John Pilger on Afghanistan: US Military a Killing Machine! & How The Taliban Went From Ally to Enemy

[Music] i'm afternoon attention you're watching going underground back for a brand new series as u.s secretary of state anthony blinken meets with german foreign minister heiko mass to discuss the significance of nato's catastrophic defeat by the taliban in afghanistan joining me now in the studio to discuss the future of nato's so-called forever wars and of the so-called end to the usa's longest war in history could mark the beginning of a new world order is legendary filmmaker and journalist john pilger john thanks so much for uh coming back on it's a week where the largest arms fair is just down the road here in london being hosted they've been bombing syria the israelis armed by the british the eu and and the united states has been bombing of gaza this week but to afghanistan first ahead of the 9 11 anniversary on saturday did uh did the americans and the british uh leave as they came killing babies we saw the drone strike we saw the chaos at kabul airport um let alone this atrocity that killed scores of people something american soldiers involved in the killing of civilians there uh what what is your take well the killing machine action a killing machine in vietnam they called the us military the green machine because it was colored green but then they changed that and i say they those who really understand what the propaganda how the propaganda has lied to us over the years it's it's basically a killing machine i mean you talk about down the road there's this arm sphere when it was out in the open one of the missiles was an mk82 that was a 500 pound precision bomb it wasn't actually a missile but it was fired by f-16 um i saw in afghanistan what one of these things did to a village and to one family the name of the woman whose family was obliterated was orapha and she had i think seven in her family her husband and six children were killed when one of these m82 missiles but it was certainly one of those way back when in the early days of this arms fair that is going on now that was exhibited with such pride and in those days uh perhaps not the likes of myself but other journalists uh who weren't the so-called defense correspondents could actually get in and see what they were actually selling uh we couldn't get a we couldn't get x no of course not but i mean i have to say this program is going out in afghanistan as well as it's being broadcast around the world some afghans 70 percent rural not in in kabul are gonna wonder was this war which is considered the good war by liberals by starmer and johnson here and by democrats and pelosi and all of that is it that they is it british and americans are incompetent uh certainly incompetent but most imperialists are incompetent they make mistakes and kill large numbers of people they didn't mean to kill so they say for 20 years this war has been heading towards uh a foregone conclusion here we had imperial powers pulling out we've had enough of afghanistan we've only spent what is it you'll probably know a trillion but it's going nowhere anyway we've got a new enemy on the horizon and the brit the british have just sent a brand new aircraft carrier off to frighten this new enemy china so we want to switch it around there the strateg the strategists at the ministry of defense and in the pentagon in washington are writing a new scenario it will still be about the prospect of killing people if you look at the the uh as i've seen the the war gaming china the numbers that they predict will be killed in either a reaction to a chinese attack as they put it or in their own pre-emptive attack are in the millions so civilian lives whether they're one family of the kind that whose atrocity and tragedy i saw in afghanistan uh it's one family or it's millions of people but that's imperialism we must use that term i feel very strongly about this it's not an agit prop term from the 60s it used to be a term with great respectability and pe in fact in peop people in this country fought for the reputation of being imperialist christian gentlemen going off to the empire to uh to to uh to spread not only to spread the message but to spread the power of the imperial center and that's what we've had for 20 years in afghanistan i reported afghanistan i reported vietnam almost every war uh involving uh my own country britain australia the united states has been an imperial war that is we that word that is used so loosely and so irresponsibly by media we invading somebody else's country and of course there's a there's a reason why i mean if you take the the the reason why i watched sky news last night uh and i'm sure they know worse than anybody else but they they talked about how uh 911 had its origins and planning uh and execution in afghanistan that's just not true you know afghanistan was the fall guy if you like the the planning was done in the united states and there wasn't a single afghani among them they were mostly saudis i mean all this has been as struck from our our our consciousness our day-to-day consciousness that the willful if you can say this willful reluctance unwillingness deliberate um uh exclusion of of uh the the why we actually go into countries we being where we are now in britain the us and the western countries why we do that what we hope to gain from it that it is a 19th century project we don't wear pith helmets now but we might as well and that's where this unwillingness to appreciate and understand recent history but as i say imperialism is not an agitron perhaps it goes it it it got a bad name in the second world war because hitler was also an imperialist but that's what afghanistan was that's what vietnam was that's what iraq was and you know when when you have somebody i would call him an arch almost a caricature imperialist in tony blair making some statement where does this man get his hootsbur is the wrong word where's where does he get his arrogance from that that the power in the world that is bearing down on us again just like it was 20 years ago are all these bad islamic people nothing to do with us uh and when you when you look back on what blair said at the time of uh at the time of the invasion of afghanistan this is a moment to seize he said following 9 11. the kaleidoscope has been shaken the pieces are in flux soon they will settle again before they do let us order reorder this world around us for me that is one of the