Front Burner - 'The war isn’t over': U.S. leaves Afghanistan

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

As U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, the Taliban is gaining ground. Today, former journalist Graeme Smith on what lies ahead: “We’re leaving behind the bloodiest war on the planet.”

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. After 20 bloody years, the U.S. is leaving its longest war. Within a month of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, the U.S., with support from Canada and other NATO allies, invaded Afghanistan. The first strike against terrorism as a missile barrage lands on Afghanistan. We will not falter, and we will not fail.

Peace and freedom will prevail. The goal was to wipe out al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban regime, accused of hiding them. More than 2,000 U.S. troops and 158 Canadian members of the military were killed during the mission. But it has been, of course, Afghans that have borne the brunt of the military were killed during the mission. But it has been, of course,

Afghans that have borne the brunt of the war's casualties. Over 60,000 Afghan security forces are estimated to have been killed. And according to the United Nations, over 100,000 civilians have been killed or injured just since it started rigorously recording civilian casualties in 2009. started rigorously recording civilian casualties in 2009. Late last week, American troops handed over the control of their main military base in Afghanistan to the Afghan army. And while the plan has been to fully withdraw by September 11th of this year, U.S. President Joe Biden said yesterday that they'll be out even sooner. This exit, it comes as part of an agreement signed by the U.S. This exit, it comes as part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and the Taliban in early 2020. But the attempts at forging actual peace between the Afghan government and the Taliban since then remain fragile, and violence still rocks the country.

Today, the legacy of the 20-year war and what it means for Afghanistan's future. Graham Smith is here with me. He's covered Canada's role in the war from Kandahar for many years as a journalist, and more recently, he acted as a consultant on the peace process. He's the best-selling author of The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, Our War in Afghanistan. And Graham was recently back in the country, working on an upcoming documentary for TVO called Ghosts of Afghanistan. Hey, Graham, thanks so much for making the time today. Thanks for getting in touch.

So I was hoping we could start with the American military's exit from the Bagram airfield, a key base in the country last week. And so U.S. forces left in the dead of the night without notifying the Afghan military first. The new Afghan commander of the base only found out that Americans had left several hours after their 3 a.m. departure. After we received some rumor that the Americans left the background, we increased our intelligence report. intelligence report and finally by seven by seven o'clock morning we understood that it was confirmed that they are already left the background. What did you think when you heard that this was how the U.S. was making its exit? The Pentagon has now denied that they just turned off the lights in

the middle of the night and snuck away without telling their Afghan partners. They claim they did a walk through the base with Afghan counterparts before they left. But the point is that in Bagram and generally across Afghanistan, the Americans have been leaving very quickly with a real emphasis on keeping their own forces safe and doing everything as smoothly as possible for the Americans, and not necessarily for their Afghan allies. And, you know, it's been tough, and it's been very abrupt for Afghan government forces. I saw one senior Afghan official tell The Guardian that many saw this move as emblematic of how the U.S. is handling their departure.

I'll quote him here. People are saying the Americans didn't ask the Afghans about coming here and they didn't consult the Afghans about leaving. That's correct, yeah. And I think the way the Biden administration has chosen to leave, setting a sort of a symbolic exit date of September the 11th, 20 years after the start of the war. It shows the Americans intend to carve their own path both in and out of South Asia. There had been hopes that the American exit could be bundled, could be hopes that the American exit could be bundled, could be a part of a package deal that would include peace in Afghanistan. And, you know, there have been and there still are ongoing diplomatic

efforts to end the war. But this piece of it, the American troops leaving, Biden decided to go his own way. I'd like to get into those ongoing diplomatic efforts a little bit later in the conversation. But first, you know, right now, there are reports of growing violence in Afghanistan, and the Taliban has been gaining ground. And more than 1000 Afghan soldiers recently fled into neighboring Tajikistan to save their own lives after clashing with Taliban militants. And what does that tell you about the current stability or, I guess, lack of stability in the country as U.S. troops withdraw? Yeah, palace officials have said that those troops that fled across the Amu Darya River into Tajikistan are going to come back and they will keep fighting the Taliban. the Amu Darya River into Tajikistan are going to come back and they will keep fighting the Taliban.

