Pod Save the World - What comes next for Afghanistan

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Tommy and Ben talk about the United States ending its war in Afghanistan as both countries navigate what comes next, what a visit from Israel’s prime minister can tell us about the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and where things stand with Russia’s opposition movement weeks away from parliamentary elections.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 Pottae the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Roads. Here we are in studio, Ben. We just watched Joe Biden speak. We just watched our former colleague, Doug Lute, who was the Warzar, I believe, was his title, during the Bush administration and then the Obama administration. It's kind of like we're back in, what, 2011 or something. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's also your birthday, Tom. It's my birthday. Yeah. My birthday. And Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's birthday, apparently. I saw that in Politico Playbook. marking the occasion. So for listeners, so listeners,

so listeners probably know what Politico is. They have a thing called playbook, which is frankly a very helpful tip sheet if you want to kind of know. No,

it's not. Well, if you want to know like big articles of the day in like this sort of D.C. It's like the D.C. Zikeist,

right? It's like Pravda for D.C. It's like doing PR for the district. And including like, you know, a rolling series of book parties,

basically with the same people and they do birthdays and stuff. And it was very nice of them to put me in I don't, whatever. But I don't know how Muhammad bin Salman, fresh off, relatively fresh,

off of murdering and dismembering a Washington Post journalist. Yeah. Still merits a happy birthday. Yeah, I would have left him. That's where you need an editor. Yeah. Yes. You need an editor.

You do. Okay, but enough about Playbook. A lot to cover today. It's going to be me and Ben again this week, just us for the show. We're going to talk about Afghanistan a bunch. We have President Biden's speech that he just delivered the horrible events of last week, all the challenges that are ahead for Biden and the Taliban, really,

and how this might change the U.S. approach to counterterrorism generally. We're also going to talk about the Israeli prime minister's visit to Washington last week. It's interesting how that was just completely overshadowed. Yeah. Could have been like a huge news event. Normally would have been. Yeah, we got Imzolenski this week too, but nobody's. Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I did see that. Yeah, late this week. We're going to be mad about Nord Stream too. Is that the focus? Yeah. It's something along those lines. We're also going to talk about some COVID news and then a bit of news out of Russia.

Before we get to that, Ben, are you aware that California has a ridiculous system that allows you to recall basically any politician? And there's a big recall effort right now to strip the governorship away from Gavin Newsom? Yes. Yes, because I'm aware because I live in a state that could soon be governed by both a mentor and follower of Stephen Miller. Oh, my God. You know. Did he, Larry Elder told Stephen Miller that he thinks he'll be president? Larry Elder told Stephen Miller that he hopes to live to see the day that Stephen Miller is president.

After Stephen Miller thanked Larry Elder for all of his kind of mentorship over the years. So this is the guy who will become governor. If not enough Californians, just simply fill in your mail ballot, no, and send it back, or just do whatever you have to do to vote, because let's not mess around with this. Like we don't need to go the way of Florida here, guys. You got until September 14th to fill out your ballot, vote no on question one. You don't have to like Gavin Newsom. A lot of people don't like Gavin Newsom.

Do you want Larry Elder to be your governor? That's the question. That's the question. That is the question. By the way, what we just said was not authorized by any candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate, which is a hilarious disclaimer when we are not being all that effusive in our praise. But go to vote saveamerica.com slash California to learn more.

Also, I know you're going to get hyped about this, Ben. The first episode of X-ray Vision from Jason Concepcion is up. It is fantastic. They dive deep to all kinds of geeky fandom shit. You're going to love it. Check it out. Subscribe wherever you get your pods. Jason Manzukas is one of the first guests.

The takes are fast and furious. Fast, furious takes. hilarious people. Check it out. Okay. Let's turn to Afghanistan. It feels good to say this, Ben. The war in Afghanistan is over.

The American war in Afghanistan. Don't correct me. God damn. Yeah, you're right. I know, I know. But on Monday, August 31st, the last military plane flew out of Kabul airport. By the way, when did we start saying Kabul? I've been saying Kabul. I used to say Kabul. There's Taliban. Either way, whatever the cases, you and I are getting it wrong. That's like the rule of thumb on the show. So the last military plane came out officially ending the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. I suppose that's the right way to say it. The commuters on the ground reportedly decided to leave about 24 hours. hours before the withdrawal deadline to give themselves some cushion against security issues or maybe bad weather. This enormously confused. Mark Theson, the former torture apologist Bush speechwriter who's now at the post who was critical of it. But what are going to do?

Time zones are hard. So the last Afghans evacuated were part of these elite commando units that have been providing security at the airport along with their families. The last flight out generally carried the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. More than 120,000 people have been evacuated since August 14th. President Biden released a long statement on Monday saying that the State Department will continue to coordinate any efforts and to get additional Americans or Afghan partners

out of Afghanistan and said that the Taliban have committed to allowing their safe passage going forward. I've seen estimates been that there are at least 100,000 more Afghans still in Afghanistan who are eligible for either SIV visas or P1 or P2 visas that would allow them to come to the U.S. So we'll see if that process is allowed to take place. There's obviously an enormous moment for the U.S. and for Afghanistan. Something that a lot of people, especially veterans, worked a long time for. Unfortunately, it is, you know, a week in a moment that is marred by the horrific terrorist

attack last week that killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghan citizens. And the reality now that Afghanistan is just fully controlled by the Taliban. So I want to get to those events from last week in a minute. But President Biden just gave a speech. What did you make of the speech, his argument, the tone, like, what was your oppression of this version of Biden that came out today? Well, I think, you know, he gave the clearest and fullest and lengthiest explanation for his decision and defense of that decision. You know, I thought the most compelling part of the speech was when he talked about the fact that there was no kind of low-grade option to stay in a war that is still a war. that still has American serving, that's still spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day.

