TRIGGERnometry - "Afghan Withdrawal Will Inspire Terrorism" - Colonel Richard Kemp

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Colonel Richard Kemp has spent most of his life commanding British troops on the front line of some of the world’s toughest hotspots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans and Northern Ireland. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​​​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Biden says, the war is now over. I have ended the war in Afghanistan. No, he hasn't. He's pulled the American troops out. He's betrayed those troops that fought there for 20 years. He's betrayed his own countrymen who are now at greater threat from terrorism than before 9-11. And he's betrayed the people of Afghanistan. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We are so pleased to say that our brilliant guest today is a retired British Army officer who served in Afghanistan. Colonel Richard Kemp, welcome to Trigonometry. It's my pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. We're so delighted that you could join us today.

We wanted, obviously, to talk about Afghanistan. But before we get into that, tell everybody a little bit about your personal story, your history, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life. And obviously, please do touch on your experiences in Afghanistan as well. I went to, I was born in Essex and I went to school in a town called Colchester which Francis just admitted to me that he also went to university so it's a small world I never really grew up

and all the time at school I love playing soldiers and I just wanted to be a soldier so I left school one day, joined the army the next I was atrocious, I was the worst pupil at my school it was called Cotia or grammar school, fantastic school and still is today but I was the biggest failure they ever had. So for me, it was either prison or the army.

So I went into the army. And I stayed there for 30 years. I couldn't really get used to it. So I left after 30 years. And I went into a bit of a time as a corporate security director in London. And after that, in around about 2012, I became self-employed. and I now write, I do commentary on security defense, etc. And I do some consultancy work and a bit of public speaking.

And we met precisely because you were doing TV. We were back in the green room and we had a little chat. And I was just so impressed with how unfiltered and direct you are about the situation that was being discussed at the time, which was Afghanistan. I think the dust is settling a little bit now and we can have a more measured conversation about it. But give us your overall thoughts on, On, you know, it's been 20 years, were we right to go in? Did we do things right when we were there?

Will we right to leave? What was your impression of the things that have happened? I think we were absolutely right to go in. We had no choice of them to go into Afghanistan in 2003, or beg your pardon in 2001, 2002, when we went in there. I mentioned 2003 because that was when I was there for the first time. But we were right to do it. We just had the biggest terrorist attack in the history of the world.

in which more Britons were killed than had been killed in any other terrorist sack anywhere. There were more casualties sustained on 9-11 than had been sustained in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese in Sacked America. That led to the Second World War and a nuclear bombing of Japan.

So, you know, it wasn't a small event. It was something that had to be avenged and had to be, the repeat of which had to be prevented. So we needed to go in. I think you could certainly question and I do what happened after that. we got rid of the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan and whether it was necessary to stay there 20 years.

But given that we had done that, I think it was a real disaster to leave when we did for very many reasons. But I think we left too short notice. We left without the conditions being set or any restrictions being placed on the Taliban. And we left without giving the chance to the Afghan government and the Afghan security forces

to prepare for a totally new situation. that they were now facing. And we did so at the height of the Taliban fighting season when they were in their most active period. So that explains, I think, to a very large extent why it all went wrong. And the consequences we haven't even begin to understand yet. And you say we haven't begun to understand the consequences. What do you think those consequences are going to be? Well, for one, probably the biggest thing. And I apologize for not focusing on the horror that's about to engulf Afghanistan. But in strategic, strategic terms, the biggest thing, is a complete undermining of US and Western reputations

around the world, which will have consequences. You know, we're now, and the US and NATO now seen as being fair with a friend, when the tough gets hard, we get the hell out of it. And who's going to rely on us then? Which countries that we're hoping to entice away from China and Russia into the democratic sphere? Which of those is going to be with us? They're not.

They're going to look more to right. Russia and China, massive strategic consequences, China and Russia are going to do their best to push their envelope now, knowing that, you know, where's the danger? Is America going to strike back now? Probably not. That's what their calculation will be. But then in other consequences, we're about to face the biggest terrorist threat, I think, probably bigger than before 9-11. With, you know, the Taliban, the new Taliban government announced a few days ago is old guard, hardline, many of them on wanted lists around the world, including UN sanctions list. These are not kind of people who, as they said, are going to be looking for equal opportunities

and human rights and stuff. They're not. These are hardline killers, murders, torturers and rapists, and they're running that country. And into that country is going to flood jihadists from all around the world. So that's a massive terrorist problem for us. And that's even before we begin to talk about what's going to face men, women and women. children in Afghanistan. There's going to be people who go, look, we were in there 20 years.

You know, tens of thousands of people died. He spent almost $2 trillion. What more could we want? What more could we do? Well, I think we could understand the situation a bit better than we did, and we didn't really understand it. I don't think we really got to grips with it. We didn't understand, for example,

that most Afghans don't have a kind of allegiance to Afghanistan as a country. You know, they are tribal people. their loyalty is to their tribe, it's to their ethnic group, it's to their local area. That's where the loyalty lies, not to some concept called Afghanistan. Those people who joined the army in Afghanistan mostly did so for the money. They didn't join it because they wanted to defend Afghanistan. They did defend Afghanistan very bravely for many years. 50,000 were killed over a seven-year period fighting for Afghanistan.

That is two-thirds of size of the current British Army killed in seven years. A massive thing. But they weren't fighting for Afghanistan. They were fighting for the money. And the same really applies to the government. The peripheral elements of the government in the regions of Afghanistan, in the provinces, didn't have loyalty to Kabul. Their loyalty was really to their region to themselves. And so when the kind of final guarantor that they would survive under this Kabul regime, very, very corrupt and incompetent regime, that they would survive in that regime. The final guarantor was the United States of America. When that pulled out, the whole edifice collapsed. And we didn't really understand that when we were there.

