03/19/12 – Umar Farooq – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, welcome back to the show, Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show, our last guest today, is Umar Farooq.
He is a freelance journalist and intern at The Nation, and he's got a piece in Salon.com called Our Immoral Drone War, and I thought it was really good and worth your attention.
Welcome to the show, Umar, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
Listen, so your point in this article I think could be summed up as, hey, those Pakistanis are real people and they have things that they think and feel about what they see when America drops bombs on them from the sky.
Is that pretty much right?
Yeah, I think that that's exactly right.
I mean, I admit, you know, Pakistan is really far away.
In fact, I think George Carlin even has a skit where he talks about how, you know, if you're working around the house and you have the TV on and they say, a giant explosion went off today, and you go, where, where, and they say, in Pakistan, and you go, ah, forget Pakistan, that's too far away to be any fun, but of course if the train derails in your town, then come on, let's all go look at the bodies and that kind of thing.
Pakistan, I'm from the middle of Texas, Pakistan is really, really far away for me, and I can absolutely understand how my neighbors might just not be able to really picture it or imagine that what happens there is real and matters, to be frank about it.
Well, I think the reason that it matters is, I mean, it touches on so many things in terms of our policy and the way we deal with the world, just because the drone war has gone on there for so long, and it's been so intense there, and it's been going on for, you know, for almost a decade now, and we haven't questioned it, and if we haven't questioned it at the scale that it's happening in that part of the world, and we haven't, we aren't questioning it in the rest of the Middle East, what's to stop anyone from doing it again in any other part of the world?
And we see even in the U.S. that there's, you know, local police authorities are going to start using drones for surveillance, you know, there's going to be a tremendous push in the Air Force in general to use these unmanned vehicles instead of the old way of manned bombers and human control over what was going on.
So I think we have a lot to worry about, just, and beyond that, just like the practical consideration, we are pissing off a lot of people, and we do see, like, we literally see people coming, I live in New York, and it's actually like a physical danger for me, because we have people like Faisal Shahzad that actually were so pissed off about it that they came here and tried to, you know, explode something in Times Square, so I think we have a lot to worry about, you know, in terms of our own citizens and our own neighbors as well as, you know, moral issues we have in the world.
Well, let's start with something that we can identify with, downtown New York.
It matters to Americans when something blows up there, so go back and tell us more about Faisal Shahzad and the Times Square bombing.
What does that have to do with what happens in Pakistan?
Well, he was a highly educated, you know, consultant here in the US.
He had a really good salary, and, you know, by all measures, he was probably doing well in the US, you know, living the American dream, and he had some family in that part of Pakistan, and he was familiar with the drone strikes, and he was radicalized through this idea of this intense, like, you know, moral problem going on in Pakistan that we in America have sort of created with these drone strikes there, and that radicalized him, and he went and joined some jihadist groups, and, you know, a few months later, he showed up here, and he was in Times Square, you know?
Well, you know, that makes your piece of Salon today, I think, your mention of that makes it a great companion, really, to Glenn Greenwald's piece about the, you know, the media's version of all the different motives and causes of the recent Afghan massacre, and how, you know, he did this for a hundred reasons, like, you know, liquors drunkened him, or he saw somebody's legs blown off, or his wife was giving him trouble, or, you know, anything but that he's a bad guy and did a bad thing because of his badness, or whatever.
On the other hand, if a Muslim ever does anything, it's only because there are evil, unmitigated terrorists, and that's why they did it, because they're terrorists, and that sort of tautology, where the Faisal Shahzad case really makes a point here.
He was an American, like he said.
He had a wife, and a car, and a job, and a house, and was doing all right, and then he went and saw the real results in front of his face, and he simply, not because of Mohammed, but because of American violence in his family's neighborhood, he joined up as a soldier on the other side.
Had nothing to do with radicalism of belief, and everything to do with just radicalism of his behavior, that if somebody's going to do something about it, it's going to be me, the same way Americans reacted after September 11th, or after the Times Square bombing, in fact.
I'm sure some people went and joined the army just on that occasion.
Yeah, I think it's definitely, we've sort of taken up the strategy of our enemies, you know.
We're all guilty of the same thing.
TV's saying now, Bales joined the military after 9-11.
That's what CNN is saying out of the corner of my eye right now.
I mean, that's the issue here, we've all sort of, everyone has bought the idea that a certain group of people in a certain geographic area are all somehow guilty.
Whether it's Americans buying this idea in our drone attacks abroad, or whether it's people from that part of the world buying the idea and attacking us here.
The problem is the same problem, it's the same mistake we're making on both sides.
And I was just really frustrated that mainstream media here in the US is all caught up in accounting how many quote-unquote civilians and quote-unquote militants there are that are being affected by this drone war.
There's no, there's absolutely no way to check anything that anyone is saying about that part of the world.
Like, it's all after the fact.
Right, I mean, even if you trust what they're saying, they're really, a militant just means a man that they say had a rifle at the time they killed him, basically, right?
Right.
And under international law, just because you have a rifle in one part of the country doesn't mean you're, you know, we have a mandate for Afghanistan, we have a mandate for maybe protecting parts of Afghanistan.
