Pod Save the World - The lessons we should learn from Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Tommy and Ben cover the latest news from Afghanistan, including an update on the evacuation efforts, the threat from ISIS, the coming US political fight over refugees, the media coverage of the war and what lessons they hope that the country will learn from it. They also explain why the Vice President’s trip to Asia was temporarily delayed by reports of “Havana Syndrome” in Vietnam, and discuss updates on the earthquake in Haiti. Then Tommy is joined by Ali Latifi, Al Jazeera English’s online correspondent in Kabul, to discuss what life is like in Kabul a little more than a week after the Taliban takeover.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 POTSate the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, someone on Twitter made fun of me for welcoming listeners back. Maybe it's just presumptuous that they've heard it before. I'd like to make them think they're welcome. I want them to be welcome. Yeah, I wouldn't them to feel good about being here. Yeah, well, you know what? I'm glad you guys are here. Everybody is listening. Welcome. Thank you. First timers, long timers. You're all welcome here. This is a show about foreign policy. We're going to talk a lot about the situation in Afghanistan again this week. We did almost, I think we did the the whole show on it last week. Talk about the latest in the evacuation effort, the threat from ISIS, the coming fight over refugees, and the broader media conversation about the withdrawal.

And, you know, what lessons we hope the country is taking away from 20 years of war versus maybe the ones we are worried they're taking away. We'll also talk about the vice president's trip to Asia and how there have been some interruptions and an update from Haiti. And then our guest today is a guy named Ali Latifi. He's Al Jazeera English's online correspondent in Kabul. We talked about what life is like there right now. We talked about his interview with a senior Taliban official, part of the Haqqani network. And, you know, you'll not be surprised to learn, Ben, that he is incredibly frustrated and angry at the U.S. response, 20 years of war at President Biden. And, you know, I thought it was important to hear that perspective from someone who lives in Afghanistan.

He was born there, I believe, forced to leave, moved back because he wanted to cover it and live in the country. again and now is dealing with the Taliban's return. I mean, you can't even imagine. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm sure he's reflective of, I've talked to some Afghans and they're furious, you know, and I think it's important for us to hear that perspective. Yeah, I think we, American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug and we sometimes think we're innocent. We're a little high on our own supply here. Yes, yes, yes. Two exciting content updates before we get into the news here. First, I know you'll like this, Ben. Take Line and all caps, NBA host Jason Concepcion is coming out with a brand new podcast.

It's called X-ray Vision. Can't wait. Each week, he's going to go deep into your favorite films, TV shows, comics, and just get into fandom and geek out on some of these, you know, amazing series. So the trailer's out now. The first episode drops on August 30th. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. You know how to subscribe to a podcast. I don't need to tell you where to go to get it.

Smash that button. Also, fans of our limited series, This Land, will be excited to learn that host Rebecca Nagel is back with a second season. Rebecca takes you inside her year-long investigation into a series of custody battles over Native American children. Along the way, she discovers how some of the most powerful people on the far right are using this moment to quietly dismantle American Indian tribes and advance their conservative agenda. It's amazing reporting. Rebecca did an incredible job with the first series at won awards for journalism. The first two episodes are out now. Check it out.

Listen, subscribe to this land, wherever you get your podcasts. You know, Tommy, I'm just going to add, I have an article that just published in foreign affairs. Yes. Called Them and Us, but it's basically about the legacy of the 9-11 period and the excesses of our post-9-11 policy and where that led us wrong and why we shouldn't repeat those mistakes, but you learn from them. And if you like it and haven't yet bought after the fall, my book, the article is pretty much adapted from the books. Awesome. I'm excited to read the article. I have not yet.

I have been reading Spencer Ackerman's new book about the post 9-11. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. A lot of overlap between my argument and Spencer's. He goes a little farther than me, but... Well, then that's okay. But, boy, I am right now, just in the beginning of the book, and we're talking about some of the real gruesome details of the CIA interrogation program, the torture program.

And it is just so awful. Yeah. And harrowing and awful to read all over again. And look, but a good reminder of all the things we fucked up in the fear of, filled period post 9-11. I look, you know, I mentioned this at the end of Las Weeks podcast, but it bears repeating. Like, we are living all these things that we still talk about are the wake of a bunch of choices made in that first kind of year. That time period between 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, like the die was cast on all this stuff, you know, and we've basically been doing cleanup ever since.

Yeah, it's not good. Okay, so let's talk about the effort to get American citizens and, uh, Afghans who worked with the U.S. government out of Afghanistan. It's picked up considerably. On Tuesday, President Biden held a virtual meeting with leaders of the G7. Again, that's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. U.S. and the U.S.S. and U.S. 700 people have been evacuated since August 14th. In the last 12 hours, 19 U.S. military flights got out 6,400 people and 31 coalition flights got out 5,600 people. I think they're trying

to make the point that the pace of withdrawals is accelerating. Biden said the U.S. is currently on pace to finish the evacuation by August 31st, but big butt here. The completion depends on the Taliban cooperating in letting people get to the airport and facilitating that exit. Big question there if that's going to happen. The Taliban, have said that the August 31st withdrawal date, it's red line for them and that there would be some sort of unspecified consequences that the U.S. stays longer. The Washington Post reported that on Monday, CIA director Bill Burns held a secret meeting in Kabul with Mullah Berrador, the de facto leader of the Taliban, which is, I mean, truly remarkable, been given the CIA's role in counterterrorism efforts against the Taliban for 20 years that those two would meet. Despite Taliban promises of amnesty for opponents, there are reports that they have violently cracked down on. on anti-Taliban protests in a bunch of cities.

And there's reports of the Taliban searching for Afghans that fought against them, especially the elite commando units in the Afghanistan intel service members. So that's not good. After a congressional briefing last night, Congressman Adam Schiff said he believes the U.S. is unlikely to be able to get everybody out by the end of the month. He's also very concerned about the airport being an ISIS target. So, Ben, I guess we just start with this evacuation effort. No one seems confident that we can get this done by the end of the month. The military says they need to start evacuating the 6,000 troops the U.S. sent to Kabul to facilitate the evacuation starting this week. There's some reports that might have already happened. The Taliban is tossing out redline threats. I'm not sure what they're suggesting here, maybe some sort of attack. What leverage do you think that Bill Burns or Joe Biden or anybody else has in a conversation right now with the Taliban about letting us complete or

extend the time period of the evacuation. I mean, there's literally, they're literally surrounded. The Taliban are surrounding the airport where our troops are staging this evacuation. Like, what can Bill say to them? Well, you know, it's a tragic circumstance where, you know, the day that we leave, for all the evacuations we're doing, the day we leave, that's it, you know. And from then on, if you're an Afghan, you have to get to a land border. And that's a hard thing to do.

And so just at this moment when we finally have at least a good, mass of people leaving every day, the idea that we just then have to stop because of this deadline feels very unsatisfying, obviously, for the people that want to get out. But you're right. Like what the Taliban could do essentially is, yeah, they could attack us, but they could also say, we're just not letting anybody get to this airport, you know, starting on the 31st. That's it. And, you know, what are you going to do about it, essentially? I kind of think that's what they're saying. Yeah. Yeah, I would imagine because, you know, anecdotally, you know, you and I, like everybody else, hearing from Afghans or hearing from people trying to evacuate Afghans. And the thing you consistently hear is how hard it is to get to the airport, you know, already. Now, in terms of Bill Burns and what he could do or what he could say, first of all, Bill Burns is the right guy. We've talked about Burrins, but he's like the quintessential diplomat. He's been in every kind of tough meeting that you could possibly been in. He's been in secret meetings. He's met all kinds of characters. But also the Taliban would understand that from their perspective, the CIA is the most relevant U.S. government.

agency. If you think about their history, they were born out of CIA support for the Mujahideen in part. Then they're basically been fighting a shadow war against the CIA and our special forces community that have been conducting targeted raids at the Taliban and its leadership. But then going forward, I think what the Taliban might believe is, look, there's going to be resistance to the Taliban inside of Afghanistan. From ISIS probably, right? Well, not just from ISIS. You've seen different factions. Oh, yes. Like the fighters in the northern province.

In the northern province say, I'm doing what my father didn't resist the Taliban. And, you know, the CIA participating or not in those kinds of efforts to undermine the Taliban. Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah. I don't know this. I'm just speculating. What might, I'm not, and I'm not saying Bill Burns is putting on the table, but I'm saying Mullah Berriter may be thinking, you know, I don't want to make an enemy of the CIA for another 20 years. and the proxy wars that are likely to come here. So there's a weird equation being formulated

wherein how the Taliban conducts itself could at least affect to some extent the impression that it makes on not just the U.S., but whatever's left of the international community, right? I'm not suggesting that's a ton of leverage. I'm really not, nor am I suggesting that the Taliban is likely to be a particularly moderate actor.

