AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, how you see especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan where President Obama says he is expanding the war, how you see it ending? You’ve done more than 50 documentaries, many of them about wars around the world. Also, the response of the British people, how you see what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
JOHN PILGER: Obama has begun a new war. There is in Obama war and that is Pakistan. The shaking of the hornets’ nest, if you like, in Pakistan, which this administration has done willfully, is a historic disaster. The creation of up to 2 million refugees in Northwestern Pakistan caused by the attacks by the Pakistanis government, egged on and paid for by the Obama administration, the use of electronic battlefield weapons such as drones and other unmanned vehicles. Drones have killed according to the Pakistanis authorities, American drones launched from I believe near Las Vegas have killed something like 700 civilians since the inauguration of president Obama. So there is a new war. It is a war in Pakistan. I believe there is a new jargon term in Washington called “Afpak”, which is, well almost beyond commenting on.
The Afghanistan War, so called, is really about building as Gates, Robert Gates the Secretary has said, has virtually admitted, is about building a number of secured permanent bases throughout that country and reinforcing the major facility at Bagram. The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one of its fortress embassies in Kabul, just as it is building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, just as it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad. Whatever happens to American ground troops who eventually, yes, will be withdrawn, will make no difference to the significance of the American presence, the American, the violent American presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen as places where the United States will have a permanent presence to be able to—a strategic position—where it will be able to monitor, and perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial rivals. Bagram is being extended. It probably has the worst record, if that is possible, then Guantanamo in terms of its human-rights abuses.
So what we will see as Obama has said, we will see American ground troops gradually withdrawn. But as they do so, the use of electronic weaponry and bombing will increase. Unless there is an understanding of this in this country, unless people stopped taking the pronouncements of governments at their word. When Obama went to Annapolis and said we’re getting out of Iraq and appeared to be giving a timetable, within a matter of weeks, I believe, General Casey contradicted him and said—we will probably be there for another 10 years. And other Pentagon generals put it even higher, 15 years.
No mention is made of the enormous American army of mercenaries who are in all those theaters of war, and Special Forces. No mention is made of the special forces operation inside Iraq come inside—I beg your pardon, inside Iran. $400 million was allotted to that particular secret war by Bush, in one of his signing decrees, which money has gone to both the Kurdish and Baluchi separatist movements. The whole region is being crafted, if you like, for a very, very long American colonial presence. Eventually, it will not need a standing army there. That is the future in that part of the world, as I say, unless people become aware of that and start to bang on the doors of government, of Congress, and of power in this country to expose it.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/6/filmmaker_journalist_john_pilger_on_honduras
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