Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz,

00:00:02.660 | a historian at Stanford,

00:00:04.440 | specializing in the history of Afghanistan,

00:00:07.680 | Russia, and Islam.

00:00:09.840 | This is the Alex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:12.040 | To support it,

00:00:12.960 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:15.280 | And now, here's my conversation with Robert Cruz.

00:00:19.040 | Was it a mistake for the United States

00:00:22.120 | to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?

00:00:25.940 | - Yes.

00:00:27.480 | - As simple as yes, why was it a mistake?

00:00:30.480 | - I'm a historian, so I say this with some humility

00:00:33.720 | about what we can know.

00:00:35.120 | I think I'd still like to know much more

00:00:36.720 | about what was going on in the White House,

00:00:38.880 | you know, in the hours, days, weeks, you know, after 9/11.

00:00:42.200 | But I think the George W. Bush administration

00:00:45.360 | acted in a state of panic.

00:00:47.040 | And I think they wanted to show kind of toughness.

00:00:49.100 | They wanted to show some kind of resolve.

00:00:51.720 | You know, this was a horrific act

00:00:54.040 | that played out, you know, on everyone's television screens.

00:00:57.320 | And I think it was really a,

00:00:59.280 | fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy

00:01:00.800 | within the White House, within the Oval Office.

00:01:02.440 | And I think they felt like they had to do

00:01:04.760 | something and something dramatic.

00:01:06.680 | I think they didn't really think through, you know,

00:01:08.920 | who they were fighting, you know, who the enemy was,

00:01:11.920 | what this geography had to do with 9/11.

00:01:14.680 | I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us,

00:01:17.200 | not to say I was, you know, clairvoyant

00:01:18.520 | or could see into the future,

00:01:19.840 | but I think many of us were, you know, from that morning,

00:01:22.360 | skeptical about the connections that people were drawing

00:01:24.280 | between Afghanistan as a state, as a place,

00:01:27.600 | and the actions of Al-Qaeda in Washington

00:01:30.200 | and New York and Pennsylvania.

00:01:33.000 | - So as you watch the events of 9/11,

00:01:35.920 | the things that our leaders were saying

00:01:40.280 | in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed,

00:01:44.760 | maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline

00:01:47.760 | of what was being said.

00:01:49.720 | One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan,

00:01:52.400 | and also what were your feelings in the minutes, weeks,

00:01:57.760 | after 9/11?

00:01:59.400 | - I was in DC, I was, you know,

00:02:02.040 | on the way to American University, hearing on NPR

00:02:05.760 | what had happened, and I thought of the

00:02:08.360 | American University logo, which is red, white, and blue.

00:02:11.760 | It's an eagle, and I thought, you know,

00:02:14.040 | Washington is under attack,

00:02:15.400 | and symbols of American power are under attack.

00:02:18.640 | And so, you know, I was quite concerned,

00:02:20.960 | and at the time lived, you know,

00:02:22.720 | just a few miles from the Capitol.

00:02:24.760 | And so, you know, I felt that, you know, it was real.

00:02:28.360 | So I appreciate the, you know,

00:02:30.320 | the sense of anxiety and fear and panic.

00:02:32.240 | And four, two, three years later in DC,

00:02:35.320 | we were constantly getting reports, you know,

00:02:37.680 | mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks

00:02:40.800 | that would befall the city.

00:02:41.640 | So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.

00:02:46.200 | But in watching television,

00:02:47.240 | including Russian television that day,

00:02:48.680 | 'cause I just installed a satellite thing,

00:02:51.200 | so I was trying to watch world news

00:02:52.440 | and get different points of view,

00:02:53.280 | and that was quite useful to have

00:02:55.640 | an alternative, you know, set of eyes.

00:02:57.360 | - In Russian?

00:02:58.200 | - Yeah, in Russian, yeah.

00:02:59.360 | - Okay, so your Russian is good enough

00:03:01.480 | to understand Russian television.

00:03:03.160 | - The news, yeah, the news and the visuals

00:03:05.160 | that were coming that were not shown on American television.

00:03:07.920 | I don't know how they had it, but they had,

00:03:09.320 | they were not filtering anything

00:03:11.360 | in the way that the major networks

00:03:13.120 | and cable televisions were doing here.

00:03:14.520 | So it was a very unvarnished view

00:03:16.920 | of the violence of the moment, you know,

00:03:18.880 | in New York City of people diving from the towers

00:03:21.600 | and being, you know, and it was really,

00:03:23.640 | they didn't hold back on that,

00:03:24.480 | which was quite, you know, fascinating.

00:03:26.480 | Much of the world saw much more

00:03:27.600 | than actually the American public saw.

00:03:29.920 | But to your question, you know,

00:03:31.240 | amid that feeling of imminent doom,

00:03:33.800 | I watched commentators start to talk about Al-Qaeda

00:03:36.880 | and then talk about Afghanistan.

00:03:39.120 | And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin,

00:03:42.920 | who's at NYU, who's a, you know,

00:03:44.320 | kind of long, very learned Afghanistan hand.

00:03:48.600 | And he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News

00:03:50.480 | to kind of lay this out for everyone.

00:03:52.800 | And I thought, you know, he did a fine job,

00:03:55.320 | but I think it was formative in cementing the view

00:03:57.880 | that somehow Al-Qaeda was synonymous

00:04:00.120 | with this space, Afghanistan.

00:04:02.000 | And I think, again, I was no Al-Qaeda expert then,

00:04:06.200 | and I'm not now, but I think my immediate thought

00:04:09.160 | went to war, and because my background had been with,

00:04:13.720 | at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced

00:04:15.800 | from decades of war, whom I encountered in Uzbekistan,

00:04:19.040 | who were refugees and so on,

00:04:20.920 | I thought immediately, you know, my mind went to

00:04:22.880 | the suffering of Afghan people,

00:04:25.040 | that this war was going to sweep up, of course,

00:04:28.560 | the defenseless people who have nothing

00:04:30.400 | to do with these politics.

00:04:31.400 | - So we should give maybe a little bit of context

00:04:33.280 | that you can speak to.

00:04:34.360 | - Yeah.

00:04:35.240 | - So assume nobody's an expert at anything.

00:04:38.000 | - Yeah.

00:04:38.840 | - So let's just say you and I are not experts in anything.

00:04:42.760 | - Right.

00:04:43.600 | - What, as a historian, were you studying at the time

00:04:46.400 | and thinking about, see,

00:04:48.920 | is it the full global history of Afghanistan?

00:04:53.720 | Is it the region?

00:04:55.440 | Were you thinking about the Mujahideen

00:04:58.920 | and Al-Qaeda and Taliban?

00:05:01.760 | Were you thinking about the Soviet Union,

00:05:04.200 | the proxy war through Afghanistan?

00:05:06.600 | Were you thinking about Iraq and oil?

00:05:09.080 | Like, what's the full space of things in your heart,

00:05:12.800 | in your mind at the time?

00:05:14.360 | - I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was,

00:05:15.400 | you know, there's the sense of, you know,

00:05:18.400 | the suffering and the tragedy of the moment of the deaths.

00:05:21.440 | And that was, I think, I was preoccupied

00:05:23.400 | by the violence of the moment.

00:05:25.440 | But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan

00:05:28.600 | as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment,

00:05:31.360 | I think immediately what came to mind was that

00:05:33.480 | little I knew about Al-Qaeda at the time suggested

00:05:35.040 | that the geography was inaccurate,

00:05:38.160 | that this was a global network, a global threat,

00:05:41.400 | that this was a kind of, you know,

00:05:43.840 | a movement that went beyond borders.

00:05:45.280 | And I think that it felt early on that Afghanistan

00:05:48.600 | was gonna be used as a scapegoat.

00:05:50.560 | And just intellectually at the time, you know,

00:05:51.720 | I was teaching at American University,

00:05:53.040 | my courses, you know, touched on a range of subjects,

00:05:56.400 | but I was trying to complete a book on Islam

00:05:59.400 | and the Russian Empire, actually.

00:06:01.280 | But in doing that research, which took me across Russia

00:06:04.120 | and Central Asia, purely by accident,

00:06:06.600 | I had developed an interest in Afghanistan

00:06:08.600 | because, just again, a series of coincidences,

00:06:12.800 | I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan,

00:06:15.320 | without housing, through an American friend

00:06:18.000 | who was like the king of the market in Tashkent.

00:06:20.240 | He knew everyone, he ran into some Afghan merchants there.

00:06:24.480 | They found out I didn't have a place to live.

00:06:26.840 | I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly.

00:06:28.320 | This was 1997.

00:06:29.400 | I had a vague idea it was next door.

00:06:30.640 | - Well, you lived in Uzbekistan?

00:06:32.240 | - Yeah, in Tashkent, doing dissertation research, yeah.

00:06:35.040 | 'Cause it was, you know,

00:06:35.880 | hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia.

00:06:37.400 | - Yeah.

00:06:38.240 | - So just by accident, I ended up with these young Afghans

00:06:40.320 | who took me in as roommates.

00:06:42.760 | And that, I think, the sense of that community

00:06:46.320 | shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.

00:06:48.520 | It was my first exposure to them.

00:06:51.200 | They were part of a trading diaspora.

00:06:53.520 | They brought, they had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.

00:06:57.520 | They had somehow brought flour

00:07:00.040 | and some agricultural products from Egypt.

00:07:02.840 | And they were sitting in enclosed containers in Tashkent,

00:07:06.560 | waiting for the Uzbekistani state to permit them to trade.

00:07:10.200 | So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.

00:07:11.960 | They'll get dressed up.

00:07:12.880 | They put on suits and ties, like you're wearing.

00:07:15.240 | They'd polish their shoes.

00:07:16.560 | And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios.

00:07:21.560 | Then they'd feast at lunch.

00:07:23.320 | And then at night, we would go out.

00:07:25.200 | So part of my research,

00:07:26.840 | 'cause I also had a bottleneck in my research.

00:07:28.240 | I was going to the state archives in Tashkent.

00:07:31.960 | And because of the state of Uzbekistan,

00:07:33.880 | you know, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do.

00:07:36.560 | So it took a while to get in.

00:07:38.220 | So I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys.

00:07:41.640 | So I got to know them pretty well.

00:07:42.840 | And it was really just an accidental kind of thing,

00:07:45.920 | but grew quite close to them.

