Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
robert cruz a historian at stanford
specializing in the history of
afghanistan russia and islam
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in the description and now here's my
conversation with robert cruz
was it a mistake for the united states
to invade afghanistan in 2001 20 years
ago
yes
as simple as yes why was it a mistake
i'm a historian so i say this with you
know some humility about what we can
though i think you know i'd still like
to know much more about what was going
on in the white house you know in the
hours days weeks you know after 9 11 but
i think
the george w bush administration acted
in a state of panic
and i think they wanted to show kind of
toughness they wanted to show
some kind of resolve you know this was a
horrific act
that played out you know on everyone's
television screens and i think it was
really uh
fundamentally a crisis legitimacy within
the white house the level offs and i
think they felt like they had to do
something and something dramatic
i think they didn't really think through
you know who they were fighting you know
who the enemy was what this geography
had to do with 911 i think looking back
at it i mean some of us not to say i was
you know clairvoyant or i could see in
the future but i think many of us were
from that morning skeptical about the
connections that people were drawing
between afghanistan as a state
as a place and the actions of al qaeda
in washington and
new york and pennsylvania
so as you watch the events of 9 11
the things that
our leaders were saying in the in the
minutes hours days weeks that followed
maybe you can give a little bit of a
timeline in
of what was being said when was the
actual invasion of afghanistan and also
what were your feelings in the minutes
weeks
after 9 11. i was in dc i was you know
on the way to american university uh
hearing on npr
what happened
and i thought of the
american university logo which is red
white and blue it's an eagle and i
thought you know washington is under
attack and
symbols of american power are under
attack
and so um yeah i was quite concerned and
at the time lived yeah just a few miles
from the capitol
and so um you know i i felt it you know
it was it was real so i appreciate the
you know the sense of anxiety and fear
and panic and for
two three years later in dc we were
constantly getting
reports you know mostly rumors and
unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks
before the city so i definitely
um appreciate the sense of being under
salt
but in watching television including
russian television that day because i
just
just installed a satellite thing so i
was trying to watch world news and get
different points of view and
that was quite useful to have an
alternative you know a set of eyes in
russian yeah in russian yeah okay so
your russians is good enough to
understand uh russian television the
news yeah the news and the visuals that
were coming that were not shown on
american television
i don't know how they had it but they
had they were not filtering anything
in the way that the major networks and
cable televisions were doing here so it
was
a very unvarnished view of the violence
of the moment you know new york city if
people
diving from the towers are being just
you know it was really
they didn't hold back on that which was
quite you know fascinating i think much
of the world saw much more than actually
the american public saw
but to your question you know amid that
feeling of imminent doom
i watch commentators start to talk about
al qaeda and then talk about afghanistan
and
one of the experts was um was barnett
rubin who's at nyu he's a you know kind
of long
very learned um afghanistan hand
and he's brought on peter jennings on
abc news to
to kind of lay this out for everyone um
and i thought you know he did a fine job
but i think it it was formative in
cementing the view that
somehow al-qaeda was synonymous with the
space afghanistan
um i think
again
i was no al-qaeda expert then and i'm
not now
but i think my immediate thought went to
war
and because my background had been with
at that point mostly afghans who had
been displaced from decades of war
whom i encountered in uzbekistan who
were refugees and so on
i thought immediately my mind went to
the suffering
of afghan people that this war was going
to
sweep
sweep up of course the the defenseless
people who have nothing to do with these
politics so we should give maybe a
little bit of context yeah you can speak
too yeah
so assume nobody's an expert at anything
yeah so let's just say yeah um
you and i are not experts in anything
right
what
as a historian were you studying at the
time and thinking about see
uh is it is it the full global history
of afghanistan is it the region
were you thinking about
the muji hadin and al qaeda and taliban
were you thinking about the soviet union
the proxy war through afghanistan were
you thinking about iraq and oil like
what what's the full space of things in
your heart in your mind at the time i
mean just the moment of course it was
you know there's the sense of
you know the suffering and the tragedy
of the moment of you know what the death
that was i think i was preoccupied by by
the violence at the moment
um but as the conversation turned to
afghanistan as a kind of theater does
not respond to this moment i think
immediately what came to mind was that
little i knew about al-qaeda the times
tested that the geography was was
inaccurate that this was a global
network a global threat
that this was a kind of you know
a movement that went beyond borders and
i think that
it felt early on that
afghanistan was going to be used as a
scapegoat and it's intellectually at the
time you know i was teaching at american
university my courses
you know touched on a range of subjects
but i was trying to complete a book on
um islam in the russian empire actually
but in doing that research which took me
across russia and central asia purely by
accident
i had developed an interest in
afghanistan because
uh just again a series of coincidences
i found myself in tashkent the capital
of jupiter without housing
through an american friend who was like
the king of the market in tashkent he
knew everyone he run into some afghan
merchants there
they found out i didn't have a place to
live
i didn't know where afghanistan was
honestly this was 1997. i had a big idea
it was next door well you lived in
uzbekistan yeah in tashkent doing doing
distinction research yeah because it was
you know hub of the russian empire in
central asia yeah so just by accident i
ended up with these young afghans who
took me in
as roommates
and that i think that the sense of that
community
shaped my idea of what afghanistan is it
was my
first exposure to them
they're part of a trading diaspora they
brought
they had brought matches from riga
latvia
they somehow brought um
flour and some agricultural products
from from egypt and they were sitting in
enclosed containers in tashkent waiting
for
these pakistani state to permit them to
trade so these guys are mostly hanging
out during the day they'll get dressed
up they put on suits and ties like
you're wearing they'd polish their shoes
and they would sit around offices
drink tea
pistachios
then they'd feast at lunch
and then at night we would go out so
part of my research because i also had a
bottleneck in my research i was going to
the state archives in tashken
and because of the state of uzbekistan
you know that was a very kind of
suspicious thing to do so it took a
while to get in so
i had down time in touchkin just like
these guys so i got to know them pretty
well and it was really just a an
accidental kind of thing but
grew quite close to them and i developed
an appreciation of um
which now i think again thinking of the
seeds of all this um these people had
already lived
young guys you know in the 20s they'd
already lived in 67 countries
they all spoke half a dozen languages
one of my best friends there had been a
um a kickboxer
and breakdancer trained in tehran his
father was a theater person in
afghanistan
he told stories of escaping death in
afghanistan during the civil war
going to his pakistan escaping death
there
and these were very you know real
stories
can you also just briefly mention yeah
geographically speaking yes afghanistan
uzbekistan tajikistan you mentioned iran
right what uh who are the neighbors of
all this what are we supposed to be
thinking about for people i i was always
terrible at geography and spatial
information so can you lay it off yeah
i'm sure sure so tashkent you know it's
a it's the capital of uzbekistan
it was um
a hub of russian imperial power in the
19th century the russians take the city
from a local
kind of muslim dynasty in 1865
it becomes the city the kind of hub of
um soviet power in central asia after
1917 it becomes the
center of
the soviet republic of uzbekistan
which becomes independent finally in
1991 when the soviet union collapses so
these are all like these uh republics
are the fingertips of soviet power in
central asia that's right
and
they've been independent since 1991 but
they have struggled to
disentangle themselves from moscow from
one another
and now they face very serious pressure
from china
to form a kind of periphery of
you know the great machine that is the
chinese economy and its
ambitions to stretch across asia
um for afghanistan where my roommates my
friends hailed from um
afghanistan had fallen
into
civil war in the late 1970s
when leftists tried to cease power there
in 1978
the soviet union then extended from
uzbekistan you know crossing the border
with its forces in 1979 to try to shore
up this leftist government that has
ceased power in 1978
um and so
for central asians in the wider region
you know their their fate had for some
decades been tied to afghanistan in a
variety of ways but it became much more
connected in 1980s when the soviet red
army occupied
afghanistan for 10 years
and here i refer your listeners and
viewers to um rainbow three as the guide
to
the historically accurate historically
accurate the bible the bible of african
history and rainbow three yeah yeah as
as a fantastic um window onto the
american view of the war right but for
us afghans you know there are people who
fought against the soviet army
um but of a certain generation
the guys i knew
you know
their mission was to survive and so they
fled in waves you know by the millions
to pakistan
to iran some went north into south
central asia later in the 1990s
and some were displaced across the
planet so california where we're sitting
today has a large community that came
in the 80s and 90s
in the east bay
um can i ask a quick question that's a
little bit of a tangent yep what is the
correct or the respectful way to
pronounce
afghanistan afghanistan
i
iran iran
so as a russian speaker afghanistan yeah
are the on versus the and yeah is it a
different country by country as an
english speaker in america
is it pretentious and disrespectful to
say afghanistan
or is it the opposite respectful to say
it that way what what are your thoughts
on that that's a fascinating question um
i defer to the
people from those countries to of course
sort out those politics i think
you know i think one of the fascinating
things about the region broadly is that
it is a place of so many cultures and
really quite cosmopolitan
so i think people are mostly quite
forgiving about how you say
afghanistan afghanistan it's not like
paris
yeah yeah right right the french are not
forgiving
exactly and i think people are very very
forgiving and i think that you know
iranians are a bit
you know
more instructive in suggesting iran
rather than iran right
iraq
iraq you know i i think there's this
there's come to be a fit between
certain ways of pronouncing these places
and
the position that americans take about
them right so
it's more jarring when
people say
iraq
and it comes with you know a claim that
a certain kind of person you know should
be the victim of violence or yeah right
so yeah it's kind of like talking about
the democratic party or the democrat
party it's sometimes using certain kind
of terminology
to make a little bit of a
sort of uh
implied statement about your beliefs
that's fascinating yeah i mean i think
when i hear iraq and iran i mean i think
it yeah is it intentional in the case of
a democrat or is it just a
you know innocent whatever i think again
i think most iranians and afghans people
i know have have been
very cool about that
what
annoys afghans now i can say i think
it's fair to say i don't mean to speak
for
maine's people
but i can just share with our our
non-afghan friends um
the term afghani
uh is is a kind of term of offense
because that's the name of the currency
and so
a lot of people ask you know why
having especially again it's more
addictive to americans because you know
we've been so deeply involved in that
country obviously for the last 20 years
right so
afghans ask why after 20 years are you
still calling us the wrong name
what is the right name this is somebody
they prefer afghans afghans yeah and and
afghani is the name of the currency and
so i just dodged the book because i was
going to say yeah i don't know yeah
that's really great to know yeah and
it's it's again i think but i would
emphasize that
people are quite open and and you know
it's a it's a whole region of incredible
diversity and
and respect for linguistic pluralism
actually so i think that
you know but i also appreciate that
during in this context um when there's a
lot of pain you know in the afghan
diaspora community in particular
you know being called the wrong name
after 20 years when they already feel
so betrayed at this moment you know just
kind of
if one follows us on social media
that is one
kind of
hot wire right yeah so the reason i ask
about pronunciation
is because yes it is true that there are
certain things where mispronounced
kind of reveal that you don't care
enough to pronounce correctly that's
right you don't know enough to pronounce
correctly right and you dismiss
the culture and the people which i think
that's right as per your writing is
something that
if it's okay i'll go with afghanistan
just because i'm used to i say iraq iran
but i say afghanistan yeah that's great
is as you do in your writing uh
afghanistan suffers from much
misunderstanding from the rest of the
world but back yeah to our discussion of
uzbekistan tajikistan the whole region
that
gives us context for the events of 9 11
right right
so yeah if we go back to that day in the
weeks you know that followed um in my
mind went to the community i knew in
tashkent
which was interesting it was i mean they
were
so islam was the focal point of our
conversation in the u.s about 9 11 right
everyone to know
was relationship between
the terrific violence and that religious
tradition with its
you know
one billion plus followers across the
globe right
that became the issue of course for
american security institutions
for you know
local state and police institutions
right i mean it became the i think it
was the question that most americans had
on their mind so
again i didn't imagine myself as someone
who had all the answers of course but
given my background and coming at this
from russian history coming at this from
studying empire and trying to think
about the region broadly
you know i was very alarmed at the way
that the conversation went can i ask you
a question what was your feeling
on that morning
uh of 9 11
who did this isn't that it's not a
natural feeling there's a it's coupled
with fear yeah of
what's next especially when you're in dc
yeah but also who is this is this an
accident yeah is this a deliberate
terrorist attack is this uh domestic
like what were your thoughts of the
options and the internal ranking given
your uh expertise i mean i suppose i i
was taken by
the narrative that this was
international
i mean i'd also lived in new york during
one of the first bombings in 94 of the
world trade center
so it was clear to me that a radical
community had
really fixed new york as part of their
imagination of
and i immediately you know thought it
was a it was a
kind of
blow to american power and
you know i was drawn
by the symbolism of about you know if
you think of it as an act it was a kind
of
um an act of speech if you will kind of
a way of speaking to
from a position of relative weakness
speaking to a you know
an imperial power and that i saw
i saw it as a kind of symbolic you know
speech act of that with horrific you
know real world
um consequences for
all his innocent victims for the firing
of the police and just the
you know the horror of the moment um
so i i did see it as as transcending
the united states but i did not see it
as really having anything necessarily to
do fundamentally about
afghanistan and the history
of the region that i've been studying
and the community people that i knew
who were optically religious right that
the the guys i hung out with actually
wore me out because they wanted to go
out every night
they wanted to party every night we had
drinking yep we had discussions about
alcohol i mean uzbekistan is famous for
its
drinking it's drinking you know it's
that's something to look forward to so i
i do want to travel to that part of it
when was the last time you were in that
part of the world
early 2000s well then mid-2000s
so by the way we're drinking vodka what
what's the pur yeah i mean that kind of
choice
uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as as
the um the choice um
and that and it informs you know and
it's but but the fascinating thing you
know as a student is what you're
observing is a non-muslim
you know i'm a non-russian i'm this is
all
you know
culturally
new to me and i'm you know a student of
all that right as a graduate student
doing my work there so you're like jane
goodall of vodka and russia that's right
just observing that's right yeah and
then you you get you get the summagon
the grass vodka you get you know i have
i've had some long nights on the
kazakhstani frontier yeah that i'm not
proud of um
you know but you got to know the people
and some of them from from yeah but
intellectually so the thing i mean the
the fascinating thing there was it and
just as a
i mean there's a whole you know i'm
historian right but there there are
