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by Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman
March 30, 2010
[Anjali Kamat] President Obama
returned to the United States Monday after making his first trip to
Afghanistan since taking office. In just a six-hour visit, President
Obama met Afghan president Hamid Karzai and other top Afghan officials
before addressing a group of U.S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base. Echoing a
theme often echoed by former president George W. Bush, Obama said the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was not a war of choice.
[Barack Obama] We can’t forget why
we’re here. We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America
wanting to expand its influence, of us wanting to meddle in somebody
else’s business. We were attacked viciously [by we don’t know who] on
9/11. Thousands of our fellow country men and women were killed. And
this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime – Al Qaeda –
still base their leadership. Plots against our homeland, plots against
our allies, plots against the Afghani and Pakistani people, are taking
place as we speak right here. And if this region slides backwards, if
the Taliban retakes this country, and al Qaeda can operate with
impunity, then more American lives will be at stake. The Afghan people
will lose their chance at progress and prosperity, and the world will be
significantly less secure. As long as I’m your commander in chief, I am
not going to let that happen. That’s why you are here. I’ve made a
promise to all of you who serve, I will never send you into crime’s way
unless it’s absolutely necessary. I anguish in thinking about the
sacrifices that so many of you make. And that’s why I promise you I will
never send you out unless it is necessary.
[Anjali Kamat] – comes four months
after he ordered 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total
to 50,000 since he took office. It’s one of several decisions that have
led anti-war critics to accuse Obama of adopting a foreign policy much
in line with President Bush’s second term.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re joined now by a man who played a major role in
efforts to end the Vietnam War in the ’70s. In 1971, the then-RAND
Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became
known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining
the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life
sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak
out against US militarism until the present day. He joins us now from
the University of California at Berkeley.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dan Ellsberg. In the wake of the surprise
visit by President Obama to Afghanistan, your thoughts?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to
nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war
in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon
Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war,
Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965, when I was working
for him, when he decided to escalate, an open-ended escalation there,
following the previous commitment of Eisenhower and of Kennedy that made
it an open-ended war, just as Obama is doing there now, and, I think,
with very much the same results in the end, tragic results, especially
for the country involved and for the Americans, and with probably the
same kinds of pressures on him, actually, as Johnson faced.
AMY GOODMAN: I saw you speak, Dan Ellsberg, here in New York after a
production of Top Secret, a very interesting play about not the New York
Times and the Pentagon Papers—they were the first to begin to print them
but were then enjoined by the Nixon government, and then the Washington
Post started to print the Pentagon Papers, and that’s what this was
about. But afterwards, you talked about the US ambassador to Afghanistan
and how important what Ambassador Eikenberry had to say in these memos
and cables that were made public. Can you talk about those?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah. Well, for years now, really since we set out to
go into Iraq on much the same kinds of lies in 2002 that sent us into
Vietnam when I was in the Pentagon, since then, I’ve been saying to
officials in the government, “Don’t do what I did. Do what I wish I had
done in ’63 or ’64, before we had entered the war, before the bombs had
fallen. Don’t wait, as I did, ’til we were in the war and the war was
essentially unstoppable, before telling the truth about the
hopelessness, understood within the government, and the
impossibility—the unlikelihood of any kind of victory there. But do it
now.”
Actually, almost as I—in recent times, that call has been answered. I
don’t know whether it was direct or not, but some government official
who is now the most dangerous man in America in the eyes of President
Obama, I’m sure—I’m sure there’s a Plumbers operation going on right now
to find out who leaked the cables, the secret cables, of our ambassador
in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry, who had been in
charge in Afghanistan, and first in charge of training Afghan troops and
then in charge of all of our operations in Afghanistan, before
McChrystal, and is now our accredited ambassador to Karzai, the head of
the so-called government that we’re supporting there now.
And in those cables, secret cables, which someone leaked in January,
after the President had announced his decision, I’m sorry to say—I wish
he had done what I most called for, and that is, send the cables, the
truth that he was telling, in before that decision had been announced.
