Pod Save the World - Decoding the Pandora Papers

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss a new, massive leak of financial documents that expose how billionaires and powerful politicians hide their money, the global impact of Facebook going offline, the CIA sounds the alarm about protecting sources, Biden’s team tries to fix relations with France, news about China and Ethiopia, and then Ben gets an update on the current situation in Afghanistan from activist and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Sahar Halaimzai.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, people are mad at our pronunciation again. Oh shit. What did we do now? So this one's on me. Hand up. Could have been me. It could have been me, man.

Last week, we were talking about German politics, and I was just having too much fun saying the name of their parliament, the Bundestag. You can't have fun with it. You can't say Bundestag like I wanted to say. Bundistog. Bundstadt. You know, you have a bunch of Germans and your mentions yelling at you if you have that

S.H in there. stuff. Oh, man. I'm hurting. Like, that's a good callout. Yeah. I mean, we're just trying to, we're trying to try and do hard. I just trying to have a good time.

I mean, this is the rare time where actually we thought we were trying hard to get it right and we got it wrong, huh? You know, listen, I apologize. Again, we issued a blanket apology for our pronunciation several months ago. I refer you all to that. But in the future, I will say that I don't want angry Germans coming at me in my mentions, sort of as a general matter. So here we are. Blanket apology.

Ben, we have a lot to cover today, literally. So there's this new massive leak of financial information that details how the rich and the powerful, hide their money and avoid taxes. There are so many stories about that from this dump of documents that I wasn't even close to capable of reading all of them, but we're going to dig into what we can. We're going to talk about Facebook

and how they kind of went out of commission for a few hours yesterday. and the implications globally. Talk about CIA sources, a couple stories out of France, some China news, Ethiopia, why Biden's immigration policy led to another resignation in the State Department. And then Shakira is going to make her debut on POTS of the World. So stick around for that. Hopefully not the last time.

Hopefully not the last time. Two things. One, I don't know if you've been listening to This Land, the second season of our amazing series. The host, Rebecca Nagel, is uncovering this incredible story that starts with a string of custody battle. over Native American children, but it leads back to these massive special interests that are trying to use these adoption cases to dismantle American Indian tribal rights.

There are oil and gas interests. There are massive right-wing groups in D.C. It's an incredible that are reporting. You should check it out and binge all eight episodes of This Land wherever you get your podcast. Now, also, Keep It, our incredible culture show,

is celebrating its 200th episode. So Alan Cumming is joining this week to look back on his career and discuss his new memoir, but Keep It is one of the most delightful shows out there. It makes me laugh every week. Check it out if you haven't subscribed. They drop every Wednesday. So it can be,

you do your like Ponset of the World, you know, go deep on something intense and academic and then have a lot of fun talking about who the beehive is fucking with this week. Wait a second. This show is fun. It is fun. It is fun. We always have fun.

We serious ourselves into the clothes and then we just fuck around. Yeah. And then Dan, Al ZU about soup. Ben, want to start with these Pandora papers? This feels like the biggest story out there. So this is like an area you've been following forever.

So it's this mega leak of financial information dropped over the weekend. It's called the Pandora Papers. The International Consortium of Investigated Journalists got their hands on millions of financial records, emails, contracts, other records that detail like trusts in other ways. Super rich people hide money from taxes or cops or lawsuits or whatever. According to the Washington Post, who are one of 150 news. news outlets involved in this project. That's how big this is.

The information dump includes records from 14 separate financial services entities. And the account owners that are detailed in this document dump include 130 billionaires and more than 330 public officials from more than 90 countries. So this is a little global story. Some of the big names in the early reporting include Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah of Jordan, the president or prime minister of the Dominican Republic, the Ivory Coast, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Kenya, Ecuador, the UAE, Chile, and Ukraine. It remains to be seen if they're going to be big political fallout for many of the leaders

mentioned. But the story is just starting. Ben, there was a story in the post that was sort of like the overall take about what they had and like how they were going to report on it. And there was this sentence and it was maybe the most depressing thing I read, period, which was, quote, financial experts said the Uber rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. that was explaining why there aren't like bold-named, you know, American billionaires in the piece.

Like Elon Musk is in an air because he could just open a trust. Yeah. Yeah, he could just do it. Yeah, open a trust in South Dakota or something. So anyway, it seems like we're going to be reading about this stuff for a long time. Like you have been following this sort of like kleptocracy piece of this, what it, like, how it impacts U.S. foreign policy, how it screws with democracies. Like any big takeaways so far from what you read? Yeah.

I'd say a couple of big takeaways. I mean, the first is the other depressing part, Tommy, is the degree to which the kind of American-made financial system globally facilitates this. You know, the capacity to have tax havens, anonymous shell companies, money kind of hidden in real estate. Like, we wired this whole global financial system to facilitate this kind of activity. And this is something I really kind of confronted in my book when I was looking at. at the ways in which the United States contributes to authoritarianism globally, this is one of the big ways, you know, in the sense that, you know, if you look at this, you know, some of these people are hiding money in anonymous sell companies in the U.S. and real estate interests here.

There was a positive step taken in late 2020 in response to a lot of activism to say that a certain kind of beneficial ownership, that means you can have an anonymous LLC, limited liability the corporation, the ability to do that anonymously was removed by Congress. So they're going to be more transparency tools going forward. But I think a first takeaway is to realize how much we need to be reforming and pulling the threat on how to make the global financial system more transparent. So we at least know whose money is moving around and people can track what their leaders or what their titans of industry or titans of kleptocracy are doing. There's another piece insofar as some of this transaction becomes illicit or, you know, is meant to evade, you know,

laws or regulations, we don't put a lot of resources into trying to crack down on this kind of corruption. It's actually another thing you can kind of pin on 9-11 in the sense that an extraordinary amount of governmental resources from, you know, Treasury, from the IRS, went into, you know, cracking down on terrorist financing. And that's a choice that took resources away from, you know, how do you cut down on money laundering and efforts to evade government regulations or national laws. So the big picture here, I think, is the idea that if we want to crack down on the capacity for really corrupt and bad actors to be hiding money and stashing in different places and stealing from their own people and putting it somewhere else, we need to be making continued reforms to bring. greater transparency and enforcement to this kind of system of international finance. Yeah, man, there's just so many pieces of this thing. I mean, like, there's ones, like,

in case you think this is like not a big deal, oh, people are just avoiding taxes, like, no, there's a story about how criminals and mobsters and like just the worst people on the planet use these accounts and, like, Belize, for example, to hide from accountability. There's stories in here. There's one of a story about Putin's mistress having an estimated net worth of $100 million, including this luxury apartment in Monte Carlo. There's stories about U.S. sanctions and their impact on Russian oligarchs. And then, you know, to the point you made at the start then, I mean, we knock, you know, Cayman Islands tax codes in the way you'll have like buildings with 50,000, you know,

addresses in the same building incorporated the same place. I mean, part of this reporting out of this piece is that South Dakota has become a massive tax and trust shelter, like on the same order of. some of the things you've seen offshore. I mean, like, we're literally, we're onshoreing some of these worst practices. I'm going to give a shout out to my mom right now. I'm in New York City, my parents' apartment, and they have built a couple of buildings, one's being constructed and one's already built right across the street from my parents.

