Pod Save the World - Nuclear-armed frenemies

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

Tommy talks with Steve Coll, author of Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, about why the hell we’re still fighting in Afghanistan after 17 years and the destabilizing influence of our nuclear-armed frenemy, Pakistan.

Welcome back to POTSave the World, thank you guys for tuning in. My guest today is Steve Kahl. He is the author of a new book about the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the CIA's role. He's also someone who probably knows more about the region than anyone else in academia or journalism. And so, you know, we talked about the effort to use drones to take out terrorists. We talked about troop levels in Afghanistan, but we started with the challenge that stems from Pakistan. and their destabilizing role in the region and their nuclear weapons program, which increases the risk and threat from everything we do there. So I hope you'll enjoy the interview, and I think you will enjoy his books if you want to learn more.

My guest today on Pod Save the World is Steve Kahl. He's the author of Directorate S, the CIA in America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That book is really almost a sequel to a fantastic book called Ghost Wars, which came out several years ago. He's also a staff writer at the New York. and the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Steve, thank you so much for being here. Well, thanks for having me. I'm going to start you off with a light question, a light, easy pop quiz.

How many nuclear weapons do we think Pakistan has? More than 100. More than 100. I think one problem with that program, which has been around since the 1980s, is that they have moved in recent years toward what are called tactical nuclear weapons, meaning smaller yield, more portable weapons that might be used on the battlefield or at least might be constructed to convince India that they might be used on the battlefield. So they're the kind of weapons that are particularly dangerous if you're thinking about them from a counterterrorism perspective.

Right. So they're not in a gigantic silo somewhere in the middle of nowhere. They're smaller. So what I guess really brings me the next question is how security do you think those weapons are? I mean, how worried are the national security officials you talk to for this book and for your job, generally about these nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue elements in Pakistan? I guess when you talk to people who specialize in nuclear weapons security, they start with the question, well, how big is the attacking force? Because your defenses depend on whether somebody's turning up with like a brigade or five guys in black masks. And so there's really no fence that could stop the kind of collapse, for example, of the Pakistan army or a civil war or something along those lines.

The Pakistanis are wary of our help in this area because they suspect that we might be looking to neutralize or identify where their weapons are. And so when we offer, for example, sophisticated knowledge about how to essentially put a lock on a nuclear weapon, they tend to be, yeah, thanks, we already know how to do that. So, I mean, they do have a relationship with China. they can take advice if they seek it, they always assure us that they got it. But I think we remain concerned in part because of just the broader question of Pakistan's long-term stability and the possibility that its security services might, in some scenario, split or have somebody come up within the command authority who has a radical view of the world. Yeah. So I started with the pop quiz because the nuclear pop quiz and everyone's favorite kind of pop quiz. Because

the little public discussion about Afghanistan that occurs in this country, it usually revolves around troop levels and fighting the Taliban or al-Qaeda or ISIS. But do you think we'd be in Afghanistan, if not for the risk that is seen in Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? I think probably not. And I think the challenge of Pakistan's stability and the role of its nuclear weapons in both deterring us from taking direct action that might destabilize the country further and as a reason to try to stabilize the region. You know, it wasn't described in public very often as a core element of the war because it's such a sensitive subject.

Pakistanis hate for us to talk about their nuclear program. But I think in the decision making, it was always there. Yeah. So you mentioned something there. It's like there is a constant concern about what we do or what we say across the border. How much do you think that concern about the Pakistani response as hamstrung us in our policy goals over time? Well, we've had trouble building a deep understanding with their leadership based on trust and based on honesty. It's just been a struggle.

