The New Yorker Radio Hour - Dexter Filkins on the Fall of Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Dexter Filkins covered the American invasion of Afghanistan when he was a reporter for the New York Times, and has continued to report on conflicts in the region for The New Yorker. Filkins’s best-seller from 2008 carried the resonant title “The Forever War.” Thirteen years after the book’s publication, the forever war is over, but its end has been the chaotic worst-case scenario that many feared. Filkins talks with David Remnick about whether it had to go this way, and whether twenty years of war changed America more than it did Afghanistan. Plus, The New Yorker’s puzzles editor puts David Remnick and Naomi Fry through a couple of rounds of the new online quiz, Name Drop. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Staff writer Dexter Filkins has covered the war in Afghanistan for a very long time. First when he was a reporter for the New York Times and then more recently for the New Yorker. His 2008 bestseller carried the resonant title, The Forever War. And now with the American withdrawal and the return to power of the Taliban, the Forever War seems to be coming to a chaos. and ominous end. I spoke with Dexter Filkins last week. Now, Dexter, we are watching the Taliban

retake complete control of Afghanistan after 20 years of American presence and occupation. As someone who started reporting on this country late in the 1990s and you were there even before I know, how did this happen? Wow. I mean, I have to say I never quite imagined it that the day would actually come. I always thought they'd kick the can down the road, you know, another decade. I think fundamentally, from the very beginning, there were two contradictions, fatal contradictions in the American project. And I think one was we made friends. Our chief friends were the warlords. And they set up the government. It was kind of a government sanctified by elections, but basically it became a criminal state that

trade on the Afghans and stole the American money and came to be really the greatest driver of Taliban recruitment. I think the other fatal contradiction is Pakistan. It was supposed to be our friend and ally. That's the country through which we sent the bulk of our supplies. We paid dearly for that privilege. But at the same time, Pakistan harbored the leadership. They knew where they were at all times. They allowed training camps. They allowed the Taliban to plan attacks. The Taliban basically had a sanctuary. And so it's hard to win a war when your enemy can just run across the border and hide. And I think those were the two things that were too big for the United States and the United States back government there to really

to kind of overcome. There's a number of people at the New Yorker, like at any media organization, who have relationships, close relationships built over the years with translators, drivers, fixers, their families. They seem to have been abandoned. I'd love to know, as you're looking at the images of chaos and worse in Kabul this week and all over the country, and as the government collapsed, people swarming the airports desperate to escape, how you feel emotionally and what your concerns are. It's just wrenching. It's horrible. I do. I know so many Afghans, and most of them I know through working with them, and most of them are still there. And I've been getting emails and phone calls from them all day long, every day for the past week.

What are they saying? Help me. Get me out. What can I do? some of them are women and we're trying. It is indeed chaos there. And so there is allegedly a formal structure that the U.S. government set up, a special immigrant visa program. But I don't know anybody that got out. I don't know anyone. And, you know, the White House claims that there's a couple of thousand Afghans that they've pulled out, but I don't know who they are. and it doesn't, if it's only 2000, it doesn't begin to touch the number of Afghans who risk their lives for the United States and who are still there. How in the hell could that not have been anticipated? How is it possible that any government, of any good sense, putting aside so many other issues,

could not have begun this process in earnest and with real rigor, and effort months ago to get these people out on transport planes. This particular aspect seems all on the Biden administration, no? I absolutely agree. I think it's criminal. I think it's inexcusable. These are very intelligent people in the White House. I can only conclude that they knew, that they did the math, they knew what was going to happen,

and they had to make a decision, do we get these people out? And if we get them out, how long is it going to take and how much is it going to cost and how many troops are we going to have to use and et cetera, et cetera, and how much further do we have to push the deadline down the road? And they concluded it wasn't worth it. I mean, I can't imagine otherwise. It's not that hard to figure out everybody who has spent any time. What does that mean? It's not worth it. It's not worth it to whom?

It's just, it's inexcusable. These are people who they believe what we believe. They are our friends. every sense of the word. And they want what we want, and they want that for their country, and they fought for us, and they risked their lives, and many of them died for us. And we have left thousands of them behind. They are still there. I'm talking with staff writer Dexter Filkins, more in a moment. The Taliban has issued statements here and there in the early days of the takeover of the country, or the repossession of the country after 20 years. Making noise is about

different policy toward women, different policy towards school kids, even the media. How different is the Taliban now than it was 20 years ago when we were seeing executions and football stadiums and all kinds of brutality? I spent a lot of time with the current Taliban leadership in Dohaf during the peace talks. And they look, they act, they speak, well, they speak a little bit. a little bit differently, but they're the same guys. And there just isn't a lot of evidence that they've changed their stripes. To me, this is the greatest tragedy of all. You know, the United States failed in so many realms in that country and in so many of its objectives. But the one

area that it really succeeded was in liberating women and in educating girls. And I think in some ways that might be hopeful because, I mean, if they stand back and say, what are we going to do? Are we going to, like, put them all back in their houses again? I can't, if they do do that, it will be a terrible, terrible scene. But it's just, it's hard to imagine. And so if the Taliban are practical people at all, then they're going to have to set their ideology aside for a bit. How would it be in the interest of the Taliban?

to behave more, to behave differently, to be more pacific, to be more welcoming of women in society and all the rest. Would it be to impress certain neighbors? What the Taliban say, you know, what they told me in Doha in the Ritz Carlton, was we learned our lesson. And the lesson was, The last time around when we governed the country, we had no friends. We were recognized diplomatically by only three countries in the world.

