Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz,
00:00:02 a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history
00:00:06 of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam.
00:00:09 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:12 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:14 in the description.
00:00:15 And now, here’s my conversation with Robert Cruz.
00:00:19 Was it a mistake for the United States
00:00:22 to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?
00:00:25 Yes.
00:00:27 As simple as yes, why was it a mistake?
00:00:30 I’m a historian, so I say this with some humility
00:00:33 about what we can know.
00:00:35 I think I’d still like to know much more
00:00:36 about what was going on in the White House
00:00:39 in the hours, days, weeks after 9 11.
00:00:42 But I think the George W. Bush administration
00:00:45 acted in a state of panic.
00:00:47 And I think they wanted to show a kind of toughness.
00:00:49 They wanted to show some kind of resolve.
00:00:51 This was a horrific act that played out
00:00:55 on everyone’s television screens.
00:00:57 And I think it was really fundamentally
00:00:59 a crisis of legitimacy within the White House,
00:01:01 within the Oval Office.
00:01:02 And I think they felt like they had to do something
00:01:05 and something dramatic.
00:01:06 I think they didn’t really think through
00:01:08 who they were fighting, who the enemy was,
00:01:11 what this geography had to do with 9 11.
00:01:14 I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us,
00:01:17 not to say I was clairvoyant or could see into the future,
00:01:19 but I think many of us were, from that morning,
00:01:22 skeptical about the connections that people were drawing
00:01:24 between Afghanistan as a state, as a place,
00:01:27 and the actions of Al Qaeda in Washington
00:01:30 and New York and Pennsylvania.
00:01:32 So as you watch the events of 9 11,
00:01:35 the things that our leaders were saying
00:01:40 in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed,
00:01:44 maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline
00:01:47 of what was being said.
00:01:49 One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan.
00:01:52 And also, what were your feelings
00:01:55 in the minutes, weeks after 9 11?
00:01:59 I was in DC.
00:02:00 I was on the way to American University
00:02:04 hearing on NPR what had happened.
00:02:07 And I thought of the American University logo,
00:02:10 which is red, white, and blue.
00:02:11 It’s an eagle.
00:02:12 And I thought Washington is under attack
00:02:15 and symbols of American power are under attack.
00:02:18 And so I was quite concerned and at the time lived
00:02:22 just a few miles from the capital.
00:02:24 And so I felt that it was real.
00:02:28 So I appreciate the sense of anxiety and fear and panic.
00:02:32 And four, two, three years later in DC,
00:02:35 we were constantly getting reports,
00:02:37 mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks
00:02:40 that befall the city.
00:02:41 So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.
00:02:46 But in watching television,
00:02:47 including Russian television that day,
00:02:48 because I just installed a satellite thing.
00:02:51 So I was trying to watch world news
00:02:52 and get different points of view.
00:02:53 And that was quite useful
00:02:54 to have an alternative set of eyes.
00:02:57 In Russian?
00:02:58 Yeah, in Russian, yeah.
00:02:59 Okay, so your Russians is good enough
00:03:01 to understand Russian television.
00:03:03 The news, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming
00:03:05 that were not shown on American television.
00:03:07 I don’t know how they had it, but they had,
00:03:09 they were not filtering anything
00:03:11 in the way that the major networks
00:03:13 and cable televisions were doing here.
00:03:14 So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence
00:03:17 of the moment in New York City
00:03:19 of people diving from the towers or being,
00:03:22 and it was really, they didn’t hold back on that,
00:03:24 which was quite fascinating.
00:03:26 I think much of the world saw much more
00:03:27 than actually the American public saw.
00:03:29 But to your question, amid that feeling of imminent doom,
00:03:33 I watched commentators start to talk about Al Qaeda
00:03:36 and then talk about Afghanistan.
00:03:39 And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin,
00:03:42 who’s at NYU, who’s a kind of long,
00:03:45 very learned Afghanistan hand.
00:03:48 And he’s brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News
00:03:50 to kind of lay this out for everyone.
00:03:54 And I thought, you know, he did a fine job,
00:03:55 but I think it was formative in submitting the view
00:03:57 that somehow Al Qaeda was synonymous
00:04:00 with this space, Afghanistan.
00:04:02 And I think, again, I was no Al Qaeda expert then,
00:04:06 and I’m not now, but I think my immediate thought
00:04:09 went to war and because my background had been with,
00:04:13 at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced
00:04:15 from decades of war,
00:04:17 whom I encountered in Uzbekistan,
00:04:19 who were refugees and so on.
00:04:20 I thought immediately, my mind went to the suffering
00:04:24 of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep up,
00:04:28 of course, the defenseless people
00:04:30 who have nothing to do with these politics.
00:04:31 So we should give maybe a little bit of context
00:04:33 that you could speak to.
00:04:35 So assume nobody’s an expert at anything.
00:04:38 So let’s just say you and I are not experts at anything.
00:04:43 What, as a historian, were you studying at the time
00:04:46 and thinking about, is it the full global history
00:04:52 of Afghanistan?
00:04:53 Is it the region?
00:04:55 Were you thinking about the Mujahideen
00:04:58 and Al Qaeda and Taliban?
00:05:01 Were you thinking about the Soviet Union,
00:05:04 the proxy war through Afghanistan?
00:05:06 Were you thinking about Iraq and oil?
00:05:09 What’s the full space of things in your heart,
00:05:12 in your mind at the time?
00:05:14 I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was just the sense
00:05:16 of the suffering and the tragedy
00:05:19 of the moment of the deaths.
00:05:21 And that was, I think, I was preoccupied
00:05:23 by the violence of the moment.
00:05:26 But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan,
00:05:28 as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment,
00:05:31 I think immediately what came to mind
00:05:32 was that little I knew about Al Qaeda at the time
00:05:34 suggested that the geography was inaccurate,
00:05:38 that this was a global network, a global threat,
00:05:41 that this was a movement that went beyond borders.
00:05:45 And I think that it felt early on
00:05:47 that Afghanistan was gonna be used as a scapegoat.
00:05:50 And intellectually at the time,
00:05:51 I was teaching at American University.
00:05:52 My courses touched on a range of subjects,
00:05:56 but I was trying to complete a book
00:05:58 on Islam and the Russian Empire, actually.
00:06:01 But in doing that research, which took me across Russia
00:06:04 and Central Asia, purely by accident,
00:06:06 I had developed an interest in Afghanistan
00:06:08 because just, again, a series of coincidences.
00:06:12 I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan,
00:06:15 without housing, through an American friend
00:06:17 who was like the king of the market in Tashkent.
00:06:20 He knew everyone.
00:06:21 He ran into some Afghan merchants there.
00:06:24 They found out I didn’t have a place to live.
00:06:26 I didn’t know where Afghanistan was, honestly.
00:06:28 This was 1997.
00:06:29 I had a vague idea it was next door.
00:06:30 Well, you lived in Uzbekistan?
00:06:32 Yeah, in Tashkent, doing dissertation research, yeah.
00:06:35 Because it was hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia.
00:06:37 So just by accident, I met with these young Afghans
00:06:40 who took me in as roommates.
00:06:42 And that, I think, the sense of that community
00:06:46 shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.
00:06:48 It was my first exposure to them.
00:06:51 They were part of a trading diaspora.
00:06:53 They had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.
00:06:57 They had somehow brought flour
00:06:59 and some agricultural products from Egypt.
00:07:02 And they were sitting in closed containers in Tashkent
00:07:06 waiting for the Uzbekistan state to permit them to trade.
00:07:10 So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.
00:07:11 They’ll get dressed up.
00:07:12 They put on suits and ties like you’re wearing.
00:07:15 They’d polish their shoes.
00:07:16 And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios.
00:07:21 Then they’d feast at lunch.
00:07:23 And then at night, we would go out.
00:07:25 So part of my research,
00:07:26 because I also had a bottleneck in my research,
00:07:28 I was going to the state archives in Tashkent.
00:07:31 And because of the state of Uzbekistan,
00:07:34 that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do.
00:07:36 So it took a while to get in.
00:07:38 So I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys.
00:07:41 So I got to know them pretty well.
00:07:42 And it was really just an accidental kind of thing,
00:07:45 but grew quite close to them.
00:07:47 And I developed an appreciation of,
00:07:50 which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this,
00:07:53 these people had already lived,
00:07:55 young guys in their 20s,
00:07:57 they’d already lived in six or seven countries.
00:07:59 They all spoke half a dozen languages.
00:08:02 One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer
00:08:06 and break dancer, trained in Tehran.
00:08:08 His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.
00:08:11 He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan
00:08:14 during the civil war, going to Uzbekistan,
00:08:16 escaping death there.
00:08:18 And these were very real stories.
00:08:21 Can you also just briefly mention,
00:08:23 geographically speaking,
00:08:25 Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran.
00:08:29 Who are the neighbors of all of this?
00:08:32 What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?
00:08:35 I was always terrible at geography and spatial information.
00:08:38 So can you lay it out?
00:08:39 Yeah, sure, sure.
00:08:40 So Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan.
00:08:44 It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century.
00:08:49 The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim
00:08:52 dynasty in 1865.
00:08:55 It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power
00:08:59 in Central Asia after 1917.
00:09:01 It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan,
00:09:06 which becomes independent finally in 1991
00:09:09 when the Soviet Union collapses.
00:09:10 So these are all like these republics
00:09:14 are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia.
00:09:18 That’s right.
00:09:19 And they’ve been independent since 1991,
00:09:22 but they have struggled to disentangle themselves
00:09:25 from Moscow, from one another.
00:09:28 And now they face very serious pressure from China
00:09:31 to form a kind of periphery of the great machine
00:09:34 that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions
00:09:37 to stretch across Asia.
00:09:40 For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends
00:09:43 hailed from, Afghanistan had fallen into civil war
00:09:49 in the late 1970s when leftists tried
00:09:52 to seize power there in 1978.
00:09:54 The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan,
00:09:58 crossing the border with its forces in 1979
00:10:01 to try to shore up this leftist government
00:10:03 that had seized power in 1978.
00:10:06 And so for Central Asians in the wider region,
00:10:11 their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan
00:10:13 in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected
00:10:17 in the 1980s when the Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan
00:10:21 for 10 years.
00:10:23 And here, I refer your listeners and viewers
00:10:25 to Rainbow Three as the guide to.
00:10:28 The historically accurate guide.
00:10:30 The historically accurate, the Bible.
00:10:32 The Bible of Afghan history in Rainbow Three, yeah.
00:10:34 As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war.
00:10:39 But for us Afghans, there are people who fought
00:10:41 against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation,
00:10:46 the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.
00:10:50 And so they fled in waves by the millions
00:10:54 to Pakistan, to Iran.
00:10:56 Some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in the 1990s.
00:11:00 And some were displaced across the planet.
00:11:02 So California, where we’re sitting today,
00:11:03 has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s
00:11:07 in the East Bay.
00:11:09 Can I ask a quick question that’s a little bit of a tangent?
00:11:12 Yep.
00:11:13 What is the correct or the respectful way
00:11:17 to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran?
00:11:25 So as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan.
00:11:28 Yeah.
00:11:30 The an versus the an.
00:11:32 Yeah.
00:11:33 Is it a different country by country?
00:11:34 As an English speaker in America,
00:11:37 is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan?
00:11:41 Or is it the opposite, respectful to say it that way?
00:11:44 What are your thoughts on this?
00:11:45 That’s a fascinating question.
00:11:47 I defer to the people from those countries
00:11:50 to, of course, sort out those politics.
00:11:52 I think one of the fascinating things about the region
00:11:55 broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures
00:11:57 and it’s really quite cosmopolitan.
00:12:00 So I think people are mostly quite forgiving
00:12:02 about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
00:12:04 It’s not like Paris.
00:12:05 Yeah, right, right.
00:12:06 The French are not forgiving.
00:12:07 No, no, no.
00:12:08 Exactly.
00:12:09 I think people are very, very forgiving.
00:12:10 And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive
00:12:15 in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, Iraq, Iraq.
00:12:22 I think there’s going to be a fit
00:12:24 between certain ways of pronouncing these places
00:12:27 and the position that Americans take about them.
00:12:30 So it’s more jarring when people say Iraq
00:12:36 and it comes with a claim that a certain kind of person
00:12:41 should be the victim of violence or.
00:12:43 Yeah, that’s fascinating.
00:12:44 It’s kind of like talking about the Democratic Party
00:12:47 or the Democrat Party.
00:12:48 It’s sometimes using certain kind of terminology
00:12:51 to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement
00:12:57 about your beliefs.
00:12:58 That’s fascinating.
00:12:59 Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran,
00:13:02 I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional
00:13:04 in the case of a Democrat or is it just a,
00:13:07 you know, and it’s a whatever.
00:13:08 Again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people I know
00:13:10 have been very cool about that.
00:13:12 What annoys Afghans now, I can say,
00:13:15 I think it’s fair to say,
00:13:16 I don’t mean to speak for many people,
00:13:18 for the entire group of people,
00:13:20 but I can just share with our non Afghan friends.
00:13:24 The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense
00:13:28 because that’s the name of the currency.
00:13:29 And so lots of people ask, you know, why having,
00:13:34 especially again, it’s more directed at Americans
00:13:36 because, you know, we’ve been so deeply involved
00:13:38 in that country obviously for the last 20 years, right?
00:13:40 So Afghans ask why after 20 years,
00:13:43 are you still calling us the wrong name?
00:13:45 What is the right name of somebody?
00:13:47 They prefer Afghans.
00:13:48 Afghans.
00:13:49 Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency.
00:13:52 And so.
00:13:53 I just dodged a bullet
00:13:54 because I was gonna say Afghans.
00:13:54 That’s cool, no, no, no, yeah, I hear you.
00:13:56 That’s really great to know.
00:13:57 Yeah, and it’s, again, I think,
00:13:59 but I would emphasize that people are quite open
00:14:02 and, you know, it’s a whole region of incredible diversity
00:14:06 and respect for linguistic pluralism actually.
00:14:09 So I think that, you know,
00:14:11 but I also appreciate that in this context,
00:14:14 when there’s a lot of pain, you know,
00:14:16 in the Afghan diaspora community in particular,
00:14:18 you know, being called the wrong name after 20 years
00:14:22 when they already feel so betrayed at this moment,
00:14:24 you know, just kind of,
00:14:25 if one follows this on social media,
00:14:27 that is one kind of hot wire, right?
00:14:32 Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation
00:14:35 is because, yes, it is true
00:14:37 that there are certain things when mispronounced
00:14:39 kind of reveal that you don’t care enough
00:14:42 to pronounce correctly.
00:14:44 So I don’t know enough to pronounce correctly
00:14:47 and you dismiss the culture and the people,
00:14:49 which I think as per your writing is something that,
00:14:54 if it’s okay, I’ll go with Afghanistan
00:14:57 just because I’m used to it.
00:14:58 I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan.
00:15:01 Yeah, that’s great.
00:15:02 As you do in your writing,
00:15:04 Afghanistan suffers from much misunderstanding
00:15:07 from the rest of the world.
00:15:08 But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
00:15:13 the whole region that gives us context
00:15:17 for the events of 9 11.
00:15:18 Right, right.
00:15:20 So yeah, if we go back to that day
00:15:21 and the weeks that followed,
00:15:23 in my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent,
00:15:28 which was interesting.
00:15:28 I mean, they were,
00:15:29 so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US
00:15:33 about 9 11, right?
00:15:34 Everyone to know what was the relationship
00:15:36 between the civic violence and that religious tradition
00:15:39 with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right?
00:15:45 That became the issue, of course,
00:15:47 for American security institutions,
00:15:49 for local state and police institutions, right?
00:15:53 I mean, it became the,
00:15:54 I think it was the question
00:15:55 that most Americans had on their mind.
00:15:56 So again, I didn’t imagine myself as someone
00:15:59 who had all the answers, of course,
00:16:00 but given my background
00:16:02 and coming at this from Russian history,
00:16:04 coming at this from studying empire
00:16:06 and trying to think about the region broadly,
00:16:10 I was very alarmed at the way that the conversation went.
00:16:12 Can I ask you a question?
00:16:13 What was your feeling on that morning of 9 11?
00:16:19 Who did this?
00:16:20 Isn’t that a natural feeling?
00:16:22 It’s coupled with fear of what’s next,
00:16:25 especially when you’re in DC,
00:16:27 but also who is this?
00:16:28 Is this an accident?
00:16:30 Is this a deliberate terrorist attack?
00:16:32 Is this domestic?
00:16:34 What were your thoughts of the options
00:16:37 and the internal ranking given your expertise?
00:16:41 I suppose I was taken by the narrative
00:16:44 that this was international.
00:16:46 I mean, I’d also lived in New York
00:16:47 during one of the first bombings in 94
00:16:50 of the World Trade Center.
00:16:52 So it was clear to me that a radical community
00:16:53 had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of,
00:16:58 and I immediately thought it was a kind of blow
00:17:03 to American power.
00:17:04 And I was drawn by the symbolism of it.
00:17:08 If you think of it as an act,
00:17:09 it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will,
00:17:13 a kind of a way of speaking to,
00:17:16 from a position of relative weakness,
00:17:18 speaking to an imperial power.
00:17:21 And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that
00:17:25 with horrific real world consequences
00:17:28 for all those innocent victims,
00:17:30 for the firemen, for the police,
00:17:32 and just the horror of the moment.
00:17:35 So I did see it as transcending the United States,
00:17:39 but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily
00:17:42 to do fundamentally about Afghanistan
00:17:45 and the history of the region that I’d been studying
00:17:48 and the community people that I knew
00:17:49 who were not particularly religious.
00:17:52 The guys I hung out with actually wore me out
00:17:54 because they wanted to go out every night.
00:17:56 They wanted to party every night.
00:17:57 Drinking?
00:17:58 Yep.
00:17:59 We had discussions about alcohol.
00:18:00 I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its, you know.
00:18:02 Drinking.
00:18:03 It’s drinking.
00:18:04 You know, it’s.
00:18:05 That’s something to look forward to.
00:18:06 So I do want to travel to that part of the world.
00:18:08 When was the last time you were in that part of the world?
00:18:11 Early 2000s.
00:18:12 Well, in the mid 2000s, 2010s.
00:18:14 So wait, so by the way, what drinking?
00:18:16 Vodka?
00:18:17 What’s the, what’s the weapon of choice?
00:18:20 Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice.
00:18:26 And that, and it informs, you know, and it’s,
00:18:28 but the fascinating thing, you know, as a student,
00:18:30 is what you’re observing as a non Muslim.
00:18:32 You know, I’m a non Russian.
00:18:34 I’m, this is all, you know, culturally new to me.
00:18:38 And I’m, you know, a student of all that, right?
00:18:40 As a grad student doing my work there.
00:18:42 So you’re like Jane Goodall of vodka and Russia.
00:18:45 That’s right.
00:18:46 You’re just observing.
00:18:46 That’s right.
00:18:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:18:48 You get the Samogon, the grass vodka.
00:18:51 You get, you know, I have,
00:18:53 I’ve had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier
00:18:56 that I’m not proud of, you know.
00:19:00 But you got to know the people
00:19:01 and some of them from, from, from.
00:19:03 Yeah, yeah.
00:19:03 But intellectually, so the thing, I mean,
00:19:05 the fascinating thing there was that, and just as a,
00:19:08 I mean, there’s a whole, you know, I’m a historian, right?
00:19:09 But there, there are great contributions by, you know,
00:19:14 anthropologists and ethnographers who,
00:19:15 who’ve gone across the planet
00:19:16 and try to understand how Muslims understand the tradition
00:19:20 at different contexts.
00:19:21 So many Uzbeks will say, you know,
00:19:25 this is part of our national culture
00:19:27 to drink and eat as we please, right?
00:19:29 And yet I’m a very devout Muslim.
00:19:31 And so of course you can encounter
00:19:33 other Muslim communities who won’t touch alcohol, right?
00:19:37 But it’s become kind of, I think it’s very much,
00:19:40 you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression
00:19:42 in each of these places.
00:19:43 And so there are ways of thinking,
00:19:45 ways of performing, ways of, you know, enjoying oneself
00:19:49 that are shared across Soviet and former Soviet space
00:19:53 to this day, right?
00:19:54 And you’ve written also about Muslims in the Soviet Union.
00:19:57 That’s right.
00:19:59 There’s an article that, there was a paywall,
00:20:02 so I couldn’t read it and I really want to read it.
00:20:04 It’s a Moscow in the mosque or something like that.
00:20:11 By the way, just another tangent on a tangent.
00:20:15 So I bought all your books.
00:20:16 I love them very much.
00:20:18 One of the reasons I bought them and read many parts
00:20:21 is because they’re easy to buy.
00:20:24 Unlike articles, every single website has a paywall.
00:20:28 So it’s very frustrating to read brilliant scholars
00:20:32 such as yourself.
00:20:35 I wish there was one fee I could pay everywhere.
00:20:37 I don’t care what that fee is,
00:20:38 where it gives, allows me to read
00:20:41 some of your brilliant writing.
00:20:42 No, no, thank you, I hear you.
00:20:43 I think moving toward more kind of open source
00:20:47 formatting stuff I think is what a lot of journals
00:20:49 are thinking about now and I think it’s definitely
00:20:51 for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship
00:20:54 that’s definitely an important thing
00:20:55 that we should all think about.
