Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Afghanistan & The New Geopolitics - With Fred Kagan

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

A few websites referenced in this episode:AEI's Critical Threats Project: https://www.aei.org/profile/frederick-w-kagan/Institute for the Study of War: https://www.understandingwar.org/Long War Journal: www.longwarjournal.orgA recent oped that Fred Kagan published in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/biden-afghanistan-taliban.htmlAnd a recent column by Charles Lane in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/17/bidens-presidency-us-foreign-policy-now-hinge-pulling-off-one-greatest-airlifts-history/

We cannot afford, as the United States, to even to entertain the fantasy of accepting our decline and trying to go gracefully into the wings. We have got to get ourselves together. We have got to understand the inherent advantages that the United States has. And we have got to realize that we have an obligation to ourselves and our children, our grandchildren, and to the world to lead. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. While the world watches America's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, there's enormous potential for human catastrophe in the weeks, months, and years ahead. At best, the future of Afghanistan is uncertain. But what about the future of America's role in the world?

How does it impact the geopolitical landscape? What are the strategic implications for the West of what's playing out right now? What does it mean for China and Taiwan and Japan, for Russia, for Turkey? Is the new U.S. policy in Central Asia simply one more step towards American disengagement globally, a process that has been ongoing through three administrations, Democrat and Republican. On this podcast, we focus on COVID-19's lasting impact on our economy and geopolitics. But what's playing out in Afghanistan right now is too consequential. So we're going to dive into it today with Fred Kagan.

I've known Fred for a long time, going back to when I worked on U.S. policy in Iraq. I always try to pick Fred's brain to make sense of what we're doing right or wrong in any number of military theaters, especially Afghanistan. Fred was based in Afghanistan for a year and a half, where he was a top strategic advisor to General Petraeus and then General McChrystal and General Allen. As it relates to Iraq, Fred was one of the intellectual architects of the successful surge strategy there. Today, he's the director of the American Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at West Point, where he taught for 10 years. His books include Lessons for a Long War and also End of the Old Order,

Napoleon and Europe from 1801 to 1805. Fred earned his PhD in Russian and Soviet military history at Yale University, and he is fluent in Russian. So as we consider the longer-term strategic implications of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way we are withdrawing, here's Fred Kagan. And I'm pleased to welcome my old pal, Fred Kagan, to this conversation. Fred, I wish we were connecting here under happier circumstances, but nonetheless, thanks for doing it. It's good to be with you, Dan, even under these circumstances. Fred, I want to start by unpacking how the Biden administration could have done what they are doing differently.

And what I mean by that is when you and I have talked about what's going on in Afghanistan, I don't think either of us support, I know neither of us support what the administration is doing in Afghanistan, the decision to withdraw. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. All right. Let's assume that they have good reason to want to withdraw. In fact, they have good be advising them to do differently from how they've been carrying out the policy over the last several weeks? So President Biden made this decision in the spring after having allowed at least a pro

forma policy review process to work forward. And that's okay, that timing was fine, but he gave the order for the evacuation to be complete by September 11th. And I'm not going to say anything further about the wisdom of choosing that particular date for the end of this mission in a symbolic way. I'm not sure that he realized that a date that close in would actually require the military immediately to cease all support to the Afghan National Security Forces and get out of Dodge very quickly. But that is, in fact, what our military forces had to do if they were going to meet that deadline. So the key thing here is, first of all, the president needed to accept that he could give

an order for all of our forces to get out of country, but that to be responsible, it needed to take longer than he wanted it to. And in fact, it could not have been responsibly completed before sometime next year. And there are a number of factors that go into that. One is, as you know, Dan, the fighting in Afghanistan is to a considerable degree seasonal. And the Taliban was just winding up for their major annual campaign of the fighting season when President Biden gave this order. So by giving the order at that time and on the timeline that he insisted on, he put our military in the position of having to strip from the Afghans the enablers that we have been providing to them, like our air power, precision air power, some intelligence stuff, some surveillance and reconnaissance stuff and communications and a few

other things, right as the Taliban was rounding into their major annual campaign. And the effect— Can I just pause you right there? So when we hear that the Afghan National Army collapsed within a matter of days, you're saying that the Afghan National Army, in a sense, was powered by these resources that you're describing here. And in the middle of the fighting season, the United States just pulled those resources. So there are two issues there, Dan, and I'll take them on in series if I can.

One is, it is not true that the Afghan stopped fighting within days. The Afghans have been fighting this entire fighting season, and there are some Afghan forces that are still fighting. This is a calumny that President Biden and others have been perpetrating on Afghan security forces. The force did collapse. There were lots of surrenders. They did not fight the way we expected them to for some reason.

I don't know why we expected them to. I'll come back to that. But neither did they simply stop fighting. That is not accurate. And it took a lot more than the 11 days that I don't know what was on Chairman Milley's mind when he made that statement with that number. But on the issue of enablers, look, there are virtually no U.S. allies in the world that have militaries that are capable of conducting major combat operations on their own without American support. We design our alliances in this way. We do that for various reasons, good or ill, but that is a reality.

Maybe the French can, maybe the British can, pretty much nobody else can. And that was true of the Afghan security forces also. We did not build them to be able to operate on their own. We built them to rely on niche capabilities that only we could provide. Well, they did rely on them. But then we suddenly told them at the start of the fighting season that they weren't going to have those capabilities and that they were going to have to fight the Taliban on roughly even terms with the Taliban. Now, listen, Dan, you know Afghanistan, you know Afghans. They are tough fighters. These are not guys who run away from a fight. These are guys who run to the sound of the guns as a general rule. But when you've built a force in such a way that that force

expects to have significant advantages, significant technological advantages over its adversary, and for 20 years has had those advantages over its adversary, and for 20 years has had those advantages over its adversary, and then suddenly right at the start of the fighting season, you say, oh, yeah, by the way, you're not going to have those advantages, so you're going to have to fight on even terms. And an adversary, in the way that that adversary likes to fight, you demoralize that force, you disorganize it, and you disorientate it just as the adversary is launching into their major attack. Well, then, yeah, they, and you disorientate it, just as the adversary is launching into their major attack, well, then, yeah, they're not going to fight very well, and they're not going to fight