great contributions by
you know anthropologists and biographers
who who've gone across the planet and
try to understand how muslims understand
the tradition
at different contexts
so
many uzbeks will say you know
this is part of our national culture to
drink and eat as we please right
and yet i'm a very devout muslim and so
of course you can encounter other muslim
communities who
won't touch alcohol right but it's
become kind of i think it's very much um
you know soviet culture left a deep
impression in each of these places and
so their ways of thinking
ways of
performing ways of you know enjoying
oneself
that are shared across
soviet and former soviet space to this
day right and you've written also about
muslims in the soviet union that's right
uh
there's an article
that uh there's a paywall so i couldn't
read it and i really want to read it is
uh happy to share with you yeah moscow
and the mosque or yeah something like
that right right um
by the way just another tangent on a
tangent yeah uh so i bought all your
books i love them very much
one of the reasons i bought them and
read many parts is uh because they're
easy to buy
unlike articles
every single website has a payload yeah
yeah so it's it's very here i'm sorry
very frustrating to read brilliant
scholars such as yourself no no no um
i wish there was one fee i could pay
everywhere i don't care what that fee is
that's what it
allows me to read some of your brilliant
writing i don't think i hear you no i
think
moving toward
more kind of open source
formatting stuff i think is what a lot
of journals are thinking about now and i
think it's
definitely for the kind of
democratization of knowledge and
scholarship that's definitely an
important thing that we should all think
about and
i think um
you know we need to exert pressure on
these publishers to do that so i
appreciate this is what i'm doing here
yeah yeah good good yeah i appreciate it
so uh yeah so your thought was
afghanistan is not
it's not going to be
the center this is the source exactly
where it's not the center of this and
invading that country isn't going to fix
isn't going to fix the
you know toxic milestone of politics
that produced
911 right
against thinking of some of the
personalities just thinking about going
back to the touchdown story which i'll
end with i mean just observing you know
real muslims doing
doing things and then asking questions
about it and and
trying to understand
through their eyes what tradition means
to them
and then you have a we had we had a very
narrow conversation about what islam is
that you know generated immediately
exploded in you know on the day of 9 11
right
and then of course um
i think the antipathy toward islam and
muslims
it was informed by
by racism and formed by xenophobia so it
became a perfect storm i think of
demonization
that
didn't sit with you know what i knew
about the tradition and with the actual
people that i had known because then
going back to i mean there were other
friends and encounters and so on but
just thinking about afghanistan and and
tashkent from what i mean
just that
thought about my friends who had been
who had suffered a great deal in their
short lives who've been
you know cast aside
from country to country but had found a
place in tashkent with some relative
stability
and you know they wanted to go out every
night
and you know they explained you know one
friend we talked about the alcohol and
all that and he he didn't get crazy but
he was like
you can drink but just don't get drunk
that's that's permissible within islam
right
um
and he's
you know i think pashtun i think uzbek's
had a different view you know
often the more vodka the better you know
and it doesn't violate as i understand
islam so even yeah it's kind of a silly
example but it's just an illustration of
the ways in which
different communities different
generations different people can come at
this very complex tradition
in so many different ways so
obviously
if whatever kind of scholar you are any
kind of expert whatever you're you know
it's always
disconcerting to see your field of
specialization be flattened right and
then be flattened and then be turned to
arguments for for violence right mixed
up with the natural human right feelings
of hate yeah and uh and hurt depression
and pain so i you know i mean that day i
vividly remember i sat with um
other phd historians in different fields
we you know we oddly enough had lunch
that day and it kind of deserted
washington's place was open we went
um and we just thought you know this is
gonna kind of
open up like
a great mall of destruction
and you know the american state is going
to destroy and it's going to destroy in
this geography
and i thought that was
misplaced for lots of reasons and then i
think
if when you know
i'd
been doing some research on afghanistan
then i was kind of shifting to the south
and i had
been looking at the talbot on um from
afar for some years and you know i think
it's clear now that in respect there
were opportunities for alternative
policies at that moment
so what should
the conversation have been like what
should we have done
differently because
you know
from a perspective of the time the
united states was invaded by a foreign
force
what is the proper response or what is
the proper conversation about the proper
response at the time what do you think
you know i know my colleague at stanford
con lisa rice would tell me this is
above my pay grade
and um you know she makes a point in her
classes to talk about
how difficult decision making is under
such intense pressure
and i appreciate that um you know i am
an historian who sits safely in my
office
i don't like battlefields i don't like
taking risks um
so i can see all those limits you know
i'm not a military expert
i've been accused of being a spy
wherever i've gone because the way i
look and because of my nationality and
so on but i'm not a spy so i defer
you know i respect the expertise of all
those communities but i think
they acted out of ignorance
they acted i think because i mean if you
think of the
in a way there was
a compensatory aspect of this
decision-making i mean
the bush administration failed this was
an extraordinary failure right so if we
start way if we're going to break down
the fear of intelligence i mean if they
if you follow the story of richard clark
um
who's richard clark he was a
national security expert who was tasked
with following al qaeda
who had
produced a dossier
under the clinton administration that he
passed on to the george w bush
administration
and if you look at
the work of conor lisa rice she wrote a
very famous
i think unpaywalled foreign affairs
article that you can read
announcing the george w bush foreign
policy kind of outlook
and it was all about great powers it's
about the rise of china is about russia
i mean there's definitely a kind
of hangover of
those who missed having russia as the
boogeyman
who spoke you know the clinton's mission
repeated again again the idea of making
sure the bear stayed in his cage
which is why the united states
threw a lifeline to the central asian
states
hoping to have pipelines
hoping to shore up their
national sovereignty as a way of
containing
russia initially but also iran yeah
which sits to the south and west
and then peripherally looking down the
road to china to the east so the the
bear is
what like russia
or is is it kind of like some weird
combination of russia iran and china but
the bears russia and and russia is
this um i think i'm trying to
characterize the imagination of some of
these yeah bachelor figures
um this is an image formed in the cold
war
i mean it has deeper seeds and
european and western intellectual
thought that go
back at least to
the 1850s in the reign of zarnickels the
first when we first get this language
about um the russian empire is this kind
of evil
uh polity
obviously this was
a kind of pillar of reaganism
um but the clinton folks kept that a lot
alive they wanted to make sure that
you know american power would be
you know unmatched and they
being creatures of the cold war
themselves they looked to
russia as
a resurgent power well before putin was
even thought of yeah i mean this is you
mentioned one
deep uh profound historical piece in
rambo it's probably uh the this this
conflict has to do with another
celestial stone movie iraqi iv which is
also historically accurate and based on
uh
it's basically a documentary so um
there is something about the american
power even
at the level of condoleezza rice these
respected uh deep
kind of uh
leaders and thinkers about history in
the future
where they like to have competition with
other super powers right and almost
conjure up
super powers even when
those
countries don't maybe
at the time at least deserve the label
superpower that's right a great point
yeah they're all allow some points so
yeah i mean russia was i think many many
experts i mean my my mentor at princeton
um stephen kawkin you know
was then writing great things about how
you know
if you look at russia's economy the
scale of its gdp
you know its capacity to actually act
globally it's all quite limited
um but kanye rice and the people around
you know came into power with george w
bush thinking that you know
the foreign policy challenges of her era
would be
those of the past right richard clark
and others within the administration
warn that in fact there is this group
that has declared war against the united
states and they are coming for us
the fbi had been following these people
around for many months and so
you know by the time george w bush comes
to power
lots of al-qaeda activists are well not
lost but you know
perhaps a dozen or so are already you
know training in the united states right
i mean what we knew immediately from the
biographies of some of the characters of
the attackers of 9 11
it was a hodgepodge of people from
across the planet but most of they were
saudi right and that was known very
early on or presumed very long so again
if we go back to your big question about
the geography why afghanistan
it didn't add up right it seemed to me
that afghanistan was a kind of
soft target it was a place to
have explosions to
seemingly recapture american supremacy
um and also i think there was in many
quarters there was a deep urge for
revenge and this was the place to
have some casualties have some
explosions
and then i think you know restore the
legitimacy of the bush administration by
showing that we are in charge we'll pay
i think there's a very old-fashioned
punitive dimension which
rests upon the presumption that if we
intimidate these people
they'll know not to try this again right
all these i would suggest are all
misreadings of a
of an organization that was always
global it had no real center i mean
called itself the center that's one way
to translate al qaeda
but that center was really in the
imagination um
bin laden bounced around from country to
country
um and crucially i think
a dimension that i don't claim to know
anything new about but has endured as a
kind of doubt is the role of saudi
arabia and the fact that you know the
muscle in that operation of 9 11
was saudi right i mean this was a saudi
operation with
if one thing so again just on the basis
of nationalities saudis you know an
egyptian or two a lebanese guy and
the
egyptian guy you know had been studying
in germany he was an urban planner right
um so if one thinks of the imagination
of this i mean
and in fact if you look at the kind of
typology of
the figures who have led this radical
movement i mean if you think of the the
global jihadists
they are
mostly not religious scholars right but
london was not a political scholar
his training was an engineer you know
some biographers claim that he was a
playboy for much of his youth
but really the the these ideas i think
that's probably why they chose the twin
towers i mean
this is uh
an imagination fueled by
training and engineering i mean a lot of
the
you know the sociology if you do a kind
of post pornography of a lot of these
leading jihadists
their backgrounds are not in islamic
scholarship but actually in engineering
and kind of practical sciences and
professions
medical doctors are among their ranks um
and so there's long been a tension
between islamic scholars who devote
their whole lives to study of texts and
commentary and interpretation
and then what some scholars call kind of
new intellectuals new muslim authorities
who actually have secular university
educations
often in the natural sciences or
engineering and technical fields who
then bring that kind of
mindset if you will
to
what muslims college called the
religious sciences
which are you know a field of
kind of ambiguity and of gradation
and of subtlety and nuance and
really of decades of training before one
becomes authoritative to speak about
issues like whether or not it's
legitimate to take someone else's life
with the relation to afghanistan who was
bin laden
milan was a a visitor um
if you look at his whole life course
part of it is an enigma still you know
he
is from a saudi elite family but a
family that kind of has a yemeni
arabian sea kind of
genealogy
so the family has no relationship to
afghanistan pastor president except
at some point in 1980s when he went like
thousands of other young saudis
first to pakistan to places like
peshawar on the border
where
they wanted to aid the jihad in some
capacity
and for the most part
the
arabs who went opened up hospitals some
opened up schools
the bin laden family
had long been
based in engineering construction
so it's thought that he used some of
those skills and resources and
connections to
build things um
you know we have images of him firing a
gun
uh for show right it's not clear that he
ever actually fired a gun in what we
would call combat
um
again i could be corrected by this and i
think you know
they're competing accounts of who he was
so he's kind of a
i mean these figures that he said at the
pinnacle of this world are
you know fictive heroes that people you
know map their aspirations onto right
and so
people like mueller omar who was then
head of the taliban
was rarely seen in public
the current head held on
is almost never seen in public i mean
this kind of studied air of um mystery
that they've cultivated
to make themselves available for
all kinds of fantasies right do you
think he believed so his religious
beliefs you think he believed
some of the more extreme things
that enable him
to commit terrorist acts maybe put
another way
what makes a man want to become a
terrorist and what aspect of bin laden
made him want to be a terrorist
great um i mean let me offer some
observations i think you know there are
others who know more about bin laden and
and have far more expertise in al qaeda
so
i'm coming this
in an adjacent way kind of from
afghanistan and from my historical
training so
this is my two cents so you know bear
with me um i'm i don't have the
authoritative account which in itself is
fascinating because you're a historian
of afghanistan and the fact that
bin laden isn't a huge part of your
focus of study
just means that bin laden is not a keem
part
of the history of afghanistan except
that america made him a key part of the
history of afghanistan i would endorse
that definitely that's it i mean you put
it in a very pity pity way um
yeah so listen he was he was a so he was
an engineer
he was said to be a playboy um he spent
a lot of cash from his family
you know like many young saudis
and from some other countries he was
inspired by this idea
that that was jihad in afghanistan
it was going to take down
one of the two superpowers the soviet
union
who you know the red army did murder
hundreds of thousands perhaps as many as
two million
um
afghan civilians during that conflict
it's very
you know
plausible and very you know completely
understandable that many young people
would see
that cause as
you know the righteous pious
fighters for jihad who call themselves
mujahideen
arrayed against this evil empire right
of a godless soviet empire that
when there's even confusion about what
soviets wanted right now now we know
much more about like what the kremlin
wanted what brezhnev wanted
and how they elite thought about it
because we have many more of their
records but from the outside you know
for jimmy carter
and then for reagan it looked like
the soviets were making a move on
on south asia because they wanted to get
to the warm water ports you know which
russians always want supposedly right
and it was kind of a move to take over
our oil
and you know to assert world domination
right so there are lots of ways in which
this looked like
good resival in congress it looked like
um
you know kind of vietnam again but this
time this is our chance to get them and
there are lots of great quotes uh i mean
disturbing but
really revealing quotes that american
possibilities made about wanting to give
the soviets their vietnam
so the cia
funneled you know
hundreds of millions of dollars into
this project to back the mujahideen you
know who reagan called freedom fighters
and so milan was part of that universe
he's part of that you know he's swimming
in the ocean of these afghan mujahideen
who out in size you know did 95 of the
fighting they're the ones who died
they're the ones who defeated the red
army right the arabs that were there did
a little fighting a lot of it was for
you know their purposes it was to get
experience it was to
kind of create their reputations like
bin laden began to forge for himself
of being spokesman for a global project
because by the late 80s
when bin laden i think was more active
and began
conspiring with people from other arab
countries the idea that you know
gorbachev power in 85 he's like let's
get out of here this is this is draining
the soviet budget it's an embarrassment
uh we didn't think about this properly
let's focus on restoring
um the party
and strengthening the soviet union
let's get out of this costly war you
know it's it's it's a waste um it's not
worth it
we don't lose anything by getting out of
afghanistan
um and so their retreat was quite
uh effective and successful from the
soviet point of view right it's not what
we're seeing now
what year was the retreat um i mean it
began
so michael gorbachev kind of found out
85 you know he was a generation younger
