Dan Snow's History Hit - Al Qaeda

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Their attacks of 11 September 2001 sparked a War on Terror which echoes loudly to this day, but where did Al Qaeda come from, how did their ideologies form and what role do they play in the world today? For this episode of the Warfare podcast, James spoke to Dr Afzal Ashraf, an expert in Al Qaeda's ideology and violent religious extremism. Dr Ashraf spent over 30 years in the UK Armed Forces as a senior officer and is a Senior Government Advisor. 

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. I am back on dry land. I was on a ship down in Cornwall for the last couple of days. It was a great experience making a program on Trafalgar. You'll be seeing it on historyit.tv coming soon. But this episode of the podcast has nothing to do with that. I'm back on dry land, I'm warm. I'm warming up my toes. Warmth is slowly trickling back to my extremities. It's that time of year again, folks. Winter is coming. Anyway, this episode of the podcast is actually one in which we feature one of our sibling podcasts. We have our own network of podcasts here at Team History here, which millions of you are listening to. So thank you very much. Can't believe it. We're building quite a big thing here. This is

Warfare with James Rogers. He talks to Dr. Afzal Ashraf. He's an expert in Al-Qaeda's ideology and violent religious extremism. This is all about the history of al-Qaeda, the organization that people are talking about once more following the fall of Kabul to their former allies in the Taliban. Will we be hearing more from al-Qaeda in the years to come? Well, Dr. Ashraf is going to tell us. Fascinating stuff. If you like these other podcasts, please go and check them out. Check Warfare, wherever you get your pods. Don't forget to go to historyhit.tv get 30 days free if you sign up today historyhit.tv last week was our record week this week's looking pretty good too

it's exciting stuff everyone and we have got big plans which you're going to be hearing about quite soon which is going to be fun in the meantime folks here's dr ashraf enjoy meantime, folks, here's Dr. Ashraf. Enjoy. Hi, Afi. Welcome to the History Hit Warfare podcast. How are you doing today? I'm fine, thank you, James. Lovely to see you. Yeah, great to see you again. Great to talk. I think the last time I saw you is when we were in Denmark at a military transformations conference. And I think I was giving a lecture on drones and spying drones, and then one ominously appeared outside the window. Yes, I remember that well. I'm pretty convinced you set that one up. Yes, that was very interesting. I wish I had. That would have been cool. It would have been a little bit of showmanship

of having some, I don't know, Russian or Chinese spying drone flying out the window watching us. But, I mean, we're not that secret and we're not that spooky. So I'm sure it was just somebody, I don't know, doing some architecture or some surveying. Now, we're not here to talk about drones. Well, not directly today, I suppose. We're here to talk about Al-Qaeda, your specialist topic. So can you give us a little history of Al-Qaeda, your specialist topic. So can you give us a little history of Al-Qaeda? Because of course, when we think about them, we think about those who perpetrated the attacks of 9-11 in 2001,

20 years ago. And of course, we think about the war on terror against them after that seminal, pivotal moment in time. But where does Al-Qaeda emerge from? Well, Al-Qaeda emerges really in the sense that we know it in the late 90s, and it emerges for a number of reasons. One is that bin Laden, who had disappeared back to Saudi Arabia after the war in Afghanistan, started to misbehave, according to the king, because he wasn't very happy with the way the first Gulf War was being fought, supported by the king of Saudi Arabia.

And really, he was indirectly paying and supporting the American-led coalition. And he warned at the outset of the war that the Americans, the West in general, will use this as an excuse to occupy Muslim lands and will use as a pretext to steal what he described as Muslim wealth. And two and a half years after the Americans evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, exactly what bin Laden had predicted happened, or it seemed to have happened. One thing was that the massive base in Tehran that the Americans had created was actually being expanded. Another thing was that the Saudis went through a virtual bankruptcy because in the words of Secretary of State Baker, the Saudis paid for the war and some.