very hard, and they're not going to fight effectively. And that is exactly what we did with this decision. Can you just walk through some of the numbers in terms of the numbers of Afghan national military personnel that have actually been killed whilst defending their country and serving as reliable allies of the United States and the West since we really handed over that responsibility in 2015 to them? Yeah, thank you, Dan. This is a really important point. We can only give minimums because the Afghans have actually been pretty shy about reporting their actual casualty numbers for various reasons. But the minimums range in the 66,000 to 70,000 killed in action over the course of the 20 years. And hundreds of thousands who have volunteered over the course of that period

and have continued to volunteer to fight against our common enemies. And I have no idea how many have been wounded, but it's a very significant number. But if you have in your mind 66,000 to 70,000 Afghan forces killed in action fighting against our common enemies, you will be at the lowest range of what the casualty count has been for them. And you've drawn the analogy, you're an historian, to what we did to the Afghan National Army is similar to what was done to the French Army in 1940 in the middle of World War II? Yeah, you can make a good, you can make a decent analogy. It's, you know, there are obviously important differences, but we subjected the Afghan Army this year to a

psychological shock that was not dissimilar to the psychological shock that the Germans inflicted on the French in 1940. And as history observed, the French military froze up in 1940. And even though it was in fact, in many respects, on paper, much more powerful than the invading German army, it collapsed. People didn't fight. They weren't coordinated. The leadership lost control. That's what happens when armies get psychologically shocked. In that case, it was the enemy who shocked them. In this case, it was the behavior of a putative ally that shocked our partners and generated that kind of systemic shock that paralyzed them and induced a lot of the

surrenders and a lot of the confusion that we saw. So assume the Biden administration is moving forward with the plan to withdraw. Explain the challenge of not just withdrawing our military, but withdrawing civilians. And if you could bifurcate that to U.S. and Western civilians, and then separately the Afghan civilians, who we would, one would think we'd have a responsibility to protect in some way in the context of a Taliban takeover. It's a massive undertaking to evacuate civilians from a conflict that you've been engaged in across the length and breadth of a huge country for 20 years. And we have American citizens and Afghans to whom we absolutely do have a moral, ethical and strategic obligation to protect them, who are spread out from Herat all the way

to Kabul and into the north. That would have been an enormous undertaking under any circumstances and something that would have taken many months to organize and plan, to communicate, and to work to bring people out. It's something that, frankly, the administration should have jumped right on with every available resource the minute that they made this decision. I don't know why they didn't, but they didn't. But even if they had started right away, it would have been a massive undertaking that would have been extremely fraught. That's one of the other reasons why what President Biden should have done is accepted a longer timeline for this. And I need to add something that he would have found even more unpleasant.

Not only would he have needed really to wait into 2022 to get all U.S. forces out, he would have needed to deploy into Afghanistan several thousand additional U.S. forces to facilitate the orderly withdrawal of our forces, the recovery or destroying of the equipment and the and the safe passage of the Americans and Afghan partners out of Afghanistan. That would have been the only way to conduct a responsible withdrawal. And the sequencing. So first you do this long term planning. You communicate with all these civilians, whether they're American nationals or others. You figure out a way to get them out. Then you withdraw our military. Here, we've done the sequencing the opposite way. Well, we've done the sequencing sort of in parallel. But yes, I mean, I think, you know, I do think that part of what's happened is that the administration, for reasons that I don't understand, took military is gone, that the Taliban will abide by

commitments that our administration claims they have made to allow US personnel and others to leave the country freely. We know that the Taliban are in fact violating those commitments on the ground on an hourly basis. But I do think that there is a notion somewhere that it's just after the US military leaves, it'll still be possible for people to get out. And I think that there is a notion somewhere that it's just after the U.S. military leaves, it'll still be possible for people to get out. And I think that this has muddied the thinking here. But yes, absolutely. I'm sorry to answer your question directly. The U.S. military should be the last people who leave in a situation like this. Okay. And on July 2nd, the U.S. effectively handed over Bagram Air Force Base, which is the biggest base in Afghanistan, to the Afghan government. So what was the thinking behind that?

And had we done everything else the Biden administration has executed upon, but at least not done that, held on to the Bagram Air Base? What implications would that have had? Well, look, it was very foolish to hand over that base for a number of reasons, chief of which was that it's a second runway. And we are absolutely finding ourselves constrained by having only the one runway of the Kabul International Airport right now to use. There's a lot of logistics that we've needed to bring in to country to support this operation. And there's a lot of people who need to flow out of country. It would have been very valuable to have a second runway and a second airbase. It's not easy in the circumstance to get from Kabul to Bagram by ground. And so it would have been a significant undertaking to move anybody

from Kabul city to Bagram. Nevertheless, you can do that with helicopters under certain circumstances. You can do that. It gives you more flexibility. And of course, it would have allowed us to use Bagram Airfield to station combat aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft and other things that we surely need. I think we're providing those assets probably from our bases in the Middle East, possibly from aircraft carriers, which is an incredibly difficult and expensive way of doing it. And it would have made a lot more sense to have retained our capability to operate those systems out of the base and country like Bagram. So it made no sense at all if one had been thinking seriously about how to conduct an orderly and responsible withdrawal.

So on July and his press conference on July 10th, President Biden said he insisted that the Taliban victory was not inevitable. As recently as August 13th, the Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that the prospect of the Taliban's arrival in Kabul is, quote, not something we're overly focused on right now. So what do you think was going on here? Do you think the administration just completely, I mean, I guess to your earlier point about the perception of the strength of the Afghan National Army without the support of the U.S., do you think they just believed that the Afghan National Army would hold up, or they completely underestimated the strength of the Taliban? Like, this seems like a pretty big thing to get wrong. Well, it's a huge thing to get wrong.