00:07:47.640 | And I developed an appreciation of,

00:07:49.440 | which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this,

00:07:53.320 | these people had already lived,

00:07:55.800 | young guys, you know, in their 20s,

00:07:57.280 | they'd already lived in 67 countries.

00:07:59.880 | They all spoke half a dozen languages.

00:08:02.080 | One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer

00:08:06.120 | and break dancer, trained in Tehran.

00:08:08.300 | His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.

00:08:11.300 | He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan

00:08:14.500 | during the civil war,

00:08:15.940 | going to Uzbekistan, escaping death there.

00:08:18.660 | And these were very, you know, real stories.

00:08:21.220 | - Can you also just briefly mention,

00:08:23.980 | geographically speaking, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan,

00:08:27.380 | Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran.

00:08:29.900 | Who are the neighbors of all of this?

00:08:32.740 | What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?

00:08:35.360 | I was always terrible at geography and spatial information.

00:08:38.840 | So can you lay it out?

00:08:39.960 | - Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

00:08:41.000 | So Tashkent, you know, is the capital of Uzbekistan.

00:08:44.320 | It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century.

00:08:49.320 | The Russians take the city from a local

00:08:52.480 | kind of Muslim dynasty in 1865.

00:08:55.400 | It becomes the city,

00:08:56.640 | the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917.

00:09:01.800 | It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan,

00:09:06.800 | which becomes independent finally in 1991

00:09:09.220 | when the Soviet Union collapses.

00:09:10.760 | - So these are all like,

00:09:12.040 | these republics are the fingertips of Soviet power

00:09:17.040 | in Central Asia. - That's right.

00:09:18.460 | That's right.

00:09:19.360 | And they've been independent since 1991,

00:09:22.400 | but they have struggled to disentangle themselves

00:09:25.600 | from Moscow, from one another.

00:09:28.340 | And now they face very serious pressure from China

00:09:31.400 | to form a kind of periphery of the great machine

00:09:34.940 | that is the Chinese economy

00:09:36.280 | and its ambitions to stretch across Asia.

00:09:39.720 | For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends hailed from,

00:09:44.660 | Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s

00:09:50.640 | when leftists tried to seize power there in 1978.

00:09:54.720 | The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan,

00:09:58.440 | crossing the border with its forces in 1979

00:10:01.640 | to try to shore up this leftist government

00:10:03.680 | that had seized power in 1978.

00:10:06.400 | And so for Central Asians in the wider region,

00:10:09.840 | their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan

00:10:13.960 | in a variety of ways,

00:10:15.080 | but it became much more connected in 1980s

00:10:18.400 | when Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years.

00:10:23.320 | And here I refer your listeners and viewers to "Rainbow Three"

00:10:26.920 | as the guide to--

00:10:28.640 | - The historically accurate guide.

00:10:30.120 | - The historically accurate, the Bible.

00:10:32.360 | The Bible of Afghan history in "Rainbow Three," yeah.

00:10:34.480 | As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war.

00:10:38.600 | Right?

00:10:39.440 | But for most Afghans,

00:10:40.840 | there are people who fought against the Soviet Army,

00:10:44.160 | but of a certain generation,

00:10:45.700 | the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.

00:10:50.880 | And so they fled in waves by the millions

00:10:54.080 | to Pakistan, to Iran.

00:10:56.700 | Some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in the 1990s

00:11:00.520 | and some were displaced across the planet.

00:11:02.220 | So California, where we're sitting today,

00:11:03.960 | has a large community that came in the '80s and '90s

00:11:07.960 | in the East Bay.

00:11:09.720 | - Can I ask a quick question

00:11:11.120 | that's a little bit of a tangent?

00:11:12.720 | - Yeah.

00:11:13.960 | - What is the correct or the respectful way

00:11:17.760 | to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran?

00:11:25.920 | So as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan.

00:11:28.680 | - Yeah.

00:11:29.520 | - Or the an versus the an.

00:11:32.480 | - Yeah.

00:11:33.320 | - Is it a different country by country?

00:11:34.760 | As an English speaker in America,

00:11:37.200 | is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan?

00:11:41.420 | Or is it the opposite, respectful to say it that way?

00:11:44.480 | What are your thoughts on this?

00:11:45.320 | - That's a fascinating question.

00:11:47.300 | I defer to the people from those countries

00:11:50.240 | to of course sort out those politics.

00:11:52.640 | I think one of the fascinating things

00:11:54.520 | about the region broadly

00:11:55.480 | is that it is a place of so many cultures

00:11:57.120 | and are really quite cosmopolitan.

00:12:00.080 | So I think people are mostly quite forgiving

00:12:02.040 | about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.

00:12:04.600 | - It's not like Paris.

00:12:05.880 | - Yeah, yeah, right, right.

00:12:06.720 | - The French are not forgiving.

00:12:07.920 | - No, no, yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:12:09.120 | No, I think people are very, very forgiving.

00:12:10.720 | And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive

00:12:15.720 | in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right?

00:12:20.120 | Iraq, Iraq.

00:12:23.080 | I think there's come to be a fit

00:12:25.040 | between certain ways of pronouncing these places

00:12:27.560 | and the position that Americans take about them, right?

00:12:31.080 | So it's more jarring when people say Iraq

00:12:36.080 | and it comes with a claim that a certain kind of person

00:12:41.360 | should be the victim of violence or, right?

00:12:43.880 | - It's fascinating.

00:12:44.720 | It's kind of like talking about the Democratic Party

00:12:47.120 | or the Democrat Party.

00:12:48.520 | It's sometimes using certain kind of terminology

00:12:51.780 | to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement

00:12:56.780 | about your beliefs.

00:12:58.760 | It's fascinating.

00:12:59.600 | - Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran,

00:13:02.720 | I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional

00:13:04.920 | in the case of a Democrat or is it just a,

00:13:07.360 | you know, and it's a whatever.

00:13:08.200 | I think, again, I think most Iranians and Afghans

00:13:10.000 | people I know have been very cool about that.

00:13:12.960 | What annoys Afghans now, I can say,

00:13:15.520 | I think it's fair to say,

00:13:16.360 | I don't mean to speak for millions of people,

00:13:18.440 | for a group of people,

00:13:20.160 | but I can just share with our non-Afghan friends,

00:13:23.320 | the term Afghani is a kind of term of offense

00:13:28.660 | because that's the name of the currency.

00:13:29.980 | And so lots of people ask, you know, why having,

00:13:34.460 | especially, again, it's more directed at Americans

00:13:36.660 | because, you know, we've been so deeply involved

00:13:38.460 | in that country, obviously, for the last 20 years, right?

00:13:41.020 | So Afghans ask why after 20 years

00:13:43.420 | are you still calling us the wrong name?

00:13:45.380 | - What is the right name?

00:13:46.700 | - They prefer Afghans.

00:13:48.540 | - Afghans.

00:13:49.380 | - Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency.

00:13:52.180 | And so--

00:13:53.020 | - I just dodged a bullet 'cause I was gonna say--

00:13:54.740 | - That's cool, no, no, yeah, I hear you.

00:13:56.100 | - It's really great to know.

00:13:57.300 | - Yeah, yeah, and it's, again, I think,

00:13:59.420 | but I would emphasize that people are quite open

00:14:02.260 | and, you know, it's a whole region of incredible diversity

00:14:06.220 | and respect for linguistic pluralism, actually.

00:14:09.820 | So I think that, you know, but I also appreciate that

00:14:12.500 | during, in this context, when there's a lot of pain,

00:14:15.660 | you know, in the Afghan diaspora community in particular,

00:14:18.880 | you know, being called the wrong name after 20 years,

00:14:22.040 | when they already feel so betrayed at this moment,

00:14:24.840 | you know, just kind of, if one follows us on social media,

00:14:28.020 | that is one kind of hot wire, right?

00:14:32.180 | - Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation

00:14:35.460 | is because, yes, it is true that there are certain things

00:14:38.260 | when mispronounced kind of reveal

00:14:41.220 | that you don't care enough to pronounce correctly,

00:14:44.580 | you don't know enough to pronounce correctly,

00:14:47.100 | and you dismiss the culture and the people,

00:14:49.820 | which I think, as per your writing,

00:14:52.260 | is something that, if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan,

00:14:57.260 | just because I'm used to it.

00:14:58.540 | I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan.

00:15:01.620 | - Yeah, yeah, it's great.

00:15:02.940 | - As you do in your writing, Afghanistan suffers

00:15:06.140 | from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world.

00:15:08.700 | But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,

00:15:13.900 | the whole region that gives us context

00:15:17.660 | for the events of 9/11.

00:15:18.940 | - Right, right.

00:15:20.380 | So yeah, if we go back to that day and the weeks

00:15:22.660 | that followed, my mind went to the community

00:15:25.500 | I knew in Tashkent, which is interesting.

00:15:28.580 | It was, I mean, they were, so Islam was the focal point

00:15:31.860 | of our conversation in the US about 9/11, right?

00:15:34.100 | Everyone wanted to know what was the relationship

00:15:36.340 | between the Serbic violence and that religious tradition

00:15:39.900 | with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right?

00:15:44.900 | That became the issue, of course,

00:15:47.020 | for American security institutions,

00:15:49.420 | for local state and police institutions, right?

00:15:53.460 | I mean, it became the, I think it was the question

00:15:55.620 | that most Americans had on their mind.

00:15:56.700 | So again, I didn't imagine myself as someone

00:15:59.820 | who had all the answers, of course,

00:16:00.880 | but given my background and coming at this

00:16:03.680 | from Russian history, coming at this from studying empire

00:16:06.900 | and trying to think about the region broadly,

00:16:09.940 | you know, I was very alarmed

00:16:10.780 | at the way that the conversation went.

00:16:12.900 | - Can I ask you a question? - Yeah.

00:16:13.940 | - What was your feeling on that morning of 9/11?

00:16:18.940 | Who did this?

00:16:20.300 | Isn't that a natural feeling?

00:16:22.540 | It's coupled with fear of what's next,

00:16:25.660 | especially when you're in DC. - Right, yeah.

00:16:27.180 | - But also, who is this?

00:16:28.700 | Is this an accident? - Yeah.

00:16:30.340 | - Is this a deliberate terrorist attack?

00:16:32.060 | Is this domestic? - Yeah.