And so what you had was what by Western standards standards, is a mild form of austerity. But that resulted in a very mild form of protest by Western standards. But that was still too much for the Saudis. And they clamped down and they actually imprisoned a lot of the religious clerics who were leading the sort of protest. And this was not demonstrations like we know them, but just, you know, speeches and maybe the odd sermon saying, look, you know, we need to look after the poor in Saudi Arabia and that sort of stuff. And anyhow, this made bin Laden very angry. He wrote a very rude letter to the king. And the king decided that because he was the son of a very well-respected

family man, his father, they would just ask him to leave the country rather than be punished appropriately. So he went into exile in Sudan. And in Sudan, whilst he was there, Bill Clinton authorized several attacks on the country, one of which was against that very dangerous target, a milk processing factory. It was a powder milk for children factory, which was allegedly supposed to be a chemical weapons factory. It was a powder milk for children factory, which was allegedly supposed to be a chemical weapons plant. And of course, it wasn't in reality. The Sudanese government got the message. They asked bin Laden to disappear. And the only place he could go was Afghanistan, where he was given political asylum. And I think that term is really

important to understand. Not many Westerners do. The idea of asylum is a very important idea in Pashtun Wali, the ancient code that the Pashtuns and most of the time in those days, late 90s, going across the border to Pakistan and places like that. And it was there that he had this conference of like-minded individuals, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and a political construct and not primarily a theological construct, which is and declared war on the West. Now, the objective of doing that was, as Bin Laden later explained, and this is really key to understand, the objective of doing that was a realisation amongst these various extremist groups spread across North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, that their attempts to get rid of what they saw as oppressive and unjust governments was failing. Now, there's a very good reason for this oppression and this injustice, and it's all to do with the Cold War. But there was this very widespread belief in oppression and injustice by the so-called Muslim governments. And that was partly because, or very largely because, they were working for one of the superpowers, primarily the West. And they had failed to remove them. And bin Laden very

intelligently, if you like, not intelligently enough, but intelligently, reasoned that the reason they were failing to replace these people was because they were being propped up by the West. And so he said these so-called Islamic governments or Muslim governments, which are not Islamic in his understanding of the term, this near enemy, as you described them, these so-called Islamic governments, can only be changed if their supporters, the far enemy, the US primarily, is coerced into leaving these Muslim countries. And he further reasoned that if you look at what happened in Somalia, in Beirut, and indeed in Vietnam before that. Every time the Americans are attacked, they run away. That was his reasoning. So this sparked off a series of high-profile attacks against American

interests. The first was the twin embassy bombings in East Africa, where, again, a lot of people don't appreciate this, particularly in Uganda. The embassy was the CIA's regional hub of operations in that area, some of which had been directed against the al-Qaeda organization or members of that organization. And the SS Cole, the U.S. Navy ship Cole, which was attacked by a suicide bomb attack resulting in 17 deaths of sailors. And that was in 2000. And ultimately, in 2001, as we know, 9-11. So these increasingly spectacular attacks. So the aim here then, Afi, was very much a political one. It was one to drive the US

out of these regions to reduce their areas of control and to allow for more of a Islamic self-governance in those regions that isn't dominated by Western politics and perhaps the forces of global capitalism, I guess, as well as that's the victory at the end of the Cold War. This is fascinating to me because they turn towards this idea that's very popular at that period of time, the idea that we have the time and you have the watches. The idea that the US and the West can't sustain in areas for very long when the casualties start to mount. It's something that Saddam Hussein had betted on himself. He said that America is a country that can't handle 10,000 deaths in one battle, and this will be the mother of all battles. Now, it didn't work

for him when it came down to the first Gulf War. So how much was this working for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden after their initial attacks before 9-11? Well, that's a very interesting point you make. And there's many things around what you've said that really deserve a great deal more thought than we have time to consider. But you're really pointing to conceptions and how people see themselves in each other. was that they had failed to understand that Vietnam, the situation in Somalia and Beirut, were fundamentally different for the Americans. They were wars of choice. And Western liberal democracies have used more violence in the history of mankind than any other type of system when they are directly

attacked. So those are wars of necessity. So when, of course, the analogy that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein failed to understand was the analogy of Pearl Harbor and the analogy of other instances in the First and Second World War when Western liberal democracies have killed more foreigners than their own people. And that's a very uncomfortable truth for the Westerners, let alone for people like bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The other thing I think is worth just at the risk of picking holes, but it is important to remember this idea of you have the time and we have the watches is not an Islamist idea. It is very much a Pashtun

idea. And that is informed, as in most cases, and what we're really jumping into now is what I would describe as security culture. And security culture, military culture, is particular to different nations, different peoples, and it's informed by history. And so this idea of watches and time is informed by Afghan history, which goes back. And indeed, I can give you a wonderful quote from Alexander the Great. I'm not quoting verbatim. These are unruly people that you can suppress for a short time, but you can never defeat, is essentially what he was saying. But of course, the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century, and then of course, in the 20th century, have reinforced this cultural belief. So I think it's important to not attribute this claim to

