The Joe Walker Podcast - The Lessons Of Afghanistan — William Dalrymple

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed historian and writer. Show notes available at: josephnoelwalker.com/138-afghanistanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Welcome back to the show. Having been dismayed by the fall of Kabul on the 15th of August, astounded by America's abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan, and saddened by the ongoing tragedy in that country, I thought I should get in touch with an old friend of the pod to talk about it. Rightly or wrongly,

Afghanistan has earned the moniker, the graveyard of empires. It's a land of jagged mountains, a cultural morass where the British Empire, Soviet Union, and now the United States have all gone to spill copious amounts of blood and treasure for little gain. Barrels of ink have now been spilled as well, analyzing the unique quandary of Afghanistan and inscribing a catalogue of errors on this latest imperial tombstone. But I wanted to place the Afghanistan crisis in its historical context, and few English speakers are better placed to be my guide than acclaimed historian and writer William Dalrymple, who returns to the podcast. Willie has written many award-winning and best-selling books, including most recently The Anarchy. You know that cliched question, if you could invite five people, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would they be be and it usually receives answers like jesus alexander the great winston churchill well i

would be sorely tempted to skip over the conquerors and the saints and invite willie dalrymple he's amazing company but more pertinently he's the author of the brilliant book return of a king the battle for afghanistan which was published back in 2013 and centers on the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839 to 42, which was the greatest military disaster in British imperial history. Willie spent a ton of time in Afghanistan and counts former president Hamid Karzai as a personal friend. In this episode, Willie and I traverse the history of military conflict in Afghanistan and then analyze the complex cultural and political landscape of modern Afghanistan. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

William Dalrymple, welcome back to the Jolly Swagman podcast. It's very nice to be doing it in remote rather than a sweltering studio in adelaide joe last time you nearly put me in a sauna well i do i like to put you through a physical challenge before the mental one well this time we had a bit of a technical challenge getting the microphone working but we are up and running we are ready to go we are indeed so you're right it's been nearly two years since we were holed up in that derelict studio in adelaide and i had without air conditioning without a fan remind you remind you yes in a car park in one of adelaide's industrial illustrious suburbs and i had so much fun during that part of adelaide i had never seen before

i had so much fun during that conversation but i had even more fun afterwards at the adelaide jaipur literature festival getting to see you in action, filling in for a speaker who dropped out, and delivering an extraordinary extemporary exposition on the Koh-i-Noor diamond. And then obviously going out for dinner afterwards with Andy from Bloomsbury and Sanjoy and some of the other organisers. Much fun was had. I mean, given all sorts of terrifying Australian dishes to eat,

including, as I remember, emu, crocodile, kangaroo. much fun was had i mean given all sorts of terrifying australian dishes to eat including i remember emu crocodile kangaroo there was something on the menu i didn't know yeah all sorts and i would have hated to have been a gin and tonic in adelaide that night but it was a wonderful night and we're gathered for an altogether more sobering reason and that is the capitulation of the west and of the Afghan government in Afghanistan. And I want to take the long view. I want to talk about the history of military conflict in Afghanistan, but I know next to nothing about it.

So I was hoping you could be my tutor. Well, never believe a Scotsman, but I'll do my best. Fabulous. So the British Empire, as you well know, will first step foot in Afghanistan, militarily speaking, in the spring of 1839. That was the first Afghan war. But the military involvement of the West in Afghanistan stretches all the way back in the name of Kandahar, which probably evolved from Iskander and was founded as one of the many. Possibly. It could also be the Sanskrit for Gandhara is the other theory, which I think is now gaining currency. But yeah, there are all sorts of Alexandrias lurking under the soil in Afghanistan. There's one under Bagram Air Base,

which was called Alexandria Under the Mountains, which he founded as well. Herat, I think, was founded by him, was also in Alexandria at one point. Many Alexandrias. You're right. Yes, the etymology of Kandahar is debatable. But does Alexander the Great's influence, is it in any deeper sense, etched into the cultures and psyche of modern afghans modern afghans uh maybe not but it left a a long footprint in afghan history because when alexander died in babylon uh shortly after his conquests uh there remained uh greek colonies all over afghanistan and even in on the banks of the oxus the northernmostmost Alexandria, a city called Iconum, which had theatres, stadia, a temple with a quote from the Delphic oracles on it, an extraordinarily unmediated, pure Greek culture. And it's an extraordinary bit of Hellenistic culture,

which then in the centuries to come expanded. So you get a series of Indo-Greek kings called things like Heliocles of the Punjab and Eucridites of Kandahar and these sort of guys who wear either Greek helmets or elephant head helmets and who worship a variety of Hindu, Zoroastrian and Greek deities. And they conquer certainly as far as Delhi and quite possibly, according to some accounts, as far as Patna in Bihar, where the Buddha had been preaching only, you know, 300 years earlier. and so um a long hellenistic footprint uh in afghanistan um but in time all these different

