TRASHFUTURE - John Bull’s Other Occupation feat. Arron Merat

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Alice and Riley speak with returning guest, journalist Arron Merat (@a_merat), reflecting on twenty years of cruelty and institutional failure on the part of the British state and its bloody imperial adventure in Afghanistan. We look deeper into the domestic pressures, economic and psychological, that made this all happen, and look at some of the attempts to actively forget what we have been doing If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* see Milo perform in London here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-voicemail-preview-tickets-167077291677 *TF LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have a live show in London on September 1! Patrons have a discount so check the posts if you are a subscriber! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/event-details/trashfuture-live-at-vauxhall-comedy-club-1-9-21 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Future listeners. Just wanted to give you a quick heads up before the start of the episode that there are two live events involving the TF cast that if you are interested in and live in London, you can attend. One of them is Tonight. Link is in the show notes for Milo doing a stand-up show. And we also have our first Trash Future Live show since the start of the pandemic. It's on September 1st at Voxel Comedy Club in Voxel. There's a link in the show notes if you want to get tickets. And also, if you're a Patreon subscriber, there's a discount for purchasing tickets. So just look at the Patreon posts. Regardless of what tier you're on, there is in fact a discount available to you. Anyway, thank

you and please enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome to this free episode of TF, that podcast you're listening to right now. It's the serious one. It's the serious one. It is just myself and Alice. And we are joined once again by a journalist and sort of a reporter from Iran and Afghanistan, Aaron Merrin. Aaron, how's it going? Hi there. Glad to be here. And we are, well, we are glad to have you back though. The circumstances I think are much like the previous time we spoke. Yeah, thank you for coming on our comedy podcast to talk about a human tragedy again.

I'm so glad to get the call every time that human tragedy happens. I don't know why I've been specializing in them so much. We're very simple people, right? We have guys for stuff. So like, if we need to read a bad book by an MP, we call Nish Kumar. If we need to read like a bad book by like a brains guy, we call Felix Biederman. And if we need to like analyze one of the worst foreign policy disasters in a generation, we call you. Glad to be here, sir. You are our go-to guy. So look, this is a difficult one to say set the table for, but

we have been sort of watching, I would say, the very, at once tragic and predictable consequences. The rapid unplanned disassembly of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Yes. And the replacement by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as the Western forces that have been occupying it, basically terrorizing it for the last, whether you want to say 20 years or 150 years have sort of leapt away in the middle of the night and then had had to walk that back a little bit by occupying Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, which has been a sort of like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. And I think one of the things that have been there, there are lots of sort of things going

on right now. There is a sort of flurry of sort of history rewriting of sort of outbursts of sentimentality by imperialist monsters all over sort of the British media, much as there was 20 years ago to kick the this particular thing off. And so we have Aaron back on focus on a few things. We want to discuss in detail how we got here from sort of the beginnings of Western, particularly British imperialism in Afghanistan for the last, well, to be 150, 200 years with this special focus on this pernicious myth that it is possible for an imperial power to sort of go in with pure intentions and improve a place by colonizing it. And why this story of state building ends up being

more or less the same as the process of whipping the country up into a bloodthirsty frenzy. In this hour or so of podcast, we are going to solve why Afghanistan happened the way that it did. That's right. Setting up some small goals for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that has been happening, in fact, I think it's probably worth opening on and is the sort of prism through which you can read much of the British involvement in Afghanistan, is that Boris Johnson has been trying to get

Joe Biden on the phone for the last 36 hours, you know, the U.K. America's Lancer, yes, he's being ignored by Joe Biden, who can't figure out how to transfer the call. But I think if we want to think about Britain in Afghanistan, right, there is this idea constantly that we'll sort of get to that we must have been, we could not have done other than being there. And that is an idea that has been very hard to break out of. It's an idea that sort of gripped the country in the 19th century, in the latter half, and for hundreds of years, in fact, right. And Aaron, one of the things we've been talking about is how this obsession has meant that history has proceeded at different speeds in Afghanistan because it has essentially

been held back by colonial powers. It has been, whether you want to call it underdeveloped, like how Europe underdeveloped Africa, or how it has just been essentially sort of wrongly used, you might say, you know, can you elaborate on that idea a bit? Yeah, so I think it was, you mentioned the media and this sort of pearl clutching by a lot of sort of a liberal commentary at and as far as I see it, these are real, they provide cover to the sort of imperial apparatus because this talk about the rights of women and foreign correspondents sort of calling up their friends in Kabul and people decrying with threat to liberty. And the Afghan Taliban being a sort of like primordial or medieval pick your metaphor

force of darkness is kind of extremely interesting. And also incredibly frustrating. And I find it frustrating really for two reasons. One is that the evocation of Western values, which are broadly considered good in the West secularism, individual autonomy, universal human rights, etc. is a part of the imperial project. There's always, there's always a utopian side to imperialism and imperialism can't really function without it. It was saving souls and Christendom and then these days it's spreading individual autonomy and preserving human rights. And these liberal values have existed in Afghanistan since the middle of modernity, like they're not alien to the country. However, to assume that they're a majority opinion, or even as people seem to imply

some sort of universal sort of essence of everyone, including every Afghan really, really like misses the point in terms of the history of Afghanistan. They're and also these values aren't shared by the governments and the imperial powers who have been involved in Afghanistan for a long time. No, we barely care about violence against women and girls here. So Yeah, the idea that they give a shit about women in Afghanistan, and that it's not just propaganda is really for the birds. Like it, the history, like just a little bit of history, like in the 1970s, Afghanistan just basically fell apart when they got rid of the king, and they

entered a civil war. And then that put the country in play in the forces of the Cold War. And then the CIA and the CIA basically, and teamed up with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to, on a huge cultural program and military program, to basically export a Salafi version of Islam, which was alien to Afghanistan before that, and financing a very synthetic Mujahideen movement to fight Soviet incursions into Afghanistan, because the Soviets were battling the government. And there was no talk about liberal values in this. It was a pure real politic move. And the consequences of this Islamist movement have been al-Qaeda and have been the Taliban. So it's not only that the Western liberal commentary is really focused on the propaganda side of things. They're the only

ones who believe in it. The governments don't believe in it. They don't share their opinion. It's when we talk about this, like we talk about history, I think what we're talking about as well is we're talking about the sort of the long run of social creation. We're talking about history, capital age. Yes, I made this joke on Twitter that I was trying to come up with a list of people I blamed for the collapse of Afghanistan. And I started with like, you know, Reagan, both of the George Bushes. And by the time I got into the second post, I was like, you know, like William the Conqueror, the first fish to get onto land. But what I think is sort of something that you almost have to say is like table stakes here, is that the idea that a place has some kind of,