And it's why you don't make this kind of thing a planning assumption. You know, a planning assumption is a, forgive me, it's a technical military jargon. But it means it's an assumption that must hold true in order for the plan to be valid. And if the planning assumption turns out to be invalid, then the entire plan is invalid. You should never take something like this kind of assessment as a planning assumption because it's not entirely dependent on factors under your control. The enemy gets a vote here. The Taliban pursued a very skillful and intelligent campaign this year, which was optimally designed

to cause the collapse of the Afghan security forces and government, and they succeeded. And clearly, the Biden administration underestimated the effect of the psychological shock that the decisions they were making would have on the Afghan security forces and therefore overestimated the resistance they would end up showing to the Taliban in the face of a Taliban campaign plan that I suspect they underestimated. So I think they probably got it wrong on both ends. But all of that adds up to you can't take as a planning assumption that when you're withdrawing forces in this way, that your allies are going to continue to fight as if you weren't withdrawing forces,

and that your enemies are going to cooperate with you to give you the space to do the kinds of things you want. You just can't take that as a planning assumption. You have to assume that things are not going to go right, and then build plans that have much more safety factor than this one did. Okay, so I want to now move to the broader conversation about the stakes of this decision, both the stakes of the decision to withdraw and also a bet in that is how we did it. I'm not comparing this at all to the lead up to World War II, but I was struck by this quote by then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when he was describing the German army's carving up of Czechoslovakia. Again, it's 1938. He referred to Czechoslovakia as, quote, a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Now, I think there are a lot of officials in the Biden administration and elsewhere who think it's a faraway country. People are fighting each other there. It's basically a civil war. We don't know much about what's going on in this country. We've been there for two decades. How much longer are we going to be there?

This is not our problem. And that was effectively part of what President Biden said in his statement earlier this week in describing why it was not in our interest to stay in Afghanistan. So how would you then respond to that characterization? Dan, it's baffling to me that anyone could characterize this conflict in that way. Why are we in Afghanistan? We're in Afghanistan because having allowed chaos and civil war to rage in the 1990s, we also allowed al-Qaeda to establish bases and train and plan in a way that allowed them to conduct the most devastating attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor and the most massive terrorist attack in the history of the world. And we went into Afghanistan to remove from power the government that had invited them there

and facilitated them in that planning and refused to break with them. And that government was the Taliban. The Taliban has considered itself not an insurgent group, but a government in exile throughout the entire conflict. It has never broken with al-Qaeda. That was one of the conditions that President Trump's negotiators were trying to get the Taliban to commit to, and the Taliban never would commit to breaking with al-Qaeda, and they haven't broken with al-Qaeda. We were there to prevent al-Qaeda and also ISIS after we allowed that to become as massive a phenomenon as it was based on our withdrawal from Iraq. We were there to prevent those groups from regaining safe haven from which to plan and

conduct attacks against us directly. And we were successful in that undertaking for 20 years. So as we talk about how with this has all been a failure and it's all been a disaster and it's all been for nothing. No, it hasn't. Because for two decades, we denied those groups safe haven and we kept Americans safe. And there have been no further major al Qaeda attacks on the American homeland. And that is not an accident. And it is an accomplishment. And it's a very important one. And it is therefore absolutely astonishing to me when I hear President Biden characterizing what's going on in Afghanistan as purely a civil war in which the United States has no interest.

It never has been that. and it will not be that. Okay, Fred, fair enough. I agree with you about our national interest. Some critics have argued that we were able to do everything you just outlined, accomplish everything you just outlined, but with what is now a minimal but important troop presence in Afghanistan. But that was also while we were effectively in a long period of diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban. to fight, as we've seen over the last few weeks, there's no way we could maintain the presence we have there without ramping up our troop levels considerably. So Dan, if you take a look at the casualties U.S. forces were suffering and the force levels from 2015 to the present,

you'll note that by 2015, we were down to under 10,000 troops. And within a year or two of that, we were down to around 5,000 troops. And throughout that period, predating the Trump negotiations with the Taliban, predating the deal with the Taliban, U.S. casualty, U.S. killed in action was averaging 20 a year. The United States military is one of the best protected and also one of the most lethal forces in the world. We were perfectly capable of keeping our forces in country at very low force levels without having to fear that the Taliban would inflict a lot of casualties on us. The notion that we needed to run for the exits lest the Taliban start to inflict some fearful casualties on us.

It's just based on a complete misunderstanding of the relative capabilities. They were not trying to kill us for that period. They were trying to kill us for that period. They couldn't. We were killing a lot of them, but they were not able to kill a lot of us. And by the way, may I add, is this really the way the world's leading power speaks? We want to be a leader of the world. We want us to take us seriously and be respected. But our president says, I needed to wait for the exits because otherwise this insurgent group in Afghanistan was going to kill American soldiers. And now we're going to go belly up to

the Chinese. I don't understand how you keep those two ideas in your head. Okay, so I want to I want to come to that in a moment. Just one question before I do. Jake Sullivan and other senior administration officials have said, look, we agree that Afghanistan was a terrorist haven. We've cleaned out a lot of the terrorist infrastructure. They claim that mission has basically been completed. Anything else we need to do to protect against terrorist groups reorganizing in Afghanistan, we can do with the sort of over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation and precision airstrikes and potentially special forces like that. Just leaving now doesn't preclude us from reengaging in a more efficient way and with

less cost and human sacrifice from the U.S. Look, there's a lot of very facile discussion going on along those lines. And it is incredibly facile, and it's incredibly unrealistic. And people are talking about how we do that in Yemen, and we do that in Somalia. And again, it's astonishing to me. I recommend that people go to Google Earth or Google Maps and look at the countries in which we've been doing over-the-horizon operations, like Syria and Iraq and Somalia and Yemen. And they'll notice that they all have one thing in

common, which is a coastline and free access from any kind of ships that we want to put in there for any kind of operations we want to conduct. If you look at Afghanistan, you'll notice two things about it, especially if you turn on the relief map features. One is that it's a landlocked country and it has no coastline. And the other is that it's actually the Hindu Kush. That is what Afghanistan actually is. So now you're talking about trying to conduct those kinds of operations in a place that is hours away from any base that we have, where the task is identifying and dealing with terrorists who are running up and down 15,000 foot mountains and tiny valley

