Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/13/21 Mathieu Aikins on the Recent US Drone Strike in Kabul and Life in Afghanistan Post-Withdrawal

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Scott interviews journalist Mathieu Aikins who has remained in Kabul to report for the New York Times. Aikins and his team recently investigated the drone strike the U.S. carried out on August 29th that officials claimed had targeted a car carrying explosives believed to be driven by a member of ISIS. However, the team from NYT found a devastating scene with the bodies of children and a distraught family claiming to have just lost ten family members. Aikins and his colleagues were able to identify the man as Zemari Ahmadi. Ahmadi worked for a California-based aid organization and was trying to get his family on a plane out of Afghanistan when he and many of his children were killed.  Discussed on the show:  “Times Investigation: In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb” (New York Times) “Examining a ‘righteous’ strike” (Washington Post) “The Taliban’s Fight for Hearts and Minds” (Foreign Policy) Mathieu Aikins is an international freelance journalist currently reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan. His upcoming book is 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; EasyShip; 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpSfw21sP5U 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, Fools 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 the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 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 to you guys introducing matthew aikens uh you long time listeners will remember his reporting with anon gopel and uh my interview of him from i'm going to say i'm almost certain 2014 about the bad election in Afghanistan that year. And then in 2000, I'm going to say 16,

he did that great report for Rolling Stone from northern Yemen, from the Sada province there on the terrible air war going on against civilian targets there and all of that. And he has remained in Kabul, reporting from Kabul and live tweeting from there and writing now for the New York Times.

And before we get to that, I almost forgot to mention. He's got a new book coming out. This coming February, his first book, The Naked Don't Fear the Water, A Journey Through the Refugee Underground, which is endorsed by Anon Gopal, which is great. All right.

And then his newest piece, and there's a couple, his latest for the New York Times, is Times investigation. In U.S. drone strike, evidence suggests no ISIS bomb. a very polite way to put it welcome back to the show matthew how are you doing sir thanks for having me scott i'm very happy to have you here so i mean man what an end to the war huh

suicide attack killed 13 americans i think it was wasn't it a 11 marines a soldier and a navy corpsman killed in a suicide attack and then along with um you know another 160 something people i believe And then the reprisal strike against the Islamic State or, I guess, an alleged attempt to prevent another attack by the Islamic State resulted in essentially this massacre of these two innocent families here. So it's really great work that you've done here. And I really do appreciate it very much. I wonder if you could take us through the story. Thank you. Yeah, on August 29th, the U.S. announced that it struck a suspected ISIS suicide bomb, car bomb, some kind of vehicle with explosives in it.

And the next day, I went there in Kabul and with a photographer, worked for the time, Jim Hoylebrook, and we got there to this courtyard of this house where the strike had happened. And there's this destroyed Toyota Corolla there and a very distraught family who told us they had just lost 10 members of their family, including seven children. I mean, we could see, you know, body parts splattered around the courtyard. But not really evidence of a big bomb that had gone off. You know, it just looked like there had been one missile strike because the walls of the courtyard were still standing and there was other visual evidence, which I'll get too late. But what was obvious, what was very clear, was that civilians' children were being killed in the strike. So that was what we reported. There was other media outlets that reported that that day.

You know, we were confronted with the family's grief and tried to convey that as well. And promising that we keep investigating, which we did, you know, over the next two weeks, I was on the ground here in Kabul. And we had an amazing team in New York and elsewhere. who were working, collecting various forms of evidence, analyzing photos and videos from the scene, piecing together the last day of the person who had been targeted in the strike, Zemmerai Hamadi, who, you know, again, the U.S. claims wasn't an alleged ISIS facilitator, or they said that one had been targeted in the strike, and he was clearly the target. So, you know, what we were finding out is that this guy,

I was working for an American-based nutrition and education international. That was a company that was into soybean processing and food aid. He had been there since 2006. He was a beloved colleague. He was, you know, his co-workers are heartbroken. His boss in the U.S. was furious and heartbroken. And they were all cooperating with us telling us about his last day, the family members, too. And it seemed to us that what the U.S. military, you know, which had been observing him

through a drone the whole day, interpreted a series of suspicious moves on behalf of ISIS. It was just kind of normal day at work. And ultimately, we obtained the security camera footage from his office, which was really key. And that showed him, you know, coming and going, who was in his car. And it also showed him filling up water canisters, you know, jugs of water, which he was bringing home to his family because there hadn't been water in his neighborhood since the fall of the government. So we don't know if that may be was what the military.

