10/21/09 – Tom Hayden – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio Chaos 959 in Austin, Texas.
And you know earlier in the show when we were talking with Martin Smith about his documentary called Obama's War, one of the guys featured in that is a guy named David Kilcullen.
And Tom Hayden has an article about Kilcullen and his Long War, well it's called Kilcullen's Long War, it's at thenation.com, and you might remember Tom, we interviewed him here, oh I don't know, a few months back anyway, maybe half a year ago, about another great article called Understanding the Long War.
And so back to Central Asia we go here, welcome to the show Tom, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thanks, nice to hear from you Scott.
It's great to have you on the show here, and what a great article, I've recommended it to a lot of people, really enhanced my understanding of a lot of this stuff.
I guess let's start with Kilcullen, since he's right there in your title, who is he?
Well I don't want to demonize the poor guy, I've never met him, but I've been reading him, I feel like a stalker for years.
He's quite a character, he comes from Australia, he was in the Australian Army, he's got a PhD in anthropology.
After 9-11 at some point he became an advisor to the Bush State Department and to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency, the theory and practice, because he had been engaged in it in Asia for some years.
So he's like an intellectual with some battle credentials, and he's very, very smart, maybe excessively smart, I mean a ton of articles over the years.
He was the advisor to Petraeus during Iraq, he was the top counterinsurgency advisor, he takes credit for helping invent the surge, and he's come out with a book called The Accidental Gorilla, which is kind of a summary of most of his writings and his views.
He believes in a global phoenix program, which will take some scratching of the heads for your audience, but the phoenix program was a so-called pacification program in Vietnam, in which the US contracted with the South Vietnamese military to try to knock out the Viet Cong infrastructure, that means the village leaders, the doctors, the teachers, the non-military infrastructure, and roll people up in strategic hamlets to separate them from the guerrillas.
It was, by most accounts, it was a fiasco in which a lot of people were killed, there were congressional hearings, and the program was terminated.
But Kilcullen stands virtually alone calling for its revival, saying it was widely misunderstood, it's just what's needed, and that's a clue to the kind of operation that he took pride in in Iraq and looks forward to in Afghanistan.
It's the dark side, the underbelly of counterinsurgency, which often sounds like, I don't know, like a community policing program combined with Peace Corps development or something for civilians, but it does involve a lot of killing, extrajudicial killing, usually at night, to decimate the enemy before you can protect the civilians, and I think that's what we have to worry about in Afghanistan and Pakistan already happening, already underway.
Well, there's so much to go over just right there.
I guess let's start with the surge in Iraq.
I think it's pretty fair to say, and you know, I'm not an expert, and I don't think anybody has to be an expert, you just have to have a long-term memory to know that the basically Ba'athist party-led Sunni-based insurgency had offered the same deal that Petraeus eventually took from them every year since the war began, beginning in the summer of 2003.
That was actually his big success, right, was that he had used that same program up in Mosul and it lasted and worked up until the time he left Mosul, but then they also just helped the Iraqi army basically ethnically cleanse Baghdad to about 85% Shiite and basically ran all the Sunnis out of town, as Patrick Coburn has put it on this show, and there's your expert, he says, listen, the Sunni-based insurgency, it wasn't entirely Sunni, honestly, but the Sunni-based insurgency had a choice.
They were basically involved in two, maybe even three wars against the Americans, against the Iraqi army, and also their problems that they had with the suicide bomber Zarqawi-type crazies.
And so they decided that they would sort of cease fire against the Americans and try to rebuild from their losses in the war against the Iraqi army that they'd lost, and then focus on Al-Qaeda, get some guns and money in the meantime.
I don't see how any of that has anything to do with the counterinsurgency doctrine.
I read it, the PDF is right there online, and what does that have to do with anything other than, you know, cutting deals and then agreeing to leave the country?
Well, cutting deals is the heart of the matter.
It's a political doctrine in part, and what Kilcullen proposed and they carried out was paying about 99,000 Sunnis $300 each not to shoot at American troops, and to turn their guns against Al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia for the period.
But also, according to Bob Woodward's history of Iraq, and he's the major mainstream historian, McChrystal, the current commander, was in charge of another program during the same period that you referred to.
It was a top secret program of extrajudicial killings, that is, the Pentagon would have lists and be the judge, jury, and executioner, and they went out and killed a lot of people at night, particularly in Baghdad and Anbar, until there was apparently not many more people to kill.