passes and unbelievably complicated terrain. And by the way, landlocked with on borders of countries that are pretty hostile to U.S. interests. Right. Including Iran. I'm thinking that we're not going to ask overflight rights for Iran, although that would be an amusing negotiation to listen to. And of course, the Pakistanis, well, they're like supporting the Taliban and they shielded and sheltered bin Laden. So, yeah, the notion that we're going to rely on the Pakistanis to give us free overflight to do whatever we want in Afghanistan when we don't have troops there is also highly problematic. Or perhaps we could ask the Russians if they would be so good as to allow us to base maybe alongside the bases that they are busy establishing in Central Asia. This is enough. Or maybe the Chinese will

be happy to let us base in Xinjiang. And I mean, this is right. This is all this is all a nonsense that we were going to be able to get regional bases or possibly even overfly rights. But even if you could do all of that, what kind of operations do we think we're talking about exactly? We can conceivably, if we're incredibly lucky, we could conceivably get occasionally stupid terrorists appearing on media that we're listening to one way or another in a sufficiently timely fashion that we can send an aircraft, manned or unmanned, or some kind of missile to precise the coordinates and vaporize somebody every now and again. That's what that kind of undertaking looks like. The notion that we were going to do special operations raids in Afghanistan from long

ranges is insanity and irresponsible in the highest degree. And when a bird goes down, when a soldier gets badly injured, when things go wrong, how do we get them out? How do we avoid the Taliban? How do we keep the Taliban from trapping them? What risks are you prepared to run with service members? We're not doing special operations raids in this circumstance. It's just just it's delusional. This stuff is not in accord with any kind of military reality to imagine that we're going to be able to have that while so much of the coverage and the debate and the analysis has focused on the here and now, the decision that was made, the lead up to the decision that was made, and then the mess of the way the decision was implemented. There has not been as much analysis taking a step back and saying, like, what has this done to our geopolitics?

It's like, you know, if you think of our geopolitics is like a snow globe and it's been like turns upside down and all these different countries around the world are now possibly rethinking how they think about the united states both friends allies and also adversaries so i want to i want to just point to a tweet um that from the president of tai tweet from the president of Taiwan. The president of Taiwan tweeted yesterday, quote, as we look at events taking place around the world, I want to make clear that Taiwanese are committed to the defense of our nation. We are willing and determined to stand up for our allies

and will continue to work with like-minded partners as a global force for good. Close quote. Why did the president of Taiwan feel compelled to make a statement lesson that they should conclude from Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. They have been saying, you guys think the Americans are going to be with you. Look at what they're doing to Afghanistan. Why do you think you're going to be any different? This is clearly, this is a drumbeat. The Russians are aiming, beaming this at the Ukrainians. The Chinese are beaming this at the Taiwanese. The Iranians are telling this to all of the people around them. Everyone who is interacting with, by which I mean, I guess, opposing fighting or preparing to fight American allies is beaming this right into those allies and saying, why do you think the Americans are going to stand with you? That's going on. We're seeing it.

And I'm very delighted that that was the response of the president of Taiwan. It was a very good response. But we better get moving pretty fast if we want to retain any kind of confidence in our willingness actually to stand and fight by those who have stood and fought by us. In terms of China, they have considerable economic interest in Afghanistan. Certainly with its One Belt, One Road program, there's a lot of opportunity for China to do infrastructure projects in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is home to immense mineral wealth, estimated to be something in the neighborhood of valued at $1 trillion U.S. dollars. And Chinese officials have at least quietly raised the possibility of extending the China-Pakistan economic corridor to Afghanistan.

So how quickly do you think China is going to open its arms to this new Taliban-led Afghanistan? We're already seeing all the noises from Beijing, from Moscow, from Tehran, and above all from Ankara, suggesting that there will be an enthusiasm, especially if they can achieve any sort of critical mass, for welcoming the Taliban, the newly reformed Taliban, Taliban version 2.0, possibly with some Karzai-looking face on it in some way into the community of nations so that they can rape it as they generally attempt to rape their partners. We're already seeing all of those noises, And I think that we should expect that to happen, although possibly more slowly than the worst case scenarios might have. It's a little bit complicated for everybody to do that.

And of course, getting the stuff out of Afghanistan will be very difficult, even for the Chinese. May I just note in passing, though, how unbelievably infuriating it is to me that it's only in this context that we're once again talking about Afghanistan's mineral resources. We've been trying to get people to realize what the incredible wealth there is that lies in the rock that is Afghanistan for more than a decade. As people have been talking about how we need the Afghan economy to improve, we need to not have Afghanistan be a ward of the international community forever, and on and on and on. We have been saying the resources are there.

If we can get investment in to extract those resources, Afghanistan can pay for its army, can pay for its government, will not need to be a ward of the international community. And we got crickets. We got very little interest from the US government, successive US governments. We got no interest from the commercial sector.

And now all of a sudden we're talking about, maybe the Chinese will go in there and get that. Well, maybe they will because their risk tolerance is much higher for a lot of things than ours. But it's just unbelievable to me that we spent a decade and more than a decade walking by the opportunity to create a viable state in Afghanistan. And now, you know, we'll see maybe the Chinese can do it with their, you know, with their wonderful tactics and approach. Do you think China will with between one belt, one road and all their other, you know, capabilities for economic, let's call it economic outreach, quote unquote, to two

countries throughout the region, or, you know, what others would call the kind of death trap diplomacy? I mean, do you see China kind of going in there and really trying to exploit or develop depending on on how you characterize it? think it's very complicated i mean it's intrinsically very hard for the chinese to do this in a big way because unfortunately for them again if you look at google earth if you look at the wahan corridor that's separate that that connects china to the most of afghanistan it's a whole bunch of really big mountain big mountains and valleys that all run the wrong way. So actually, for the Chinese to build railroads or stuff through that is a major undertaking. Now, the Chinese do major undertakings, but I'm not sure that they're

going to find it worth their while really to do that on a huge scale. Now, they will go in, I'm sure, and look for rare earth metals and various other things, which we've fortuitously mapped out for them already, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. And they'll benefit from the work that we've done to identify local locations of particular interest to them and go and try to get it. So it's very hard to tell whether they will prioritize Afghanistan versus other things that they're looking at. But they will be interested. The Russians are interested.