you know, organic, essential culture that is aside from its history and the history of these sort of the struggles of institution building an institutional control in it that are aside from its history of sort of imperialism as an imperial power or colony is, you know, sort of, it's something that the liberal interventionists have always depended on. But if you actually look at the history, but the history, especially the history of here, is one of the sort of capital H history is of place, imperial powers projecting themselves onto it and trying to reshape it in their image. And so when we say that history has been arrested, it is, and again, this is sort of going to be a key concept as we go on, that the arresting of history has been sort of a tragedy

for for the people who are actually affected by it. And the idea of arresting history is a really good way to look at things like, essentially, after the fall of the Soviet Union, we have this whole notion of the end of history, obviously. And really, going into Afghanistan in 2001 was trying to stop the end of history. It was, it was, it was trying, it was trying to, it was trying to, it was trying to, it was trying to embed the end of history. The Taliban was about to take over the country. And we sent them out, we excluded them from the political consensus, we installed a client government, we essentially colonized and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years. And last week, history, the clock has

started again. And we're just going straight back to the consequences of the Cold War. In 2021, it's just been freeze frame since since 2001. So I think with that sort of bit of, I don't know, sort of by way of introduction, I guess, I think what I want to do is introduction, we have established that invading Afghanistan was a bad idea. You speak about this. I'd like to talk specifically a little bit more about about Britain, right? Because we had this in the early 2000s, right? There was this idea that the armies of the West would act as avenging

angels effortlessly sweeping aside all in their path by dint of bravery, valor, honor, the superior technology. And it was completely inescapable. And it is now led much I'd now led, I think, you know, to the that the sort of very striking image of the last helicopter leaving the American Embassy. It has led to what I think a lot of people are calling a Vietnam moment. But I think it's sort of that's sort of wrong. I would say it's it's America's Suez, but it's our second Suez, because we really didn't we really wanted to get over the first one. And so we were willing to do anything to try to try to get around that. But instead, we just did a second Suez crisis as sort of you're more and we have less credibility somehow than before.

Yeah, I mean, it's just the idea that like it's sort of internationally recognized now that for America, at least just like, oh, you just you can't do that anymore. You don't have the state capacity to pull off something like this anymore. Yeah, absolutely. I think Suez is a better fit. But like, the thing that always always comes up to me is like, you can always do these incredibly like reductive views of history, like, I just repeats itself, doesn't it? And then once you like, you you learn a little bit, you stop doing that. And then you spend the next, you know, 10, 15 years learning and reading. And then you come back and you go, Oh, yeah, actually, the reductive thing was just broadly correct. It's just like, Oh, yeah, just yeah, basically, as Vietnam,

sure, who gives a shit that comparison works, depends what you're using it for. And in our desire to, I think, remove ourselves from our from the humiliation of Suez, we sort of, I think in the early 2000s, the British state, and again, ironic, because it led to another one, but the British, the British role in Afghanistan, I think should be remembered as the kind of frenzied violence of a dying animal, where even on its own terms, it wasn't a strategy, it was sort of lash, it was the expression of internal politics, mania's insecurities and material conditions, sort of just lashing out bloodily across the world, right? Like, I think there is, but also I think that there was this in the early 2000s, this idea of the idea of the

obvious justness of this sort of, you know, bloody imperial adventure was something that I think, I think we have forgotten the extent to which that sort of Tony Blair's sort of Christian missionary zeal to go into Afghanistan and to fight Islam on behalf of on behalf of the sort of glory of the fucking, I don't know, all the people that Ben Shapiro likes. I go back and forth, right, because like, obviously, we agree that this was bad, right, but I don't necessarily think that it was that relevant. And I think that my, like, my best expression for this is Boris, you know, texting, texting Joe Biden like, you know, like, hey, hey, hey, hey, do you out too much? Like, I think genuinely that there's

like a particular irrelevance that we have to contend with when we're talking about Britain in Afghanistan. And I think if you want your own sort of miniature table stakes for this, I think it's the first say that like, if Tony Blair had like, been a completely different person or had never been leader of the Labour Party, and the British Army and the British Armed Forces had never signed up to ISAF in the first place, and we had never invaded Afghanistan, it would have made, I think, zero practical material difference to whether or not Afghanistan was invaded, what that invasion looked like, what the occupation looked like, or probably even how it ended. Yeah, I completely agree. It doesn't feel really anything is different between 2001

and 2021, except for a load of dead Afghans and military personnel and an incredible transfer of wealth between essentially US and European taxpayers and various private, private security companies, private security companies and local warlords, of whom we did a fantastic job of picking the absolute worst of the worst. And that's something that like, I'm endlessly fascinated by is like, you know, we have we have occupied your country, we will now be giving a large amount of money in cash in pallets to like, the worst rapist in it. It's like trying to like, nation build an Indiana by giving all of the country's money to John Wayne Gacy. And I think, right, there is this sense that all of the, that one of the important things to

capture about this as well, right, is that all of the people who sort of were willing to take to the front covers of the broadsheets and denounces traders, anyone who wouldn't, who wouldn't give their full-throated support to this, A, incredibly evil, but B, incredibly irrelevant mission. It's not just that they have been inherited, right? It's not that their positions have been inherited by others who agree with them. They're just still in the same, it's the same guys. It's the same guys saying it does, but events have completely discredited them, but they are undefeatable because they're also the referees of deciding who is defeated. It's really hard to listen to like Tom Tugenhor. He's really, he's, he's, he's, he's got nothing

really left to say except for spilled blood and honor of British soldiers. And we've made a sacrifice and we need to continue making the sacrifice in order to achieve the sacrifice. Like it's incredible. It's just like, it's, it just, it's imperial nostalgia writ large. And it's, it's sort of like, he's basically just advocating throwing good money after bad because, because, because what? Because Britain needs an expeditionary force. It needs to have its former colonial glories transferred into the 21st century. Like it's, the fact that that's his only response to this really shows how tawdry the sort of like thinking is in London, particularly. It's the, it's the, I think that when we talk about nostalgia, it's one of the things that