00:20:56 And I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers
00:21:01 to do that, so I appreciate that.
00:21:02 This is what I’m doing here.
00:21:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good, I appreciate it.
00:21:06 So your thought was Afghanistan is not going to be
00:21:11 to be the center, the source of where.
00:21:14 It’s not the center of this and invading that country
00:21:16 isn’t gonna fix the toxic milestone of politics
00:21:22 that produced 9 11, right?
00:21:25 I’m just thinking of some of the personalities,
00:21:26 just thinking about going back to the Tashkent story
00:21:28 which I’ll end with.
00:21:29 I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things
00:21:34 and then asking questions about it
00:21:35 and trying to understand through their eyes
00:21:39 what the tradition means to them.
00:21:40 And then we had a very narrow conversation
00:21:43 about what Islam is that generated, immediately exploded
00:21:48 on the day of 9 11, right?
00:21:50 And then of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam
00:21:53 and Muslims was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.
00:21:59 So it became a perfect storm I think of demonization
00:22:03 that didn’t sit with what I knew about the tradition
00:22:06 and with actual people that I had known
00:22:08 because then going back to, I mean, there were other friends
00:22:10 and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan
00:22:13 and Tashkent for a moment, I mean,
00:22:15 just thought about my friends who had been,
00:22:18 who had suffered a great deal in their short lives,
00:22:20 who had been cast aside from country to country,
00:22:24 but had found a place in Tashkent
00:22:26 with some relative stability.
00:22:28 And they wanted to go out every night
00:22:31 and they explained, one friend,
00:22:33 we talked about it with the alcohol and all that
00:22:34 and he didn’t get crazy, but he was like,
00:22:37 you can drink, but just don’t get drunk.
00:22:38 That’s permissible within Islam, right?
00:22:42 And he was an ethnic Pashtun.
00:22:44 I think Uzbeks had a different view,
00:22:47 often the more vodka the better,
00:22:49 and it doesn’t violate, as I understand Islam.
00:22:51 So even, it’s kind of a silly example,
00:22:54 but it’s just an illustration of the ways in which
00:22:56 different communities, different generations,
00:22:57 different people can come at this very complex rich tradition
00:23:01 in so many different ways.
00:23:02 So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are,
00:23:06 or any kind of expert, whatever,
00:23:08 it’s always disconcerting to see
00:23:10 your field of specialization be flattened, right?
00:23:13 And then be flattened and then be turned
00:23:15 to arguments for violence, right?
00:23:18 Mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate.
00:23:22 Yeah, that’s right.
00:23:23 And depression. And hurt at that moment, and pain.
00:23:25 So, I mean, that day I vividly remember,
00:23:28 I sat with other PhD historians in different fields.
00:23:32 We, oddly enough, had lunch that day
00:23:35 and it kind of deserted Washington.
00:23:37 Some place was open when we went.
00:23:39 And we just thought, you know,
00:23:40 this is going to kind of open up
00:23:42 like a great mall of destruction.
00:23:45 And, you know, the American state is going to destroy
00:23:51 and it’s going to destroy in this geography.
00:23:53 And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.
00:23:56 And then I think if one, you know,
00:23:59 I’d been doing some research on Afghanistan then,
00:24:02 I was kind of shifting to the South
00:24:03 and I’d been looking at the Taliban from afar
00:24:08 for some years.
00:24:08 And, you know, I think it’s clear now
00:24:11 that in retrospect there were opportunities
00:24:14 for alternative policies at that moment.
00:24:16 So what should the conversation have been like?
00:24:20 What should we have done differently?
00:24:23 Because, you know, from a perspective of the time,
00:24:28 the United States was invaded by a foreign force.
00:24:33 What is the proper response
00:24:35 or what is the proper conversation
00:24:36 about the proper response at the time, you think?
00:24:39 You know, I know my colleague at Stanford,
00:24:41 Condoleezza Rice would tell me this is above my pay grade.
00:24:44 And, you know, she makes a point in her classes
00:24:46 to talk about how difficult decision making is
00:24:50 under such intense pressure.
00:24:52 And I appreciate that.
00:24:53 You know, I am a historian who sits safely in my office.
00:24:57 I don’t like battlefields.
00:24:58 I don’t like taking risks.
00:25:01 So I can see all those limits.
00:25:02 You know, I’m not a military expert.
00:25:05 I’ve been accused of being a spy wherever I’ve gone
00:25:07 because of the way I look
00:25:08 and because of my nationality and so on, but I’m not a spy.
00:25:10 So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise
00:25:12 of all those communities.
00:25:13 But I think they acted out of ignorance.
00:25:16 They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the,
00:25:19 in a way there was a compensatory aspect
00:25:22 of this decision making.
00:25:23 I mean, the Bush administration failed.
00:25:27 This was an extraordinary failure, right?
00:25:29 So if we start.
00:25:30 In which way?
00:25:31 Can we break down the nation?
00:25:32 Of intelligence.
00:25:32 I mean, if they, you know,
00:25:33 if you follow the story of Richard Clarke.
00:25:36 Who’s Richard Clarke?
00:25:37 He was a national security expert
00:25:40 who was tasked with following Al Qaeda,
00:25:43 who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration
00:25:47 that he passed on to the George W. Bush administration.
00:25:50 And if you look at the work of Condoleezza Rice,
00:25:53 she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaywalled
00:25:56 foreign affairs article that you can read,
00:25:58 announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook.
00:26:02 And it was all about great powers.
00:26:05 It was about the rise of China.
00:26:06 It was about Russia.
00:26:07 I mean, there’s definitely a kind of hangover
00:26:10 of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman.
00:26:16 Who spoke, you know, the Clinton administration
00:26:17 repeated again and again the idea of making sure
00:26:19 the bear stayed in his cage.
00:26:22 Which is why the United States threw a lifeline
00:26:26 to the Central Asian states, hoping to have pipelines,
00:26:31 hoping to shore up their national sovereignty
00:26:34 as a way of containing Russia initially, but also Iran,
00:26:39 you know, which sits to the south and west.
00:26:42 And then peripherally looking down the road
00:26:43 to China to the east.
00:26:45 So the bear is what, like Russia?
00:26:50 Or is it kind of like some weird combination
00:26:53 of Russia, Iran, and China?
00:26:55 The bear is Russia and Russia is this thing.
00:27:00 I’m trying to characterize the imagination
00:27:01 of some of these national security figures.
00:27:04 This is an image formed in the Cold War.
00:27:07 I mean, it has deeper seeds in European
00:27:09 and Western intellectual thought that go back
00:27:12 at least to the 1850s and the reign of Tsar Nicholas I.
00:27:17 When we first get this language about the Russian Empire
00:27:21 as this kind of evil polity.
00:27:24 Obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism.
00:27:29 But the Clinton folks kept that alive.
00:27:30 They wanted to make sure that American power
00:27:34 would be unmatched.
00:27:36 And they, being creatures of the Cold War themselves,
00:27:39 they looked to Russia as a recession power
00:27:42 well before Putin was even thought of.
00:27:45 Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep,
00:27:49 profound historical piece in Rambo.
00:27:52 It’s probably, this conflict has to do
00:27:55 with another Sylvester Stallone movie,
00:27:57 a Rocky IV, which is also historically accurate
00:28:00 and based on, it’s basically a documentary.
00:28:03 So there is something about the American power,
00:28:07 even at the level of Condoleezza Rice,
00:28:10 these respected deep kind of leaders and thinkers
00:28:15 about history and the future,
00:28:17 where they like to have competition
00:28:20 with other superpowers and almost conjure up superpowers,
00:28:26 even when those countries don’t maybe at the time
00:28:31 at least deserve the label of superpower.
00:28:33 That’s right, great point.
00:28:34 Yeah, they’re all some points.
00:28:35 So yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many, many exports.
00:28:39 I mean, my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Cotkin,
00:28:43 was then writing great things about how,
00:28:46 if you look at Russia’s economy, the scale of its GDP,
00:28:49 its capacity to actually act globally,
00:28:52 it’s all quite limited.
00:28:54 But Condoleezza Rice and the people around her
00:28:58 came into power with George W. Bush,
00:29:00 thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era
00:29:03 would be those of the past, right?
00:29:06 Richard Clark and others within the administration
00:29:08 warned that, in fact, there is this group
00:29:10 that has declared war against the United States
00:29:12 and they are coming for us.
00:29:14 The FBI had been following these people around
00:29:17 for many months.
00:29:18 So by the time George W. Bush comes to power,
00:29:21 lots of Al Qaeda activists are, well, not lots,
00:29:23 but perhaps a dozen or so,
00:29:26 are already training in the United States, right?
00:29:30 And what we knew immediately from the biographies
00:29:31 of some of the characters of the attackers of 9.11,
00:29:34 it was a hodgepodge of people from across the planet,
00:29:37 but most of them were Saudi, right?
00:29:39 And that was known very early on
00:29:41 or presumed very early on.
00:29:43 So again, if we go back to your big question
00:29:44 about the geography, why Afghanistan?
00:29:47 It didn’t add up, right?
00:29:48 It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target.
00:29:51 It was a place to have explosions,
00:29:54 to seemingly recapture American supremacy.
00:29:58 And also, I think, you know, there was,
00:29:59 in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge.
00:30:02 And this was a place to have some casualties,
00:30:05 have some explosions.
00:30:07 And then I think, you know, restore the legitimacy
00:30:09 of the Bush administration
00:30:11 by showing that we are in charge, we will pay.
00:30:14 And I think that was a very old fashioned punitive dimension,
00:30:17 which rests upon the presumption
00:30:19 that if we intimidate these people,
00:30:21 they’ll know not to try us again, right?
00:30:23 All these, I would suggest, are all misreadings
00:30:25 of an organization that was always global.
00:30:28 It had no real center.
00:30:29 I mean, it called itself the center.
00:30:30 That’s one way to translate Al Qaeda.
00:30:32 But that center was really in the imagination.
00:30:36 Bin Laden bounced around from country to country.
00:30:40 And crucially, I think a dimension
00:30:42 that I don’t claim to know anything new about,
00:30:45 but has endured as a kind of doubt,
00:30:47 is the role of Saudi Arabia and the fact that, you know,
00:30:50 the muscle in that operation of 9 11 was Saudi, right?
00:30:55 I mean, this was a Saudi operation with,
00:30:57 if one thinks, again, just on the basis of nationalities,
00:31:00 Saudis, you know, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy.
00:31:04 And the Egyptian guy, you know,
00:31:06 had been studying in Germany.
00:31:08 He was an urban planner, right?
00:31:10 So if one thinks of the imagination of this,
00:31:12 I mean, in fact, if you look at the kind of typology
00:31:15 of the figures who have led this radical movement,
00:31:19 I mean, if you think of the global jihadists,
00:31:22 they are mostly not religious scholars, right?
00:31:25 Bin Laden was not a religious scholar.
00:31:27 His training was an engineer.
00:31:29 You know, some biographers claim
00:31:30 that he was a playboy for much of his youth.
00:31:32 But really, these ideas,
00:31:34 I think that’s probably why they chose the Twin Towers.
00:31:37 I mean, this is an imagination fueled
00:31:41 by training and engineering.
00:31:43 I mean, a lot of the, you know, the sociology,
00:31:46 if you do a kind of post biography
00:31:47 of a lot of these leading jihadists,
00:31:50 their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship,
00:31:53 but actually in engineering
00:31:54 and kind of practical sciences and professions.
00:31:57 Medical doctors are among their ranks.
00:32:00 And so there’s long been a tension between Islamic scholars
00:32:03 who devote their whole lives to study of texts
00:32:05 and commentary and interpretation.
00:32:08 And then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals,
00:32:10 new Muslim authorities,
00:32:12 who actually have secular university educations,
00:32:16 often in the natural sciences
00:32:17 or engineering and technical fields,
00:32:19 who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will,
00:32:22 to what Muslim scholars called the religious sciences,
00:32:26 which are, you know, a field of kind of ambiguity
00:32:30 and of gradation and of subtlety and nuance,
00:32:33 and really of decades of training
00:32:36 before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues
00:32:39 like whether or not it’s legitimate
00:32:41 to take someone else’s life.
00:32:43 With the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden?
00:32:47 Bin Laden was a visitor.
00:32:50 If you look at his whole life course,
00:32:53 part of it is an enigma still.
00:32:55 You know, he is from a Saudi elite family,
00:32:59 but a family that kind of has a Yemeni Arabian sea
00:33:03 kind of genealogy.
00:33:07 So the family has no relationship to Afghanistan,
00:33:10 past or present, except at some point in 1980s,
00:33:13 when he went like thousands of other young Saudis,
00:33:16 first to Pakistan, to places like Bashour on the border,
00:33:20 where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.
00:33:25 And for the most part, the Arabs who went
00:33:29 opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.
00:33:32 The bin Laden family had long been
00:33:35 based in engineering construction.
00:33:37 So it’s thought that he used some of those skills
00:33:39 and resources and connections to build things.
00:33:44 We have images of him firing a gun for show, right?
00:33:48 It’s not clear that he ever actually fired a gun
00:33:50 in what we would call combat.
00:33:53 Again, I could be corrected by this.
00:33:55 And I think there are competing accounts of who he was.
00:33:58 So he’s kind of a, I mean, many of these figures
00:34:01 who sit at the pinnacle of this world are fictive heroes
00:34:05 that people map their aspirations onto, right?
00:34:08 And so people like Mullah Omar,
00:34:10 who was then head of the Taliban,
00:34:13 was rarely seen in public.
00:34:15 The current head of the Taliban
00:34:17 is almost never seen in public.
00:34:19 I mean, there’s a kind of studied era of mystery
00:34:22 that they’ve cultivated to make themselves available
00:34:25 for all kinds of fantasies, right?
00:34:27 Do you think he believed, so his religious beliefs,
00:34:33 do you think he believed some of the more extreme things
00:34:39 that enable him to commit terrorist acts?
00:34:42 Maybe put another way,
00:34:44 what makes a man want to become a terrorist?
00:34:46 And what aspect of bin Laden made him want to be a terrorist?
00:34:51 Great.
00:34:52 I mean, let me offer some observations.
00:34:54 I think there are others who know more about bin Laden
00:34:57 and have far more expertise in Al Qaeda.
00:34:59 So I’m coming at this in an adjacent way,
00:35:04 kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training.
00:35:06 So this is my two cents, so bear with me.
00:35:10 I don’t have the authoritative account for this.
00:35:12 Which in itself is fascinating
00:35:14 because you’re a historian of Afghanistan,
00:35:16 and the fact that bin Laden isn’t a huge part
00:35:21 of your focus of study just means
00:35:23 that bin Laden is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan
00:35:28 except that America made him a key part
00:35:31 of the history of Afghanistan.
00:35:32 I would endorse that.
00:35:33 Definitely, that’s it.
00:35:34 I mean, you’ve put it in a very pithy, pithy way.
00:35:37 Yeah, so listen, so he was an engineer.
00:35:40 He was said to be a playboy
00:35:42 who spent a lot of cash from his family.
00:35:45 Like many young Saudis and from some other countries,
00:35:48 he was inspired by this idea
00:35:50 that there was jihad in Afghanistan.
00:35:52 It was gonna take down one of the two superpowers,
00:35:55 the Soviet Union,
00:35:57 who the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands,
00:36:01 perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians
00:36:05 during that conflict.
00:36:07 It’s very plausible and very completely understandable
00:36:13 that many young people would see that cause
00:36:16 as the righteous, pious fighters for jihad
00:36:21 who call themselves mujahideen
00:36:23 are ready against this evil empire
00:36:26 of a godless Soviet empire that,
00:36:30 I mean, there’s even confusion
00:36:31 about what the Soviets wanted.
00:36:32 Now we know much more about what the Kremlin wanted,
00:36:34 what Brezhnev wanted,
00:36:36 and how the Soviet elite thought about it
00:36:37 because we have many more of their records.
00:36:39 But from the outside, for Jimmy Carter and then for Reagan,
00:36:42 it looked like the Soviets were making a move on South Asia
00:36:47 because they wanted to get to the warm water ports,
00:36:50 which Russians always want supposedly, right?
00:36:52 And it was kind of a move to take over our oil
00:36:56 and to assert world domination, right?
00:36:58 So there are lots of ways in which this looked like
00:37:01 good versus evil in Congress.
00:37:03 It looked like kind of Vietnam again,
00:37:06 but this time this is our chance to get them.
00:37:08 And there are lots of great quotes,
00:37:11 I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes
00:37:13 that American policymakers made about
00:37:16 wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam.
00:37:18 So the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars
00:37:23 into this project to back the Mujahideen,
00:37:25 who Reagan called freedom fighters.
00:37:27 And so Bin Laden was part of that universe,
00:37:29 he’s part of that,
00:37:30 he’s swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen
00:37:33 who out of size did 95% of the fighting,
00:37:36 they’re the ones who died,
00:37:37 they’re the ones who defeated the Red Army, right?
00:37:40 The Arabs who were there did a little fighting,
00:37:43 but a lot of it was for their purposes.
00:37:45 It was to get experience,
00:37:47 it was to kind of create their reputations
00:37:50 like Bin Laden began to force for himself
00:37:52 of being spoken for a global project.
00:37:55 Because by the late 80s,
00:37:57 when Bin Laden I think was more active
00:37:58 and began conspiring with people from other Arab countries,
00:38:02 the idea that Gorbachev came to power in 85,
00:38:06 he’s like, let’s get out of here,
00:38:07 this is draining the Soviet budget,
00:38:09 it’s an embarrassment,
00:38:11 we didn’t think about this properly,
00:38:13 let’s focus on restoring the party
00:38:17 and strengthening the Soviet Union,
00:38:19 let’s get out of this costly war,
00:38:20 it’s a waste, it’s not worth it,
00:38:23 where you don’t lose anything
00:38:24 by getting out of Afghanistan.
00:38:26 And so their retreat was quite effective and successful
00:38:31 from the Soviet point of view, right?
00:38:33 It’s not what we’re seeing now.
00:38:35 What year was the retreat?
00:38:37 I mean, it began,
00:38:38 so Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985,
00:38:41 he was a generation younger than the other guys,
00:38:44 he was a critic of the system,
00:38:46 he didn’t want to abolish it,
00:38:47 he wanted to reform it,
00:38:48 he was a true believer in Soviet socialism
00:38:51 and in the party as a monopolist, right?
00:38:56 But he was critical of the old guard
00:38:58 and recognized that the party had to change
00:39:00 and the whole system had to change to continue to compete.
00:39:04 And so Afghanistan was one element of this.
00:39:07 And so he pushed the Afghan elites
00:39:11 that Moscow was backing to basically say,
00:39:14 listen, we’re gonna share power.
00:39:16 And so a figure named Najibullah,
00:39:19 who was a Soviet trained intelligence specialist
00:39:23 sitting in Kabul agreed.
00:39:26 And he said, we need to have a more kind of
00:39:28 pluralistic accommodations approach to our enemies
00:39:33 who are backed by the US mainly,
00:39:36 sitting in Pakistan, sitting in Iran,
00:39:39 backed by these Arabs to a degree,
00:39:40 getting money from Saudi.
00:39:42 And he said, let’s draw some of them into the government
00:39:45 and basically have a kind of unity government
00:39:48 that would make some space to the opposition.
00:39:50 And for the most part, with US backing,
00:39:53 with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing
00:39:56 and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no,
00:39:58 we’re not going to reconcile,
00:40:00 we’re gonna push you off the cliff.
00:40:02 And so that story goes on from at least 1987,
00:40:06 the last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989,
00:40:11 but the Najibullah government holds on for three more years.
00:40:15 It is the, I mean, they’re still getting some help
00:40:17 from the Soviet Union,
00:40:18 its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly.
00:40:21 And it’s not till 1992 that they lose.
00:40:27 And then Mujahideen come to power,
00:40:29 they immediately, they’re deeply fractured.
00:40:33 And that’s where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll.
00:40:35 That’s right.
00:40:36 And he’s part of the mix, but he’s also mobile.
00:40:37 So he at one point goes, is in Sudan.
00:40:42 He’s moving from place to place.
00:40:44 His people are all over the world.
00:40:45 In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the,
00:40:48 once the Mujahideen take power,
00:40:50 they have difficulties with Arab fighters too.
00:40:52 And they don’t want them coming in and messing
00:40:54 with Mujahideen regarding this as like,
00:40:57 this is an Afghan national state that we’re gonna build.
00:40:59 It’s gonna be Islamic, it’s gonna be an Islamic state,
00:41:01 but you can’t interfere with us.
00:41:03 And so there are always tensions.
00:41:05 And so the Arabs are always kind of,
00:41:07 I would say they were Arab fighters were always interlopers.
00:41:11 Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money,
00:41:13 send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons,
00:41:17 but they were never gonna let this be like a Saudi
00:41:20 or Egyptian or whatever project.
00:41:23 But then many of those fighters went home,
00:41:26 they went back to Syria, they went back to Egypt.
00:41:29 Some wanted to go back to the Saudi Arabia,
00:41:30 but the Saudis were very careful.
00:41:31 I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan
00:41:33 as a kind of safety valve.
00:41:34 In fact, they had fundraisers on television,
00:41:37 they chartered jets.
00:41:38 They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan,
00:41:42 get out in the shower and say, go fight.