bits of western culture were snuffed out i canum fell after about 300 years and was just left uh an empty ruin and um by about the the first century bc there were a handful of greeks or people with g Greek names left. And by the end, it was just snuffed out. Nothing, nothing remains. So, no, I think you can say confidently that very little of Alexander's culture remains in modern Afghanistan, though Alexander himself became a great figure in Islamic storytelling and myth. And there is a Iskandar Nama, the Alexander Romance, which has an Islamic form, which still tells story of the great deeds of Iskandar. And he goes off to find Khwaja Kiza, who has the waters of eternal life and all this

sort of stuff, which you won't find in the history books, but which is very much part of the folklore of that part of the world. Wow. Before the first Afghan war, how did the denizens of Afghanistan describe themselves? Was Afghanistan a clearly defined entity before that time? No, not at all. Afghanistan as a unit which resembles the modern nation state really exists from the time of a man called Ahmad Shah Durrani. When we last met, Joe, we were talking about the Koh-i-Noor diamond. And the man who stole the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India, first of all, was Nadir Shah, who raided Delhi in 1739. His main bodyguard was a man called Ahmad Shah.

And allegedly, Nadia Shah fished him out of the dungeons of Kandahar when he conquered Kandahar and he rose, this kind of near do well rose to be the head bodyguard and on the night of Nadia Shah's assassination, at least according to Ahmad Shah Durrani's

own account, he protected the women of the harem with his life and defended these ladies while rape and pillage pursued throughout the camp. And in the morning, as a present in gratitude for his protection, the chief wife of Nadir Shah handed over the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which he then used as the capital to create a state in Afghanistan. And he declared himself emir and created the Durrani Empire, which ate a chunk of the Uzbek Empire to the north,

ate a chunk of the Persian Empire to the left, nibbled away a bit of China to the right, and gobbled up a great chunk of the Mughal Empire to the south. And that created for the first time a state which resembles the modern nation state of Afghanistan, which up to that point had always thought of itself as part of a wider area called Khorasan or Khorasan. And Khorasan geographically encompassed quite a lot of Persia, all of what's now Afghanistan. And that name, Khorasan, was the original name really for Durrani Afghanistan. And it's only after the first Afghan war that people begin to talk about the kingdom of the Afghans.

And eventually, by about the 1870s, Afghanistan. I apologize for my next question, because I'm going to ask you to talk about something you've talked about a thousand times. The first Afghan war was a catastrophe, a costly catastrophe for the British Empire. How did it begin? So the thing to remember is that the force which captured India after the breakup of the Mughal Empire, after the Taj Mahal is built, after the Peacock Throne is constructed, that world is not brought down by the British Raj, as is often mistakenly said.

It's brought down by a public company listed on the stock exchange with a share price, operating out of a single office in Leadenhall Street in London. And that company was called the East India Company. And it started very modestly, a century into its existence. Only 35 people worked for it out of this one office, now under what's the Lloyds building, the Lloyds of London Insurance building in the city of London. And this amazingly small skeleton staff,

by borrowing money from Indian bankers and paying top dollar for Indian mercenaries, captured first Bengal, then Upper India, then all of India. And by 1830s were eyeing the area to the north. There was this huge area of Central Asia. They knew it had wonderful lapis and silks and carpets. And they saw it both as a major source of mineral and other resources for their trade, plus a large market for their goods. And so having used the Ganges very successfully as a way of penetrating economically the heart of India,

the obvious strategy, they thought, was to use the Indus to do the same for Central Asia. The trouble was there was a whole set of different rulers in the way. There was, first of all, the emirs of Sindh in what's now sort of Karachi, the Pakistan coast. Above that in the Punjab, there was Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Empire, which was staffed and armed by an incredible array of ex-Napoleonic generals who brought Napoleonic tactics to Lahore. And then above that, there were a variety of warring kingdoms

in what we now called Afghanistan, particularly the descendants of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who was a man called Shahshudrul Mulk. He'd just been kicked out. And a man called Dost Muhammad, who was a very distant cousin, took over. And so basically, as so often in world history, it's economics, it's the money. And what the East India Company was after was a source of new trade materials and new markets. And they thought the best way to do that was to send an expedition leapfrogging over the Sikh Empire and to take Afghanistan.

