Conversations With History - Ahmed Rashid

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Ahmed Rashid who is an independent journalist based in Lahore Pakistan his articles appear all over the world in major newspapers and journals including the New York Review of book BBC online The Telegraph in London and the International Herald Tribune he's the author of several books and for more than two decades these books have provided unmatched insight in to terrorism in the geopolitics of the region of Central Asia the books include the resurgence of Central Asia Taliban jihad and his newest book is descent into chaos Ahmed welcome back to our program great pleasure to be here after six years we really should talk about Pakistan is Pakistan a rogue state well no I wouldn't describe it as that because I think there's a the problem in Pakistan has been this perennial conflict between military power and civilian power you had bouts of civilian rule but essentially the military have ruled the country especially for the last 3040 years and they have controlled foreign policy particularly foreign policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan Afghanistan in India and it's been very very difficult for these intermittent civilian governments we had for in the 1990s we've just got one now in after the elections in February 2008 it's been very difficult for these civilian governments to encroach upon the military's control of foreign policy let's help our audience know some of the facts about Pakistan how many people how larger countries it's the fifth largest country in the world it's 160 million people with a very high population growth rate dwindling resources huge problems now of energy of water of land and we are going to be you know over 200 million very soon and certainly a major economic crisis is probably pending and in Pakistan never sort of carved a national identity that all groups and ethnic groups could agree to or is that a fair assessment well exactly I mean I think you know Pakistan was members was born out of British India a separate country in the name of of Islam but the founding fathers of Parkes I never imagined that it would be a theocratic state or a state run by religious leaders instead they wanted a western-style British style democracy the Constitution we have is is parliamentary democracy very much modeled on what Britain has but the whole problem has been that with three after three wars with India the national security issue with India the dispute over Kashmir the desire to have a pro-pakistan government in Afghanistan all these issues have really been driven by the military and and and they have controlled these policy issues as a result you know at one point we were spending like 30 percent of the budget on the army education is illiteracy is about 50 percent one of the lowest in South Asia we're not spending enough money on on developing human capital in the social sector and this has been one of the very very big problems you you say at one point and you actually have already touched on this but I want to unpack this you say that there in in the history of Pakistan there have been two important relations that are terribly important the military to civil society and the state to Islam so first let's talk about the military to civil society because the the as you just described it it's its dominance over the system has led to a situation where civil society has really pushed down repressed and not able to realize the vitality that potentially is there yes I mean we've seen that in these intimate and civilian governments the military has not allowed these civilian governments to encroach upon what it considers its territory secondly the military defines national interest the civilians don't so the military defines a national interest in terms of of the enemy India both trained military capability which this is a reason Pakistan went nuclear and the civilians if you ask them they would define national interest completely differently democracy a vibrant economy education math literacy these these kind of categories don't come into the sort of military's thinking processes unfortunately the other thing is that the military has not just grown politically powerful but it has grown economically powerful and especially under General Musharraf he has given incredible perks and privileges to the military a lot of the land in the country is owned by the military or if it's not owned it's seized upon by the military and developed according to what the military wants the senior officers get far more perks and privileges than anybody in the civil sector almost all their children are studying in America on scholarships they they are a highly highly the most privileged group in the country at one point you quote the the famous expression that somebody coined about all countries have an army but in Pakistan the army has a country well yes I mean that's what many Pakistani think because you know I mean everything is dictated by the army and no civilian leader can afford to rub the army the wrong way mm-hmm and and you you the second relationship that you said was very important was the relationship of the state to Islam and you you've made the point in the book throughout that the military doesn't have a it doesn't have a vested interest in building up the institutions of civil society but they have used Islam to - as an instrument talk about that well you know I civil society in the political parties view the founding fathers as being modernist Democratic and and they want to set up a democratic system where all the for example the non-muslim minorities have the same rights and religion is is part of the culture and tradition of the country but it is that it does not dictate the political process now the problem with the military is that in order to further their foreign policy aims in Kashmir towards India and towards Afghanistan they have fuelled Islamic extremist groups because Islamic these Islamic extremists for since the 1980s especially when the Americans came and trained the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan since then the military has used these militants to fight in Kashmir to fight in Afghanistan for their favored proxy force and that of course is created a blowback in the country I mean you can't create militant groups and then expect them to just stay outside the country and fight foreigners they would want to do the same thing internally they will want to set up a Islamic state at home and this