But when it comes to something like, do they tacitly permit for a few extra days tens of thousands of people to get out who, frankly, they probably don't want around anyway because they're activist types. Maybe there's some slight improvement in Taliban cooperation that we've seen since Bill's meeting in a way because that's when you've, you know, and part of that's just setting up the evacuation, but maybe contributed to the greater flow of people to the airport that we see. That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about the Taliban saying, don't you,

dare arm those northern militia members. And you could imagine there actually could be a conversation that starts between Bill and the Taliban about ISIS and managing ISIS or al-Qaeda in the country. I don't know if the Taliban wants to participate in that kind of conversation, but the U.S. would probably like to have it. So, you know, Ben, the nightmare situation is ISIS-related, right? I mean, it's a nice attack on the Kabul airport. You have these huge crowds of people gathered together, women, children, families, like they're completely exposed. If there were an attack, people who aren't hurt by it would, you know, then be stuck in this chaotic, horrible scenario right of trying to escape. It could shut down the airlift operations early. Jake Sullivan and Adam Schiff,

Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Adam Schiff, the member of Congress, have both spoken up publicly about the threat from ISIS. They're both clearly very worried. I imagine that the majority of our intelligence infrastructure and personnel is gone from Kabul, right? Or at least not operational. Do you think that means that we're just kind of like flying blind here? I mean, is our best defense against an ISIS attack at the airport, these Taliban checkpoints? Yeah, I think to some extent. I mean, you know, look, I'm sure there's some infrastructure there. I'm also not revealing anything, but like when you give a bagram, right? That was kind of like the big, big base. But I think there are two scenarios that I worry about Tommy, and clearly there are more than two, but two that I highlight. One is just like an ISIS attack, like a car bomb rams, a bunch of people out in front of the airport and kills a whole bunch of people and it's awful. And it kind of disrupts the evacuation in addition to that terrible suffering. And there, you know, the Taliban may feel like it also has an interest in that not happening

because, you know, they've not, I think in our judgment generally been aligned with ISIS. And they may want to be trying to convey that actually, look, it's normal here. Like we're a government, you know, things are calm. The second scenario that I really worry about is whatever the last day or two is, a lot of people have an interest in kind of shooting at us on the way out. Yeah. You know, to make it look like they chased us out. And that could include the Taliban, right? Or it could include kind of, you know, whatever the blurriest, extremist end of the Taliban is, you know.

Or it could just be ISIS opportunistically wanting to get in and do something. And so I think those have to be the two things that you're particularly worried about from a security standpoint. Just like you have a lot of exposed people trying to get to an airport that is a relatively soft target except for Taliban checkpoints. And then you have just people wanting to literally shoot at the last American leaving Afghanistan. Yeah. And the sort of residual command of forces, Afghan command of forces and Afghan intelligence service members who apparently are also providing security, who are the sworn enemies of the Taliban. And the less people there are at that airport, the more risk there is because, you know,

right now we have a lot of people there. We have got 6,000 troops, right? That can deal with a lot of contingencies. My sense is once it starts to move, they want to move it all out very fast. And that could be a very messy moment. I mean, this is, again, why, like, and this is why I think it's important. We have to, this has to play out. And the objective is to get as many people out for as long as you can.

safely. You can't mitigate all these things. It's possible that people are going to shoot you on the way out. You just have to try to execute. And trying to judge this thing in real time on social media. Don't do that. I think it was wrong when everybody was presuming that the Biden people were abandoning the Afghans entirely, you know, five days ago. Now I see some people kind of dunking in the other direction. Look at this is the greatest evacuation history. We're in the middle of it. You know, like, let's just let this thing play out here. Yeah. Chill the fuck out with that. This is not over until it's over. And like a lot could happen. Yeah. It's, I'm with you. So, Ben, we're clearly the very beginning of what will likely be a big fight over refugee admissions. Yeah. The good news is that the CBS poll over the weekend found that 81% of voters, including 76% of Republicans, say they want to help Afghan interpreters get to the United States. That's an amazing number. The bad news is that there is already a concerted right-wing effort to undermine that sentiment. Here is Hollywood Darling, turned venture capitalist, turned belated Maga suck-up, Ohio Senate, candidate. at J.D. Vance on Tucker Carlson. 40% of Afghans believe that suicide bombing is a reasonable way to solve a problem. Who wants people like that in their community? Now, we know that J.D. Vance is a piece of shit and that he's doing this for political purposes

because back in the day, he attacked Trump and said the following, quote, Trump makes people I care about, afraid, immigrants, Muslims, et cetera. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us. But now J.D. is worshipping at the altar of Republican primary voters. that's the issue here. But, you know, Republicans know this is what their base wants to hear, the caravans, the, you know, Syrian immigrants, et cetera. What do you think is the best way to take this fight on? Because I'm just worried about Democrats making an argument that's basically like, look, we promised these Afghan interpreters we would take care of them. And then the Republican rejoinder will be. I didn't promise anyone anything. You know what I mean? We got to take care of America

first. And I'm worried about the terrorism fearmongering, et cetera. Well, first of all, where did the 40% of that? He probably made it. I mean that. I don't know. I mean, give me a break, first of all. That's such a bad faith, predictable, racist, nativist, opportunistic piece of bullshit from J.D. Vans. He's trying to beat Seth Mandela. So, like, put this guy, yeah, he's trying to beat the only guy in the country who acts like an even bigger creep than him, right? But, look, let's just step back here and look at this, right? So first of all, the numbers, we should lay them on the table.

And I spent, I called around to try to get a sense of this because it's pretty ambiguous. but how many Afghans could kind of credibly say that they work with us, for us, etc. It's a big number because when you add up, yeah, it's interpreters, but it's also military kind of contractors, like the guys who were, you know, you see at the airport, you know, doing the perimeter or the people who do maintenance or things like that. But then also, as we talked about, Afghans who took money from USAID, all this, I think, gets you north of 100,000 people that contributed to... the NATO war effort in Afghanistan for 20 years.

Does that include their families? No. Okay. So that's what I was going to get to. Then you're basically stretching that out to about 500,000 people, right? When you talk about, you know, how many kids these people have and their spouses. Now, nobody would suggest that 500,000 Afghan refugees could or should be resettled in the United States. This is where an allied effort comes in.

And you've already had the UK say they take 20,000. Canada say they take 20,000. And if you kind of project that out over the NATO alliance, part of the United States, of what the Biden team, I think, has to do is say that we're not the only ones, that everybody who is involved in this war effort is doing their share to take in these Afghans who worked with us, who bled with us, who saved our lives, who sacrificed with us. And we're doing this kind of proportional to our role in this. So we should take more than everybody else by a good, healthy margin, given how much this was our war

and given how much bigger we are than those countries. Then I think, look, you're never going to win these fights in a defense. of crouch, right? And so the thing that we learned in the Obama years, I think, is that when we were trying to kind of make an argument about, you know, the extreme vetting of the refugees and all this stuff, well, you're never going to be as, you know, Trump just said super extreme vetting, right? Like, you're never going to win a securitized argument. I know, Ben, and Biden just gave a speech and he talked about how they're going to do a background check on, you know, people that are coming out right now. And I just thought to

myself, it's literally impossible to do a background check on someone who's, who's lost all their possessions. You have to make a values argument. Yeah. You have to, you just, you just just have to go at it directly and say it is our moral responsibility, it's who we are as a country, to not just take refugees, but in particular to take refugees who died by our soldiers, who saved our soldiers' lives. And frankly, what I think that Biden and the Democratic Party have this time around that we didn't have under Obama is our military. You know, these people have been so passionate about wanting to get out the people that serve with them to get out their interpreters. Those are powerful voices.

But even absent that, you know, I think that like this is a, this is a simple argument. Like these people sacrificed for us. They stood up for the things that we believe in. Like, we have an obligation to them. And that's part of who we are as a country. Like, I think that this has to be in all hands on deck. Once you start being defensive, then the appearance to the public. And I remember some being in a lot of refugee fights is, oh, wait a second, these guys are nervous about something, you know.

or if these guys are saying we have to do extreme vetting of these refugees, why wouldn't I just go with the people telling me we should just keep them out? So it's going to be a big fight. And by the way, it's going to last a long time because these aren't just going to be decided the next few months. This is going to be years that they're Afghans who are trying to get permanent homes. We've got to find these interpreters, find the service members they worked with, send them to every state, sit them down for local TV interviews where they tell their story

about how they work together. how, you know, this interpreter saved this, you know, Marines life. I mean, like, bring it home, right? I mean, that's why this last week has been so searing because we are talking about these, these personal stories, you know, the personal, you know, the struggles of the people trying to get into the Kabul airport, et cetera. Like, we have to tell that story once they get here as well about, like, what they did for us as a country.

