The Chaser Report - BEST OF: David Kilcullen

Episode Date: December 26, 2021

BEST OF: David Kilcullen - The Taliban’s swift capture of Kabul means that it now controls Afghanistan – how did they do it, and why didn’t any of the experts see it coming? This is a longer version of today’s interview with counterinsurgency expert, Dr David Kilcullen. His latest book is The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, I'm welcome to The Chaser Report. It is Monday, the 27th of December 2021, and we are still here putting out new episodes, Charles Firth and Alex of Ulavich. We are insatiable. We sat in a room and recorded a whole bunch of intros, but that's because we want you to have new episodes every single day of the year in case you're really bored and miss us.

Can we just get to the interview? Yes, this is a great one. Now, David Kilcullen, one of the world's most renowned experts, It's a genuine quality expert who worked with, you know, the Obama administration and so on, on Afghanistan. He explains how the Taliban won and stormed Kabul, because no one thought that they would, and he explains it all. And if that's not satisfactory, Tucker Carlson had a pretty good explanation, too.

We'll go with Kilcalin right after this. Like an awful lot of us, we were trying to figure out what on earth was going on in Afghanistan. We don't really understand what went wrong, or whether the whole idea was stupid to begin with, But someone who really understands this is David Kilcullen. He's an Australian counter-insurgency expert, formerly with the US State Department. His latest book is The Dragons and the Snakes. How the rest learnt to fight the West, and that certainly happened here. David, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, guys. Were you surprised that Kabul fell so quickly? Yeah, I was actually. And I'll be honest, I'm on record in writing saying it would be a stretch to imagine the Taliban capturing Kabul anytime soon. I was totally dead wrong on that. So I'm officially getting out of the prognostication business. So we really shouldn't have.

Thanks, David. It's been lovely talking to you. But I'll tell you, look, I think it's worth mentioning why I was wrong on it, right? I made the assumption that the international community would not just completely blow off the Afghans with no moral compunction and just let them hang. And that's exactly what happened, right? The Taliban took Kabul with a very small force. We did nothing. We didn't, not one airstrike, not even a harsh tweet, right?

You know, President Biden came out on Saturday night and basically said, yeah, it looks like the Taliban of one. That's what made, it wasn't Biden's fault, but that's what made the Afghan army just evaporate because they realized they were being sold out and there was no need to fight. And, you know, I just could not credit, maybe I live in a different moral universe from politicians, but I just couldn't credit that we would really let this just happen. So, you know, I own that. That's why I called it wrong.

I thought that if it came to that point, we would actually shake ourselves off and do something. But we just, we've let it happen. And frankly, we're still letting it happen on the ground. And a lot of people have sort of blamed the Afghan forces. There's sort of, there's lots of videos going around on Twitter and Facebook of them not being able to do star jumps and things like that. Like just sort of humiliating those forces. Is that in any way true, or is that just as a way to sort of defect blame from the Western forces who are withdrawing? It is a matter of deflecting blame, but it's actually worse than that.

This is victim blaming, right, of the worst kind. I mean, I've worked with the Afghan military for years. Yeah, they're not a Western First World military, right? Noted, right. But they have lost 5,000 soldiers killed every month for the last five months. fighting the Taliban, they've been desperately fighting to survive, they've been losing, and the reason they've been losing is we fucking pulled their air support and their maintenance and their logistics and their intelligence support in May, after promising them for a decade

that we would never do that. It's like, you know, the game jenga. It's like we have a stack of jenga blocks, and by design, four or five of them are American jenga blocks, and we just whipped them out, right? Well, what are you going to do? Blame them that it collapsed. Of course, it was going to collapse. And I, even as long as recently as a couple of weeks ago,

Afghan friends that I was talking to could not believe that the US was really going to do this. And frankly, as I said, neither could I. But we saw it coming at the last minute. And, you know, Australia, the last combat casualty we had in Afghanistan was 2013. The last combat casualty of the Americans was end of 2019. We've been doing this thing on the cheap with a small number of people. the Afghans have been doing the hard yards. We couldn't even sustain our little bit as an international community.