blowback is what we have really suffered from very badly we suffered from it at the end of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the Soviets left the country we suffered from it again during the Taliban period in the 1990s when we were supporting the Taliban and the Taliban were getting recruits from Pakistan and thousands of five sunnies were going off to fight for them we suffered again with this blowback from Kashmir and now of course after 9/11 there's been a much more severe blowback because for the first time we have developed what we call now the Pakistani Taliban and these are fighters who militant groups they are mostly from the Pashtun ethnic belt in the northwest part of the country but they are linked to other groups the Kashmiri groups of punjabi extremist groups and they all want to create they want to carve out a Shariah state that is a state for Islamic extremism in the northwest part of the country and so now they have become a real threat mm-hmm so in a way the chickens have come home to roost and if you take the trajectory of all of your book all of your books this the situation over time gets worse and worse so so so that in in the beginning when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan there were no suicide bombers but now you're seeing them well I mean we have never had suicide bombing until very recently when some in the late 90s some of the Kashmiri group started suicide bombing at the behest of the military having been trained by the military to do that now of course we you know last year we had something like in 2007 we had something like 70 suicide bombings now it's become kind of de rigueur you know and this is a tactic that has been brought in by al Qaeda al Qaeda had been settled in the Pakistani border regions for the last six seven years it's reported by the Afghan Taliban who've adopted the same strategy while fighting in Afghanistan against American forces so if you've described it perfectly I mean the blowback after the Soviet war in the 80s was containable you know there was a the whole of society was armed with Kalashnikovs and drugs came in for the first time but it was still containable in a sense at the end of the Soviet Union was was a left a kind of vacuum in which these extremist groups didn't quite know which way to go but you know the Taliban then has the blowback from the Taliban movement in the 90s has been very severe but of course the blowback from the post 9/11 period has been deeply affecting the whole fabric of society because we gave refuge to the Taliban we the Afghan Taliban we allowed them sanctuary in Pakistan we allowed them to recruit and rearm and have got in in Pakistan and you know I was writing I was warning in 2002 2003 that if we continue this we are going to Taliban eyes Pakistan there's no way you can keep these guys separate or put them out in the mountains and expect them to go and attack the Americans in Afghanistan without them influencing Pakistanis and that's precisely what's happened there there are two points here that I want to emphasize and one is these explain to us what these federal territories are and what do you do a great job in your book of doing is explicate how the the control of those areas are limited or at least the government limits itself in controlling those territories but also there are no defined borders Pakistan has never agreed to defining the borders between it and Afghanistan agreeing to the so-called Durand Line so so in a way what you have is a natural platform for these developments to occur and to have a transmission belt of extremists being trained supplied in Pakistan going across the border and then coming back well you're talking about Fattah which is the federally administered tribal areas now these constitute seven tribal agencies each tribal agency together they have a maybe about three to four million people in it it's very mountainous very rugged very bearing kana me it has never been developed and essentially this region which borders Afghanistan is ruled directly by the President the laws are that that work there are holdover from the British period this Britain created this buffer between independent of gana Stan and British India in order to keep the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan from marauding into British India and this buffer was just taken up wholesale by Pakistan and nothing has been done in the last sixty years to change the status of this buffer now Democrats want political reform they want this buffer to be bought into the Pakistan Constitution so that they can benefit so the people of Farah can benefit from the same facilities etc you know legal system law and order education etc that the rest of Pakistan does but for the military this has been when I write in my book is that this has actually been a very as you said ik very convenient platform from the days of the training the Mujahideen you know when the Soviet foreign minister would issue a dommage to Pakistan and say you are training these militant Afghans on your soil against the Soviet government in Afghanistan we would just reply well we're not because you know they're not in the body of Pakistan and by the way if you're talking about Fattah well farter of course doesn't come into the a body of Pakistan this is governed by a separate set of laws so it gave you a kind of escape hatch for doing whatever you did the Kashmiri Mujahideen were trained there the Taliban were trained there and now of course even more dangerous of all everyone all the extremists al Qaeda's there the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban there they were also and and they basically now control Fattah so the the problem on the border is it's not so much that Pakistan is not wanted to recognize the Durand Line the issue has been that Afghanistan lays claim to a large part of Fattah and a large part of the Northwest Frontier Province and so Afghanistan has not recognized the Durand Line this was a border that was again mapped out by the British it was a convenient border which the British demarcated in their own self-interest and it of course divided the Pashtun tribes between Afghanistan on one side and Pakistan on the other now it's very important to help our audience understand you mentioned the strategic goals of a Pakistan controlled by the military and one that's very important that comes up again and again is that for the last three or more decades the military has seen Afghanistan as giving it strategic depth in the threat