And what particularly spurred them on was a pretty spurious idea, then really pure paranoia rather than anything coherent, that the Russians were going to come riding down the Khyber Pass with their Cossacks. Now, at the same time as East India Company had been moving west and northwards across India, getting by the 1830s as far as the Sutlej River in the Punjab, the Russians had been moving south with equal speed, about 100 miles every decade, under Peter the Great and his successors. And they, by the 1830s, had gone as far south as the Orenburg Line, which is sort of way north of all those caravan cities like Bokara, Samarkand,

Kiva, that now, you know, are tourist destinations in the Stans, particularly Uzbekistan. So the Russians were north of that. And so they were still, you know, thousands of miles and many kingdoms between the Russians and the company. dreamt up this idea that the Russians could very soon send envoys or troops with great ease through those other empty areas and charge down the Khyber Pass and rob Britain of the jewel of its crown, its profitable Indian territories. And so somebody called Lord Ellenborough, who was kind of incredibly like the neocon hawks prior to threat which doesn't exist and by paranoically pursuing it actually bring it into into being um because the russians begin to read british books on uh on central asia um and realize that it'd be british agents messing around in bokhara and so on notably a man called alexander burns who published a book it's translated into French, and the Russians read it in French. And suddenly, they all wake

up and say, there's lots of Brits there, we better send some spies down to counter them. So just like in many ways, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq, until George Bush invaded it, and sort of was the godfather of Islamic terrorism, which didn't exist under the Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who hated Islamists and who tortured them and strung them up. So in Afghanistan in the 19th century, the Brits created a Russian threat when none existed. Even so, it was only then a very distant threat,

very, very far-fetched that any Russian army would be able to march through Afghanistan and appear anywhere in India. So in 1839, having worked themselves up into a lather, believing that Russia was about to form an alliance with Afghanistan and that it was only a matter of time before Cossacks appeared on the Khyber Pass. The East India Company sends an army leapfrogging over the Punjab, crossing the Balochistan desert in the middle of summer with sepoys dropping like flies in their winter uniforms in the withering heat.

It's an absurd invasion in the way that only 19th century British military expeditions possibly can be observed. Every officer apparently brought 26 camel loads of uniforms, every senior officer, for their mess dinners. They brought a pack of foxhounds. 26 camels were given over to cheroots, in other words, cigars. One camel

carried only eau de cologne. And so it's absurd. The only thing they don't have is a map. They don't have a map because there isn't one. So they're stumbling around the passes, wandering around the desert, sepoys dropping like flies, massive death and unnecessary fatalities

just out of ignorance and idiocy. And yet, at the end of the day, most of them do make it through to Kandahar and take Kandahar and Kabul with barely a shot fired. So suddenly, there they find themselves in Kabul. They assume that the Afghans are not at all the military people they've been led to believe because they've got in without fighting. And they proceed to do sort of amateur theatricals um shoot duck go fox uh fox hunting with these

fox hands which again amazingly have made it through the balochistan desert in the middle of summer and generally begin to misbehave and then the thing that really gets the afghans as you can imagine is that suddenly there are 20 000000 single men on the plane outside Kabul. And there is obviously a premium on Afghan women. And Afghan honor is very rapidly offended when Afghan women do start drifting out of Kabul at night to find their way into the contumance and coming back richer in the morning. And this reaches a particular point when one of the British commanders, Alexander Burns, the guy that wrote the travel book that alerted the Russians, who is a bit out of a job because everyone hates him

because he's very famous. He's had an audience with the Queen. All the people who've been slogging away doing espionage for years in Central Asia think this guy's a bit of a wanker because he's produced this book. He's got gold medals for the Roger Graphical Society. So when he arrives in Afghanistan, no one will really give him a job. So he's nominally the second in command. But in fact, he has no work. What does he do? He starts shagging the local women, but particularly he starts seducing the mistress of a warrior leader called Abdullah Khan Achaxai. And Abdullah Khan Achaxai will not have this. He first of all sort of has a meeting of his tribesmen

and proclaims, according to one epic poem, that Alexander Burns has ridden the donkey of desire into the field of stupidity. And they then descend on alexander burns house which according to afghan accounts alexander burns is in bed with two if not three women at the time uh having a high old time when abdullah khan at check side breaks in with his his ruffians and burns is cut down and a revolution starts and the british are completely unprepared for it they've thought this is just a jolly duck shooting expedition with a bit of amateur theatricals. And they've put their tents and the beginning of what will be a cantonment, they'd hoped, in a valley over overlooked by hills,

which, of course, today inevitably is the site of the American embassy, an indefensible site next to the airport today um so uh the british skirmish uh for uh for for a few few weeks but it's very clear they're surrounded there's no supplies coming in winter is approaching winter is is coming in in the words of game of thrones and um the british have no option, really, but to negotiate a retreat. So having pushed this huge army of 20,000 up from India through the desert, they now are proposing to march south

in the middle of winter when no one, when, you know, sub-zero temperatures, swirling blizzards, snow drifts everywhere, which is an even more absurd plan than going to Afghanistan in the first place. and they begin to notice that the afghans are rather suspiciously dragging out negotiations and and they they realize that something's up but they don't quite put two and two together of course when they begin to retreat on the 6th of january 1842 um 17 000 men women and children lots and lots and lots of people who are actually there to feed the horses

