Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/01/21 Gareth Porter on the Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Taliban

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Gareth Porter joined Scott on Antiwar Radio to discuss his recent piece at the Gray Zone about the dishonest ways the media has covered the Taliban. Both Scott and Porter agree that the Taliban are not to be considered the good guys, but that the media has a history of pushing a misleading narrative about them to justify war. Scott and Porter reflect on how this has been happening, to some extent, for the Taliban’s entire history, but especially as it relates to the group’s connections with Islamic terrorists.  Discussed on the show: “Corporate media stirred global terror hysteria to push postwar hostility toward new Afghan govt” (The Gray Zone) Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal  Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on the national security state. He is the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and, with John Kiriakou, The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter and listen to Gareth’s previous appearances on the Scott Horton Show. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October the 3rd, 2021, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough All Great. Time to end the war on terrorism.

You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing this week's guest, my very favorite guest and yours too, the great Gareth Porter, now writing regularly for the Grey Zone project at the Greyzone.com. welcome back to the show how you doing gareth i'm doing fine thanks guys glad to be back very happy to have you here and such an important piece that you have for us this week corporate media stirred global terror hysteria wait we could stop right there right oh corporate media stirred global terror hysteria to push post-war hostility toward the new afghan government all right well the new

afghan government means the islamic emirate of afghanistan which is qualitatively worse than the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which it replaced in power two months ago, I guess. But so, yeah, now the Taliban's back. And can we start with? Everybody knows that the Taliban are a bunch of horrible SOBs, and they always were and they still are. Is that fair? You know, they're part of a wide array of SOBs in Afghanistan. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you know, if you want to get into fine distinctions, then I think you can make some. some distinctions between the Taliban and some of the worst SOBs that the United States has actually supported over the years. So, you know, that's part of the background of this, but not the story

that I'm working on that I did work on. Well, but it is important, right? Because we don't want people listening in the audience to just think, oh, a couple of Taliban apologists. I mean, I don't think there's any such thing in North America as somebody who favors the Taliban, other than maybe Bill Clinton. You know, Zipina Prasinski is dead. So that policy, you know, Nobody supports them. We're not here to apologize for them. We are here. You are here accusing people who are falsely accusing them because no matter whether they're SOBs or not, the truth is the truth. And we're loyal to it. Yeah, you said it right. I mean, you know, the point here is that the, that there are interests in the U.S. government who want to do things in Afghanistan or around

the issue of Afghanistan or elsewhere in the Middle East that requires. require them to carry out certain propaganda that involves the Taliban. And that's what we're talking about here. Right. Okay. So now, just to make this very clear for people, because this isn't just a matter of stupidity or something. This is just a matter of wide-scale ignorance in this country. And for benefit of the doubt purposes, let's just assume that the listeners this morning are under the age of 30. They don't really know. They don't remember how this war started. They've been told about how it started, but they didn't live through it. And so maybe they don't know the difference between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place. Gareth,

can you please enlighten us? Absolutely. This is a crucial point, and it's worth starting with it. I agree, because that is indeed the crux of the matter of my article, how the United States is propagandizing about a tie-in, not just a tie-in, but virtual similarity or virtual identity. identity of interests between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And that is really a very serious misrepresentation of the history of the relationship between the two. Now, obviously, there has been a relationship between the Taliban, the original Taliban government and al-Qaeda way back in the 1990s, when the Taliban were the post-Afghanistan war regime, and without getting into any detail on that history, of course.

The point here is that the United States was supporting a vast array of jihadist forces who were in their own way. In many cases, if not most cases, terrorists. They carried out terrorism without any question, particularly, you know, after the Russians were defeated and a continuing war was taking place among the jihadists themselves. There were horrible terrorist incidents that were carried out by non-Taliban forces of people that the United States had supported.

So the Taliban were part of that broader history of opposition of resistance to the Russians in Afghanistan and were in power in the 1990s, in part because many of the other major political groupings of the jihadists had discredited themselves, had made enemies, so many enemies, and had really alienated the population of Afghanistan, particularly the urban populations so that they were able to take power in 1995. And that's really the background of this tale that we're talking about today of how the United States has basically taken on the Taliban in their propaganda efforts. So I hope that maybe covers the most basic part.