But yeah, it's clear that in some of these far-flung outposts, the Afghan government is having a hard time holding the line. This morning, the Taliban was boasting of having captured 162 of Afghanistan's 400-some districts in recent weeks. I checked that with a Western official in Kabul in the last hour who said, well, it's probably more like 160. But still, it's an impressive number. The Taliban really are advancing very quickly. And the Taliban is pressing on with its territorial campaign, making significant gains.

The armed group now controls almost a third of the country's 400 districts, mainly in the north. Not only me, but all Afghans are worried that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan as U.S. troops leave the country. From the day the issue of the withdrawal of foreign troops arose, it has had a negative impact on the daily work of people. Afghan security forces are currently in control of what used to be, until a few days ago, the biggest U.S. military base in the country.

The Americans vacated the premises, and now there are fears the Afghan military will collapse once foreign troops complete their withdrawal by September. I know that you were actually in the U.S. shortly after 9-11. You went to cover the plane that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania. And what dark signs of what was to come did you encounter on that trip? Yeah, I was standing in the Globe and Mail newsroom when the planes hit the towers. And pretty soon the news editors sent me down to cover the fourth crash site in Pennsylvania. my car and and the guy who was pumping gas for me uh was standing under the clear blue sky because there were absolutely no no planes in the sky and he looked at me and said yep we gonna kill some and i was i was shocked and i i but he turned out to be right you know there was a kind of visceral American need for retaliation at that time after 9-11.

And unfortunately, that's how it played out in Afghanistan. A lot of people were killed. Nobody really knows the number, but best estimates are somewhere in the order of 200,000 Afghans have lost their lives so far. And the war isn't over, even though we're leaving. When you look back to when this war started, did you think that this is where things would stand 20 years later, with the U.S. formally pulling out, with the Taliban gaining ground, with this violence on the rise? You know, when I wrote my book about Afghanistan, it was published in Canada in 2013, but I guess I wrote the first drafts in 2009. The first four words of the book are, we lost the war. I mean, it was clear to

pretty much everybody on the ground that the, you know, campaign to establish a Western style democracy at gunpoint just wasn't working. And so, you know, there have been people like me who spent many, many years trying to argue that we need to have a negotiated solution. There needs to be a settlement with the Taliban that brings the Taliban into the governing structure in Kabul in a peaceful way, you know, that we could do this through diplomacy. And those efforts are not over. But, you know, clearly what is over is this idea of forcing Afghanistan to accept the kind of governance that we, the West, wanted for it. Do you think there's been any successes? Yeah, of course. I mean, today there are more than twice as many Afghans living in Afghanistan as there were under the Taliban regime in the 1990s.

You know, it was a population of only 16 million or so, and now it's 38 million. Of those, you know, 38 million, there are millions of boys and girls in school who, you know, weren't being educated under the Taliban. There is more electricity. Today I was talking to a friend in Kabul and he said there's still blackouts as electricity pylons get blown up north of the city. But anyways, there's more electricity than there was before. There's more telecommunications. You can get pretty reasonable 3G internet access.

I can FaceTime my friends in Kabul. So things really have changed. It's just, you know, we're leaving behind the bloodiest war on the planet Earth. More people are killed annually in Afghanistan than all the Middle Eastern wars combined. It's more than Syria. It's more than Yemen. It's more than Iraq, it's more than all of those other wars put together. And so we are really walking away from a bloody inferno. In Nangarhar province, peace is particularly elusive. There are many Taliban and ISIL fighters. They fight each other and they fight the government.

From April to June, 160 civilians were killed in Nangarhar and nearly 500 wounded. Most of those casualties were no accident. I know you lived in Afghanistan. You have lots of Afghan friends, colleagues, contacts. And I wonder if you could give me a sense of the magnitude of the impact this war has had on some of them. I mean, just like everybody else who spent years in Afghanistan, I've had friends killed and kidnapped. Actually, just this week I was trying to help a friend

whose guard had a cute little boy who was kidnapped, probably a commercial kidnapping. There's a lot of people desperate for money these days in Afghanistan. You know, it's hurt everybody, and nobody has escaped unscathed. I've been bombed and shot at and rocketed and mortared and RPG'd in a convoy I was in. I was hit by a suicide bomber, and I was chased through the streets. And honestly, I feel lucky.