and cook the meals and an enormous Indian support staff who are unarmed. And then about 6,000 troops who are the garrison in Kabul. When they begin to march down, the shooting and the sniping begins almost instantly. But before they can march back again, looters and various other rioters break into the deserted contumance and burn them down, just like we saw in Bagram when the Americans left in a great hurry, turned the lights off, the locals turned up and ran off with anything that wasn't welded to the ground. And the same happens in British contumance. And day one is pretty bad. Day two is a nightmare and they realize that the Afghans have spent the time when they were negotiating building rather amazing

blockades uh to stop the Brits getting through to where they were meant to be going including an enormous holly hedge at a place called Jogdalik which not even the cavalry can pass so these guys are sitting ducks the Afghans have got long hunting rifles called jazails that can shoot about half a mile. The British army musket called the Brown Bess can only shoot 500 yards. And so it's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's just a turkey shoot. And by the last day, there are about 400 men left, still alive, desperately trying to get through to the British garrison at Jalalabad.

The lances are cut down one by one. And in the end, it is just one man, Dr. Brydon, who makes it through to Jalalabad. And the only reason he makes it through is he is a big reader and he has a hardback book. This is an edition of Return of the King, which is something like this. And in his hat, he has a sort of hardback book like this is an edition of return of the king which something like this is in his hat he has a forage hat and because he's a reader he has it on his head as he's riding his horse and when they take a swipe at him it goes through the big hardback book but it doesn't the sword doesn't go into his skull so he emerges bookless but alive at jalanabad um but virtually no one else does a few gherkas make it through a week later. The Gurkhas, of course, know what to do in the snow and they've hidden in a cave somewhere

and they make it through. A strange Greek merchant called Mr. Benes, who's been sort of selling kebabs at the Kuntubut, makes it through, again, having hidden in a cave with a bottle of ouzo for a week. And there are a few hostages who survive. But basically, the whole army's wiped out. And what is extraordinary is when you go when

i was suddenly when i went to afghanistan in 2006 7 8 9 and was researching all this it was the same story not only was the american embassy there on the site of the cantoom and hamid karzai turns out to be the great great great grandson of shah shuja, who was the Popozai chief that the British put on the throne again. The guys who massacred the Brits in 1842 in the past of Jagdhalik and finally the last stand of Gundamuk, they are the Gilzai tribe, and they are now the foot soldiers of the Taliban. So beneath what looks to us like a straightforward knockabout

between liberal Democrats on one side and sort of medieval barbarian Islamists, turns out, in fact, to be just a tribal fight that's been going on for 150 years with the Durranis and the Sadazis on one side in Kabul and the Gilzai, who are the kind of nomads to dispossess the herdsmen and so on are fighting for the Taliban and it all it looks incredibly familiar and the Afghans know this you know there's no we can't see these parallels because none of us know the history but to the Afghans this is all absolutely yeah you know like the Battle of Britain or something this is something that every Afghan is brought up with or Trafalgar or if you're an indian the freedom struggle um if you're an australian perhaps gallipoli you know it's just one of those stories that every kid is brought up with and everyone knows and what's invisible to us is blindingly and painfully obvious to every afghan so much so that the main resistance leader uh was the akhbar Khan. That's what they named the diplomatic area after in Kabul today. So it's an extraordinary case of history repeating.

And when this book came out, Karzai actually called me to Kabul and asked me to tell him the whole story in detail and quizzed me over six nights in his palace. And I happily did that in return for an an interview he would talk to me and i would talk to him and he actually altered his policy that we didn't none of us realized quite how much he'd altered his policy uh until it emerged in wiki leaks that hillary clinton was blaming uh return of a king my book on afghanistan for karzai's new intransigent stand and karzai had taken away from the book the fact that you could not be perceived to be the puppet of the Americans if you wanted to survive in government. And so as soon as he got to Washington under the Obama administration, he began distancing

himself and saying, you frigging Americans bombing our people. We don't need you. While at the same time, time in fact taking both military and civilian aid uh and and he hoped by distancing himself he'd be okay and he he is still alive remarkably and talking to the taliban today well obviously ashraf ghani has fled so over those dinners after iftar and the presidential palace he presented the view to you that he thought the u.s were doing to him what the brit had done to Shah Shuja 170 years before. Did you agree with that view?

Do you think he was onto something? I think quite clearly that in both cases, the countries went there for their own interests. In the case of the East India Company, they wanted to control the trade. And the British government in the background wanted to keep the Russians out. This time, it was, of course, 9-11 and al-Qaeda that brought the Americans to Afghanistan. It wasn't really that they wanted women to go to school and so on, although obviously they were very happy that they did. And what we've seen in the last month is the fact that it's suddenly become in this new isolationist America that's grown up after Trump's America first rhetoric, that foreign interventions are now seen as toxic in domestic American politics. And that

is why the Americans have pulled out. It's not because they were defeated by the Taliban. It's not because, you know, at the end of the day, they couldn't win if the Americans had actually put all their resources in and dropped, you know, five regiments and unlimited firepower and all their air force and everything else, we'd still be fighting that war, you know, they might not be able to defeat the Taliban, but they certainly were not defeated themselves. But what happened was that it was no longer domestically viable in the judgment of Biden. And Biden just decided he'd be better to let it go. And the opinion polls have not proved that intuition wrong.

