The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 28

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Member's podcast explore three big issues in the news week: After two decades all foreign troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan as Taliban forces surge toward Kabul – What did we learn from this war? What do we owe the people of Afghanistan including its women and girls? And, what is likely fate now of this perpetually war torn country?; Mass civil unrests grips Cuba and South Africa – Why are the protestors on the street? How is food inflation playing into increasing social instability in the developing world?; and the delta variant surges across Asia, Europe and the United States – How concerned should we be about this variant? To what extent could it imperil the reopening of our economies and return to something approaching “normal” this autumn? We discuss it all. To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, the host and moderator of the Monk Debates. to this, our regular Friday monk members podcast. This is our program where we dive into the big issues and ideas and people in the news in the last week. And we hopefully leave you with some new analysis and insights as a result. And as our guide on each of these programs, we're exceedingly

fortunate to have Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and internationally acclaimed author, scholar, and she's all ours for the next half hour. Janice, great to have this opportunity to be in dialogue with you. And what a treat to be with you, Rudyard, and all the Monk members. I want to pull back a little bit on our first topic. In the last week or so, we have acknowledged a milestone in the conflict in Afghanistan. Two decades now, finally, Joe Biden, President Joe Biden, officially announcing the complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops. Janice, as a scholar, as an academic, and as a Canadian, this is a war that you followed closely. You co-wrote a book about it.

I'm just wondering what your reflections are as we confront this turning point, the complete withdrawal of foreign forces, the surge of the Taliban across Afghanistan, and a country and a people once again in peril. Richard, I have been watching events unfold in Afghanistan with sorrow, frankly. And I think of the parents of the 158 Canadian soldiers who died in this war, the veterans who are at home in Canada. many injured in that war and facing lifelong adjustments. And I've heard from some of them, and they describe their feelings of sadness about this and ask the big question, why? Why did we do this and was it worth it?

This ending was a story foretold. Certainly when we wrote our book, we predicted that unless some of the critical conditions that are changed, we would be seeing what we are seeing now. So we have to ask ourselves, how do we make these decisions? Didn't we know the end? And the answer in some really important reason, Roger, and it's a cautionary tale for the future. No, we didn't. And part of the reason we didn't know, nobody at our senior levels knew anything about Afghanistan.

Nobody, right? There were no Pashtun speaking officers at the desk. We, you know, in a last minute flurry, I remember one of our defense ministers meeting in a cafe in a London hotel with an Afghan ex-execkel. that his staff pulled out for him. So there was absolutely no knowledge of the political conditions. Yeah, the military had knowledge of the tactical conditions on the ground. And even they were shocked when they got there. We didn't know anything, frankly. Janice, was there a more profound mistake? And maybe in a mistake, this is where I get a little bit angry. I feel this lack of accountability. The people prosecuted this war, frankly, abysmally. And as you say,

tragically caused the death of 158 Canadians, Americans far worse, thousands were dead over a trillion dollars spent. And what did we do? We made a fateful pivot in 2002 after initially pushing the Taliban out of Kabul. We decided, then Prime Minister Martin, Rick Hillier was was in on this, too, to nation-built. Instead of creating security, which we could have done in terms of neutralizing the threat of al-Qaeda in the South, using a light footprint, you know, a special forces, drone. I mean, it's horrible stuff, but it's frankly how we prosecuted the war now in Syria. And largely, it's how we defeated ISIS in Iraq.

We did something very different. we decided that we were going to effectively pursue a kind of World War II, you know, Marshall Plan type approach to Afghanistan and completely rebuild this society. Guess what? In our own image. As democratic, as tolerant, as open. And you can say that those were lofty and good ideas, but they were, as you say, so deeply out of sync with the reality and the culture and the dynamics of Afghanistan, but no one, Janice, no one has really been made accountable for that hubris, that kind of tragedy that we entered into in 2002 that leads to this war ending. Two decades later, abandoning the Afghan people, abandoning Afghan women, children,

intellectuals to probably a vicious and brutal fight for the country over the next coming months with the Taliban. I agree with you, Roger. And, you know, unpacking the issues here, we go from the fact that we still have in Afghanistan, Afghan interpreters, Afghan enablers for the Canadian forces. We've gotten some out, but not enough. And now those people will be in the front of the line of sight for Taliban that take over cities and it's urgent that we get these people at. The second group, and this is a more complicated

issue, and it's partly how Canadians were convinced to support this, is Afghan women. Let's just call a spade of spade here. The treatment of women in Afghanistan is appalling. Appalling. It is also deeply part of the culture, and it takes generations to transform culture. And Canadian soldiers coming in there, along with, you know, 10-X development workers is not going to get that done, frankly. And if anything, and this is hard to say, it provoked a counterreaction. Who are all these foreigners telling us what to do? And your word is right, Roger. It's hubris.

It's an exaggeration of our own influence. Now, what does that tell us about the future? because we can't undo this mistake, unfortunately, but it does tell us something about the future. There is still a visceral impulse among many Canadians. And we're going to talk about a few of these later. When we see demonstrations in the streets, people, courageous people saying,

we want freedom, we want the end of authoritarian governments in our country. There is a visceral impulse. Help, go in, get involved, send forces. That's what we take. should be taking away from this. You cannot change society through the barrel of a gun, especially if you're not local. If you're Mount Siegongan as guerrillas

and you're local on the ground, then you know the terrain and you swim in a sea of support, that's one thing. Foreigners coming in from outside cannot do this. And we have to take a deep breath and be much more realistic, much more careful. Look, I think Joe Biden, touched a nerve in the American public.