And that, you know, part of the rationale for ending this war is that, you know, we have a lot of big issues to deal with. And we weren't really moving the ball forward in Afghanistan. We weren't making things better there. We were spending a lot of resources. And at some point, you have to end this period in time. And, you know, look, I thought a lot, I watched that photo of the last soldier leaving the commander of the ASIC and airborne. I thought a lot about my own experience with this, I hope like everybody else who was involved in the war in Afghanistan. And my experience of the war in Afghanistan was largely in like situation room meetings with a bunch of people thousands of miles away talking about debating,

making decisions about this war. I again want to be careful. And this is not to, you know, cover myself. I was never, it wasn't like particularly enthusiastic about the surge. Tommy, you were there. I think, you know, we in the White House were kind of felt a little bit like the military, you know, really pushed that one forward. But then my only experience of Afghanistan was Bagram Air Base in the presidential palace in Kabul. And, and again, I think that, you know, my little piece of this experience highlights a lot of the flaw. in the sense of like this machinery that had been constructed was not achieving objectives in Afghanistan that were beyond, I think, what was achievable. And frankly, was informed by a lot of corruption and not just corruption on behalf of the Afghan government, but on behalf of how we did military contracting and, you know, why we built an entire army that was so dependent on military contracting, just to take one small example. And so I think Biden is right when, you know, he basically indicts the over-extension of the United States in this project that that was, that had not achieved its objectives and that didn't have a kind of clearly sustainable, you know, way forward.

That was the part that was right. I think the other thing that was wrong with, among many, with the way the war was managed was not listening to Afghans, not listening to the board. of people that could have told us the things that we were doing wrong and tried to do so. And I think Biden continued that problem of like the Afghan seemed kind of absent from the speech. Let's say it's 100,000 who are still there, the extent to which a lot of them did try to stand up for themselves. So, you know, I think that's in kind of miniature how I've felt about the whole last couple of weeks in that I think his fundamental case is correct. This war was not working. It had to come to an end. He was going to be the one to end it. He's ending it for a number of reasons, including that he thinks it's an unachievable mission that's passed its expiration date that has had a huge cost to it

and that there's a big agenda in the world that we need to focus on as well. But I think where we've been critical is just in this kind of the lack of kind of seeing and validating and registering both the vulnerable Afghans we have to get out and just kind of the Afghan experience of this whole thing, which has obviously ended in trauma. So in a way, the speech kind of summed up the whole period of time where I think he's on the high ground in terms of ending the war. I think in the long run, that is what people will remember from this time is that we ended the war. But that the, in part because of Biden, but in part also because of just the mistakes of 20 years, the people left holding the bag were the Afghans,

and that's something that you can't really feel good about. So I think Biden, understandably, as a politician, as a president, as a leader, wants Americans to feel kind of good about turning the page on this. I think, you know, the challenge is, it's not that, you know, we want to be armatured generals here. I'm not like the neocons with nostalgia for the war, anything. But it's just I do think we need to carry with us.

the experience of the Afghans as that that should inform the types of decisions we make going forward is listening more to the people around the world that we're trying to help or that we're trying to advance our interest with. So yeah, I mean, I think on balance it was a robust effort and his best case yet. And clearly they did as much as they could to get evacuate as many people as they could in this window of time. But like, you know, we should also kind of take a moment to think about the Afghan people here too. So I agree with that. I've been looking at a lot of the commentary

and seeing people, including reporters like Richard Engel who are in Kabul right now, talking about how this is a capitulation by America when it comes to democratic values or human rights. And there's some truth to what they were saying insofar as life in Kabul is going to be very different for the people who live there under Taliban rule. What I think is not necessarily getting translated

in the conversation is that life for Afghans living in some of the provinces where the war was the heaviest fought has been horrific for many years now, that the U.S. hearts and mind strategy stopped succeeding long ago. They didn't feel like we kept them safe. The Taliban were not keeping them safe. And so there's a chance that life will be very different for some sets of people in Afghanistan that will be much, much, much, much worse, but for some, there's just relief that there's no longer a civil war in their, like, literal neighborhood. And I don't know, like, to your point, like, I don't know how to feel about any of this, because I think about the women and girls who will no longer potentially

be allowed to go to school, be treated horribly by the Taliban. And then I think about the families in somewhere like Kandahar, which has been experiencing the worst fighting you could possibly imagine and are probably thinking, we just wanted it to stop. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the statistics, right? I mean, you have tens of thousands, tens and tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties over the years. And that number had actually gone up. A lot. In recent years, because what Trump did is he essentially got rid of any restraint in terms of air strikes and the civilian casualties they could cause. And as the U.S. moved from being the ground force to being the Air Force, and we're relying more on that air power to support Afghan security forces,

just had a lot more people getting killed. And so there is, I think, a point that wasn't really present in any of the discussion that you have the terrible human rights circumstance of the Taliban winning the war, but you also had a terrible human rights circumstance in the context of the ongoing civil war. Yeah, just that there was a war. That Afghanistan's government was not winning. I think, I guess we never know. It's hard to kind of, as we've learned, to fully understand the complexity of the experience in a place like Afghanistan. I think what should stick with us is there are a lot of Afghans, like hundreds of thousands of Afghans, millions of Afghans, really, who, not just, we're not just talking about interpreters who basically invested in what we were saying. Yeah, we're

here, we want democracy. There were Afghans who moved back to Afghanistan. who were in the diaspora, they're Afghans, who started media organizations, who started NGOs, who went into government because they kind of believed in what America was saying and what the world was saying about democracy and human rights. And so on the one hand, you feel like we've let those people down. Absolutely. And on the other hand, I mean, this is what I've really wrestled with. I don't think, I think we've learned, I don't think that promoting human rights through wars in other countries is the right way to promote human rights. So you had this kind of unsolvable problem where the perpetuation of the war on terror, I truly believe, and this is a big

argument in my book, the perpetuation of the war on terror was undermining America's support for human rights globally because so much of our foreign policy was invested in this war. And those wars, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, were not succeeding and building successful governments to protected human rights. So there is a human rights case to say, like, we need to end this period of war and make our foreign policy bet something else. And Biden, you know, spoke to that today. On the other hand, the act of doing that, of making that pivot is undermining the human rights of those people who stepped up to support us. And I think that's just, I think it's a problem without a clear solution.

