Blowback - S4 Episode 8 - "Sons of Liberty"

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

America runs its war in Afghanistan on the cheap — and subcontracts to crooks, kingpins, and gangsters.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Khas Uruzgan is a small district in southern Afghanistan. Over the past 40 years, it's seen some of the worst fighting in the whole country. And as Afghanistan disintegrated throughout the 1990s, older ethnic and tribal ties again became the ultimate measure of who Afghans could trust. In November 2001, with control over most of the country, the Americans set up counter-terror operations, and Afghans learned that if they wanted to eliminate a personal rival in a power struggle, land grab, or business dispute, all they had to do was tell the soldiers that their foe belonged to the Taliban.

One morning in late January 2002, a local official in Khashurzgan, named Ali, checked up on the town's schoolhouse. Previously vacant, it had been repurposed for the interim post-Taliban Afghan government. When Ali got closer, what he found was a massacre. The journalist Adnan Gopal lays out the scene in his book, No Good Men Among the Living. Near the door to the main building, the soles of his shoes began to squish, and he glanced down and recoiled.

It was blood. When he looked up, he saw it everywhere, smeared on the walls, puddled on the walkway. He turned to the knob of a classroom and stepped inside. There, lying on blood-soddened sleeping mats, were the bodies of a pro-American government official and his aides. These men, 19 in total, had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. It turned out that the Americans had been fed a bad tip by a local rival of the dead men. They didn't bother to check it out. And now, Afghans who had supported the Americans were dead.

This kind of thing would render official body counts, and the distinction between enemy and civilian, highly suspect. And it would not be the last time Uruzgan itself was punished. Quote, in July AC130 gunships shot up four villages in Uruzgan province, killing 54 people while families were celebrating a wedding, writes Ahmed Rashid. That same month, he continues, U.S. forces launched six raids into Uruzgan,

but did not capture a single Taliban leader, although 80 civilians were killed. After discovering the massacre in January, Ali at the schoolhouse, headed out the back door onto the playground. Quote, "'Splayed out on the snow was another body. It was another government official, a supporter of Hamid Karzai.

A splintered femur protruded from his thigh, and he had a single bullet hole in his back. His hands were bound with plastic cuffs, bearing markings that Ali couldn't understand. They read U.S. Patent Number 565-1376 Other Patent Pending We're at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities. The bulk of this country today is permissive, it's secure.

Season 4, Episode 8, Sons of Liberty. Last time we saw the Bush administration invade and conquer Afghanistan. On the ground, the U.S. would resume its contacts with the Afghan warlords from the 1980s, some of whom had once been partners of bin Laden himself and the Taliban, and almost all of whom were still largely hated by the country's population. In addition to the bombs, suitcases of cash worth millions and millions of dollars in bribes were dropped to these mafayadons of Afghanistan, and they resumed their grip on the country, setting themselves up as power brokers in Afghanistan's new political regime.

Now we will witness the aftermath of those opening months of the war in the years of violence and degeneration that consumed Central Asia, the Bush years from 2002 to 2008. At home, the American public was told that Afghanistan would get up on its feet in short. short order as the U.S. military machine pivoted to conquering Iraq. But Afghanistan would remain, as a Soviet leader once called it, an open wound. As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our union has never been stronger. On January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush announced a Congress and the world

a new crusade against not only terrorists, but the states that supposedly made possible their existence. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror. Iran, which had months earlier helped arrange an interim government in Afghanistan and offered to help America in search and rescue missions, was now labeled by the U.S. President as one of the three most evil entities on the planet. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. The Americans, Ahmed Rashid, writes, were concerned that al-Qaeda leaders were escaping to Iran through Herod. This, after Vice President Cheney had overseen the supervised escape of Taliban and

and al-Qaeda agents into Pakistan from American-controlled territory in December 2001. This kind of imperial politicking was exploited by the Afghan warlords, now on their way back to power. In a typical ploy, Rashid writes, the wily Ismail Khan, warlord of the West, made sure that the Iranians and the Americans spent most of the time watching each other rather than him, as he fed them tidbits of misinformation and gossip. that kept their daggers drawn. Khan was an interesting chief of the Afghan mafia. In the 1990s, Rashid writes,

he ran the best warlord fiefdom in Afghanistan, which educated girls and set up industry. But by now, writes Malala Joya, also from the west of Afghanistan, it seemed that Khan had picked up some habits from the Taliban. Quote, he had remade his own version of the Taliban's vice and virtue squads to enforce his primitive fundamentalism.

Like the Taliban, Kahn's men roamed the province, harassing men for dressing in Western clothes, smashing and burning video and music cassettes at the markets, and terrorizing women. They even dragged women off the streets to conduct humiliating medical examinations, quote-unquote, to make sure that they were virtuous. That was not to say Kahn lived a life of pious self-denial. His control of the border with Iran earned his racket between, $3 and $5 million every month in customs revenue. Here every day, writes Rashid, quote,

hundreds of trucks arrived, loaded with Japanese tires, Iranian fuel, secondhand European cars, cooking gas cylinders from Turkey, and consumer goods from the Arabian Gulf. Khan refused to share any of this income, let alone handed over to the central government. No one earned as much as Ismail Khan. Of course, Khan was only one of many bosses.

now carving up Afghanistan. Ex-communist Rashid Dostom, for his part, received nearly 40% of the take from customs in the north, while one-time Bin Laden Associate Abdul Sayyaf bought an entire town outside of Kabul. Though the Americans viewed these guys as the new front against the Taliban, some of the new warlords on the block were, in fact, ex-Taliban, who had been persuaded on the Americans' agenda

by briefcases of cash from the CIA. This criminal class of warlords possessed far more cash on hand and the freedom to use it than the official Afghan government. Just as would happen in Iraq, the U.S. relied on this warlord strategy as a cost-effective and for some very lucrative way of keeping order and enforcing their agenda. One particular practice of more than a couple American allies in Afghanistan was the holding of young boys as concomptimate. mines. Reports Craig Whitlock, it was not uncommon for Afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as a bachabazi or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status keeping quote-unquote tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. U.S. troops referred to the practice as quote, man-love