As a military man, I'm not, but I'm interested in history and military history. Can you explain to people? And I know some of what you're about to say, but I think it's important. How is it possible that we've trained up a huge army in Afghanistan, given them, I mean, the Taliban now have more gunship helicopters than the UK, apparently. Right, we've given all these weapons, all the training, all the support. And I understand your point. These people were fighting for money and then the guarantor disappeared. But if we've trained up a huge army, given them modern weapons, gunships, you know,

whatever else, APCs, whatever else they got, how is it possible that they folded like this? And actually, mostly without fighting as well. Yeah, there was very little fighting during this latest phase of the war. there was lots of buying off of different governors, different military commanders, et cetera. But there wasn't much fighting. And in war, the single most important factor is morale. Napoleon, I really hate to quote a Frenchman,

but hoping not to trigger any Frenchmen. But Napoleon said in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. In other words, morale is three times as important as all other factors. Now, the morale was a rug, a U.S. with a U.S. flag on it, that the Americans whipped out from under their feet, therefore taking away their confidence, their reason to stay fighting. And the morale collapsed, and then the army collapsed. And, you know, some of them went over to the Taliban. Some of them ran off to the Panshir Valley and attempted to put up resistance there, which sadly looks like it's been, for the moment at least, crushed. And some went back to their villages. But they, you know, I go back to this factor about pay as well.

A lot of them hadn't been paid for a long, long time. And, you know, if you're there, if you're fighting maybe under somebody, under the command of somebody who doesn't even speak the same language as you from a different part of Afghanistan, and you know that the people that are supposed to be paying you put the money in their pocket instead, and your ration, you're on half rations because your commander is selling the other half the rations. Now, that doesn't, you know, those things don't create a good level of morale in the first place before this carpet of morale is ripped out from under your feet. So that makes perfect sense.

So let me ask you the obvious question then. If we spent 20 years and $2 trillion attempting to deal with that, when were we ever going to get in Afghanistan to a position where we could withdraw? Well, I'm not sure we would have done. I think it's a situation we could have been in for a very long time. You know, 20 years is not a long time. It certainly wasn't a long time for the Taliban. They were very patient.

They held out, they fought on, they eventually scored a major victory. For us, it is a hell of a long time because we have very little strategic patience. But we shouldn't forget. There was British and American forces in large numbers in Germany until very recently. There still are a few since the Second World War against a potential Russian threat predominantly for many years. There was, you know, the Americans have still got strong forces. in South Korea when the Korean War ended in the 50s. We have troops in Cyprus now,

serving in Cyprus with the United Nations and guarding our sovereign base areas. My own regiments at the moment, the Royal Anglian Regiment. They're serving in the British sovereign base area in Cyprus. And that is following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which was a long time ago, years, more than 20 years ago. And we fought for pretty much 40 years in Northern Ireland.

So, you know, this is not a lot of, long time. I believe we needed to stay there at least for longer than we did. It wasn't a huge commitment that I think the end of British combat operations in Afghanistan was 2014. And I don't think a British soldier has been killed there since then, or if they have, it's just one or two. And the same with Americans. Very few have been killed recently. So we're not talking about a hot conflict with lots of people dying. We're talking about having, being there to provide the support that a country that is coming out of a most horrific situation needed and no longer has.

So I think, yeah, I think we should have been ready to stay for another 20 years if need be. But don't you think the situation was ultimately made unsustainable by the corruption, by the corruption in the Afghan army, by the corruption in the government? Well, this is going to trigger a few people in who are listening to this or watching this. And that is that we needed to take a more imperial view

I know the British Empire was terrible times and very bad obviously it also did some good around the world, quite a lot of good, but that's not the broad view and I shall now be cancelled for saying this but nevertheless. That's what the show is about, ending your career. But I think, well, fortunately I no longer have a career, so you're fine.

I'm just messing with you. Look, sensible people will hear what you say in the way that you intend it. I'm not really bothered anymore what they think. Good. The reality is that the United States, United States should have controlled the government more than it did. When I was there in 2003, whatever the US ambassador said to President Karzai is what President Karzai did. He didn't argue

with it. He didn't debate it. He just did it. And the British ambassador, to a lesser extent, had a similar effect. They were running the country, basically, with orders from Washington and London. But then they decided that the government needed autonomy. And understandable, in our terms, that's understandable. But the result of that autonomy was the collapse we've seen today at Venture, massive corruption. Many of the leaders, government leaders and officials in Afghanistan now have very large houses and fortunes stashed away in Dubai and Turkey and places like that. So they needed controlling. And a democracy which we tried to create there, perhaps wrongly, but nevertheless we tried, cannot be created overnight. It takes a long time, a lot of strong guidance,

which we failed to give them, in my view. And isn't also the problem that Afghanistan as a country, it's just arbitrary lines on the map. Now, convert me if I'm wrong, with tribes who are perpetually warring against each other, isn't it practically impossible to turn that sort of state into a Western liberal democracy? I think it is pretty difficult, as we've seen.

And to be fair, you can't do something like that in 20 years, if you can do it at all. and if that's what is best for the people and what the people in that country actually want, then, you know, you can try it, but it's more than a 20-year project. But I would have thought, you know, I'm not, although I've been to Afghanistan,

and I've followed what's happened there, I've taken part in military operations, I don't pretend to be an Afghan cultural expert, but what I would say is that I think a better idea might have been a much looser federal kind of arrangement that is focused much more on the ethnic groups and the provinces, et cetera, rather than a duplicate of the U.S. or a duplicate of the UK with Kabul as its capital. And what do you make a lot of people, I've spoken to a number of people who are here in the UK who are from Afghanistan,

you know, one of the things that they'll say, and look, as a Russian, it's quite easy for me to say, you know, we keep interfering in all these foreign countries and in their affairs. And look at Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is the product of CIA funding, Lardin to fight the Soviets, my people, right? And we keep messing with these things and then something happens and the Al-Qaeda comes from that and then the Taliban came from the Mujahideen to some extent and we keep giving people money that we don't really know and some of them are terrorists and some of them. And we keep doing this and then it just keeps coming back to bias and us because we keep messing with things. We don't really understand. I don't disagree with that.