Rather amazingly, while the whole of the rest of the world sees this as the end of the American empire and the end of foreign interventions by America, the domestic numbers in America do actually support the notion that a withdrawal was the right thing. They criticize how it was done. But this is something that in domestic politics, Biden will certainly survive. So yes, Karzai is right that, you know, is of course the case in international politics. No country does something for nothing. You do it for your own interests. When those interests converge, that's very nice. When they don't, you end up with a mess like we've got on our hands now. The terms of the deal when you had those conversations with Karzai was that he could quiz you on the first Afghan war and you could ask him anything in turn.

Do you remember what you asked him or what were you most interested to ask him? Yes. And anyone who's interested can read the, there's a long 10, word profile i wrote of him which is in the new york times magazine which is still online if you're a subscriber to the new york times uh and now a lot of fun he's a very nice man i mean kaza is incredibly charming which is why he against all the odds survived in office so long and so well and is so fondly remembered um i subsequently got him to come to my jaipur literature festival inasthan. And I've never seen a more consummate charmer on a stage. There was a vast Indian audience there, about 5,000,

not because it was me and him chatting, but because one of the big Bollywood stars had just been on the session before. And as is the case in these things with Jaipur, we don't have tickets. You don't have to, unlike, say, the Adelaide Festival, you don't have to buy a ticket for a specific event. you're there you can just sit in your house and listen to whatever comes next like watching netflix or something uh and um so everyone stayed on because he started entertaining them and singing hindi film songs and saying how much he loved india and talking about his time uh as a student and similar uh and um and speaking quite good Hindi.

And he had the Indian audience eating out of his hand. And he's been able to do that in Kabul too. Well, Ashraf Ghani, who followed him, was a very different man. Ashraf, extremely clever man, was very kind to me. He helped me find a lot of the sources, which I wrote Return of the King out of, because there are these incredible Pashtun and Ur and dari sources recording the first afghan war and rather amazingly no one's used those before you have a lot of accounts of the first afghan war

but they're always the uh the usual ones that you find from british uh observers uh the very rich seam of primary sources giving the afghan point of view uh remain almost untouched and um yeah we we so we because i and i um had had six very jolly nights uh in in the palace chatting away uh i got a very nice article out of it and he decided to um put the finger up at obama which made him very popular at home as you can imagine uh made me rather less popular i went and gave a uh i was asked subsequent to all this having so you know so to speak caused some of this mess um i was asked to brief the west wing uh the afghan uh a bit of the white house i got slightly chilly reception

what what did the west wing want to know well the west was interesting you know there was all these guys all with top firsts from harvard and so on a lot of them quite young many of them had been in afghanistan living in containers um various points but none of them knew the history uh they you know they were more or less completely ignorant of the whole story of 1839 to 42. So it's both a good illustration of two aphorisms. One that Aldous Huxley is famous for saying that the only thing you learn from history is that no one learns from history. And also the other sort of famous line that those that don't learn from history are forced to repeat it. And that's what we've seen in Kabul over the last week. Does history offer lessons beyond the common sense or the bleedingly obvious?

Well, the fact that you'd be better not to invade Afghanistan seems like a pretty obvious lesson because, you know, there have been so many screwed up missions there. First, the East India Company, then the Raj, then the Russians. You know, we all said when they were going in, have they never read Flashman? Have none of them ever opened a history book? And apparently this was part of sort of British political law in that when Harold Macmillan was handing over to Sir Alec Douglas Hume, these two chummy Tories, said, oh, Hume said, have you got any advice to offer me?

And Macmillan said, well, as long as you don't invade Afghanistan, you'll probably be okay. But no one seems to have told Tony Blair that. I just want to briefly digress into some historiography and philosophy. Willie, to what extent do you agree with E.H. Carr's statement in What Is History that, quoting him here, it used to be said that the facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them. It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor and in what order or context.