than the other guys
he was a critic of the system he didn't
want to abolish it he wanted to reform
it
he was a true believer in in soviet
socialism and in the in the party as a
you know
a monopolist right
um but he's critical of the old guard
and recognized that
the party had to change and the whole
system had changed to continue to
compete
and so afghanistan was one element of
this
and so he
pushed
the afghan elites that moscow was
backing
to basically say listen we're going to
share power
and so
a figure named najibola
who was a soviet trained
intelligence specialist sitting in kabul
agreed and he said we need to have a
more kind of pluralistic
accommodations approach to our enemies
who are
backed by the us mainly sitting in
pakistan stated in iran
backed by these arabs to agree getting
money from saudi and he said let's draw
some of them into the government and
basically have a kind of unity
government
that makes some space the opposition
and for the most part with u.s backing
with pakistani backing with iranian
backing and with saudi backing the
opposition said no we're not going to
reconcile
we're going to push you off the cliff
and so that story goes on from at least
the last soviet red army troops leave
early 1989
um but the nigeria government
holds on for three more years
it is the um i mean they're still
getting some help from the soviet union
its enemies are still getting help from
the us mainly
and um it's not 1992 that that um that
they lose
and then the mujahideen come to power
they immediately
you know they're deeply fractured and
that's where bin laden is watching all
of this unroll that's right and he's
he's part of the me he's also mobile so
he he at one point you know goes um
you know he's in sudan you know he's
he's moving from place to place his
people are all over the world in fact
they i mean if you think of the
once the mujahideen take power
yeah they have difficulties with arab
fighters too and they don't want them
coming in and you know messing with
mujahideen regardless as like you know
this is an afghan national state that
we're going to build it's going to be
islamic it's going to be islamic state
but
you can't interfere with us and so
there are always tensions and so the
arabs are always kind of i would say
they were
bear fighters were always interlopers
um yes the afghans are happy to take
their money
send patients their hospitals
take their weapons but
were never gonna let this be like a
saudi or egyptian or whatever project
um but then many of those fighters went
home
they went back to syria they were back
to egypt
some wanted to go back to saudi arabia
the saudis was very careful i mean the
saudis always used afghanistan as a kind
of safety valve
in fact they had you know fundraisers on
television
they chartered jets they filled them
with people to fly to pakistan um
get out in the shower and say you know
go fight and it was one way that the
monarchy the saudi monarchy
very cleverly i think created a
kind of escape valve for would-be
dissidents in saudi arabia right just
send them abroad you want to fight jihad
go do that somewhere else don't don't
bother the kingdom
but all this became dicier um
in the early 90s when some of these guys
came back home
and some of the scholars around them
said you know let's we've defeated the
soviet union which is a huge huge boost
i think part of the dynamic we see today
is that
the taliban victory is a renewed
inspiration for people who think look
we beat the soviets now we beat the
americans
and so already
watching the soviet retreat across this
bridge back into uzbekistan if you see
these dramatic images of the tanks you
know moving a lot of people interpreted
this as like you know we are going to
change the world
and now we're turning to the americans
and our our local national governments
are backed by the americans
so let's start with some of those places
and then let's go strike let's go strike
you know the belly of the beast which is
america which is new york
and going back to bible you're
questioning about you know what
motivates him what motivated him
you know again he was not
a
rigorously trained islamic scholar
and that i think you know when i when
this when this comes up in our classes
you know i think especially young people
i mean people weren't even born i mean
they're shocked they see they see his
appearance they see
him pictured
in front of a a giant bookshelf of
arabic books he's got the klashnikov
he's got what looks like a religious
scholars library behind him right
but if you look at his
words i mean one fascinating thing about
just our politics and just one thing
that kind of sums us up i mean
the fact that on 9 11 we had to have
a few people
a few experts
people like bernard rubin who was an
afghanistan expert so that was one way
in which i think you know i'm not
faulting him personally but it's just
one way in which that relationship
appeared to be you know
formed right of linking afghanistan to
that moment
um
if one looks actually you know what bin
laden was saying and doing
people like richard clark were studying
this
there were arab leaders the arab press
was watching this because he gave some
of his first interviews to
a few arab newspaper outlets
but speaking of our american kind of you
know monolingualism a lot of what he was
saying wasn't known and so i think
for several years
people weren't reading what bin laden
said i mean experts are reading reading
it in arabic
but there was great anxiety around
translating his works so you know we
have my conf we have all this other
stuff you can buy the collective works
of lin and stalin mao whatever you want
in whatever language you want
but bin laden was taboo for american
publishing so it was only a
verso in the uk
that published
a famous volume called messages to the
world
which was the first combining compendium
of of banan's writings so he has a
mineconf he has a type does he have a
thing where he's kind of collected works
it's the collected works okay uh of his
like a like a blog
like yeah it's a collection of articles
versus yeah these are interviews these
are his his missives his his
declarations his um
his
decrees right um it would but i think
just in terms of if we zoom out for a
second about you know american policy
choices and so on the powers that be
didn't trust us to know what he was
really about i put it that way and i
don't say that in a conspiratorial sense
i just think that it was
you know it was a
a taboo i think people
you know there were
a kind of consensus that um
you know trust us we know we know how to
fight al-qaeda
and you don't need to know what they're
about because they're they're crazy
they're they're fanatics they're
fundamentalists they hate us remember
that language yeah uh it's us versus
them
but if you read bin laden that's when it
gets messy that's where the bin laden's
argumentation is not fundamentally
about islam
and if you were sitting here with an
islamic scholar he would say
you know depending on which islamic
scholar they would tend to go through
and dissect
and negate
you know 99 of the arguments that milan
claimed was in islam right but what
strikes me as an historian who's again
looking at this adjacently
um is read bin laden i mean the
arguments they make
are first of all they're sophisticated
they reflect
a
mind that
is about geopolitics
he uses terms like imperialism
he knows something about world history
he knows something about geography so
imperialism is the enemy for him or
what's the nature of the enemy it's a
it's an amalgam and
he like a good politician which is what
i would call him
he
is adept at speaking
in different ways to different audiences
so if you look at
the context in which he speaks if you
look at messages to the world
if you look at his writings
and it would zoom out now and we now
have compendia of the writings of
al-qaeda more broadly
you can purchase these
you know they're basically primary
source collections
um
we now have that for the taliban i mean
what's fascinating about
i think
if you like this culture acknowledging
it's very
you know diverse internally
is that
these people are
representatives of political movements
who seek followers they speak
they often
are very
i'd say skilled at
visual imagery and especially now i mean
what's fascinating is that i mean the
taliban used to shoot televisions
they used to you know blow up
vcr um you know videotapes um
they used to string
audio and video cassettes from trees and
kind of ceremonial hangings right that
we're we're killing this nefarious
infidel technology that is doing the
work of satan and yet today
and last i mean one of the keys to the
top on success is that they got really
good at using media
i mean brilliant at using
uh
the written word the spoken word music
actually
um and
you know hollywood hollywood is the gold
standard and these guys have studied how
to create drama how to speak to modern
users i mean islamic state did this i
mean the the role of media new media i
mean
i am i follow and i am followed by
senior top on leaders which is
you know bizarre you know on twitter on
twitter i don't know why they care about
me i'm i'm nothing uh they they follow
they follow you on twitter i don't know
why this is no joke this is no joke so
it's
they are part of our modern world and
how they talk is how they recruit and
this is part of the this is why they are
you know so bin laden if you're bin
laden he
he speaks multiple languages i would say
it's uh
it's
environmentalism
you know the west is bad because we
destroyed the planet the west is bad
because we abuse women
so in class you know
especially you know female students
are very surprised to learn and actually
say you know this this feminist argument
is not
you know we start with you know this is
a murder
this is a person who has taken human
life innocent life over and over again
and he is um
you know
aspirationally genocidal
but let's try to understand what he's
about so we walk through the text read
them and people are
shocked to learn that
it's not just about
you know quotations in the quran strung
together in some irrational fashion
he knows um
i mean the core i'd say is the problem
of human suffering
and he has a geography of that that is
mostly muslim but he talks about the
suffering of kashmir all right so if you
have a student in your class
who's from south asia who knows about
kashmir
you know he or she will say
that's not entirely inaccurate you know
the indian state commits atrocities in
kashmir
uh you know pakistanis from that too
you know palestine is an issue right so
you have
the american university setting people
across the spectrum who
get that you know palestinians have had
a raw deal
and so it's a
victimhood is essential and it's
muslim victimhood which is primary
but
as number scholars have written and i'm
you know i definitely think this is
a framework for what this useful i mean
in this kind of vocabulary and this is
framing this narrative um
today in today's world if we think of
today's world being
post-cold war
91 to the present
looking at the series of gulf wars and
seeing the visuals of that i think that
you know i think the american public has
been shielded from this but if you look
at just the the carnage of the iraqi
army
that
george h.w bush produced right or you
think of you know the images of the
suffering of
iraqi children under george h.w bush's
sanctions u.s british airstrikes
then you have madeleine albright
answer a question on 60 minutes saying
do you think you know the deaths of
half a million iraqi kids is is worth it
he was that justified to contain saam
hussein
and she says on camera yes that it's
worth it to me
if you put that all together
i mean american kids and of course the
american public
they're not always aware of those those
facts of global history
but these guys are and they they very
capably
use these images use these tropes
and use facts i mean in fact i mean so
many things are not are not deniable i
mean the
i mean these estimates about the number
of iraqi civilian children dead you know
that that came from i think the lancet
and it came from yeah those are those
are estimates but
looking at the point of view of
of oman of you know jaffa
of
nairobi you just think around the planet
um and if you see yourself as the victim
of this
great imperial power
you know you see why especially young
men would be drawn to
a road of of
of self-sacrifice
and the idea is that
in in killing others
you are
making
them feel how you feel yeah because they
won't listen to your arguments
reasonably because they won't you know
recognize palestinian suffering
bosnian suffering right chechen
suffering
you go across the planet right because
they don't recognize our suffering
we're going to speak to you in the only
language you understand and that's
violence and look at the violence of of
the post-1991
world right in which american air power
really
becomes a global you know kind of
fact in the lives of so many people
um and then the big mistake after 9 11
among many i mean fundamentally was
taking the war on terror
to some you know 30 or 40 countries
right so that you have a
more and more of the globe feel like
they're under attack right
and then the logic is essentially it's
not it's not it's rebin law and it's not
we're going to
convert you and turn you into muslims
and that's why we're doing this that
that appears that claim does appear at
times
but it's if you look at any given bin
laden text i mean there are 40 claims in
each text i mean it's kind of it's
dizzying but
he's a modern politician he knows the
language of
of social equality you know that there's
a class dimension to it there is an
environmental dimension to it there's a
gender dimension to it
and yes there are chronic quotes
sprinkled in
and when he wants to speak that language
he knew that you know he's not a scholar
so he would often get
a few recognized scholars to sign on so
some of his declarations of jihad
had his signature kind of sprinkled in
with like a dozen other other signatures
from
people who were somewhat known or at
least you know with titles right
so as a kind of intellectual exercise
it's fascinating to see that
he is
throwing everything at the wall in one
level
um that's one way to see that it's a
it's a these are kind of testaments
toward recruitment
of people who
yes they're angry yes they're unhappy
and this is what you know i think
for a broader public it's hard to get
you're like well bin laden didn't suffer
he wasn't poor
like yeah i mean
lenin
pol pot i mean they're speaking to
they're empathetic to the suffering the
landscape the full landscape
it's interesting to think about
suffering
you know america
the american public american politicians
and leaders
when they see what is good and evil
they are often not empathetic to the
suffering of others and
what you're saying is bin laden
perhaps accurately could speak to the
ignorance of america maybe the soviet
union to the suffering of their people
that's right and i mean if you look at
the speeches and the ideas the republic
of hitler in the 1930s
he spoke quite
accurately to the
injustice and maybe the the suffering of
the german people
it i mean charismatic politicians are
good at telling accurate stories it's
not all fabricated
but they emphasize certain aspects right
and then the problem part is the actions
you should take based on that that's
right right so the the narratives and
the stories may be grounded in
historical accuracy right the actions
then cross the line yeah the ethical
line yeah i find that too i mean it's a
again if you pick up just one of these
texts i mean it's it's a claudio scope
so the
hitler analogy is interesting because
it's
you know hitler spoke to
he could speak things like inflation
right which really existed
um but he also appealed to
the irrational emotions of germans right
he
sought out scapegoats you know jews roma
um disabled people homosexuals and so on
right
and that's also
there in bin laden too i mean daddy of
um
you know a an anti-semitism
uh the constant flagging of zionists and
crusaders it's a kind of shotgun
approach to
a search for followers but i also hasten
to add that it's
for all of the
things that we could take off saying
well yes kashmiris have suffered
chechens have suffered and so on
um
bin ladenism
never became a mass movement i mean it
never really
i think the
i mean this is the encouraging thing
right about
ideology i mean i think the
the blood on his hands
always limited his appeal
among muslims and others
um
but milan did have i mean he had a
there's a great book by um a great
scholar at uc san diego um
jeremy prestol who wrote a great book
about global icons in which
he has bin laden
he has um
bob marley
he has
tupac you know he asked why
when he's doing research in east africa
why did he see young kids wearing bin
laden shirts
they're also wearing like tupac shirts
they're wearing
bob marley shirts and
bass it's a way of looking at um
a kind of partial
embrace
of some aspects of
the rebelliousness of
some of these figures some of the time
by some people under certain conditions
well the terrifying thing to me so yeah
there is a longing in the human heart to
belong to a group
and a charismatic leader somehow
especially when you're young
just a catalyst for all of that and
i tend to think
that perhaps it's actually hard to be
hitler
so a leader so charismatic that he can
rile a nation to war
and bin laden perhaps were lucky
was not sufficiently charismatic
i i feel like if his writing was better
if his speeches were better if his ideas
were stronger
uh better it's like uh more viral
and then there will be more people
kind of um yeah young people uniting
around him so in some sense
it's almost like accidents of history of
just how much charisma
how much charisma a particular evil
person has
bin laden
i think it's fair
evil works i think do you think bin
laden is evil oh yeah yeah i mean he was
a mass murderer um
i'm just saying that you know his ideas
were
they're more complex than than we've
tended to acknowledge
they had
they have a wider potential resonance
than we would acknowledge i mean and
also i guess what i'm the just
one fundamental point is that
um
thinking about the complexity of bin
laden is also a way of removing him from
islam
he is not an islamic thinker he is a