you can argue that a better executed withdrawal could have protected more of those people, but at the end of the day, any withdrawal was going to lead those people vulnerable to the Taliban. All I think we can do coming out of this, besides really doubling down on trying to help every Afghan get out who wants to get out or trying to extend whatever support we can to those Afghans that can receive assistance from the United States going forward is kind of where do we go from here? Like I was thinking as I listened to Biden talk, like, If he does truly build a foreign policy that moves beyond the war on terror and that once again is really rooted in U.S. interests, but also kind of U.S. support for people who aspire to human

rights and democracy around the world, then this decision will look one way. It will look like the turning of the page to something different and better and it will age well. If we don't do that And if we're just still in the kind of, we're still fighting the war and terror everywhere else. We'll get to that. Yeah. Oh, we only get to that because there's all these reporting about, you know, they're basically considering what to do now in Afghanistan, what to do outside of theaters of war in terms of drone strikes and counterterrorism and stuff.

Well, so before we get to that, let's just, you know, the nightmare scenario that everyone was afraid of in terms of the current terrorist, the threat in Kabul happened last Thursday, when an ISIS-K operative managed to get past the Taliban checkpoints, detonated suicide best in this huge crowd of people trying to get to Kabul. airport and nearly 200 Afghans were killed in the attack as well as 11 Marines, one sailor, and one soldier. Politico had a story earlier this week that detailed classified phone calls leading up to this terrorist attack where officials were talking about their concern about this intelligence, that this attack was maybe imminent, but they were unable to prevent it. I suspect the

details of that story specifically like questions about whether the U.S. should have closed this specific gate where the attack occurred, but I guess they kept it open to facilitate the evacuation of some UK citizens. I bet that will be the focus of some of these congressional investigations we're starting to hear about. President Biden went to Dover Air Force Space on Sunday to attend the dignified transfer ceremony and greet the remains of these fallen U.S. Service members and meet with their families. Ben, I never attended a dignified transfer ceremony with President Obama. I did go with him Section 60 of Arlington, which is where service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. And I flew with him to Walter Reed

when he met with wounded warriors And that was on Marine One, right? So it was like on the way there It was me, Matt Flavin, who you know well, Reggie Love. On the way there, like we made polite small talk, right? He got briefed on what was going to happen. The way back was silent.

You know, it was President Obama staring out the window. You could see the toll it took on him on his face. There's been some reporting about President Biden's Dover visit, including the fact that some families were angry at him. Some outlets suggest. that that was a sign of partisanship or polarization. To me, it was totally normal in the sign of a grieving parent who was understandably angry and not about politics. I don't know. How do you think President Biden has handled this tragic incident? And are you surprised to see all these details

of this Pentagon classified phone call about security at the airport already leak? I mean, I think that the reality is it's a war. and, you know, Kabul, I mean, there have been attacks like this regularly for, and we talked about this, you know, last week, but there are huge suicide attacks in Kabul on a regular basis. Our troops just were usually kind of behind the wire, if you will. They were not out in an exposed area. There was an attack recently on the Secretary of Afghanistan's home. Yeah.

So I think that what we all just have to acknowledge is that, when you're in a war zone, there is a danger and that they calculated that the risks that were associated with the evacuation effort writ large. Forget one gate and one, because it could have been at any time, right? Like, the risks associated with that were worth saving potentially tens of thousands of lives. I mean, that's the one thing I kept coming back to is like, for all the question about what was futile about the mission in Afghanistan. And I would say, that some things weren't. I mean, we went and we got Al-Qaeda, right? And these people saved a lot of lives. Like their service was, and again, that's no comfort to the families that are angry,

and I'll never understand what they're going through. But I do think that, you know, their service was clearly performing a function of saving an enormous amount of people. 122,000 people got out. So I do think, so, you know, the point is, like, if you're going to be in a place like Afghanistan, you're going to be at risk every day that you're there and every minute that you're there. And they knew that there were these threats. And they clearly assessed that they had to get this evacuation mission done as comprehensively as possible. And so they decided to live with some of those risks.

And it's less about the individual decision-making down at the individual gate. And more just about once you assume that risk, things like this could happen and very well may happen. And it did. I was surprised by the speed of that leak. And reporting that out while the evacuation is still ongoing was, I don't know. You could see the Pentagon was furious about that and potential additional risk. Yeah. Because it showed that we were on maybe ISIS comms or something.

I don't know. I found it concerning, you know, we've, I felt a building dynamic in the Obama years. And so this got worse after you left Tommy. You were fortunate to miss out on it. But post-Benghazi, the selective leaking out of stuff that could then service a Republican investigation or a media scandal kind of increased. It's like we've all experienced living in American politics becoming uglier in the last decade or two. And one of the manifestations of that is every event that happens. People are like thinking ahead to what are the investigations going to be.

What's the scandal going to be? what's the fall going to be in a way that I just don't remember that being the case, like in 2009 2010 when we came into government. And like even the last couple days, people were like, well, the Republicans are going to take back the House and then there'll be all these investigate. It's bizarre that we're even thinking about that. And I think this is a problem for national security. They're basically like if any national security is filled with complicated events, most of which don't go well or you're managing things that aren't going well, or you're responding to something that is a disaster.

