Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/12/22 Matthieu Aikins on the Many Problems Facing Afghanistan Today

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Scott interviews journalist and author Matthieu Aikins about life in Afghanistan one year after the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Having spent a lot of time in the country, Aikins is able to give a nuanced and detailed account of the problems facing Afghans and how they’re addressing them. He speaks with Scott about the country’s economic problems, rifts within the Taliban and the apparent killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri in Kabul at the end of July.  Discussed on the show: “The Taliban’s Dangerous Collision Course With the West” (NYT Magazine) “11 Years After Trying to Kill Each Other, a Marine and a Talib Meet Again” (New York Times) Mathieu Aikins is an international freelance journalist and author of the book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground. Follow him on Twitter @mattaikins. 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; and Thc Hemp Spot. 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 anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's 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 2004. 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's show all right you guys introducing matthew akins he's a freelance reporter but who also writes pretty regularly for the new york times and if you read fools there and you know i cited him

about the election of 2014. He and Anongobo wrote for Harper it's all about what a disaster it was. And also he did that great report where he snuck into Yemen back during the beginning of the Yemen war and reported from the Sada province and all that. Remember?

Great reporter. And he's got a new book out. It's called The Naked Don't Fear the Water, an underground journey with Afghan refugees. And he's got this really important piece in the New York Times. the Taliban's dangerous collision course with the West. Welcome back to the show, Matthew.

How are you doing, sir? Great. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you here. Listen, so first of all, I've got to apologize to you. I have not read your book, and I don't know when I'm going to find the time. I'm all caught up with Russia stuff here. But I'd like to hear very much,

I very much would like to hear about your book. The Naked Don't Fear the Water. First of all, what does that title mean? Well, it's a Dari proverb in Afghanistan. Luchas Obnamitarsat, means if you got nothing to lose, you got nothing to fear. And that is the situation of the refugees from Afghanistan and other countries that this book is about. Gotcha. So, and now, so take us back, I guess, I'm curious about the refugee crisis here and the way all this played out

because, you know, America had been at war in the Middle East since the turn of the century. And then, of course, you had the Arab Spring Breakout and the wars, you know, first Afghanistan and Iraq, but then Libya and Syria and the rest. But it seems like the, and they really start in 2011, but it seems like the refugee crisis from all of these countries really seemed to hit right at 2015 and 2016. So I wonder what we could start with. What is really the explanation for that?

Well, as you know, I've been covering these wars for years and I'd seen all the people displaced first inside their own country and then going across borders to neighboring countries, which is usually where refugees first go to countries like Turkey or Egypt. And what happened was essentially it's been described not as a refugee crisis, but a crisis of the European border system. So what Europe had done is it had made deals with all these strong men and dictators that surrounded the continent, people like Gaddafi in Libya or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt,

and they were the ones that were keeping people out. They were Europe's gatekeepers. They were toppled by the Arab Spring. So that system began to break down. People started to cross. In Turkey, it was that Erdogan, the strongman, was having problems with Europe and tired of hosting millions of Syrian refugees. So people started to flood into Europe over a period of about a year, starting the summer of 2015, about a million people crossed the Mediterranean Sea and entered the European Union. It's the largest movement of refugees by sea in history.

And this is the moment that I was in Kabul and one of my best friends there, Omar, he's a translator. We'd worked together. He'd also worked for the American military as a translator. He'd been with the special forces and he'd applied for one of these special immigrant visas where, you know, the U.S. government allows Iraqis and Afghans who are in danger to come to the U.S. And he should have gotten it but didn't because of paperwork. He was rejected. And so he decided to risk his life, go as a refugee to Europe in the hopes of Safe Haven.

And I wanted to report on this crisis from the inside and go with him. But the only way I could do that, given the risk of being arrested or kidnapped, was to go undercover as an Afghan refugee myself, which I was able to do because even though I'm not Afghan, I kind of look Afghan and I speak the language. So we travel together through the mountains and deserts with smugglers, and that is a story at the heart of this book. Yeah, that's amazing. And so now I'm just curious, and I know we can't go through the whole thing, but you guys went north of the Caspian Sea, or you went somehow through Iran and Iraq and Turkey and Syria and through that route? Yeah, well, the main route that we followed, and there was a few twists and turns, which I won't get into here.

