01/16/08 – William Lind – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio, I'm KS959 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, thanks for listening, and our guest today is William S. Lind, he's a military affairs analyst and director of the Center of Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.
He writes also for Anti-War.com, you can find his archives at Anti-War.com slash Lind.
Welcome to the show, Bill.
Thank you.
Good to talk to you again, it's been a little while, and you have an incredibly interesting article here on Anti-War.com about, well I guess the truth of America's Pakistan slash Afghanistan policy as compared to the common perception, I'm assuming, in Washington, D.C.
That's your audience you're trying to write to here, isn't it?
Well not really, I have no illusions that change is going to come from anybody in power in Washington, D.C., I've been in this town more than 30 years, and I can assure you that that illusion disappeared a long time ago, the pigs at the trough are not about to voluntarily leave it.
Yeah, so this is for us to educate ourselves and then run for Congress ourselves?
Well, I think it's pointing to what happens when the roof falls in.
After the current grand strategy this country is following, which essentially is to try to rule the entire world, collapses, as such grand strategies always do, then those who warned that it was going to do so might actually get listened to the next time around.
Ah, well, it makes sense, I'd like to think so, it seems like all the neocons can do is fail upwards so far, and people like you who have been right all along stay marginalized, but...
That's how Washington works.
Yeah, I guess once the final collapse comes, maybe then they'll finally get it through their head.
Alright, so tell me, what's going on here, you say in here something that Eric Margolis said on the show a few weeks ago that I think is a very important point, that the United States is not really at war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, we're at war against the Pashtuns, we're on the side of the Tajiks and the Uzbeks against the Pashtuns in a civil war there, is that basically right?
That's certainly how the Afghans perceive it, I mean organizations, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, etc., come and go very quickly.
What lasts permanently is the tribal division, and the problem is, yes, we are fighting the Pashtun, and the Pashtun always in the end win the Afghan wars, which means we're on the losing side.
That makes perfect sense, I actually saw Rambo 3 not too long ago, and there's a whole soliloquy by Rambo's boss, the guy that always recruits him in each movie, where he says, you can't beat these people, nobody's ever conquered them in thousands of years throughout all history, and you're not going to do it either, he explained to the KGB officer.
And he was right, obviously the Soviets were defeated as the British had been defeated, as we will be defeated.
But the real problem I'm writing about here isn't Afghanistan, Afghanistan strategically is pretty much a dead end, as is Iraq.
That is not true of Pakistan.
And the basic point of my column, and this is part of a series, in fact it's number 246 in the series, called On War, and they're available on a bunch of different websites.
The basic point here is that what we're doing in Afghanistan is destabilizing Pakistan.
And if Pakistan goes, our whole strategic position in the region collapses.
Essentially our strategic position in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, is a three-legged stool.
And those three legs are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
If any one of those goes, we have a two-legged stool, and a two-legged stool is not the most stable of platforms.
And of course, in addition to that basic strategic function, Pakistan also has nuclear weapons, which could end up in the hands of people who we would rather not have get them.
Now tell me, what is it exactly about America's policy in Afghanistan that's creating such instability in Pakistan?
Well, first of all, when we decided, or allowed ourselves to get put in the position of fighting the Pashtun, there are lots of Pashtun in Pakistan, and in fact they're very populous in the Pakistani Armed Forces.
So war with the Pashtun is war with the Pashtun, and that invariably meant that you were going to bring the Pashtun into, in Pakistan, into the war as well.
They don't care much about lines on maps drawn in London.
And we went ahead to try to deal with this problem by putting more and more pressure on the government of Pakistan, and that of course has delegitimized that government.
Mr. Musharraf is now commonly referred to in Pakistan as Mr. Busharraf, and it is not a compliment.
No, certainly not.
We then pushed him into doing something that he actually had to violate a treaty in order to do, namely send the Pakistani Army into the Northwest Tribal Territories.
Now, the British have learned the hard way, don't go there.
And the Pakistani Army, having gone in, has predictably gotten its butt kicked.
They have had thousands of casualties.
They have brought thousands more tribesmen into the fight, and they have made the Pakistani Army look like a tool of the most hated man in the world, namely George Bush.
And now, let's dwell on that one point there for a couple of minutes.
This is something that's actually not very widely reported.
I've seen it before, that Musharraf sent the Pakistani Army into the tribal areas, and they ended up surrendering, ambush, surrendering, and then they were being ransomed, and all this kind of thing.
