Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/11/21 Andrew Quilty on the Afghan War Criminals being Brought to the United States

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Scott interviews Andrew Quilty, a journalist who’s stayed in Kabul, about a recent article he wrote for the Intercept. The article talks about the Zero Units which were militia groups of Afghan commandos led by CIA advisors, or handlers. These units gained notoriety during the war and have been accused of numerous war crimes. Many refer to them as CIA Death Squads. Quilty explains how members of these Death Squads were given priority in the evacuation from Kabul and how they will be resettled in the United States. Quilty also gives his account of how things are in Afghanistan after the U.S. has pulled out. Discussed on the show: “The CIA’s Afghan Proxis, Accused of War Crimes, will get a Fresh Start in the U.S.” (The Intercept) “The Other Afghan Women” (The New Yorker) No Good Men Among The Living by Anand Gopel “Looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign” (Connecting Vets)  “Surprise, panic and fateful choices: The day America lost its longest war” (Washington Post) BBC reporting about eyewitness claims that soldiers fired into the crowd after the suicide attack.  Andrew Quilty is an Australian freelance photojournalist and reporter. A winner of Polk and World Press Photo awards, he has been based in Kabul since 2013. Follow him on Twitter or at andrewquilty.com. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing andrew quilty you might remember uh he is an australian journalist he did the show what i don't know half a year ago or something like that a year ago about cia death squads killing innocent uh people including children in Afghanistan and he has stayed in I hope you guys are following on my Twitter

he has stayed in Kabul after the regime changed by the Taliban there of the last few months and also he has this new piece at the intercept so I's got to click the right button here the CIA's Afghan proxies will get fresh start in the US oh man welcome back to the show how are you doing thanks having Scott good to be back uh very happy to have you here and i should say by way of disclaimer i think it is important to say and i'm sorry because i don't want to get you in any trouble but i don't think this should get you any trouble but your co-author on this story matthew cole one i'll give credit to him and i quote him in my book because he's done great work on war crimes in afghanistan in the past particularly by seal team six and uh for the

intercept and that's good stuff. On the other hand, he's the guy that got John Kiriaku locked in prison and he's the guy that got Reality Winner locked in prison. And so there are people and maybe another one too, I'm sorry, I forget. There are people who credibly suspect him of being some kind of rat, you know, not even really being a journalist, but being here to get other people in trouble. And so that's worth bringing up. I mean, John Kiriaku went to the penitentiary because of him. So anyway, great piece, though, and I know that you must have been doing the lion's share of this work here from the position you're in there in Afghanistan. But before we talk about the CIA death squads here, and there's so much, but I think people really want to know

what is Kabul like now? What is Afghanistan like now in terms of just how totalitarian are these Taliban? Are they throwing women down the well? And are they, you know, going completely crazy with power and acting like ISIS or the Khmer Rouge? Or, you know, just how bad are the restrictions against women and girls going to school and having jobs and being out in public compared to before and all and journalists? I know you've been covering on Twitter. The kidnapping and beating and persecuting of journalists. I don't know if maybe they've murdered some too, I think you said. so let us have it let us know what it's like there now please if you could sir well where to begin look the the short answer is no they're not the Khmer Rouge yet um they have however

started to or the i should say their their actions are starting to veer away from the the words that they were purporting to plan to rule by it before they came into power and in the very early days that they gained power from the former Ashafghani government. They ran a very, very successful public relations campaign, which was partly the reason why they were able to take the country back from the American-backed Ashafghani government so quickly, and I should also add, with so little bloodshed. That's not to say there was no... You mean in terms of promising amnesty? Exactly, exactly. They had this commission, the commission for invitation and guidance for a long time, but it had been more or less

dormant for years until very soon after the Doha agreement was signed between the US, the Trump administration and the Taliban on February 29, 2020, the Taliban leadership really got that, got that commission up and running and dusted it off and put it into full effect. And from the very beginning, in fact, I remember reporting from the provinces early on following the Doha agreement and hearing from low, level Taliban commanders, how effective this strategy they had to try and bring members of the Afghan National Security Forces over to their side. Actually, I misspoke there. They weren't intending to bring them across to their side. They were merely wanting them to desert from

the government security forces. So they weren't taking them on. They weren't defectors, They were just putting down their weapons in exchange for a letter that guaranteed their safety going forward. And this gathered momentum in the weeks and months before the final takeover. And, you know, it's to a large extent what saw the government forces collapse so calamitously in the final weeks because so many of them just laid down their weapons and, you know, when they saw the writing on the wall, they realized they were not going to get the support they needed from the government

and from the Ministry of Defense. And they'd also run out of morale. And they thought, you know, I think there was a sense that, you know, what is worth fighting for anymore? Well, why are we fighting for this government? And, you know, they were proven right in the end with Ashrafgani sort of skipping off on a hell. helicopter without notifying anyone else outside his very immediate circle.