The Iranians are interested. The Turks are very interested. There's a great game. There's a new great game that is going to start to play out in Afghanistan right now as they all compete for favor with the Taliban and they all compete for access to at least state claims to resources that they might want to mine sometime in the future, whether they actually do it now or not, and whether it will benefit the Afghan people or not, which I would highly doubt, given the way these countries operate. So one of the top foreign policy advisors to President Putin in Russia, his name is Fyodor Lukyanov. He was quoted as saying, quote, you can't blame Russia for feeling

a little smug about what is happening in Kabul. Close quote. This is Fyodor Lukyanov, a top foreign policy advisor to Vladimir Putin. Now, when the U.S. first went into Afghanistan after 9-11 in 2001, 2002, in the early years, Russia was with us. They supported us. And then they seemed to start playing both sides. So what was Russia's calculation early on and how has it evolved? The major issue that happened actually had, of course, nothing to do with Afghanistan. It had to do with Putin's view toward us, which is the changes in which have been documented extremely well by the analysts, the Institute for the Study of War, particularly Natalia Bugayova and Mason Clark, who've laid out

the way that Putin came really to focus on the United States as an enemy that he accused us, particularly after the color revolutions, fomenting color revolutions, seeking to undermine Russia and so forth. And you could see, and i believe that you were actually there with me um in munich in 2007 listening to the speech that he gave at the munich security conference yeah which was you know i remember it yeah it was basically a verbal declaration of war um on the nato alliance in the united states so you know from that point forward put point forward, Putin was not with us at all and was interested in having us fail one way or another. As he's become more aggressive, as he has felt stronger and safer, as he has seen how little we are actually willing to do to push back on anything

he does to us, he's become emboldened. We've had these reports of Russians, you know, putting bounties on the heads of U.S. service members in Afghanistan and other things, certainly making contact with the Taliban for a long time. He's been hedging along those lines. All of that comes, in my view, in part, in no small part, from the weakness that successive American administrations, Republican and Democrat, have shown toward his various aggressions in Europe and elsewhere. And I just think, you know, we need to understand weakness has a consequence.

Weakness, you know, you pay a price for being weak and looking weak. And defeat is not free. Defeat is very expensive. And when it is a self-inflicted defeat and a self-inflicted humiliation like this, it can be very expensive indeed. In 2009, the U.S. had leased a base in Kyrgyzstan, an air base, during the first few years of the war in Afghanistan. And in 2009, the Russian government basically pressured the Kyrgyzstan government to basically end the arrangement, because according to reports, Putin was concerned about the U.S. having access to an airbase in the heart of Central Asia. First of all, do you think he had that concern on the one hand? And how does he strike a balance between having a concern about U.S. presence in Central Asia? At the same time, given Russia's

history in Afghanistan, what concern he might time, given Russia's history in Afghanistan, what concern you might have about the Taliban being back in power and what kind of threat that could pose ultimately to Russia, regardless of what kind of diplomatic channels it keeps open to the Taliban? Putin has a problem in Afghanistan any way he goes. He certainly did not want us there in principle operating in a region that he's working on reconsolidating Russian suzerainty over. On the other hand, he is concerned about Islamist terrorism, and he should be. He has a massive Islamist problem in Russia itself, and there's certainly a very big Islamist

problem in Central Asia. So it is a dilemma for him. I think that his general view is that we are more of a problem for him uh i think he thinks that he can handle we we we in the united states we being active in central asia as well as we being there i think or anywhere on his periphery is more of a problem for him because you know putin putin made his bones in the Second Chechen War, fighting against people that he characterizes as Islamist terrorists. Not all of them were. Some of them were. But he brands all of them in that way. with the problem was to obliterate the city of Grozny with Russian air power and unbelievable weapons of war directed deliberately at civilians.

So I do think that he, I mean, I know that he is concerned about Islamist terrorism. I suspect that he believes that he can handle it and probably better than we can because he's prepared to be more brutal and he thinks that that's what will work. But I think that he's much more concerned about the danger of having long term U.S. presence on what he is trying to reestablish as Russia's borders or Russia's effective frontier than he is about a bunch of terrorists that I think he suspects he will be able to handle in different ways. So I think he regards this as a huge opportunity. And he's acting that way. And so we're seeing him reinforcing Russian military positions in Tajikistan that were already there. We're seeing him work to establish new Russian military positions in Uzbekistan where they're different.

As the Soviets would say, it's no accident, comrades, that these are the first steps that he's taken and that he's taken with zeal. And you mentioned Turkey earlier. What are the implications for Turkey? So Erdogan, you know, our good friend who is so supportive of all American activities, forgive the sarcasm, you know, has wasted very little time making it clear that he's eager to be the clearinghouse for Taliban relations with the world. He's offered to keep, we were originally negotiating with him to have the Turks be responsible for securing Kabul airport after we left for us. He's now offering to the Taliban to do that for them. I think he's basically offering to beard for them and to be a reassuring presence so that the international community will feel comfortable over time, you know, establishing diplomatic relations and sending ambassadors because there will be a nice friendly Turkish military forces face greeting you at the airport and so you'll

feel better about that. He's working hard to ingratiate himself with the Taliban. At the same time, he's built up some street cred with them, I presume, by ferrying Islamist fighters that he's been supporting in Syria to Afghanistan, which he was doing as we were withdrawing. So Erdogan is going to be a big player here. He's competing for the loyalty of the Taliban. He's competing for the loyalty of the Uzbeks, who are, as you know, Turkic people, because he wants to compete with Putin for influence in Central Asia, which is a heavily Turkic region.