really was distinct between the sort of British and American sort of lead ups to and day new months. Yeah. Like the Americans, like the decision makers in America who in like occupied Afghanistan and perpetuated that occupation, they weren't trying to recapture anything. They just, you know, by and large, they, they, you know, they did it because they wanted to. And then because it was later, because it was foisted upon them. Like, whereas in Britain, it's always, always been this sort of like, well, what do we do with this legacy of colonialism? And maybe we can like, and giving it the most favorable possible interpretation because I'm nice. What if maybe we like, turn that sort of civilizing mission towards like, sort of nice

liberal causes. And we, you know, we prevent violence against the women and girls, always women and girls. And like, we, we, we build a sort of a liberal secular state in, in Afghanistan. And soon you'll be able to go to a press and Monge and Kabul. Yeah. And it's, it's the sheer sentimentality, I think, with which that was, it's what I'm looking for. It's really mortgage. And, and for not taking it seriously, you can sort of, it can then be said that you, you are hurting the people who have made the sacrifice. And I, you know, Danny Finkelstein, who speak on their behalf, right? If you don't take my feelings about this seriously, because that is important to all of us, I have decided on the page, the front page of the times. Speaking of Finkelstein,

I actually have taken a bit of an article, sort of in our, our bit of the episode where we talk about the sort of current political media climate around it. This is an article by Danny Finkelstein in The Times. He says, but advocating for why basically we should just be at war forever. He says, there is a reason why we have police forces without them comes the rule of the without them comes the rule of the violent and the triumph of the thief. You know, it's not violent is continuing this metaphor with invading Afghanistan. Without them, there is no law worth having and no freedom that endures. Yet the relief that US powers seem to be receding, didn't appear to create an understanding that a Western alternative

would need to be created. Why? Why would it? Why would it need to be created? Well, I'll tell you why, Alice, because everything is just institutions, which are just ideas. Is it because if we don't create the fucking, like if we don't do a rules-based international order and we don't do colonialism, Putin is going to do it? Yes, that is what he says. So what the fucking is? Why is it always Putin with these people too? Like, probably the least capable person of doing half the shit that they imagine. It says Assad is the first example he gives. And the sort of like Russia scare, the Red Scare is exactly, it's got a real echo for the

beginning of our sort of like colonial experiment in Afghanistan as well. It was like a great game, was just obsessed with Russia getting in on the sort of cash cow that was the barrage. Like, Afghanistan repeatedly throughout the 1800s just had to be cowed and divided. And it's really gory stuff. Like, everyone knows about the First Afghan War, which was the failure, and it's sort of like that sort of like national myths around Britain's losses, which is like Dunkirk sort of spirit idea. But the Second Afghan War, we succeeded, we went in and we burned the country down to the ground in vengeance. Like, as we were leaving in the First Afghan War, there was like, there's very credible stories by sort of like Tory

historians in the sort of like 1906, who have written about like mass rape by British soldiers and cutting the mulberry trees to destroy in a sort of like slash and burn strategy because they lost the war. And then when they went in the Second Afghan War, they completely terrorized the population. And they were essentially raw, they empowered the warlords to stop the Ruskies getting in. And it's exactly the same thing in the 20th century. It's phenomenal. Like, I mean, it's just, it's very, it's almost like, it's just tropes, which they don't really believe in anymore, but they're just at hand. And if you want to be materialist about it, as we've just discussed, but real, the real reason why we're there is it's finance, it could be, it could be Afghanistan or

it could be anywhere else, it's just a way to create a stimulus for defense industries and and politicians who are interested in pursuing imperial projects and bankrolling those defense industries. I mean, it's this is, this is something I think we're sort of reaching, we're reaching ahead to this a little bit, but I think it's worth bringing up now, right? Like the the the point of sort of imperialism in your sort of standard, like, you know, Leninist analysis or whatever is basically that imperialism exists to secure capital assets abroad, when sort of returns on capital at home become too low, right? And you need to, and you need your, your, your government to basically go and secure what you've done overseas, like your mine or whatever overseas.

And what sort of was so striking about this, especially, and this I think is true for both the UK and US is kind of global consumers of last resort, is that the when the empire already bestrides the entire world, right? When everyone's in the WTO more or less, you don't really, you're not really sort of sending expeditionary forces to go secure your mine or not nearly as much. What you are doing is you are mining sort of the only source of wealth, or at least for now, you're mining the only source of wealth, which is the Fed, you're mining the US treasury, you are, you're creating a big hole for it to shovel money into. And because, because these people, these leaders, whether it's sort of, you know, your Rumsfeld or Blair or whatever,

have been shaped by this particular system, because they come from that history of being in an imperial core, the only way that they know or want to, how to do or want to do that is by delighting in, by sort of, you know, glorying in the sort of directing of mass slaughter, basically, they could not think of another, they could not, they could not and did not want to think of another money burning program other than just the mass slaughter of people they don't think of as human, basically. We used to, we used to dig coal out the ground and now we kill Afghans, like, I mean, it's just whatever, whatever pays the bills. And so Finkelstein goes on, he says, as Brett Stevens argued prophetically in his book, America and Retreat in 2014.

Imagine, imagine simping for Brett Stevens of all people. I mean, that's, that's, and this is, this is my point about it relevance, right, is like, this is the guy whose attention you're trying to get, whose ideas you're trying to recycle is this guy who's like, he's a joke in his own country, but like, he's at least in the room. And like, you're not in like the paper of record in yours, which is great. Which, yeah, that is, I will always find that very funny. But the quote he takes from Stevens is this, a world in which the leading liberal democratic nation does not assume its role as world policemen will become a world in which dictatorships contend or unite to fill the breach. Fine. Good. Who cares? Who cares? Why should I give a shit?