And now they're going down the gurgler. And frankly, you know, it makes me ashamed. Joe Biden said just a short while ago that there was no way of the US leaving without chaos ensuing. From what you're saying, it sounds as though that was wrong. Yeah, you think. I mean, no, he said that. And then Tony Blinken at one point said, I can't imagine a situation in which, you know, it's a collapse between Friday and Monday, right?

Well, it wasn't a collapse between Friday and Monday. It was a collapse between Friday and Sunday afternoon, right? So all those guys were way off base. It was wishful thinking, right? They wanted to leave. They didn't want this to happen. It's like, if I don't look at the snake, it's not going to bite me, you know? And I think there was just a huge amount of, I don't even know how to describe it, right?

I'm almost like catatonic, you know, I'm going to do it anyway. It reminds me. Or was it more cynical than that? Was it actually a bit intentional? I mean, was it negligent or was it actually, like, it sounds to me like, no one could have done this without sort of knowing that that's what was going to happen. Right. I mean, there are two, well, so of course, this is America, right, where I'm living here. So everything's political, everything's partisan, right?

You got Tucker Carlson on one side and Rachel Maddow on the other. And there's no middle ground where people are actually. talking about the reality, you know. And so just to sort of as a Aussie in America, my point would be, yeah, it's Biden's fault. It's also Trump's fault. It's Bush's fault. It's Obama's fault. You can trace this all the way back. And it's the Afghan's fault, right? They bear a significant measure of blame in terms of Afghan political leaders and commanders who change sides and so on. There's plenty of blame to go around. But it is absolutely clear that we knew this is going to happen.

You know, the Intel community was saying it could collapse within a month, right, last week. So even they were caught by surprise by the speed. In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that it was going to accelerate as it collapsed for reasons of, you know, it's a complex system as it collapses, that collapse gets faster. We sort of know that in theory, but there was just a lot of, yeah, wishful thinking, right? And I don't know that I wouldn't want to go so far as to say it was intentional. It might be even in some ways worse than that of just not caring, right?

Like, you know, caring more, I'll give you one little anecdote. On Sunday, sorry, on Monday, as the evacuation is kicking into high gear, there are clusters of civilians located about two miles from the airport who needed to be lifted by helicopter because the entire road in between them and the airport was flooded with Taliban. U.S. political leaders wouldn't approve that because they didn't want, the imagery of helicopters taking off, like, for the Vietnam War, right? And it's like, guys, people are going to fucking die, you know, and you're all worried about

the imagery on Twitter. The photo op. It was, that was a bad photo off. So instead, we had the photo up of all the desperate people at the airport. I'm just wondering, we spent... It puts Trump's photo up in front of that church in perspective, right? I mean, I'm not a Trump fan, but, you know, if you're going to be, anyway, yeah. We spent 20 years just about, we spent trillions of dollars.

trying to win this war, how are the Taliban still so strong? I mean, constantly we were told senior leaders had been killed, they were, you know, a shadow of their former cells. Clearly they weren't. So who are these people who've just won this war? Well, the very senior leaders are the same as the original guys. And one of the great ironies on Sunday was that it was the negotiation between Abdul Ghani Barada, who's the sort of head political guy in the Taliban,

and Hamid Khazai, the former president, and they sat down and did the deal. almost exactly 21 years ago, 20 years ago, in December of 2001, Hamid Karzai and Abdu Ghani Barada sat down together and negotiated the surrender of the Taliban in Kandah. It's the same actual dues, right, 20 years later, having that conversation. At the lower level, they are very different. So young, much more radical, much more capable. We've put in the short answer, and we could spend all day talking about this particular question, but the short answer is we didn't really want to win

and we put enough pressure on them to make them better but not enough to destroy them and that improved them over time like sort of breeding a better class of jihadists yeah like a delta variant of of talibati is that right oh gosh absolutely yeah and so what were their techniques like how did they take out each town so super smart right so they're a small guerrilla group they've got limited assets they there's two general plans

or general approaches they took I wrote about this a couple months ago like it's been obvious to us but we didn't realize it's going to succeed so well they would go and sort of partially surround a village or a district center and they would then send in an elder from the local community that's known to the garrison

and he would say guys the Taliban have got you surrounded they are going to fucking kill you all or they're leaving an opening if you hand over your weapons and your ammo they'll let you go home and increasingly