So this combination of the payoff to the Sunnis with the killing of the intransigents is what lowered the violence so dramatically in 2007 and 2008, which is what General Petraeus was looking for.
He did not want high levels of violence during the American election year.
Yeah, well, I don't know, I guess none of us really know the truth of that, but Bob Woodward and confirmation bias go together, I think, a lot.
I mean, none of that, and this is the popular narrative, but none of that narrative takes into account the fact that they just lost the Civil War.
There was this entire other context that was going on, in terms of them fighting against the Iraqi army, and for that matter, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, which were butchering people and forcing them out.
Well, I'm not sure what your point is.
Just that they try to give these generals all this credit for being geniuses, for paying these guys not to fight, but it's just that at the same time that they finally agreed to that, when the Sunnis had been offering it all along, of course, they basically are taking all this credit for a situation where they hadn't just convinced all these people with a genius plan.
They convinced people who were basically dying to be convinced, and had just been pushed up against a rock and a hard place, and basically had no choice.
Well, that's not unfair.
I think that's accurate.
I mean, the slogan goes that the surge worked, but it doesn't seem to me anything but a slogan, is all I'm saying.
Unless the surge just meant the American army helping finish the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad in early 2007, I guess there was some of that.
No, I think the point of the surge was more or less political to try to do something to keep the Iraq war from being the central topic in the 2008 election year.
Remember, they always talk about setting back the American clock, which means looking for more time from the American public, and pushing up the Iraq clock, which means shortening the conflict in some way that will bring the casualties down.
And they were able to get a very fragile agreement, which may or may not be carried out, but they can say that violence is down, and turn their attention to Afghanistan, which I think...
Yeah.
Well, and pardon me, Tom, for going off all over your interview.
It's just that seems to me like a pretty thin reed to hang the entire premise of these people's credibility on, you know?
I mean, their whole thing is they're geniuses who got it so right in Iraq that we can let them have their say in Afghanistan, too.
Well, you know, I don't know if anybody can follow this, because it's not much in the papers.
And so they may be claiming they're geniuses, but I think they're also biting their fingernails over Iraq while they focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are now much bigger theaters of war.
And this is all about the Kilcullen notion of the long war, which is a 50-year war against Muslim countries with oil, gas, and pipelines, which he considers an arc of crisis where there are havens from Europe to Asia for al-Qaeda.
And when you think about it, the audacity is staggering, because a 50-year war, and that's a minimum estimate, would involve 13 presidencies, 25 sessions of Congress, two years each, voters who are not yet born, people running for office who are not yet thinking about it.
And somehow it's kind of assumed by these people that this will continually be approved by the American people through elections, or the elections will have to be somehow ignored, because the plan is the plan.
And I think people have to wake up and realize that from Kilcullen's point of view and Abuzayd's point of view and the Pentagon's point of view, we're in about year eight of a 50-year war.
Minimum 50-year war.
Well, that's why they call it Injun country, right?
Because all of Eurasia is our Old West now.
Well, that makes it a 300-year war, right?
We're still in the later stages of the Indian Wars.
But this one is a particular one.
It doesn't include Cuba, it doesn't include Venezuela.
It runs from the Middle East to the Philippines, and it starts in 2001 and it goes on another 41 years, unless we do something to question its cost, and not just the casualties, but the unexplainable expense to the taxpayer, which it just seems clear that these people are either all-powerful or totally detached because there is no money that I can see for several wars costing a trillion dollars each, stretching on another 40 or 50 years.
Everybody, it's Tom Hayden.
He wrote Kilcullen's Long War in The Nation.
That's TheNation.com, and I'm sorry for people who've been listening for the whole show.
This may be a bit redundant from previous interviews today, but it's all important, and you point this out in your article that the, I don't know if you're talking about just Kilcullen, David Kilcullen, or I think you're describing sort of the whole inner circle core of the leaders of this new and improved counterinsurgency doctrine, these long warriors.
They accept the Michael Shoyer explanation for why we're at war with these people.
It's not many skirts in primary elections, it's that we're an empire in that part of the world, and they don't make any bones about that.
And in fact, I guess they consider themselves very realistic and smart for not going along with that myth, but in fact facing the reality of why we were attacked in the first place and so forth.
But then, I think he's saying here, the conclusion that they draw is, well, that's why we just have to make sure and be really smart about how we occupy Eurasia forever.
We have to try to occupy it in a way where the locals like us as the local police force somehow, and we kill anyone who dares resist us in such a way that it doesn't lead to the recruitment of all of their cousins into the war of resistance against us, which has been, I guess, the lesson of the last eight years.
