Angry Planet - America's Liaison to the Taliban on What Went Wrong

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

The facts on the ground are undeniable. The U.S. is out, the Taliban is back in.The end was ugly and there were plenty of ugly spots along the way.Since we’re all doing what ifs, here’s ours: what would the off-ramp have looked like, and did we ever at least have our turn signal on?Joining us today is a guy who was in the room. Former diplomat Frank Ruggiero dealt directly with the Taliban, as well as managing U.S relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2010 and 2012. Hillary Clinton gave him the State Department’s distinguished honor award.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. The facts on the ground are undeniable. The U.S. is out. The Taliban is back in. The end was ugly, and there were plenty of ugly spots along the way. So we're all doing what ifs.

And here's ours. What would the off-ramp have looked like? And did we ever at least have our turn signal on? Joining us today is a guy who was in the room. Former diplomat Frank Wigero dealt directly with the Taliban, as well as managing U.S. relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that's between the years 2010-2012. Hillary Clinton gave him the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award.

Frank, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Can you just describe your role and the situation while you were doing it? Sure. I had two roles related to Afghanistan. The first one was I was the senior U.S. civilian. in southern Afghanistan from the summer of 2009 to the summer of 2010. So that's when the Obama administration surged military forces into the south, primarily Helmand and Kandahar provinces,

to initiate a counterinsurgency strategy. I left that job and came back and was Richard Holbrook, senior deputy in the summer of 2010. He passed away in December of 10. So I was the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for a few weeks. I could think a month or so. And then I did that job for about two years. And then I left the State Department. What's your view in a nutshell of when this should have ended? Were you there when it should have or could have ended? I always thought that we should have used the force we had on the ground when we surge military forces to seek a political settlement to the conflict. So use that force to negotiate. And if you look at Secretary Clinton's speech,

she gave at the Asia Society in early 2011. She laid out very clearly how the United States was going to fight and talk to the Taliban at the same time. And the idea was that of that was to get them to break ties with al-Qaeda in a public way, because that was our core objective in Afghanistan. And then also to begin a process where you get an negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. So that's what we were working on all throughout 10 and 11 and a little bit into 12, but it kind of fell apart in 12. Why? Why did it fall apart in 12? I think there was certainly on the Afghan side, the Afghan government, there was resistance

to the talks. We had had conversations with the most senior levels of the Afghan government, keeping them informed of what we were doing by initiating a channel with the Taliban. Some of them encouraged continued negotiations. Some of them were very hesitant. But specifically, we were talking to informing President Karzai, keeping him up the date. And I think that there was a bond conference in December of 2011. And at that conference, Karzai just walked away from the talks. At that point, there was a real push on to make these Afghan led, the Afghan government was going to lead these talks. And the Taliban just wouldn't go for that. That's not how they wanted to negotiate an end of the conflict. So we hit five heads. And then I left the government in 12.

so I'm not sure. I wasn't privy to discussions after that. So the Taliban was kind of all or nothing, right? We re-rule the country. There's no, there's no kind of joint rule here possible. There were no preconditions to the conversations. We were trying to do it was initiated dialogue with, you know, and the way you would initiate a dialogue, you know, to have the Taliban have a place where they could have negotiations. So they were going to set up a political office in Qatar. Qatar was a party to the talks. They helped host the talks. And that's where the Taliban political office eventually was established. So there were no preconditions on either side. It was to begin a dialogue to think about what is the end of this conflict. So what do you think the Taliban would have taken?