Thursday. Americans who witnessed this kind of thing were ordered to look the other way by their commanders. While Afghanistan's mafiosos became feted in powerful, the country boasted some of the worst living conditions ever recorded. The Bush administration remained notoriously stingy, especially when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon had anything to say about it. The DOD was, after all, gearing up for a whole new war in the Middle East. America's promise of nation-building of helping to restore Afghanistan's infrastructure and economy was already coming apart. Steve Comerow, of USA Today, who'd written in on horseback with U.S. Special Forces during the invasion, said of the occupation, quote,

what you see is more traffic, more cars. What you don't see are the big infrastructure improvements. Things that would make the power reliable, make the water safe. Instead, there was an attempt to paper over these failures with more symbolism, including veneration of this warlord class. Quote, Ahmed Shamsud is deified here in Kabul, Kamero said, and it's a town he destroyed. In these early years of the war, international donors skimped on the trust fund set up for Afghan reconstruction.

The nations pledged $4.5 billion, still far short of what was required, reports Rashid. The European Union estimated the cost of rebuilding for the first five years was somewhere around $9 to $12 billion, while the Afghan planning minister insisted it was far more. In fact, nobody knew how much Afghanistan really really. required, end quote. In late October 2002, Rumsfeld knocked on President Bush's office door, informing him that one General Dan McNeil was wondering if he could squeeze in a meeting with the commander-in-chief. Who is General McNeil? The president asked. He's the general in charge of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld replied. Bush waved him off. I don't need to meet with him.

Greetings from Kandahar, wrote a green beret in August 2002 to his colleagues at the DOD, formerly known as the home of the Taliban, now known as miserable rat-fuck shithole. End quote. That same year in 2002, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, was equally blunt. The future for the United States in Afghanistan, he said, was fire. hell, and total defeat. For his part, in the winter of 2002, Omar would arrive in Kedha,

across the border along the waste of Pakistan. Jalaluddin Hakani, an O.G. Mujahideen commander, and once described by Charlie Wilson as goodness personified, was given sanctuary in the Pakistani territory of North Waziristan, where he rebuilt his network on both sides of the border and became the third most wanted man by U.S. forces. and Goldbadine Hekmatyar, who had actually been living in Iran since the Taliban drove him out, essentially under house arrest, returned to Pakistan.

From Peshawar, he reunited with his troops and allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, of course, had escaped into Pakistan himself from Tora Bora, though the Pentagon would long deny it. But at the time of his escape, Secretary Rumsfeld had ordered CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, to start preparing plans for a new invasion of Iraq. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. In June of 2002, Kabul was swamped by international press, diplomats, U.N. officials, contractors, consultants and politicians,

politicians, all arriving for the first national loyajurga of the post-Taliban Afghanistan. The loyajirga, or council, was a traditional form of deliberation in the country. In this occasion in Kabul, it was something like a convention for choosing the shape of Afghanistan's new government. Rashid writes that, quote, now was the moment for Karzai to sweep out the warlords and drug traffickers, end quote. But this was never the plan. Instead, the new cabinet would be controlled by Northern Alliance warlords, to a degree that unnerved even Karzai's advisors, according to Joshua Partlow.

After the assassination of a vice president, Karzai was convinced to take American bodyguards wherever he went. What little reconstruction underway in Afghanistan was moving at both a snail's pace and designed to benefit some very specific people. In September 2002, Hamid Karzai's brother Mahmud agreed to purchase 10,000 acres of land in Kandahar from the government for the price of $6 million, a great deal. The Bush administration threw its support behind Mahmood's plans for a new, bright and shiny gated community, and they gave his holding company $3 million. Meanwhile, Hamid's other brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was mainly known as a Kandahar warlord Wheeler Dealer, and for having dipped his beak in the burgeoning drug trade. He was also,

the New York Times later reported, on the payroll of the CIA, having helped them organize paramilitaries not long after the coalition forces had first arrived on the scene. While the Karzai's eyes were cutting Kandahar land deals and taking CIA cash, other Afghans from the south of the country were beginning to chafe at continued presence of foreign soldiers. shows of force meant to intimidate Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives frightened friends is how a September 2002 AP story opened. Some former friends say it's time for the Americans to go. But that was not about to happen,

even if cost-cutters like Donald Rumsfeld probably would have liked it. Halliburton had laid down roots in the country. Other American contractors, Dyncore, Lockheed Martin, and so on, were all telling investors to prepare for a long war, as was George W. Bush. A revealing aside in a Chicago Tribune story from January 2003 notes that perhaps the coalition presence in Afghanistan was about more than just Afghanistan. Quote, Western sources say that the U.S. has a keen interest

in maintaining stability in Afghanistan's western corridor, especially near the airbase, which is an ideal spot for monitoring the Iranian border. The CIA was also working over time to set up an Afghan security state, creating the Afghan National Directorate of Safety, an agency that critics would soon compare to the secret police of the Najibullah government. Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, once this was part of the Soviet Union, now its government is helping us in the war against terrorism.