And they basically tore down kind of old apartment buildings, and they're putting up these really glitzy new buildings that, you know, are taller than my parents. my parents' department, but they're only like 10 apartments there because God knows how much these things cost. And, and like nobody lives in the buildings, right? Why is that interesting? It's interesting because part of what a lot of investigations revealed in New York City, for instance, is a lot of real estate, luxury real estate in the United States is not people buying places to live. It's people from places like Russia, like putting money into real estate in the United States, often through anonymous, you know, interests, anonymous shell companies so that they can hide money here

or they can wander money into real estate here. I mean, so much of our system just facilitates this kind of stuff and it's going to require a lot of effort to turn them around. Another quick piece in this, you mentioned Putin, and you talked about it being early, because I think some people might say, well, look, these big reports come out and nothing really changes and so do they even matter. There's usually a tail to these things. So we talked about WikiLeaks last week. You know, some of those cables, it took a year or two, but, but, you know, ultimately, if they reveal corruption, there are these kind of mini scandals that grow and grow and grow and grow inside of countries.

And the more people learn about this kind of behavior and this kind of corruption, the greater vulnerability there are for political leaders, whether it's Putin, you know, in the report their allegations of kind of what he was doing for a mistress and, you know, a potential child that people don't know about. And King Abdullah, obviously, it was huge amounts of money. He's moving around in different places. I would be cautious in saying, oh, there's no, you know, just because the world didn't change in a week, doesn't mean these things matter. These things accumulate over time. And I think the impression of certain leaders being corrupt, certain governments being corrupt, is building. And that does create internal pressures over time. And I think the exposure of this

kind of corruption should be an objective in and of itself, because that's part of how we have to combat autocracy. Yeah, the Panama Papers, I think, toppled a couple governments. You know, Ben, when you gave your mom a shout out, I was imagining her, like, sleuthing through this new building, like, only murders in the building. You've seen this show on Hulu, like, chasing down some oligarch, you know, on the sixth floor. Somehow my mom gets good information about, like, how many people, like, are actually in these apartment buildings and how many apartments are being. There's definitely a wire that she's plugged into here. I don't know where she gets her info, but it's good info, I think.

The, this international consortium of journalist should call her. Yeah, yeah. Let's turn to Facebook. So yesterday, Monday, October 4th, Facebook, and every Facebook-owned app went completely offline for about five hours. So in the U.S., that was met with a lot of jokes about how like anti-vax boomers now have a lot of free time. But the impact globally was a lot more serious. So, you know, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, they're all part of this suite of horrible companies. There are, you know, this essential communications tools for individuals and also the backbone for a lot of businesses that sell products. on Instagram, for example. A couple stats that jumped out of me, Ben. So the New York Times had a piece on this. They reported that 2.76 billion people, 2.76 billion people, use one Facebook product per day, and that WhatsApp, the messaging service, is used to send more than 100 billion

messages per day. That scale gets at the point that I think is important to understand here, which is that for a lot of people, Facebook is the Internet. Many people don't have access to or can't afford cell phone service, but they can find free Wi-Fi and they could use it to access Facebook. So the Washington Post had another good story on this, and they noted that in seven countries, including Kenya, Malaysia, and Columbia, so big, important countries, more than 90 percent of people aged 16 to 64 are a monthly WhatsApp users. So again, like the impact that this outage had was hundreds of millions, if not billions of

people, had no way to really communicate for a part of the day. So on Tuesday, today, a former Facebook employee turned Whistleblower are testifying Capitol Hill about all the damage Facebook cost before this outage. I haven't been able to watch a lot of it, but some of the partial reporting I saw was good in that it suggested that there was a conversation not just about like how Facebook was impacting the U.S., but also the lack of oversight and content moderation abroad. Ben, I don't know how much of these hearings you caught today or how you're feeling about the odds after the outage and these, you know, this whistleblower report that regulation might be in the offing or, you know, something else. I think there are two pieces to this, right? There's autocracy and there's antitrust.

And they're somewhat related. But to take the autocracy first, and that's what this whistleblower, I think, you know, I take her comments as is validating of the idea that Facebook just doesn't give a shit about anything other than profit. And so the fact that, you know, their algorithms and their product is having an impact on foreign countries that is incredibly corrosive to democracy that as long as Facebook makes a buck, they don't really care what the consequences are. look, that was, you know, there's always a part of me that when this happens and you see kind of headlines, you're like, you know, how is this is obvious? We've all been talking about this for years. But that doesn't mean it's not useful that the whistleblower comes forward because a whistleblower, even if they're confirming kind of what you already suspect to be true, that triggers congressional hearings and that can add to the momentum for the necessary regulation. If Facebook will not protect public health and safety in the United States and around the world through its platform, that's when governments have to regulate things. And here they'd have to regulate the algorithm. And they'd have to introduce some sense of liability for Facebook for the poison, literally, that it's spreading online. So good for this whistleblower. I'd encourage other Facebook employees to come forward and be a part of this debate. Like if you are part of an enterprise that you feel

like internally you're not getting a reaction, you know, there are times when airing these concerns publicly can make a positive difference. Obviously, We were on the other end of that in government, so I just want to own that, obviously. So there's always tension here, which I understand. But I think this is obviously advanced a debate. On the WhatsApp point, it really jumped out to me yesterday, Tommy, because, you know, I almost everybody I communicate with internationally, including, like, the types of activists we hear on the show, like they live on WhatsApp.

Right. And during the, you know, Afghan evacuation, for instance, all those efforts, including efforts, by U.S. veterans and NGOs to get people out. Those were all WhatsApp groups. And part of me was thinking, like, what would have happened if this outage happened in the middle of the Afghan evacuation? It would have literally, you know, prevented the saving of lives. And this gets at the antitrust point.

Why does Facebook own, they didn't create WhatsApp? They didn't create Instagram. They bought them. They were so big that they just kind of consumed them like an ever-growing organism. and because what do they want? They want more data that services their profit model. And I don't think it makes sense for like a social network to have to be also the dominant power in instant messaging and how people speak on the phone, which is, you know, WhatsApp is obviously used for all those things. So Elizabeth Warren has been at the forefront of this.

But, I mean, we need to be looking at why Facebook has been able to grow in so many areas. to achieve this kind of dominance of, you know, data accumulation, essentially. That's in the same way that you need public safety regulated by the government. You need antitrust laws enforced in the spirit of any trust laws enforced. And Facebook, clearly, as we learn in the outage, like their tentacles just feel far too wide for any one company. Yeah. And look, a lot of those mergers and acquisitions happen during the Obama years.

And I think, you know, we should look back on those. decide whether their mistakes decide whether the law was there to block them and then update the laws to, you know, fit the reality. Yeah, when I, you know, people, when I go out and talk about my book, some people ask me, like, what was the biggest mistakes, the Obama administration? And I don't know what they expect me to say, but I often say, like, you know, the falling behind the curve on the impact of the scale of big tech and the lack of regulation of social media, which wasn't really debated at the time. Like, I don't remember there being much pressure

to do it. So I understand why the Obama administration, you know, we weren't ahead of the curve on this. But clearly, it's been way too long, you know. And now is a chance for the Biden team, I think, to try to put more attention on this, at least from what can be done on the executive branch level. Maybe put some people under 50 at some of these hearings, too. That'd be good. Ben, can I read you an alarming New York Times lead? Yeah. Top American counterintelligence officials warned every CIA station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United

States being captured or killed. That was the lead all of this report. So apparently a cable went out, a top secret cable went out from the CIA to, I guess, all the front line stations. And it was referencing the fact that intelligence services and places like Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan have been really good at hunting down CIA sources. In some cases, they've been killing them or arresting them or turning them with the double agents.

