Angry Planet - ICYMI: Taliban Memories

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

The Taliban - we all know them, few of us love them, and it looks like they’re going to rule Afghanistan - again.So, what was it like the first time the Islamic militants took over, in 1996?Today, we have two journalists who were in Afghanistan in the 90s. Scott Neuman was working for United Press International and wrote from the scene.Alan Chin is a photographer who went to Afghanistan to take pictures for The New York Times. 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. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to co-operation, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom.

peaceful. Freedom is never safe-guided peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Field. And I'm Matthew Galvin.

The Taliban. We all know them. Few of us love them. And it looks like they're going to rule Afghanistan again. So, what was it like the first time the Islamic militants took over in 1996? Today, we have two

journalists who were in Afghanistan in the 90s, Scott Newman, who was working for United Press International and wrote from the scene, and Alan Chin, a photographer who went to Afghanistan several times to take pictures for the New York Times. I've known them both for more than 20 years, which is an embarrassment to all three of us. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. All right. Let's start off with sort of a basic question. what was your first encounter with the Taliban? Scott, could you go first? So I was based in Delhi at the time with UPI,

and I had been interested in going to Afghanistan for a couple of years, a year since I had been in the bureau, and I convinced my editor to let me get an entry visa, which at the time was the Robani government. But the reason why I was able to get him to let me go was because it looked very much like the Taliban would be rolling over the government in Kabul. They had already taken Jalalabad on the road to Kabul at that time, as I recall, and had captured a power plant that supplied Kabul and Sorobi.

So it was very eminent. And by the time I actually got in to Afghanistan, I had a visa from the Robani government, but I was entering with a new government shortly after they took over. So there were a couple of different ways to get in at that time. One of them was a sometimes regular flight between Delhi and Kabul on Aeroflot, as I recall, which just says safety right there, doesn't it? Yeah.

But anyway, that flight was frequently canceled or just sort of ignored or whatever anyway. It was impossible to get in that way. So the other way was to go to the border at typically at a place called Torquam, which is just west of Peshawar, and catch a, I guess you would, actually, I guess you would catch the flight in Peshawar with the U.N. and fly over. But the U.N. would sometimes take journalists,

sometimes not. It really depended on what their needs were at the time. So that was my second option, and I did get there and did sort of beg for a flight in and didn't get one. So the third option was to go in over a road. So that starts at Torkum, which is, again, right on the, border. It's basically a border for checkpost. And there's a road, main road, that goes through

Jalalabad into Kabul. I made contact with our stringer and the Shawarwar's name is Burroughs Khan. He still works for the Dawn, which is a English-language Pakistani newspaper. And we got a driver and we went into Afghanistan. So on that road, which was littered with the debris of many years of fighting, burned out tanks and vehicles along the side of the road. And not long after we got in, we hit the first Taliban checkpoint. And the thing I remember most vividly is the streams of audio tape from cassette tapes, cassette tapes were a thing then, that were used to festoon machine gun positions. And it was a, what it was was basically the Taliban, who didn't believe in music, don't believe in music, decided that they were going to confiscate anybody's cassette tape who

came through. So at these checkpoints, if you had any cassette tapes, either had to keep them well hidden or they got confiscated. And so their, I guess their victory lap after confiscating one of these was to break it apart and pull out the guts and then use it as a streamer. That's probably one of my most vivid memories of the first time I encountered them. Of course, the signature turban was another thing, and that was a distinctive feature of the Taliban as well. But that road, that drive in from Pakistan to, especially by the time you get to Jalalabad, the Taliban were pretty well entrenched then and the checkpoints became more frequent than getting into Kabul. So we'll talk about getting into Kabul and what that was like in a minute. But Alan, so what was your first encounter like? And also before we lose the thread, before we started talking, Alan, you rejected our premise that the Taliban is going to take over Afghanistan soon.

And I do want to hear your argument about why it's not going to happen. I'll start with that. I'm not saying it's not going to happen. I'm just saying it's not a sure thing the way you guys seem to think it may be. And the reason for that is what I'll call the Saigon syndrome. We like to think, and we saw it most recently, almost a version of this in Mosul, when much of the Iraqi army collapsed before the onslaught of ISIS. a couple years ago, but not every client state is the same. Not every client army is the same.

And I think if you look at photographs or read stories from Kabul and other places in Afghanistan now, you will see a developing country that is barely recognizable from the country that Scott and I visited in the 90s and early 2000s. Kabul has gained several million people in population. It has mini skyscrapers. It has shopping malls. It has dense traffic. It has the internet. And we see how that conflict continues. We see the assassinations of Afghan women journalists and people who are pushing that envelope. We see the continuing struggle. But I don't think this is going to be a walkover. Even if the U.S. were to pull out tomorrow, and by the way, I don't think even though we are pulling out in terms of certain aspects, we're not going to pull out the way we did in the 70s in Saigon. We're always going to have that air support on hand. And even if not so much that, we have drones now. We don't have to put our pilots even in harm's way. We have just the photographs and video from those drones and satellites. We can do a lot that we didn't have decades ago. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, right? Because the Iraqis had all that too,

and ISIS was able to plow them in Mosul, sure. But notice the loss of Mosul, unlike the loss of Danang in the spring of 1975, did not ultimately end in the fall of Baghdad this time around, right? The Iraqi government was able to make a comeback. Anyway, I'll... That is a whole separate podcast, and I think I agree with 30% of what you said, but I'm not going to go over what the 30% was because I want people to be guessing. Okay.