Yeah. And, you know, if anything positive can come of this whole calamity, it's the lives that all these Afghans are going to lead in places like the United States, the things that they're going to do here for the next several decades, like the ways that they're going to enrich communities, the ways that they're going to make their mark. And by the way, if the Taliban, you know, proves incapable of governing well and that starts to crack at some point, like you want also like a diaspora that has experience in civil society. And, you know, so there's so many reasons why to our benefit, not just from a moral perspective, but from every other perspective to

deal with this. Yeah, I've got to make sure these people succeed. It's not enough to just get someone out of the country, keep them physically safe. You have to help them set up a life where they can actually thrive and live, you know? I mean, imagine you lose all your possessions, and then all of a sudden you're like living on government assistance. No one wants to be in that place. You know, that's like the Republican caricature.

Yeah. But if you look at all the research on this, like refugees tend to. excel as immigrant populations because they are like they are you know they they are starting from scratch they work their butts off sometimes it may not be the case of the afghans that there's a gratitude that goes along with and kind of being given safe haven um refugee populations in this country have a good track record of success yeah yep um so i think the meta question that you and i both are kind of been obsessed about is is what if any lesson will america take from this experience from 20 years in Afghanistan. And, you know, in a couple weeks, we'll have a better handle on how successful

the rescue mission is for the evacuation. And that's, I think, going to go a long way towards defining how Biden is viewed. But what we're talking about is more fundamental. It's like, will we learn the lesson to not start these wars in the first place? And so, you know, I think you and I both obsessively read the coverage. Some things that have made me hopeful and not hopeful. So hopeful, the polling so far. Voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden's handling of Afghanistan in recent days, no surprise. It's been chaotic. We all know why. But they still believe the war itself was not worth it by a margin of 61 to 29%. So that suggests, you know, we might have learned a lesson here. We might oppose future wars. Not hopeful. We are seeing the

same old war supporters make the same arguments with like zero pushback. We have architects of the Iraq war like Paul Wolfowitz or Paul Bremer writing opeds in the Wall Street Journal. We have David Petraeus saying it was premature to leave Afghanistan after 20 years and that we needed to do more nation building. I mean, I guess saying we needed a permanent force is at least, you know, an honest position unlike a lot of what we're hearing. You have Tony Blair getting a ton of coverage for attacking the withdrawal. Thanks for returning. There's very little discussion of how devastating 20 years of war was for the Afghan people in particular. So how are you feeling about the lessons learned question? And am I too close to this?

Are you and I overthinking it because we're reading the really soft interview with David Petraeus and the New Yorker that most of the country will never see, we'll never hear of? How are you feeling right now about the lessons learned? I mean, it's not great, Tommy. What bothers me, you know, this happened in the Obama. You're just happening now. You can look at Iraq and Afghanistan and make the calculation that invading those countries and waging wars of regime change. in nation building was a mistake. Or you can construct something that was done wrong in the execution of those wars that allows

you to believe that that original decision wasn't wrong. This played out most acutely on Iraq, where first it was we didn't send in enough troops. Then it was, we shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi army. Paul Bremer was incompetent, which he was. But then it was, you know, the surge was too late. And then it was Obama didn't leave 10,000 troops there after 2011. But what all these things had in common, some of these things were criticisms of actually Bush before Obama was somehow thinking that like a different way of fighting the Iraq war would have led to a different outcome than what we saw. And in Afghanistan, we're seeing the same thing where, you know, I think that any honest reckoning with 20 years.

And even what we were trying to do last time, you know, this president blamed for this and that, well, when the whole premise is flawed, like those presidents could have done things differently and still led to the same result, you know, the whole premise that the United States could go in Afghanistan, remove the Taliban, establish a new government, build a new army and then leave things to those people. Like that premise, I think you and I believe is flawed. And so trying to make it about anything other than the original premise and decision. seems to still be so hardwired into the American establishment. And when I say establishment, I mean, media, political, and national security. You know, there's just this kind of – and maybe it's because that would require an acknowledgement of just how catastrophic the original decision-making was to go into Afghanistan, and particularly Iraq, because the decision to go into Iraq kind of permanently screwed up Afghanistan in its own way, too. But, you know, that to me, that – that failure.

to kind of reflect on just the original idea of these military interventions is what's so absent from this kind of blame game about the prosecution of these wars. And like a Patraeus thing, too, is the counterinsurgency strategy that he puts forward for Afghanistan, when Obama had 100,000 troops by Dave Patrasis' as his own analysis at that time, that was nowhere near enough to do a counterinsurgency strategy across all of Afghanistan. It could allow you to do a counterinsurgency strategy in one piece of Afghanistan. There was just no political universe in which, like, an American president could have well over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for well over another decade. Or 250, which is what I think that, you know, the real coin supporters wanted.

And what is that even based on, right? Because where is coin, you know, it's worked in little pieces of countries, right? So to me, like, if you pull back the camera, if you look at the countries where the United States intervened militarily after 9-11, yes, you're doing. taking a lot of terrorists. Yes, we've, I think, prevented terrorist attacks and saved lives. But look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Yemen. Look at Somalia. Look at Libya, if you count that. Are those countries better off from kind of a humanitarian and political perspective than they were before the U.S. interventions? I mean, they're not. And we have to deal with that as a country. And the way to deal with that is not to kind of blame Joe Biden for the execution of withdrawal,

Even if he did mess up the execution of the role. Or blame him for the execution of the trial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, have the bigger conversation, too. That's not the story of Afghanistan. Yeah. That's like saying the story of Vietnam is Gerald Ford. I mean, it's just not what the truth is.

So I want to play you a bit of audio from an interview that Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did over the weekend on ABC News. There's actually two clips that actually gave me some hope. So here's the first one. When you look back on those years, are you really kind of beating yourself up over that? Well, I am, yeah. What I thought we could do, and I advise President Obama accordingly, is I thought we could turn it around. Obviously, I was wrong. You've also heard President Biden say, look, we should have gotten out 10 years ago. We should have gotten out after they killed Osama bin Laden. You were there when they killed Osama bin Laden. You were the chairman. Should we've gotten out then? I think in retrospect, yeah, we should have. I don't think it was possible for us to just abruptly walk away right after. we kill bin Laden, but clearly we could have gone earlier than we did. As I look back and a lot of

people are critical of the president right now, the President Biden had it right back then. He was focused singly on counterterrorism, and his advice was along those lines, and he certainly said that. And I give him credit for that. So I didn't choose that to give Biden credit, but it is, I think, really commendable that Mullen admits he was wrong. Here's the second clip. I think we need to learn lessons. I think we need to examine in the military that can do spirit and that can we understand why we too often say yes to a mission when we should say no.

That was interesting to me, Ben. Now, no. Yeah, I'm going to make an amendment to that. I see your hesitation there, which is there have been times in the military, is pushing for... Yeah, it wasn't saying yes. It was saying, give us. Right, right. And that was famously true during the 2009 Afghanistan Review, where Mullen was a chairman.

Where Mullen was a chairman. Nobody asked him to come to, nobody asked him to develop a surge option. Yes. You did that on their own. But I do think there is this conversation that's been happening a lot about the disconnect between what are often overly rosy or optimistic statements from senior Pentagon leadership about, say, the training of Afghan security forces versus the reality experienced by people on the ground or the reality. State Department cables or CIA assessments. I think this is an interesting discussion because the Washington posted a big series on this. They called the Afghanistan Papers. It was clearly an effort to compare it to the Pentagon Papers. I think Mullen's point here gets at a distinction that's worth talking about in which there's

a difference between the Pentagon Papers disclosing like secret bombing of Laos that was never reported on or whatever. And U.S. generals offering overly positive statements, both are bad, both are damaging. Both are problems that need to be fixed. But to Mullen's point, like sometimes those overly optimistic statements come from this military culture that views every job is achievable. And their job is to salute and say yes and get it done and be optimistic. But that can mean, I guess, refusing to acknowledge the reality that there are limits to what they can achieve or the U.S. military can achieve.

I just thought it was an interesting illustrative point. I think it was a fin—first of all, like, that's an astonishing feeling. welcome statement by Mike Mullen. I mean, it's just so rare that you have a former four-star go out and say, you know what, like that was wrong? Yeah, like that. Compare that to betrayus. You know, yeah, that's hugely to his credit.

And he always was like an honorable guy, but he was a dead set backing up the surge, you know, 40,000 additional troops guy. But even at that time, he was backing up Petraeus and McChrystal. What didn't it originally from Mullen, he saw his job. job as chairman backing them up. So this leads to the second part of what he said, because I think he's what I think he meant and I think he's exactly right. It's not that they're, because this is the problem I also have with like Jim Shudow, you know, tweeted something. The CNN. It was like, you know, I've seen the U.S. military be given, you know, forced to do

far too many missions that, you know, civilians inflicted on them. And again, the awkward reality of the Obama years on the Afghanistan policy is we didn't, you know, the military came to Obama in 2009 was like you have to give us 40,000 troops. That wasn't Obama seeking an escalation in that way. But I understand the mindset. And this leads me to, like, I think what Mullen was getting at. First thing is, if the military has any responsibility, if they have responsibility, if you're Stamacrystal and you're sent to Afghanistan as the new commanding general in 2009, and you're like, I've been given this mission to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat Al Qaeda, well, shit, I want more resources. And who wouldn't?