Still, the decision hasn’t been fully implemented, especially by
Congress, in terms of appropriation. And they would do well to read what
it is they’re appropriating money for.
Eikenberry’s cables now, at this stage, read like a summary of the
Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. And that’s the first installment of
papers that we need right now. Just change the place names from “Saigon”
to “Kabul” and the Afghan national forces serving as the surrogate of
our mercenary ARVN of Vietnam, and they read almost exactly the same.
He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who
he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read
Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic
partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and
inefficiency.
Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to
Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his
government. I’m really reminded of when Kennedy and Johnson decided to
enlist our Mafia in an effort to get Castro. I don’t think they spent
time telling the Mafia, “By the way, it’ll be helpful to us, if you’re
going to be our partner, to clean up your act, get out of the drug
business.” In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us,
drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his
source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance,
root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our
next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption
is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so
long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.
It’s obviously—it’s not just a symbolism. It’s the fact that we have a
government there that has no prospect of achieving legitimacy in the
eyes of the people we’re supposedly appealing to in Afghanistan. And
that’s symbolic of the whole effort. There is no prospect of any kind of
success in Afghanistan, any more than the Soviets achieved in their ten
years there, just as in Vietnam we really had no realistic prospect of
more success than the French. But countries find it very hard to learn
from the failures of other countries.
ANJALI KAMAT: And Dan Ellsberg, what’s your assessment of the
counterinsurgency strategy that the Obama administration is pushing,
that General Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal are pushing?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: I’m very familiar with that theory, because that’s what
I was working in in Vietnam for so many years, the counterinsurgency
theory, strategy theory. My job was to evaluate its, quote, “progress,”
which meant lack of progress, total stalemate, total lack of progress in
Vietnam. And to that end, I visited thirty-eight of the forty-three
provinces of Vietnam and reported stalemate, which McNamara heard and
understood, even while the word “progress” was the word to be used, just
as Obama was talking about progress.
What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is
predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more
foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every
enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and
especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties
after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in
a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is
saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit,
in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many
years ahead of us.
I believe, by the way, that that applies to Iraq, as well, that I
believe that our president is deceiving the American public—I don’t say
that lightly—in the same way that all of his predecessors deceived us
with respect to Vietnam, including the ones I served, which included
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Specifically, when he says in his State of
the Union message that we will—he will get all troops, not just combat
troops, but all troops, out of Iraq by the end of 2011, I believe that’s
false and that he knows that’s false, and he has no real plan or
intention of removing American bases manned by American military
personnel, not just mercenaries, ever. By his second term or the second
term of his successor, whoever that is, I think we have a future of
30,000 to 50,000 Americans in Iraq indefinitely. And I’m talking about
the lives of our children, in terms of actual planning.
And in Afghanistan, in the same State of the Union address, when he
implies that this first installment of extra troops in Afghanistan,
which Ambassador [Karl] Eikenberry specifically recommended against to
the President, saying that it would make the situation worse, not
better, make the Karzai government more dependent on us and postpone any
possible date of our withdrawal, rather than shorten it—that’s just the
first installment. He implies that by the end of next year—or this year,
rather, when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are
up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to
the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten
years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply
absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point,
and that, too, was a first installment.
My knowledge of counterinsurgency doctrine, which is, from what I read
of McChrystal and Petraeus’s doctrine statements, is as good as theirs,
or as bad as theirs, says that in a country of that size, hundreds of
thousands of troops are needed. That is not going to come from the
Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are
not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of
Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap. As
troops do come out of Iraq, bringing us down from 130,000, or perhaps
90,000 now, down to 30,000 to 50,000, that extra 100,000 troops will
have a short time at home with their parents and their spouses and their
kids and then go to Afghanistan. I believe that four years from now we
will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.
The public doesn’t seem to understand that, and when they look at cost
estimates, they come up with figures like a trillion dollars for our
effort in Afghanistan eventually. Try doubling that. It’s going to be
more troops. Those estimates are based on the notion—in Iraq, as
well—that we’re getting all troops out of Iraq. That’s not going to
happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg—
DANIEL ELLSBERG: So those estimates are illusory. You could double them.