I like that, Jason. I like that because I think that is the million-dollar question, obviously, in terms of what's going to happen in these places where we have fought these never-ending wars. But to answer your question, so like Scott, it was the same time when the Taliban first took Kabul, which was in September and October of 1996. I was a very young photographer. I had just done my first assignments for the New York Times in Bosnia and Croatia. and I was actually sleeping on the sofa of the New York Times correspondent in the Balkans, Chris Hedges,

and he woke me up late at night. And his first question was, hey, Alan, would you mind going to London tomorrow? And I said, well, sure, why? And he said, because John Burns, who is our senior friend correspondent, is on his way to Afghanistan, where an Islamic fundamentalist group called the Taliban have just seized power. And unfortunately, his satellite phone was stolen out of his car in London. And so can you please take the one here from the Sarajevo Bureau and fly it up to London and hand it to him. And this was a time when satellite phones were the size of a briefcase.

They weighed about 25 pounds. They cost about $20,000. And it was about $3 a minute to transmit either data or to talk with voice. And so I said, sure, yeah. weekend in London. Sounds great. This New York Times thing has perks that I didn't imagine. And I went back to sleep. And maybe an hour later or half an hour later, he woke me up again. And so I wasn't getting very much sleep that night. And he said, oh, and by the way, Alan, do you want to go to Afghanistan? And I said, yeah, I do. Other than what I'd read in the papers and growing up, my generation with the Soviet war of the 80s, I didn't really know very much about Afghanistan. understand at all. I'll be the first to admit that. I had really done my research on the Balkans, which is where I was, which I had meant to really dive into. And this other extraordinary opportunity landed in my lap. And of course, I wasn't going to say, no, I think it was one of

the biggest breaks of my career. And I'm very lucky and very privileged to have had it. And I'd be the first to say that. And I thank the people who gave me that chance. And yeah, I too found myself in Peshara at the hotel, and I put my name on the waiting list for not the UN plane, but the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, because they were flying into Kabul also. And in that era, before cell phones or anything like that, I put my name on the waiting list, and I stayed in my hotel, I'm waiting for them to call. I didn't want to leave, not even for a walk around the block, because what if they call and say, yeah, you're on the next flight and I'm not there to get that call. So I basically was living off of chicken biryani that I

ordered off room service and Marinda, which is the orange soda, popular in much of the world, and listening to and watching Indian Bollywood music videos for hours on end. Like maybe, I think it was a whole day, maybe 18, 20 hours that I was just sitting there biting my nails, waiting for the phone to ring. And it finally did. And they said, come over to the airport. You're on the next flight. And I got on that flight, and it was a very small propeller plane with maybe eight seats or 10 seats plus the pilots.

And it was a South African crew. And the first thing they said is, okay, Bahro and we haven't been able to make radio contact with the tower at the airport in Kabul. What we're going to do is we're going to fly really high. until we get to Kabul and then we're going to do this corkscrew turn to land. And the reason they do that when they take off and land in uncertain airfields is if anybody might want to shoot at them, they present less of a target. So that was my introduction to what I had gotten myself into. And we did that. We landed and go in through the airport, that terminal.

You'll remember this, Scott, right? Maybe coming out of that terminal, the first thing I saw was all these wrecked air craft on the airfield, everything from passenger jets to military helicopters and just destroyed from all those years of war, as Scott was saying. And then also, once we walked out of the terminal building, which by the way, had no electricity and basically barely anyone in it except for the guy who did stamp on passports. And there was a tank. There was a tank right at the airport. Okay, not surprising. New government, revolutionary situation. There's a tank. And it had a white flag flying on it. And I thought, oh, that must be the previous regime surrendering. And

this is a good example of how we don't understand them and they don't understand us. No, in fact, it was flying a white flag because white is a symbol of purity. And the Taliban went into battle and flying a white flag, not to surrender, quite the contrary, to demonstrate their purity of purpose. So that was my introduction. Scott, how were the Taliban greening? Were people glad to see them? To be honest, I'm not sure that I could get a fair read of that because there seemed to be, they seem to be greeted favorably. But I think if you had a sudden change in government and the new government was at least as repressive, probably more repressive than the previous one, you might be inclined to show your willingness to support them or greet them as liberators. But my sense was, is that

people were okay with it. But in a larger sense, too, I think that, as you point out, Afghanistan had had decades of fighting previous to the Taliban, starting really in the late 70s with the Soviet invasion and then the response to that, which was the Mujahideen, and then the fight for control of the country by various warlords after the Soviets withdrew. And that had left really a traumatized population. It's really hard to get a read on then how people feel about a government, a new government. At that point in Afghanistan, Afghanistan was not an infrequent occurrence. It had been a revolving door for a number of years. So, yeah, so I don't have a real sense of how people felt about the Taliban. My guess is that

most of them were okay with it or probably were happy with it because it seemed like these people had a reputation for creating order out of chaos. They had a reputation for providing some normalcy to life where there hadn't been any, where the warlords had come in and corrupt and many saw them as un-Islamic. Some of them were un-Islamic. And the Taliban were at least as advertised, just the opposite. In that sense, I suppose that they were happy with it, at least additionally. As for Kabul itself, it was the most ruined city I ever witnessed. And to this day, I ever witnessed. And it's also worth noting that much of the destruction in Kabul was not, did not occur on the Soviets watch in Afghanistan. It occurred after they left.