But the main route, the Har route overland, goes from the southwestern corner of Afghanistan, Nimrodos, through the deserts. It actually, migrants actually dipped down through Pakistan and then into Iran. And this is the same route that a lot of opium goes, by the way. And then they cross Iran and they go over the Zagros Mountains into Turkey. All of this was smugglers, illegally, hiding from the police, you know, at risk of getting shot or kidnapped. And then they cross Turkey. They arrive in Istanbul, there's a big community of migrants, Afghan, Syrians, you know, after Syrians, Afghans are the second largest nationality that crossed in New York during the crisis.

From there, they can get on these little rubber boats and cross to the Greek islands and land on the shore. I'm sure you've all seen those images of, you know, people coming ashore, women, children, on the beaches. And then from there, they go to Greece. And the route continues up through the Balkans and into Europe. Most people are trying to get to places like Germany or Sweden or even the UK. Yeah. Well, and not to get too far into this too, but boy, did all of this provoke a massive reaction to the right in Europe and in America and all over the place. And probably, you know, you can attribute Brexit and Donald Trump and a lot more, you know, a lot of Brexiteer types being elected to the U.S.

European Parliament and all that can be, you know, all that was sort of reaction to a lot of this. And as you said, at least in the cases of Syria and Libya, it was the Americans who overthrew the bottle cap on the refugees, right, and allowed them to all come through at the same time that they were creating all these refugees with their violent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. Libya and the dirty war in Syria, which still counts. And, of course, Assad, once the war started, Assad only had control over the west of its country. And the east was just, you know, a free fire zone there for years. So all of this was made in Washington, D.C., really.

And the Europeans were either in on it or at least stood out of the way. Absolutely, yeah. These wars were all connected in one way or another to the war on terror and other, you know, imperialist wars abroad. But at the end of the day, it's a much bigger problem than just those wars. It's linked to the tremendous disparity that exists between the global north and the global south. You know, you have people who are living in very desperate situations who are facing corruption, grinding poverty, ecological disaster. And as long as there's such a stark difference in, you know, income and wealth between the north and the south, people are going to

keep making these journeys and you're going to have brutality at the border to keep them out. Sure. Although, gigantic explosions going off all around you, it's a real kick in the butt to get up and move compared to just being poor, which is, you know, the typical condition of humanity up until recently here. So, you know, whatever percent it is, it's a lot more when it's wartime. But, you know, so this brings up a question. I know it's just sort of fantasy thinking, but Since the Taliban is right back where they started when we overthrew them 20 years ago, as you've written about here, I wonder what you think about, or if you do think about the way I do. What if they had really just targeted bin Laden and Zwahri at Toribor, or hell, even deliberately let them go, but just left the Taliban alone and not done a regime-changing Kabul, and instead essentially just treated them with decent respect. nothing special and just spent 20 years being nice and maybe ridiculing them where they need

being ridiculed and helping them out where they can and you know i'm not saying put them put afghanistan completely on the american dole forever or whatever but what if we had just tried to lead them with the light of liberty and not the light of a laser designator for the last generation how much better of a place would we be in now than the place where we are, which is right back where we started only with a few hundred thousand extra dead people. I think it's hard to make a case that we could be much worse off than we are now, which is exactly with the Taliban back in power with the leader of al-Qaeda until recently in Kabul,

you know, we just got taken out by a drone strike. So what have those 20 years accomplished besides a lot of death and destruction and radicalization? Now, there were a lot of gains that were made. Afghans rebuilt their country, but maybe they would have found a way to do it under the Taliban as well. It's just really hard to use these kind of counterfactuals. The war was misguided in the very least from the beginning, and the way that it developed, you know, as such a boondoggle involving so much corruption, a lot of deceit on the part