garrisons were doing that because they weren't getting air support they weren't getting food they were running out of ammunition they knew if they got injured there was no way to evacuate them to a hospital so when the Taliban comes up and gives you an opening you go yeah okay and also there was kind of a network effect right so if there's nine garrisons in a district

and five of them flip well okay you can fight on her if you want to but it's not going to make any difference at this point right so people were changing. So they applied that method at the district level for months. Then they began to apply it in the last week or so at the province level. And same technique, bigger scale. Instead of the local garrison commander, they're talking to the province governor or the mayor,

and people were just flipping left and right. You saw that on the news. Some even changed sides, right, and joined the Taliban. And then for Kabul, they were planning to do the same thing, right? So they basically partially surrounded Kabul, paused, and then Berater flew in, met with Karzai. And I think the army was ready to fight and probably would have fought

and their problem was a lot easier because they're just defending one area. But by the time the military guys on the front line heard that the politicians are busy selling you out in the presidential power. So like, all right, we're done. And the whole thing fell over.

So that's one strategy. The other thing is six or eight weeks they've been fighting for Kandahar and Hellman, which are two big towns in the south. Sorry, two big provinces in the south. and the guts of the Afghan military was basically destroyed in trying to save these towns to the point where when they flipped and started going north, the cover was bare. There was nothing they could do.

I mean, we have spent 20 years systematically underestimating the Taliban, and they've just for the 10th time proved that, you know, they're a lot better, I mean, more capable than we give them credit for. So to your point, there was no way of doing this without stepping things up in other surge, perhaps, or at least air support. Actually, no, they were holding their own with the air support that they had in place. It would have been a surge of airstrikes rather than a surge of troops. I think putting more troops in was a non-starter.

Probably wouldn't have made a difference, right, at that point. But if we hadn't have cut off the air support and the maintenance and all that, they would have been able to continue flying their own aircraft. And then we could have been calling in strikes. I'd say three big missteps, right? pulling the air out, giving up Bargroom, which is a second air base, right? We spent, planes were flying 16-hour round trips from the Middle East to just do 40 minutes over Afghanistan, right? That's not an active war.

And then the other big one was when it became clear that the Taliban were really closing it on Kabul. They could have run some really heavy like B-52 strikes and not killed civilians because it would have been concentrations to Taliban outside the cities. by that point we were, I think, morally defeated and we just let it go. And you say we've consistently underestimated the Taliban. Does that extend to governing? They've been fighting for 20 years. Will they be any good at governing? Yeah, so if you're not familiar with Afghanistan, you probably have a sort of CNN media

version of the Taliban in your head. So just to be clear, Taliban have a very sophisticated legal system, 15 regional courts, that deliver free legal judgments, don't take bribes, and are much quicker than the government courts. They have a tax system, three different kinds of tax. They build roads. They sponsor small business projects. They skim money off of the local businesses

and put that money to tax projects, or to public works projects. They control entrance and exit points into Afghanistan and they take customs and exit. ice money. That was another part of their strategy was to knock off all the external border crossings and then start taking that money. They're just an extraordinarily sophisticated guerrilla governance structure. The question is, will they be able to flip that now to running the state? I think they might be able to. And just one datum point, on Monday, almost the first thing

they did was hold an international investment conference where they got investors on the phone and said, we want direct foreign investment. We want aid. We want the IMF money. tell us what we need to do we're going to work with you international community i mean now these guys are not the taliban of 2001 yeah who you know tortured the former president by all accounts were very very brutal in all kinds of ways there are all kinds of horror stories from back then how optimistic can we be they're still brutal mate but they're just smart enough to keep it off television these days so you still think the rapes all the killings continue yeah it's happening now i'm getting reports from people on the ground all the time of it um you know

people getting, women getting shot just overnight for wearing two immodest clothing, people getting beaten to death. I won't even inflicted on you, but they're still doing it. But it's junior commanders, right? It's pretty deniable. They're not doing the gratuitously grotesque stuff like, you know, castrating the former president, Naji Buller and hanging him from a landpost, which is what you're referring to.

