Making Sense with Sam Harris - #352 — Hubris & Chaos

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Rory Stewart about the fraying world order. They discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems with nation building, cultural ignorance, tolerance for corruption, our catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the role that Islam played in our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, conspiracy theories, the influence of social media, cults of martyrdom, the war in Ukraine, the age of populism, Trump and the future of NATO, Brexit, the current state of politics, GiveDirectly, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Rory Stewart. Rory has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books. As you'll hear, he spent over a year walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. And he also walked across Afghanistan in 2002 after the fall of the Taliban. He describes that last part of the journey in his book, The Places in Between. And he has also run, however unsuccessfully, for prime minister in the UK. And his latest book,

titled How Not to Be a Politician, describes that. Rory is a former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government for services in Iraq. He now lives in Scotland, and he runs a quite wonderful charity, which is GiveDirectly, which we discuss at the end of this episode. GiveDirectly is one of the favorite charities of GiveWell, which many people consider the most objective evaluator of charities, and it is a charity I support, and I hope you will as well. Rory is a fascinating person, and it is certainly nice to see someone who knows so much about the world running a charity of this kind. Today we speak about the fraying world order. We discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems with nation building,

the problem of our cultural ignorance when trying to build nations, tolerance for corruption, our catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the role that Islam played in our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, conspiracy thinking, the influence of social media, cults of martyrdom, the war in Ukraine, the age of populism, Trump and the future of NATO, Brexit, the current state of politics, and finally the work he is doing at GiveDirectly. Apologies for my voice. I was still fighting a cold or whatever it was, but I am now recovered. And now I bring you Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart. I am here with Rory Stewart. Rory, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me. I am a fan of your work. I remember your, I don't know if it was your first book or not, The Places in Between, but I read that some time ago when it came out. And your new book, some time ago when it came out, and your new book or newish book is How Not to Be a Politician, which covers very different terrain, but is no less interesting. Let's just start with your background here, because it is fascinating and just so unconventional. How would you describe your career so far? And we're going to take it in pieces. I do want to take you back to Afghanistan to start. So yeah, please tell people who you are.

Well, thank you, Sam. So I'm British. I was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. I joined the British Army when I was 18, served very briefly, and then I went to Oxford University. And then I was moved into the British Foreign Service, the equivalent of the State Department. And I served in Indonesia, I served in Yugoslavia, just as the time of the Kosovo War. And then I took two years off to walk across Asia. So I walked across, well, from Turkey across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. I walked for about 21 months. I walked 25, 30 miles a day, stayed in a

different village house every night. So I think I stayed in 550 different village houses on the walk. And then I returned and was posted to Iraq, where I was made the acting governor of a province in southern Iraq after the US invasion. And then I became a professor at Harvard. And then I became a British politician and a cabinet minister. And I ran to be prime minister against Boris Johnson and was defeated. And I now work with a nonprofit called GiveDirectly, and I'm also a professor at Yale. Yeah, as I said, it's a thrilling bio. There are no doubt many adventures lurking under those several sentences. Let's talk about, I'll tell you where I want to take this. I want to talk about the state of our world and the erosion of what, again, I'm going to take this somewhat from an American perspective here, but there seems to be a quickly eroding commitment to maintaining what is often described

as the liberal world order, or the rules-based international order, or the Pax Americana, or whatever you want to call it. You know, for more or less as long as I've been alive, there's been this expectation that America and Britain and other allies will keep the chaos at bay, you know, post-World War II. It's not to say we haven't had significant misadventures, obviously, but there's a new mood in America, and I'm sure there are populist analogs in nuclear-armed Switzerland, which is you just get out of the world's business and leave people to their own devices. And so, you know, you have seen so much of our dashed hopes in foreign lands. I mean, so you have seen what, because many of these lessons for this new kind of realism seem to have been learned in Iraq and Afghanistan