So all is to say is that there was some initial hope that the types of people that one might have expected to be targeted might get through this transition period without, in fact, being targeted that since the takeover and since the very early days of the takeover has started to fall away a bit you've seen you've seen isolated incidents where former members of the government security forces have been searched for and pulled out of homes in some cases they have disappeared or turned up dead There hasn't, however, been any kind of systematic implementation of this policy. So it's really hard to know whether these are lone wolves acting on personal grievances or family grievances or, you know, land disputes or tribal disputes and using the Taliban as cover to take sick revenge.

Well, you know, I saw a thing that said that I'm not sure exactly where this was. I think they said it was in the Ghazni province where, you know, my understanding is the Hazaras are, you know, the dominant, you know, that's their area and that a bunch of people, essentially for being Hazaras or at least, I don't know if it was, you know, like the Taliban was claiming a religious basis or just like a tribal basis, but that they were just kicking people out of their homes and occupying them. There certainly has been some reports of that. Yeah. And look, these are in, there was. possibly in Ghazni province, as you mentioned. Also in Daikundi, they're all in central Afghanistan where the Hazaras have their, where they're mostly situated. And they are still, however, minorities in most of these places. So they have a small concentrations of their population living basically in a sea of predominantly Pashtun areas.

and a lot of these places have had histories of, you know, contention over land. So, look, I haven't done any reporting on this, so I'm hesitant to comment, but I do expect that these land grabs are kind of complicated and perhaps more than just Taliban persecuting Hazaras because they are Hazara. I wouldn't, however, rule out the fact that, again, as I was saying, may have been the case with some of these reprisal killings, individual reprisal killings, that the people doing these, pushing people out of their homes, maybe using this new environment with the Pashtun dominant Taliban now in power

and using them as enforcers when in the past they haven't had the ability to do that. But now overall, you're saying it feels like the PR campaign that, hey, we're nice guys, that that's over now that they've really, you know, finished seizing their monopoly on power, that they're starting to get more heavy-handed, or are they still trying to, I mean, because the thing is, we talked about this, you know, all along. the war was to foist a coalition of approximately 20% minorities on the 40% plurality, which is never going to work. But now we're talking about a 40% plurality trying to lord it over essentially a majority that ain't them, even if that majority is not all, you know, one united, you know, ethnicity and tribe. You see what I mean. So they've bitten off a lot, right?

So in order to chew it, I guess the question is, Are they just going to be absolutely ruthless and terrifying, or are they really trying to broker deals and get along with Hazaras and Uspex and Taji chiefs that they need to be able to win over, right? Yeah, I mean, it really looks like they're falling into the same trap that the Americans and British fell into in the beginning by siding with the Tajiks and the other minorities that you mentioned. who made up the bulk of the Northern Alliance who the Americans had partnered with to overrun the Taliban in 2001, early 2002. And it looks like the Taliban and making the same mistake.

I mean, there was never any doubt that that was going to be the case, but it doesn't bode well for the future when you do not have an inclusive government. And they've made very little attempt to try and portray this as, you know, anything other than what it is. I mean, there's no getting around it. Not only are they, by and large, Pashtuns, they are old-guard Taliban.

And so there's, you know, there's very few of these sort of young reformers who have, you know, may have studied in the West and have a broad view on the world. These are very much the old-guard Talibs who are running the show again. right and then so what about women and girls i know there's been well i guess i wouldn't say conflicting reports but you know over time the reports have changed about well first they close some schools then they reopen them or they said that they did but they didn't really reopen these i guess that is conflicting reports go ahead yeah look if if any issue was um was given um the most airtime than

others by the Taliban early on and it was an issue that they were drawn on most of all by international actors and foreign and national media alike. It was the issue of women's rights and one of the real lightning rod issues focal points there is obviously the ability of girls to go to school.

all along the Taliban had said they will they I mean before they came to power the Taliban said they will give women the rights that they that the Quran gives them they will give them the rights insofar as Faria law allows it when they came to power all schools from the beginning were closed and I think that was as much a measure taken by the schools themselves because of the uncertain and the upheaval at the time. When schools went back, both boys and girls in grades 1 to 6 went back. Only boys from grade 7 to 12 went back.

