Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/5/25 Sangar Paykhar on the State of Afghanistan Today

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Scott interviews Sangar Paykhar, host of The Afghan Eye Podcast, about where things stand in the country today. They touch on the formation and eventual triumph of the Taliban, their escalating tensions with Pakistan, the status of ISIS-K and more. Discussed on the show: Paykhar’s interview with Scott Sangar Paykhar is the host of AFGHANEYE. Subscribe to the show on YouTube and follow him on X @paykhar Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott’s work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott’s other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott’s books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, y'all. Introducing a Sagar, Paiqyar, whoops, I said around. Bekar. Sorry about that. He interviewed me recently on his show about what's going on in Afghanistan.

And so now I'm very interested to have him here to talk about what's going on. in Afghanistan, and he obviously knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do. Welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you for having me. I'm doing fine. Thank you. And I'm sorry about ruining your last name there, man.

Thank you for doing you. It's okay. I should have practiced. Listen, so first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from, where you are now, and a little insight into your perspective on what's going on in Afghanistan. know. So I was born in Afghanistan. By the age of 12, we fled to the Netherlands. I've been living in the Netherlands and UK. I currently work as a teacher and I host the Abkhanaan podcast. I travel to Afghanistan every year and I also do some work as a coach and consultant on the side. And basically, I'm, constantly occupied with what's going on in Afghanistan

and how can we make some kind of positive impact on lives of millions of people who are still there? Okay, good. So obviously it's been a long 20 or maybe 50 years of war, depending on how you count it here. Now the Taliban have completed their takeover of the country. what's your perspective on that? I believe that the Taliban are a phenomenon

that has emerged in Afghanistan as a consequence of many social and political problems that we faced in the 20th century. You see, you have to understand that Afghanistan is a landlocked country where majority of the people in Afghanistan have historically been isolated from major developments such as industrialization and modernity.

So the rural part of Afghanistan are very traditional, very conservative, and very religious. Now, what has happened in the 20th century is that we had communism in Asia, in Russia and China and Central Asia. And we had the United States allied with Pakistan and some other regional countries. Now, religion was an important antidote to communism. And this is why major Western allies of like the people in Afghanistan,

they started with the religious conservatives in Afghanistan, and the religious conservatives were of two varieties. There were those religious conservatives who are more or less Muslim Brotherhood. That's a very modern ideological movement in the Muslim world. They have emerged somewhere in late 19th, early 20th, early 20th century. And then you have the more traditional, not so much politically, ideologically, motivated, conservative religious clerics in the rural communities who are, how would you say, they don't have a global vision about politics and religion, et cetera. These two groups in Afghanistan, they opposed the spread of communism in Avran society in the 20th century. To make a long story short, those two groups, one of them became the Muslim Brotherhood aligned groups like Hezb Islami, Jamiate Islami, Tehad Islami,

and the others, they were groups like belonging to leaders like Nabi-Mahi-Mohan. Amadee and Eunice Chalas. And these figures, they were very conservative and religious, but they didn't necessarily have this agenda of, you know, transforming the world and et cetera, et cetera. So what happened is that the groups that were more aligned with Muslim Brotherhood, they eventually had a falling out after expectations. of Soviet Union, and they waged the civil war with each other.

And the other group of religious figures who were very rural and not so ideological, they opposed these groups that were more aligned with Muslim Brotherhood. And they said that basically you were causing corruption in the land, and you're causing a civil war, so we're going to disarm you. And that's how Taliban has emerged as a movement. It's not a movement that has a very deep political philosophy, a grand vision for the world, et cetera. There are very practical people.

And this is why I think, you know, whether they're very strict and conservative or reactionary in certain aspects, I don't necessarily think that that problem is inherent of Afghan society, but it's more a phenomenon that has emerged over the decades that Afghanistan faced many crises. And in my opinion, you know, even if the Taliban in certain aspects are very strict and reactionary, I think these phenomena, after a few years may even soften and they may start to adjust to wider society and become less harsh and restrictive against their own. on people in certain aspects. So that's my general view of the Taliban.

All right now, one of the ways that they won the war in the last years leading up to 2021 was they went ahead and offered, I guess, pretty generous compromises to various, at least Tajik and Uzbek leaders. I don't know about the Hazaras. I think maybe they got around to just reading the Hazaras the Riot Act after the fact, but they certainly were making deals with Tajits and Uzbeks up in the north of the country and saying, hey, you don't have to be a Pashtun to be a Taliban, but you do have to be a Taliban to have power around here, boy.

