The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 32

Episode Date: August 13, 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 Members podcast focuses on three topics in the news this week. The Taliban shock the world with their rapid military takeover of Afghanistan – What explains the Taliban's ability to overthrow the Afghan government in multiple regional capitals? How is this crisis likely the play out in the coming weeks. Vaccine mandates become an increasing part of America's COVID response while Canada lags on making vaccinations mandatory – Why is Canada a laggard on vaccine mandates? With kids unvaccinated is it time for to make vaccination mandatory for all teachers? And, a Canadian federal election looks likely to called this Sunday – What are the issues that will dominate the campaign? How can the opposition parties challenge the incumbent Liberal government with so much of the election taking place before Labour Day? 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.wmunkdebates.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. Welcome to this, our regular Monk members podcast. is our weekly program where we dive into the big issues and ideas in the news in the last week, hopefully leave you with some new analysis and insights.

Our guest on all these programs is Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally acclaimed. Scholar and author, Janice, terrific to be in dialogue with you again this week. Great to be back and again. What an interesting week. Where are the dog days of summer, Roger? I can't find them. If this is August, imagine what September and October are going to be like.

Janice, one of your many expertise as a kind of commentator on international relations and foreign affairs is Afghanistan. And more broadly, the Middle East, you wrote a best-selling book on Afghanistan and Canada's mission there. So I really want to get your reaction to this incredible implosion. I think that's the only way to characterize. characterize it that we're seeing right now of the Afghan military, the government, the Taliban seizing province after province, and more importantly, strategic city after strategic city, Kandahar has fallen. That was the home, Jan, as you know better than most, of Canada's provincial reconstruction team. Our military forces were deployed in Kandahar for over a decade to support

peace and reconstruction. What has come to pass and why is this happening so quickly? I am stunned by how fast it is happening, Roger. I expected this to happen, but I am frankly astonished by how fast it is happening. I would not have expected this kind of really implosion collapse, as you described it. So, Underneath all the rhetoric that we've been hearing, the Afghan government was able to maintain itself in power, relying just on two kinds of force. One is the ear support that it got from the coalition. And secondly, the commandos, the special forces that the Afghan forces had and were largely trained by the United States and its allies. You look at this picture, and let's just stop for a minute, because I think there are two big stories coming out of Afghanistan this week.

Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on training an Afghan police force and an Afghan regular army that were unable to sustain themselves after 20 years of investment. Now, that really says to everybody involved, you have to take a step. back and look at this and try to understand why it happened. You know, continuing to do what you do when it fails over and over and over is just, frankly, not smart. And that's what we've been doing. There wasn't a senior military officer in this country who had experience in Afghanistan who did not know that these forces were unable to defend, much less the rural district.

but the provincial capitals, which fell like dominoes this week. And I think there's a moment of reckoning. When we look more, you know, in a more strategic way, what we do with our development dollars and what we do with our military assistance, if we don't put this experiment under the microscope and start with an absolute recognition of failure here, not dressed up in other language,

and do the kind of forensic investigation, because we cannot do this again, and we cannot do this again, frankly, to another society, because that's what we did. Well, Janice, here, you know, for the sake of our soldiers who served, many of whom, unfortunately, were wounded, some who died.

Plus, what's happening, the tragedy right now, listening to the BBC this week, is just heart-wrenching to hear these Afghan women, clearly educated, passionate about their civil society, terrified now that the occupation of their cities by the Taliban, forcing them to go to the market, escorted by men, fully veiled. You know, this isn't simply, you know, the Viet Cong retaking Vietnam. This is a theocratic kind of religious version, almost, of the Kimmer Rouge.