And there was a considerable amount of fighting between competing warlords there. And the artillery duels in parts of the city had just raised it to nothing but broken stones. And there wasn't much left. And I guess it was worth having. At least someone thought so. We had to destroy the village to save it, right? I think Americans remember the Soviet invasion and we forget that there was that four years of civil war that kind of gave rise to the, Taliban. Exactly. And it was it was the experience of that war that helped create the Taliban. The Taliban

may have been organic in some sense, but they definitely, another thing worth remembering, I suppose, is that they definitely had considerable covert support from the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. And Pakistan in particular was, has always been concerned about an Afghan government that might be friendly to India and they have this concept called strategic depth that they feel as though in any conflict with India presumably a conventional conflict, at least that was the thinking now, that they might have to have a backyard to withdraw to. And they certainly didn't want an unfriendly government on their back doorstep if India decided to come knocking. And that may not seem like a realistic scenario, but especially in Pakistan, I would say that there's sort of a national, there's always

been a sort of a national obsession with India. And the fears for them were quite real. So, Scott, the other thing I wanted to know is, could you see the Taliban putting its stamp on Kabul already when you got there? Yeah, there were a number of checkpoints. The checkpoints were very in your face, guys wielding AK-47s. A lot of them, I think, though, but I would say this, that a lot of it seemed to me as though, and this may not, this may or may not be correct, but a lot of it seemed to me as though these guys had switched, a lot of these guys had switched sides at the very end. And they knew which, they knew the way the wind was blowing and they, they chose wisely. And this is not just the, the average militant on

the street, but this was also government officials. I had an interesting experience on my way out, actually. Afghanistan was one of the few places in the world that requires an exit visa. You don't need a visa to get in, but you also need a visa to get out. And so I had to go to the foreign ministry in order to get this. And going into the foreign ministry, it was clear that all of these pencil pushers, all of these bureaucrats were left over from the old regime. And not only were they left over from the old regime, but they had been through success. I talked to them, they had been through successive governments. They had just all they had done when the Taliban came in was don the appropriate turban and continue working as they as they normally did.

And the guy, the problem was, is with the power outages, they were running out of, as I recall, they were running out of the form that you had to fill out for this exit visa. And one of the bureaucrats made me wait there for several hours in the semi-dark until the power came back on because he only had one copy left. And if he gave it to me, he said no one else would get out of the country. Alan, did you experience anything similar? What was it like to be there, actually live there for a minute? Yeah, in those first days, one thing that was very noticeable on the streets of Kabul was the absence of women. And this really answers that question about how did people accept the Taliban?

And of course, the answer to that is who are you talking to or at least observing? And certainly Kabul then and now is a big city. It's a middle-class city. It has a lot of educated people. A lot of these people did not want the Taliban there, right? And especially the women, the middle-class and upper-class women, but even working-class women, were afraid to go onto the streets because the Taliban reputation of sexist violence, everyone knew about that. So they made themselves scarce for the most part. There were very few women on the streets. and so that was number one and number two Scott was talking about those cassette tapes that they would break and unwind and indeed that was actually the Taliban had a religious police

and I had a very interesting conversation with a young member of this force and I asked him and I said we were standing in a courtyard of one of a police precinct or something like that and there was an enormous pile of destroyed televisions and broken cassette tapes and things like that.

And I said to him, I said, wow, this is impressive. You've destroyed all these things that you consider quite corrupting and terrible. But do you yourself have a lot of or any experience actually watching television? Do you understand? How well do you understand what you're destroying? And of course, I phrased that in a maybe more polite way than I'm saying it now. and he spoke good English because many of them had been educated in Pakistani refugee camps and so they had decent English.

And he said, it's actually very simple. I have watched a lot of television because I was in Pakistan. And I said, really, you actually watched a lot of television? And he said, oh, yeah, what I really love were those nature documentaries, especially the ones of the oceans where you have the big ships and the big fish. and I imagine maybe in a landlocked country that might be interesting. And I said, wow, okay, so you really enjoyed that. But if you really enjoyed that, then why are you destroying all these televisions here?

And his answer was really simple. He said, because that is all well and good for you, you meaning you're non-Muslims, you people in the rest of the world. But for us, it's wrong and corrupting. And to him, that answer made sense. And of course, it didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I had to wrap my head around that one. And another, and a similar story, and this was at the front line, actually, with a Taliban combat unit that was fighting the forces that never stopped fighting them. The forces led by Masoud, the ethnic Tajid commander, Mujahdin commander, and then leader against the Taliban.

And this was near the front line, and the Taliban were firing these big Katusha rockets at the, at their enemy positions. And this junior officer was cleaning his pistol. Very meticulously, he had it all laid out, cleaning his pistol. And so I figured it was a good time to stop and chat. And he looked at me and he said, and this was through our translator, so this was not in English, but this was the way it was translated to me. He looked at me and he said, oh, hi, welcome.