Why should I have to like, go and send my kids to get killed for, you know, your policing project? And well, and, and there's that, there's that, there's that criticism. Yeah. But there's also like, again, the, the sort of this view, the liberal interventionist worldview has such a poor remembering as a poor memory, because it does not recall that sort of many of those soldiers that sort of the US or UK would have sent out across their borders were in support of like fucking like, I don't know, Raphael Trujillo or whatever, you know, this was, this is the, this is the country that says, yes, we need Fulgencio Batista. We need to, we need to make sure the fingernail pulley, it's the, they do not see, and whether they don't see because

they don't want to or they don't see because they're cynical, but they are the union of tyranny, basically. Yeah. But like, we have to, we have to do that tyranny because otherwise other bad, bad people might do the tyranny and it's bad when they do it. So we have to do it in like, you know, to preempt that. And at the very core of all of that writing and sort of you know, the times or the guardian basically saying, well, imperialism is a bad business, but you know, we must be spreading human rights because A, if we don't do it, the Russians will spread their version of society and B, look at these sort of poor, benighted people requiring, requiring our saving anyway. It's the same version of that. It's identical. Yeah. I mean,

you need to, you can't, you can't just say, we want your stuff anymore. You have to dress it up in idealism. And it used to be religious idealism. And now it's secular, the same energies which were focused on sort of prophetizing people are now getting people to join up to the international rules based order, which is subjugated by Rome. It's another, it is another, it's an entirely faith based organization as well. But I think there's, we can talk now, I write about, if that was the environment at the time, this sort of, we have the environment at the time and now being, I think, roughly similar, where it almost doesn't matter if every British, British media and political figures being cynical or not, because the end result is the same. And the end result now is

being, is looking at sort of two decades of sort of failure and suffering that is directly traceable, sort of at least a lot of it is directly traceable back to us. Most of it's directly traceable back to the US just by the numbers. But our allies, we sort of vociferously supported, there is a general consensus that if you want to learn anything from the last 20 years, it's in bad taste to do so. In fact, talking about this and talking about the evil primarily flowing from, let's say, inside the house is taking away the agency of the people who've been sort of brutally colonized and had their history frozen for 150 years. Or even that can anything other any involvement that we may have that doesn't grow out of the barrel of the gun

is supporting terrorism as Richard Bergen is frequently now being sort of accused of by prominent columnists as well. And it's just, it is a classic, it is, I talk about Searight Mills quite a bit, I think, for no bad reason, because this is the classic sort of case of what he would call crackpot realism. The idea that we can only have peace if we intensify the violence and anything other than violence intensification is going to actually be counterproductive to the project of peace building. And if you ask how that works, then you are an enemy. You have to destroy the village in order to save it, in order to take another one of

this kind of thinking's greatest hits. And the, you can see sort of the great, the great sort of barting on the side of British liberalism is, you know, that's the British liberalism that sort of runs through all of our major parties, that sort of defines the grounds of acceptability for our media, that's sort of almost uniquely anti-intellectual and bloodthirsty ideology that has sort of had the country at its grip more or less since the fucking corn laws. It is, again, gearing itself up to claim to have been right all the time, to have been and to have been betrayed by the sort of masses of people who either don't enticed by Jeremy

Crubbins. And so it's, you say, and so we can go on a little bit. The thing that I sort of mostly noticed that was sort of just absolutely jaw-dropping was a clip from Sky News that was going around where a journalist is asking the children of a dead soldier, do you think now that your dad died in vain? Oh, because they love owning children, is this the thing? Because the media, the news media loves to feel important and glorious and like they're involved in history. And to take away their war takes away the thing that makes them special. And so, of course, they are furious that we are, you know, no longer going to be, you know,

spreading some of this democracy in the barrel of a gun. And just that question, do you think your dad died in vain? I mean, that poor child's poor father did die in vain, like no one's disputing that. But so what? So what do we do? We make more people die in vain to sustain something which we know to be unsustainable. Because acknowledging reality is Taliban or Russia, or you're just sort of loony lefty, if you try to, if you allow these yourself to understand this, if you allow yourself to look in this place and make an apprehension of the truth, then you are an enemy.

But basically, if you connect, if you connect your words to reality, you are really messing up the apple car. And it's, they're only interested in owning the other sides politically for domestic purposes. It's like totally unmoored from the reality of British occupation of Afghanistan four times in the last 200 years, achieving absolutely naught. I think it's more than it's, you could even go beyond that though. You can say it's unconnected. It is connected to the reality because though it never receives information back up, it sends information back down. It has the capacity to hurt others, but not to be hurt by the truth. Precisely. It will be discredited but never defeated.

Yes. It's the kind of thinking that this is the reason why we have had to kill that kid's dad or bomb a compound or whatever, but it's never going to be the reason why we do anything good. Yeah. Precisely. The truth is what we make it. Yeah. So I think we can also say, right, like, what are, how are sort of politicians reacting now? A lot of it is quite similar to that. In the European Union, the wonderful progressive European Union looks like it's going to be protecting itself against migrant flows from Afghanistan. So it sucks we left that because that says, we're Britain saying we'll take 20,000, a microscopic amount, a paltry number of people considering how many lives we have been personally

involved in shattering over there, how many people we have personally endangered by coming into contact with them. We're saying we will take 20,000 of you over the course of several years. And by the way, if you want to have a chance of resettling here, you have to keep all the stuff that's evidence that will be used by people who want to kill you in your country. Yeah. Just keep that in like a nice, sort of neat bundle. Yeah. Yeah. Even that paltry amount, though, did outflank labor from the left, which was the purpose of the announcement. And what a roaring success because Navatories can always say, well,

we wanted to help the Afghans and you did it. Yeah. Voters love compromise, though. So I think, well, let's see how that plays in red car. And that's the other thing. Every western country has been told that it has broken this place. It has shattered lives of people here, again, for the feelings of like 10 guys. And then so one guy can get a yacht with a helicopter. And they're saying, okay, well, we need to make sure that we only deserving claimants are able to come in. And so they still, they still have to say, we still want to send most of you back home. And, you know, I mean, it's that's Aaron, you mentioned labor. I mean,

Starmer's speech, sort of not about the refugee thing, which he was sort of immediately outflanked on, has basically been saying, he said this, this is from his speech, for those brave people around the world living under regimes paying scant regard to human rights, but resisting those regimes in the pursuit of democracy, equality and individual freedom. What does this withdrawal say to them? What does this retreat from freedom signal to those prepared to stand up for it? What does this surrender to extremism mean to those prepared to face it down? And what does it mean for those nations who support, say it with me now, international rules based system, when we hand over power to those who recognize no rules at all?

And they recognize rules, you just don't like them. And it's not even that they're good rules, they're terrible rules, but like, it's they're not fucking tyrannids, man, you don't have a mind to retreat from freedom. It sounds like Reagan, like it's incredible. Can you imagine one of his 25 year old aides is cooking up like probably watching Reagan speeches and getting carried away of himself. And then it comes out of Keir Starmer's mouth. I mean, Reagan, Reagan had the charisma of an actor. So what if we combine his intellect with the charisma of a sort of angry divorce man in an SUV? He says, we have fought for 20 years to

rid Afghanistan of terror. Yep, that sure is something that we have done. Oh, my gosh, even if we were trying to do that, we had done a terrible job at it for any number of reasons. Like you said, Alice, we fought for freedom in Indiana by giving two trillion dollars to John Wayne Gacy. I really hope John Wayne Gacy is actually from Indiana. All that joke is going to like annoy me when I listen back. But this is again, it's the what I think what the point of what labor is saying here is what Starmer is. Starmer is not actually saying this. What he's actually saying is, look, we know what facts we cannot apprehend. We know where we cannot look. And you can trust us to not look there. We will, we promise to not take this seriously.