cosmopolitan thinker who
plays in all kinds of modern ideologies
which have proven to mobilize people in
the past right so
anti-semitism
populism
environmentalism and the kind of in the
the urging to like
you know do something about humanity do
something about suffering that's why i
think the actual you ask about like what
motivates people to do this kind of
stuff i think that's why if one goes
below the level of leadership and this
is being reported if you look at the
trial ongoing now in paris of
uh the bataclan
murders i think um
the court allowed some discussion of the
backgrounds of the accused and they come
from
different backgrounds but if there's any
common bond it's kind of that they
had some background in petty crime
famously in the 7-7 bombings in london
the
metropolitan police you know uk
authorities looked at all those guys
and
what people want is this idea that like
they must be very pious they must be you
know super islamic to do this kind of
stuff
they must be fanatical true believers
but
what they found with those guys was that
some were
nominally muslim
some went to mosques some didn't
um
some were single young guys with like
criminal backgrounds
some
you know we're like sorry they were
you know kind of misfits who never
succeeded in anything
uh but others had you know at least one
thing had a wife and family who he you
know widowed and orphaned
and so there's no i mean for policing i
mean if you're looking at that lens
there is no kind of typology that will
predict
who will become violent that's why i
think we have to move beyond thinking
about
religious augmentation narrowly or by
itself
and think about things like geopolitics
think about
how people respond to inequality
you know the the existential threat of
cri of a you know climate crisis
of um a whole host of matters of and and
think about th this is a mode of
political contestation i mean it's a
violent one it's one i condemn it is
evil right
but these are people that are they're
trying to be political they're trying to
change things in some way
it's not nearly about like i want to
impose sharia law on you
you must wear a veil
you must eat this kind of food it's it's
not that parochial but one another quick
thought about your interesting claim
about charisma in this i think that the
one self-limiting feature
of this subculture is that
definitely you know i mentioned the
enigma of not wanting to be seen and
that the
kind of
invisibility
is a productive force of power
you know which
a colleague of mine who knows ancient
history far better than i
you know said this is you know when she
looked at at
maloma initially or we come up bin laden
i mean this kind of studied
posture of staying in the shadows
yeah is also a source of authority
potentially because it it um it invites
the idea and it's partly dictatorships
do as well i mean it advises the idea
that someone's working and maybe it's
the basis for a lot of q a or other
conspiracies today that someone's
working behind the scenes and things are
going to go the right way
you can't see it
that's almost preferable because
you can kind of feel it and so
not having someone out front
can maybe maybe more effective than
having someone out in front constantly
then they
and then the whole bin laden you know
omar thing like you can't see me or if
you look at you know bin laden's
photographs and his video stuff
i mean he's
he's coy
uh some observers have noted he's kind
of effeminate he doesn't strike this
kind of masculine
he's not a mussolini he's not a hitler
macho i'm standing my thumb in my chest
he's not doing the theatrical chin you
know
the theater people tell us is so
aggressive um
you know or chin what bringing your chin
up i saw a great uh bbc theater person
it was kind of a it was a makeover show
about how to become
a better creator oh no uh just a
powerful
uh yeah leader authoritarian figure no
just how to how to like get ahead in
life and then oh okay cool and just like
about acting like how you can act
differently right so it was it was a bbc
thing um
and this woman claimed that um
you know sticking your chin out like a
wrestler does right is the most like
male-to-man i love this kind of mustache
hilarious analysis that people have
about
power but watch the chin watch the chin
it's the same as analyzing like in
wrestling
styles that win or fighting or so on
there's so many ways well the chan i
mean the chan is a could be
an interesting verbal gesture and i uh
i've watched enough mussolini footage
from my classes to try to pick the right
moment and the chin is misleading is all
about the chan so and i have watched
human beings and human nature enough to
know that there's more to a man a
powerful man than a chin yeah no no i'm
saying no i'm saying it's an active
aggression i'm not saying it's it's one
of the many tools in the toolkit
deliberate enough
with the way he presents himself so he
what i'm saying about bin laden that
makes him different from these other
characters is it because he
played at being the scholar
he played it being a figure of modesty
and humility and that meant that he was
often
again if you watch his visuals i mean
yes there's one video of him firing a
gun
but if you watch how he moved
how he wouldn't look at people directly
how his face was almost
i mean he appears to be incredibly shy
he saw spoken
you know his voice was low
he attempted to be poetic
right so it wasn't a warrior kind of
image that he tried to project of like a
tough guy
it was i'm i'm demure i'm humble
i'm you know i'm i'm offering you this
message and that and that the appeal
that he was going for was
to see um
to protect himself as a scholar
his knowledge
and humility the whole package carried
with it an authenticity
and a valor
that would animate inspire people to
commit acts of violence right and so
it's a different kind of like logic of
like yes go and kill right so he he put
he presented himself
in contrast to the imperialist
kind of
macho
whatever yeah yeah so that's just yet
another way of uh yeah and you have to
have facial hair or hair of different
kind that's recognized we had a very
recognizable look too or at least later
in life
yeah no he he tried to look apart
yeah yeah
but i'm saying we're fortunate that
whatever right calculation that he was
making he was not more
um effective yet i mean
there's the the world is full of
terrorist organizations and we're
fortunate
to the degree any one of them does not
have an incredibly charismatic leader
that attains the kind of power that's
very difficult to to manage at the
geopolitical level yeah we and we credit
we credit the publics
you know who don't you don't bind to
that right you see through this we
credit the the critics you know um
barely on
pretty much 9 11 itself
one of the problems was that
u.s government officials kept kind of
leaning on muslims to
to condemn this as if
all muslims shared some collective
responsibility or culpability
and in fact
dozens of scholars and organizations
hundreds condemn this
but their condemnations never quite made
it out but it created a tension where
you know if you wore a veil
you must been one of them and you must
be on team bin laden so a lot of the
you know i think a lot of the popular
violence and discrimination and and
profiling came out of that urge to
see a oneness
which you know been like bin laden
projected right he wanted to say we are
one community you know if you are a
muslim you must be with me right
but i think the
that's where the the diversity of muslim
communities became important because
outside of small pockets i mean they
didn't accept his leadership right
people wore t-shirts in some countries i
mean non-muslims were teachers because
he was like he stuck it to the americans
so
in latin america people were like yeah
that was sad but
you know finally i mean there was a kind
of shot in florida in that moment yeah
international it's like cheri guevara or
somebody like that yeah change the other
character in prison's book yeah yeah
that's right that's right yeah it's just
a symbol it's not exactly what he
believed exactly or the cruelty of
actions he took right it's more like he
stood for an idea of
revolution versus authority that's right
and that's and that's
a great way to understand bin ladenism
and the whole phenomenon but i think
looking at the big picture it's also
you wonder
will that ever end right i mean is that
i mean that's the the risk of being a
kind of hyper power
um like the u.s were you
in insisting on a kind of unipolar world
in 2001 2002 2003
i think that created um
um an almost irresistible target
you know wherever the us wanted to exert
itself militarily before
we go to the history of afghanistan the
people and i just want to talk to you
about just some fascinating
aspect of the culture
let's go to the end
withdrawal of u.s troops from
afghanistan
uh what are your thoughts on how that
was executed
how could it have been done better yeah
an important question
i mean i would
preface all this by saying
you know as i noted i think the war was
a mistake um
i
had hoped the war would end sooner i
think there were
different exit routes all along the way
again i think there were
lots of policy choices
in september in october when the war
began
there were choices in december 2001
so we could look at almost every
six-month stopping point and say
we could have done differently
as it turns out though i mean the way it
played out um you know it's been
catastrophic and i think um
the bride administration
[Music]
has remained unaccountable for the scale
of the strategic and humanitarian and
ethical failure that they're responsible
for
well okay let's lay out the full
there's george w bush there's
barack obama there's donald trump that's
right there is uh
biden yeah
uh so they're all driving this van and
there's these exits and they keep not
taking the exits and they're running out
of gas yeah i do this all the time
thinking where am i going to pull off
i'll go to the perfect till it's empty
how could it have been done
better and what exactly
um
how much suffering
have
all the decisions along the way caused
what are the long-term consequences what
are the biggest things that concern you
about the decisions we've made in both
invading afghanistan and staying in
afghanistan as long as we have
i mean if we start at the end as you
proposed um
yeah the horrific scenes of the airport
you know that was just one one dimension
um
i think in the weeks to come
[Music]
i mean we're going to see afghanistan
implode
um
there are lots of signs that
malnutrition hunger starvation
are going to claim
tens of thousands maybe hundreds of
thousands of lives this winter
and i think there is really
nothing
there's no
framework in place to
force all that
what is the government
what is currently the system there
what's the role of the taliban
so there could be tens of thousands
hundreds of thousands that starve
uh
either just
almost the famine or starve to death
so this is economic implosion this is
political implosion what um
what's the system they're like and what
could be the one you know some inkling
of hope right right
the taliban sit in control that's unique
when they were in power in 1990s from
1996 2001
they controlled
some 85 to 90 of the country
now they own it all
but they have no budget
the afghan
banking system is
frozen
so the financial system is a mess and
it's frozen by the u.s because the u.s
is trying to use that lever to exert
pressure on the taliban
and so the ethical quandaries are of
course legion right
do you release that money
to allow the taliban to shore up their
rule right
the body administration has said no
but
the banks aren't working
uh if you're in california you want to
send 100 to your cousin so
she can buy bread you can't do that now
it's almost impossible there are some
informal networks they're moving some
stuff
but there are red lines the talbot
government is incapable
fundamentally just of ruling i mean they
they can discipline people on the street
they can force people into the mosque
they can shoot people they can beat
protesters
they can put out a newspaper
they can have they're great at diplomacy
it turns out
they can't rule this country so
essentially the hospitals
and
the kind of healthcare infrastructure
is
being managed by ngos that are
international
um
but
these people had to leave
and and the taliban have impeded some of
that work
they've told
adult women essentially to stay home
right so
a bitch big part of the workforce isn't
there
so i mean the supply chain is
it you know is kind of crawling to a
halt
trade with pakistan and its neighbors i
mean it's kind of a transit trade
economy
it exports fruits
pakistan has been closing the border
because they're anxious about refugees
they want to
exert pressure on the international
community to recognize the taliban
because the pakistan want the taliban to
succeed in power because i see that in
pakistan's national interest
especially the lens of rivalry with with
india
so the pakistan the pakistani security
institutions are playing a double game
essentially afghan people are being held
hostage and so the taliban are also
saying you know if you don't recognize
us
you're gonna let tens of millions of
afghans starve
so to which degree is taliban like
who are the taliban what do they stand
for what do they want
obviously year by year this changes so
what is the nature
of this organization can they be a
legitimate peaceful kind respectful
uh government
sort of holder of power or
or are they fundamentally not capable of
doing so yeah
i mean the briefest answer would be that
they are a
clerical
slash military organization
um
they have
this is kind of a
imperfect metaphor but
years ago a german scholar used the term
caravan to describe them and that that
has some attractive elements because
different people joined the taliban for
different purposes at different times
but today
and people tell us you know scholars who
know more about the room than i have
said listen
the taliban is this kind of hodgepodge
of different actors and people and
competing interests
and i think
so we have a lot of scholars say listen
they're it's polycentric
it's got people in this city in that
city and so on i think actually
i was always very skeptical how do they
know this i mean this is an organization
that doesn't
want you to know um where that money
comes from and so on
but i would say
now that we have a clear picture of what
has happened i'd say they are a
astoundingly well-organized
clerical military organization
that has
a
very cohesive
and enduring ideology
which is quite idiosyncratic if we zoom
out and continue the conversation we're
having about islam and how we think
about radicalism and
you know who's drawn to what
um
people throw different terms
around to describe the taliban
some use a term
that links it to
a kind of school of thought born in the
19th century in india the deobandi
school
but if you look at their teachings
it's very clear now i think that
these labels it's like saying you know
you're an mit guy well what does that
mean i mean mit is home to
dozens of different potentially
kinds of
intellectual orientations right
i mean attaching the name of the school
doesn't quite
capture i mean
it's complicated i mean actually mit is
interesting because it's i would say mit
is different than stanford for example
yeah i think mit has a more kind of
narrow yeah um bad analogy in my part
maybe
well no it's interesting because i would
argue that there's some aspect of a
brand like taliban or mit yeah no
relation
that
has a kind of uh interact like
the the brand results in the behavior of
the like enforces a kind of behavior on
the people and the people feed the brand
and like there's a loot i think yeah
stanford is a good example of something
that's more distributed there's
sufficient amount of diversity in like
all kinds of like centers and all that
kind of stuff that the
the the the brand doesn't become one
thing yeah mit is so engineering it's
yeah i think that okay so
scratching my teeth scratching for two
because i think stanford's more like mit
than than
than you might imagine but uh but isn't
taliban isn't it pretty
i don't think there's a diversity so
yeah so like sorry so just a rephrase so
so people say oh the deobandi school i'm
like what is that i mean but the taliban
are
they're an ethnic movement
they represent
a vision of
pashtun power right questions are people
who
are quite internally diverse who
actually
speak multiple dialects of pashto who
reside across the frontier of pakistan
and afghanistan
there are pashtuns who live all over the
planet right there's a community in
moscow california everywhere right so
it's a global diaspora of sorts
pashtuns have a kind of genealogical
imagination so that lots of passions can
tell you the names of their grandparents
great-grandparents and so on and that's
kind of a there's a sense of pride in
that
posture language is a kind of
core element of that identity but it's
not universal so for example
you can meet people who say i am pashtun
but i don't know pashto
so as you as you claw away at this idea
it's amorphous it also means different
things different people at different
times so
saying the taliban our costume requires
lots of qualifiers because
lots of passions will say no no i i have
nothing to the taliban i hate those
people
you know so
the taliban tried to mobilize other posh
students with limited success but their
core membership is almost exclusively
pashtun and they say
no no we represent afghans we represent
pious muslims and so in recent
two three years
they've gone further to say no we have
other ethnic groups we have uzbeks we
have tajiks
we have hazaras
and in the north of afghanistan in
recent years they did do a bit better
at drawing in people who were very
disappointed because of the government
and they were able to diversify their
ranks somewhat but if you watch august
15 and who they've appointed
what language they've used how they've
presented themselves it's clear that
you know they are pashtun they are male
and they
are extremely ideologically
cohesive
and
disciplined i'd say
right so i think that a lot of the
polycentrism blah blah some of that
stuff was a way to fight a war
um they are they are fundamentally you
know
a guerrilla movement
they see themselves as kind of
