The Press Box - The Fall of Afghanistan With ‘Reign of Terror’ Author Spencer Ackerman

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Bryan Curtis is joined by author and journalist Spencer Ackerman to break down his new book ‘Reign of Terror’ and to discuss recent news and events involving the United States leaving Afghanistan. They cover the 20-year “War on Terror,” weigh in on the decision Biden and his administration made to pull out of Afghanistan, and talk through the United States’ approach to foreign policy since 9/11. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Spencer Ackerman Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Bacari Sellers podcast tackles the most pressing current events through conversations and interviews with high-profile guests. Building upon his experience in South Carolina government and politics and his experience as a lawyer, Sellers will talk to his guests about all topics from the world of politics. Check out the Bacari Sellers podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis here, along with producer Erica Servantes. David Shoeemaker is on assignment today. There has been one story that has preoccupied our attention. this week. It's what's going on in Afghanistan. The images of the Taliban taking control of the capital of Kabul after the announced withdrawal of American forces, Joe Biden's speech yesterday. How to

make sense of this. We called Spencer Ackerman, author of a new book called Rain of Terror, how the 9-11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. Spencer is a long time national security correspondent. The reviews for the book have been fantastic. A barn burner, says the New York Times, which called the book upsetting, discerning, and brilliantly argued. Spencer talked with us about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, all those images you're seeing on TV, the war on terror generally, and the beginnings of his career at the New York Press. Here is Spencer Akram. All right, Spencer, so we've seen this series of events on television over the last few days, the Taliban taking control of Kabul, Afghan citizens trying to board those flights.

of the airport yesterday, the American Embassy shutting down, destroying documents. As someone who has written about this war and other wars for the better part of 20 years, what was your first reaction? My first reaction was how reminiscent of seeing New Yorkers jump out of the burning twin towers to their certain fate it was when Afghans tried to grab hold of C-17s out of Hamid Karzai International Airport and fell to their deaths. That was such a horrific bookend, such a triggering reminiscence, and such an avoidable human catastrophe that it made me in particular upset to see the ease with which elites,

political elites, journalistic elites turned to the language of additional war as a way to suggest that somehow the war didn't bring us to this circumstance

but stopping, fighting a war somehow did. Essentially saying that if we were to just, if we were to just, the act here that has caused this is us leaving Afghanistan, rather than the act of being in Afghanistan for the last 20 years?

That's correct. The residue of the 9-11 era has stopped us from recognizing that as we have constructed this endless ever-mutating war against an ever-mutating enemy, those enemies have gotten worse. They've gotten more powerful. their impact has been far more expansive. That was the case with the Taliban. In December 2001, the United States had the option of choosing a different course.

In December of 2001, after the fall of the Islamic Emirate and the Taliban having to retreat to its stronghold in Kandahar, they saw that the righting was kind of on the wall and offered to the then newly U.S.-backed Afghan political figure, Hamid Karzai, to surrender, join a political process provided that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, could remain under some kind of house arrest in Kandahar. And Karzai recognizing what the implications of that offer were immediately accepted. Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration rejected that. They demanded instead unconditional surrender. Everything that happened over the next 20 years made the Taliban strong enough to make this week possible. When the Bush, I'm sorry, when the Trump administration last year signed a deal with the Taliban about withdrawal, the terms of that deal were fundamentally the same as the terms of December 2000.

the Taliban were going to join a political process, the U.S. was going to tether its withdrawal, not to conditions on the ground, as Mike Pompeo deceitfully said on Fox News Sunday, but to abate certain to leave because there is no other way to end the war. You can always question whether in December 2001 the Taliban offer was sincere or not. What you can't question is that the United States, States had vastly more leverage in this deal that it rejected in 2001 than in the deal it sought on the same terms in 2020. And the thing that changed in the interim was so many people died, were made into refugees, were emiserated, and had their futures stolen from them. Help me answer this question. Why did Joe Biden decide to leave Afghanistan now?

