Consider This from NPR - Chaos And Collapse In Afghanistan: How Did The U.S. Not See It Coming?

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

The Taliban now control Afghanistan. How did the country's government fall so quickly — and why didn't the U.S. see it coming? NPR put those questions to the former commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus. Afghanistan's future remains unclear, especially for its women and girls. One of them is Freshta Karim, a Kabul resident and founder of a mobile library project called Charmaghz, who spoke to Audie Cornish. Karim is one of many Afghans who NPR reached in Kabul during the final hours before its collapse into Taliban control. Those interviews aired on Morning Edition, and on special coverage produced by the staffs of Weekend Edition and All Things Considered. For more Afghanistan coverage listen to Up First via Apple, Spotify, or Google; or the NPR Politics Podcast via Apple, Spotify, or Google. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Sunday morning in Afghanistan, as Kabul University was evacuated, some teachers asked male students to leave the classroom first, and then they said goodbye to the female students who remained. They did not explain why they said goodbye, whether it was because Taliban would not allow women to go to university anymore, or they would separate boys and girls. But everybody was in panic because every class, every office was evacuated today. Student Aisha Karam told NPR that as someone who grew up in modern Afghanistan,

she felt privileged to have opportunities and an education. Right now at this moment, it looks like a nightmare. Everything that we have worked towards collapsing right before our eyes. I don't know what to feel and think anymore. Today, just today, I feel older than my age. And I'm sure a lot of young people feel the same way. That same afternoon, Mahib Shenwari, a doctor in Kabul, was at work. I was sitting there and suddenly there was shouting that they're here.

They're here. Rumors were swirling about whether the Taliban had really taken over or whether thieves and warlords were in charge. And then, like, we were panicked and we just wanted to reach to our home. And the way it was, like, traffic jammed, no one could even move their car. It was totally messed up. As things got worse, Omid Sharifi, who runs a non-profit arts organization in Kabul, was outside painting a mural. 12 p.m., 11.30, we were painting on one of the walls in Kabul, and then suddenly there was a panic and chaos,

so I had to walk all the way to my house because I didn't know what was happening. Sharifi told NPR three of his sisters were missing, and he was trying to reach them. It feels that this country is sinking. It feels that I'm not sure I may be able to paint again or not. I'm not sure my organization will be there. I'm not sure if my paintings will be there tomorrow. Elsewhere in the city, NPR reached a man we're calling Reggie, who worked for years as a translator for the U.S. military. Now, in the early afternoon, he watched from his roof as the local police station emptied out and was left abandoned.

There is no government official, no military. They left, and then after 30 minutes, Taliban came and pretty easily entered. And people gathered around them were watching what's exactly going on. The Taliban fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. Cell service was spotty in his house, so Reggie spoke to NPR from the street. Reggie said it's not hard to Google his real name and find pictures of him online, taken during his work with the U.S. He's trying to get a visa so he and his family can get out of Afghanistan. My family is suffering right now. My family, my kids are telling me that bad guy is

going to come and he's going to kill you first day, then us. I cannot sleep for a minute. I cannot sleep for a single minute. Consider this. Last week, we asked if the decades-long, multi-billion-dollar U.S. effort in Afghanistan would be undone in a matter of months. In the end, it took only a few more days for the Taliban to surround the capital and the Afghan government to collapse. One big question now, why wasn't the U.S. better prepared? From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Monday, August 16th. Support for NPR and the following message come from First Republic Bank. No matter what your financial goals are, your dedicated First Republic banker can help guide you every step of the way.

Learn more at firstrepublic.com. Member FDIC. Equal housing lender. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the W Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. There are arrowheads in the walls. I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Randabdit Fattah.

And we're the hosts of ThruLine, NPR's history podcast. And for our special series this month, the best of ThruLine. You know, if we carry on as we have been, this is what we might wind up with. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. On Monday, after the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital Kabul, that city's airport descended into chaos. Hundreds of Afghans flooded the runway,

forcing U.S. troops to pause evacuations while they cleared the airfield. One video posted online early in the morning showed hundreds of Afghans running alongside a U.S. Air Force cargo plane as it taxied. In another, gunshots rang out as people streamed across the tarmac. Later, the Pentagon confirmed that two people had been killed by U.S. gunfire, and NPR learned that a nearby hospital, 80 patients arrived overnight, many of them victims of chaos at the airport. As the events of the last few days unfolded, Jason Dempsey struggled to process what he was watching.

It's hard to process all this because so much is happening at once, but it's hard to avoid kind of a mix of sadness, anger, and a little bit of humiliation. Dempsey is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He's a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, served as an advisor to Afghan forces in 2012. Those forces utterly collapsed in recent months, faster than almost anyone expected. All of this ties into the fundamental challenge, which is we built an Afghan national army for a nation that simply doesn't exist. Dempsey argued that for decades, the U.S. tried to build the Afghan military in its own image without understanding all the things that make the U.S. military what it is. That's functioning bureaucracies. It's a lack of corruption. It's a lack of sectarian conflict. It's a great educational system. It's access to technology and proficiency with those weapons.