And this is not the first phase of our relationship where we've declared that we're out. but then not conducted ourselves with transparency or trust on either side. And, you know, there was during the Obama administration in 2010 a very serious effort to try to have an honest conversation with them about big picture questions of strategy and interests. And that was probably as close in the modern era as the Pakistanis have come to answering our basic question. Like, what do you want we take to get you to?

to change your conduct in relation to these Islamist militant clients that are causing us so much grief and the region so much instability. And you know, there's this scene in the book where the leader of the Pakistan army, Ashvakayani, who was also a former ISI director of the Pakistani intelligence service, you know, he writes a series of papers into the National Security Council. The first one's very bland and it looks like it just was written by the foreign ministry, kind of just talking points. one goes a little farther. And the third one, which, you know, Doug Lute, who led the Afghan-Pakistan

policy at the National Security Council at that time, he called it Kayani 3.0. It was, you know, it was pretty specific and a little bit bracing for the Americans to read because it was essentially, you say what do we want in order to be, to have a different kind of relationship and maybe pursue different policies. We would want a free trade agreement. We would like the civilian nuclear deal that you gave to India. We want help with our energy deficits. We want to negotiate more successfully with India for access to water. And, you know, I think the specialist took that paper in and they said, well, I'm not sure we can do this. I mean, this is politically a big stretch. But it was at least an exchange about what's really at issue for Pakistan. Then, of

course, we got to 2011 and the whole relationship fell apart because of Raymond Davis and the killing of Osama bin Laden and so on. I want to ask you a little more about the Pakistani leadership in that sort of double game you talked about. But let's talk about Ray Davis for a minute because I was actually in the White House at the time. Can you tell that story of who Ray Davis was and what he did and why that was such a disaster for U.S. Pakistani relations? Yeah.

So he had a career in special forces and intelligence and had been abroad for some time. But when he comes into the picture in Pakistan in early 2011, he's working as a a contractor for the CIA at their base in Lahore, Pakistan, which is in the heart of the Punjab closer to India than to Afghanistan. But it's an area that has these Kashmir-oriented militants and terrorists, including groups that had carried out the Mumbai attack. And the CIA had turned its attention to some of these groups. And Raymond Davis's job was basically to go around and scout locations and to set up meetings for career CIA officers with their sources to make sure that those meetings were secure.

And so he was driving around Lahore, which is a very busy city in his own vehicle without anyone else in the car. And he had a pistol with him. And he had a bunch of burglar's equipment, turned out. And he was apparently scouting some routes that he would use for other meetings. And he saw a couple of guys on motorcycles behind him that looked as if they were preparing to rob him. In fact, they flashed the bore of a gun by his account at an intersection. And then he drove to the next intersection.

He took his pistol out. And the guys pulled up alongside him on their motorcycle and again flashed their weapon to indicate that he should cooperate with them. And he picked up his pistol and shot one of them dead through the windshield. And then the other one ran away and he got out of his vehicle, took a few pace, and shot that guy dead in his back as he was fleeing. Then he calmly took out a digital camera or his phone and took pictures of his victims to indicate, I think, that they had been armed. And he got back in his car to try to get away.

Well, now a mob gathered, tried to prevent him from leaving, followed him, and eventually he was arrested by the Pakistani police. And that set off a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Pakistan. Unfortunately, it got worse when efforts were. A car was sent out to retrieve him, and I believe that car struck and killed someone en route, right? Yeah, that was awful. The CIA base, learning that he was trying to get away,

sent a chase car out of the consulate, and the driver jumped the median strip to get away from some traffic, I guess, and struck a young man on a motorcycle coming the other way, killed him. He was just a middle-class shop owner. And the chase car failed to reach Raymond Davis and return to the consulate. But it was a really ugly, an ugly day. And all of that was complicated, like so many future conversations with Pakistan by Osama bin Laden. Because there was now this CIA officer, contractor, scout, whatever you want to describe him as,

sitting in a prison, as a few officials in the U.S. government knew that this operation was being planned. to get Osama bin Laden, right? I mean, why did they think it was so critical to get Ray Davis out before taking any actions against bin Laden? Well, they thought there might be retaliation against him if they did strike inside Pakistan without asking permission. You know, there was also a question of who knew what, about what. I don't think anyone believed that Raymond Davis knew anything about the surveillance operation.