But the Al-Qaeda forces were in Afghanistan during. that war against the Russians providing training for various jihadist groups, including, working with the Taliban and doing that. So there was that relationship during the Afghan war, and they stayed on afterwards to continue to do some training. But, and here's the big but that people are really unaware of, the relationship between, the al-Qaeda bin Laden's group of trainers, Arab trainers in Afghanistan and the Taliban government during that period was not all fuzzy and warm. Believe me, it was very rocky. They had very big differences. And there were occasions when the, when Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban regime then, not only threatened to. kick the al-Qaeda trainers out but actually did seriously consider measures to do that

came very close to doing that right in fact you do have to be clear here for for people to understand that when we talk about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan whether in the 1980s or 90s or whatever we're talking essentially about Saudis and Egyptians we're talking about and not not entirely but you know you throw in some Chechens or whoever but these are errors these are not Afghans. They're not from Afghanistan. And when bin Laden first came back to Afghanistan in 1996, he was planning on hooking up with Burinadine Rabani. But then the Taliban were ascendant and Rabani was marginalized. So the Taliban ended up taking the capital city. And they were stuck with bin Laden. But it wasn't like bin Laden and Mullah Omar had been good friends from before.

Bin Laden was expecting to be hosted by entirely separate factions in the country when he got there. Right. And let me just insert a key point, from my point of view, at least here, very quickly, that when the Obama administration was aiming at planning to send 40,000 troops or 35,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2000. 2010, there was a propaganda effort carried out by one of their key officials who had been involved in the planning to blacken the Taliban by suggesting that they were indeed in very close league with al-Qaeda had been and still were, and that the relationship between Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, and bin Laden were very, very close, and there was even

some marriage tie-in between the two. It turned out to be just simply a pack of lies, which I exposed in my own writing back then. It was really a really horrible example of just how far U.S. officials would go in trying to carry out their propaganda in terms of lying. I mean, there was no effort at all to check any of these lies and find out if they were true. And so that's just how far they would go. Yeah, well, look, I mean, that's, that is not some minor point. I mean, the fact is they have to lie about all this stuff because the truth does not favor their policy at all. They have to get it all completely twisted around. And I would cite for you before we, you know, move into the modern era here, right at the dawn of the terror war, the end of the

90s, the beginning of the terror war, Milton Bearden, who would help run the CIA operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he told the Washington Post that, look, Mullah Omar hates bin Laden and wants rid of him, and he's tried to give him up to us over and over again. And the Taliban would do things like say, oh, gee, we lost track of bin Laden. He's out falconing somewhere in the countryside. In other words, wink, wink, elbow, elbow. He's outside of our protection right now. And if you guys dropped a bomb on his head, we could say, hey, not our fault. He was out in the countryside where we couldn't protect him. We told them to stay home at his farm and this kind of thing. And then the way that Bearden talked about it, he said the Americans just wouldn't speak

their language. They would say to us, hint, hint, hint, and we would say to them, hand him over. And then it would go nowhere. And this had been going on since the Africa embassy bombings of the summer of 1998. Right. So that's the background of, you know, what happened later, which is that after 9-11, when the United States simply demanded that he be handed over immediately. And Mila Omar said, look, we have to do this in an Islamic way. There has to be an Islamic tie-in in order for me to justify handing over bin Laden, who is an Islamic guest, and by the way, it's very popular in my country, I need to have some way that Islamic countries can be involved in the judgment. And so there was some back and forth in the United States

simply refused to agree to any negotiations and said, you know, you've got to turn him over straight, or we're going to attack you. And that's exactly what happened. right but there was and just on that garr i'm sorry but um you know in in my book i categorize or you know explain and have footnotes to explain each piece of this where they did try three separate offers and including on the day the bombing began october eighth 2001 they said okay okay okay you don't even need to provide us any evidence and we'll turn them over to any third country in the world i mean presumably excluding israel too but otherwise they'd turn them over of the French or the British or the Mexicans for us.