Do you have any thoughts about like what their idea of a negotiated settlement would have been? You know, I don't know the answer to that. We didn't get that far down the track of what their broad parameters were for what they were seeking in a negotiation. We were focused on how do you begin a process where, one, we get, her because met vis-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-tie-a-a-tie-a-a-tie-a-tie-tac-tie-a-tie-tall. We got sit-down together with the United States in the room to negotiate a settlement. I mean, there were some, there were some thoughts about at that time, you know, clearly events turned out differently. They got much more than, like, they got everything. You know, there was some internal thinking, I remember on the team about, you know, do they want, do they want, would

they be an interim government, the power sharing arrangement? Would there be, would they take control in certain provinces in the South only? Would they be able to, you know, would they want certain ministries? Those were all conversations that the U.S. team was having about, you know, what would a negotiation look like once we finally got to it? So we were all focused on a negotiation started, and that's where we didn't get past that hurdle. So sort of deciding what the table would look like before everybody sat down around it? That's right. Who would be in the room?

Who would be in the room? If you look at peace negotiations, it's often, you know, who's going to be in the room, look at the Vietnam negotiations, who's sitting where. So what's your opinion of how this was handled, this current end to the war and the evacuation? You know, I've always remained focused on the 20 years leading up to where we are versus the last 20 days. I don't think anyone, and I haven't seen intelligence in a long time on this topic, I don't think anyone would have imagined that the Afghan government would have collapsed so completely, so quickly. Now, the idea that the president of the country, shot fired and cobbled, would get on an airplane and depart, I think it was beyond the real. realm of anyone's what would happen. I think most people probably thought there'll be a period of

fighting after the Americans withdraw. The Afghan government will be able to hold on for a period of time. The most optimistic scenarios, maybe a year. I don't think anyone thought they are going to, we spent $100 billion on Afghan national security forces and they were routed in the north, first, then in the south, and then gave up Kabul without a fight. I don't think anyone anticipated that. And then the rest flows from that. How do you evacuate Americans now with the Taliban controlling the airport? I just want to push back on that just a little bit because I feel like talking to every single person I knew that came back from Afghanistan, reading the Special Inspector General of Afghan Reconstruction reports, especially about the Afghan National Army, maybe this is in hindsight, but I feel like the writing was on the wall there in a lot of ways. I mean, my colleagues from Vice come back.

they make these documentaries about what it's like to hang out with the Afghan National Army. And there are, especially in the like special operations forces equivalents in the Afghan National Army's good soldiers. But there were also a lot of people, especially in the North, sitting around smoking hash, not really doing anything. So I just, that like, it, I struggle with, sorry, go ahead. I don't disagree with you. That was always my view that they were very much. overrated on what they could achieve and what was what was stated about them and their capabilities was never proven on the battlefield. But I think the consensus in the U.S. government was that

they're going to hold on for a period of time. Another aspect, you mentioned Ghani just gone up and left. And so the question to have is, didn't we know him a little bit better? I mean, shouldn't we have had some clue about who this guy was? I'd met Ashraf a few times. in my capacity as the deputy special representative. He was not in power at that point. So I can't, you know, who in the U.S. government knew him or how close did he knew him because he didn't come into power until after I was out of the government. Again, I met him in a capacity as a, you know, I think he was a former World Bank official

as me or I forget his background. But he was considered an imminent, you know, eminent Afghan. He'd come back to enter the fray of Afghan politics. Well said. So was there inside the Obama administration, was there an effort to get out? Were there factions that actually thought it was time to go? Yeah, I think the whole debate around the beginning in negotiation with the Taliban was an attempt to end the conflict without the negotiated settlement. So you, again, you go back to

Secretary Clinton, which she wrote, gave a speech in, I think it was February of 11, the Age Society was the culmination of the U.S. government saying, we are going to initiate a political process to end this conflict. Not everyone was on the same page. I mean, I think there were always people in the military, DOD, that thought that building up this ANSF was going to allow them to get the Taliban to, the two words that were always bantered around

were reconciliation versus reintegrate. So the people that believe in a political settlement or seeking a political settlement, always believed there had to be reconciliation with the Taliban. There was going to be some type of an arrangement where the Taliban were accommodated in terms of power in the government. Reintegration was basically they were going to throw up their hands and be reabsorbed into Afghan society as, I don't know, police officer or something. I think the view of the people on the side of reconciliation just didn't think the reintegration story was even feasible. There was nothing on the battlefield that would make you believe that the fight was going in the direction.