interpreted it as explosives, but based on the analysis of the scene, videos, photographs who showed to experts, there was just no evidence of a significant secondary explosion, a bigger blast, you know, triggered by the missile strike. And that was what the U.S. military claimed. That's General Mark Millie, the top, you know, Joint Chief of Staff chairman. He had claimed that there was evidence of that. He had also called it a righteous strike. Yeah. And that's important, right, that you guys, there's this video presentation that goes along with your article there at the Times website, where the narrator there says that they got, I think, three different independent explosives expert. I think, I forgot if they say exactly, or imply retired military guys or professional, you know, contractors of some kind who came in and said, yeah, no, there's no secondary explosion here because,

all the tell-tale signs such as X, Y, and Z are not here, correct? Yeah, that's right. So we had a number of factors. I just wanted to make that clear that you went there to the courtyard and you said, well, I don't see evidence of a secondary explosion, but someone might say, yeah, but what do you know about secondary explosions? And then, but the point is that it's not just what you saw or did not see there, but also people who this is their job professionally

is doing examinations of aftermaths of scenes of explosions and they said and they all agreed the same conclusion as you is the point that's correct and you know the Washington Post actually published their own investigation based on images and videos where they talked to experts and they reached the same conclusion that there wasn't evidence of a bigger bomb blast of a significant secondary explosion there probably wasn't explosives in the car. Yeah. Now, Matthew, I mean, is it somewhat clear

or is it completely clear that really what happened here was mistaken identity? There was a Toyota Corolla that was up to something and they thought this was the one they maybe lost track of it for a minute and picked up the wrong corolla?

Or is that just a supposition? We don't know what evidence they have or, you know, don't have linking Samurai Ahmadi to, ISIS. You know, he was someone who wanted to move the United States. He was desperately hoping to be resettled there as a refugee. His American-based company was sponsoring him and his family. So as his family pointed out, you know, why would someone like that have a motive to commit terrorist attack against the U.S.? He wanted to get on one of those planes

from the airport and then making plans, too, was hoping to. But we don't know what evidence they have. I think the perhaps the most like conclusive finding of the investigation is just that, you know, if there wasn't explosives in the car, then how could the vehicle oppose an imminent threat to U.S. forces? And then how could they have made a decision to take this strike in the guys' home? You know, in a crowd residential neighborhood. They struck the car and they killed 10 people, seven of them children. Yeah. And, you know, people can go and look at your Twitter feed. two and see pictures of these children and, you know, further, you know, comments by their family about what happened and all of that there, too. So, and I really appreciate that. I mean, man,

and it's brave of you to stay behind in Kabul. We're going to talk more all about that here in a few, but, you know, what, something Stalin said about numbers and statistics and what which is different than the picture of this beautiful little toddler whose life was torn to shreds, you know, it's it's important to humanize these humans, I guess, as they say, right? Yeah, so we can mourn them. I mean, there are thousands, tens of thousands of victims of drone strikes and other, you know, bombs and missiles fired by U.S. aircraft. since 2001 and we only know the names and see the faces of very very few of those you know and I think if we saw more of them maybe we wouldn't take their lives so lightly you know maybe we wouldn't be so cavalier about these over the horizon counterterrorism strikes for example that we're going to use now that we've withdrawn troops from Afghanistan

it really does say something too doesn't it that this is the last thing that happened the last two things a suicide attack by some guys who used to work for the Afghan government and and then a reprisal or a preventative something or other type reactive strike that kills all these innocent people in fact speaking of the reprisal did anybody ever report what actually happened in jalalabad because that was really the reprisal strike was they hit somebody there but I never heard any follow-up about how many innocent people were killed in that one. It's not, from what I've heard, only two people were killed in that strike and they may