The potential reasons why cited in this report were maybe sloppy work by the CIA, not prioritizing the security and vetting of sources well enough, as well as the impact of new technology that just makes it easier for these counterintel services abroad to track CIA officers or sources in their countries. It was a weird story. There's been some previous reporting about how China, for example, was able to roll up all of the CIA sources that were in the country.

I think what happened is they figured out how the U.S. was communicating with those sources, the so-called covert communications. So weird story. Here's the thing I was wondering after reading this, Ben. Like, do you think this memo was leaked to the New York Times on purpose to like get? Like, how does this get out? How does it top secret cable about the need to like button things up when it comes to counterintelligence make its way to the New York Times a week later? That's really weird to me. Everything about this is really weird and really obviously concerning.

If the CIA, because look, if this is true, right, then their capacity to access any human intelligence, right, to have sources and people that work with them and provide them information is pretty devastating. compromised, right? So in the first instance, whatever happened, whether it's some compromising communications, whether it's a hack that could be exploited, whether there's a mole, you know, in the old-fashioned parlance, it's not good for the CIA. And the leak itself, yeah, if someone took the step of putting this in the public domain, or are they trying to, you know, are they to warn people like or yeah i know like what what what's happening here and how did the cia not push like so i i put to reverse question you time me like you would have been at the nsc in a story like this is going to run the times would normally call and say to the white house like hey we're going to run this

and you know presumably you might try to stop it from running or you might like it like i don't know you're right the fact that this appears in the paper like is is unusual yeah it's very i There was sort of one little redaction you could see in there, which is it said in the report that I think the cable itself detailed the exact number of sources or informants who had been captured or killed or otherwise like disappeared. And that was not reflected in the story. So that was sort of one little like operational security thing. You could imagine someone asking not to be reported. I don't know. The whole thing was just really weird.

Maybe interesting sort of related topic. I also saw that Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is putting forward legislation as part of the Intel community's funding bill. That will include restrictions and reporting requirements that will make it harder for former U.S. spies to work as contractors for foreign governments. So some of those restrictions include a 30-month waiting period for some individuals before you can work for the U.S. and then go work for some private company that's doing work abroad. This law was inspired by a 2019 Reuters investigation that exposed basically an American-led spy for higher operation in the United Arab Emirates,

a bunch of hackers over there. So again, another report where I read this and I thought, how the fuck was this allowed in the first place? I was the U.S. training a bunch of spies and then all of a sudden they wind up in the UAE, like hacking dissidents or journalists or maybe American officials.

This is a huge story. And God, I love this topic list today, as dark as it is because this is the stuff I've been really interested in, you know, because it all connects back to this autocracy. question. I mean, you've seen this explosion of private intelligence, which we've talked about a lot in the last decade. But I mean, to short end it for people, like if you're working in the U.S.

government, you're drawn a U.S. government salary, right? And you're a CIA operative. And then you're aware that if you take your skill set and, you know, and you take it, you know, for a spin to a place like the Gulf, imagine how much more you'll get paid by the Emirates or the Saudis. Or if you go to one of these really hardcore mercenary type outfits, you could end up working for kind of some murky interests that connects back to the Russian government or the Chinese government. Like there's some weird stuff in Africa, right, about how you're securing natural resources. And, you know, so this whole private intelligence thing is a huge issue. And yeah, I mean, if people are entrusted with the secrets to the U.S. government and they're

taught the kind of skills that we provide to people, the idea that you just kind of take that on the open market. You can see the vulnerabilities here. And look, I mean, this is an opaque world and I don't know the answer to any of this because I've, you know, I haven't been in government in five years, but the combination of like the Havana syndrome stuff and these leaks and that time story you referenced, like it seems like there's some pretty significant, you know, really kind of almost structural challenges for American intelligence these days. Yeah. And, you know, it's just worth noting that there was been like after we talked about the Havana syndrome stories last week, I think it was.

There was a report in BuzzFeed that suggests that another set of experts think that most of the challenges are psychosomatic that arise from stress, that some of the recordings that have been made of what was considered like a directed energy device were making were actually some form of crickets. I don't say that because I know that to be true or to belittle anyone who feels like they're suffering from this. There's a range of opinions on this. But yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty, it sounds like.

It sounds like the intelligence community is uncertain as to why people feel like they're being hurt, where the hell their employees are going once they leave the services and how the hell all their sources are getting rolled up abroad. None of that seems very good. Well, and look, look, this is a place for congressional oversight in general. And I should point out, by the way, that the first two years of the Trump administration, I remember when my house was hauled in front of the House Intelligence Committee chair by Devin Nunes with staff director Cash Patel, I remember thinking at the time, what are they not doing? of oversight. They're spending every second of their leadership of that committee, which is the only

real source of oversight of the intelligence community, trying to validate, you know, conspiracy theories that aren't true on behalf of Donald Trump. We've obviously had different leadership under Adam Schiff. And I do think that we may be at a moment in this legislation, the reference is, I think, a positive step where, you know, that Congress might need to, you know, across the board be looking at these issues. Like, what are we putting out? What do we understand about the Havana syndrome? How are we addressing this issue of private intelligence? Why have there been so many leaks or apparent vulnerabilities in our intelligence networks?

You know, it does feel like periodically, you know, you need to take a step back and look across the whole enterprise. And this feels like a time where that might make a lot of sense to do. Yeah, that might be good. Okay, a couple pieces of news out of France. The first is fucking awful. and I don't know what else to say about it. So an independent commission set up by Catholic bishops in France found that 216,000 victims under the age of 18 were sexually abused by priests or other clerics in the

French Catholic Church since 1950. Truly horrific. Throw those fuckers in jail. That is a dark, dark, broken institution. And I'm going to stop talking before I say something that will offend people. But oh, my God. And country after country, too, by the way. Like we had our reckoning here.

Ireland had a reckoning recently. the other, I mean, it's just everywhere that there's an investigation into this, the numbers and outcome is worse than anybody possibly imagined. Staggering. The Vatican just has not done nearly not. Francis has tried to do a bunch of stuff. He's met with some resistance at times, but holding these people accountable and cleaning up that awful moral morass, evil behavior.

I mean, yeah, I'm going to stop talking, too, because I, like, you. Like it's just the most disgusting thing imaginable. It's the crimes. It's the coverups. It's the coverups for the second and the third time. Like shifting people around. It's just awful. So we're very pissed about that.

So last week was a tough one for former French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, who was sentenced to a year of house arrest for campaign finance violations during his 2012 re-election campaign. So Ben, the reason this story jumped out of me was really more, less about like the Sarko-specific facts. So there'll be some fun ones later. But this. France has spending limits for campaigns to ensure fairness. Remember back of the day when we used to think those were good ideas? So in 2012, the limit was $19.7 million for the first round of elections and then $6.7 million for like the second round of runoff.