But, you know, there'd been a lot of work done to try to assess this house. Abidabad by CIA station in Islamabad. And so, you know, it was just, it was not plausible to carry out this strike while he was in prison if you, you know, if you were concerned about his welfare for sure. I think that was the main concern. Yeah. So eventually we got him out, but it took an enormous amount of diplomatic effort and there was an enormous cost to relations between the U.S. and the Pakistanis. But I think that story sort of, I think, helps paint a broader picture about the relations we have with the Pakistani Intelligence Service. I mean, the book is named Director at S, which is the covert action arm of the ISI or the inter-service intelligence agency,

which is the Pakistani Intelligence Service. I think they epitomize that sort of fraught, confusing relationship we have in the region. On the one hand, they've been a critical partner in our counterterrorism efforts. They have access to places we don't get to. They can penetrate, pay off whatever terrorist networks that we can't. But they also support. terrorist groups that are working to destabilize Afghanistan. We spy on them. They spy on us. Can you explain a bit of that fraught relationship and the double game, the ISI plays and how we manage that? Yeah, I mean, it goes back, you describe it very well. I mean, it goes back to the 1980s when we were collaborators in that kind of business against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So it was the partnership among the CIA, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and the royal family, and ISI that funneled all this money and weaponry to the Afghan Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet forces. And that was when ISI grew into a much larger and more corrosive institution in Pakistan. And its covert action arm also really seized upon this strategy of using radical Islamist militias as clients in order to challenge first the Soviets, but then later in Kashmir, India. And so we left after the Soviets left, more or less, and ISI continued. And the Taliban became their principal client during the 1990s as the Taliban in the midst of a terrible civil war kind of swept as the purifying movement to end the war and took power.

And by 1996 had taken Kabul and controlled most of the country. And ISI was their main patron. It was barely clandestine. And they ran all their supply lines and military training and supplies through Pakistan. And so that's what we encountered on 9-11. The Taliban harbored al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda carried out the September 11th attacks. Taliban didn't participate in those attacks, but they were complicit because of the sanctuary they provided.

And when we came in, we confronted an ISI that had essentially nurtured the most of the movement that harbored the killers of September 11. So we had this very complicated history. And we said to ISI, you know, well, now you're going to have to switch sides and work with us. And they did so for a few years, especially against kind of foreign al-Qaeda that were inside Pakistan after they fled Afghanistan in 2001. They carried out some, you know, pretty significant arrest, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsey bin al-Shib. But then, you know, we went off to fight a war in Iraq and they saw Afghanistan, uh, becoming a kind of post-American landscape again. And they went back to their old playbook.

You've covered this for so long. You understand these complexities so well. But the general public conversation about Afghanistan, to the extent that there is one, is about troop levels and drone strikes, as best I can tell. You know, there was all this breathless reporting when the U.S. dropped something called the mother of all bombs on a site in Afghanistan,

when despite the fact that there was basically no strategic impacts to that action. Do you think that lack of a complexity in the conversation about Afghanistan makes it harder for us to get this right? I mean, is the public debate preventing us from actually talking about the real problem across the border in Pakistan? Yeah, I think it is an impediment to a successful strategy. And the way it's playing out now is that, you know, there's this understandable, but almost emotional hostility toward Pakistan that has built up inside the U.S. system, inside the Pentagon, inside the intelligence services.

And it's rooted in hard experience on the battlefield in Afghanistan, particularly after 2008, when tens of thousands of American forces went out to try to change the equation on the ground in Afghanistan. And they were frustrated by Taliban who were attacking them with the, certainly from Pakistan, with passive and active support from Pakistani intelligence services and frontier corps troops. So, you know, Americans died. Americans were wounded by Taliban units that were clearly winning support from Pakistan. And that left a lot of the people in command furious at Pakistan. And some of those people are now in the Trump administration.