This happened numerous times, right?
Basically the case is that the Federal Army of Pakistan just cannot invade that part of the country and occupy it.
Well, it doesn't want to, and its soldiers don't want to fight.
The Pakistani troops weren't surrendering, they were going over.
Many of the men ended up staying there and fighting on the side of the Pashtun.
The others just said, hey, we're not going to fight you guys.
And in turn, they were very well treated, and in a week or two they were released.
So it's very hard to send in an army to fight a war that it doesn't want to fight.
Now how weak do you perceive the Pakistani government as being at this point?
Well, I think the Pakistani government at this point is a house of cards, and it's just a question of when it comes down.
Musharraf essentially has very little legitimacy left.
The fact that he sent the army into a war it doesn't want to fight also puts him in the army's crosshairs, which is not a position you want to be in if you're a dictator in Pakistan.
His attempts to booger the elections there, of course, have only made things worse.
And now there's no clear alternative to him with the assassination of Mrs. Bhutto.
So the danger here is not really a governmental crisis in Pakistan.
The danger is that the Pakistani state itself could disintegrate, and that's the very essence of what I call fourth-generation war, which we're seeing spread all over the world.
It is the effective disappearance of the state.
Sometimes it disappears altogether.
More commonly it remains as a polite fiction, as it is today in Iraq and in Nigeria and much of West Africa.
But in fact, the state no longer controls anything.
It's simply one gang among others trying to line its pockets most effectively as it can.
That's kind of where Pakistan is right now, and if that goes further and the state completely disintegrates then, of course, we have the wonderful phenomenon of loose nukes.
Well, is the war party in the United States not using the weakness of the Musharraf government now as their excuse to go ahead and send in troops to seize the nukes or to send special forces types into Waziristan to handle the problem that he can't handle?
That kind of thing.
Of course they do that, because they live in a world, a dream world, in which the U.S. military can do anything.
All that Washington has to do is say, go do it.
But as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's not capable of doing everything.
In fact, in this kind of war, it's not capable of very much.
It may, against opponents who on paper are vastly weaker than itself, be able to get a draw, and even that's questionable.
So again, we see Washington living in a dream world and disconnected from reality, which is what always happens to closed systems, which this administration in particular is a closed system.
And Washington absolutely won't grasp that this problem is strategic in nature.
In other words, so long as we follow the grand strategy that the neocons have pushed us into of trying to rule the world, and if anybody defies us, we invade them, occupy them, and then remake them in our own image, a task which so far has proven somewhat beyond us, that grand strategy guarantees disaster after disaster after disaster.
And Washington will not grasp that.
The only two presidential candidates in both parties who are daring to suggest that this grand strategy of we're on the offensive may not work terribly well are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
All the major candidates are beating the drum for more of this neocon nonsense, and it's a disaster for the country.
Well, since the focus of your study is the danger of the collapse of states and their replacement with these fourth-generation private armies, your focus also then would be how best to shore up states that are in danger of falling like this.
So if you were in Hadley's position and you could change the strategy or advise George Bush to change the strategy, do you recommend just hands-off, or what would be a smart way for America to help shore up, not necessarily Musharraf the dictator, but the state of Pakistan so that it doesn't fall into warring private factions like this?
Well, if I were just slightly more cynical than I already am, I would say that we should bomb Pakistan.
There's usually nothing that does more to rally the people around their dictator.
Yeah, go ahead and invade.
That'll help.
In practical terms, we need to take a vastly lower profile.
To the degree that we want Pakistan or anyone else to do something for us, that has to all be arranged behind closed doors.
In public, if anything, we should arrange some squabbles between our government and theirs where we back down and say, oh, well, you know, they won.
They forced us to back down.
Instead of making everybody look like our puppet, and of course Washington wants them to look like our puppet because Washington wants them to be our puppet.
So it's T.R.'s old advice of speak softly and carry a big stick, and the big stick should be carried behind back so that it isn't out in public to become an issue for people.
And Washington, again, both parties seem to have no interest whatsoever in speaking softly, which is absolutely critical in these situations.
But beyond that, we simply need to recognize that this is the way the world is going.
The state is weakening.
That's going to be one of the major factors in the world in the 21st century.
And instead of enmeshing ourselves in these situations, which just makes them worse and tends to import the disorder back here, we need to isolate ourselves from them.
We need to come to the realization that not everything that happens in the world is something we have to get involved in.