And so they all said, okay, fine, and signed on the dotted line, as they would say for a very long time in, you know, the learned Western press covering this, that the Taliban control half the country in the daytime, 75% at night. and that they were just building what they called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. That was, and it went from a shadow government to truly the government of the majority of the country as the, as American power wane there, and they were replaced. On the other hand, obviously the movement does come out of Kandahar province and Hellman province

in these societies that, as you're saying, this is a very big country where Kandahar, be pretty far from Azari Therif and these guys don't even speak the same language, have the same culture. These borders were drawn by various empires over the times and all of that. So as I talked about in my book, and as all the experts have been explaining on my show for 20 years, a big part of the problem here was America was trying to foist essentially a coalition of Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazaras that were about 20% of the population each. making up about 60%, but trying to voice that coalition

onto the Pashtuns, which are about 40%, which is a minority, but still it's the plurality. They're the single biggest ethnic group. And then even though there were people like Hamid Karzai, of course, was a Pashtun,

the original sock puppet president there and the various governors that he appointed and whatever, that didn't make those people really representative of the people in the South. So it was really, like for example, in the Army, I know for a great many years, it was almost exclusively a Tajik-led army at war against the Pashtuns in the south, that kind.

So I'm saying all this so that, one, you can correct me wherever I'm being over general, but also, too, so you can clarify. So where does that leave us now where we have, obviously, these ethnic and sectarian differences do matter quite a bit when it comes to power and power sharing in the country? When you mentioned the fact that the previous regime relied heavily on certain ethnic groups and not so much on Pashtuns, there is another dimension to that. So if you go to rural Afghanistan, like two years ago, I took a car, you know, a Toyota forerunner, and I drove all the way to Badakhshan to a valley where up until, now they still don't have roads. I was in a valley in Badakhshan and in Badakhshan there are primarily Tajiks. There are some other small ethnic groups there as well and I was

in that valley and I was speaking to local people and what we have to understand is that the people who were supported by United States in Afghanistan were not necessarily representing their own ethnic group. Because where they're originally from in those rural areas in northern Afghanistan, there is a lot of poverty. People still don't have roads. There is no adequate medical health care. There are no job opportunities. There was a tyranny of local thugs who basically joined the local militia and became the government. And they would do whatever they want. Like if you want to go by road to Thachar or to Kunduz, there are certain roads that for more than 20 years,

people could not travel there without a armed guard because it was basically day and night you could get robbed. And that kind of insecurity in northern Afghanistan, not everywhere, but in some parts, forced a lot of locals to side with the Taliban, and the local Taliban, they were not ethnic Pashtuns. There were Uzbeks, there were Turkmen, there were Tajiks. And what made them Taliban is basically they were the local clergy,

local religious leaders who had longstanding networks with other religious leaders from elsewhere. And that's how basically the insurgency formed a network. and they primarily relied on the grievances of people who felt like this new setup, this new government is giving too many privileges, too many, how do you say? Like, some people were elevated to a status of almost gods. They could kill people in daylight. Like, you know, when Donald Trump jokingly said that he could shoot someone in. Sixth Avenue in daylight and get away with it.

That's a joke in America. But in Afghanistan, those were the things that were really happening. And those developments forced many people to join the Taliban. And ethnicity became irrelevant. It was a general sense that people were sick and tired of these groups that received all the money, all the resources. They would drive around in armored vehicles. They could go to any family's house who had a young, beautiful daughter,

and they say, we want to marry your daughter, take her. And the families couldn't even object because, well, if they would say, we don't want our daughter to marry you, then the brother would get arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist. So those kind of developments forced a lot of people, regardless of their ethnic background, to support the Taliban. Now, in the current situation in Afghanistan, what you have to understand is that in every home,

they at least have a shotgun, okay? People have guns in Afghanistan. In 2021, when the Americans were leaving, if you can go back and look at the news reports, Ashraf Ghani was distributing guns to people in rural Afghanistan, not just him, but the governor of Mazare Sharif, Atah, Mohamed. President, Ghani, the president. Yeah, President, Ghani, and Atah Muhammad Nur,

the governor of Mazara Sharif, Dostom, you know, the general, the communist Uzbek general. They were distributing guns. They were giving everyone, Kalashnikovs, you know, PKMs, all kinds of very heavy guns that people use in rural Afghanistan to wage war with. Still, the Taliban managed to take. take the country in 11 days.