And we could have had them in an instant. And Bush said, too little, too late. That's it. War is on. And then what do he do? He let al-Qaeda go and focused on regime change in Kabul against the Taliban instead. Exactly. This is the dirty linen that, you know, has normally, it never gets talked about, right?

I mean, this is how terrible the lack of any kind of. consistency in U.S. policy toward the Taliban and toward al-Qaeda were in this period. Yeah. All right. Now, so, look, we all know the story. The al-Qaeda guys got away at the end of 2001, and the Bush guys just had to pretend that they were there for the rest of the time. I don't remember a single case. Correct me if I'm wrong. Right. Where, like, oh, boy, we came upon a group of Arabs and had a big firefight through the entire rest of the Bush presidency. And then in the, in the Obama years, remember Bill Crystal, pardon me, Stanley McChrystal, I got Bill Crystal on the brain this week, Stanley McChrystal wrote his report saying, listen, I need a big escalation in 2009

as part of the effort to roll Obama into the search, which worked, of course. And when he gave the report to Congress, Lindsay Graham had to pull him aside and say, General, you forgot to mention Al-Qaeda. There's no Al-Qaeda in your report anywhere. And McClain, Crystal said, oh, no, I totally forgot to pretend that there's Al Qaeda in Afghanistan somewhere and went back and added it at the senator's suggestion. That's a good one. That's a good one. My God. And then I got a brand new one for you, too, Gareth. It's out of the new Bob Woodward book, Peril. It says, Biden recalled, this is page 381, Biden recalled visiting Afghanistan while he was vice president elect. He met with then U.S. commander David McKiernan, who said they had not seen al-Qaeda in 80s.

18 months. Right, right. And that was back in 2008 before he was sworn in as vice president. So just, I mean, that's a good segue into the final version of this whole theme, which is that there was a myth that grew up that was sounded very recently in the media, which is why we're talking today, about how... al-Qaeda and the Taliban were remaining close allies throughout these years, whereas in fact, there is a very great deal of evidence that what actually happened was that even though

the Taliban had been helping that, sorry, that al-Qaeda had been helping the Taliban in their 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 offensive. and help to make it more effective. What was going on in the background of this was that the people in Al-Qaeda wanted to separate from the Taliban. They wanted to have a party in Pakistan that might then draw support away from Mullah Omar's Taliban

because they wanted a party there that would support explicitly the al-Qaeda line on jihadism, which was global jihadism, supporting terrorism against the United States and its allies around the world. So what was happening here was that MoMA was saying, no, he was not going to go along with that, and they knew that. So there was a big parting of the ways in 2007, 2008, 2009, When al-Qaeda went ahead and created this Pakistani party, essentially a Pakistani al-Qaeda party, the Tariq Taliban party. And this was the big parting of the ways between the two.

Now, of course, they continued to have contact with one another, and they didn't completely create enemy relationships between them. but there was a great deal of distance and tension between them. But now, of course, you have the media parroting a line which was being talked about in the wake of the defeat in Afghanistan, the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, that, oh, you know, Al-Qaeda is going to be a big terrorism problem because they're going to now allow Al-Qaeda to come back in and use Afghan territory to carry out terrorism plans. and this was a complete lie. There was no real evidence to support it whatsoever.

Hold on just one second, be right back. So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com. Well, that makes sense. They bring it right to your house. So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org, and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale. It won't cost you a thing.

Nice little way to help support the show. Again, that's right there in the margin at scotthornton.org. Hey, you want to know what industry is recession-proof? Yes, you're right, of course. Scott Horton here to tell you about Green Mill Super Critical Extractors. The SFE Pro and Superproducing Parallel Pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes.