al-Qaeda. I've never come across it being made by al-Qaeda, certainly not during the time of bin Laden when I was reading everything he said and Imran Zawahiri said. There were similar claims, I think, made or analogies at least by Ho Chi Minh in the Vietnam War as well. The idea that, you know, there is time in America. Well, it doesn't have the time on its side and can't handle those costs. But how does this work into 9-11 then? Because that isn't an attack that's in Sudan or in Kenya, in Tanzania. It's not in a part of the world where the US is projecting its power. This is downtown New York City. This is the Pentagon in the heart of Washington DC. This is also aiming potentially, so we're told, for attacks on the White House as well. What is the aim behind this attack if it isn't about stirring the hornet's nest?

Well, I think the aim was not to stir the hornet's nest. And this is where, if you like, the miscalculations that Al-Qaeda made come to the fore. where, if you like, the miscalculations that al-Qaeda made come to the fore. The aim was to frighten the Americans into thinking, wow, I mean, there was just before 9-11, just step back a little bit. In the years immediately before, about five years before, there was a concept that people have forgotten that was doing the rounds in terrorism and even indeed in the wider international relations community. And that was a concept of super terrorism. So there were attacks, highly spectacular attacks, Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma. You had the Omshiriko attack, the Sarin gas attack in Tokyo, and indeed the Twin Embassy bombings in

1998, I think it was, or 1999. Those attacks came fairly close to each other from very diverse locations and very diverse locations, very diverse motivations. And people were trying to make sense of this trend. In fact, I was commissioned by PGAQ, the Permanent Joint Headquarters, to write my master's dissertation on the idea of superterrorism. because there is no ideology associated with terrorism, is a tactic. What we're seeing is a very important feature of terrorism of any kind. Terror is intended to terrorize the target audience and to frighten them to the extent that they can be coerced. Now, this fear thing is a bit like adrenaline, if you like. You know, the adrenaline junkies, they have to push the threshold further and further to get the same level of fix. Well, in order for terrorism to grab people's attention, which is really what it was supposed

to do, and to give them sufficient fear and to act as a coercive capability, you needed to keep upping the ante, the simultaneous attacks and twin embassy bombings, the attack on a warship which kills people and which was supposed to sink the ship and failed to do so, but also this almost freeing of the imagination. And again, I can't remember the exact quote from Conrad's book, The Secret Agent, but I think he uses this almost 100 years earlier, something along the lines of an act so unimaginably horrific that it stuns the audience. And those aren't the words that Conrad uses, but it is this idea of unimaginable horror, which we see culminating in the hundred years or so

in terrorism as a tactic used by all sorts of people across the world for all sorts of purposes that we see coming together in 9-11. But the one really important thing about 9-11 is this amazingly impressive, and if I might use that term without glorifying it, impressive freeing of the imagination. And of course, it wasn't completely radical. As you know, in the mid-90s, it was an attempt to blow up the Twin Towers by very conventional means, which was bombs in the foundations.

And of course, that didn't do the business. And so they thought very differently. But what they realized was that, yes, you could do the Twin Towers, but why not do something else as well, which was, of course, the Pentagon? Why not do the White House? else as well, which was, of course, the Pentagon. Why not do the White House? I mean, the symbology of all three of those targets had been hit and successfully hit would have been even greater than what actually occurred in 9-11. So I hope that sort of explains it. It really does. And I suppose it's actually quite tactically sophisticated when you think about it,

because not only is it an achievement, if we say that in imagination, but they also realize that you get one shot at this because you're not going to have multiple attempts after this to then hijack more planes and take down targets. This has to be a simultaneous surprise attack on the US homeland, something that history has shown that the US is incredibly vulnerable to. Go back to Roberta Wohlstatter, look at her work on Pearl Harbour, say how that this is something that the US is repeatedly vulnerable to because we don't expect that the great superpower is going to be able to be attacked by anyone lesser than them. Now, there is a stirring of the hornet's nest. There are calls for revenge after this point,