00:41:44 And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy,
00:41:48 very cleverly I think, created a kind of escape valve
00:41:52 for would be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right?
00:41:55 Just send them abroad.
00:41:56 You wanna fight Jihad, go do that somewhere else.
00:41:59 Don’t bother the kingdom.
00:42:01 But all this became dicier in the early 90s
00:42:04 when some of these guys came back home
00:42:06 and some of the scholars around them said,
00:42:09 we’ve defeated the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost.
00:42:11 And I think part of the dynamic we see today
00:42:12 is that the Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration
00:42:17 for people who think, look, we beat the Soviets,
00:42:20 now we beat the Americans.
00:42:21 And so already watching the Soviet retreat
00:42:24 across this bridge, back into Uzbekistan,
00:42:26 if you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving,
00:42:30 a lot of people interpreted this as like,
00:42:32 we are going to change the world
00:42:34 and now we’re training to the Americans.
00:42:36 And our local national governments
00:42:38 are backed by the Americans.
00:42:39 So let’s start with those places
00:42:42 and then let’s go strike the belly of the beast,
00:42:44 which is America, which is New York.
00:42:47 And going back to Bin Laden,
00:42:48 your question about what motivates him,
00:42:50 what motivated him, again,
00:42:52 he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar.
00:42:57 And that I think, when this comes up in our classes,
00:43:00 I think especially young people,
00:43:01 I mean, people who weren’t even born on 9 11,
00:43:03 I mean, they’re shocked, they see his appearance,
00:43:05 they see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf
00:43:10 of Arabic books, he’s got the Kalashnikov,
00:43:13 he’s got what looks like
00:43:14 a religious scholars library behind him, right?
00:43:16 But if you look at his words,
00:43:19 I mean, one fascinating thing about just our politics
00:43:21 and just one thing that kind of sums all this up,
00:43:22 I mean, the fact that on 9 11,
00:43:25 we had to have a few people, a few experts,
00:43:29 people like Burnett Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert.
00:43:32 So that was one way in which I think,
00:43:33 I’m not faulting him personally,
00:43:35 but it’s just one way in which that relationship
00:43:37 appeared to be formed, right?
00:43:40 Of linking Afghanistan to that moment.
00:43:44 If one looks actually at what Bin Laden was saying and doing,
00:43:47 people like Richard Clarke were studying this,
00:43:49 there were Arab leaders, the Arab press was watching this
00:43:51 because he gave some of his first interviews
00:43:54 to a few Arab newspaper outlets.
00:43:57 But speaking of our American kind of monolingualism,
00:44:00 a lot of what he was saying wasn’t known.
00:44:01 And so I think for several years,
00:44:04 people weren’t reading what Bin Laden said.
00:44:07 I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic,
00:44:10 but there was great anxiety around translating his works.
00:44:13 So we have Mon conf, we have all this other stuff,
00:44:15 you can buy the collected works of Lenin, Stalin, Mao,
00:44:18 whatever you want in whatever language you want.
00:44:20 But Bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.
00:44:22 So it was only a Verso in the UK
00:44:25 that published a famous volume called
00:44:29 Messages to the World,
00:44:30 which was the first compendium of Bin Laden’s writings.
00:44:33 So he has a Mein Kampf.
00:44:35 He has a type, does he have a thing?
00:44:38 I mean, it’s a kind of collected works.
00:44:39 It’s a collected works of his, yeah.
00:44:41 Well, like a blog, like a collection of articles versus.
00:44:46 Yeah, these are interviews, these are his missives,
00:44:49 his declarations, his decrees, right?
00:44:54 But I think just in terms of if we zoom out for a second
00:44:58 about American policy choices and so on,
00:45:00 the powers that be didn’t trust us
00:45:02 to know what he was really about.
00:45:04 I put it that way.
00:45:05 And I don’t say that in a conspiratorial sense.
00:45:06 I just think that it was a taboo.
00:45:11 I think people, there was a kind of consensus
00:45:14 that trust us, we know how to fight Al Qaeda
00:45:20 and you don’t need to know what they’re about
00:45:21 because they’re crazy.
00:45:22 They’re fanatics, they’re fundamentalists.
00:45:24 They hate us, remember that language, us versus them.
00:45:28 But if you read Bin Laden, that’s when it gets messy.
00:45:30 That’s where the Bin Laden’s argumentation
00:45:34 is not fundamentally about Islam.
00:45:37 And if you were sitting here with an Islamic scholar,
00:45:39 he would say, depending on which Islamic scholar,
00:45:43 they would tend to go through and dissect
00:45:45 and negate 99% of the arguments
00:45:48 that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?
00:45:51 But what strikes me as an historian who’s again,
00:45:53 looking at this adjacently, if you read Bin Laden,
00:45:57 I mean, the arguments that he make are,
00:45:59 first of all, they’re sophisticated.
00:46:01 They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics.
00:46:07 He uses terms like imperialism.
00:46:09 He knows something about world history.
00:46:12 He knows something about geography.
00:46:14 So imperialism is the enemy for him
00:46:16 or what’s the nature of the enemy?
00:46:17 It’s an amalgam and like a good politician,
00:46:21 which is what I would call him,
00:46:23 he is adept at speaking in different ways
00:46:27 to different audiences.
00:46:28 So if you look at the context in which he speaks,
00:46:30 if you look at messages to the world,
00:46:33 if you look at his writings and you can zoom out now
00:46:35 and we now have compendia of the writings
00:46:37 of Al Qaeda more broadly, you can purchase these,
00:46:42 they’re basically primary source collections.
00:46:45 We now have that for the Taliban.
00:46:47 I mean, what’s fascinating about,
00:46:49 I think if you’d like this culture,
00:46:52 acknowledging it’s very diverse internally
00:46:55 is that these people are representatives
00:46:58 of political movements who seek followers.
00:47:01 They speak, they often are very,
00:47:05 I’d say skilled at visual imagery.
00:47:08 And especially now, I mean, what’s fascinating is that,
00:47:10 I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions.
00:47:12 They used to blow up VCR, videotapes.
00:47:19 They used to string audio and video cassettes
00:47:22 from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right?
00:47:25 That we’re killing this nefarious, infidel technology
00:47:30 that is doing the work of Satan.
00:47:32 And yet today, and plus, I mean,
00:47:34 one of the keys to the Taliban success
00:47:35 is that they got really good at using media.
00:47:38 I mean, brilliant at using the written word,
00:47:42 the spoken word, music, actually.
00:47:45 And Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard.
00:47:48 And these guys have studied how to create drama,
00:47:52 how to speak to modern users.
00:47:53 I mean, Islamic State did this.
00:47:55 I mean, the role of media, new media.
00:47:57 I mean, I follow and I am followed by
00:48:01 senior Taliban leaders, which is bizarre on Twitter.
00:48:06 On Twitter?
00:48:07 I don’t know why they care about me.
00:48:08 I’m nothing.
00:48:10 They follow you on Twitter.
00:48:12 I don’t know why.
00:48:13 This is no joke.
00:48:14 This is no joke.
00:48:15 So they’re part of our modern world
00:48:17 and it’s how they talk and it’s how they recruit.
00:48:18 And this is part of the, this is why they are.
00:48:20 So Ben Laden, if you read Ben Laden,
00:48:22 he speaks multiple languages, I would say.
00:48:24 It’s environmentalism.
00:48:28 The West is bad because we destroyed the planet.
00:48:31 The West is bad because we abuse women.
00:48:34 So in class, especially female students
00:48:38 are very surprised to learn
00:48:40 and actually say this feminist argument is not,
00:48:45 we start with, this is a murder.
00:48:47 This is a person who has taken human life,
00:48:49 innocent life over and over again.
00:48:51 And he is aspirationally genocidal,
00:48:56 but let’s try to understand what he’s about.
00:48:57 So we walk through the texts, read them
00:48:59 and people are shocked to learn that
00:49:02 it’s not just about quotations in the Quran
00:49:05 strung together in some irrational fashion.
00:49:08 He knows, I mean, at the core,
00:49:10 I’d say is the problem of human suffering.
00:49:12 And he has a geography of that, that is mostly Muslim,
00:49:15 but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir, right?
00:49:17 So if you have a student in your class,
00:49:19 who’s from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir,
00:49:22 he or she will say, that’s not entirely inaccurate.
00:49:26 The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir.
00:49:31 Pakistan is doing that too.
00:49:33 Palestine is an issue, right?
00:49:35 So you have in the American university setting,
00:49:37 people across the spectrum who get that,
00:49:41 Palestinians have had a raw deal.
00:49:43 And so it’s a, victimhood is central
00:49:46 and it’s Muslim victimhood, which is primary,
00:49:50 but as a number of scholars have written,
00:49:52 and I definitely think this is a framework
00:49:55 for what this is useful.
00:49:56 I mean, in this kind of vocabulary,
00:49:58 in this framing, this narrative,
00:50:01 today, in today’s world,
00:50:03 if we think of today’s world being post Cold War,
00:50:06 91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars
00:50:12 and seeing the visuals of that,
00:50:12 I think that the American public
00:50:14 has been shielded from some of this,
00:50:15 but if you look at just the carnage of the Iraqi army
00:50:20 that George H.W. Bush produced, right?
00:50:24 Or you think of the images of the suffering
00:50:26 of Iraqi children under George H.W. Bush’s sanctions,
00:50:31 US British airstrikes,
00:50:33 then you have Madeleine Albright answer a question
00:50:36 on 16 Minutes saying,
00:50:37 do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids
00:50:40 is worth it?
00:50:41 Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein?
00:50:44 And she says on camera, yes, it’s worth it to me.
00:50:47 If you put that all together,
00:50:49 I mean, American kids, and of course the American public,
00:50:52 they’re not always aware of those facts of global history,
00:50:55 but these guys are,
00:50:57 and they very capably use these images, use these tropes,
00:51:02 and use facts.
00:51:03 I mean, some of these things are not deniable.
00:51:05 I mean, these estimates about the number
00:51:07 of Iraqi civilian children dead,
00:51:10 that came from, I think, the Lancet,
00:51:12 and it came from, those are estimates,
00:51:13 but looking at this from the point of view of Amman,
00:51:18 of Jaffa, of Nairobi,
00:51:22 you can just think around the planet,
00:51:25 and if you see yourself as the victim
00:51:26 of this great imperial power,
00:51:29 you can see why especially young men
00:51:31 would be drawn to a road of self sacrifice.
00:51:37 And the idea is that in killing others,
00:51:41 you are making them feel how you feel,
00:51:46 because they won’t listen to your arguments reasonably,
00:51:49 because they won’t recognize Palestinian suffering,
00:51:52 Bosnian suffering, right?
00:51:54 Chechen suffering.
00:51:55 You go across the planet, right?
00:51:57 Because they won’t recognize our suffering,
00:51:59 we’re gonna speak to you in the only language
00:52:01 that you understand, and that’s violence.
00:52:04 And look at the violence of the post 1991 world, right?
00:52:08 In which American air power really becomes a global,
00:52:12 you know, kind of fact in the lives of so many people.
00:52:16 And then the big mistake after 9 11 among many,
00:52:19 I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror
00:52:22 to some 30 or 40 countries, right?
00:52:25 So that you have more and more of the globe
00:52:28 feel like they’re under attack, right?
00:52:30 And the logic is essentially, it’s really bin Laden,
00:52:33 it’s not we’re going to convert you
00:52:36 and turn you into Muslims and that’s why we’re doing this.
00:52:38 That appears, that claim does appear at times.
00:52:42 But if you look at any given bin Laden text,
00:52:45 I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.
00:52:47 I mean, it’s kind of, it’s dizzying,
00:52:48 but he’s a modern politician,
00:52:51 he knows the language of social equality,
00:52:54 you know, there’s a class dimension to it,
00:52:56 there is an environmental dimension to it,
00:52:58 there’s a gender dimension to it.
00:53:00 And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in.
00:53:04 And when he wants to speak that language,
00:53:06 he knew that, you know, he’s not a scholar.
00:53:09 So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on.
00:53:13 So some of his decorations of Jihad
00:53:16 had his signature kind of sprinkled in
00:53:19 with like a dozen other signatures
00:53:20 from people who are somewhat known
00:53:22 or at least with titles, right?
00:53:24 So as a kind of intellectual exercise,
00:53:28 it’s fascinating to see
00:53:29 that he is throwing everything at the wall in one level.
00:53:34 That’s one way to see that it’s a,
00:53:35 these are kind of testaments toward recruitment
00:53:39 of people who, yes, they’re angry, yes, they’re unhappy.
00:53:43 And this is what, you know,
00:53:44 I think for a broader public, it’s hard to get,
00:53:47 you’re like, well, bin Laden didn’t suffer, he wasn’t poor.
00:53:51 Like, yeah, I mean, Lenin, Pol Pot, I mean.
00:53:55 They’re speaking to, they’re empathetic
00:53:57 to the suffering, the landscape,
00:53:58 the full landscape of suffering.
00:53:59 It’s interesting to think about suffering,
00:54:03 you know, America, the American public,
00:54:06 American politicians and leaders,
00:54:09 when they see what is good and evil,
00:54:13 they’re often not empathetic to the suffering of others.
00:54:16 And what you’re saying is bin Laden perhaps accurately
00:54:21 could speak to the ignorance of America,
00:54:24 maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people.
00:54:28 That’s right.
00:54:29 And I mean, if you look at the speeches
00:54:32 and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s,
00:54:37 he spoke quite accurately to the injustice
00:54:42 and maybe the suffering of the German people.
00:54:46 I mean, charismatic politicians
00:54:49 are good at telling accurate stories.
00:54:50 It’s not all fabricated,
00:54:53 but they emphasize certain aspects.
00:54:55 And then the problem part is the actions
00:54:58 you should take based on that.
00:55:01 So the narratives and the stories
00:55:03 may be grounded in historical accuracy.
00:55:06 The actions then cross the line, the ethical line.
00:55:11 I found that too, I mean, it’s a,
00:55:13 again, if you pick up just one of these texts,
00:55:14 I mean, it’s a kaleidoscope.
00:55:15 So the Hitler analogy is interesting
00:55:18 because it’s Hitler spoke to,
00:55:21 he could speak to things like inflation, right?
00:55:23 Which really existed.
00:55:25 But he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans.
00:55:29 He sought out scapegoats, Jews, Roma, disabled people,
00:55:36 homosexuals and so on, right?
00:55:38 That’s also there in bin Laden too.
00:55:40 I mean, the idea of an anti semitism,
00:55:44 the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders,
00:55:47 it’s a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers.
00:55:50 But I also hasten to add that it’s,
00:55:53 for all of the things that we could take off saying,
00:55:55 well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered,
00:55:58 Chechens have suffered and so on.
00:56:01 Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.
00:56:04 I mean, it never really, I think the,
00:56:08 I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right?
00:56:09 About ideology.
00:56:11 I mean, I think the blood on his hands
00:56:14 always limited his appeal among Muslims and others.
00:56:19 But Bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a,
00:56:21 there’s a great book by a great scholar
00:56:23 at UC San Diego, Jeremy Prestholt,
00:56:26 who read a great book about global icons
00:56:29 in which he has Bin Laden, he has Bob Marley,
00:56:35 he has Tupac, you know, he asked why,
00:56:40 you know, he’s doing research in East Africa,
00:56:42 why did he see young kids wearing Bin Laden shirts?
00:56:46 They’re also wearing like Tupac shirts.
00:56:48 They’re wearing Bob Marley shirts.
00:56:50 And it’s a way of looking at a kind of partial embrace
00:56:56 of some aspects of the rebelliousness
00:57:00 of some of these figures, some of the time,
00:57:02 by some people under certain conditions.
00:57:05 Well, the terrifying thing to me,
00:57:06 so yeah, there is a longing in the human heart
00:57:08 to belong to a group and a charismatic leader somehow,
00:57:14 especially when you’re young,
00:57:16 just a catalyst for all of that.
00:57:18 I tend to think that perhaps it’s actually hard
00:57:22 to be Hitler, so a leader so charismatic
00:57:26 that he can rally a nation to war.
00:57:29 And Bin Laden, perhaps we’re lucky,
00:57:32 was not sufficiently charismatic.
00:57:35 I feel like if his writing was better,
00:57:37 if his speeches were better,
00:57:39 if his ideas were stronger,
00:57:42 better, it’s like more viral,
00:57:46 and then there would be more people,
00:57:48 kind of young people uniting around him.
00:57:52 So in some sense, it’s almost like accidents of history
00:57:56 of just how much charisma,
00:57:58 how much charisma a particular evil person has,
00:58:01 a person like Bin Laden.
00:58:03 I think it’s fair, evil works, I think.
00:58:05 So you think Bin Laden is evil?
00:58:07 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:08 I mean, he was a mass murderer.
00:58:11 I’m just saying that his ideas were,
00:58:13 they’re more complex than we’ve tended to acknowledge.
00:58:17 They have a wider potential resonance
00:58:21 than we would acknowledge.
00:58:23 I mean, and also, I guess what I’m,
00:58:25 just one fundamental point is that
00:58:29 thinking about the complexity of Bin Laden
00:58:31 is also a way of removing him from Islam.
00:58:35 He is not an Islamic thinker.
00:58:36 He is a cosmopolitan thinker
00:58:39 who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies,
00:58:43 which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right?
00:58:45 So antisemitism, populism, environmentalism,
00:58:51 and the urging to do something about humanity,
00:58:56 do something about suffering.
00:58:57 That’s why I think the actual,
00:58:59 you asked about what motivates people
00:59:00 to do this kind of stuff.
00:59:01 I think that’s why if one goes below the level of leadership,
00:59:04 and this is being reported,
00:59:05 if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris
00:59:09 of the Bataclan murders, I think,
00:59:14 the court allowed some discussion
00:59:15 of the backgrounds of the accused,
00:59:17 and they come from different backgrounds,
00:59:20 but if there’s any common bond,
00:59:22 it’s kind of that they had some background in petty crime.
00:59:26 Famously, in the 7.7 bombings in London,
00:59:29 the Metropolitan Police, UK authorities
00:59:32 looked at all those guys,
00:59:34 and what people want is this idea
00:59:36 that they must be very pious.
00:59:39 They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff.
00:59:42 They must be fanatical true believers,
00:59:43 but what they found with those guys
00:59:45 was that some were nominally Muslim,
00:59:50 some went to mosques, some didn’t.
00:59:53 Some were single, young guys with criminal backgrounds.
00:59:57 Some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits
01:00:01 who never succeeded in anything.
01:00:04 But others had at least one thing,
01:00:06 had a wife and family who he widowed and orphaned.
01:00:10 And so there’s no, I mean, for policing,
01:00:12 I mean, if you’re looking at it through that lens,
01:00:15 there is no kind of typology
01:00:17 that will predict who will become violent.
01:00:20 And that’s why I think we have to move beyond
01:00:22 thinking about religious augmentation narrowly or by itself
01:00:25 and think about things like geopolitics,
01:00:27 think about how people respond to inequality,
01:00:30 the existential threat of climate crisis,
01:00:35 of a whole host of matters,
01:00:38 and think about this is a mode of political contestation.
01:00:42 I mean, it’s a violent one, it’s one I condemn.
01:00:43 It is evil, right?
01:00:45 But these are people that are trying to be political.
01:00:47 They’re trying to change things in some way.
01:00:49 It’s not narrowly about like,
01:00:51 I don’t know, impose Sharia law on you.
01:00:54 You must wear a veil.
01:00:55 You must eat this kind of food.
01:00:57 It’s not that parochial.
01:00:59 But another quick thought
01:01:00 about your interesting claim about charisma in this,
01:01:03 I think that the one self limiting feature
01:01:06 of this subculture is that definitely,
01:01:11 I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen
01:01:13 and that the kind of invisibility
01:01:17 is a productive force of a power,
01:01:20 which a colleague of mine
01:01:22 who knows ancient history far better than I,
01:01:24 said that this is, when she looked at Milo Omar initially,
01:01:29 or we talk about Bin Laden,
01:01:30 I mean, this kind of studied posture
01:01:33 of staying in the shadows
01:01:36 is also a source of authority potentially,
01:01:37 because it invites the idea,
01:01:41 and it’s partly dictatorships do as well.
01:01:42 I mean, it invites the idea that someone’s working,
01:01:45 and maybe it’s the basis for a lot of QAnon
01:01:47 or other conspiracy today,
01:01:48 that someone’s working behind the scenes
01:01:51 and things are gonna go the right way.
01:01:53 You can’t see it.
01:01:54 That’s almost preferable because you can kind of feel it.
01:01:57 And so not having someone out front
01:02:01 can be maybe more effective
01:02:02 than having someone out in front constantly.
01:02:04 Then the whole…
01:02:05 Maybe, maybe.
01:02:06 And then the whole Bin Laden,
01:02:07 you know, Milo Omar thing, like you can’t see me,
01:02:09 or if you look at Bin Laden’s photographs
01:02:11 and his video stuff, I mean, he’s coy.
01:02:16 Some observers have noted that he’s kind of effeminate.
01:02:18 He doesn’t strike this kind of masculine,
01:02:21 he’s not a Mussolini, he’s not a Hitler,
01:02:24 macho, upstanding, thumping my chest.
01:02:26 He’s not doing the theatrical chin, you know?
01:02:29 The theater people tell us he’s so aggressive, you know?
01:02:32 Oh, a chin?