Biden inherited a deal with the Taliban that was simply the, not just the best way, there's no best way at, you know, year 20 in a war, but the most viable way to end the Afghanistan war. There is no sense in which continuing to fight the war would have led to a better outcome. There is, I would argue, instead only a sense in which continuing to fight the war would have led to this day being so much worse. And that's with the full recognition of how horrific things are in Afghanistan right now for real people, people with names, people with souls. Biden inherits this deal. He doesn't particularly stick to it with much fidelity. The United States was going to be entirely out by the terms of the deal in May 2020. We were supposed to be, I'm sorry, May 1st, 2021. Instead, Biden decides unilaterally that as long as we

stick around somewhat longer to secure the departure from Afghanistan, you know, who cares, you know, the Taliban will just sort of swallow that. The United States uses this time not to prepare the withdrawal, not just of its own nationals, but those of Afghans who served the war. Notice that we're not talking about removing from this danger, Afghans who didn't serve the war. We're not talking about opening up something like TPS status for millions of Afghan refugees, even as the Trumpist right from Laura Ingram to Stephen Miller to Tucker Carlson is screaming bloody murder about allowing in those few thousand Afghans that worked for the United States and its allies in Western institutions.

Instead, what happened was the United States, the Biden administration, tried to act as a facilitator of an Afghan peace process when it is itself a combatant. the Taliban seeing all of this simply decides why not victory, why not win the war outright enough of this? That is what brought Joe Biden to this situation. But I'm not sure from what we heard from Biden yesterday that Biden recognizes this as some sort of finality, even as he tells the American people that it is. Recall that he also said, in yesterday's speech that he reserves the right to bomb Afghanistan when he feels that it's in the U.S. national interest. Who knows how he'll actually define that? Similarly, we've seen throughout the

20-year war on terror that leaving a war, ending a war, contains a kind of important caveat, which is the retention of an option to re-escalate the war when necessary. Think, for instance, in a war that most Americans probably are not aware that we have been fighting long enough for the war to be bar mitzvah in Somalia. Trump pulls out last year of Somalia, but he puts all of the stuff for the Somalia war in neighboring Kenya and nearby Djibouti at Camp Lemnir, which is one of the more enduring symbolic military bases of the war on terror and the premier staging ground for the United States. States in Africa, certainly in Eastern Africa, a circumstance that did not exist before the war on terror. And in such a circumstance, it is very easy to find, as Joe Biden did, that you can just bomb Somalia, as he did a couple weeks ago. We saw this as well in Iraq. Since 1991, the United States has declared the end of combat operations in Iraq four times. The war finds new rationales. It finds new

meetings, it finds even worse circumstances that policymakers feel the need to draw the United States back into, whether it's the so-called Islamic State or whether it's combating Iranian proxy militias in Iraq. The circumstances keep getting worse, the more the United States reaches for endless war. And yet we don't talk about it in these terms. We're, I think it's all important. to see whether Biden will consider what he has done in Afghanistan to end the ground war and to pull out U.S. troops as the beginning of unraveling the war on terror or the end of it. And this is as far as he's going to go. We heard him say that counterterrorism will continue, not just in Afghanistan, but globally to new vistas, where new terrorist groups, the threats of today, as he put,

it are. But we've seen how this movie plays out. Is this really something the United States wants to continue doing? One of the things you've talked about over the last couple of weeks is the fact that there has been no real reckoning for the architects of the war on terror. I don't know if we need to put air quotes around that for most of the architects. Has there been an architect of the war who has been the subject of a reckoning, a real reckoning in American life? No, not at all. Most of them became hashtag, resistance heroes during the Trump administration by liberals, liberals who identified with people who either created or maintained the machinery, the apparatus of the war on terror. People like

Jim Clapper, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, people like Mike Hayden, the NSA director who begins shredding the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and implementing regime of bulk surveillance of Americans' communications, particularly international communications, that a generation prior would have been technologically impossible. You know, on and on down the line, Bob Mueller, who sets the FBI on a very long period of harassing Muslims in the United States, of infiltrating their places of worship, of course, of course, coercing people into becoming informants. All of these things remain. One of the premier torturers, someone who oversaw at a CIA black site, the torture of men like Abu Zubeda and men like

Abdul Rahim al-Nashri, Gina Haspel became Donald Trump's CIA director. There hasn't been a reckoning. There hasn't been consequences for this. There's just been continuity. I saw that Stanley McChrystal said in your book that the war on terror in his mind was not worth it at the end of the day. Is that an opinion broadly shared by military types who were involved in the war in various aspects? I think McChrystal kind of went further to a more omnibus view of the post-9-11 enterprise. But, you know, no one likes it. Everyone, you know, pretty much everyone I've ever talked to in military circles, Over time has a serious disillusionment set in with either, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Not very often do those critiques kind of expand to the whole post-9-11 enterprise being, you know, this much of a, of, you know, of a predatory enterprise, this much of a disaster. Everyone kind of recognizes that this has gone terribly. But it's, of course, a very difficult emotional and psychological process when you've, you know, served in such a crucible to, you know, contextualize what that service meant. So I don't think it's, you know, any kind of, you know, moral failing on the part of people who haven't, you know, who just might not share my critique. But, you know, someone like McChrystal going as far as he did, I think probably heralds what, you know, may come on the horizon as, you know, if not necessarily a consensus view. A strong component contingent, a strong contention that may end up being amplified and echoed.