The regime gets millions of dollars in aid. We get to use its bases for the war in neighboring Afghanistan. But just who is our new best friend. Handouts to Central Asian dictatorships remained essential for the Afghan occupation to work. In 2002, total aid to the region's post-Soviet governments doubled from 200 million to over 440 million. Bush pledged 155 million in aid to Uzbekistan that year, most of it going toward the military in its security agencies. Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, made out of it.

almost as good, with 92 million in military aid, offering up territory for another U.S. military base in the region. The contract to fuel the base went to the esteemed family of Kyrgyzstan's president. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China, one-time collaborator with America on the anti-Soviet jihad, now watched with alarm at encroaching American influence in the neighborhood. Quote, China's greatest fear was the penetration of its predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang by Uyghur extremists, Rashid reports, who had found refuge in Afghanistan and Pakistan and might now slip back into Central Asia. And so, Chinese military exercises booted up along the borders with Central Asia. The main beneficiary in the region was, of course, Pakistan.

President Bush never missed a chance to praise his colleague, President Pervez Musharraf. Quote, Rumsfeld was even more effusive, Craig Whitlock writes. You have a challenging job. It has to be one of the most difficult leadership posts on the face of the earth, right? And I've admired you from afar and am delighted to have a chance to say a little in person. Thank you, everyone. Quote, in an August 2004 speech in Phoenix, the defense secretary lauded Musharraf, calling the dictator thoughtful and a superb partner in this global war on terror.

It sounded reminiscent of his words decades earlier about another local strongman allied with America, one Saddam Hussein. There are a lot of conversation around that he's a madman and crazy and so forth. I don't happen to believe he is at all. He's a strong man, he's an intelligent man. He has a totally different value set than those of us in the United States would have. Having decided that Pakistan was now on Team America,

the Bush administration lavished the country and its intelligence agency, the ISI, with support, just like the good old days. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould put it this way. Quote, most of what has been claimed Musharraf was doing for the U.S. as an ally in the war on terror has been revealed as little more than public relations with up to 70% of $5.4 billion in military assistance

provided to him since 2002 gone missing. Pakistan's pet government, the Taliban, was no longer in charge across the border. But its generals were compensated for their loss. All they would have to do was help out with American counter-terror operations and feed the coalition a steady diet of al-Qaeda suspects to bring in. And there was a new, closely guarded initiative within the CIA that was very, very interested in what they could get those suspects to say. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which had once been tasked with stopping Osama bin Laden,

was also now charged with figuring out what to do with so-called high-value targets. In fact, this was one of the jobs for which Alex station, the CIA's Get Bin Laden unit, had been repurposed. Prior to September 11th, the CTC had been perfecting a practice known as rendition, where it partnered with Egyptian, Jordanian, Polish, or other governments to detain and interrogate on the agency's behalf. But after 9-11, there was the expectation that the Americans would have taken responsibility for these prisoners themselves. This dilemma led to the creation of so-called black sites

as revealed by the Washington Post in 2005. Secret prisons funded and operated by the Americans everywhere from Eastern Europe to Thailand. The stage was set, Steve Cole writes, for the most shockingly bureaucratized dissent into the application of pseudoscience on human subjects by the CIA since the agency's notorious M.K. Ultra project.

The CIA videotaped these torture sessions extensively, but destroyed the tapes in 2005, and as the AP reported, quote, wiped away the most graphic evidence of the CIA's overseas prisons. The United States is doing all it can, trying to free the American journalist Daniel Pearl kidnapped last week in Pakistan.

Secretary Powell emphasized the U.S. government will not discuss the kidnappers' demands, which include sending Pakistanis detained at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, home for trial. In mid-May 2002, the body of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl turned up north of Karachi, cut into nine pieces without a head. It was the first al-Qaeda beheading shown to the world on video. Quote, some Pakistani journalists, writes Rashid, suspected that

hardline elements in one of the intelligence agencies may have encouraged the militants responsible to carry out the kidnapping of a Western journalist in order to discourage reporters from delving too deeply into extremist groups. Such tactics had been used in the past. The subsequent investigations of the murder by both the ISI and the CIA produced questionable results as to who did what and who was tortured to obtain what. Pearl's beheading sparked a wave of terror attacks across Pakistan and Samusharraf continuing to sign billions of dollars worth of checks from the Americans banned political demonstrations and consolidated his support among the Islamic fundamentalist parties in Pakistan.

He was and would forever be managing a balancing act, attempting to feed the U.S. victories against al-Qaeda while secretly giving the Islamic militants protection and prestige. By the end of 2003, writes Pakistan correspondent Carleta Gaul, Pakistan claimed to have captured no fewer than 450, al-Qaeda members, almost half of whom were Yemenis and Saudis. By 2006, the official count would grow to 709, although the numbers were impossible to verify. Rarely mentioned was the huge number still at large in the tribal areas who were settling down to stay. Officials denied their

existence. Reporters were entirely capable of tracking down the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. Yet they did not dare relate the things they saw and heard. Many in Indian administration Kashmir are now looking at the central government to take some positive steps in order to reduce the tension. But nothing has emerged so far. Afghanistan, like almost every item on Pakistan's agenda, was seen as a zero-sum contest with India,

the Pakistani geopolitical arch rival. New Delhi had poured half a billion dollars into Afghanistan after the invasion, hoping to win favor and influence and to stave off Pakistani domination. But the political makeup of the new Afghanistan saw Islamabad achieving huge gains. According to one observer, Afghan trade with Pakistan increased from $100 million in 2000 to $1 billion in 2004 to $1.6. billion dollars by 2006.