that it perceives from India talk a little about that because that's the link here the the support of the Taliban as a way to to deal with India you see historically Afghanistan is a landlocked country it has depended upon Pakistan for all its imports its exports its trade and everything else but in order and in the 50s to 16 70 in order to balance off this kind of overwhelming influence that Pakistan had it always played the India card in the sense it cozied up to India it tried to play this balancing act between India and Pakistan so that it would not become wholly dependent on Pakistan and Pakistan would would not attempt to swallow up Afghanistan now it was a weak state it was a state without an army it was a state that depended on foreign aid American aid Soviet aid you know and and so for its own national interest it was a good way to go but it never opposed Pakistan as such now unfortunately what has happened you know after that is that Pakistan wants so much iodine were in power once so much iodine started their war in Afghanistan Pakistan saw that the the Indians gave a very strong backing to this to the Afghan Soviet regime in the 1980s and they didn't want that to be repeated because at that time they accused the Indians of intervening in in Pakistan's ethnic groups arming and subverting them some and this is a proxy war of course that has gone on between India and Pakistan for the last 50 years their intelligence agencies operate in our territory our intelligence agencies operate in their territory Kashmir we've we've intervened in Kashmir we helped arm the Sikh rebellion in the seventies and eighties in in India they have done the same in Balochistan and amongst Indies but the danger was that if the Indians were to consolidate in Afghanistan then we would be caught in this kind of pincer movement the Indians coming from both sides as it were and the army became very paranoid about this you know I've always written that this this threat is is is it's far more to do with army the Army's paranoia and a perception of what could happen rather than what is actually happening now after 9/11 of course the Indians were didn't have any presence in Afghanistan throughout the 90s the Taliban were were vert montly anti-hindu anti-indian and as a consequence we backed them because we wanted to strengthen their anti-india of feelings after 9/11 of course the people who come into power are the Northern Alliance who had who had been fighting the Taliban and the Northern Alliance had been armed and supported by India by Iran by Russia by other regional powers and consequently after 9/11 and the war ended we took back the Afghan Taliban even though we had pledged to the Americans that we would be supporting the war on terror we took back the Afghan Taliban in Indy in the hope that even though we we helped defeat them we now needed them again because we fear that India would once again come to play a major role in Afghanistan now if you ask the army today if you ask any leading person in the foreign ministry they will tell you India has playing is playing a dominating role in Afghanistan well I mean I think that's nonsense you know the Americans and NATO and about 30 other countries who have troops in Afghanistan are playing a much more important role they're giving more money they're giving troops etc etc India is is playing a role but it doesn't have any troops there it has an aid program for the Afghan reconstruction but again this tit for tat war has started Pakistan is accusing the Indians of intervening in Pakistan and this is why the Army has has used the India factor as an excuse for maintaining support for the Taliban now in this equation we now have to add the United States and and the point I will talk a little later about US policy in the region but but I think what's very important is that these Pakistani focus foci that the military has has really led them to interpret their relations to benefit their strategic goals and not necessarily what the US wants so from the time that we were using Pakistan to fight the Soviets through the Mujahideen to the period after 9/11 the Pakistanis take the money but do other things with the money that support these these goals that you've just described well I you know I think that's been true all along for example the the Pakistan Army was very closely allied to the US during the Cold War and in fact the Americans built up the Pakistan Army in the 60s precisely as a as a weapon in case the Soviets you know came south and decided to you know occupy the Gulf region etc now even then Pakistan used a lot of the armaments and money that the u.s. gave not to build up a force that would counter the Soviets who would be invading from the northwest but to build up a force against India and this has been the historical relationship I mean the Americans have not been ignorant of this the Americans know perfectly I have known perfectly well we are we are arming and funding the Pakistanis against the Soviet Union but they are going to use it against India and we did we fought three wars against India using American weapons and those wars of course led to sanctions on Iran Pakistan for several years in which bitchiness grew in the army and and and and and the Pakistanis kept saying to the Americans well you know we always told you that you know we would be using your weapons to fight India we would not be using your weapons to fight the Soviets so I think you know in in 9/11 what happened after 9/11 was that there was this outpouring of support for Pakistan obviously Pakistan was the main route by which American forces would invade Afghanistan it was the main supply route for the American occupation forces who were in Afghanistan after the war ended and so Pakistan was very much needed in Pakistan again uses this for its own purposes it uses for example I mean since 9/11 the US has given something like nearly 11 million 11 billion dollars to Pakistan in aid eighty percent of that age has gone to the military now what is the military done with our aid now the US demand was that you should train counterinsurgency forces in warfare to fight you know the the Taliban in the tribal areas rather we have bought we have used these to buy heavy-duty weaponry for the India border you know and only now as the Bush administration kind of woken up to this and Congress has woken up to this and Congress is now in fact even contemplating that no future arm sells to Pakistan which are directed in India would be sold by the US and the