from an American perspective. So I want to talk about how things look in 2024, but perhaps we can start with our failure in Afghanistan and Iraq. What was your view of each of these wars when we went in? And perhaps you can talk about how or whether your view changed, and then take me up to our exit from both of those conflicts. Well, Sam, I guess I'm just a little bit younger than you. We're very similar age, and I've lived through these changes very dramatically. So just to frame it before I get into Iraq and Afghanistan, when I started as a young soldier at the beginning of the 90s, I was very much part of this world after the end of the Cold War. And the 90s and early 2000s felt like a time of real kind of democracies in the world doubles. Every year the world's getting more peaceful. There are fewer refugees. I served in the Balkans just after Bosnia and the Kosovo campaigns. And those interventions seem to be extraordinarily successful in stopping wars,

in bringing war criminals to trial and demobilizing militia. So I came into Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of the 2000s. Yes, I guess because I'd been on the ground in places like Indonesia and in the Balkans, I thought realistic, but not realistic enough. I remember saying to friends before we went into Iraq, yeah, it's sure we're going to create a messy, corrupt, incompetent government, but it's got to be better than Saddam Hussein. I mean, I thought that was setting the bar pretty low. And again, in Afghanistan, it didn't seem to me to be inconceivable that we could create a state that was, or support the creation of a state that was better than what the Taliban had created. So fast forward, I served in Iraq, trying to govern this province. And as you can imagine,

very, very quickly found out how profoundly unpopular our project was. I was in southern Iraq. Just to be clear, Rory, when you say you served in Iraq, this is in a political capacity, not as a soldier, right? Exactly. I was the acting governor of a province, first of 1 million people and then of 2 million people. So Misan and Dikar in the south. And I was the acting governor of a province, first of 1 million people and then of 2 million people. So Misan and Dikar in the south. And I was responsible initially on my own and then with an American boss for holding small district elections, setting up a police force, trying to create employment schemes, building clinics, getting electricity off the ground, trying to mediate between different tribal groups. off the ground, trying to mediate between different tribal groups. And it was a very, honestly, it was a very kind of colonial situation, which had been created by Paul Bremer under George W. Bush, who didn't want to hold elections too soon and thought that

the US and the UK and other allies could basically try to run Iraq. What I discovered, of course, is that Iraqis were grateful that Saddam Hussein had gone and that we'd got rid of Saddam, but were very troubled and upset at the idea of somebody who wasn't a Muslim, wasn't an Iraqi, and was a 30-year-old guy trying to run their affairs. Do you remember what your opinion was of our initial invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11? I mean, just to remind listeners of what I was thinking, going into Afghanistan seemed obviously warranted and even necessary. Obviously, we made some terrible mistakes in how we tried to deal with al-Qaeda initially. And the project of nation building there, which I want to ask you about,

didn't immediately seem as hopeless as it wound up being. Going into Iraq always seemed to me to be a dangerous distraction from the war in Afghanistan. And obviously the connection to 9-11 was tenuous at best. But I certainly shared your view that getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his psychotic sons had to be an intrinsic good that would suggest that almost any change, even with some considerable collateral damage, would be better and better for Iraqis. And of course, in hindsight, it looks like a terrible misadventure. What was your view at the time and how did it evolve? Well, I had, I mean, obviously these things were taking place when I was walking across Asia. So I missed 9-11 entirely. I was in a remote

region of Northern Nepal and I didn't find out about 9-11 until i think the 18th of september when i was arrested and accused of being an al-qaeda activist um so and then i i walked across afghanistan between the end of 2001 so just after 9-11 through to march of 2002 i think the thing that's let's just hover over that for a second. It doesn't... I mean, that's, on paper at least, looks spectacularly dangerous, right? You're this Westerner walking through Taliban country just as we are going over the brink into conflict. What was that like?

