The Team House - Inside the Afghanistan Negotiations in Doha | Dante Paradiso | Ep. 275

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dante Paradiso is the current Director of the Office of East African Affairs and a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. He most recently served as a Senior Advisor to the Special Envoy for Afghanistan Reconciliation, and immediately before that as Director for Peace and Reconciliation at US Embassy Kabul. In previous tours he has been Charge d’Affaires and Deputy Chief of Mission at US Embassy Libreville, Economic and Political Counselor at US Consulate Hong Kong, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, and Brigade Senior Civilian Representative with Task Force Mountain Warrior and Task Force Bastogne in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Dante has also had diplomatic assignments in Beijing, Ethiopia, Liberia, Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, and, as an intern political officer, Tanzania. Before joining the Foreign Service, Dante practiced bank regulatory law with Goodwin LLP in Boston. Dante is from New York. He received a BA from Yale University and a JD from UCLA School of Law. He is married to US diplomat Darragh Paradiso.Grab Dante’s book here⬇️https://www.amazon.com/Embassy-Story-War-Diplomacy/dp/0825308259?dplnkId=ea8cf3c4-c951-4503-ac27-34b68996117f&nodl=1----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#statedepartment #diplomacyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. We would really appreciate it if you guys went and reviewed us on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really help people find the podcast and help it get recognized. And, you know, if you've been enjoying the show, we really appreciate your support. Another thing that you can do to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go out and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. I, The Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park.

Hey, folks, welcome to episode 275 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. Our guest on tonight's show is Dante Paradiso. He is the current director for East African Affairs at the State Department. He is a career foreign service officer. He's the author of the Embassy, which we hope you guys will take a look at. He had many different assignments, many different travels around the world, including some hot spots in Africa as well as Afghanistan. We're excited to talk to him tonight.

First up top, do you want to give your disclaimer? Yeah, just as a current serving Foreign Service officer, I have to say the views I express are my own and not necessarily those of the United States government or the United States Department of State. Thank you. And I just want to tell people before we get started, if you want, you can check out our Patreon, the links down in the description, consider supporting the team house, keeping this show going. And if you sign up for five bucks a month, you get all of these episodes ad free, both the video and the podcast. And we really appreciate you guys supporting us.

So, you know, you're the first State Department guy we've had on the show. We've talked a lot on here about, you know, they say there's the three options. there's military action, there's covert action, and then there's diplomacy. We haven't really talked about the diplomacy so much, unfortunately. We hate diplomacy, no, I'm just kidding. But I wanted to just kind of like, before we get into your personal story, kick off the conversation a bit. Because I was thinking, as I was reading in foreign affairs this week, about why this matters, why diplomacy matters. And in this article, the authors write, China, in contrast with the United States invests heavily in the diplomatic

resources necessary to market its initiatives, speaking of like the Belt and Road initiative and things like that. It has more embassies and representative offices around the globe than any other country, and Chinese diplomats frequently speak at conferences and publish a stream of articles about China's various initiatives and local news outlets. So we talk a lot about great power competition and these other buzzwords nowadays, a new era of strategic competition. Diplomatically, why does it matter that China is out diplomatically? Why does it matter that China is out diplomatting us. Yeah.

It's a great question to start with. The core of diplomacy is the management of relations between countries, right? You can't go to another country. You can't trade with another country. You can't conduct operations through another country. You can't fly over another country without... agreement of that country. I think a lot of folks, you know, we were talking offline about global war on terror. There was a lot of freedom of movement within other countries that there was

always tension about sovereignty, but there was a question of how sovereign some of these entities were. In an era of strategic competition, sovereignty is at a premium. And so, So if you look at how integrated the world is, it's basically impossible to get along without the diplomatic aspect, because you're not doing military solutions for whether you get the component parts to make your iPhone through a series of countries into a manufacturing base that then sells back to the United States. The global flow of oil goes from refinery processes to export into plastics. That whole network is based on agreements between nations on how to treat the flow of goods, services, and people. So it's kind of a critical component to our everyday life that we don't see because so much of what America is and is built on was built out of.

diplomatic relations. I mean, you take French support for us in the Revolutionary War. It goes back to that. But that's sort of the core of diplomacy, is managing how we interact as America with other states. And if we fall behind China, if they have more embassies, more consulates, I don't mean to just put an arbitrary number on it, but what I mean is if they're conducting more diplomacy and building more relationships than we are, does that affect us from a security standpoint and economic standpoint, Well, you know, I'd say economic and security are completely tied together. Yeah. But, you know, just to give a very, very simple example, you know, rare earths, critical minerals,

things that are mined that go into the technology that we're relying on to put on this show that we use in our phones in our pockets, if supply chains get locked up. by one country, it doesn't have to be China, it could be any country. If that supply chain gets locked up and we haven't paid attention to it because we haven't put resources into the diplomatic relations that would keep that supply chain open for us, what is that going to do? It's going to have an effect on whether the availability of that technology for us, which directly affects our lives, our economy, and it'll do things like drive inflation, because things are harder to get at.

So when we take a country like China that is investing in building up ties around the world, if we were to scale back significantly, it would have knock-on effects for us. So I think that's, you know, when you're talking strategic competition, it's not always a zero-sum game. Diplomacy fundamentally is about how to manage the relationship. You try to get to cooperate.

try to get to cooperation, but when you're talking strategic competition, there is a bit of that zero-sum factor that comes in. That's fascinating. So, Dante, thank you first off for that answer. But to back up a little bit, I want to pick up a little bit with your story. And I want you to literally start at the beginning, if you could, because I was convinced that your name is a pen name. I was too.

When I saw it, I was like, where did Dante Paradiso come from? Who were you born to? Where did you grow up? How did that take you eventually towards governmental service? Yeah, I don't know where the government came into that. I'm a classic New Yorker. Irish Italian, you know, my mom's side of the family was Staten Island through Brooklyn via Ireland. My dad's side of the family was Italian, Southern Italian Bronx, classic New York love story.

They met in the stacks at Columbia University and the sort of. of school of general ed, not the not the she-she part of the school. General studies, general studies, right? That's the school I went to. Yeah, exactly. They were they were working in the stacks. They bet there it was the late 60s and here I am. I started started my first steps, you know, up in that area, you know, steps of St. John's and things like that. It got pulled out of, you know, the states, they were a little bit bohemian. My mother's father, so my grandfather, was an illustrator. He illustrated classics, illustrated comics, John Wayne comics. He did pulp comics in the 50s. But back in those days,

that was a poor thing to do. Like, you didn't make a lot of work. You just churn this stuff out. But, you know, there was a lot of artistry in the family. I've come from a lineage of artists and filmmakers. And they decamped, my parents decamped from New York to Spain. If you go back to the early 70s, this is Franco, so this is fascist Spain. And they stayed there a couple years and didn't quite work out as artists, you know. They came back and, you know, I grew up in mostly in Connecticut and then returned to the city for high school. And over that time, you know, watched a lot of film. Back in the day, we didn't have the access to, you know,

our kids have today to everything. Sure. You know, but that started to influence me. Film and literature started to influence me about getting interested in the world and overseas thing. And then as a New Yorker, you're just all day we're confronted with opinions. So you've got to develop some. And you get you interested in the world.

rest of the world. So that's, I think, sort of where the origins of my international interests started. And so what was the next step after high school? I mean, you presumably go to college and some interest in foreign affairs? Yeah, it's a, it really, I had kind of wanted to be a journalist. I had gotten interested in high school, in journalism. I'd read a lot of, you know, literature, you know, folks like Steinbeck were big influences on me. And then, you know, a child of the 70s. in the 80s, I also grew up on a lot of the great war films like Apocalypse Now. These are like seminal films. And so you kind of want to challenge yourself physically and mentally, and you also want to see the world and you want to participate in something that's bigger than

yourself. You know, I really thought journalism would be a great way to do that. I took a course when I was at Yale. They had these seminars that you could take. And they brought in a guy who was a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor who had published a book on Afghanistan. But this was Soviet Afghanistan. He'd gone in through Peshawar and described what that was like. His name is Ed Girarday. You know, tremendous reporter still does stuff out of Geneva. He's got a little company called Global Geneva that still talks global issues and serious journalism. They're trying to tell you what's going on. It's not politicized. This is sort of the story. So he was co-teaching this with a guy who had worked as a UN lawyer.

And this was 91. And, you know, the Cold War was ending. And what he was trying to do now with the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, it was a turbulent time. What they were trying to do was start a demining effort through the United Nations. And he was a lawyer. And he was trying essentially to get the Soviets to cough up maps of where they put the mines so that you could actually protect civilians.

And I started to see that there were maybe other avenues to go down rather than just journalism. We also didn't have any money as a family. So, you know, when I saw a lot of successful journalists, I would talk to them. I would say, how'd you become a journalist? Oh, you know, I was a stringer. It's like, how'd you pay the rent while you were stringing? Because people could do that. You would string for a while.

You know, you'd write a few articles. People in the community would get to know you. They'd maybe get you picked up by an organization. But, you know, I mean, I didn't have any money to go to a place to string. I also, you know, was, I had the James Woods model in my mind from, you know, Salvador, if you guys ever saw that movie from the early age. I don't think so. It's a great film, yeah.

That was James when he was on the left, not on the right. So, you know, different James Woods back then. But so I started to get interested in is there a way through law that you could do something. But so I graduated Yale and was kicking around. I wasn't quite sure what to do and I got called out by a friend of mine to, to, you know, build trails in northern California on a trail crew for at-risk youth. The crew was for at-risk youth, and I went out there, you know, I took a friend of mine from Yale also, one of my old roommates. He came out too,

so we spent a year doing that. Wow. And from that, I joined Peace Corps. Interesting story, though, because I had wanted to join the Navy, and I'd had an injury, and it was sort of between this program and the Navy, and it was sort of between this program and the Navy. And the Navy came back and I took the Asvab test and they were like, man, you scored really well. We're going to put you on the nuclear program. And I said, I'm like terrible at math. I don't know what, I don't know what happened. But apparently I sent them too many x-rays to prove that the leg was good. So they need more time. And I got the other offer and I just went out and did the trail crew, you know. So, and then later I had developed a little bit of respiratory

condition. So that was, that path was foreclosed to me. So anyway, I ended up in Peace Corps coming out of that other thing. And that was my first real introduction to embassies. I didn't know much about what embassies did, but what embassies do in places, I went to Kenya. And a lot of peace corps, you get kind of dirty and unshowered over there. over the years and some embassy communities are real nice and they may open their houses to the Peace Corps. And so, you know, when you go into Nairobi, some people would go and stay with an embassy family and they would have a weekend that was, you know, with a clean bed and a shower and things like that. I didn't actually have those relationships, but I started to talk to people who were in the embassy community

and learn a little bit about what an embassy does. And I learned things like, we have jobs that you report on the politics of a country. So it's kind of like being a journalist, but for the government, feed that information back that determines what our policy is going to be to the country. But you're living over there. And I got interested in that. And so I took a couple more details. And I came back and I went, still didn't have any money.

Like, you know, volunteer service doesn't really get you that, nor does minimum wage work for a trail crew. But I highly recommend that kind of work, by the way. It was fantastic time building trails in the redwoods. But didn't have any money and, you know, my set of folks were like, so law school is where you end up. And I ended up in law. A lot of my law school colleagues, of course, you know, sort of, you know, are in it for the money.

I was in the sort of idealistic camp, I guess. Still sort of hoping to do international law. And I would talk to people, how do you do international law? And there was this lawyer who was a prosecutor, Pierre Prosperry, became a big-name prosecutor in L.A. He was, I think he had Haitian roots, so he spoke some French. And when the international criminal tribunals came for Rwanda, they were looking for an American prosecutor because we had some funding relationship with it. And so he ends up out there. I said, you know, how do you get these jobs?

I just fell into it. I said, I don't know how I'm going to fall into that job. He had a unique skill set. There was a genocide. It happened in a francophone place, and you end up with the skill set that matches. But like a lot of us, I'm a 9-11 product. So before 9-11, I interned with the State Department in Tanzania.