Obviously true. And, I mean, what's fascinating about the history, I've been researching for the last 20 years when I've been doing the East India Company history, I've now written four books. It's called The Company Quartet. First one is The Anarchy. Second is White Mughals. Third is this one, Return of a King. And the fourth is The Last Mughal. And I find to an astonishing extent that no one's been using the Mughal or the Afghan or the Urdu sources. And I worked with some very talented translators, a guy called Bruce Wannell, who's a fluent Pushdu, Urdu, Farsi and Dari speaker,

who came and lived with me for quite a lot of the last 20 years in Delhi, and we'd work on these texts together. And, you know, you can get a completely different set of facts and order them completely differently when you see the other people's point of view. As Robbie Burns said, you've got to see ourselves as others see us. And the history of colonialism

is a very clear example of that. If you were writing a history of the Second World War, you wouldn't think of writing an account that only used British and Australian sources. You'd, of course, use German, Japanese, Italian and everything else. And yet, amazingly, a lot of colonial history is still written using only the British and East India Company version, which is very easy to do because the National Archives in India and the India Office Library in London, now part of the british library uh have

35 miles in london of imperial records that you can access but you get a completely different set of facts if you go to the afghan sources for example none of the brits seem to realize quite how disparate and fissured and uh autonomous the different parts of the Afghan resistance were. They saw it all as a bunch of people with beards coming at them with swords. But in fact, there were very distinct tribal elements, some of which were at war or very much certainly in rivalry with each other. And it looks very different from the Afghan point of view. Most of all, the British are seen as evil occupiers. They look on the Brits

much as we looked on the Nazis. And someone like Alexander Burns has always been this rather jolly sort of sprightly hero in British accounts who comes to this tragic end is actually shown to be the sort of Lucifer incarnate,

this seducer and betrayer who has no honour and who finally reaches a justful end at the sword point of Abdullah Khan Achaxai. If we accept that the historian is central to history, and we don't have to accept that, but if we do, doesn't that mean that everyone is just going to read their own lesson into afghanistan some will say as harold mcmillan told alec douglas horn as long as you don't invade afghanistan you'll be absolutely fine others will say the lesson of afghanistan is in fact you've got to invade it

properly well yeah i mean it's true there is not you know you could you every interpreter of history will read it his own way and and bring his own life lessons and experience to that, which is why the writing of history is never finished, because each generation finds new things to recognize. in the Victorian period, everyone began to see Robert Clive and Warren Hastings and all these early Brits in India as the British Empire is building a British colony in India. But today, in an age when we have lives being watched, tracked and so on by Facebook, by Google, by all these huge corporations. It's far more interesting to rediscover the fact that it was the East India Company, a corporation with a share price, with an office, with a board of directors, with shareholders that is running this takeover of Afghanistan, that it's a case of a militarized

corporation. And this is something which speaks to us and we notice it, but which, you know, was not an issue for the Victorians. And they kind of, you know, they obfuscate the fact that the company is not the British government. It's something quite different. Let me share what I think is a convincing lesson to take from the history of war in Afghanistan. And then let me know what you think. So if I had to pick one lesson I found convincing, it would be warning of the dangers of naive interventionism. That is, if you intervene in a complex system, like a country or a culture, and try to change it in a top-down manner, to paraphrase Hadeep Puri in his book, Per his book perilous interventions the desired results are rarely

achieved and it invariably leads to the rise of terrorists and non-state military actors creating a new set of rivals altogether so the point is naive interventionism is worse than pissing in the wind it's like pouring gasoline on the fire and of course none of that is to say that the u.s elegant very elegant uh comparison some uh liquid metaphors but of course none of that is to say that the u.s should have left when or in the manner it did perhaps they shouldn't have started the war but obviously once started they had an obligation not to f things up even more my my view is that is that it was always a long shot this one uh and it was probably going to fail because the afghans are incredibly xenophobic and do not like being

ruled by others and have the geography and the tribal system and the military know-how to defy anyone who tries to invade and occupy them. But what was certainly the case was that the way that the Americans left was clearly going to undermine everything. Today, these complex weapon systems that the Americans introduced to Afghanistan relied on a bunch of contractors who maintained them and amended them and made them work and when the americans pulled out they didn't just pull out themselves and pull out their troops and their advisors they also took the contractors with them so all this very complicated equipment uh was was more or less

unusable it's like leaving um i don't know two grandparents in your house with a complicated telly with all the netflix and all the all the bits and whizzes and expecting them to use the remote. They need a grandchild around to get the telly working. I certainly do. And as you may have seen in the setup of the microphone an hour ago. This is rather what happened with with the afghan army that they were left with all this sort of very high highfalutin equipment that none of them could use and their rifles don't work but uh uh the artillery and the missiles and all the stuff

requires software and uh and high-tech support and and they took the americans took it with them and then the manner which they left just you, you know, turning the lights off in Bagram Air Base, not telling the Afghan army they were leaving, leaving, I believe, 6,000 vehicles, but taking the keys. This sort of thing is clearly going to undermine the morale. And it's no surprise at all that the thing fell flat on its face in a few weeks. So I've never been to Afghanistan, but I know you've been many times. Can you give me a little picture? I don't think you're going to be booking your ticket anytime soon, Joe, to be honest.