robin hoods
the rhetoric is very much about taking
from the rich taking the privilege
giving to the poor
being outside of the underdog
fighting against evil
and so
i mean they're bad if you like their
thing they're their central theme their
brand is about public morality and so
their origin story going back to 1994 is
that
they interceded they broke up a gang of
criminals
who were trying to rape people
and so there's a branching kind of like
emphasis on like sexuality and on on
public morality
and really being the core of like you
know we're going to restore order and
public morality
and how that translates into governance
is something they've never sorted out i
mean how do you run a banking system if
your
intellectual priorities are really about
you know the length of a beard
and then and then their path to power
in a kind of abstract sense i mean a lot
of that was very much driven by um
if you like
propagating the problems of martyrdom
and that sounds i don't mean to say that
in a way that
to make it sound ridiculous it may sound
like it's um
you know a moral judgment it's simply i
think a fact it's a fact of their appeal
that
they promised young men who have known
nothing else but
studying in certain schools if at all
but they've known fighting and they've
known
they'd known victimization
and this isn't i'm not asking for like
sympathy for them but i think the
reality is that a lot of
we know about the kind of foot soldiers
is that they
they lost families and bombings um
in air strikes in night raids you know
i mean orphans have always been a stream
um
living in in all male society
not knowing girls not knowing women
hearing things from outside about places
like kabul and so there's always been
this kind of urban rural
dimension it's not it's not just that
but
i think there's a
there's a whole imagination
that being taliban
captures
and the whole marginal thing is really
it's um
yeah i think to any religious person i
mean it's not a it's not a bizarre idea
i mean it animates i mean
so many global traditions yeah but i
think the
but then you try to tell like an army
colonel right if you were to have a
conversation with you know u.s marine
about this
i mean some would get it from their own
religious backgrounds but i think the
it
it's an alien idea but i think it it's
essential to kind of stretch our
imaginations understand that's
that's attractive and now one of the
dilemmas going forward is that
they've got a pivot from
martyrdom and some have been some have
told foreign journalists i mean
it's good that we're in charge now we're
going to build a proper state
but i it's kind of boring um i want to
keep fighting i want to maybe i'll do it
in pakistan yeah i mean it's nice that
they are expressing that thought
some are not even honest sufficiently
with themselves to express that kind of
thought if you're
if you're a fighter
yeah it's a you see that with a bunch of
fighters or professional athletes once
they retire yeah they don't know it's
very it's boring
yeah
and so like the if the spirit of the
taliban yeah
even the the the best version of the
taliban is to fight is to be martyrs is
to yeah is to and the paint the world is
good and evil and you're fighting evil
and all that kind of stuff that's
difficult to imagine how they can run an
education system a banking system
respect
all kinds of citizens with different
backgrounds and religious beliefs and
women and
all that kind of stuff so yeah and
they've they've walked into kabul and
other major cities um
if someone are young they never didn't
know those places but also
the very important
obstacle for them is that afghan society
has changed i mean it's
it's not with even for the older guys
it's not what they knew in the 1990s
um some always had some ambulance about
you know the capital
but now it's totally different i mean
they've been shocked to see i think to
me one of the most striking
features of the last few weeks has been
that
you know women have come out on the
streets
and have stood in their faces and said
you know we demand rights we demand
education we demand employment
and um these foot soldiers are
are paralyzed they're not sure they
don't know what to do with women period
yeah yeah and they don't know what to do
with being yelled at and having someone
stick their fingers in their faces i
mean this is not
not what they've imagined and so i think
and at this at this juncture there are
still foreign cameras around
so
they have committed active violence
against women against journalists
they've beaten people yeah they've
disappeared people even with cameras are
on even in this tense period yeah but i
think that when the cameras
you know retreat and that that's not
gonna happen it's gonna get much worse i
think
so the challenge now is you know can the
taliban rule
and
and then this is where the diplomacy is
so important because
the top one can't rule in isolation and
they know that and
part of the success is due to the fact
that they were
they became very good at talking to
other people
in the last
i mean it's been building the last
decade but that's the last five years
and they always had pakistan's backing
and so the taliban are we we noted their
military force very effective gorilla
force they be they beat nato i mean this
is
still hasn't sunk in i mean the fact
that they
with light arms
using suicide attacks
using mines
improvised explosive devices
machine guns
and some in recent years they got sniper
rifles
and you know from the summer they got
american equipment on a broad scale
right they have airplanes they have a
lot that they will be able to use
eventually um so but still basically
it's a story of
ak-47s
some american small arms
and mines so it's very
ho chi minh
very old-school guerrilla fighting right
and they defeated the most powerful
military alliance in world history
probably so
that has not yet sunk in on what that
means for
american and global politics
um and now they're trying to rule right
they know they need
international support
and the most consistent backer has been
pakistan
who sees them as a extension of
pakistani power
you know and this is very important for
a pakistani elite that of course is
looking toward india
they want to have their
rear covered right
they want to make sure that these
pashtuns don't cause trouble for
pakistan
and they like i mean for some of the
security forces they like this vision of
the islamic state that the taiwan are
building there because they
those are not citizens from their views
of what pakistan should be
but
the taliban have been
smart enough to kind of diversify their
potential international allies
so
everyone in the neighborhood has wanted
the us to leave right if we got 2001
there were iranian and american special
forces in the north
working together against taliban to
displace them using
you know
iranian american and then afghan
resistance forces against the taliban
and that was a real moment of request
mall if we go back to the missed
exits um
the glacier with iran could be different
at that moment
but
the us under george w bush
you know devised this axis of evil
language
put them together with their enemy iraq
and north korea
all that went south
that was the missed opportunity
but in recent years the taliban and iran
have
kind of papered over the differences
they allowed
the talbot to open some offices in on
iranian territory
likely shared some resources some
intelligence some sophisticated weaponry
um and then the taliban went to moscow
and for the demonstration
you know they've long been worried that
you know they see the talbot as a kind
of
you know disease that will potentially
move north
in fact uzbekistan tajikistan kyrgyzstan
turkmenistan
and maybe creep into russia's sphere of
influence
maybe that's why they have you know
a bunch of troops sitting in tajikistan
i mean the one you know forward base
that russia as well has in central asia
is indigestion
and so the talmud were always
you know a worrying point but also
useful because
they could say well you know
um in case it's how long it out control
we need to be here
and so tajikistan
said okay you know you're helping you're
helping secure us and yes it impinges
upon our sovereignty but it's okay you
know
so putin said you know
let's
you know give another black eye to the
americans
and let's
you know treat the taliban as if they're
the kind of government in waiting let's
have them come to moscow multiple times
this summer you know
for the last year or two they've been
talking to the talking to china right so
the photographs of
senior top on figures
going from their office in qatar which
was a major major blow to the u.s back
government the fact that they were able
to open up
an office in qatar that at one point
began to fly a flag of the islamic
afghanistan
that basically said we're a state in
them in the waiting
and as the u.s backed afghan government
failed and failed and failed at at
ruling two right as they showed how
corrupt they were
and as they really alienated more and
more afghans by committing backs of
violence against them
by stealing from them
by you know
basically creating a kind of kleptocracy
right
um
the taliban said we are pure
we are not corrupt
and look at us we're winning on the
battlefield and
look we're talking to china we're
talking to putin we're talking to china
yeah
we're a legitimate powerful center of
central asia and also kind of you know
hinting that you know we oh we have a
website i mean the whole digital angle
is amazing because they
they began to and this is important
actually they they had a
a website which
grew more so skated again after having
you know shot televisions and these kind
of ceremonial killings of these infidel
devices right
they said
we have a government we have
commissions we have a complaint line
they
lifted all this technocratic language
that you get from any u.n document you
know about good governance and all that
kind of you know generic language that
the ngo world has produced for us right
in english
they reproduced that in five languages
on their telephone website
and of course i'm not saying even
believe this but it was like
you know just put me in coach you know i
know the playbook i know how to run a
government and look we have a we have an
agricultural commission
we have um you know a taxation system
and again this id and then on the ground
they had their own law courts
and they would creep into a district
assassinate some people the local
authority figures men of influence
talk to local clerics either get them on
board or kill them
and say you know this state is corrupt
but we're bringing you justice this is
our calling card we're bringing public
reality and justice
and then
to a broader world they said you know
yeah things didn't go perfectly the
whole al qaeda thing you know
you know wish we could have a do-over on
that
um we're not going to let anyone hurt
you from our territory we just want to
rule and
people like us and and look
and so if you look at the neighborhood
iran even central asian states after a
while
recognizing they can make some money i
mean one of the one thing that spikes
down likes about the current arrangement
or they're not
they're not hostile to is that
they have all these contracts they can
potentially make some money from
you know the pipeline dream remains
alive running natural gas oil
to you know
the indian ocean
to markets you know beyond central asia
it's sitting on a couple trillion
dollars probably in mineral resources
that china would love to have of course
and so people looking at afghanistan now
after 20 years saying
you know under american rule it was a
basket case
there was immense human suffering
incredibly violent the world did not
start counting civilian casualties in
afghanistan until 2009. everything about
that the war went on for eight years
the talbot were never really defeated
they just went to pakistan they went to
the mountains into the woods um and so
all these different american operations
as you noted
under bush obama trump and so on
um
killed
countless civilians the u.s never
counted for that we never we never even
counted um
trump escalated the civilian casualties
by escalating the air war
but a lot of this was like very ugly on
the ground you know night raid stuff
where you drop into a hamlet
and and massacre people
and then you're not honest about what
happened right so
that dynamic continued to fuel the
growth of taliban from below
so the foot soldiers they never they
never ran out of foot soldiers i mean
the us and its allies killed
tens of thousands maybe hundreds of
thousands of taiwan fighters over the
last 20 years
but they just sprouted up again and part
of that was kind of solidarity culture
the male bonding of
of of martyrology of you know of
martyrdom and enough
you know revenge and a sense of um
you know the foreign invader and i've
heard i mean i've you know i haven't
taught a ton of
u.s military people but through the
hoover you know they put officers in our
classes sometimes and
met a few wonderful you know army and
marine officers who
i really enjoyed you know we came from
the south like me
always had great rapport with them and
and they expressed a range of opinions
about this i think that you know i
learned a lot from some of them who said
yeah i mean i get that i get why they
hate us i get why
they're still fighting because
you know last week
we just
killed 14 of their
you know fellow villagers
so
the officers the guys on the ground you
know fighting this war we're not stupid
about that i mean they they got the
human dimension of that and yet no one
got off the exit as you said people
people kept driving
um but going forward now internationally
it's critical that they have
i mean they've had meetings
i mean what the top one have done since
august 15th is a lot of diplomacy
they've had meetings they've had people
they've had tashkent come they've had
beijing come they've had mosque.com
i mean they've had
major visits from islamabad
from security people from diplomatic
circles
and they're counting on
things being different this time i mean
the first time around the only people
who backed the taliban by recognition
giving them automatic recognition
with the saudis pakistanis and the uae
and because of al qaeda
because of opium
because of some of the human rights
stuff you know the us pushed everyone to
like you know let's not recognize the
state even though the u.s did i mean
colin powell famously
in the summer of 2001 you know we did
give a few grants and aid um
to the taliban
as a kind of like massaging negotiations
they kept talking about bin laden but
they also wanted them to stop um
opium production i mean afghanistan
throughout all this period we've talked
about is the global center of
opium production i mean over the years
more and more of the afghan economy
continue to today is devoted to the
opium trade
which is
uh the thing that leads to heroin yep
uh some of the painkillers
and even if afghan poppies don't make it
to
you know hoboken you know that they are
not the
the source of american deaths you know
they are part of a
a universal market a global market which
you know i think any economist will tell
you is part of the story of our opium
you know problem
something i
read
maybe a decade ago now and i just kind
of looked it up again to bring it up to
see your opinion on this is um there's a
2010 report by the international council
on security development that showed that
92 percent
of afghans in helmand and kandahar
province
know nothing of the 9 11 attacks on u.s
in 2001.
is this
at all representative of what you know
is this possible so basically put
another way yeah it
is it possible that a lot of afghans
don't even know the reason
why there may be troops or the sort of
american
provided narrative for why there's
troops
so american soldiers and american drones
overhead
in afghanistan right
i mean my gut response not knowing the
details of this actual poll is
that that's a um
a very
unhelpful way to think about how afghans
relate to the world and i think um
you know it could be you know if you go
to my hometown
in north carolina
if you knock out some doors
you may meet people who don't know all
kinds of things i could probably walk
around this neighborhood here in
california and there'd be all kinds of
people who
don't know all kinds of things um
you know kyrie irving
apparently thinks the earth is flat i
mean you know
so we could we could
make a lot of
certain kinds of ignorance i think but
i think what i would say and then and
there's also i mean a companion point
may be that
in thinking about the withdrawal the
collapse the return of the taliban
there's been
a big conversation about um you know
what advocates think of us really and
this famous piece in the new yorker was
about
how you know many people liked the
taliban
you know that many women
interviewed
supposedly in this piece um
you know were sympathetic because they
lost family members and all the violence
and the idea kind of was that
you know we haven't thought about that
at all when in fact you know of course
we have and lots of people have but i
think if you're just dropping into the
conversation if you look at the media
arc of coverage of afghanistan the
united states i mean
the
arc went from lots of coverage during of
course 9 11 it's aftermath
lots of coverage during obama's surge
and then quickly drop down the last
decade has been almost nothing
so if you ask the same question about
americans or other americans i'm not
sure what they would say to you what
percentage would actually know
why the u.s is in x y or z either right
but again the afghan side just to return
to that for a moment i think that
you know we can fetishize these
provinces they are kind of you know a
place where talbot support has been
greatest
also where there's been the most
violence where the americans have been
most committed to trying to
root out the top on movement where
hellman and kind of exactly in the south
what are the other parts in the south of
the gas yeah it's mostly poshtune not
exclusively but mostly poshtun you know
mostly rural
whatever
that's the other group you know that
that the taliban claimed to represent
right
so they're this group what other groups
are there okay sorry yeah sorry so in
cities you'll find
everything right that is in afghanistan