So H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor, did a couple of tours out there at the height of the war. James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, the same thing. And, you know, it's not those two individuals, but it's all the colonels and lieutenant colonel. and brigadier generals who fought that war. So because of Abidabad and Osama bin Laden and because of this hard experience, there is a kind of an effort now to pressure Pakistan without really engaging with the reality that any stability, any reduction of violence in Afghanistan is going to have to include engagement with Pakistan. Yes. And I want to get to that some of those policy decisions. But just the first question, I mean, you wrote back in 2000.

2009, that our record of policy failure in the Afghan region in Afghanistan and Pakistan should humble all of us. So here are some more recent humbling facts. In January, the BBC conducted a study that found the Taliban are openly active in fighting in 70% of Afghanistan. Just today, the UN reported that more than 10,000 Afghan civilians were killed or wounded in violence last year. The security situation has deteriorated, even in major cities like Kabul. Do you think that this 17-year-long U.S. effort in Afghanistan has served either U.S. interests in the region or the interests of the Afghan people in any way? It's hard to argue that it served U.S. interests in the region, other than those that were at stake immediately after 9-11 when nobody knew if there was another attack coming and they were scared to death that al-Qaeda had another planning cycle underway. And so they went to break them up with the initial war in Afghanistan.

I think that was justifiable. A war justified out of ignorance, but there was, you know, also the shock of the scale of the September 11 attacks and fear about what might be coming next. But other than that, it's hard to make that case. For the Afghan people, I think a little more complicated because we tend to think of Afghanistan in cliched terms as, you know, land of warring tribes and perpetual conflict. And that's not right. In a century, Afghanistan was poor, but it was at peace with its neighbors. and internally it had a pluralistic constitutional government and a multi-ethnic army that was, you know, about the right size, 80,000 soldiers for a country in its condition.

And the suffering that Afghanistan has endured was caused by an outside invasion by the Soviet Union and then the escalation that ISI and the CIA participated in and civil war and so forth. So after the Taliban fell, you know, Afghans came pouring home to try to restore the country that the older among them still had living memory of. And they really counted on the international community. The bond agreement was a really remarkable thing. And they performed under it initially. They wrote their constitution based on the constitution they had in the 1960s. They staged a successful presidential election with high participation. They staged a successful parliamentary election.

And if we hadn't gone off to fight the war in Iraq, if we hadn't been so ideologically opposed to providing reconstruction assistance in that period, say, 2002 to 2006, you know, they might have gotten the support from the international community that I think they deserved. Since then, you know, that government has fragmented. There's still a big population in the cities that counts. on the international community to forestall another civil war or Taliban comeback. So it's kind of hard to argue that they should just be abandoned. But dropping bigger bombs on the Taliban in the countryside is clearly not going to change the war. Yeah. I mean, you report this out in the book. And it's also, you know, heard in almost every public declaration a policymaker makes about Afghanistan, which is that there is no purely military solution to this war, in particular

against the Taliban. There has to be some sort of reconciliation process, the political solution, peace talks. And yet, this emphasis is on troop levels, taking out bad guys. I understand the frustration that probably everyone who's dealt with the Afghanistan policy feels about imperfect partners in Afghanistan. Right now you have literal warlord serving in government. You have a literal mass murderer was the vice president. Longtime president Hamid Karzai was erratic and unstable. But like, what do you think the best way to increase the sort of softer assistance and the diplomatic effort we've put forward into Afghanistan that might have actually improved the situation and allowed us to deal with partners like those who are imperfect at

best? Well, I think you have to bring the regional governments into the picture as much as possible. I mean, the Obama administration had a really difficult hand to play after inheriting the war in 2009, and particularly the problem that was more severe then than it is today, was that Pakistan was falling apart. And the big project had to be to prevent Pakistan from collapsing. I mean, remember in 2009, the Pakistani Taliban at war with the Pakistani state were rocking Pakistani cities with car bombs. They were even attacking their paymasters at ISI. They blew up an ISI building in Lahore at one point. They came marching out of a region in the mountains called SWAT, and people thought in the spring of 2009 they might enter into Islamabad. And this is a

