The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 33

Episode Date: August 20, 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 the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan. What should Western powers do next to have a chance to get their citizens and Afghan allies out of Kabul? Is there a possible deal that could be reached with the Taliban to avert bloodshed? And what does this crisis say about the state and future of America's engagement with the world? Specifically, what lessons should we be drawing from a failed twenty year war and botched evacuation? We wrap the show with details on our live show taping in September. 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.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. our regular monk members podcast every Friday. We dig into the big issues in the news with an international focus trying to think about the events and trends that have shaped the last week and that we all need to kind of keep an eye on to understand this extraordinary moment that we're in. We're exceedingly

fortunate on these programs to have as our regular guide and guest, Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally acclaimed author and scholar, and she's all ours for the next 30 minutes. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you today. Absolutely. And I think what we're going to do this week, Janice, is spend the entire program focusing on Afghanistan. As you said, it's everything that everybody is talking about at this moment. And then at the end of the program, if you stick with us, we've got some details, some specifics on how You can participate in the first ever live taping of the Monk members podcast. You can meet Janice and we'll tape that show in September.

Details in the final segment. So stick with us. But Janice, I want to kick off just with a broad question. I mean, you have throughout your career regularly advised ministers, prime ministers, heads of state on global foreign affairs and security issues. So what is your advice at this moment? Because the BBC and others have been reporting the last 24 hours scenes of utter chaos at the Kabul International Airport. They're also reporting the Taliban going door to door with detailed intelligence dossiers seeking out and some say hunting down.

So-called Afghan collaborators with the quote foreign forces. And finally, we've heard just recently. that both the French and British have sent troops into Kabul out of the airport, into the city, to extract a combination of nationals, Afghan workers at their embassies. This is a very, very fluid situation. I want your advice. What is your advice to leaders about how they manage this crisis from here? Let me start by saying, Redyard, if it were easy, they would have already done it. So you're right to talk about the risks. Secondly, we are to use very advanced technical language in a mess that should not have happened this way. That goes without saying. Thirdly, the problem everyone is

facing is that they have thousands of people. Some citizens, Britain, France, Canada, the United States hold up and unable to reach the airport, but they're a small number. The larger numbers are interpreters, fixers, people who worked for these countries for 10 years. And we are talking about thousands of people who are hiding in the city and communicating by text message with networks here in Canada. I know them here, you know, in Britain, in the United States. frantic messages for help to set the scene for everybody. What is going on on the ground? We have somewhat less than 6,000 troops.

We don't know exactly that have secured the interior of the airport, the runway area. But they have not secured the perimeter of the airport, which is where Taliban soldiers are stationed, and they are firing on crowds that are still trying, desperately to get into that airport in order to get a flight. And we saw this week flights take off from Kabul airport. British flights, French fights, Spanish flights, almost empty because people are unable to get to the airport. Well, supposedly the Taliban are also going through those crowds

looking for these so-called collaborators. So I mean, it just seems there's no safe passage here out of Kabul to the airport to these people that we all acknowledge that we owe something to. Absolutely. And time is running out. Time is running out not because the U.S. is not going to stay past the 31st, but because the Taliban have these lists. Of course they have these lists. So my own personal advice, there's leverage right now.

There's leverage right now that the United States and others have over the Taliban because the Taliban have no money. They are broke. All the assets are frozen in Western banks. There is a huge humanitarian crisis looming. People in the cities are running out of food. There are only two trading posts open between Afghanistan and Pakistan right now.

It will be calamitous, frankly, Roger. We are going to see awful, awful things happen over the next few weeks unless the Taliban can get food and assistance in. So challenge now. Do, in fact, what the United States is doing, send highly armed squads of people into the city in an effort to get these people out in a secure way, understanding that there's a risk, that there will be a confrontation with the Taliban. But when you're in a situation like this, you're effectively have no more options

as a way this is structured. You send your special forces in to extract people that are on those lists. You know, that's interesting because I listened to H.R. McMaster last night, a former monk debater, former national security advisor, who resigned from the Trump administration before these fateful decisions were made

in terms of a so-called peace deal with the Taliban in Doha. His advice was very similar, maybe put more bluntly as a military officer, of basically you push with the first Marine division into Kabul. You create a codon sanitaire from the airport into the heart of the city. And you say to the Taliban, if you attack our troops, if you interfere with this safety passage, we are going to come down on you like a proverbial ton of brick. So is that what we're going to hear from the Biden administration over the next few days,

Janice, it seems as if they do not want to contemplate something along these lines. But without doing that, how do you ever get these people out? You don't. The Taliban have surrounded the airport. They are going through the clouds. They have combing the files of the interior ministry, which they now have access to. They know everybody who is spying, who is acting as a commando, who is in the police forces, the security forces. I just don't see how the Biden administration doesn't escalate from here.

Right. And I think what you've described is accurate. They know everything and they are going through the cloud, which is another story here and getting all the names and the identities of people. And even text messaging, which is a little safer, but not safe enough under these circumstances, is dangerous. So we saw one, we saw special forces, My sense is the Biden administration, this has been a terrible week for them.