00:16:34.980 | - What were your thoughts of the options

00:16:37.460 | and the internal ranking given your expertise?

00:16:41.060 | - I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative

00:16:44.100 | that this was international.

00:16:46.460 | I mean, I'd also lived in New York

00:16:47.980 | during one of the first bombings in '94

00:16:50.780 | of the World Trade Center.

00:16:52.260 | So it was clear to me that a radical community

00:16:53.980 | had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of,

00:16:58.300 | and I immediately thought it was a kind of

00:17:01.660 | blow to American power.

00:17:04.380 | And I was drawn by the symbolism of it.

00:17:08.860 | If you think of it as an act,

00:17:09.740 | it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will,

00:17:13.180 | a kind of a way of speaking to,

00:17:16.900 | from a position of relative weakness,

00:17:18.620 | speaking to an imperial power.

00:17:21.540 | And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that

00:17:25.820 | with horrific real world consequences

00:17:29.020 | for all the citizens, victims, for the firemen,

00:17:31.580 | the police, and just the horror of the moment.

00:17:34.620 | So I did see it as transcending the United States,

00:17:39.740 | but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily

00:17:42.900 | to do fundamentally about Afghanistan

00:17:45.460 | and the history of the region that I'd been studying

00:17:48.060 | and the community people that I knew

00:17:49.860 | who were not particularly religious, right?

00:17:51.980 | The guys I hung out with actually wore me out

00:17:54.300 | because they wanted to go out every night.

00:17:56.220 | They wanted to party every night.

00:17:57.740 | - Drinking?

00:17:58.580 | - Yep.

00:17:59.420 | We had discussions about alcohol.

00:18:00.620 | I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its--

00:18:02.660 | - Drinking.

00:18:03.500 | - Its drinking.

00:18:04.340 | You know, it's--

00:18:05.160 | - That's something to look forward to.

00:18:06.000 | So I do wanna travel to that part of the world.

00:18:08.420 | When was the last time you were in that part of the world?

00:18:11.380 | - Early 2000s.

00:18:12.780 | Well, in the mid 2000s, 2010s.

00:18:14.900 | - So wait, so by the way, what drinking?

00:18:16.980 | Vodka?

00:18:17.820 | What's the weapon of choice?

00:18:20.120 | - Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice.

00:18:25.180 | And it informs, you know, and it's,

00:18:28.340 | but the fascinating thing, you know,

00:18:29.620 | as a student is what you're observing as a non-Muslim,

00:18:32.540 | you know, I'm a non-Russian.

00:18:34.500 | This is all, you know, culturally new to me.

00:18:38.860 | And I'm, you know, a student of all that, right?

00:18:40.820 | As a graduate student, doing my work there.

00:18:42.540 | - So you're like the Jane Goodall of vodka and Russia.

00:18:45.300 | - That's right.

00:18:46.140 | - Just observing.

00:18:46.960 | - That's right.

00:18:47.800 | - And studying.

00:18:48.640 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:49.460 | And then you get the Samogon, the grass vodka.

00:18:51.300 | You get, you know, I have,

00:18:53.400 | I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier

00:18:56.700 | that I'm not proud of.

00:18:59.000 | (laughing)

00:18:59.840 | You know.

00:19:00.660 | - But you got to know the people

00:19:01.500 | and some of them from Kazakhstan.

00:19:03.040 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:03.880 | But intellectually, so the thing,

00:19:04.960 | I mean, the fascinating thing there was that,

00:19:06.800 | and just as a, I mean, there's a whole,

00:19:09.240 | you know, I'm a historian, right?

00:19:10.080 | But there are great contributions by, you know,

00:19:14.440 | anthropologists and ethnographers

00:19:15.600 | who've gone across the planet

00:19:16.960 | and tried to understand how Muslims

00:19:18.440 | understand the tradition in different contexts.

00:19:21.600 | So many Uzbeks will say, you know,

00:19:24.340 | this is part of our national culture

00:19:27.200 | to drink and eat as we please, right?

00:19:29.760 | And yet I'm a very devout Muslim.

00:19:31.600 | And so, of course, you can encounter

00:19:33.960 | other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right?

00:19:37.420 | But it's become kind of, I think it's very much,

00:19:40.120 | you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression

00:19:42.360 | in each of these places.

00:19:43.200 | And so there are ways of thinking,

00:19:45.360 | ways of performing, ways of, you know,

00:19:48.360 | enjoying oneself that are shared across Soviet

00:19:52.280 | and former Soviet space to this day, right?

00:19:54.640 | - And you've written also about Muslims

00:19:56.240 | in the Soviet Union. - That's right.

00:19:58.280 | - There's an article that, there was a paywall,

00:20:02.320 | so I couldn't read it.

00:20:03.160 | And I really wanna read it.

00:20:04.960 | Is-- - I'll be sure to share

00:20:05.920 | with you, yeah.

00:20:06.760 | - Moscow and the mosque or something like that.

00:20:10.320 | - Right, right.

00:20:11.880 | - By the way, just another tangent on a tangent.

00:20:14.280 | - Yeah.

00:20:15.120 | - So I bought all your books.

00:20:16.320 | I love 'em very much. - Thank you, thank you.

00:20:18.160 | - One of the reasons I bought them

00:20:20.080 | and read many parts is because they're easy to buy.

00:20:24.360 | Unlike articles, every single website has a paywall.

00:20:27.920 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:20:28.760 | - So it's very-- - I hear you, I'm sorry.

00:20:30.440 | - Very frustrating to read brilliant scholars

00:20:32.720 | such as yourself. - No, no, no.

00:20:35.320 | - I wish there was one fee I could pay everywhere.

00:20:37.520 | I don't care what that fee is.

00:20:38.840 | - Right, right. - Where it gives,

00:20:40.160 | allows me to read some of your brilliant writing.

00:20:42.240 | - No, no, thank you, I hear you.

00:20:43.080 | No, I think moving toward more kind of open source

00:20:47.360 | formatting stuff, I think is what a lot of journals

00:20:49.160 | are thinking about now.

00:20:50.040 | And I think it's definitely for the kind of democratization

00:20:53.200 | of knowledge and scholarship,

00:20:54.560 | that's definitely an important thing

00:20:55.960 | that we should all think about.

00:20:56.920 | And I think we need to exert pressure

00:21:00.400 | on these publishers to do that.

00:21:02.040 | So I appreciate that. - This is what I'm doing here.

00:21:03.880 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good.

00:21:04.720 | Yeah, no, I appreciate it, appreciate it.

00:21:06.520 | - So your thought was Afghanistan is not going to be

00:21:11.520 | the center, the source of where--

00:21:14.960 | - It's not the center of this,

00:21:16.080 | and invading that country isn't gonna fix the toxic

00:21:21.240 | milestone of politics that produced 9/11, right?

00:21:25.240 | I think I'm just thinking of some of the personalities,

00:21:26.560 | just thinking about going back to the Tajikistan story,

00:21:28.920 | which I'll end with.

00:21:29.840 | I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things,

00:21:34.080 | and then asking questions about it,

00:21:35.400 | and trying to understand through their eyes

00:21:39.040 | what the tradition means to them.

00:21:40.960 | And then we had a very narrow conversation

00:21:43.720 | about what Islam is that generated,

00:21:46.920 | immediately exploded on the day of 9/11, right?

00:21:50.140 | And then, of course, I think the antipathy

00:21:53.080 | toward Islam and Muslims was informed by racism,

00:21:58.000 | informed by xenophobia.

00:21:59.920 | So it became a perfect storm, I think, of demonization

00:22:03.000 | that didn't sit with what I knew about the tradition,

00:22:06.200 | and with the actual people that I had known.

00:22:08.380 | 'Cause then going back to, I mean,

00:22:09.360 | there were other friends and encounters and so on,

00:22:11.880 | but just thinking about Afghanistan

00:22:13.320 | and Tajikistan for a moment, I mean,

00:22:15.360 | just thought about my friends who had been,

00:22:18.360 | who had suffered a great deal in their short lives,

00:22:20.600 | who had been cast aside from country to country,

00:22:24.680 | but had found a place in Tajikistan

00:22:26.680 | with some relative stability.

00:22:28.680 | And they wanted to go out every night.

00:22:31.020 | And they explained, one friend,

00:22:33.480 | we talked about it with the alcohol and all that,

00:22:34.840 | and he didn't get crazy, but he was like,

00:22:37.260 | "You can drink, but just don't get drunk.

00:22:38.860 | "That's permissible within Islam," right?

00:22:41.400 | And he was ethnic Pashtun.

00:22:45.040 | Ethnic Uzbeks had a different view.

00:22:47.720 | Often, the more vodka, the better,

00:22:49.920 | and it doesn't violate, as I understand, Islam.

00:22:51.920 | So even, it's kind of a silly example,

00:22:54.160 | but it's just an illustration of the ways

00:22:55.240 | in which different communities, different generations,

00:22:58.060 | different people can come at this very complex,

00:23:00.360 | rich tradition in so many different ways.

00:23:02.560 | So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are,

00:23:06.200 | any kind of expert, whatever,

00:23:08.280 | it's always disconcerting to see

00:23:10.840 | your field of specialization be flattened, right?

00:23:13.760 | And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments

00:23:17.000 | for violence, right?

00:23:18.400 | - Mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate

00:23:22.800 | and depression. - And hurt, in pain.

00:23:25.440 | So I mean, that day, I vividly remember,

00:23:28.040 | I sat with other PhD historians in different fields.

00:23:32.760 | We, oddly enough, had lunch that day,

00:23:35.720 | and it kind of deserted Washington.

00:23:37.280 | Some place was open, we went.

00:23:38.720 | And we just thought, this is gonna kind of open up

00:23:42.480 | like a great mall of destruction.

00:23:45.780 | And the American state is going to destroy,

00:23:50.780 | and it's gonna destroy in this geography.

00:23:53.760 | And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.

00:23:56.520 | And then I think if one,

00:23:58.360 | you know, I'd been doing some research on Afghanistan then,

00:24:02.520 | I was kind of shifting to the South,

00:24:03.600 | and I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar

00:24:08.000 | for some years.

00:24:08.840 | And I think it's clear now that in retrospect,

00:24:12.520 | there were opportunities for alternative policies

00:24:15.360 | at that moment.