And that was 98. So they sent me over for the summer to be a reporting officer as an intern. And that was the year that the bombing happened. And so I was in the bombing. Came back, still needed money. So I took the corporate law job. And then I'm up in Boston. The morning, those planes would have flown right past my office.

I had an office on the 27th floor. And I was on the call. with the client. I'll never forget it because the first plane hit, and I assumed it was like one of these little biplane things, and, you know, because of the 93 bombing that everybody forgets in the World Trade Center, I thought it was, I immediately assumed it was a bombing.

Nobody else does, right? But, you know, I kind of just assumed this was going to, this was a sort of bombing. I called a friend of mine. I was like, yeah, they tried again. He was in New York. He hadn't even heard anything. It was the first he'd heard of it.

I go back on with the client. The client is asking me about the minutia of board minutes. And somebody runs in and says, you know, the tower is on fire. Like this is, it was a jet plane that went into the tower. And so I said, look, this is New York. I'm a New Yorker. I'm up there in Boston. But the guy is up in New Hampshire.

And I said, I got to go. And he goes, you'll call. me back I'll go I got to go so so I went watched with everybody else the second tower fall yeah and I'll never forget that either because the the newscaster on the feed that I was watching did not realize the second the towers were collapsing they were just reporting as the towers are sort of on fire they were just they just didn't know and then of course because we were in a high-rise you know you know We evacuated the building, walked home.

Everybody's out on the streets, just wandering around in a day. Kind of crazy. And then, because it's the corporate world, within a few days, we're back at work. And it is, you don't even know. I mean, everybody's talking about it. It's a thing, but it's back to, you know, meet the client deadlines. And the clients are focused on a whole bunch of. other things. They're focused on corporate governance issues, bankruptcy issues, finance issues,

the next mezzanine round of a financing for a joint venture. Is it going to be affected by the events that are happening? You know, does this affect our, you know, the funding that's coming in? You know, there's some turbulence in the markets. I said, okay, I'm working away, and then we go into Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden. And, you know, this is 2001 now, and I'm a year, year and a half in. I'm walking around the luffer, but I'm just sort of, I mean, I really enjoyed the partners I worked with. There were some terrific people there.

But I would poke my head in, I'd go, you know, we're at war. People would look at me like, you're a little different. And I'm like, you had this feeling like, okay, this is a. There's something larger going on here. It's my city that's affected. Afghanistan is something that I'd been tracking all the way back from high school. I think we all remember that National Geographic cover with the girl with the green eyes. I mean, that thing was all seared into us.

Then I'd studied the topic in colleges I discussed. And so I just had a sense that you got to join. And a lot of other people joined the military at that time. You know, for me, I ended up with an offer from the Foreign Service. And so I said, okay, I'm taking that and headed off to, you know, see what I can contribute. Now, the Foreign Service, they don't, you know, they don't say, okay, you're coming in, you're going to go to Afghanistan. Right. But that's sort of how I got into the career.

Can we rewind him a little bit? Yeah. You were involved in a bombing and I'd love to hear about your experience. don't mind talking. No, absolutely. So this is August 7, 1998. Dara Salam was a, you know, bustling but relatively sleepy, dusty port town. I had just gotten back from a trip to Arusha to visit the international criminal court where I was kind of reporting on the activities there so we could kind of see where our investment. and again they were prosecuting folks that were responsible for the genocide

and kind of wanted to see how that effort was going and this is in northern Tanzania at the base of Kilimanjaro and it was having a great summer again I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya so I knew the region had a little opportunity to go on safari it's always great you know and I get back and we're in a morning staff meeting. During the summer, particularly at embassies that are smaller in their footprint, not every embassy is embassy Beijing with a thousand people working there. Some of our African embassies may have 15, 20 officers. The summer is generally transfer season, so you have a lot of interns,

temporary duty people out there, very small staff. So there were about 10 or 11 of us in the Sharjé's office. I mentioned Sharjay's the acting ambassador. We hadn't had our ambassador appointed yet, or the ambassador hadn't arrived at Post yet. The Sharjie was John Lang. And just a regular morning staff meeting to go over, where are we with development assistance today, that kind of thing.

Who's in, who's out of the office? And we hear a large boom is the best way I can describe it. And then there was a strange pressurized feeling. Yeah. And I was sitting right next to the Chargerje on a couch just like yours. and I slouch which is good because normally if I was standing up

the entire window structure went over us and hit the back wall of the office and folks were sitting sort of in an L shape like me and they were covered with debris but if you'd been standing if any of us had been standing in front of that window somebody would have been decap it

Yeah. So people were sort of cut up, in shock, kind of wondering, and it's Dara Salam. What's going to happen in Dara Salam? You know, you had the trouble in the east out in Goma where you're talking about, you know, the Rwandans and the Eastern DRC issue with the Hutus and the Tutsis are still, you fighting, this is 98, right? So you're doing, you know, I mean, they're still fighting there. So was it something related to that? Could it have been some sort of, you know, honestly, gas explosion, right? That's more what you're thinking. You're not thinking you're going to be

the epicenter of a terrorist attack. It just, you know. But the shape of the embassy was such that the bomb went off on a corner and blew out the whole corner. We were sort of tucked around in a second wing of the embassy. So we sort of got, the blast came around. It had come in under a water truck, water delivery truck, a massive, massive hole. So we didn't know any of this, though. We start making our way out.

We go one direction, and we decide. okay we got to there seemed to be some damage where things had fallen in I was trailing the whole group our charjeet was at the at the lead he disappeared he went down to our

consular section and was was digging out one of the consular officers who was the spouse of one of our Marines who was buried under the rubble she survived so he immediately did that we made our way

out and you know we had a wall in front of the embassy that was concrete gone vaporized all of the motor pool which was parked out out front on the street pancakeed all the frames melted completely right but we kept hearing pop pop pop pop pop sounded like gunfire it was tires exploding from the residual heat. So we're all standing there. Everybody's in a daze, and trucks pull up and ladders come over. I think it was like, I don't know, fire trucks.

I don't know who was coming. Maybe it was the local Tanzania. We made our way over the wall. There was a French embassy compound on the far side of a road. We went over there, and then I could see everybody was completely dazed. and so I started doing accountability and just got out.

I said, hey, and I remember my boss, Chris McMullen, later became an ambassador, great diplomat, the head of the political section, just absent-mindedly handed me a pen. And I took one of those old yellow sheets and started saying, who's here? In the end, we didn't lose any Americans, but we lost 11 of our Tanzanian colleagues. and there were some other folks that were vaporized on the street.

And then, you know, from that point on, we sort of regrouped and we figured we were going to go to our public affairs officer's house. And we regrouped there. That was sort of the part that we were going to go back to if there was ever anything like this. It's not a contingency plan. And we may have gone to this sharp. I went to the Charger's house first.

We ended up at the Public Affairs House. I think we went to the Charger's house first. I remember at some point, there was like a fax machine or something, and I saw a printed thing come in that said, this is, the Israelis think this is Usama bin Laden. Oh, wow, that quickly. Yeah.

It was like within hours, right? But the other thing that happened is, We're there, we're like, okay, so this is a bombing. We're at the epicenter of bombing. We don't know what's going on. The Marines are trying to secure the premises. Small, it's our marine security detachment. And for embassy workers, these guys are gold, right?

Our MSGs are our core defense. They're under the control of the RSO. So they're cut to the regional security officer, right? So it's a unique arrangement. And the regional security officer was immediately liaising with, you know, host country officials. But they're trying to secure it, so we still had a whole bunch of communications equipment in there. I had to go back with our communicator with a sledgehammer. Yeah.

This is how we did. With a sledgehammer to bust up everything because the truth is we weren't going to be able to really fully secure this compact. And, you know, back in those days, there was still a lot of paper files around. Then we're burning things, you know, feeding them into an incinerator and stuff. These days, it's a lot, it's more efficient because there's just a lot less paper. We had paper file cabinets. You had to break into the cabinet. And so I did a lot of, you know, destruction of the sensitive items with a sledgehammer with my one other co-worker who, it was her responsibility.

she ran that shop. I'd never even been back there. I had no way. I was like, oh, we got servers. I have no idea what's going on. But then I remember, you know, seeing, you know, this is bin Laden, and this is a terrorist attack. But in those early moments, we're like, okay, so, you know, we got to need Washington's support. And we find out Nairobi's been bombed.

So it took us a little time. but we realized this is a dual bombing. And then everybody was under lockdown because they thought that Campalo was going to be bombed too. But that shifted everybody's attention because Nairobi's embassy, our embassy was in essentially a suburban area at a crossroads of two large roads. It was a dispersed explosion.

It crushed the embassy. It crushed the chancery, right? Blew out all our walls, pancake everything. But we had a small footprint. and there were virtually no civilians around. In Nairobi, it was a complex attack where there was like a grenade or something went off in advance, and they're in a downtown concentrated area,

and 240 people were killed. And you also had secondary explosions so that people had heard some sort of initial disturbance. Kenyans had gone to the windows in these downtown offices, and the windows were all blown over them. So it was this massive event. And, you know, Washington's attention went to Nairobi because we were also, we had lost Americans.

You had a collapsed building in downtown. And you had thousands of people trying to be helpful, you know, complete chaos, whereas we were in this sort of more days, discreet, and we had crowds gathering, but, you know, again, it was the nature of the area. So, you know, that was it. That was the start of, you know, for me, the global war on terror.

At that time, Ben Laden, was he still in Sudan or he had been exiled by that? No, he was in Sudan. And so if you guys remember, the initial response was to, you know, drop some missiles on what was claimed to be some sort of pharmaceutical factory. You know, I honestly lost the threat on, you know, sort of what. what happened. But that's how, you know, the Sudanese didn't want any part of him after that. That's how he ended up in Afghanistan, right? Right.

Because he was looking for safe space. And we were putting pressure on the Sudanese to turn him over, and he just got out of dodge. So that takes us through. Then you told us about 9-11, propelling you towards foreign service. Tell us about, I mean, it sounds like maybe this was your first overseas assignment. Was Liberia the first one?

So I count this because I was an acting political officer. It was an internship, but I was doing the job. So I count that. The first formal assignment was Liberia in 2003. So I go through the whole process to bring. us in, they give us 10, 11 weeks of training, and then you're out the door. And I get to Liberia in April of 2003. So what's happening in April of 2003? Charles Taylor is in Liberia. He's under extraordinary sanction. Arms embargo, they just done an embargo on timber to try to cut off

revenues to Taylor because, you know, he had sort of come to power, running a lot of irregular units. There's a lot of stories about the early 90s and sort of, you know, his legendary coming in at Christmas and, you know, eventually winning an essentially internal struggle to get control of Liberia. He was definitely on the wrong side of Washington policy, so he was on the outs. But he had allowed his troops to get, because he wasn't paying him, to sort of go loot in internal conflict that had broken out in neighboring Cote d'Ivoire. and the Uyborians got mad

and they allowed an insurgency to you know crop up there magically while there was another ongoing one on the border with Guinea and Sierra Leone the Lord Rebels no it's not the Lord of Resistance right yeah it was like Liberians united for the restoration of democracy you know so everybody's got there

and the other one was Modell in the south. So Taylor was now facing two insurgencies from different bases while being under tremendous pressure. And Liberia was just sort of collapsing in on itself and turning into a real humanitarian catastrophe. They had several hundred thousand internally displaced people. and the war started to come into toward Monrovia. They started making games because again, you know, people weren't really getting paid

and the payment was looting and the looting was driving chaos and so it was a all manner of bad situation. And so, you know, my first assignment was to go into the embassy. You know, you get a bid list of potential places you could go. You're matched with, I had 89 people in my incoming class. There's 89 places.

You find everybody enters. They have different ideas of what they want to do with their careers. You know, there's certain people who, they want those parish jobs. Not a lot of parish jobs for the entry-level officers. You know, I think I put, like, Moscow is my number one. I was always interested in sort of seeing what the Russians were up to. But I had Liberia pretty high. and not a lot of people had Liberia very high.

So, you know, and it was because of the crisis experience I had. And again, the sense that you want to do something with your career, that you're part of something bigger, different. I knew there was conflict. And, you know, this is an opportunity to do diplomacy. Because for me, I talked about the management of international relations because you started with China. You start with strategic competition, right? So that is the core. Right.