Why? Because people were capable of fighting against them. They did have the guns, but they simply didn't want to. And this is a very small detail that is being overlooked. People were capable of fighting. People were capable of resisting. Even today, people can fight against the Taliban, but people are sick and tired of fighting,

and they're saying, okay, these people, we don't agree with them, we don't like their policies, but at least there is some security and stability and they can be tolerated. And this is why in a very diverse multi-ethnic society where people have different languages, they have different ethnic backgrounds, they live in different geographies,

their customs are different. Under these circumstances, it is still possible for a group like Taliban to, you know, control the country and govern it, as even Putin has acknowledged yesterday. And the reason why that is, is that most people are very sick and tired of war, and they have been traumatized by all these different factions that have ruled Afghanistan over the past 50 years. So many people see Taliban as a necessity, not so much as a ideal government that they would

once. Yeah. In other words, compared to the absolute satanic evil of the American occupation and sock puppet regime there, the so-called Afghan national government that America supported in power. And which, hey, I'm from here, but the truth is the truth. As you're saying, well, look, it's a thought experiment. Why would Tajik's from northern Afghanistan choose the Taliban? Why would the Taliban be able to walk right into the north instead of having to defeat the Northern Alliance, right? Before it was a civil war, and they were at war with the Northern Alliance, and the Northern Alliance would rather die fighting. Not this time, this time they walked right in. And it was because, let's see, I guess if you think about it, that would mean

that the local population overall considered the Afghan national government to be even less legitimate than Heckmachar and Hakani and Dostam fighting a civil war over Kabul in the mid-1990s. We're there. Even after the Taliban took Kabul, the Northern Alliance kept fighting, right? We're here. The Northern Alliance was like, hey, we'll take it. That goes to show you. And compared to what?

Compared to George W. Bush and Barack Obama's regime. That's what compared to, right? The one that the United States of America built and forced on to the people of that country. And, you know, I know less about the governance of the sock puppets in the north. I know a lot about PKZ and other allies of Hamid Karzai that he appointed to be the governor in, I think, BKZ moved around from Nangahar to Dandahar and wherever. And these guys were just criminals,

and the police chiefs and the mayors and the governors or just drug dealers, rapists, murderers, gangsters. And, you know, even David Petraeus said in some unguarded moment that, well, you know, the local people, they prefer their traditional methods of dispute resolution to, you know, our police and our court system and the way we do it. Oh, yeah, you don't say, huh? They do, huh? Well, but see, that's the end of the argument right there. And I think he said that in like, I don't know, 2012 or 13 or something.

Oh, well, no, before that, would have been in like 2010. Oh, the people prefer to do it their way than our way. oh well then why don't you turn around and go home right now then that's the final admission that that was what the war was to force our system our regime on to these people who would never accept it um it's just crazy that they were able to get away with keeping the thing going as long as they were um so let me ask you about the the conflict going on now well in fact before i ask you about that. They say that they zapped Iman al-Zawahari in a drone strike in Kabul. And he hadn't put out a podcast since then. But, and I read a lot about it, like in the aftermath, I tried to.

And I didn't see any real confirmation that, yes, I'm an al-Zawahari did get killed. That, one, the Taliban had let him come back. And they were hosting him in Kabul. Is that really true? and then two, did they kill him that day? I guess it seems more likely than not since it's been a few years and he was an avid podcast host for a long time there. I was about 300 meters away

when that explosion happened in 2022. I heard the bang. It was early in the morning. It was a really loud bang. And I was not allowed to go near to the place where the explosion happened. And it happened in a neighborhood where basically you have all the very expensive, fancy mansions built with the money that was pumped into Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation. and these houses were all owned by people who are very high-ranking people in the regime during the occupation or they were businessmen or whatever.

But even today, if you are in Kabul, you drive around that neighborhood, you see all those big houses, quite a lot of those houses are empty. what happened in 2021 is that when the Americans left all these rich people, all these millionaires and billionaires, they also left Afghanistan because their source of income, the way they were making their money basically was cut off. So they now live in New York, in London, in Dubai, in other places, but they have those empty houses there.

that you can go and rent, okay? Everyone can go and rent those houses. Now, the government in Afghanistan didn't know in which house I was staying when I was in Kabul. The year after that, I was in the same area of Kabul in another guest house with other people,

and in each of those cases, the authorities don't know who's in these houses. Now, suppose, let's just go by the official story from the U.S. government. Ayman al-Zawahiri was there. They shot him. He was targeted with a drone

and he was killed. If that is the case, the government must have brought him there. Okay? That's the narrative. They have brought him there. If that is the case,

let's just look at what Ayman al-Zawahiri was saying about the Taliban during the negotiations. There are statements of him where he basically more or less is saying that their negotiation with the Americans

is against the teachings of Islam and that he opposes that, but he was very mild in his criticism. He wasn't very, how do you say, harsh in his criticism, but he did show that he was more or less opposed to what the Taliban were doing. And what most people around the world don't know is that al-Qaeda as an ideological movement is a transnational movement that has a global agenda.