And, you know, there are, there are more, right? Pat McFadden, Dan Jarvis, they've said other things. There's this whole sort of like co-tory of particularly Tory MPs who are like mostly junior officers and various like guards, regiments who have now like, they're sort of the primary drivers of being in your feelings about this on national TV. But they're also the ones who are like sort of moving within government for like various purposes, including both taking more Afghan refugees, but also reoccupying bits of Afghanistan, which is just stunning. They're the ones who want to like support the pancharis, I think. Yeah, they're like, well, there's resistance to the Taliban. So we've been out of there for,

what, two days? Fifth angle, let's go. The reason why Dominic Raab is in trouble is because essentially, like, he wouldn't join on to Ben Wallace, the Ministry of Defence, is plan to build a coalition without the United States to try and like unilaterally intervene again. I mean, I would love to see British soldiers squaring up without the Americans to the Taliban. Like, it would be a jolly fight. Remember when Britain last tried to do something unilaterally without the U.S.? Britain ran out of bombs in 40 minutes.

Yeah. It was in, this was the first, this was before America got involved in Libya. It was an Anglo-French operation and they ran out of bombs in 40 minutes. So this is just, it is something you have to sort of think about in two ways. It is fantasy. It is the fantasy of a child, but it is the fantasy of a cruel and sociopathic child. The same thing. A cruel, sociopathic child such as a captain and the grandeur guards. And so basically now, like Tory MPs have made like, like Labour MPs mostly are focusing on

this ruins the rules of the Atlantic Alliance because, you know, like I think Labour fought tooth and nail to be a party that was all about sort of being the best at the rules. And without the Atlantic Alliance, we have lost rules and those are rules I can no longer sort of memorize or hold over people. Tory MPs, as you say Alice, are generally like, yeah, they, the gibbo group chat of MPs, bunch of sort of, you know, it's not the gibbo group chat. It's the like junior officer version of the gibbo group chats, which is think of it more as the sort of like pouring port all over your head at Durham kind of thing, but with a side order of like, maybe we should support Masood's son from the panchir.

But they're basically now mostly going on TV and crying, which is fucking infuriating. You're going on TV and you're crying for something that you fucking did. You're crying because you got to do, you got to live out your little fantasy of being the sort of, I don't know, like, like a Abbott for the 21st century, but safely from Westminster. And then you go on TV and you fucking cry. You cry because you didn't get to you because you have done this horrible thing and you now have to live with the consequences and you are I can't believe that like the horrible thing that I did was also done badly by the British government, a thing that I work in and is like familiar to me now as an MP, you know, you know,

on the one hand, it's kind of like a toddler sort of like crying that his fantasy didn't come true. But also Ben Wallace, the nerve of him, like he is so deep in sort of like the private sector in sort of private security sort of stuff. Like he's a director of a company which was made by the war in Afghanistan. Like so he's crying as much over like financial losses as he is about sort of his dream not coming true. It's a real spooky sight. And when we speak about about his, that's what he is. He is to this imperial project, the equivalent of the owner of a mine in the previous one. He is someone who has who's there sort of dutifully mining the coffers of the British state because just because they

have to live out their murder fantasy. And Tobias Elwood went one further. He said just because the US chose Tobias Elwood's also a guards officer. Yes, all of these guys were guards officers. Although Wallace was a guards officer who only experienced deployment in Northern Ireland. Little practice there, you know, all this stuff fits together very nicely. Tobias El, I think Tom Tugendot was a guards officer as well. These guys are all fucking guards officers. Elwood says just because the US chose to depart does not mean we should slavishly follow suit. We must assert our freedom and stay here. Absolutely nothing to assert independently. We don't have that capacity. Like if you want to play the great game thing, which is stupid,

you shouldn't do it. But if you want to do the like, we have to like advance a, you know, a characteristic sort of national mission against, you know, Putin or Xi or Assad even, then you have to at least be fucking realistic about it and acknowledge that like there's nothing we can do unilaterally anymore. Our last best hopes for that were like getting in with the Americans and doing everything they say or trying to have some kind of say in Europe. We've managed to signally fuck both of those. Yeah, exactly. There is, there is, but because... For no real reason. Like this is my most FBPE thing. It's like, if this is what you say you want,

if you want a Britain that is like aggressively, like muscly, liberal, internationally, then your only real hope of doing that was like within some sort of larger combine. And you just destroyed the possibility of one of those because you just felt like it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because it's still about fantasy. Just, and I think that the key, I think the idea is just that, yeah, well, I like, I want to believe that we can have, that we, that we can continue. And this is where it gets back to the sentimentality, right? And where this is a uniquely, a uniquely sort of, a uniquely British moment in a war that has been, where we have been sort of supporting players more or less there

because we think it's the, there because we just want to be there. But the one bit that was like very uniquely us is this, as it falls apart, the just absolutely fucking typical victim complex and mockish sentimentality that is inescapable in this country and worshiped like is the God Force itself. And so I think, I think sort of that's, if we can understand sort of the politics of it now, it's that, yeah, it's all of mainstream politics is lined up between trying to get us back in, except for the, you know, the people who are like have to be, except for anyone with any actual power, basically, is sort of realized that a, Britain is not a serious country. It can't do anything about this. B. Yeah, well, like, this is the thing, right? Like, ultimately,

this is where being reductive pays off again, right? Because like, if you were, you know, a young teenager, when the war in Afghanistan was started or was being prosecuted as I was, then you can be like, but at the time, you're just like, oh, it's like four Americans who just wanted to do it because they liked it because they're crazy. And like, once again, you sort of circle back. And this is basically the case. And like, it's like decisions made by Americans, by American presidents who like at first wanted to and then like, wouldn't unable to figure out a way not to be in Afghanistan. And then finally, we culminate in Joe Biden, who, you know, has a brain disease. I mean, if Britain wants to be in Afghanistan,