And it remains to be seen now how the Indian government will calm the rising frustration of the youth of Kashmir. But Musharraf's two-tracked policy was not without risks. Some of the more hardline elements of militant Islam inside his country, inside his own military perhaps, had placed a target on his back. In December 2003, on the day Saddam Hussein was captured by US forces in Iraq, Rashid writes, a massive bomb exploded under a bridge in Rawapindi, just 30 seconds after Musharraf's convoy had driven across. Musharraf's life was saved only by a jamming device in his car

provided by the FBI. Days later, on Christmas, 15 people were killed and 50 wounded as Misharv barely escaped yet another coordinated bombing. Rashid writes, human body parts littered the highway. Some on the American side were more than a little skeptical about the U.S. Pakistani alliance and its effect on the so-called War on Terror. Author and activist Rob Schulthice, who covered the Mujahideen for Time magazine in the 1980s, he was on the ground in Afghanistan at this time in the 2000s. Quote, I talked to a woman last night from an aid agency,

who said everything south of Kandahar is just rife with ISI people. There are villages full of Pakistanis trying to revive al-Qaeda. We do have the means here to wipe out everything like that. There are areas where we're very active, but there are others where he trailed off. It could be our intelligence. It could be incompetence playing a role. But some people are still getting money. Probably not from Pakistan.

Probably from Saudi Arabia. End quote. May 2003. My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended in the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. As President Bush declared, mission accomplished for his Iraqi campaign on the USS Abraham Lincoln in San Diego, Donald Rumsfeld landed in Kabul. Hamid Karzai greeted him with a joke.

I thought you had all gone to Iraq. In his own remarks, the defense secretary echoed his boss back home. The war in Afghanistan had been conclusively won. Any areas where there is resistance to this government and to the coalition forces will be dealt with promptly and efficiently. Rumsfeld's words were absurd, writes Craig Whitlock, citing one U.S. military officer who said, quote, quite frankly, we were just going around killing people. We'd fly in, do a mission for a few weeks, then we'd fly out.

And of course, the Taliban would just flow right back in. Despite the existence of entire regions where the Taliban were allowed to regroup, with Pakistani help as we've seen, President Bush told the world, In the Battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban, many terrorists, and the camps where they trained. At this time, Wright Fitzgerald and Gould, quote, the grand victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Good War to liberate Afghanistan was looking more and more like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Monies allocated for reconstruction had failed to arrive due to a lack of security,

while security could not be established due to the raping and the pillaging of the warlords, end quote. Meanwhile, American troops were ordered to police and hunt down insurgents, while our Pakistani ally was housing, training, and funding those same insurgents, only miles away, even setting up medical clinics for wounded militants, all with a healthy stipend from the Gulf monarchies. By spring 2003, this collusion between the ISI and their talism, Taliban and al-Qaeda patrons led to the first major Taliban offensive in the South. There, U.S. troops were far and few between, and the Taliban remained far more popular

than the corrupt and violent warlords empowered by the Karzai government. One U.S. infantry officer remembered years later, one time we had a unit on patrol, and some Afghans asked, what are the Russians doing back here? These people didn't even know the Americans had been there for a couple years. Wasn't this all the job for a new and improved Afghan army and police? Well, America's attempt to magic a new Afghan military, quote, flopped from the start and would defy all attempts to make it work, one general would say. In the winter of two thousand

In the winter of 2003 came another Loya Jirga. This one would have a twist to it. Into the hall full of delegates, reporters, activists, consultants, and gangsters walked a woman who you've already heard from on this show, going by the name Malalai Joya. She had spent her youth in refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s and gone on to secretly volunteer during the Taliban era,

educating young Afghan girls in Herod. Now she'd want a local vote to serve as one of the 500 or so delegates at the Loja Jirga. She would make news and history for her speech, because, as Malala herself puts it, from the very first day of the conference, she could not believe what she was seeing. And it's worth quoting here from her memoirs at length. I was shocked and appalled to see warlords and other well-known war criminals seated in the first row at this important assembly.

All my life, I had heard of the horrible things they had done, and some I had seen with my own eyes. Hamid Karzai had the right to select 52 delegates. Many of the warlords were picked by him. Some were here because they had manipulated delegate elections and intimidated other candidates from running against them. She scanned the room. There was Abdul Sayyaf with his long white beard and his fascist mind. He was in fact the person who first invited the international terrorist Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan during the 80s. He had also trained and mentored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Sayov in particular would go on to be a very heavy hitter on the new judiciary of Afghanistan, which meant Sharia for 50% of the population. Quote, also right up front was Burhanidine Rabani, who had issued the rules for women that were as bad as the Taliban's Malala writes. She adds that Rabani, along with the late Ahmed Shamsud, had massacred thousands of civilians in Kabul in the past decade. And, of course, there was Rashid Dostam, Ismail Khan, and another whose name you may remember from earlier this season. Sibgatilamu Jaddi, the scholar turned Mujahideen chieftain from the next. 1980s, whose family had been a major landowner expropriated by the communists. And as far as Malala was concerned, quote, his sympathies as chairman of the assembly were

obvious. Disgusted at seeing the future of the country handed back over to this rogue's gallery, Malala Joya decided to use her speech to issue a public warning. I would have three minutes to speak, she writes in her memoir. My heart was racing. I struggled to compose myself. and remember the key points I wanted to make. Because I am only five feet tall,

an official lowered the microphone so I could reach it. I spoke as rapidly as I could, and directly from my heart. Malala asked the room how the delegates and officials could allow these men to make up the new government and forge the destiny of the country. Quote, why would you allow criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now.

As she continued, her friends and sympathizers in the audience began to applaud. But by now, she writes, a number of the warlords were on their feet, yelling and shaking their fists in my direction. She continued, raising her voice, The warlords should be prosecuted in the national and international courts. Suddenly, I could no longer hear my voice echoing over the PA system. I had been speaking for barely 90 seconds when the chairman, Mojadedi, cut off my microphone. There was enormous commotion. One of the warlords shouted, down with communism.