What goes back to what you said a second ago about the war on terror being this big nebulous thing that's hard to. get your mind around. So it's easier to express reservations about Iraq. It's easier to express reservations about Afghanistan. That almost becomes something that's so big and multifaceted that, you know, rejecting it or whatever, whatever conclusion you come to is just perhaps harder for people to get to or perhaps even safer for them to embrace and say, oh, that the wider push was a success, even if these particular missions were not. Very often when we talk about the war on terror, we talk about the component operations, Iraq, Afghanistan, surveillance, drone strikes, torture, Guantanamo.

But it's rarer to talk about the war on terror as one thing, as one big thing, with all of these different facets to it. And that was important to me for the book, that we see this thing in the context, not just of each of its component parts, but of the entire enterprise. And that way we can see what its deleterious effects on American democracy are. That way we can see the Patriot Act and its consequences. That way we can see the Department of Homeland Security and the transformation of immigration from a process of making more Americans into a national security threat. That way we can see things like the former Department of Homeland Security program,

Encears, which is functionally a Muslim database of Muslim travelers who are coming into the country, Barack Obama ended that program. He never purged that data. That program can be turned back on. Only when we see all of this together, I believe, can we get a full picture of what, you know, I tell you straight up on the cover is a reign of terror. And only when we recognize that these past 20 years, have been a reign of terror, not just abroad, but against Americans at home. And increasingly a threat to ever expansive categories of Americans, can we actually have the reckoning that's necessary in order to dismantle this apparatus? So a tweet from Ruben Gallego, U.S. House member from Arizona, former Marine himself yesterday.

He said, what I am feeling and thinking about the situation in Afghanistan, I can never fit on Twitter. But one thing that is definitely sticking out is I haven't gotten one constituent call about it. And my district has a large veteran population. Is that your read on the public reaction to the withdrawal from Afghanistan? There has never been a large constituency for the war. There just hasn't. American foreign policy and national security are some of the most undemocratic, functionally speaking, aspects of American governance. This is an elite enterprise. This isn't something that occurs because of a public groundswell. There have been at times public ratification of the wars. But that's come after, and in particular, between 2001 and 2003, and then again

during the surge in 2007, Obama's surge in 2009-10, an atmosphere of absolute abject fear, the idea that the United States, in particular during the early years after 9-11, would be attacked, if not for these expansive wars of aggression, particularly meaning Iraq. There, accordingly, aren't, you know, to be expected. Lots of people at this point, particularly in Gallego's, you know, district, who are, you know, going to speak out in favor of keeping the war is going.

You know, some people I have definitely heard, you know, not now, but over the last, you know, several years in particular during the Obama administration, saying things like, you know, we won't necessarily win the war, but we don't have a choice. We have to just keep fighting because the enemy is so barbaric and so horrific. The person who said that, the person who argued that is the Marine General John Kelly, who goes on to become Trump's secretary of Homeland Security and institutes a policy of kidnapping migrant children, and then goes on to be Donald Trump's chief of staff before in 2020,

trying to tell every reporter who was willing to listen that, in fact, he had been one of the good guys on the inside the whole time. We're a few weeks away from the 20th anniversary of 9-11. How did, as you say in your subtitle, our response to 9-11 give rise to Donald Trump? Well, everything that I've just talked about in this interview, for one, in material ways with, you know, the people who populated the war on terror going, you know, very far in on Trump before Stephen Miller. was a fan of the Camp of the Saints and prominent anti-immigration white nationalist. He was a Duke University campus activist against Islam under the grounds of, you know, combating terrorism or something like that. Who was Trump's most important military validator?