that the Taliban felt that, you know, they had to give up, which events certainly have bore that out. I have heard, speaking of the factional stuff, and this may not be a question that you have an answer to, that even then as Vice President Biden was against the surge and kind of wanted us pulled out back then. Is that true? You know, I know the Vice President has much less power and is much less involved than sometimes people think that he is, but I'm curious if you have any insight. my recollection of discussions around that time were that the vice president, and I think it's public record, was opposed to the surge, always viewed our counterterrorism objectives as the primary objectives in Afghanistan and would have preferred to get out. Going all the way back to Bush,

and I'm not saying that you were working in this field then, but one thing that's always struck me is, you know, we now talk about the mission was over once al-Qaeda was on the run. or if we got the Taliban away from al-kind to pride them apart. But I really remember the propaganda at the time we were going in that we were also going to rescue the women of Afghanistan. And, you know, I mean, I'm taking it to an extreme,

but the Taliban itself was a force for evil and that it was important to keep them out. But you're actually talking about a government that was much more pragmatic than what the PR was saying, is that right? Certainly by 10 and 11. So you go through the surge, the Obama surge, and I think that people realize that,

if you look back at after the American forces went into Marja and Helman, that was kind of the beginning of the surge forces were going to do. And I remember Stan McChrystal was, you know, there was a quote from him about bleeding marja or something like that. But it was basically that there weren't enough forces

to do this. that the military surge was probably not going to get the results that people wanted. So at that point, people started to say, how do we either take advantage of the forces we have on the ground to get a political settlement or just simply get a political settlement? But yes, there was always the tension about, I mean, a counterinsurgency strategy kind of built on those folks in the government that really wanted to see a new Afghanistan. And I don't think that tension was ever really settled. there were always those who wanted to remain engaged and make Afghanistan something.

Remember, we'd have a long discussion about something called the Kabul Bank. And this was a question about what is corruption in Afghanistan? And what can we do about it? And I remember sitting around the White House Situation Room, the place where we had National Security Council meetings, and talking about, well, what do we do about this? And, you know, half of the room was saying, this is just a problem. it's too big. What can we really do about this question and how much nation building are we really going to get into here? And is that effort really going to pan out? What do you think this went on for 20

years? I think as long as al-Qa, as bin Laden was out there, that there was going to be an effort to make sure that Afghanistan was never used again to launch attacks on the West. The question for me has always turned down to after the death of bin Laden. How did it go on for another decade? And, I think with the death of the Bidlain, the pivot that was occurring already in the government to seek a negotiated settlement really gained steam. And there was a lot of progress, I thought, in the summer of after Bidlian was killed in May of 11 through the bond process in December of 2011. There was a lot of progress. You know, people, there were some parts of the government that weren't as interested in this as those of us were seeking reconciliation. But my question's always

then how did it go on so long after we achieved our core objective? And I think that President Biden has been saying that, you know, we achieved our core objective against al-Qaeda. And we continued on with basically a nation-building strategy for a decade that ended up where we are. I just think that... All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back after this.

All right, angry planet listeners, thank you so much for waiting. We are back on. what was told to the public was much more along the lines of nation building anyway. I just keep thinking about, you know, the talk about schools for women and bridges and tunnels and all of the other stuff that we were supposed to be doing. I also think it depends on which part of the government was talking to the public at what time. Because it changed and it very much depended on if it was a military source or if it was a diplomatic source, if a civilian government source, they're all saying different things at different times, I feel. But, and I've said this repeatedly on this show, we weren't really paying attention.

Most Americans had no idea what was going on there. It didn't care to them. Yeah, to look at the front page of the major publications now. It's certainly a story. But nothing on Afghanistan for a decade. And all of a sudden, this flurry of the entire front page of major publications just dedicated to Afghanistan. So it'll be, it'll be interesting to see how quickly that. I think you're right, though.

