Noam Chomsky on US Expansion of Afghan Occupation, the Uses of NATO, and What Obama Should Do in Israel-Palestine

Speaking with Noam Chomsky, prolific author and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As NATO leaders gather for a sixtieth anniversary summit in France, Chomsky says, “The obvious question is, why bother celebrating NATO at all? In fact, why does it exist?” Chomsky also analyzes the Obama administration’s escalation of the Afghanistan occupation and reacts to the new Netanyahu government in Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama and European leaders arrived in France today ahead of a key NATO summit to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the alliance. Obama will visit Germany today, as well, which is also playing host to the summit.

The French city of Strasbourg is under security lockdown, with 25,000 police on patrol following a day of clashes between protesters and riot police. Three hundred people were arrested, and a German press photographer was hospitalized after being hit in the stomach by a police rubber bullet. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have descended on Strasbourg and the German towns of Kehl and Baden Baden to protest the summit. France has temporarily reinstated border controls with Germany to restrict access to protesters.

The focus of the summit will be Afghanistan, where 70,000 troops, mostly under NATO command, are at war. President Obama will use the talks to enlist support for his escalation of the war. Obama has sent 21,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, is considering deploying 10,000 more.

Meanwhile, Taliban militants in Pakistan marked the start of the two-day summit by destroying a fleet of nine parked NATO vehicles in transit for Afghanistan.

Last week, President Obama defended his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

       PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistan slides back into chaos or al-Qaeda operates unchecked. We have a shared responsibility to act, not because we seek to project power for its own sake, but because our own peace and security depends on it. And what’s at stake at this time is not just our own security; it’s the very idea that free nations can come together on behalf of our common security.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky is a prolific author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just down the road from here, where he taught for over half a century. Among his many dozens of books are Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs; The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo; Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians; Manufacturing Consent; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies; and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. There’s a great collection of his work, just out now, edited by Anthony Arnove, called The Essential Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky, welcome to Democracy Now!

NOAM CHOMSKY: Very glad to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to be with you here in Massachusetts in the studio, instead of talking to you on the phone at home.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s start with what’s happening with this NATO summit celebrating sixty years, France rejoining after more than four decades. Your analysis?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the obvious question is why bother celebrating NATO at all? In fact, why does it exist? It’s twenty years now, almost, since the Berlin Wall fell. NATO was constructed on the—with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

Well, in fact, the answers are interesting. Mikhail Gorbachev made an—agreed, made a remarkable concession at that time to the United States. NATO’s essentially run by the United States. He offered to allow a reunited Germany to join NATO, a hostile military alliance—

AMY GOODMAN: But as, Noam, you were just saying, at MIT they have these technological problems, too, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Right, the leading technological institute in the world. At commencement, the PA system almost inevitably breaks down. So this is familiar.

AMY GOODMAN: Briefly summarize what you were just saying, if people were having trouble hearing you through the static.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Alright. Well, I think the first question to ask about NATO is why it exists. We’re now approaching the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, unification of Germany, first steps in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, the alleged reason for NATO’s existence was to protect the West against a Russian assault. You can believe what you like about the reason, but that was the reason. By 1989, that reason was gone. So, why is there NATO?

Well, that question did arise. Mikhail Gorbachev offered at that time to the United States, which runs NATO, that he would permit a unified Germany to join NATO, a hostile military alliance aimed at the Soviet Union. Now, that’s a remarkable concession. If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times. And now he was offering to let a reunited militarized Germany join a hostile military alliance, backed by the most awesome military power in history.

Well, there was a quid pro quo. George Bush, the first, was then president; James Baker, Secretary of State. And they agreed, in their words, that NATO would not expand one inch to the east, which would at least give Russia some breathing room. Now, Gorbachev also proposed a nuclear weapons-free zone from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, which would have again given some protection and, in fact, security for peace. Well, that was just rejected. I don’t even think it was answered. Well, that’s where things stood in 1989, ’90.