clearer statements of an imperialist in other words we'll go into a country we'll blow it all up we'll change it all around we'll undermine its culture we'll kill its people and we'll make it a better place when i put that to the former chief of the defense staff here in ministry of defense i got one of those rare interviews a few years ago with as with as he then was sir david richards general sir david richards i i put this to him and i actually quoted to him uh this famous afghan woman malalai joya and what she said about the real reasons the west it was in her country and had nothing to do with altruism he lost his call and and said i was a a taliban apologist for which i have to give him the credit he then apologized for because he's he was one of the modern pr generals but he even even he you hit a raw nerve i hit the nerve that's the point people can watch uh uh breaking the silence coming war on china as regards as the future and and the war you don't see on at john pilger.com but it has to be said that uh afghanistan is considered by liberals as the good war as i was saying earlier and it's repeated often that this is the roots of this are lie in the fight with the russians who had come to support najibullah who did such wonderful things for women's schools and so on and therefore mi6 and the cia had to help the mujahideen that would uh morph into the taliban into the into al-qaeda into isis well it was a project it was called operation cycler it was to destroy uh it was to destroy any government that appeared enough in kabul that was progressive and one government did appear in in 1978 a government of pdpa government and they brought in the most extraordinary progressive government equal rights right across the board for women uh illiteracy which was then 30 odd percent in in in afghanistan was within a decade 90 odd percent i mean it it's it's a again like when i was referring earlier to the to this this this unwillingness to learn something at the history to answer the question you've put about the good war at the time of this government the united states and this is this is a leak cable from the u.s embassy in kabul august 1979. the u.s embassy reported that the united states larger interests will be served by the demise of the pdpa government despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in afghanistan in other words rights of women can go to hell the rights of poor people can go to hell an mi6 cia mi6 cia we want this country we want it for various reasons it's strategically very importantly placed the taliban in fact far from being where uh 911 was plotted and planned and put together the taliban had been a clan state of the united states very few know that the bill clinton administration the taliban leadership including some of the people we're seeing now were invited to the united states they dropped in i think it in very secretly secretively into disney world and to target stores and did a bit of shopping and they went to the cia in langley virginia why because the us wanted to build one american oil company to build a natural gas pipeline from turkmenistan through afghanistan to pakistan it's absolutely crucial the alternative routes were via russia and iran that wasn't all it was only when bush came to power george w bush that his administration actually started to question the reliability of the taliban to deliver on the deal now this deal the head of this deal was dick cheney who became bush's vice president john i'll stop you there more from john pilger after this break welcome back i'm still here with john pilger the legendary filmmaker and journalist behind such films as the war you don't see and breaking the silence i suppose we were referring to the cost of the war in its entirety away from those origins of where this war began julian assange in breaking the silence says um i think it's that or it could be in the war you don't see says it's a money laundering one dimension of this is a money laundering campaign it doesn't cost whether it be one trillion or eight trillion it's actually a way of taking taxpayers money or the money of ordinary workers in western countries and recycling it into five big defense companies and this kind of defense industry complex and and uh it makes a lot of money yes but it's a way of financing um imperial projects i mean by the end of the 90s the taliban was so in bed with the u.s administration that uh it was calculated that every taliban official was paid for with u.s taxes so it wasn't paid directly of course when julian was talking about money being laundered through it huge amounts of money was laundered through afghanistan it all went bad of course it went bad in their own terms they didn't actually get what they want in the same way iraq went bad in a way the same way that vietnam went bad they usually do is there a class dimension to the type of afghan that's interviewed on our screens obviously urban they speak english so we get that sense as i said 70 percent rural actually afghanistan in that they whenever they answer questions on british television or american television stations or in french tv stations they all assume like the interviewer that essentially there is altruism there on the part of the uh invading nations of nato it's like it it's going wrong they never the afghans interviewed don't seem to suggest that there is something malign about the intentions no uh because those afghans interviewed by and large benefited and those people at the airport were beneficiaries in other wars they might be called collaborators which they were in a sense but they were certainly beneficiaries and there's no question there were women's schools and girls schools set up in kabul which were themselves progressive but what we were never told was that you go into the hinterland the extraordinary hinterland of afghanistan the wildest country on earth as far as i'm concerned absolutely beautiful but i it's a it's a feudalism and that's when i first went there a feudalism in which uh these mujardin uh these warlords actually run their own little fifedoms and they trade in women they trade in women and young boys and then they ran the the heroin trade and of course the cia which were their principal backers followed very closely by mi6 knew all about this now when you mention a class dimension compare them these wild characters if you like but feudalists from the middle ages uh the very people that the government that the