And they were in Afghanistan due to the Soviet occupation, but the people who are Taliban, what I explained in the beginning of the show, who they are and what their background is, they have a totally different ideology and philosophy. about how a society should be governed, what the priorities of Muslims are and what Muslims should do. This is why, while the Taliban will never tell you

that they think that bin Laden is a bad person or that Ayman al-Zawahir is a bad person, they will never say that because that would be immoral to criticize another Muslim who is being targeted. But internally, they never liked their beliefs and ideology and what they were doing. If it was up to them, they would have told bin Laden in the 1990s, please shut up, stay quiet, don't say anything, because you're causing problems for us.

There are a lot of people within the Taliban who don't like their philosophy and beliefs. So while those people were very focused on getting rid of the Americans and, you know, bringing some sort of stability in Afghanistan, why would they then bring this guy back right in the city center of Kabul for what purpose, to do what exactly? Their beliefs don't align, their ideology doesn't align.

The only thing they have in common is that they're all Muslims and that they all share the same history of fighting. All right, well, let me stop here there. So there's the lady. I should read her stuff more and talk to her, but I know enough about it, I guess. Her name's Sarah Adams.

And you may have seen her, the blonde former CIA officer. Yes, I do. You know, all right. So let me, I'll try to give the devil this dude here. She's saying that, look, that this is just naive, that, yeah, they have differences in all that, but they have sames too. And for example, that they have the United States as their enemies. Now, I think that's assuming a lot on the part of the Taliban, which I agree with you,

they would rather not pick a fight with us if they could avoid one. Now that they've won, why would they want to get back into a war with us? But she says, listen, you know, whatever we used to call al-Qaeda and the Haqqqani network and Hizb, Islami, and whatever, all these groups are the same thing. They're working together and they're working against us. And they're supporting, you know, ultimately attacks against American targets here and overseas. and that when you multiply the groups together like that, it's almost a whole new Al-Qaeda network again.

Now, I got to tell you, just on the face of it, come on, man, Hickmichar and Hacani are now coming after us. I mean, Hickmichar, you know, fought for America and Azerbaijan in 1993, and as late as 93, he was our guys' enemies during the occupation there, and same for Hacconi, but they never were part of the Al-Qaeda network are part of this global, you know, kind of Leninist bin Ladenite movement in the past. But on the other hand, you know, I don't know. Rich people know each other.

So like Islamist, kuk, revolutionaries know each other too. The Uspecs and the Chinese Uyghurs and the Lashkar-e-Tiba and all these kooks pile around with each other from time. a time, often with MI6 and CIA backing and Saudi backing and oftentimes not, also they're individual men and their own organized groups with their own will and capacities and all these things. But I think they are dangerous. I think just because America's war on terrorism is a big bony, horrible thing doesn't mean that the bin Ladenites are not real. It doesn't mean that they're not a danger to the United States and or our friends, wherever. And so, uh, I,

I guess I'm worried that I don't know enough about just what is the reality of their network and strength now and what, if any, alliance do they have with groups like Hizbi Islami or the Akani network or the Taliban for that matter? What they all have in common ideologically, and this goes back to why Al-Qaeda initially, wanted to draw America into a war it was basically what was happening

in Palestine that the biggest opposition bin Laden and people like him have Iman al-Zawahiri all of them is

against Israel as a powerful state in the Middle East and the whole ideology they have is that America

since America supports Israel and oppressive regimes in the Islamic world. Therefore, we need to defeat America so that if America crumbles, then they can go after the local governments, Israel, et cetera. That's their ideology. That's their philosophy. And if you look back at why they wanted to basically attack America in a way that would provoke America to invade Muslim lands because there is this documentary

that Al-Qaeda released in, I think we can't remember if it was 2006 or 2008. It's called Manhattan Raids. It should be onarchive.org. There, they explained that why they did that and what their justification is for that. Now, if we want to understand Al-Qaeda

and what motivates them and why they do certain things, then we have to look at these other groups that have emerged in the last 30 years and they have been at some point in our recent history aligned with figures who are in al-Qaeda to a certain degree. Like we have the government in Syria now.

That guy was also al-Qaeda, okay? Now he's wearing a suit and he has a minister for women's affairs and LGBT rights. You know? Enforced all the white brides. That's my next interview. My next interview is with William Van Wagon

and about how all the jihadis are abducting the al-a-white women enforcing marriage on them, marriage, quote-unquote. So, yeah. The issue with Al-Qaeda is that they have this particular vision of what needs to happen to change the politics of the Middle East.