So I've got to tell you, I was kind of amazed by this, the whole thing about either they're all powerful or very detached from reality.
I've got to tell you, I think I'm leaning toward the latter there.
Well, they're very incorporated into the reality of war.
These are not armchair intellectuals, but I think that they're in a cluster, a cloister, a bubble, whatever you call it, of national security thinkers who think alike, and they don't pay much attention to trends in the United States.
The head of this group is John Nagel, who's the president of the Center for a New American Security in Washington.
He's written books on counterinsurgency.
Kill Cullen is probably the brainiest and the most eccentric.
Scheuer, who you mentioned, is from a somewhat different background.
He was the CIA's tracker of bin Laden.
They live in a think-tank world, basically.
Oh yeah, I just want to be clear.
I wasn't saying that Scheuer was one of them.
He's the guy who's been very politically incorrectly saying that they don't hate us for our freedom.
They hate us because of Palestine, because of the support for the kings, Abdullah and Jordan in Saudi Arabia, support for Mubarak in Egypt, their torture regimes that those people put on, those governments put on their people, and all the emirs and sultans throughout Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula there, that that's what it's about.
And he says even, you know, hey, I'm just an analyst.
You guys decide whether you think that it's worth it or not.
I'm just telling you that that's why 3,000 people died, not because we're free.
Yeah, no, I think he's a pretty good author to read, and I think that Kill Cullen shares the same view, but Scheuer puts it more bluntly.
He says you either deal with al-Qaeda's agenda and break with the current emphasis on, you know, doing anything that Israel says is in Israel's interest, and breaking from the tyrannical Arab regimes that put these people in the basement cells, or you have to kill a lot of people in a long war, you have to kill a lot, a lot of people, or negotiate.
So let's talk about Afghanistan.
I mean, I think this is, we ought to be in virtual time here.
It comes down to a case in point, and I don't know what Kill Cullen would say about it.
The alleged head of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, who after 2001 moved over to Pakistan, he heads the Shura Council in Quetta, and the American ambassador says he's got to be eliminated, and if the Pakistanis don't do it, the U.S. will, which is pretty scary because it's a town of 700,000 Muslims.
But anyway, Mullah Omar has a proposal, and I'm not saying that you should agree with it, but that all negotiations involve initial proposals, and the U.S. has not replied in kind, but he's given it to the U.S. through the Saudis.
The Saudis are actually sponsoring a peace process behind the scenes, because this is all about Sunni versus Shia on one level, and the people in Pakistan and Afghanistan are largely Sunni, and that's why Iran is sidelined to an extent, because they're Shia.
So the proposal from Mullah Omar consists of the following points.
One, that there should be a power-sharing arrangement in Kabul, with or without the Karzai government, but implied as negotiations with the Taliban and with other entities, a power-sharing arrangement.
Number two, there has to be an incorporation of the insurgents and the Taliban fighters into a reformed and reconstructed Afghan army.
And number three, there has to be a peacekeeping force, not NATO or the present coalition, but a peacekeeping force from nations that are Muslim nations.
So it's not an unreasonable starting point, if you try to visualize the eventual outcome, and I think all the U.S. is trying to do is weaken the Taliban and al-Qaeda militarily to a point where they'll negotiate the same points on U.S. terms.
But that could take seven years, if it ever happens.
It could also get worse for the U.S., but we should be talking about the political side of this, and whether there's any point in continuing to send American men and women into a fight for a regime that seems to be utterly corrupt, or whether we should be looking for a way out, an exit strategy, instead of an escalation strategy.
And I think Omar's points are worth considering in whatever secret or open negotiating process is going on.
Well, you know, I was just talking with Martin Smith, the guy that did Obama's war for front line earlier in the show, and he was saying he thinks that the Pentagon is not so much into this, or at least certainly that they're not the driving force, but that it's really just a political thing, and he couldn't even really seem to identify any interests that are really pushing the policy, other than just politics, I guess.
Well maybe, I don't know.
I don't know the fellow.
I mean, it seems to me that they do have an overwhelming interest in defeating Al-Qaeda, whatever that means, and another overwhelming interest in not losing to a supposedly inferior enemy.
And a lot of wars go on so as to avoid losing.
Right.
Just like Lyndon Johnson, there's audio of him saying, I'm not going to be the first president to lose a war.
Exactly.
I'm going to just keep it going and then not run for re-election.
That'll be my strategy.
At least I won't have lost it.
Exactly.