You must be a foreign journalist, words to that effect. and I said something like, yes, I am, and I just want to see what's going on here, blah, blah, blah, you know. And he then says, oh, just so you know, you're going to hell, right? And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, because you're not Muslim. You guys are infidels and you're doomed. And I said, but what if I help old ladies across the street? What if I try to do my share of good deeds in the world?

Will that help me? And he said, no, not really. You should do that anyway, because you should be. good to your own people, but it's not going to save you. And he said this without any animosity. It's just the way the world is. You got to, and, and so I hope these anecdotes illustrate a little bit of what the kind of pedestrian reality of that kind of thinking is.

And from the distance of decades, it's not that different, perhaps, than some of our own people here. Yeah. Alan, I had a question. Your anecdotes really striking. One thing that I thought was super interesting that you said was about misunderstanding the white flag and what it represented in a different cultural context. Can both of you tell me what you think Americans get wrong about Afghanistan, normal person on the street? What is the biggest misconception of the country, do you think?

I would say, I think, I think, one, we tend in the United States and in Western, countries in general, we tend to think that our identity is wrapped around the nation state and that other labels that we carry, even in the United States, whether we're, what our religion is, typically come second or maybe even the third, where our region is, that, those sorts of things all are like secondary to the fact that we're Americans first. in Afghanistan and and also, this is true very much in Pakistan and particularly along the border where Afghan people consider them, many people move back, would traditionally move back and forth across this very poorest border. And they considered themselves, a lot of them in Pakistan

consider themselves Afghans. But they, for them, their religion and their sectarian identification in that religion was typically paramount and or, probably close second or maybe at an equal level was the tribe that they came from. Remember, President Karzai, that Karzai is the name of a tribe. Yusufzai is a name of a tribe along the border. And those were that those things were, those sorts of things were much more important to them than what country they belong to. In fact, I wasn't always clear that they, that there was a sense that people who lived in the border region were either Afghan or, or, or Pakistani. So that, I think that's probably the biggest thing that Americans don't understand. So when we think about geopolitics,

we assume that this neatly drawn map with borders that intersect means a whole lot to people who live in that area. And of course, this is true. This is not new. This is true. This is, of course, true from colonial times, but in places like Africa. But people on the ground, people in small place who live in small places in the middle of what we would consider nowhere, don't necessarily have the same view of what a country is that we do here. I would answer that question precisely on this notion of the middle of nowhere. I think Americans still have this idea that this is a primitive place, and a remote place, an exotic place, a place that is very much the other.

And although there are obvious reasons why a lot of people might think that, there are differences of language, of religion, of history, of culture, of course, that's all true. But I think it really is worth noting that Afghanistan was one of the only countries actually not to be successfully colonized by a great power by Britain or France or Russia or the U.S. or anybody else. It always was independent. I think it's also worth remembering that in retrospect the Soviet war, which we were against the Soviets, we supported the Mushanidin, and we supplied them with Stinger missiles that were the decisive weapon of that war, that basically beat the Soviets and forced them to pull out. The Soviet Union lost 15,000 approximately combat dead out of a total force of 150,000 deployed through those eight years, give or take, And if you do the math, that is statistically the exact percentage ratio of the number of American dead vis-a-vis our engagement in Vietnam, also over eight years.

So it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, really and truly. And we were enemies. But we forget that in retrospect, in Afghanistan, the Soviets were actually also the modernizers. They were the ones who brought more equality and opportunity for women. They were the ones who built highways and dams and power stations. They were the ones who selected members of the Afghan elite, certainly, to go to university in college in Russia and other parts of the Soviet bloc. And the Americans competed in that as well in that time because it was this kind of neutral place,

the way that Yugoslavia was in other places. And Americans also built highways and schools and hospitals. Both sides did that. but the Soviets being much closer because they were the neighbor, but were more visible. And so there was always, in some ways, the great tragedy that all the forces of modernity of what we would call, for lack of a better word, secular humanism or not even democracy, but something resembling civil society as we know it in the West, that became impossibly and to extricate that from the Soviets, right?

So the Soviets who were these invaders, who were not democratic, who were an authoritarian superpower in decline, lashing out violently in this vicious war, were also the people that were associated with modernity and secularism. And that combination became impossible to untangle. I don't think Americans think about that, know about that, appreciate that. And therefore, when we showed up after 9-11 and we decided we now were going to be the forces of democracy and modernity and secular humanism and civil society, it's tough, right? Because a lot of people who came around promising that were the Soviets. So wait a minute. What's going on here? I think that's a complexity to that that is very hard, even.

for experts and for people with the best intentions to figure out on any side, on the Afghan side, on the American side, on the Russian side, and so on. If I could just, I agree with all of that. I would just say that I think it's probably worth pointing out that much of that modernizing effort, if you want to call it modernizing that the Soviets brought in, they, most of that was concentrated in places like Kabul. And once to get outside the city, there is a different, there's, there are different attitudes. There are different views of the world. And, and there is a lot of Afghanistan that is not urban.