We wanted to put all of that on the Afghan military to make it effective instead of working with them as they were. What we needed to do was work with local power brokers and figure out how to build an army that worked for those who wanted to fight against the Taliban. It may be easy in hindsight to explain the shortcomings of the Afghan military. It's harder to say why almost no one in the U.S. military or intelligence community predicted how fast the Taliban would retake the country. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. In a speech Monday afternoon, President Biden said his administration believed the Afghan military would fight longer and harder than it did. He said the U.S. would continue to work with allies and international aid groups

to help the Afghan people. But, he argued, it was still right to leave the country according to a timetable that had been negotiated by the Trump administration. There was only a core reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict. But for Jason Dempsey, the military analyst and veteran of the Afghan war, America's long effort to rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan,

an effort that cost $830 billion, thousands of American lives, and the lives of many more Afghan civilians and service members. It's really hard to acknowledge it as anything but a failure, as painful as that is. Before we do all the incriminations and recriminations and the I told you so's, I hope we reflect deeply on just how much was given and how much was lost in this effort and really think deeply about how we use military force overseas and what we're really capable of doing. So let's return to the question of why the U.S. government seemed to be caught so off guard by the speed with which conditions in Afghanistan declined. Was it a failure on the part of U.S. intelligence, a lack of planning, warnings that fell on deaf ears?

Well, it's very, very hard to say without knowing what individuals were actually saying inside the situation room. On Monday, former CIA director and commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, spoke to NPR. I do believe that there were those of us who actually were alarmed by the possibility of the psychological impact of the announcement to withdraw, then the actual withdrawal, because I think people were... Petraeus told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, simply knowing there was no longer any American backup contributed to the Afghan military collapse. And one overlooked aspect of that collapse, he said, was the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. military contractors who were essentially keeping the Afghan Air Force flying. And that capability was the most important capability Afghan security forces psychological impact from knowing nobody's coming to the rescue.

Very much so. By the way, keep in mind, Mr. Louise, if I could, Afghan forces have very much fought and died for their country over the years. Our concerns when I was the commander there, when I was the commander of the U.S. Central Command prior to that, when I was the director of the CIA, our concerns actually had to do with the fact that they were dying in such large numbers while fighting for their country that they wouldn't be able to maintain the end strength that was authorized. This is not a force that was unwilling to fight if they had a sense that someone was coming to the rescue. And again, the key is reinforcements, emergency resupplies, ammunition, water, food, and above all, close air support. On Sunday, as Kabul descended into chaos, Freshta Karim was reflecting on how much Afghanistan has changed over the last few decades.

Karim started something called the Sharmaz Mobile Library Project, giving a space for young people to read. I think in past 20 years, the life for people has changed so much from flourishing of music, amount of music produced, amount of poetry produced, and also the amount of children. Half of the population is just below 15 years old. All they have experienced is not a perfect democracy, but a democracy. They have grown up with a liberal thinking, with an equal thinking towards other human beings. Freshta told me she worried for that generation's future,

especially women and girls who have heard the Taliban make promises to give women rights. I think that entire idea that Taliban say that we will give women, that's their language, we will give women rights. I think that is problematic because our right, we feel that our right is an intrinsic right. We don't need to take it from, we't need to Taliban to give it to us. The entire idea that they think they're superior and then they do a favor to give us that right is problematic.

And you can understand where they stand by using this language. And I don't believe them even a little bit because they are an ideology group. Their war against women is at the core of their ideology. If they don't have it anymore, they're not going to be Taliban. And I don't think they will leave their identity because that's how they identify themselves with. Can you give us an idea right now what you're hearing as people are obviously concerned in the city about the Taliban's impending takeover? A couple of hours before, in the morning, people had a normal life. And then we heard the news of Taliban takeover. They had entered the city from different points and everyone was frightened, running away.

I was also in the middle of the city. I was out for work and people had to walk for hours to get to their home because there was road blockade there was traffic jam, people were running on the streets, and it looked like our world is crumbling down. But after a few hours, right now it looks like there's such a deadly silence, as if the music of people's life has stopped, and they're just waiting for their uncertain future for politicians to decide what will happen. You said you described something that feels sudden, despite the fact that the Taliban had been taking over so many provincial capitals. Right. This is brewing for many days and weeks. What has this been like the last few days? Well, for the entire idea that they are taking over so quickly has been really shocking.

It took us as a shock because the U.S. government was doing a different prediction. Our own government was taking a different prediction. We thought that it will take a year or at least six months. At least for Kabul, we thought that they will not take it as easily. You work with young people and, of course, young girls. You talk about the shock. What were you hearing from some of these people,, of course, young girls. You talk about the shock. What were you hearing from some of these people, some of these youth? Just as I'm talking, I'm hearing a lot of helicopters running from here,

so you might not hear my voice very well. It seems that the U.S. is evacuating its own citizens. That is also a very ironical thing, that the entire idea of the U.S. government, that the U.S. foreign policy, that it has a duty to protect its own citizens, the entire idea of nationalism. I invite everyone to rethink about it. It looks so outdated to me. In the 21st century, we still think that some people's life values more than some other people's life.

And it's okay for us to put their life at risk with our foreign policy, with our wrong decisions, with our lack of strategic thinking or lack of sympathetic, empathetic thinking towards others. And I feel very sad for that foreign policy that has been very unkind. Fresh to Kareem in Kabul. It's Consider This from npr i'm adi cornish