country as we started talking about that has nuclear weapons. You don't want the Taliban in charge of it. And so an unintended consequence of the war in Afghanistan was the massive destabilization of Pakistan when al-Qaeda migrated across the border into Pakistan and hooked up with local groups that ISI had succored over the years for its misguided foreign policy purposes. And so that Frankenstein monster just went on a rage between 2007 and, say, roughly 2014, and Pakistan endured the worst terrorism it's ever known. Now, they have gotten a grip on the country since then, the Army, security services. I mean, it's not without terrorism, but it is much better than it was during the Obama years. And so there is an opportunity to go back to talking and not be quite so intimidated by Pakistan's.

own instability. But the bigger picture is everybody in the neighborhood wants to prevent another Afghan civil war. It's not in anybody's interest to see Afghanistan collapse again. China certainly doesn't want to see that. Central Asian republics to the north of Afghanistan don't want to see that. Iran does not want to see that. Pakistan, though they're responsible for a lot of the trouble in Afghanistan, certainly don't want a civil war because they know that it'll spill back into Pakistan. So there is, in fact, enough of a common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan to undertake really active regional diplomacy. It's not going to be easy and there's no panacea.

But that's what I think needs to be resourced. And the Taliban are part of the picture, too. Talking to them, having contact with them is essential because, you know, they're going to come under pressure only if the governments that support them decide that they want to change the equation. And that's where it gets very complicated. I mean, when it comes to talking to the Taliban, you start with who do we even call, right? I mean, the Obama administration literally tried to work with them to set up a Taliban office that could be used for these sorts of negotiations. But even getting to that point was fraught, right?

Yeah. Well, they, we had never really thought about talking to the Taliban before the Obama administration. The Bush administration had a clear policy of treating the Taliban as if they were al-Qaeda. which I don't think made much sense looking at the facts, and it certainly didn't make much sense in terms of having a strategy to complement military action with negotiations. So when the Obama administration came in, they appointed both at the National Security Council and at the State Department a cell essentially to try to figure out whether there was somebody to talk to. And the book describes how in the first really year plus, I mean, it was just about trying

figure out who's out there. And they, you know, the British, you know, you thought maybe, well, maybe MI6 has some longstanding set of contacts. They didn't have any addresses. They didn't have any phone numbers. And eventually the sky surfaces, there was a little bit of, as it turned out, turmoil in the Taliban leadership about who their political representative was going to be. And they changed their kind of chief negotiator and fundraiser and eventually made made it known first to the Germans and then to the United States who we should talk to. And that guy was a young guy named Taibaga in his 30s who had a long history as a personal aide to Malahman Omar, the emir of the Taliban.

And so we did eventually start talking to him. And I think achieving that political office, even though the negotiation was collapsed and was a failure. and it was complicated by Hamid Karzai's not wanting it to happen and by ISI's role. But, you know, we did at least establish that there was a political wing of the Taliban, and they still have that office in Qatar. People go talk to them, probably more Europeans than anybody else. But if somebody wanted to get back to trying to connect regional diplomacy with the Taliban's position in the war,

at least now there's an address. Yeah. Any talks with the U.S., the Afghans, the Pakistanis, and the Taliban are going to be complicated, right? No harm in trying. If you'd ask anyone on President Trump's senior foreign policy team until pretty recently what their policy was in Afghanistan, it would essentially have been what Obama was saying in 2009, which was we should fight our way to the negotiating table. Now, Trump's doing it with, what, a tenth of the number of troops that Obama had at his disposal at that point. But ultimately, it's largely the same. until a couple weeks ago, Trump was asked at an event about his policy and he said,

we don't want to talk with the Taliban and said, we're going to destroy the whole insurgency. I don't know if his team took him seriously when he said that, but the Taliban certainly did, and they responded. I mean, do you have a sense of what their actual policy is and if those statements had a real impact on the potential for future talks? I think their policy is what you describe, that they, it is, it is, it is a real impact. It has the same contradictions that we've seen in both Bush and Obama years where there's an acknowledgement that, outside of the president anyway, that the war can't be won on the battlefield and that we're fighting them to the negotiating table. But then the only kind of line of policy that is resourced to the max is the military side.