Of course. I was on Medi Hassan's show recently, and he kind of tossed me a softball. Like, isn't the military to blame for some of this? And I was like, well, of course they want more resources. So it's hard for me to hold that against them because if I'm a general and I have an enemy, I'm going to say, send more troops so I can do more to defeat that enemy. And so I think that the mindset of the military is just like they want to believe they can achieve the mission in front of them.

And part of what Malin's getting at is that McChrystal could have come back and said, you know what? Actually, I don't think we can defeat this enemy with a reasonable amount of resources instead of the mindset kicking in of, no, I can get this done. Just give me enough to try to get it done, right? Then I think the second thing that happened in Afghanistan that you looted to is that because I've read the Afghan papers and I said this to you, you and I've gone back and forth on this. We did relay rosy assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces. I had no reason to not believe that those were true, you know, that when When you get the DOD guidance that suggests that there's 300,000 troops, blah, blah, blah. Now, why does the military kind of, they want to, they're deeply invested in what they're doing. And so I do remember the only way in which we might have known that wasn't true, right, is there was usually dissent.

And often the dissent was, by the way, from the intelligence community, right, without getting too into it. But like, this is why I don't think the intelligence failure arguments are true because the biggest skeptic of the, war in Afghanistan, at least when I was there, was always the intelligence community saying it's not as good as the military says it is. And they'd have these kind of fights about how well things were going or how badly things were going. And I think that, you know, some of this is just human nature. If you are, if you're fighting and your friends are dying and you're doing tour after tour of duty in a place like Afghanistan, you want it to be succeeding, you know. and you want to believe the best version of what you're working on, right?

That's of human nature, right? And to me, that suggests that I don't think the problem here is with the U.S. military. It's with the premise of giving our military or any military regime change nation-building efforts. Right. When does that ever work? The military, you ask them to go blow something up. You ask them to go into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden. They can do that because that's what a military does.

But, like, you ask them to build a government in Afghanistan. why would they be able to do that? Right. Stan McChrystal, Admiral Mullen, Barack Obama could not solve the problem of the corruption that is created when the United States spends $80 billion in a country or the problem of the safe haven in Pakistan. Or at least the military could not be asked to solve the problem of a Afghan government that was perceived as corrupt. And the entire government was never able to solve the problem that everyone identified, but no one could address of the Taliban. having a safe haven in Pakistan. Yeah. And, you know, there was an interesting moment between Petraeus and Obama on this where it was

a height of the surge. And Petraeus was explaining how he'd brought in these kind of anthropologists to, you know, think about Kandahar and power dynamics there and, you know, tribal relations. And it was about as smart as a person could try to be in the challenge of governance in Kandahar. But, and I think Petraeus thought that Obama would kind of connect with that. You'd geek out with them. But Obama kind of. had the opposite reaction of like what what are we doing you know like we can't sit in Washington and

diagnose the block by block politics of kandahar you know like it's this is not what we're supposed to be doing this is not you know you could have the smartest generals in the world and and the idea of the united states being able to design a local government in kandahar it wouldn't make any we can't we can't we've got we've got we've got how can't in a country that has January 6 run Afghanistan. You know, like, we just, we're not, like, so, so to me, like, that's where we have to get back to this debate always has to return all the way back to, like, should we be engaged in these kinds of military efforts in the first place or not?

So there, there's also been sort of an associated or related conversation about the coverage. And in particular, a discussion between journalists that sort of spilled out on Twitter about whether some of the reporters covering the story of what's happened. Afghanistan are too close to it. The point that, you know, some of these journalists who are more DC-based are making is, you know, the reporters covering the story in Kabul right now have worked with interpreters. They are worried for their friend's safety. They are angry, understandably, that Biden's exit has put their friends at risk. That is totally understandable. It's human. Everyone gets that. But they're wondering whether those correspondents have lost their ability to be

objective and maybe that's skewing the coverage. Is this even an appropriate conversation, right? Is objectivity even real? Blah, blah, blah. For the past week, I have felt like this conversation about Afghanistan has echoes of the Obama redline coverage and decision. And so, again, I just want to start by, to be clear, like, we're not trying to relitigate that. No, please no. Obama, Biden, they deserve criticism and scrutiny. And you could certainly argue that they created these problems for themselves, at least in part, right? The red line in what we're seeing right now.

By saying red line. Not arguing that now. But the reason I bring this up is because, you know, one of the reporters who was sort of getting some flack on Twitter as Clarissa Ward, who is at CNN and doing really incredible and brave coverage that I admire, but she also covered Syria. And at one point, Ben, you know,

when you were at the White House and working on Syria, she sent you the following email that I think she later disclosed in her book. This is verbatim. Dear Ben, I hope you are sleeping soundly as a leperabom. Burns, at least we have the Russians to sort it out. Best Wish is Clarissa. I imagine that's stung to receive, but, you know, it's not about you. We're not trying to make this about like DC. I also imagine it was really hard to cover someplace like Syria to have friends killed, to have journalists you were close to kidnapped. I'm sure it was devastating and enraging all at once.

But, you know, she put that email in her book and did some interviews about it and talked about how she felt like she crossed the line. She said she was heartbroken and angry that, quote, there wasn't really a strong U.S. policy that we had said Assad must go and then we had done nothing to make him go. And later she said, Obama's Syria policy, quote, wasn't a well thought out policy, but rather a kind of series of improvised decisions to try and avert getting sucked into a quagmire. She later says in this interview, which was with CBS, with Mike Morel, the former CIA director, which adds a whole other layer of complexity to this conversation, that she wasn't advocating for military intervention. But if you're talking about the red line debate,

If you're talking about the U.S. really having some teeth behind a policy to remove Assad, you de facto absolutely are talking about starting a war or military intervention. Yeah. And I just think it's worth stepping back in thinking about the discussion around Biden ending the war in Afghanistan and the red line debate. And you compare the criticism Obama got around the red line to the universal praise Trump got for bombing a runway in Syria and achieving nothing. Meanwhile, ultimately, after the red line fias. Obama cut this diplomatic agreement that resulted in 1,300 tons of chemical weapons getting shipped out of Syria and destroyed, which almost certainly kept them out of the hands of ISIS fighters. Joby Warwick wrote an entire book about this, but that's still viewed as this big stain on Obama, big stain on America's credibility in the world. There's never the context that a military strike associated with chemical weapons or the red line conversation wouldn't have ended the war. It wouldn't have ended the suffering of the Syrian people. fact, it might have, it could have made things worse. We just never know. And there is very little

discussion today about the cost of continuing to wage war in Afghanistan, especially for the Afghan people. And so like this is a delicate conversation. I'm not trying to impugn anyone's motives or work, but it does seem like you're seeing, you know, similar things play out. You know, you have journalists who are very close to what's happening on the ground. And sometimes those human emotions spill into coverage, and it's just a question of, I don't know, is it, is it properly contextualizing what America could do in either of these situations? So, yeah, a bunch of thoughts of this. And I didn't know you were going to read that, that email. It brings back memories. You know, there's one tiny little DC piece to it that you'll

find interesting that only a subset of the audience will, but that part of what motivated to write that I think is, remember how everybody kind of assumed that every background quote that appeared was from me, you know. So somebody had said when Russia intervened in Syria, like, knock yourself out on background. And I think Clarissa thought I'd said that, and I didn't. So let me just put that aside. So was the timing of that email, like right after the red line? No, no, it was later. So this is later. And I always admired Clarissa for the same reason she's getting a lot of praise today. I mean, but like here's how I look at, you know, foreign correspondents do have a role to play in spotlighting human suffering that is happening in places and kind of grabbing the audience by the lapel and shaking them and saying, look at this suffering. Yeah, this is why you should care.

You should care about this and you should think about doing something. Here's America's role in making this happen in some cases. And so I think when you look at a Clarissa or Richard, Richard Engel or any of these people, like, they're out there and to some extent. serving as that kind of, you know, most extreme version of our conscious about what's happening. I will say, though, often not from like the DRC or there are plenty of places that we are not brought human suffering where there's not some kind of geopolitical nexus to it. But then the problem with it in terms of how it gets translated into the Washington discussion is, yeah, in Syria, the premise of the premise of, you know, a certain kind of criticism. that you've seen with Biden is, you know, we should be stopping it. Had we acted, we could have stopped the Russian war planes or something like that.