And did you perceive it to be dangerous? I mean, it was. It was, of course, quite dangerous. And a lot of Afghan friends tried to deter me from doing it. My sense, though, was that Afghans are, and this turned out to be true, along with all the other things which are negative about Afghanistan, particularly in rural villages, people are incredibly hospitable, honorable, generous, pretty straightforward. And probably I was much safer walking alone as a man than I would have been if I'd been walking in a larger group. I was frequently very grateful that I wasn't carrying a weapon because, again, I had no

opportunity to escalate things when people pulled weapons on me. And truthfully, I walked across Afghanistan and made it across because of the kindness of Afghans who fed me night after night, put me up. And these were people who, many of them were strong Taliban sympathizers. Many of them were very angry with foreigners of all sorts, angry with the Soviet Union because they'd been fighting the Soviet Union during the 80s, angry with the US, angry with Britain, pretty xenophobic. And so I guess I arrived back in Afghanistan, back in Kabul, so in the capital city in March of that year, already a little bit doubtful about the way that the US and its allies were talking about

Afghanistan. I remember coming into a meeting with Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, who were the people who went on to be the presidents of Afghanistan. And for some reason, I still don't understand, Bianca Jagger, who was a sort of UN ambassador. And they said, I think Ashraf produced the line, every Afghan is committed to a gender sensitive, multi-ethnic centralized state based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. And I just remember thinking, I literally cannot translate this into Dari. I don't know how I would explain this to anybody I stayed with. And yet, literally $3 trillion was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan propagating these kind of ideas, and everybody got sucked into it.

kind of ideas, and everybody got sucked into it. And I became increasingly angry, because I believed that we could be doing good in Afghanistan, but not through this mad project of nation building. So I imagined a light footprint that we could provide some modest support to the Afghan government, except it was going to be imperfect and not get dragged too far in. But by 2008, you had President Obama dragged in, you had these surges, you had 150,000 troops on the ground, and the situation just getting worse and worse and worse. And, you know, it was a real introduction for me to both about the illusions and obsessions of government. And quite literally, you know, I remember President Obama making a speech where he said, the only way to catch Osama bin Laden is to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan. Now, if you think about that, the statement was patently nonsense even at the time. And sure enough, a few months later, he caught Osama bin Laden without winning in Afghanistan and stabilizing Pakistan. But people were just generating nonsense.

And I think it was very painful, partly for the US. I remember Strobe Talbot, who was a big State Department, had been a former very senior State Department official, saying to me in a very angry engagement, he said, Rory, stop producing problems, produce solutions. This is America. Stop telling us what we can't do, tell us how to do it. America. Stop telling us what we can't do. Tell us how to do it. And I was trying to say, you cannot do this. You cannot turn Afghanistan into the kind of country you imagine. I can spend hours trying to explain why, but the punchline is you can't do it. Well, let's explain why. On its face, if you just look at the last 100 years of history, you wouldn't necessarily draw the conclusion that a nation building project is by definition hopeless. I mean, you look at what happened after World War II, you look at Nazi Germany and Japan, and what we did over there after bombing them halfway to oblivion, it's fairly miraculous what's happened. I mean, we helped them rebuild their societies, and we created in both countries durable allies, right?

And you might say, well, German culture, as deranged as it was under Hitler, was still close enough to our own that there wasn't much of a cultural translation required once we rebooted their society as friends. But you really couldn't quite say the same thing of Imperial Japan. Why are those bad analogies? I think they're bad analogies partly because of this we thing. I think at best, these nation-building projects, the US can act like a sort of midwife or a facilitator in a supporting role, providing resources, providing advice when wanted. But fundamentally, the work has to be done by the countries themselves. And the reason why Germany and Japan

were able to rebuild in a way Afghanistan wasn't is that one forgets that Germany and Japan were amongst the most advanced countries on earth. They had extraordinary industrial bases, highly educated populations, a very well-organized state. I mean, the Japanese state had been in existence in its modern form for six, 700 years by the time you intervened. It had a highly developed bureaucracy, civil service that had beaten the Russian Navy in 1905, 40 years earlier. Germany was the great intellectual musical capital of Europe and one of the most educated industrial nations on earth. So even with all the damage that was done during the war and extraordinary damage, right? And a lot of people killed and a lot of infrastructure destroyed. The human capital you were working with was completely different. I mean, Afghanistan,

in most villages I went to in that period, I would find usually one person in the village who could read or write to a basic standard. Later, I mean, many years later, 10 years later, I went to see the police training in Helmand. And I think they calculated that eight out of 100 recruits could write their names or recognize numbers up to five. Women in these communities had not been more than three hours walk from their village in their lives. It was a wonderful, wonderful country, but it was not a centralized, organized state like Germany or Japan.