I think it depends on how you were talking to. Because if you look back at President Obama, you know, he was very, you know, he did the surge, and then he was prepared to announce the withdrawal of American forces, cut the number of forces in the country, declared the surge over, declared the combat mission over. At the same time, you're probably talking to people that were focused on Afghan women's issues, on, you know, we were going to stay engaged. We were going to make that a priority. I think you just had people talking past each other, but from their own perspective of what the conflict was, and those don't align when you think of in a historical context.

It was also so big, too, right? Because it was like not just this military component, this huge state building exercise, quite unlike, I think, almost anything America has ever done before or attempted. right? You know, like comparable only, I think, to the aftermath of World War II, but even then like the infrastructure of those countries and the culture of those countries, Japan and Germany was completely different than Afghanistan, right? Yeah, you were trying to build something absolutely from scratch. I mean, when I came into it in the summer of 10, you know, the counterinsurgency strategy was nation building activity really that really accelerated.

And the idea was, in order to create stability in the South, how do you, you know, tamp down a research in Taliban? You know, you have to build up local governance. You have to build up economics. You have to build up the political ties between Kabul and the provinces and the provinces and the provinces and the districts when the Taliban existed. And then you'd have to build up an Afghan national security force that could take over the security function.

And the piece I just wrote, you know, I was in Afghanistan for about, you know, three or four months. And there was this debate going on about how many additional troops Obama would send in. And I remember Ambassador Carl Eikenberry, then the U.S. ambassador to Kabul to Afghanistan, came down south and asked the basic question, how much of this is sustainable? Because once you put the U.S. forces in, so every district in Afghanistan basically got a battalion of U.S. forces and about 10, 15, 20 civilians. So diplomats, aid workers, agricultural workers, justice workers. And as long as the military was there, you could show progress because the few district government officials you could get from the Afghan side could go out and do their job. You could see some U.S. aid dollars flowing in.

But the question was, as soon as U.S. forces leave, what does it look like? And my assessment was always that, and most of the people that I supervised in the South, was that this is all fleeting. That this is, you know, as long as the battalion remains there of U.S. soldiers, this will sustain itself. But when you pull those soldiers out, the Afghans didn't have the capacity or the will to do it. So your average Afghan, do they have, how caught up in this were they? Were there people who actually said the U.S. is a good thing? Were there people who said the U.S. is a bad thing? Or were people just sitting there waiting us out?

I think it depends on which Afghan. If you were involved in the central government and you were, part of the government the United States was supporting. I think that it was, you wanted the United States to stay. You wanted the assistance to continue to flow in. If you were a average farmer in southern Afghanistan, I think you were worried about what's the security situation for you and who could provide you some modicum of justice. And I think that, you know, the government from the south was viewed much differently than the government from the north was viewed. So if you were a northerner looking down and you saw, you know, a lot of people that were, you know, from your background. If you were from the South looking up, it was a different story. Can we, I want to talk about your, this piece you wrote in the Atlantic Council that came out on September 1st, how to avoid another state building failure after Afghanistan. It's good, but it is also depressing to me in a number of ways.

Because I feel like these are the basic things. these four things are like, and I don't, I don't mean that as a criticism of you so much as a criticism of our nation, of our nation building efforts in Afghanistan. And the whole nation, really. And the whole nation. Number one, focus on achievable objectives. How did we not have achievable, how did we not know what our achievable objectives were for the past 10 years? It's, where, how did we get into this mode where we were just kind of making it up, you know, every two years, it felt like, the mission would kind of change. And again, depending on who you talked to, how did we get to this place?