So, you know, we're talking like $26, $27 million for the whole thing. Like that's just so incredible. That's like a decent fundraising quarter for like Barack Obama in 2008 in the presidential campaign, let alone what people were. are raising throughout the duration of an entire campaign. And then, so, Sarkozy apparently spent double that limit. And then here's the other interesting part. So in the past, I guess Sarkozy has also been accused of tricking the heiress to the L'Oreal Cosmetics Empire to giving him money.

I think we talked about this previously. Those charges were dropped. He's also accused of receiving illegal campaign financing from Omar Gaddafi's government. That investigation is ongoing. So Sarko's appealing the campaign finance conviction. And amazingly, he's still seen as like a relatively big player in French politics, so people still want his endorsement and stuff. But man, 19.7 million for the first round, 6.7 for the runoff.

That's just incredible. Well, first of all, Donald Trump is still a player in our politics. And that guy tried to overthrow the US government. So glasshouse over here. Big time glasshouse. But yeah, like, you're right. I mean, we spend billions of dollars on presidential campaigns. This is a reminder that our system is insane and corrupt.

I mean, you can have limits. and those limits can be enforced and people can face consequences if they break them. And so I take that away. And also the Sarkozy, the Gaddafi stuff, right, which has always been kind of a part of this big ball of corruption, shadowing Sarkozy. Again, what's worth pointing out is that Sarkozy was at the forefront, the absolute forefront of the decision to intervene in Libya. You know, he was pushing for it more than anything.

pushing harder than anybody. And it does make you kind of wonder, you know, about like, what, was he trying to atone for something there? What was going on with that? I mean, because, you know, he, let's just say, you know, he swung pretty far on the Gaddafi issue pretty fast, you know. Yes, very, very dark element to that whole decision. So last thing. So Ben, Tony Blinken, our friend, Secretary of State, he's in France right now. Listeners probably remember that France is angry at the U.S. because the U.S. signed a security deal with the U.K. and Australia that led to the cancellation of a French contract to sell $66 billion with the submarines to the Australian. So French lost a lot of money on this deal. So Tony visited with the French foreign minister today.

I guess they walked around the French equivalent of the State Department for about an hour. They did like a walk-in talk instead of a formal meeting. Ben, here's how the New York Times described this stroll. They compared it to Reagan's walk-in' the woods with Gorbachev in 1985 to reset U.S. Soviet relations and to Jimmy Carter's walks with foreign leaders at Camp David during the Camp David Accords. Do you think we've reached peak hyperbole about this subject better? I don't know what the equivalent is to like the red hen civility alert. But yeah, like this is. The height of the Cold War. Yeah, I mean, this is insane.

Like, why do people, there's, I mean, like, as someone I worked, you know, with the press, like I did, like this desire to constantly kind of attach yourself to more iconic events that happened in the past, you know, is one of the weirdest pathologies of the American media. So, I mean, this is where it's like, you know, anything that, you know, if Obama, like, farted, you know, would be like, is this his Katrina? You know, like, because Katrina was a really big event. And maybe if I call this little thing that happened, Katrina, like people, like, like, we had a lot of Katrina's.

Like, Tony's walking around trying to make the French farm ministry, like, be a little less pissed at us by kind of, you know, smiling. And, you know, Tony speaks elegant French, by the way. And these guys are friends. They've known each other for years, Tony and the French foreign minister. What the hell? Maybe he just took a walk with the guy. And, yeah, maybe he's trying to, like, show that, like, hey, we really respect the work the French Farm Ministry does. That doesn't mean it's like Reagan and Gorbachev deciding about nuclear disarmament, you know, or fucking Camp David Accords here, guys. Like, let's just get some,

the Ocas story was like an exciting two-day narrative thing in D.C. And there was like a, like an exciting dustup where the ambassador got recalled. But like, let's just chill out here a little bit, guys, you know. Yeah. I, I too want the U.S. and France to have close relations. I want this breach repaired. The press is just that. That is just such an absurd comparison. Like, come on. Let's move on. Okay.

Ben, two pieces of China news. This is another, like, story where, like, I couldn't really tell if this was a big deal or not, and I wanted to see what you thought. So first, Catherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, gave a speech about U.S. China trade relations. That's one item. Second, Taiwan keeps sounding the alarm because the Chinese are flying fighter jets into their air defense zone. So, like, here's a question. Like, you hear about these air incursions.

a lot into the Taiwanese air defense zone. I guess what's new is that the Chinese are sending more and more of them at a time. So it'll be like 20 fighters, 30 fighters, right? It would be more and more planes, which is alarming, understandably. So that's maybe the new part. The speech, I don't know, you hear a lot of, like, American officials giving these speeches saying it's time to get tough with the Chinese government about trade. Did anything jump out at you about the speech or anything about these air incursions

seem particularly new or worrisome? I mean, I think the speech, you know, kind of confirmed what we've been able to surmise thus far, which is that the tariffs that Trump put in place and some of the punitive measures that Trump put in place are not going to be rolled back. She said in some cases there'll be like exceptions, you know, more carved out exceptions where people don't have to pay the tariffs, but that what the Biden team is doing is not dismantling Trump's trade war

and replacing with something else. It's keeping a lot of that infrastructure in place, but aiming to build it out and multilateralize it and figure out joint positions with allies. So to me, it just kind of reconfirmed that they are in the process of building a kind of long-term series of tools that are meant to combat everything

from Chinese subsidies to favorite industries and unfair practices and theft of intellectual property and obviously more focused on human rights than Trump did and doing it in a variety of ways. But a lot of the details kind of remain to be filled in in the future. I think on the Arab defense issues in Taiwan, look, what the Chinese try to do is they take, this is what they've done in the South China Sea. Like they're supposed to recognize certain kind of international norms and they're supposed to see certain areas as, you know, contested and not do certain things. But in the South China Sea, they started like building militarized rocks, you know, and like with airstreams on. And just kind of trying to create a new

status quo. And I think in Taiwan, what they're trying to do is going to wear people down and where the Taiwanese down and wear us down, like, hey, we just don't acknowledge that we can't just fly our fighter jets through here. And I think that is, it's worrisome, not that they're going to invade Taiwan. It's worrisome in that they have this strategy of. kind of continuing to blur the lines of any sense of sovereignty for the Taiwanese or any sense of an agreed upon or negotiated way of approaching these issues. I think that it raises the bar, like, you know, what we would do in the Obama administration to show that the South China Sea wasn't just like a Chinese body of water because it kind of snaked around the coastlines of a bunch

other countries in any international process would not say that that whole body of water is theirs, is we would, you know, we would do naval exercises ourselves on behalf of the idea that this freedom of navigation. These are international waters and we can come through here too. So I think the Biden team may be looking for ways to kind of push back and to demonstrate that we don't accept like a new reality that China is trying to create. I do think this whole space is worth watching. I saw an announcement today that Jake Sullivan and the National Security Advisors is going to meet in the coming days with like the top Chinese diplomat. Xi Jinping and Joe Biden are both going be at the G20 summit, which is in a few weeks, recently both going to be in Glasgow. They had not

interacted yet since Biden became president. Oh, that'll be a hoot. Yeah, so I think, you know, on all these fronts, we may know a lot more about at least the mood music that the U.S. and China want to establish because usually those leaders meetings, you know, you come out and, okay, this is where things stand on Taiwan, this is where things stand on trade, this is where things down on climate change across the board. And so this is going to be very busy few weeks for figuring out just how, you know, how tense the relationship is going to be going forward with China. Yeah. And then the first round of meetings with Tony and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken in the Chinese were basically them just screaming at each other. So yeah, that didn't seem

very fun. A couple more quick things before we get to Ben's interview. So last week, Ethiopia said was kicking seven United Nations officials out of the country for, quote, meddling in the internal affairs of the country. So this came from an Associated Press report. So the context here, as we've talked about before, is that there's this ongoing civil war in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has been attacking fighters and leaders in the Northern Tigray region. And currently, they are blocking shipments of food, fuel, and medical supplies to that region, which is starving kids. There's just no other way to describe it. The people are going to die. because of this blockade.