And the thing is like on Syria in particular, but I think the same applies today in Afghanistan. I'll get to that is we could have gone into Syria. We could have done any number of things in Syria. I think the lesson from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and I'd add Somalia and Yemen, let's just take those five countries, is the U.S. intervening militarily does not translate automatically into things getting better for children in those countries. Or certainly it doesn't translate into war stopping. It translates into the United States being a party to the war.

And frankly, we ended up in Syria, just in different parts of Syria fighting ISIS. And so there's a kind of all or nothing presentation of these issues, like the way in which you demonstrate that you care about people is by militarily intervening in their situation. you know, which I think is a is I don't agree. You know, I just, I'll be like, and this is not a criticism of cleric at all because, like I said, her job is to grab us and shake us. But like, you know, too often, I don't know when it became the thing that the only way to show that you had a humanitarian interest is to intervene militarily. Like, just take the conversation around girls' education. Like, what if we took all the money that we spent in Afghanistan and spent that on girls' education?

That would have a much better positive impact on the world. But somehow it becomes about the use of our military in places. Yeah. This interview with Michael Morrell, she said, like I just said a minute ago, she described the Obama policy as a series of improvised decision to try and avert getting sucked into a quagmire. And sometimes when you're talking about the military's role in a place like Syria, that is the best you can do. Yeah, and that is a policy objective.

It wasn't the only policy objective. But I think her overall criticism our Syria policy has a lot of truth to it, you know, improvised to ad hoc, the statement to call for Assad to go, not following through enough. So there's, she's not wrong in a lot of her analysis, I think, but the broader mindset of the way in which you demonstrate that you care is somehow tied to what you're willing to do with your military. You know, it's just not borne out by reality. And it's, by the way, the problem of the degree to which democracy promotion also got

fused with the military action like this we have to decouple American foreign policy like wars should not be attached to democracy and humanitarian ends as much as they have been I think the second point is somebody's involved in communications like you Tommy is like from a media perspective even allowing for the the understandable passion that a lot of reporters so let's go beyond closer like a lot of reporters who know afghans have expressed online I saw cjj Chris Chivers, a great reporter. The problem with it is, I don't know, there are reporters to cover health care and see patients dying who are uninsured and don't, if they did the same thing, and the premise,

basically what they're doing is like, why, how can America not save the lives? You need to, you do need to decouple, you know, opinion from just reporting what's happening. And this seems to be weirdly the only aspect of the American media in which those walls are just dismantled. Yeah. And look, and, you know, like the probably most honest and most charitable explanation for why is that they are friends with people who are scared and trying to get out and they become part of the story. Yeah. And from a human level, I totally understand that. And I think from a foreign course, again, I think Clarissa Ward is actually different in the sense that I won Clorce Award and Richard Engel out there giving.

us like the worst version of what's happened. Me too. Because we need to know that. I think it's different when it comes to Washington. Yeah. And suddenly it's just kind of the de facto, if you're everybody from the headline writer to the cable booker to the lazy pundit is just kind of, you know, getting on some herd about, you know, American foreign policy and the need to be in war, you know, ignoring the lessons

the last 20 years. Yeah, like, again, remember of bleeding from behind was some sort of like horrible thing. Yeah. The other thing that it's very frustrating in the coverage is when it's, you know, It goes from specific to vague. So like specifically, we all agree that the visa processing should have been done faster by Biden. The chaos we've seen from the last week was preventable and should have been avoided by, you know, changing the date of withdrawal, whatever. But when it starts to be ambiguous bullshit about, you know, the U.S. has disappointed European allies, you completely lose me.

Or when they say, you know, we should stay in Afghanistan to prove to allies in Asia that we're, you know, we're going to completely lose me. that will get Taiwan's back if China invades, like, then what the fuck are you talking about? We cannot stay in Afghanistan to send a message to China, Iran, Russia. Like, that is... Or European security elites, you know. Right, or like conservative MPs who probably don't like Biden to begin with. Yeah. I mean, there are two things.

One is just the Vietnam thing is fascinating to me because the media thinks it's like this giant gotcha on Biden to say this is like Vietnam. as if the problem with Vietnam was the evacuation and not the war. You know, comparing it to Vietnam kind of validates, I think, Biden's decision. Like, my lesson from Vietnam is we shouldn't have fought the fucking war in Vietnam. Yeah. So it's not that, like, we should have had more helicopters to get people off that building at the end of the war, or that we could have won the war with a better counterinsurgency strategy. So, like, they're telling on themselves with this Vietnam comparison, because if this is

Vietnam, well, maybe we shouldn't have been involved in nation building in Afghanistan to begin with, right? And then this other thing, this constant, I mean, what's so frustrating to me about it is they don't apply it in reverse. Yes, there's some Europeans who are really frustrated with this one down. There are a fucking ton of Europeans who were furious that Trump pulled out of the Iran deal or the Trump pulled out of the Paris climate deal. And there wasn't some hand-wringing freak out that it was the end of American credibility that we pulled out of the Iran deal, you know? So for whatever reason, if it's like a hawkish perspective, it's treated as more credible in American media. It is astonishing to me that 20 years after 9-11, 18 years after the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, after all this hubris and excess and failure in hawkish foreign policy, that those people are still treated as more credible voices and as the go-to people that you want to book on your segment or as the people have more legitimate claim on your op-ed space, that that is still the case.

And that they can make these bank shot arguments that, like, we have to have a force of 10,000 people in Afghanistan for 15 years so that if the Taiwanese are less likely to develop nuclear weapons. What are we talking about here? Yeah, I hope we can apply this moral clarity and the outrage we are hearing when the Republican efforts to demagogue and block SIVA visas from come to the U.S. Okay, you want to apply it over to ending the war? We should also apply it here. I think that's fair. So you brought up Vietnam, which is actually a helpful segue to the vice president's trip. So vice president of Kamala Harris is currently traveling abroad.

It's her second ever foreign trip. She's going to Singapore and Vietnam. I'm sure, like you were just saying, Ben, that the media narrative around this trip is driving the VP staff crazy because every reporter, again, is thinking it's clever to suggest that the timing is problematic because of the comparison to the fall of Saigon. There is no mention in these stories of the nearly 100 million Vietnamese people. or the fact that Vietnam is now a close partner of the U.S. It's a big vibrant economy and that we all should hope that Afghanistan looks like Vietnam in 50 years. Think about how so fucking dumb this is. Like, do you think that they plan the trip thinking that the Afghan withdrawal go well and be like, well, we'll send her to Vietnam so we can show the success of the Afghan.

She's there because it's an important country, an important part of the world that's doing really well. Right. Like, yeah, yeah, it's the best case scenario, by the way. If Afghanistan look like Vietnam in a few decades, like that'd be pretty great. Truly, truly. And then a few hours before we started recording, there were reports that the VP's flight to Hanoi was delayed because they learned that at least one diplomat had to be medevacked out of Vietnam because of an unexplained health incident.

The speculation in the reporting, I don't know how confirmed this is, is that this diplomat, maybe one, maybe two, was suffering from what's come to be called Havana syndrome, which manifests is vertigo, ear ringing, nausea, basically like it looks like a traumatic brain injury. We've talked about this bunch of on the show before. There's speculation that the Russians are. doing this somehow. The VP's office said she's going to continue her trip. But, man, I mean, this seems like a break-class moment on this issue. If there is a shred of evidence or a shred of concern that the vice president of the United States can't travel abroad because of whatever this

phenomenon is, this is a game changer. Is it not? We need answers on this thing because, and we've talked about this, but like Havana syndrome, right, it starts because a bunch of people get these symptoms in Cuba, then we just, you know, it's given a name like it's a fucking Sean Connery movie from the 1980s or something, Havana syndrome. Oh, yeah, it's a good title. Clearly, this is not the Cuban government. The Cuban government is not involved in global attacks on U.S. personnel and Vietnam and China and Washington, D.C. and all the rest of it.

So, you know, there's been this growing, you know, long time suspicion that Russia could be behind this, right? But, I mean, at this point, we just need answers because if principals can travel places or every U.S. diplomat has got to be thinking wherever they go, like, shit, is I going to have to deal with Havana syndrome? And by the way, I don't know what the truth is here. What if this is just some technology, right, that is causing problems, like some weird, whether it's our technology or somebody, some foreign adversaries intel technology, like, like, like, this, this needs answers. Like it's been, you know, it's been five years since he's, you know, and granted, we probably lost a lot of those years with the Trump people, not taking that seriously. But there needs to be some information in part because, like if, you know, it's got to, like I said,

be in the back of diplomats' heads. And you can't, you can't run a foreign policy with this kind of thing hanging over. I mean, what if it happened to some income country right before Biden was going to go there? your choices are risk having the president of the United States incapacitated with a traumatic brain injury or canceling the trip? Yeah. I mean, it's a huge deal. It's a huge deal. Yeah.