Even one of the female delegates threatened me, pointing and shouting, take the pants off this whore and tie them on her head. In the midst of the pandemonium, a widow named Aisha grabbed me and shielded me with her body. Aisha knew full well the kind of depravities of which these angry men were capable. They could have torn me to pieces. I later learned that her brother had been killed by the warlords. She was trying desperately to save me from the same fate. Mosededi himself called her a communist and an infidel.

And so, Malala writes, I knew it was time to leave. This scene, Malala's historic speech, became not just national but international news. Women began to protest in support of her. It placed women's rights, front and center. In her memoir, Malala shouts out Afghan journalist and fellow outspoken feminist, Zaki, who spread the story and ran a radio station called Peace Radio. Zaki herself would years later end up murdered in her own home by gunmen connected to the warlords. For the rest of her time in Afghanistan, though Malala would serve as a member of parliament,

she required bodyguards. She had to live in safe houses, and she had to take secret routes to travel from place to place. So in larger that 2003, we made constitution on that time, these fundamentalist warlords. I saw that how they control Lojjjjirka and they acting like democrat, like progressives, with bloody hands. And that is why I couldn't tolerate and I thought that the tribune of Lojjjirka is the best chance. When I had a speech in Lojirka 2003, it became more dangerous that they even couldn't have office. Two times they attacked my office several times. They did a assassination attempt to kill me as they could not make me silenced.

The major concession won by the religious right at the Loyal Jirga was that the Supreme Court of Afghanistan was given the power to review constitutional legislation and presidential decrees. The court was dominated by the conservative Ulema, or Islamic scholars, and the 80-year-old chief justice was controlled by former bin Laden ally Abdul Sayyaf. We are here principally to improve the general security environment, which in turn will lead to elections for the Afghan people. By 2004, Afghanistan had become so dangerous that doctors without borders decided on some borders.

The world-famous medical NGO, quote, withdrew its 80 foreign staff after five of its members were assassinated in northern Afghanistan, right Fitzgerald and Gould. After working in the country for 24 years under Soviet and Taliban occupation, bringing aid to refugees and remote Afghan communities by packhorse and mule, the dismissal of 1,400 local staff represent more than just the failure

to provide security in rural Afghanistan. The Afghan American appointed by President Bush arrived at Kabul Airport and offered American support to this devastated country. That year, what Afghanistan lost in medical rescue teams, it gained in new American vice-roys. Returning to the land of his birth after 30 years, Khalilzad said he'll work with the United Nations and top Afghan officials to help rebuild this war-torn country. Enter, new ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmeh Khalilzad. Born in Afghanistan himself, Kalilzad had been a high-ranking player in U.S. foreign policy.

Kalilzad got his start in American statecraft, working at Columbia University. consulting with then-national security advisor Zabignu Brzynski, just as the U.S. jihad against the Soviet Union was kicking off. Known as Zal to his friends and colleagues, Khalilzad spent the Clinton era working at the Rand Corporation, and then as a consultant to the oil giant Unicale, which, as we've seen by now, had long had its eyes on Afghanistan. Once Bush was elected, he became a senior director at the National Security Council.

Now with the United States, not the Soviet Union occupying the country of his birth, he became known to many journalists and insiders as the most powerful man in Afghanistan, easily surpassing the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. Yes, yes, it is true. He was more powerful because he was one of the key, one of the main toll of the U.S. government that used him for U.S. trust. and he is like a wolf and their skin of laughs. People call him a small bush.

Khalil Zad set up his quarters in the U.S. embassy's wide trailer and kicked things off with a buoyant op-ed in the Washington Post, which was met with eye-rolling from diplomats in Kabul, according to Craig Whitlock. Everyone knew there was a Taliban comeback happening day by day. But with presidential elections due not only in the United States, but also Afghanistan itself, by year's end, Donald Rumsfeld and his generals refused to acknowledge any of this.

With the elections coming up, results, or scalps, as Bush himself put it, were highly desired, not just for the sorry state of Afghanistan. This city was brought to a halt by carnage and terror. Ten bombs exploded during the morning rush hour. Islamist terrorists made headlines in March 2004, this time in Madrid. A bomb set off in a train station claimed almost 200 lives and more than 1,500 casualties. The perpetrators claimed the bombing was because of Spain's contribution of troops to the war in Iraq. This is theorized to at least partially explain the uptick in Spain's voter turnout

and the swing from the incumbent party to the socialist party, which then withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq. and the conservative government's response to it, deepened political and social divisions that already existed in Spain. And how was the hunt for al-Qaeda going? Bin Laden aside, quote, the CIA said that 70% of the al-Qaeda leadership had been captured or killed since 9-11, while ignoring the fact that al-Qaeda replaced every captured individual with someone new, writes Ahmed Rashid. The Pakistani government, meanwhile, declared every captured al-Qaeda leader,

as the number three man in the movement, which only confused the public even further. At a press briefing with Donald Rumsfeld, Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, was asked where he thought Osama bin Laden had gone. My assessment only can be as good or bad as yours, that he could have died or he is alive in Afghanistan. The U.S. had not forgotten that a year before,

Al Jazeera had released a videotape showing bin Laden and Iman al-Zuahiri, strolling in a landscape very similar to that of South Waziristan in Pakistan. Welcome to the federally administered tribal areas, a key sliver of territory bequeathed by the British Empire. When Osama bin Laden escaped into these tribal areas in December 2001, it became the new base area for al-Qaeda. It was from there that the bomb plots in London, Madrid, Bali, Islamabad, and later Germany and Denmark were planned.