And I think, but I do think when you look, if you look at one of the things you mentioned there, the Mujahideen fighting the Russians, what we did there was the right thing to do. And I made up in your view. But that created Osama bin Laden who then creates the biggest terrorist attack in history. Arguably, yes. But the fact is that we were doing the right thing, in my view, we were doing the right thing. We were pushing back against the Russians. We were in the Cold War. We were fighting the Russians in the Cold War.

in so many different places. That was just one. It was a very important one. Now, you can't predict what's going to happen as a result of your actions in a situation like that. I don't think anyone, no matter how clever they were, could have predicted that our support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan would have led to the situation we're in today. Similarly, you can say, well, we shouldn't really have fought the First World War against the Germans' expansionist policies in Europe because it led to the Second World War, which it did. But we didn't know. It wasn't known at the time. And you can say that about almost any major event. You shouldn't have done it in hindsight, but it's not so easy when you're making decisions at the time.

My point is slightly different, though, and I completely hear what you say about the First World War, and it makes sense. My point is it's the type of people we're dealing with. You're bringing the Mujahideen is not an Afghan phenomenon. These were extremists from mostly from Saudi Arabia, brought in specifically because they were extremists. And we gave them money.

And look, this isn't me coming out of from a Russian, angle, by the way. I'm just trying to make the point that I think when you deal with these very bad people, the consequences are going to be very bad. Is that wrong? Absolutely. No, it's absolutely right. But, but as I would say, again, you can't foresee, you know, unexpected, unintended consequences decades away. You can only, to an extent you can only deal with the situation as you face it, although, you know, maybe greater expertise will guide you to do it in a different way. But, you know, if you take the consequences, you can only, consequences of the global war on terror. People say, for example, people will say the London

suicide bomb attacks in 2005, the 7-7 attacks. Sadiq Khan, who was the leader of those attacks, said he was a soldier of Islam. He was doing this because of what Britain was doing in Muslim countries. And people then blame us for that. But actually the reason we were doing what we were doing in Muslim countries were because we had suffered 9-11. And as I said earlier, we had to react to that in a very forceful way. And then, you know, it was at the start of it. No, it wasn't really the start of it.

So you keep looking back and back. I think, you know, I think there's a, you know, there's, to look at things realistically, you have to see a situation as exist today. Anticipate as much you can the future, but deal with it. you don't deal with it, you know, people said, well, if we hadn't gone into Afghanistan or into Iraq, we wouldn't have all these body bags coming back, true. And if we hadn't gone onto the beaches of Normandy in 1944, we wouldn't have had all the body bags coming back from there either. But, you know, you either do nothing and let people run over you, or you make an attempt to

hit back at them. So I guess your argument, which is one I agree with, is the Soviet Union had to be defeated at that time, and we had to interfere on that, and the consequences are what the consequences are. But part of the consequences are, is that we no longer have a hostile nuclear power that is as big as the Soviet Union challenging us in the West. That's a very good way of putting it, I think. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And moving back towards Afghanistan, it shocked so many people because it literally seemed to happen overnight. Could you give an explanation as to why the US withdrawing in the manner that it did was so disastrous? Well, I think the thing. first thing is that President Biden made the decision in April that he was going to go.

He did so. He was given options by his team that reviewed the situation in Afghanistan when he became president or when he was elected president. And he was given a series of options, one of which was what he did, but it wasn't the one he had to do. It was only one of the options he had. And then he immediately announced it and it was to happen in very short order. You know, the British foreign minister, foreign secretary in evidence he gave to Parliament not long ago, he himself said that even in Britain,

people didn't really believe the Americans were going to do it. You know, they announced it and they said they intended to, but we didn't relieve it really was going to happen. It was hard to comprehend, which accounted for our, I think, misappreciated to the situation as well. But if you can imagine a British government taking that, what's the Afghan government going to, if they're going to take? They were just, they disbelieved it.

They did not expect it to happen. They couldn't, they couldn't really face it because they knew what the consequences were likely to be. So they were told that. They weren't even given time to adjust to the idea that it was going to happen, and then to plan for a new situation. Now, whether they could have planned

and organized themselves and organized the army in such a way that something different would have happened, I don't know, but they weren't given that chance. It was a very short flash-to-bang period. And then, as I mentioned before, the withdrawal took place in August, not in, which was at the height of the power of the Taliban.

It's their fighting season. It's when they're most active. It's when they're all on the ground trying to kill people. I'm just going to interrupt you, the fighting season. What does that mean? Well, they tend to be more active in fighting in the summer months, unless in the winter months.

You talk about them, like they're some kind of termite or something that comes out of its burrow in summer. It is the reality. I mean, you know, and it's understandable in a way because it's true in many parts of the world, people do tend to kind of wind back in during the more harsh periods of the year, the winter, and that's what the Taliban did. You know, traditionally, most of the fighting by the British forces, American forces in Afghanistan, was done, you know, over the sort of late spring, summer, early autumn type period.

And the rest of the year, it was less active. So if he'd waited, let's say, until, I don't know, until the late autumn or winter, then it's likely we would not have seen such a rapid and immediate collapse of the government and its forces there. And the other problem, I think, of this situation, the other reason is catastrophes because for some reason Biden withdrew all the US forces pretty much, most of them, before evacuating the civilian population. The civilian population should have been evacuated.

from the time he made his decision back in April over months. And we wouldn't have seen this fiasco. And it's the same with the British. We should have started it back then when they made the decision originally to withdraw. We would not have seen this utter disaster, which is so damaging. It's obviously, you know, it costs a lot of lives.