So to date, countrywide, aside from three provinces in the north, which in the last week or so have sent girls from 7 to 12 back to school, that age group is not in school. Spokespeople for the Taliban and you can add as big or small grain of salt as you want to this are saying that the plan is for them to be allowed back and that they are just working out security arrangements to allow it to happen in a safe and orderly fashion. You know, security arrangements in terms of sending girls back to school, I think, what the Taliban are referring to here is it's not security in terms of

are they going to get blown up by a suicide bond around their way to school they're talking about more logistical things about how they are going to get to school safely without crossing paths with any more males than they need to and how are they going to be taught by teachers

by female teachers the the answer one answer to that is that they won't be because there are not enough female teachers to go around and for that matter there are probably not enough male teachers to teach all the male students I mean you essentially need twice the number of students to to teach classes that were once mixed and are now split again having said that I should caveat that by saying that some schools did already segregate classes from 7 to 12.

And then you have the universities which bring in the same measures, segregating classes, many of which already were segregated. But yeah, look, at the current moment, you've got the majority of girls in the country between ages, between grade 7 and 12, are not in school at the moment. Yeah. And so as far as the amnesty for former government employees and all that, they're really sticking with that. They're not rounding up these people and charging them with, you know, whatever crimes and locking them all away. Well, they're not doing it on a systematic level from anything I can understand, but it certainly looks like it's happening on a small scale on an individual basis. It's just, you know, they're doing it.

Whoever's doing it, they're doing it carefully. It's not, you know, there's not some kind of big purge that's going to put them on the, in the headlines. It's happening piecemeal. And it's, so it's not enough to make the headlines, but it is enough to send shivers around anyone who did used to work in the security forces. There's no doubt about it. And I've met with a number of these guys, former commandos and so on who are, who are renting, houses away from their former family homes where it's assumed that it was known they lived. So, yeah, they've gone to ground. They're hiding out. And many of them are hoping to

get out of the country still after having missed that first evacuation. Hey, y'all check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder. He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean, and no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question. Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richmond. We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine, and What Social Animals Owe owe to each other. Both are instant classics. I'm proud to say that coming to Palestine is surely the definitive

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And then I wonder about the average guy in his relationship with the police now and how different the Taliban, you know, local cops are for the regular people there compared to the previous era. Yeah, look, it's a good question. I mean, for one thing, the new Taliban, quote, unquote, police, I don't believe they've had any training in policing. So it's very ad hoc. Some have uniforms. One of the bizarre things to see is all these talibs walking around in the uniforms of the former National Security Forces.

And it's not as though the new police are wearing the old police uniform. They're, you know, these guys are just using whichever uniforms they came upon in the takeover. So you've got, you know, you'll see someone manning a security checkpoint wearing a beret of the Afghan National Army and the, you know, the clothes of a policeman or the former National Director of Security, the intelligence agency. So it's all very ad hoc. I mean the Taliban were relative I mean it was one of the things that the Taliban were given some credit for by the populations that they controlled before they took control of the entire country that being their application of justice it was in comparison to the that which the government presided over it was swift and and there was less prone to corruption I'm not saying it wasn't prone to corruption. And I think that's a misnomer that the Taliban are not corrupt. I think it's probably hard to say that there's any ruling government in the world

that is not corrupt. And I don't think the Taliban are immune from that as pious as they may be. But although it's ad hoc, I think, you know, they do get things done in a less Byzantine fashion than the old Byzantine and riddled with corruption than the old government did. All right, now, so this is sort of a two-parter, if I can figure out how to put it together here. As I'm sure you're aware, when they came to power in 1994 through 1996, that they really got their start by murdering child kidnappers and rapists. You know, started off down there, I think it's been Bulldack.

and then went on to Kandahar City and, you know, ended up taking the whole country. And at the time they walked into Kabul in 1996, which I don't know, do you know offhand, even like a ballpark of what percentage of the population of Kabul is ethnic Pashtun back then or now, or if it's changed much? I don't know in the proportion. I know that, oh, look, I wouldn't say it's small. I would say it's probably slightly less than the national average across the point. but it's still, I would say it's still probably a plurality, excuse me.