Zalaluddin Haqani, the former Taliban minister, became a key organizer here by hiring Fata tribesmen to provide sanctuary or safe passage out of the region. Within a few years, these tribesmen had become commanders of the armed groups calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban, for their part, banned, quote, television, music, and the internet, and made prayers and beers and beer.

mandatory for all males. Their media ban excluded, of course, the Taliban-produced DVDs that showed accused spies beheaded and hanged on lamp posts. But yes, I would certainly think that he is in Afghanistan, either dead or alive. Musharraf's balancing act tipped this way and that. And who could blame him?

By June 2004, he had won Pakistan the designation as a non-NATO ally, a great prize. eyes over in Asia. Officially, by 2007, the U.S. had provided at least $10 billion in aid to Islamabad. And unofficially, the figure was much higher, Rashid writes. But what did ordinary Pakistanis get out of the deal? Quote, 60 years after independence, Pakistan's literacy rate is an appalling 54%. With female literacy at less than 30%, Rashid wrote at the time. Public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP remained less than two percent per year. But one area Pakistan was making novel progress in was nuclear weapons, in the form

of Dr. A.Q. Khan. The distinguished nuclear scientist was caught in 2004 selling nuclear technology to just about every anti-American regime on the scene. The solution, as so often happens, was to allow the good doctor to take the fall as one bad apple acting on his own. Rashid reports, quote, in February 2004, Musharraf pardoned Dr. Khan after the scientist publicly took responsibility for the proliferation upon himself. And in turn, Bush let Musharraf off the hook. My wife, Wendy, was murdered by terrorists on September 11th. The Faulkner's daughter Ashley closed up emotionally. But when President George W. Bush 11 on Ohio, she went to see him as she had with her mother four years before.

He walked toward me and I said, Mr. President, this young lady lost her mother in the World Trade Center. He turned around and he came back and he said, I know that's hard. Are you all right? That January, the Karzai government adopted a constitution. There had only been one suicide bombing in 2003 and there would only be two in 2004. That October, Karzai was elected president with 55% of the vote. Although 15 candidates withdrew, alleging systemic fraud and threats of violence, Karzai was declared president anyway.

And that same month, Osama bin Laden returned, with his most boisterous tape yet, released while on the lamb. With days to go before the 2004 presidential election, bin Laden's latest tape took square aim at President Bush, even noting his response to the news, of the 9-11 attacks.

Quote, Bush was more interested in listening to the child's story about the goat rather than worry about what was happening to the Twin Towers. Bin Laden's

October 2004 taunts were well-timed, for Bush, that is. When Americans went to the polls in November, they voted George Bush back in. A recommitment

to the war on terror. And in time, a recommitment to the war in Afghanistan. As the picture began to form of a kleptocratic central government, receiving little development aid from its U.S. patron, entrepreneurs, warlords by another name, would fill the void in Afghanistan.

This would be the era of the contractor, the military contractor, the construction contractor, contractors for communications, education, sanitation. Journalist Susie Hansen, in her book, Notes on a Foreign Country, recalls looking around the check-in line at the Dubai airport during her own trip to Kabul. I met one stocky American guy with a jockish voice. I asked him whether he was in the military. Nope, I'm a contractor, just like everyone else here in this line.

The Dubai waiting area for the flight to Kabul was as exotic as Columbus, Ohio. The whole room was littered with people who made money off the war. On the military side, the contractors had marquee names, Northup Grumman, Blackwater, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, each received millions upon millions of U.S. cash. Some, like Blackwater, began to serve as paramilitary armies. Others, such as Lockheed, supplied the gunships that ruled the skies. To pay for it all, the Guardian reports, Congress used, quote, emergency and contingency funds. that circumvented the normal budget process, so detailed spending oversight was minimal. The result was what former Defense Secretary Robert Gates called a culture of endless money inside the Pentagon. The Defense Department made the operational decisions, according to the financial times,

managed the bidding process for contractors, awarded the contracts largely using non-competitive bids, and kept at least 10% of the wartime funding in classified. in classified accounts. But it wasn't just a bonanza for gunrunners and mercenaries. In 2004, Lewis Berger, the massive American construction conglomerate, won contracts to build 96 new clinics and schools just in time for the Afghan elections. But a year later, writes Rashid, quote, only nine clinics and two schools had been completed. Top execs at Berger would eventually be charged with fraud for their shady dealings in

Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe. Even the Defense Industry magazine Breaking Defense concedes, quote, a key problem was that a single company, Kellogg Brown and Root, held the contract for logistics services known as log cap. The fact that former vice president Dick Cheney had been associated with Kellogg Brown and Root added a conspiratorial element, end quote. It certainly did. KBR at that time was a subsidiary of the multinational energy concern, Halliburton. You help build base camps, you provide food, laundry, power, sewage, all the kinds of things that keep an army in place in a field operation.

So you're sort of the contractor and caterer for the U.S. Army when it goes abroad? It is. Young soldiers have said to me, if I go to war, I want to go to war with Brown and Root. And they have in places like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia. Kosovo, and now Iraq. The Afghanistan war came at a great time for Halliburton. At the time, legal payouts related to asbestos were putting major pressure on the company's stock. It was a common rumor in the business press at the beginning of 2002 that Halliburton might be declaring bankruptcy.

It was feared that another Enron lurked just beneath the surface. A contract from the Pentagon in December 2001 quashed all that. After all, it had been Dick Cheney who had invented the log cap contract program in 1992 when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush I. Charles Lewis is the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit organization which investigates corruption and abuse of power by government and corporations. He says the trend towards privatizing the military began during the first Bush administration when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense.

Cheney made sure that Halliburton got the vaunted log cap contract, just as the new war, or wars, plural, ramped up. From Afghanistan alone, Halliburton would get hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue, all before U.S. boots ever touched the ground. It's a sweetheart contract. There's no other word for it. But as time went on, what would Halliburton and American firms,

like Nudson Morrison, decades earlier, actually billed for Afghans while in Afghanistan. Susie Hansen wondered the same thing as she confronted the unpaved roads and dilapidated buildings under American-occupied Afghanistan. It felt like a massive illegal operation as shot by a Hollywood director.