There's lots of hostages in Afghanistan now who wouldn't be there if they've been evacuated. And it was so damaging to the reputation and the image of the West. So, you know, I think that all of those different factors had they been done in a different way. And contrary to what we're talking about foreseeing the future, all of this, you know, a second lieutenant,

when he first receives his training at Sandhurst or at West Point in America, would have been trained to avoid all these situations. So why didn't they, if it's basic training, why don't they do that? I don't know. I don't know, but I think there will be an investigation. And, you know,

and I think there should be an independent inquiry into what happened, both in Britain and in America and other countries, and in NATO. Not to have a witch hunt and nail people to a stake or something, but to learn the lessons from it and find out what really did happen to make sure nothing like it happens again if we have any similar type of situation.

But I just can't answer it. It's so illogical. I've spoken to many sort of experienced military people who just really can't understand the thinking behind what happened there. We have heard the intelligence community, as it's now called, did suggest that the Afghan army wouldn't be able to hold off. So it's kind of odd that it's happened that way. The information apparently was available.

I think there was, you know, people saw the options that, you know, the possibilities. It might be that they couldn't hold the thing together for very long, or they would lose the plot immediately or whatever. it might take a lot longer. There were different options. I don't think anyone came, not that I've seen, anyone came to that specific,

I think the US intelligence assessment and the British intelligence assessment, I'm not saying there weren't dissenting views, was that the government would hold up until the end of the year. Okay. That was the best assessment, but a military person knows

you should never plan for the best case. You should plan always for the worst, almost dangerous case. And very clearly that's not what happened. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you because obviously a lot has been made, and, you know, not wrongly so, of the amount of equipment and arms and the money that was essentially left to now the Taliban. Do you think that could have been avoided or did we have to leave that equipment to the Afghan army so that they would, in our minds, at least, have the chance to defend themselves? Is that what's happened or has this been a catastrophic mistake of just handing weapons and material to the enemy?

I think as we didn't appreciate the speed, at which the Afghan forces would collapse, and we didn't, you know, the US, the UK didn't appreciate that. They couldn't just have taken all the weapons away when they went, I don't think, you know, before or during the Taliban offensive. If you couldn't have done that, would be even worse than what we did. But I think now, now is the time to try and deal with it,

to destroy some of it if we can. And, you know, we can work out the concentrations of the equipment and strike it from the air. I don't think we will do that. Because we've got hostages in the country. Partly because there are hostages in the country, but also because we seem to be more interesting in trying to negotiate with the Taliban

and become on good terms somehow with the Taliban, which I think is a mistake. Why? I can understand why we should not destroy this kit, but it's an option that could be taken. I think in the circumstances, it's not going to happen. Sorry, I interrupted you there, but I'm very curious because I, instinctively, it doesn't make

sense to me why we're negotiating with the Taliban, given how you've described and given the people that they're now putting in power, basically terrorists that we've been looking for for decades. But to people listening to this, who maybe take a neutral view or don't know what to think, why is there a mistake to negotiate with the Taliban? Well, I mean, I think one of the, I'll give two, because I'll want to. answer to that. On the first point, really, why are we wanting to negotiate with them and be on good terms of them? And I think the answer to that lies in in President Biden's reputation or lack of at the moment.

He was talking about how almost, and other members of the US administration as well, talking about how we're kind of on the same side now against the Islamic state, who he described in a recent speech as the sworn enemies of the Taliban. And there's been talk of, for example, British forces helping to train the Taliban to deal with the Islamic State. Just an extraordinary concept. Yeah, there have been. We're going to train the Taliban now. Well, I hope not, but there's been consideration of that.

And some members of Parliament have been sort of advancing that idea as well. Are these people mental? Well, in my view, yes. but not in their own view. But going back to the point about being friends with the Taliban, I think President Biden, I mean, by the way, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the Taliban in the Islamic State are not sworn enemies. None of them are.

They're jihadists. They have the same agenda. They have the same doctrine. They have the same intentions. They just wear different cap badges. Sometimes they hate each other and kill each other. Sometimes they're friendly with each other. That's the way it works in that part of the world.

You know, we can't really comprehend it because it's not our culture. but it is their culture, and we should be able to comprehend it. But it was much better for President Biden now to advance the narrative that we've basically handed over Afghanistan to these guys who are going to be helping us fight the Islamic State, which is the greatest evening. That's that agenda. The reason we shouldn't, the other part of the answer,

the reason we shouldn't negotiate with the Taliban, I think will be in good terms of the Taliban. The Taliban's victory, which is the greatest victory for Islamic, jihadists, I think, in modern times, even greater, for example, than the overtaking of Iran by the Ayatollahs back in 1979, which created a terrorist state in Iran. We now also have a terrorist state, a Sunni terrorist state, as opposed to a Shia terror state in Afghanistan. That victory is hugely damaging to the West and hugely inspirational to insurgency movements and jihadists everywhere.

It's the greatest inspiration they will have had, certainly in my memory. Defeating the great Satan, the West, the US, NATO. They've defeated it. And it's can only be something that will celebrate. They will celebrate. They have been inspiring and inspire insurgents in many different places around the world

to overtake the country that they're fighting against. So that's already there. But recognizing them, which effectively amounts to kind of bowing to them, showing them deference, it's just going to add to that. It's going to give them greater credibility than they have now. And it's not going to achieve anything because none of these people are going to be influenced by what we say. We talk, you know, I think Nancy Pelosi in the US said, she said, you know, the Taliban must have, you know, women in the government. I mean, you know, the government is made up of terrorists.

Perhaps she'd like women terrorists in the government as well. I don't know. That's progressive, isn't it? That is progressive. But that's the kind of stuff that's coming out. But anyway, they're not going to, they haven't taken notes. Because there are no women in, they're not only terrorist women in their government. So they don't take notes to what she says. They don't take notes to what we say. They won't do other. They'll do what they want to do.

China will be the players in Afghanistan now. They will be, and Pakistan, of course. but China and Pakistan will be the major influences in Afghanistan from now, not Britain, not America. Hey, Constantine, do you love Trigonometry? Of course, incredible interviews, hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my handsome jawline. Whatever takes away from your hairline. But if you do love Trigonometry and you want to support us, there's only one place to do that, and that's on Locals.