of the hornet's nest. There are calls for revenge after this point, and there has to be retribution. The world comes together. Everyone is American today, as was the adage that went around. What happens immediately to al-Qaeda after this point? We have the war in Afghanistan that starts on October 7th. That's when the first drone strikes start to go in. Is this when we start to see al-Qaeda being targeted incredibly seriously? And do they go underground or are they prepared to fight? Okay, so I think there is a great danger in all of this to see al-Qaeda as being an instrumental organisation in its own right. Al-Qaeda is the product of geopolitics, and everything that has happened to it, and indeed it has done itself, has been for geopolitical reasons. And so one of the things that happens, which is of significance, and again, that has

been sort of conveniently forgotten in history. There are two things, in fact. One is a very significant account as one of George Bush's national security advisors, who says that he went into President Bush's office the next day and he was told by Bush, give me the link with Iraq. And he said, well, I can't, there isn't one. And the response was, I want the link with Saddam Hussein. And he said, sir, there isn't one. And the point was made again that the president wanted to see the link between what happened on 9-11 and Iraq. And what that tells us is essentially that George Bush wasn't as interested in dealing with al-Qaeda,

who had perpetrated this horrible deed, as he was in perpetuating his own foreign policy and global political agendas, whatever they may be. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll talk about Al-Qaeda. More coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. so this was the politics of convenience at this time as well if you're going to have a global war on terror then let's enshrine this in if i remember correctly the axis of evil which is gonna include saddam hussein and what is that all Afi? Is that as a leftover from the first Gulf War, the fact that George Bush Jr.'s father is thrown out of office after one term? He doesn't win election. I think he must be the only US president in history that doesn't win re-election after winning a war. And I think there's also rumours that Saddam had tried to get George Bush Senior assassinated as well. Is this personal politics that's going on here? Well, that's a very good question. And I'm not sure that I'm qualified to answer it. I think

in all of these situations, there isn't one simple answer. There may well be an issue of personal politics. But knowing what little I know about the influences in George Bush Jr.'s government, the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and all those what are commonly called the neocons, he was being run to a large extent by various agendas. And those agendas were partly ideological and very significantly commercial. So you've got this idea of the military-industrial complex, which is, again, an American government, if you like, idea that I think takes on a new form. It's a new military-industrial concept that is taking hold of foreign policy at this stage. But the

other thing that I wanted to sort of mention, the second thing that is conveniently forgotten, and it goes back to my point earlier about the idea of political asylum in Pashtunwali, the Taliban government in Kabul at the time had agreed in principle to consider releasing bin Laden to a place of safety. So there is no evidence anywhere that I've come across to suggest that Mullah Omar, who was the head of the government nominally, was at all aware, or indeed any member of the Taliban government, were aware that 9-11 was being planned, let alone being party to it. So they were willing to do what is conventional in those terms, that is to release him to a place of safety. Now, if that sounds like a bit foreign and unacceptable

to the West, then let's just think about what the UK does to terrorists that we have in our custody. Even if they're guilty of terrorism, we will not release them to a country where there is a danger of them being tortured or capital punishment. So we have our own ethical standards, which we do not compromise. compromised. So this is where, if the purpose was to prevent Afghanistan being, if you like, a base or a launchpad for international terrorism, this could have been very easily resolved in doing that rather than what we have seen happen in the last 20 years. So what happens to al-Qaeda, coming back to your main question, is that by attacking Afghanistan, and that, if you go back and deal with it in a little more detail, which we haven't got time for, is just basically an attempt to show the world that we're doing something in Afghanistan so that it paves the way for real

interest, and that is to attack and occupy Iraq. And that process is, as you will recall, B-52s used to carpet bomb Tora Bora, the mountain range where bin Laden was holed up. And according to bin Laden's claim, we had only 6% casualties. But even if he's exaggerating by 100%, it's only 12% casualties. by 100%, it's only 12% casualties. There was certainly a lot of al-Qaeda people who saw the 40-something-odd Americans watch them walk down the mountain. And those Americans were primarily CIA and special forces. And bin Laden boasts that you didn't dare attack us because they were outnumbered. Now, the point is that with the Americans and indeed NATO forces, including the Germans, who have some of the best mountain troops anywhere in the world,

they could have within 24 hours managed to get an elite troop of people parachuted in or taken in by helicopter to give bin Laden and his supporters and his disciples a welcome as they came down to the bottom of the mountain. But no such thing was done. And they were allowed to melt away. Some of them remained in Afghanistan and were captured, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and then released. And then others went off to Pakistan, including bin Laden and his deputy. And then others went off to Pakistan, including bin Laden and his deputy. So what then happens, of course, is that al-Qaeda effectively goes underground. And in 2003, in the early months of 2003, bin Laden recognizes that he becomes fairly incidental to world events. that he becomes fairly incidental to world events.