u.s. is now trying to train and harm paramilitary forces for fighting the insurgency in northwest Pakistan but the real issue here is that you know in the last seven years again I think you know as my book says Musharraf when he first had his first meetings with the generals after 9/11 he he he agreed and he wanted to support the US invasion of Afghanistan but at the same time you know some generals were opposed to it others said okay that's fine we'll use the US will say yes now but we'll say no later on we'll take that money we'll do what they want now but later on we will fit this new shift in strategic direction that we are being forced to do by the US by this ultimatum the Rumsfeld and Colin Powell give to Pakistan we will shift this around so that it works in AI interests and in particular the particular interest of the Pakistanis after 9/11 was to maintain the Taliban as a proxy force and of course the u.s. gave an opening in the sense that its focus was on the hunt for al-qaeda now I think it's very important because it you there's a point in your book where you say that in in the recent period there's been a greater American pressure to deal with the Taliban and you point out that to deal with this situation the the ISI and you should explain what that is essentially created a non-governmental organization a group of contractors who were on the side helping the Taliban because the military couldn't be open about doing that well Harry first of all I think you're absolutely right I think that the critical strategic mistake made by the Americans after the war ended was to narrowly focus all the regional allies it had to get al-qaeda and bin Laden you know and and they basically said to the Pakistanis you know the Taliban are coming back here there would be you know we're not bothered about the Taliban you can do what you like with the Taliban you know and President Karzai of Afghanistan would rush to Washington you know every few months and and tell Bush bluntly that look al Qaeda is not the threat I face al Qaeda is a few hundred guys I mean they may try and launch terrorist attacks in Europe but they're not going to overthrow my regime the people who are gonna overthrow my regime and hurt your presence and your support are the Taliban you have to do something about these sanctions and and and this administration just did not listen to that they weren't interested in that largely because of Iraq they were bogged down in Iran now certainly I think the the to run the Taliban after 9/11 was very difficult because first of all the CIA had very intense cooperation with the ice I which is the inter-services intelligence this is the overarching Pakistani military intelligence service which runs the politics and the foreign policy and it's extremely powerful it is you know tens of thousands of agents on his payroll all around the country they interfere with almost everything but essentially they formulated they had formulated the Afghan policy and the Kashmir policy since the 1980s now the ice I wanted to maintain the Taliban but they were cooperating with the CIA on hunting down al Qaeda which the ice I did hunt down and they caught a you know large number of our kind of people some of them very senior such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who's now on trial for organising 9/11 but they had to create something which was completely outside the military outside the eye side which could not be tracked down by the CIA which which would not have a be part of any official budget which did not employ you know the CIA for example had had lists of all the employees of I sigh and and they could monitor exactly you know who is doing what where when and how now in order to avoid that kind of monitoring the eyesight created a a nice eye within the eye side it was basically run like an NGO it was run like a non-governmental agency you know where you come in for part-time work you your official job is you're retired you're an army officer who spent 20 years helping the Taliban or 10 years in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan you speak the language you know the people you know the leaders but now you're retired you have a job as a teacher or you're a professor somewhere or you're retired in some other capacity and you come back into the system you work for three to four weeks and you tell everyone at home I'm going off on holiday to the you know whatever and you come and work with the Taliban and then you go home again and and and and that was how it was essentially run so it was on track it was on track traceable and you know Americans in in 2003 2004 the Americans were asking all the Pakistanis well how do you think is there a rogue ëyesí is there and this was the feeling firfer for a long time that somehow there were rogue officers who were more Taliban than the Taliban who had somehow set up a clandestine organization in the ice aisle while serving in the eye side who were running the Taliban and I maintained I wrote very publicly at that time that there was no rogue ice I this decision to back the Taliban was a state policy it was made by Musharraf himself and it was passed down and the I side with the implementers of this thickened structure that was created in order to avoid detection by the Americans now what is the relationship of this this military the ISI to this whole nuclear proliferation question we have the case of AQ Khan in other words it was another of the art military strategic goals that had unintended consequences or were they in charge of the operation all along and here we're talking about the fact that mr. Kahn was selling the technology and information about how to build bombs to both Iran and then later to North Korea to get missiles well you know this is a very murky area but it is and and and publicly and privately even very little is known about it because the secrets are held by very very few people but most Pakistan is accept the fact that the military was deeply involved in everything that IQ Han was doing there was no way AQ Khan was operating on his own that he was selling technology to Libya and Iran and all these countries without backing from the military because he was using all the Army's facilities aircraft offices you know his bodyguards military people he had officers working with him etc now the problem here is that you know that clearly and there's been no accounting by the way of all the money that that PacSun earned through this sale there was the suggestion that AQ Khan made a