Mike Pugliese listed a bunch of audio files without comment.
Unfortunately I don't have a sound card. But I did look up the one non-audio site listed which is included below. So Mike if you have listened to these, how about a quick summary.
Are these experts copping to probable large scale civilian causalities due to infrastructure bombing to produce a mass exodus and famine? Or do they pawn this off as unfortunate colateral damage?
What do they have to say about going after the Taliban troops in the mountains?
Below is an conversation that covers some basic political problems, but it doesn't deal directly with the war in Afghanistan, since it was probably put out before that started. Chuck Grimes
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>From The National Interest No. 65-S
September 11: A Conversation
[Adam Garfinkle]: I want to return to the question of what constitutes success, what constitutes complete victory as the President has spoken of it. It seems to me that the real challenge arises when we exhaust the list of countries that the State Department says support terrorism, and recognize that real success depends on changes in regimes that are not on this list, but that we are taking explicitly as allies so far in this crisis. In point of fact, Al-Qaeda is an emanation of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is Wahhabi fundamentalist Islam, and Wahhabi fundamentalist Islam comes from Saudi Arabia, which supports Wahhabi evangelism to the tune of about $10 billion a year over the past many, many years. And the madrassas in Peshawar, Pakistan, which Saudi money supports, is the incubating area for the Taliban's foot soldiers for this radical Wahhabism. So we are in the strange position of identifying Al-Qaeda as the target, the destruction of which would constitute success, whereas the deeper problem lies in two allies that we are using in order to target Al-Qaeda. The way that the Saudi regime behaves toward its opposition, and the machinations of Pakistani regional policies, are the real sources of the terrorism we saw on September 11. In this light, how do we achieve complete victory?
[Charles Krauthammer]: Those are the hardest problems, how do you change the Saudi regime or change its policy, which in a sense has been promoting or buying off this kind of radicalism. It's not the immediate problem, but you are right: it is the ultimate problem. It cannot be solved right now, but I do think that if we create a cascade of events where there are serious penalties for those who have promoted the terrorists who have attacked the United States, the dynamic will change. The countries on the State Department's terrorism list compose one set of problems. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan need to feel pressure and need to pay a price for having promoted this kind of radicalism, so that they will change their policies. If they see such change as being in their interest, they might actually change course. In the end, you might have a confrontation, but that is way down the road.
[L. Paul Bremer, III]: Yes, but I don't think we can leave it too long, Charles. It is fashionable to say that this is not going to be a war on Islam, and everybody would agree that we do not want it to be a war on Islam. But everybody's focused on the wrong question. The question is not are we going to make war on Islam. It is whether Islam is going to make war on us. The so-called moderate Arabs and moderate Islamic leaders in the United States, in the region, and as far away as Indonesia need to step up and say, "These guys do not define Islam. They are apostates. They're not going to heaven; they're going to hell. They have violated the teachings of the Prophet; they have violated the premises of the Quran." If the Islamic leaders in Egypt, in Jordan, in Indonesia, in Saudi Arabia allow Islam to be defined in radical Wahhabist terms, then this will be a war on Islam-at Islam's behest.
Pressure needs to be applied directly to prevent this from happening. It can be done behind the scenes, but these guys must stop the kind of hate-filled commentary we are still seeing in the Egyptian press, in the Gulf, the kinds of things that lead eight year-old boys in madrassas in Pakistan to vie with one another to decide who gets the right to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago.
[Krauthammer]: It is deeply disappointing how few official spokesmen for Islam-mullahs, universities, theologians-have said what President Bush said at the Washington Islamic Center a few days ago: that the terrorism of September 11 was an act against Islam. Our President is a good man, but he is not an expert on Islam. Such statements are useful as a way to discourage the horrible discrimination against American Arabs and American Muslims, but it's hollow coming from us addressed to Muslims. It was not said, by the way, at the National Prayer Service on the Friday after the bombing, where a Muslim cleric made an appalling speech. He did not come close to saying that this act of terror was against Islam and, in fact, if you read his parable it is hard to tell if "the plotters of evil" he referred to are the guys who did this or the United States.* That's how ambiguous it was. We do not have the kind of response from the Islamic world that we need in order to make this something other than a war of civilizations. It's up to our allies in the Islamic world, and to American Muslims, to stand up and say that terrorism is against Islam. Is that asking a lot?
[Anthony Cordesman]: Yes, it really is. Because you're inferring the whole cause-and-effect relationship here.
[Krauthammer]: Let's start with American Muslims who are citizens of this country. Is it asking a lot, Tony?
[Cordesman]: Yes, it really is, because you are dealing with one basic problem: the impact of the second intifada and the backlash from the fact that our alliance with Israel is producing a great deal of this reaction. You are ignoring the fact that the governments that we are talking about have fought their own battles agains Islamic extremists. Particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia, it is important to note that this is not an oppressive oligarchy put on top of a liberal group of people struggling for democratic reform. It is a combination of a royal family and technocrats dealing with a far more conservative society over which they have limited control, and where they have to be very careful about how they act. I spent a good deal of time in Saudi Arabia when the second intifada hit and I watched as the Saudi government issued formal statements to the effect that Pepsi-Cola was not a Zionist slogan, a claim that was coming out of the streets, the schools and the mosques. If we act as if we did not face a massive problem over Middle East peace issues, as if this was not a key source of backlash against the United States, we will create a massive recipe for failure.
[Krauthammer]: Tony, it's simply incorrect to say that the fanning of anti-Americanism in places like Egypt in the official or unofficial press is a consequence of the second intifada. It predates the second intifada by years.
[Cordesman]: Of course it has, because we haven't had a working peace.
[Krauthammer]: We had eight years of a peace process in which Israel implemented a series of territorial withdrawals, which saw countless meetings between Israelis and Palestinians based on a sense of mutual recognition, and so forth. We can argue about how illusory it all was, but these eight years were real. If you talk about the last year, and ignore those eight years, you are ignoring reality.
The anti-Americanism fanned by Arab governments is cynically done in order to deflect disaffection in the street with their repressive and failed rule-repressive politically and disastrous economically. It is a cynical use of this propaganda to deflect attention on the United States and Israel, and it long predates the second intifada. So blaming it, essentially, on Israel I think is just fundamentally wrong.
[Cordesman]: I'm not blaming it on Israel. I'm simply saying that it is a real problem, and that have to live with the fact that anti-Americanism in the Islamic world is a complication of actions we need to take in our national interest. To blame this on Islam or a clash of civilizations, or to see regimes as decoupled from their own interest or to promote regime change in Saudi Arabia as a practical option, is frankly ridiculous.
[Krauthammer]: Do you think that if Israel and the Palestinians signed a peace treaty tomorrow, Osama would quit?
[Cordesman]: I don't think Osama would quit. We would still have a problem with many of the same extremist elements. (Let's remember, however, that some of these are the products of our own decisions. We tolerated Mohammed Zia, who came to power as an Islamic extremist within the Pakistani military, because he was intensely convenient to us for a while, and we now live in part with the legacy of the Inter-Services Intelligence and other elements he helped create.) Should we abandon all the realities we face? No. But to turn this into the kind of split that you guys are outlining almost ensures that we are going to end up buying problems rather than solutions.
[James Schlesinger]: Let me suggest that for the Palestinians this is the predominant issue. For the Egyptians and those that lie to the west, what Tony says has particular force. For bin Laden and for those in the east, however, the American desecration of the country of the two mosques is more important than is the Israeli issue.
[Krauthammer]: For the Pakistanis, it's Kashmir.
[Schlesinger]: Yes.
[Krauthammer]: It's not exactly Palestine.