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Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Wharton.org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Yeah, now, we've seen claims and claims and claims of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan I'm thinking of Thomas Gibbons Neth And I pick on him because I really respect him It's probably the writer I like the most At the New York Times Former Marine and a friend of a friend of mine And he's done really great work on Afghanistan

And yet he claimed one time That you know they found a giant Al-Qaeda training camp In Kandahar province That had been there right under their nose For maybe even years And then they sent in the B-52s And just carpet bombed it off the face of the earth or whatever. But not one spot in that entire article does he say why these guys are al-Qaeda guys.

What connection do they have to anybody? Are they Saudis? Right. Are they Egyptians? Who are they at all? He doesn't say at all. As far as I know, they're just local Pashtun militiamen. And who says they're al-Qaeda? Somebody. The Pentagon or the CIA or some spokesman claims, and then that's good enough somehow. But there's never any actual evidence ever. Well, they have put forward the name of an al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan. Well, that's right, the one Egyptian public relations guy that they said, right? The Kunar province guy. Yeah, that was the one guy in the last 10 years. You got me there.

That's the one exception. Otherwise, they say, well, you know, you have to look at the UN reports. But then you look at the UN reports, and the UN reports say, according to member state information, which then they don't even describe at all. just somebody with a government job claim this to us and now we're repeating it to you and isn't that suspicious right on the face of it well you know there's a u.n report that says the u.n what do they know about it you're not even going to it's like the british have learned saddam is trying to buy uranium from africa oh the british learned that did they you know

i know whether this is this is a scandal it really is the way this u.n outfit has been used constantly by the U.S. media as a way of basically getting the most damaging storyline out to the public about the Taliban, for example, and other issues. But in fact, I mean, this outfit simply picks up the current political line from various intelligence agencies and other outfits that have an obvious interest in peddling in peddling their propaganda line so they have no way of checking it they don't they don't claim that they even check it or anything no fact checking involved yeah uh and then this is the same thing i see as a trend lately now especially in reuters i think that well you know there's this new group a q i s alkata in the indian subcontinent which i'm sorry but

just on the face of it that sounds like somebody else's problem to me. And it also sounds like they're facing east from Afghanistan and not a problem for those of us in North America, whoever they are. Well, you're absolutely right about that. And by the way, it's very clear that the U.S. counterterrorism specialists have long since decided that al-Qaeda does not represent a terrorism threat in Afghanistan. They don't claim that anymore. I mean, these stories are not coming from the real specialists who have been studying this most closely. It's coming from basically political types who are pushing a propaganda line. And that's a very important distinction to make. Because, I mean, there are people

who were directly involved in the counterterrorism part of the U.S. government who have said explicitly that they no longer have any evidence that al-Qaeda is working on terrorism in Afghanistan. They haven't had any evidence of that for years. Yeah. Now, let's talk about Jalaladin Hakani. This was a guy who was Mujahideen, backed by the Pakistanis and the CIA during the Reagan years in the 1980s there. And then he was part of the civil wars that tore the country up until the Taliban finally marginalized him and the rest of the warlords in 95-96. And then, I don't know where the hell he was. If he was with the Northern Alliance, or if he made his peace with the Taliban between 96 and 01, I forget. Maybe you can

enlighten us on that. But I know that, and this is in Anongopal's book, and people can read his articles at Tom Dispatch about it. And it's in my book, Fool's Aaron, about how Connie tried to surrender to the new American back government over and over and over again. He had been America's friend before, and they essentially just refused to let him come in from the cold. Right. Right. So you're asking me, what about this guy? And the point here, of course, in this context, is that Hakani has now, the Hakani network has been targeted by this new round of propaganda as a particularly nasty fellow or nasty group of fellows who are dangerous, because they are not only tied in with al-Qaeda,

but also with, guess who, Islamic State. And this is a particularly nasty piece of propaganda work because it's so completely unrelated to any evidence whatsoever. I mean, nobody really seriously has suggested that within the U.S. government. It's all coming from, you know, this post, U.S. defeat effort to muddy the waters. And the idea that the Akani network is sort of in hoc to al-Qaeda or, you know, is following the orders of al-Qaeda or doing their bidding. It's exactly the opposite. I mean, the al-Qaeda is far more powerful than al-Qaeda has been for many years.