Yes, Locals is a brilliant platform that has been incredibly supportive. to our show and other problematic creators. The great thing about locals is that it's a community for people who love trigonometry. That's right, it's a place for you to hang out with like-minded people, share thoughts, memes and discuss the show. You can enjoy it for free, but it also gives you the option of supporting us for as little as $7 a month. And if you want to give more, you can.

We have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well. We've got everything for mugs, monthly group calls and one on two chats with me and KK. Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. And so what do you think the future holds for Afghanistan? I think there will be now a period of relative peace. The Panshiri's, the kind of the renewal of what was the Northern Alliance, which fought against the Taliban during its previous reign in Afghanistan

and managed to prevent it from taking the north of the country. The panchiris have pretty much been, I think, crushed by the Taliban. According to some rumors, and I don't know there, there are any rumors, with assistance from Pakistan, from Pakistan military, which is beyond possible because the Pakistan military basically created the Taliban and enabled the Taliban to achieve what it's achieved today. But with them out of the way, maybe they'll regenerate themselves hopefully

and become a thorn in the flesh for the Taliban. I hope they do. But at any rate, I would anticipate there will be a period of relative peace for maybe a year, two years. Because the country's been at war for a long time. People want, they actually do, even with the Taliban, they want a degree of stability and relative lack of violence.

They won't get it under the Taliban, but that's what they want. and then I think we'll see maybe in a couple of years time or maybe even less an upright one or more uprisings against the Taliban in the country and we'll see some kind of maybe civil war is going a bit too far but certainly some kind of resistance against the Taliban happening and meanwhile we will see a very repressive government people already journalists being whipped for reporting on you know demonstrations taking place in different cities,

people being executed, Taliban going to door looking for people who were working for the British, working for the Americans, who worked for the last government, who were doing human rights work, anything like that, going around, rounding them up, dealing with them.

We will see, you know, women not allowed out of their houses without the male escort, without being covered head to foot, girls and women not really being educated. You know, they say, oh, they can be educated in accordance with Sharia law. that means. So that's going to be the country and it'll probably get economic support from some form

of economic support from China in return for allowing China to plunder its resources and in return for as much stability as the Taliban can impose. And when you see everything that has happened and you served in the military and you, I imagine, have had friends who have lost their lives, does it make you feel that those servicemen have lost their lives in vain for nothing? No, it doesn't. far from it. I think, I mean, all we shouldn't forget is the reason we went to Afghanistan. We went there in 2001 in relatively small numbers with the US, and also relatively small numbers,

and together with this Northern Alliance, that I mentioned, defeated the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and then there was the resurgence. But we went there to get rid of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, particularly al-Qaeda who carried out in 9-11. That was the reason. It was a counter-terrorism mission to make sure it didn't happen again. We stayed, and we discussed before, whether it's right or wrong to stay, we did stay,

and we stayed for one reason. We stayed to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for terrorists from which they could attack the West. We achieved that mission. And the British soldiers and American soldiers and other soldiers who were killed there died protecting British citizens who would otherwise have died by terrorist attack, launched from Afghanistan, and citizens of allied countries. So that was it was success in that respect, in the terms of the pure mission.

It was a sacrifice that was necessary and worth making. And I say that, knowing many soldiers who have been killed there, and the families of many soldiers have been killed, so I'm not saying it likely, but I do not believe that their sacrifice was in vain. People talk about different missions when we were in Afghanistan. You know, for the whole period, the mission's changed and shifted, and is it to counter narcotics? Is it to give women's rights?

it to enable girls to go to school? No, it was none of those things. It wasn't any. Yes, of course, all those advantages, if you can achieve them, but the mission was to destroy terrorism, not to put women on equal footing with men in Afghanistan, desirable though that might be. Now, moving on, that sacrifice that was made and that success and that effectively, effectively that victory, which I would call it, against terrorism, has now been betrayed by this withdrawal, because that threat remains there. It's not gone away. President Biden says, the war is now over. I have ended the war in Afghanistan. No, he hasn't. He's pulled the American troops out. He's betrayed those troops that fought there for 20 years. He's betrayed his own countrymen who are now at greater

threat from terrorism than before 9-11. And he's betrayed the people of Afghanistan. Although there are plenty of other people in the world we could fight for, who need us to fight for, but we don't have the resources to fight for everybody. And we weren't actually fighting for the people in Afghanistan. We were fighting for our people's safety. And you talk about terrorism, and you referred earlier to the fact that these people are all jihadis, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc. And you talked about they have the same vision. We've had a number of people on the show, former Al-Qaeda members turned double agents and other people who've studied the region very well. What is your understanding of these people's agenda? What do they want?

Well, essentially they want a global Islamic caliphate. They want, first of all, they want all countries in the world that were ever under Islamic rule to return to Islamic rule. And that includes Spain, for example, which was originally part of the caliphate, includes, of course, Israel, and a number of other places that were once under Islamic dispensation. And not only that, it wants them under their idea of Islam, not, for example, Jordan's idea of Islam or the UAE's idea of Islam, but the fundamentalist idea of Islam closer to what Saudi Arabia is, but Saudi Arabia, of course, is also not seen as legitimate Islam for a number of reasons, partly because it is also allied to the United States.

That can't be. So that's the first stage, and the second stage is then to, engulf the rest of the world that wasn't ever Islam, but it's a duty to take back those lands that were once Islamic lands and then to extend that to the rest of the world. But people like Al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and also I would guess the Taliban and the Islamic State, don't see that as something they're going to achieve.