00:24:16.580 | - So what should the conversation have been like?

00:24:20.940 | What should we have done differently?

00:24:23.580 | Because, you know, from a perspective of the time,

00:24:28.580 | the United States was invaded by a foreign force.

00:24:33.460 | What is the proper response,

00:24:35.140 | or what is the proper conversation

00:24:36.780 | about the proper response at the time, you think?

00:24:39.100 | - You know, I know my colleague at Stanford,

00:24:41.340 | Connally Sirais, would tell me this is above my pay grade.

00:24:44.660 | And, you know, she makes a point in her classes

00:24:46.660 | to talk about how difficult decision-making is

00:24:50.260 | under such intense pressure.

00:24:52.220 | And I appreciate that.

00:24:53.920 | You know, I am an historian who sits safely in my office.

00:24:57.420 | I don't like battlefields.

00:24:58.740 | I don't like taking risks.

00:25:01.460 | So I concede all those limits.

00:25:02.980 | You know, I'm not a military expert.

00:25:05.300 | I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone

00:25:07.220 | because of the way I look

00:25:08.040 | and because of my nationality and so on, but not a spy.

00:25:10.320 | So I defer, you know,

00:25:11.740 | I respect the expertise of all those communities.

00:25:13.720 | But I think they acted out of ignorance.

00:25:16.980 | They acted, I think, because, I mean,

00:25:18.500 | if you think of the, in a way,

00:25:19.980 | there was a compensatory aspect of this decision-making.

00:25:23.860 | I mean, the Bush administration failed.

00:25:27.580 | This was an extraordinary failure, right?

00:25:29.580 | So if we start- - In which way?

00:25:30.700 | If we're gonna break down the-

00:25:31.540 | - A failure of intelligence.

00:25:32.740 | I mean, if you follow the story of Richard Clark-

00:25:35.620 | - Who's Richard Clark?

00:25:37.820 | - He was a national security expert

00:25:40.840 | who was tasked with following Al-Qaeda.

00:25:43.420 | Who had produced a dossier

00:25:46.300 | under the Clinton administration

00:25:47.260 | that he passed on to the George W. Bush administration.

00:25:50.700 | And if you look at the work of Connie Lisa Rice,

00:25:53.420 | she wrote a very famous, I think,

00:25:55.560 | unpaywalled foreign affairs article that you can read

00:25:58.700 | announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook.

00:26:02.820 | And it was all about great powers.

00:26:05.260 | It was about the rise of China.

00:26:06.460 | It was about Russia.

00:26:07.520 | I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover

00:26:10.940 | of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman

00:26:15.940 | who spoke, the Clinton administration repeated again and again

00:26:18.420 | the idea of making sure the bear stayed in his cage.

00:26:21.840 | Which is why the United States

00:26:24.980 | threw a lifeline to the Central Asian states

00:26:29.260 | hoping to have pipelines,

00:26:31.140 | hoping to shore up their national sovereignty

00:26:34.620 | as a way of containing Russia initially,

00:26:38.220 | but also Iran, which sits to the south and west.

00:26:42.220 | And then peripherally looking down the road

00:26:43.860 | to China to the east.

00:26:45.660 | - So the bear is what, like Russia?

00:26:50.260 | Or is it kind of like some weird combination

00:26:53.220 | of Russia, Iran, and China?

00:26:55.380 | - The bear is Russia.

00:26:56.340 | And Russia is this,

00:26:59.200 | I'm trying to characterize the imagination

00:27:01.780 | of some of these national security figures.

00:27:03.880 | This is an image formed in the Cold War.

00:27:07.280 | I mean, it has deeper seeds in European

00:27:09.500 | and Western intellectual thought that go back

00:27:12.220 | at least to the 1850s in the reign of Czar Nicholas I.

00:27:17.220 | When we first get this language about the Russian Empire

00:27:21.180 | is this kind of evil polity.

00:27:24.980 | Obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism,

00:27:28.080 | but the Clinton folks kept that alive.

00:27:31.020 | They wanted to make sure that American power

00:27:34.060 | would be unmatched.

00:27:36.100 | And they being creatures of the Cold War themselves,

00:27:39.420 | they look to Russia as a resurgent power

00:27:42.880 | well before Putin was even thought of.

00:27:45.540 | - Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep,

00:27:49.440 | profound historical piece in Rambo.

00:27:52.160 | It's probably, this conflict has to do

00:27:55.680 | with another Celeste Stallone movie, "Rocky IV,"

00:27:58.680 | which is also historically accurate

00:28:00.560 | and based on, it's basically a documentary.

00:28:03.560 | So there is something about the American power,

00:28:07.460 | even at the level of Condoleezza Rice,

00:28:10.180 | these respected deep kind of leaders and thinkers

00:28:15.180 | about history and the future,

00:28:17.600 | where they like to have competition with other superpowers

00:28:22.220 | and almost conjure up superpowers,

00:28:26.560 | even when those countries don't maybe at the time

00:28:31.300 | at least deserve the label of superpower.

00:28:33.540 | - That's right, great point.

00:28:34.420 | Yeah, they're all excellent points.

00:28:35.820 | So yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many experts,

00:28:39.460 | I mean, my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Kakin,

00:28:42.480 | was then writing great things about how,

00:28:45.380 | if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP,

00:28:49.620 | its capacity to actually act globally,

00:28:52.280 | it's all quite limited.

00:28:54.220 | But Condoleezza Rice and the people around her

00:28:56.700 | came into power with George W. Bush,

00:29:00.100 | thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era

00:29:03.620 | would be those of the past.

00:29:06.540 | Richard Clarke and others within the administration

00:29:08.180 | warned that, in fact, there is this group

00:29:10.500 | that has declared war against the United States

00:29:12.980 | and they are coming for us.

00:29:14.820 | The FBI had been following these people around

00:29:17.320 | for many months.

00:29:18.160 | And so by the time George W. Bush comes to power,

00:29:21.900 | lots of Al-Qaeda activists, well, not lots,

00:29:23.820 | but perhaps a dozen or so,

00:29:26.180 | are already training in the United States.

00:29:29.860 | And what we knew immediately from the biographies

00:29:31.820 | of some of the characters of the attackers of 9/11,

00:29:34.460 | it was a hodgepodge of people from across the planet,

00:29:37.140 | but most of them were Saudi, right?

00:29:39.380 | And that was known very early on,

00:29:41.260 | or presumed very early on.

00:29:43.260 | So again, if we go back to your big question

00:29:44.540 | about the geography, why Afghanistan, it didn't add up.

00:29:48.300 | It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target.

00:29:51.260 | It was a place to have explosions,

00:29:54.140 | to seemingly recapture American supremacy.

00:29:58.400 | And also I think, in many quarters,

00:30:00.500 | there was a deep urge for revenge.

00:30:02.700 | And this was a place to have some casualties,

00:30:05.460 | have some explosions.

00:30:07.520 | And then I think, restore the legitimacy

00:30:09.780 | of the Bush administration

00:30:11.380 | by showing that we're in charge, we'll pay.

00:30:14.100 | I think that was a very old fashioned punitive dimension,

00:30:17.500 | which rests upon the presumption

00:30:19.300 | that if we intimidate these people,

00:30:21.620 | they'll know not to try this again, right?

00:30:23.860 | All these, I would suggest, are all misreadings

00:30:25.660 | of an organization that was always global.

00:30:28.380 | It had no real center.

00:30:29.680 | I mean, it called itself the center,

00:30:30.660 | that's one way to translate Al-Qaeda.

00:30:32.880 | But that center was really in the imagination.

00:30:35.540 | Bin Laden bounced around from country to country.

00:30:39.260 | And crucially, I think a dimension

00:30:42.740 | that I don't claim to know anything new about,

00:30:45.220 | but has endured as a kind of doubt,

00:30:47.900 | is the role of Saudi Arabia,

00:30:49.100 | and the fact that the muscle in that operation of 9/11

00:30:52.740 | was Saudi, right?

00:30:55.000 | I mean, this was a Saudi operation with,

00:30:57.500 | if one thinks again, just on the basis of nationalities,

00:31:00.380 | Saudis, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy,

00:31:04.440 | and the Egyptian guy had been studying in Germany.

00:31:08.660 | He was an urban planner, right?

00:31:10.980 | So if one thinks of the imagination of this,

00:31:12.340 | I mean, and if you look at the kind of typology

00:31:15.740 | of the figures who have led this radical movement,

00:31:19.460 | I mean, if you think of the global jihadists,

00:31:22.020 | they are mostly not religious scholars, right?

00:31:25.460 | Bin Laden was not a religious scholar.

00:31:27.660 | His training was an engineer.

00:31:29.420 | Some biographers claim that he was a playboy

00:31:31.100 | for much of his youth.

00:31:32.620 | But really, these ideas,

00:31:34.660 | I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers.

00:31:37.580 | I mean, this is an imagination

00:31:41.380 | fueled by training and engineering.

00:31:43.860 | I mean, a lot of the sociology,

00:31:46.380 | if you do a kind of post-pacography

00:31:47.540 | of a lot of these leading jihadists,

00:31:50.780 | their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship,

00:31:53.180 | but actually in engineering

00:31:54.500 | and kind of practical sciences and professions.

00:31:57.140 | Medical doctors are among their ranks.

00:31:59.240 | And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars

00:32:02.980 | who devote their whole lives to study of texts

00:32:05.300 | and commentary and interpretation,

00:32:07.980 | and then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals,

00:32:10.620 | new Muslim authorities,

00:32:12.340 | who actually have secular university educations,

00:32:16.060 | often in the natural sciences or engineering

00:32:17.820 | and technical fields,

00:32:19.180 | who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will,

00:32:22.520 | to what Muslim scholars call the religious sciences,

00:32:26.740 | which are a field of kind of ambiguity and of gradation

00:32:31.740 | and of subtlety and nuance

00:32:33.900 | and really of decades of training

00:32:36.500 | before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues

00:32:39.820 | like whether or not it's legitimate

00:32:41.220 | to take someone else's life.

00:32:43.260 | - With the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden?

00:32:47.420 | - Bin Laden was a visitor.

00:32:50.660 | If you look at his whole life course,

00:32:52.720 | part of it is an enigma still.

00:32:56.000 | He is from a Saudi elite family,

00:32:59.920 | but a family that kind of has a Yemeni,

00:33:03.220 | Arabian Sea kind of genealogy.