So shortly before this announcement, a top UN official criticized what was happening, criticized the blockade and called it a stain on our conscience. I assume that it's something to do with these UN staffers getting later kicked out. So Ben, I'm just going to end this section less with a question than with a request to our listeners.

I imagine some of you work in the State Department. I imagine some of you work in Congress. We would love to see more statements, more letters, more calls for sanctions, more calls for anything to actually happen to stop what the fuck's going on. Because it doesn't feel like there's a lot going on. There was a couple of limited announcements from the Biden team setting up potential sanctions. But, you know, you have like a famine potentially happening as we speak.

And it just feels like no one's doing anything or talking about it. Yeah, I mean, Samantha Power has been very vocal about this. So, you know, I think she's been out in the lead on this. I saw Tony, you know, put something out on it. But, I mean, look, I think this, we've talked about this a lot. Like, the scale of the humanitarian crisis just keeps growing. And look, I would add to your call to international actors, foreign governments. Like, this is something that requires, I think, a much more broad and vocal international response.

It's not to say that people aren't working hard on it, they are. Yeah. But it's just time to, you know, just keep turning the decibel level up because clearly the, this is continuing to care in the wrong direction. Yeah, look, you know, Sam over USAID, like, they want to be able to deliver food and do their job and save people's lives, and that's great. I do think there needs to be just like a more of a punitive element. And I think one thing we learned from our conversation with NIMA at CNN and many others

that the Ethiopian government cares a lot about what the U.S. media writes about it, what people here think about it and say about it. And so members of Congress, we just start blasting away and just describing what's happening. I think it would actually matter. But it's not happening. It's not happening enough, at least. Two other things. So a top State Department advisor, legal scholar, has resigned from the State Department

and sent an exit moment criticizing President Biden's immigration policy, talking about a guy named Harold Coe, who is really a big, sort of like big name, kind of a luminary in legal circles. He was the State Department's legal advisor from 2009 to 2013 under Obama. Ben and I both know him well. He's like a brilliant, good guy. He criticized Biden's use of Title 42 in this. memo. That's the public health authority that was first used by Trump and now the Biden administration

to expel individuals in the name of preventing the spread of COVID. Coe specifically cited the administration's decision to fly thousands of migrants from Texas to Haiti under Title 42, despite the fact that many of them are fleeing violence, fleeing persecution, fleeing torture, so they were just not given any chance at asylum. The Biden administration's use of Title 42 authority has also been challenged in court. So this is the second State Department aid to resign over the treatment of Haitian refugees. The first was the special envoy to Haiti. But I suspect that this won't be the last as long as this law is kept in place.

So just something worth watching. Yeah, I mean, he's a big figure in international legal and humanitarian circles. So, you know, when Harrow Coe does something like that, it gets a lot of attention. You know, he also made some constructive suggestions, too. He wasn't just protesting. He said there could, yeah, it's a memo. And, you know, I may not get them all in, but, you know, he suggested that more effort could be done to determine whether some of these people have family in the United States,

that they're, you know, more efforting to be put into adjudicating, obviously, asylum claims, raising questions about whether the deportations should be back to Haiti because in some cases these people have been outside of Haiti for years and have been in Chile and other countries. And so what is the, you know, is it the, is it the. right thing to deport people back to someplace that is dangerous, that they haven't even been for a while. So it raised a bunch of questions and also, you know, raise, you know, some more humane ways of dealing with this issue. You know, I saw the Biden team essentially kind of revert to the point that this is a CDC type decision that so long as there is this kind of medical emergency that their

hands are tied in some ways because they have to follow kind of the CDC determination before they can move beyond using this measure. But look, I mean, I think in some circumstances, right, you just, you have to take into account the extreme circumstance of what's going on in Haiti, all the things that recently happened there, the assassination, the earthquake, and the images, frankly, the Americans have seen and so many people have been horrified by. So I think this shows that they're going to have to put more attention into the border question, obviously, generally, they're doing, but this Haiti question in particular. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't understand Title 42's ins and outs or what the CDC can or shouldn't do, but I do know that, you know, a lot of people

were critical of the Trump administration's use of Title 42 to expel all migrants and really unravel the asylum process. And I think still using that authority to send people out of the country when we have vaccines and other tools to manage COVID, I think just feels wrong. You make a really good point, though, which is that the Trump people were trying to dismantle the asylum process, obviously. Like, Stephen Miller, you know, their clear objective. And they use this to kind of finish the job. And so that intent should matter. You know, the Trump didn't make some CDC-based determination here. It's like, oh, let me weaponize this thing to do this. And so I think even though there may be a bureaucratic reason or rationale behind it. And the original motivation for the use of Title 42 felt more like a

punitive measure to shut the border than it did a public health consideration. Yeah, as a little Stephen Miller fucking fantasy. Ben, wild boars are back in the news. So Shakira, the singer, superstar, she was walking in a park in Barcelona with her son when two wild boars attacked her, stole her purse, and then ran off with it into the woods. This news was mostly reported by Shakira herself via Instagram. So thank God that Facebook didn't go down that day. But as we We know she does not lie. Her hips also do not lie, so it has to be true. Now, wild hogs are apparently a growing menace in Barcelona.

According to the BBC news, Spanish police got nearly 1,200 wild hog-related calls in 2016. And this report also said that, quote, in 2013, one city police officer attempted to take charge of the problem himself and shot at a bore with the service revolver, but missed and hit his partner instead. I feel like that anecdote in this BBC news story raised more questions than it answered for me. Yeah. Yeah. Where's the follow-up story? What was the follow-up on that guy? But for real, these wildhogs suck. They carry disease. They can live almost anywhere. They eat trash. They're like a true invasive species. They get aggressive. So I don't know. Let's hope they're not gunning for pop stars in the mid-2000s or else Sean Paul, James Blunt, Natasha Benningfield. You're on notice, you know. You're next.

So, first of all, it's concerning. I like Barcelona. I like, you know, people from Barcelona and I don't want wild boars, you know, running over them. San Juan, I'm a big Shakur fan. We actually did an event with Shakur. Do you remember with Obama and Colombia? Yes. You were still in government.