have had a connection to ISIS. I don't know if they were actually the planners of the attack, but we don't have reports of civilian casualties for that strike. But the fact the matter is, we don't really have good on the ground information. That area wasn't easy to access, certainly right now. There's barely, barely any reporters in Kabul, and then there weren't any outside foreign reporters, that is. at the time and that's really the case of the last majority of strikes we don't have any version but the official version yeah and you know I don't know it sounds kind of pedantic or whatever I guess but you know people have a stereotype of just oh these Afghan cavemen or whatever but if you go and look at the reporting here look at the pictures watch the video presentation that they do showing this guy and his family

you know these are city folk they're not hillbilly taliban from some valley way out in the mountains somewhere whatever these are civilized people who look like people in your town who you can identify with you know this guy's driving a Toyota Corolla around how many people listen to this have ever driven around or ridden around in a Toyota Corolla probably all of us at one time or another I know I have um and and here he is he's going around this guy he works for an NGO where he literally, not just some line of BS where he collects a bunch of money, but he actually, his livelihood is going around delivering food and water to desperate, poor, hungry people.

And this is the guy who got bombed to death here, him and his people, you know, not just no different than us, but maybe better than some of us, you know? Well, I mean, I think one of the things that's notable about the strike is that it happened inside Kabul. You know, there's really only something that we could have imagined very recently with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. And again, yeah, most of these strikes took place in rural areas where people, yeah, they look like what we imagine Taliban to look like. They look like rural Afghans. They had turbans and beards. and so perhaps we do feel more sympathy seeing this guy because he looks more like us but

that's a pretty troubling way of measuring the value of someone's life i know it and i'm sorry to put it that way i just feel like it's sort of like an act of desperation to try to get people to see because it's just a recognition of the fact rather than you know it's not something i'm trying to indulge but i think you understand what i mean it's so easy for people to just put this out of sight and out of mind, you know? It is. And it's not just about, you know, feeling good or bad. I mean, there's whole systems that work based on whether or not the consequences of

these actions are, you know, something that we feel good or bad about, what we feel sympathy for. I mean, you see the same thing in the United States that some people's lives are worth more than others. Some people, you know, are easily stereotyped as deserving what happens to them. So that kind of calculus, there's a philosopher named Judith Butler who talks about something called grieveability. You know, some people, we can grieve more easily than others.

Some people's deaths are mourned more than others. And she doesn't mean that, like, you know, in the sense their loved ones cared more or less about them. What she means is that, you know, publicly there's going to be more grief if, well, you know, if a banker freezes to death in a park, for example, that's going to make headline news. and if a homeless person does. And these are related to inequalities of power, right? We have an equal society, both at home and in the world.

And Afghans, rural Afghans are some of the least powerful, poorest people out there. Yeah. All right. So what more can you tell us about the innocent people who were killed here? Well, the other cousin of Zemar, Nasser, who was. killed was a former Afghan army officer who had also worked as a contractor for the U.S. military base, as a security guard in a base, sorry, and he also had a resettlement case and was hoping to go to the U.S. and he was planning to marry his fiancé earlier this month so that

she could be included in his resettlement case. And then the rest were children and then Zemarized Adelt's son. So they were little kids. I mean, you can go to the photos. There's no way they could have deserved what happened to them. Yeah. And then I think I read, not from your reporting, but somewhere else, that part of the story here was as he pulled into the courtyard, they had kind of a little tradition where they would let the kids drive the car

all the way into the courtyard the last few feet, kind of a thing, something like that. So that was why all the children had run out to kind of participate in this little ritual, right? Yeah, I mean, the strike happened in an incredibly dense, crowded residential neighborhood. So by default, there should have been an assumption that there was a very high risk of civilian casualties of collateral damage. Even if this was an ISIS facilitator, there was going to be civilian casualties if they took the shot where they did. Yeah. Hold on just one second. Be right back.

So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com. Well, that makes sense. They bring it right to your house. So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right hand. margin at scott horton.org and i'll get a little bit of a kickback from amazon's end of the sale won't cost you a thing nice little way to help support the show again that's right there in the margin at scothorton dot org hey you want to know what industry is recession proof yes you're right of course pot scott horton here to tell you about green mill super critical extractors the sfe pro and super

producing parallel pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oil for all different purposes. These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business. For precision, versatility, and efficiency, green millsupercritical.com. Hey, y'all, Scott here. If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.

Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school but should have. Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton.org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. All right, man. So, first of all, tell me about your decision to stay in Kabul. Did you decide that long before the Taliban came, or you thought, well, I don't know, 50-50, maybe I'll go to the airport, maybe I won't, or how did that all take place there? Well, yeah, it was just a matter of staying at my post doing the job that I need to do, you know, pretty much most of the other news organizations, I mean, all of them did, including the New York Times, they evacuated their staff.

So I'm a freelancer so I can make that decision for myself and I decided to stay. That's good. And I guess, you know, a lot of people thought that this is kind of. going to be like the Khmer Rouge or ISIS or something where the Taliban is going to come in and start butchering everybody and it's going to be this insane sort of chaos and I guess it hasn't been that but what has it been can you tell us yeah it's been a very strange uncertain period I knew that the Taliban I mean I believe that the Taliban were going to come in and start killing everyone because the Taliban want power and they understand that the

way to get power now is to get people to cooperate with them and they've been spreading that message well before a call will fell you know that they're saying we're going to win but when we do that we're going to forgive you and if you work with us and if you don't you know resist we'll forgive you which is you know a very rational thing to do if you want power so that made sense to me and that's basically what they've done they there hasn't been any mass killings or mass persecutions there's been a lot of false reports that have spread. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been pretty serious incidents. There were some journalists who were detained and beaten viciously for covering protests, local journalists. The airport was a tremendously violent scene, but that can't really be

blamed on the Taliban as much as the internationals who made a complete disastrous mess of it. And we're relying on the Taliban basically to provide security and keep Afghans who were desperate to gave from rushing the airfield. But we don't really know these early days. You know, we don't really know what's going to happen what the Taliban are going to do once they consolidate power. But I do think it's important to weigh with hold judgment and see. I think we have to cover them objectively.

We have to call it like we see it. And there was, it has been, I think, a rush to judgment about what they're going to do. it doesn't mean it's not a very dangerous very sinister situation in many ways now so there's been a couple pictures floating around and i hadn't really tracked it down to the source where but it's all these women dressed completely in black where their entire faces are covered they got these crazy hoods it looks like something out of science fiction or something and someone i guess there was one picture where there's one woman in the group who she has her you know the top of her head covered but other

why she's refusing to go along with this and this auditorium full of women this is at the university now is that really right yeah scott that's that's a that's a quite a a curious incident event that

is now surrounded by a maelstrom of controversy and misinformation so I don't know if we can really unpack all the layers there I will say this that this is a kind of a staged event you know the bust these women in from somewhere dressed up like this oh so this is like a protest in other words it was

it seemed like a very canned event that there was lots of taliban guarding them journalists weren't allowed i didn't go there myself i had a colleague went there and he couldn't get close don't get close to talk these women find out who they really were or if they were really women i assume they're women you know there are women who dress like that the style of dress clothes they're wearing is is is very much imported from the from the middle east is kind of you know you see it more like Saudi Arabia Yeah, but that Saudi Arabia has been funding a lot of mosques and stuff here for a while through the cooperation of people in the Afghan government. And so there is this ideology or this kind of aesthetic as well. But so in other words, so this is not, you know, the women of Kabul have been ordered that they better all start dressing like this too kind of thing?

No, no, no, no. This was a group of women who had, who were brought, you know, whether they were hired to do this, whether they were voluntary. but they were brought there by the Taliban you're saying not they weren't protesting the Taliban they were there for some kind of stunt by the Taliban but it's not clear what their point was in support of the Taliban uh-huh okay and the woman was the I don't know about the woman who was not wearing I mean she might have been a journalist who is there I'm not exactly sure I know there was some fake photoshopped images that went around that event um that you know that's it's such a complicated issue the fact the matter is is that most women in afghanistan especially in rural areas do wear

you know some kind of covering hijab they call it um which may cover the face as well that's that's just pretty much standard for conservative although i mean in the picture i saw the the hoods that they're wearing stick out so far you know what i mean it looks like a costume from some extras in star wars or something like that where it's just like this is ridiculous you know but that maybe that was the point i don't know um well much more intense than the burka yeah the blue one well yeah that which is you know absurd in its own way and i know from talking with your colleague anongopal in the past that that's not the taliban's invention that's just you know out in the countryside in poshtunistan that's how they've done it for a very long time i don't know exactly for

how long but certainly predating the Taliban yeah that's that's right it predates the Taliban all right now so I guess it was announced you know the form of the new government do I have it right that all but one of them were Pashtun members you know kind of Oji Taliban guys from a long time ago from the South and the East and that all the Tajiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras were essentially excluded but and then I guess that was And now it's, first of all, that's a question. It's supposed to be a question.