What they see, they see that in the long, long, distant future. They see creating steps towards that process as being their mission. In other words, to kill as many people as possible, as many non-Muslims as possible, and as many upper-state Muslims as possible, and to set Muslims against non-Muslims. In other words, to creating country up this civil war between Muslims and non-Muslims,

that's their kind of way of eventually working towards this process. And that's all of their objectives in different ways. The Taliban before 9-11 were focused mainly. They weren't so much focused on that wider objective. they were focused more on Afghanistan. That was their place. That was what they wanted. They wanted to run it.

They wanted it to be the way they wanted it. Now, 20 years later, they've spent 20 years fighting the West. They've gotten many new members in the organization who are more outwardly focused. Some of them have been to Guantanamo Bay as guests of the Americans there. And so they've now changed their perspective to an extent. And at least some of them also have that outward focus of conquering the world. And in some of the recent statements they've made, that's come through. And I guess people here in the West, I think there's so many things we don't understand about how the rest of the world works.

I mean, you talk about the decline of America and NATO's reputation. And that was the first thing that obviously stuck out to me as someone coming from Russia. Most people in the rest of the world understand only one language, which is strength, right? Strength and force. If you're stronger, they will listen to the words that you say. If you're Nancy Pelosi, they won't because they know there's nothing behind. that, right? But the other thing we don't understand is the power of conviction and the power of belief. And these people are ideological, right, that they have an ideology that drives them

forward because a lot of people might in the West look at the town and go, look, they've got their country, quote-unquote, back, they've got control, they've got American weapons, they've got money, they're now negotiating with the West. Why would they want to attack us? Like, why would they want to? You know, you talk about there's going to be more threat of terrorism than before 9-11. Surely they're just going to go back to being nice, peaceful Afghans and living in prosperity.

Yeah, unfortunately, very few people do actually understand cultures foreign to their own. They, you know, there's a modern trend of wanting to claim that all cultures are equal and therefore worthy of respect. But really, without any attempt to understand them,

they're probably better than us, but we don't really need to. to understand them and they don't understand them. And that's why you get, you know, staunch feminists who complain about some builder whistling at a woman walking down the street, which might well be offensive. I don't know. I've never experienced it and don't ever expect to. But that's their complaint.

The complaint is not that women get stoned to death in countries like Afghanistan, that women get a force to wear robes that cover them head to foot. That's not their complaint, because it's a culture that's supposed. period or hours probably. They don't understand it. And they then, they also make a pretense that women do it voluntarily, which they really don't in any of these countries. Who would? Who could possibly? You know, there's kind of a, in many ways, it's kind of a British, not, and it's not only British, but a British ignorance and arrogance that, that really allows this misunderstanding

to go on. I think, you know, it's, I, I was, I had a knife at my throat from an Afghan at the age of 17 in England for a cultural misunderstanding. I don't think I was particularly to blame, although he did, and he blamed the entire history and betrayal of his race on me for that one thing. But since then, since 17,

when I first encountered a very, very different culture, I've done my best to learn from it and to appreciate and understand it, but not necessarily to respect it. I guess the question, a lot of people would probably want to understand is why would these people continue to engage in terrorism now? They've won, right? They've got money.

They've got gunships. They've got weapons. They've got their country under their control. They are about to be negotiated with by the Western powers. Why would they continue to try and kill innocent people? Why continue terrorist attacks? Why are you concerned about that? Well, because it's basically in their religious doctrine.

You mentioned us now they have their kind of zealous people. They have doctrinal inspiration. They're ideological. And it's in their ideology. They have to do it. It's what they're told they have to do. Let's say even if some or the majority of the Taliban leadership are not focused externally. which I don't really think is the case now,

but let's say that's the case. They are so closely linked and aligned to Al-Qaeda in particular and have been for many, many years and have fought alongside Al-Qaeda for 20 years against the West, including in the fighting in August. They owe something to Al-Qaeda.

So they owe them to operate out of Afghanistan. They don't owe anything to you or me not to let Al-Qaeda kill our sister or daughter or anything like that, or wife, they, they owe something to Al-Qaeda, and therefore they will, you know, they will pay their chips to Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda will carry on attacking for them. The same with the Islamic State. They're not as closely linked, but nevertheless, they're all in the same side. They pretty much want the same sort of thing.

That's a very, very bleak picture that you're painting there. Do you think part of the problem in the West is that we've forgotten what it means to go to war? We're so disconnected in this country in America, from the idea of going to war, from the idea of battle, from the idea of fighting. None of us really know, apart from yourselves, but everybody else of my generation has never been to war, has never been to fight. I think it's a very good point. And there's a, you know, if you look at many of the statements made in Parliament, with the exception of certainly some of the, maybe all of the former military MPs that are there now, and there are a few now, more than the were. But if you look at a lot of things said there, it clearly betrays a lack of

understanding of war. And this is people who are supposed to be directing war, like the prime minister, the foreign secretary, maybe not the defence secretary who was in the army himself. But they, you know, I think their kind of lack of urgency has betrayed their lack of understanding of war. And, you know, for example, the foreign secretary, as he has been discussed, endlessly in the media, was on holiday when all this started. Now, to me, that, if I'd been on holiday when this started, I'd have been straight back, because this is a situation that requires leadership, grip, and commands, and he was the man to do that. But he didn't, I would say he was kind of thinking, this is another crisis. The foreign office deals with lots

of different crises, and I don't come back from holiday every time. I think that kind of the thing shows a lack of understanding of war. I think many people in this country, they only, most vast majority of people, of course, in this country, thankfully, only understand war from what they see on their television or in their computer game, which isn't probably that close to reality. But I think many of them do, certainly many of the people I've spoken do, do understand that, you know, if not understand it, they support, certainly support the soldiers, even if they don't support necessarily the political aims behind their military operations. And I think that's improved over my time since I first joined the army. It's improved a great

deal when we were doing a lot of very dangerous and difficult demanding operations in Northern Ireland, and no one really knew or cared anything about it very much. Whereas I think the Afghanistan and Iraq campaign saw a great deal more public support. And that's probably because of the media, I think more than anything else. I'm going to ask you a question, and it's a very lame and like question, but I'm sure that a lot of people will want it answered. What does it mean to go to war as a soldier?