of our military and our government leaders, one that inflicted a massive toll. not only overseas, you know, these countries, which bore the brunt of the suffering, but also at home, you know, there's so many broken families and shattered lives in America. And I just think that it should give us real skepticism about even the best intentioned overseas interventions. Yeah. You know, YouTube forever has pulled up in the margin a video clip of a Marine talking about his time in Vietnam. You may have seen it. I don't know. The algorithm has just for years has wanted to show it to me, but it's like 15 minutes long, and I just never had the full 15, and I just didn't click on it. For years, I finally was sitting at the hotel doing nothing. YouTube served it up for me in the margin again. I said, fine, I sit there, watch it. It sounds like he's talking about Afghanistan. A little bit more brutal. Okay, a lot bit more brutal, but still the same story about. You know, we're protecting the south from the north. In the case of Afghanistan, we're protecting the north from the south and the east, again. you know um and uh but it's one country that we're talking about here is this is completely artificial designation and the people that were supposed to be helping well we're killing them and they absolutely

hate our guts and when i got there i thought hooray i'm going to be greeted like a liberator and i'm going to help these poor people and fight off the bad guy enemy and then boy did i quit believe in that after just a few weeks and this and that and just anyway listen to the guy go on it sounds like he's describing the exact same war. Yeah, the fact the matter is, is the same system that produced the Vietnam War was still in place, you know, when 9-11 happened, the same military industrial complex, the same kind of national security state. And so it's not as surprising that we make the same errors again and again.

Yeah. All right, so now let me ask you about the Great Depression in Afghanistan now, because, you know, You mentioned the corruption there and all the foreign money coming in. It was, what, $40 billion a year, I think, was the average, right, leading up to the end of the war. And then now all that's gone, right? So this is just every market, every price structure in Afghanistan has crashed and had to be reset. And, you know, whatever food distribution, you know, I guess the aid must have gone through a major decrease. And then whatever food is being grown locally and distributed or even imported, the distribution systems.

have broken down. And so even from the very beginning after the withdrawal, they said, oh, man, famine's going to set in right now for this winter, last winter. So I wonder if you can really help draw a picture for us of what is the humanitarian situation, especially in terms of hunger and starvation in Afghanistan now. Sure. Well, I think first is important to understand that even though the U.S. and its allies spent more than $100 billion on development aid in Afghanistan, building schools and bridges and lots of other more dubious projects like capacity building, Afghanistan remained one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world.

And so when that aid was suddenly cut off after this Taliban Sea's power, naturally you had a complete crash. You know, the economy collapsed. There were, you know, all these government workers who salaries couldn't be paid, teachers. people, hospital workers, doctors. So there was tremendous suffering, massive unemployment, near universal poverty. And over the fall, the UN warned that half the country was in the brink of starvation, this is the world's largest humanitarian crisis. So I went back in May to see what had happened. It was my first trip back since I had covered the collapse of the

Republic and the evacuation the previous fall. And what I discovered was that, you know, the famine actually hadn't happened, but that was because there was this massive humanitarian surge happening. There are actually more aid workers working for humanitarian agencies inside Afghanistan today than there were before the U.S. troops were. And over the winter, the World Food Program was feeding close to half the population. It was billion. of dollars in humanitarian aid that have been earmarked for Afghanistan. The U.S. is the largest contributor. The U.S. is also one of the causes of the humanitarian crisis because the Biden administration

seized Afghan bank assets, $7 billion. They've earmarked half for 9-11 families and other victims. And so you have this humanitarian cash as being infused in the country. the weird position of the U.S. being both a cause of and, you know, kind of a largest donor of aid. And right now, it's just, it's just being stable as a country is being kept on life support. The U.N. is flying in pallets of $100 bills into the country nearly a billion to date. And this is, the Taliban is cooperating with this, and it's had the corollary effect of helping to stabilize their new government. But the alternative would be quite literally

a famine in the country. Yeah. Well, and so I guess. the idea is, though, that these guys are as cruel as a regime could be, and they must be taking all that money and spending it on themselves and not helping the people. Is there any accountability? Is the food getting to the poor, especially out in the countryside, do you think? There are a lot of problems delivering it, but the food and the money is not going directly to the Taliban. In fact, that's the whole point, is that the development aid that we're talking the hundred billion dollars we're talking about before, that was going to the Afghan government

or basically with the Afghan government. Now the Taliban in power that is in power. That's all cut off. What is happening is humanitarian aid, but that's delivered directly by the UN and the aid agencies on the ground. So is a lot of waste and corruption? Sure. But it's not going directly to the Taliban.