lot of money well he may have made a lot of money but you know we're talking of hundreds of millions of dollars that were earned by selling this proliferation and there you know I think most part Sonny's believe that much of this money was used for this vast budget that the I Sai has don't forget in the 80s and 90s when much of this proliferation took place the ice I were running operations in Afghanistan they were running the Taliban and I'm having to support them and pay for them they were running the very heavily involved in running the insurgency in Kashmir there are two full full-scale insurgencies that they had to operate upon they needed vast sums of money for this now where exactly the money went did it go directly to the military did it go to the I side I mean I really don't know but a AQ Khan himself recently in the last few days has come out with several interviews saying you know I was not the only one responsible the army chiefs know exactly what happened and and who benefited from this so I think you know this is this is going to emerge and it but it's a very sensitive issue the Bush administration is that when the scandal erupted in 2004-2005 the Bush administration ultimately gave a clean pass to the army because they knew that if we dig a little deeper and imp and we implicate the military in this profile proliferation the military is gonna go haywire they may stop supporting us in in in the hunt for al Qaeda and they didn't want to jeopardize that for the sake of going after what really happened in this non-proliferation I'm sure the Americans have enough files and enough evidence which probably shows that the military was involved but it's something it's something that they are not going to the Bush administration was not going to rake up now of course it's very interesting and as a very sensitive issue in Pakistan because if you get a Democratic administration coming in the Democrats are very tough on have always been very tough on proliferation much tougher than the Republic you write the America about yeah I mean if you get a Democratic president coming in uh in November the Democrat lobby for non-proliferation is much tougher than the Republican Lobby and there could be pressure from some of the Democrats maybe on the new Democratic president to really get to the bottom of this which of course would put at serious risk the whole relationship between the Pakistan military and the Americans so it remains a hot potato in the sense that it really has not been uncovered yet and the truth has not come out but it will and when it does come out I'm sure it is going to implicate a lot of people and and and I'd put a lot of things at risk also there is another quote that I have here from that you you cite in your book I'm thinking of what you just said about the way Pakistan has dealt with the United States Pakistan negotiates with its friends by pointing a gun at its own head which is what you just described I mean unfortunately yes I'm you know sometimes when we see the kind of extreme measures that the military is prepared to take you know and hi-hi I think IRA can't that in the incident well many such incidents but in particular the build-up against India in 2002 when we sent this message the military sent this message to the Indians through the Americans and there was a danger at that time of all-out war nuclear war and there was a danger that the Indians were going to invade Sindh province in the south of the country and split Pakistan into leaving Punjab and the where all the heavy concentration of the army was separately and we sent a message saying that if an Indian armored division comes through into sin we will put a nuke on that armored division in sin which of course would kill tens of thousands of Pakistanis also because the Indians would be inside Pakistan and so that that you know that kind of thing I mean has obviously been immense you know led to immense cause of concern so let's talk about US policy and in the western response to events especially in Afghanistan the u.s. it seems in every period that we've been talking about the the 80s under Reagan the 90s under Clinton and then after 9/11 has really kind of acted in a way that has really cut the wrong way in terms of solving the problems that were being addressed we supported the Mujahideen through Pakistan which then unintentionally led to al-qaeda Clinton in the 90s let the the Saudis and the Pakistanis take the lead with regard to the Afghan civil war and then as we've just talked about the Bush administration after 9/11 was narrowly focused on al Qaeda and and really sort of missed all the big picture you know the Afghans in particular are very bitter about this because they consider the real betrayal of the u.s. took place in 1989 when the Soviets withdrew from son and the US walked away as well and and that you know and not helping rebuild the country helped form a government and that of course led to the civil war that we had in the 90s in which ultimately the Taliban came up on top after 9/11 I think the real fault and I essentially there were two the first ones the the sole focus on al-qaeda at the expense of any kind of you know rebuilding the country reconstruction etc and thickened Lee was very quickly the decision to go into Iraq and and I described how by March or April in in 2002 you know 12 weeks after the war was won you know I mean people were still in the state of shock the best that the few resources that the US had in Afghanistan the Special Forces the satellite imagery the reconnaissance etc etc they were all taken out and they were they were sent stateside and they were set in for retraining for Iraq and you got the second string of perhaps you know not such highly trained US forces coming into Afghanistan and but and then as a result of this focus on Iraq the the CIA basically had a policy of maintaining law and order in the country or so they thought through the Warlord's so there was this policy of arming and putting the Warlord's on the payroll on the American payroll and that was devastating because you know the Warlord's have been driven out by the Taliban precisely because the Afghan people were so fed up with them the warlord throughout the 90s had devastated the country they had pillaged and you know Harriston and stolen people's property and everything else and and here was the Americans that the liberators of Afghanistan the people who have overthrown the Taliban who freed us from oppression bringing back the Warlord's on their payroll