AMY GOODMAN: Military officials in Kabul have admitted US and NATO
troops have killed thirty Afghans and wounded eighty others in or near
military checkpoints since last summer. In no instance did the victims
prove to be a danger to troops. In a recent videoconference, military
commander General Stanley McChrystal said, “We have shot an amazing
number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a
threat.” Your response to this?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: That’s an amazingly, amazingly candid assessment by
McChrystal. I’ll give him credit for saying that. He also, for the first
time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by
increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the
number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths
per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing
the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.
You’re talking about a country, like Vietnam, that has 2,000 years of a
tradition, and not just of self-image, but of actual success, in
ejecting foreign invaders. They aren’t organized for much there. You
could say it’s a state of disorganization, valley by valley and tribe by
tribe. They’re ideally organized for ejecting control by foreigners, and
even control by a central government—that’s somewhat unlike
Vietnam—controlled by Kabul, even if Kabul were to clean up its act,
which is—means to transform its nature altogether.
One of Eikenberry’s points is that there is no basis for assuming that
Karzai, at this point in his life, is going to change his nature or the
nature of his government. By the way, that was in secret cables to the
President. That’s like the Pentagon Papers. In public testimony, what we
heard from Eikenberry in front of Congress was, “Oh, I fully support
McChrystal’s program,” which he had just demolished in secret. “I fully
support the program. I have every confidence.” In short, like any
official working for the President, after the President had made his
decision, Eikenberry lied, or, at any rate, he contradicted his secret
testimony. And what Congress should do is simply bring him back and let
him clarify the difference between his secret cables, which were
published on the New York Times archive, which anyone can get, and his
public testimony and give him a chance to tell the truth and resign.
ANJALI KAMAT: Dan Ellsberg, your leaking of the Pentagon Papers helped
bring the Vietnam War to an end. What do you think needs to happen now
to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Congress, somehow, has to be brought to have the
courage to follow its convictions and cut off the funding for the wars,
for escalation, in particular. Barbara Lee, the one congressperson who
had the guts to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with respect to
Afghanistan back in 2001, pointing out that it had been done
without—like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution years before, without hearings,
without debate, without evidence, just a blank check to the
President—one person in Congress who did that, now has a bill—I think
it’s 3966 3699, something like that—calling for cutting off
appropriations for further escalation in Afghanistan. And that bill,
that appropriations lie ahead.
The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose
further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our
ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the
appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No,
very, very unlikely. But some of their colleagues will.
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: And if we press our colleagues that that’s what we
want, ultimately that’s the way the war can be ended. The only way the
Vietnam war could have been ended was by Congress cutting off the money.
It’s the only way this war will be ended, and it will take a very long
time—
AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, we have to leave it there.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: —in what I call Vietnamistan.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but we will continue the
conversation and put it online at democracynow.org. Dan Ellsberg—Henry
Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
[Amy Goodman] Daniel Ellsberg, when you talk about a new whistleblower
coming out with the Pentagon Papers of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, what ultimately turned you? What made the difference
between you being right there, an analyst for the war, with top-secret
clearance, to asking questions, which a lot of people do, to actually
taking the step that you took?
[Daniel Ellsberg] A key thing was meeting, face-to-face, young Americans
who were choosing to go to prison rather than to participate in what
they saw as a wrongful war. But reading the earliest part of the
Pentagon Papers, going back to 1945, a period that many people didn’t
imagine as being part of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam, was crucial to
my seeing the war as having been unjustified from the very beginning.
It’s having been an effort to help the French reconquer a former colony
which had declared its independence. And that made all of the deaths in
Vietnam, on both sides, that we had encouraged and facilitated, made
all of them seem unjustified and essentially murder.