And mostly, yeah, most of the population lives not in the cities at all. It's like overwhelmingly, it's on its countryside. Yeah. And that's where the, that's where the Taliban were born in the country. And so to a certain, so they reflected to a certain degree that, that rural ethers, And I agree with, it was important that Alan pointed out that it did when you asked the question about how did people receive the Taliban. The ones who were afraid of the Taliban shut their doors. I wasn't speaking to them and probably Alan wasn't speaking to them. But there definitely were people who didn't, who were afraid of the consequences of that regime. And there are others who did welcome it, especially traditional male cultures.

It's true, especially, because the Taliban were, to your point about the sectarian and tribal and, and local emphosces. Yeah, Afghanistan has four major ethnic groups. The Pashtun, who are close to or maybe a little more

than half of the total population, depending on how you count it. And then the ethnic Uzbek and the ethnic Tajik and a group called the Hazara, who are also a Turkic people, but look like me or I look like them. They're the most East Asian looking.

And the Hazara are also Shia, and everybody else is Sunni. And so you have those breakdown as well. And the Taliban were and are a primarily, almost entirely, Pashtun movement. And Masoud was ethnic Tajik, and the other major ethnic Uzbek warlord was, he was a former Soviet sponsor general, and then he became the ethnic Uzbek warlord. And so you had the ethnic Uzbek and ethnic Tajik regions of the, and ethnic Hazara regions of the, regions of the country united to fight this primarily Pashtun movement of the Taliban. And now, none of these

regions are entirely easily defined, right? Like, it's not like this entire province is Pashtun and this entire province is Tajik. Like in a lot of countries with sectarian issues and conflicts, right, you're going to have regions within regions that are more one and the other. So, for example, the province of Kunduz, which is right in the north there, has been a Taliban stronghold because it's an ethnic Pashtun majority in an otherwise mostly Tajik area. And so you have very complicated things like that. And that has made the war very messy and very ugly. And also means that you can't simply, as the colonialists often did, you can't simply draw a line on a map and say,

okay, guys, you go there and you go here. It doesn't work that way. not without more horrific ethnic cleansing and population transfer. You mentioned Dostum. One of my walkabouts outside of Kabul was up through the Salang Tunnel, and his forces were based just north of that tunnel. It was very long, at least it seemed quite long to me, dark tunnel. Oh, amazing.

I did that exact same trip. Going up through the hills and, in fact, it was very poorly dressed for the thing, because we left Kabul and it was warm, and by the time we emerged from that tunnel, it was actually snowing. I was freezing my ass off, but as you came out of the tunnel, there was a tank parked right on the outside of the tunnel that was obviously protecting the pass, an old Soviet tea, whatever. I don't know how old it was, but it was definitely,

it was all Soviet hardware there anyway, but the contrast between his forces and the way they were equipped and sort of the rag-tag groups that you saw elsewhere was quite remarkable, I thought. All of these guys were wearing full uniforms, nothing missing from their uniform, Soviet-style uniforms, and they had coats. And all of the military equipment seemed to be basically in working order. It was clear that this guy had gotten a lot of money from the Soviets even after they left. Not only that, they had hammers and sick holes on their belt buckles, some of them.

I didn't remember that. Yes, because it was old Soviet stock. And it was extraordinary to see that. And I actually went, so I'll tell you, here's a funny story about Dostom and Masud and Halili. So I did that exact same trip as you, Scott, going through the Salang Pass, through the tunnel, which is truly is one of the great engineering feats of Asia. And the Soviets built it in the 60s.

It's a mile-long tunnel that goes right through the Hindu Kush Mountain. If you've ever been in Europe, it's like the Burner Pass. It's one of those amazing places. And yes, even after you go through the tunnel, there's those snow galleys because they cover the roadway with a concrete roof, basically, because in the winter, the avalanches of snow and even just the snow accumulation meant that it was easier to build a miles long covering over the roadway than it would be to try to keep shoveling it. And as I remember, just as you said, Scott, as we moved through that, we came up to the first Dostom checkpoint. And yeah, exactly as you described. But I'll say this, Masood's guys who were nestled in the Panshir Valley, they were exactly, they didn't look as well dressed, but they had a better reputation as fighters. And so we had actually crossed the front line.

We had left on the little road trip we did. We left Kabul, we drove north and we reached the front line. And we actually had what I like to call a magic letter that. permitted us to cross the front line. And we got to that checkpoint. We kept going because we wanted to go to Masay Sharif, which is the biggest city in the north and Dustus. But along the way, there was a Cadillac, an American Cadillac, traveling at high speed going the other direction, going south. And it was accompanied by about 20 pickup trucks and SUVs, you know, with, like in Africa, they call them technicals with the, with the heavy machine guns on

the flat beds and this heavily armed convoy at high speed. And the more experienced colleagues I was with, they said, that's Dostom. He has the only kind of lack in the country. Turn around. Let's follow them. And we couldn't go as fast in our old Toyota as they went. But basically, as we went, there's only a few roads, right? So as we got to East Crossroads, we'd ask someone, and we said, which way did the

convoy go? And they say that way. So we kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going. couple hour chase and we arrived eventually at a small village called Hinjan. I'm probably mispronouncing it, but in English it's transliterated as K-H-I-N-J-A-N. And it was a small little place that originally had been built to support the workers building the Salang Tunnel. So it was north of the tunnel, but in that area. And a helicopter lands and Masud comes out. And Dostom and Masood, who in that period of the warlords fighting each other,

had been enemies and also allies, and then enemies again and then allies again. God knows how many times. But now they're faced with the Taliban, right, that have seized Kabul. They decided that they needed to kiss and make up and form an alliance. And they did, along with Halili, the Hazara representative. Their negotiations and talks went late into the night. There was no electricity. And And they didn't let the, it was the foreign journalists where it was myself and John Burns from the New York Times, Jonathan Steele from the Guardian, I think a young man from the telegraph newspaper, and a Russian TV group. And they didn't let us in, of course, while they were working and talking, but finally, and it was past darkness. And they said, come in now. And they let us in.