After interviewing U.S. Special Forces, Seymour Hersch R. reported that by 2004, opium production in Afghanistan was 20 times what it had been under Taliban control. Major production existed, Fitzgerald and Gould note, in areas in which the U.S. has a major military presence. As much as one-third of the Afghan economy lay in the hands of narco-terrorists. By 2006, Afghanistan accounted for 92 percent of global illicit opium production. Drug lords and warlords,

often the same people, sported diamond-studded guns and watches, and used their profits from the trade to grease the wheels with the U.S. and Afghan government, buying politicians, elections, and even generals. Peterdale Scott

notes that heroin also fed about a third of the economy of Pakistan and of the ISI's budget in particular. You seem quite happy with that result. fucking result. Yeah, but Quay Baldo, who benefits? Quee gives a shit. It's got a freaking bow on it.

Was the Taliban funding its insurgency with drug money, as its Mujahideen forebears had done? In part, but on pure mathematics, the Taliban could not have been the only ones, or even the main ones, benefiting from the drug trade. Quote, the insurgent share of drug trafficking revenues collected in Afghanistan, writes Peterdale Scott, was only about a tenth of the total, with the bulk of the remainder shared between the Karzai

machine and the warlords associated with it. In fact, according to Craig Murray, Britain's former ambassador to Uzbekistan, quote, the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government. In 2005, DEA agents found more than nine tons of opium in the office of Cher Muhammad Akunzada, the governor of Helmand province, and a close friend of President Karzai. He was removed at the urging of the British, and instead simply got a seat in Parliament. And none other than Akhmed Wali Karzai, CIA Asset and brother of the president himself, was a notorious player in the drug trade, using his private army to increase his market share

and protect his dealers. My theory, said Rob Schulteis, is that a lot of the policy decisions that were made here that were so inexplicable were produced by corruption on a local level, by CIA station chiefs, and lower. You know, a lot of fortunes have been made in Langley. A lot of dirty things went on at that level, and a lot of what's happening today is being done by friends of those people covering for them at this point, because they don't want to see old Colonel Clutz going to prison. By 2008, after seven years of U.S. occupation, and Afghanistan now the world's premier heroin supplier,

the New York Times would write, Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices. And Peterdale Scott sums up, it is because of the larger share of drug profits going to supporters of the Kabul government, that U.S. strategies to attack the Afghan drug trade

are explicitly limited to attacking drug traffickers that support the insurgents. The aim has been to alter market share, to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under control of those traffickers who are allies of the state security apparatus and or the CIA.

After 9-11, the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote to the Bush administration, urging that prisoners in this novel War on Terror be treated humanely. The White House didn't reply. All prisoners, taken by Americans, al-Qaeda, Taliban or not, were to enter a new existence as illegal enemy combatants. In that universe, neither Geneva conventions nor U.S. constitutional rights existed. White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who would go on to become Attorney General, summed up the Americans' position by declaring that the Geneva Conventions had been rendered, quote

unquote, quaint. All this was part and parcel of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's long-time plans working on so-called continuity of government. The standards of Abu Ghraib, which we discussed in season one, were starting to be applied writ large. The Afghan-Pakistan border region became an immense human bizarre, Rashid reports, where lives were traded with no limits or rules. Often the very old or the very young were sent to the south of Afghanistan under U.S. control. There, Afghan boys, aged between 13 and 16, were held at Kandahar, and then, later Guantanamo. An Afghan boy who had been a dishwasher at a restaurant where the Taliban once ate was taken and shipped off. Men over 80 years old, barely able to stand up straight, also ended up in Guantanamo.

One young man named Dilawa was picked up while driving his taxi with two passengers inside. Afghan guards found a broken walkie-talkie inside of the vehicle and detained all three of them. Delawar was flown to Bagram Air Base, reports Carletagal, and interned in the detention camp there. It was a makeshift jail, set up inside a dilapidated two-story hangar, once used by the Soviet military as a machine repair workshop. No light or sound came from the building. Delawar was taken to one of the cells, a hood placed over his head. His hands were cuffed and then chained to the wire mesh above his head, forcing him to stand with his hands, stretched out and up. It was standard treatment, used to deprive prisoners of sleep between interrogations.

And a few days later, on December 10, 2002, DeLawar, his last breath of fresh air, was spent driving passengers in his taxi cab before the holiday of Eid, was found dead in his cell. He was one of several who had died of pulmonary embolisms, blood clots, most likely caused by beatings. But even those deaths ruled homicides, saw no charges against the soldiers. The official statement on this kind of thing came in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union. More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way. They're no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

Even more obscure than the military prisons were those of the CIA, off limits to non-agency folks. In one, just outside the capital in Kabul, Afghan guards working for the CIA, quote, stripped naked a young Afghan detainee and chained him to the concrete floor. in the middle of winter. He died the next day, ending up as a ghost detainee, one of an unknown number of people who just disappeared from the face of the earth because nobody could ask the CIA any questions. There were also the private prisons run by military contractors authorized and paid for by the U.S. government. One case there that did come to light. Jonathan Edema, a contractor claiming to be working for the CIA, was caught not only running

his own private prison, but also keeping three dead Afghans hanging from his ceiling in his private home. Edema, a longtime military contractor who had carried out operations across the world for years, some authentic, some fraudulent, was disavowed by the United States government. His associates each served several months in jail, but their terms were cut short. One was pardoned by President Hamid Karzai. The other got out on good behavior. Adama himself served three years of a 10-year sentence. Afterwards, he moved to Mexico to head up a boating tour company. In 2012, he died of AIDS. All the while, thousands upon thousands of men flowed to the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. An unwanted canker on an island still itself demonized by the American government.