00:33:07.080 | So the family has no relationship

00:33:08.140 | to Afghanistan past or present,

00:33:10.880 | except at some point in 1980s,

00:33:13.560 | when he went like thousands of other young Saudis,

00:33:16.960 | first to Pakistan, to places like Peshawar on the border,

00:33:20.700 | where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.

00:33:24.720 | And for the most part, the Arabs who went

00:33:29.160 | opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.

00:33:32.140 | The bin Laden family had long been

00:33:35.020 | based in engineering construction.

00:33:37.360 | So it's thought that he used some of those skills

00:33:39.420 | and resources and connections to build things.

00:33:42.460 | We have images of him firing a gun for show, right?

00:33:48.280 | It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun

00:33:50.600 | in what we would call combat.

00:33:52.220 | Again, I could be corrected by this.

00:33:55.460 | And I think there are competing accounts of who he was.

00:33:58.600 | So he's kind of a, I mean,

00:34:00.280 | many of these figures who sit at the pinnacle of this world

00:34:02.280 | are fictive heroes that people map

00:34:07.120 | their aspirations onto, right?

00:34:08.400 | And so people like Mullah Omar,

00:34:10.400 | who was then head of the Taliban,

00:34:13.280 | was rarely seen in public.

00:34:15.900 | The current head of the Taliban

00:34:17.680 | is almost never seen in public.

00:34:19.460 | I mean, there's a kind of studied era of mystery

00:34:22.220 | that they've cultivated to make themselves available

00:34:25.340 | for all kinds of fantasies, right?

00:34:27.700 | - Do you think he believed, so his religious beliefs,

00:34:32.020 | do you think he believed some of the more extreme things

00:34:38.700 | that enable him to commit terrorist acts?

00:34:42.300 | Maybe put another way,

00:34:44.000 | what makes a man want to become a terrorist?

00:34:46.960 | And what aspect of bin Laden

00:34:48.760 | made him want to be a terrorist?

00:34:50.420 | - Right, right.

00:34:52.500 | I mean, let me offer some observations.

00:34:54.100 | I think there are others who know more about bin Laden

00:34:57.040 | and have far more expertise in al-Qaeda.

00:34:59.600 | So I'm coming at this in an adjacent way,

00:35:04.340 | kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training.

00:35:06.500 | So this is my two cents, so bear with me.

00:35:10.820 | I don't have the authoritative account.

00:35:12.680 | - Which in itself is fascinating

00:35:14.060 | because you're a historian of Afghanistan

00:35:17.060 | and the fact that bin Laden isn't a huge part

00:35:21.180 | of your focus of study just means that bin Laden

00:35:24.820 | is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan,

00:35:28.700 | except that America made him a key part

00:35:31.020 | of the history of Afghanistan.

00:35:32.340 | - I would endorse that, definitely.

00:35:33.580 | That's it, I mean, you put it in a very pity way.

00:35:36.320 | Yeah, so listen, he was, so he was an engineer.

00:35:40.540 | He was said to be a playboy.

00:35:42.580 | He spent a lot of cash from his family.

00:35:45.180 | You know, like many young Saudis

00:35:46.940 | and from some other countries,

00:35:48.280 | he was inspired by this idea

00:35:50.600 | that there was jihad in Afghanistan.

00:35:52.800 | It was gonna take down one of the two superpowers,

00:35:55.860 | the Soviet Union, who, you know,

00:35:58.700 | the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands,

00:36:01.740 | perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians

00:36:05.700 | during that conflict.

00:36:06.860 | It's very, you know, plausible and very, you know,

00:36:12.460 | completely understandable that many young people

00:36:14.900 | would see that cause as, you know,

00:36:18.660 | the righteous, pious fighters for jihad

00:36:21.820 | who call themselves Mujahideen,

00:36:23.900 | arrayed against this evil empire, right,

00:36:26.460 | of a godless Soviet empire that,

00:36:30.260 | I mean, there's even confusion about what the Soviets wanted.

00:36:31.980 | Right, now we know much more about, like,

00:36:33.660 | what the Kremlin wanted, what Brezhnev wanted,

00:36:36.260 | and how the Soviet elite thought about it

00:36:37.580 | because we have many more of their records.

00:36:39.260 | But from the outside, you know, for Jimmy Carter

00:36:42.060 | and for Reagan, it looked like the Soviets

00:36:44.740 | were making a move on South Asia

00:36:47.940 | because they wanted to get to the warm water ports,

00:36:50.820 | you know, which Russians always want, supposedly, right?

00:36:52.700 | And it was kind of a move to take over our oil

00:36:56.140 | and, you know, to assert world domination, right?

00:36:58.800 | So there are lots of ways in which this looked like

00:37:01.500 | good versus evil.

00:37:02.700 | In Congress, it looked like, you know,

00:37:05.940 | kind of Vietnam again, but this time,

00:37:07.700 | this is our chance to get them.

00:37:08.960 | And there are lots of great quotes.

00:37:11.420 | I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes

00:37:13.940 | that American Postal Workers made about

00:37:16.340 | wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam.

00:37:19.020 | So the CIA funneled, you know,

00:37:22.620 | hundreds of millions of dollars into this project

00:37:24.260 | to back the Mujahideen, you know,

00:37:25.700 | who Reagan called freedom fighters.

00:37:27.620 | And so, Bin Laden was part of that universe.

00:37:29.500 | He's part of that, you know,

00:37:30.340 | he's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen

00:37:33.540 | who out of size, you know, did 95% of the fighting.

00:37:36.780 | They're the ones who died.

00:37:37.780 | They're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right?

00:37:40.540 | The Arabs who were there did a little fighting,

00:37:43.140 | but a lot of it was for, you know, their purposes.

00:37:45.740 | It was to get experience.

00:37:47.100 | It was to kind of create their reputations.

00:37:50.260 | Like Bin Laden began to forge for himself

00:37:52.620 | of being spokesman for a global project.

00:37:55.220 | Because by the late 80s, when Bin Laden,

00:37:57.820 | I think was more active and began conspiring

00:38:00.500 | with people from other Arab countries,

00:38:02.820 | the idea that, you know, Gorbachev came to power in '85.

00:38:05.980 | He's like, let's get out of here.

00:38:07.060 | This is draining the Soviet budget.

00:38:09.340 | It's an embarrassment.

00:38:10.460 | We didn't think about this properly.

00:38:13.220 | Let's focus on restoring the party

00:38:17.260 | and strengthening the Soviet Union.

00:38:19.340 | Let's get out of this costly war.

00:38:20.700 | You know, it's a waste.

00:38:22.580 | It's not worth it.

00:38:23.820 | We don't lose anything by getting out of Afghanistan.

00:38:26.900 | And so their retreat was quite effective and successful

00:38:31.900 | from the Soviet point of view, right?

00:38:33.140 | It's not what we're seeing now.

00:38:35.180 | - What year was the retreat?

00:38:37.340 | - I mean, it began, so Mikhail Gorbachev came to power

00:38:40.620 | in '85, you know, he was a generation younger

00:38:42.820 | than the other guys.

00:38:44.580 | He was a critic of the system.

00:38:46.340 | He didn't wanna abolish it.

00:38:47.180 | He wanted to reform it.

00:38:48.580 | He was a true believer in Soviet socialism

00:38:51.380 | and the party as a monopolist, right?

00:38:55.620 | But he was critical of the old guard

00:38:58.020 | and recognized that the party had to change

00:39:00.940 | and the whole system had to change to continue to compete.

00:39:04.660 | And so Afghanistan was one element of this.

00:39:07.460 | And so he pushed the Afghan elites that Moscow was backing

00:39:12.460 | to basically say, listen, we're gonna share power.

00:39:16.380 | And so a figure named Najibullah,

00:39:19.700 | who was a Soviet trained intelligence specialist

00:39:23.340 | sitting in Kabul, agreed.

00:39:26.460 | And he said, we need to have a more kind of pluralistic

00:39:30.340 | accommodations approach to our enemies

00:39:33.260 | who are backed by the US mainly,

00:39:36.300 | sitting in Pakistan, sitting in Iran,

00:39:39.220 | backed by these Arabs to a degree,

00:39:40.580 | getting money from Saudi.

00:39:42.380 | And he said, let's draw some of them into the government

00:39:45.140 | and basically have a kind of unity government

00:39:48.460 | that would make some space for the opposition.

00:39:50.860 | And for the most part, with US backing,

00:39:53.380 | with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing,

00:39:56.060 | and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no,

00:39:58.580 | we're not going to reconcile.

00:40:00.740 | We're gonna push you off the cliff.

00:40:02.740 | And so that story goes on from at least 1987.

00:40:06.700 | The last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989.

00:40:10.180 | But the Najibullah government holds on for three more years.

00:40:15.260 | It is the, I mean,

00:40:17.100 | they're still getting some help from the Soviet Union.

00:40:18.780 | Its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly.

00:40:21.700 | And it's not until '92 that they lose.

00:40:26.700 | And then Mujahideen come to power.

00:40:29.580 | They immediately, they're deeply fractured.

00:40:33.100 | - And that's where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll.

00:40:35.980 | - That's right.

00:40:36.820 | And he's part of the mix, but he's also mobile.

00:40:37.900 | So he at one point goes, is in Sudan.

00:40:42.140 | He's moving from place to place.

00:40:44.100 | His people are all over the world.

00:40:45.260 | In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the,

00:40:48.220 | once the Mujahideen take power,

00:40:50.220 | they have difficulties with Arab fighters too.

00:40:52.140 | And they don't want them coming in and messing with,

00:40:55.260 | Mujahideen regard this as like,

00:40:57.180 | this is an Afghan national state that we're gonna build.

00:40:59.380 | It's gonna be Islamic.

00:41:00.220 | It's gonna be an Islamic state,

00:41:01.660 | but you can't interfere with us.

00:41:03.780 | And so there are always tensions.

00:41:05.700 | And so the Arabs are always kind of,

00:41:07.060 | I would say they were,

00:41:08.460 | Arab fighters were always interlopers.

00:41:10.360 | Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money,

00:41:13.900 | send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons,

00:41:17.500 | but they're never gonna let this be like a Saudi

00:41:20.740 | or Egyptian or whatever project.

00:41:22.760 | But then many of those fighters went home.