Now answer me this, because I know you care.
What about Osama?
He's there.
He and Zawahiri are still there.
They're still podcasting to their followers around the world every couple of months or so, putting out more propaganda.
Doesn't somebody have to get them?
Actually they're doing a wonderful job at the moment of getting themselves.
What we see Al-Qaeda doing in case after case is undertaking actions that alienate the local population.
Well in this kind of war, if you don't have the support of the local population essentially, you're going to lose.
And this may be inherent to their type of organization.
We saw them in Iraq, in Anbar province, they have done this.
They made the classic mistake, other revolutionary groups have made it before, of trying to impose their agenda, which the locals do not like, before they had consolidated power.
Now other revolutionary groups, when they saw they'd made this mistake, backed off.
Osama has not, and I suspect the reason he has not may be that he cannot, that the kind of people who sign up for Al-Qaeda are such true believers that you can't tell them, hey, don't force the most draconian interpretation of Sharia down the local throats.
You can't tell them that.
They won't obey.
They'll just say, well, we aren't going to listen to you anymore, we'll listen to whoever tells us to do that.
So I think that Al-Qaeda, ironically, given enough running room, will be defeating itself.
The main thing that can short-circuit that, of course, is us making ourselves even more hated than Al-Qaeda.
Right.
It is all about moral legitimacy, right?
He claims, Osama claims, to be fighting a defensive jihad against our imperialism.
We claim to be fighting a defensive war against his terrorism, and who wins is the person who makes the general public at large in the world believe them.
Actually, far worse, what we continue to say over and over and over again ad nauseum is we are on the offensive.
That's the Bush administration's mantra.
We are on the offensive.
Well, if one side's on the offensive and the other on the defensive, and the one on the offensive seems far stronger, who do people line up with?
In the 3,000 years that we have told the story of David and Goliath, how many people have identified with Goliath?
This is Central and Fourth Generation War.
America's greatest military theorist, Colonel John Boyd, said that wars fought at three levels, the moral, the mental, and the physical.
The physical, which is where we focus virtually all of our warfighting effort, is the least powerful.
The moral is the most powerful, and that's where Al-Qaeda has been beating us.
Again, they are making a blunder that we could, we did it right, take advantage of and deprive them of that moral high ground, but that means, again, we have to start letting other people live their own lives in their own places.
One thing here, of course, there's the neoconservative world revolutionary strategy that you've identified, but there's also the widespread political support for it in this country.
It seems to me that, well, honestly, it takes somebody like you to make the case for restraint and prudence and so forth from the right.
If you were some liberal from some liberal foundation trying to make this case, it wouldn't work because the typical so-called conservative case in America for this kind of thing is we have to go and kick butt.
You have to be very right wing.
You don't have to be the director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism to say, no, we don't need to go kick butt.
We need to ramp this thing down and carry our stick behind our back, because that's what's smart.
As the greatest conservative thinker in post-World War II America, Russell Kirk, repeatedly said, the first conservative virtue is prudence.
And a strategy that says the United States is going to do whatever it takes to rule the whole world pretty much defines imprudence.
So the notion that this Bushian, neocon, grand strategic offensive strategy has anything conservative to it is pure nonsense.
The Bush administration has successfully attached the word conservative to a whole lot of things that are traditionally considered anti-conservative, whether we're talking federal spending or deficit size or expansion of the power of the federal government or this kind of wildly ambitious foreign policy.
But the fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, it is the neocon voices that are the loudest because they have the most money.
And traditional conservatives, such as us here at Free Congress, don't get heard nearly as well as they do.
The neocons, of course, aren't conservatives at all.
They're Trotskyites.
All they've done is replace Marxism with so-called democratic capitalism as their ideological basis for demanding world revolution.
But a Trotskyite remains a Trotskyite.
All right, everybody.
That's William S. Lynn.
I really appreciate your time today.
He's the director of the Center of Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.
And part 5,000-something of his series On War is published today at antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for your time.
My pleasure.
You started this damn war.
Now you have to deal with it.
And we will.
It is just a matter of time before we achieve a complete victory.
You know there won't be a victory.
Every day your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom fighters.
The fact is that you underestimated your competition.
If you'd studied your history, you'd know that these people have never given up to anyone.
They'd rather die than be slaves to an invading army.
You can't defeat a people like that.
We tried.
We already had our Vietnam.
Now you're going to have yours.