because it feels that it should, pretty much that's like the teleology of why we would ever be extending our mission in Afghanistan, versus the Taliban, who want to get rid of corruption and foreigners and institute indigenous rule of Afghanistan. Which is very funny, because it did not used to be thus, of course, that's something that we have made the Taliban into. And during the very, very early stages of the war, when we were still trying to like, I guess, arm and train moderate rebels. One of the things that proved to be most effective against the Taliban is Pashtuns talking to other Pashtuns and going, yo, check out these weird Arabs who are trying to impose like a sort of like Saudi version of Islam here. And then,

like, part of the reason why that never came off is because they would be immediately drowned out by the sound of like the Air National Guard fucking demolishing somebody's compound, burying a bunch of people alive. And I think this, this is something that also leads us, I think, nicely back into back into our discussion of history. Yes. Also, we also, we helped them out a lot by killing all of the Arab leaders of the Taliban. And so it, you know, increasingly became more, more homegrown Afghans, just like not, not perhaps the smartest move. We talk a little bit more about history, right? So we've alluded to, I think that this is sort of a multi-century problem. We've also sort of discussed, I think, this idea that there is

another thing that's inescapable, I think, in the sort of run up to and now Danuma from, from the, from the occupation of Afghanistan, which is that the Taliban are evil. And if you don't, if you do not understand them as basically a cartoon villain, then you are once again, a sort of, you are yourself, a sort of liberal baddie. But, and that's not to say like, actually, the Taliban are based or whatever, but rather like the Taliban. The right is saying that now, which is perhaps the weirdest feature of this. But it's that it's at the top there, there have been many Taliban's that there are many regional that many Taliban's throughout time and space. And you don't really understand that without

understanding, for example, the sort of original Saudi Taliban, the fact that the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban are basically different. You don't really even understand it that without then understanding, well, the sort of the facts of the of the sort of earlier Anglo-Afghan wars and the great game that led to the drawing of the Durand line as it was. And yeah, the fish climbing out of water for the first time. But, and again, this is something that again, we were speaking about earlier, right, Aaron, like the understanding that the understanding of these sort of the last couple hundred years of history, where it is, it's not so much that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires because of some essential thing about it. It's rather a, it is,

it has been a place, in fact, that has been sort of held in held either in Stasis and Stasis or had itself projected onto by various empires by or various sort of expeditionary projects, whether those are Saudi or Russian or British or American or what have you, right? Yeah, it's like this sort of projection you talk about, I think a lot of what is driving the need to project is that we simply don't understand what is going on in Afghanistan. We don't really understand what the Taliban are, that they, if you try and get to the bottom of the Pakistan, Afghan, Taliban, they're sort of incredibly ambivalent, their relationship. What constitutes the new generation of the Pakistan is completely unknown to scholars and military analysts. And

there was a fantastic quote I read, I think it was in a New York article, where a US military personnel said the cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge, but it's hard for us to understand it. And I think that really, really captures like what when, if you don't know what is going on, you have to create extremely crude narratives, which your domestic audience understands, and which you eventually imbibe and begin to believe by projecting it onto it. But the reality is, we don't know who these people are, we don't know the forces which are driving the political economy of Afghanistan, and we don't know what's going to happen. Like we like, I mean, God knows what's going to happen in Afghanistan, it could be a civil war,

Afghanistan, the Taliban might be able to assert control, we simply don't know. And not knowing even the vague direction of travel really is telling about what we have been doing for the last 20 years. But of course, if you are a good liberal war planner, then what you actually know is that the Afghans yearn for a pret, and that the Taliban, their whole main thing is making sure there aren't, is making sure none of that ever happens. For example, one of the key failures of state building, for example, is that most of the pedophiles and murderers who are our pedophiles and murderers, empowered by the US and UK, were not really interested in governing. And you said earlier, Erin, one of the things the Taliban were doing was governing.

They weren't just governing before 2001, they were governing quite a bit of the country at a local level, basically since 1996, more or less in some cases, more or less uninterrupted. I mean, they're the only people who have provided any governance. If you're an Afghan who hasn't supported the Taliban, traditionally, you might be more open-minded to them than you were before after successive governments propped up by the West, which just moved money upwards and outwards to Dubai for 20 years. The Taliban reminds me a lot of the Houthis. They're incredibly brutal, they kill spies, they kill anyone who talks back to them. But they're galvanizing mission, and it's what brings support from their base is anti-corruption. And it's anti-corruption created

by the West propping up various regimes, like Salah and Yemen and Karzai and Ghani and Afghanistan. Yeah, and it goes back to, well, why are we propping up those regimes? Because we need to project ourselves onto this place. We need their money and we need some sense of meaning for ourselves. And we had this idea. It was, in fact, a Canadian general who's sort of Rick Hillier, who's credited for bringing it much more into the forefront when the war in Afghanistan when counterinsurgency became a state-building project, when you decided that how we're going to, how we're going to do, is that we're going to get a guy from, I don't know, like, we're going to get a guy from the home counties who went to like a sort of second-rate public

school and might be in crippling automotive debt. We're going to get them to go over to Helmand, and if they tell enough people to go to a town council meeting and then go back to the base at night, then a pret will happen somewhere. That was sort of the main, that was basically the theory of change. And there was this whole idea, that if we want to build states, because we are good liberals and we believe that everyone's more or less sort of the same in the ideas that they have, not their material needs, of course, but their ideas are all the same. Yeah, everyone contains a liberal. Yes, indeed. Everyone contains a liberal. They're just waiting for that liberalism to be sort of

released when we remove the sort of bad elements at the top and arrange those people into the right institutions. So we have someone called the Secretary of Education now, and we have something called a school. We have something called a police station. We have something called a town council or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, so it's almost a cargo cult, isn't it? Precisely. And I think what this always ignores is that states emerge from history. States are not simply arrangements of institutions. They are arrangements of institutions that come from history. And if you look at the history here, it is the history of powers coming in and directing that process, of course, of arresting it in history, of stopping sort of the development of

capacity in order to fulfill these fantasies or, in the case of the great game, a swage paranoia. But it's always for the needs of Britain or America or Russia or fucking Saudi Arabia, there's always someone who's willing to say, we are now going to fulfill those needs by trying to make Afghanistan into a vision of ourselves. And the wellspring of liberalism came from the same place as that idea of scientific rationalism. They're sort of one of the same thing. It's the idea, as you say, of it's not history driving politics. It's if we can sort of scientifically rationalize what a school is, what a political party is, what a government is, what a security apparatus is, we can sort of like apply it in a sort of mathematical way. And that came out of