And we know how well that ended in Cambodia. So you're right. I think we need some kind of equivalent of the 9-11 commission here in Canada to say, what did we get for the billions spent for the lives lost? Let's bring the major decision makers forward, Paul Martin, Rick Hillier, Bill Graham. Let's have these people answer some questions. Let's get the heads of the Canadian military, former MP, Andrew Leslie, who, you know, who served as government whip leader, but was, you know, head of the land forces. These people need to, it's not about putting them on a show trial, but as you say, it's about having an important national conversation and debate about what went wrong and why, as you say so precisely not just simply for ourselves and our future military and foreign aid strategy, but as some kind of acknowledgement of the extent to which we have left these Afghan people who did buy into our vision of a

of a more, maybe not democratic, but a more pluralistic society who are now facing the brutality of possibly and possibly death as a result of this Taliban takeover. I mean, they will be at the front lines because they declared themselves. They led in building better institutions for Afghan women. They led in a push for higher education. All these people, of course, will be the primary targets. Let me make a second point, Roger, which hasn't gotten the attention as people watch in a horrified amazement at what is happening.

If you saw the map of Afghanistan, the provincial capitals that fell first, where the dominoes really fell this week, was in northern Afghanistan. Now, if you think back 20 years, the Taliban never succeeded in really conquering northern Afghanistan during the area. So these areas were not subjected to Taliban rule. And in fact, the original US strategy was to rely on warlords who had managed to carve out autonomous areas in northern Afghanistan. They supported these.

And I'm not holding them up as heroes, but they were separate and distinct from the Taliban ruled areas. The Taliban moved their first. this week. And it's really interesting why they did so to remove any possibility this time really of resistance. That's what they did. And that tells you, I mean, you don't have one more minute. The son of General Dostom, who was... Lovely guy. Yeah, a lovely guy. Yeah, a real piece of work. Yeah, real, you know, there isn't a human rights advocate in the world who doesn't rule the rights in horror when they hear about him. But he is, you know, the area that he controls with a facsimile

of a militia fell first. And there's no doubt that the Taliban did that to prevent the resistance and to avoid what they experienced last time, which was a brutal civil war. So there is no resistance, none this time, not only by Western forces, but by Afghan forces. What do you think of the theory that's circulating that this collapse is just too fast, too furious. People are starting to point to two potentially exogenous factors. One, Pakistan. Pakistan has always wanted to control Afghanistan. Some people are saying that there are, there's a level of sophistication and a size and scale to the Taliban surge in terms of personnel and weapons that suggests Pakistan's direct involvement. You know, you'd have to wonder why after 20 years we hadn't kind of solve the

problem of Pakistan's meddling in Afghanistan, but we didn't. The United States continued, you know, throughout the war to transfer billions of dollars of military and financial aid to Pakistan that went in, disappeared into the coffers of the ISI, their feared security force. All of this, Janus, again, just looks like another major. part of the fumble here, that the regional powers are circling the corpse of Afghanistan, and Pakistan may be in there plunging the knife into the heart of any hope of a pluralistic future for this war-ravaged nation. So let's talk about two regional neighbors who are deeply, deeply involved. So with respect to Pakistan, Chris Alexander, our first ambassador in Kabul

has talked over and over and over and said repeatedly this war is not winnable as long as the supply line from Pakistan into Afghanistan to the Taliban continues. Pakistan offered headquarters, hiding places, support, intelligence to the town. Hospitals, training facilities, money, weapons. Everything, everything. And this is continued for 20 years. Now, when you say, why didn't we stop? it because the overwhelming strategic interest of Pakistan was to do so. This is for them, do or die, whereas for the West, it's just one more problem as you look around the world. And that's, I think, part of the recognition. We had no capacity to stop that.

Never did. So railing against it and saying, well, do something about them, cut off aid, nobody was going to do that to a government that had nuclear. that had nuclear weapons, who is a challenge for everybody. It was a failed state, arguably, torturing and killing its own journalists. With nuclear weapons, don't forget that, with nuclear weapons.