That was Michael Flynn, someone who was the intelligence chief for the Joint Special Operations Command, the, you know, a commando entity that ends up killing Osama bin Laden, although Flynn at that point was then the intelligence chief of the entire Afghanistan war, and then the head of the defense intelligence agency. This guy says that there is a problem with the deep state. Like, who could be more of a deep stater if you're the sort of person who's inclined to think in those terms? The actual answer is the difference between a security state and a deep state is loyalty. to a figure like Donald Trump. More broadly, what happens on 9-11 is a deliberate, in-definition of the enemy, a move away

from saying this is a struggle against this specific organization, Al-Qaeda, that committed this specific atrocity, that these specific people are culpable for that atrocity. And when those people are dealt with, then we have reached the just conclusion of this enterprise. Instead, it becomes something that we call the war on terror, which is a term that gets hazier, the more you, the more you try and pick at it. But what it means in practice is that it is a, you know, almost metaphysical exercise. It, you know, caches out to meaning that over, you know, a very long period of time, this was seen as, you know, in ennobling, enter. surprise, the length of this campaign at first, but it encompasses not only Al-Qaeda, but people who

simply share a religion of the sort that al-Qaeda has tortured into justifying, you know, mass atrocity. And once that happens, a door opens under cover of national emergency toward all of the atavistic racist nativism that has existed throughout American history and has found very violent expression, not just through white terrorism in the United States, but through brutality inflicted abroad. Waterboarding is a practice that comes, you know, the first time the United States uses waterboarding is against Filipinos during the Spanish-American War in 1898. things like stress positions, things like dietary and temperature manipulation, were tools of chattel slavery.

All of these things come back. Their habits of American history, they're tools that Americans reach for again and again and again throughout their history, when they feel that either they must or that they adopt cover of emergency. And that's what happens. Under cover of patriotic emergency, this door to this very ugly past opens and it licenses things that were previously not seen as civilized things to do, but now they're seen as necessary actions to forestall a civilized, an emergency for civilization that comes, again, not just abroad, but perhaps from your Muslim neighbors nearby, from immigrants that are trying

to enter this country and who knows what nefarious plans they hold. And then increasingly, it comes under a circumstance that the architects of the wars don't anticipate, which is that it becomes a disaster. It becomes an obvious disaster. And when that happens, there's a kind of cognitive dissonance that people who believe America is omnipotent, overwhelmingly powerful, can't quite comprehend, which is how is this enemy that we speak of in practically subhuman terms able to do this to the United States of America? And at that point, people like Trump have an explanation handy that it is the elites that have stopped you from winning this war because they have not been prepared to apply sufficient brutality to sufficient people. And that explanation is not just potent

to a considerable degree of Americans. It's an opportunity to inflict different forms of revenge on people who are already seen, not just any more as political adversaries, but as enemies. And that's how we get not only to Trump, but how we get ultimately to January 6th. So Trump's gambit is to attack the elites to fainting. at the idea that he is against entangling foreign wars at various times. So he says lots and lots of different things about those wars. And then to harness that nativism that you talk about that is unlocked after 9-11. Put that all together, essentially.

Yeah. That's right. That's right. And, you know, Trump succeeds at this. It works out very well for Trump. As well, you know, it's important to, you know, remember that, that, you know, the opposition to Trump, particularly in the Democratic Party, identifies in, elite elements, the leaderships of the Democratic Party. I'm not talking about the base of the Democratic

Party, identifies primarily when the threat of Trump seems very vivid to them with the mechanisms in institutions of the national security state, with the veterans. of that enterprise that come out of it. It doesn't see the continuity between those people and those institutions as they've come to be redefined since 9-11. It sees it as an alternative to it. That is a discrediting phenomenon in an atmosphere that Trump can explain by saying it's these people who've stopped us from, as he puts it, you know,

we don't win anymore. And these people are why. Was this a hard book for you to sell to publishers or an easy book to sell to publishers? Well, it's the first successful book I've been able to sell the publishers in 20 years. So that happened. I don't know if it was easy, but I was lucky to have found real reception to it at Viking. And in particular, my editor there, Rick Kott. Was it something you saw you've been thinking about these themes for a book,

before? Well, this is sort of a, this is sort of a contextualization and an exploration of like the only thing I've ever done in my professional life, which is report on the war on terror. So I can't, you know, I wouldn't say that like I've had this book in my head forever, but, you know, during the early years of Trump's presidency, there were a lot of explanations for how we got here. And, you know, some were compelling, some were not compelling, but all of them kind of left out the fact that we had been living for 20 years in this atmosphere of national emergency that had a real civilizational undertone to it that had weakened the institutions that were supposed to safeguard American democracy precisely in the name of strengthening them