you know and and that was something that the Afghans became very very bitter about you know Karzai himself was not able to do anything about it because this was you know I mean he was told just you know you just stayed there as a kind of weak president the warlords will control the countryside and we are doing Iraq by the way so you know your second your second or third on the list now you're not you're not the number one on the list and of course the problem with the warlords was that they began to defy Karzai they said well look I mean we've got SIA who who are you I mean you know you might be the president but you know we're on the CIA payroll I've got three thousand militiamen you had warlords who had two hundred tanks three hundred tanks I mean you couldn't annoy them so Karzai his hands were tied in that sense because you know there was this American backing for the Warlord's and this only stopped around 2004 when they were taken off the payroll but by then these warlords had gone into drugs and business and trafficking and all sorts of other so they were you know remained incredibly rich politically powerful ruthless you know I mean but but that now they were wearing suits they weren't wearing you know militia uniform they would be wearing suits and ties they they they they found places in Parliament many of them stood in the presidential election which the UN and all tried to make sure that they didn't but the Americans insisted that they should stand so you know it's it's that this warlord policy which was actually the creation of Paul Wolfowitz and I several times called mr. Wolfowitz he's the Deputy Secretary of State for the Deputy Secretary of Defense I call him warlord Wolfowitz you know he was trying to he thought this was such a profound discovery yeah he was trying to sell the policy in Somalia and in Sudan and in other parts saying that we should be arming and funding independent militia warlords who would go after al-qaeda so the other problem of course was that these rollers were told to hunt al-qaeda but half these warlords were in bed with al-qaeda they were taking money from al-qaeda also so they weren't going to betray al-qaeda no warlord has ever delivered a senior al-qaeda figure to the Americans and and I want you to talk a little about this drug business because I think it becomes very important if you don't get nation-building you don't get reconstruction you don't get security that is required for development in in reconstruction then what you get is an economy that the locals find the drug trade as a place to go the poor farmer to survive the warlords to make money and the Taliban and al-qaeda basically can can rake off money also you know right after the war myself and a bunch of scholars who are working on Afghanistan in America we we literally begged the State Department and the Agency for International Development USA to invest in agriculture you know 80% of Afghanistan Afghans were living on agriculture within the next few months 2.5 million refugees came back home from Pakistan in Iran what would these people suppose to do there were no jobs the land was devastated and they all went back to their villages and their farms and there was no investment in agriculture and what you needed and it was a minimal investment you know you need this new crops you needed knew you needed fertilizer you needed some farm-to-market roads you needed better water distribution etc and you know agriculture was such a thing that we said you know you can have a turnaround in in one or two harvests in one or two growing cycles you can turn down the whole economy around you know perhaps you can get them to grow crops which you would buy up yourself and pay more money than the crop was worth simply to get the farmers on their feet again you know but instant there was no investment in agriculture and the result was and everybody went back to growing something that that didn't need any infrastructure to grow poppy you don't need fertilizer you don't need water you don't need infrastructure it grows anywhere or almost anything and that's what put the poor farmers did and eventually initially it became of course a major source of livelihood for millions of farmers across the current but particularly in the south of the country and very quickly at the Taliban were back in 2003 the Taliban came back they first started taxing the water be the farmers after that they started taxing the local traffickers who were picking up the opium at the farm gate and then transporting it through up to a big trafficker then they started taxing the big traffickers you know so there was this progression and buy and today I mean I have no doubt that al Qaeda and the Taliban are heavily involved in in not just making money which is a pittance at the bottom end of the ladder which is where the farmers are but they're making money at the top end of the ladder which is where the distribution is in Europe and you know where the final destination is where of course that opium you know doubles and triples and quadruples and in the price and and you rake in far bigger profit and if you look at the money today that these groups have the Pakistani Taliban the Afghan Taliban I mean they have enormous sums of money with which they're they're able to keep thousands of militiamen in the field they're paying their soldiers now you know in the 90s the Taliban never paid their soldiers it was a holy war I mean you know now they're paying up to 100 to 150 dollars a month to the soldiers which is about twice as much as what an Afghan soldier in the regular army gets so you know they're paying the the the families of the suicide bombers so if your son goes to commit suicide and killed a few Americans depending on how successful he was the father and the mother and the parents get a huge lump sum of money with so that you know to make to compensate for the son's death so now we are seeing an insurgency and a movement that is flush with cash a lot of it is coming from the drug straight mm-hm and now Afghanistan produces what percent of the world well guys thought today produces 93 percent of the of the world's heroin and unfortunately you know the international community has had no no real strategy there was the argument and made back in 2003 when when the opium escalation had started that at least the American forces and subsequently NATO okay we're not asking for American soldiers to go into the fields and hack down the poppy crop you know and and antagonize the farmers but at