Yeah. They're keeping it on the down low, right? So what they do is they use violence and coercion quietly to gain control while trying to portray themselves as, you know, these are not the droids you're looking for to the international community. Yeah, because their spokesman came out and said some fairly reasonable-sounding things about, you know, no revenge, it's all going to be fine, and potentially women still being able to engage in education and work the way that they had before, and women have been very integrated

into the economy from what I understand in the past 20 years. Is that just talk? Well, it's hard to know, right? So it may be that it's a short-term chaotic phase and they get control and that that top-line thing becomes reality. Taliban have been saying for years that they're okay with women's education. And I do think that at some level they mean it, but they mean women's Islamic education, right? And that's what they mean for men as well. They haven't yet shut down female journalists in Afghanistan.

That might be temporary, but they haven't. so they are doing some things differently from last time and of course they're letting people watch television which wasn't a thing 20 years ago but at the same time and I'm not going to get into detail for obvious reasons but friends of mine are getting hunted house to house by Taliban death squads that are trying to find and kill certain people

that worked for the government including some prominent women members of the intelligence service people that worked for the government and so it's like a you know, it's like a good cop, bad cop, right? And it's like you knuckle down under Taliban governance and an eight, well, it's not going to be as bad as you think, or we are going to cut your head off on

television, not on television, right, we're going to cut your head off. And that's like, you know, they, they are better than Islamic State. I'll give them that, right? But that's not much of an endorsement. And so will they end up getting international recognition, do you think? If I was to guess, I would say yes. And the reason I say that is because the Russians have already said that they are watching the situation closely.

And if the Taliban behave responsibly, they will recognize them and get them some aid. The Chinese, de facto, recognized them on the 28th of July when their whole Taliban delegation led by Molivarader went to Tianjin outside Beijing and met with Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister. And they've never had a public meeting with these groups before. And they effectively gave them de facto. recognition. So I, and you know, the Chinese want to incorporate Afghanistan into the Belt and Road structure, which would give them some economic leverage

over the Taliban. I think these powers are saying, okay, Americans have learned their lesson, hopefully. Let's try to apply different forms of leverage to moderate some of their behavior. Whether that works or not, well, as I said, I'm getting out of the prognostication business. And what's the West's moral obligation from here? I mean, 20 years of stuffing things up in many ways, lots of civilian casualties, but it's clear that for some people life was a lot better for the past 20 years. How do we play things from here? It has been a lot better. So I think there are two things that we need to do. One of them is we need to put the Afghans and their will-being first, right? That means we have to hold the Taliban to account and we have

to pressure them and possibly kill a few, right, depending on the circumstance, in order to protect the population. But it also means that we shouldn't just artificially keep the war going because we're embarrassed about losing, right? And I am worried that that's going to happen. Like we have lost this war. We've been defeated, right? The Taliban are in control. They're holding peace talks right now. People have been looking for an end to the war for 20 years. This is an end to the war if we want to take it, right? It's unpleasant. You don't want to negotiate with the Taliban. But, you know, I'm sure the Nazis didn't want to negotiate with the Western allies in 1945 either.

But when you lose a war, that's what you have to do. I'm worried that I'm seeing indicators like the US is trying to freeze all of Afghanistan's money so the Taliban can't have it. I'm worried that like the IMF is talking about not allowing them to have the money that's been committed. There's a whole bunch of guys still fighting up in the Panshee Valley. I think we need to let the Afghans figure out what to do about that and not just say, right, we're back to the 90s.

Let's keep on back in these. misjahe in. That may be the answer, but it needs to be the Afghans who come up with that. You know, radical idea, right? We should actually let the Afghans have a say in what happens to their country instead of continuing to treat it like a colony. We got in there in the first place after 9-11, and it made a lot more sense than Iraq, because that's where Al-Qaeda actually were in that region. So the justification actually made sense, which is not taken for granted when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Will this then mean a resurgence of terrorism, or do you think the Taliban understand that that's a line that they can't cross without repercussions?