And I just, I think there has to be some transparency around an aspect of this. We've heard nothing from the U.S. government about what this is. You know, and again, like it, I don't, I have, you know, Russia is the only foreign adversary. I can think of being crazy enough and, you know, sadistic enough to do this. But then it's happening everywhere. You start to think, like, is there just some technology that is causing problems? Yeah, there's some speculation. Like, what if this is some U.S. technology that's like our encryption technology.

I'm no technologist. So I'm not suggesting I know anything here. But like whether it's somebody pointing a weapon at us or whether it's something we use to try to prevent people from pointing a weapon, something is messing with people. And we need to know what it is. Yeah. Final story here. So on August 15th, there was a massive 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

This comes about a month after Haiti's president was assassinated and it comes a little over a decade after Haiti was hit by the previous devastating earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people. According to a Washington Post report, 24 health care facilities were damaged and 287 schools were damaged or destroyed. Other critical infrastructure was damaged. In many cases, Ben, like there's these communities where the church, provide services like schooling, you know, food for the poor, shelter in some cases that the government,

the government's literally not even there. I mean, the church is the government, essentially. Those churches are now destroyed, like priests were killed. It's horrible. Many of these hardest hit communities by the earthquake were basically already cut off from the capital because, you know, there's very few roads and what roads were available to them are controlled by gangs. So, like, I mean, the Haitian government is completely burned by the 2010 relief effort because so much of it was siphoned off by corruption. There was the horrible cholera outbreak. They're now asking that all aid flow through the Haitian government to try to avoid those mistakes. But of course, it's a caretaker government.

They're still, you know, they're going to try to have an election this year. I don't know how you pull that off with COVID, the assassination. And now this. So I just, I don't even know what to say about this. It's so profoundly unfair that any country could have to. to endure this much suffering. But, you know, this is just, again, for everyone's awareness and maybe keep an eye out for ways to donate to support relief efforts or whatever it might be.

I see. Jose Andres' organization has been there on the ground delivering meals. That's a start at least. I think the two things I'd offer, you know, we talked about in past, listen more to Haitians and formulating our strategies. One is just to connect these conversations. Like, we've spent $7 trillion on the war on terror, right? part of what we should think about is, you know, obviously there's a question of what we could have done with that funding if we weren't doing it.

But going forward, if you know, if you're significantly reducing or ending these wars, obviously it's not going to be a dollar-for-dollar transition to things like Haiti, but there should be more available resources to provide sustained assistance to a Haiti in a world in which a lot of your development funding isn't just flowing to support your war efforts. And then the second point, and at some point, I'd be great to have Samantha on talk about this, if you will. The development strategies of the United States often do rely on like contractors, where USAID is kind of subcontracting out to somebody else to build some capacity. And whether there can be more direct assistance given to NGOs on the ground, local actors, the money is going to have a very clear outcome instead of it being. some kind of laborious process. It does feel like Haiti is the kind of place where you just need to be rebuilding some stuff and you need to be helping to feed people and get the place back on its feet instead of trying to formulate a development strategy in which you're working with contractors to support, you know, some longer term objectives. So Haiti is a place

where more resources that gets more directly to people will make a bigger difference. And yeah, if people are asking who to support in any of these cases, Afghan refugees or Haiti, find the organizations, and we can start suggesting some, obviously, on our pages and stuff, but, like, that reach people directly that are working with Afghan refugees or that are on the ground in Haiti. Like, who is doing that? No overhead just right to providing support. And I think those are the most effective organizations right now. Could not agree more.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, you'll hear my conversation with Ali Latifi, who is Al Jazeera English's online correspondent in Kabul. So stick around for that. I am very excited to welcome onto the show. Ali Latifi, he's a journalist based in Kabul, where he is a correspondent for Al Jazeera English. Ali, thank you so much for joining. Thank you. So it's been, you know, a little bit more than a week since the Taliban came to Kabul. How would you describe the atmosphere in the city generally right now? Are there visible Taliban checkpoints or are people able to move around the city? Like, what's life like?

People are able to move around. You know, the Taliban are much less visible than they were in the first two or three days. In the first two days, they were everywhere. Everywhere you turn, you would find a Taliban now. You really only see them when they're driving through in one of the police rangers or the Humvees that they now ride along in. In the first two days, they were everywhere. where they were lounging around places, they were walking around,

they were talking to people, they were taking pictures. Now they're mainly either at, they don't really have checkpoints around the city that I've seen, and I've been all around the city. But what they do have is, so for instance, a lot of like the old sort of like government and embassy type entrance gates

and all of that that's where they're standing out. They've basically replaced all of those guards. And it's funny because now, you know, the Taliban are the guards outside the Ministry of Women's Affairs. So it's kind of ironic. People so far, you know, and this is the thing is that on the outside, on the streets, things seem fairly normal, you know, but what's changed, changed is that there's a lot fewer people out on the streets.

You know, it's fine. I was talking, I was doing a story on the impacts of the economy over the last week or so. And all of the business owners I talked to, they were like, every day feels like Friday. You know, feels like a day off because there's so few people out. Right. And more than that, there's so few women out. It's not to say that women don't go out, they do. but it's a very small, small amount.

You know, maybe if you go around the whole city, you know, you spend all day outside, you might see 100 total, if that. So clearly, for the majority of women, they haven't reached a point where they feel comfortable, where they feel reassured enough by what the Taliban is saying to go out. Right, right, understandably.

And, you know, and also a lot of men, you know, like I was, because I was doing this economy story today, so like I went to a barber shop and the barbers were like, you know, our customers have like our, our, our income per day has dropped by 50, 60, 70 percent because even though the Taliban haven't said anything. you know, people, a lot of men are still afraid to shave their beards in case, you know, that the laws do change in case this becomes something. And so for a lot of people, it's, it's sort of like whatever like the physical version of self-censorship is, you know, it's not trying to create a situation where you could anger a Taliban where they might hit you or they might throw you in jail or worse, you know. So a lot of people are taking precautions. You know, most men have changed the way they dress.

You know, they're trying to be much more low-key. You know, they're trying not to go out as much unless they have to. Women, obviously, even more so. So it's kind of like every day you're kind of, you're sort of mitigating with yourself. where do I go? What do I do? You know, what are the chances that I'll run into some kind of an issue? And it's more the fear of that issue than anything that's, you know, holding people back. Because the worst thing that could happen is so if you're a guy, you know, you anger a tall lid because you're wearing jeans and a t-shirt or because your beard looks too short.

Or if you're a woman, you know, they think you're not covered enough or just the fact that you're, your outside angers them. So it's become a lot of, I don't know what the proper word is, but like self-censorship. Yeah. No, you wrote this amazing piece in the nation. The headline was in Afghanistan, we have never tasted true independence. I recommend everybody reads. But you talk about this question of how in past years it was people in more rural villages

in districts who were worried about personal freedom because of night raids, because of drone strikes, because of air strikes. And you were talking about how that anxiety about personal freedom has now shifted to Kabul in the ways you're talking about now. I thought that was a really important point in contrast. And it's much more physical, right? Because it's like it's the most basic things that, you know, like for instance, today I went to write one of my stories in this cafe slash like Shisha Bar that I was go to.

One of the ATMs was working today. So I had some extra money finally. So I, you know, I treated myself. and usually when I write, I put on headphones and I listen to music because then I get distracted. And even though we were inside this restaurant and there were clearly no Talibs around, the whole time I was worried, I was like, am I getting, are the waiters going to be upset that I'm putting on headphones? You know, do I run a danger if someone walks in, if a Talib walks in and they see me wearing headphones? So it's all these sort of like very small little things that you now have to worry about that, you know,

10 days ago, you know, it would make you stand out and people might stare at you and there would be a chance that you might get robbed or someone says something stupid to you, but it didn't seem like an existential threat, you know? Right. Or like this weight on you. Yeah. That's, it's such an important point and something to understand about this, this weight that people in Kabul now feel. And I guess I'm also trying to understand if there's any way to get a sense of, The sentiment about, like, there's sort of two distinct issues, right? There's the way the Biden administration left Afghanistan, and then there's the fact that the U.S. is leaving Afghanistan,

and I think there are sort of distinct things. And I wonder, oh, sorry, go ahead. U.S. leaving is an issue. Right. Nobody cares. Very few people care. The only people that cared were the people who benefited from this war, right? The war profiteers, all of those, the NGOs that made all this money,

the foreign contractors that have on contract. the UN, you know, like all these corrupt places. They care, you know, and the politicians. To them, it mattered. And they were, they were grasping at straws, you know. Like, I remember there was a former vice president. He was in a clubhouse chat. And he's like, Al Qaeda is here.