Then Bill Clinton was elected. One of his first acts was to break the promise and expand NATO to the east, which, of course, is a threat to Russian security. Now, the pretext given, for example, by his—Strobe Talbott, who was the Under Secretary of State for Eastern Europe, is that that was necessary to bring the former satellites into the European Union. But that can’t be. There are states inside the European Union that are not part of NATO: Austria, you know, Finland, Sweden. So that’s irrelevant. But it was a threat, and Russia, of course, reacted to the hostile threat. It increased tension.

Well, going up to the present, President Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, has been a strong advocate of the view that NATO should expand further to the east and to the south and that, in fact, it should—to the east and to the south means to control the energy-producing regions. The head of NATO, Dutch, the Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer, has proposed, advocates that NATO should take the responsibility for protecting energy supplies to the West—pipelines, sea lanes, and so on.

Well, now we’re getting to Afghanistan, which is right in the—has always been of great geostrategic importance because of its location, now more than ever because of its location relative to the energy-producing regions in the Gulf region and in Central Asia. So, yes, that’s what we’re seeing.

Actually, there’s more to say about NATO, about why it exists. So we might look back, say, ten years to the fiftieth anniversary. Well, the fiftieth anniversary of NATO was a gloomy affair that was—right at that time, NATO was bombing Serbia—illegally, as everyone admitted—claiming it was necessary for humanitarian reasons. At the NATO summit, there was much agonizing about how we cannot tolerate atrocities so near Europe.

Well, that was an interesting comment, since at that time NATO was supporting atrocities right inside NATO. Turkey, for example, was carrying out, with massive US aid, huge atrocities against its Kurdish population, far worse than anything reported in Kosovo. Right at that time, in East Timor—you’re not going to praise yourself, so if you don’t mind, I will—at the time of the Dili massacre, which you and Allan [Nairn] heroically exposed, atrocities continued. And in fact, in early 1999, they were picking up again, with strong US support—again, far beyond anything reported in Kosovo. That’s the US and Britain, you know, the core of NATO.

Right at the same time, in fact, Dennis Blair, President Obama—inside President Obama’s national security circle, he was sent to Indonesia, theoretically to try to get the Indonesian army to stop carrying out the mounting atrocities. But he supported them. He met with the top Indonesian General, General Wiranto, and essentially said, you know, “Go ahead.” And they did.

And in fact, those atrocities could have been stopped at any moment. That was demonstrated in September 1999, when Bill Clinton, under very extensive domestic and international pressure, finally decided to call it off. He didn’t have to bomb Jakarta. He didn’t have to impose an embargo. He just told the Indonesian generals the game’s over, and they immediately withdrew. That goes down in history as a great humanitarian intervention. It’s not exactly the right story. Right up until then, the United States was continuing to support the atrocities. Britain, under its new ethical foreign policy, didn’t quite get in on time, and they kept supporting them even after the Australian-led UN peacekeeping force entered. Well, that’s NATO ten years ago.

That’s even putting aside the claims about Serbia, which maybe a word about those are worthwhile. We know what happened in Serbia. There’s a massive—in Kosovo. There’s massive documentation from the State Department from NATO, European Union observers on the ground. There was a level of atrocity sort of distributed between the guerrillas and the Serbs. But it was expected that the NATO bombing would radically increase the atrocities, which it did, if you look back at the Milosevic indictment in the middle of the bombing, almost entirely, that atrocity—except for one exception, about atrocities, after the NATO bombing. That’s what they anticipated. General Clark, commanding general, had informed Washington weeks early, yes, that would be the consequence. He informed the press of that as the bombing started. That was the humanitarian intervention, while NATO was supporting even worse atrocities right within NATO, in East Timor, and go on in other cases. Well, that’s NATO ten years ago.

And it begins to tell us what NATO is for. Is it for defending Europe from attack? In fact, there is such a pretense now. So when President Bush put—started installing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, the claim was, well, this is to defend Europe from attack against Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles. The fact that it doesn’t have any doesn’t matter. And the fact that if it had any, it would be total insanity for them to even arm one, because the country would be vaporized in thirty seconds. So, it’s a threat to Russia again, just like Clinton’s expansion of NATO to the east.

AMY GOODMAN: France joining?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Pardon?