Al-Qaeda hasn't done anything, not even close to 9-11, let alone a modest terrorist attack. And so on Valentine's Day of 2003, I remember it well, he wrote a speech which basically said that it would be perfectly fine for Islamists to work in an alliance with the ungodly Ba'athists against the West. So it's his desperate attempt to go with this ungodly, secular, fascist sort of regime, which he despised, but work alongside them to fight the West. And that was his attempt to make al-Qaeda relevant to this focus of international affairs, which was the war in Iraq that was about to unfold in the days after his speech. And it was pretty obvious to everybody what's going to happen there. So that's what gives him slowly a degree of legitimacy. But even then, nothing really happens until about 2004.

Now, at the beginning of 2004, we see the emergence of this man, Zarqawi. You might remember him. He was Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, who, even by bin Laden's standards, even by al-Qaeda's standard, he was known as a thug and a brutal individual. And he had, in the early months of that year and before, perfected the genre of beShia. And when Abu Mas'ab al-Zarqawi wrote in October of 2004 to bin Laden asking to be a member of al-Qaeda, I was in Baghdad at the time, I remember talking to my American general and saying, this is really fascinating because bin Laden now has a choice that in some ways Hitler faced, and that was opening up the ideological equivalent of the Western Front, because he knows that not only will his public relations suffer because

of this brutality of this man, but also he knows that he will be opening up a war against the Shia, which he can't afford to do because he wants to fight the West. But the choice he has is either to accept Zarqawi or to remain irrelevant to world events. And so it takes until December of 2004 for bin Laden to reluctantly accept him as a member, because otherwise he continues to be irrelevant. And that's when we get a focus of al-Qaeda, if you like, labeled attacks, not, of course, just in Iraq, but then you get these franchises, as some people have described them, or affiliates and other organizations. You get AQIM, that's the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib, you get al-Qaeda

in Yemen, and then you eventually get the development of al-Shabaab, and then Boko Haram and other organizations erupting slowly across the globe to do their stuff. But you also get, as a direct consequence of the coverage of the war in Iraq, much more so than what happens in Afghanistan, certainly in the first few years, you get this locally inspired attacks, the sort of attacks we see in Madrid, the Madrid railway attack, and then subsequently we get 7-7 and other attacks in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. And of course, at this stage, and we're talking about 2005, 6, and maybe even 7, the Americans are very curious about this domestic threat, a homegrown threat. Why? I mean, I was involved in a conference from an elite group of American civil servants, for want of a better word,

who wanted to study, wanted my help to talk to people who could help them understand why we have this homegrown terrorism issue, and they don't. Of course, we know things have changed quite considerably since then. So that is what's happening to al-Qaeda. It can't directly, after 9-11, plan centrally. Even then, I'm not sure it planned 9-11 centrally. It was done by one of its major members, but not necessarily in Afghanistan, somewhere else. But it is no longer able to mastermind events, but it is able to inspire events, including domestic terrorism. And then you get this mushrooming of propaganda. Again, people get mesmerized by social media, which has been really well exploited by ISIS.

the trend and was very successful, extremely successful in getting its messages out on the internet through some very clever means on websites and so on that could be mirrored within milliseconds into tens of thousands across the world. And there was a whack-a-moe type of affair with the NSA, GCHQ, trying to suppress it. But we never really, as far as I'm aware, succeeded in preventing them to getting their message out, which they inevitably did. So in a nutshell, this is how we see it developing. And this is very much something that is a theme that continues around the world today. It's not like al-Qaeda has disappeared in any way, shape or form. So many of these groups are still active and still working hard to derail the Western presence in parts of the Middle East and across

the African continent, including in places like Mali, for example. But it's here that you also get the merging together of unhappy bedfellows of convenience. So you see as ISIS was defeated, and I'm not sure how you would fit ISIS into this, maybe as another splinter group of franchisees who now, or at least until recently, were working together with elements of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to try and defeat Western presence. And that may have splintered and split and terrorist groups quite often splinter and form new fractious groups once they disagree on things. But well, maybe tell us a little bit about how we fit ISIS into this, perhaps. But also, what are the next steps for al-Qaeda? Where do we stand in terms of the future as we withdraw from Afghanistan, and as that debacle continues with horrendous