So actually, yes to both of those, right? So on the invasion in 2001, it's not the same as Iraq, right? Iraq was based on what turned out to be wrong intelligence. It was a distraction from the main war on terrorism. It was a complete fiasco. You know, we can go there if you want to. But, you know, it was horrible. But your massive global opposition, right?

everybody from the Pope onwards opposing it. In 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan, NATO, the UN, vast majority of the international community supported an intervention. What happened was we got in there, we overthrew the Taliban. Hamid Khazai, actually, in that meeting I was telling you about before, said, right, we've defeated these guys. Now we have to make peace. Let's get him in a room.

Let's talk about it. And Donald Rumsfeld said to him, we don't negotiate with terrorists. So we never actually bothered to make peace in 2001, right? Like once they were defeated, we treated them like they didn't exist anymore. That's why it all came back. So I think there's big problems in 01, but the invasion itself was not, you know, the big problem. So to the other point, yes, there will be a massive surge in terrorism. Yes, the Taliban won't, I think, will realize they can't cross that line.

So how do those, you square that circle? Taliban know that, and they've actually been, I first had my first conversation with Taliban, maybe 2006. they've been consistently saying this for 15 years, and I believe they're sincere, that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven or a base for an attack on the international community. I do think they'll stick to that, if only because they realize that that would be the one thing

that might bring the international community back, right, and would certainly cut them off from aid and all that. So I think they've got a strong incentive not to do that. But it's also a boost to terrorism worldwide, because it's a massive, it's just a massive morale boost, right? Every jihadist on the planet must be feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof today, right? Because the, you know, little Ragdad Taliban showed that they could defeat a nuclear-armed superpower more powerful than any other country on the world by just sticking at it, being persistent, believing in themselves, continuing the fight. And everyone's like, holy shit, if they can do it, you know, we can do it too.

And I think what we're going to see is a big spike in terrorism as it just energizes everybody. We saw this with the fall of the near fall of the Iraqi government in 2014 when Abu Bakrani declared the caliphate in Mosul, and that led to like a six-year spike of terrorism. So the irony here is I know where President Biden was coming from. He wanted to end the war on terror. Ironically, by the way we've done this, we've given such a boost to jihadists that we've probably given ourselves another decade of it. We've just started it all again, right?

So I think it's been a massive own goal. And again, that's not a partisan political statement. Whoever happened to be in the White House when this happened, it would have been the same. So do you think maybe, like given that, what, you had, like, Korean War, a bit of a tie, Vietnam War, pretty much lost, first Iraq war, a bit of a stalemate, second Iraq war, I suppose one in a sort of way. Like, don't you think that the US is just very bad at war and perhaps should get out of the whole war business?

Yeah, look, there's a whole, I mean, I've wrote about this in my book, actually, in great detail, as you probably know, and there's a whole industry of pundits talking about it. But I think the US is really, really good at battle and really, really bad at translating battlefield success into peaceful outcomes that favor them, right? So, you know, JFC Fuller, right, a famous British general of the 20th century, doesn't get read about much because he happened to be pro-Nazi in the second war, but whatever.

So he once said, you know, channeling St. Augustine, that the object of war is not victory, it's a better piece, right? Better meaning more advantageous, you know, more stable, whatever. The US is great at winning things on the battlefield, but they really suck. And so do we actually, at translating, we're better than them, but they do suck at translating that battlefield success into enduring, you know, sustainable peace. I mean, and refusing to negotiate with the Taliban in 2001 is a great example of that. And we've talked a lot about the US, David, but what's Australia's role in all of this?

We seem to have done a worse job in the US of organising the evacuation. What can we learn for this? I would dispute that a little bit. I think we did a much better job in evacuating our own people. We saw the writing on the wall some time ago. We pulled the embassy out a couple of months ago. We've been working pretty hard to get our special visa people out. But the problem that Australia's had is Taran Kaut and Urzgan province,

the capital and the province where we used to work mostly, that fell to the Taliban quite a long time ago, right? So the ability to actually get in there and get people out has been just really bad. So there's a bit of an excuse there. Because we did a podcast, sorry, I worked on another podcast a couple of months ago. And one of the fascinating stories was that the Australian government was requiring all these people who were completely eligible. They'd worked alongside the Australian military forces. But they were requiring them to take their paperwork with them to Kabul in order to be able to apply to get,