We got no foreign aid. Our country was in ruins. The economy was dead in the water. We had nothing. So we were doomed to fail. We don't want to repeat that experience. We need friends. We need the West to be engaged in our country.

And we need money. We need aid. And so, you know, essentially, we will behave ourselves. in order to get those things. But it's got to occur to you that what's said in the breakfast room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Doha might be different than what is said and what the transaction are in Kandahar, Kabul, Mazar Shereef, and Harat. Absolutely. The Taliban is not remotely monolithic and is ridden by factions, all of which are struggling with each other.

and some of which are more radical than others. And it's very hard to know even who's making the decisions right now or who's on top. It's very, very difficult. We don't have a lot of visibility on any of that. And so things could change very rapidly overnight. In looking at the tremendous amount of money

that went into this effort, how could we have trained thousands of soldiers who then disappeared, melted away in the term of art lately? It's as if the entire Afghan government has been a mirage and the Afghan government's military even more so. You know, I remember back in 2001 when the war started. And the U.S. military didn't wipe out enormous Taliban formations. Most of the Taliban surrender came in the form of Taliban soldiers walking across the line

and embracing their Afghan brethren in the Northern Alliance. And exactly what we've witnessed over the past week. You just had people quitting and walking over to the other side. And I think, you know, at this point, Afghanistan has been at war for 42 years. And the instinct of the average typical Afghan soldier is to survive. And I think the moment he felt, man, the Americans are gone. I mean, practically speaking, that was a disaster for the army. But I think it was like, why bother?

I know which way the wind is blowing. So I'm done. I'm going home. It's not worth it to me. Now, these are not revelations. It's not a new thing to even the most conservative neo-con American consciousness, the difficulty of what you called the American Project in Afghanistan. We know from official documents obtained by the Washington Post that as early as 2002,

2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo that, quote, We're never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan, unquote. And he concluded this memo by simply writing the word help exclamation point. How do you respond to that? Well, the most depressing, really the most depressing thing to me is if you imagine the U.S. military in its diplomatic corps is kind of a great machine that is supposed to be kind of dynamic and alive and processing information. and correcting course and changing course when it needs to. The thing could never change.

It was clear, or if it were clear in 2002 or 2003, which it was, that the thing wasn't working. The machine never corrected itself. The American military and the State Department and the diplomatic corps, the impression, the overwhelming impression I got was that they're not listening. They're not, they don't understand the country. They don't understand what's happening. So they don't know how to change course or if they do, they go the wrong way. And that's, that's, that's, we, we don't know how to do this. We're just not good at this. How many times are

going to do this? How many times are we going to do this? I, you know, whether it's the French in Algeria, the, the French in Indochina, the U.S. in Vietnam, the U.S. and Afghanistan, you know, if the most senior people at the Pentagon from the war's earliest days are essentially saying, this is a quagmire, how does the machine just keep going for two decades? What is the dynamic, from Republican to Democratic administration, regardless of party, how does it not get stopped and we end up where we are now? I think what was so gallingly obvious was that everyone in the U.S. government knew exactly what we're talking about here. They knew that the Afghan government was predatory.

They knew that it was a criminal state. They had a name for it. They called it vice, V-I-C-E, which stood for vertically integrated criminal enterprise. That was the name that the Pentagon gave to the Afghan government. They knew. And yet, the thing did not get fixed. And so what was that? And I guess ultimately it was a lack of political will.

It seems interesting or ironic that one of the major American politicians who earlier would get up in meetings in the situation room and say, we just don't have a, we don't have a possibility of victory here. we should get out, is Joe Biden, the person on whom the burden of the withdrawal falls, and you can easily argue who's responsible for the titanic, titanic and tragic screw-up of the execution of that withdrawal. But if you look at Biden's voice in the arguments within the Obama administration, he's a voice telling Obama, don't listen to the generals, don't have a surge, get out and now it lands on him what has been Biden's role in this epic all along well i think you're right i think Biden from the beginning was deeply skeptical of the United States attempting anything ambitious

in Afghanistan i think he he did believe that president Obama got rolled by the generals intimidated by the generals in 2009 when Obama did the surge. I think there are there are moments where Biden and I think in this case he was confronted by by Richard Holbrook, the special envoy, who said, you know, we can't we can't leave in a hurry. You understand that, Mr. Vice President, you know, back in 2010. And Vice President Biden essentially saying, out, get out, we're leaving. I don't care. I don't care about all the Afghans on the ground there. Don't bother me with this. The I Don't Care

is we'll leave a hideous taste in the mouth of history for a long time to come. Yeah, here we are. You know, a lot of people say that, you know, in the end, this will not hurt Joe Biden politically in places like Scranton because

people who bear the costs of this war, who have always borne the costs of this war, are in places like Scranton and they're happy not to send their kids there anymore. That's right. That's true. This war was fought and the war in Iraq was fought by, you know, 19-year-olds. But I don't know anyone watching on television what has unfolded over the past week cannot be pleased with the way it was done, even if they believed strongly that we needed to leave. And I think that that's going to stick. But the callousness and the unnecessary cruelty with which the withdrawal was done, I think that'll stick with virtually everyone.

It just didn't have to happen this way. Dexter Filkins, thank you so much. You can read Dexter's reporting on Afghanistan and much more at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of W. NYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.