least what American forces could have done was interdiction stopping the convoys picking up the really big traffickers who everybody knew who they were you know and everybody still knows who they are you had you know the Americans had the helicopters they had the Special Forces they had the troop the Afghan government didn't have any of these resources you could have stopped these convoys you could have picked up a lot of people and you know brought them to justice either in Afghanistan or in America or anywhere else and and this was just not done because Rumsfeld refused to involve the US military in any form of counter narcotics now and the State Department for two running battle with Rumsfeld upon that issue but got nowhere because you know Rumsfeld was controlling the military you know as I listened to you and as I read your works and especially this new book it's like there there's a big picture here and all of the actors for their own narrow vested interests refused to see the big picture and their narrow focus which they think are solving a problem so Rumsfeld I guess thinks he's solving the problem of terrorism but by not seeing this big picture not understanding what's happening on the ground sort of does all the wrong things and even in a way beyond we here in the United States understand because it's what's happening on the ground here so essentially you create a a system that produces more and more terrorism by not dealing with the politics and the economy and the society in a comprehensive way I I think you're absolutely right I mean if you look at all the major players whether it's Musharraf or bush or Karzai or anyone they were dealing with their own local problem rather than looking at the big picture but but I think most at fault were the Americans because the Americans had an obligation to look at big picture they were leading they were the leading player in Afghanistan now I think partly why they just utterly failed was the focus on Iraq you know and even in Iraq you can argue that they didn't look at the big picture you know the neighborhood the other higher up states Iran how would the Iranians react to an invasion of you you know they they just looked at this narrow that we you know we're going to take Baghdad topple Saddam etcetera but I think you know the precisely this point is what this what the the next u.s. president has to do there is a a strategic you have to look at the region in a strategic way now and especially so now now I mean I for example if you want to deal with Afghanistan you want to settle Afghanistan you have to settle you have to deal with the sanctuaries in Pakistan if you want to deal with Pakistan you have to get the Indians on board to give the Pakistan Army some kind of feeling of security you have to help resolve the Kashmir dispute the same on the other side goes for Iran if you want to settle Afghanistan you have to talk to the Iranians and you have to give them some reassurances now what I'm trying to say is that there is a strategic picture here that this president utterly failed to - to President Bush sure President Bush and also President Musharraf actually absolutely and the next year American president will have to look at the strategic picture and be able to conduct you know you need a dozen hands you have to conduct multiple diplomacy in a dozen different levels with half a dozen countries all at the same time to resolve one problem mm-hmm you know there's no you know yeah and and then within that you have to have obviously country specific policies you have to deal with the Pakistan government you have to deal with the Afghan reconstruction whatever but you in order to try and settle this I mean you you have to have a better strategic picture than what the Bush administration had and and you know you you fault the United States beyond this and in terms of implementation but because you say you know we just don't have the skills and we're not willing to devote the resources and we don't have the institutions and argument to make a lot of this happen even if we got a new president who had a strategic way I you know I think I make a lot of that in my book and what I say is that basically after the end of the Cold War during the Cold War you had the tools of of nation-building if you like you know you rebuilt Europe after the Second World War with the Marshall Plan you had people who were knowledgeable about the world about economics about etc etc you had you know agencies like the USAID which when I was young and AI dee' was working in Pakistan they had agronomist sand water engineers and bridge builders and road engineers and you you don't you wouldn't find any technical person in AI D today you'd find a bunch of bureaucrats who signed checks to contractors you know now you had the u.s. Information Service which was incredibly good at putting out the US message in all these countries but and also seeing the press and influencing the local press you did away with all that and a lot of this was done away with after the at the end of the Cold War and by the Clinton administration it wasn't it wasn't deliberately done it was just rundown you know and Bush came in in fact an unmerged AI D with the State Department he merged the information services again with the State Department and these agencies you know in Treasury you used to have a capacity to actually help other countries with their currency problems and with their inflation and all this you know you've lost that ability come but you don't have anyone in Treasury now who can go out to Kabul and help deal with the currency problems there you know and so unfortunately what has happened is that these institutions that were there have been utterly run down so you'd the gut the US government does not have the capacity now now I think what we've seen in the last two years of the Bush administration they are aware of this and there be numerous reports by American institutions which appointed this out and they are trying to rebuild some capacity in the State Department but and and they now have a special section in the State Department which is called something it's not called nation-building but it's related to that and but I I mean clearly this is this is the what you know the Wars of the future are not going to be fought just by special forces and high-tech gadgetry and satellites and and drones and all the rest of it they're going to be fought by what comes after the war what kind of political deal can you put together after the war to settle