you'll find uzbeks tajiks hazaras
um these are people who
you know is a turkey language right uh
most uzbeks live in what is now
uzbekistan but they form majorities in
some northern parts of the city i'm
sorry of the country of afghanistan
but whatever size is that um
and you can you can find online an
ethographic map afghanistan and you'll
see
green where pashtuns live red where
hazaras live
orange islands live you know purple
where tajiks live
then there are a bunch of other smaller
groups of different kinds you know there
are
um
[Music]
there are baluch
there are
different religious communities there
are sunni shia different kinds of shia
what are the key differences between
them is it a religious basis
from the origins of where they
immigrated from
and how different are they yeah so
they're all
i mean they're all indigenous i think i
mean there's a kind of mythology that
some groups have been there longer right
so they have a greater claim to power
but
historically
i mean it's like you know ethnic groups
anywhere people have different
narratives about themselves but many
many pashtuns would tell you not all but
many would say
we are the kind of state builders of
afghanistan the dynasty that ruled much
of the space
that was born in the mid 18th century
that ruled until 1973 more or less
generalizing
you know it was a pakian dynasty the
taliban have definitely said
to some audiences we are the rightful
rulers because we are pashtun
um
the trick though is let me i don't mean
to be evasive but just to convince some
of the complexity um one quick answer as
well the majority of minorities i mean
one finds out a lot along with those
maps
but i would say
suspend any firm belief in that because
that could be entirely wrong in fact
there's never been a modern sense of
census of afghanistan
so when journalists say
pashion's a majority whether the biggest
group
i would say not so fast
i'd say not so fast because of
migration is one major issue
no major
modern census
actually the soviets got pretty close
but didn't quite you know find something
comprehensive and didn't publicize it
knowing that it was
um you know modern times ethnicity can
be the source of political mobilization
it's not it's not innately so but it's
been part of the story but then you have
mixed families right so a lot of people
you'll meet you'll encounter in the dash
run around i mean well
um i am you know my my one parent is
haji
one is one is posh soon right or i'm
pashtun as i mentioned before but i
don't speak pashto right
or i am hazara but
you read about us is
ours in fact i'm a sunni zara or i'm a
secular hazara or i'm an atheist to zara
i mean everything's possible right
um
one of my friends
if you if he were here he'd say i'm
kabuli
you know i'm i'm from kabul so
if you think about the russian terms you
know it means a lot if you're a mosquito
you know if you're from bishop or yeah
i mean you know yeah well even here
there's bostonians yep that's right
texans
californians
yeah east coast west coast all that
stuff
those are all part of the mix here so
you ask about kandahar and helmond then
i would say
yeah if you go to you know a pomegranate
you know field
you'll meet a guy who
may reckon time differently from you and
me
who
may not be literate he may not have ever
had a geography lesson
but if you go one door over you may meet
a guy
who
[Music]
you know his life path has taken him to
live in you know six countries
he may speak five languages
and this is all things i'm not saying
they're all these are just because
people have money can go fly around i
mean they're people who are displaced by
war
from late 1970s right even already in
the early 70s people were traveling by
the tens of thousands to iran
you know as labor migrants and once you
get to iran once you get to pakistan
once you get to uzbekistan
you then connect to all kinds of
cosmopolitan cultures in fact i think
one of the themes of of the book you
know that you may or may not have read
and they put you to sleep um
you know afghan modern was about you
know conceptualizing afghanistan as a
cosmopolitan place where
for centuries people put on the move
and trade in this area you think of you
know i think this mischaracterization of
places like hellmann
and kandahar you fly in
or you're part of the marine battalion
and you see people there and they look
different and i think in our imagination
if i can generalize
you know they look like they've been
there for millennia right the dress the
whatever right you think of technology
think of the
the mud compounds and so on you think of
you know
animal drawn
transportation that kind of stuff right
or the motorbike right at most is what
they have
but in fact if you buy those families um
their trade is taking them to northern
india for centuries right the trade has
connected them to
cosplaton centers you say they have a
scholar in the family that scholar may
have studied all of the middle east
south asia right
you know the ancestors may have been
horse traders who went all the way to
moscow right i mean we we have historic
records of all these people traveling
across eurasia
pursuing all kinds of livelihoods
and so afghanistan is this paradox of
visually looking
remote and looking like it's kind of
stuck in time but the family
trajectories and the current
contradictories are astoundingly
cosmopolitan and mobile
and so um and a conception of being a
world center is also quite strong so
you know another way to frame that
question about like do they know about
911 would be like
why should we know about 911 because we
are at the center of something important
right we are the center of asia we are
the heart of asia
we have a kind of historic greatness we
are
you know
a proud culture of our own achievements
right so
we're not worried about that right
that said i mean sure there are
different narratives about why americans
are there why people are being killed
you know
of course you'd find you know they want
to convert us you know they want our
gold they want our opium they want x y
and z right
there was a recent story about a taliban
official
sitting in office in kabul and a
journalist asked him can you find in
this rotating globe
find your country find where we're
sitting right now
and he was filmed not being able to do
it and so a lot of you know race was
good afghans with asperger were saying
you know ha ha look at this and if that
exists i mean i think
i could go to my stanford classroom and
there'd be a lot of kids who wouldn't
know where afghanistan is too right but
but i i wouldn't i wouldn't use those
metrics to suggest that this is a
a place that doesn't have a sense of its
place in the world and of
geopolitics i think if anything being a
relatively small country in a very
complicated neighborhood
i mean everybody every cab driver i mean
people have a i mean
you know this is where america is
different because i don't think
americans have this sense you know we
we're talking about moscow and stuff i
think you know
moscow cab drivers
i think a lot of them are going to tell
you like what's happening in the world
and why right it's just part of it's
part of their thing right you can find
that in ghana you find that mexico city
right you find that lots of places so i
think
afghans are part of
a very sophisticated kind of
mapping of the world and where they fit
in
and a lot of them remarkably had done it
firsthand which is what struck me so
much and you know relating my
experiences from the 1990s and tashkent
places that these guys had already lived
in more countries than i've ever been
they already knew half those languages i
mean
this one friend's russian was impeccable
um and of course it helped they had
russian girlfriends
they had you know they they mixed with
the police they had run-ins i mean they
this wasn't something you got from a
book right this was like hard knock life
i mean one one friend what's my wealthy
family
uh in this trading diaspora
and he was imprisoned i mean they sent
him to prison uh in pakistan and he
talks about how he started like running
running in the jail you know
taking cigarettes to people doing little
things and
kind of you know it's
these are not stories of like oh i went
to i went to harvard and so i'm so
learning because
i mean it's a whole range of experiences
the interesting thing is a survey is a
survey and
it doesn't
reflect ignorance as you're saying
perhaps
but it may reflect a different
geopolitical view of the world than the
west has
yeah so if
you know for a lot of the world 9 11
was one of the most important moments of
recent human history
and for afghanistan not to know that
especially when they're part of that
story yeah
it means they have a very different like
uh
there could be a lot of things said
one is the spread of information
is different the channels of the way
information is spread
and uh to the things they care about
maybe they see themselves
in uh as part of a longer arc of history
with the bickering of these
superpowers that seem to want to go to
the moon
uh are not as important as the big sort
of arc that's been the story of
afghanistan
it is you know that that's an
interesting idea but um it's still a bit
if at all representative of the truth
right it's heartbreaking
that they're not
do not see themselves as a
active player
in this
game between the united states and the
the in central asia because they're such
a critical player and they feel and
obviously
um in many ways get the short end of the
stick in this whole interaction with uh
uh you know invasion of afghanistan for
many years and then uh this uh rushed
with withdrawal of troops and and now
the economic uh collapse and that yeah
it's um
it's it's sad in some ways no it's very
it's true i mean you know another way to
put it is this um
i mean there's a range of knowledge and
and you're right the information flows
are
peculiar to particular geographies and
histories and stuff i think that
you know plucking out one sample from
some fairly remote area
from one like follow the follow the
agricultural products i mean
and this is where you know i think
urban rural divides sure used to mean a
lot more
in the 19th century right so a lot of
like nuts and bolts of history is about
conceiving of these kinds of
distinctions you know but i think that
if one has the privilege of traveling a
bit you see that like
urban areas are fed by rural interlands
and if you look think of who actually
you know brings the bread the milk you
know the pomegranates and so on it
creates these networks and then
you know mobility
channels information and so on
but yeah that but your broader point
about like the tragedy of this man i
guess if i can quote a brain student of
mine an afghan american woman who just
received her phd who's now you know
doctor
um he's a great scholar
you know we've done
several events now trying to just think
through what's happened and
of course she's very emotionally
affected by it and she continues to ask
a really great question if i can get her
phrasing right
you know if you think of the cycle of
like the top one being in power in 2001
in the way in which that affected women
in particular you know half african half
half of the society right
then you think of this 20-year period of
violence and
and you know missed exits right and
repeat a tragedy
but also it created a space i mean it
created a space for a whole i'd say
generationally it created a sense a
space for
people to realize something new and i
think so we have to attend to the the
dynamism of the society right so
yeah this happened mostly in kabul other
big cities mazar sharif herat and
kandahar
but you can't limit your analysis to
that because things like radio
television
everyone got a tv channel there's a
wonderful documentary called afghan star
that i recommend to your listeners and
viewers that it's about a singing show a
scene contest show
but you see just just personal things
about like connections i mean
it's a it's a show by an independent
you know television network that did
drama it did it did kind of infomercials
for the government and
huge american investment in it so it
wasn't politically neutral but it did
talk shows did all this kind of stuff i
did the singing show that became you
know incredibly popular
modeled upon the british american you
know american idol kind of stuff you
know and you could vote so had a kind of
democratic practice element
but it's fascinating to see that you
know
people hooked up generators to
televisions and watch this you know you
think of like
literacy rates literacy rates are
imperfect and you know people who study
you know
medieval modern europe talk about how
yeah no one could read
and there weren't many books but if
someone had a book it'd be read aloud to
a whole village potentially or gathering
so there wasn't much you know some of
these metrics don't get what people
actually
perceive as information or exposure
because
there's a magnifying power of
open spaces and
hearing radio in group settings seeing
television group settings
having telephone
you know cheap telephones which then
become an access point to the world and
social media right so
all the stuff swept across afghan
society as it did elsewhere you know um
in the last decade or more
so african society became you know in
important ways really connected to
everything going on and so you see that
reflected politically and what people
wanted so you had some people obviously
back to return to the taliban
some people wanted sasquatch
but increasingly many more people wanted
something else
um and one of the great failures was to
expose people to democracy
but only give them the rigged version
and so the us and state department in
particular continue to double down on
faked elections for the parliament and
for the presidency in afghanistan what
kind of elections faked
fraudulent elections for parliament and
and for
president
and afghanistan again and again from the
very beginning
and those these elections
were partly theater for the us right for
remaining on the road that you're
describing right for not deviating for
not exiting because we were building
democracy there
in reality the us government knew it was
never really building democracy there it
was establishing control
and elections were one means to gather
control right but then you had on the
ground especially when young people
going to university
yeah having experiences that were denied
to them before
you know they took these promises
seriously so part of the disenlargement
that we see today is that you know
they believe what the us told them that
they're constructing democracy and of
course you know cynics like us maybe
thinking well you know you're not really
doing that you're backing fraud they
believed it when they were younger and
now they're actually smart enough to
understand that it's a farce yeah but
and so indirectly had the consequence of
actually working
yeah and that it taught the young
over a period of 20 years young folks to
believe
that democracy is possible and then to
realize what democracy is not exactly
the currency that's due for beautifully
said and so
but now but i look at us now it's you
know it's
now november
and so
this whole
period and i wouldn't say like you know
i wouldn't cast the last 20 years if
you're looking at all the achievements
you know
i wouldn't
put them in an american tally sheet like
oh this something we should pat
ourselves on the back for i think that
much just happened actually against what
the americans wanted i mean that the
kind of
free thinking
democracy wanting
i mean even like yeah we could point out
on the religious religious sphere i mean
the
african religious landscape became very
pluralistic lots of young people wanted
a different kind of secular politics
but the old the old guard who wanted the
status quo and wanted something that
they'd fought for in 1980s
tended to still get american backing as
the political leads who still tend to
monopolize political power
um so all stuff was happening in
different ways
i mean the americans established this
american university of afghanistan which
is i think one of the best things the
u.s did there and i regret that the us
didn't fund 20 more you know sprinkling
them across the country making them
accessible people because it was
it was you know again it wasn't an
engine of americanization
it was just opportunity and so that the
thirst for higher education was really
extraordinary there was never never
really met the u.s tended to put money
in
primary education which much of that too
was was fraudulent
but so you have all this interesting
dynamism you have you know the arts you
have
a critical space i mean i call it a
public sphere in the classic
european sense you know the afghans made
of their own and
again it wasn't americanization it
wasn't
imposed
it was something that afghans built
across generations but really with a
firm foundation among youth
who wanted importantly a multi-ethnic
afghan society you asked about pashtuns
and that kind of stuff and a lot of that
language in recent years was um
they were aware that the us-backed
government was playing ethnic politics
and trying to kind of put people in the
blocks and mobilize people based on
their ethnic identity
and there was a younger cohort of people
who said you know we are afghan
and there's interesting social media
stuff where
people would say i am hazara but i'm
also tajik i'm also uzbek i mean
it was a way of creating a multi-ethnic
afghan national identity
that embraced everything i mean very
utopian you know super utopian right
but symbolically it's very important
that they rejected
being mobilized politically
you know voting as a hazara or voting is
whatever and of course there were there
were communities who wanted to you know
vote as that ethnic community but there
are also people who said you know let's
put a kind of civic nationalism first
one that accommodates i think pluralism
in a way that rejected a kind of
majoritarian politics of
one ethnic group dominating the thing
so all this stuff was quite interesting
i mean women were sorting themselves
in across you know multiple spheres
of course it remained patriarchal of
course there's struggles of course
there's violence of course you know
there's no utopia
um but the door and all that shut
in on august 15.