Now, the other groups that Sarah Adams and her other very competent colleague, Kido Blow, who's from the Netherlands, what they are saying is also that ISKP or ISIS is also Hakani and Khanis is also Taliban. So when a minister of Taliban government last year was killed by ISIS, we should assume that that was just, how do you say a way to deceive people? Like, would they even go that far to having their own minister killed? Okay, so if you leave the Taliban out,

Now, what about Hakani and Al Qaeda are now back together, wherever one? So Sirajuddin Hakani, the son of Jalalid Khani, he is the guy who, like, the Taliban used to have a position as a deputy, emir. You had the emir, Mullah, and then you had the deputy emir. Sirajuddin Haqani is not officially the deputy emir, but during his last visit to Kabul to Kabul city, the emir came from Kandahar and he told everyone he is the second in command you should obey him

so Sirajdin Haqani according to the supreme leader of the Taliban is the second in command now the second in command he is someone who has a political ideology

in belief system that is slightly different than the traditional Taliban from Kandahar, okay? He's culturally from a different region. His father has a different background ideologically. But if you look at the grand picture of all these groups,

what makes them all similar, people who are currently in Taliban movement, is that their primary focus is Afghanistan. They don't have an international agenda or philosophy. Sure, if they can help Muslims elsewhere around the world, like in the 90s, in Azerbaijan or in Bosnia, those things were primarily led by people who are like Hekmatyar, who are of the Muslim Brotherhood persuasion. Now, this new leadership of the Taliban, they are people who are more or less shaped by the experiences of the last 30 years. the fact that they are willing to have diplomatic relations with India and even ask for having

diplomatic relations with Russia and United States at the same time is because they have been shaped by their experience of the last 30 years. They've seen that certain uncompromising postures that their predecessors had were not conducive to a positive, you know, uh, uh, out. come in Afghanistan. So they are basically modifying some aspects of their politics and trying to focus more on what they can do in Afghanistan to preserve stability. So this is why these theories about them preparing some kind of grand, jihad, and attacking

everywhere around the world, doesn't make sense. If you are in Afghanistan, if you see what they're preoccupied with, is how can we get a deal with Kazakhstan to build this train track over here? How can we make a deal with India to build a water dam over there? Those are their priorities. That's what they're all talking about. That's what they are engaged with, with the neighboring country, whether it's with Russia, whether it's with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan now with India.

They're very preoccupied with building the infrastructure in the country, providing job opportunities for people because these people, they're all blacklisted. Their entire Taliban leadership, they're all blacklisted. They can't even go to Pakistan. Wherever they go, they will be arrested. They have no future elsewhere around the world. So they're thinking of it's basically,

let's make the best of it while we're here. Let me ask about the Indians, because in the war, America used Indians, in fact, to get around sanctions. they would have the Indians give helicopters to the Afghan national government and then pay them back later or have the... I guess they had the Indians buying Russian helicopters to get around sanctions on the Russians is what it was.

What fun. Anyway, so the Indians were on the American side of the war against the Taliban. So now you're saying the Taliban is in power and they've decided no hard feelings. We'll go ahead and work with the Taliban, even though... I mean, pardon me, with the Indians, even though they were just working against us,

because business is business. As you said, they want a dam to be built. But then, so that leads to then what may be a completely uninformed question, but what the hell seems like obvious segue? Is the Taliban's new friendship with India to blame for their new problems with Pakistan? So, so traditionally the Pakistani ISI that supported the rise of the Taliban with Bill Clinton and the John Major and the Saudis help, of course, in the 1990s. and it was the Pakistanis who supported the Taliban against the United States

from at least 2005 all the way through 2021. Now the Taliban won and they're lying with the Indians and turning on the Pakistanis or the Pakistanis turned on them first or what the hell's going on with that? Because there's been real fighting between the two countries, right? Yes. And the thing is, is that international relations between countries is not based on, you know, sentiments and feelings.

Fact is that Afghanistan has its needs. Afghanistan is a landlocked country. It doesn't have resources. It doesn't have money. It doesn't have industry. And if it means that a deal with India would enable Afghanistan to have some kind of development work, that they would otherwise not get anywhere else,

they will just have cordial diplomatic relations with India and pursue that path. That's what they're essentially doing. However, Pakistan is a country that sees Afghanistan as an area that they need to control. Just like if you look at the map of Pakistan, okay? If you look at the map of Pakistan, the western parts of Pakistan and basically generally all of Western Pakistan along the Durand Line with Afghanistan, those areas have historically

always been underdeveloped, very weak and poor. But those areas have always been used by Pakistan to extract certain resources, whether it's gas or water, so those areas serve to extract certain resources, but there's no money going back to those areas. They're not doing any development in those parts of Pakistan. So all of the development and power in Pakistan is concentrated in Punjab and in Karachi, just a few major urban areas. and they see Afghanistan basically as an extension of their rural western countryside.