01:02:33 What, bringing your chin up?
01:02:35 I saw a great BBC theater person.
01:02:38 It was kind of a…
01:02:39 It was a makeover show about how to become a better…
01:02:42 A dictator?
01:02:43 Oh, no.
01:02:43 Just a powerful, yeah, leader, authoritarian figure.
01:02:47 No, just how to get ahead in life.
01:02:49 And then…
01:02:50 Oh, okay, cool.
01:02:51 And just about acting, how you can act differently, right?
01:02:53 So it was a BBC thing.
01:02:56 And this woman claimed that, you know,
01:02:59 sticking your chin out, like a wrestler does, right,
01:03:01 is the most, like, male to male.
01:03:03 I love this kind of hilarious analysis
01:03:05 that people have about power.
01:03:08 But watch the chin, watch the chin.
01:03:09 It’s the same as analyzing, like,
01:03:11 in wrestling styles that win or fighting or so on.
01:03:16 There’s so many ways to do it.
01:03:17 Well, the chin, I mean, the chin is a…
01:03:19 Could be interesting verbal gesture.
01:03:21 And I’ve watched enough Mussolini footage from my classes
01:03:25 to try to pick the right moment.
01:03:27 And the chin is…
01:03:28 Mussolini is all about the chin, so…
01:03:29 And I have watched human beings and human nature enough
01:03:33 to know that there’s more to a man,
01:03:36 a powerful man, than a chin.
01:03:38 Yeah, no, no, no.
01:03:38 I’m saying it’s an act of aggression.
01:03:40 I’m not saying it’s…
01:03:41 It’s one of the many tools in the toolkit.
01:03:43 Yeah, yeah, sure.
01:03:44 So she definitely…
01:03:45 It’s not all about the chin, but it’s a…
01:03:47 But that’s what I’m trying to tell you about Ben Laden.
01:03:49 I don’t think he was deliberate enough
01:03:52 with the way he presents himself.
01:03:55 What I’m saying about Ben Laden
01:03:55 that makes him different from these other characters is that
01:03:58 because he played at being the scholar,
01:04:01 he played at being a figure of modesty and humility.
01:04:05 And that meant that he was often…
01:04:07 Again, if you watch his visuals,
01:04:09 I mean, yes, there’s one video of him firing a gun,
01:04:11 but if you watch how he moved,
01:04:14 how he wouldn’t look at people directly,
01:04:16 how his face was almost…
01:04:17 I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy.
01:04:20 He’s not spoken.
01:04:22 His voice was low.
01:04:23 He attempted to be poetic, right?
01:04:25 So it wasn’t a warrior kind of image
01:04:28 that he tried to project of like a tough guy.
01:04:30 It was, I’m demure, I’m humble.
01:04:34 I’m offering you this message.
01:04:37 And the appeal that he was going for was to see…
01:04:43 To project himself as a scholar,
01:04:45 his knowledge and humility, the whole package,
01:04:48 carried with it an authenticity and a valor
01:04:52 that would animate, inspire people
01:04:54 to commit acts of violence, right?
01:04:56 So there’s a different kind of logic of like go and kill.
01:04:59 So he presented himself in contrast
01:05:03 to the imperialist kind of macho power, superpowers.
01:05:09 So that’s just yet another way of…
01:05:12 And you have to have facial hair or hair
01:05:14 of different kinds that’s recognized.
01:05:16 We had a very recognizable look too,
01:05:18 or at least later in life.
01:05:20 So…
01:05:20 Yeah, no, he tried to look the part.
01:05:22 Yeah, yeah.
01:05:23 But I’m saying we’re fortunate
01:05:25 that whatever calculation that he was making,
01:05:29 he was not more effective.
01:05:33 I mean, the world is full of terrorist organizations
01:05:38 and we’re fortunate to the degree any one of them
01:05:42 does not have an incredibly charismatic leader
01:05:45 that attains the kind of power that’s very difficult
01:05:49 to manage at the geopolitical level.
01:05:52 Yeah, and we credit the publics,
01:05:55 who don’t buy into that, right?
01:05:57 Who see through this.
01:05:57 We credit the critics, you know?
01:06:01 Early on, Kermadev 9.11 itself,
01:06:05 one of the problems was that US government officials
01:06:08 kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this
01:06:12 as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility
01:06:16 or culpability.
01:06:17 And in fact,
01:06:20 dozens of scholars and organizations,
01:06:23 hundreds condemned this,
01:06:25 but their condemnations never quite made it out.
01:06:27 But it created a tension where, you know,
01:06:29 if you wore a veil, you must’ve been one of them
01:06:32 and you must be on Team Bin Laden.
01:06:33 And so a lot of the, you know,
01:06:35 I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination
01:06:38 and profiling came out of that urge
01:06:40 to see a oneness, which, you know,
01:06:44 Bin Laden projected, right?
01:06:45 He wanted to say, we are one community.
01:06:47 You know, if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right?
01:06:50 But I think that’s where the diversity
01:06:53 of Muslim communities became important
01:06:55 because outside of small pockets,
01:06:57 I mean, they didn’t accept his leadership, right?
01:07:00 People wore T shirts in some countries.
01:07:01 I mean, non Muslims wore T shirts
01:07:02 because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans.
01:07:03 So in Latin America, people are like,
01:07:07 yeah, that was sad, but, you know, finally,
01:07:09 I mean, there was a kind of schadenfreude
01:07:10 in that moment internationally.
01:07:11 It’s like Che Guevara or somebody like that.
01:07:13 Yeah, Che’s the other character in Prasad’s book.
01:07:16 Yeah, yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
01:07:17 It’s just a symbol.
01:07:18 It’s not exactly what he believed
01:07:20 or the cruelty of actions he took.
01:07:23 It’s more like he stood for an idea
01:07:24 of revolution versus authority.
01:07:28 That’s right.
01:07:29 And that’s a great way to understand Bin Ladenism
01:07:32 and the whole phenomenon,
01:07:33 but I think looking at the big picture,
01:07:35 it’s also, you wonder, will that ever end, right?
01:07:40 I mean, is that, I mean, that’s the risk
01:07:42 of being a kind of hyper power like the U.S.
01:07:45 where you, in assisting on a kind of unipolar world
01:07:49 in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created
01:07:55 an almost irresistible target, you know,
01:07:57 wherever the U.S. wanted to exert itself militarily.
01:08:00 Before we go to the history of Afghanistan,
01:08:03 the people, and I just want to talk to you
01:08:05 about just some fascinating aspect of the culture.
01:08:10 Let’s go to the end.
01:08:13 Withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
01:08:18 What are your thoughts on how that was executed?
01:08:21 How could it have been done better?
01:08:24 Yeah, an important question.
01:08:26 I mean, I would preface all this by saying,
01:08:29 you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.
01:08:31 I had hoped the war would end sooner.
01:08:36 I think there were different exit routes all along the way.
01:08:39 Again, I think there were lots of policy choices
01:08:43 in September and October when the war began.
01:08:46 There were choices in December 2001.
01:08:50 So we could look at almost every six month stopping point
01:08:54 and say, we could have done differently.
01:08:57 As it turns out though, I mean, the way it played out,
01:09:00 you know, it’s been catastrophic.
01:09:02 And I think the Biden administration
01:09:08 has remained unaccountable for the scale
01:09:10 of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure
01:09:14 that they’re responsible for.
01:09:15 Well, okay, let’s lay out the full,
01:09:19 there’s George W. Bush, there’s Barack Obama,
01:09:24 there’s Donald Trump, there’s Biden.
01:09:27 So they’re all driving this van and there’s these exits
01:09:32 and they keep not taking the exits
01:09:34 and they’re running out of gas.
01:09:36 I do this all the time thinking, where am I gonna pull off?
01:09:38 I’ll go till it’s empty.
01:09:41 How could it have been done better?
01:09:43 And what exactly, how much suffering
01:09:48 have all the decisions along the way caused?
01:09:52 What are the longterm consequences?
01:09:54 What are the biggest things that concern you
01:09:56 about the decisions we’ve made in both invading Afghanistan
01:10:00 and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have?
01:10:03 I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed,
01:10:07 you know, the horrific scenes of the airport,
01:10:09 you know, that was just one dimension.
01:10:12 I think in the weeks to come,
01:10:15 I mean, we’re gonna see Afghanistan implode.
01:10:19 There are lots of signs that malnutrition,
01:10:22 hunger, starvation are going to claim tens of thousands,
01:10:26 maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter.
01:10:29 And I think there is really nothing,
01:10:33 there’s no framework in place to forestall that.
01:10:38 What is the government, what is currently the system there?
01:10:42 What’s the role of the Taliban?
01:10:44 So there could be tens of thousands,
01:10:46 hundreds of thousands that starve,
01:10:48 either just almost to famine or starve to death.
01:10:54 So this is economic implosion, this is political implosion.
01:10:58 What’s the system there like
01:11:01 and what could be the one, you know, some inkling of hope?
01:11:05 Right, right.
01:11:06 The Taliban sit in control, that’s unique.
01:11:09 When they were in power in the 1990s from 1996, 2001,
01:11:14 they controlled some 85 to 90% of the country.
01:11:18 Now they own it all, but they have no budget.
01:11:22 The Afghan banking system is frozen.
01:11:28 So the financial system is a mess.
01:11:30 And it’s frozen by the U.S.
01:11:32 because the U.S. is trying to use that lever
01:11:34 to exert pressure on the Taliban.
01:11:36 And so the ethical quandaries are of course legion, right?
01:11:40 Do you release that money to allow the Taliban
01:11:44 to shore up their rule, right?
01:11:46 The Biden administration has said no,
01:11:48 but the banks aren’t working.
01:11:52 If you’re in California, you wanna send $100 to your cousin
01:11:56 so she can buy bread, you can’t do that now.
01:11:59 It’s almost impossible.
01:12:01 There are some informal networks,
01:12:02 they’re removing some stuff, but there are bread lines.
01:12:06 The Taliban government is incapable,
01:12:09 fundamentally just of ruling.
01:12:10 I mean, they can discipline people on the street,
01:12:13 they can force people into the mosque,
01:12:15 they can shoot people, they can beat protesters,
01:12:18 they can put out a newspaper,
01:12:20 they can have, they’re great at diplomacy it turns out,
01:12:23 they can’t rule this country.
01:12:24 So essentially the hospitals
01:12:27 and the kind of healthcare infrastructure
01:12:31 is being managed by NGOs that are international.
01:12:38 But most people had to leave
01:12:41 and the Taliban have impeded some of that work.
01:12:44 They’ve told adult women essentially to stay home, right?
01:12:47 So a big part of the workforce isn’t there.
01:12:51 So the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt.
01:12:57 Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors,
01:13:00 I mean, it’s kind of a transit trade economy.
01:13:03 It exports fruits.
01:13:05 Pakistan has been closing the border
01:13:07 because they’re anxious about refugees.
01:13:09 They want to exert pressure on the international community
01:13:12 to recognize the Taliban
01:13:13 because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power
01:13:17 because they see that in Pakistan’s national interest,
01:13:20 especially through the lens of its rivalry with India.
01:13:24 So the Pakistani security institutions
01:13:27 are playing a double game.
01:13:29 Essentially Afghan people are being held hostage.
01:13:31 And so the Taliban are also saying,
01:13:34 if you don’t recognize us,
01:13:36 you’re gonna let tens of millions of Afghans starve.
01:13:39 So to which degree is Taliban,
01:13:41 like who are the Taliban?
01:13:44 What do they stand for?
01:13:45 What do they want?
01:13:47 Obviously year by year, this changes.
01:13:49 So what is the nature of this organization?
01:13:53 Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful
01:13:58 government sort of holder of power
01:14:02 or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so?
01:14:06 Yeah.
01:14:08 I mean, the briefest answer would be
01:14:09 that they are a clerical slash military organization.
01:14:17 They have, this is kind of a imperfect metaphor,
01:14:23 but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan
01:14:28 to describe them.
01:14:29 And that has some attractive elements
01:14:31 because different people have joined the Taliban
01:14:35 for different purposes at different times,
01:14:37 but today, and people tell us,
01:14:40 scholars who know more about the women than I have said,
01:14:42 listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge
01:14:45 of different actors and people and competing interests.
01:14:48 And I think, so we have a lot of scholars who said,
01:14:51 listen, it’s polycentric.
01:14:54 It’s got people in this city and that city and so on.
01:14:57 I think actually, I was always very skeptical.
01:15:00 How do they know this?
01:15:00 I mean, this is an organization that doesn’t want you
01:15:03 to know where that money comes from and so on.
01:15:06 But I would say now that we have a clear picture
01:15:09 of what has happened,
01:15:11 I’d say they are a astoundingly well organized
01:15:15 clerical military organization that has a very cohesive
01:15:22 and enduring ideology, which is quite idiosyncratic.
01:15:26 If we zoom out and continue the conversation
01:15:28 we’re having about Islam and how we think about radicalism
01:15:30 and who’s drawn to what,
01:15:34 people throw different terms around to describe the Taliban.
01:15:38 Some use a term that links it to a kind of school of thought
01:15:43 born in the 19th century in India, the Doabandi school.
01:15:47 But if you look at their teachings,
01:15:49 it’s very clear now I think that these labels,
01:15:51 it’s like saying, you’re an MIT guy.
01:15:54 Well, what does that mean?
01:15:54 I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different potentially
01:15:59 kinds of intellectual orientations, right?
01:16:02 I mean, attaching the name of the school
01:16:03 doesn’t quite capture, I mean, university.
01:16:07 It’s complicated.
01:16:08 I mean, actually MIT is interesting
01:16:09 because I would say MIT is different
01:16:11 than Stanford, for example.
01:16:13 I think MIT has a more kind of narrow.
01:16:16 Yeah, I hear you.
01:16:18 Bad analogy on my part, maybe.
01:16:19 Well, no, it’s interesting because I would argue
01:16:21 that there’s some aspect of a brand like Taliban or MIT,
01:16:26 no relation, that has a kind of interact,
01:16:33 like the brand results in the behavior of the,
01:16:37 like enforces a kind of behavior on the people
01:16:39 and the people feed the brand and like there’s a loop.
01:16:41 I think Stanford is a good example
01:16:43 of something that’s more distributed.
01:16:45 There’s sufficient amount of diversity
01:16:48 in like all kinds of like centers
01:16:50 and all that kind of stuff that the brand
01:16:53 doesn’t become one thing.
01:16:55 MIT is so engineering.
01:16:57 It’s so different than that.
01:16:59 Okay, scratch MIT, scratch Stanford too
01:17:01 because I think Stanford’s more like MIT
01:17:03 than you might imagine, but isn’t Taliban,
01:17:07 isn’t it pretty, I don’t think there’s a diversity.
01:17:10 So yeah, sorry, so just to rephrase.
01:17:13 So people say, oh, the Deobandi school.
01:17:15 I’m like, what is that?
01:17:16 I mean, but the Taliban are, they’re an ethnic movement.
01:17:20 They represent a vision of Pashtun power, right?
01:17:26 Pashtuns are people who are quite internally diverse,
01:17:29 who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto,
01:17:34 who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
01:17:40 There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet, right?
01:17:42 There’s a community in Moscow, California, everywhere,
01:17:45 right, so it’s a global diaspora of sorts.
01:17:48 Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination
01:17:51 so that lots of Pashtuns can tell you
01:17:53 the names of their grandparents, great grandparents
01:17:55 and so on, and that’s kind of a,
01:17:56 there’s a sense of pride in that.
01:17:58 Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity,
01:18:03 but it’s not universal.
01:18:05 So for example, you can meet people who say,
01:18:07 I am Pashtun, but I don’t know Pashto.
01:18:10 So as you claw away at this idea, it’s amorphous.
01:18:14 It also means different things,
01:18:15 different people at different times.
01:18:17 So saying the Taliban are Pashtun
01:18:20 requires lots of qualifiers
01:18:21 because lots of Pashtuns will say,
01:18:24 no, no, I have nothing to the Taliban.
01:18:26 I hate those people.
01:18:28 So the Taliban tried to mobilize other Pashtuns
01:18:32 with limited success,
01:18:34 but their core membership is almost exclusively Pashtun.
01:18:37 And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans.
01:18:40 We represent pious Muslims.
01:18:42 And so in recent two, three years,
01:18:46 they’ve gone further to say, no, we have other groups.
01:18:48 We have Uzbeks, we have Tajiks, we have Hazaras.
01:18:52 And in the North of Afghanistan, in recent years,
01:18:54 they did do a bit better at drawing in people
01:18:57 who were very disaffected because of the government.
01:18:59 And they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat.
01:19:02 But if you want to say August 15 and who they’ve appointed,
01:19:06 what language they’ve used,
01:19:07 how they’ve presented themselves,
01:19:09 it’s clear that they are Pashtun, they are male,
01:19:14 and they are extremely ideologically cohesive
01:19:20 and disciplined, I’d say, right?
01:19:22 So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah,
01:19:25 some of that stuff was a way to fight a war.
01:19:28 They are fundamentally a guerrilla movement.
01:19:33 They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods.
01:19:37 The rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich,
01:19:40 taking from the privileged, giving to the poor,
01:19:43 being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.
01:19:47 And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing,
01:19:50 their central theme, their brand is about public morality.
01:19:53 And so their origin story, going back to 1994,
01:19:55 is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals
01:20:00 who were trying to rape people.
01:20:03 And so there’s a very interesting emphasis on sexuality
01:20:08 and on public morality and really being the core
01:20:11 of we’re gonna restore order and public morality.
01:20:16 And how that translates into governance
01:20:18 is something they’ve never sorted out.
01:20:19 I mean, how do you run a banking system
01:20:20 if your intellectual priorities are really about
01:20:23 the length of a beard?
01:20:25 And then their path to power in a kind of abstract sense,
01:20:29 I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by,
01:20:33 if you like, propagating the promise of martyrdom.
01:20:37 And that sounds, I don’t mean to say that in a way
01:20:38 that, to make it sound ridiculous,
01:20:40 to make it sound like it’s a moral judgment,
01:20:44 it’s simply, I think, a fact, it’s a fact of their appeal
01:20:46 that they promised young men who have known nothing else
01:20:52 but studying in certain schools, if at all,
01:20:56 but they’ve known fighting
01:20:57 and they’ve known victimization.
01:20:59 And this isn’t, I’m not asking for sympathy for them,
01:21:03 but I think the reality is that a lot of the,
01:21:05 we know about the kind of foot soldiers
01:21:06 is that they lost families in bombings,
01:21:11 in airstrikes, in night raids.
01:21:15 I mean, orphans have always been a stream,
01:21:18 living in all male society, not knowing girls,
01:21:23 not knowing women, hearing things from outside
01:21:25 about places like Kabul.
01:21:27 And so there’s always been this kind of urban rural
01:21:30 dimension, it’s not just that,
01:21:32 but I think there’s a whole imagination
01:21:36 that being Taliban captures.
01:21:39 And the whole margin of thing is really it’s,
01:21:43 you know, I think to any religious person,
01:21:45 I mean, it’s not a bizarre idea.
01:21:46 I mean, it animates, I mean, so many global traditions,
01:21:50 you know, but I think the,
01:21:52 but you try to tell like an army colonel,
01:21:54 if you were to have a conversation with,
01:21:56 you know, a US Marine about this,
01:21:58 I mean, some would get it
01:21:59 from their own religious backgrounds,
01:22:01 but I think it’s an alien idea,
01:22:04 but I think it’s essential to kind of stretch out
01:22:06 my imagination to understand that’s attractive.
01:22:08 And now one of the dilemmas going forward
01:22:09 is that they’ve got to pivot from martyrdom.
01:22:14 And some have been, some have told foreign journalists,
01:22:16 I mean, it’s good that we’re in charge now,
01:22:19 we’re gonna build a proper state,
01:22:21 but it’s kind of boring.
01:22:24 I wanna keep fighting, maybe I’ll do that in Pakistan.
01:22:26 Yeah, I mean, it’s nice that they are expressing
01:22:28 that thought, some are not even honest sufficiently
01:22:32 with themselves to express that kind of thought.
01:22:34 If you’re a fighter,
01:22:38 you see that with a bunch of fighters
01:22:40 or professional athletes, once they retire,
01:22:43 they don’t know, it’s very, it’s boring.
01:22:47 Yeah, yeah.
01:22:48 And so like if the spirit of the Taliban,
01:22:51 even the best version of the Taliban is to fight,
01:22:55 is to be martyrs, is to paint the world as good and evil
01:23:00 and you’re fighting evil and all that kind of stuff,
01:23:02 that’s difficult to imagine how they can run
01:23:04 an education system, a banking system,
01:23:07 respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds
01:23:12 and religious beliefs and women and all that kind of stuff.
01:23:16 Yeah, and they’ve walked into Kabul
01:23:18 and other major cities, some of them are young,
01:23:22 they didn’t know those places,
01:23:22 but also the very important obstacle for them
01:23:26 is that Afghan society has changed.
01:23:28 I mean, it’s not what, even for the older guys,
01:23:31 it’s not what they knew in the 1990s.
01:23:34 Some always had some ambivalence about the capital,
01:23:37 but now it’s totally different.
01:23:38 I mean, they’ve been shocked to see, I think to me,
01:23:40 one of the most striking features of the last few weeks
01:23:43 has been that women have come out on the streets
01:23:47 and have stood in their faces and said,
01:23:50 we demand rights, we demand education,
01:23:52 we demand employment.