Al Qaeda is here. I'm like, where the hell is Al Qaeda? Even if Al Qaeda is here, who do they pose a threat to? You know, like, what are you talking about? Why are you dredging up 2001? And then he ended his talk by saying, I can guarantee you there will be another attack. on the West and it'll come from Afghanistan, which is like total bullshit, right? Because first of all, the biggest problem in the United States is like white nationalists and gun control,

you know, not a quote unquote terrorist. And COVID, yeah. Yeah, exactly, in COVID. And secondly, like the odds of a group being that capable in this day. And like if Daesh couldn't do it, what makes you think the remnants of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban can do it, you know? Right. So your sense that the broad sentiment is that people are happy that the U.S. left? Because that's sort of not the sense you get from U.S. being a coverage. If not happy, resign to it. Because you have to remember, the U.S. committed all kinds of abuses here. You know, Obama accelerated the drone war. Trump, you know, was off the rails here, you know. Bush, you know, during his time, you know, during Bush and Obama's time, you know, there were night raids. There were air strikes.

the air strikes and the drone strikes really took, I was under Obama that we became the most drone bomb country in the world. You know, there was rendition, there was Guantanamo, there was, there was Bagram, there was illegal detention, there was all kinds of issues, there was Robert Bales, there was what the Australian soldiers did, there was what the British soldiers did, there was the Kunduz air strike by the Germans, there was the bombing of the MSF hospital by the US. Nobody forgot any of these things, you know. People were living through this all the time

and they were upset about it. And so that hostility has been there a lot. So at the end of the day, like the average person was like, okay, well, what did you really do for us anyways? But what has angered everybody rightfully is the way Biden has done it. The fact that he announced the withdrawal with no conditions on anybody.

He didn't tell the government, you need to really sit down in earnest and figure out a peace plan, right? He didn't tell them you need to end corruption, like for real this time, not like, oh, we may, you know, limit funding or like you really have to put an end to corruption, right? And he also didn't tell the Taliban, you need to seriously sit down and negotiate,

or that you need even a one-month ceasefire. And then on top of that, you know, we all knew that Biden didn't like Afghanistan. We all knew he didn't like this war. But now it's become very clear he doesn't like this country. I don't know, maybe he doesn't like brown people because, you know, he defended Moiraac to the end too. But he definitely doesn't like Afghanistan. If you look at the way he's talked about this country, since he was vice president,

it's quite appalling and it's only gotten worse over the years. And now he's president, you know, he feels even more emboldened to say all sorts of ridiculous things. And people, you know, as much as Trump said ridiculous things, that was expected from him. He's Donald Trump. Nobody had any expectation. And the one good thing that Donald Trump did that won him a lot of political favor here was in the beginning. He called out Pakistan and he cut off military aid to them for a short time.

So that, you know, won him some political points in the beginning. And then he went off the rails. But, you know, in the beginning, that won him political favor. Like his books were being sold in Pashto and Daddy everywhere. You know, there was a woman who translated his daughter's book into Pashto saying she's a great role. model for women, you know, and people were saying things like Trump may be bad for the U.S., but he's good for us. And I was like, just wait, he's an Islamophobic.

He's not good for you either. And then in the end, they realized he wasn't. And Biden, in a lot of ways, it's turned out to be a thousand times worse than Trump. You feel like the recent events and the comments about the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government in particular are what is driving that feeling? and saying that the Kornengal Valley looks like hell and that in 2000 when did he become vice prince 2008? Yeah.

Like around then, 2008, 2009 he came to see Hamid Karzai and he said Pakistan is however many times more important to us than you are and saying that they've never been united and we need to divide them and you know, all of these horrific things. It's not new. It's been going on. And if you look at his rhetoric during the debates, you know, I know that people and like liberals in the U.S. are happy because he's not Trump. But he's just as flawed, if not more than Trump when it comes to Afghanistan. I also want to talk about another interview you did over the weekend that was, I thought, really amazing.

You talked to Khalil Oreman Hakani, a member of the Hakani group. piece. So for the, for listeners who don't know, the Hqani Network is one of the most brutal and violent factions of the Taliban. This individual is now in charge of security in Kabul. It was an amazing interview. He told you that all Afghans should feel safe under Taliban rule and that their fight was with the foreign militaries occupying Afghanistan, not with the Afghan people. And he also said that he offered amnesty to former president Gandhi through his national security advisor before they fled the country. Do you get this. that people believe those kinds of claims when they hear it from Hakani? No. No, I think the onus is on him and the rest of the Taliban establishment to bear their claims out with action. You know, like I said, like every day, the fact that, like, we, you know,

if women don't feel comfortable, that's unfortunately a given considering what we know about the Taliban, right? That's unfortunately to be expected. But if you have men who don't feel comfortable going outside, you know, that also says something about them, about how people have yet to feel reassured and that they can do these things. You know, the fact that they really haven't come out

and said anything about, like, you know, your hair or your beard or whatever, and yet men are afraid to go to a barber, you know, and women are, you know, I had a coworker at Al Jazeera, he said, because like, for like four or five days, he was just in the bureau. He couldn't go home. And he was saying, you know, my children are hungry, they're thirsty, but my daughter, my wife is scared to go downstairs because there's a Talib posted outside and she doesn't know if he'll get mad at what she's wearing or that she's out alone. And I was like, we'll send one of your daughters. And he's like, what if they attack one of my daughters? So as much as the Taliban say these things, every single day they have to prove this to the Avalon people. And it's going to take for a lot of people, for everyone it's going to take a different sort of a different level to feel assured.

And the truth is for millions of people, they haven't reached that level yet. Yeah. So do you have a sense of what? What comes next for the Taliban government in terms of setting up whatever structure or process they're going to use to run the government? I mean, you were talking about some of the economic problems that we're starting to see, the lack of money at ATMs, there's questions about foreign loans. I mean, what comes next for them in terms of running the place? Yeah, right?

Like they have to figure that out, right? Like they have to find a way, they have to turn these basically fighters and madrasa students into bureaucrats. Or they have to make deals with former bureaucrats, which is what they're trying to do now, you know, by bringing in Hamed Karzai and Abdullah and all of these other political figures over the last few days. And hopefully what that means is that even though those figures were all flawed in different ways themselves. But at least if they do become part of the government structure, the hope is that they can mitigate against the Taliban's more extreme thoughts. And they can remind them that, hey, you said you wanted, you know, freedom and personal freedoms and rights and

all of these things. So to put that into action, you need to do this. So that's the hope right now is that if it's not a 100% Taliban government, that's a much better outcome for people, because it's much more likely than that certain rights and certain advantages could be maintained and that it would be much more difficult for them to take them away. So that's the best possible scenario at this point, is that they do actually, you know, because that's the other thing I've Qani said, is like, we want to embrace everybody. And so if they really do do that, that's, and they also need, the realities they need to, because they don't know about finance. They don't know about foreign affairs in that way.

You know, they don't know about setting up an education system and maintaining that. Health care system and maintaining that. They don't know, you know, what a mayor does and how to keep that going. And so if they're smart and if they've really changed, they'll say, okay, these people, we said we apply to general amnesty. So, hey, since we apply to general amnesty, let's get these people that actually know what they're doing, well, to an extent, you know, to have at least some sense of what they're doing and bring them in.

Right, right. So even though people like Hami Karzai were viewed as Abdullah called, you know, Puppets of the West, They were called corrupt. You know, Karzai's brother was, you know, famously on the drug dealer on the U.S. payroll, the CIA payroll, which is a whole other problem with the U.S. propping up people like that. The sentiment is better to bring in people like that who have the potential of moderating the colonies. Yeah, yeah. And then giving the colonies that much power. One thing that is clearly changed or evolved at least with the Taliban is their PR abilities.

Yeah, yeah. Great. I've been impressed, right? They all press conferences. They're doing interviews. I believe they did an interview with a female reporter from Tolo News. Is that just, do you think that's just a shrewd strategy knowing that they have this window of acute interest to, I don't know, send a message to the world? Or how do we make of this?

It is shrewd. It's two things. One, it's shrewd on their part. The other thing on their part is that they may not realize. it, but it could actually backfire on them because what happens is they've gone out, they've had these press conferences and they've said, you know, we don't want to take women's rights, we don't want them to stop working, going to school, you know, we're going to give a general amnesty to everybody, we want to include everybody, we want, you know, young people

and media workers and all of these people to feel safe, right? They put that on the record. They said it in Pashto, they said it in Darien, they said it. in English and it was broadcast all over the world and it was written about all like I wrote about it. Everyone else wrote about it. So now if, but more likely when they backtrack on it, people can come out and say, wait, but you said this. Well, then why did you say this? You know, why would you say this and do the other? So I don't know if they realize that, that, that, that this is a great way to hold them to account.

It's they need to go out and do more because everything that they say can hopefully be used against that if they do, you know, go against their word. Yeah. Other thing is that it's also, you know, so like Tolo, you know, I've known people at Tolo for 10 years now.