What does that mean to be flown into somewhere like Afghanistan, in a place where, you know, you have no connection, you've never been before, you don't know the language, and then be plunged into conflict? Well, it's probably the most exciting thing you'll ever do in your life. And it's, you know, I'm sorry. speaking as somebody who volunteered to join the army. And everyone in the British Army today also volunteered to join the army. We don't have any conscripts anymore. And if you volunteered to join the

army, you did so because you want to fight. And that sounds shocking. You want to fight. You don't want people to be at war. You don't want civilians to get killed or whatever. You don't want to see your mate getting killed. But if you don't want to fight, you don't join the army. And I always kind of liken it to a surgeon. A surgeon doesn't want to see a traffic accident with people maimed and mangled and mauled and mauled. But he wants to be the one that chops the leg off if it needs amputating. That's what he's trained to do.

It's what he gets satisfaction from, doing a good job, repairing the person as best he can so he can have as good a life as possible. And a soldier is the same. A soldier, I think, wants to fight, wants the excitement of combat. You know, there are huge problems with it as well. Don't get me wrong.

everything is not, you know, as it is maybe in a movie. There are some terrible aspects to it. But, you know, I've known many soldiers, myself included, who really live to go from military operation to military operation. And the stuff in between is just pretty boring. Now, I appreciate I don't speak for everybody. And there are many people who are terribly badly scarred by war, both physically and mentally,

who wouldn't want to go near another one again once they've done it. But I think, you know, really I go back to the thing I may have said before. If you don't want to fight, why would you possibly join the army? We talk about ethics, and we talk about the Geneva Convention, war crimes, etc., etc. And we talked about Marine B before the interview. Would you be able to talk about that particular case

and why you disagreed with the way that that soldier was treated? Yeah, I think you, ethics and the rules of war and the laws of war are extremely important. And I think it, you know, I think it, you know, there may be some soldiers who would have no qualms other than to kill people as and when they could without, if they don't really need to. I've never met one myself. I'm sure. I don't say there aren't any. But I would, I think any government or any military commander would find it extremely hard to ask a soldier to fight without ethics, without, you know, without adhering to the laws of war. I think it's extremely important. And if you do that, if you try and get people to do things that are outside those laws, then you're really condemning them, not just a potential criminal activity, but also to real moral hazard for themselves, which could affect them in untold ways.

So I think it's really important. Marine A, who was accused and convicted for murder, for killing a wounded Taliban soldier in Afghanistan. I never believed he should have been convicted for murder. And ultimately, on appeal, his conviction was overturned, and he was not any longer convicted of murder, and he was released from prison, but he did serve a period of time in prison.

What he did was wrong. It was against the Geneva Convention. It was against the laws of war. It was immoral. It was unnecessary, and it was completely wrong. Could you just explain what he actually did? Right, he shot a, there was a wounded Taliban prisoner who was probably about to die. He was so severely wounded.

He probably would not have survived. And he shot him, got to get rid of him. To finish him off. Yeah, basically. And that he should not have done because that is murder, even in a war situation, it is murder. What he should have done was to do his best to patch him up and then evacuate him if he could to some way he could get better treatment. Maybe he would die on the way, but that wouldn't have been,

that would have been the right thing to do, but he didn't. And it was filmed. One of his fellow soldiers filmed this happening, and so it was, there wasn't any dispute as to the facts of what happened. But my opinion is that the reason he shouldn't have, and this is the reason he was eventually

his conviction was overturned on appeal, was that he was suffering from the most extreme stress, which caused him to behave in a very uncharacteristic way and in an illegal way. But stress sometimes does that to people battle stress. He'd been on numerous operational tours. He seems to speak all things done to his fellow Marines.

And he was behaving really outside of his control. He was really not mentally capable of doing what he was doing. And that was the eventual finding of the Court of Appeal. And I think, you know, for whatever, reason his first court martial kind of treated him as if he'd been someone in South London stabbing

a rival to get drug money or something like that and it's not like that at all. It's a totally you know it has to be looked at as a totally different situation. He was not acting in my view he was not acting in you know under his own mental control

and you do get that. I mentioned earlier that the levels of stress and the horrors that people see and experience can have very, very bad effects on their minds. But doesn't that also go back to my point of people, and there may be very educated people in the law and politics, they don't understand what it's like. I remember talking to my grandfather who fought in El Alamein

and he fought in the Second World War and he fought in Italy. And he said, you only really see the soldiers when the lead's flying. And he goes, and you will never. know what that's like. So for us to therefore judge him is ridiculous because we don't know what it's like, well, I certainly don't to have an Islamic fundamentalist with an AK-47 trying to blow my head off. No, I agree. And it's, it is very difficult to understand unless you've actually experienced something like that. But in fact, in the case of Marine A that we were talking about, the people judging him were soldiers because there's a military court martial. So they should have,

I believe they should have done it differently. I mean, you know, I've, I, I've sat on court marshals myself and different factors come into play. I'm not accusing them of being corrupted, but I do believe it suited the army. It suited the government for Marine Aid to be convicted. Now, I'm not sure how that kind of desire from the armed forces and from the government was transmitted into a conviction in a court martial, but I know it certainly did suit them.