And if you're constantly thinking that whatever you're doing is going to be the subject of some scandal, I just think this is a problem that we haven't fully internalized. Because I bet you the people in the White House have, and that sucks because then you're just, I don't want them to be sitting thinking every time they write an email on a crisis. Like, how's this going to look when somebody leaks it, you know? And there's like second or third order consequences. know if you saw this, but lawmakers in the in the UK responded very strongly to the, the suggestion in this political report that the gate was held open to help facilitate UK residents

getting out because they felt like it was an attempt to shift the blame and blame them for the attack. Yeah. Which obviously that's not good. I mean, my guess is that that was not what the leaker was thinking. I bet they were probably angry at someone who made this call and trying to blame them in real time and, you know, you do exactly what you said, like kick up an investigation. But it was pretty shocking. Yeah. I mean, ISIS K was responsible for the attack, presumably, not the people at the gate, not the people at the Pentagon, not the people at the White House. And I just think this is a dangerous, slippery slope that really started with Benghazi, where it's like, if anything bad happens in the world, there's going to be an immediate knee-jerk desire to make it a scandal. Which, by the way,

like, you know, that's not what happened with Trump when four people were killed in Niger, when most Americans didn't even know we had any troops in Niger, you know, this is a uniquely partisan thing. Yeah. You know, you alluded to this, but the evacuation itself was pretty astounding and historic, 122,000 people. CNN reported this morning that members of the Taliban were actually secretly helping escort Americans into the airport. They're meeting up these like rendezvous checkpoints, moving them out. I guess that shouldn't surprise me. because none of this could have been done without the Taliban helping in some way or at least allowing it all to happen. But I don't know. Did you find that level of cooperation surprising?

And is there any chance it bodes well for future relations or is this them just being like, we want you out of here. We'll make it happen. I think, you know, because my experience is Tommy is like I was working with some people, like, you know, a lot of people, you're just on WhatsApp chains and you're trying to figure out if you can get a name to someone who has a seat on a plane. And my experience of that was almost nobody that I was trying to help got out of Afghanistan, because it was so hard to get to the airport. And so obviously they accomplished an extraordinary amount in getting that many people out.

I think that when you look at the Taliban here, you have to remember it's an organization made up of human beings. And so there will be Taliban fighters who go around and, tragically, I think, kill people or beat people up or we're beating people up at checkpoints. Then there's some Taliban people who are like, no, no, we got to like show that we can deliver here. And we got some directive from some senior person who was like, work with the Americans because we fine, we can get these people to hell out of here and we can look good for the international community.

What I take from it is the Taliban leadership did clearly make a decision that at least in this period of time when the eyes of the world were intensely on them, they wanted to put whatever their best face forward was, which was still a pretty complicated face. You've got guys with guns standing behind a newscaster. You've got, you know, anecdotal beating people up. But you also have the Taliban helping some convoys get through the airport. And, you know, that clearly happened, right? And so to me, it's a fascinating window into who are they going to be going forward? Are they going to be the people who try to transition into being a government and not necessarily a government that you and I like, but a government that's not that extreme on the spectrum, or are they going to

revert back to being the thugs who beat people up and go around and kill people and, you know, don't let people listen to music and stuff. And I think this is what to watch. I think, well, you know, this will be pretty clear in the next month or two. So I think we probably are at the end of, like, the period of really acute media focus on Afghanistan or the evacuation, but to your point, Like the challenges are all ahead of us, basically. So I've been doing a bunch of reading. I'm just going to list out a bunch of open questions and challenges. And I'm curious to hear what you think is the most important, the most difficult to get done.

So some of the questions are just for the Taliban or about the Taliban. Like, will they even be willing or able to build a functioning government? They don't have one currently. Will they keep their promise not to harm Americans and African citizens who worked with America? Will they let people leave the country who want to? Will the economy collapse? will there be food shortages, right? I mean, that, that, it seems like it's an acute problem that's coming.

There's really high levels of food insecurity in part because of all the fighting. People like Afghan farmers weren't able to plant crops. And then for Biden, I mean, they're going to have to figure out how to support refugees in the political fight that will come with that. They'll have congressional hearings, undoubtedly, if not several rounds. There will be the classic DC bullshit insider game of trying to figure out who's going to get fired and speculating on it and talking about it. they're going to have to watch the terrorists throughout emanating from the region.

And then they're going to have to decide whether they're going to recognize the Taliban government and reopen the diplomatic presence in Kabul itself or just leave it in Dohaq Qatar, which is where they moved it to. I mean, I'm sure I left a lot out there. It's worth noting that I think that a lot of these questions and challenges would have arisen even with a completely clean, perfectly executed exit from Afghanistan. But like, what do you think the next big set of issues are on Biden's place? when they have the next like situation room meeting about this stuff? I think for Biden like, so issue one is the Afghans, you know, we have tens, if not hundreds

of thousands of Afghans who are out of the country, out of Afghanistan, but they're not in permanent homes. You know, they're in Ramstein. They're in Qatar. They're in the UAE. They're in Tajikistan. They're going to be going into Pakistan. And so, and then you have the Afghans who are still there and want to get out.