Well, and so in any case, when they walked into Kabul in 1996, they were greeted with flowers and candy like Dick Cheney predicted for us in Iraq, because, just because of how bad Massoud was, right? It wasn't that everybody was really happy to be taken over by a bunch of hillbillies from the south. It was just that, thank God they're getting rid of the last guy. And we saw a little bit of that here, at least, when they came in. So I just wonder, I guess what I'm curious about is whether they have a reputation among regular people that, well, at least these guys are law and order and just not blatant kleptocrats and kidnappers and, you know, the worst kind of warlords like America has propped up in power there for the last 20 years, in many cases anyway. I don't think they've entered Kabul this time with the open arms that they were last time. First of all, when they came last time, they were an unknown quantity, and the circumstances

in Kabul had been far, far, far worse than they were when the Taliban arrived this time. I mean, they'd been through, you know, several years of civil war with indiscriminate shelling on a daily basis. I mean, it was hellish. And then they, and then there was the warlordism and the, you know, checkpoints shaking people down and dragging women out of houses and cars and raping and murdering. I mean, it was hellish. And it's, you know, the Ashrafgani government and the Khazai government, the forum, certainly far from perfect.

But they did, you know, hold together some kind of functioning state in Kabul for the past 15 or more years. And a lot of people in Kabul did benefit in those years. And I think I would say the majority of people were not welcoming the Taliban this time in the way that they did last time. I think, you know, Afghanistan is a broadly, extremely conservative nation with a conservative cultural basis. And although there has been a lot of modernising the past 20 years, it's hard to wipe that cultural basis out. And so there are a lot of people, I would say, mostly men, older generations who are happy to have this back, happy to have the Taliban back and running the show and putting men back

in the seat of power. Not only at the presidential palace, but in the homes and on the streets, you know, as we saw with the election of President Trump in the US, it enabled a portion of the population to, you know, act out the kind of fantasies that had always been lying dormant in years prior because it was given some kind of legitimacy. And I think the same is happening here in Kabul where you have these, these latent feelings and ideology and culture that, you know, didn't disappear in the last 20 years and will be readily brought back by a lot of people, not just the Taliban themselves. I mean, Kabul has had a very different experience in the last 20 years in comparison to the rural areas. and Kabul, there is no doubt, and Kabul citizens are the ones who benefited most. So they are the ones who stand to lose the most in terms of the rights that they won and the freedoms that they enjoyed in the past 20 years, whereas a lot of those freedoms didn't really come to the rural areas, and certainly a lot of the benefits didn't come to the

rural areas. So the change will be hardest felt in Kabul. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. And just as a parenthesis, here. I'm sure you know this anyway, but it's just the great new piece from just a few weeks ago in the New Yorker called the other Afghan women by Anand Gopal, who of course is the author of the book No Good Men

Among the Living, which is one of the very best books I've ever written about the Afghan War there. And boy, is that thing eye-opening. You've got to read that thing through the end, everybody, seriously. But now, so... Yeah, just to interrupt, I mean, that's exactly the kind

of dynamic that I'm referring to. the urban versus rural dynamic, which Anand, you know, pulls apart incredibly well. And you know what, as long as we're at it, right at the same time that that came out, there's a piece by Jack Murphy in Concern Veterans. You can find it. Anyway, I interviewed him all about it, and it was all about the drone war in Helmand and in Canter Harbor, I think particularly in Helmand in the Trump years. and he had all his sources were from the drone warriors themselves and they were telling their side of the story of man they had us killing innocent people there so badly and it's just the exact you know it's the same story as an gopal it's telling but from the robot's point of view and it's madness and the way anybody was something that looks like it might be a walkie-talkie antenna zap and anyway so this stuff's coming out more and more you know

know people are telling stories um you know kind of recap and and bad things around but uh have happened and and those stories are being told but now so here's the question real quick before i get to your awesome story about these CIA death squad murderer guys who are soon to be my local sheriff deputy uh here in Williamson county um i wonder about uh had you sell school yeah this um this uh great expert journalist uh think tank lady i don't know exactly who she is but uh her name is Ashley Jackson and I never could get her on her show on my show I don't know why but uh she had written this great study about three years ago where she'd been all over the place you know north southeast and west all over Afghanistan and she said that after the CIA zapped um the previous

mullah uh who was it mansour mulla i'm sorry i haven't had enough coffee today once they zapped him and hawkinsada took over hawkinsada's a lot smarter guy And that they decided that instead of just blowing everything up, they would just co-opt it all. And instead of waging such an ethnic chauvinist war, that they would, you know, starting back then, that they would try to win over as many influential Tajiks and Uzbeks, I don't know, Hazaras, I think even, you know, at least making friends with some Hazaras, but bringing some Tajik's and Uzbeks actually into the Taliban and giving them official positions as leaders of the Taliban and this kind of thing. in order to prepare the ground for what we saw happen in August, right? So I just wonder like whether any of that stuck, you know? Well, I mean, I think the, it's undeniable. I mean, it was the north of the country where you have most of these minorities,

particularly the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, that fell to the Taliban first. Right. after beginning around May when the, soon after Biden first announced the revised withdrawal time of, well, first it was September 11 and then August 31. It was, I mean, these provinces that were, you know, they were the strongholds of Massoud and the Northern Alliance. Back in the day, we're talking about like Badakshan and Thakar. And, I mean, these were the Northern Alliance strongholds. And they were the first to go.