01:23:53 And these foot soldiers are paralyzed, they’re not sure.
01:23:57 They don’t know what to do with women, period.
01:23:59 Yeah, yeah.
01:24:00 And they don’t know what to do with being yelled at
01:24:01 and having someone stick their fingers in their faces.
01:24:04 I mean, this is not what they’ve imagined.
01:24:07 And so I think, and at this juncture,
01:24:10 there are still foreign cameras around.
01:24:12 So they have committed acts of violence against women,
01:24:16 against journalists, they’ve beaten people,
01:24:18 they’ve disappeared people.
01:24:19 Even with cameras around, even in this tense period.
01:24:22 Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat
01:24:24 and that’s not gonna happen,
01:24:26 it’s gonna get much worse, I think.
01:24:28 So the challenge now is can the Taliban rule?
01:24:31 And then this is where the diplomacy is so important
01:24:35 because the Taliban can’t rule in isolation
01:24:38 and they know that.
01:24:39 And part of the success is due to the fact
01:24:41 that they became very good at talking to other people
01:24:45 in the last, I mean, it’s been building for the last decade,
01:24:48 but I’d say the last five years,
01:24:50 they always had Pakistan’s backing.
01:24:52 And so the Taliban are, we noted they’re a military force,
01:24:55 very effective guerrilla force.
01:24:57 They beat NATO, I mean, this is, still hasn’t sunk in.
01:25:00 I mean, the fact that they, with light arms,
01:25:04 using suicide attacks, using mines,
01:25:08 improvised explosive devices, machine guns.
01:25:13 In some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles
01:25:17 and from the summer, they got American equipment
01:25:20 on a broad scale, right?
01:25:22 They have airplanes, they have a lot
01:25:23 that they will be able to use eventually.
01:25:25 So, but still, basically it’s a story of AK47s,
01:25:30 some American small arms and mines.
01:25:33 So it’s very Ho Chi Minh,
01:25:36 very old school guerrilla fighting, right?
01:25:38 And they defeated the most powerful military alliance
01:25:40 in world history probably.
01:25:41 So that has not yet sunk in and what that means
01:25:43 for American and global politics.
01:25:47 And now they’re trying to rule, right?
01:25:49 They know they need international support
01:25:52 and their most consistent backer has been Pakistan
01:25:56 who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.
01:26:01 And this is very important for a Pakistani elite
01:26:02 that of course is looking toward India.
01:26:05 They wanna have their rear covered, right?
01:26:08 They wanna make sure that these Pashtuns
01:26:10 don’t cause trouble for Pakistan.
01:26:13 And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces,
01:26:15 they like this vision of the Islamic state
01:26:17 that the Taliban are building there
01:26:19 because those are not so distant from their views
01:26:22 of what Pakistan should be.
01:26:24 But the Taliban have been smart enough
01:26:27 to kind of diversify their potential international allies.
01:26:30 So everyone in the neighborhood
01:26:32 has wanted the US to leave, right?
01:26:34 If we go back to 2001,
01:26:36 there were Iranian and American special forces in the North
01:26:39 working together against the Taliban to displace them
01:26:41 using Iranian, American, and then Afghan resistance forces
01:26:47 against the Taliban.
01:26:48 And that was a real moment of rapprochement
01:26:50 if we go back to the missed exits.
01:26:54 The relationship with Iran
01:26:55 could have been different at that moment,
01:26:57 but the US under George W. Bush, you know,
01:27:01 devised this axis of evil language,
01:27:04 put them together with their enemy,
01:27:06 Iraq and the North Korea, all that went south.
01:27:10 That was the most opportunity.
01:27:12 But in recent years, the Taliban and Iran
01:27:14 have kind of papered over the differences.
01:27:19 They allowed the Taliban to open small offices
01:27:22 on Iranian territory,
01:27:24 likely shared some resources, some intelligence,
01:27:26 some sophisticated weaponry.
01:27:28 And then the Taliban went to Moscow.
01:27:30 And for the Putin administration,
01:27:32 you know, they’ve long been worried that,
01:27:35 you know, they see the Taliban as a kind of,
01:27:37 you know, disease that will potentially move North,
01:27:40 infect Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
01:27:43 Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,
01:27:44 and maybe creep into Russia’s sphere of influence.
01:27:47 Maybe that’s why they have, you know,
01:27:51 a bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan.
01:27:52 I mean, the one, you know,
01:27:54 Ford base that Russia as well has in Central Asia
01:27:56 is in Tajikistan.
01:27:58 And so the Taliban were always, you know,
01:28:01 a worrying point, but also useful because
01:28:03 they could say, well, you know,
01:28:06 in case the Taliban get out of control,
01:28:08 we need to be here.
01:28:09 And so Tajikistan said, okay, you know,
01:28:12 you’re helping secure us.
01:28:14 And yes, it impinges upon our sovereignty,
01:28:16 but it’s okay, you know?
01:28:18 So Putin said, you know, let’s, you know,
01:28:21 give another black eye to the Americans
01:28:23 and let’s, you know, treat the Taliban
01:28:25 as if they’re the kind of government in waiting.
01:28:27 Let’s have them come to Moscow multiple times.
01:28:30 This summer, you know, for the last year or two,
01:28:32 they’ve been talking to China, right?
01:28:34 So the photographs of senior Taliban figures
01:28:39 going from their office in Qatar,
01:28:40 which was a major blow to the U.S. back government,
01:28:43 the fact that they were able to open up
01:28:45 an office in Qatar that at one point
01:28:47 began to fly a flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,
01:28:51 that basically said, we’re a state in the waiting.
01:28:54 And as the U.S.-backed Afghan government failed
01:28:57 and failed and failed at ruling too, right?
01:29:00 As they showed how corrupt they were.
01:29:02 And as they really alienated more and more Afghans
01:29:04 by committing acts of violence against them,
01:29:07 by stealing from them, by, you know,
01:29:11 basically creating a kind of kleptocracy, right?
01:29:17 The Taliban said, we are pure, we are not corrupt.
01:29:20 And look at us, we’re winning on the battlefield.
01:29:22 And internationally, look, we’re talking to China.
01:29:25 We’re talking to Putin, we’re talking to China.
01:29:27 We’re a legitimate, powerful center of Central Asia.
01:29:31 And also kind of, you know, hinting that, you know,
01:29:33 oh, we have a website.
01:29:34 I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing
01:29:36 because they began to, and this is important, actually.
01:29:39 They had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.
01:29:43 Again, after having, you know, shot televisions
01:29:45 and these kind of ceremonial killings
01:29:47 of these infidel devices, right?
01:29:49 They said, we have a government, we have commissions,
01:29:53 we have a complaint line.
01:29:55 They lifted all this technocratic language
01:29:57 that you would get from any UN document,
01:30:00 you know, about good governance
01:30:01 and all the kind of, you know, generic language
01:30:03 that the NGO world has produced for us, right, in English.
01:30:06 They reproduced that in five languages
01:30:08 on their Taiwan website.
01:30:10 And of course, I’m not saying even believe this,
01:30:12 but it was like, you know, just put me in coach.
01:30:15 You know, I know the playbook.
01:30:17 I know how to run a government.
01:30:18 And look, we have an agricultural commission.
01:30:20 We have, you know, a taxation system.
01:30:24 And again, this idea, and then on the ground,
01:30:26 they had their own law courts.
01:30:28 And they would creep into a district,
01:30:30 assassinate some people, the local authority figures,
01:30:32 men of influence, talk to local clerics,
01:30:36 either get them on board or kill them and say, you know,
01:30:39 this state is corrupt, but we’re bringing you justice.
01:30:42 This is our calling card.
01:30:43 We’re bringing public reality and justice.
01:30:45 And then to a broader world, they said, you know,
01:30:48 yeah, things didn’t go perfectly, the whole Al Qaeda thing,
01:30:51 you know, you know, wish we could have a do over on that.
01:30:56 We’re not gonna let anyone hurt you from our territory.
01:30:58 We just wanna rule and people like us and look.
01:31:03 And so if you look at the neighborhood,
01:31:05 Iran, even the Central Asian states after a while,
01:31:08 recognizing they could make some money.
01:31:09 I mean, one of the, one thing that Uzbekistan likes
01:31:11 about the current arrangement, or they’re not,
01:31:13 they’re not hostile to is that they have all these contracts.
01:31:17 They can potentially make some money from, you know,
01:31:21 the pipeline dream remains alive, running natural gas, oil,
01:31:25 to, you know, which is the Indian ocean,
01:31:28 to markets, you know, beyond Central Asia.
01:31:31 It’s sitting on a couple of trillion dollars,
01:31:32 probably in mineral resources
01:31:34 that China would love to have, of course.
01:31:36 And so people are looking at Afghanistan now,
01:31:38 after 20 years saying, you know, under American rule,
01:31:41 it was a basket case, right?
01:31:43 There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent.
01:31:46 The world did not start counting civilian casualties
01:31:49 in Afghanistan until 2009.
01:31:51 I mean, think about that.
01:31:51 The war went on for eight years.
01:31:53 The Taliban were never really defeated.
01:31:54 They just went to Pakistan.
01:31:56 They went to the mountains, they went to the woods.
01:31:59 And so all of these different American operations,
01:32:01 as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on,
01:32:07 killed countless civilians.
01:32:09 The US never accounted for that.
01:32:10 We never even counted.
01:32:13 Trump escalated civilian casualties
01:32:15 by escalating the air war.
01:32:17 But a lot of this was like very ugly, on the ground,
01:32:19 you know, night raid stuff,
01:32:21 where you drop into a Hamlet and massacre people,
01:32:25 and then you’re not honest about what happened, right?
01:32:27 So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth of the Taliban
01:32:31 from below.
01:32:32 So the foot soldiers, they never ran out of foot soldiers.
01:32:35 I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands,
01:32:39 maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters
01:32:41 over the last 20 years.
01:32:42 But they just sprouted up again.
01:32:44 And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture,
01:32:46 the male bonding of martyrology, of martyrdom,
01:32:51 and of revenge, and a sense of the foreign invader.
01:32:56 And I’ve heard, I mean, I haven’t taught a ton
01:32:57 of US military people, but through the Hoover,
01:33:01 they put officers in our classes sometimes,
01:33:03 and met a few wonderful army and marine officers
01:33:07 who I really enjoyed.
01:33:08 You know, we came from the South like me,
01:33:11 always had great rapport with them,
01:33:12 and they expressed a range of opinions about this.
01:33:15 I think that I learned a lot from someone who said,
01:33:17 yeah, I mean, I get why they hate us.
01:33:20 I get why they’re still fighting,
01:33:21 because last week, we were in the middle of a war,
01:33:25 we just killed 14 of their fellow villagers.
01:33:31 So the officers, the guys on the ground,
01:33:34 fighting this war, we’re not stupid about that.
01:33:37 I mean, they got the human dimension of that,
01:33:39 and yet no one got off the exit,
01:33:41 as you said, people kept driving.
01:33:43 But going forward now, internationally,
01:33:46 it’s critical that they have,
01:33:48 and they’ve had meetings.
01:33:50 I mean, what the Taliban have done since August 15th
01:33:52 is a lot of diplomacy.
01:33:54 They’ve had meetings, they’ve had people,
01:33:55 they’ve had Tashkent come, they’ve had Beijing come,
01:33:58 they’ve had Moscow come.
01:34:00 I mean, they’ve had major visits from Islamabad,
01:34:06 from security people, from diplomatic circles.
01:34:09 And they’re counting on things being different this time.
01:34:11 I mean, the first time around,
01:34:13 the only people who backed the Taliban by recognition,
01:34:15 giving them diplomatic recognition,
01:34:17 were the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the UAE.
01:34:20 And because of Al Qaeda, because of opium,
01:34:24 because of some of the human rights stuff,
01:34:27 the US pushed everyone to like,
01:34:28 let’s not recognize the state,
01:34:30 even though the US did.
01:34:31 I mean, Colin Powell famously,
01:34:33 summer of 2001, we did give a few grants and aid
01:34:38 to the Taliban as kind of like massaging negotiations.
01:34:44 They kept talking about bin Laden,
01:34:46 but they also wanted them to stop opium production.
01:34:49 I mean, Afghanistan, throughout all this period
01:34:50 we’ve talked about, is the global center
01:34:52 of opium production.
01:34:54 I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy
01:34:57 continued to today is devoted to the opium trade.
01:35:00 Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin,
01:35:06 some of the painkillers.
01:35:07 Yeah.
01:35:09 And even if Afghan poppies don’t make it to Hoboken,
01:35:13 they are not the source of American deaths.
01:35:18 They are part of a universal market, a global market,
01:35:22 which I think any economist would tell you
01:35:25 is part of the story of our opium problem.
01:35:29 Something I read maybe a decade ago now,
01:35:34 and I just kind of looked it up again
01:35:36 to bring it up to see your opinion on this,
01:35:38 is a 2010 report by the International Council
01:35:43 on Security and Development that showed
01:35:45 that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province
01:35:52 know nothing of the 9 11 attacks on US in 2001.
01:35:56 Is this at all representative of what you know?
01:36:00 Is this possible?
01:36:01 So basically, put another way,
01:36:05 is it possible that a lot of Afghans don’t even know
01:36:10 the reason why there may be troops
01:36:13 or the sort of American provided narrative
01:36:17 for why there’s troops, American soldiers,
01:36:21 and American drones overhead in Afghanistan?
01:36:25 Right.
01:36:26 I mean, my gut response,
01:36:28 not knowing the details of this actual poll is
01:36:32 that that’s a very unhelpful way to think about
01:36:38 how Afghans relate to the world.
01:36:39 And I think it could be, if you go to my hometown,
01:36:44 in North Carolina, if you knock on some doors,
01:36:48 you may meet people who don’t know all kinds of things.
01:36:50 I could probably walk around this neighborhood
01:36:52 here in California and there’d be all kinds of people
01:36:54 who don’t know all kinds of things.
01:36:57 Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat.
01:37:01 I mean, so we could make a lot of certain kinds
01:37:07 of ignorance, I think.
01:37:08 But I think what I would say,
01:37:09 and there’s also, I mean, a companion point maybe
01:37:12 that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse,
01:37:15 the return of the Taliban,
01:37:17 there has been a big conversation
01:37:18 about what Afghans think of us really.
01:37:21 And this famous piece in the New Yorker
01:37:24 was about how many people liked the Taliban,
01:37:28 that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece,
01:37:35 were sympathetic because they had lost family members
01:37:37 and all the violence.
01:37:38 And the idea kind of was that,
01:37:41 we haven’t thought about that at all.
01:37:42 When in fact, of course we have and lots of people have,
01:37:45 but I think if you’re just dropping into the conversation,
01:37:48 if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage
01:37:49 of Afghanistan and the United States,
01:37:50 I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during,
01:37:55 of course, 9.11 and its aftermath,
01:37:57 lots of coverage during Obama’s surge,
01:38:00 and then quickly dropped down the last decade,
01:38:03 it’s been almost nothing.
01:38:05 So if you ask the same question about Americans
01:38:07 or of Americans, I’m not sure what they would say to you,
01:38:09 what percentage would actually know
01:38:11 why the US is in X, Y, or Z either, right?
01:38:14 But on the Afghan side, just to return to that for a moment,
01:38:16 I think that we can fetishize these provinces.
01:38:19 They are kind of a place
01:38:21 where Taliban support has been greatest.
01:38:24 Also where there’s been the most violence,
01:38:25 where the Americans have been most committed
01:38:27 to trying to root out the Taliban movement.
01:38:30 Where exactly in the South.
01:38:32 What are the other parts in the South of Afghanistan?
01:38:34 Yeah, it’s mostly Pashtun, not exclusively,
01:38:37 but mostly Pashtun, mostly rural.
01:38:39 What is Pashtun?
01:38:40 That’s the other group
01:38:41 that the Taliban claim to represent, right?
01:38:44 So they are this group.
01:38:45 What other groups are there?
01:38:46 Okay, sorry, yeah, sorry.
01:38:48 So in cities, you’ll find everything, right?
01:38:51 That is in Afghanistan.
01:38:51 You’ll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras.
01:38:55 These are people who, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right?
01:39:01 Most Uzbeks live in what is now Uzbekistan,
01:39:03 but they form majorities in some Northern parts of the city.
01:39:06 I’m sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.
01:39:08 But what I emphasize is that,
01:39:11 and you can find online an ethnographic map of Afghanistan
01:39:14 and you’ll see green where Pashtuns live,
01:39:16 red where Hazaras live, orange where Uzbeks live,
01:39:20 purple where Tajiks live.
01:39:22 Then there are a bunch of other smaller groups
01:39:23 of different kinds.
01:39:25 There are Noristanis, there are Baluch,
01:39:30 there are, in different religious communities,
01:39:32 there are Sunni, Shia, different kinds of Shia.
01:39:34 What are the key differences between them?
01:39:36 Is it religious basis from the origins
01:39:39 of where they immigrated from and how different are they?
01:39:43 So they’re all, I mean, they’re all indigenous, I think.
01:39:46 I mean, there’s a kind of mythology
01:39:47 that some groups have been there longer, right?
01:39:49 So they have a greater claim to power.
01:39:50 But historically, I mean, it’s like, you know,
01:39:55 ethnic groups anywhere,
01:39:55 people have different narratives about themselves,
01:39:58 but many Pashtuns would tell you, not all,
01:40:01 but many would say,
01:40:03 we are the kind of state builders of Afghanistan.
01:40:05 The dynasty that ruled much of the space,
01:40:09 that was born in the mid 18th century,
01:40:12 that ruled until 1973, more or less,
01:40:15 generalizing, you know, it was a Pashtun dynasty.
01:40:18 The Taliban have definitely said to some audiences,
01:40:21 we are the rightful rulers because we are Pashtun.
01:40:26 The trick though is, I don’t mean to be evasive,
01:40:28 but just to convey some of the complexity,
01:40:30 one quick answer as well,
01:40:32 they’re majorities and minorities.
01:40:34 I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps,
01:40:37 but I would say suspend any firm belief in that
01:40:40 because that could be entirely wrong.
01:40:42 In fact, there’s never been a modern census of Afghanistan.
01:40:47 So when journalists say Pashtuns are the majority,
01:40:49 or they’re the biggest group, I would say not so fast.
01:40:53 I would say not so fast
01:40:54 because of migration is one major issue.
01:40:57 No major modern census.
01:41:00 Actually, the Soviets got pretty close,
01:41:01 but didn’t quite, you know, find something comprehensive
01:41:04 and didn’t publicize it knowing that it was,
01:41:07 you know, in modern times,
01:41:08 ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization.
01:41:11 It’s not innately so, but it’s been part of the story.
01:41:14 But then you have mixed families, right?
01:41:16 So a lot of people you’ll meet,
01:41:17 you’ll encounter in the diaspora and around,
01:41:19 I mean, well, I am, you know,
01:41:22 my one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right?
01:41:26 Or I’m Pashtun, as I mentioned before,
01:41:27 but I don’t speak Pashto, right?
01:41:29 Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as Shiite Hazara,
01:41:35 in fact, I’m a Sunni Hazara,
01:41:36 or I’m a secular Hazara, or I’m an atheist Hazara.
01:41:39 I mean, everything’s possible, right?
01:41:41 One of my friends, if he were here,
01:41:46 he’d say, I’m Kabuli, you know, I’m from Kabul.
01:41:49 So if you think about it in Russian terms,
01:41:51 you know, it means a lot if you’re a Muscovitch,
01:41:53 you know, if you’re from Pisa or Moscow, I mean, you know.
01:41:57 Yeah, well, even here is Pashtunians, Texans, Californians.
01:42:04 Yeah, East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff.
01:42:07 Those are all part of the mix here.
01:42:08 So you asked about Kandahar and Helmand,
01:42:10 then I would say, yeah, if you go out to, you know,
01:42:14 a pomegranate field, you’ll meet a guy
01:42:18 who may reckon time differently from you and me,
01:42:22 who may not be literate,
01:42:24 you may not have ever had a geography lesson,
01:42:27 but if you go one door over, you may meet a guy
01:42:31 who, you know, his life path has taken him
01:42:36 to live in, you know, six countries.
01:42:38 He may speak five languages.
01:42:40 And these are all things I’m not saying they’re all,
01:42:41 these are just because people have money
01:42:43 can go fly around.
01:42:44 I mean, there are people who are displaced by war
01:42:46 from late 1970s, right?
01:42:48 Even already in the early 70s,
01:42:50 people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran,
01:42:53 you know, as labor migrants.
01:42:55 And once you get to Iran, once you get to Pakistan,
01:42:56 once you get to Uzbekistan,
01:42:59 you then connect to all kinds of cosmopolitan cultures.
01:43:02 And in fact, I think one of the themes of the book,
01:43:04 you know, that you may or may not have read,
01:43:06 it may put you to sleep.
01:43:07 You know, Afghan Modern was about, you know,
01:43:09 conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place
01:43:11 where for centuries people put on the move
01:43:14 and trade in this area.
01:43:15 You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization
01:43:17 of places like Helmand and Kandahar,
01:43:20 you know, you fly in or you’re part of a Marine battalion
01:43:24 and you see people there and they look different.
01:43:26 And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize,
01:43:30 you know, they look like they’ve been there
01:43:31 for millennia, right?