What it's had the effect of doing is stabilizing the country somewhat and helping the Taliban govern. And, of course, a lot of the money that is spent eventually ends up back in government coffers through taxes. Yeah. by the way did you read that thing by thomas gibbons neff about i don't know half a year ago about how he went back to helmand and met with the old man who had been kind of the leader of the local militia that he'd been fighting before and they sat and had tea and all that yeah i read that piece and i know

t m it's just an amazing story where the bottom line of the whole thing is and this isn't you know the worst of the fighting down in helman for the marines and everything and the bottom minds why was Neff at war with this old man and his men again and nobody knows no good reason yeah i mean i think it's i think it's hard to feel like they accomplished anything when all those areas where they fought and died for now back in the hands of taliban yeah it's just amazing and like what difference does it make right like they it already was in the hands of the taliban all along anyway that's where they're from you know right or not well i think we just really misunderstood what doing that, we're intervening on one side of a civil war, and it wasn't necessarily the good

guy's side, especially in a place like Helmand, where the government was deeply involved in drug trafficking and corruption and abuses against locals that caused them to support the Taliban. But again, this is what you see in places like Vietnam, where we backed extremely corrupt regime in the south. We had South Vietnamese death squads working with the CIA to target the Viet Cong. And that was, again, the case in Afghanistan. We had a lot of brutal militias working for the CIA. You had Afghan government forces that were routinely involved in torturing people and extraditional executions. And don't get me wrong, the Taliban was pretty nasty too. They were doing a lot of the same things. But was this some kind of war where we were on the right side of

it? I think that is really hard to say. It was pretty murky in a place like Helmand. And we obscured that, I think, with a lot of these aid projects where we were helping, you know, Afghan girls to study, which is, of course, a good thing. Afghan girls should study. But was that the purpose of the war? Was that really what it was accomplishing? I think that for a long time, we lied to ourselves about what we were really doing in Afghanistan. Yeah, well, some of them lied to the rest of us anyway. But, yeah.

And those people are still in government. They're still setting U.S. policy. They are now very much in the driver's seat on what we're doing in Ukraine. And to be honest, I think we haven't learned much in the way of lessons, not ones that are going to stick anyways. Yeah. Yeah, it's really too bad. And we're going to have Daniel Davis on the former lieutenant colonel to talk about Petraeus' spin.

And this is coming back. We're talking about this on Twitter this morning about this is how they did it with Vietnam, too. Oh, we could have won if you've just given us a little bit more money in a little bit more time. And once we got rid of Westmoreland and brought in Abrams, see, we were going to implement the strategy that would have worked if the New York Times hadn't stabbed us in the back and all that same kind of stuff makes it, you know,

where it's not their fault. It's everybody's fault, but the people who lost the war, like a bunch of World War I generals, you know. Yeah, everyone's fault with the people who we gave billions of dollars to and complete control over, you know, tens of thousands of American lives. seriously um so i mean and as uh one of my uh interlocutors put it on twitter this morning it's going to require a real effort on our part to continue to push back on that new myth making and refuse to allow them to establish those lies as the new facts you know uh if they

could have possibly stayed they would have stayed you know we all know that that's the real truth of it um no i think that's what there's an opportunity for people like myself journalists but also academics and anyone who's interested in the conflict you know there's a chance to write the the real history when i was back in afghanistan um i was amazed at the kind of access that i could get i could travel around the country to places that were extremely dangerous to go before even traveling kind of undercover as I used to because the Taliban are in control now and if you deal with them they will allow you to work and I'm not under no illusions that I have a lot of privilege as a Western male journalist but at the point is I want to use that to get out there

and to to uncover so many things that were hidden for us for a number of years you know the other side of the story and so I do think there's a chance to write the real history of the war There's going to be a battle of over the memory of Afghanistan. There's that great quote from Vietnam, where all wars are fought twice, first in the battlefield and the second time in memory. Yeah. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already. Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done.

Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute. and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along.

Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone, from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced.

Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. Well, listen, I mean, you're doing your part for sure. You're a big part of the reason that people do know the truth about that war, and I cite you heavily in Fool's Aaron, and I forget, but probably in enough already as well. on on afghanistan and on yemen in enough already uh so yeah all that stuff's really important and and we are up against the war machine itself so they have a lot of uh you know incentive and uh finance behind their narrative buildings so it's a hell of a fight that we've got you know from now

on still you know um now so talk about as you do in your great article for the times uh you talk about the actual status of education for girls. This was one of the major excuses for continuing the war for so long, as you mentioned there. But despite all the hype, I think buried in here, you have the lead is that the World Bank says that education for girls, even out in the countryside, has increased since America left. Is that right? Yeah. And that's because mostly the security situation has improved, especially in rural areas. So parents feel more comfortable sending their girls to school, knowing they're not going to get caught in the fighting or a roadside bomb. Some of them, the conservative ones, because Afghanistan is a very, very conservative

Muslim country, and some of them feel more comfortable sending their girls to school under the Islamic Emirate. Now, that's for elementary schools. The Taliban have not reopened girls' public high schools in most provinces. which is a shame, but if they did, it's probably likely that there'd actually be more girls in school now than under the US-backed republic, which is deeply ironic. I agree. But the fact the matter is they haven't opened schools yet. And that's really what I went to Afghanistan. One of the reasons I went to Afghanistan was to understand why, because they were, they We've been saying this is just temporary, and they had kind of promised that on this new

year of the Afghan school year, which is on March 23rd, the schools were reopened, and there was been a plan that the girls went to school, and on that day, word came down with the education ministry that no, the schools wouldn't actually reopen, and there was media there to cover it, and so all these girls went home crying. It was a complete disaster, but also kind of baffling. you know, why would the Taliban do this? Why would they announce that they would open it? And then cancel like this in a way that was deeply embarrassing for them.

It broke so much trust not only with the Afghan people, but with the international community. And what I was surprised to discover in Kabul was that actually a lot of the Taliban officials that I spoke to, they were really frustrated with the band. They really wanted girls to go back to school. You know, in some cases... Including Sir Rajadine Hakani? That's the Hakani, right?

That's Jalalideen's son and the main guy. Sarajidine Hakani and his brothers and just the kind of element of the Taliban that he's part of, the so-called Akani network, are actually the most socially, quote-unquote, liberal of the Taliban and have been very much in favor of allowing girls to be educated. And there's a lot of U.S. or international NGOs that when they had problems with their female employees working, because there are still Afghan women working in Afghanistan, definitely. When they had problems with other parts of Taliban, they called up Saraj's guys. They called up Haqani guys, and he helped them out.

So there's another paradox for you, which is the FBI's designated terrorist is actually one of the people who wants to allow girls to go back to school. And they're being frustrated by the hardliners in Kandahar around the Supreme Leader, because the Taliban has sort of a dual authority structure where you have a formal cabinet in Kabul and then a second more powerful shadow government in Kandahar in the south led by you know in this theocratic structure the supreme leader Sheikh Habatala and a lot of these really hardline

conservative clerics are blocking girls education well so first of all I want to mention here your Padna Anon Gopal had you know he really did the best job of explaining for Tom Dispatch and in his book, No Good Men Among the Living about how Haqqani tried to surrender at the beginning of the war and the Americans refused to accept his surrender over and over again, driving him to insurgency and driving him to be one of the worst, his organization be one of the worst parts of the anti-American insurgency for all those years there. Completely self-inflicted wound with that. But then I got a question, which is, I guess, a two-parter. You really think it's right that they got Zawahari and