I mean, it's incredible. And you saw Kandahar and Helmand, the former Taliban strongholds, they were among the last to go. And the ones that were fought over the most that actually put up a fight, whereas a lot of these, a lot of the provinces in the north, you know, fell over with a few bullets fired. So, yeah, that's certainly paid dividends in the end. I mean, they were never going to, I guess, and that was probably part of the reason that they started in the north.

So there was the dregs of the Northern Alliance and, you know, what became the Northern Resistance front, led by the Amundshamassud's son, weren't given time to rally their forces and, you know, prepare a resistance of any. uh kind of efficacy and yeah and look where it's led yeah very strategy on their part i think you know i was calling at the time oh see what they're doing they're heading them off at the pass go ahead and seize conduce first huh these guys got their act together you know they saw this thing coming and i guess would it be fair to say from your point of view that when biden kicked the can down the road from may to september that they just didn't they stayed on the same timeline of what they were going to do this summer anyway, whether the Americans had already pulled out or whether they were really just starting to and going to over the next couple of months. It was the same difference to them. And they just went on ahead. It looked that way. Yeah. I mean, look, they, I mean, they beat the Americans to Kabul. Like the Americans were still in Kabul when the Taliban arrived. I mean, it's insane. And it could have been, it could have been so much worse for the Americans getting out. You know, tens of thousands of, uh,

American citizens crammed in the airport. I mean, it could have been an absolute bloodbath if the Taliban had wanted it to be. I mean, I don't want to be called the Taliban apologists, but they're disciplined around the airport when they had this mortal enemy of 20 years, literally surrounded on all sides. Yes, granted, with a lot of firepower and a lot of air power overhead, but they could have made an absolute mess of that evacuation if they'd wanted to. yeah i mean where the americans are relying on them for security hey do you know about this

the washington post the washington post for what it's worth i you know they may or may not be speaking for the CIA at any given time or whatever i don't know what it is but uh you know they claimed that in fact maybe the taliban were their source for this you know and said that you know we offered to the americans that we'll stay out of Kabul you guys keep responsibility for the city of Kabul until you're done with your evacuation and then we'll come and then, and the Americans said, no, we already don't have enough men for that. So essentially, come on in. I mean, it was certainly the arrangement that Taliban had wanted with the Afghan government, and when it became clear on that day, August 15th, that while that had been negotiated,

in reality, the security forces and, you know, all the way up to the president, they were shedding their uniforms and hitting the road and it got to the point where there was no one in control of the streets and looting began and it was at that point that the Taliban were ordered into the city to take to take control. So actually, you know, again, I'm going to get called the Taliban apologist here, but they could have made this takeover a lot worse for everyone than they did. Even that, I mean, I have to say as a resident here, when I saw, all the police shedding their uniforms and abandoning their posts I thought look the best thing that can happen now is that the Taliban comes in before this becomes you know like a lawless

zone for until they do and and they did they they were very reactive they um they saw what was happening and they they came in and it you know wasn't perfect in the beginning by any means and that they admit as much but um look I just I can't get over how much um how smoothly this transition of power went in comparison to... To be perfectly clear here. Andrew, I mean, there's nothing that you said that is an apology for them there. To say that somebody is not Pol Pot, it's not to say that they're a perfect gentleman, to say that they're wise enough.

That's not how social media works. Yeah, to say that they're clever enough to play it cool instead of going completely berserk is, you know, I don't know. that's like just describing the color of the skyman that's that's not praise you know that's just saying it is what it is and yes you're abs and there's just no question about it right who could argue that this looked just like when ISIS rolled into western iraq it just didn't thank god it didn't you know but it didn't and and as we've always said as everybody knows anything about this thing has always said that the Taliban are not al-Qaeda they're conservatives not radicals and There's a big difference there in this case, you know?