But the core core is war and peace. What drew me was the same impulse that drew me to apply for the Navy to be interested in, you know, working on military issues, is that. That if you can be part of something that stops a war, you know, that can be meaningful work, deeply meaningful work. Which I just want to point out, the Liberia experience is detailed in your book here, the embassy. not just your experience, but some of your colleagues as well that you went through there. And I'm afraid I haven't read it yet, but I plan to. It sounds really good. Homework for you guys.

Absolutely. So I would love to hear because we always hear about embargoes and we hear about sanctions. What is an embargo? How does U.S. enforce that embargo? And then at a time, like maybe when China wasn't so much a near-peer, like Russia may have, If we put an embargo or sanctions and another country decides to just ignore that, what are the recourses for us? This is a great and timely question. You know, sanctions, I think, were viewed.

It's a little bit before our time. But I think they were viewed as an alternative to military solutions and as a way to sort of shape behavior in a way. a world that is completely dominated by the U.S. dollar. The sanctions idea, there's certain things that you could always do like deny entry to the country, an individual sanction on visas, which is perfectly reasonable. You commit human rights abuses or something, right? We're just not going to invite you to the United States. You don't have no right to come here, right?

need to apply to come here legally. So, but, you know, there were, there were a couple things. So it was born out of the discomfort with apartheid. And how do we shape South African behavior or, you know, the governments, I hate the word behavior because we're not, you know, it's not parent-child relationship. Sure. It's patronizing, right, for us. But how do you shape or influence policies of a foreign government?

And one way to do that was, you know, to try sanctions. And so it was a means to respond to apartheid. It was one of the core ways to do it. An embargo where you stop sending, you know, aid has a, you know, is a way to express. our own policy directly into a country. So, you know, the most famous examples are from the, you know, the Carter years, where they introduced really human rights into the, as a core part of our calculus in the late 70s. And so we started trying to scale back military assistance to right-wing governments in Latin

America. And then when Reagan came in, he flipped it. And he said, no, no, no, those are our allies. We're not giving it up to the Sandinistas. And so we're going to turn the aid back on. So the embargo would be, hey, we're stopping that. So sanctions work if a country doesn't have friends. Okay.

If the country has a lot of friends, sanctions don't work. Liberia didn't have a lot of friends. And we were at a moment in history where Russia and the Cold War was over. You're talking late 90s, early 2000s. China had not exceeded. They just exceeded to the WTO, thanks to us. They were not an economic powerhouse. They did not have all these diplomatic resources.

They were still very much dealing with China. And Russia's army was in complete disarray. They were at a point of not a lot. It was the Yeltsin years moving into early Putin. so the KGB had not reestablished full control over things. And so here you have an isolated country that's running a cash economy, where the key sources of revenue are a shipping registry, it's run out of Virginia, and timber that they were selling.

And so if you sanction that, meaning you get agreement at the Security Council that countries will not buy Liberian timber, there's no market for it. So when they go in and pull in to a port with the Liberian timber, it can't be offloaded. So now there's no revenue coming in. Now what are you doing? You're starving that country of the resources to do what? Buy guns to perpetuate the regime. It's a way to put pressure on the regime.

In that case, you know, eventually the objective really was to just have Charles Taylor leave. Right. But, you know, the core objective was to steer them back to democratic elections. That's what we were trying to do. How did that go in the expansion of the... When you got there in 2003, how did things kind of unfold in Liberia? Yeah. Well, what had happened was the sanctions were somewhat effective, again, but it was part in just sort of the way the country was being run where money would come in.

It would be cash dispersed. They weren't doing a sophisticated banking section there. So the regime was collapsing, and our thinking was that the war was going to be going on in. indefinitely. And so our role was to try to get the groups to the peace table. And I think Taylor started taking some hits in the south part of the southern part of the country because of, again, this new insurgency that had come up. I think it started, I think he was going to try to play the long game and go to peace talks and kind of draw it out. But the rebels didn't really have the ability to overthrow them. And so peace talks were initiated. They started up these trilateral peace

talks in Ghana and right at the start of the peace talks, a court for Sierra Leone, a special court that we, our Congress was funding with an American prosecutor, again, for crimes that they accused Charles Taylor of committing in Sierra Leone. more backstory to why Charles Taylor was on everybody's blacklist was, if you guys remember, the Sierra Leone conflict was horrific. They would do things like, you know, cut the arms off children and pile them in a pile in the middle of the village and, I mean, just horrific, horrific crimes. So Taylor was in trouble with this special court.

The special court unseals an indictment for the head of state of Liberia. Liberia while he was out of the country in Ghana. This led to complete chaos back in Liberia where they were like, oh my God, our president's gone. All of his militia started panicking. And so the Ghanians were like, you're asking us, the court is asking us to, we invited this guy for peace talks to bring the parties together and you're going to tell us we're supposed to arrest him. They flew him back.

They flew them back to Liberia because Liberia was melting down. And who gets, who's the victims? The victims of the population that's at the mercy of militia that are completely loyal to one guy who thinks their guy has been taken off the board and they're going to loot and they're going to rape and pillage and do damage. And then you also had rebel groups that were basically doing the same thing. So the rebel groups took that as a momentum play. Taylor returns, he gets back command and control, but the rebels, the other rebels, the Lord,

attacks the city and they made it further than people thought. Over the course of a three-month period, the rebels attacked Monrovia three times and they ended up taking half the city and driving everybody into the center of the city by everybody. I mean, tens of thousands of displaced people and people who had lived in the city in the part of the city that the rebels had come in. They all came streaming into the embassy into the environs of the embassy

because Liberia has such a unique relationship with the U.S. We essentially gave money to found the country. The idea was to give former slaves a homeland back in Africa. Liberia is like Liberty. Yeah, yeah. That's right.

So the whole idea of Liberia, so there's been this long, unique historical relationship between Liberia and the United States. Far too complicated. We could do a whole other podcast on that. But for these purposes, you know, folks had sort of crowded around the embassy. What was amazing was at the low point we had about six officers and seven Marines and our local guards. So the embassy's security posture is generally reliant on host country security.

Here the host country security or contract security, but there's also a relationship between the host country security and our contract security. So in Liberia, because of the ongoing conflict, we had contract security. But those are local Liberians, just as we had local Tanzanians, that provide the bulk of the security for an embassy. So it's a unique dynamic. And your Marines are really sort of inside the perimeter, you know, protecting the core things of the chancery. So you had seven Marines and that. And that was sort of dealing with hundreds of thousands of people at the gate saying, what are you going to do?

to help us out. What's also happening right at this time? Iraq. Iraq. So from a U.S. government military standpoint, from a defense department standpoint, particularly Rumsfeld, it was, we do not need this problem. You guys are out. Colum Powell was Secretary of State, And he's like, this is our credibility for all of our defense and security architecture in West Africa. So everybody will look to see what we are doing in Liberia if the United States is committed to its partners. And we had been spending a lot of money on building up ECOWAS, the economic community of West African states, but from a military training standpoint to handle regional security problems, putting money in. to Nigeria, Ghana.

But it had been a mixed result in the mid-90s. There had been Echo-Ekowos missions that the Nigerians had gone into Liberia, and it didn't work out so well for anybody. So, you know, Colin Powell said, no, no, we have reasons to be there. There's a humanitarian crisis. We shouldn't just, you know, abandon the folks in a country that we have a deep historical relationship to, We've got broader issues. And then there's always, in the global war on terror world, the core belief, right, was ungoverned spaces are going to lead to places that, you know, Al-Qaeda and others can take root.

And so this is the counter argument to just what are we doing. It's totally chaotic. Because if you look at it from a diplomatic security standpoint, a military standpoint, you say, you've got no way to. to exfiltrate. The airport is 20 miles away. Your neighbor is, you know, through the jungle. There are no roads going out there that are passable. It's, you know, two days drive out through Sierra Leone. You can't convoy out. You can't convoy out through Guinea or, you know, Cote d'Ivoire because rebels hold that territory. So, what did we do? The first thing we did is the French came, sent a

a warship. I got in touch with the one French attache who was there and we conducted an evacuation. But the ambassador, John Blaney, said, hey, here's the case for staying and I think it's my estimation that the Liberians want us to stay. That means the rebels and the government who were trying to get the head of state out. They still want us. He's making that assessment, right? And so that's a call because if you look at it sort of tactically, if you're looking at threat streams, you're isolated,

you don't have the assets. So we evacuated everybody onto this front. By everybody, I mean we called Americans that were in town and said, hey, if you can make it to the embassy, we'll get you out with the French because the French were evacuating the UN and other foreign nationals, the Lebanese, whoever was around. Not a lot of people, not a lot of, it wasn't a big tourist destination in 2003. They got everybody out and a second rebel attack happened, right? Again, I told you there were three attacks. So now, you know, the number one response for us is at the time we had a fast platoon

that would come down from Europe to augment embassy security. The ambassador, of course, asked for the fast platoon. Rumsfeld held it, wouldn't act on it, wouldn't send down, wouldn't let the platoon go down, to starve us out. Real stuff. So they end up, because of the high-level differences in the cabinet between Rumsfeld and Powell, and Powell being the advocate to actually get something done here, we end up getting half the platoon. That's so weird.

And we got some seals to augment our security. They went in. They went in. And so we had this small augmentation, but everybody had mixed signals because some people were getting the signal that we're going to send in. aircraft carrier, and we did send an aircraft carrier, and the ambassador sent a cable because we needed to request a NEO to get the aircraft carrier to get out. Non-compatent evacuation operation, right? Don didn't care for that, I'm sure. So, well, so, so, well, he wanted it. At that point, he did. Well, because the NEO is the way to get us out. What the

ambassador did was he requested the NEO. but the embassy would stay open with a core staff of two or three people to work the diplomacy and that sent that led to just real real real fights so the rebels pull out

they get beaten back and we're in this sort of stasis Charles Taylor can't leave he can't go back to peace talks because he's under indictment and doesn't know if he's going to get rolled up President Bush goes on television and says, Charles Taylor needs to go. Now, we talk about sanctions. We talk about the effect of diplomacy, right?

If you go back to, if you said this today, a foreign leader may just say, what are we talking about? Who's going to remove me, right? I've got friends. I've got other spate. Charles Taylor is looking, what did we just done to Saddam Hussein when we said Saddam Hussein has to go? Yeah, right, for sure. He doesn't know. as a factual matter

that he's under indictment, potential ships are coming, he's seeing more Marines coming into the country, right? He doesn't know that this is not a assassination operation. There's no idea. Right. It's also weird because to get all these people into the country,

we're in touch with his national security advisor and his team saying, hey, don't shoot at our helicopters because we're bringing people in. So we're working with the guy we're trying to remove. Yeah. Fairly complicated stuff. It's interesting because I once had an analyst tell me that

Americans, politicians, or administrations, I say, they just don't understand, like, foreign mentalities and that if they, like, shake hands with somebody, then that somebody thinks that America has their, back and they don't understand, like, they don't understand that that could shift two months or three months down the road if somebody else comes into office or somebody else is appointed to a position, like, that Americans just don't understand that so many these people think very long-term and Americans think very short-term when it comes to politics or political.

Yeah, the way I'll put it, I mean, our strength as a country is we're optimistic and looking. I mean, this is, you know, and, you know, folks who, you know, are your audience are people who believe in purpose, believe in the country, believe in, that we stand for things, right? But by definition, that means we're very forward-looking, and we tend to allide history. We just tend to do it. And, you know, I think a good example, we're very forward-looking. example is, you know, going back a few years, we were on the wrong side from the African National Congress, from Mandela's party, we're on the wrong side of the apartheid debate, right? When Mandela came in to us, Americans, we're like, this is a great story, right? He's a voice

of the people. He's preaching a peaceful, right? Not a retributive thing. This is the story we all want to hear. It's a new multicultural South Africa, all of that. And so we love South Africa, right? And multiple administrations looked at South Africa as this shining model of multi-ethnic democracy, triumph of, you know, progressive politics, right? South Africans are like, well, you've still got half of our people sanctioned as terrorists. So, We didn't forget. Right. We're happy that you're happy with Mandela, but they didn't forget that part of the history.