These villages had been basically without any form of government for nearly 40 years in vendetta with their neighbors, living a very basic subsistence life, no electricity between Herat and Kabul. But the problem was that communicating this is so difficult. I mean, Sam, I know you've spent time in the developing world, but it's very, very, very difficult explaining to people who haven't lived in these villages what they're actually like and the gap between, you know, I remember an American on a plane saying to me just after the Arab Spring, saying, do you think there can be a Facebook revolution in Afghanistan? And I was having to explain there's literally no electricity between Herat and Kabul. You know, almost

nobody can read and write. How are you going to have a Facebook revolution? How would you differentiate the challenge of Afghanistan and Iraq? They seem different in some important ways. Maybe these are differences of degree, but how doomed were those respective projects and how would you compare them? So I think Iraq was more doomed. I think Afghanistan, if you'd set your bar very low, if you'd said our aim is to create a slightly more prosperous, slightly more peaceful Afghanistan in 20 years time than it is today, and we're going to contain

terrorist attacks, we would have been able to do this. I think the situation that the US had before Biden's catastrophic withdrawal, So the situation that exists at the beginning of 2020 was a good situation. It was a situation where no American troops had been killed for 18 months, no British troops had been killed since 2014. You had about 2,500 soldiers on the ground. The Taliban were not in the position to take any major city. There was not a major al-Qaeda group based in the country. That could have continued almost indefinitely, but it required setting very low objectives, not getting involved in fantasizing about nation building. Iraq was completely different. I mean, Iraq is,

as you know, it was a much more developed state, a much more educated country, vast natural resources, had been run by an autocratic dictator. And the difference was that in Iraq, by toppling Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, we basically removed all the infrastructure of the state and government. Whereas in Afghanistan, these things didn't exist. Do you think the de-Baathification was a mistake? I think it was a mistake for the North. The problem is it was necessary in the South. I mean, the population I was with, the community I was with, who were Shia Muslims who'd suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein, absolutely demanded the dismantling of the Baath Party

and would have been horrified if it hadn't happened. So in a way, the problem in Iraq is you were damned if you did, damned if you didn't. So how much of the failure of Iraq was due to our not appreciating the level of religious sectarianism and just the capacity for internecine violence there, and our just having made no real provision to deal with it, had we even anticipated it. Well, I think America has a really difficult job dealing with these countries. Really difficult job. Because you don't want to be an empire.

You don't want to behave like the British Empire. So you're very uncomfortable cutting political deals with tribal and religious groups, which is the way that the British often did it. You're uncomfortable with indirect rule. You're uncomfortable with corruption. You want to create a very pure society. So you're coming in straight away. You want to rewrite the constitution. You want to work out how you're going to do the university curriculums. You were trying to set up a stock exchange. You were worrying about how many women were in parliament. curriculums, you were trying to set up a stock exchange, you were worrying about how many women were in parliament. So you're doing all that good stuff, but highly, highly idealistic.

And on the other end of things, you are deploying 100,000 soldiers in an incredibly aggressive military machine. And it's not surprising the local population sees a lot of soldiers who frankly were often extremely rude and were often shooting at people and not take very seriously the idealistic language they're hearing from Washington. But shouldn't the idealism have been a strength had it been implemented by more courteous soldiers. But you don't have courteous soldiers, really. I mean, I think that's the problem. I think the US tradition of law enforcement compared to European tradition is quite harsh. I mean, I'm very struck whenever I encounter a US policeman or a US soldier.