that had accomplished an overwhelming public wealth transfer to the defense industry that in 2019 was estimated at $6 trillion and so on and so forth. mean to say that the war on terror is the only thing that produced Trump. What I mean to say is it provided crucial context for all of the others to join together in this atmosphere of national emergency while the institutions that were supposed to safeguard us from those elements get increasingly hollowed out. A few questions about your career before we let you go. I read an essay the other day. You were talking about your very first job of the New York press, the late New York Alt Weekly. Will you tell people who were not around to read the New York Press what that

paper was all about? Oh my God. New York Press was an extremely scabrous New York All Weekly. It was like the rabbit. It was basically like the it was like a grown and sexy fanzine. It published like tons of really eccentric. writers, eccentric personalities who were just like extremely politically diverse and divergent. You know, it's editorial

policies, its mission like don't really look great in the light of 2021, but like I was a teenager and like this seemed just really cool to me because the atmosphere of New York press was just like

relentlessly against everything. that was being kind of like put out in New York City discourse. But the people who were writing for this paper, whether they were writing restaurant reviews, whether they were like writing, you know, reported pieces from weird things happening around the city, these people could really write. These were just writers that like, even if the critiques could kind of get, you know, we would say probably in 2021, I can certainly say I wrote a lot of these, you know, obnoxious.

you know, not particularly, you know, mature. They were crafted together with just such pinash and such flair that, you know, this was sort of everything I thought I wanted. And this became, you know, this was a paper that I got rejected for an internship for and just kind of refused to take, like, no for an answer because I was so devoted to it. Like, I read it so religiously every Wednesday when it came out. Like, I knew someone from the New York punk scene named George Tab, who wrote for it, who also wrote for, like, the most important punks will get mad at me for saying that. But, like, the most important punk fan scene, maximum rock and roll. And so, like, I had someone who I kind of knew who I could, like, look up to, who was at that place. And, you know, I just essentially told the listings editor, like, what job, like, don't you, like, want to do yourself?

And she was like, well, I guess you can open my mail and, like, type up what people send in. I was like, I'll do that. I'll definitely do that. And, you know, that went to Raid of Terror. A few years, a few years later. I mean, just amazed. Matt Taibi, Armand White. Matt Zoler's sites.

Like, all these people worked at the same place. Not necessarily at the same time. Taibi is a different editorial regime. Different editorial regime. But yes. John Strasbow, Taki Theodoricopoulos, who's a despicable piece of shit. You know, like, Andrei Slivka, who is just, you know, heads no, a tremendous, tremendous writer and like unparalleled stylist, Lisa Lee King, Jennifer Mayors, Tanya Richardson.

Daria Weissman. I'm just like naming people I love who are writers for that paper. But, you know, I won't, you know, agree with, you know, a lot of the politics of New York Press, particularly, you know, with 20 years in hindsight. But like Russ Smith built something that I think a lot of different people from New York will cherish fondly. Last one for you, Spencer, you left the Daily Beast where you'd been for a few years for Substack recently. Why did you go to Substack? You know, I, like everyone else, have lost my mind in the pandemic. And I've not wanted for a while to have a boss.

I think it's important for writers to have editors. And my substack is edited by a friend of mine who is my work husband at the Guardian. But, you know, I don't want to, you know, at all, you know, shit on the Daily Beast. the editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast, who's just now left for Rolling Stone, Noah Shackman has been a true friend and a real mentor to me in a business where very few people get mentored. And if I don't feel like working for that guy,

I'm just not in a mood to be part of a newsroom staff and do the kinds of stuff that comes along with that, was, you know, particularly after having drafted reign of terror and redrafted reign of terror and redrafted reign of terror, really just wanted to pursue that kind of journalism. And it's one that I feel kind of more comfortable directing myself for a change, rather than sort of hashing out with top editor who has to worry about, you know, all sorts of other aspects of, you know, news coverage. You know, here I can just sort of do my thing and define my journalism outside the needs and priorities of a news institution.

And, you know, having worked for those institutions for 20 years, it seems like just time to take the next step. The book is Rain of Terror, How the 9-11 era, destabilized America and produced Trump. It's out now. The substack is Forever War. Spencer Ackerman. Thanks for coming on the press box. Hey, thanks so much, Brian, and thank you to the ringer as well. All right, I am Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes.

We are back Friday with David Shoemaker and more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.