But anyway, speaking of radicals, let's talk about... Listen, I'm sure the next time I have to get a driver's license test, the guy giving it to me and deciding whether I'm allowed to drive a car in my own town where I was born and race is going to be a former member of a CIA death squad. Is that right? Down at the DMV. That's who decides... Because this is how people assimilate in America

when America uses people to run their death squads in foreign... countries and then they have to hightail it out of there how they assimilate is they get government jobs which means they become overlords of everybody who's actually from here

so the next time I get pulled over it's going to be by a member of what do they call on them now zero units is that the same thing as a counterterrorism pursuit team or that's a different distinction of CIA does squad

same thing okay and these zero teams you've done the show about you know one time before about these death squads killing kids in their in their school barracks essentially um and all of this and help the CIA desquads are and their war crimes are legendary in this war so we don't have to redo all of that but that's why they call them desquads I think people get it so but then your story it's unbelievable that the CIA they put all these guys on planes and brought them straight here they didn't try to

to get them a place to live like a little village somewhere in Uzbekistan or something. They brought them to the United States of America? Yeah, I mean, look, there's actually been a lot of praise, as we mentioned in the article for the way the CIA dealt with their, you know, proxies or partners, as they would refer to them. And, you know, I suppose as far as loyalty goes that they have, and that has not been the case with a lot of the other Afghan units that were not sort of run by the CIA and funded and trained by the CIA and, you know, with the relationships that those, that organization built up with their proxies over the years, there were a lot more or a lot less. shadowy units, special units under the Afghan National Army that have felt, you know, very much abandoned.

And I've spoken to a number of, you know, former American veteran, Afghanistan veterans, who are, you know, really angry about the way that, you know, their former partners here have been treated and left behind when, when, in comparison to the CIA, you know, they really got, they rolled out the red carpet for them. Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things. Like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers

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Institute stuff they've got going there. Find the ad in the right-hand margin. at Libertarian Institute.org. Libertasbella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit

I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War? Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia 1945 through 61.

And as he explains on the back of here all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the american war there in say 1964 through 1974 but how do we get there why is this all harry truman's fault find out in why the vietnam war by the great mike swanson available now yeah all right so actually you know what i'm sorry man let me go back one step when there's the uh the Taliban are providing security at the airport. Their counterparts are the CIA counterterrorism pursuit teams. These zero units.

They're also there providing security at the airports. They're on the American side, obviously there, but they're sort of working together to vet everyone. But then there's a story, I'm sure you heard about this, at least from reading, you know, watching the BBC on Twitter, at the very least, you must be familiar with the accusation, that after the suicide attack, that somebody on the wall, that somebody on the And some said the CIA desquads, their mercenaries, open fire on the crowd. And one doctor described a bunch of people had, you know, downward sloping gunshot wounds

to their upper chest area and their heads and this kind of thing. And so I wonder if you know anything more about that. If you ever heard anyone confirm that and say that, yes, I saw that happen. Because, you know, originally they even said it was two suicide bombs because 175 killed. That's a lot. And then they said, oh, no, what it was was after. a suicide bomb, then the bad guys also broke out in machine gun fire. But then there were no bad guys with machine guns to point at. So then the question was like, was it the good guys

with machine gun fire? Yeah, look, the jury is definitely still out. It's bizarre actually how little reporting's been done on this. And I think it just, there was so much going on at the time that, and all the news agencies here, I mean, myself included, were so overwhelmed with what going on but yeah it's it's um there's definitely a gap in the reporting there um my understanding is that the zero units were not anywhere near this particular gate at the time um that they were controlled by uh conventional forces from um the u s and other coalition countries um and look that the anecdotal evidence would certainly suggest that there were at least some people who were killed by coalition forces yes and and that may have been these same guys um no i don't think it was

i don't think the the zero units were anywhere near that that gate um they were on as far as i know they were on a directly opposite gate you know a couple miles away i got you yeah and you know what i heard you say that but then i got an email and it broke my brain apparently and i forgot That's right. Okay. So, all right, well, hopefully we'll get some more journalism on that aspect right there. I mean, that's an important story in itself. But now, so could you tell me, where did you get the number 7,000 from? Do they admit that? They said, yeah, we brought 7,000 CIA guys, you know, assets. That was Matthew Cole's reporting. Okay. So I don't know where you got that. All right. And then, but it doesn't surprise me at all from, I mean, what I saw, again, anecdotally,

I spent a bit of time over near that gate. And there were, you know, there were, there were, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of people queued up outside that gate, many of whom looked to be in a, in a posture that suggests that they were actually going to end up inside the airport. And a number of them that I spoke to on one day were from Host Province, which is home, of course, of the Host Protection Force, which is one of these counter-terrorism pursuit teams that doesn't fall under the same designation as the zero units, but is akin to them.