And by the light of a kerosene lantern and the Russian TV crew's battery operated light, these guys signed. the document that created what they call the United Front or the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban. So I got to see that meeting. And indeed, it was amazing to see the Dostom guys in their Soviet-style uniforms, the Masood guys in their much more kind of guerrilla outfits and all of them getting together to fight the Taliban. And amazingly, it was an alliance that lasted until the Taliban were defeated with American help. So, and it's successors, you know, the people who jockey for power now in the elections and, well, and also not only in elections, they're all descended from or in some cases they, back then they were the younger members of those groupings. Wow. I was hoping you were going to tell us some of your experience, the things that you saw didn't realize you saw that.

So that's pretty cool. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be back right after this. In the fight against COVID-19, working together is more important than ever. At Facebook, we're continuing our collaboration with European governments, organisations and researchers. In Spain, the World Bank is using Facebook Disease Prevention Maps to forecast needs for testing and hospital beds. And we've worked with governments across Europe to build WhatsApp chatbots that answer questions about COVID-19 quickly and accurately. Get the full story at about.fb.com forward slash Europe.

Thank you for listening, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back to our conversation about Afghanistan. So the question for both of you is, in your experience, do you think there really is an Afghanistan? I'm just sort of struck by what both of you said about how there are different groups, different religions. It seems like the borders are just more artificial borders that were created by someone on it with a map. So what do you guys think? It feels like a crossroads that people happen to inhabit. Yeah.

I'd say that's the third misconception. Okay. Well, then tell me, expound on that. Precisely because they were never conquered. So that fact alone, I think, unites Afghans. Their neighbors to the north, the Uzbek, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, were all conquered by Russia and then became part of the Soviet Union and now are the post-Soviet successor states. The neighborhood to the west, Iran was an empire in its own right.

Their neighborhood to South, Pakistan, I think Scott talked about very well, and was first part of the British Empire, British India, and these days has its own very significant perceptions and struggles with India. So they're the only ones in that whole neighborhood. And in that sense, yes, it was across the crossroads because everyone went through there and everyone tried to take it over, right, at different times. But nobody ever really succeeded, not for long. and I think because of that, Afghans do have this very strong sense.

I agree with Scott that the sectarian and tribal and other kind of divisions, rural versus urban, you know, all those things we've been talking about, those divisions are all very real and indeed even maybe any particular person's primary loyalty. But underneath that, I do still think there is a bedrock identity of being Afghan, not enough for them to stop fighting each other, Not enough for them to agree on much of anything, but enough for them to know that this area is very much and distinctly ours. And in fact, there are natural borders. The border to the north is the Amudaria or Oxis River.

And the border to the south, of course, is all these mountains. So it is a naturally defined region. It's not arbitrary. So, Scott, how long were you there? and why and when did you decide to leave? I was there about three weeks, and I guess I got tired of sleeping on the dirt floor under the BBC house, which was what was available to me at the time.

No, I stayed for a particular length of time. It's what I had agreed to with my editor, and within the bounds of how difficult it might be for me to get out, which it was not too difficult to get out. But, yeah, I wanted to go back again, later, I was working for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, and immediately after 9-11, I think it was almost like, I think it might have been the day after 9-11. I had to go back and look at my passport.

But I was sent to Pakistan, and I landed in Islamabad and worked there for a few days and wrote some stories and then moved on to Peshawar, which is near the border. And my thinking was that I would be, I would get my chance to go back in. I didn't that time, and I came back later and did the same thing, except I went down to Quetta, which is another border town in the south, and had helped across. And both of those trips, I was actually working alongside Danny Pearl. And after everything happened in his case, they decided not to send anybody back or send anybody over. They got very paranoid after that, naturally.

Editors were very protective then, and there wasn't an opportunity. But that was a, in retrospect, it was probably a good thing. But I think maybe I was a little too anxious at one point, or eager to go in. And it was probably not, would not have been the best thing to have done at that point. But of course, what happened to Danny happened in Pakistan. So that could have happened to anybody, but nobody was thinking that then. I think a lot of attitudes changed immediately after that. Can you tell that story just very briefly?