00:41:26.380 | They went back to Syria.

00:41:27.500 | They went back to Egypt.

00:41:29.180 | Some wanted to go back to Saudi Arabia,

00:41:30.620 | but the Saudis were very careful.

00:41:31.660 | I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan

00:41:33.240 | as a kind of safety valve.

00:41:34.900 | In fact, they had fundraisers on television.

00:41:37.220 | They chartered jets.

00:41:38.460 | They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan,

00:41:41.380 | get out in the shower and say, go fight.

00:41:44.380 | And it was one way that the monarchy,

00:41:46.420 | the Saudi monarchy, very cleverly, I think,

00:41:50.160 | created a kind of escape valve

00:41:52.700 | for would-be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right?

00:41:55.460 | Just send them abroad.

00:41:56.920 | You wanna fight Jihad?

00:41:58.320 | Go do that somewhere else.

00:41:59.180 | Don't bother the kingdom.

00:42:01.300 | But all this became dicier in the early '90s

00:42:04.460 | when some of these guys came back home

00:42:06.340 | and some of the scholars around them said,

00:42:08.380 | let's, we've defeated the Soviet Union,

00:42:10.180 | which is a huge, huge boost.

00:42:11.260 | I think part of the dynamic we see today

00:42:12.860 | is that the Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration

00:42:17.420 | for people who think, look, we beat the Soviets.

00:42:20.300 | Now we beat the Americans.

00:42:22.020 | And so already watching the Soviet retreat

00:42:24.620 | across this bridge back into Uzbekistan,

00:42:26.980 | if you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving,

00:42:30.360 | a lot of people interpreted this as like,

00:42:32.480 | we are going to change the world

00:42:34.720 | and now we're turning to the Americans.

00:42:36.560 | And our local national governments

00:42:38.280 | are backed by the Americans.

00:42:39.840 | So let's start with those places.

00:42:42.100 | And then let's go strike the belly of the beast,

00:42:44.880 | which is America, which is New York.

00:42:47.360 | And going back to Bin Laden,

00:42:48.200 | your question about what motivates him, what motivated him,

00:42:51.760 | again, he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar.

00:42:57.380 | And that, I think, when this comes up in our classes,

00:43:00.580 | I think, especially young people,

00:43:01.980 | I mean, people who weren't even born in 9/11,

00:43:03.140 | I mean, they're shocked.

00:43:03.980 | They see his appearance.

00:43:05.440 | They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf

00:43:10.440 | of Arabic books.

00:43:11.880 | He's got the Kalashnikov.

00:43:13.500 | He's got what looks like a religious scholar's library

00:43:15.620 | behind him, right?

00:43:16.980 | But if you look at his words, I mean,

00:43:20.060 | one fascinating thing about just our politics

00:43:21.500 | and just one thing that kind of sums all this up,

00:43:22.680 | I mean, the fact that on 9/11,

00:43:25.180 | we had to have a few people, a few experts,

00:43:29.740 | people like Bernard Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert.

00:43:32.140 | So that was one way in which I think,

00:43:33.780 | I'm not faulting him personally,

00:43:35.240 | but it's just one way in which that relationship

00:43:37.500 | appeared to be formed, right,

00:43:40.340 | of linking Afghanistan to that moment.

00:43:42.600 | If one looks actually at what Bin Laden was saying and doing,

00:43:47.380 | people like Richard Clarke were studying this.

00:43:49.340 | There were Arab leaders.

00:43:50.320 | The Arab press was watching this

00:43:51.920 | because he gave some of his first interviews

00:43:54.040 | to a few Arab newspaper outlets.

00:43:57.060 | But speaking of our American kind of monolingualism,

00:44:01.060 | a lot of what he was saying wasn't known.

00:44:02.660 | And so I think for several years,

00:44:05.560 | people weren't reading what Bin Laden said.

00:44:08.420 | I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic,

00:44:10.940 | but there was great anxiety around translating his works.

00:44:14.420 | So we have Mein Kampf, we have all this other stuff.

00:44:16.500 | You can buy the collected works of Lenin, Stalin, Mao,

00:44:18.900 | whatever you want in whatever language you want.

00:44:21.140 | But Bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.

00:44:23.060 | And so it was only Verso in the UK

00:44:26.220 | that published a famous volume called

00:44:29.100 | Messages to the World,

00:44:31.040 | which was the first compendium of Bin Laden's writings.

00:44:33.900 | - So he has a Mein Kampf.

00:44:36.060 | He has a type, does he have a thing where he--

00:44:38.220 | - I mean, it's a kind of collected works.

00:44:39.300 | It's a collected works of his--

00:44:41.060 | - He had like a blog.

00:44:43.940 | It's a collection of articles versus--

00:44:46.900 | - Yeah, these are interviews.

00:44:47.940 | These are his missives, his declarations,

00:44:52.140 | his decrees, right?

00:44:54.380 | But I think just in terms of,

00:44:57.300 | if we zoom out for a second about

00:44:58.740 | American policy choices and so on,

00:45:00.620 | the powers that be didn't trust us

00:45:02.720 | to know what he was really about.

00:45:04.280 | I put it that way.

00:45:05.120 | And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense.

00:45:06.820 | I just think that it was a taboo.

00:45:11.140 | I think people, there was a kind of consensus that

00:45:15.140 | trust us, we know how to fight Al-Qaeda.

00:45:20.220 | And you don't need to know what they're about

00:45:21.380 | because they're crazy.

00:45:22.500 | They're fanatics, they're fundamentalists.

00:45:24.540 | They hate us, remember that language?

00:45:26.420 | Us versus them.

00:45:28.740 | But if you read Bin Laden, that's when it gets messy.

00:45:30.740 | That's where Bin Laden's argumentation

00:45:34.220 | is not fundamentally about Islam.

00:45:37.140 | And if you're sitting here with an Islamic scholar,

00:45:39.180 | he would say, depending on which Islamic scholar,

00:45:43.140 | they would tend to go through and dissect

00:45:45.540 | and negate 99% of the arguments

00:45:48.660 | that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?

00:45:51.100 | But what strikes me as an historian,

00:45:52.580 | who's again, looking at this adjacently,

00:45:55.020 | if you read Bin Laden, I mean, the arguments that he make

00:45:58.420 | are, first of all, they're sophisticated.

00:46:01.420 | They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics.

00:46:06.420 | He uses terms like imperialism.

00:46:09.940 | He knows something about world history.

00:46:12.220 | He knows something about geography.

00:46:14.300 | - So imperialism is the enemy for him?

00:46:16.100 | Or what's the nature of the enemy?

00:46:18.340 | - It's an amalgam.

00:46:19.180 | And like a good politician, which is what I would call him,

00:46:23.380 | he is adept at speaking in different ways

00:46:26.980 | to different audiences.

00:46:28.060 | So if you look at the context in which he speaks,

00:46:30.580 | if you look at messages to the world,

00:46:32.980 | if you look at his writings, and you can zoom out now,

00:46:35.700 | and we now have compendia of the writings

00:46:37.620 | of Al-Qaeda more broadly.

00:46:39.300 | You can purchase these.

00:46:40.860 | They're basically primary source collections.

00:46:45.260 | We now have that for the Taliban.

00:46:46.980 | I mean, what's fascinating about,

00:46:49.500 | I think, if you'd like this culture,

00:46:52.220 | acknowledging it's very diverse internally,

00:46:55.740 | is that these people are representatives

00:46:58.860 | of political movements who seek followers.

00:47:01.140 | They speak.

00:47:02.500 | They often are very, I'd say, skilled at visual imagery.

00:47:07.500 | And especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that,

00:47:10.180 | I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions.

00:47:12.900 | They used to blow up VCR, videotapes.

00:47:17.900 | They used to string audio and video cassettes from trees

00:47:23.660 | and kind of ceremonial hangings, right?

00:47:25.860 | That were killing this nefarious, infidel technology

00:47:30.380 | that is doing the work of Satan.

00:47:32.260 | And yet today, one of the keys to the Taliban's success

00:47:35.740 | is that they got really good at using media.

00:47:38.860 | I mean, brilliant at using the written word,

00:47:42.180 | the spoken word, music, actually.

00:47:44.100 | And Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard.

00:47:48.500 | And these guys have studied how to create drama,

00:47:52.300 | how to speak to modern users.

00:47:53.900 | I mean, Islamic State did this.

00:47:55.020 | I mean, the role of media, new media.

00:47:57.580 | I mean, I follow and I am followed

00:48:00.700 | by senior Taliban leaders, which is bizarre on Twitter.

00:48:05.700 | - On Twitter?

00:48:07.620 | - I don't know why they care about me.

00:48:08.900 | I'm nothing.

00:48:10.460 | - They follow you on Twitter.

00:48:12.820 | - I don't know why.

00:48:13.660 | This is no joke, this is no joke.

00:48:15.620 | They are part of our modern world.

00:48:17.260 | It's how they talk and it's how they recruit.

00:48:18.420 | And this is part of the, this is why they are.

00:48:20.780 | So Bin Laden, if you read Bin Laden,

00:48:22.100 | he speaks multiple languages, I would say.

00:48:24.300 | It's environmentalism.

00:48:27.500 | The West is bad because we destroyed the planet.

00:48:31.500 | The West is bad because we abuse women.

00:48:34.540 | So in class, especially female students

00:48:38.820 | are very surprised to learn,

00:48:40.180 | and actually say, this feminist argument is not,

00:48:43.580 | we start with, this is a murderer.

00:48:47.420 | This is a person who has taken human life,

00:48:49.140 | innocent life over and over again.

00:48:51.380 | And he is aspirationally genocidal.

00:48:56.060 | But let's try to understand what he's about.

00:48:57.620 | So we walk through the texts, read them,

00:48:59.340 | and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about

00:49:03.740 | quotations from the Quran

00:49:05.820 | strung together in some irrational fashion.

00:49:08.300 | He knows, I mean, at the core,

00:49:10.940 | I'd say is the problem of human suffering.

00:49:12.980 | And he has a geography of that that is mostly Muslim,

00:49:15.420 | but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir.

00:49:17.700 | All right, so if you have a student in your class

00:49:19.580 | who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir,

00:49:22.260 | he or she will say, that's not entirely inaccurate.

00:49:25.980 | The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir.