And he's trying to, he has this not neo-Ottoman vision. He has, it's an old, you know, turn of the 20th century Pan-Turkist view that Turkey, that Ankara is the natural leader of all of the turkic peoples in the world um and so he's pursuing this agenda which is uh which is going to be a huge problem for us because we're talking about potentially having again a nato ally uh increasingly i feel like saying more is the pity um in afghanistan you know working basically on behalf of the Taliban vis-a-vis the international community. Other organizations that have publicly signaled positive future relations with the

Taliban, and the examples I'm going to give you, have gone out and publicly congratulated the Taliban for what they've accomplished in recent weeks. These groups include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Tahrir al-Sham in Syria terrorist group, and of course, al-Qaeda's international leadership have all released statements congratulating the Taliban. What is the implication of that? You know, Dan, as again, as you know very well, both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the two emirs of Al-Qaeda, have sworn by a sworn allegiance to every successive Taliban emir. It's a weird situation, right? Because we think of Al-Qaeda as being the big dog and Taliban as being the tail. But in their world, the emir of the Taliban is the one to whom Osama bin Laden originally swore allegiance, and al-Qaeda has retained that allegiance.

And so for them, this is a massive victory. But for all of the enemies of the United States, this is a massive victory. Seeing the great Satan bringing itself to its knees and humiliating itself is a delight to the Iranians. Yes, they're concerned about the Taliban and so on, although they appear to be reacting also by reaching out to the Taliban rather than wanting to fight them. But the humiliation of the United States brings joy and solace to all of the enemies of the United States. And you're seeing that reaction. And I think it is going to embolden them all.

And it is going to make them more likely to undertake further attacks against us, both because they think we're weak and won't respond, and because this will generate a competition within the global Salafi-Jahadi movement, of which ISIS and al-Qaeda are a part. This is how this organization works. We've pursued this fantasy for years, that it's somehow good for us that there's ISIS and al-Qaeda and that they fight each other and so on, which they sometimes do. We're not tracking enough on the competition that this creates. And it's a competition to see how many Americans you could kill, to see how much humiliation you can bring on the Americans. And so the Taliban having just won

this massive victory, it makes al-Qaeda rejoice, makes ISIS rejoice, although ISIS is complaining about it now, but it's also going to make them want to outdo the Taliban and compete with one another to show that actually they're the big dog of the Salafi jihadi world. And of course, Hezbollah, which is not part of that world, is part of the Iranian-controlled so-called axis of resistance. They also are going to desire to show their chops in fighting what they call a great sin, what the Iranians call a great sin. So this is bad news across the board for us. In the press coverage of President Biden's decision, we've heard a lot of criticism,

I think some of it unfair, of what at worst you could describe as misleading projections, at best just miscalculations. But the criticism of our U.S. military leadership, of our U.S. military planners, that for years they've been sitting in the Situation Room with the president, telling them if we just have a little more time and if we just maintain our troop presence, or in some cases we increase our troop presence, things will get better. And the Afghani security forces are on track to getting better. And the situation in Afghanistan, civil society is getting stronger.

And the government is getting more capable and getting stronger. And if we just stick it out, we will get to a much more sustainable place in Afghanistan. And that there's been just criticism after criticism of our uniform leadership, which, again, I think has been largely unfair, basically saying they have been, you know, getting it wrong, and finally, President Biden, the fourth administration that's had to deal with this, has said enough. What is your response to that? The so-called Afghanistan papers are not the

Pentagon papers. There's been this huge effort to portray some kind of misleading of the American people and concealing of the truth. And it is astonishing when you go through that documentation, how much of it is actually matters of public record already, and how very little of it was actually classified or withheld from anybody. Fundamentally, the accusations amount to the fact that in press conferences where bad news was presented, upbeat presentations also occurred. Not that the news was withheld, because the news wasn't withheld. For more than a decade, we've had an entire office, the special investigator for Afghanistan, the SIGAR, has done nothing but pump out report after report about everything that was going bad in Afghanistan, all in the public domain, all out there.

We've had a series of reports from the State Department and the Defense Department about all the problems that were out there. We know that the government is corrupt because the US government has been reporting that the government is corrupt because the U.S. government has been reporting that the government is corrupt. I know that because as early as 2009, as part of the civilian assessment team that General McChrystal brought together, we identified in that review corruption as a co-equal threat to the enterprise with the insurgency. And that review was, unfortunately, it was intended not to be made public in that form, but it was leaked at the time in 2009. And from that moment,

that assessment was available. And that was the commander's assessment. And it was the assessment that he presented to the president. He didn't seal anything. So this has been a very transparent activity, and no one's been whitewashing this. No one has been saying, well, I don't want to say no one. I don't know that there haven't been people out there saying, but I do know the success of commanders in Afghanistan have been dutifully reporting back all of the challenges they face, the risks that they are taking, the problems that they are encountering, and political leaders in Washington have been, in my view, up until this moment, making the right decision that it was worth the costs, risks, and consequences of remaining there rather than accepting the

situation that President Biden has just generated. I think that was the right call. But that call was not made on the basis of ignorance or misleading reports from the field that everything was okay with people concealing all of the bad stuff. It's just it is factually inaccurate to assert that that has been going on. It is easily demonstrable that it is factually inaccurate. Our friend Neil Ferguson, the historian, has has in a number of his writings look back at the decline of Britain's, Great Britain's influence in the world. It's sort of imperial Britain's position in the world a century ago.

And he basically has pointed out that since, if you go back a little over a century ago, since 1914, Britain had endured a war, you know, World War I, a financial crisis. And then, interestingly, in 1918 to 1919, the Spanish influenza. And also its economic situation was completely overshadowed by a massive amount of debt. While the UK maintained the dominant currency globally, its position in global finance was no longer what it once was. It was no longer unrivaled. And he's drawn a parallel to, not a perfect parallel, as he will concede, but he draws parallels from time to time as to where America is now and its position in the world.