It was 20. I was there for that. Yeah, you were there for that. It was like an education event. That was a trip when we were a little distracted, I think, by the Secret Service guys, visiting prostitutes repeatedly in the press hotel. Yeah. That's true.

that story. Yeah, that was a real fun fucking trip. Yeah, you were probably in some press file mentioning that story. I was like hanging out with Shakira and Obama making some nice announcements about like education. She's a huge figure in Columbia. The last thing, though, that, to cross these things together, you ever watch Zootopia? I don't know why you would. Oh, yeah. I've seen this. Good movie. So Shakira's got like a star turn in that. Great song. I forget what kind of animal she is in that, but she was integrated into the animal kingdom in Zootopia. I don't know why that's relevant in some fashion it popped in my head. I was trying to think of there were wild boars in Zootopia because she might have had experience, I'm saying, at least in a voiceover context of dealing with it.

I don't know. It's apparently very impressive. It sounds like, I don't know that she fought off the wild boars per se, but it does sound like that she and her son, she had her son with one of the soccer stars who's so famous. He only has like one name, like Gerard or something like that. Yeah. She asked him to vouch for her bravery in this Instagram story that she posted about the board. I've no doubt about her bravery. I also want to, just so people know that Tom and I don't do this alone, our producer Michael Martinez just put in the chat. She's a gazelle, I believe, Ben, which is exactly right. I think she was a gazelle in Zootopia, which a gazelle would want to run away from a wild boar, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. Man, somehow we got from Shakira to the Secret Secret. service, prostitution scandal in, in, it's a good segment. In Colombia. It's a good segment.

Yeah. So my memory of that, by the way, is I learned of that news when I was at a dinner with nine reporters. And I think it was Julie Pace from the Associated Press was emailing me from across the table with eight other reporters around us that they had gotten this anonymous tip to one of their tip lines and they were about to report it. So I'm like trying to manage a story with like, you know, like everyone around me trying to see what I'm typing about.

It was not fun. It was so awful because, like, it was, you know, of course the U.S. press, and to be fair to them, it's a good story, right? Yeah, you're not going to pass on that one, yeah. But like any hope of getting any coverage of the summit of the Americas, you know, or the success story of Columbia went out the window, you know, like Obama's doing press conferences, standing next to foreign leaders, you know, and all he's being asked about is like, you know, secret service sex, you know, it was a low point for taking American. American culture on the road there. Oh, yeah. A low point for a whole lot of us. But a high point for Shakira.

A high point for Shakira. Okay. Well, we're glad she's okay. We're glad she fought off these wild hogs. Yeah. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. What are folks going to hear? So I talked to Sahar Halamsai, who is an expert on Afghanistan.

Obviously, has deep connections to Afghanistan herself. And we're really getting a perspective, an Afghan perspective. and the perspective of someone who worked with Afghan women in civil society in recent years to try to have a more inclusive peace process and what happened. Sahar walks us through how life is changing for Afghans under the Taliban, what the United States might do going forward to support the Afghan people, what lessons we should draw from what we just went through. And so while you and I have talked about these issues a lot,

you'll hear a totally different perspective from Sahar and one that is representative of Afghan women in civil society. So I really encourage people to check it out. Yeah, I'm really glad you did that interview today. I think it's very important to stay on this story. Even if the mainstream media's attention is not fully on Afghanistan at the moment. Okay. Okay, so we're going to take a quick break, but stick around because you will hear Ben's interview with Sahar-Hollamsai about Afghanistan after the break. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by Sahar Halamzai, who is a non-resident senior fellow at the South Asia Center, as well as an Afghan-British rights. advocate, writer, and human rights campaigner.

So thanks so much for joining us, Sahar. Thank you so much. So I just want to start here. You obviously focus on Afghanistan in addition, obviously, to having personal connections there. We've talked a lot about recent events. But what is your sense of what life is like now under the Taliban rule? How have things changed in the few weeks since the fall of Kabul? the ascendance of a Taliban-led government?

Yes, I think that's a really good question. I think for, you know, Afghanistan is a place of multiple truths, and I think we're seeing a lot of that play out in the debate outside the country in terms of whose lived experience and whose perspective is the correct one. And I think for the most, and I think that's, it's important to think about it in those terms as well and the diverse experiences that Afghans across the country have had over the last 20 years. But I think at the core of it, you know, the vast majority of people are waiting to see what Taliban governance is going to look like. I think over the last, you know, several weeks

since Taliban takeover, everybody, you know, it's felt a little bit like a transition period. But now the reality is that Taliban are actually going to have to deal with real problems of governance. And Afghanistan is facing the winter is coming. That's always a difficult time. There's huge problems with drought over the summer. So people have less to eat. COVID is still a huge problem. And now we're dealing, you know, we're looking at a huge humanitarian crisis.

And I think for the most part, most Afghans across the country are worried about how they're going to weather the winter. You know, people are facing starvation. There are huge numbers of internally displaced people. There's a deep sense of uncertainty. So I think there are those sorts of very real daily struggles that Afghans are facing. And I think on a sort of more broader level, there is a real sense of just confusion in terms of what happened and how quickly things changed and how quickly the international community, you know, abandoned ship almost and and, you know, what future engagement looks like. So there's just a deep sense of uncertainty about the future. And what about in particular women and girls, you know, the Taliban

then made some kind of public relations statements that seemed to be belied by the lived reality there. But what is your sense of how things have changed for women and girls who'd gained so much in the last two decades in terms of certain rights and access to education and opportunity? Yeah, I always find the women question a little bit tricky for a number of reasons. But I think women's rights has been weaponized over the last 20 years by all actors and stakeholders in this war. So, you know, I think for the most part, women in Afghanistan have had to fight really hard to reclaim some of their basic rights in spite of Taliban violence, a conservative society, the military presence of the international community. And in spite all of those challenges,

they haven't always been positive for Afghan women. They have worked really hard to rebuild their capacity, reclaim their spaces. And I think the future, again, looks really uncertain. Today is day 17 of girls not being allowed to go to school. You know, that is devastating for a country where the vast majority of people, you know, over 60% of the population is under the age of 30. They haven't really lived under Taliban rule, even though they face. you know, a myriad of challenges as a result of what's been happening in Afghanistan over the last

20 years. But I think generally the sense around women, I think there is a frustration of their rights being so politicized, the women's issue being so politicized. You know, the debates are either, you know, there are Afghan women who are willing to cede anything for security without really thinking about why they want security. They want security so that they can get basic rights that come from living in security. And there are women who, you know, who are higher education, who are doctors, who are engineers, who are lawyers who are seen as elitist and unrepresentative, who have lost everything. And I think the sense of abandonment is really real. And it's so important. I work mostly with women in Afghanistan. And I think that it's more important than ever

to continue to engage with those networks, to engage with women, and to really have an honest conversation with Afghan women at the table, no matter what the platform is, about what is the best way to support them as they face this deep uncertainty and insecurity. And just in terms of the people you're speaking to, I guess, that encompasses all Afghans, but obviously women have a very cute,

choices to make. Are there still significant amount of people that would like to leave the country if they could? Or, you know, where does that stand in terms of, you know, there's so much attention on this kind of chaotic evacuation at Kabul Airport? But, you know, I know personally people who've continued to try to leave through Pakistan and other places. I'm sure you know a lot more people in Afghanistan than I do. What is your sense of the kind of scale of people that if they could leave would do so versus people who are just, you know, obviously preparing to live in a different political reality? I think, I think in terms of numbers, that's, that's quite difficult to ascertain. I think plenty of people because, because their lives have changed overnight and their, you know,

their livelihoods, their communities have disappeared overnight are terrified and understandably so. I think we all would be who do want to leave. I think equally there are lots of people who have spent so, you know, they've spent their lives investing in Afghanistan and in their, you know, in their communities, in their families, in their lives who don't want to leave and become refugees in other countries, you know, against a backdrop of quite a hostile environment for most refugees. And, you know, I think, I think it's really difficult, you know, I would be very hesitant to say, oh, you know, X number of people, but I think what we should really focus, on is supporting people who do want to leave, making sure there are safe paths for them to do so.