That's a pretty potent argument, I guess, when you're in the Oval Office and the president has got his reputation on the line, and he's being told, if you don't do this, you're going to lose this war.
I don't know what dances in his head, but it's got to be some pretty scary political prospects.
Alright, well now, do you think that the Obama administration, the idea that Petraeus and McChrystal would actually have negotiations with the Taliban types to work out an actual exit strategy, or would this just be a part of figuring out how to stay forever still?
Yeah, no, I think negotiations are clearly going on at some level, or several levels, and that they're in secret.
But occasionally, you know, you hear that somebody has just come back from a meeting with a Taliban commander, and it's got to be about something.
Their official position is supposed to be sensible.
I find it far from sensible.
It's that they want to offer jobs and income to the reconcilable insurgents, along the lines of what they did with the Sunnis in Iraq, going back to your first point.
But you know, if I'm a hardcore irreconcilable guy, and I'm your prisoner, and you treat me well and discuss the Koran, and let me read the New York Times or go online, I can be softened pretty steadily.
I can become reconcilable, right?
For somebody who is already in the category of reconcilable, if you bomb his house and kill his family, he can become irreconcilable in a moment, right?
So this idea that you can draw a line between the hardcore Taliban and the ones that you can buy off is just a stumbling first step.
It's a big mistake.
What you have to do is consider that their motive is not to get paid.
Their motive through history has been to fight against foreign invasions, and so if you want to lessen their violence, you want to withdraw the provocation of the occupation.
It's that simple.
Which, of course, Petraeus doesn't want to do at this point, because the war is far from won, and he can't afford, on his reputation, a loss.
So I think they've had an opportunity this last month, because of the unbelievable exposure of the corruption in Kabul, to say, we have to get out because we don't have a partner.
But it looks like they've found some vitamin for Karzai, and they're going to pump him back up, and then they're going to add more troops.
So the moment is swiftly passing, and it will be up to 50 or 75 members of Congress and the media to provide some criticism from the inside, and it'll be up to the peace movement to increase the opposition at the neighborhood level.
Already, I think Obama has to be very worried that 70% of Democrats in polls as recently as last month thought that this was a bad war.
They're not with him.
And his support base has declined to Republicans, who, of course, want to get rid of him.
You know, the Republicans will say, if he gets out, that he's weak and he's surrendered to terrorism.
If he stays in, they're cheering him to stay in.
As soon as he stays in, then they'll accuse him of causing a quagmire and not having a victory strategy.
He is really stuck.
They'll even skip cheering him for staying.
They'll always accuse him of not doing enough and being a pacifist, like Rush Limbaugh said last week.
Right.
So he's stuck.
Yeah.
Well, now, what did you make of the article in The Telegraph last week?
Did you see where one of these Taliban guys, I think claiming to speak for Mullah Omar, said, we're willing to give up the al-Qaeda, which I guess means the last Egyptians and Saudis hanging out with Osama up in the mountains there.
I don't think that's quite what they said, but I thought that it was very important.
And more important was how it was dismissed and trashed by the American media and the American negotiators.
I've had the same thing, though.
It's not just an official disdain for anything sensible the Taliban might say, short of, we surrender.
I meet people all the time who, when I say negotiate with the Taliban, they think it's an insane group of thugs, terrorists and rapists who are incoherent and you can't negotiate with them.
Or they dismiss Mullah Omar.
They say, well, how can we trust him?
So we're in the very early stages of recognizing reality here.
And I don't know what it will take, higher body count, I'm afraid to say, deeper quicksand, because the mode they're in now is to just dismiss any peace gestures from the Taliban, which only hardens the hardline faction of the Taliban if there is one.
They'll say, see, you offer the Americans a possible way out and they reject it and they drop more bombs.
So it's a very, very bad situation at the moment, but it's unsustainable.
And I think people need to keep up the criticism, do their reading, keep the pressure on Congress, speak out, because we are a factor in this.
If 70% of the American people were for the war, don't you think those 40,000 troops would be dispatched yesterday?
The reason they're not dispatched even now is that the White House can't figure out a convincing explanation for why to send 40,000 troops into a quagmire on behalf of a government that's a corrupt gang of drug dealers and landlords and warlords.
I wish I could come up with a good plan for how to actually put pressure on them, but I'm afraid we have to end the interview now because Gabriel Kolko is coming up next.
I really appreciate all your time on the show and your insight.
There he goes.
That was Tom Hayden.
You can read him in The Nation, Kill Cullen's Long War, Gabriel Kolko, right after this.