Right. We tend to be like, but that was, that was like, that was yesterday. Yeah, that was a, yeah. And so, you know, this is true. Again, you know, there's a, so there's an a historical element to U.S. foreign policy. We're very much looking forward. And look, you guys have dealt with it in Iraq. You deal with it in places.

Hey, you know, we just, we were, I mean, we were supporting Saddam. Yeah. Yeah. Against the Iranians, right? And then all of a sudden now we're on the wrong side of Saddam. Well, we kind of did the same thing to Gaddafi. We gave all these terms to, like, fulfill. He did it.

He thinks it, he thinks that, like, We're like copacetic now. And then it's like, oh, Gaddafi's got to go. Yeah, I mean, and so that can lead to, I'd seen some difficult outcomes or just misunderstanding. So again, the core for diplomats and the core for analysts, the people who are charged with the long-term view is for your ambassador class and for those to learn the history. understand the history, understand the environment which you're operating in. As we define, we, our administration, our Congress, define U.S. interests today, you've got to interpret that in a way for the local audience so they understand where we're coming from

so that you can say, okay, you know, I recognize the history, I understand where we've come from. But here's why I'm saying the relationship has to get to a different place, or here's where the relationship needs to be today. because the policy won't necessarily be taking the history into account. So, wrap up Liberia, of course, because I'd like to make sure we have enough time to talk about Afghanistan. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, in the end, what was interesting in Liberia is the ambassador wouldn't leave. He won. He had the backing of Colin Powell. It was a gutsy move because, you know, if it goes wrong, you went to.

end up with a situation like, what's on Libya? Yeah, and you're the person everybody blamed. Exactly. Yeah. And the ambassador knew that. He gave us all an option. He said to the whole, you know, the country team, very few of us, but he said, anybody wants to leave, you can check out.

We had an extraordinary defense attach, and she and she and I worked together to establish contact with the rebels. and we got the numbers for the rebels. And eventually what happened was, again, you can read the details at your own leisure. But eventually what happened was we had the rebels owning half the city and Charles Taylor and his group in the other half of the city and civilians caught in between, mortars dropping on everybody. it was like fish in a barrel, bad scenes, very tough time. We were able to go in and convince Charles Taylor to leave, not us, that was done at senior levels, and he was convinced that he's going to have to leave.

He ends up going to Nigeria. On the ground, we crossed the front lines with a small contingent of folks that had deployed from JTF Liberia. JTF was stood up and it deployed in through the embassy and we took a contingent of folks from JTF Liberia. We got an echo mill and West African peacekeepers were able to come in and we were able to broker a local ceasefire that got the rebels to voluntarily pull out of the capital and allow for the broader peace agreement to take hold because otherwise they could have just fought until the end, it allowed the broader peace agreement to take hold that was hashed out in Ghana, and we were able to end the war. So it was the core stuff of diplomacy, as I talked about. Wow. So after Liberia, tell us about your kind of entry into Afghanistan, how that begins for you. Yeah. So after Liberia, I went off to Beijing, and then I was in Ethiopia.

And in Ethiopia, I did a TDI-Y to CJTF Hoa, you know, our counterterrorism platform in Djibouti. And so I had some experience working with a command staff. And when 2009 rolled around and there was a big push to get a civilian complement to the military effort, as we started to surge troops into Afghanistan. They were looking to fill these billets that had been created by General Eichemberry. Eichemberry, as you know, had been the commander of the forces over there, U.S. forces over there. I don't know if he was commander, but I guess he was. And then he became ambassador.

He was made ambassador under President Obama. but rather than have a traditional political advisor that's a State Department person attached to a commanding officer he had this idea that as the military elements ramp up and you've got platoon all the way up to your command headquarters that you would pair civilian leaders that would report back to him and the embassy but be sort of co-equaliened. with the military commanders at each level.

As I've described, so I took one of these jobs. It was a brigade level. They called it senior civilian representative. So they would have it down at the battalion level. They even had it down at the company level in some provinces. So company, senior civilian representative, battalion, brigade, and then division. Up at division, we had an ambassador, a rank person,

or a senior person that was going to be paired with the generals up there. So I was paired with initially Task Force Mountain Warrior. And I went down and Randy George, who's now the chief of staff of the Army, is, you know, was the brigade commander. And 6,500 troops, we were responsible for N2KL, so that was Nangahar. Kuhnar, Logman, and Nuristan. And we didn't have a lot of presence up in Nuristan at that time. But we had 35 cops and fobs scattered throughout the four provinces,

and it was pretty intense combat operations. The main effort was under McChrystal, and it was down south. So we were, you know, the supporting effort per the campaign plan. But, you know, it was very clear that we needed, we were, you know, going heavy into coin. What was this was, this was, this was a coin-centered approach to the, to the war at this point. So, I mean, we've talked a lot about on this show, including about Neurstan specifically from a military infantry special ops perspective. I mean, what was it like for you as a diplomat to dovetail with that effort? Yeah.

And as you talk about, you know, wage a counterinsurgency. So, you know, again, we talked a little before the show that it was interesting because when I was in Liberia, the command element from the JTF, they sent a liaison from the ships into my office, right? And, you know, I said, take this space, set up what you should. need to set up, we're going to be hand and glove, but you're coming in on an embassy platform under Chief of Mission Authority because it was not an active combat role. I mean, it was, they were in a combat zone, but you're fundamentally embedding with us to achieve the diplomatic

outcome. You know, in Afghanistan, the civilians were embedded and relied 100% on the military downrange. We were opening some consulates. We had a couple consulates open. up in Bombion, for example, that had a slightly different footprint because the Taliban had just not penetrated there the same way. They had self-drive, for example. But I was embedded. And this civilian complement to the military was going to be development experts. So you had USAID, Department of Agriculture, and then, you know, State Department diplomats. The idea of, the in the counterinsurgency operation, of course, was that you were going to work by with and through your partners, and you were going to build governance in the provinces.

Because the core issue in Afghanistan fundamentally was nobody like the government. And the government reached didn't go down to the village level. I mean, 2009, 10 years into the war, 9.000. years into the war, you know, you had a unitary government that would appoint people down to the district level, but those people were not from the district. Right. People were not from the province at the provincial level. So the idea, of course, was to instill.

We also had rule of law experts, like lawyers that went out. And the idea was to first explain to the Afghan people, the kind of the country. Constitution that the Afghan people had crafted for themselves, right? Because it was just not understood. Explain to them the benefits of Kabul to people who had very little interaction with Kabul other than the officials that were given that they could see very clearly were kind of looting the money that we were pouring in. So, but this is the idea, right? Now, when the structure is such that we're embedded, the truth is, you know, you you, you know, it's going to take a commander who is also given the task of doing governance and development. It's actually built into their subordinate plans, right? So you're talking to

a battalion commander. They're supposed to go out and they have the relationship with the provincial governor. They've got the relationship with their company commander has the relationship with people. The State Department person in theory should lead on that. But, you know, I think in Afghanistan, given that these were military leads and the military was providing all the platform of sustainment, where it was effective, where it worked in terms of the civilian military relationship, was where the civilian understood, how can I be of use to you the commander? And again, I say, in my own organization, this is a controversial position, you're supposed to lead. Well, I'm not leading a brigade commander with 6,500 people.

I had 40 people in four provinces that are all reliant on what... The command provides, right? So the dynamic you work out is that it's partially advisory, partially consultative, but I also just, you know, rode, right? So when we needed to do things that would help brief up, we could brief up. I also report it. This was an interesting dynamic because what you find is that in a true embedded relationship, by being out of channel, I could provide the commanders, because I wasn't reporting to them, I could provide them a prospective, frank conversation.

The other thing is, is I could send things up my channels. He could send things up his channels if we had blockages in either of our channels that were trying to get done. So you could work, you know, the embassy could hear something that could be useful, that could be then spoken to at the senior command. because the commander can't speak to up the chain that way, right? So there's these interesting dynamics that develop in that thing. But, you know, fundamentally you're in embed and what you're trying to do collectively is to essentially instill confidence in a government that nobody had confidence. Right. It's due to the nature and structure of this government. It sounds like you

really accepted this role and kind of dove into it in this sense that you weren't a subordinate, but you also or Superior, it was a partnership, even though that's not the standard role for State Department when dealing with the military. Are you aware of, and you don't have to spill any tea or anything, but are you aware of other instances where that type of relationship was not so successful when it was... No, absolutely. Listen, I had, you know, there was heavy pressure to show civilian leadership, right, and that was all the way through. And so all the time, you would see, you would see, in the field, even in my AOR, people that were subordinate to me, that were reporting up to me,

but they didn't have a good relationship. Their sense was, hey, this battalion commander, they're supposed to take me to my meeting. Yeah. You know, it's not happening. You're in the middle of combat operations. These are combat foot patrols. If you're engaging, the engagement is with intentionality that has to meet the commander's intent for both. force pro and to generate the effects that they're being asked to do as part of the counterinsurgency effort and you would see those relationships break down and you would walk into a combat outpost and you would see your military command on one side or your security detail for example and the four civilians eating in the cafeteria on the other side you

know and you know that's not an effective relationship in a combat zone right right so So that would break down. And then, of course, you know, in other areas, right, there's just this, you know, you have to come at it from a sense of mission and trust. And you have to have the mindset of, hey, man, we are here. You know, General Miller always used to ask people in Afghanistan, why are you here? the answer is to protect the homeland, right? In Afghanistan, that was very much so. We were there because fundamentally this tied back to 9-11.

That's the core purpose of being there. But that can break down in the day-to-day operational things, and we go into our tribal, put on our tribal hats of, I'm supposed to do governance, or you guys think short-term, we think long term or whatever the tropes are that breed between agencies. During this time frame, I mean, for you and the people you worked with, I mean, how did the capacity building side of it go? Like successes, failures?

I mean, what do you think? You know, for me, there was a part in my biography. We didn't touch that much on it. I was a corporate lawyer right before I came, right? For two years, I did finance and insolvency. What else? So we talked about what was happening in Liberia. What was happening in 2009 in Afghanistan, back in the States, the financial crisis?

We're pouring billions of dollars in Afghanistan. We had senior leaders talking glowingly about our burn rate and our spend rate. I'm sitting there with the private sector view going, this is absolutely unsustainable. Now, what effects are we achieving? Well, I remember, you know, then Colonel George said, okay, we got commanders' emergency response funds, right? You know, the SERP program, right? You know, allow our commanders on the ground to sort of build things for people.

So you're going to win hearts and minds, classic hearts and mind stuff. So he said, can I get a roll up of all the SERP projects that we've done? in the nine years we've been here in, you know, Nangahar, for example. Okay, can we overlay that with the projects that the UN has done in the area? And then can we also ask what the USAID has done and what the U.S.A.I.D. Why? Because here's the kind of stuff we were doing. You're in the Kuhna River Valley. It's rocks. They've had rocks for millennia. They know how to do retaining walls for their farms. We were paying $200,000 to build a retaining wall.

We were hyper-inflating this economy. While you knew the American public would have been outraged because the American public is losing 600,000 jobs a year and freaking out, and we're hitting 10% on unemployment, and you could see this disconnect. So what effects are being achieved? A growing insurgency, massive wastage of U.S. government resources,

and a great construction boom in Dubai for all the Afghan officials that we were funding, right? This is what was happening. And if you asked Afghans, which anybody who was out there would, with Afghans did, corruption was their number one issue. Yeah. The Taliban was not it, right?

Of course, if you were frontline Shinar in Nangahar, you've got tribal and issues with the Taliban. But remember, most villages were ungoverned, meaning they're governed by their own village rules. The unitary state didn't come down there. So you could see very clearly that this. was not achieving the effects. The second thing is, is that as part of counterinsurgency, part of the initial thing was protect the population centers, right?