And you, in listening to Tony yesterday, and like it's clear that they're going to continue to try to find ways to evacuate people, again, with assuming the Taliban lets them go. And so you're going to have to set up an infrastructure to resettle, who are you going to resettle the United States, who are you going to try to resettle in places like Canada or the UK who said they take people, trying to get other countries to take people. That's going to be a whole project, right? then the security issue, the counterterrorism issue, you know, making an assessment of, you know, whether the Taliban is actually trying to prevent an ISIS K from getting a foothold. Are they fighting those guys? Are they making deals with those guys? Like, we should have enough intelligence to get a sense as to whether or not the Taliban is like allowing safe haven for terrorists or whether they're in some kind of conflict with them and then figuring out, well, what, if anything,

do we have to do about that? And then this question of the politics of Afghanistan, yeah, I mean, the Taliban coming into this, look, that government is made up of civil servants and kind of technocrats who are not Taliban, but the government can't function without them. The Taliban's clearly trying to cut some deal that they're talking to people like Hamid Karzai and others about keeping some of that infrastructure, the government, probably just like layering a bunch of Taliban people on top of it. That's going to be complicated.

And there's huge humanitarian questions to go with that because, you know, if the government can't receive international aid, if the government can't really function, an already bad humanitarian situation, everything from food shortages to electricity or whatever, is going to continue to spiral. And then the questions become the U.S. and should the U.S. provide assistance, maybe not through the Taliban, but through kind of the U.N. system or NGOs to at least mitigate some of that. So I think they'll be gaming that out. I think this political recognition question, they'll probably test us for a while. You know, like I don't see any near-term scenario where we're recognized as in Taliban. But I do think they might want to say, like, what are these guys doing

over the course of the next year or two? Are they seeking to be like an odious but recognizable kind of regime? Or are they the kind of extreme version of themselves from the 90s, you know, where they basically didn't govern and they're executing people in soccer stadiums? And so they'll have to wait and see on that. Yeah. So final sort of Afghanistan adjacent topic that you kind of just touched on. So the Biden administration, we know this from news reports, has been working on a policy that will govern basically how they conduct counterterrorism operations in places where there aren't troops on the ground, talking about drone strikes, talking about basically special forces, teams, rating compounds or whatever. According to a report in the newer times, the Biden team's working

draft would return to a centralized vetting of proposed drone strikes for places that are not their outside theaters of war, but for places like Somalia and Afghanistan, they had planned to establish basically country-by-country plans that would give the Department of Defense or whoever, like more flexibility, do act under a set of guidelines. But that strategy assumed that Ashrafgani would still be in charge. So we'd have relations with the government, not the Taliban. So, Ben, two questions for you. One, knowing that they're working on these rules, like, how do you think the Biden team

should scope what they're working on or whatever the output is to deal with these real threats, but again, begin to hopefully wind down some of the excesses of the post 9-11 forever war, like drone strike everywhere policies that our boss did, others did. And two, do you think they'll be able to operate in Afghanistan? Because, I mean, you know, we just talked about all these things we need to work on with the Taliban, you know, food insecurity, recognition, getting people out, et cetera. If the U.S. starts taking counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan, even if it's against, you know, ISIS K members that, you know, the Taliban maybe want gone, I imagine they would view it as a

problem or offensive or consider retaliating. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like there's going to be that much freedom of movement for us or to operate unless we risk really pissing off the people now in charge. Yeah. I mean, I guess here's what I would want. I'm not, I don't know if that's like what they'll do. But like that, you know, we talk about the Forever War. and Afghanistan is the clearest manifestation of it, right? It's where you have a bunch of troops in what has been a war that we've been fighting. But, you know, the infrastructure we have of kind of drone strikes and, you know, violent counterterrorism operations spans a bunch of countries.

And just to take drones, like, you know, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Pakistan, even though we don't talk about that, in a bunch of places in North Africa, what concerns me is the kind of permanence of the drone strike apparatus. You know, it's like we just, we assume we're going to be doing those things. And now maybe Afghanistan will be in another country where we take drone strikes. And we saw like a perfect manifestation of both the effectiveness and the ineffectiveness and the ineffectiveness and tragedy of drone strikes with, it appears like a successful drone strike against an ISIS-K target, but also a drone strike that killed a bunch of civilians, including children.

Seven kids. seven kids. And so to me, I think where you'd want to get to is a place where we're not just taking drone strikes. Like the assumption is we're actually not. We may have to in a dangerous world. There may be a plot that we can trace to somewhere. There may be a particularly essential terrorist leader that, you know, we believe we have a basis go after. But that when you're doing that, it's like an extraordinary thing where you actually have to go out and say like, hey, here's why we took this. I mean, think about if we had to publicly explain every drone strike we took, you know? Yeah. And I think one thing for people understand is like this got a lot of coverage during

the Obama years. There was discussions about the kill lists, right? And what those reports talked about was high value targets, like senior, senior Al Qaeda people that we have intelligence on where that person specifically is and a decision is made to target them with the drone and try to kill them. Yeah. The other kind of drone strikes you see is let's say we're talking about, you know, somewhere in the theater of war, somewhere in Afghanistan, and a drone operator sees a bunch of men that look like they're 18 or older in the back of a truck with what looks like weapons or an IED heading towards, you know, an Afghan army base and strikes that group of people. That's called a signature strike. It's like based on their activities. That's

killing people anonymously. That's right. Like that's an effort to protect. forces or do whatever. Like, the high value targeting, the effort to collect intelligence to really find specific people and go after them has at least the chance to be more precise. Now, again, like we saw in Kabul just now, that apparently an effort to go after a specific ISK target went catastrophically wrong. So I'm not suggesting that it won't. But I think most drone strikes are the latter thing I described, which is like going after

activities from groups of people that look like they are probably fighters, but you don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, look, I think we can go back and debate the particulars of the Obama era. There was a period of time when, like, you know, you were dealing with Al Qaeda, the core of al-Qaeda, particularly in 2009, 10, and 11. And as time went on, though, and, you know, you're degrading and taking out all these terrorists. And yet you're not, I mean, the thing that always bothered me about the use of drones the most is the sense of permanence in using them. These should be for extreme circumstances. And so you're right, like a signature strike is the clearest example is something that can be routinized in bad ways. I mean, yeah, if you see some people driving

a truck bomb towards like a U.S. Embassy somewhere, that's a different thing. But sometimes, you know, it's more ambiguous than that. Sometimes catastrophic errors happen. Yeah. And so I just think that, like, you want to be in a place where, because look, at the end of the day, it's weird as this sounds, like the most sustainable, effective way that ISIS-K is going to be denied a safe haven in Afghanistan, and this sounds really strange to say, is if the Taliban denies them a safe haven. That's going to be more sustainable and effective than U.S. drone strikes. So I guess the point is that if they don't do that, and if we have a real problem, because the Taliban refuses to deny them a safe haven, is basically permitting them.

