like, there were so many scary fantasies being offered that had no relation to reality.
I mean, I mean, Saddam Hussein had no such planes, no way of getting them off the East Coast of the United States, etc., etc., but this was stuff, this was serious stuff.
Senator Nelson from Florida was, he was, I remember he talked about it afterwards, he had been briefed by, I forget, maybe the CIA on this, but you know, one of the intelligence agencies on this possibility and he said, this is unbelievable.
I mean, it was such a strange world, and it remains a strange world, it still remains, I mean, if you listen to Obama at West Point, he was still telling the same story, it was the story that we're familiar with from Bush, there's evil in the world, it has us in desperate danger, we have to be thousands of miles away from home spending our fortune, you know, in order to protect Americans from, you know, from this organization that looked at, realistically, even in the best of times before it was being seriously attacked, was only capable of mounting major operations over a couple of years, which had no sleeper cells in this country, this was all junk.
Yeah.
You know, I actually saw an episode of Penn & Teller, their Showtime show, Humbug, I guess you could call it, where they actually showed one of the guys that had covered his entire house with duct tape and plastic, like heavy grade plastic, he'd wrapped his entire house, he was sure that the terrorists were going to come and spray us with germs any day now, that that would keep him safe, because that's what TV said, and apparently he didn't have a single thing in his head that would say, yeah, but just because TV says something, or just because some politician claims something doesn't mean you're supposed to internalize it, he didn't have a single thing in his entire brain to tell him that this is ridiculous, man, you live in Appalachia, nobody's coming for you.
You know, it was all over the country, there was a park, you know, one of these kind of water parks called, I don't even remember, in Florida called something like Witchy Witchy or something, I've forgotten the name, which was declared, you know, locally declared to be a potential terrorist target, I mean, this happened all over the country, you know, and this was kind of some level of, it was both fantasy fear, and it was money making.
I mean, money was pouring into police departments for this sort of stuff.
The Homeland Security Department, our second defense department, was building a whole constituency and a little, you know, mini-industrial complex to go with it, I mean, these things, I mean, there were interests that formed around these things, and that actually promoted them strongly.
Well, we like being scared, right, so why don't we go to horror movies?
Well, that's true, but you know, the sad thing is that so many, I mean, listen, I live in New York City, 9-11, it was very close to home, you know, I mean, you couldn't live in New York City and not know somebody who knew somebody who had died, I mean, I had friends whose kids were in school right there, who stepped out of school and watched people jumping out of those buildings, I mean, this was a nightmare.
But so many societies have lived through worse than this, this wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't the apocalypse, it was a televisually spectacular attack, but it was not the end of anything.
And the thought that we would have organized ourselves purely on this basis and headed out into the world as a kind of a crusader nation, it still strikes me as remarkable and yet it's true, I mean, you know, the first thing, I'm going to write about this in my next piece, I mean, this is a piece for next week because I have other people's pieces coming up at Tom Dispatch, but the first thing that started me going, a few weeks after 9-11, when the coverage, the news coverage was terrible and I had had a different idea of what might happen, and somebody sent me a piece by an Afghan guy living in California, he was in exile, and there was an image in it, it was a very striking piece, which I just went back and read the other day, there was an image in it, and he asked a question, the war was about to start with Afghanistan, he said, what does it mean to bomb the rubble?
Because Afghanistan was already wrecked at that point, and I thought, God, that's an image you don't see, and that was the first piece I sent around, and what later became Tom Dispatch, I sent it out to friends and said, you know, you really have to read this, but when you go back and read it today, he was very anti-Taliban, he had a strong sense of who they were, he had a strong sense of what al-Qaeda was, and thought nothing of them, but he knew the folly of going into Afghanistan, if you look back at that piece, he functionally predicted much of what happened, he was a warning against going into Afghanistan, and staying there, and there were people in that first moment who knew what a catastrophe this would be, and none of them are now in Washington, none of them are in the Obama administration, none of them are advising on foreign policy, that's the irony.