so to go back to the quote that i wanted
to
offer from
the student now professor
was it you know trying to make sense of
this
and you mentioned the tragic
arc here um
you take the 20 years like
she asked you why did you go to war in
our country basically why did you do
this to us for 20 years when
this was never about us you never asked
us if you wanted to come
you never asked us what you wanted to
build here
you asked us when you were coming and
you didn't ask us when when you're
leaving you just did this all on your
own
and we tried to make the most of it
and then you pulled the rug out from
under us you know at the 11th hour
in return returned to power
partly by diplomacy
it wasn't at the end just a military
loss i mean it was a
series of diplomatic decisions i mean
the idea you asked about alternatives i
mean
giving up bagram i mean holding the
timeline
i mean the biden people did not need to
hold to
the doha agreement that trump had signed
i mean every american president writes
his or her own foreign policy right so
the body administration acted as if they
tried to convince us that their hands
were tied
um and that it was either this or 21
years of war or some absurd kind of you
know
false
alternative
and so but i think that's important for
american audiences to hear that you know
they're like you came to here to
experiment
you came here to
punish you came here to kind of
you reassert
your dominance the world stage
you know to work out the the fear and
and hurt of 911 that we talked about
which was so real you know and palpable
um and it's important for american
politics since then like you did you
worked out your problems you know on us
on our territory
and
now what do we have for it you know and
then the people who
who had a stake in in that system
imperfect as it was
have been desperate to leave
and so this i don't know how much people
wear this but
you know i'm a scholar i work in
california you know
i have friends i
edit a journal on afghanistan and
you know but i'm not a politician i'm
not a soldier
but people assume that
you know afghans have been desperately
trying to reach me and anyone who is
kind of on the radar as an american
to help get them out you know that's the
kind of like
you know the symbol of voting with your
feet you know is quite powerful i mean
they
there's a huge swath of society that
doesn't want the system and is
literally living in terror about it
naturally women you know i mean
especially women of certain age i mean
they feel like their lives are over i
mean there is an epidemic of suicide
um they feel betrayed and
and some people have done some good
things and getting people out you know i
mean some
you know the u.s military vets have been
you know at the forefront of
working to get out people you know that
that they
they know they owe
but um the us government doesn't want
these people i mean they have created
all these obstacles to
to allowing a safety valve for people to
leave
looking forward from a perspective of
leadership how do we avoid these kinds
of mistakes
so
obviously some interests some aspects of
human nature led to this war yeah how do
we resist that in the future
i think that's beyond my
moral and intellectual capacity i'll say
this i mean looking at again looking at
it from you know my home ground is the
university and
i think of the
the intellectual um
you yeah ways of ways of thinking that
that i think students
should develop themselves
as citizens right maybe that's where to
start is like historical thinking
i mean these are all
and i try to tell people you know
if you want to do robotics computer
science you'd be a doctor whatever you
should study history yeah i mean you
don't being destroying like me and it's
you know my job isn't perfect my
profession is deeply flawed right but
as i get older i'm like
there are fewer historians actually like
yeah i want to hang out with and stuff
so it's like i'm not offering my myself
as like a model for anything but
you know whether you're a
you know you carry the male or you're a
brain surgeon whatever i mean i think
it's not it's a way of civic engagement
in the way of like
you know ethical being in the world that
we need to familiarize also because
if you're an american or if you're from
a rich country
you know you need to be aware of your
effect um on a on an energy effect world
um you can't
you can't say anymore that you don't
know or care what's happening in
afghanistan or really circle the globe
and point of place i mean
we're all connected and we're all we
have ethical obligations um
that's one place to start i would just
say this and this is a i'll offer a
self-critique and that is um
so much my teaching and like the themes
my research have been about empire you
know how big states work
not only on big territories like the
russian empire and soviet union stuff
but the way in which power often
is projected beyond those boundaries in
ways that we don't see so this is where
things like neoliberalism or just you
know if you want to take capitalism or
just things that
you know the idea of humanity or
liberalism or of humanitarianism ideas
that move beyond state boundaries are
all things that we think about
as affecting power in some ways that
that often harm people right so i think
part of as i've seen my job so far is i
think about
you know building upon the work of my
people in grad school and you know
scholars have affected me i mean
you know we're all concerned with how
power works and its effects and trying
to be attuned to
understanding
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things that aren't visible right that we
should be thinking about that should be
known to us and as scholars we can
hopefully play some useful role in
showing
effects that
aren't you know
obvious initially
um so empire is a framework to think
about this and so you think about
invading foreign countries obviously if
you're a scholar of empire
you've seen what what that looks like
and
that's horrific right you look at things
like racism as one of the ideological
pillars of empire you know that's
horrific it must be critiqued it must be
you know we must be educated against um
some of the you know gender exploitation
of empire is also something to highlight
you know to rectify and so on
um you have to be moral beings when you
think about
past inequality and in the legacies of
legacies of violence and destruction
that live on i mean living in the
americas i mean look at you know we're
all on
stone land we're all in the sense
living with the fruits of genocide and
slavery and all those things that are
hard to come to terms with right
but the last few months in afghanistan
and thinking about empire i think
made me more humble
when i read
people who say
to put it simply have taken some joy in
this moment saying like well
the americans got kicked out of
afghanistan
you know if you're against empire
this is a good thing this is the kind of
victory of of anti-colonial
you could see from the perspective of
afghanistan
that america is not some kind of place
that has an ideal of freedom and all the
kind of things that we american tell
ourselves yeah but it's more
america has the idea of empire that
there's one place that has the truth and
everybody else must follow this truth
and so from a perspective afghanistan it
could be a victory against this idea of
centralized truth of empire
that's another way to tell this story
and then in that sense it's a victory
and yeah in in that sense also i mean
you push back against this somewhat
this
idea of afghanistan as the graveyard of
empires right right
and i'll say this i'd say you know i
mean it's i mean
i'm a critic of empire i mean you know
colonialism is a
a political phenomenon that stays with
us and i think you know we need scholars
to point to the way in which it still
works and still does harm
um
but it's part of being an empire that
you can just get up and leave a place
right that you can
remake its politics on one day
and then because it
fails to advance your agenda at one
moment
you simply
walk away i mean you know we can point
to other moments i mean 1947 on the
subcontinent
you know the way that the british
withdrew
um
played a significant role in
mass violence you know that the company
partition
it wasn't all the actions of the british
that you know
dictated that right there were lots of
actors who
chose to pick up you know the knife to
kill their neighbor and so on i mean
there's lots of agency in that moment as
there's now in what's happening in
afghanistan
but i think the
the capriciousness i mean the the
ability to act as if your
your political decisions
about people's lives
you know are something that can be made
you know in secret
um that can be made willingly
they really are beyond the
accountability you know of
of those who are actually going to live
with the consequences of
shifting the cards on a deck in a way
that decides who rules and who doesn't i
would love to hear your conversation
with somebody i just talked to which is
neil ferguson who argues on the topic of
empire yeah that you can also
zoom out even farther
and say weigh the good and the bad of
empire
and he argues i think he gets a lot of
flack for this from other historians
that like the british empire
did more good than bad
in uh certain moments of history and
that's an uncomfortable truth yeah
there's like levels it's a cake with
layers of uncomfortable truths and it's
not a cake at all because none of it
tastes good right i mean i would
continue to disagree with without
persons i'm still i'm still working out
you know where i am and and what this
moment does to kind of i think qualify
qualify my understanding of the past and
to i think in a moment of humility
you know i i do
and i'm probably i'm probably reacting
to the kind of
you know as you put it i mean
the idea this is like a good thing that
american power has been defeated here i
mean i do think american power should
contract and i i don't think
and again if i if i had to create a
tally sheet of what the americans did in
the us i mean i mentioned the
american university afghanistan right it
could have done that without invading
the country and killing people could
have you know i'm not i've not now
become an apologist for empire i'm not
i'm not now
a mini now person but
you know ending empire is
i mean that's
how you
those decisions you make are
in some ways a continuation of imperial
hubris right
um so you're not really out of empire
yet you're not really contracting empire
for those who are living it you know
um but i think it's also i mean maybe
put this way it's
be careful what you asked for you know i
mean i i wanted i wanted the us out of
afghanistan
um
but i wanted there to be a political
settlement
i wanted
you know i wanted my cake and i wanted
to eat it too right i wanted all kinds
of things to be different right but why
is going afghanistan even needed for
that you can play all those games
of geopolitics without ever invading and
taking ownership of the place
it feels like the war yeah
if it feels like i mean i'm not exactly
sure
what military force is necessary for
except for targeted intense attacks it
feels like to me
the right thing to do after 9 11
was to show
what was a display of force unlike
anything the world has ever seen for a
very short amount of time
targeted at sure a terrorist at certain
strongholds and so on and then in and
out and then focused on education on uh
empowering women to uh
into the education system
all those kinds of things that have to
do with supporting the culture the
education the flourishing
of the place that's nothing to do with
military
policing essentially right now i think
yeah if you look at it through that
lens i mean if any afghanistan and then
invading iraq didn't end
al-qaeda
it didn't end terrorism right it didn't
really
deflate these ideologies entirely um
there were if you like you could say
there were
you know some
limited discrediting of certain kinds of
ideas um but in fact i mean look at the
phenomena of suicide bonding bombing um
i mean it spread i mean it was never an
islamic thing it was never you know a
muslim thing
um some muslims adopted it in some
places but
you know the circus of knowledge about
how to do these kind of things only
expanded um with the insurgencies that
emerged in afghanistan and iraq and then
they kind of became connected and then
they came to the president i mean
islamic state is
it's the best thing that happened to the
taliban
ever because
it's on the basis of its
supposed
new stance as a counterterrorism outfit
that it will get recognition from all
its neighbors it will get recognition
russia
i mean already with the evacuation
airport the united states was
collaborating with taliban
against against islamic state and openly
talking about the taliban as if they
were partners in the security operation
so
and then al qaeda remains present in
afghanistan so
trillions of dollars spent yeah
the drones up above
bombing
places that result in civilian death the
death of children the death of fathers
and mothers and those stories even at
the individual level propagate virally
across the land creating potentially
more terrorists
and
a cynical view of the trillions of
dollars is the
military-industrial complex
where there's just a momentum
where after 9 11
the feeling like we should do something
led to us doing something and then a lot
of people realizing they can make money
from doing more of that something and
then it's just the momentum where no one
person is
sitting there petting a cat in an evil
way
saying we're going to spend all of this
money and create more suffering and
create more terrorism right but it's
just something about the momentum that
leads to that and it to me honestly i
just i'm still a sucker i believe in
leadership i i believe in
great charismatic leaders
and the power of that one to do evil and
to do good yeah and it felt like
i honestly put the blame on
george bush
obama trump and biden sure for the lack
of leadership yeah definitely definitely
i agree and yeah there is the
multi-industrial complex component which
is huge
and there's also i mean speaking of
government leadership it's also
i'd say the imbalance of power within
washington i mean
the pentagon
used this moment
um well beginning in 2001 i think to
assert this authority
at the expense of other institutions of
national government yeah i mean the
state department diplomacy
you know
has become a shadow of what it was once
capable of doing
and of course i mean other historians us
historians you know which i'm not
foreign in the united states but
you know we can go back to talk about
vietnam we talk about lots of um cold
war and post-cold war engagements um
and i think you know we need a reckoning
about how the united states uses
military power
you know why we devote so much to our
military budget and what could be
available to us if we
had a more sensible view of the value of
military power of its effectiveness
and i think we're willing to hammer home
that this is a defeat i mean i think
there should be accountability and if
you and this could be a kind of opening
for a kind of bipartisan conversation
because if you are
a kind of um
american militarist i mean you have to
look at the leadership that got you to a
place where you're defeated by
men wearing sandals
firing ak-47s right yeah there should be
a humility with that yeah
i mean yeah we should actually say that
we like literally
the oh we lost you lost it wasn't just
you know um
the american military
lost yeah and i i feel i have very mixed
feelings and you know it's
i don't know a ton of veterans but you
know i've mentioned i've taught my share
and um have a student now and
you know they are
they're suffering because they look at
the sacrifices that they made that i
didn't make i mean american society
didn't make the sacrifices i mean
men and women lost limbs they lost eyes
they lost lives you know
uh there's been this of course quiet
epidemic of suicide
among
among veterans and i
i've heard
some stories affected the state
department is seeing a similar surge of
suicides because
they see their
adult life's work
collapse they've seen their
relationships i mean they've seen
they've received phone calls in the
middle of night from people who they
entrusted with their lives who they know
are going to be targeted i mean some
have already been killed um
they've seen the i mean i think just i'd
imagine just ideologically and
professionally
what they believed in and what they
what they sacrificed for you know has
vanished
and i think that's a that's
that's bad i mean historically thinking
of some of the presence you were
thinking of i mean if you think of
you know first of all you know at a
human level i feel horrible for those
people who you know may not have agreed
with
everything they'd done and their choices
in life but i respect the fact that many
good people went out of
you know the best intentions as young
people to
to do the right thing and make things
right and i respect that
and i've met enough to know that
there were people who
saw the gray and complexity and that
that's
you know all you can hope for um
but we don't want a generation of
disillusioned veterans um
you know if we look at the other
post-war moments and this is kind of a
possible moment where
you know i think we need a conversation
with american veterans about about what
they've gone through and what they're
feeling and they have they solve skin in
the game you know because their personal
connections and their in the end of
their histories and they're also going
to be future leaders i mean
uh yeah veterans already yeah people who
are served are often great men and women
that's that's true and
you know throughout history whether you
sacrifice you served in fighting world
war ii
in fighting vietnam that's going to mold
you in different ways
that's going to mold
how you are as the leader that leads
this country forward and uh so you have
to have an honest conversation about um
what was um
the role of
the war in afghanistan the war in the
middle east the war on terror
in the history of america if we just
look at the full context at the end of
this 21st century how we're going to
remember this
and how that's going to result
in our future interactions with small
and large countries with china or some
proxy war with china with russia or some
proxy war with uh
russia what's the role of oil and
natural resources and opium and all
those kinds of things what's the role of
military power
in the world and now with kovid
you know it it's like um
it's almost like
the because of the
many failures of the us government
and many leaders
in in science and politics to respond
effectively and quickly
to uh to covid we kind of forget that we
fumbled this other thing too yeah and
it's hard to know which is going to be
more expensive yeah
uh yeah they they seem to be symptoms of
something
of us of a same kind of source
problem um
of leadership of bureaucracy of of uh
the way information and intelligence
flows throughout the u.s government all
those kinds of things and that hopefully
motivates young leaders to fix things
right
definitely i mean i think if there's one
theme that jumps out to me and think
about this moment i mean
if we recognize that we live in a kind
of crisis of democracy um
in the united states and in other
countries that have long been part of
their democratic traditions if we see
them being under assault from certain
quarters i think
military defeat is yet another addition
to all the
the aspects of this that you mentioned i
mean the fact of military defeat is
a giant match that you're throwing on
this fire potentially if we think of
its legacies and other post-war
environments when
you know the veteran angle you know is
one when you have
people who feel betrayed i mean they
have been
fodder for the far right in other
settings i mean interwar europe is very
much about
mobilizing disillusioned veterans the
name of right-wing fascist politics
um if one thinks two of this moment
of really increasing xenophobia you know
our immigration debate is now talking
about whether or not afghans should be
permitted at all in the united states
you know after 20 years
and i think immediately the response in
europe which i followed to some extent
you know focusing on germany
uh because it it was
really ramping up deportations of
afghans leading up this collapse
and now they have been
you know a lot of
right-wing center-right politicians in
in germany have been watching all this
with an eye to
using it to their advantage for a
domestic german audience
to say you know in the context of like
recent elections that you know we are
the party who will defend you against
these afghans are going to be coming
from this so
you know what i've tried to emphasize in
talking to different groups about this
moment is that it won't be confined to
afghanistan or even the region i mean
obviously malnutrition hunger will send
afghans to neighboring states
but
where the european right is resurgent
this has been a gift right to say that
the africans are coming
they're brown skinned they're muslim
they're uneducated they're going to want
your women
um and they'll take you know the odd
sexual assault case or the odd whatever
um dramatic
act of violence that
you know happens numerically in any
population
and they'll magnify that to say that you
know
our far right group is going to save the
nation
and sorry that the main point i wanted
to
to be a leadership was that
i think the serial well there are many
many
um carnal sins if you like but if you go
back to our analogy of all the exits i
mean
what blocked some of those exits was um
an absence of truth and transparency
and the lying and so i mean that the
this is no secret anyone who's followed
this but the
we've allowed