We don't have a mandate for shooting anyone with a gun across the border in Pakistan.
Especially not when they're sleeping in their house with their wives and their kids, or driving a Toyota pickup truck on a road, you know, 20 miles from the border.
Now, something that Glenn Greenwald has covered a couple of times, quite a few times actually, specifically in Pakistan, is the public opinion, the reaction to this.
And I don't know if he's written, I've at least heard before that in some parts of Pakistan they think, you know what, do what you like with those tribal crazies up there and don't really identify with them, think of them as foreigners the same way Americans do or something.
But on the other hand, this has been going on for a long, long time, and the way the New York Times reports it is, you know, these crazy Muslims hate us so much, boy they must believe in Islam a lot, or something, and completely don't even mention it at all.
And people can go back and search the New York Times for this, you can find where they don't even discuss the drone strikes, they simply just say these people are such conspiracy kooks and Muslim believers, Islam believers, that they think we're out to get them for some reason.
I mean, we can find all kinds of people in America that subscribe to all kinds of really, you know, ideas that we've found to be totally against our moral standing in the U.S., we can find members of the KKK in the U.S., we can find, you know, right-wing neocons that want to, you know, eugenic supporters or something in the U.S., something similar that's happening with a lot of the mainstream media that's going to that part of the world, they're talking to a really liberal, secular elite in the cities of Pakistan that is probably more scared of Muslims and Islam than a lot of Americans are.
And instead of, like, instead of understanding that, papers like the New York Times are sort of using that as proof that, look, there's this group of people in Pakistan that are supporting these drone strikes, when in fact the numbers don't play out at all, you know, like more than 90% of people consistently say they hate the drone strikes, they think they're not justified under any conditions, they, you know, there's daily retaliatory attacks against Pakistani civilians, police, army, in direct, you know, in direct retaliation for drone strikes.
When a drone strike happens in Pakistan, there's, like, can you hear me?
Yeah, well, actually I was about to go ahead and stop you, we have to go out to this break, but we can pick up where we left off right here on the other side with Umar Farooq from Salon.com, our Immoral Drone War.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Sands High War Radio.
Sorry I didn't have time to mention earlier, I forgot to mention earlier, the piece over the weekend in the New York Times, another one by James Risen, reconfirming for the zillionth time that America's intelligence agencies believe with high confidence, as they call it, that the Iranians are not making nukes.
Don't forget to go and look at that.
It's amazing what the New York Times has in the form of journalism on the Iran nuclear program when it's not David Sanger writing it.
Things that approximate accuracy.
Huh.
All right, so, now back to Umar Farooq.
He's got this piece at Salon.com called Our Immoral Drone War.
And speaking of the New York Times, one of their articles about what conspiracy kooks Pakistanis are says, yeah, one of their crazy conspiracy theories, because they believe in Islam so much, I guess, is why they're so crazy, is that America will one day come and seize their nuclear weapons.
But it was, in fact, the New York Times in September 2007, where Robert Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon wrote their essay about, we need to start planning for an invasion, a lightning quick cakewalk where we'll go in there and seize the nuclear weapons from Pakistan's military.
You know, if it comes to that.
And then they spend the rest of their time apparently trying to make it come to that by, as Salim Shahzad put it in his book and on this show, they are al-Qaedaizing the enemy.
They keep killing so many Pakistani fighters that the only ones left to direct everything are a bunch of Saudis and Egyptians and friends of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri over there.
And so now they're taking over and centralizing all these different jihads and rebellious actions going on, whether in Kashmir or across the stands, and they're doing it all on al-Qaeda terms instead of Taliban terms, instead of Pakistani tribesman terms.
And so all we're doing, even if you accept the premise and the excuse for all this, all we're doing is just making it worse and worse and worse over there.
We definitely are making it tremendously worse for people over there.
Even if people aren't, you know, caught up in the politics of it, just the tremendous economic loss that that country has suffered in the last 10 years.
You know, kids have to have, kids have to have snipers on their school roofs so they can go to school because they're afraid of suicide bombers.
You know, everywhere there's security checkpoints everywhere going through the main cities of that country.
What's really weird on top of that is that we, people in our Congress in the U.S., try to tie, well, first of all, we call it, you know, aid to Pakistan.
And then we try to tie giving that aid to Pakistan to, you know, concrete steps that the army might take there to distance themselves from al-Qaeda.
But the thing is, part of it's not even aid.
Most of it is actually reimbursement for using Pakistani airfields, using Pakistani fuel, reimbursement.
We used to give them, basically, money for each head that they gave us for al-Qaeda.
Like, you know, we gave them money for each person that we took from them and we sent to get them, including hundreds and hundreds of innocent people.
But there's just like total propaganda war against, quote-unquote, aid going to Pakistan, when actually a lot of it isn't even aid.
It's money that we owe them.
It's bills that we need to pay them.
And they don't get the money that they owe, that they're owed.
So instead, the country has to go to the IMF and the World Bank to get these loans, and then the economy gets even worse.
So it's like we're beating them up and we don't even acknowledge that they're getting beat up.