So nobody was willing to do that and there is a government that is willing to do that. Let's talk about on the other side of the border now, Iran. This is a nightmare for Iran what's happening. They, in fact, had a quiescent government for 20 years. Iran, let's just understand, and nobody talks about this, Iran as a result of Western strategy, got 20 years of relative peace along its borders. The United States took out Saddam Hussein, which was Iran's biggest nightmare.

And then, of course, on the other side, they took out the Taliban, which for the Iranians is a huge problem and put in place a government that clearly had no interest. If Pakistani intelligence is celebrating this week, which it is, the Iranian government is looking at this with absolute horror. They now have a problem back on their borders. A Sunni state funded by their Gulf opponents. Correct. It sounds like Janus, according to news reports, a lot of foreign fighters back on the field. Golf state, you know, Uzbek's.

Tajik's, you know, this is starting to look like pre-9-11 Afghanistan all over again. Well, and we haven't talked about the role of Saudi Arabia. And again, tracking the money and tracking the support is a big part of the story. But the Saudis have an overwhelming interest in this happening now because of the problem it creates for Iran. So if we understand how Afghanistan becomes the focal point for all these regional neighbors who will play a regional power struggles in the country, you have to sit back and say, what did Canadians really understand about all that? Right? Before we move on to our next topic, let's just talk briefly about what the primary external actor here may or may not do, which is the Biden administration. I mean,

I think there is some legitimate criticism of the extent to which the Biden administration not only rapidly pulled out forces, but it pulled out all the contractors. You know, people are saying HR McMaster, a former monk debater, really criticized the Biden administration, saying, okay, you may have had a vision of no forces in Afghanistan, but to do that over a matter of 60 or 90 days is partly responsible for the speed and acceleration of this implosion. What I took as a really interesting little snippet of news today is, guess what? The Biden administration is sending 3,000 troops, that magical number, the number that was left in Afghanistan before they decided to withdraw.

extensively to, quote, help evacuate U.S. embassy and other staff in the country. I would be really surprised, Janice, if those 3,000 troops maybe don't end up leaving the Kabul airport too quickly. Yeah. You know, is it more than just coincidence that that number matches up exactly with their pre-force deployment before their implosion of the Afghan military? Look, let's just talk about two things here. First of all, Joe Biden. is determined to get out. He's wanted to get out ever since Barack Obama became president,

made a huge effort as part of the Obama administration lost to Barack Obama. He was a guy that convinced Obama to get out of Iraq, and that worked out so well with the rise of the Islamic State. I mean, Joe Biden is just a kind of drive-by shooting when it comes to the Middle East

and the governance of these countries. So he's not going back in. He's not going back in. But what they do not want, they do not want pictures of the kind that we had in Saigon. When you had people trapped on the roof of the embassy and helicopters were flying in to evacuate people and people were hanging on, as you remember, to the helicopters. So they are now going to move in and aggressively take everybody out of the embassy. And anywhere else, Americans are?

They've now just told Americans to leave the country. And that's all about managing the PR of this. But let's talk about one other factor that has changed the game inside the United States. Trump supports this. Trump started this. We have a Republican Party. To say it's split is to give the dissident Republicans too much credit, although it's encouraging when you see the handful of Republican senators.

but by and large, these people, Donald Trump still owns that party. There's no domestic opposition. The Democrats want this and the Republicans want this. This is not going to become an issue in the midterms or in any other foreseeable context over the next year in U.S. politics because we have a bipartisan consensus on this inside the United States. So what McMaster says doesn't matter. Because allies in Taiwan should really take note.

They should. They should. Because this America today is a kind of straw man when it comes up for, when it comes to standing up for its so-called, you know, liberal international order that it was proudly the architect of after World War II. I have to make one quick comment on that one before we move on. What people will tell you in Washington is, no, we're doing this because we are moving away from interests that are not core.

We're going to define what's core. That's Asia. And we're going to focus our resources. So it's not that we're cutting and running from the world as a whole. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, the Chinese, I think the Russians and others are just laughing up their sleeves. 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. monk debates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our monk members podcast. Thanks for listening.