Do you really think it's right that he was staying at Saragin Haqani's house in Kabul? Because isn't that what the claim was, or was one of the Haqani's, they said? That is the American claim. You know, I was told by a senior administration official that the main leadership actually didn't know that Al-Zawahiri was in Kabul and that he was all being hosted by a faction of the Hakanis, you know, connected to Saraj, who's also the Interior Minister. Now, you've got to be a little skeptical about this because the Americans are always trying to paint that Connie's as independent faction and isolate them in a way that I think is kind of becoming counterproductive. But it is possible. We just don't know. What is true is that Saraj has been out as Interior Minister doing public events, so he's clearly not, you know, being broken with by the rest of the leadership.

Now, was it right for the U.S. to take him out with a drone strike? I mean, it's kind of hard to argue against killing the leader of al-Qaeda, except that it is, you know, is a little bit disturbing that we're doing these kinds of assassinations without any real debate about their legality. I mean, it is normally an illegal act, you know, under international law to assassinate someone in a country without that country's consent. maybe it was justified in this case, but it just doesn't seem to be any public debate about this, nor debate about the strategy going forward. I mean, why was Zawahri in Kabul? You know, that's a good question, right? If he had been running around the mountains of Afghanistan, presumably maybe where he wasn't under the Taliban's control, then maybe it would make sense to take him out. But he's there in Kabul. It means the Taliban must have some kind of control over him. If the whole

strategy in leaving Afghanistan was that, you know, the Taliban could be relied on to some extent to follow their own interests in not allowing Afghanistan to be used as a base for transnational terrorism, then was there no way to work with them? But these are, there's a lot of speculation. And of course, it's a win for the Biden administrations, you know, over the horizon counterterrorism policy. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, he sure did deserve to be exploded to death, but the American way is you give a guy accused of a crime, a trial, and then you prove he did it.

And then you bury him in solitary confinement until he goes mad and kills himself, you know. That's the American way. But I guess not. No, I mean, just explode the guy. But, you know, his trial would have been great. You know what I mean? Give him, like, some of the hard. Carter's Corps ACLU lawyers in New York City to defend him and then make the Department of

Justice prove their case? Wouldn't that have been something? Oh, well, we don't do stuff like that. Well, the Taliban doesn't do something like that. They would have never extradited Zahari to the U.S. I mean, that was the same problem that they had of Osama bin Laden in 2001. But I'm not so sure about that. How are you going to manage this problem in the long term? You know, I don't think is manageable by playing whack-a-mole with drone strikes. You know, ultimately, if the Taliban are going to continue as the government of Afghanistan, which they have every indication of being stable for the moment, then they need to be engaged with.

They need to be part of the solution in managing these groups. Yeah, which, by the way, isn't it the case that when this kind of thing happens that Al-Qaeda always comes right out and claims it? They don't admit it. They say, yeah, our hero has been. martyred and is sitting at Allah's right hand now so how do you like me now kind of thing right have they done that in this case yeah they well they've they've they've commented on his death and yeah called him a martyr oh okay I hadn't heard that I went and looked at the site intel group which I

know is Israeli intelligence but they keep it close track on um or at least you know very friendly with Mossad whatever uh however you define it but they usually have uh you know up-to-date announcements about what al-Qaeda is saying about things but last time i checked they didn't have anything on it yet but maybe i got it could be it could be that they haven't actually released a statement yet i know the taliban have said that they're investigating you know what happened and if he was there why he was really there yeah but it didn't seem like so you're saying you had heard that they can that al-kata had confirmed it or not no no i take that back i don't i don't know if that's for sure i might be wrong on that one okay um no problem But, yeah, so that would be interesting to see.