01:43:33 The dress, the whatever, right?
01:43:34 You think of technology,
01:43:35 you think of the mud compounds and so on.
01:43:38 You think of, you know, animal drawn transportation,
01:43:42 that kind of stuff, right?
01:43:43 Or the motorbike, right, at most is what they have.
01:43:46 But in fact, if you follow those families,
01:43:49 their trade has taken them to Northern India
01:43:51 for centuries, right?
01:43:53 Their trade has connected them to cosmopolitan centers.
01:43:56 You know, say they have a scholar in the family,
01:43:58 that scholar may have studied
01:43:59 all of the Middle East, South Asia, right?
01:44:02 You know, their ancestors may have been horse traders
01:44:03 who went all the way to Moscow, right?
01:44:05 I mean, we have a sort of records of all these people
01:44:07 traveling across Eurasia,
01:44:10 pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.
01:44:12 And so Afghanistan is this paradox
01:44:14 of visually looking remote
01:44:17 and looking like it’s kind of stuck in time,
01:44:20 but the family trajectories
01:44:22 and the current trajectories
01:44:23 are astoundingly cosmopolitan and mobile.
01:44:26 And so, and a conception of being a world center
01:44:29 is also quite strong.
01:44:30 So, you know, another way to frame that question about like,
01:44:33 do they know about 9.11 would be like,
01:44:36 why should we know about 9.11?
01:44:37 Because we are at the center of something important, right?
01:44:39 We are the center of Asia.
01:44:41 We are the heart of Asia.
01:44:42 We have a kind of historic greatness.
01:44:44 We are a proud culture of our own achievements, right?
01:44:49 So we’re not worried about that, right?
01:44:51 That said, I mean, sure,
01:44:53 there are different narratives about
01:44:54 why Americans are there,
01:44:56 why people are being killed.
01:44:57 You know, of course you’d find,
01:45:00 they want to convert us,
01:45:02 they want our gold,
01:45:03 they want our opium,
01:45:04 they want X, Y, and Z, right?
01:45:06 There was a recent story about a Taliban official
01:45:10 sitting in an office in Kabul
01:45:11 and a journalist asked him,
01:45:12 what can you find in this rotating globe?
01:45:15 Find your country,
01:45:16 find where are we sitting right now?
01:45:17 And he was filmed not being able to do it.
01:45:21 And so a lot of, you know,
01:45:22 race sophisticated Afghans in the diaspora
01:45:23 were saying, you know, ha ha, look at this.
01:45:25 And that exists.
01:45:27 I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom
01:45:29 and there’d be a lot of kids
01:45:30 who wouldn’t know where Afghanistan is too, right?
01:45:32 But I guess I wouldn’t use those metrics
01:45:35 to suggest that this is a place
01:45:38 that doesn’t have a sense of its place in the world
01:45:40 and of geopolitics.
01:45:42 I think if anything,
01:45:43 being a relatively small country
01:45:44 in a very complicated neighborhood,
01:45:46 I mean, everybody, every cab driver,
01:45:48 I mean, people have, I mean,
01:45:50 you know, this is where America is different
01:45:52 because I don’t think Americans have this sense.
01:45:54 You know, we’re talking about Moscow and stuff.
01:45:55 I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers,
01:45:59 I think a lot of them are gonna tell you,
01:46:01 like what’s happening in the world and why, right?
01:46:04 And it’s just part of their thing, right?
01:46:07 You can find that in Ghana,
01:46:07 you can find that in Mexico city, right?
01:46:09 You find that lots of places.
01:46:10 So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated
01:46:13 kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in.
01:46:17 And a lot of them remarkably had done it firsthand,
01:46:20 which is what struck me so much.
01:46:21 And, you know, really my experiences
01:46:22 from the 1990s and Tashkent places
01:46:24 that these guys had already lived
01:46:26 in more countries than I’d ever been.
01:46:28 They already knew half those languages.
01:46:30 I mean, this one friend’s Russian was impeccable.
01:46:34 And of course it helped, they had Russian girlfriends,
01:46:36 they had, you know, they mixed with the police,
01:46:38 they had run ins, I mean,
01:46:40 this wasn’t something you got from a book, right?
01:46:42 This was like hard knock life.
01:46:44 I mean, one friend was from a wealthy family
01:46:48 in this trading diaspora and he was imprisoned.
01:46:51 I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan
01:46:54 and he talks about how he could start like running,
01:46:57 running in the jail, you know,
01:46:58 taking cigarettes to people, doing little things
01:47:00 and kind of, you know, these are not stories of like,
01:47:03 oh, I went to Harvard and so I’m so learned
01:47:06 because of this.
01:47:06 I mean, it’s a whole range of experiences.
01:47:08 The interesting thing is the survey is a survey
01:47:10 and it doesn’t reflect ignorance,
01:47:16 as you’re saying, perhaps,
01:47:18 but it may reflect a different geopolitical view
01:47:22 of the world than the West has.
01:47:25 So if, you know, for a lot of the world,
01:47:29 9 11 was one of the most important moments
01:47:33 of recent human history.
01:47:35 And for Afghanistan to not to know that,
01:47:38 especially when they’re part of that story,
01:47:41 means they have a very different,
01:47:43 like there could be a lot of things said.
01:47:46 One is the spread of information is different.
01:47:49 The channels of the way information is spread.
01:47:52 And two of the things they care about,
01:47:54 maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc
01:47:59 of history where the bickering of these superpowers
01:48:03 that seem to want to go to the moon
01:48:06 are not as important as the big sort of arc
01:48:09 that’s been the story of Afghanistan.
01:48:13 You know, that’s an interesting idea,
01:48:15 but it’s still a bit, if at all,
01:48:18 representative of the truth.
01:48:20 It’s heartbreaking that they’re not,
01:48:23 do not see themselves as active player
01:48:28 in this game between the United States
01:48:32 and Central Asia, because they’re such a critical player.
01:48:37 And I feel, and obviously, in many ways,
01:48:41 get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction
01:48:44 with the invasion of Afghanistan for many years,
01:48:50 and then this rushed withdrawal of troops,
01:48:54 and now the economic collapse, and it’s sad in some ways.
01:49:04 That’s right.
01:49:04 I mean, you know, another way to put it is this.
01:49:07 I mean, yeah, there’s a range of knowledge,
01:49:08 and you’re right, the information flows
01:49:10 are peculiar to particular geographies
01:49:14 and histories and stuff.
01:49:15 I think that, you know, plucking out one sample
01:49:17 from some fairly remote area,
01:49:20 from one like follow the agricultural products.
01:49:22 I mean, and this is where, you know,
01:49:24 I think urban rural divides used to mean a lot more
01:49:29 in the 19th century, right?
01:49:30 So a lot of like the nuts and bolts of history
01:49:32 is about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions,
01:49:35 but I think that if one has the privilege
01:49:37 of traveling a bit, you see that like urban areas
01:49:40 are fed by rural hinterlands.
01:49:43 And if you think of who actually brings the bread,
01:49:47 the milk, the pomegranates and so on,
01:49:49 it creates these networks.
01:49:50 And then, you know, mobility channels,
01:49:53 information and so on.
01:49:55 But yeah, but your broader point
01:49:57 about like the tragedy of this,
01:49:58 I mean, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student of mine,
01:50:01 an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD,
01:50:04 who’s now, you know, a doctor, he’s a great scholar.
01:50:07 You know, we’ve done several events now
01:50:10 trying to just think through what’s happened.
01:50:11 And of course, she’s very emotionally affected by it.
01:50:14 And she continues to ask a really great question.
01:50:17 If I can get her phrasing right, you know,
01:50:19 if you think of the cycle of like the Taliban
01:50:21 being in power in 2001 and the way in which
01:50:24 that affected women in particular,
01:50:25 you know, half Afghan, half of the society, right?
01:50:28 Then you think of this 20 year period of violence
01:50:30 and, you know, missed exits, right?
01:50:34 And repeated tragedy that also it created a space.
01:50:38 I mean, it created a space for a whole generation.
01:50:39 I’d say generationally, it created a sense,
01:50:41 a space for people to realize something new.
01:50:44 And I think, so we have to attend to the dynamism
01:50:47 of the society, right?
01:50:47 So yeah, this happened mostly in Kabul,
01:50:51 other big cities, Mazar Sharif, Herat, and Kandahar.
01:50:55 But you can’t limit your analysis to that
01:50:56 because things like radio, television,
01:51:00 everyone got a TV channel.
01:51:02 There’s a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star
01:51:05 that I recommend to your listeners and viewers
01:51:07 that it’s about a singing show, a singing contest show.
01:51:10 But you see just for some of these things
01:51:12 about like connections, I mean,
01:51:14 it’s a show by an independent television network
01:51:17 that did drama, it did kind of infomercials
01:51:21 for the government and huge American investment in it.
01:51:24 So it wasn’t politically neutral,
01:51:25 but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff.
01:51:27 But it did a singing show that became incredibly popular,
01:51:31 modeled upon the British American,
01:51:33 you know, American Idol kind of stuff, you know,
01:51:35 and you could vote.
01:51:36 So it had a kind of democratic practice element.
01:51:39 But it’s fascinating to see that, you know,
01:51:41 people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this,
01:51:44 you know, you think of like literacy rates,
01:51:46 literacy rates are imperfect.
01:51:47 And, you know, people who study, you know,
01:51:50 medieval or modern Europe talk about how,
01:51:52 yeah, no one could read and there weren’t many books,
01:51:56 but if someone had a book, it’d be read aloud
01:51:58 to a whole village potentially or gathering.
01:52:00 So there isn’t much, you know,
01:52:01 some of these metrics don’t get what people actually
01:52:03 receive as information or exposure
01:52:05 because there’s the magnifying power of open spaces
01:52:08 and hearing radio in group settings,
01:52:11 seeing television group settings, having telephone,
01:52:15 you know, cheap telephones, which then become an access
01:52:18 point to the world and social media, right?
01:52:20 So all the stuff swept across Afghan society
01:52:23 as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more.
01:52:28 So Afghan society became, you know, in important ways,
01:52:31 really connected to everything going on.
01:52:33 And so you see that reflected politically
01:52:34 and what people wanted.
01:52:35 So you had some people obviously
01:52:37 back to return to the Taliban,
01:52:39 some people wanted the status quo,
01:52:41 but increasingly many more people wanted something else.
01:52:44 And one of the great failures was
01:52:45 to expose people to democracy,
01:52:47 but only give them the rigged version.
01:52:50 And so the US State Department in particular
01:52:52 continued to double down on faked elections
01:52:55 for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.
01:52:57 What kind of elections?
01:52:58 Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament
01:53:02 and for president in Afghanistan again and again
01:53:06 from the very beginning.
01:53:08 And those elections were partly theater for the US,
01:53:12 like for remaining on the road that you’re describing,
01:53:14 right, for not deviating, for not exiting
01:53:15 because we were building democracy there.
01:53:18 In reality, the US government knew
01:53:19 it was never really building democracy there.
01:53:21 It was establishing control
01:53:24 and elections were one of the means to gather control,
01:53:26 right?
01:53:27 But then you had on the ground,
01:53:28 especially among young people going to university,
01:53:32 you know, having experiences
01:53:33 that were denied to them before,
01:53:36 you know, they took these problems so seriously.
01:53:37 So part of the disillusionment that we see today
01:53:40 is that, you know, they believe what the US told them
01:53:43 that they’re constructing democracy.
01:53:45 And of course, you know, cynics like us may be thinking,
01:53:46 well, you know, you’re not really doing that.
01:53:49 You’re backing fraud.
01:53:50 They believed it when they were younger
01:53:52 and now they’re actually smart enough
01:53:54 to understand that it’s a farce.
01:53:56 But in so indirectly had the consequence
01:53:59 of actually working and that it taught the young
01:54:03 over a period of 20 years, young folks to believe
01:54:07 that democracy is possible
01:54:08 and then to realize what democracy is not.
01:54:10 It’s just the current system.
01:54:11 That’s beautifully said, beautifully said.
01:54:12 And so, but now look at us, now it’s, you know,
01:54:15 it’s now November.
01:54:17 And so this whole period,
01:54:21 and I wouldn’t say like, you know,
01:54:23 I wouldn’t cast the last 20 years
01:54:25 if we’re looking at all the achievements, you know,
01:54:27 I wouldn’t put them in an American tally sheet,
01:54:30 like, oh, this is something
01:54:31 we should pat ourselves on the back for.
01:54:32 I think that much of this happened actually
01:54:34 against what the Americans wanted.
01:54:35 I mean, that the kind of free thinking,
01:54:39 democracy wanting, I mean, even like, you know,
01:54:42 we could point out on the religious,
01:54:43 go back to the religious sphere.
01:54:44 I mean, the African religious landscape
01:54:47 became very pluralistic.
01:54:50 Lots of young people wanted a different kind
01:54:52 of secular politics, but the old guard
01:54:56 who wanted the status quo and wanted something
01:54:59 that they’d fought for in 1980s tended
01:55:01 to still get American backing as the political leads,
01:55:04 who still tended to monopolize political power.
01:55:06 So all this stuff was happening in different ways.
01:55:09 I mean, the Americans established
01:55:10 this American University of Afghanistan,
01:55:12 which was, I think, one of the best things
01:55:13 the U.S. did there.
01:55:14 And I regret that the U.S. didn’t fund 20 more,
01:55:18 you know, sprinkling them across the country,
01:55:19 making them accessible to people,
01:55:20 because it was, you know, again,
01:55:23 it wasn’t an engine of Americanization.
01:55:26 It was just opportunity.
01:55:27 And so the thirst for higher education
01:55:28 was really extraordinary there.
01:55:29 It was never really met.
01:55:31 The U.S. tended to put money in primary education,
01:55:34 which much of that too was fraudulent.
01:55:37 But so you have all this interesting dynamism.
01:55:38 You have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space.
01:55:42 I mean, I call it a public sphere
01:55:43 in the classic European sense.
01:55:45 You know, the Afghans made of their own.
01:55:46 And again, it wasn’t Americanization.
01:55:49 It wasn’t imposed.
01:55:51 It was something that Afghans built across generations,
01:55:54 but really with a firm foundation among youth,
01:55:58 who wanted, importantly, a multiethnic Afghan society.
01:56:01 You asked about Pashtuns and that kind of stuff.
01:56:03 And a lot of that language in recent years was,
01:56:07 they were aware that the U.S.-backed government
01:56:09 was playing ethnic politics
01:56:11 and trying to kind of put people on the blocks
01:56:14 and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity.
01:56:17 And there was a younger cohort of people who said,
01:56:19 you know, we are Afghan.
01:56:21 And then there was interesting social media stuff
01:56:23 where people would say, I am Hazara,
01:56:25 but I’m also Tajik, I’m also Uzbek.
01:56:28 I mean, it was a way of creating
01:56:30 a multiethnic Afghan national identity
01:56:33 that embraced everything.
01:56:34 I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian, right?
01:56:37 But symbolically, it was very important
01:56:39 that they rejected being mobilized politically,
01:56:42 you know, voting as a Hazara or voting as whatever.
01:56:45 And of course, there were communities who wanted to,
01:56:47 you know, vote as that ethnic community.
01:56:50 But there are also people who said, you know,
01:56:52 let’s put a kind of civic nationalism first,
01:56:55 one that accommodates, I think, pluralism
01:56:57 in a way that rejected the kind of majoritarian politics
01:57:00 of one ethnic group dominating the thing.
01:57:03 So all this stuff was quite interesting.
01:57:04 I mean, women were asserting themselves
01:57:07 across multiple spheres.
01:57:09 Of course, it remained patriarchal.
01:57:10 Of course, there were struggles.
01:57:11 Of course, there was violence.
01:57:12 Of course, you know, there’s no utopia.
01:57:15 But the door on all that shut on August 15.
01:57:18 So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer
01:57:22 from the student, now professor,
01:57:25 was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this,
01:57:28 and you mentioned the tragic arc here,
01:57:31 if you think of the 20 years, like, she asked, you know,
01:57:35 why did you go to war in our country?
01:57:37 Basically, why did you do this to us for 20 years
01:57:39 when this was never about us?
01:57:41 You know, you never asked us if you wanted to come.
01:57:43 You never asked us what you wanted to build here.
01:57:46 You didn’t ask us when you were coming
01:57:47 and you didn’t ask us when you were leaving.
01:57:49 You just did this all on your own.
01:57:51 And we tried to make the most of it.
01:57:53 And then you pulled the rug out from under us,
01:57:55 you know, at the 11th hour,
01:57:57 and returned to power, probably by diplomacy.
01:58:02 It wasn’t, at the end, just a military loss.
01:58:04 I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions.
01:58:06 I mean, the idea, you asked about alternatives.
01:58:08 I mean, give me a Bagram.
01:58:10 I mean, holding to the timeline.
01:58:12 I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold
01:58:14 to the Doha Agreement that Trump had signed.
01:58:17 I mean, every American president
01:58:19 writes his or her own foreign policy, right?
01:58:21 So the Biden administration acted as if,
01:58:24 and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied,
01:58:28 and that it was either this or 20 more years of war
01:58:31 or some absurd kind of, you know, false alternative.
01:58:36 And so, but I think that’s important
01:58:37 for American audiences to hear that, you know,
01:58:40 they’re like, you came to here to experiment.
01:58:42 You came here to punish.
01:58:44 You came here to kind of reassert, you know,
01:58:47 your dominance the world stage,
01:58:49 you know, to work out the fear and hurt of 9 11
01:58:53 that we talked about, which was so real, you know,
01:58:55 impalpable and so important for American politics since then.
01:58:59 Like you did, you worked out your problems,
01:59:00 you know, on us, on our territory.
01:59:03 And now what do we have for it?
01:59:06 You know, and then the people who had a stake
01:59:08 in that system, imperfect as it was,
01:59:12 have been desperate to leave.
01:59:13 And so this, I don’t know how much people are aware of this,
01:59:15 but, you know, I’m a scholar, I work in California,
01:59:19 you know, I have friends, I edited a journal on Afghanistan
01:59:23 and, you know, but I’m not a politician, I’m not a soldier,
01:59:26 but people assume that, you know,
01:59:28 Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me
01:59:31 and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American
01:59:34 to help get them out.
01:59:36 You know, that’s the kind of like, you know,
01:59:39 the symbol of voting with your feet, you know,
01:59:42 is quite powerful.
01:59:43 I mean, there’s a huge swath of society
01:59:45 that doesn’t want the system
01:59:47 and is literally living in terror about it.
01:59:50 Naturally women, you know,
01:59:51 I mean, especially women of a certain age,
01:59:52 I mean, they feel like their lives are over.
01:59:54 I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide.
01:59:58 They feel betrayed and some people have done
02:00:02 some good things in getting people out.
02:00:03 You know, I mean, some, you know,
02:00:05 the US military vets have been, you know,
02:00:08 at the forefront of working to get out people,
02:00:10 you know, that they know they owe,
02:00:14 but the US government doesn’t want these people.
02:00:17 I mean, they have created all these obstacles
02:00:19 to allowing a safety valve for people to leave.
02:00:24 Looking forward from a perspective of leadership,
02:00:27 how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes?
02:00:31 So obviously some interests,
02:00:33 some aspects of human nature led to this war.
02:00:36 How do we resist that in the future?
02:00:41 I guess beyond my moral and intellectual capacity,
02:00:44 I’ll just say this, I mean, looking at it,
02:00:45 again, looking at it from my home ground as the university,
02:00:47 and I think of the intellectual,
02:00:53 you know, ways of thinking that I think students
02:00:55 should develop for themselves as citizens, right?
02:00:59 Maybe that’s where to start is like historical thinking.
02:01:01 I mean, these are all, you know,
02:01:03 I try to tell people, you know,
02:01:04 if you want to do robotics, computer science,
02:01:07 you’d be a doctor or whatever.
02:01:08 You should study history.
02:01:10 Yeah, I mean, you don’t have to be in a story like me,
02:01:11 and it’s, you know, my job isn’t perfect.
02:01:13 My profession is deeply flawed, right?
02:01:15 But as I get older, I’m like,
02:01:17 there are fewer and fewer historians
02:01:18 that I actually like and want to hang out with and stuff.
02:01:20 So it’s like, I’m not offering myself
02:01:22 as like a model for anything,
02:01:23 but you know, whether you’re a, you know,
02:01:25 you carry the mail or you’re a brain surgeon, whatever.
02:01:27 I mean, I think it’s a way of civic engagement
02:01:30 and a way of like, you know, ethical being in the world
02:01:32 that we need to familiarize ourselves with,
02:01:34 because if you’re an American
02:01:35 or if you’re from a rich country, you know,
02:01:38 you need to be aware of your effect
02:01:40 on an intricate world.
02:01:42 You can’t say anymore that you don’t know or care
02:01:45 what’s happening in Afghanistan
02:01:46 or really circle the globe and point to a place.
02:01:49 I mean, we’re all connected and we have ethical obligations.
02:01:54 That’s one place to start, but I would just say this,
02:01:55 and this is a lot for a self critique,
02:01:57 and that is so much of my teaching
02:02:01 and like the themes of my research have been about empire,
02:02:03 you know, how big states work,
02:02:05 not only on big territories like the Russian Empire
02:02:07 and Soviet Union and stuff,
02:02:08 but the way in which power often is projected
02:02:11 beyond those boundaries in ways that we don’t see.