Yeah, and you know, the thing that really gets me, too, is that if it had been Harry Brown or even say Ralph Nader, somebody with, I don't know, character, who'd been the president at the time, if he had told the American people, don't be afraid, we're actually going to do a very limited mission, some of you may really want to see big bombs exploding on TV, but the fact is, you can't really bomb the town of Bedrock, there's nothing there, we're looking for a few bad men, and we're going to catch them and kill them, and that's going to be the end of that, the American people would have went along with that, instead George Bush said, be afraid, be very afraid, only I can lead you now, and if I don't, you'll all die, and here's what we have to do, and it was this endless list, 60 countries with Al-Qaeda people that we might have to regime change, and all these things, you're with us or against us, and so the American people are bloodthirsty lot, kinda, but it seems to me like all this rot comes from the top, that if Ralph Nader or Harry Brown had been there and said, alright everybody, this was really sad, but we need you to be cool, and we need to, you know, not be afraid, we need to figure out, you know, take a limited action and put an end to it as soon as we can, the American people probably would have gone along with that too, don't you think?
I think so, actually, yeah, I mean, you know, I honestly don't know, but yes, it's the thing that should have been done, you know, and I do believe that, see, I still believe this, I wrote, at Time Dispatch I wrote, it was one piece of mine that got a lot of attention, I wrote an alternate speech for Obama, you know, he just gave the speech in West Point, about two weeks before that I wrote the speech that I knew he wouldn't give in West Point, which was the speech saying, you know, this administration will be responsible for ending, not extending, two wars, and, you know, I think that if he, everybody believes here that domestically, that if, as a president, particularly a democratic president, faced with a war like this, could not go out and simply de-escalate it, that it would be that he would be political dead meat, and yet if you look through the historical record, there's no evidence one way or the other, the only example I could really think of that was even faintly relevant was Ronald Reagan, he, after the disaster in Lebanon, he pulled American troops out almost immediately, and suffered, in essence, nothing for that, you know, what we do know is what, we at least have some evidence of what happens to a president, particularly President Johnson in the Vietnam years, who decides to escalate an inherited war like this, so I believe that even now, there would have been a lot of angry people, it would have been, the media would have been a kind of an echo chamber, it would have been very noisily, if Obama had gone and said, no, I am basically, in a sane way, in a reasonable pace going to end this Afghan war, no more surges, no more escalations, there would have been a lot of noise and a lot of escalation, but I don't think there's any proof, one way or the other, whether or not he would really suffer for that, I think it's still possible that Americans might have really felt, no, you know, we can live with this, it's an unpopular war.
Well, the thing is, though, you know, Gareth Porter wrote a great thing about how Gates and Clinton and the generals kind of boxed Obama in on all this, and I think there's probably a lot of truth to that, but I wonder if there's any truth to the idea that he would rather do better, I mean, why should we believe that he's any better than Dick Cheney on any of these issues, really?
I mean, he keeps acting like Dick Cheney and we keep saying it's all Gates' fault, but, you know, why?
No, I think he's, I mean, I don't take him off the hook at all, personally.
On the other hand, you know, soon after he was elected, I did write a piece titled Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart, and I think he came committed to a surge strategy in Afghanistan, I think he basically said so in his election campaign, and the thing that made it easier to do, and this is where Gates comes in, is that that strategy was already underway.
I mean, that is, it was already under, I mean, just as in Iraq, his policy in Iraq is not a new policy, he simply has accepted the late Bush policy on Iraq, I mean, which again was Gates.
I mean, this is what he's carrying out.
You know, it's not, it's not, I don't think there is, in this case, a striking Obama policy.
There's enormous continuity, whether you call it Cheney or Bush or whatever, in these wars, there's a great deal of continuity.
The reason I don't say Cheney is because I actually think that the end of the Bush second term was not a Cheney moment, and that the continuity is not quite with Cheney, so, but that's more of a Condoleezza Rice continuity.
Yeah, I think, but nonetheless, there is real continuity, and I don't think, I mean, I won't say that Obama isn't uncomfortable, because I just tend to think as I get older that we don't know what's going on inside people, and often even when they say they do, they don't themselves, so I'm not sure whether he's uncomfortable or not, or how he's feeling about this, but if you just look at what's happening, there is continuity, you know, and...
Well, and as he said before, too, I mean, he really is in the position to make the change if he wants to.