Okay? If Afghanistan creates a powerful government that manages its resources, its water, its roads, and trade routes, this means that Pakistan has to engage with Afghanistan as an equal counterpart. They don't want to do that. They want to keep Afghanistan weak so that they can dominate the region. And for that reason, when Afghanistan wants to have diplomatic relations with India, they see that as a problem. Even with northern parts of Afghanistan with Central Asia,

the Central Asian republics, they share a major source of water with Afghanistan. There is a river that flows out of the mountains in northern Afghanistan and then into Central Asian Republics. It's the Amu River, and Amu River is a very important source of water for that region. Now, Afghanistan is trying to build a 250-kilometer-long canal to irrigate northern deserts of Afghanistan to create a lot of, you know, it's mainly for agriculture to provide food security in Afghanistan. Now, those northern countries in Central Asia, they can object and they say, look, you're taking all this river water and redirecting it to your rural countryside where you want to build a canal. The water is going down and this is going to harm our economy. We don't want this.

Those countries are not saying that. Those neighbors are not saying that. But the Pakistanis who came to Kabul several times over the past few years, they were making objections behind closed doors with the Taliban authorities. Don't build that canal. Don't do that. And then this puzzles people like, what is the issue with Pakistan? Why are they worried about the canal in northern Afghanistan?

The real reason for that is that food security in Afghanistan means that Afghanistan will not be economically dependent on Pakistan. You see, any kind of development in Afghanistan, they see that as a threat. So this is why diplomatic relations with India is also used as a reason to escalate even to a war. You're muted. Oh, I'm sorry. People were making noise. I always do that.

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Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save $25 bucks and get free shipping, at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. The audiobook, I know. People are always asking me, when are going to be done with the audiobook for Provote. Well, the fact is, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I'm working on the Academy. But the fact of the matter is, I have published the H.W. Bush chapter and the Bill Clinton chapter, which is already, I think, nine or 12 hours, an audiobook worth just right there.

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You know, my first one was called Fool's Air and Time to End the War in Afghanistan. It was really good and it all came true too. Watch me predict the end. Right there in the preface of the thing. Also, enough already time to end the war on terrorism. That's all the wars from Jimmy Carter all the way through the first Donald Trump administration. And then my latest is provoke how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson says it's the definitive take.

Expanddesigns.com. That's my friend Harley Abbott's company. And he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton show, as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website. He's done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of webmasters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years, the thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it

and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website, you need it fixed up, you need a new one, you're setting up a business, working on any kind of online project like that. Check out expanddesigns.com. Tell me, so what started the fighting then between Afghanistan and Pakistan recently?

So what started the fighting is that, the Foreign Minister of the Taliban government, Amir Khan Muttaki, went on an official state visit to India, a first in the history of Taliban. And this visit was announced earlier, and he didn't get his waiver from the sanctions that he's under sanctions, so he's not allowed to travel, so he needs a waiver in order to travel.

And first, his waiver, was not granted, but then they granted the waiver and he traveled to India. And he was also planning on going to Darululam Deoban, basically the most prestigious Islamic seminary in the whole of South Asia. And the Taliban movement are also ideologically aligned with that historic seminary. And that was a very, very big historic seminary. visit, not just the fact that the Taliban government is visiting India, but also visiting the religious seminary and the fact that they are going to have very elaborate diplomatic

trade and commercial ties with India. On that particular day that he arrived in India, Pakistan conducted an airstrike in Afghanistan. There were noises of explosions in Kabul, but later it was disputed. Some people even say that it was just a sonic boom from one of their jets because they couldn't find any sight of any damage. But in other parts of Afghanistan,

they bombed a small market and killed some civilians. Now, this air strike was the beginning of the hostilities because they violated Afghan airspace like it has been violated several times in the past four years, but they even went after the capital city. So the Pakistanis, they said that they were targeting the leader of the TTP, the leader of the Tehriki Taliban, Pakistan, Nurwalim Masud, and they said he was in Kabul and we conducted an airstrike on him. But it turns out on the same day, he released a voice message and said, I'm fine.

I wasn't targeted. That wasn't true. And two days later, he published a video where his location can be geolocated. So like, you see the mountain behind me? He was in a video where he could, he showed where he's, so you can geolocate his location and see that he was on the Pakistani side. in Pactun Khoa. He wasn't in Afghanistan.

But Pakistanis persisted saying we conducted this air strike because we wanted to kill the leader of the TTP. Now Afghans obviously objected and because this was an escalation that

was even worse than what has happened in the last couple of years the Afghans felt like the Taliban government felt like they have to respond now. And they conducted strikes along the Durand Line in eight provinces, like over a stretch of more than 2,000 kilometers. In different spots, they attacked Pakistani positions.