Europe at exactly the same time as the idea of liberalism and rights of man, like they're kind of, they're completely inseparable. So it's no real surprise that liberalism can only really be built top down. And that's the other thing, right, is, well, how do we think the liberal states emerged? They also emerged from history. These ideas themselves emerged from the need to create, say, justifications for why we did the First Imperial Project. It's like trying to reconstruct a fire based on what the smoke looks like. It was, it's one of these things, but also, you know, Erin, you were saying this to me earlier as well, it's like, for 150 years, people have been trying to modernize Afghanistan based on fantasies that they have that arose

from their material reality of their own countries. And so it's just, it's, you know, this new boss, here comes the new boss, same as the old boss. Oh, they're calling it the Secretary of Education this time, but it's still, because of the material reality is not changing or not changing very fast or not changing at the same pace, again, because of this outside interference, then you're not, you're going to call the same guy a different thing and hope that that somehow changes it. You're going to say, well, these guys used to be, you know, fighters for this warlord, we've called them the police now. How can they, how can they not be communists? They have a general secretary now.

And like you can say it, if you want to think of it this way, I think the next logical question is, well, okay, what's the difference between state building and having a colony? Nothing. There is no difference. Yeah, vibes. It's a vibes difference, you know, like it's, and we had, we tried to, there was the theory was just don't forget this, because there are going to be a lot of people in politics and the labor party and the conservative party and the, and the head of every broadsheet, people just sort of yabbering at you saying that you're going to try to get you to forget this, that we tried to build Afghanistan as a neoliberal state. We tried to do that, where, and that, the whole idea, right, is that the state is just a service provider and contract

issuer. And we tried to, there was this whole Iran fantasy where we didn't even like, you knew that they weren't, I mean, we always knew that they weren't serious about it, but anyone who was interested in what was going on would know they weren't serious about it when they decided they would not pick anybody to run anything that had any experience of government, of governing the country from before, because they were all communists or they had all been communists in the past. They were like, nope, can't get these people. We're going to have to just get, I don't know, Dostam, he's going to be, he's going to be the vice president. That's a funny exception is that like, none of that seemed to matter when it was

the worst people you can imagine, because Dostam had been a communist for a while. He was a, yeah, he was a union leader before he went bad, if you like. Just one of his classic moves of being a communist and anti-communist and Islamist and anti-Islamist and so on and so on. Yeah, almost as though whatever he, it's that's who rose to the top, is whoever understood the nature of the game, which is that others, that the imperial cores of the world project their fantasies onto us, those of us who conform to those fantasies, we get the, you know, giant buckets of money that we can then put in suitcases and send to Dubai.

Yeah, I just bit of speaking of which, on the other hand, less personally venal, but also true of Karzai and Ghani, who were able to like, I so badly want to read Ashraf Ghani's book about how to fix a failed state right now. It's on my list, I'll get to it. I think we should read it probably on a future episode. Do you remember the sort of hagiography of Ghani when he came in? I remember sort of almost being it's sold on it myself. It was sort of always pictured among bookcases and very scholarly sort of like ex-world bank, sort of a real technical fixer-upper of a guy.

And because he was sort of like sort of short and sort of like quite soft looking, I think he really served the optics really well. Yeah, yeah. And what's really funny is that he did live up to the ideology. He implemented a perfect neoliberal solution for Afghanistan, which is that like, okay, we're not gonna, we're not gonna do colonialism because colonialism is when you just give pallets of cash to like security contractors, right? What we're gonna do instead is we're gonna do a sort of like round of startup funding where we're gonna find a bunch of very innovative people, give them the money, and then they give it to the security contractors.

And that's different. Yeah. And I mean, if you, if you want to think of it this way, right? Because a neoliberal state sees itself largely as a service provider and contract issuer, right? Like that is how, that is the relationship between the sort of neoliberal state and the citizen, right? Is that that it does a lot more things. But in terms of basic service provision, it is, that's what it is. It is a, it is an agglomeration of services that people pay for through taxes. And what really what we created was we created a big machine that sucked in money from all over the world in pallets, then it broke that money down off of those pallets, and then either directly

or via a security company would then send the money from those pallets in duffel bags to Dubai. And that's what it was. I mean, there's, there's, there's multiple possibilities as to where that money ended up. But yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what that ultimately, like all of this, everything, all of the, everyone who was sort of killed, who had their life destroyed, who was, you know, just humiliated by sort of a teenager or whatever. It was so that this just that that was the machine that they were working on. That is what they gave it all to build. That's what Tom Tugendatz people, they, that's their sacrifice. That's what it was for. It was for a machine that sent money from,

I know, the Swedish Development Agency to Dubai, by Afghanistan. There it was. It's what you did. So, and we can all, we can all feel very positively about this. And I mean, if we want to sort of go back to this, right, where all of, all of the effort, all of the, it was very clear that this was happening, not just from like, you know, three years ago. This is what it's sort of always been. Like what the security development nexus, the three D's, the whole of governor approach, every single buzzword has been a method for constructing big buildings. You call schools that very rarely have people in them, unless it's in a big city. It's basically money laundering is the thing. And we, we've essentially been wallet

inspected by five guys who wanted to invade Afghanistan, which is great. Like I can't, it's, it beggars belief that like we thought we could, or that, that the British state thought it could like, I don't know what, turn Helmand province into like, you know, like a canton of Switzerland, because like Britain can't even build a functional state here. No. And, and, and Helmand particularly, like Helmand was just an echo of first Afghan war. That was where the Brits really got hammered in when they were retreating through. They just used to massacre entire villages on their way out. Like it's phenomenal. So a lot, like the, the British are held like in Iran actually in extremely sort of ill repute by Afghans, like even much more

compared to the Russians and the Americans just because of that cultural memory. It's like, it was kind of a real like trauma. I mean, in the face of all of this, in the face of making every decision sort of, I guess, sort of in the most wrong or cruel way. What ultimately, Aaron, was the British plan? Well, in the 1800s. No, no, no. I mean, I think, I think you summed it up when you just said that we had to follow America. We just, it's, it's a mixture of sort of lazy sort of conceptions of a world which sort of hold as true that there is such a thing as a rules based order, which we prop up. And the US is the progenitor of that use rules based order. So we're going to follow them.