00:49:29.980 | Pakistanis have done that too.

00:49:33.340 | Palestine is an issue, right?

00:49:35.100 | So you have, in the American university setting,

00:49:37.940 | people across the spectrum who get that,

00:49:41.500 | Palestinians have had a raw deal.

00:49:43.460 | And so it's a, victimhood is essential

00:49:46.220 | and it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary,

00:49:50.140 | but as a number of scholars have written,

00:49:52.380 | and I definitely think this is a framework

00:49:55.420 | for what this useful.

00:49:56.260 | I mean, in this kind of vocabulary,

00:49:58.500 | in this framing, this narrative,

00:50:00.180 | today, in today's world,

00:50:03.340 | if we think of today's world being post-Cold War,

00:50:06.620 | 91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars,

00:50:11.620 | and seeing the visuals of that,

00:50:12.980 | I think that, I think the American public

00:50:14.700 | has been shielded from some of this,

00:50:15.540 | but if you look at just the carnage of the Iraqi army

00:50:20.100 | that George H.W. Bush produced, right?

00:50:24.180 | Or you think of the images of the suffering

00:50:26.540 | of Iraqi children under George H.W. Bush's sanctions,

00:50:31.220 | US-British airstrikes,

00:50:33.460 | then you have Madeleine Albright

00:50:35.740 | answer a question on "60 Minutes" saying,

00:50:37.460 | "Do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids

00:50:40.660 | "is worth it?

00:50:41.860 | "Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein?"

00:50:44.700 | And she says on camera, "Yes, it's worth it to me."

00:50:47.900 | If you put that all together,

00:50:49.860 | I mean, American kids, and of course the American public,

00:50:52.340 | they're not always aware of those facts of global history,

00:50:55.940 | but these guys are, and they very capably

00:51:00.420 | use these images, use these tropes,

00:51:03.060 | and use facts.

00:51:03.900 | I mean, some of these things are not deniable.

00:51:05.820 | I mean, these estimates about the number

00:51:08.020 | of Iraqi civilian children dead,

00:51:10.780 | that came from, I think, the Lancet,

00:51:12.140 | and it came from, those are estimates.

00:51:14.020 | But looking at this from the point of view of Amman,

00:51:18.460 | of Jaffa, of Nairobi,

00:51:22.580 | just think around the planet,

00:51:24.020 | if you see yourself as the victim

00:51:26.540 | of this great imperial power,

00:51:28.920 | you can see why especially young men would be drawn

00:51:31.700 | to a road of self-sacrifice.

00:51:36.700 | And the idea is that in killing others,

00:51:41.860 | you are making them feel how you feel.

00:51:46.860 | Because they won't listen to your arguments reasonably,

00:51:49.200 | because they won't recognize Palestinian suffering,

00:51:52.660 | Bosnian suffering, Chechen suffering.

00:51:55.900 | You go across the planet, right?

00:51:57.460 | Because they won't recognize our suffering,

00:52:00.020 | we're gonna speak to you in the only language

00:52:01.580 | you understand, and that's violence.

00:52:04.220 | And look at the violence of the post-1991 world,

00:52:08.220 | in which American air power really becomes a global

00:52:12.220 | kind of fact in the lives of so many people.

00:52:15.580 | And then the big mistake after 9/11, among many,

00:52:19.340 | I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror

00:52:22.860 | to some 30 or 40 countries,

00:52:25.060 | so that you have more and more of the globe

00:52:28.180 | feel like they're under attack.

00:52:30.860 | And the logic is that essentially,

00:52:32.300 | it's not, it's free bin Laden,

00:52:33.540 | it's not, we're going to convert you

00:52:36.500 | and turn you into Muslims, and that's why we're doing this.

00:52:38.820 | That appears, that claim does appear at times.

00:52:42.100 | But it's, if you look at any given bin Laden text,

00:52:45.140 | I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.

00:52:47.500 | I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying,

00:52:48.900 | but he's a modern politician,

00:52:51.060 | he knows the language of social equality.

00:52:54.860 | You know, that there's a class dimension to it,

00:52:56.820 | there is an environmental dimension to it,

00:52:58.660 | there's a gender dimension to it.

00:53:00.740 | And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in.

00:53:04.180 | And when he wants to speak that language,

00:53:06.500 | he knew that, you know, he's not a scholar.

00:53:09.300 | So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on.

00:53:13.420 | So some of his declarations of jihad had his signature

00:53:17.140 | kind of sprinkled in with like a dozen other signatures

00:53:20.500 | from people who are somewhat known,

00:53:22.780 | or at least, you know, with titles, right?

00:53:24.900 | So as a kind of intellectual exercise,

00:53:28.220 | it's fascinating to see that he is throwing everything

00:53:31.500 | at the wall in one level.

00:53:33.100 | That's one way to see that it's a,

00:53:35.780 | these are kind of testaments toward recruitment

00:53:39.860 | of people who, yes, they're angry, yes, they're unhappy.

00:53:43.860 | And this is what, you know, I think for our broader public,

00:53:46.540 | it's hard to get, you're like, well, bin Laden didn't suffer.

00:53:49.980 | He wasn't poor.

00:53:51.300 | Like, yeah, I mean, Lenin, Pol Pot.

00:53:54.780 | - I mean, they're speaking to,

00:53:56.380 | they're empathetic to the suffering, the landscape,

00:53:58.580 | the full landscape of suffering.

00:53:59.900 | It's interesting to think about suffering, you know,

00:54:03.820 | America, the American public,

00:54:06.940 | American politicians and leaders,

00:54:08.940 | when they see what is good and evil,

00:54:13.120 | they're often not empathetic to the suffering of others.

00:54:16.580 | And what you're saying is bin Laden perhaps accurately

00:54:21.580 | could speak to the ignorance of America,

00:54:24.900 | maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people.

00:54:28.300 | - That's right.

00:54:29.140 | - And I mean, if you look at the speeches

00:54:32.740 | and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s,

00:54:37.260 | he spoke quite accurately to the injustice

00:54:42.260 | and maybe the suffering of the German people.

00:54:46.500 | It, I mean, charismatic politicians

00:54:49.100 | are good at telling accurate stories.

00:54:50.860 | It's not all fabricated,

00:54:53.060 | but they emphasize certain aspects.

00:54:55.660 | And then the problem part is the actions

00:54:58.420 | you should take based on that.

00:55:00.060 | So the narratives and the stories

00:55:03.620 | may be grounded in historical accuracy.

00:55:06.700 | The actions then cross the line, the ethical line.

00:55:11.700 | - I thought that too.

00:55:12.660 | I mean, it's a, again, if you pick up just one of these texts,

00:55:14.780 | I mean, it's a kaleidoscope.

00:55:15.980 | So the Hitler analogy is interesting

00:55:18.460 | because it's, you know, Hitler spoke to,

00:55:21.220 | he could speak to things like inflation, right?

00:55:23.420 | Which really existed.

00:55:24.460 | But he also appealed to the irrational emotions

00:55:28.740 | of Germans, right?

00:55:29.940 | He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma,

00:55:34.940 | disabled people, homosexuals, and so on, right?

00:55:38.140 | That's also there in bin Laden too.

00:55:40.140 | I mean, the idea of, you know, an anti-Semitism,

00:55:44.020 | the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders.

00:55:47.640 | It's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers.

00:55:50.740 | But I'd also hasten to add that it's,

00:55:53.160 | for all of the things that we could tick off saying,

00:55:55.660 | well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered,

00:55:58.380 | Chechens have suffered, and so on.

00:56:00.080 | Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.

00:56:04.300 | I mean, it never really, I think the,

00:56:06.660 | I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right?

00:56:09.780 | About ideology.

00:56:11.420 | I mean, I think the blood on his hands

00:56:14.860 | always limited his appeal among Muslims and others.

00:56:18.080 | But bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a,

00:56:20.800 | there's a great book by a great scholar at UC San Diego,

00:56:24.700 | Jeremy Prestholt, who wrote a great book about global icons

00:56:29.120 | in which he has bin Laden, he has Bob Marley,

00:56:34.120 | he has Tupac, you know, he asked why,

00:56:40.440 | you know, when he's doing research in East Africa,

00:56:42.360 | why did he see young kids wearing bin Laden shirts?

00:56:46.260 | They're also wearing like Tupac shirts.

00:56:48.120 | They're wearing bin Bob Marley shirts.

00:56:50.000 | And basically it's a way of looking at

00:56:52.760 | a kind of partial embrace of some aspects

00:56:57.940 | of the rebelliousness of some of these figures,

00:57:01.800 | some of the time by some people under certain conditions.

00:57:05.280 | - Well, the terrifying thing to me,

00:57:06.500 | so yeah, there is a longing in the human heart

00:57:08.760 | to belong to a group and a charismatic leader somehow,

00:57:13.260 | especially when you're young,

00:57:16.120 | just a catalyst for all of that.

00:57:17.960 | And I tend to think that perhaps

00:57:22.160 | it's actually hard to be Hitler.

00:57:24.680 | So a leader so charismatic that he can rile a nation to war.

00:57:29.560 | And bin Laden, perhaps we're lucky,

00:57:32.600 | was not sufficiently charismatic.

00:57:35.560 | I feel like if his writing was better,

00:57:37.720 | if his speeches were better,

00:57:39.560 | if his ideas were stronger,

00:57:41.700 | better, it's like more viral,

00:57:46.000 | and then there would be more people,

00:57:48.840 | kind of young people uniting around him.

00:57:52.560 | So in some sense, it's almost like accidents of history

00:57:56.200 | of just how much charisma,

00:57:58.260 | how much charisma a particular evil person has,

00:58:01.120 | a person like bin Laden.

00:58:03.160 | - I think it's fair, evil works, I think.

00:58:05.680 | - So you think bin Laden is evil?

00:58:07.400 | - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:08.240 | I mean, he was a mass murderer.

00:58:09.920 | I'm just saying that his ideas were,

00:58:13.740 | they're more complex than we've tended to acknowledge.

00:58:17.680 | They have a wider potential resonance

00:58:22.000 | than we would acknowledge.

00:58:23.360 | I mean, and also I guess just one fundamental point

00:58:27.200 | is that thinking about the complexity of bin Laden

00:58:31.720 | is also a way of removing him from Islam.

00:58:34.580 | He is not an Islamic thinker.