and you think of the general mistrust of
government mistrust of of authoritative
of authority across the board
of professors of economists of
scientists scientists uh doctor doctors
right well i actually think that's the
hopeful thing to me about the internet
yeah because
the internet hates
inauthenticity they can smell bullshit
much better and i think that motivates
young leaders to be transparent and
authentic
so like that's
the very problems we've been seeing
with this kind of attitude of like uh of
authority where oh the populists they're
too busy with their own lies they're not
smart enough to understand the full
complexities of the things we're dealing
with so we're not going to even
communicate to them the full
complexities yeah we're just going to
decide and then
tell them what we decided and conceive
some kind of narrative
that that
makes it easy for them to consume this
decision right
as opposed to that i have
i really believe i see there's a hunger
for authenticity of of uh when you're
making decisions when you're looking at
the rest of the world and trying to
decide
uh untangle this complexity yeah the
internet the public
the world wants to see you as a leader
struggle with the tension of these ideas
to uh change your mind
to see you know to recognize your own
flaws in your own thinking from a month
ago all that the full complexity of it
also acknowledged the uncertainty as
with kovid also with the wars
you know uh i think there's a hunger for
that and i think that's just going to
change the nature of leadership in the
21st century i hope so i think you know
all the things you highlighted i mean
accountability is part of that right i
mean we need you know
honesty openness uh and then you know
acknowledgement of mistakes and humility
is the key to all learning right but
also i mean you think just the headline
from yesterday the
the horrible drone strike which was
really the last kind of american
military action
on the day that the us was i think
mostly departing from kabul
wiped out an entire family mostly
children
you know the u.s acknowledged that yes
this was not the isis bombing outfit
that they thought it was
but yesterday the they did a quick
review um
i'm not an expert on undrone strikes in
their aftermath but those who looking
more closely said it was basically um
whole cloth taken from what the u.s
government has been saying
after all these strikes
you know reproducing the same language
and
basically pointing to technical errors
but denying that there were
any
procedural
mistakes
or flaws or is this kind of
they found little ways of acknowledging
things not go as planned but
you know we follow policies essentially
and that's it it's not a crime
it's a way of not even saying
you know we screwed up
and it's kind of the legalese that that
suddenly makes a war crime not a war
crime you know and that
that is reflects i think or feasible to
take accountability
i think people are really sick of that
yeah in a way where the opposite is true
which is
they get excited for people who are not
for leaders who are not that right and
so there's they're not going to punish
you for saying
i made a mistake yeah that i i
i just had a conversation with francis
collins the director of nih and part of
my criticism towards anthony fauci has
been that um
it's like such subtle
but such crucial
communication of mistakes made
if you make a small mistake it is so
powerful
to communicate
i think we messed up we thought this was
true yeah and it wasn't so the the
obvious thing there was with masks early
in the pandemic
there's so much uncertainty it's so
understandable to make mistakes or to
to also be concerned about what kind of
hysteria different statements you make
lead to just being transparent about
that and saying we were not correct in
saying the thing you said before that's
so powerful to communicate
to uh gain
trust and the opposite is true when you
do this legalese type of talk yeah yeah
it's it uh destroys trust and i again i
really
think the lessons of recent history yeah
teach us what it
what how to be a leader and teach young
leaders how to be leaders and i so i
have a lot of hope yeah good partially
thanks for the internet yeah yeah that's
great yeah
no humility i mean we you know we need
humility accountability honesty um
and yeah studying the past is an
important way to do that i mean to to
learn from past mistakes and obviously
there's a source of inspiration and
courage and you know we can take
some kind of assessments from that too
but um
but also learning from learning how not
to do things right and then
you know analogies are never like one to
one i mean we talk about vietnam i mean
i think
many vietnam veterans would say
yeah this is like deja vu you know i
mean there's the story the the the
visuals of the kabul airport and of
of the saigon embassy were not the same
but close enough that people would
juxtapose them all let's run up but i
would just ask people that you know
overanalogizing is also you know a kind
of
path down like making errors of judgment
and in comparison
and then
sameness um
but it's stretch you mean like 9 11
itself i think the idea that um
people lack the imagination within our
security apparatus to think this is even
possible right
and you think of the simplicity of
having a 10 lock on a cockpit door you
know could have wanted all this and
you know again i'm not saying
either the time or in hindsight that i
am on mission about all this but
you know i just been living in germany
the year before and
there was a plot there this guy was
hatching from germany to blow up the
mausoleum of ottawa and ankara with an
airplane
and so if you kind of dig
you know it wasn't unimaginable that you
would use an airplane as a weapon
and the bush was association kept saying
no one had ever heard of this who would
do this like well
not a lot of people do this and then you
know at that very moment my wife was
teaching the joseph conrad novel secret
agent
which was about a conspiratorial
organization that wanted to bomb
actually in respect it was kind of
suicide bombing because i think they
tricked this guy into doing it but they
want to
bomb the greenwich observatory for some
obscure political purpose
um
so
that's an instance in which you know the
novel right to go back to our kind of
humanities bitch right that it's my
point was that um
you know as you mentioned we need
humanity transparency but also
imagination right i think part of
expanding imagination is by you know i
mean obviously delving into your fields
you know of engineering and the sciences
and robotics and artificial intelligence
and all that rich landscape and then
but also we find this in film poetry
literature i mean just the kind of
stretching that
that we need to do
to
really educate ourselves more fully
right across the
across the spectrum of everything humans
need to imagine
do we imagine security you know so much
what we talked about today i mean
it's much of you know
our security is affected by others
perception of their insecurity right
um which unleashes a whole
web of emotions can you
tell me about the afghan people
uh what they love what they fear
what they dream of for themselves and
for their nation is there something to
say to speak to to the spirit of the
people
that may humanize
them and maybe speak to the concerns and
the hopes they
have yeah i think i you know as an
outsider i hesitate to to make any grand
statement but i would say listen i mean
um
there are a number of documentary films
that that
are incredibly rich that will offer your
listeners and viewers at snapshots so
there is
um afghan star
you know which really brings you to the
homes of
a set of people who you know they won't
start them
they're artists they want to express
themselves
some want to push political boundaries
cultural boundaries there's a woman who
gets into hot water for dancing
but you realize it
i mean
people i mean they love art they love
music they love poetry they love
expression
you know people want to care for their
children they want safety to families
they want to enjoy
what everyone enjoys you know i think
it's a very
humanizing portrait
there's another great documentary film
called um
love crimes of kabul
which is a great snapshot of of the post
2000 world that the americans shaped a
lot of ways and it's about a women's
prison
and
it's incredibly revealing because it's
about
young girls and what they want um well
not not just young but young teenage and
then some middle-aged people who
who are accused of moral crimes ranging
from homicide which one woman admits to
to
having such relations outside of
marriage
and
so it shows in a way continuity with
the previous telephone regime and that
women are imprisoned for things that you
wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere and
that islamic law operates as the the
kind of
judicial logic for these um
these punishments but lettings women
kind of speak themselves
i mean it's fascinating i mean they i
don't want to give too much away but
women make ranching choices in this film
that land them in this predicament so
they don't all profess
innocence some are like i'm guilty but
they're guilty for reasons
in one case one woman is guilty she's in
prison because
it's a way to exert pressure on her
fiance to finally marry her
you know yeah so you get ethnicity you
get like you know kind of romeo and
juliet things or their families don't
like each other necessarily but they
find each other you have questions of
like love money
clothing furniture
um it's beautiful and like i mean the
parts with it i remember showing it in
class there was a wonderful afghan
student who was a
i think a fulbright at the ed school at
stanford and she's a genius she's
amazing um
it was awkward for her because
talking about young women having sex and
stuff and it was just it wasn't
you know the snapshot of afghanistan
that she wanted and obviously there's so
much more they're great writers and
you know musicians and i mean you know
music is a huge thing i mean poetry all
these things are great
um
so she found it you know
i hear you i mean it's a kind of taboo
subject but i thought the american
students sing it really identified with
these women
because they're just so real and so
you know young people trying to find
like i mean relationships that are
universal
um and circumstances that are
very difficult um love love is universal
yeah so it's i mean we do have resources
to humanize i mean you know you know
some of your people will know khao
husseini you know he's african-american
he's done his stuff but there are
there are a number of
novelists and short story writers who do
cool things i think that
another tragic aspect of this moment is
that those people have now pretty much
had to leave the country so
um there's a visual artist i would
highlight for you named khadam ali
is a hazara based in australia
he does extraordinary work in blending
a tradition of persian miniatures
with contemporary political commentary
his work is between australia and
afghanistan but he also he had to flee i
mean he's doing some work in kabul
but it's a
extraordinary um
kind of visual language that he's
adopted that has been shown all over the
planet now he's got some of his work is
in new york galleries is in europe
he's been shown in australia but he
talks about migration
in a way that puts afghans and hazaras
at the center but it's totally universal
about um
you know
our modern crisis of of
all the mains people who were displaced
across our planet and he attempts to
kind of speak for some size of them
in a way that like i think everyone can
get um
i mean the visual imagery experts will
know that it's from you know like the
the chaname like an ancient persian you
know epic that iranians were attached to
that afghans are attached to that people
can quote you know at length um it has
mythical figures of good and evil that
kids grow up embodying
they're named the names of the
characters that are um it's called the
book of kings
uh the heroes and villains are the
staple of conversation and
and poetry and
you know
like russians i mean the kind of the
the resort to literary references and
speak is something that you know
americans don't do most
west european countries don't do but the
fact that everyone's got to know this
character everyone has this reference
the word play the linguistic finesse um
in multiple languages is
you know a major value of
afghan storytelling um
as an outsider i'm
scratching it the surface of the surface
yeah but there's a depth to it just like
it is fascinating the layers yeah with
the layers of russian language that's
exactly the the culture it's a i've been
struggling and this is kind of the
journey i'm
embarking on
convey to an american audience
uh what is lost in translation yeah
between russian and english and it's
it's very challenging and some of the
great translators of dusty yes gif
tolstoy
of russian literature struggle with this
deeply and yeah they work uh
it's it's a it's an art form just to
convey that and right it's amazing to
hear that afghanistan with a full mix
of cultures that are there have the same
kind of uh wit and humor and depth of
intelligence i mean the humor thing is
that that's you know i'm so much our
visual imagery is about like this sad
place and dao or whatever but the
i mean socially again
i mean engage in some stereotypes about
generalization stuff but just the um
you know the afghan friends that i've
come to be close with they really love i
mean the
the humor there's so much there i have
common common stuff of like
when i go to ireland it's one of my
favorite places and just like the
i feel a sense of pressure like the
humor all around me all the time i feel
like there's something between iron like
i learned in russia
with the humor stuff
where it's like you've you got to be on
your game if you want to be you know so
it's yeah it's not i feel like i mean
it's the intensity of conversation
in terms of yeah you have to be on your
game in terms of wit and so on i mean
you have to
there's certain people i have like when
i talked on this podcast they're like
that uh certain people from the jewish
tradition have that totally like where
the where is just like okay i have to
oh yeah i really have to pay attention
yeah yeah it's a game it's like it's
like uh you know what it feels like it
feels like speed chess or something like
that and you really have to
uh focus and play and at the same time
there's body language in the and then
there's a melancholy nature to it at
least in the russian side yeah the whole
thing is just a beautiful moment yeah
there's a there's a funny two type video
that went around that that i got from
like some afghan acquaintances that was
uh
he's an irish comedian
kind of
highlighting you know kind of irish and
german natural stereotypes around
hospitality
and um this afghan woman said you know i
didn't know that the
irish were just white afghans because
the whole like you know the hospitality
like politics of like of refusal you
know you you know you don't you don't
take
something that's offered to the first
time you don't i mean it's the
the culture of um
of receiving a guest you know that's you
know
americans aren't i mean that's not you
know that's not always i mean they're
different the regional cultures or
that's the thing there's whatever but
it's i mean the
the kind of like generosity and the kind
of you know that that's that's real i
mean that's
and that's a cool thing and that's
amazing that's um you know the food i
mean going on just the sufficient things
about it with the
but all that the the warmth of
hospitality and um
of wit and and humanity i mean it's
that that that's what we don't see if
you're in the place just through war and
geopolitics and the moving pieces of the
map and stuff and that's
and that's hard to see when the other
gaps in in language and in religious
tradition and all that stuff and then
you know being open to the fact that
people do
do things differently you know and it's
uh
and the gender did mention there's
important right they're they're kind of
you know
arguably each culture has a kind of
gender dynamic that's different and so i
think it's helpful to have humility in
thinking that
some afghans will do something something
different differently yeah but then
you'll also have afghans who say
every woman should be educated everyone
should work and so on and so on so
there's no there's no single way of yeah
and there is a dynamic in russia too
they we need to be respectful that like
that's not that's not always what it
looks like at first yeah exactly there's
layers where power is i mean that's
definitely i don't know yeah uh yeah
that's a whole nother conversation where
the power is yeah uh rumi the 13th
century persian poet who was born in the
land that is now afghanistan is there
something in his words that speaks to
you about the spirit of the afghan
people
i mean everyone owns rumi i guess i'd
say and that that's going to get me in
trouble with certain afghan fans of rumi
who
want to see him as as an afghan i would
say
are they proud of yeah did they see him
as an afghan do they yeah i mean so it
depends i mean some some people
will be militant and say
you know the irony is going to have him
he's ours
um
but they're also saying you know he's
i mean you could say
again he's like blood i mean he's he's a
sufi he's a muslim
he's a central asian he's iranian he's
afghan
he's a turk i'm trying to think of
analogy but he's
he's something special to everyone so i
guess i would i would not walk into that
conversation and claim that he's one or
another but it's a cool thing i mean
it's the um
but i'm glad you brought that up because
that's a good way of seeing
[Music]
a seeing something that that afghans i
mean we love our country to afghanistan
and say okay roomies everyone you know
madonna helped make famous united states
you know for better for worse they used
to sell stuff at starbucks and that's
all complicated um
and embarrassing and his his
translations are very much disputed
where you have people being like there's
some awful roomy translations and there
are
there's also a lot of
speaking of the internet there's lots of
uh fake roomie quotes yes
you know like roomie said always be your
best
like
we didn't say that you know that was you
know i mean this kind of stuff but yeah
but the cool thing is like the um
i mean i think
you can read roomie as a religious
thinker but you can also you know
read rumi as a um
you know in an islamic sentence but you
know also as a kind of spiritualist
right someone who or an ethicist or
moralist and so i think that's
i i like the
the lens of roomie as a gateway to
afghan um ecumenicism and
cosmopolitanism you know the theme i
keep the sizing of
of
meeting actual afghans who were actually
you know fluent in russian fluent german
fluent turkish
they know diary they know pashto
um
they've gone to university or sometimes
they haven't
and yet i mean they are um i like the
category of the uh
popular intellectual you know the
intellectual who isn't
isn't formally educated necessarily
although of course that's represented
too especially increasingly now at this
generation of going university all over
the world you know stanford mit
everywhere
um afghans are war reps into there
but just being
i don't have any kind of worldly
knowledge that is
not limited to a province to a village
to a hamlet but
sometimes it is but sometimes it's not
because of
again not because of some fairy tale
story of
curiosity wanting the globe out of
you know some sense of of privilege but
out of necessity out of survival of
having to adapt and it's really um
extraordinary that i mean also when you
think about like professions so like
you know ask ask an afghan you know what
does he or she do for a living
and what have they done in the past i
mean the answer is one gets shoe
salesmen
task drivers
uh surgeons all in one guy yeah yeah
i mean
i mean that's not just afghan but that's
you know that that's very common but
it's also russia is the same that's
right i think it's right whenever
there's complexities to the economic
system and that's right a short term and
the long term history of how the country
develops and it's basically the people
figuring out their way
around
a mess of a country politically yeah but
a uh beautiful flourishing culture and
humanity yeah and that that creates
super interesting people yeah yeah so we
can often see okay there's taliban
there's war there's
uh economic malfunction
there's harboring of terrorists there's
opium trade all that kind of stuff but
there's humans there with deep
intellectual
lies
uh and uh like i love the movie love
crimes and the same kind of uh hopes
fears and desire to love
the the old romeo and juliet story and i
think roomie to me represents that
the wit
the intelligence but also the
just eloquent and just beautiful
representation of humanity of love some
of the
some of the best quotes about love are
from him half of them fake
half of them real but the best ones are
real right the best ones are yeah yeah
the best ones are real uh robert this is
an incredible conversation thank you for
having me thank you for the
tour
of
afghanistan and making me making us
realize that um
there's much more to this country
than um what we may think it's a it's a
beautiful country and it's full of
beautiful people you made me think about
a lot of new things too so it was
definitely definitely great for mine too
so thank you so much
thanks for listening to this
conversation with robert cruz to support
this podcast please check out our
sponsors in the description and now let
me leave you some words from winston
churchill
history will be kind to me
for i intend to write it
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time