you know political differences and issues in countries and of course we've seen the tragedy of Afghanistan in Iraq the same mistakes were made in both countries not enough troops on the ground over dependence on technology and gadgets tree you know secondly no plan to rebuild the country actually in Iraq the State Department had learned and they did have a plan but the plan was Scotch by Rumsfeld it was taken away by Rumsfeld the Pentagon is not supposed to do nation building so for the you know the Pentagon it may win the war but then it has to hand over the the political and the economic side to the State Department and to other departments of the US government so it's been very tragic that you know exactly I've watched this and really went because the same mistakes that you've done in Iraq we were seeing in 2002 2003 in Afghanistan you know I'm just saying well I hope the Americans don't repeat this anywhere else because this has been a big blunder and and there and there you are for sure you know 18 months later you were repeating exactly the same mistakes in Iraq and it's interesting that you you really do fault the Europeans also because when they came in in the secondary role they they were reluctant players focused again on their own area their own NGO concerned about the voter back at home not wanting to lose a life on the military so I talked a little about that because they as they say in the CIA the the Europeans didn't really want to walk the talk basically look I I you know when I write about the Europeans is two things I mean I think the Europeans were felt very trade by the Americans after 2001 when they offered all their support and NATO support and basically the Bush administration rejects them and that of course Peaks the Europeans angers them upset to them and there they're made into kind of second-class donors will do the fighting you can do the rebuilding or you can do education and health in Afghanistan you know and then of course when the US comes to Europe genuinely to seek their support for the war in Iraq the Europeans said well you rejected us there why should we support you here finally the Europeans come on board nature comes onboard in 2005 - in 2005 because the the Americans were so bogged down in Iraq and the insurgency had started in Iraq and America could not spare the troops so they go to NATO again and say please you know come and help us out but by then I think the the the the anti-bush feeling in Europe because of the war in Iraq was running so high that it was very difficult for these governments to actually commit troops to the Battlefront because III think well I really fault the Europeans at not educating that their their public's the government's did not educate their publics 1 on the dangers of al-qaeda and the whole terrorism thing and secondly they didn't educate their publics about the difference between the war and Afghanistan which was a UN mandated war it was a war that was supported by the whole world the international community etc etc and the war in Iraq which was a war of choice by the Americans alone you know and there was a difference between the two and you should not have treated Iraq and Afghanistan as one war but many Europeans did they said all troops in Iraq troops in Afghanistan it's the same thing it's it's a Bush's war we're not going to fight this war so so I I really fought the European governments and then after that of course once they committed the troops to - they they they they imposed so many restrictions on what their troops could do every country had a long list of caveats in other words restrictions that they couldn't fight they couldn't fight at night they then they couldn't carry Afghans in the helicopters they wouldn't do this there do that it is almost ridiculous because you know and and and the Afghans were laughing I mean I've got a said you know this is a Western army you know this is the feared you know NATO alliance that was going to defeat the Soviet Union and and they won't fight at night and and and for example the Germans stipulated that an ambulance had to follow a whole ambulance had to follow every patrol which meant that the patrol could only go on the the dirt roads the patrols could never go in the mountains because and no ambulance could follow in the mountains so I mean you know there were all these kind of absurd things and I think that really upset the Afghans it upset the Americans and and it sent a message a very strong message to the Taliban and to Pakistan that these Western countries are basically non serious about winning the war in Afghanistan so pile on the pressure you know let's target these vulnerable NATO countries and the Taliban had a brilliant strategy of trying to create crises with the with the government back home so for example they kidnap an Italian journalist threatened to kill him there's a crisis back home the government initially fell for ten days the government there was no government in Italy because the government was hanging by a to vote majority in parliament and and this crisis you know geared up the left and all the rest of it and and the government fell now I mean that was just an enormous kind of propaganda victory for the Taliban and that's what they're trying to do repeatedly they would love to see in the next six months as a result of the present summer offensive in 2008 that you know one or two countries actually leave Afghanistan one what has to say that this book that you've written and we've been talking about makes a very important contribution to educating the American public about this big picture that the next American president is going to have to address I hope so but I hope it also educates the Pakistani public you know about the about the role of the military and about how civil society needs to assert itself I hope it it educates the Afghans too everyone in the region as to what really happened and and how their expectations were dashed why their expectations were dashed and and what can be done essentially to try and get you know all these countries back on track again on that note thank you for writing the book thank you for coming back to Berkeley it was a great pleasure thank you very much and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

Views: 34,717

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: uc, berkeley, Terrorism, militancy, Islam, Foreign, Policy, Asia, yt:quality=high

Id: OWsmJIwe9Q4

Length: 58min 59sec (3539 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 20 2008