And actually Trump did it first. He said enough of the forever wars that accomplished nothing. And you know, you saw Biden as... So, Janice, I agree with this. But, you know, let's go back and let's name some names because we had people here in Canada, certainly in the United States, who cheerleaded this war. I'm not talking Iraq.

I'm talking Afghanistan. Yeah. I'm talking people like Rick Hillier, who then subsequently, went on to get a $200,000 a year job with the Ontario government to do a pretty middling job on vaccine rollout. So it's like these people keep getting second acts despite, despite I think being at the epicenter of one of the greatest public policy failures of our generation. And no one is accountable. Everyone skates. Everyone alides. That, you know, you can criticize the Americans. but they have things like the 9-11 commission. They have impeachment trials.

They bring these issues to the National Four and they subject them to rigorous inquiry and debate. And here in Canada, you wouldn't even know reading our press that this war is ending. You wouldn't even know that the people who are involved in these, no one's going back and asking them, what do you think? They're all hunkered down completely skating on this.

And I just think that's wrong. Well, listen, again, Rudyard, I agree. Rick Hillier, who was the chief of the defense staff at the time when the critical decision was made to escalate our commitment and to take on what was clearly, let me back up for a minute. Before we get to Rick Hillier, our intelligence agencies failed us. They did not predict the resurgence of the Taliban, right? We were getting really poor intelligence because we had no capabilities on the ground. Well, then don't get involved if your capabilities are that poor. But secondly, and here's the critical moment in the whole story.

And you're right. Rick Hillier did a presentation to Prime Minister Paul Martin, who was dubious, who was skeptical about this. And the presentation was, as Rick Hillier can be, fluid, you know, comprehensive. But it did not identify the risk that you and I are talking about, that Canadian forces would become mired in an unwinnable war that would go on and on. In fact, he promised tactical victory. I think it would be really interesting to do an interview with General Hillier right now and say, looking back, what went right, what went wrong?

And if you were, if you knew then what you knew now, what would your advice? have been to the Canadian Prime Minister. Now, let's put this in that larger context, one more, because there's so much to learn from this, Roger, and I'm so glad you and I are talking about it. Let's put this in the context. Prime Minister of Craig Chan's refusal to join the American War against Iraq.

And then a kind of really deep nervousness breaks out in our established senior civil servants and politicians. Oh my goodness, we are annoying the United States. We've got to stand up and do something. And Afghanistan was just as much about our relationship with the United States. And this is a perennial problem for Canada. We're seeing it play out right now on China. It is, we struggle with this as a small country living next door to the United States. I don't think we can look back on this without saying when do we say no to the United States? We can't do it 100% of the time.

When do we say yes to the United States? How do we think about our relationship with the United States in the future? Because that is a big driver here of what happened. Just to give our listeners a heads up, we've got a terrific podcast debate coming out next week on the end of the Afghanistan war and whether this is a tactical and strategic blunder or not to terrific ex-vest. veterans debating this point. And one, Janice made an interesting, interesting, just cultural, cultural kind of data point that as that war began in 2001, the number one show on U.S.

television was the World War II, hagiography, the band of brothers. And what this, what Elliot Ackerman, the best-selling author, fictionalist and former Special Forces, U.S. Special Forces member that we had participating in this debate mentioned is that that's where America's, you know, psychology was going into Afghanistan. It was the humiliation of Vietnam will never happen again. The band of brothers is playing, you know, we can do this again. It's, you know, World War II, it's America victorious. It's America just years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know, we are the hyperpower. This is within our control and command. Get Ready World. watch us. That's the big, I think that's the big takeaway from all this, right? Your

modesty, modesty about how much we can change somebody else's country and somebody else's culture. Yes, Afghan women, and I've met so many of them. You know, when we went into Afghanistan, Afghan girls were not allowed to go to school. And so you go out, you say to Canadians, oh, we're doing this for Afghan women. Well, the truth is we were not. And we now have a generation of Afghan women who have been educated in universities, who are superstars, who are professionals of the highest order. And people who know them, of course, are deeply worried about their future, but we can't from this side all the way where we are. We can't protect these people. And in a sense, there's a deep unfairness, Roger, when we make promises to people like,

that, that we will be there, that we will protect them in the future. We can't. Now, there's one other piece, and as you talked about, the geography of the brothers in, you know, on American TV, that's one thing this war did for the Canadian Armed Forces. Canadians have never had a strong, in recent, in, you know, recent past, not really since World War II. We haven't had a highway of heroes. We haven't had the forces as part of our public culture. We did not have members of the forces, you know, appearing in baseball stadiums at the beginning

and holding the flag before a game starts. All that changed as a result of the Afghan war. And Canadian forces became part of our public culture. Is that worth the cost that we paid? I don't think so but I know frankly members of the forces who think that it is.

That's a big and that's a bigger problem. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members only podcast. To access the rest of the episode consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www monkdebates.com.

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