Go to the collapse into the population centers because what we had done was a theory of interdiction for a while. If you got there in 2001, we started to expand the ink spots out through places like Noristan and we're putting, you know, these combat outposts out there. Why? Oh, because the guys are coming through these ungoverned spaces. I think it was the, you know, I think the mindset that we collectively as a government had was bin Laden planned 9-11 from a cave. I think this is what led to you got to go out there to the Koringal.

You've got to go into capillary valleys off capillary valleys of capillary valleys to to find these guys, the reality was, and General George was always articulate on this. He said, the reason we're being shot at in the coringol is because we're in the coringol. Right, yeah. And if you looked at it from an interdiction standpoint, if they wanted to pass the coringal, you just go on the opposite side of the ridge. Remember, we're also pre-drowned. We had started to, you know, this is like the very, very, you know, this is like the very, very, you know,

early days. I remember seeing a kit, somebody opened it up and there was like a tiny little It was like the old balsa wood thing that you would fly as a kid, you know, and they put a camera on. But like we didn't have hardly any of the real, you know, surveillance. We had, you know, stuff up in the sky, you know, much higher altitude. But again, you guys will know, competing demands, limited resources. So you've got all of these things. If these guys wanted to bypass us, they could just hike right past. You would have no idea. And then where was bin Laden in the end? Assadabad. Where was his command and control? Probably in play, probably, this is pure speculation, but it's in places like Jalalabad. Why? Because they have access to, you know, food, resource, communications. The internet. And you know, the road that never got hit, ever, what was the road that never got hit in Nangahar? All of our guys were getting hit with massive IEDs every time they were on, all of the surface streets.

It's the main road, you know, from the Khyber Pass to the base. So this also tells you what we knew. Everybody knew it. I don't know it as a factual. Here's the specific intel that I'm now referring to. We all knew. The Taliban are making money off the war. The Afghan government's making money off the war.

Everybody's invested in it. So you ask what kind of effects you're achieving. You can see very clearly, not achieving the sustained, you know, self-government. Good governance. No, the sustained self-governance. Where are the revenues coming from that Afghanistan is going to use to run itself while doing this? Right, right.

The government is largely funded by the international community, 75%, 80%, and the security forces were funded by us. So it's not a self-sustaining model. that's where we were. It was knowable. It was seeable. So, you know, and I think anybody downrange would have felt that. So after a few years when we started, you know, to come out, you know, I actually wrote on this in 2011 after I had left. I said, we should be honest with where this is going. This is like 2011, 2012, I wrote this. And I said, we should just be honest that the core thing, particularly after we got bin Laden, was we have achieved the national security objective, which was to take bin Laden off the board. That's a good thing. We also gave Afghanistan.

Look, we've poured resources into other countries. They've stood up, you know, obviously the famous examples of Germany and Japan and South Korea. You know, South Korea. You know, we, so there's a, it's not like pouring in resources to a partner means a partner is going to be forever dependent. It's just the way Afghanistan ended up developing, the way the economy developed, the way the officials chose to interact with us, what they chose to do with the resources. You know, one of the things I like when I think back on Afghanistan is you can see it as a failure from a certain perspective. But on the other hand, I look at it as we achieve national security effects that we needed to achieve. We gave our partners every chance to go in a different route.

The fact that it didn't go there is not for lack of generations of soldiers, civilians, contractors, people who put good faith into trying to make it work. that to me that work doesn't go away and for all of us who have Afghan friends people that we know have experienced difficulty who are still stuck back there

some who've made it out I mean you know that partnership was real but it was overcome by the structures that were in place yeah Afghanistan is really interesting because like you I feel

like people talk about losing the war in Afghanistan and it's sort of like well we won like we won in the first 30 days then we decided to just stay after the party was already over and then it just became very nebulous and you know you mentioned like you know Germany and Japan well there you're funding a government that is building projects in a tribal area which i don't think i don't know if any administration ever really got in a tribal area like afghanistan that's not there's no there's no afghanistan national identity really. Like when you fund somebody, you're funding a tribe and it's going to their tribe members who they install in all the different regions. Like it's, we went in there and we tried

to impose a federal system where we have. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, no, it's a system of tribes. It's like, well, shut up. You're going to have a federal system now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I strongly agree with that as the, as the core. It's a unitary state where people were being appointed from a central government, I always, the way I always looked at it was, imagine, look, I'm a New Yorker, man. If I'm, if you send me to Texas to tell somebody how to run their town, it's not going to go that well, right? And so as a result, you know, it was interesting that we, as a, as a, as a core self-government, like govern your own, like this is the core of in the DNA of America that we were fundamentally supporting a structure that does

have models. There are other countries in the region. It's not like it's a, you know, and they had a history of a monarch in Afghanistan. They used to central authority, but that we would be the ones to say that this is the model that has to be and not approach it differently. Because obviously the model they got constructed and put together was put together by people from the diaspora and things like that. And, you know, yeah, they brought in, you know, a number of constituents,

but fundamentally it was our money that kept backing that particular system. So it made it hard, I think, for us, you know, as a government to reassess that, just the collective weight, the accretion of the project over years. The other thing though in the Eccretion though is interesting because remember that Rumsfeld on this case didn't want troops on the ground, right? Felt strongly that we shouldn't get ourselves involved. Now he contradicts himself by then running the whole Iraq war, right? And it's a contradiction of the reasons he had were very well-founded to not get involved

in Afghanistan. He just blew those out of the water in Iraq. But the accretion of our forces there came from a demand signal from the Afghans and also international partners, including the NGO community who was saying, hey, there's not enough security. You can't go in this war in Iraq and just forget Afghanistan. So it was a weird dynamic where there was a demand signal from communities that you wouldn't naturally say would have a demand signal for U.S. forces.

Now, by 2009, when you're coming in. and with a heavy footprint, suddenly that signal is, oh my God, you're escalating the war. But it was, you know, I think that we ended up having multiple missions, right? Because it's also backed in the whole, you know, neo-conservative worldview, which is create democratic society. So one is democratic societies as partners for us and expand democracy that came out of the Bush years. You know, you're doing that with your aid people who are like, hey, the reason for this is to, because we can't abandon the people.

If you abandon the people, you know, you're going to end up with an ungoverned space, a humanitarian catastrophe. So that's a rationale for the war. And we sort of drifted away from, hey, the core reason we're with the Taliban is they didn't turn over bin Laden. Had they turned over bin Laden, we wouldn't have been at war. But we went into a whole bunch of other justifications. And, you know, so that's how we ended up. where we were. To fast forward a bit, I mean, you've had some other experiences too. I hope we,

if we can't get into tonight, another time for sure. But I want to fast forward a little bit because you were involved in sort of the end game with Afghanistan as well. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit about that. Yeah, sure. I was, you know, I got an assignment. It was a unique assignment that in 2018 they stood up a peace and recognition. reconciliation section in the embassy, thinking that we needed to get a peace process going because there was no discussions of note with the Taliban. And they started this section with the idea that there would be bottom up, that we would be reaching out to the provinces and at the district level and trying to see if there are

folks out there that can reach out and start to build some consensus around a national way forward that comes bottom up but about a year after they stood that up or almost

soon after they stood that up not even a year soon after they stood that up President Trump came into office and decided that we should just do a top-down approach that it's time to wrap this war up and that means direct negotiations with the Taliban. And so this section, which reported to Ambassador Bass through the DCM, Karen Decker, also served as Ambassador Khalil Zad, who

became the special envoy that was going to take on the direct negotiations. It was going to support him when he was in Kabul because the negotiations were not going to happen in Kabul. The negotiations, the Taliban were not in Kabul at the time. They were in Doha and they were in Pakistan. And so where we were going to engage them was going to be somewhere other than Kabul. But we had to keep the government closely informed. It was a choice to, and certainly a, a Taliban asked that we negotiate directly with the Taliban and not include the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban always were clear that they only wanted to negotiate with us, that the central government was a proxy government for us. And so as a way to catalyze the negotiations,

we were going to talk to the Taliban directly and then essentially keep the government's equity close at heart and keep them briefed very closely of what we would be doing. The government never felt that they were a true partner. The Afghan government never felt that they were a true partner in that process, ever. But this was the arrangement. And so when Ambassador Khalilzad in his team came into Kabul, my office became the support structure to go to all the meetings, take the notes and provide feedback and input into that process.

But again, working for Ambassador Bass. So it was an interesting dynamic. And then what happened was after we got to agreement, I left, and I came back for the last, let's say, five months in Doha, working directly for Ambassador Khalilzad, we had a military touchpoint that was under General Miller's command with the Taliban. So for the last year after the agreement,

this was to kind of give the Taliban a touch point with us because they would keep complaining that we violated the agreement. And we could, from a military perspective, explain, no, no, no, no, we're in compliance with the agreement. and I became the Ambassador Khalilzad's representative on that group that was reporting to General Miller. Can you tell us what, so Trump wanted out of Afghanistan, you guys were trying to make it happen. What were the U.S. as chief goals and, you know, sort of hard limits, soft limits.

What were the Taliban's chief goals, their hard limits, their soft limits for making this agreement happen? Well, I think for making the agreement happen, I was not in the room for the negotiation phase of the agreement. I got there when the agreement was all but done, and we can talk a little bit about that period when I arrived on the scene. But, you know, the Taliban were always clear that it would be basically to give them the government. That was it, that there was going to be a new government and it was going to be a Taliban-led government. And that was their objective from the beginning. The real question was whether there was any accommodation possible, meaning the goal ultimately for us would be that they would be brought into the existing construct in some way, shape, or form.

So you can call it power sharing, not predetermined by us. So Ambassador Khalilza did not want us to predeterminate it, but the goal was to get the Afghan government leadership into the government. the room with the Taliban to negotiate that. So his objectives, Ambassador Khalilzad's objectives, and what I think, you know, essentially the deal with the administration was, was if we're coming out and the intent is to end this war, the American war in Afghanistan, if we just come out, it'll be chaotic, it'll be dangerous, and we get nothing. There's nothing we leave behind, right? At the time, the thinking was that it would be,

likely a civil war, that the Taliban couldn't just win because there's so many other constituencies in a loaded country, right, that you would have a rerun of the early 90s where there was this horrific civil war. You know, the Taliban had done a lot of work, and this obviously became apparent later, eroding all of those other constituencies, either buying them off, something was happening because in the end, we did not. see a civil war breakout. We saw the Taliban take Kabul with less than 3,000 people. Six million people, less than 3,000 people. There were more than enough capabilities to defend Kabul and yet everybody went to ground. The whole thing dissolved, right? So that

tells you that the Taliban had made a lot of inroads all around the countries, particularly in the north, you know, for anybody who had been up there in previous years to then go back in 2019 and 2020 and find out that the north is basically, you know, Maser al-Shareef is basically nearly under Taliban control. You're like, you've lost the, how can you lose the province? For me, I knew things were over when it was a couple weeks. Maybe it was a month before Ghani fled the country. His office put out like a press release about building a hydroelectric dam in Kunduz. And like, we have this big plan. We're going to build this hydroelectric dam. He was like, well, Kunda's already felt of the Taliban.

You're talking about building, like, the priorities are so off and so weird that it's like, you just knew this wasn't going to end well. It was sort of, there were a lot of mismatches going on there. But so the core objectives that Ambassador Khalilzad was trying to get at was, one, to get the Taliban to break with al-Qaeda and transnational terrorism, al-Qaeda specifically because of the history, but also transnational terrorism, that you're not going to use. Afghanistan is a platform to attack other countries. Second, you know, second equally, you know,

critical priority is that our withdrawal be not a hostile withdrawal, that when we come out, they're not going to be attacking us on the exfiltration, that we're going to get to an agreement. You know, third critical point was that the Afghans

would have the opportunity, to come to a peace agreement, that we would be committing to, you know, a peace agreement. And so, you know, he viewed these goals as all very interlocking goals. There's four elements, and I am forgetting one. Was there any sort of, was there any, with that peace agreement or aside from that, Was there any sort of thought of amnesty for like the Afghan national forces who had fought against the Taliban? Or was there any like... No, because it was never presupposed, never, that the Afghan government would collapse.