But then also, this is supposedly an interim government, and they're working on it. So maybe there's an opening there for further integration of these now sort of subject populations. Yeah, this is, yeah, there were a couple of Tajik and Uzbek members in the group. But it was basically the kind of hardcore, I think hardcore is the right way, just the core of the Taliban, and it was the senior membership. And I think this is a group that they came up with really because this movement prize is above all else, unity. So this was a unity government for the Taliban. They picked the senior figures that everyone would rally around. And that makes sense for them, I think.

And they need to stay unified right now. They have some really very serious challenges up ahead governing the country in the face of a humanitarian financial crisis being top of that list. But whether or not, you know, this is a means to an end of an ultimately more inclusive government, you know, that does, yeah, bring in other parts of the society, people outside the Taliban. That remains to be seen. That was clearly not what happened here. But again, I think this is more recognition of the reality of what's having. happening right now, which is the Taliban of seize power, and they need to unify themselves and kind of govern immediately in the face of pressing challenges. And the bigger

conversation about what kind of future system and who's going to be in it will come down the road if it comes at all. You know, I've read this thing by Ashley Jackson back two or three years ago now, I think, where she has spent all this time there and talked about how one of the inventions of Hawkinsada after Mansour was killed, you know Hawkinsada became the new mullah or whatever, the top dog

and that he had this policy like kind of Maoist People's War not the Petraeus could ever figure this out but where instead of blowing up everything that the Americans had built, they just wanted to take it over and they just came in and said the Americans built to school, we'll just appoint the principal.

They created a police force, we'll just make sure our guy's the chief. And this kind of you know, tactic across, or strategy, across the country. And it included a lot of integrating, I think even Hazar, as I say that, because they're Shiites and so further on the outs, I guess, but definitely Tajik's and Uzbeks and bringing some of them in and saying, hey, you're good enough Muslims for us. And we're not Pashtun chauvinists. We're Muslim chauvinists.

And you guys are welcome to join our team and be part of it. And that this was, they're smart tactic, right? You can't just wage war against everybody. Ask ISIS in Iraq. They're gone. So this is apparently working, but it seems like only up to a point here. Or I guess they could appoint, you know, other people to lower positions in the government and keep, you know, all the very chief positions at the top for themselves, I guess.

But I don't know. It would be interesting to see how this plays out. I guess it's still very early. Yeah. clearly their strategy has been successful so far yeah um well okay so can you give us an update on uh i i know you haven't been exclusively covering this or anything but you must have a better word than me on what's going on in the panchier valley if they're still fighting or surrenders or and i'm curious about where's general dostom and mohammed atad nur and you know these various

other kind of notoriously anti-taliban warlords now Well, Dostom, I think, is in Turkey, if I'm not mistaken. I honestly don't know where Dostom and Atta are right now. I know Atta reserviced in Uzbekistan initially. So they're not part of what's going on in the Panscher Valley there? No, the ones who stuck around were Amrilla Saleh, who is the vice president from Panshir and Ahmed Massoud, who is the son of Ahmad Shah Masud, the famous anti-Taliban commander. So they have gone to ground.

There's rumors that they're now in Tajikistan. And the Taliban have captured the main population centers of Pine Shear, including the provincial capital, Basirak, it's a small valley. And the rebels, what remains of them, have kind of, I think, gone up into the high valleys and are perhaps carrying out a low-level, you know, guerrilla war. But Taliban under control of the main valley. And there are reports, there's lots of, you know, the interesting thing about, one interesting thing about the whole Pineshare thing,

which got a lot of international media attention, despite being a very small province, was the incredible amount of fake news that surround it, you know, outright disinformation being spread, A lot of it by pro-Panchier resources. Indian media was really getting quite worked up over it. They were playing clips from a video game purporting that it showed, you know, Pakistani fighter jets over Pineshire.