And that's basically how the tension started. And then quickly after the attack by the Afghan side, Turkey and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they all intervened. and they said, you have to announce a ceasefire and let's negotiate, but don't continue this fighting. But the situation is very tense, and Pakistanis continue saying,

well, this is because we want to fight against the TTP and the TTP is being hosted in Afghanistan. But at the same time, they also reveal that they have serious objections against the fact that Afghanistan is having direct diplomatic relations with India. And they're accusing the Taliban of being part of a conspiracy with India to support the TTP and basically destabilize Pakistan. So a Hindu majority India with a Hindu nationalist party leading India is, according to Pakistan, working with the hardline Islamist Afghan Taliban

to basically cause instability in crisis in Pakistan. And from Afghan perspective, we see this all as an excuse. We see this as an excuse. We see this as basically deception because in reality, Pakistan has always had a problem with Afghan and Pakistan. Pakistani and Afghan and Indian relations. In 2008, when Indian embassy in Kabul was bombed, if you can remember that, it was done

by the Taliban. It was later unclear whether it was Taliban or Lashkar-Tayba. But similar attacks happened, and in many circles in Afghanistan, they always say that these targeted attacks in Afghanistan against India were. the work of the Pakistan intelligence services. And now there are tensions between the two countries and Afghanistan is ironically being pushed more towards India. And that's the policy.

Yeah, all right. Now, I'm sorry because we're short of time. A couple more things. I wanted to ask you, because we skipped this before, but I remembered, I wanted to ask you about the situation for the Hazaras. who are more or less centrally located in one sort of geographical area there south of Kabul. And I remember this footage from when the Taliban took over.

And, you know, I think there's like five million of them or something. And, you know, Patrick Coburn, I remember, said to me, he thought that the Taliban are going to have some trouble because there are millions of these people and they're going to not want to put up with this. And I thought, yeah, I don't know, because I had just seen this footage where the Taliban came to speak to some Hazara elders and introduced them to the new world order. The Americans are leaving. We are in charge now.

And, you know, I don't think his terms were that harsh, but he was letting them know that you don't have any power now. We have the power over you and we'll let you know what we decide is to become of you was basically what he said. I don't think he ran off with their daughters right then or what. It did raise a real question about, so what is the fake? Because the Hazaras, they're a separate ethnicity, but they're also Shiites. And so that puts them in a separate, separate category then and what have you. So we already talked about Taliban relations with Tajik Zanus Bex in the north. But what's the current status of the Hazaras now?

The Hazaras in Afghanistan are led by groups that, have emerged in the 1970s and 80s. And these groups later became very powerful after the Iranian revolution. So when Khomeini took over in Iran, he immediately started to support the Hazara groups that were fighting against the communists. So in Hazara pockets in central Afghanistan, the... Insurgents fighting against the communist, their bases were in Iran. What a lot of people also don't know is that Iran used Afghan Hazaras as foot soldiers during the Iraq-Iran war.

Now, these Hazaras that have been basically... They also fought with Hezbollah against al-Qaeda in Obama's Syrian dirty war. Yes, yes. Well, America was backing them in Afghanistan. and fighting against the Afghan Taliban. The Afghan Taliban went to Syria to fight on al-Qaeda's side, and the Hazaras went to fight on Hezbollah and Damascus's side against him. I just thought that was funny.

Sorry, go ahead. Yes. And the Hazaras in Afghanistan have, like, they were targeted by ISIS in Afghanistan because some of their men were involved in the war in Syria And in Syria, those Hazara militias were killing a lot of Sunnis. They were doing all kinds of atrocities. So ISIS was retaliating against Hazaras in Afghanistan. Now, it was a very best up situation.

And the thing is that during the last 20 years of conflict, where the Americans were there, Hazaras were primarily in support of the American. American-backed government. But in rural Afghanistan, as I said before, there's a different game. Like, in rural Afghanistan, many Hazaras, they are still very poor and underprivileged people, and some of them were actually part of the Taliban insurgent groups. Those people, they created this network of trust between the Taliban and the Hazara communities.

And something very important happened around 2015, 2016. There was a Taliban leader by the name of Abdulmanan Yazi, who he basically separated from the Taliban movement. And he was also opposed against peace talks with Americans. And this guy, if you look back at his history, he was the one who massacred the Hazaras in the 19-19. 90s. And he was killed by the Taliban.

When he separated from the Taliban movement, he was also killed. And with him, this very toxic sectarian element within the Taliban was crushed and subdued. Because the Taliban, basically, they are very conservative Sunni Muslims and the Shiite brand of Islam that is being promoted by Iran is very different. and they have many issues with each other. But when you look at the ground realities in Afghanistan, if you go to Kabul, like one of the biggest neighborhoods in Kabul that almost has like more than 2 million inhabitants is Dashtabarchi.

It's basically a Hazara neighborhood. They have their own shops, their universities, their schools, everything. It's also a very vibrant and well-developed part of the city because Hazaras, they're like very hard-working and very industrial community. So if you go there now, they have been subjected to the same restrictions as other parts of Afghanistan.