I mean, it could be that they're just waiting until they, you know, put out their new magazine issue or whatever it is, their next new podcast. So, and then, yeah, now, as far as I want to go back to what you were saying there about the way that they portray Hakani as sort of a separate group from the Taliban. And, you know, this is sort of the bridge, too, in their implication of the Taliban for harboring. al-Qaeda, at least the hawks, is they say, well, you know, maybe it's not Mullah Omar's son and this other faction of Taliban guys, but it is Hakani and his friends. They're the ones who are friends with the Arabs, and they're the ones who are going to host Arab terrorists against the Americans and as a base and this kind of thing. Which, by the way, I saw where, I don't know if it's Sir Raj's cousin or what, but one of these Hakani's got blown up by an ISIS suicide bomber

the other day or yesterday um yeah that was rahimullah hakani but you know the thing is the hakani is often used as a surname by people who are not related to the family at all but are graduates of the hakani um madrasa i think so that was a Taliban ideologue who was blown up look the thing is the is the hakani network is more or less a fiction that was created by the united states um as a kind of boogeyman you know there's there are a lot of different families groups, networks you could call them within the Taliban, but at the end of the day, they're not separate from the rest of the Taliban. There's been a lot of wishful thinking about the Taliban fragmenting over the years, and the fact

the matter is that they preserve their unity through 20 years. They've emerged united. They've managed to hold together through their first year on power. Hacconi is the interior minister, and he sits in the cabinet with the other Taliban ministers, and they all defer to the Supreme Leader. Khanis actually one of the deputies of the Supreme Leader. So I think the U.S. is going to realize at some point that it's counterproductive to try to split the Haqqqis

from the rest of the Taliban. And actually, the Haqqqis, I think, in many ways are some of the most reasonable people who can be dealt with in Kabul. And there's, you know, someone like Anas Hakani has spoken with U.S. officials. That's one of Hakani's brothers. So, you quote one of them here saying, listen, if anybody wants to debate me about educating girls based on the Quran, I'm ready to debate them. And this is something that goes back to something I guess I learned from a non-Gopal, I don't know, years and years ago, that he had written for Tom Dispatch and we had talked about even before his book.

came out, I guess, was that in many cases, the even most kind of austere interpretations of Islam are far more liberal than the Pashtun Wally coat, which goes back to like caveman times or whatever. So you have, you know, the Taliban coming to liberate women from the oppressive kind of customs and traditions of their villages and actually provide that, most importantly, they can own property they can inherit it they can even buy and sell it at least that was how it was you know as he was reporting that say 10 years ago in taliban controlled parts of the country and in their previous history in power there where the poshtun wali code was far more restrictive than that yeah i think it's a stretch to say that taliban are are liberating women um from poshtun wali

But they certainly have ended the war and put an end to a lot of predatory behavior by government warlords. And in that sense, I think there are women who support the Taliban in some communities. But at the end of the day, Taliban are not really a pro-women or feminist movement. And they're an Islamist movement. But, you know, Afghanistan is a Muslim society. And the debate that they're going to have about what women's roles should be in society, what rights should be given to them is going to have to take place, you know, within that discourse about Islam. It's not really one that we in the West can say a lot to.

But at the end of the day, it's about what's right for Afghanistan, not what that's why the Taliban should educate girls. It's not about Western money. it's about their own daughters. And I think that a lot of Taliban, and I spoke to, did realize that. They know that their country needs female doctors and nurses in the very least. But for now, unfortunately, the hardliners are blocking that kind of progress. But we just have to, we just have to wait and see, I think, the options for Afghanistan, we got used to kind of having a lot of control or the illusion of control over the lives

of Afghans, and the troops are gone now. So it's a very different relationship. And I think we need to measure our expectations on what can be accomplished in Afghanistan. While at the same time, listening to Afghan people supporting them, and I feel like America is very eager to forget about the Afghan war on some level. You know, one Biden administration official told me that the policy is now sort of keep Afghanistan off the front page. And I don't think that's fair at Afghans. I think we caused a tremendous disaster in the country.

We're responsible for people facing it a horrible. situation economically, also in terms of this government. And so we ought to keep support that we ought not to turn our backs on the Afghans. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks very much for coming on the show, Matthew. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Take care, Scott. All right, you guys. That's Matthew Aiken. You can find him at the New York Times magazine. This one's called the Taliban's Dangerous Collision Course with the West. The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com,

Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.