I see. You know, what you're dealing with in peace agreements often in these kind of peace agreements is what we euphemistically call security sector reform, which means you bring the irregular elements, in this case it would be the Taliban, into the professional military that has been built. Right. So we've all seen the images of these guys driving around in our funded APCs, right? But the idea would have been, rather than have the unit dissolve, the expertise dissolve, the logistics supply chain dissolve, they're coming into these existing structures that in theory

are functional and operational, right? And we're not losing all of that capacity to a civil war. So it was never amnesty for the Afghan government, if anything, the question would be, oh, the other thing that the Taliban very much wanted was removal of sanctions. Individual Taliban are all sanctioned because they're terrorists. Okay. So, you know, they've killed people, including Americans. So they're on sanctions, you know, individual sanctions financial, travel, et cetera. So the Taliban, of course, wanted that peace removed.

But for us, it's okay, you know, if we're going to go down that path, you are going to break the ties with al-Qaeda, and you are going to commit to not becoming a terrorist state, right? What was the response to that? Well, I mean, they negotiated that they would essentially do that. The reality on the ground is that we killed, you know, Zawahiri, who was celebrating, you know, on arrival. With that said, I will say that's a good example of why it was, once we got out, we actually achieved the second biggest effect that we could have achieved, probably because we weren't there, because he's not being hidden by those guys, and he thought he was in a safe space. So in some senses, we achieved the effect on that particular target, and that is a significant target, right? But it is in the agreement, right?

Their counterterrorism commitments are in the agreement. And even to this day, you know, you can see that they have gone full Taliban, right, in terms of how they're governing the country, in terms of where they are. But, you know, there's still the idea for the Taliban, and it'll eventually fade. that there could be some sort of arrangement with the United States that can achieve these other effects that they want. And so that element is there.

The core thing that was achieved, because the other pieces didn't come together, the governance piece, the peace agreement between the Taliban and the Afghans, was not tied to the timetable of our withdrawal. Mm-hmm. Right. So in theory, we would come out,

And that didn't necessarily have to be done. The idea was to have it done. But, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it didn't come out. Talk to us a little bit about that. I mean, the deal is negotiated. Eventually, we sign a deal. Yeah. What happens next?

And how do things, you know, I think we all agree that the way we ended up pulling out of there was not ideal. Yeah. So, first of all, you know, there were some stops and starts to, to how that came forward. You know, Trump hit a pause after a U.S. soldier was killed right, you know, on the eve of the signing. And was that sort of like if we follow through this now, it'll look like it's an image issue, or they're not holding their deal? I can't speak for President Trump.

I mean, we know his words. He said, what kind of people are these? Yeah. You know, I think the thinking, you know, the Taliban explanation, was we weren't in the scope of the peace agreement yet because we hadn't signed it, right? I mean, that's, that was their mentality. He's like, hey, you're going to, you know, that's what he said, what kind of people would do this. Yeah. So he hit, he hit the pause button. We then conducted negotiations in Doha, that were off-book negotiations, where Ambassador Khalilza, the agreement, the U.S. the Taliban agreement was all but done and then it was paused and there was no it was called off

I mean we didn't know whether it was a permanent pause or when you say off book you mean like informal essentially I'm going to say informal yeah to not use other words you know it was it was because we were no longer negotiating with the Taliban formally right but behind the scenes it's like if we do this we'll do that so now they ran into each other so now so now you know you know Ambassador Khalil-Zad said, well, let's not lose what we have. We've got the U.S.S. Taliban agreement is basically ready to go. We can make some adjustments. I would like to take a run.

How can we get the Taliban? The Taliban said, hey, we'll come back to the table, but it's you guys. So what is Ambassador, you know, Khaled? One of the big goals of the Trump administration was freeing American hostages. They put a lot of time and effort into that, that they felt that, Americans should not be left overseas. Now, you know, I think all of us understand the very difficult choices made with Americans that are hostage overseas. And, you know, we've had a longstanding policy that we weren't going to negotiate on hostages.

And there's a very good reason for that, which it introduces moral hazard. You pay $4 million for somebody, the next person is $8.00. It becomes an economy. Or it becomes a series of political objectives that they're going to. can get and we always pay a lot more, you know, for Americans. We trade a lot more, we give up a lot more than other people, you know, are willing to do. But, you know, it's not just the Trump administration, you know, this administration, every administration has committed to, you know, it's our top thing, it's protecting Americans overseas, so you make tradeoffs when

you deem that there's an opportunity. So what Ambassador Khalilzad realizes, we could bring somebody home safely. And what we're going to do is use this as an opportunity to sort of go back and test a few things. And one of the things was whether the Taliban really had commanding control, whether they could deliver what General Miller was asking for, which is if we're going to go into a U.S. Taliban scenario, we need to see a reduction of violence, a serious reduction of violence. because the Taliban view was always, we're not going to attack you, but we are going to come after the Afghan government because they're not party to the agreement. Right. Of course, because they didn't want them to party the agreement.

They wanted the power. And our point to the Taliban was always, okay, you know, that's not good. You should be negotiating with the government. But if you attack our partners, we are going to defend our partners. Right. Okay. So we were still engaged in combat operations against the Taliban, but it was not, in theory, not direct. Right.

So one of the things to test was whether you could actually have a ceasefire, whether you could get to a point. We couldn't get in ceasefire, but we were going to have a reduction of violence. And so one of the operations for these negotiating to return our people was we, we were, We needed to have the Taliban stand down in an area and not attack if we were sending our special operations forces in to the area to pick up a guy that you don't even know if he's alive, right? So we worked out that agreement. The mission happened.

The Taliban did have a ceasefire. They actually ended up in a firefight with the Afghan government at one point, which they blamed on the government. we spent months trying to unstick in this military touchpoint. It all worked. The agreement was eventually signed. We returned to the table. We got a hostage freed.

And the agreement happens. I exit the scene for a while at that point. Now we go into implementation. We're drawing down. But we had COVID. So that really jacked up a lot of things. There were fewer meetings within Afghanistan. A lot of stuff was being done virtually at this point.

And part of the agreement was prisoner releases. So this was a huge thing. The Taliban were supposed to get back up to 5,000 prisoners. The government didn't want to. They didn't negotiate for it, so they didn't want to give them up. And so we did a lot of stop and start over these prisons. prisoners, trying to get the two sides to the table. All of this was happening while we're drawing down and the Taliban were slowly making some inroads, right? So I get recalled back in, you know, they started calling me and say, hey, we have this gap. We need somebody to be in their military touch point to be partnered with the general, General Klein. It was General Tully. who was the main guy for 15 months talking to the Taliban every day.

You know, that guy... Pour one out for him. Yeah, poor one out for him. I mean, you know, really, truly. But nearer to the end, as we got closer to the end, he was replaced by General Klein. And so I was going to be the civilian counterpoint to this. So Zal's representative, these guys are reporting to General Miller. They're conveying essentially to the Taliban, hey, we,

are on the trajectory that we said we're on. Which was for April 1st, right? Well, it was, I think it was May 1st. May 1st, okay. Because the Taliban were not attacking us in a way, you know, of course some, you know, and it was a deconfliction channel too, like, okay, so if you're not attacking us, why did we have seven rounds drop on Bogram last thing? Oh, it wasn't us, or we're going to investigate.

or it's a rogue commander, whatever, you know, but you're trying to deconflict so you don't get people killed on the way out. And so I came back to that, and what had happened was we had the change in administration. And during the change in administration, you can understand. You come in, you've got a deal on the table to get out. There's a lot of equities in Washington saying, okay, let's not come out. I mean, this was a controversial thing that President Trump did because, look, huge equities within the defense establishment were operating under the mow-the-grass theory,

that it's a relatively low cost to stay in Afghanistan, and this will not become a terrorist event, and we cannot be kicked out with some number of troops that are supporting our enablers. We can keep like 2,000 people in the country and just maintain a counterterrorism presence. So I'm not going to put numbers because that was always a controversy. A small platform. But again,

with our Afghan enablers and with our enablers for the Afghans, but also remember the Europeans are also in there. NATO is in there. So when we looked at, oh, we had 8,000 troops. Well, we're actually at a 16,000 troop strength because you have your partner nations are in there. So you're at a higher level.

But you can understand, so there was a constituency within the Defense Department, which is very much like, why are we doing that? There's still the neo-conservative approach of, hey, ungoverned space. Then there's people who are like, you're on the doorstep of Pakistan, China, Iran. Russia's over there. Great power. It's a strategic environment to be there, right?

Yeah. And then there's the State Department, which is, you know, hey, we educated a generation of women. We've got partners in here. This is a valuable partner in the region. And let's be honest, we're also emotionally tied to this subject. And there's the emotional ties to the entire U.S. government establishment that has worked under the GWAT framework for 20 years building this thing. We're deeply vested. So, you know, I think President Trump made very much the right decision.

because as you guys know back home outside of the foreign policy establishment it's why are we still in Afghanistan I don't think we should be spending any money over there I don't know why people are dying over there why are we fighting a war even though we could convince ourselves that this war was against somebody else so I think you know President Trump made a decision that was difficult to make that's why people don't make it because if you choose to come out, you're the one who gave up the al-Qaeda scenario. But both parties were kind of done with this war by this point. Well, so here's, this is where I'm going with this, right? So when the new administration comes in, it's got to take on board all of these inputs.

This is a logical thing for any new administration. Sure. Let's examine. And remember, President Biden's position from back in 2009 was not come out entirely, but keep it just as a counterterrorism mission. A CT presence. And it's a separate. And it's a. CT presence. Now, we know that the CT presence was enabled by the military footprint. The logistics of a landlocked country through which you've got to go through in Afghanistan don't really allow you that pure CT presence. Right. If you have 2,000 people there. But his position wasn't radically different from President Trump's position. With the exception, he would have kept a CT plet. Now, would President Trump, if that had been

sort of at the end would that have been an outcome because we don't know because there were still moments at which you could have paused this trajectory, right? So we don't know. The administration changed. They took, the Biden administration took a prudent pause. There's no question. You have to take the inputs. You have to come with

a fresh set of eyes, assess this, and remember you're getting it from a lot of other people. Right. The problem is, we had a deal, and that deal was May 1st, and as part of that deal, the Taliban were not attacking the exfiltration. So if you're going to abrogate that particular term of the deal, you are exposing us to risk. General Miller, as the commander, understood that crystal clear, right? So the advice that tends to go up is, well, I think we should keep a certain level and maintain because we've got force pro, we've got all these other equities. But if they were going to come out, which is what they ended up doing, then you better get out under the terms that we agreed because otherwise the Taliban are telling us.

And where are the Taliban telling us? in the military touchpoint, right? You're telling us this in the military touch point. So the people that were interacting directly face to face with the Taliban are very few in the U.S. government. There's Ambassador Khalil Zad directly, his deputy from time to time,

but really Ambassador Kalilzad. And General Miller through is a military touch point. That's it. This is how we're communicating with the Taliban. And what we're hearing is, hey, what are you doing? What is this pause?

What's going on? Okay, now we're beyond the scope. When the Biden administration came and said August 31st, and first they said September 11th, I think prudently backed it out to August 31st, the Taliban said, we don't accept that. Where did they say it? They told us in this touch point. They didn't accept it. But they said, we don't trust you.

We heard you were coming out before. Again, under the Obama issue, we were supposed to have a significant drawdown. And it just ended up being ramped back up. So we had to keep delivering the message. We are coming out militarily. But you guys got to get to the peace talks. And we did start to get the Afghan government and the Taliban to finally meet face-to-face. The problem was, is as we started to move out, district after district started to fall.

They just, you can come up with any theory you want. The reality was, I mean, and look, the beauty of Afghan maps was, again, always goes to that village level, right? That you look at the map, it says, hey, this is Afghan government controlled. if you looked at at the village level, none of the villages were Afghani government. They may have been Taliban, they may not have been, but they certainly weren't governed. The district center was controlled. That was the space. So now those district centers are gone.

And now you're seeing, okay, well, they haven't gone after the provincial capitals, but you're watching the map go red from May, June, July. And this is all open source stuff that, you know, they did. And I found, I don't use Twitter anymore at all. Gotten off that platform. But at the time, there were Twitter accounts from Randos doing spectacularly good. This battle happened. The Taliban have now taken this village, this village, this thing with pin drops.