I think they see themselves as being more, you know, sort of consistent and putting pressure on Pakistan by, suspending aid by declaring, as Vice President Pence did, I think, that we will stay in Afghanistan until the last terrorist is gone forever, and that somehow this combination of toughness on Pakistan and resolve will cause the Taliban to realize that they should negotiate. Now, I'm skeptical about that. I don't see the record to support that hypothesis, but that's what I think see themselves doing. You've mentioned their cutting off of aid to the Pakistani I mean, they, I think in early January, they said they would cut off security assistance to Pakistan in an effort to isolate them and change their support for some of the violent proxies we talked about early, like the Haqqani Network or LET. Do you have any sense of whether that decision has been effective or how it has been received within the Pakistani system?

Yeah, I don't think it's been effective yet, and it may never be. We sanctioned Pakistan for a decade even more severely than this over their nuclear program. and it didn't change their conduct then. And in many ways, they're in a more resilient position now because their most important allies, China always has been. And China is obviously a much bigger country with many more financial resources than it had in the 1990s. So I see Pakistan nesting inside their relationship with China, trying to draw other regional

governments into their alliance with China at the expense of the United States. I think, you know, publicly shaming Pakistan is not a great strategy, and it's only going to, you know, provoke deeper nationalism in an already fiercely nationalistic country and especially in the Army. And, you know, I think they see themselves as kind of countering the American pressure primarily from the strength of their relationship with China. But also they'll look to Iran and to Central Asian governments, even to Russia, none of which really wants the United States to have. have a long-term military presence in Afghanistan as a counter to whatever pressure the Trump administration puts on them. I think the one thing that might make them nervous, and you can see this in the headlines, the Pakistanis I mean, is, you know, they don't want to be illegitimate in the international

system. And whenever they've been threatened with the possibility of being listed, for example, as a state sponsor of terrorism in one regime or another, they've really scrambled to try to avoid that. And, you know, China protects them at the UN against anything of that type. But if the U.S. were to really go after, you know, generals and impose travel sanctions or that sort of thing, you know, that might rattle them a little bit. I'm not sure would have a very healthy result. You know, they may seek to escalate through the Haqqanis in Afghanistan in response to this pressure. I don't know how to interpret those horrible mass casualty attacks that followed the announcement

of the suspension of security aid. Maybe they were indigenous and unrelated, but it wouldn't be unusual for ISI to try to respond to pressure with pressure of its own. Yeah, I noticed that as well. I mean, I've been hesitant to sort of hang that escalation on the Trump administration's policy decision because I just haven't seen any evidence tying the two,

but certainly the timing is notable. Yeah, I agree with that. So we've talked about the structural weirdness here, that we're fighting a war in Afghanistan, and yet there's a safe haven in Pakistan where terrorists are allowed to plot and plan and train and get support from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence. Go back to 2009, the Situation Room, Obama is in there with this top. Generals talking about what to do, whether to send tens of thousands of more troops and how to address the war. Vice President Biden essentially pushed for taking out troops, setting up a more robust drone strategy to take out terrorist.

on a case-by-case basis. Do you think that's the future of our posture in Afghanistan and that the drone strategy has been effective enough to manage that threat? Yes and no. I mean, I think, you know, in hindsight, I'm sure President Obama would go back to that situation room and probably make a different decision. I mean, it was a really painful situation he was in because he inherited a war that was going south. And the first thing that happens when he was. becomes president as a bunch of generals come in and say, you have to send troops now. We've got an election this summer. We've got to get moving. Biden was one of those, you know, who cautioned against being pushed by the military, but the timeline was what it was. And so, yeah, I think,

you know, he was describing a version of a counterterrorism first strategy that is more or less what we've got now. And there wasn't an advise and assist component of it, of available at that time because the Afghan security forces hadn't been built up. And so the other rationale for going in big was to hold the war long enough to build Afghan security forces that could then be assisted at a lower level of military aid, which is again kind of where we are now. We function as their air force that they do all the fighting on the front lines for the most part.