scenes, are we going to see the re-emergence of groups like ISIS, like Islamic State, and like al-Qaeda back into a safe haven that could be Afghanistan? There's a lot you've asked there. I think to help stop it being too confusing, I think it's important to go back to basics and understand the things that have driven Al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on. At the ideological level, it has been the common objective of getting rid of what are perceived injustices. And I use the word perceived, but in reality, they're real injustices. If you look at any state that is run by the majority Muslim government, they are to varying degrees corrupt, inept, and repressive. So you've got these real life injustices. And the other thing we need to remember is that in almost every case,

there is an example of exploitation by the West of religious, if you like, extremism for geopolitical purposes. And I can give you examples in the case of the Mujahideen in the 1980s and so on, which led to the Taliban and of course, Al-Qaeda too. And there are many others. And I think there is considerable indirect evidence to support the view that Western proxies were funding and supporting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. There's quite a lot I can go through. So those are the sort of things that have perpetuated these organizations. And one of the things that I don't think we fully appreciate, and I just finished in February this year, a study funded by the EU, which involved interviewing ISIS and al-Qaeda prisoners

in jails in Kyrgyzstan. And I mean, one of the amazing things that we were able to achieve in that research was to make this bunch of people who are notoriously difficult to get to talk, but to get them to talk in a way that we couldn't even use half of what they told us. It was just that much information. They just told us a lot of stuff. But the one thing that came out loud and clear in almost all of these 38 cases that we interviewed, virtually, I think, 95% of them, was that they were disillusioned. And they were disillusioned because of the infighting. And the infighting was vicious and bloody between the ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And the infighting within the groups was also vicious and bloody. So the primary commander of the Kyrgyz group, known as Abu Sahla, was, and probably still is the last time I checked, imprisoned by Jabhat al-Nusra, the group he was a commander with. So there is a very destructive element within these groups, self-destructive element, which is very easy to understand if you understand the way

totalitarian ideologies work and how the mixture of totalitarian ideology and religious idealism is a caustic and explosive mixture. The point is this infighting exists. And that is something we need to bear in mind if we are to try to understand what might happen in the future. The other thing that I think we need to remember is that radicalization only takes place after spectacular successes. And we see this with the communists. It wasn't the ideologues, it wasn't Marx that led to radicalization. It was Lenin's spectacular success in the Bolshevik revolution, which incidentally was supported by Germany, the superpower, one of the superpowers at the time who paid for him to go there and run this revolution. Those spectacular successes, 9-11 being one of them, 2014, the ISIS declaration of the caliphate being another. Those spectacular successes is what draws people to these organizations.

Now, the problem now for the radicals is what is the latest spectacular success? Well, undoubtedly, it is the Taliban's spectacular success that almost without bloodshed, they've taken over a country within weeks that the Americans took 10 times longer with huge loss of life to do. But the problem they've got is the Taliban are at least claiming, and by their actions demonstrating so far, that they're very different, that they're not supportive of al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda have both congratulated them, but also made some nasty comments about them. And so there is this degree of ideological shock for the first time in the Islamist extremist history. So 9-11 was a no-brainer for them. They thought, wow,

Baghdadi's declaration of the caliphate 30 miles outside Baghdad. Wow, that's awesome. There's no ambiguity there. This is a success. We need to follow this boy band. They're the best boy band in town. The Taliban have really wrecked this for any self-respecting al-Qaeda or ISIS follower. They've got rid of the Americans, something that al-Qaeda failed to do. They have established an Islamic republic or about to establish one, which none of them have really succeeded in. But then they are a little too compromised. They're talking about women's rights under Sharia and all that sort of stuff. The point is that it's difficult to predict until we know how these people are going to reorganize information in their heads. And they're going to do exactly what the West is doing right now,

what everybody does. They're going to create political myths. They're going to present things in a different fashion. The West has successfully presented this defeat in Afghanistan, this defeat in Afghanistan, not as a geopolitical war, which is what it started off, as a setback in their project to bring about human rights and female emancipation. And one of the things that I'd like to talk to our friend Caroline about is to write a paper on the weaponization of feminism, which is the first time I think it's happened. I give you that as an example of how narratives have already begun to be reinvented so that history can be learned in a particular way, rather than in the way that you and I boringly might try to deal with it in forensic terms. So I'm expecting al-Qaeda, what remains of it,