And then he also just links to the post and the Hill in their reporting. that as the post puts it there were 20,000 Afghan quote-unquote partners and their relatives brought here, which he points out would be a third of the 60,000 Afghans that they've taken in overall. So two-thirds of them, I guess, would just be random civilians, they're saying. But, yeah. Man, now, did you guys get much reaction from this article that, hey, this is alarming because we don't want Afghan squad CIA guys to be our deputy sheriffs you know um look it won't surprise you that the um most of the uh attention it did get was from people like yourselves people like yourself who is on the

lookout for it um and not from the people who um who um who you know who like to um view the work the that the American government does as noble and infallible. Yeah. In fact, you're really kind of reigning all over the parade of their one little silver lining in their absolute

catastrophic failure here, which is that at least we were able to rescue all of these poor, helpless civilians and get them to safety. And now you're saying, nope, you don't even get that and they don't want to hear that. Yeah, I mean, every major newspaper a network that as far as I've seen has been reporting these very laudatory stories about

the, you know, saving children from the clutches of death and, you know, barely mentioning the history of these units. And, you know, it's certainly, I guess it's certainly something that the CIA is not going to want to broadcast too much. And, you know, I get a feeling that Some of the stories that have come out have been, you know, pushed along by the agency. Some of them certainly have that flavor. And look, I'm not nativist here. I mean, grab the average Afghan and put him in an American county. He'll be just fine.

I'm not saying that. I'm only saying guys who are members of CIA death squads. You know, I got a problem with that, warlords and kleptocrats and murderers. and there are some people America's worked with in Afghanistan with some very bad reputations for very good reason and to think that they get to just come and all of a sudden become American naturalized citizens and everything's just fine and, you know, in no time at all,

just essentially for public relations purposes at our expense is pretty outrageous, you know? Yeah, I mean, look, they were on the right team, weren't they? They threw an... a lot with the right side and and I mean for once you know in one of the very rare occasions you've seen the the losers in the war at least a small portion of them come out better off as the result yeah by the way this is just a parentheses it's just a coincidence but it's a new thing I learned today I'm always learning new things the Taliban has a group that they

call the Bada Brigade, which no relation to the Iranian-backed group and the George W. Bush backed group that rules Iraq now. Entirely separate group, but named after the Battle of Bader, surely as they are. So that's just a fun little film. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, these guys are pretty visible in around Kabul they're um and and um they're all uh from the the the hakani side of the taliban so they've certainly got a bit of a reputation behind them as well i bet they do then yeah god dang um all right well there's another tangent there from a non gopels reporting about how the CIA hired hakani to be on a counterterrorism pursuit team for a little while there when he was begging to come in from the cold early in the war

But then the military kidnapped and tortured his brother at Bogram, and the CIA kicked him out. Maybe they grabbed him. I think the military grabbed him, and then the CIA didn't stick up for him. The CIA let the military have him and abuse him, and then finally let him go, and then made an enemy out of him at that point, where he'd been begging to come in from the cold right then. And they could have, as bad as he is, he could have been on their side this whole time, instead of their deadly enemy this whole time. and now here he is sitting right in the catbird seat anyway

for god's sake well at least you won't run into him at the uh at the rye screen shop i'm sorry at least um at least you won't run into him you know down the the gas station um along with the zero one guys yeah exactly all right and now i'm sorry one last question i want to ask you about afghan society nowadays i know this is already a desperately poor country but it occurs to me that there must be some kind of massive economic crash and recession now

with this massive flow of foreign money now halted right and so there's got to be market corrections of every description going on right now and i wonder just how bad of a crisis people are feeling there they're already so poor it doesn't make a damn difference or what yeah it's it's definitely being filled um On many of the main streets in Kabul now, you see dozens, if not hundreds of makeshift stalls being set up where people are selling their household goods, not only so they can afford to try and get out of the country, but some tell me that they're doing it just so they can feed themselves, feed their families. because, yeah, as you say, there's the 75% of the Afghan budget with the former government was foreign funded. That has now been seized. And sorry, when I say seized, I mean stifled, as you say, not taken.

But so you've got, yeah, look, there's a. Not only is salaries not being paid to civil servants, the cash that used to be delivered, physical cash that used to be delivered on a weekly or monthly basis into Afghanistan from the US has stopped. So you've got a situation where the banks have a major cash shortage and they are only allowing account holders to withdraw a maximum of $200 per week. And on top of that, you have, you know, all this divestment across the country where, you know, although it had been declining for the last five or six years after the majority of international forces departed, you've also had a lot of international aid organizations leave in recent months, businesses getting their money or did get their money out of the country. um no one is hiring anymore people are laying off staff so um and and the the as i said the civil servants of the country um and and and there are you know hundreds of thousands of them in Kabul uh i mean not only if they not been paid since the Taliban came to power but the lower level ones amongst them i'm talking about the the traffic police and the i mean the former police

who are you know not really um very few of whom are in their jobs anymore um but the street sweepers and municipal workers, they had not been paid for two months from the start of the Taliban regime. So they're now into their fourth month without a paycheck. So, yeah, it's pretty desperate. And coming into winter, we're looking at Kabul being entirely without power because the majority of electricity is imported from the former Soviet republics to the north. And like the civil servants, those electricity bills have not been paid in the last two months. And Kabul suffers from massive electricity shortfalls in the winter anyway.