It's just a while ago. And I think it resounded more in the journalism community. than outside of it too a bit. Yeah, Daniel Pearl was a very well-respected reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He didn't have a lot of experience in that region. I don't think, if I remember right. But he was a very dogged reporter, and he was interested in following up on the, again, this is ancient history. I'm not sure how many people even remember this, but there was an attempt to bomb an airliner

by this gentleman Richard Reed, who is, well, was forever known as the shoe bomber because... The suicide bomber, yeah. Yeah, yeah, because he had hidden an explosive device in his shoe, which he was unable to trigger. But so Danny was trying to follow up on where this guy got his marching orders from. And he had made contact with some... The same kinds of people that all of us were trying to talk to,

the bad guys, for lack of being more specific than that. And he started exchanging emails with them. with a contact and they essentially lured him into what he thought was going to be an interview situation and it ended up being a kidnapping. He was held for several days. Actually, nobody knew where he was for a few days. That's the first time I heard about it. I was called into a conference room by senior editors in Hong Kong who said, we haven't heard from Danny. Do you have any, can you help us find him? And I said, I can try, which my extent of trying was trying to call the cell phone number that he had, but of course they'd try.

that too. And interestingly, I had that number on a notebook for years, and every once in a while I would call it just to see whether that phone was ever reactivated, but it never was. But anyway, he was kidnapped and held for several days. And eventually he was pretty much the prototypical execution video of our era, I think. And it was a pretty, pretty shocking and stunning event. And he was a very well-loved reporter there. And he's left that that experience left an indelible mark for any of who kind of was close to it. And as I was actually, I was not, I didn't know him all that well, but I had worked with him. And so it was certainly, certainly something that stuck with me. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for telling it. All right. I'm going to just ask Alan one more question, I think. And Matthew, you may have something else. But so what's your most indelible impression from your time there? And I know you went back more than once. Just to take us through it a little bit. Yeah. So I, that first trip that when Scott and I were there at the same time in 96, I too had a visa that was a 30-day visa and I stayed until the 30th day. And also then had to get

an exit visa, which required sitting down with some Taliban official and drinking a lot of tea. Good thing I like tea. You have to do that a lot in that part of the world. I went back in 2000, a few years later, and to cover the anti-Taliban movement that I had witnessed being formed. And so I went to the Panshir Valley with Masood's mostly ethnic Tajik forces. And at that time, they were really struggling. They were barely being kept alive by a trickle of assistance from the Russians, from the Uzbek and Tajik's a little bit, from the Iranian. of all people. The Americans were beginning to reach out to them, but the Americans were the traditional supporters of Pakistan, who were the supporters of the Taliban. And so it's like, how does that

work? The enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the friend of my enemy is also my friend or my enemy. Very confusing. So the Americans were always a day late and a dollar short in that period. And Massoud was very welcoming to journalists at that time. And in fact, that's how he was assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives pretending to be journalists, hiding their bomb inside of a TV camera in two days before 9-11 as part of that larger plot. But the year before, I got to spend, yeah, a few weeks there. And it was a fascinating insight into how they were keeping this basically anti-Taliban movement alive. And then, of course, after 9-11, I went back when the Americans did land. And that was also very interesting.

because it was my first, and I think a lot of people's first exposure to the Bush administration's attempt to fight war on the cheap. They would send in a few special forces guys, and of course they had all this incredible air power, but very few boots on the ground. There were more French soldiers than American ones in Marjorie. And it was surreal. It was surreal to see Americans, but the soldiers who clearly at that moment were filled, with righteous vengeance after 9-11, but really it was talk about a bowl in the China shop. These guys were really stood out, let's say.

And yeah, and that was, in retrospect, that was also when thousands of Taliban who surrendered were crammed into these container trucks. And of about 6,000 or 7,000 in this one group that had surrendered, at least 1,000 of them died inside these trucks, either from, you know, dehydration or literally being trampled to death, packed too tightly, or in some cases they were summarily executed. But because they were the bad guys, nobody really cared that much.

And so there was a lot that happened right after 9-11 in those months that I don't think ever got that much attention because we were also caught up in the righteousness of avenging 9-11. Can you tell us a little bit more about your experience with the Northern Alliance, Alan, especially with Ahmed Shah Massoud? I flew on helicopters with him, and these helicopters were held together by duct tape. And Massoud, and I don't, I'm not a religious person, so I don't know well enough the significance in different religions, but he had these beads like rosary beads, although I'm sure they wouldn't call them that, but he was an incredibly calm and charismatic guy.

But as we're riding these helicopters through bad weather and dust storms and he's sitting there, you know, not really talking to anybody playing with his beads. And I'm just like, wait a minute. If the General Isimo is playing with his beads like that, maybe I should be a little worried too. But it wasn't that which killed him. No, it was really incredible place. And yeah, I think I have to get back one of these days. but I I I I'm outside of the cities and especially place like Kabul that was was I'm sure

magnificent at one point but what had been ruined I'm I'm reminded of what I think Neil Armstrong said of the moon and because in a way the place was a moonscape as a stark beauty all its own that's the phrase it comes to mind that that's the horrific kind of thing I think that's very hard to explain to people that haven't experienced it is that there is always this horrific grandeur when things are that destroyed. Actually, I think people experience that with 9-11. Remember those images of the ruined wreckage, the pieces of steel, and people, and so I guess Americans did experience it with that.

But imagine that, as you remember, spread out over the whole city. It was incredible. And I'm glad you brought up that it wasn't the Russians that did that. That was during, and it was actually Martia, who was an American-backed, warlord who did most of that damage. And I believe he was always very fundamentalist to begin with. So even before the Taliban, he had been using, in some ways understandably, he had been whipping up the Islamism as a counter to the Soviet communist idea, right? And the Americans backed him because I thought he was the strongest one of all those warlords. And he turned out to be,

they were all nasty, but he turned out, I think, to be one of the nastier ones. It's built into the job description being nasty. Well, with Dostom, the story was his soldiers were called the carpet boys, because they would show up in your house, and they would take everything you own and put it in the middle of your carpet and roll up that carpet and steal it. So those were the carpet boys. Good to have a brand even then. That's right. Yeah, good stuff. I don't know.