Australian help and that was putting them all at risk because by having this paperwork it was sort of like painting a red target on their back. There's a way around that. I'm not going to talk about it right now but if you want to have me back sometime I'll tell you about it when the dust settles

there's ways to do that. We're doing that right now. I don't want to talk about it on the air while it's still happening. But yeah, we did well we, Australian government did do that but so did every other government right. In the areas where we've been

bad. I think we've been about as bad as everybody else, but we have been better in some ways. But can I just say we, we are conflating, a lot of countries are conflating, protecting and securing Afghans that are going to be killed by the Taliban if they're not helped with resettling those people in our countries, right? And that's why we're doing this ridiculously detailed visa processing of people on the airstrip in Kabul. And planes are flying out nearly empty because they're not processing anyone fast enough to get them through. Just get them to fuck out, right? And when they're on the ground in like Qatar or somewhere else, then we can do that processing. You mentioned Vietnam before. You know, the way they did it in Vietnam was they

pull people out to Guam. They processed people on Guam. So they had them in a safe location. And then they resettled them where they need to go. Right. And I think we, there's a problem in the way we're even conceptualizing what this is. First, we've got to stop them getting killed, right? Then we figure out where they go, you know. Yeah, I mean, that image of the plane, I think we'll carry with us forever, of the full cargo hole. And it just makes you wish that everyone who wanted to be on a plane like that could have been, you know?

Yeah, and ironically, they probably could, right? I mean, from the Taliban standpoint, they would rather all these people leave, right, so that they don't have to have the opprobium of killing them and becoming a prior state again. They don't want them there in Afghanistan, but they don't want to have to go through that. The senior Taliban leaders have said, get them out, you know? junior Taliban commanders are being assholes on the ground, but that's what they do, right? So if we'd have said, right, we're creating a humanitarian corridor, we're going to guard that with troops, we're going to, everyone that wants to come to this location and

will then fly you to the airfield by helicopter and go from there, you know, potentially it would have been a very different outcome. But it's not over yet. It could be, could get better. But that's, you know, it's pretty chaotic right now. As things were collapsing, it just seems like it, in. up being a complete chit show. What happened? Yeah, I don't know what the correct passion word for cluster fuck is, right? But that's what this is, right? You know, I was a military

instructor and I served in the army for 25 years. I could take any corporal or private soldier and say, mate, go plan me in evacuation, right? And the guy would come back with a pretty sensible plan, right? It's pretty logical. If a guy came back to me and said, right, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to give up one of my two airfields, right? And then I'm going to pick the one that has only one airstrip that's right in the middle of downtown. And that's going to be the one I'm going to use. And then I'm going to evacuate the military first and then the diplomats and then somehow, you know, underpants gnomes, right? The civilians are going to get out. And that, you know, you would say, dude, you're an idiot. And no NGO or private would be

stupid enough to come up with that plan, right? I don't know who planned this thing. but, you know, they deserve to be held accountable when it's over. It would have been generals. It would have been the generals in Washington, wouldn't it? Yeah, what you find is you get a tug of war between the diplomats and the generals, right? So probably it was actually colonels working for generals who came up with some kind of a plan. And they were already boxed in by decisions that have been made already, like giving up the other airfields. And they tried to come up with the best possible choice.

And then the diplomats would have gone, yeah, but, you know, that's going to panic people. It's going to make us look bad. certainly about a month, about three weeks ago, I'm aware of conversations where the diplomats were saying, look, we've got six to 12 months before, you know, Carvel's under threat. We've got plenty of time. So don't worry about it, right?

And I think that was a fundamental miscalculation. But again, like, it's not rocket science, you know. So I am, it's embarrassing, right? And whether or not you think it's any particular political party's fault, I happen to not think it's a partisan political issue. And whether or not you think that we should have left or should have stayed. And, you know, I'm open to debate either way. Either way, if you decide to leave, don't do it like this.

I mean, this is just outrageous. I mean, it's just an outrageous classification. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I've never heard of anything like it. And it's just, it's embarrassing, right? And more than embarrassing, people are going to get killed because we screwed this up. And I think that people should be hanging their heads in shame as a result of it. that.

Thanks for listening. Our gears from road microphones. We're part of the ACAST credit network. Another interview tomorrow. See ya. Bye.