and indeed ISIS, to try to make sense of this, whatever they do. And I want to just focus for a second on the question that a lot of people have been asking, and that is al-Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan. Now, here, I'm going to stick my neck out a bit, which is always a dangerous thing in terms of predicting the future. I think that unless something radical happens in the next few weeks, in terms of what the Taliban do, if they have an internal coup, for example, if that doesn't happen, then there is going to be a very bloody and highly effective conflict between the Taliban and these foreign groups, ISIS and al-Qaeda. And the Taliban will be far more successful in dealing with them than the coalition, the American-led coalition and the Afghan government were over the last 20 years. And there's a whole number of reasons for that. One is the intrinsic

chauvinism in the Afghan people, but particularly the Pashtun who are primarily the Taliban. They are, above everything else, a chauvinistic people. They're very hospitable and they don't hate foreigners, but they hate the idea of foreigners interfering in their country, just as they don't tend to interfere in other people's countries. So you've got more Pashtuns living in Pakistan than you have in Afghanistan. And whenever they have a tribal fight and they have these horrible vendettas, and I know this from personal friends that I've grown up with generationally, my father was friends with their father and friends with their children are friends and so on. These generational vendettas are never exported.

So if you've got a problem in your tribal homeland and you happen to be in Pakistan, as some of these families are maybe working in the Pakistan government, you slap in a leave pass, you go back into your tribal homeland and kill the people you need to kill. And then you come back out and resume normal life. And that's the way they operate. And these subtleties have just gone over the heads of people who are doing a lot of analysis on Afghanistan. And it's one of the many reasons why the strategy on Afghanistan has been an unmitigated failure by the coalition over the last 20 years is they have failed to understand the political and strategic culture of the Afghan people. And you don't have to have grown up like I have, you know, with these people and understand their culture. You can actually do so as an ordinary Western, as long as you are willing to be open

minded, and indeed, unbiased about things. And this lady, Sarah Chase, who's written this book, Thieves of State, has done exactly that. And she's lived in Afghanistan. And she has told several military commanders, that the reason why the Taliban exist isn't because of religion. It is because the Afghan people, more so than any other people in the world, have an allergy to corruption and oppression. And the reason they came into being was simply because Mullah Umar, a very small-time village Mullah, had enough when he saw not just financial corruption, but sexual exploitation of children by the warlords. And that's conveniently forgotten. And that's one of the reasons why the government has failed, because it has indulged in widespread corruption

for a very long time. And that is why nobody was willing to fight for it, because it was very widespread. Now, I don't mean every single person in the government and every single official was corrupt. No, there were a lot of very decent, honest people who worked genuinely hard. But as a body, as a system, it was corrupt, particularly in policing and justice terms. And that is why the Taliban primarily have a great deal of support. Now, you won't hear this by listening to the news, because all of our correspondents go in to Kabul and talk to those people that have benefited from this system, that have genuinely believed in the system that has led to failure. This is why in the early 2000s, Hamid Karzai was nicknamed the mayor of Kabul.

Ahmed Karzai was nicknamed the mayor of Kabul. They never had a remit across the country. And one of the things that I hope we can do research on, and I hope others will think about this, we need objective research. When we talk about women's rights, which I think is something that we should talk about, we should care about, let's just see to what extent the women's rights were actually delivered in terms of education to the poor people of the villages of Afghanistan. How many of those were living above the of ordinary Afghans, and we know from figures collected since 2009, that at least 111,000 civilians were killed, of which it is safe to assume the 50% were women and girls. So let's say pessimistically, 50,000 women were killed during this 20-year conflict. If I were a father or a brother or an uncle, a husband of any of these women, would I, given the choice of having them alive or being able to go to school, which

would I choose? I would always choose the alive option. You would always choose the alive option. And this is not a choice between good and bad. It's a choice between bad and worse. And what we've delivered is a bad government. Afi, thank you so much for tying all of these threads together and for showing us how, just like in the past, that deep into the future, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban look like they're going to be intertwined deep into the future. Thank you so much. Pleasure. I feel they have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Well, that, folks, was an episode of Warfare with Dr James Rogers. We've extended the remit of Warfare to First and Second World War, but also the great wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So I hope there'll be something in the Warfare feed for you all to enjoy. If you want to subscribe to Warfare, just head over to wherever you get your podcasts, search Warfare, and feel free to give it a rating and a review as well. Thank you. you