Good stuff. Yeah. But what made you guys? want to do this thing in Afghanistan and why interview us? Why not interview people that have been there like really recently? First of all, you guys are cheap. Oh, that's true. We wanted to talk about what it was like then. We wanted to get that different perspective. We didn't, we, we've got people in the Rolodex. We can call up and talk about what's going on there. And we've had them on before. We just, we wanted to look back a little bit. Yeah. And I think I was thinking that what

you might have seen might be indicative of some of what we might see going ahead. And I think we got it. I think we got that a little bit, even if Alan completely disregards the premise. But that was part of my thinking too. I think he were smart to talk to a photographer. He obviously speaks in pictures. I don't know. I guess I spent too much time with Massoud and Dustin and the anti-Taliban people and not enough time with the Taliban.

And therefore, I ultimately think, yes, the Taliban are persistent. Yes, they have not gone away. Yes, they are always a force in waiting for the Americans to finally give up. Yes, that's all true. And was it, I think it was Ho Chi Minh's general, I can't pronounce his name, GIP, GIP, who said, or one of those guys who said to, I think it was John Foster Dulles, the famous quote or apocryphal quote, For every one of your guys, you lose, we will lose 10, but you will be tired before we will.

So the Taliban clearly have that in mind because they're not going anywhere, whereas sooner or later, if it's not, it wasn't Trump, if it's not going to be Biden, it'll be the next president, or maybe it will be Biden. Sooner or later, the American investment is going to wind down, sure. Eventually everybody goes home. Right. At some point. But also, but also for unengines. unemployed young men and militancy becomes a profession. It's like they, they, they, uh, a lot of times they, there aren't any other options.

And so continuing to fight is, I suppose it's probably like a little bit like prison. It's like they say people who commit crimes in their 20s eventually. They're, they're pretty much done with that phase of their life by their four, by the time they're 40, you can just let them out. But it takes a while and a lot of them don't survive that long. Yeah, I also do look at, I hate to say this. successful counterinsurgency. After 30 years, the Sri Lankans crushed the Tamil tigers like a bug when they finally got around to it. I finally got around to it. The Salvadorians with a lot of American

help. The FMLM talked them, fought them to a draw, you could say. Yeah, so you look at these things and can an Afghan government without major U.S. military assistance survive? And yeah, it's easy to say, like I said earlier, that look at the Iraqi, that didn't do too well. But look at the way the Iraqis bounced back. They mobilized the Shiite militias and they said, okay, these ISIS guys really made us look bad and let's deal with them. And they did. They got a lot of help. My God, did they get a lot of help? They had Soleimani coming in from outside, Iran backing them to the hilt. We lent air power. But that will happen again. Yeah.

Iranians don't like the Taliban. No, that's true. That would be interesting if we end up in this another kind of position like we were in with the Islamic State where we have the enemy of the enemy is my friend situation in, but in Afghanistan would be interesting. It's always been that way. Right. I think we've done an episode about this, but I'd always like to go back and look at that very strange period in Syria where everyone was working together against the Islamic State. state trying not to mess up everyone's airspace too bad. And yeah, it was an interesting little campaign.

Totally. Except the Russians were actually bombing anti-Assad positions. Hey, you know, the Taliban, but they, sometimes you're going to take opportunities where they present themselves. Look, if you see a carpet and you put stuff in it and roll it up, what's going to stop you do? are there things you miss, Alan?

I mean, would you ever want to go back? I think at the end of the day, I've always wanted to go back. Unfortunately, other things in the world keep happening and in my life keep happening. So I have not yet gotten the chance to go back. But when I do look at photographs and reports and videos and read things from Afghanistan, no, yeah, I think it would be beyond recognition, really. You know, I've also read accounts. There was a generation after World War II of journalists and veterans and other people who were then in their 40s and maybe 50s going back to places in Italy and France where they had been during the Second World War.

And they wrote up their kind of thoughts. And I realized with a little bit of shock, that's as much or more time has now passed for me and Scott as well. If you think about it, if you're going back to visit the Arden Forest in the mid or late 60s, that's 20 years after World War II. And it's already now been 20 years since 9-11 and 25 years since the Taliban first took power. So it's the same. It's very humbling. We like a little humility here. If we can't be depressed, we'll be humbled.

That's the new tagline for the show. Stop it, guys. Hey, I really want to thank both. of you very, very much for coming on and telling us about your experiences. They're not experiences that, you know, that many people have. So thanks. My pleasure. Thank you, guys.

Thank you, guys. Thank you. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, Angry Planet pod.com. You can sign up for our substack. $9 a month gets you access to two bonus episodes.

That's two bonus episodes every month for just $9. Again, that's at Angry PlanetPod.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until day. Asda have got low prices that stay low on the things you love, with over a thousand low-price locks. Uncle Ben's golden vegetable microwave rice is just 99p, and 12 Asda medium-free-range eggs are just £1.33. That's a whole lot of low.

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