I would then call my Afghan contacts or talk to the Taliban, and they would confirm that these places are gone. And I don't know who the randos are that are dragging the stuff on open source. The military is briefing in the commander update brief. There's a lot of open source that's feeding into that stuff because what are we also losing? We're losing our ISR. And we're losing our intelligence network because we're reducing all those. Not only that, we're losing assets because now CENTCOM's losing assets to pay off.

Because you have the larger battle for resources within our government. So this all starts happening and you can kind of see the thing coming down. So I think a prudent decision made, which is that we stick to the agreement, an irritant that produces a significant vulnerability and the reality now shifting on the ground. I think there are a lot of people who will argue, okay, well, that, you know, that it was red flags and all of this stuff, right? The challenge is when you look at it from a Washington perspective. And again, you know, I can't emphasis as enough. You guys know, people working on Afghanistan worked in good faith.

We're trying to get to the right outcome. There's very few. There are cases where you say, oh, what did we do this government? We overthrew this government? We tried to do this. No, people were trying, you know, working to try to get, you know, from your line soldiers to your diplomats,

to Ambassador Juliozad, to General Miller, different perspectives, different approaches, but definitely trying to do the right thing for the United States and also for our Afghan partners. So if you look at it from Washington, perspective, the analog, the historical analog is the civil war. And you have to think that with thousands of Afghan police and officers and the armaments that we dumped into Kabul itself, that at a minimum you would have several large ink spots as provincial centers, maybe the Taliban

would sweep through parts of the country, but that at the end you're going to have some sort of bad civil war if you can't get to a deal. And certainly that was Ambassador Khalilzad's analysis, that it would be a civil war, not an outright victory, not a dissolution of the Afghan forces. So I think what was happening was the reality was we were built on quicksand. Again, you know, the agency said, hey, you know, I think there was some assessment at some point where they said, it's got six months or whatever, you know, earlier in the process, that it's not going to last maybe a year or whatever. But I think there's a really good argument that the Afghan government would defend itself,

at least in Kabul, that there were equities of all of these troops and all of these families that they would defend themselves, which meant that your time horizon would be longer. Right. Right. General Miller clearly said, once we're beyond the agreement, we've got to come out faster. And so they were pulling out. And, you know, I think my assessment is that no matter how you came out, the 20-year relationship, once that military piece is out, it was going to be chaotic.

Are there mitigants that could have, you know, stopped, you know, some of the scenes that we saw? Yeah, there are things that we can do better as a government. Right. But in the end, the outcome was the right outcome. And that's fundamentally what we have to focus on because, you know, I said this to you before we were taping. If you look at the world today and the battle space and the change in technology, if we're opposing Russia in Ukraine and we're... you know, crosswise with, you know, Iran, and you see the damage the Houthis are inflicting. I find it impossible to believe that that stuff wouldn't be hitting U.S. forces and U.S. diplomats

if we were still in Afghanistan today because, you know, we would be beyond the scope of any agreement. And the folks that the Taliban do business with, you know, are ramped up. and the technology has changed because for the first time ever, some of your guests' point is you have to look to the air now in a way that we've never had to look to protect embassy platforms or other platforms.

I mean, it's also a question of like priorities. We're trying to counter Russia, China, Iran, and then somewhere after that, we're also looking at the global war on terror, counterterrorism, North Korea. I mean, you get to a certain point where it's like, can we maintain these long-term you know, quote unquote, sustainable counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Afghanistan,

Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, while also trying to confront some of these larger nation states. The logistics chain, the cost, I mean, there are many in our defense establishment and, you know, and, you know, also on the state side, I think that would argue that these costs are relatively minimal. I don't, I don't agree with that. And I don't think most Americans would agree that, you know, $9 billion a year or whatever, whatever it costs. Just simply because, again, the complexity of sustaining operations in Afghanistan was immense. And we saw that when Bogram closed because now you've got a single point of failure, which is that runway at Karzai International Airport. One way in and when they're out.

Could you convoy out? Sure. But you're convoying hours and hours and hours. I mean, it is very, very easy to, you know, take out those, you know, a convoy. So, I mean, this is operationally you're stuck at that point. So when you look at this, you know, sort of global force posture and global diplomatic posture, this cost, if you're under, if you're really drawn deeper into the war, which we would have been had we stayed, because, again, you know, all of this technology would have flowed in there.

The Russians would have loved to hit us, I am sure, and I'm not a Russian expert. It just stands to reason that we would have more Tower 22s if we were still there. So the outcome was the right outcome. And, you know, again, what I mentioned before is what's unique about this is we had two presidents that are from radically different perspectives on virtually everything, right, that, understood, I think, where the American public was on this issue and understood the American public was not, you know, aware of, supportive, of pouring money into this particular war anymore.

And so the decision was made across both administrations. So when we go back to execution, again, things that you can do, some of the things are just going to be what they were. I'll give you a very good example. You know, it's a really tough conversation for State Department people when we have to pull up out of an embassy. When I was in Liberia, it was a potential for us to pull up stakes and pull out. And sometimes the security posture and the logistics to sustain the place are not viable. Maybe the country wants us out. Maybe we're directly under attack, so it's not viable. The large number of people who work for the embassy that run generators, that run your human resources in many countries are our Foreign Service nationals. These are local Liberians, local Hong Kongers, local, you know, people, many of whom have put 20, 30-year careers in with us, right? Just like all the military interpreters that we hear about that in Afghanistan worked with us for 10, 15 years.

In traditional evacuation, by traditional, I mean historical evacuations, the answer is they stay in place. We don't take them out. If they are entitled to a special immigrant visa, they've worked for us for a certain amount of time, we can bring them and their families home. But it's not happening generally in an evacuation. This would be the normal course of you worked your 20 years, you apply, and you're going, an interagency committee looks and says this person is who they say they are, they've got recommendations through their years, and we're going to give their family a chance to come to

the states. It's a reward. And, you know, in places where people, you know, don't have difficult circumstances, you don't use a lot of SIVs, where they have difficult circumstances, it's an option. Most people don't want to really leave their country, but it's a nice thing. Now, in Afghanistan, you heard we had a lot of people that would be targeted and so we had a bigger program. But we worked with people across the spectrum for 20 years that we invested in relationships that anybody who was in country has friends or, you know, contacts or that was a good person or people that they've saved your life, right? Literally saved your life.

So in Afghanistan, sorry, in a normal situation, the answer is, to local staff is you don't come. We will try to help you. We will try to keep your salary on the books for another year. We'll try to get back. And I had to have those conversations in Liberia. We cannot take you out. That is a hard conversation.

You are keeping the lights on so I can get the messages back to work the diplomacy. But if I am ordered to leave, I can't take you. In Afghanistan, because like in Iraq, we had this. we basically, if you worked for us for a short period of time, we were going to give you the option of an SIV. Basically, most of our staff had an option. And then we had all these other relationships that were, you know, contracting relationships with people, meaning they didn't work for the embassy, but they may have worked for a military contractor who was supporting our fob.

Right. we felt a certain obligation to try to get a lot more people out. And then we also had made 20 years of commitment to Afghan women, girls. There were vulnerable groups of people that we've had our Congress sit with them. We've had, you know, and then you look and you say, well, here's a woman author, for example. There's a book, The Secret Gate, that came out about this, about a DS agent who became a state department. Department, Foreign Service Officer, well, DS's Foreign Service, but he became a political officer. And he came in and, you know, evacuated an author. Why did the author come out?

The author came out because as a matter of policy, we said we're going to try to take out some of, you know, as many of our friends as we can and vulnerable people. So if you're looking at an after action, what did that do? That was a magnet for everybody to come to the airport. Yeah. Now, if you've worked the issue, are you really going to criticize and say, hey, just leave everybody. Just leave everybody.

And by the way, there's a ton of American citizens in Afghanistan, but a lot of folks who, you know, were Afghan and now they're American, so we have an obligation to them. But what were they doing there? They were doing there because they were trying to get, they were there on vacation, visiting family, you know, things that we wouldn't conceive of in a war zone, but they're there because they thought the state was going to be there. Now they're caught off guards, but they also have very tough choices. Do you leave the family that is under U.S. immigration law, under all that, not entitled

to come out, right? But now you have these moral questions, the American citizen is saying, hey, you know, I've got one daughter who's in America, but my other daughter came back with me. you know, or my other daughter was here, she was in the immigration process. All of those people, some of them are entitled to come out, many are attached to people who are entitled to come out. If you say no, right, you might mitigate people trying to get to the airport, but probably you wouldn't because people would not, you know, have a sense. And so as a result, there was a magnet coming to the airport and what did that do? That introduced a

of vulnerabilities and we saw the very tragic outcome of that. Do you want to tee up the questions for Dante? You know I'm curious because something you mentioned has kind of stuck with me. Like when I wonder if for you know people in state, people in the Department of Defense, people in the administration like administration of workers, when they look at an effort in Afghanistan and they say well you know for $9 billion a year or whatever like or how much ever it is for $9 billion dollars like that's not a high price to pay. I wonder if how many of those opinions would change

if they were forced to go out and walk patrols with the troops walking those. You know, that like we look at this as a monetary thing, but there's also, you know, a generation of warfighters who are also living with, you know, sort of the consequences of that war. And then the moral injury of how we left, how we left, you know, a lot of the Afghan partners

and things like that. Listen, this is an excellent question, right? And it's a core question that any of us have worked on the issue, because I will tell you that the way you framed it, you would say, okay, it was people who have that perspective are only looking at the monetary cost. Right. You know, some of the people who are framing

are those same people who are out there because there's still the theory, that we operate under, which is it's better to take the fight into the field forward rather than have to fight it back here. Now, there's another theory, which is it really doesn't matter

what happens in Afghanistan if we protect the homeland in the homeland. Your border control is working. Your port access is working. We all take off our shoes at the airport so we don't get a shoe bomber, right? This is a theory. There's no right answer.

But those people, I would still say, would say, yeah, I don't minimize the physical cost of families, the cost in loss of lives. But we're trying to protect the homeland. So again, I come back to good faith. Yeah. I don't run into a lot of people who are dismissive of that cost. Right. But I do agree that the further you are from the front, the further you are from a combat outpost or an embassy, the easier it is to put it in economic terms rather than the human

toll. I agree with that. But some of the people making those decisions do have that in mind. But the calculus is what 3,000 people were lost in 9-11, so we're trying to prevent a 9-11. We're trying to prevent what the... Houthis are doing right now. Right.

So, but it's a great question. Okay, M. Corbyn, thank you very much. How big of a headache is the leasing agreement for Djibouti? But now you're talking my current job, you know. Listen, I have to go into State Department speak. Djibouti is a critical counterterrorism partner. We can see the challenges in the Red Sea. So we want to make sure that our partners feel.

you know, that we appropriately view the relationship as a strong strategic partner. Yeah. So that's what I've got to. Out of curiosity, have you ever had from any of these partners, obviously there's the monetary, there are, you know, all types of diplomatic things, has there ever been a really weird request that just caught you off guard or, you know, anything that, like an ambassador or some like anything not an ambassador but like have there ever been concessions that they wanted or or things that struck like you or like americans is odd um you mean from our partners

yeah from our partners um you know there's i mean you know when you're in a foreign country you there's just different things happen and you don't you don't really understand I'm not going to give an example. The example I'm going to give you is a funny one because it just popped into my mind, not because I'm trying to avoid a formal government request. I just didn't have one right in mind. I'm negotiating with General Cobra. And we're trying to get General Cobra to withdraw his forces from Liberia,

from Monrovia. And he ends up doing it. So then I go back to his headquarters, right? And they're trying to sort of figure out what their new posture will be in the sort of post-war era. And this is what he figured out. He throws down a giant lump of stone and he goes, this is a raw diamond. You and me, we can sell this. And I was like...