02:02:14 So this is where things like neoliberalism
02:02:16 or just, you know, if you want to take capitalism
02:02:18 or just things that, you know, the idea of humanity
02:02:21 or of liberalism or of humanitarianism,
02:02:24 ideas that move beyond state boundaries
02:02:26 are all things that we think about as affecting power
02:02:30 in some ways that often harm people, right?
02:02:33 So I think part of, as I’ve seen my job so far
02:02:36 is to think about, you know,
02:02:37 building upon the work of my people in grad school
02:02:39 and, you know, scholars that have affected me.
02:02:42 I mean, you know, we’re all concerned
02:02:43 with how power works and its effects
02:02:45 and trying to be attuned to understanding
02:02:50 things that aren’t visible, right,
02:02:50 that we should be thinking about,
02:02:51 that should be known to us.
02:02:52 And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role
02:02:55 in showing effects that aren’t, you know, obvious initially.
02:03:01 So empire is a framework to think about this.
02:03:03 And so you think about invading foreign countries.
02:03:05 Obviously, if you’re a scholar of empire,
02:03:07 you’ve seen what that looks like,
02:03:09 and that’s horrific, right?
02:03:11 You look at things like racism
02:03:13 as one of the ideological pillars of empire.
02:03:16 You know, that’s horrific.
02:03:17 It must be critiqued.
02:03:18 It must be, you know, we must be educated against.
02:03:22 Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire
02:03:24 is also something to highlight, you know,
02:03:25 to rectify and so on.
02:03:27 You know, to be moral beings,
02:03:28 we need to think about past inequality
02:03:31 and the legacies of violence and destruction that live on.
02:03:35 I mean, living in the Americas.
02:03:36 I mean, look at, you know, we’re all on stolen land.
02:03:39 We’re all in the sense living with the fruits of genocide
02:03:43 and slavery and all those things
02:03:44 that are hard to come to terms with, right?
02:03:46 But the last few months in Afghanistan
02:03:49 and thinking about empire, I think, made me more humble
02:03:53 when I read people who say,
02:03:57 to put it simply, have taken some joy in this moment,
02:03:59 saying like, well, the Americans
02:04:02 got kicked out of Afghanistan.
02:04:03 You know, if you’re against empire, this is a good thing.
02:04:07 This is a kind of victory of anti colonial.
02:04:10 You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan
02:04:14 that America is not some kind of place
02:04:16 that has an ideal of freedom
02:04:18 and all the kind of things that we Americans tell ourselves,
02:04:21 but it’s more America has the ideal of empire,
02:04:25 that there’s one place that has the truth
02:04:28 and everybody else must follow this truth.
02:04:31 And so from a perspective of Afghanistan,
02:04:34 it could be a victory against this idea
02:04:36 of centralized truth of empire.
02:04:39 That’s another way to tell the story.
02:04:41 And then in that sense, it’s a victory.
02:04:43 And in that sense also, I mean,
02:04:46 you push back against this somewhat,
02:04:49 this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires.
02:04:54 Right, right.
02:04:56 And outside this, I mean, I’m a critic of empire.
02:04:59 I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon
02:05:04 that stays with us.
02:05:05 And I think, you know, we need scholars
02:05:06 to point to the way in which it still works
02:05:08 and still does harm.
02:05:11 But it’s part of being an empire
02:05:12 that you can just get up and leave a place, right?
02:05:15 That you can remake its politics on one day.
02:05:19 And then because it fails to advance your agenda
02:05:22 at one moment, you simply walk away.
02:05:26 I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.
02:05:27 I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent,
02:05:30 you know, the way that the British withdrew
02:05:34 played a significant role in mass violence,
02:05:37 you know, that accompanied partition.
02:05:40 It wasn’t all the actions of the British
02:05:41 that, you know, dictated that, right?
02:05:44 There were lots of actors who chose to pick up,
02:05:46 you know, the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.
02:05:49 I mean, there’s lots of agency in that moment
02:05:52 as there is now in what’s happening in Afghanistan.
02:05:54 But I think the capriciousness,
02:05:56 I mean, the ability to act as if your political decisions
02:06:03 about other people’s lives, you know,
02:06:06 are something that can be made, you know, in secret.
02:06:09 They can be made willy nilly.
02:06:11 They really are beyond the accountability, you know,
02:06:14 of those who are actually going to live
02:06:17 with the consequences of shifting the cards on a deck
02:06:20 in a way that decides who rules and who doesn’t.
02:06:23 I would love to hear your conversation
02:06:25 with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson,
02:06:28 who argues on the topic of empire,
02:06:30 that you can also zoom out even further
02:06:34 and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire.
02:06:38 And he argues, I think he gets a lot of flack for this
02:06:41 from other historians, that like the British empire
02:06:45 did more good than bad in certain moments of history.
02:06:50 And that’s an uncomfortable truth.
02:06:52 There’s like levels, it’s a cake
02:06:55 with layers of uncomfortable truths.
02:06:57 And it’s not a cake at all because none of it tastes good.
02:07:00 Right.
02:07:01 I mean, I would continue to disagree with Neil Ferguson.
02:07:04 So I’m still working out where I am
02:07:06 and what this moment does to kind of, I think,
02:07:08 qualify my understanding of the past into,
02:07:12 I think in a moment of humility, I do,
02:07:15 and I’m probably reacting to the kind of, as you put it,
02:07:18 I mean, the idea that this is like a good thing
02:07:21 that American power has been defeated here.
02:07:23 I mean, I do think American power should contract.
02:07:25 And I don’t think, and again,
02:07:28 if I had to create a tally sheet
02:07:30 of what the Americans did in the US,
02:07:32 I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan.
02:07:35 It could have done that without invading the country
02:07:37 and killing people.
02:07:38 I’ve not now become an apologist for empire.
02:07:41 I’m not now a mini Neil Ferguson,
02:07:44 but ending empire is, I mean,
02:07:51 those decisions you make are in some ways
02:07:54 a continuation of imperil hubris, right?
02:07:57 So you’re not really out of empire yet.
02:07:59 You’re not really contracting empire
02:08:01 for those who are living it, you know?
02:08:03 But I think it’s also, I mean, maybe I put it this way,
02:08:05 it’s be careful what you ask for, you know?
02:08:08 I mean, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan,
02:08:12 but I wanted there to be a political settlement.
02:08:14 I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right?
02:08:18 I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?
02:08:20 But why is going to Afghanistan even needed for that?
02:08:22 You can play all those games of geopolitics
02:08:26 without ever invading and taking ownership of the place.
02:08:30 It feels like the war, it feels like,
02:08:33 I mean, I’m not exactly sure
02:08:35 what military force is necessary for,
02:08:38 except for targeted intense attacks.
02:08:41 It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9 11
02:08:46 was to show what was a display of force
02:08:49 unlike anything the world has ever seen
02:08:52 for a very short amount of time.
02:08:54 Targeted at, sure, a terrorist,
02:08:57 at certain strongholds and so on.
02:08:59 And then in and out and then focus on education,
02:09:03 on empowering women into the education system,
02:09:08 all those kinds of things that have to do
02:09:10 with supporting the culture, the education,
02:09:13 the flourishing of the place.
02:09:16 It has nothing to do with military policing essentially.
02:09:21 Right.
02:09:22 I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it through that lens,
02:09:25 I mean, if any Afghanistan and then if any Iraq
02:09:28 didn’t end Al Qaeda, it didn’t end terrorism, right?
02:09:33 It didn’t really deflate these ideologies entirely.
02:09:38 There were, if you like, you could say there were,
02:09:41 some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.
02:09:47 But in fact, I mean,
02:09:48 look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing.
02:09:50 I mean, it spread.
02:09:51 I mean, it was never an Islamic thing.
02:09:53 It was never a Muslim thing.
02:09:55 Some Muslims adopted it in some places,
02:09:58 but the circuits of knowledge
02:10:00 about how to do these kinds of things only expanded
02:10:02 with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq,
02:10:05 and then they kind of became connected.
02:10:06 And then they began to the present.
02:10:08 I mean, the Islamic state is,
02:10:10 it’s the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever
02:10:12 because it’s on the basis of its supposed new stance
02:10:18 as a counterterrorism outfit
02:10:20 that it will get recognition from all its neighbors.
02:10:22 It will get recognition from Russia.
02:10:24 I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport,
02:10:26 the United States was collaborating with the Taliban
02:10:29 against the Islamic state
02:10:31 and openly talking about the Taliban
02:10:34 as if they were partners in the security operation.
02:10:35 So, and then Al Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan, so.
02:10:40 Trillions of dollars spent.
02:10:42 Yeah.
02:10:43 The drones up above bombing places
02:10:48 that result in civilian death,
02:10:50 the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers,
02:10:53 and those stories even at the individual level
02:10:56 propagate virally across the land,
02:10:58 creating potentially more terrorists.
02:11:01 And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars
02:11:04 is the military industrial complex
02:11:08 where there’s just a momentum where after 9 11,
02:11:13 the feeling like we should do something
02:11:16 led to us doing something.
02:11:18 And then a lot of people realizing they can make money
02:11:21 from doing more of that something.
02:11:23 And then it’s just the momentum
02:11:25 where no one person is sitting there
02:11:28 petting a cat in an evil way,
02:11:30 saying we’re going to spend all of this money
02:11:33 and create more suffering and create more terrorism.
02:11:36 But it’s just something about that momentum
02:11:37 that leads to that.
02:11:39 And to me, honestly, I’m still a sucker.
02:11:42 I believe in leadership.
02:11:43 I believe in great charismatic leaders
02:11:47 and the power of that want to do evil and to do good.
02:11:51 And it felt like I honestly put the blame on George Bush,
02:11:58 Obama, Trump, and Biden for lack of leadership.
02:12:03 Yeah, definitely, definitely.
02:12:05 I agree.
02:12:05 Yeah, there is the military industrial complex component,
02:12:08 which is huge.
02:12:09 And there’s also, I mean, speaking of government leadership,
02:12:11 it’s also, I’d say the imbalance of power within Washington.
02:12:15 I mean, the Pentagon used this moment,
02:12:20 well, beginning in 2001,
02:12:21 I think to assert this authority
02:12:24 at the expense of other institutions
02:12:26 of national government.
02:12:27 I mean, the State Department diplomacy
02:12:31 has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.
02:12:35 And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians,
02:12:37 which I’m not formally a historian of the United States,
02:12:39 but we can go back to talk about Vietnam.
02:12:42 We talk about lots of Cold War and post Cold War engagements.
02:12:47 And I think we need a reckoning
02:12:49 about how the United States uses military power,
02:12:52 why we devote so much to our military budget
02:12:55 and what could be available to us
02:12:56 if we had a more sensible view
02:12:59 of the value of military power, of its effectiveness.
02:13:03 And I think we’re willing to hammer home
02:13:04 that this was a defeat.
02:13:05 I mean, I think there should be accountability.
02:13:08 And this could be a kind of opening
02:13:09 for a kind of bipartisan conversation,
02:13:11 because if you are a kind of American militarist,
02:13:16 I mean, you have to look at the leadership
02:13:18 that got you to a place where you were defeated
02:13:20 by men wearing sandals firing AK 47s, right?
02:13:25 Yeah, there should be a humility with that.
02:13:29 I mean, we should actually say that,
02:13:31 like literally the…
02:13:34 Oh, we lost.
02:13:35 You should say we lost.
02:13:35 It wasn’t just, you know…
02:13:37 The American military lost.
02:13:40 Yeah, and I feel I have very mixed feelings
02:13:43 and it’s, I don’t know, a ton of veterans,
02:13:46 but Mitch and I have topped my share
02:13:48 and have a student now and they’re suffering
02:13:52 because they look at the sacrifices that they made
02:13:54 that I didn’t make.
02:13:55 I mean, American society didn’t make the sacrifices.
02:13:57 I mean, men and women lost limbs,
02:13:59 they lost eyes, they lost lives.
02:14:02 There’s been this, of course, quiet epidemic of suicide
02:14:06 among veterans.
02:14:07 And I’ve heard some stories
02:14:10 the fact that the State Department
02:14:12 is seeing a similar surge of suicides
02:14:14 because they see their adult life’s work collapse.
02:14:19 They’ve seen their relationships.
02:14:20 I mean, they’ve seen phone calls in the middle of the night
02:14:23 from people who they entrusted with their lives
02:14:26 who they know are gonna be targeted.
02:14:28 I mean, some of them have already been killed.
02:14:30 They’ve seen the, I mean, I think just,
02:14:32 I’d imagine just ideologically and professionally
02:14:35 what they believed in and what they sacrificed for
02:14:40 has vanished.
02:14:41 And I think that’s bad.
02:14:44 I mean, historically thinking of some of the precedents
02:14:46 you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of,
02:14:49 first of all, at a human level,
02:14:51 I feel horrible for those people who,
02:14:53 I may not have agreed with everything they had done
02:14:55 and their choices in life,
02:14:56 but I respect the fact that many good people
02:14:59 went out of the best intentions as young people
02:15:03 to do the right thing and make things right.
02:15:05 And I respect that.
02:15:07 And I’ve met enough to know that there were people
02:15:09 who saw the gray and complexity
02:15:12 and that’s all you can hope for.
02:15:16 But we don’t want a generation of disillusioned veterans
02:15:20 if we look at the other postwar moments.
02:15:23 And this is kind of a postwar moment where,
02:15:25 I think we need a conversation with American veterans
02:15:27 about what they’ve gone through and what they’re feeling.
02:15:31 And they still have skin in the game
02:15:33 because their personal connections
02:15:33 and the end of their histories.
02:15:35 And they’re also gonna be future leaders.
02:15:37 I mean, veterans.
02:15:39 People who have served are often great men and women.
02:15:43 That’s true.
02:15:45 And throughout history,
02:15:50 whether you sacrifice you served in fighting World War II,
02:15:54 in fighting Vietnam,
02:15:55 that’s going to mold you in different ways.
02:15:58 That’s going to mold how you are as a leader
02:16:02 that leads this country forward.
02:16:04 And so you have to have an honest conversation
02:16:07 about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan,
02:16:13 the war in the Middle East,
02:16:15 the war on terror in the history of America.
02:16:18 If we just look at the full context
02:16:20 at the end of this 21st century,
02:16:22 how are we going to remember this
02:16:24 and how that’s going to result in our future interactions
02:16:27 with small and large countries,
02:16:30 with China or some proxy war with China,
02:16:32 with Russia or some proxy war with Russia
02:16:36 what’s the role of oil and natural resources and opium
02:16:39 and all those kinds of things.
02:16:40 What’s the role of military power in the world.
02:16:45 And now with COVID,
02:16:50 it’s almost like because of the many failures
02:16:55 of the US government and many leaders
02:17:00 in science and politics to respond effectively
02:17:04 and quickly to COVID,
02:17:07 we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too.
02:17:12 And it’s hard to know which is going to be more expensive.
02:17:17 They seem to be symptoms of something
02:17:21 of a same kind of source problem of leadership,
02:17:28 of bureaucracy, of the way information
02:17:31 and intelligence flows throughout the US government.
02:17:34 All those kinds of things.
02:17:35 And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things.
02:17:39 Definitely, I mean, if there’s one theme
02:17:41 that jumps out to me and thinking about this moment,
02:17:43 I mean, if we recognize that we live
02:17:45 in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States
02:17:48 and in other countries that have long been proud
02:17:50 of their democratic traditions,
02:17:51 if we see them being under assault from certain quarters,
02:17:54 I think military defeat is yet another addition
02:17:57 to all the aspects of this that you mentioned.
02:18:00 I mean, the fact that military defeat is a giant match
02:18:04 that you’re throwing on this fire potentially,
02:18:05 if we think of its legacies
02:18:07 and other postwar environments,
02:18:09 when the veteran angle is one,
02:18:12 when you have people who feel betrayed,
02:18:15 I mean, they have been fodder
02:18:17 for the far right in other settings.
02:18:18 I mean, interwar Europe is very much
02:18:19 about mobilizing dissolution veterans
02:18:23 in the name of right wing fascist politics.
02:18:26 If one thinks too of this moment
02:18:28 of really increasing xenophobia,
02:18:32 our immigration debate is now talking about
02:18:34 whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all
02:18:36 in the United States after 20 years.
02:18:39 And I think immediately the response in Europe,
02:18:41 which I followed to some extent, focusing on Germany,
02:18:45 because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans
02:18:49 leading up to this collapse.
02:18:50 And now they have been,
02:18:53 a lot of right wing center right politicians in Germany
02:18:57 have been watching all this with an eye to,
02:19:01 using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience
02:19:05 to say, in the context of recent elections,
02:19:07 that we are the party who will defend you
02:19:09 against these Afghans who are gonna be coming from this.
02:19:11 So what I’ve tried to emphasize
02:19:13 in talking to different groups about this moment
02:19:15 is that it won’t be confined to Afghanistan
02:19:17 or even the region.
02:19:18 I mean, obviously malnutrition, hunger
02:19:20 will send Afghans to neighboring states,
02:19:23 but where the European right is resurgent,
02:19:27 this has been a gift, right?
02:19:28 To say that the Afghans are coming,
02:19:30 they’re brown skinned, they’re Muslim,
02:19:32 they’re uneducated, they’re gonna want your women.
02:19:34 And they will take the odd sexual assault case
02:19:37 or the odd, whatever, dramatic act of violence
02:19:41 that happens numerically in any population.
02:19:45 And they will magnify that to say that,
02:19:49 our far right group is gonna save the nation.
02:19:51 And sorry, the main point I wanted to speak of leadership
02:19:54 was that I think the serial,
02:19:56 well, there were many, many carnal sins, if you like,
02:20:00 but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits,
02:20:02 I mean, what blocked some of those exits
02:20:04 was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying.
02:20:09 And so, I mean, this is no secret,
02:20:11 anyone who’s followed this, but we’ve allowed,
02:20:15 and you think of the general mistrust of government,
02:20:17 mistrust of authority across the board,
02:20:21 of professors, of economists, of scientists, doctors, right?
02:20:26 Well, I actually think that’s the hopeful thing to me
02:20:28 about the internet is the internet hates inauthenticity.
02:20:34 They can smell bullshit much better.
02:20:36 And I think that motivates young leaders
02:20:38 to be transparent and authentic.
02:20:40 So like the very problems we’ve been seeing,
02:20:45 this kind of attitude of authority where,
02:20:49 oh, the populace, they’re too busy with their own lives.
02:20:53 They’re not smart enough to understand
02:20:54 the full complexities of the things we’re dealing with.
02:20:57 So we’re not going to even communicate to them
02:20:59 the full complexities, we’re just going to decide
02:21:02 and then tell them what we decided
02:21:05 and conceive some kind of narrative
02:21:08 that makes it easy for them to consume this decision.
02:21:13 As opposed to that, I really believe,
02:21:16 I see there’s a hunger for authenticity
02:21:18 of when you’re making decisions,
02:21:21 when you’re looking at the rest of the world
02:21:23 and trying to untangle this complexity, the internet,
02:21:28 the public, the world wants to see you as a leader struggle
02:21:33 with the tension of these ideas, to change your mind,
02:21:37 to recognize your own flaws
02:21:40 and your own thinking from a month ago, all that,
02:21:43 the full complexity of it,
02:21:44 also acknowledge the uncertainty as with COVID,
02:21:47 also with the wars, I think there’s a hunger for that.
02:21:51 And I think that’s just going to change the nature
02:21:53 of leadership in the 21st century.
02:21:56 I hope so.
02:21:57 I think all the things you’ve highlighted,
02:21:59 accountability is part of that, right?
02:22:00 I mean, we need honesty, openness,
02:22:04 and then acknowledgement of mistakes.
02:22:06 Humility is the key to all learning, right?
02:22:08 But also, I mean, you think just the headline
02:22:10 from yesterday, the horrible drone strike,
02:22:14 which was really the last kind of American military action
02:22:18 on the day that the US was, I think,
02:22:20 mostly departing from Kabul,
02:22:22 wiped out an entire family, mostly children.
02:22:25 You know, the US acknowledged that, yes,
02:22:27 this was not the ISIS bombing outfit
02:22:29 that they thought it was.
02:22:31 But yesterday, they did a quick review.
02:22:34 I’m not an expert on drone strikes in the aftermath,
02:22:36 but those who’ve looked at it more closely said
02:22:38 it was basically whole cloth taken
02:22:41 from what the US government has been saying
02:22:44 after all these strikes, you know,
02:22:46 reproducing the same language
02:22:48 and basically pointing to technical errors,
02:22:51 but denying that there were any procedural mistakes
02:22:57 or flaws, or it was just kind of,
02:22:59 they found little ways of acknowledging
02:23:01 things did not go as planned,
02:23:02 but, you know, we follow the policies essentially,
02:23:06 and yeah, that’s it.
02:23:08 It’s not a crime.
02:23:09 It’s a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up.
02:23:13 And it’s kind of the legal ease
02:23:15 that suddenly makes a war crime not a war crime, you know?
02:23:19 And that reflects, I think,
02:23:22 our refusal to take accountability.
02:23:24 I think people are really sick of that
02:23:26 in a way where the opposite is true,
02:23:29 which is they get excited for people who are not,
02:23:33 for leaders who are not that,
02:23:35 and so they’re not going to punish you
02:23:37 for saying, I made a mistake.