them to be there, then I think we have to kind of make an argument publicly about that and say, look, we give you a chance to do this, but if, you know, there may be cases where we have to take a strike because we have intelligence about plots from here. But I think we'll have to make that case. I don't think it should just be this kind of thing that just kind of happens without us explaining why we're doing it. And again, I think if you really want to end the Forever Wars, you're going to have to start to dismantle this infrastructure, not just in Afghanistan. I mean, why do we get here? We got here because civilian casualties, in part from drones, the corruption of the Afghan government, including the ways in which we built it, the corruption

of U.S. private military contractors and the kind of privatization of war that created a certain kind of dependency in the Afghan army. Those things are present in other places. Like they're present in Somalia. They're present. They were in Yemen, which is now a shell of itself. And so, So I think I'd like to see Biden extend this idea of dismantling the forever to like, what is the, what is, what do we truly, truly need to keep this country safe and, and a scaled back version of that. So it's not like anybody who we define as a militant. We're taking out because by the way, the number of militants has gone up, you know, most every year since 9-11. Clearly what we're doing is is also creating terrorists, right?

And so I think he, you know, I hope that it's not just ending Afghanistan. It's beginning to dismantle this infrastructure of forever war that is operated in a lot of places. Okay, we're going to turn to some things we didn't cover the last couple weeks because we've been talking about Afghanistan so much. The first is Nftali Bennett, the Israeli prime minister, visited Joe Biden last week in Washington. He was there on Thursday the day of this horrible terrorist attack in Kabul. So that meeting, I think, got pushed to it later. A few things we learned from that meeting in the interviews that Bennett did around it. The short answer is kind of something we already knew, Ben, which is that Bennett, Ben, it's not a progressive.

He opposes the Iran nuclear deal. He says he wants to expand settlements or he will expand settlements with natural growth. He opposes the U.S. reopening a consulate for the Palestinians in Jerusalem. And he told The New York Times that he's rolled out reaching a peace agreement to create a Palestinian state. So that's not anything we like. Bennett's tone is different than Netanyahu's right. to me, he says he wants to work with the U.S., supposed to Bibi Netanyahu, who basically bragged about sticking it to the United States. I read some additional reporting. They talked about how Netanyahu

had basically cut off all intelligence sharing with the United States when Biden was elected. You know, during the Trump era, they were coordinating on assassinations of people, including Kassam Soleimani, the Iranian general. That, I guess, all got cut off. That is problematic for a lot of reasons, in part, though, because I think it's pretty well known. The Israelis have better intelligence on Iran from sources there than we do. Bennett was also complaining about Ben and Jerry's. So great. Glad that's still going. So Ben, one thing he did say that was really interesting to me was that every conversation he has with foreign leaders ends up being like double or triple in length if COVID comes up because Israel has all this interesting vaccination

data and best practices, et cetera, et cetera. Would you come away thinking from this visit? I mean, do we have a little bit of hope for Bennett still or are we just getting played by a guy who's like doing a softer presentation of the same policies? I mean, I think it's a soft present. I mean, look, like substantively, he's kind of, it's like George H.W. Bush saying we're, you know, a kindler, gentler policy from Ronald Reagan. Like, he's basically saying, I have the same agenda as BB in terms of opposing the Iran deal, not wanting a Palestinian state, continuing settlements, but I'm not going to meddle in American

politics in the same way and we try to do this in a quieter way, which I, again, I think is positive, right? Yeah, like it's. It's not corrupt as far as we know. It's better than the alternative of what we had. And by the way, we're also learning like the BB, I mean, who I had no love for, like every detail you learn, like the guy's more and more of a lunatic, you know, like terminating intelligence sharing the United States, like bragging about really sticking it to the Democrats.

I mean, we knew all this stuff. But so I think the way to, you know, someone made this comment that like what I think Bennett's strategy here is it may be quite savvy is to just keep the attention off, you know, like they're going to keep building settlements, but they're not going to build the most provocative settlements so that they don't invite statements from Biden, but they kind of count on the Biden administration to kind of be looking at other things. They don't help us get to an Iran deal. They kind of oppose Iran deal, but they don't make a lot of noise about it. And so I think it presents kind of opportunities for Biden since he doesn't have a Bibi Nanyahu come here and, you know, lobbying against him and politicizing everything. But challenges too because in a kind of savvy way, Bennett's not going to be, he may try to not be overly provocative in his actions. And that may allow for attention to just kind of drift while settlements grow and things get worse with the Palestinians kind of until the next flare up or the next Gaza war. And so, you know, again, I think it's preferable to where we were, but it doesn't kind of make it any easier to either get an Iran deal or to make progress on the Palestinian issue. Yeah, it does seem like the Iran deal is in a bit of a fragile place as well. Yeah, we should talk about that in a later show. It's just not, it doesn't look good right now.