AMY GOODMAN: France joining, now rejoining?

NOAM CHOMSKY: France joining is quite interesting. I mean, France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a “third force,” independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course. It was—he spoke of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. That was a great fear of the United States since the Second World War, that Europe would strike out on its own after reconstructing, which it could. The economy is on the scale of the United States. There’s no reason—except in military force, it’s comparable to the United States. So it could have been a move towards a peaceful Europe independent of the superpowers. In fact, a large part of the purpose of NATO was to prevent that from happening, to ensure that Europe would stay within the US umbrella under US control.

Well, France has now abandoned that position and has rejoined what is now just an intervention force, an international intervention force, exactly as James Jones and de Hoop Scheffer and others portray it. It’s an international intervention force under US command. Why should it exist?

In fact, if you go back to 1989 and 1990, it’s extremely interesting to see how the United States reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, which signaled the end of the Soviet Union, clearly, the Bush administration, Bush I, immediately released a national security strategy, a military budget, and so on, which are very interesting reading. What they say, in effect, is everything is going to go on exactly as before, but with new pretexts. So now we have to have a huge military establishment and military budget, and not to protect ourselves from the Russians, who are collapsing, but because—literally, because of the technological sophistication of third world powers. Now, that was promulgated without ridicule. You know, if someone was watching from Mars, they’d collapse in laughter. So, because of the technological sophistication of third world powers, we have to keep this huge military budget, and we have to keep intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, the main target of intervention. Why? Not because of the Russians, as had been claimed. What it said was we have to direct the intervention forces to the Middle East, where our problems could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door. And so, in other words, we’ve been lying to you for fifty years, but now the clouds have lifted. So we just have to have intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, because we have to control it. We have to maintain what they called the Defense Industrial Base. That’s a euphemism for high-technology industry. Now that’s why you have things like computers and the internet and so on. So that’s the massive state sector of the high-tech economy. We have to maintain that, again because of, you know, the threat of the third world and so on. In other words, everything remains the same; the pretexts change. Now, that passed without a whisper.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I want to get to Afghanistan. It’s the main topic of NATO. It’s a debate around the issue of the expansion of war in Afghanistan. President Obama’s initiative is not the main topic of debate in the United States, meaning whether or not we should be doing this. What do you think?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s interesting. It is the topic of discussion in the United States right in the middle of the establishment. So, Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal, had an interesting article probably six months ago, or roughly, by two of the leading specialists on Afghanistan: Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid. And their basic point was that the United States should give up the idea that military victory is the answer to everything.

They said that the United States should reorient its policy so that there would be a regional solution in which the interested—the concerned countries, that includes, crucially, Iran, but also India, Russia, China, would themselves work out a regional settlement and that the Afghans should work something out among themselves. He pointed—they pointed out, correctly, that the regional countries are not happy about having a NATO military center based in Afghanistan. It’s obviously a threat to them. Now, this past—this is not what’s being done. There’s some gestures towards, you know, maybe some under secretary will say hello to an Iranian representative or something, but that’s not the core of the policy that’s being pursued.

Now that—side-by-side with that is something else that’s been happening. There is a significant peace movement in Afghanistan. Exactly its scale, we don’t know. But it’s enough so that Pamela Constable of the Washington Post, in a recent article in Afghanistan, argued that when the new American troops come, they’re going to face two enemies: the Taliban and public opinion, meaning the peace movement, whose slogan is “Put down the weapons. And we don’t mind if you’re here, but for aid and development. We don’t want any more fighting.”

In fact, we know from Western-run polls that about 75 percent of Afghans are in favor of negotiations among Afghans. Now, that includes the Taliban, who are Afghans. In fact, it even includes the ones in Pakistan. There’s the difference—the really troubled areas, now, are Pashtun areas, which are split by a British-imposed line, artificial line, called the Durand Line, which was imposed by the British to protect British India, expand it, and they’ve never accepted it. It just cuts their territory in half. Afghanistan, when it was a functioning state, never accepted it, right through the 1970s. But certainly, the Afghan Taliban are Afghans. And President Karzai, formerly our man, no longer, because he’s getting out of control—