In this case, it's going to be pretty dire, I suspect. And then are you keeping your eye on this whole ISIS and E-T-I-M? See, I'm afraid that the, you know, ISIS was sort of. kind of, ISIS in Afghanistan was sort of kind of groomed by the NDS and the CIA in the first place back, you know, in the early 2000s before they

hoisted the black flag and declared loyalty to ISIS and all that. But it seems like if you rewind further, the Americans have had a relationship with the Uyghurs in the past he was against China back in the Bill Clinton era for example.

And, of course, there's all the hype about China and all the hype about the Uyghurs now, and I'm not sure if you know this. It's an obscure little detail that the U.S. bombed an E-T-I-M, that's the East Turkestan Islamic movement, bombed a training camp of theirs that was, you know, hosted by the Taliban up in, what do you call that little weird corridor that sticks off the very near? The Wakan corridor. Yeah, exactly. So it's way up there and that weird little thingy that borders China and the Americans bombed it.

But then Pompeo took them off the terrorist list in 2020. And you would think they'd just leave them on that and break the law. I mean, what the hell? It's covert action, right? Why would they even do that? But it seemed like such an obvious signal

that, you know, when Muslim terrorists, who Islamist terrorists are pointed east toward China, maybe they ain't so bad after all again and it seems like you know i don't know there's like two choices right is the CIA going to try to work with the Taliban to kill these guys or is the CIA going to try to back them and turn them east and i just wonder and you can call me a kook if you want to i don't mind do you don't have feelings so just tell me what you think of all those crazy things i just said Look, the ETIM is a little bit out of my zone of, my limited zone of knowledge, but look, I mean, speaking geographically, the border that Afghanistan shares with China is, I think it's about, I think it's 20 miles or 50 miles or something, and it is through the most inhospitable terrain. I mean, you certainly can't drive a vehicle through there to say that a lot of the, the routes that the Taliban have used over the years into the tribal areas in Pakistan are possible by vehicle.

But I think geography will curtail possibilities there to a certain extent. you did see there was a there was a really horrific suicide bombing in a Shia mosque in the northern city of Kunduz over the weekend and the Islamic State Khorasan province claimed that the guy who carried it out was a Uyghur. So look, they're certainly they're not, they're playing all these politics, you know, to their to their own benefit and, you know, throwing fuel on the fire, for sure. As far as what the CIA plans to do with them,

I'm, yes, I say, I'm not really qualified to say, I'm afraid. Well, you keep your eye point in that direction anyway. One thing I could have added there was one year ago, the post had it that J-Socq was helping the Taliban kill ICE. guys. That was their priority. Their own little kind of mini awakening movement there. Something we can work with the Taliban on is getting rid of these guys who actually are dangerous to, you know, American and Western interests in a way that the Taliban really just aren't, and never were.

And so, yeah, they definitely, I mean, the Taliban always denied that. But Wesley Morgan, the guy who reported is an excellent journalist, and especially in that part of the country. and look there are some shared interests there so um you know who um you know we've seen the zero one guys being resettled into american suburbs you know what how well we'd be fools to write off uh us supporting the taliban to eradicate ISIS you got that right um yeah or you know what I think even align with ISIS and ETIM to do something else you know I don't think there's really nothing you could put past the CIA that they don't think is a good idea,

no matter how bad of an idea it is, that they'll just do it. You come across some crazy thing, you're like, man, I can't believe it's that way. And then you find out the CIA was behind it. And you go, okay, I guess that makes sense, kind of, you know? Of course ISIS-K used to be backed

by the CIA. How could they not have been, right? At the end of the day, come on. All right. Anyway, I'll let you off the hook. Thank you so much for your great work and for your bravery, staying in Kabul. You will catch me alive or dead there, buddy.

So you'd be careful out there, and I hope we'll talk soon. Thanks, God. Thanks, man. All right. All right. You guys, that's Andrew Quilty. He's reporting from Kabul, and he's writing at the Intercept. Hey, there's a reason to look at the Intercept.

This one is with Matthew Cole, but it's good and important. And it's called the CIA's Afghan proxies. Accused of War Crimes will get a fresh start in the U.S. Man. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.