The
corresponding part right now would be this: The Pentagon Papers of
Afghanistan, the decision-making in Afghanistan, would have to begin 30
years ago, in 1979, as Zbigniew Brzezinski was the national security
adviser to President Carter revealed in 1998, he had recommended to
Carter, and Carter had followed, arming extremist fundamentalist warlord
type fanatic Muslim fanatics in the countryside against a Communist
government in Kabul at a time when there was no war going on. He’d
encouraged arming them through Pakistan with the intent of hoping to
provoke the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Now that was six months
before I and others in the public learned that there had been an
unprovoked invasion by the Soviet Union. And when that invasion did
occur after six months of these efforts, Brzezinski reports that he
wrote to the president, “Now we have the opportunity to present the
Soviets with their Vietnam.” And that was a good prediction. He saw
Afghanistan as a trap for the Soviet Union empire, and indeed, ten years
later, after losing 15,000 dead, the Soviets did retreat. And it did
contribute to the break-up of their empire, which Brzezinski was very
proud about. But the aspect of doing that is it gave the Afghans their
Vietnam: a million Afghans died. And that’s what’s happening now.
Barack Obama’s Vietnam will be a Vietnam much more lethally for the
Afghans.
[Amy Goodman] But that moment for you when you decided to take one of
the few copies of the Pentagon Papers –
[Daniel Ellsberg] I can imagine other people reading that history in the
area that I now think of as Vietnamistan, if they were to read it and
realize how deceived they had been as to the nature of the struggle
there, and how hopeless it really was, as well as illegitimate, would
decide that this was a process of murder with which they really could
not cooperate. And that they were obligated, even at risk to themselves,
to do what they really could to stop it. And that could very well mean
simply telling the truth.
Matthew Hoh, for example, chose to do what Eikenberry did not do when he
and Eikenberry discussed in Kabul, with great agreement according to
Matthew Hoh, the infeasibility of our efforts there.
Eikenberry
proceeded to express those feelings secretly to the President, but to
deny them in public. Hoh did the opposite. He resigned his position,
came back, refused a position under Holbrooke, which would have kept him
silent, and said that he’s spent the months since then saying at every
opportunity exactly what Eikenberry was saying in private: that the more
Taliban we kill in the province he represented in Afghanistan, the more
there would be. They would not quit. They in the end would prevail.
The people who spoke the language who were Afghans, who were neighbors,
and family of the people we were killing – they would be there when we
left.
[Amy Goodman] What about the Eikenberry cables.
He released them -- he didn't release them, he sent them on to
Washington, to the White House –
[Daniel Ellsberg] No, no, no, he sent them secretly to the President in
November, and someone else admirably released them, someone who was
quoted by The Times as saying he thought the public deserved this
history. That person was acting in the same spirit that I did when I
released the Pentagon Papers.
Let’s say there was a difference in the way they were handled. They
were presented in The Times' computerized version, the online version,
verbatim. I hadn’t seen verbatim. No Distribution. Secret cables
with all the modifiers on them. Quite interesting. I hadn’t seen
anything like that since the Pentagon Papers. I’m not on the
distribution list anymore, but they look really familiar. There was not
a single story about those cables in the Post that I saw. Conversely,
when Matthew Hoh resigned, there was
a story about that in the
Washington Post, on the front page, but not a mention of it in the New
York Times. In neither case was there a follow-up story. And I found
with audiences, even in Washington D.C., almost no one in an audience
that comes to hear me or see the film The Most Dangerous Man, has heard
of Eikenberry or Hoh or the cables. Apparently, if something isn’t on
the nightly news night after night after night, it just hasn’t happened; it hasn’t penetrated American consciousness at all.
[Amy Goodman] Congress could call Ambassador Eikenberry back since the
cables are there.
[Daniel Ellsberg] Absolutely. And there’s no excuse for their not doing
that, for their having accepted testimony that he fully supported McChrystal’s plan, that the President’s plan had every prospect of
success, when they now can be aware, if they read those cables, that his
private thoughts, which were highly authoritative, more authoritative
than McChrystal’s I would say, were entirely to the opposite of that.
They should not follow the tradition of Congress, of allowing officials
to perjure themselves in support of a president’s position, without
facing any requirement of clarifying their testimony, that is of
correcting it.