Right.
Well, Jan, talk a little bit.
You do in the article.
Please tell us a little bit about the refugee situation, because, of course, America's really been insisting most of the war is not the drone war there, right?
Most of the war is America forcing the Pakistani military to wage war, for example, in their repeated invasions of the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, et cetera.
Right.
They've launched, I think, at least half a dozen in the frontier areas, in the tribal areas only.
The army, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops laying in there, stationed there.
You know, three million internally displaced people in that part of the country.
It was the largest displacement of refugees since the last time that Pakistan experienced saving in 1947, when, after independence, Muslims and Hindus went from one country to another.
Since then, the U.N. says that this was the largest displacement, you know, in the world and the most, like, devastating in terms of possible outcomes.
A lot of those people end up in refugee camps outside major cities like Karachi.
Like, there's a big refugee camp there that a lot of these people from tribal areas end up in, and they're consistently targeted by Pakistani security forces.
The police and the army go there and round up hundreds of people at a time.
No trial.
You know, no idea where your family member has ended up in jail, because there's this intense, like, pressure to round up anyone that doesn't look like they ethnically belong in different parts of the country, which is another point I was trying to bring up there, that people in the West try to say that, oh, the Pakistani army or the Pakistani leadership is helping us make these lists of targets.
Well, Pakistani leadership itself isn't, they're not like angels either.
We have all these incidents of them going in and doing all these human rights abuses in this war, and we're relying on them to sort of tell us who's a terrorist and who's not.
Well, and now I guess America, as best I know anyway, correct me if you think I'm wrong, I don't know that they were behind Musharraf's coup in 1998 or 99, whichever it was, but they certainly supported Musharraf's military dictatorship for a long, long time, and then they tried, the CIA obviously was trying to install Benazir Bhutto before, I think it was Musharraf had her whacked, but then now it's her husband, Mr. 10% or Mr. 20%, I guess they debate, Zardari, and of course the military and the intelligence services there in Pakistan have always been very close to America's military and intelligence services, and I wonder whether from the point of view, I mean it certainly seems this way from here, but from the point of view of the average Pakistani, do you think, they think that their government is entirely inorganic and foisted upon them by this foreign power, the United States?
I think there's tremendous mistrust of the U.S. in that sense, and that's why the New York Times keeps talking about like it's a conspiracy theory, but it's actually not always a conspiracy theory, a lot of it is, a lot of Musharraf's regime has definitely popped up by the money that the U.S. was giving them in terms of counterterrorism stuff after 9-11, so conspiracies sometimes are actually based on some sort of truth, and definitely I think that's some truth in the fact that the Pakistani government, even though a large number of people in Pakistan are against it and publicly call it out as being corrupt and in the interest of someone else, they're still in power, there's elections coming up, there's national elections coming up early next year in Pakistan, and we'll see what happens there, that there's newer political parties that are coming up that are vocally anti-American, they're vocally anti-drone war, they're against these austerity-linked loans, they want a new grassroots democratic movement there, so we'll see what happens.
Well now, one thing that we learned from Michael Hastings' reporting in Rolling Stones was that the former general in charge of the Afghan war, General Stanley McChrystal, and he was the former head of JSOC, running the Delta Force and all that, doing the night raids and all those guys in Iraq, he had what he called insurgent math, every time we kill one we make ten more, and that was at least for the war in Afghanistan, and Hastings said he heard that from the source's mouth himself personally directly right there, it wasn't just passed around hearsay or anything, which makes you wonder why he didn't just fold up his tent and go home, but anyway, would you agree that that same insurgent math applies to the drone war in Pakistan that actually with each and every one of these strikes, we're just making more enemies, is it possible that actually the CIA does a great job and finds a house full of really bad guys and takes care of them and now they're gone and everything's better now?
At all?
I mean, even isolated incidents like that?
No?
I think it's impossible to, that's another problem with this whole strategy, there's a finite number of people, it's not like shooting fish in a barrel and you just get rid of all the fish and no one else can come into the barrel, these are like cities, there's a lot of people in a really small part of the world that we're talking about, of course they're going to get radicalized by what they're seeing around them, just like here, we have all these crazy nut jobs, these right wing nut jobs that look at what happened on 9-11 and they got crazy radicalized, it happens everywhere, it happens here, it's going to happen everywhere.
Yeah, I mean, whoever listened to Paul Wolfowitz before, it was absolutely unprecedented.
Yeah, but after 9-11 everyone was like, we've got to do what we've got to do, you know?
Yeah, well I guess the Israelis listened to him when he was stealing stuff and giving it to them back in the 70s.
Anyway, yeah, you're absolutely right, I always thought the neocons and the al-Qaeda types were the perfect mirror image of each other, the virtual crazies on the street corner ranting at the stars, but once things start blowing up, people start thinking, hey, that guy said this was going to happen, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Alright, well, unfortunately that's the music playing and we've got to go, the show's over.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, I really appreciate it.
No problem, thanks so much.
Everybody, that's Umar Farooq, he's got this piece at Salon.com called Our Immoral Drone War, in Pakistan, this time.