And then I think the propaganda and the sort of politics meeting that it's something about what is something about our universal values, our values being universal. And in every Afghan, even in every Taliban, if they would sort of read a book, there is a liberal and we can somehow sort of like bring it out of them. It's exactly the same sentiment which drove the spread of like Christianity as well. It was just like, they're just too ignorant to know that they are Christian. And we are too ignorant to know when we have been beaten by our own sort of, we are too ignorant, you're too ignorant to know when we have been beaten by our own hubris incompetence. And the, I think, I've been thinking a lot about this

day. I was wondering whether or not to include it, but I was thinking a lot about the concept of original sin when it comes to imperial powers, where we talk about states being formed as processes of history. And you do not become an imperial state at this point in the 21st century. You don't really become an imperial state, generally speaking, without having an imperial past, the countries of NATO, your five eyes more or less. And you do not continue to exist as an imperial state unless you do things that you are driven to do, that you feel you must do, these things that cause sort of these outbursts of sort of mockish sentimentality in the Brits of sort of, you know, almost like sort of get the sort of giddiness of potential violence in Americans.

You do not sort of have that unless you feel like that is your purpose. And unless you, unless sort of our societies, I think, can be made to confront their original sin, then I see no, I see us having further sueses, sort of just each more farcical than the last, but none less tragic because of the suffering that they involve inflicting on those least able to bear it. We didn't, of course, we also didn't just harm the people that we harmed directly in Afghanistan, if you follow it, maybe also harm the people who, if they weren't necessarily on board with the whole liberalizing vision, had some kind of impetus for reform. The, if you like, as a sort of byword for this stuff, the women and girls, right? Like, and the people who we are now,

you know, arguing about whether or not we're going to evacuate them from Afghanistan. And I think it's an immense cruelty that we did is to like, well, okay, the consequence of us occupying, if you are say, if you want to build schools, if you want to do feminism, if you want to do anything that is like, unpopular with the Taliban is like, perhaps a little bit more, more like secular or progressive or whatever. You are able to do this without being killed immediately in some places, at the cost of you may be killed horribly later, and also for time immemorial, you are now a foreign agent. And any time that you try to do anything, or anyone has to say is, oh, you're being funded and protected by the Americans,

by NATO, by ISAF, and your ideas are like, you know, completely foreign, and it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy, right? So like, if you do want this kind of like liberal thing, if you do want perhaps the good things out of that, if you want perhaps like an equal status of women within the Sharia, right? That's, that's something that like, it kind of becomes immediately sabotaged and tainted by the association with the occupation. Yeah, because it's not like, as I was saying, like, it's not like these modernizing reformist liberal values are alien to Afghanistan. And we've brought them and they've just said, no, thanks, like they've existed in Afghanistan, but we've, as you say,

we've totally carteled any possibility of it becoming an organic indigenous phenomenon, which is the only way you can stay built. Yep, it's once again, you know, it's, it's, it's, we have, by projecting this sort of parody version of ourselves on onto this day, we sort of broadly, right, the global consumers of last resort that form NATO have once again, you know, arrested history, basically, for the last 20 years. And again, why did we do it? Because some guys wanted to, because and they wanted to. They didn't think of, they didn't think of Muslims as human. They kind of wanted a vague attempt at revenge for 911 and for that classic, most evasive glory of which we have found

remarkably little in Afghanistan, if you care about that sort of thing. Yep, that's right. And, you know, it was, it was not just, and it wasn't just the glory for, you know, the, the sort of the generals, it was glory for the pundits. It was glory for the politicians. It was glory for the reformers. They were going to be proved right. And they weren't. And this has been like a sort of a psychic wound on them ever since, I think sort of thus the sort of like long things about how I'm not owned in national newspapers. And one of the long sort of other questions you can say as well, if this tendency, like, you know, fascism, fascism, as we say, is, you know, colonial violence returning to the

metropole. Well, it's not going anywhere. Wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't no wonder all of the, the right wingers think of the Taliban a base now. I saw a tweet from former US Navy SEAL, Robert O'Neill, who was like one of the 16 guys who has claimed to have killed Bin Laden at this point. And the tweet is, this is only like a four, like four hours old. The tweet is, did you see how the Taliban rolled through the streets and took back their country? I know a few dudes who would do the same with me right now. So it's coming back. It's coming back. Coming back. I mean, it already came.

It's coming home. It's coming home. It's coming home. I mean, I, it's, I, I take like the, the sort of the vast increase of the, of the surveillance day. I mean, all of that stuff, it's all, all just sort of war coming home. But well, I guess that's, that's all she wrote. Dusting, dusting hands theatrically, it's China's problem now. And, you know, wish them every success with it more or less. So I think with all that in mind, Aaron, do you have any final thoughts? Final thoughts. No, any other question. There are no final thoughts because nothing ever ends. There's no finality. How can you have

final thoughts? Well, podcast episodes do have, you might say they never end. They have interludes of about three days, depending on if you're a subscriber. Nothing ever ends. I thought, I thought like Alice's last comment sounded like a nice ending, so I don't want to ruin it. Aaron, it's always, always a pleasure. It's always a pleasure to have you on. So the topics we discuss are, so far I've been rarely anything like that. But I do want to say thank you so much for coming on and sort of talking about this with, with us sort of today and also throughout the day. And, you know, for, just for, for, for giving us like that, like sort of attention and focus. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's great. I was really happy you invited me.

And also, if you're on, on the internet listening to this, I'm sure Nate will link many of these in the description. But one of the few things you can actually do is you can, there are ways you can fund organizations helping Afghan refugees in your home country. I know Nate has already been doing that. And I'm certain, refugee in Glasgow, extremely good. So I'm sure he will put some links down on the bottom. If you, if you want, if you want to, it's the opposite of Tobias Elwood going on TV and openly weeping that, you know, we're not sort of sending in a cavalry charge, you know, to support panchier. It's the opposite of that. You can do the opposite of a Tory MP going on TV and fucking crying. You can actually do something that will actually

make someone's life better, who has been negatively impacted, let's say, by this country trying to work its shit out. So I strongly recommend that. We're just going through some stuff right now. So I strongly recommend that you check those out. So Aaron, do you have anything you want to sort of direct people to as we're leaving? Yeah, why not? I've got an article coming out on new lines in a couple of weeks. It's about the resistance and missiles and deterrence and how basically Iranian sort of like weird indigenous technology is being rolled out in Yemen and Gaza and Lebanon. And it's actually affecting how Israeli and Saudi generals act in the Middle East. So do check that out when it's here. But other than that, I think we're ready to sign off,

say thank you, Aaron, again. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you in a few days on the Patreon or about a week's time on the free episodes, depending on how you choose to interact with this RSS feed. All right, later, everyone.