No, it does not look good. Speaking of not looking good, some COVID news, Ben, the European Union has removed the United States from its safe travelists, which means Americans will be discouraged from visiting EU countries for non-essential travel and EU countries could bring back measures like quarantines and other steps on a case-by-case basis. I guess my response is, what took you so long? Yeah. Did they just learn about Florida?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not, I mean, it's, well, it does speak to this. There's a kind of lack of clarity about this international travel question, which, you know, someone used to travel internationally. Like, I don't, I don't even quite understand when and where it's, you know, who's deciding. No clue. There just needs to be, I'd like to see some more, you know, multilateralism on this about kind of transparency about what the guidelines are because it all feels very ad hoc, you know,

including the CU decision, which, yeah, presumably they could have made. like a month ago based on the numbers they're making now. So if anything, whether it's European governments, U.S. government's Asian governments anywhere, I think there's going to have to be, and normally you do this through like the World Health Organization, but like there's going to have to be a kind of pretty clear effort to determine and tell people like, hey, here's where things are going on international travel. Yeah. And on top of that, the whole conversation in the U.S. around boosters is probably not helping our efforts to conduct some global vaccine diplomacy and get the world vaccinated.

Yeah, no, and that's the only long-term solution to this is to vaccinate as many people as possible as many places as possible. Last bit of news from Russia. So Russia has parliamentary elections on September 19th. You know, there's a lot of conversation about the ways Putin has or will, you know, rig those. Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader, anti-corruption activist we've talked about who's currently sitting in a prison in eastern Moscow, did an interview with the New York Times ahead of these

elections. It sounded like he filled out like 50 some odd pages of like handwritten cues and A's to like get them back. Impressive. A couple things that jumped out of me, Ben. One, these Russian prisons apparently have transitioned from forced labor camps to just making prisoners watch eight hours a day of mindless propaganda videos. It sounds like that's like their new brand of torture.

Yeah. Yeah. That's which is a brand of torture. reading, writing, doing anything else he said is prohibited. They've stopped waking Navalny up once an hour every hour, so that's good. He in this interview criticized U.S. sanctions because he believes they hurt the Russian people. He only wants the U.S. to target top oligarchs with sanctions. Navalny for, you know, he's incredibly rave.

He has some flaws we've talked about previously. He's got a great sense of humor for someone in a horrible situation. He's hilarious. So he said that he and other inmates sometimes cook snacks in a microwave. This is a quote, when we cook, I always remember the classic scene from Goodfellas, when the mafia bosses cooked pasta in a prison cell, he said. Unfortunately, we don't have such a cool pot, and pasta is forbidden. Still, it's fun.

Just like a very funny guy. But a fascinating interview, highly recommend everybody reads it. And, you know, talk about another big thing on the Biden agenda that they're watching that's coming up in these elections. Yeah, I, you know, when I interviewed Navalny for my book, he had the funniest, he had the funniest sense of humor. And it was like this dark, weird sense of humor, too, where, like, he kept making fun of me for. for being spied on by Black Cube, you know? And so, like, as late as when I was texting with him when he was in Germany, and I was like, dude, you know, are you sure, you know, he was shifting which communications platform we're using? I'm like, no, it's totally fine. Like, whatever you need

to do, man, you got a lot to worry about. And he's like, no, I think you have a lot to worry about. Maybe the Black Cube guys are the ones spying on us, you know? But it's just kind of this weird, dark humor that I loved. But, like, I think, well, first of all, like, the treatment of Navalny does not suggest that Putin thinks that he would be in a strong position if there was like an election tomorrow and Navalny was free to run against him. You don't persecute someone and try to destroy their whole organization if you're confident in how these elections are going to go. And all reports are they're harassing everybody. Yeah, but Navalny's spokeswoman just fled Russia in the elections. She had gotten an 18-month, you know, set of restrictions on her freedom of

movement because they found her guilty of violating COVID-19 safety rules or another fig leaf punchment. Yeah. And, you know, his, Navalny's point about sanctions is really important. You know, here's the guy that ostensibly is the kind of person that, you know, you would want to listen to. Like we were saying, listen to the Afghan people. Well, if you're trying to support democracy in Russia, maybe listen to the leading democracy

activists. And he's saying, like, yeah, target the shit out of the oligarchs, but stop fucking with all the other Russian people because you're just hurting my people. like that we need to internalize that lesson and and figure out ways to target our actions and the thing i'm going to watch here tom and we'll be able to talk next week about this ukraine visit um i'm curious if coming out of this afghanistan decision um and there's kind of a hawkish turn from the biden people on some other things you know to kind of show like hey no this isn't about retreating from the world right um you know whether that's increasing their support to

Ukraine, you know, the China-Russia language, Biden referenced that at the end of a speech, I would guess, and this is not, and this is really just a guess, like I would guess we're going to see some of that. That's like one of the ways that they're going to try to address some of this criticism they got about America retreating from the world and what a credibility below this is is to show that they're going to flex in some other places. And that will be, you know, that depends on what the places are and how they choose to do it, obviously. But that would be an interesting dynamic to watch. It's been interesting to see.

So some of the stories, you know, a few days ago or a week ago talked about how one of the things that really influenced Biden in terms of the Afghanistan withdrawal decision was intelligence. He saw suggesting that Russia and China wanted us to stay in Afghanistan and get bogged down for longer. I think he mentioned that in his speech today. It's notable that that's become part of like the core argument. I don't doubt that. I believe it too. So these people who are like, what a big win for for China, number one, the Taliban was the biggest ally of the Uyghurs back in the day. That's why those Uyghurs were in Afghanistan with the Taliban. And having a kind of extremist cabal running Afghanistan, you know, in ways it could spill over

violence into some of the other Central Asian countries. And you've seen Pakistani Taliban attacking Chinese interests in Pakistan. Like, yes, China likes to see the U.S. humiliated. They love that. But I'm not sure that they're thrilled that the Taliban runs Afghanistan. And same thing with Russia. They pulled their people out of Afghanistan as well. And so, yeah, I think that the best case scenario for Russia and China was the U.S. continuing to steadily lose in Afghanistan over a period of years.