And every time you go into Tolo and these other TV networks, you know, and I've worked for TV networks over the world myself. And the one thing that strikes you about the Avon TV stations is they're all run by young people. Everyone's in their 20s. Everyone's in their 30s. The oldest person may be in like their 40s, you know, and there's very few of them. You know, like the director of news is like a 30-something year old. The director of domestic news is probably about the same age. You know, most of the reporters are in their 20s and 30s. So they think very differently from the older generations.

You know, Tullah purposely, it's not an accident that the first day they started broadcasting again, all their anchors were women. And that they sent out their female reporters on the streets back when Taliban were everywhere. You know, you could see them standing on the street and giving live shots and a piece to cameras. And there would be like, Taleb's all around them. Yeah. That's a very obvious, very clear signal that before you can even say anything, we're not going to give you that opportunity. And that's really only something that young people who have grown up in this sort of like digital media age would think of instinctively right away. You know, the fact that they had a female anchor purposely interview a Taliban official. you know so so that's the other good thing is that you know people are if they if they won't

aggressively push back they'll find other ways to push back as much as they can it's a good point i mean look first of all everyone should uh follow you on twitter so you should give your handle a shout out when you when you can and read all of your work but i think but my last question is i think one of the great failures of U.S. foreign policy generally, globally, is the refusal or just lack of interest in listening to the people in the places we are talking about, right? Whether it's Haiti or Afghanistan or, you know, name a lot of countries. Yes, right. So my last question is a big one, which is essentially just, what do you think, like, what do the American people need to know about Afghanistan right now

and how the U.S. can either be helpful or I guess even just get out of the way or I don't know. Like what is like the sense of what people in Afghanistan would like the international community to do or not do when it comes to the current situation in the Taliban government and life in Kabul or anywhere else in the country?

One thing is to find a way to hold Taliban to account. You know, because okay, you essentially handed the government over to that. you made this deal without consulting the Avran people or the Avran government. As flawed as it was, you didn't consult them at all. You made a deal to protect yourself. So now the least you can do is to hold them to account in a real way. You know, so that every time they mess up, they face some kind of a penalty, a real meaningful, not just a blanket condemnation, not just another stupid rogue condemnation,

but a real, I don't know, something, a real, political reprimand, right? That's one. Sure, like a sanction or something. Something, something. The other thing is, you know, they need to look back on these last 20 years and really, really examine it

and see why it was such a failure. You know, because if you just throw everything on the Avalon people and the Avalon government, that's not true. That's only half the story, you know? The other thing is, Avalonistan did not start in 2001. It didn't start in 1996.

It has a long history. People have been fighting for their rights for a long time. There have been versions of democracy in the past. Women have had rights. Minorities have had rights. It's been flawed in its infancy, but it existed. It didn't start in 2000. You know, a lot of these things that they call gains are actually regains.

Mm-hmm. That's a good point. So when Biden says things like, oh, those people, those people, those people, well, those people have been intellectuals. They've been poets. They've been filmmakers. They've been writers. You know, they've been all sorts of, they've been kings, you know. So you can't ignore it.

Nothing, you know, it's, Avron history exists. it well before 2001. The other thing that's, in a way, it seems like a no-brainer to the people here, but me understanding the realities of Washington is quite difficult, is that they need to put pressure on our neighbors, the two neighbors that are supporting the Taliban, and that's Pakistan and Iran. And the governments of Afghanistan have proven that time, and again, they haven't been as harsh on Iran for whatever political reason, but they've been very clear about Pakistan, very, very, very clear. And yet they faced no repercussions. They've never had any demands put on them. They've never

had any financial penalty. They've never, like nothing has ever happened to them. You know, Osama bin Laden was allegedly found in Pakistan, right? Obama trumpeted like, oh, I killed bin Laden. Where did you kill him? You know, Malamansur, the second leader of the Taliban, was killed in Pakistan. There was video and photos of him going through the Karachi airport to go to Iran on several occasions. You know, we have found Pakistani weapons and fighters. on Afghan territory, same with Iranis.

None of this is hidden. It's quite obvious. And yet, because both the Republicans and especially the Democrats have this fondness for Pakistan, nothing has ever happened to them. You know, I remember when I lived in Washington, there was a premiere of this documentary about Benazir Bhutto and the National Geographic.

and like it was delayed for like an hour and a half too like things in Washington are always late but never that late you know and I was like why is this taking so long and I remember I was sitting at the edge on the aisle and I just see like this this was before like this is before I lived in Afghanistan so I'd never seen anything like this I just see this rush of like black suited men with like sunglasses and like little things in their ears and then I look up and I realize it's Nancy Pelosi okay and She came personally. I think she was the Senate majority leader at the time. She would have been in the house.

She was the speaker of the house. Yeah, yeah. She was the speaker of the house then. She took time out of her schedule of being speaker of the house to come and give like a 10 minute intro to the Benazir Bouto documentary and just praise Benazir. We didn't like Benazir Budo. I mean, look, I'm down on the ISI and all the people that were supporting Musharraf, those who, you know, I agree with you. You know what we call her here? you put on the what?

The mother of the Taliban. Oh, God. Well, I thought that was Ronald Reagan. Is he the father? Because, you know, we funded them as well. No, I mean, that was before. That was different. Yeah.

Different iteration. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, though. You were saying, like, any final messages? That proves it, you know. The fact that this woman was one most powerful women in the United States, and it's still one most powerful women in the United States, one of the most powerful people in the United States, took time out of her day to interpret.

introduce a documentary about, you know, this killed ex-Poxny Prime Minister accused of killing our own family. You know, it's astounding. It's quite remarkable. And when you watch that documentary, Hillary was in it, Bill was in it. I'm sure John Kerry and other people were in it. I can't remember right now. And so like that that's the thing that just astounds people here. that there's never been any ramifications on Pakistan ever in the last 40 years.

That's fair. That is a very widely held in, I think, fair criticism of U.S. government policy in the region that as long as there was a safe haven in Pakistan for the Taliban in its leadership, there was basically no way to ever get rid of them or deal with it. I mean, and that's what Homet Karsai, as you say, is like, you're bombing our villages. You should be, you know, like your target is in the wrong part of the Duran line. And the government of President al-Hani, you know, kept saying it's an imposed war. Yeah.

That's what you mean by it. All fair points. Last question for you. Where can people find your work? Where can they follow you? How can they find your journalism going forward? It's all on Al Jazeera. You can follow me on Twitter.

You might get upset. That's okay. Ali-Bom-A-L-I. B-O-M-A-Y-E. And you can follow me on Instagram, same name. Oh, one other thing. One other thing. Yes.

Ilhan Omar said something really stupid today on Twitter. Oh, no. And I really liked her. I had a lot of hope for her. I was like, she's a Muslim. She's down for the cause. She gets it. And she was praising Biden today saying, you know, this evacuation has been great.

Let me see if I can find the tweet one second. I know, actually. I know what's what you're talking about. Yeah. You are right, Senator, whoever. This has been maybe the largest evacuation in U.S. history, 50,000 evacuated and more to come without hostages or casualties. Yet the media continues to hammer Biden and refuses to acknowledge an important work

his administration has done in the past week. Live news for Ilhan Omar, at least 19 people have died in the last, how many days has been 11 days. So that comes out really callous and, you know, okay, maybe no Western. were killed. But plenty of Avon people were killed. And also they face violence and intimidation from the Taliban outside the airport, from the CIA-backed intelligence forces outside the airport, and from the U.S. forces who have been accused of lobbying tear gas and just having an overall hostile and bullying attitude towards people seeking refuge. So I think that that's another example of you know, not looking at the lives of non-Westerners, you know,

because it's like because, you know, an American or Brit hasn't died. It means no one has died. Yeah. I can't speak for her, obviously. I suspect the point she's trying to make is the understandable concern and very harsh coverage of the last week is leading in U.S. press, lots of people who have been pro-war for 20 years to come out and say, aha, the answer was stay longer, just keep U.S. troops, you know what I mean? And I think she's trying to fight back along with Chris Murphy,

the senator, she was retweeting there to say, you know, the fundamental lesson here is we should not engage in wars in places and occupy countries and harm civilians. You know what I mean? But I agree with you that it is way too early to declare victim. on the evacuation process. It'll never be a victory. And if they try and there's a victory, they're lying. It's important voice thing mission accomplished. Yeah, I think that I wouldn't be, you know, beating up the press on this quite yet.

I think there's a lot more work to do. But listen, Ali, thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all your work. And I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks again to Ali Latifi for joining the show and connecting with us from Kabul late at night for him and obviously during a very

horrible, too much of his time for the Afghan people. And that's it for this week. Yeah, no, thank you guys for listening. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome back. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale-Fried, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as Vinclair. videos each week.