General Cobra, I don't want to rekindle the war, I don't want to get shot. I'm like, you know, this is a great, you know, sorry, it's not my lane, you know, and I'm trying to. So, I mean, things come, you know, you don't quite know what is, what you're going to be dealing with on a daily basis. But, yeah, that's the example that pops into my, it is, it was not a formal government request, but it was the head of the rebel contingent. Thank you, Devin. Thank you very much, very generous. I would like to know your action in a nuclear war setting. Wait. If a nuclear bomb drop, what would you do? Die, probably.

What would I do in a nuclear bomb? Yeah. I mean, look, like everybody, if I'm not vaporized immediately, I'm going to go find my family and, you know, try to go to ground. Thanks, Devin. We appreciate it. Collie, thank you very much. We define success in Afghanistan. as a strong, stable central government ignoring reality. Did this misalignment ensure failure?

I would say that, again, I want to be clear, I think we achieved our core strategic mission in Afghanistan, which is we took the leadership of al-Qaeda off the board and the ideological gravity center of that organization off the board, and that's the organization that killed 3,000 Americans, right? So I feel strongly that that core national security objective. Now, when you're talking about what came and what we were trying to achieve in terms of the stability, it's less sort of that objective than I think there are alternate history

lines as we've talked about, that certainly us, I think the bigger, you know, the bigger mistakes that were made were hyper-inflating an economy that couldn't handle it, that it blatantly enabled the corruption. So we fueled a completely dependent structure that wasn't serving the benefit of the people that, in theory, we were trying to help. And again, it gets back to we as Americans supporting a unitary state. By unitary state, I mean a central government that appoints the governing structures, the governors and the district governors of the provinces and the outlying areas, and all the resources flow back to centrally led ministries. This is the type of stuff that

drives us crazy in America. And so I, you know, the fact that we worked so much on that project. If I had had a stronger say, you know, and had been a senior person, I would have been looking more at, you know, what are the relationships of the tribes and how do we do, you know, a looser confederation of peoples that, you know, will fundamentally be willing to accept some money, far smaller amounts, to tell us when al-Qaeda shows up and turn them over. And that's it, and then leave the Afghans to sort out a different construct rather than we didn't fully impose it, but we funded it so much that. So I think the, you know, I hope I'm being responsive to the answer. I don't think it was a preordained failure, but I do think that the structure as it developed was definitely not the right structure.

And there are other things that probably could have, should have been tried earlier in the process. I mean, once we were, once I got there in 2009, we were far down the road of supporting a unitary state, and that was our problem. I think we should have looked at other models. That's my own view. Ian Brown, thank you very much. What are Dante's thoughts about the diplomatic security service? How did he work with him? Thanks, Sky.

I mean, I can't say enough positive things about my colleagues in. diplomatic security and again the marine security guards that work for them at embassies. I'm a field person. Most of my career has been overseas. Those folks are responsible for not only our safety of us, safety of the chancery, but they're maintaining the relationships with all the local security apparatus, right? Because fundamentally we're in somebody else's country. We are relying on them.

you know, a strong RSO and a strong RSO contingent is completely tied in and has the context. So when you need to evacuate somebody from a country, when there's a real crisis, that person being able to do it. And, you know, my colleagues are excellent. The other thing is that they are tasked with, and you guys know this, if you look at threat streams, we would close everywhere because you're constantly under threat. if your focus is on threat streams. And the RSO has to have the judgment, and they do. We have exceptional RSOs throughout the world who are looking at these threat streams

that we're all seeing in different channels, and they have to go to the ambassador, the chief of mission, and say, hey, we got this, or it's time to go. And so, like, in Liberia, if you can imagine the pressure that Ted Collins and Brad Lynn our RSO and A RSO, we're under. You not only have the washing and pressure, but it's, if I give the ambassador the wrong advice, I don't think we can hold, if I say

I think we can hold this compound, the compound's overrun. Right. I mean, not only do I maybe get killed, I get the ambassador killed, but I've, you know, destroyed the U.S. credibility in the region. We've lost a platform. I mean, huge ramifications.

The ambassador as the chief of mission with the authority will make the final call unless it's taken away and Washington decides we don't think the ambassador has it right, we're going to order the ambassador out. But the RSO is the critical counsel to the ambassador on how to handle the riot that is out front of your embassy, how to handle the civil war that's broken out. What does this mean for the security of our personnel. So I can't say enough positive things about it because you don't see, you know, all of the things that are prevented on a daily basis by that. Igan, thank you very much. Hit the likes, guys. Let's get to that 100. Hopefully we got there

already. Thanks, Igan. We appreciate it. Collie, thank you very much. Does the United States government facilitating private hostage negotiations, example of the Burnhams, undermine the stated policy of no negotiation with terrorists? Good question. So this is a really good question. I really have to caveat it that it's, you know, I'm not familiar with that particular example in terms of what that means, the facilitation. I'll say this, that it's a very, you know, hostage negotiation stuff is very, very difficult. We have a commitment as a government to recover our people safely, right? But there's a moral hazard every time you're doing it.

And you're dealing with the emotions and lives of family members and communities. But you're balancing that against the reality. that the more you pay into a system, and I don't mean monetary, whatever transactions you do on hostage release, can introduce more hostages. So these are very, very tough calls on whether or not that's right. So in terms of is there moral hazard, and I can't answer that specific case because I don't know it, but as a general principle, you know, negotiations introduced that. and then, you know, we have to make very hard choices.

The Burnums were in the Philippines, and it was a big deal in the early 2000s getting them out of there. They were missionaries. And when they were finally rescued, I believe the wife made it out. The husband, I believe, was killed, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I'm not familiar with it. I will say that, you know, there's some, you know, again, not my area of expertise. there's some areas of policy that are under consideration. Because I think we used to have a law that private citizens couldn't do their own negotiation.

You sort of understood it because, again, it was to try to prevent the moral hazard and try to prevent people from getting deeper into a situation that they're unfamiliar with and producing something. But a change in policy there would make some sense in the sense that, look, if a family member wants to try, they should be aware of the risks that they're undertaking. But we as a government shouldn't, you know, I think there's a strong case to be made that it's not our role to stop it. Right. But, you know, but it's because of those kind of very, very difficult situations that the policy gets gray.

Sure. Tell us a little bit about where you're at now. You're the director of East African Affairs at the State Department. What does that entail? That entails. You know, an office within the State Department in what we call a regional bureau is sort of your primary touch point for the embassies in the reporting back. So when an embassy reports what's going on in a country, you know, they will, you know, feed their views and that information into a policy process on how we respond to what I'm going on. the country is doing, if somebody wants to join bricks, do we have a policy response? Should we encourage them not to? Do we have an alternative for them? You know, those kind of things.

So the office is the primary pooler and gatherer of information for the embassies. And then the second thing is where the, you know, we provide a regional and country-specific perspective into interagency deliberations over whatever policy is being cooked up. Hey, we want to, you know, we want to train police. Okay, good ideas, should we be training these police? Right. You know, how are we balancing the human rights considerations with the hardcore national security considerations?

So it's a lot of internal conversation. And then, of course, we are a touchpoint for the embassies here from the foreign missions. You know, in places where we have intensive negotiations, we may support those negotiations. Maybe there's a trade treaty that they bring in our expertise on. Maybe there's some other kind of bilateral dialogue. We support a lot of things like that. You bring their foreign minister over. we bring the secretary together and we discuss the issues.

So you're trying to manage the relations with countries where the sort of primary, you know, regional policy expertise on that. And folks out there that are interested in your book, which, I mean, I think you described it to me before, that it's really about what it's like to be existing in a crisis in a U.S. embassy abroad. In this book, where can people find it? They can find it on Amazon. The book is The Embassy, a Story of War and Diplomacy.

Just a couple quick points on it. It is designed. It's written in narrative nonfiction. There's a brief section that you've got to get through in intro. You don't have to read it on history. A little dry. What I do is the reason I wrote it is to put you in an embassy in a crisis. So it was based on my own personal observations and experiences, but I also did extensive interviews with everybody that was involved in the crisis at the time, and I was sort of at the nerve center.

So you've got chapters built around the perspective of the RSO, more or less, chapters built around the perspective of the ambassador, of a local staff member, and they're woven together to take you through. an extraordinary summer in which, again, three rebel attacks, the end of the Charles Taylor regime, and a peace agreement that has endured to today. That's fantastic. I don't know if I've ever heard of a book of that nature where it's really, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And is there anything else that you want to plug? Where can people find you?

I know you're currently a government official. Do you have any sort of public-facing places that you want to direct people to? An Etsy shop or anything like that. No, no. You know, if you want to see the travel version of the Foreign Service and see some travel photography, you can go to my Instagram account, Parity, so DX. If you just want to reach out to me and you have further questions, you know, I think one of the things that your platform does is give people a chance to connect.

So you can just find me on LinkedIn under my name. Okay. Because, you know, I'm always happy to engage people and, you know, build the community of interest. For people who might be interested in pursuing the field of Foreign Service, what's a good age to start that? What are some good in rows? And what does the Foreign Service look for in candidates? Yeah, I mean, the Foreign Service, there are a couple. A couple ways in, I'm not that familiar with the sort of non-traditional mid-career ways.

They're trying to open up that process and make it a little more flexible. The traditional way is there's a foreign service exam. You should find out from state got gov where you can find the information on the exam. And it's a written exam followed by an oral exam, followed by security and medical clearances if you pass it. You know, the preparation for the career can be varied, obviously, folks with military background is excellent. We're fortunately getting a lot of folks that are using it as a second career.

You can enter at any point. The retirement age is 65. You're going to have to come in, you know, in your late 50s if you want a couple tours overseas. the thing is is that you're not going to become an ambassador if you start when you're 55 because it's just you're not going to have the time to work your way up through the system but there's a tremendous number of great assignments out there there's a lot of different aspects to foreign service life so you know I'm a political officer by you know by

they call it cone what do you guys call it skill code right political officer that's essentially reporting on the political dynamics in a country. But there are also management officers that just sort of run the affairs of an embassy. You know, make sure that we have our motor pool set, you know, make sure that your financial stuff is being run. We have public affairs officers and, of course, consular officers. And if, you know, immigration is your thing and you want to help, you know, bring people to the states, You want to keep people out of the states. You're going to be working on visas.

You're going to be working on family reunification. And the critical component of American citizen services, which is when somebody's in trouble overseas, you get thrown in jail. The embassy is going to visit, track you. We can't run your court case for you. But it's those kind of things sort of helping Americans through evacuations in extremists and all that. Those are all aspects. And then there are specialized rules, which is. like diplomatic security

those are folks come in in diplomatic security or IT people you know if you have a general interest in living overseas representing the country but you know they're not as

as interested in the core diplomatic sit in the meeting with the foreign minister and write reports on that then you know some of those other roles are ways to contribute to the interagency platform. And I want to shout out everybody that is part of an embassy team.

The State Department provides the core platform, right? But a country team at an embassy, you know, like if you go to Thailand, it's like 54 agencies. I didn't even know we had 54 agencies. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, there's the, there's the A, there's CIA. You can go through the entire litany of the U.S. government and apparently and find it entirely. You go to a smaller embassy, you know, you're going to find two or three agencies. Usually you're going to have a defense attache there and you might

have a USAID person or whatever. So it really depends. There's a lot of, you know, folks that are doing foreign affairs and doing embassy work. So they should all get credit for that. Well, Dante, thank you so much for coming in to do this interview tonight. Even if you came in under an alias, that's okay. Really appreciate it. And we will be back on Wednesday with Adam Gamal, the author of the unit. So that's Wednesday at noon. So it'll be a noon interview, a little odd for us.

But I hope you guys will check out the embassy. The book's available on Amazon. And there's going to be a link down in the description as well. You guys can go and check it out. Thank you. And, you know, I hope that we can have you back sometime in the future. because there's a few other things here that we didn't quite get to tonight.

Yeah, we let out China. We got that in Hong Kong. I mean, China could probably be a tone episode. Yeah, no, it absolutely could. And, you know, I have no idea. Maybe you'll have another book to come and talk about as well. I'm trying. We're trying.

Yeah. You know, it's great. It's a real, honestly, an honor to be here. And, you know, you guys have phenomenal guests. You know, love this program. And it's, we all learn from it. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

So that's it. We'll see you guys on Wednesday. Take care of out there. Have a nice weekend.