[Amy Goodman] We’re talking to Daniel Ellsberg, who released the
Pentagon Papers. Again, let me ask you one more time, and I know
Angelou has a question for you about a major New York Times piece that
ran on Sunday, but that moment where you switched from well, you became
anti-war, but actually pulling the Pentagon Papers top secret out of
your safe and knowing that you could go to prison for life for treason.
[Daniel Ellsberg] Well, if you speak of a moment, it was when I realized
that the people who were going to prison, Randy Keeler, Bobby __ that I
had just met, had done the right thing. And that hit me very
emotionally, that the best thing that young men like that could do for
their country was to go to prison and face charges of being unpatriotic, and unmanly, cowardly, and nevertheless to
-- I felt the power of their
act on my own life.
Now, the process of actually removing the Papers from Rand was not a
single moment, but it was something that extended over the course of a
year, really, taking them out night after night, spending nights copying
them, and ultimately taking them to senators, like Fulbright or Mathias
or McGovern, and having each one of them, by the way, say initially that
these should be out, they would do it, had every right to do it under
the Constitution, could not be questioned as to their source, and then
think better of it within days or a week, and privately decide in effect,
“Let’s let Dan Ellsberg do it.”
[Anjali Kamat] Dan Ellsberg, I want to switch topics a little bit and go to
another country that’s in the cross-hairs of U.S. foreign policy:
Iran. The New York Times in the Weekend Review ran a major piece by
David Sanger this weekend called “Imagining an Israeli strike on Iran,”
and talks about the simulation of what would happen among top policy
makers in Israel, the United States, and Iran were Israel to strike
Iran.
[Daniel Ellsberg] I found that headline and the story accompanying it,
and the diagrams of the scenarios of attacking a country that has not
threatened the United States, is no threat to the United States, a
despicable piece of journalism in its failure to address the simple fact
that such an attack would be against the U.N. Charter, which is the
highest law of this land, it would not be justified by the Security
Council, or by any needs of self-defence of this country -- the U.S.
would be totally complicit in it -- and it would not serve Israeli self-defence
in any respect, either. There was not one mention in the article in
talk of consequences of the almost incontrovertible fact that the effect
of such an attack would be to expel all IAEA, International Atomic
Energy Agency, inspectors from Iran, and to go underground with a crash
program that would probably speed up the attainment of a nuclear weapon,
which may not be at this point the clear objective of the nuclear energy
program at all, but would certainly be such after that program.
The
article begins with a description of the 1981 Israeli attack on the
Osirak reactor, a reactor that was not intended for nuclear weapons
production. It doesn’t mention that the effect of that attack was to
drive the program underground and speed it up to a point where it was
almost ready for a nuclear bomb, unknown to us by the time of the Gulf
War. There’s not a mention in that of the civilian casualties that
would be involved both in the initial attacks and in the escalation that
would surely follow. The premises assume that there will be no
retaliation directly against the U.S. That is a very optimistic
assumption, although it does premise that the people there are rational
enough to be deterred from such an attack, which puts in context the
urgency of the whole operation.
But in any case, I find that this bland
war-game scenario, the kind of wargame I had participated in when I was
in the Pentagon in connection with the Berlin crisis, was describing a
legitimate military operation which would actually be an aggressive
attack. We can imagine in Germany say, a headline of imagining an
attack on Poland, for example, which would be pretty much corresponding
to the wargames that preceded our attack on Iraq, I guess, exactly as
aggressive. It really made me wonder what it would look like in The
Times to see we’re wargaming the shooting of prisoners. That would be
one of the few war crimes that the U.S. has not committed lately in
addition to torture and suspension of habeus corpus and aggressive war.
Shooting prisoners, gassing, hanging, shooting, all options that has to
be on the table.
[Amy Goodman] Well, Daniel Ellsberg we want to thank you very much for
being with us. Daniel Ellsberg, called The Most Dangerous Man in
America by Henry Kissinger. In fact, that is the name of the film that
tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s life, The Most Dangerous Man in
America. And it’s going around all over this country now. Dan
Ellsberg’s book, his memoirs, called Secrets. Dan Ellsberg, thanks so
much.
[Daniel Ellsberg] Thank you for having me.
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