In May 2006, the New York Times reported, an American military truck slammed into a crowd and killed at least five people. The deaths sparked riots in Kabul. American soldiers opened fire on the crowds. That same year, the Taliban had absorbed the al-Qaeda tactic of suicide bombing, calling willing participants, quote, Mullah Omar's missiles. Golbadine Hekmachar, writes Carletagal, organized a group of suicide bombers from the edge of Peshawar. Tipped off by an informant, NATO forces gave what intel they had to the ISI,

quote, naively expecting that police would round up the Peshawar end of Hekmachar's bombing group. But the Pakistanis made no move. Instead, the informant who helped to uncover the cell was seized and killed. His body, cut up

into eight pieces, was dumped in a black refuse bag in a refugee camp. Afghan intelligence was convinced that the ISI leaked what NATO had given them directly to Gobedin Hekmachar. There was

also a huge increase in the Taliban's use of IEDs or roadside bombs, which rose from 530 in 2005 to nearly 1,300 in 2006, reports Rashid, a strategy that took NATO totally by surprise. Perhaps beginning to see their stingy policy may have been a mistake, Washington increased the aid to Afghanistan to $3.2 billion. Too little too late. The violence went up, and In 2007, the aid was doubled once again. The Americans frantically tried to magic a functional, professional Afghan National Army into existence, with a modern police force to boot. In 2007, the U.S. furnished $10.1 billion for the ANA and the police, providing them with

much-needed equipment and increasing their salaries. The people of Afghanistan on the U. other hand, remained ripped off and beaten down. By the end of the Bush years, the Americans had still failed to deliver most of Afghanistan regular electricity and clean water, and that included Kabul. Seven years on, Afghanistan was still listed fifth from last on the UN's Human Development Index in terms of education, life longevity, and economic performance, sheed reports. One third of Afghans did not have enough to eat, and only 12% of women were literate, compared to the 32% of men. Life expectancy was just a miserable 43 years, half of that in the United States.

Although the U.S. press praises are benighted efforts at nation building, writes Melvin Goodman of Johns Hopkins University, the Soviet Union actually built more hydroelectric dams, tunnels, and bridges in Afghanistan and the United States. I'm Laura Bush, and I'm delivering this week's radio address to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan. Women's rights, the American liberal's go-to argument for supporting the war, had hardly advanced past the Taliban era,

and were certainly nowhere near the status quo during the con. communist years. According to correspondent Anne Jones, quote, the fact is that the liberation of Afghan women is mostly theoretical. The Afghan constitution adopted in 2004 declares that the citizens of Afghanistan, whether man or woman, have equal rights and duties before the law. But what law? The judicial system, ultra-conservative, inadequate, incomplete, and notoriously corrupt, usually basis decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations of Islamic Sharia, tribal customary codes, or simple bribery. And legal scholars instruct women that having equal rights and duty is not the same as being equal to men.

The war of Afghanistan was not only military invasion. It was to propaganda war too. The U.S. was saying the first time we brought women rights in Afghanistan, especially Laura Bush, if you remember, after 9-11, came in Afghanistan, the media was saying, first time we brought the woman rights. It was a shameless lie, you know. A catastrophic situation of women was very good excuse for USA and NATO to occupy Afghanistan. And right after that, I made that, did the radio address from our ranch. We were at our ranch that weekend.

Jenna and I went shopping together at a department store, and the ladies who sold cosmetics. at the department store said, thank you so much, Ms. Bush. Thank you for speaking for the women of Afghanistan. Former Prime Minister Benazir Budo, who electrified her country when she returned from exile and took on Pakistan's ruling party, was struck down today by bullets and a bomb. Days away from an election, she was poised to win. Doctors tried desperately to revive her, but at 6.16 p.m., she succumbed to a bullet wound to her neck.

Crowds had swarmed the hospital when her spokesman emerged to break the terrible news. She has been martyred, said Barbara Wan. The main focus of their rage president pervays Musharraf, Mbudo accused of allowing Pakistan to slide into extremism. Benazir Bhutto's return was resented by Islamist terrorists, but more than that, it was resented by Pakistan's security establishment. When you say the government there, that was President Prevez Mushar. Yes. You blame him for your mother's death?

He murdered my mother. You go that far? I hold him responsible for the murder of my mother. Why do you say that? In December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Earlier that year, there was another attempted assassination in Afghanistan. A suicide bomber struck outside. the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan Tuesday during a visit by Vice President

Dick Cheney. Word had leaked out, writes Craig Whitlock, that Vice President Dick Cheney had slipped into Afghanistan for a meeting with Hamid Karzai. He had just come from Islamabad, meeting with Pervez Musharraf. Cheney is in Afghanistan after meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf yesterday. There the two had discussed the resurgence of al-Qaida and Taliban violence along the border with Afghanistan. Cheney was due at Bagram to depart for Kabul, spying a convoy of vehicles approaching the gates of the airport, a suicide bomber detonated his vest. The blast killed

20 Afghans who had come to the base for work, as well as two Americans and a South Korean working for the military occupation. If a ported Taliban spokesman told the Associated Press that Cheney was the target of the attack. The bomber had the wrong convoy. writes Whitlock. If he had waited 30 minutes more, he might have gotten his target. The Taliban claimed credit for the blast and confirmed that the vice president had been the intended target. A U.S. military spokesperson dismissed this idea as absurd, but as Whitlock writes, behind the scenes, they knew it to be true. But as much as the Bush administration had twisted the truth about Afghanistan year after year,

even they would have to take second place to the next American administration.