They are divided. They are confused. They are operationally challenged, frankly, or this would not have happened. And what you described and what General McMaster described would require really crisp executive decision-making, which I fear, Rudyard, the Biden administration has demonstrated a total inability. to make. But they are hemorrhaging politically too. And as these desperate messages come out, the damage that is being done to the president and the people around him may in fact lead to a version of what we're talking. There may not be a push into the city as you've described

with a fair number of forces. But I do believe there will be an escalation of special forces in order to get people out. devil's advocate here and say, look, the counter argument is that you push into Kabul and you're looking at Fallujah all over again. You're looking at brutal urban warfare against a motivated, highly armed opponent that has your military equipment and is going to use it against you with a civilian population numbering five, six million. I mean, this is multiple sizes bigger than Fallujah. That didn't work out so well in Iraq. I mean, is this really an option, Janice? Or is it just time to say that this has been botched?

It's a debacle. We're not going to fix this. There's no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. We just have to get out. And unfortunately, these people will suffer. They will be killed. We will see it on our social media feeds. But this is the price of failed execution in terms of a military withdrawal from a 20-year

conflict. I am so deeply critical of the execution of this and of our own failures in Canada as well to anticipate, although we are wholly dependent always on the United States to get on the ground in these kinds of situations. But I do think there is an option worth doubling down on right now, which is special forces that go in, go out, go in, go out. And it is a, dare to the Taliban then, right? The Taliban has an overwhelming... But Janice, it just takes one young Taliban soldier to, you know, to fire off a shot or somebody acting outside of the chain of command and who knows how tight that chain of

command is on part of the Taliban to take a hostage or two. Yeah. And boy, this situation goes into an American nightmare of, you know, I think of the Iran hostage situation. I mean, I think of all the hostages that have been taken in Syria and elsewhere. I mean, this, we are on a knife's edge right now. Yeah. There is no good option here, Richard. There's no good option. But I think the pressure building on the administration as the Americans watch this, and it's interesting, you're beginning to get now criticism in the United States, both from the Democrats and the Republicans of a botched execution of the worst kind.

And I don't know how long the administration can sustain that without some sort of response. But again, I worry who's running the show when we saw what we saw. I was in an exchange this morning with somebody and they were asking me about the intelligence. how could the intelligence have gotten it so badly wrong in the United States? And my answer is which intelligence? And that's part of the problem, right? So you have the CIA, you have military intelligence, you have diplomats that are sent a cable warning of exactly this two weeks ago.

But there was not really a coordinated, timely warning that said, if you do this in this way, this is what you're going to face. And so what we're seeing now is depending on who you are, there's cherry picking, right? So furious State Department people are leaking tables, warning of this, whereas the CIA is saying, no, look, we really did not predict, and I don't believe they did in a coordinated estimate. Gina Haspel, the head of the CIA, should be walking the plank on this. Well, she was the one who says? yesterday. We did not predict this.

Well, well done. Yeah, and she went beyond it, right there. How many tens of billions of dollars in that budget? Well, she said something else, which actually, when we have more time, is worth talking about, we can never make this kind of point prediction. That's not what intelligence does. And she's not wrong about that. But there's no excuse for what we're watching.

final serious. Just to pick up on your first idea. Is there, is this the moment just to, okay, put aside these, these understandable qualms we have this moment to recognize this government, to treat it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, is it the moment to set that aside and say the Taliban, let's make a deal. We will establish diplomatic relations to you. We will unfreeze, I believe the monetary, the IMF has a $400 million fund. I mean, again, this is wild to think you're going to be transferring half a billion dollars to the Taliban who have foreign fighters, long-time partnerships with al-Qaeda and others. But in a sense, Jed, just to be honest about this, isn't the Taliban really driving the bus here? They control Kabul. They control the fate of the detainees.

They control the fate of the thousands of Westerners, our fellow citizens who are in Kabul. Let's just kind of be honest here. let's do a deal. It hurts. I know. It makes us feel humiliated, but we lost. We lost this war. We're the losers. Yep. I think it's very important. We just say that all of it struckly. We lost. They won. And let's start from there, because that is the brute fact that we're seeing on the ground. I don't think, you know, there's half a billion dollars, the International Monetary Fund. All the assets of the bank of Afghanistan, many, many of them are in the United States. Yeah, gold bars in the hundreds of millions. Which are all frozen.

So I don't think you go all the way, Roger, but they're desperate. They're going to run out of food in another week. There's not enough coming in. That's a negotiation you do with the Taliban, and you keep your demands very limited. We want these 5,000 people out of the city. And our guys are going in to get them, and you leave them alone. And then we release this, that, and the other thing. Look, let me tell you, the Taliban only got to where they are

because they made those deals over the last 10 days. They went to the governors of northern provinces, and they said, we're coming in. And they worked through the tribal elders, and they said, we're coming in. Now, either you surrender, and we will make sure that all of your people, live and nobody's hunted down and there's no killing or we're going to fight and all of that is going to happen. And they honored those deals, Roger, over the last 10 days. So far. So far. There's no reason not to try the same strategy now. Let me just shift to one of the risk. Yeah, no, let's take a quick break and then I want to come back and I want to talk with you about

what does this mean bigger picture? What are the lessons? Because, you know, we just, I think it's important. You just said it. We lost. They won a small group of guerrillas, well, maybe not so small, defeated the world's largest military force in history. So let's talk about what that means after this break with the lessons that we need to draw from this debacle, in fact, are back in a moment. 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 a available at www.wunkdebates.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.