I think you missed your chance. Yeah, the ship sailed on that one, sadly. But can you give me a little picture of it between 2001 and 2021? What's it like on the street? So by the time I got there which was 2006 which is a full five years after uh the cards i've been installed and after all the stuff had gone in um already there was this incredibly uh international young uh world growing in Kabul of of kids who are at university people watching Netflix uh using cell phones taking you know on Instagram on Facebook on Twitter uh so a whole new middle

class sprung up where there'd be nothing like this before I mean there'd barely be electricity I think in in Taliban uh Afghanistan nothing had worked. There were sanctions. They were completely isolated. Now it felt very much like, you know, parts of Delhi or Karachi or Tehran, where, you know, there's a whole world of partying and social media and all the rest of it. However, the countryside was often, you know, go walk 10 miles out of Kabul

and you were more or less in exactly what had been there before 9-11. A lot of very remote settlements without roads going anywhere near them. Even in Kabul, although the Americans had poured however many trillion dollars into Afghanistan, it was all going into the pockets of contractors and their own people.

And there was very little infrastructure. I mean, the road from the airport to the diplomatic district was a shocker. It was like, you know, the very, very poorest bits of most backward bits of boondocks India on a very bad day in the monsoon. But this was the capital city, you know, that was normally having this great rush of aid pouring in. And what you got, I think, in Afghanistan was something very much like what you got in Iran in the 1970s, where you had a small elite who's, you know, of beautiful young things, playing, playing hard, drinking hard, partying, whose parents had their hands in the money, often corruptly, and were making money by various dodgy means. And then you had an increasingly resentful rural heartland

that looked on these people as traitors, as quizlings, as immoral, as un-Islamic, as corrupt and unjust. And they resented the privilege and the money and all the luxuries of the city. And those guys, if they didn't join the Taliban, they certainly didn't support the regime against the Taliban. And as we've seen at the end of the day, very few people were willing to die for Ashraf Ghani. They just gave up almost instantly in province. And that last week, we saw first Mazar, then Kandahar, then Herat, and finally Kabul fall without a shot being fired as commander after commander just did a deal with the local Taliban and handed over their weapons.

That rift you're talking about, does that map over the Popolzai and Gilzai divide, or was it worse than that? Well, it's, I mean, these tribal divides are there very importantly in the background. But what you've got basically is that the Durranis and the Popolzai are landlords, have money, have resources, therefore were part of that world, had a house in Kabul, had Netflix, had all the rest of it. Their kids were going to university, often going abroad,

while the Gilzai were the dispossessed. They were the guys who were the day labourers, the herdsmen, and they were pissed off. They were sitting in the villages watching people pass in flash cars or big land cruisers wondering why they all had the money well they had to fight hard to earn a few a few um dollars a day so you can almost say this in marxist rather than religious terms well the two go two go together. As in Iran in the 1970s, it's a potent mixture of religious conservatism, which is outraged by the decadence and corruption

of the rulers. It's a mixture of tribal factors whereby the rulers are a different tribe from you. And it's a social difference in that the rulers are richer than you and you're poor. And those three coming together, religion, tribal identity and economics, and you're displeased and resentful of the ruling authority coming together, create a potent reason why what we saw last week happened. So, Willie, there was a famous 2013 Pew poll which found that 99% of Afghans favor making Sharia the official law, 81% of Afghans favor making Sharia the official law, 81% favor corporal punishment like lashings for theft. 85% favor stoning as the punishment for adultery. And 79% favor a death penalty for leaving Islam or apostasy. Was there ever a widespread appetite for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan? Well, what there

definitely was an appetite for was for justice. Right. And that was something which was seen to be often with the Taliban, where we saw Sharia law in its brutal form, often peasants regarded it as the only way which they could get justice without having to pay for it through bribes and corruption. And so freedom and democracy are not incompatible in any way with Islamic law and religious conservatism. But where you have an elite who are seen to be publicly un-Islamic, to be decadent and corrupt, where democracy is seen to be a joke because the elections are rigged in favor of the Americans' puppet candidate, as undoubtedly happened with

Ashraf Ghani's election, with the Americans just watching on while ballots were stuffed. And where freedom meant, often, if you were a peasant, a Gilzai in the rural heartland, the freedom to starve, the freedom to be out of work, the freedom to have your house raided by Americans, or maybe a family member killed in mistaken friendly fire, like the drone strike we saw this week, then these things take a very different appearance so i i don't believe for a minute that you're dealing with sort of primeval barbarians who hate freedom in a sort of bush sense not far from it what you're dealing with is is uh a very conservative people who see the ruling dispensation as corrupt and decadent and uh and uh illegitimate both in

the sense that they're put in by foreign rulers their elections are rigged uh and uh they're behaving in the interests of foreign puppeteers rather than the real afghanistan so i think if you had a poll and said you are Afghans for freedom? Everyone would say they certainly are. Are Afghans for democracy? I suspect quite a lot would be. But if you had a poll saying, do you really believe that Ashraf Ghani is a legitimate ruler? Not many people would have said that.