It's a very authoritarian, quite aggressive style, which is very unsuitable for dealing with people in cultures that are, at a personal level, at least often scrupulously polite. I mean, I remember seeing senior sheikhs and religious figures sweating for eight hours outside US embassies or civilian positions waiting to go in for meetings, and you'd lost your friends by the time they came in through the door. I mean, you're very, very. I mean, this is unfair because I'm making cultural stereotypes about the US, but it never struck me that you're particularly empathetic to or interested in the manners of other people's cultures. You give the impression that the US has

the right system and everybody should be following an American model. And therefore, you don't really have the patience for the 20, 30 years of work that would be involved to actually enable and midwife and facilitate and bring along people on a journey of development. Yeah, well, patience or not, we did spend the 20 years in Afghanistan and have, as you know, very little to show various babies so as to get things done in extremis. But I remember these stories where you'd hear that some warlord, and I'm thinking of Afghanistan, some warlord who we had empowered as our surrogate or with whom we were collaborating is also found to be raping boys in his

bedroom, right? And this is just viewed as intolerable from the point of view of the U.S. military or the U.S. government. And well, it should be, right? I mean, like, how is it that we can collaborate with someone who's, you know, raping preteen boys in his bedroom, wouldn't we expect, again, perhaps naively, that the population wouldn't want us to tolerate such a thing? Well, Sam, I mean, that's a very good example you've used, because that was central to the whole thing. So you're absolutely right. After the intervention in Afghanistan, 2001, from then until 2005, 2006, initially, the US had quite a light footprint, and it let President Karzai's government get on. And that involved some pretty nasty figures,

particularly in places like Helmand in the south. And you're right, they were involved in horrible activities, corruption, drug dealing, human rights abuses. The question then is, bluntly, what was the alternative? And the.s and their allies and this this wasn't just the u.s you know britain's to blame for this as well and holland and many other countries decided that what they would do is get rid of these people and replace them with clean technocrats and replace the militias that these people had with foreign soldiers. But then you're in the you break it, you own it problem. So from 2008 onwards, effectively, with 150,000 troops on the ground and 150,000 foreign consultants and an expenditure of over $100 billion a year,

the US and its allies were trying to run Afghanistan themselves. And of course, that's absurd because we don't really know anything about Afghanistan. Very, very few of the people on the ground, very few could speak an Afghan language fluently. Security requirements didn't allow you to be outside the bases or spend a night in an Afghan house. Even the US that did longer deployments were on nine months, maximum 12-month deployments before people were cycled out and put back in again. So you're absolutely right that it's intolerable in the modern world to be involved in situations of such intense moral ambiguity. then my suspicion is you don't want to embark on a course of nation building because the alternative, which is to pretend that the U.S. has the knowledge, the legitimacy, the power to be able to micromanage how a district is run in southern Afghanistan, is, I'm afraid, and has been demonstrated over 20 years to be patent nonsense.

has been demonstrated over 20 years to be patent nonsense. So you referred to our exit from Afghanistan as catastrophic. It certainly was catastrophic in its implementation. Do you think the exit itself, just exiting on any terms, was a bad idea? Should we have maintained some force there? We definitely should have done so. As I said, you had 2,500 soldiers there. You hadn't had any soldiers killed in 18 months. To put that in context, you have 25,000 troops in Korea. And it was costing the US very little. It was costing the UK very little, costing NATO

very little. And you were preventing the Taliban from taking the country, largely with air power from bases at minimal risk and minimal cost. The withdrawal from Afghanistan handed the country back to the Taliban, destroyed the reputation of the United States throughout the world, and just exacerbated the pattern that has gone on from President Obama's failure to hold the red lines in Syria. And it was a very, very bad decision. It's an unjustifiable decision. There was no benefit to the United States or to the Afghans from doing it. And what is the state of Afghanistan now? I don't know how much you have been following it since the withdrawal, but one imagines that many good things happened despite all the pain

on all sides that was felt. I mean, we have girls going back to school and, you know, or going to school for the first time and the Taliban having far less control of the country. When we left, was Afghanistan essentially returned to the year 2000 or is it in the process of being returned there or worse? What's the state of things? of being returned there or worse? What's the state of things? It's a very mixed picture. So the Taliban have not done what they did before 2001.

They haven't engaged in mass killing. So the UN report suggests that there have been 235. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.