And I want to zero in on one point, which is the pandemic. The pandemic is truly a black swan event. We haven't experienced something like that in a century. I mean, you could say maybe 1957 is the closest, but it's been a long time since the whole world has been consumed with something on that scale. How much do you think the mistakes being made by the administration are just a function of they're

spread thin, they're distracted, they and every Western power is completely consumed with combating COVID-19, and they're going to make mistakes. In this case, the mistakes, as you're laying out here, have pretty big consequences. But if we look back at history, you know, it's hard for governments, including superpowers, to do a lot of big things at once. And they've been busy with this pandemic. Well, I want to come back at the end of this to the question of whether America is Britain and our power is waning and this is inevitably marks the inflection of American decline. But look, I'm sorry, I'm not prepared to give President Biden that out. He set a policy process in motion to look at the situation in Afghanistan. He took the time to do that. He had presented to him whatever he had presented to him, and he made a decision. It was a bad decision.

It was an unforced decision. I understand his line that President Trump had put him in a bad spot. That's true. The deal that President Trump made with the Taliban was a terrible deal. It was an evil deal. It was bad for the United States, and it did put President Biden in a difficult place. Of course, the Taliban had violated that agreement by the time President Biden came to office. His assertion that he had to do this lest American troops start getting shot at by the Taliban is just, I don't even know.

Well, I'd also add that I don't know why this particular agreement or policy was sacrosanct. President Biden ran for office saying he was going to unwind most of what president trump had done and he he's done he he he he pulled out of the out of the keystone pipeline he he re-entered the paris climate accord he's obviously been trying to negotiate uh and with the iranian government in reverse trump's decision to pull out of the um iran deal so i mean on case after case he's he's never been felt constrained by something trump did right and so what you're getting to is of course that biden has wanted to pull out of afghanistan since he was vice president and that that was very clear he opposed the surge of forces into afghanistan he wanted to draw down he wanted to pull out he

was very frustrated that he wasn't able to and it really seemed pretty clear that as when he became president one of the first things that he wanted to do was. And it really seemed pretty clear that when he became president, one of the first things that he wanted to do was to undo that decision that he thought that President Obama got wrong and that he was pretty clear about, let alone President Trump. And so I don't think this had anything to do with COVID.

I don't think this had to do with the problem of bandwidth. I think this had to do with the problem of leadership and just having a president whose head was in completely the wrong place about this and who behaved in an incredibly irresponsible fashion. And of course, you're talking about the military. The military is not primarily responsible for dealing with COVID. The military, COVID affects the military, obviously, but the military can do more than one thing at a time and they're perfectly capable. Yeah, but the decision makers in the White House, again, I'm not giving them a pass here, but the decision makers in the White House, again, I'm not giving them a pass here,

but the decision makers in the White House, it is a small staff in the White House. They're the ones who ultimately have to dedicate time and interagency meetings to decisions, and they have a lot going on. As they will say, by the way, they will say, when I talk to administration officials, they say we're focused on covid climate and china those

are our priorities and everything else is peripheral that's partly the reason they gave not publicly not not in official statements as to why they weren't going to get involved with the israeli pal israeli hamas conflict in may of this year's they said we're just not going to spend time and energy and political capital dealing with a peripheral issue could they have calculated afghanistan i'm not saying it i'm not saying it's issue. Could they have calculated Afghanistan? I'm not saying it's accurate, but could they have calculated it's a peripheral issue? Well, they might have, except that we know that they went through a formal policy review process. We know that they actually did spend time on it. It's not as if this was some kind of just, you know, oh, I don't have time for this. Okay, well, we're pulling out.

They went through a formal process. The president spent time on it. There were briefings, there were papers, there were meetings and all of that kind of stuff. And they just big fat made the wrong decision. so it's hard then to say well we didn't have time to consider it seriously enough because they did they just they made the wrong decision he made the wrong decision and and if they did and if they did say that we didn't have the the the bandwidth it's not like there was some pressing deadline that they was forcing their hand on well they chose the timing well look they could argue that the deadline was the was the may 1 deadline from the Trump deal.

So he did have to make a decision. I will grant them that. He had to make a decision. Now, he could have done a variety of things to buy himself more time. And of course, he made the decision to blow past that deadline anyway. That's my point.

In a sense, it's artificial he he could say i you know this was this was an agreement negotiated by the previous administration we're re-evaluating right it was an executive agreement it wasn't a treaty in any event and and so on right absolutely okay come back you wanted to yeah he's been on this podcast and i'll probably have him on to respond to whatever you're saying yeah so go ahead look you know you know the roman empire was falling for about 700 years according to robins right um and there is a certain um tendency in great powers like ours and great britain to uh predict their own demise prematurely. And I really believe that this is one of those cases.

Yeah, China is rising. Now, I'm not an economist, so I have to accept what China experts who know a lot more about it than I do say. I don't accept the narrative that the Chinese economy is inevitably going to match or pass or eclipse the American economy. I do think that we're wildly underestimating structural problems within the Chinese economy itself that will hinder them from doing that. Starting with, it's not a capitalist system.

It's a half-capitalist system grafted under a dictatorship that is getting ever more controlling. And as you watch Xi, for political reasons, tighten his control over the capitalist sector that has been fueling Chinese economic growth, and you project that out, I don't think that you're going to find that the straight line projections of Chinese growth and that passing us are going to be there. I know my colleague, Derek Scissors at AEI, arguing about the problematic usage of GDP as a measure of actual economic power anyway, as compared to national wealth, which is a whole other story, which is a place where the United States has an enormous advantage over China.

So I don't even accept, but granted as a non-expert, the premise that the Chinese economic situation is as rosy as everybody says that it is. No one else is anywhere close. The only country that can overtake the United States in economic terms is China. So I'm just looking at the economics of it, which is a basis for a lot of this triumphalism, this Chinese triumphalism and Chinese century stuff, I think is very problematic. From a military standpoint, the Chinese are well on the way to getting themselves into a place where it is very, very difficult for us to defend Taiwan if we don't get our act

together and focus on that. That is a long way from saying that the Chinese are anywhere close to being able to match us as a global military power. They're not. And they're not going to be close to that anytime soon at all. So we're still talking about a regional power. Granted, it's an incredibly important region. It's a region we need to be very worried about.

It's a region where we need to defend. It's still a region in the world, and it will remain the case that there is only one global military power for quite a long time, I suspect, and that will be the United States of America. And so we can choose to decline. This would be my message back. And I would agree with Neil about this.