The Taliban announced, I think today that they're reopening the passport office. They're going to issue Afghans with passports. And I think we can safely determine, you know, who are the people who are at risk. You know, we've seen how Taliban have been behaving over the last two and a half years, you know, since the U.S. Taliban deal. So I think we need to support those people who do want to leave and ensure that we don't turn away, as tempting as it is, to say, you know, it's done, we've ended the forever war,

this is an Afghan problem, you know, get stuck in all these kind of incomplete and false narratives, actually think about, okay, what is the kind of strategic and moral responsibility the international community has after 20 years and how do we support those people who want to stay and try and build something and continue to build on the on the advancements that they've made against these, you know, absolutely extraordinary odds. And what do we do to support those who are afraid for their lives and want to leave

and make sure that they have a dignified and humane way to leave Afghanistan and, you know, and go somewhere where they're treated with dignity? Well, you've mentioned, you know, a couple things that raised the question about what the United States in particular should do going forward as well as the international community. You mentioned the hard winner coming. We know their food shortages. We know the Taliban is not experienced and governing or providing basic services. What should the United States do, you know, when faced with the dilemma between a kind of moral responsibility to provide. assistance to Afghans, particularly those who are, you know, are struggling to meet basic needs given the tumultuous of recent events, versus not wanting to give assistance of the Taliban or not wanting to legitimize the Taliban by engaging them too much. How should we be thinking

about the role and responsibility of the U.S. government going forward? Well, I think, like, two successive administrations decided to, you know, one, the Trump administration decided, to engage in these talks with the Taliban and the Biden administration decided to stick to the terms of the deal, you know, despite analysts around the world and experts saying, okay, this is problematic because you've given everything at the first stage of negotiation. So surely, as part of those discussions, they must have had discussions also about what happens when the Taliban take over. You know, what happens if we have a, you know, a power sharing arrangement? What happens if, you know, we have a majority Taliban government, whatever those

compositions look like, there must have been some planning done around this, around, you know, Afghanistan depends heavily on international aid. So I'm sure there are much more, you know, much smarter people who I hope have planned for this. But if not, I think that there is absolutely no question about withholding humanitarian aid at this point. I think there are always to do that without, you know, legitimating the Taliban as a government. I think, you know, we can, you know, we are now in a situation where, you know, they've taken over militarily. And engagement is absolutely, you know, we don't, there is no choice about engaging. but how do we do that in a way that doesn't, you know, continue this pattern of giving them everything

without any, you know, without any anything in return. And look, the Taliban have said over and over again that they don't want to be a prior state. They want to engage with other countries. They want to govern. They want to meet the needs of the Afghan people. And, you know, whether there is any leverage there. I personally, I'm not sure, you know, if there are levers there. But, you know, but I think that's definitely we're thinking about. But the idea that we now, you know, we've abandoned this country after 20 years. And, you know, after two and a half years of legitimating and, you know, the Taliban, I think it would be a complete moral failure.

And as well as a strategic one, because Afghanistan is a problem, you know, we cannot, you know, people in the international. community, you've been there for 20 years, sticking your head in the sun and pretending this isn't going to be something that is going to impact the region and therefore the rest of the world, it's just bad, bad policymaking. Well, you make a good point, actually, that, I mean, we've been engaging them for years now. We legitimated them by making a deal under Trump that essentially, you know, agreed to leave and knowing that they had an interest in taking over the country.

and then Biden obviously doubles down on that. Providing kind of food assistance would seem to be not as extreme an act of legitimization as the very diplomatic deals that have already been reached. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think it's also important to, you know, for the United States, in particular by the international community too, to, you know, I think there are, I've seen kind of heartening examples of self-reflection in terms of, again, we need to learn some lessons here.

but I think that, you know, there needs to be, you know, some sort of a standing commission, something that tracks both the impact of the withdrawal and what happens going forward, because I think it is important to actually look at, you know, what mistakes were made, which parts of it were deliberate, you know, which, you know, which aspects of it weren't considered at all. Because even with the evacuations, we knew, the international community knew for a long time. The United States knew for a long time they were going to leave by August. And yet nothing happened. Nothing was put in place to ensure that, you know, their partners, you know,

these Afghans who've worked and supported the work of the international community were evacuated. So I think that it is, I think it's important to have an honest conversation about how we ended up here and what we can do going forward to make sure that yet again, the Afghan people, as they have done for the last 20 years, bear the brunt of choices that they have, as we've seen over the last two and a half years, you know, little chance of changing. And I assume you were one of those people

that was, you know, on WhatsApp groups and working with anybody you could to try to get people out in those chaotic days? Yes. Yes. I think that, I mean, look, After, again, you know, I'm laboring this point, but it's for a reason, after 20 years of being in Afghanistan, there will be a lot of people, tens and thousands of people who have direct link to working with the Americans and with the international community. And, you know, it was just, I think on a very personal, like my own very personal experience of it was, and the thing that I struggled with the most was the, you know, it wasn't just how kind of cruel. and callous the withdrawal was. It was also just the way in which, you know, the Afghan people were not even afforded just a little bit of dignity in attempting to piece, you know, the impact

of the last 20 years together. Just, you know, talking to people who are, who against the most incredible odds have made it to medical school or lawyers or judges, you know, waiting in sewage for two days in order to be able to, and with the full understanding that their lives are never going to be the same again. They're losing their communities. They're losing their families. They're losing their language. You know, they have to start from scratch. And I think just the cruelty and the indignity of that was something that I personally really, um, struggled with, struggled to process. And I, you know, that's something that I, you know, I'm still trying to process. But that, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

a really horrifying lesson in how you take absolutely everything away from a people. So, I mean, as someone who, um, has looked at this from a policy perspective, right? You're, you know, a big part of your work is, is, is working on, on trying to influence policy. As someone who's, um, as someone who's, um, tried to promote, you know, a more inclusive peace process with civil society and women, that was part of your work. And as someone who has all these personal connections to Afghanistan, how do you put that together into what the lesson, I know this is a big question, but you mentioned a couple of times the lessons people are drawing, you know, what would you say in particular to an American audience about the lesson we take away and how that affects

our engagement with Afghanistan going forward and how we think about, you know, our, our foreign policy going forward? I think the kind of most important thing I think is to, it's important to remember is that, from my own experience of working in this, is no matter how the military presence in Afghanistan has been packaged or sold over the last 20 years, at the core of it has always been American interests.