I don't know if you saw Gordon Prather's article, Obama the Great, but he said, you know, all Obama has to do to go down in history forever as Obama the Great is just give one speech and just say it shall be the policy of the United States government and the United States armed forces as long as I'm the president that we will never bomb any safeguarded facilities, and that way to better convince every country to join the NPT and cooperate with the safeguards agreements and all those things, and it would be, it would probably be downward pressure on the price of oil immediately and all that, since the Iranians are in fact members in good standing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and no one can contradict him on that.
The Congress can't really contradict him on that, not to effect, the State Department and the Defense Department can't contradict him, he's the president, if he says the policy is we will not bomb any nuclear facilities as long as they're safeguarded, that would be the policy, period, for four years.
By the way, on top of...
That's all he has to do.
On top of which I like, you know, Gary Wills wrote a good piece about a one-term president and pointed out that, you know, the ultimate, the ultimate value in life is not being re-elected president of the United States, it's doing what should be done in your term.
Sure.
Yeah, doesn't sound too difficult to me.
Well, and speaking of difficult, let's get back to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
Do you know of any credible, like, you know, people whose opinion about these things you've come to respect over this time, who thinks that this is actually possible?
That they could, you know, carry out this strategy as they've defined it, of, you know, they'll stand up, we'll stand down after, you know, we'll train up their army and all these things, or is this just, are they trying to destroy the place forever?
What is going on here?
What are the possibilities for, quote-unquote, success, do you think, Tom?
I think success, defined even modestly, I think the possibilities are very small.
I mean, on the Afghan army, you know, they're talking about an army of 240,000, but estimates I've seen are that you could not create an army there of more than 100,000, as long as you had a desertion rate, as now, of 25 to 30 percent, you just can't bring enough people in and train them without losing them at desertion and non-re-enlistment rate.
Plus, the Americans have to pay their salaries.
Oh, yes.
This is ours.
I mean, this is on the theory of Colin Powell's, you know, so-called Pottery Barn Rule, which is you break it, you own it.
In this case, you make it, you own it.
I mean, Afghanistan is one of the poorest nations on earth.
You know, if we were capable of creating a force of 400,000, you know, police and army people, it would be ours.
We would have to pay it ad infinitum.
The Ahmed Karzai said 15 to 20 years we'd be paying.
That was just what he said the other day.
I mean, and that's, it's not even a meaningful number.
I mean, that is 15 or 20 years from now, there's, who knows what's going to happen in Afghanistan, but there's no reason to believe that they could pay for a 400,000-man security force.
The answer is, I mean, I would never say that, in those Iraqi terms, that it wouldn't be possible, say, to blunt the, I mean, this is all that they're talking about, success, to blunt the Taliban, the spread of the Taliban, to tamp down the insurgency for a while, to, you know, I mean, this, I have no idea.
I think it's unlikely, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
I just think that, largely speaking, if you have done that, if you've succeeded, what exactly have you done, and why?
For what purpose?
You will, all that means, you're still there, the Taliban aren't going to go away, everybody agrees on that, I mean, even the Obama administration agrees on that, they're not going away, the insurgency won't end, so you're just stuck there forever, you're spending American money there in huge quantities forever.
I mean, these bases that are being built up are enormous, you know, just as in Iraq, there are these huge, permanent-looking facilities on the land, so I can't really imagine what, you know, if we succeeded, what that would mean in any positive sense, what does succeed mean?
I mean, even if it were possible, maybe it is, you never know in this life, I don't think it's meaningful, I don't think it matters.
Well, I don't think anybody questions the ability of the United States Marine Corps to put firepower on targets, and, you know, I've read a lot of quotes of Afghans saying, what are you kidding me, you're sending 100,000 troops to go after 100 guys, and your Marine Corps can't find them and kill them?
I mean, what are we talking about here?
So I guess, you know, I would just have to assume they haven't really been trying this whole time or something, or they just can't get to the mountainous areas where the guys are hiding out or something, I don't know.
But if they really tried, I have to assume that the Marines can kill people, that part is not really in question, but the question is whether that is progress, whether that's a step toward, you know, some, I don't know, westernized, centralized, somewhat democratic nation state there, in between Iran and Pakistan.
Yeah, I think this is basically inconceivable, and I don't think that'll happen, but, you know, I mean, but all of this, you just constantly have to ask the question, to what purpose?