I feel like I got off really easy compared to a lot of my friends who've really, you know, they've suffered. They've lost people who are close to them. My name is Junior and I was working for the Canadian forces at Kandahar PRT for about seven years where I lost my both legs below the knee in an operation in Panjwai district. And what he means by operation is not a medical operation, but a military operation. Actually, it was a combat mission. We were fighting with the insurgents while they shot an RPG at the vehicle that I was in and then unfortunately hit my legs. Fortunately, it didn't hit my head.

Is there a story or two that really stands out to you? I mean, honestly, every day is a new story. An hour ago, I was on the phone with a friend in Kabul who was trying to find a way out of Afghanistan. And I get those calls a lot. People are really desperate to leave. Not everybody. When I'm in Doha and I'm talking to the Taliban, some of them are desperate to get back. Some of them haven't seen Afghanistan in years because they were chased away by the arrival of international forces. And they still dream, literally dream. They tell me that in their dreams they see their country and they want to go home. But especially in urban Afghanistan, the sort of English-speaking professionals that I've gotten to know over the last, well, gosh, it's been a long time now, more than 15 years, those people, a lot of them want to leave. We are very worried about a possible return of the Taliban, so we want to leave the country

before the situation gets worse. Most districts have fallen. There's not a single district without fighting. They've even reached the chief of police's office and provincial capitals. I've come here to get my passport and get out of Afghanistan. It's not safe here. 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I realize today we're talking in terms of the U.S. leaving Afghanistan,

but one thing I did want to ask you is, you hear Biden talk about how he's ending this forever war. Today we have service members serving in the same war zone as their parents did. We have service members in Afghanistan who are not yet born on 9-11. And after 20 years of value, valor, and sacrifice, it's time to bring those troops home. But I guess one thing I do wonder about it is like to what degree is that really the case? Like, is the US really leaving this war? What's going to happen now? I mean, I wish I knew. I'm professionally, you know, an analyst of Afghanistan. And being an analyst was terribly easy for so many years, because people would ask you, what's going to happen next? And you say, well, probably it's going to be 15 to 20% more violence next year. Probably the Taliban will

have a few more districts. And that sort of slow grinding, incrementally rising warfare was really easy to sort of chart. Mapping the trajectory of it was really simple, depressingly simple. And now with the onset of the peace process and the American departure, the scenarios are wide open. I mean, I get paid to write scenarios and the breadth of the scenarios is kind of mind boggling. I mean, there's a whole range of things that could happen next. I think in the short term, over the summer, you're likely to continue to see some pretty brutal fighting the departure of the Americans has reset the battlefield in some ways and the Taliban are testing to see how far they can push they have taken a fair bit of territory even just in the

last several weeks I think it's going to get harder for the Taliban to take more significant territory, but you will see probably pretty significant battles ahead. After the Taliban are sure that the Americans are fully departed in September, October, I would expect to see, you know, some real violence on the battlefield. I'm afraid we haven't seen anything yet. There hasn't been a major fight over a major city, for example, and that's something that we will see. Do you think it's possible that the Taliban could take back the country? You know, it's funny.

I've been sort of just reading the New York Times or reading the media coverage. You get this impression that the Taliban are going to militarily take over the entire country. You know, that's in the list of scenarios, but I have to say it's probably not in the top 10. I, you know, Western analysts like myself have a really poor track record of predicting the future in Afghanistan. So take whatever I say with a grain of salt. But, you know, the enemies of the Taliban in the last two decades of our presence in Afghanistan, have become heavily armed billionaires. You know, these are people who got wealthy from military contracts, from drug smuggling.