It has never been the interests of the Afghan people. And I, you know, very quickly want to give an example of that. and I mentioned it earlier, and it was about the kind of weaponization of women and women's rights over the last 20 years by different actors. You know, after 9-11, Laura Bush gave, you know,

what's now a famous radio address, as in Sherry Blair gave a speech in which they talked about, kind of using very much of language, talking about how, you know, it was the responsibility of the international community to give Afghan women a voice. you know, fast forward 18, 19 years later, and Zalmaichal-il-Lazard's wife,

just as he arrives to negotiate with the Taliban in Doha, excluding the government, women, civil society, everybody else. His wife, Cheryl Bernard, writes an article in which she effectively says, Western women weren't given their rights by people, by kind people who came from far away. they fought for it themselves, and African women can't expect to be liberated. They have to fight for it themselves. And so those two narratives are kind of two sides of the same coin,

and they both served one thing and one thing only, and that was the interests of America. You know, what American policymakers, you know, after 9-11 and two years ago, what they wanted to do, what they thought was in the best interest of America. It was never about the Afghan people. So I think it's really important to remember when we hear these narratives of,

oh, you know, there are people at the airport who aren't at risk and are just trying to come here. Afghan women didn't do enough. The army didn't fight hard enough. You know, the government was corrupt. You know, Afghanistan, it's been 20 years, you know, you can't expect a country to turn into Switzerland after emerging from conflict, right? It's just all of those narratives are deliberate and tailored to push an, an agenda and that agenda is this is about American interests

and not about the Afghan people. So I think it's important to remember that and just have an honest conversation about how policy is made and what's at the heart of those policies because then, at least then we can think about what are workable potential solutions to address what is about to happen in Afghanistan

which is a huge humanitarian crisis that is not going to leave the rest of the world untouched. We now live in as much as we want to pursue, you know, stick our heads in the sand. That's just not an option anymore. Whether it's climate change, whether it's women's rights, we actually have to work together. So I think question those narratives that that sells the idea that we're going to go and the West is going to go and police the world because, you know, they're trying to save people. Because Afghanistan is a perfect example of how gaslighting as a narrative that is.

So it's very good advice and something that we have to, you know, be very vigilant in trying to remind ourselves of constantly. The one last question I wanted to ask you then is looking ahead, what is the better scenario for how Afghanistan could look in a year or two years or three years? Like what is, you know, you're not going to fix everything, right? and, you know, nor is a Taliban going to liberalize. But at the same time, it's a different circumstance in the 90s. People have, in some ways, higher, you know, expectations. People have had 20 years of a different kind of system. And so there's obviously going to be some tension.

What is the, as somebody who works on this issue, like, what is the better scenario that we should be aiming to try to facilitate or make more likely, or that Afghan some sense? are hoping for in the years ahead? I mean, I think I really wish I could answer that question in detail, but I can't. There's, you know, the situation is so in flux all the time at the moment. But I think really just a couple of things. The first thing is, as I mentioned, we cannot turn our backs on Afghanistan. It's just, you know, morally and strategically, it would be the bad of.

option. It would be bad policymaking. And so we have to look at the kind of humanitarian issue that the country is facing. How do we make sure that the majority of the Afghan people who need, who are going to need a lot of assistance during the winter, are able to survive, are able to access basic services like food and, you know, able to get basic medical care, You know, those are real issues, and we have to look at how do we engage with the Taliban in a way that doesn't legitimate them, but also doesn't punish the Afghan people who have really suffered the most. So I think in a year from now, if we're looking back and we say, actually, we prevented this huge humanitarian catastrophe. we prevented lots of people from starving. And I think that's something that we should be able to do.

And I think that's a good scenario. And I think, you know, I think, and that's the kind of very immediate needs. And I think then looking at how do you continue to engage with the Afghan people to make sure that the country doesn't go dark? We don't just say, you know what, we're done. this is now an Afghan problem and let's leave them to their fate. The Taliban are representative. So it is what it is. And just make sure that we continue to engage with these people, you know, with people across the country with women, with young people to make sure that they know that they're not, you know, they haven't been fully abandoned and there are actually,

you know, we are going to use other levers, you know, whether it's diplomacy, to continue to engage with the country. And then I think finally is making sure that those Afghans who've managed to leave are not condemned to, you know, to this kind of hostile environment that we're seeing to make sure that they're able to continue their work. I think the preservation of this new generation of the knowledge of their, you know, expertise is really, really key. And so that they're able to actually continue the work that is going to benefit the country in the long term.

So, yeah, I think, I think, you know, those three points. Well, look, this has been an incredibly important conversation. I really want to thank you for joining us here. If people want to follow your work on social media or institutions, where can they do that? They can follow Time for Real Peace on Twitter where I post most of my work. Thanks so much, Sahar, Halim's Eye, for joining us. And hopefully we'll be able to circle back and check in on these things

as things move forward here. Thank you so much. Thanks again to Sahar for joining the show. Thanks to Shakira for her bravery. Yeah. What other mid-2000 stars? Brittany. I mean, free Britain.

a renaissance yeah yeah it's having a renaissance good for her i heard uh you know i was doing my psa listening day tomm i'm gonna throw out a celebrity embarrassing experience to tell me try to rival you guys uh because uh hearing about love it you know flubbing george lucas and john embarrassing himself at the correspondence dinner i can combine those experiences i was at the correspondence dinner i had a little bit to drink i mean that happens sometimes at those things and i decided that that would be a good time to approach the claire dame and the cast of Homeland and alert them to the fact that I was a national security official and that to begin to offer them advice on rooms where you cannot use your phones because I,

you know, Claire Danes is like always on her phone and like the situation room and stuff. Yeah. Let's just say that like Claire Daines was looking at me like she wished she had like security of her own that could get me as far away from her as possible at that time. And as if that wasn't bad enough, fast forward a few years later, once again, I'm at the Correspondent Center, and there's the cast of the Americans. And I thought that was a great moment to alert them to the fact that I was with Lisa Monica, who was in our counterterrorism chief, that she was the one who actually rolled up the Russian

illegals in the U.S. That was a slightly better reaction. It was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. We're not really interested in exploring it further, but that's interesting. So I did a little bit better the second time, but both of them, in retrospect, were pretty, pretty humiliated. What the fuck? Lisa's like the reason they had that show. Lisa rolled up the illegals, man. She knew what you said. That's crazy. I remember when that story popped. I was like, I'd taken a couple days off to, like, visit my dad. And I drove him in sinks. Like, he was, we were supposed to, like, be hanging out at the beach. And I was just, like, back at some apartment the whole time, like, dealing with that story.

I don't think if I had a good, insulting celebrities. It was always around the correspondent center when, you would be walking around the office and like Jay-Z was getting a tour in the situation room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people were better than me at like figuring out how to get celebrities tours so that they could meet celebrities. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There was, I actually remember talking to Obama about Homeland.

And I think like everyone was really into it the first couple of seasons. Yeah, yeah. But I remember him specifically making fun of the like, like Abu Nazir texting and making phone calls, like from the situation room meeting where they're trying to. tracking Abou Nazir. We talked about this like in the Oval Office, you know, like we're being like the PDB and there'd be like distraction about Abu Nazir texting Claire Daines or whatever. And I was just trying to alert the creators and cast of Homeland to this and not a lot of interest.

What are you going to do? But I still, great cast. And I love Clare Danes. For the record, I've loved Claredane since my so-called life, you know. Oh, yeah. To date myself. I mean, we're all Gen X, late Gen X, whatever. we are. No, no, no. Millennials. Is that where we are? Yeah, as far as you know. You are. Okay,

that's all with Ben, enjoy New York for the listeners at home who made it this far bend in New York. And I'll see you next week. See you guys. Potsave the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.