So there was a lot of confusion and fog of war. And that has not helped our understanding of what is actually happening on the ground there. Now, if there are reprisal killings, I'm sure there must be some reprisal killing. That's just been a characteristic of this war, both sides for a while. But if there's any kind of, you know, wide scale scorched earth or massacres and like that, we don't know. We don't have evidence. We haven't been able to get in yet.

Taliban are saying, you know, it's still a war zone. It's not ready. But we're going to try to follow it up. And the fact the matter is the Taliban have allowed international media to operate in Kabul. And so there are more and more journalists coming back. and that will mean that this kind of stuff will get, I hope, uncovered if it's happening. But we just have to wait and see. All right.

Now, the former... We have to get out on the ground and do it. Yeah. Now, so Hamid Karzai, the former president, has announced this sort of triumvirate with Abdullah Abdullah and with Gubaldeen Hekmatjar. And they're supposedly trying to, I guess, grease some skids for integration of former regime people with the new government in some kind of way. Do you know anything about if they're making, if they're having any effect on this or if they're still just sitting on the outside? I mean, it seems like Heckmachar is already pretty good friends with the Taliban. Any?

Not really. I wouldn't say, no. No, he was, you know, an enemy of theirs previously. during their old government. Well, yeah, but he, but didn't his be Islami fight with the Afghan Taliban against the Americans for most of the last 20 years? They made common cause in some areas. They also fought each other in other areas.

Eventually, Hechmachar came over to join the current government a lot. Most of the people still wanted to fight, you know, obviously they joined a Taliban. I think some joined ISIS. The former power brokers, to my, from what I've seen, I've not made a lot of headway in getting included, and they're not super popular among the Afghan population. I would say they have more support from outside, from, you know, the West, maybe not Ekmachar, but people like Karzai, you know, when the West talks about inclusive government or neighboring countries talk about inclusive government, one of the things they could mean is including some of the characters that we used to fund in your new government so that we have a stake too. And I think that would be a mistake because the people's corruption or the reason why this whole mess, one reason why this whole mess reached the point that it's at.

I hope inclusiveness will mean, you know, bringing in people who are represented in a broader segment of society. But again, we really just have to wait and see its early days. Well, I am very curious what you think about the possibility of the Americans trying to continue to work with the Taliban against ISIS or possibly even. in favor of the East Turkestan Islamic movement or things like that in the future here. Well, I'm not sure about the East Turkestan Islamic movement, but counterterrorism is definitely one of the main potential points of cooperation, you know, or conflict with the Taliban and the West, the U.S. Now the Taliban are in power. They have much less incentive to work with and tolerate groups like al-Qaeda, you know, who they were, definitely making alliances

with at various levels, especially tactical to fight the Americans. Now the Taliban have to govern the country, so I don't think they're going to be quite so interested in having those groups around. So that's one area of cooperation. I think humanitarian crisis this country is facing right now has been a drought, a record drought this year. People are going to starve this winter if humanitarian agencies can't get on the ground and just feed people.

financial crisis. You know, Afghanistan was dependent on aid money for so long. So people are in desperate straits financially. Migration is another area. You know, I think Germany is already talking about bringing its embassy back and think places like countries like Germany, the Europeans will be very eager to prevent flows of Afghan refugees coming. So these are all potential areas that the West could cooperate with the Taliban, the Taliban, if they're capable of it, you know, of showing reforms, of showing that they're moderate, of showing that they're willing to try to govern the country inclusively, could in return get some help on that and we could avoid a looming catastrophe this country.

But I'm very worried, I think Afghans, as much as they've suffered for the past 40 years are facing perhaps one of the most frightening and difficult times. Yeah, I mean, that's such an important point, right, that they are facing the worst kind of economic depression with the suspension of whatever percent, it must be the super majority percent of all the foreign aid that they've been getting now with the end of the war or the end of the American occupation there.

So I don't know what all their markets are doing, but they must be all, you know, crashing. So. And then, I'm sorry, on that ETIM thing, I don't know much about it. You're in a much better position to learn than me. I know that. But I do know that the Trump government bombed them, the military bombed them in 2018. But then Pompeo took them off the terrorist list. And that, to me, is suspicious. That's all I got. But it seems like something to try to keep our eye on, you know. For sure. Well, it's great talking to Scott. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you so much. doing the show, Matthew. I love your work. The Scott Horton show, an 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.