Do you have a favorite poem of the Taliban? You're referring to a book called The Poetry of the Taliban, which I thought was very interesting because, you know, it's all very well to just take the position that the Taliban are terrorists and the enemy. But when you discover that young Taliban fighters are writing poetry, it immediately humanizes them. And you understand in a sense what they're fighting for. So I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the,

the poetry in the, in this book, the poetry of the Taliban is ever going to be winning the next Nobel prize for literature. But it's a very interesting insight into what these guys think, what they fear, what they're fighting for. And I thought it was an interesting book. There have been some lampoons on Twitter lately

about this book, but no, I think it's an interesting text. Has the Taliban changed since they were last in power? Too early to say, too early say but but uh in many important respects clearly not there's still a movement which is deeply Ultra conservative which is in its own view patriotically Afghan and and doesn't want foreign interference uh and which does not want women in senior public positions. So there are clearly some changes. I mean, they're much more PR savvy than they were. Their spokesmen are clearly aware of what the West wants to hear

in a way they weren't before. They clearly think that they can continue to do deals with the West in the way they have at Doha and the way they basically talk the Americans out of Afghanistan. They promised not to attack American troops, and they've kept that promise by and large, which has allowed them to get where they are. And they are clearly better organized and less fractured than we believe them to be. It was a remarkable campaign that they waged against that government. And it was a very coherent one. And the speed and the efficiency of their taking of each one of those major cities,

Mazar, Herat, Kandahar then finally kabul uh wasn't a very militarily a very impressive performance um which no one really thought that they were capable of uh certainly at that speed so they're they're more pr savvy they're more centrally organized is their philosophy fundamentally different absolutely not uh will they allow women to work? Probably yes in some inferior positions. Will they be vengeful to the previous employees and soldiers of the previous regime despite their words?

Yes, apparently there are endless accounts now of Taliban hunting down judges and soldiers and intelligence people. I mean, this is very bad news. There's no question that, you know, this is bad news for Afghans. It's very, very bad news there's no question that uh you know this is bad news for afghans it's very very bad news for afghan women it's bad news for america which is now seen to have betrayed its uh broken all its promises both to the afghans and to its allies it's bad for nato because america's just behaved unilaterally and didn't even bother trying to take their allies with them.

It's bad news for India, which has lost a major regional ally. The only people that have done well out of it are Pakistan, who armed, trained and sheltered the Taliban, while at the same time managing to receive millions of dollars of american aid which is rather a brilliant um uh if if uh entirely uh dishonest and uh treacherous uh way to behave but nonetheless successful and it's been very good for china uh which is now the principal foreign interlocutor with the taliban taliban declared china to be old and trusted friends last week. And already the Meslai Nak copper mine is beginning to operate and major trade deals being done.

So when you have people on the media talking about how the international community must do this or must do that, they're not really talking about a coherent unit because China is playing its own game very successfully in um in afghanistan i come back to return of a king which we were talking about earlier uh my book and the last words written in 2012 are a quote a tribal elder and he says last month some american officers called me to a hotel in jalanabad said the elder one of them asked me why do you hate us? And I replied, because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children.

We cannot accept this. We will fight back and we will break your teeth. And when your teeth are broken, you will leave just as the British have left before you. It's just a matter of time. And the next guy, his friend, said these are the last days of the Americans. Next, it will be China. Wow. Willie, last question.

Since 2001, the US government spent $2 trillion, that is $2,000 billion or $300 million per day every day for two decades in Afghanistan and in return got an ignominious retreat and a regime that dissolved like a dandelion in a summer's breeze. What should we infer from that juxtaposition? Well, there are many, many lessons to be learned from this. But just, you know, it's almost now will be held up,

I'm sure, in all classes in the future as a textbook example of how not to intervene in foreign affairs. Everything went wrong. And you're right, it's an astonishing failure considering the resources poured in. I saw a picture yesterday of what was described as Taliban special forces. What were they wearing? They were wearing American military uniform with night vision goggles,

sunglasses, shades, and all the rest of it. And this is the Bader regiment, the Afghan suicide squads, who are now dressed in US special forces kit with helicopters, Blackhawks, night vision, sniper rifles, and all the equipment they've ever dreamt of. I mean, it is the most incredible cock up. It's certainly the biggest disaster in American foreign policies. It's Vietnam. And I don't think we've even begun to take in the scale of how badly this is going to affect not just America, but India, NATO, the West. And I'm sure historians will see it as a major moment when America went into retreat and the dominance of China in geopolitics became self-evident and undeniable.

William Dalrymple, thank you again for joining me. Thank you, Joe. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For links, show notes, and the transcript, head to my website, thejspod.com. Until next time, thank you again for listening. Take care.

Ciao.