We now are back in direct combat with the Islamic State element that's popped up in eastern Afghanistan more recently. But, you know, the part of Biden's argument that really stands out when you go back and kind of narrate the blow-by-blow of how we got where we are is his emphasis on Pakistan, you know? I mean, I don't think he quite knows what to do with his insight, but he does have that insight. And he, you know, he goes off to Kabul early on and meets with Hamid Karzai. And Karzai says to everyone who visits him, you know, you've got to get after ISI, the war. in Pakistan, put more pressure on them. And Biden replies, Mr. President, Pakistan is 50 times more important to the United States than Afghanistan. That went well, I bet. Yeah, that didn't go very well.

But it was, you know, it had the ring of truth about it. Right. But the problem was that we didn't have a policy that actually was structured to recognize that fact. So that was a thread that he couldn't tie off. Yeah. Or if we did, it was classified at such a level that we couldn't discuss it because it all revolved around a nuclear weapons program in Pakistan that scared the shit out of everybody. Yeah, exactly. My last question for you is probably the hardest one. Is there any sense how this great experiment in Afghanistan ends? Are we destined to end up on the list of countries like Russia and the British who are humbled by this country,

or is there a better diplomatic outcome that you can see? I think we're already on the list. I'm okay. So I think either it ends in tears in another long civil war in which, you know, more Afghans suffer than already have. And it could be a terrible war. I mean, the one in the 90s was awful. And now there's so many more weapons in the country. And the regional kind of equation is no better now than it was in the 90s. So that is a deterrent, I think, to a lot of Afghans. They don't want to relive that. And they are.

One thing that Pakistan has contributed to Afghanistan through interference is it has brought Afghans together. I mean, there is a strain of nationalism in Afghanistan, especially among young people in the cities. That's very powerful. It's undermined by ethnic polarization and factionalism and a constitutional crisis in the government. But there is a there there in Afghanistan. And, you know, the young men who volunteer to join the army for, you know, in this war, they, They're still fighting. And I think there is the possibility of an active approach to the neighborhood that I don't see, you know, a beautiful peace bargain, you know, like in Colombia or in what the Obama administration negotiated with Cuba.

But I could see the reduction of violence, the gradual incorporation of more Taliban in politics, both formally and informally. there's already a lot of Afghan-to-Afghan kind of truce negotiations that go on because they, you know, they have their own war apart from the international community's version of it. And so, yeah, the idea would be to make it much less necessary for us to have 15,000 troops and to internationalize the counterterrorism mission that will be around for another 10 or 20 years at least. That's an important point that I hear you make often, which is that not every diplomatic effort ends with a grand ceremony and everything fixed. It's a grinding, you know, piece by piece work that cleaves off little pieces and factions and slowly reduces violence and helps the population and frankly everyone involved. Exactly. That's the way the world works. You know, once in a while, you can see an opening to do something more complete.

But especially in a civil war like this, that's a reason to get up and do the work because you can make a difference. Yeah. Just have to try. This is one of the most complicated issues that any president will face probably for the next decade or two. too. I don't know that anyone in academia or journalism knows more about Afghanistan or Pakistan than Steve Kahl. His book, Director at S, the CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan in Pakistan is available for purchase right now. You should buy it. You will learn more from that book than I did in four years at the White House. So check it out. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it. Thanks again for listening to POTS of the World. If you like the show, rate us and review us in the iTunes store. It means a lot to me. And it helps people find all these substantive conversations that you've enjoyed. Thanks, guys.