02:23:42 I just had a conversation with Francis Collins,
02:23:44 the director of the NIH,
02:23:46 and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci
02:23:49 has been that it’s such subtle,
02:23:54 but such crucial communication of mistakes made.
02:23:58 If you make a small mistake,
02:24:00 it is so powerful to communicate,
02:24:04 I think we messed up.
02:24:05 We thought this was true, and it wasn’t.
02:24:08 So the obvious thing there was with masks
02:24:11 early in the pandemic.
02:24:13 There’s so much uncertainty.
02:24:14 It’s so understandable to make mistakes
02:24:17 or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria,
02:24:21 different statements you make lead to.
02:24:23 Just being transparent about that
02:24:25 and saying we were not correct
02:24:26 and saying the thing we said before.
02:24:28 That’s so powerful to communicate, to gain trust.
02:24:33 And the opposite is true.
02:24:35 When you do this legal ease type of talk,
02:24:38 it destroys trust.
02:24:40 And again, I really think the lessons of recent history
02:24:47 teach us how to be a leader
02:24:51 and teach young leaders how to be leaders.
02:24:53 And so I have a lot of hope.
02:24:56 Partially thanks for the internet.
02:24:58 Yeah, yeah, that’s great.
02:25:00 Oh, humility.
02:25:00 I mean, we need humility, accountability, honesty.
02:25:05 And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that.
02:25:07 I mean, to learn from past mistakes.
02:25:09 And obviously there’s stories of inspiration and courage
02:25:11 and we can take some kind of assistance from that too.
02:25:14 But also learning from, learning how not to do things.
02:25:19 And then analogies are never like one to one.
02:25:23 I mean, we talk about Vietnam.
02:25:24 I mean, I think many Vietnam veterans would say,
02:25:27 yeah, this is like deja vu.
02:25:28 I mean, the story, the visuals of the Kabul airport
02:25:31 and of the Saigon embassy were not the same,
02:25:35 but close enough that people would juxtapose them.
02:25:38 All of this right now, but I would just ask people
02:25:39 that over analogizing is also a kind of path down
02:25:44 making errors of judgment and comparison,
02:25:47 and then sameness, but it’s stretch.
02:25:51 I mean, like 9.11 itself,
02:25:52 I think the idea that people lack the imagination
02:25:56 within our security apparatus
02:25:58 to think this was even possible, right?
02:26:00 And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock
02:26:03 on a cockpit door, could have wanted all this.
02:26:06 And again, I’m not saying either the time
02:26:09 or in hindsight that I am omniscient about all this,
02:26:11 but I had just been living in Germany the year before,
02:26:15 and there was a plot there.
02:26:16 This guy was hatching from Germany
02:26:18 to blow up the mausoleum of Attertwerk in Ankara
02:26:22 with an airplane.
02:26:23 And so if you kind of dig, it wasn’t unimaginable
02:26:27 that you would use an airplane as a weapon.
02:26:29 And the Bush administration kept saying,
02:26:31 no one had ever heard of this.
02:26:32 Who would do this?
02:26:33 Like, well, not a lot of people do this.
02:26:35 And then at that very moment,
02:26:37 my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel Secret Agent,
02:26:41 which was about a conspiratorial organization
02:26:44 that wanted to bomb,
02:26:46 actually in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing
02:26:48 because they tricked this guy into doing it,
02:26:50 but they wanted to bomb the Greenwich Observatory
02:26:53 for some obscure political purpose.
02:26:57 So that’s an instance in which, you know, the novel,
02:27:00 right, to go back to our kind of humanities pitch, right,
02:27:02 that my point was that, you know,
02:27:05 as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency,
02:27:08 but also imagination, right?
02:27:09 I think part of expanding our imagination is by, you know,
02:27:14 I mean, obviously delving into your fields, you know,
02:27:16 of engineering and the sciences and robotics
02:27:19 and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape.
02:27:20 And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature,
02:27:24 I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do
02:27:28 to really educate ourselves more fully, right,
02:27:31 across the spectrum of everything humans need
02:27:34 to imagine, to reimagine security.
02:27:37 You know, so much of what we talked about today,
02:27:38 I mean, so much of, you know,
02:27:41 our security is affected by others perception
02:27:43 of their insecurity, right?
02:27:46 Which unleashes a whole web of emotions.
02:27:49 Can you tell me about the Afghan people,
02:27:54 what they love, what they fear,
02:27:57 what they dream of for themselves and for their nation?
02:28:00 Is there something to say,
02:28:02 to speak to to the spirit of the people
02:28:04 that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns
02:28:09 and the hopes they have?
02:28:12 Yeah, I think I, you know, as an outsider,
02:28:13 I hesitate to make any grand statement,
02:28:16 but I would say, listen, I mean,
02:28:19 there are a number of documentary films
02:28:21 that are incredibly rich
02:28:23 that will offer your listeners and viewers a snapshot.
02:28:26 So there is Afghan Star, you know,
02:28:29 which really brings you in the homes of a set of people
02:28:32 who, you know, they want stardom, they’re artists,
02:28:34 they want to express themselves.
02:28:36 Some want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries.
02:28:39 There’s a woman who gets into hot water for dancing.
02:28:42 But yeah, you realize that, I mean, people,
02:28:46 I mean, they love art, they love music,
02:28:48 they love poetry, they love expression.
02:28:50 You know, people want to care for their children.
02:28:52 They want safety of their families.
02:28:54 They want to enjoy what everyone enjoys, you know?
02:28:57 I think it’s a very humanizing portrait.
02:29:00 There’s another great documentary film
02:29:01 called Love Crimes of Kabul,
02:29:06 which is a great snapshot of the post 2000 world
02:29:10 that the Americans shaped a lot of ways.
02:29:11 And it’s about a women’s prison.
02:29:13 And it’s incredibly revealing
02:29:15 because it’s about young girls and what they want.
02:29:19 Well, not just young, but young, teenage,
02:29:22 and then some middle aged people
02:29:23 who are accused of moral crimes,
02:29:26 ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to,
02:29:29 to having sexual relations outside of marriage.
02:29:33 And so it shows in a way continuity
02:29:36 with the previous Taliban regime
02:29:38 and that women are in prison
02:29:40 for things that you wouldn’t be in prison for elsewhere,
02:29:42 and that Islamic law operates as the kind of judicial logic
02:29:46 for these punishments.
02:29:50 But letting these women kind of speak for themselves,
02:29:52 I mean, it’s fascinating.
02:29:53 I mean, I don’t want to get too much away,
02:29:55 but women make very interesting choices in this film
02:29:58 that land them in this predicament.
02:30:00 So they don’t all profess innocence.
02:30:04 Some are like, I’m guilty, but they’re guilty for reasons.
02:30:06 In one case, one woman is guilty, she’s in prison
02:30:09 because it’s a way to exert pressure on her fiancee
02:30:12 to finally marry her, you know?
02:30:14 So you get ethnicity, you get like, you know,
02:30:16 kind of Romeo and Juliet things
02:30:18 where their families don’t like each other necessarily,
02:30:20 but they find each other.
02:30:21 You have questions of like, love, money, clothing,
02:30:25 furniture, it’s beautiful.
02:30:28 And like, I mean, the parts with it,
02:30:29 I remember showing it in class,
02:30:30 there was a wonderful Afghan student who was a,
02:30:33 I think a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford,
02:30:35 and she’s a genius, she’s amazing.
02:30:38 It was awkward for her because talking about young women
02:30:41 having sex and stuff, and it was just, it wasn’t,
02:30:44 you know, the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.
02:30:46 And obviously there’s so much more,
02:30:47 they’re great writers and, you know, musicians.
02:30:50 And I mean, you know, music is a huge thing.
02:30:52 I mean, poetry, all those things are great.
02:30:55 So she found it, you know, I hear you.
02:30:57 I mean, it’s kind of a taboo subject,
02:30:59 but I thought the American students seeing it
02:31:02 really identified with these women
02:31:04 because they’re just so real.
02:31:05 And so, you know, young people trying to find like,
02:31:08 I mean, relationships that are universal
02:31:11 and circumstances that are very difficult.
02:31:14 Love, love is universal.
02:31:16 Yeah, yeah, so it’s, I mean,
02:31:17 we do have resources to humanize.
02:31:18 I mean, you know, some of your people will know
02:31:20 Khaled Hosseini, you know, he’s an African American,
02:31:23 he’s done his stuff, but there are,
02:31:25 there are a number of novelists and short story writers
02:31:29 who do cool things.
02:31:30 I think that another tragic aspect of this moment
02:31:33 is that those people have now pretty much
02:31:35 had to leave the country.
02:31:36 So there’s a visual artist I would highlight for you
02:31:39 named Khadem Ali, who’s a Hazara based in Australia.
02:31:44 He does extraordinary work in blending a tradition
02:31:48 of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary.
02:31:54 His work is between Australia and Afghanistan,
02:31:56 but he also, he had to flee.
02:31:57 I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul,
02:31:59 but it’s a extraordinary kind of visual language
02:32:04 that he’s adopted that has been shown all over the planet now.
02:32:06 He’s got some of his work is in New York galleries,
02:32:08 is in Europe.
02:32:10 He’s been shown in Australia,
02:32:11 but he talks about migration in a way
02:32:13 that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center,
02:32:16 but it’s totally universal about, you know,
02:32:20 our modern crisis of all the mains people
02:32:23 who were displaced across our planet.
02:32:24 And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them
02:32:28 in a way that like everyone can get.
02:32:31 I mean, the visual imagery experts will know
02:32:32 that it’s from, you know, like the Shah Naam,
02:32:36 like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to,
02:32:38 that Afghans are attached to, that people can quote,
02:32:41 you know, at length, that has mythical figures
02:32:44 of good and evil that kids grow up embodying.
02:32:47 They’re named the names of the characters that are,
02:32:50 it’s called, you know, the Book of Kings.
02:32:52 The heroes and villains are the staple
02:32:53 of conversation and poetry and, you know, like Russians,
02:32:59 I mean, the kind of, the resort to literary references
02:33:02 and speak is something that, you know,
02:33:04 Americans don’t do, most West European countries don’t do,
02:33:07 but the fact that everyone’s got to know this character,
02:33:09 everyone knows this reference,
02:33:10 the wordplay, the linguistic finesse in multiple languages
02:33:16 is, you know, a major value of Afghan storytelling.
02:33:21 As an outsider, I’m scratching at the surface of the surface.
02:33:25 Yeah, but there’s a depth to it.
02:33:26 It’s just like, it is fascinating.
02:33:28 With the layers, yeah.
02:33:29 With the layers of Russian language that’s.
02:33:31 Exactly.
02:33:32 The culture, it’s a, I’ve been struggling,
02:33:36 and this is kind of the journey I’m embarking on
02:33:40 to convey to an American audience
02:33:43 what is lost in translation between Russian and English.
02:33:47 And it’s very challenging in some of the great translators
02:33:51 of Dostoevsky, of Tolstoy, of Russian literature,
02:33:55 struggle with this deeply.
02:33:56 And they work, it’s an art form just to convey that.
02:34:01 And it’s amazing to hear that Afghanistan,
02:34:03 with a full mix of cultures that are there,
02:34:06 have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect.
02:34:10 I mean, the humor thing is, that’s, you know,
02:34:13 I’m so much of our visual imagery
02:34:14 is about like this sad place in Dower or whatever,
02:34:15 but the, I mean, socially, again,
02:34:18 I’m gonna engage in some stereotypes
02:34:19 about generalization stuff, but just the,
02:34:22 you know, the Afghan friends that I’ve come to
02:34:25 be close with and really love, I mean, the humor,
02:34:28 there’s so much there of common stuff of like,
02:34:31 when I go to Ireland, it’s one of my favorite places
02:34:33 and just like the, I feel a sense of pressure,
02:34:36 like the humor all around me at the time.
02:34:38 I mean, I feel like there’s something between Ireland
02:34:40 and Russia with the humor stuff where it’s like,
02:34:43 you’ve gotta be on your game if you wanna be, you know,
02:34:46 so it’s, yeah, I feel like the intensity of conversation
02:34:52 in terms of, yeah, you have to be on your game
02:34:54 in terms of wit and so on.
02:34:55 I mean, you have to, there’s certain people I have,
02:34:58 like when I talk on this podcast,
02:34:59 they’re like that, certain people from the Jewish tradition
02:35:02 have that, like where the wit is just like,
02:35:05 okay, I have to, oh yeah, I really have to pay attention.
02:35:09 It’s a game, it’s like, you know what it feels like?
02:35:12 It feels like speed chess or something like that
02:35:14 and you really have to focus and play
02:35:17 and at the same time, there’s body language in the,
02:35:19 and then there’s a melancholy nature to it,
02:35:22 at least in the Russian side.
02:35:23 The whole thing is just a beautiful mess.
02:35:25 Yeah, I mean, there’s a funny TikTok video
02:35:27 that went around that I got from like some Afghan
02:35:29 acquaintances that was a, that he’s an Irish comedian
02:35:33 kind of highlighting, you know,
02:35:35 kind of Irish and German national stereotypes
02:35:38 around hospitality.
02:35:39 And this Afghan woman said, you know,
02:35:41 I didn’t know that the Irish were just white Afghans
02:35:44 because the whole, like, you know, the hospitality,
02:35:46 like politics of like, of refusal.
02:35:48 You know, you don’t take something
02:35:51 that’s offered to you the first time.
02:35:52 You don’t, I mean, it’s the culture of receiving a guest.
02:35:56 You know, that’s, you know, Americans aren’t,
02:35:59 I mean, that’s not, you know, that’s not always,
02:36:01 I mean, the different, the regional cultures
02:36:02 where that’s the thing, there’s whatever,
02:36:03 but it’s, I mean, the kind of like generosity
02:36:06 and the kind of, you know, that’s real.
02:36:09 I mean, that’s, and that’s a cool thing.
02:36:11 And that’s amazing.
02:36:12 That’s, you know, the food, I mean, going off
02:36:13 just the superficial things, but all of that,
02:36:17 the warmth of hospitality and of wit and humanity.
02:36:22 I mean, that’s what we don’t see viewing the place
02:36:25 just through war and geopolitics
02:36:27 and the moving pieces of the map and stuff.
02:36:29 And that’s hard to see when, you know,
02:36:31 there are gaps in language and in religious tradition
02:36:34 and all that stuff.
02:36:35 And then, you know, being open to the fact
02:36:38 that people do things differently, you know,
02:36:41 and it’s, and the gender dimension there is important,
02:36:43 right?
02:36:44 They’re kind of, you know, arguably each culture
02:36:47 has a kind of gender dynamic that’s different.
02:36:49 And so I think it’s helpful to have humility
02:36:50 in thinking that some Afghans
02:36:53 will do some things differently, you know.
02:36:55 But then you’ll also have Afghans who say,
02:36:58 every woman should be educated.
02:36:59 Everyone should work and so on and so on.
02:37:01 So there’s no, there’s no single way of, yeah.
02:37:03 And there is a gender dynamic in Russia too.
02:37:06 We need to be respectful of that.
02:37:08 And that’s not always what it looks like at first.
02:37:10 Yeah, exactly.
02:37:10 There’s layers.
02:37:11 Where power is.
02:37:12 I mean, that’s definitely, I don’t know, yeah.
02:37:14 Yeah, that’s a whole nother conversation
02:37:16 where the power is.
02:37:17 Yeah.
02:37:18 Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet
02:37:20 who was born on the land that is now Afghanistan.
02:37:23 Is there something in his words that speaks to you
02:37:26 about the spirit of the Afghan people?
02:37:31 I mean, everyone owns Rumi, I guess I’d say.
02:37:33 I mean, that’s gonna get me in trouble
02:37:34 with certain Afghan fans of Rumi
02:37:36 who wanna see him as an Afghan.
02:37:38 I would say.
02:37:40 Are they proud of Rumi?
02:37:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:37:42 Do they see him as an Afghan?
02:37:44 Do they?
02:37:44 Yeah, I mean, it depends.
02:37:46 I mean, some people will be militant and say,
02:37:49 you know, the Iranian’s gonna have him.
02:37:51 He’s ours.
02:37:53 But they’ll also say, you know, he’s,
02:37:55 I mean, you can say, I mean, again,
02:37:57 he’s like a Rorschach blot.
02:37:57 I mean, he’s a Sufi, he’s a Muslim,
02:38:00 he’s a Central Asian, he’s Iranian, he’s Afghan,
02:38:04 he’s a Turk.
02:38:05 I’m trying to think of the analogy,
02:38:06 but he’s something special to everyone.
02:38:08 So I guess I would not walk into that conversation
02:38:11 and claim that he’s one or another,
02:38:12 but it’s a cool thing.
02:38:13 I mean, it’s the, but I’m glad you brought that up
02:38:15 because that’s a good way of seeing something that Afghans,
02:38:20 I mean, we live in our country in Afghanistan
02:38:22 and say, okay, Rumi’s everyone, you know,
02:38:24 Madonna helped make him famous in the United States,
02:38:26 you know, for better, for worse.
02:38:27 They used to sell stuff at Starbucks
02:38:29 and that’s all complicated and embarrassing.
02:38:32 And his translations are very much disputed
02:38:35 where you have people be like,
02:38:36 there’s some awful Rumi translations.
02:38:37 And there are, there are also a lot of,
02:38:40 speaking of the internet,
02:38:41 there are lots of fake Rumi quotes, you know,
02:38:44 like Rumi said, always be your best.
02:38:46 Like, Rumi didn’t say that, you know, that was, you know,
02:38:48 I mean, that’s kind of slow stuff like that.
02:38:49 But the cool thing is like, I mean,
02:38:52 I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker,
02:38:56 but you can also, you know, read Rumi as,
02:39:00 you know, in an Islamic sense,
02:39:01 but you can also read him as a kind of spiritualist, right?
02:39:03 As someone who, or an ethicist or moralist.
02:39:05 And so I think that’s, I like the lens of Rumi
02:39:09 as a gateway to Afghan ecumenism and cosmolitanism.
02:39:14 You know, the theme I keep emphasizing of,
02:39:16 of meeting actual Afghans who were actually,
02:39:19 you know, fluent in Russian, fluent in German,
02:39:21 fluent in Turkish, they know Dari, they know Pashto.
02:39:26 They’ve gone to university or sometimes they haven’t.
02:39:28 And yet, I mean, they are,
02:39:30 I like the category of the popular intellectual,
02:39:34 you know, the intellectual who isn’t,
02:39:36 isn’t formally educated necessarily.
02:39:37 Although of course that’s represented too,
02:39:39 especially increasingly now with the generation
02:39:41 of going to university all over the world,
02:39:42 you know, Stanford, MIT, everywhere.
02:39:45 Afghans are well represented there.
02:39:47 But just being, I don’t have any kind of worldly knowledge
02:39:50 that is not limited to a province, to a village, to a hamlet.
02:39:54 But sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s not.
02:39:58 Because of, again, not because of some fairy tale story
02:40:02 of curiosity wandering the globe out of, you know,
02:40:06 some sense of privilege, but out of necessity,
02:40:10 out of survival of having to adapt.
02:40:11 And it’s really extraordinary that, I mean,
02:40:14 also let me think about like professions,
02:40:16 so like, you know, ask an Afghan, you know,
02:40:20 what does he or she do for a living?
02:40:22 And what have they done in the past?
02:40:23 I mean, the answers one gets,
02:40:25 shoe salesman, task cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.
02:40:30 Yeah.
02:40:31 I mean, that’s not just Afghan,
02:40:33 but that’s, you know, that’s very common.
02:40:35 But it’s also Russia is the same.
02:40:37 I think it’s whenever there’s complexities
02:40:39 to the economic system and the short term
02:40:43 and the long term history of how the country develops.
02:40:46 And it’s basically the people figuring out their way
02:40:49 around a mess of a country politically,
02:40:54 but a beautiful, flourishing culture and humanity.
02:40:59 And that creates super interesting people.
02:41:01 Yeah, yeah.
02:41:02 So we can often see, okay, there’s Taliban, there’s war,
02:41:05 there’s economic malfunction,
02:41:09 there’s harboring of terrorists, there’s opium trade,
02:41:11 all that kind of stuff, but there’s humans there
02:41:13 with deep intellectual lies.
02:41:17 And like, I love the movie, Love Crimes.
02:41:21 And the same kind of hopes, fears, and desire to love
02:41:25 the old Romeo and Juliet story.
02:41:27 And I think Rumi to me represents that.
02:41:31 The wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent
02:41:37 and just beautiful representation of humanity of love.
02:41:40 Some of the best quotes about love are from him,
02:41:44 half of them fake, half of them real, but.
02:41:48 The best ones are real, right?
02:41:49 The best ones are real, the best ones are real.
02:41:52 Robert, this was an incredible conversation.
02:41:53 Oh, thank you for having us.
02:41:54 Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan
02:41:59 and making me, making us realize that there’s much more
02:42:04 to this country than what we may think.
02:42:09 It’s a beautiful country and it’s full of beautiful people.
02:42:13 You made me think about a lot of new things too,
02:42:15 so it was definitely, definitely great online too,
02:42:17 so thank you so much.
02:42:19 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:42:20 with Robert Cruz.
02:42:22 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
02:42:24 in the description.
02:42:26 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:42:27 from Winston Churchill.
02:42:29 “‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’”
02:42:34 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.