americans undermined the pdpa government tried to uh whose power they tried to curtail um i mean compare those with some of the people being interviewed on television in the last few weeks you know i saw an interview with we were called on to be sympathetic and one could be with a former chief prosecutor in kabul this is a highly educated man with probably a degree in the us or uk or or whatever kabul was a was a was a um an enclave within this feudalist country basically uh and and so that that class overthrowing that class was was the object of the government that has been lost to history and that's in 1978 this pdpa government undermined by by the us and then destroyed by the mujardin that would it was setting out to change that to set that to change that class dimension in afghanistan and specifically to class ashraf ghani was called incorruptable by the bbc not a few months ago he was uh spent most of his time in the united states ends up in the world bank then he's pops down in russia working for the world bank millions killed at the uh reduction of life expectancy in the neo-liberal reforms after the fall of the soviet union and then he ends up in afghanistan in a flawed election again a neo-liberal class that could be parachuted in yeah and is this occurring on a can we expect this as as the empire fades the united states empire phase yeah now you're right i'm not sure about parachuted in uh he was staying out there win the election that he's now run off with supposedly with money which he denies the polite term in let's say medievalist countries or really underdeveloped countries uh is perhaps the mercantile class which is far too polite they in afghanistan this class really knew where the money was and uh produced a class that really ruled over it in the meantime the country remained medievalist well the 20-year anniversary of 9 11 coming up and of course the 911 that won't be covered on any of the stations will be chile 1973 which you again mentioned in the war you don't see and and that's about this mercantile class the origins in a way of that chicago school what are your feelings now as to why it's still not going to be covered on saturday albeit that it's the 20-year anniversary well it's not covered for the same reason is that the the world's biggest arms fair just down the road is not covered people don't know about it it's not covered because it's not convenient to be covered because it carries an inconvenient truth on september the 11th 1973 as far as chileans are concerned those who lost their their those who lost so many in their family to the horrendous savagery of pinochet and his american backers that is the september the 11th that's the 9 11. it's never remembered around the world because we are so and i don't think brainwashing is a an exaggeration we are we are drowned in the tsunami of propaganda um the the center of the world the center of importance um is the united states the day that today the world changed i don't think it was the day the world changed actually i think the world changed a lot before that during the korean war when the americans decided they were going to become a true imperial power that certainly changed with the fall of the berlin wall and many others but we are we we are conditioned to believe that everything around this one event uh that only they deserve remembrance not the people in chile only they deserve mourning not the orapha the woman with her six dead children in afghanistan it's that it's almost what we we are so backward in that we've yet to achieve this equality of consciousness about human beings um that we we what happens in the united states that's what matters everything else flows from that and i should just finish i suppose talking about julian assange pinochet after all was under house arrest in a luxury home here visited by mrs thatcher um house arrest pending extradition means a supermax jail for julian assange yes yes uh julian is i sat in court on the 11th of august to listen to a chief justice i'm no longer surprised of course they come out and say this try to discredit a witness uh in in in something that i just thought was outrageous but looking ahead on the 27th and 28th will be a high court hearing on whether the united states is is granted its appeal against the the the the bar on extradition of julian to the united states it is probably in i think it's probably the most important legal day uh certainly if not in my lifetime but it's certainly in the modern era because it will say about free speech it will say about journalism it will say about our humanity this is a man who's committed no crime who is gentle intellectual person uh who has done what true journalists do and for that he is being punished now whether there is something of british justice left in the masonry of the judiciary judiciary in britain that on that day the judges decide as they must that he should be freed i don't know john belgium thank you that's it for the show you can see john's films for free at johnbilger.com we'll be back on saturday the 20th anniversary of the september 11th attacks that catalyze the invasion of afghanistan but also 48 years since the cia backed coup against socialist president salvador allende which handed power to fascist dictator agusta peninsula until then follow us on social media for all the updates from this new season and make sure to let us know what stories not seen in the mainstream you'd like us to cover [Music] thanks for watching this going underground interview don't forget to leave a like and subscribe to the channel with notifications on to never miss an interview now it's your turn tell us what you think by commenting below and getting in touch via our social media see you next time all the solid melts into air

Channel: Going Underground on RT

Views: 131,999

Rating: 4.8850026 out of 5

Keywords: RT, Going Underground RT, RT going underground, Afshin Rattansi, Politics, News, RT news, Russia Today, Taliban, Afghanistan, Afghanistan news, Afghanistan Taliban, Afghanistan news today, US invasion of Afghanistan, US withdrawal Afghanistan, US imperialism, Imperialism, Afghanistan war, John Pilger, John Pilger interview, Military-industrial complex, Afghanistan Mujahideen, History of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda

Id: LlyVJF00Pxc

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/IndoorOutdoor99]

Thanks for posting - great interview. Pilger makes good documentaries, too.