I guess what the point France was making was more about the commentary and the media, because I remember seeing that story at the time as someone who's not in any way involved with the military. It just seemed like a bunch of people in comfortable armchairs in Westminster, talking about somebody who was in a combat situation. And look, as you say, the Geneva Convention and the laws of war and all of that exists. But to expect someone who's just been shot at and nearly killed, having served and seen horrible things, to immediately, treat someone is about to die anyway

as I see both sides of it but I don't think it's reasonable to just expect them to behave with utmost moral perfection in that situation. You can't be clinical in my view and you know in all wars throughout history leeway has been shown to soldiers who have transgressed the laws of war

you know there's a real difference between somebody who in the heat of battle because they're wound up there You know, they've seen lots of people killed around them. They're really aggressive and with, you know, blood dripping from them, really, in a very tough combat situation. You've got to treat people differently in that situation from, let's say, an SS squad that lines a group of soldiers up against the wall and machine guns them

and murders them, which happened to a company from my own regiment in the Second World War just before the Dunkirk. evacuation. So, you know, there's war crimes, and there are soldiers behaving in a way that, you know, you can't control human beings like automotons in some circumstances, and I think that definitely needs to be understood. But we're seeing, we've seen far too many cases of soldiers being prosecuted and investigated, endlessly investigated as a result of allegations made against them in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Northern Ireland. And to we're watching as sort of old-aged pensioners who were once soldiers who are being

hounded through the courts in Northern Ireland for alleged offences they committed half a century ago, half a century ago. And, you know, this is being done for political objectives. All of it is being done for political objectives. In the case of the Northern Ireland allegations that are being held, which soldiers are being hounded there, it is essentially an attempt by Irish Republicans to rewrite history to present their terrorists as the good guys and British soldiers as the war criminals, which is the total reverse of the truth. In Afghanistan, it was, and Iraq, the allegations were made for a rather different reason, but one was money, and the other one was Iraqis and Afghans, in some cases, were making allegations and encouraged to do so by British

laws in order to score political points over, you know, British and Western governments. Well, nice to end on a non-controversial note there. Colonel, it's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our local supporters in a second. But before we do, we've got one final question for you as always. Which is always what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be. I think in this context about, there are many things in the world we're not talking about.

I think in the context of our conversation, one of the biggest problems we face at the moment is two things. One is radicalisation and de-radicalisation. And we've seen cases recently in the last couple of years in London where Islamic terrorists who have been convicted, done their sentence, been led out of prison, have gone through de-radicalisation programmes, have then carried an attacks, which goes to show how de-radicalisation programmes do not work, clearly.

It's certainly not in those cases. and I suspect, and many people who are closer involved, and I am, in prisons, etc., have confirmed that our de-radicalisation programmes leave a lot to be desired. So, you know, because if people are indoctrinated, they have a religious belief in their mind, it's not like it's not the same as a common criminal who can be made to understand

and deterred from carrying out his crime by punishment. sometimes religious beliefs and indoctrination transcedes punishment and I think in many of the cases of jihadists it does so if we're not to keep them in prison indefinitely which obviously is highly undesirable in any democratic society then we need to do more about we need to talk more about deregicalisation and I would argue we need to try and involve

countries like the UAE and other other countries in the Middle East which are Muslim countries to be involved now do radicalisation programs. And the second thing that people aren't talking about, you're getting two for the price of one, is linked to the same kind of problem, which is how you deal with prisoners of this conflict. It's a multi-generational conflict that we're facing.

This is not going to end in five years, 10 years or 50 years. It's going to go on for a very long time, this jihadist conflict. And how do you deal with people, with people you capture. It goes back to the de-radicalization point, but if you look at Guantanamo Bay, you know, President Obama vowed to end Guantanamo Bay.

He did two terms in office. It's still there now because there was no solution. In a conventional war, you capture prisoners, and when the war is over, you release those prisoners because hostilities are finished. This is not going to finish. So there will never come a time when you can really release and expect

them no longer to be fighting you. And we've seen, you know, we've got in Afghanistan today, in the government, certainly among the Taliban leadership, people have been to Guantanamo Bay. So they, you know, they were released and they're still fighting. So it's a real problem. I don't have the answers, but I think one of your extremely clever listeners probably ought to come up with the answer to that question. Let me follow up very briefly, because Guantanamo Bay,

it, I don't know, it just grinds so much against my liberal instincts, happened there? Do you think it was a mistake or do you think it was necessary and do you think we're going to have to do more of that? I think it, unless someone comes up with a better solution, it was a necessary evil. And I don't, I don't really understand how you can deal with a problem like Islamic jihadism, which is a conflict. It's not a, this is not criminal activity. It is criminal, but it's much more like a conflict. How you can deal with it without something like Guantanamo Bay. And even the genius President Obama, a law professor, elected twice to the most powerful man in the world twice, he couldn't figure out a solution to it. So if he couldn't,

I certainly, I'm not going to be able to. What about all the waterboarding and all that stuff? Surely that was unnecessary. Yeah, I think, I think it was. You know, torture is a very contra, if you just call it torture, I guess we would certainly classify it as torture is a very controversial thing. And it's certainly forbidden under our laws. And I don't think, you know, I would not support it. I was never involved in anything that. And I would not support it.

But having said that, I can understand in some circumstances why people, why they did it in those, in that situation. And the reason they did it was because they were so fearful of another 9-11. Now, that doesn't excuse what happened, but I think it sort of explains why they felt that such extreme measures needed to be taken. And it wasn't just about, you know, another 9-11 flying aircraft into building. It was the knowledge and the intelligence that suggested that, you know, that these jihadists were trying to get their hands on biological weapons, chemical weapons,

and nuclear weapons and getting close towards it in some circumstances. So, you know, it's not an excuse, but I think an explanation. Someone should have told them they just need to get a bat to sneeze on them. If they needed a biological weapon, we've ended up with one. You need no further than Wuhan. Exactly. Colonel Richard Kemp has been absolutely pleasure. Where can people find your work, your writing, et cetera, online?

How do they find out more about what's going on? I've got a website which is called Richard-Kemp.com, and I'm on Twitter, which is at C-O-L Richard Kemp. So if you want to abuse me for any of the horrible, cancelable, triggerable comments I've made, then you can get me on those things. I've got plenty of abuse already, so please join in. Colonel, it's been an absolute pressure.

Thank you so much. And if you've enjoyed this interview and you want to see others, they always go out Wednesday, Sunday, 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard, or Aurora, which always go out at the very same time. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss. another fantastic episode.

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