So, do they have any relationship? They probably do. Yes, they probably make contact with them. Yes, There's no doubt about that. But al-Qaeda, if anything, serves the interests of the Haqqqani network rather than the other way around. And then there's the whole idea that somehow infudated or related to the Islamic State, which is a particularly nasty piece of propaganda work, because, in fact, they have nothing to do with the Islamic State. And the idea basically was promoted by one interest and one interest only, and that's the intelligence. agency of the former Afghan government. They're the ones who've been peddling that line for years. Right. Nobody else took it seriously. So, you know, as long as we're talking about who's

complicit with ISIS in Afghanistan, the reality is they are Pakistani Taliban refugees from Obama's drone war there, which wasn't just against al-Qaeda, but as you reported so well at the time, meant an alliance with the Pakistani government against the Tariqi Taliban there, which drove many of them into the Nangahar province, where then, and there's this great article, I'm sorry forget the guy's name, but it's a great article at afghananalysts.org, which I cite in my book as well, where he describes how the NDS, which is the Afghan intelligence service, which was, you know, basically means in parentheses, the CIA, which was running the thing the whole time, that they recruited these guys. They wanted to use them against the Afghan Taliban and as revenge, do revenge

strikes in Pakistan as you know that's what you get for back in the Afghan Taliban against us on this side of the line kind of thing and then it was only what a year later a year and a half later something they hoisted the black flag and declared their loyalty to ISIS and no longer to the CIA and became the big boogeyman you know safe haven myth part two why we have to stay because of the new dangerous ISIS K which of course I mean come on how could there be such a thing that the CIA didn't have a hand in helping to create in the first place, you know? Yeah, and of course, as I think you suggested very quickly, but may not have been picked up by many listeners, you know, the Hakani Network was extremely close to the CIA.

They were supported very strongly by the CIA. That was one of the key groups in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan that the CIA was arming and promoting and giving money to. And there's this great book by George Criall or George Creel about how the U.S. CIA was supporting al-Qaeda people in Afghanistan and there was very close relationships. And in that book, of course, Hakani is a major figure because it was, of course, Charlie Wilson of the famous guy who was really pushing the... the war in the CIA war in Afghanistan, who was extremely close to Hakani. They were best of

friends. And George Creel basically ends his book with the scene of the parting between George and the Hakani guy. They were such good friend. They had a party to mark the end of their collaboration after the war. All right. So there's for the past truth. And the present debunked propaganda, but what about the future? The Taliban do make bad decisions sometimes. However, there really does seem to be an ideological split here. I mean, a religious one, too, where, you know, the Taliban are Hanafi Sunnis, which is different than the Wahhabis, and they have a whole different set of beliefs and whatever. But there's also, I think, politically, there's really a split between those who want world revolution and those who want

revolution in one country, as this is the case in American history and in Soviet history and now in jihadi history, right? Well, absolutely. I mean, this is a fundamental, not just a distinction, but a big gap, a conflict between two points of view that have in the past been, you know, related to one another, working with one another, the al-Qaeda view on one side, and the Taliban view on the other, the al-Qaeda view is, you know, global jihad, and the Taliban view is we only have a jihad for national liberation. And that was always their viewpoint. They didn't have to change their view. It was always

in favor of merely fighting for their own country's freedom from foreign interference or foreign occupation. And so it's a fundamental divide, and it has been going on now for many, many years. And the fact that this post-U.S. war in Afghanistan propaganda offensive claimed that the Taliban regime was somehow infudated to al-Qaeda is just one of the worst lies that I have encountered in my many years of encountering many, many lies from the U.S. emanating from the U.S. government. all right you guys that's gareth porter the great he's at the gray zone dot com and his latest piece is called corporate media stirred global terror hysteria to push post-war hostility toward the new afghan government you can also find it of course in his archive at antiwar dot com thank you sir thank you man good to be back again all right you guys and that is anti war radio for this morning again i'm your host scott horton i'm the editorial director of anti-war

war.com and author of enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. Find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.