Like there is no singing and dancing out in the public and women are asked to wield themselves. But they don't go around in that neighborhood basically harassing people. They're a little bit cautious with that. And there are many religious, but also political leaders, like there is a very significant figure who was also a politician during the U.S. occupation. His name is Jafar Mahdawi.

These people, they have like thousands and thousands of supporters. They basically say, look, the occupation did not really benefit us. Some of our people were killed in Syria as militias. Some of our people were butchered here, and then you had this sectarian war as well. Right now, it is not in our interest to start another civil war. So they are dialogue partners with the Taliban government, and they're basically trying to create a status quo where the sectarian tensions are, you know, limited. They can't still have their certain festivals, et cetera, that are really, you know,

You know, controversial, the sectarian attacks were against those religious festivals. So the Taliban have told them, you can have your festivals, you will have the security, there will be armed guards, and then we will make sure that there is no ISIS attacks. But at the same time, the Hazaras are, how do you say? I wouldn't say that they are very pleased with this current government, but they're also not up in arms and starting a civil war. They're just like other Afghans, they're tolerating it. Sure.

Okay, last question is ISIS-K. We talked about on your show. There's a great article by Osman-Bornan at Afghan analysts about the rise of ISIS-K. They were essentially Pakistani Taliban, Tariqi Taliban, hiding in Afghanistan for Save Haven, when Obama was helping the Pakistani government bomb the Swat Valley and the federally administrative tribal territories, and I'm going to say 2010, then they came to Afghanistan and they were adopted by the NDS,

which is the Afghan CIA, which is, of course, controlled by the CIA. And they use these guys to attack the Afghan Taliban, but also to do reprisal attacks against the Pakistanis for backing the Afghan Taliban. So sort of a mirror image kind of a thing there, since the Pakistanis were giving the Taliban safe haven on their side of the border. But then, as Boran says, what happened is in 2013 or so, 2014, maybe, they hoisted the black flag and declared themselves loyal to the Islamic State Caliphate

under Baghdadi in Iraq and Syria over there, started slit in throats, like in the cliche, and were worse than the Taliban. And this actually, interestingly, gave the Americans the opportunity. and I don't think this was deliberate, this was an after effect, that it gave them the opportunity to actually adopt something like the coin strategy from Iraq, which is what they said that they were doing in the Obama surge when really they're just cracking down on the Pashtuns

in the south of the country. But if they were actually replicating what they had done in Iraq, it would have been allying with the Taliban to kill any last Arab suicide bomber, bin Ladenite types in the country. That's what they were doing in what, Western Iraq was aligning with the local militias to turn against the bin Ladenites. Well, here, they sort of invented some bin Ladenites, and by the end of the war, America was

helping the Taliban fight them. And there's an article in the Washington Post about the Delta Force is flying drones as air cover, but the Taliban at war with ISIS K on the ground in the Nangahar province. So whatever, fine. Anyway, these guys are bin Ladenite types, and they were blamed for the massacre in Moscow in, I think, early 24. I'm sorry, it all blends together now. But the theater massacre in Moscow, they were blamed for that. And I mean, who knows who put those guys up to it at the end of the day. But I know there were ISIS guys who went from Syria to Ukraine.

It was in the New York Times and in the intercept and a bunch of other places. It sounds crazy. But you literally got bin Laden nights on the ground with the Nazis fighting, you know, the Nazi militias. fighting on the ground in eastern Ukraine, certainly before the war. I don't know about now. But anyway, so, and I'm sorry because we got like three minutes. So what is the latest on ISIS-K?

Do you have a firm opinion on whose guys are they now? Where are they now and who do they threaten? If you look at the theology and philosophy of ISIS, they basically believe that all Muslims are heretics and apostates because they do not subscribe to their brand of Islam and this kind of

philosophy only attracts fringe groups fringe figures in every society people who are socially awkward and basically social rejects those people are attracted to this ideology and for that reason

they do not have a strong community base in any country and that kind of group can be easily exploited by intelligence services in any country. Because if you have a radical group that basically disassociates from the rest of society and believes that they are better than everyone else and they go around doing all kinds of, you know, malicious stuff, killing people, then yes, everyone can exploit them. There's marks for hire.

So then start with the usual suspects, US, UK, Saudi and friends. But, yeah, it could be anybody. All right, listen, thank you so much for your time on the show. This has really been great. I really appreciate your time. That is Sangar Picar Pekar. Yeah. Look, I...

It doesn't say it right. It does say it right. Sangar Paiqar. There you go. Pikar. I knew that. And the show is Afghani is the podcast, right? Yes.

Very good. All right. Thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it. You're welcome. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokridge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places, and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scotthorton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scotthorton.com and Patreon.com and pay

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