I just think that the objective shifted over time. It started out as a conflict against al-Qaeda. And then it became, we need to set up a government to make sure that the Taliban doesn't come back. Because I believe a decision was taken early in the conflict. The Taliban was routed. I think that they had put out feelings to figure out how do they come back in? And the answer was don't. There was an op-ed by Harvard professor Stephen Walt a few days ago in the Financial Times where he laid out what I thought was really a terrific lesson learned, that has to be learned from the Afghanistan conflict. If you're going to have a realistic foreign policy, you have to be able to judge facts for

what they are and pivot your actions and your policy according to the fact. I think that, you know, this gets back to setting realistic objectives. You have to be able to say, yes, we've set this objective. Maybe everyone didn't think a coin strategy was the best objective to set, but to be able to analyze it and say, that's not working. I think that's the real question about Afghanistan. The lesson to be learned is, in the end, this is Afghanistan. I don't mean to downplay importance of Afghanistan and global politics,

but it's Afghanistan. If you can't judge what's happening with your policy in a realistic way, And you put that in a different context outside of Afghanistan. That's a dangerous thing. And so we have to figure out how are we able to take a critical look at ourselves as we try to implement policies. I also want to look at number two, which is something that's like a personal hobby horse of mine. Increased civilian oversight at the Pentagon. The U.S. military is trained to carry out complex and dangerous missions.

It excels at them. The military's optimism that it can achieve difficult tasks is laudable, but that optimism can cause it to extend its reach beyond overall policy objectives. Thus, civilian Pentagon leadership must steer the military towards achievable goals. It does feel to me, having covered this stuff for a while, that the military is pretty disconnected from the American public and from its civilian leadership. How do we get back to a place where they are listening to each other and communicate? I don't know. That's a real challenge. But you have to have the, And when you're setting policies, the military, and I was trying to capture this in a piece,

you know, they are given tasks. They're told to take a hill, and they'll do it. And they're trained to do that. And I was trying to give them great credit because they do amazing things. But that spirit of we can do what we're tasked to do, I think has to be tempered at times by the policy leadership in the Pentagon, because the State Department can't do that. The White House can do that, but it's a challenge. So you have to have that civilian leadership of the Pentagon that says, we understand the objective of the military you want to achieve. You know, are you getting there?

Are you not? And if you're not, let's pivot. What I saw oftentimes was they became more of a support mechanism for the military. Did you ever feel as if military leadership bucked against civilian control? or was obtuse with its information? No, I think they were trying to do what they thought was the right thing to do. They set out in a policy that they thought would work. And the building of the Pentagon then moved out in the direction of trying to achieve those objectives.

My analysis of that is there has to be a way when you see that that's not working to correct and to pivot and go in a different direction. Because what happened in Afghanistan is we didn't pivot and go in a different direction, and we ended up with the Taliban routing the country. And this goes to point four in your piece, I think, recognize that history is not static. And you kind of talk about the inability of some people on the American side of things to come to terms with people changing or people telling you that they had changed,

that kind of felt like it feels as if everyone was filtering everything through a 2001 lens, right? That the Taliban, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, certainly in relationship to the Taliban, it was very difficult to get people to look at them as an entity in 2011 or 2020 versus an entity in, you know, the summer of 2001. The views of them were fixed and it was very hard to change any. view of them. So, you know, we would go negotiate with them and come back with what we thought were interesting developments and just, you know, a chunk of the government just wouldn't be bunched. They just would not be bunched by that. Now, on the Afghan side, it was pretty obvious that our interests weren't aligned. And, you know, at some point, our interest was to be less involved

in Afghanistan, particularly after al-Qaeda. But if you're going down a counterinsurgency, state-building strategy. You know, the people that believe that think that you need to hug the Afghan government even closer. So you need to, you know, make them really believe that you're going to be there for them forever. And so that just clouds people's judgment about what they really were, what the Afghan government really was. Again, I go back to the president of the country getting on a plane and departing without a shot fired in Kabul. How do you explain? He took the money and ran and perhaps understood the country better than the rest of us did. I mean, there's a long history of people doing that, though.