You know, I think for any normal American purpose, I mean, for any normal American, unless you are, as you said before, in terror of al-Qaeda and so on and so forth, unless you're living in that state of terror, you just have to ask, you know, what is the purpose of this?
Well, let me ask you that, because I asked Patrick Coburn that, and I asked Gareth Porter that, and I asked everybody I can that would talk about the Afghan war on this show.
What is this all about?
You know, Pepe Escobar says it's all about pipelines, and then other people, I forget who I'm quoting here, say, well, the Israelis are really worried about Pakistani nukes, so they're trying to get America to take Pakistan's nukes, and it's all about, you know, what Netanyahu wants, and other people say, well, it's all just about, you know, checking Russian and China, of course, the Caspian Basin, and gas lines in Turkmenistan, and, you know, who knows?
But nobody seems to really know.
A lot of people claim to know, but, you know, Gareth Porter says that, no, their only goal is to kill the people who are resisting them, and they don't have any smarter thought process behind it at all.
I think you'd have to trace this historically, and you'd have to say that when the Bush administration went in, they had a very geopolitical vision of how the world worked.
They wanted to roll back Russia.
I mean, it was very clear, I mean, they made this clear.
They thought that American military power alone, they believed, they were romantics about American military power.
They believed that the threat of this powerful force, once it stopped being a threat, once it was actually applied, could actually subdue people, and that, if you remember the phrase shock and awe, that the Middle East could, in essence, be shocked and awed into a kind of, I mean, really, it was Pax Americana.
I mean, they were interested in oil flows.
They were interested in basing themselves on either side of Iran.
They were interested in a number of geopolitical things.
I think, at this point, most of that, and in this sense, if that was Patrick Coburn who was saying it, or whoever, I think most of that has gone.
I mean, years have passed, you know, even if you look at Iraq right now, where we are heavily based still, and Iraq is actually giving away oil contracts, they're largely not giving them away to the American majors.
This was the original, I mean, originally the neocons did, were planning to privatize the oil, the Iraqi oil economy, and to bring in the oil majors, particularly the American oil majors.
But that hasn't, I mean, Exxon got one contract, but basically that hasn't happened.
I think a lot of this stuff has now gone by the boards.
I think people are still thinking about, you know, basing, you know, the crucial basing places and trying to keep American troops in what they consider key areas, and so on and so forth.
But I think a lot of this is kind of gone, and we're just left with this damn war.
Yeah, well, and there's weapon sales, too.
I saw the craziest clip.
Weapon sales, of course, yeah.
I saw this clip from CNBC where they said, all right, well, Obama's set to announce his surge, which gives us the opportunity to analyze some defense stocks.
Here are our experts.
What do you like, guys?
And they're going, oh, well, I like Northrop Grumman.
I like Lockheed.
Oh, we're going to make a killing off all this killing.
I mean, there is a lot of this.
I mean, there are a lot of interests.
You know, in a way, this was very overdetermined, and if you want to think about it, it wasn't when people just say oil, it can't have been just oil, because there were many, there were many interests, and there still are that have a role in all this.
I mean, for instance, Afghanistan is, like all American wars, Afghanistan is now a testing ground for, and Pakistan, testing ground for weaponry.
We're bringing online the latest drones.
They finally got the ridiculous Osprey, you know, it's not a plane, it's not a helicopter, whatever it is.
They got that into use.
I mean, it is a testing ground for weapon systems for the next war, for future whatevers, and so on and so forth.
I mean, all of these things are a factor, but in the end, I think something about the war itself simply has us in its grasp, and there may be no single thing, no single overriding thing that even makes sense in terms of this.
Well, all we need is, say, I don't know, two out of three hundred million people to go out on the street and say, hell no, that's it, but they won't ever do that, and so I guess it's going to go on until the dollar is worth a nickel.
I fear so, I really do, and on that note, I have to go write my next piece.
Well, on that note, I'd like to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Tom.
God, this was great.
All right, everybody, that's Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com.
Of course, you can find him at AntiWar.com slash Englehart.
Look for The Nine Surges of Obama's War, and also all the other articles by the great authors that write for him at Tom Dispatch, and of course, he writes the introductory paragraphs for so many of them, including the latest, The Dust Bowl of Babylon.
Thanks again, Tom.
Okay.