Well, they like to see the U.S., you know, let's face it, lose in Afghanistan. I don't know that they're, like, thrilled that the Taliban is running Afghanistan right in their neighbor. Yeah, unless they can just buy them off and get access. You know, the dumb argument you'll see popping up is like, there are rare earth metals in Afghanistan and we should stay and get, it's like, oh, my God. By the way, first of all, so. It's a colonial exploitation. They will try to buy them off, the Chinese in particular. You know, they may do it.

They may wear all do it. This idea that there's like $3 trillion worth of rare earth materials. I mean, like, let's just go down memory lane, right? We've been hearing this forever. You were in government when that story came out. That story came out, like, I think, and, you know, correct me, I may be wrong, but I'm, I mean, I may be wrong, but. I think like the U.S. military like helped put that out because they wanted to like justify like the value of Afghanistan or something like or I just remember like them talking about it.

I've yet to see like the Chinese have like a copper interest in Afghanistan I think and they have an oral interest and they haven't been able to develop it because guess what if the security situation is shitty or if you've got a bunch of Taliban like running the place it's not it's not that easy to get it like rare earth materials and minerals and stuff you know so you may be five years 10 years down the line, you'll see some mining. But the idea that there's some like bonanza, mineral bonanza, I don't know. Yeah, it's this, there's this suggestion that there's this windfall to come, right? Yeah, I remember when those stories came out, we were in the administration. I remember, I think I dug deep into some intelligence we had on it, and it did just seem like a bit of a pipe dream.

Yeah, yeah. We'll see. A hypothetical of like the best case scenario that assumes a functioning government and a lot of capability. And I think more the Chinese are going to try to buy. off the Taliban. You know, when the Taliban went to China before, two weeks before Kabul fell, I think what the Chinese are trying to get from the Taliban is an assurance that they wouldn't support like Uyghur separatists. And I'm sure the Taliban probably gave them that assurance and said, hey, but, you know, could you recognize us? So I think the thing to watch is first countries to recognize the Taliban likely to include Pakistan and China and then China trying to essentially buy off the Taliban to just stay out of their business. Yeah, the Taliban will immediately

show to the world that they are not in any way religious focused. They could give a shit about liberating Muslims who are being, you know, oppressed like the Uighurs and they're for sale. They seem to have like 20 years on and it connects to what we're saying earlier. Some guys probably are still like full on religious ideologue nutcases. And some of these people seem like they've developed a pretty pragmatic tree. I mean, they've been trading in poppies and heroin. I mean, these are not people who are above dirtying their hands. It's a real mafia vibe. Yeah, there's a bit of a mafia vibe with a streak of hardcore ideology.

But that's probably, you know, among some of their foot soldiers more than anything else. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's all I got for today. Anything else you want to talk about? The Patriots released Cam Newton. I want to, have you followed this medicine? Okay.

So there was, was it Javi Baez who did a thumbs down? Hobby Baez and Lindor, who we were paying 300 plus. million dollars for the next decade to you know do we give a shit about this is this is this like a bunch of old white baseball writers being like unwritten rules say i mean it's a little weird to have like your star player like booing the fans but it was just such a classic meds because they did the interview and the guys like yeah you know they booed us and so if they boo us when we do something bad we're going to boo them when we do something good and i'm like look i love that i'm all for player empowerment but it's just like it's such a met story like it's bad enough the met's

collapse. They've been on terrible fucking losing streak. But then they boo the fans. Like, come on. Baseball is supposed to be my like, my escapism from like the, all the kind of other shit I have to think about all day. And like, and then I'm getting booed by my own

players I'm cheering for. I think that's the funniest goddamn thing I have ever heard. I love, I love the idea of booing fans. Or booing umpires or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So the Patriots, we released Cam Newton, which means that Mack Jones, QB, out of Alabama, is undoubtedly

going to be the starter. I'm going to get myself excited about that. I think it'll be okay. I just can't stop thinking about what could have been if we traded up to 11 and gotten Justin Fields out of Ohio State, who is just the man. Yeah. Well, I was surprised that they can't go so fast. But, I mean, maybe you're in a hurry to get to the future, you know. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, weird, weird vibes. I guess. No. Who knows?

Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening. Any birthday plans? Not really, man. I don't know. It's a Tuesday. We're wearing a podcast.

Like, Hannah's got some stuff she's working on. I got, you know, last week was full of stuff. Next weekend's a year away and it's a holiday. This is what happens. You went into August 31st birthday.

You're kind of like, you always fall kind of weirdly around Labor Day and, you know, people got stuff going on. Yeah, you slip through the cracks. My mom will probably text me. Have you texted yet, Tommy's mom?

She has. Okay, good. First thing. And she posted a photo on her Instagram, but she, but it was a vertical photo that she accidentally posted horizontally. But it kind of evolves because like when you're like, you know, I think when you first go to college, like your parents call and they like sing happy birthday or some shit. And now you're like a text, you know?

Like it's like. Yes. My dad just somehow thought I had the same number for four years of college. So he would leave the same voice message on the same number and whoever lived there would just forward it to me. Back in the day of answering machines. Yeah, back in the day. I'm like, oh, God, I'm rushing to brought this up. Okay, that's it.

Okay, good. We're done for today. Shout out Mack Jones. Shout out Justin Fields. Shout out Hobby Bayeyes and Francis Gilendor. So it's bye. 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 videos each week.