We can choose to decline. We can choose to be that waning power. We can be the weary titan, as people in Great Britain were referring to it, before the First World War. We can say that we're the weary titan. We can't handle this anymore. We can say that we're the weary titan. We can't handle this anymore. We can. But to make a point that I've heard you make before, Dan, and we both know is true, Britain had that luxury in a sense, because the power behind them was us. What's behind us?

It's not actually China, because the Chinese will not construct a world order. Even if you asked yourself, do you think that you would prefer a world order in which the decisions are made in Beijing? If you're a conservative, you could say, would you prefer a world order in which all economic decisions are made in Beijing, in which military decisions are made in Beijing? If you're a liberal, ask yourself, do you think that the climate will be better if Xi Jinping is deciding on global climate policy? Do you know why the air is yellow in Beijing as much as he cares about it? Why the fish are dying in the Yangtze River as much as he cares about climate? Do you think that will be better? Of course not. So consider those questions. But the truth is, it isn't going to be Xi making the rules because he won't have the power to do that it won't be putin either it won't actually be anybody

what you will actually get is a hobbesian world that can rapidly descend into a war of all against all only this time with vast numbers of nuclear weapons in increasing numbers of countries around the world. We don't have this option, Dan. We cannot afford, as the United States, even to entertain the fantasy of accepting our decline and trying to go gracefully into the winds. We have got to get ourselves together. We have got to understand the inherent advantages that the United States has. And we have got to realize that we have an obligation to ourselves and our children, our grandchildren and to the world to lead. Because that is the only way, that is the only chance we have to avoid real catastrophe.

Just before we wrap, when you're painting a picture of this Hobbesian world, you're painting a world in which before America had treaty and defense alliances and relationships throughout Asia and Europe, and countries didn't know who they could depend on when they finally found themselves

in these military skirmishes. Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, right. I mean, we could basically be stripping ourselves of our lives. We could be making it clear that we're not going to defend people, that we're not going to engage. We could be doing what we're doing with the defense budget currently, cutting it more and actually actively reducing our capability to engage in this sort of mournful, solipsistic, wound-licking that we want to engage in now.

Also, self-loathing, this deep sense of self-loathing that is guiding us to say, well, we only do bad things in the world anyway, which is simply not true. All right, Fred, before we go, you and your project, the Critical Threat Center at the American Enterprise Institute, has enormous resources that are extremely relevant to, I think, many of our listeners in terms of following events that we've talked about, some of the issues we've talked about today. So can you just tell us where to find your work and the work of your center? And then also equally important is you referenced the Institute for the Study of War earlier. So can you just tell us how people find this info and just at a high level what's there?

Yeah. So both the Critical Threats Project, which is based at AEI and which you can find at criticalthreats.org, and the Institute for the Study of War, which is an independent think tank run by Kim Kagan, my wife, and which you can find at understandingwar.org. We're basically open source intelligence organizations. We perform the same kinds of analysis and assessments of things going on in the world that the intelligence community does, only we do it using unclassified, readily publicly available information. And we make our findings available, freely available on those websites, criticalthreats.org and

understandingwar.org. And we have portfolios that cover Iraq and Syria, that cover Iran, that cover Afghanistan, Russia, and the global Salafi jihadi movement as well, and beginning to work on China. And we've been following these issues for many years, in some cases for more than a decade. And that gives us a huge value because a lot of people come in and out of these conflicts

episodically and sort of lose track of what's going on. But we really keep a steady stare on these things so that we can see when things change and make good forecasts and make policy recommendations, which is our core mandate. I will say as a consumer of this content, it is incredibly valuable. I highly recommend it to anyone listening, both the Critical Threats program and then also the Institute for the Study of War, and I'll provide more information on those after this conversation. Fred, I just want to take a moment to thank you for everything you do. I know you're in the thick of things right now, and it's sort of informing policymakers and journalists and other analysts as to what's actually going on is enormously valuable. And also the relationships you maintain on the ground in Afghanistan is just helping out the number of people you're helping is invaluable.

So thank you for everything. And thanks for taking the time to have this conversation today. Thanks so much. Thanks for your friendship and support over the years, Dan. And thanks for having me on. That's our show for today. A few related pieces that I'd like to flag for you. One is Charles Lane from the Washington Post. He has an important column called Biden's Presidency and U.S. Foreign Policy now hinge on pulling off one of the greatest airlifts in history. That's the title of the piece. What Charles does in this

column is looks at successful but very complex refugee evacuations and airlifts throughout history, whether it was the Indian government having to move something like over 100 Indian nationals from Kuwait in 1990, right before the Iraq War, the first Gulf War, whether it was Israel's evacuation of a number of Ethiopian Jews in 1991, or it was even the mass refugee effort that the U.S. was engaged in in Vietnam. And he really examines how complex these projects are, these campaigns are in the context of what we're up against in Afghanistan. Charles writes, quote, The United States has unparalleled capabilities but faces a worst-case scenario.

The number of evacuees is huge. They are scattered about the country and Kabul. The city is remote from the United States. The local political environment is turbulent. If anyone rules, it is the very force that people are trying to flee, and the president, meaning President Biden, is in a hurry, close quote. So this gives a lot of historical context for understanding and analyzing what we're up against right now. I also recommend anything written by the Long War Journal, which is a journal run by the Think Tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Their website is longwarjournal.org. Now, to follow Fred Kagan's work, the easiest way to do that

is to go to AEI.org and just search for Fred Kagan. All his pieces are there. The work of the Critical Threats Project is there. All his testimony on Capitol Hill is there. It's a very good resource. And then Fred also mentioned the Institute for the Study of War. Their website is understandingwar.org. That is understandingwar.org, which is run by Dr. Kimberly Kagan. And what is great about Fred's project and Kim's think tank is they have, as Fred described, a number of very impressive civilian analysts working, producing content for the public that is comparable to the publicly available content in terms of its rich analysis that one will see that's produced by the Pentagon or the State Department and other government agencies. Post-Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.