They have tens of thousands of armed men. Even leaving aside the very well-trained Afghan special forces, you know, there's just a lot of people who don't like the Taliban who have a lot of guns. Afghan special forces, you know, there's just a lot of people who don't like the Taliban who have a lot of guns. And so I have a hard time imagining a straightforward Taliban takeover. And I have to say that the Taliban's own political analysts, at least the ones that I've spoken to, don't expect this to be a straight up military victory. They think that they are going to assert themselves on the battlefields and take some territory and then negotiate. And in fact, they have reopened

negotiations very quietly in Doha, even as this military offensive has been ongoing. Can you tell me a little bit more about these negotiations? I know you have been part of them. you tell me a little bit more about these negotiations? I know you have been part of them. Yeah, I'm a freelance consultant, but I've been working with a Norwegian foundation called NORAF and also working with a UK-based think tank called ODI. So I've been spending a lot of time in Doha over the last year or so and trying to help out on the sidelines of the peace talks. It's difficult. The two sides of the negotiations, the republic, which includes both the Afghan government and the political opposition in Kabul, and the Taliban, they both decided to talk without

anyone else in the room, without mediators or facilitators or any of the sort of stuff that you normally see in peace talks. And so there are a small number of foreign diplomats and people like me sitting around on the sidelines trying to make ourselves useful. The talks have been progressing slowly, but peace talks normally do progress slowly. I mean, some of the fastest peace negotiations in the world have still taken years. And actually, the two sides have started to sort of shape some common understandings of what they want to talk about and how they want to talk about it. of what they want to talk about and how they want to talk about it. Obviously, no peace has resulted yet, but that's not always the first thing that happens in peace negotiations.

And do you think the U.S. leaving, does it help this peace process or does it ultimately hurt it? You know, I sometimes say that asking for a full-fledged peace process in Afghanistan is like asking for a birthday cake. And, you know, what Biden did was kind of hit us over the head with a bag of flour. It's like, okay, yeah, that's an ingredient of a birthday cake. But it's not, it's not a peace process. Now, can we take what we've been given and still mix the ingredients together and get a peace process? Yeah, probably. But the abrupt U.S. departure certainly complicates diplomatic efforts. And it's not, you know, there are lots of other things that Biden could have decided that would have been made things even more difficult. So I think from the from a kind of a keeping peace talks alive point of view, it's maybe not the end of the world. difficult though i have to say i mean i i i think everyone expected the afghan security forces to hold the line a little better than they did in recent weeks so while the battlefield is so dynamic um it makes it very difficult for people in doha to reach any sort of understanding because

when things are so fast moving with the military situation, translating the military situation into sort of a political understanding is quite hard. We talked earlier about all your friends and your contacts in Afghanistan. And finally, before we say goodbye today, I wonder what you're hearing from them on this front, what they're reflecting on as they reach this chapter in this 20-year war. Well, you know, this is just a new chapter. The war is not over. The United States and its allies continue to give one side of the war six to seven billion dollars a year for its security forces. And you'll probably continue to see a small number of airstrikes. And, you

know, it's the war has entered a new phase, but it is definitely not over. And so what I, you know, I think there's worry that the world would turn its back, to be honest. I'm really happy that you called today because it means you're still interested. And I hope that, you know, in the coming years, because it will take years, you continue to cover Afghanistan and ask, you know, whether or not we've made peace yet

and what Canada and other Western governments can do to support that process. Because, yeah, the real risk is that the country continues to burn, but just with nobody looking. All right. All right, Graham, thank you for this. We're really, really appreciative. Thank you. All right, so before we go today, Reuters has learned that Canada is planning to take in hundreds of Afghan interpreters and staff at the Canadian embassy, as well as their families, as soon as possible, as many of them fear retribution from the Taliban after working with Western countries.

Human Rights Watch has previously called on all countries involved in Afghanistan to urgently accelerate programs to resettle former Afghan interpreters and other employees, saying they face danger because of their work with foreign forces. That is all for this week. FrontBurner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcast. The show is produced this week by Elaine Chao, Imogen Burchard, Shannon Higgins, Allie Janes, Jeremy Allingham, and Sundas Noor. Actually, Shannon is leaving us very sadly for a year of maternity leave, and we're going to miss her very, very much, but we are so,

so happy for her and wish her a wonderful, wonderful year and many congratulations. Our sound design was by Derek Vanderwyk and Mackenzie Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Chavison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Front Burner is Nick McKay-Blocos, and I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thank you so much for listening, and we will talk to you next week. We'll talk to you next week.