I mean, baby Doc D'L. Yeh, he got out ahead. Didn't at least one of the presidents of Vietnam managed to get out with the... There's this great piece that was written about the last people getting on the helicopter and the senior South Vietnamese officials actually having trouble getting on the helicopters because they were carrying so much gold, literally gold bars. I guess that's not the part that surprises me. I think he could see the writing on the wall and he went. Yeah, he'd been reading the SIGO reports.

Sorry. Do you think, so do you, and this is kind of a bad question to ask you, because I think I know exactly what your answer will be, but do you think America should be engaged in this kind of state building? And how do we not screw it up the next time? I think it's very difficult if you're going to try to use a foreign power to impose, which basically doing is using foreign power to impose a government. You can phrase that in any way you want, but I think, how is it viewed by the local people?

And I think, I just think it's very difficult. I used to describe it to people as follows. They would say, so what, what is it like in southern Afghanistan to try to, you know, create this state that's going to work, you know, for the average Afghan. And I used to say, imagine if there were a bunch of Afghans who didn't speak of work, of English and you stuck them in Chicago and you told them to figure out the local politics and come up with a government. How would that go? We're talking about Chicago. It might be an improvement. But I know, I mean, I see what you mean. It does seem impossible. And I guess we're

blinded by the American ideals of that we live in a not perfect society, but in its ideal form, we live in the perfect society. And also that we've done it before, right? Yeah, we never, we're very bad at using force in a nuanced way. We want total victory. And that's from our World War II experience, right? I mean, we had total victory on two fronts and we rebuilt the world. You know, it's an amazing achievement by the American soldier and the government. But we've tried to repeat that in a lot of ways.

And I remember having a conversation actually with Henry Kissinger. We did an event at the Wilson Center sometime in 11 where we were talking about the political process, the chances of a political process in Afghanistan. And at some point, Henry looked over at me and he said, you know, I hope we've learned how to fight and talk. He said, because Americans generally fight, they stop fighting, they decide they don't want to fight anymore, and then they want to negotiate a withdrawal. And that's kind of what happened in Afghanistan. You know, we have the forces on the ground. We could have used them in a, in a place. political way to foster and negotiate. But we're not good at that. That's just not something. Again, it goes back to this reconciliation reintegration question. You're going to win.

You're going to force them in to reintegrate. And the facts on the ground just in support that. We don't normally have people who've actually met with senior Taliban officials on the show, to be honest. I was wondering if you would share some of your personal impressions. You don't have to use names, although that's always interesting too. But, I mean, what were these senior officials like? I mean, crass, crude, sophisticated, I mean, any sort of adjectives you want to hit us with. I'm just curious what these, they seem like they're from another planet from sitting where I am. The gentleman that I met with, his name's out there in the media, is that Taya Baga, so I'm not giving up any confidence. That was the person that we met with. I don't know if he's involved in what he's doing now. I have no idea.

I found him to be genuine. He was actually kind of reserved. We were very cautious about who we are talking to. How do we know this guy's actually? Because there were a few instances where people tried to begin channels with the Taliban, and they turned out to be just completely bogus. I remember there was this instance of, this was the press, I think, about, you know, fake Moulamansur. There was a guy who was pawning himself off as Mullah Monsor who eventually was, you know,

he was killed. And, you know, made his, this guy made his way all the way on the palace in Kabul. And, you know, in the end it was a bust. So we, we took some pretty significant steps to make sure the guy we were talking to was who he said he was and represented the larger Taliban political entity. So I found him to be kind of reserved, thoughtful. He, you know, he didn't come into the room of throwing Islamic fundamentalism out of us. Frank Ogero, thank you so much for coming on the show. taking us through all this. I appreciate your point of view. And again, thank you. Thank you. My pleasure to be on.

That's all for this week. Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack at AngryPlanent.substack.com or AngryPlanetpod.com, where for a mere $9 a month, you get access to two, count of two bonus episodes every month. Again, where that is at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until that.