00:58:36.800 | He is a cosmopolitan thinker

00:58:39.680 | who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies,

00:58:43.240 | which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right?

00:58:45.720 | So anti-Semitism, populism, environmentalism,

00:58:50.720 | and the urging to do something about humanity,

00:58:56.400 | do something about suffering.

00:58:57.800 | That's why I think the actual,

00:58:59.100 | you ask about what motivates people to do this kind of stuff.

00:59:01.000 | I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership

00:59:04.380 | and this is being reported,

00:59:05.720 | if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris

00:59:09.240 | of the Baraklan murders, I think,

00:59:12.860 | the court allowed some discussion

00:59:15.600 | of the backgrounds of the accused.

00:59:17.640 | And they come from different backgrounds,

00:59:20.340 | but if there's any common bond,

00:59:22.040 | it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime.

00:59:26.160 | Famously in the 7/7 bombings in London,

00:59:28.320 | the Metropolitan Police, UK authorities

00:59:32.560 | looked at all those guys

00:59:34.520 | and what people want is this idea

00:59:36.920 | that they must be very pious.

00:59:39.080 | They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff.

00:59:42.000 | They must be fanatical true believers.

00:59:43.540 | But what they found with those guys

00:59:45.340 | was that some were nominally Muslim,

00:59:50.000 | some went to mosques, some didn't.

00:59:51.700 | Some were single, young guys with criminal backgrounds.

00:59:57.640 | Some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits

01:00:01.880 | who never succeeded in anything.

01:00:04.400 | But others had, at least one of them had a wife and family

01:00:07.920 | who he widowed and orphaned.

01:00:10.480 | And so there's no, I mean, for policing,

01:00:12.840 | I mean, if you're looking at it through that lens,

01:00:15.160 | there is no kind of typology

01:00:17.560 | that will predict who will become violent.

01:00:20.120 | And that's why I think we have to move beyond

01:00:22.140 | thinking about religious augmentation narrowly or by itself

01:00:25.880 | and think about things like geopolitics,

01:00:27.320 | think about how people respond to inequality,

01:00:31.480 | the existential threat of climate crisis,

01:00:35.960 | of a whole host of matters,

01:00:38.160 | and think about this is a mode of political contestation.

01:00:42.080 | I mean, it's a violent one, it's one I condemn.

01:00:43.560 | It is evil, right?

01:00:45.200 | But these are people that are,

01:00:46.760 | they're trying to be political.

01:00:47.760 | They're trying to change things in some way.

01:00:49.800 | It's not narrowly about like,

01:00:51.480 | I'm gonna impose Sharia law on you.

01:00:54.220 | You must wear a veil.

01:00:55.960 | You must eat this kind of food.

01:00:57.240 | It's not that parochial.

01:00:59.360 | But another quick thought about your interesting claim

01:01:02.400 | about charisma in this,

01:01:03.360 | I think that the one self-limiting feature

01:01:06.840 | of this subculture is that definitely,

01:01:11.000 | I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen

01:01:13.960 | and that the kind of invisibility

01:01:17.420 | is a productive force of a power,

01:01:19.740 | which a colleague of mine who knows ancient history

01:01:23.860 | far better than I,

01:01:25.840 | this is when she looked at Mullah Omar initially,

01:01:29.440 | or we talk about Bin Laden,

01:01:30.480 | I mean, this kind of studied posture

01:01:33.640 | of staying in the shadows,

01:01:34.960 | is also a source of authority potentially,

01:01:38.000 | because it invites the idea,

01:01:41.180 | and it's partly dictatorships do this well.

01:01:42.820 | I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working,

01:01:45.800 | and maybe it's the basis for a lot of QAnon

01:01:47.840 | or other conspiracy today,

01:01:48.680 | that someone's working behind the scenes

01:01:51.240 | and things are gonna go the right way.

01:01:53.040 | You can't see it.

01:01:54.500 | That's almost preferable because you can kind of feel it.

01:01:57.920 | And so not having someone out front

01:02:00.320 | can maybe be more effective

01:02:02.720 | than having someone out in front constantly.

01:02:04.880 | - Maybe, maybe.

01:02:06.400 | - And then the whole Bin Laden,

01:02:07.720 | Mullah Omar thing like you can't see me,

01:02:09.280 | or if you look at Bin Laden's photographs

01:02:11.360 | and his video stuff,

01:02:13.000 | I mean, he's coy.

01:02:14.960 | Some observers have noted that he's kind of effeminate.

01:02:18.840 | He doesn't strike this kind of masculine,

01:02:21.140 | he's not a Mussolini,

01:02:22.340 | he's not a Hitler,

01:02:24.260 | macho, I'm standing,

01:02:25.940 | thumping my chest,

01:02:26.780 | he's not doing the theatrical chin,

01:02:28.500 | the theater people tell us is so aggressive.

01:02:31.580 | - Oh, a chin?

01:02:33.620 | Just what, bringing your chin up?

01:02:35.500 | - I saw a great BBC theater person,

01:02:38.220 | it was kind of a,

01:02:39.420 | it was a makeover show about how to become a better-

01:02:42.300 | - A dictator?

01:02:43.140 | Oh no, a powerful,

01:02:45.120 | yeah, leader, authoritarian figure.

01:02:47.740 | - No, just how to get ahead in life.

01:02:49.860 | And then- - Oh, okay, cool.

01:02:51.060 | - And just about acting,

01:02:52.400 | how you can act differently, right?

01:02:53.720 | So it was a BBC thing.

01:02:55.360 | And this woman claimed that sticking your chin out,

01:03:00.520 | like a wrestler does, right,

01:03:01.600 | is the most male-to-male-

01:03:03.040 | - I love this kind of- - Most aggressive-

01:03:04.760 | - Hilarious analysis that people have about power.

01:03:08.400 | - But watch the chin, watch the chin.

01:03:09.660 | - It's the same as analyzing in wrestling,

01:03:13.120 | styles that win, or fighting, or so on.

01:03:16.320 | There's so many ways to do it.

01:03:17.440 | - Well, the chin, I mean, the chin is a,

01:03:19.420 | could be interesting verbal gesture.

01:03:21.600 | And I've watched enough Mussolini footage from my classes

01:03:25.880 | to try to pick the right moment.

01:03:27.520 | And the chin is, Mussolini's all about the chin, so.

01:03:29.880 | - And I have watched human beings and human nature enough

01:03:33.560 | to know that there's more to a man,

01:03:36.240 | a powerful man, than a chin.

01:03:38.080 | - Yeah, no, no, no, I'm saying it's an act of aggression.

01:03:40.320 | I'm not saying it's-

01:03:41.160 | - It's one of the many tools in the toolkit.

01:03:43.840 | - Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.

01:03:44.680 | - So she definitely-

01:03:45.680 | - It's not all about the chin, but it's a-

01:03:47.520 | - But that's what I'm trying to tell you about Bin Laden.

01:03:49.500 | I don't think he was deliberate enough

01:03:52.520 | with the way he presents himself.

01:03:55.100 | - What I'm saying about Bin Laden

01:03:55.940 | that makes him different from these other characters

01:03:57.020 | is that because he played it being the scholar,

01:04:01.500 | he played it being a figure of modesty and humility.

01:04:05.620 | And that meant that he was often,

01:04:07.980 | again, if you watch his visuals, I mean, yes,

01:04:09.520 | there's one video of him firing a gun,

01:04:11.800 | but if you watch how he moved,

01:04:14.260 | how he wouldn't look at people directly,

01:04:16.240 | how his face was almost,

01:04:17.940 | I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy.

01:04:20.340 | He's not spoken, his voice was low.

01:04:23.900 | He attempted to be poetic, right?

01:04:25.860 | So it wasn't a warrior kind of image

01:04:28.540 | that he tried to project of like a tough guy.

01:04:30.940 | It was, I'm demure, I'm humble,

01:04:34.160 | I'm offering you this message.

01:04:37.180 | And the appeal that he was going for was to see,

01:04:43.700 | to project himself as a scholar,

01:04:45.640 | his knowledge and humility, the whole package,

01:04:48.380 | carried with it an authenticity and a valor

01:04:52.060 | that would animate,

01:04:54.400 | inspire people to commit acts of violence, right?

01:04:56.180 | So it's a different kind of logic of like go and kill, right?

01:04:59.700 | - So he presented himself in contrast

01:05:03.680 | to the imperialist kind of macho power.

01:05:07.920 | - Bombastic, whatever, yeah.

01:05:09.800 | - So that's just yet another way of,

01:05:13.000 | and you have to have facial hair

01:05:14.500 | or hair of different kinds that's recognized.

01:05:16.200 | We had a very recognizable look too,

01:05:18.140 | or at least later in life.

01:05:19.980 | - So yeah, no, he tried to look the part.

01:05:22.860 | Yeah, yeah.

01:05:23.980 | - But I'm saying we're fortunate

01:05:25.900 | that whatever calculation that he was making,

01:05:29.060 | he was not more effective.

01:05:32.900 | - Yeah.

01:05:33.740 | - I mean, there's,

01:05:35.820 | the world is full of terrorist organizations

01:05:38.220 | and we're fortunate to the degree,

01:05:41.460 | any one of them does not have

01:05:43.680 | an incredibly charismatic leader

01:05:45.580 | that attains the kind of power

01:05:47.760 | that's very difficult to manage at the geopolitical level.

01:05:52.500 | - Yeah, and we credit the publics,

01:05:55.060 | you know, who don't bind to that, right?

01:05:57.140 | Who see through this.

01:05:57.980 | We credit the critics, you know?

01:06:00.140 | Fairly on, going back to 9/11 itself,

01:06:03.920 | one of the problems was that US government officials

01:06:08.880 | kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this

01:06:12.140 | as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility

01:06:16.280 | or culpability.

01:06:17.820 | And in fact, dozens of scholars

01:06:22.140 | and organizations, hundreds condemned this,

01:06:25.120 | but their condemnations never quite made it out.

01:06:27.180 | But it created a tension where, you know,

01:06:29.940 | if you wore a veil, you must've been one of them

01:06:32.460 | and you must be on team Bin Laden.

01:06:34.020 | And so a lot of the, you know,

01:06:35.660 | I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination

01:06:38.440 | and profiling came out of that urge to see a oneness,

01:06:43.440 | which, you know, Bin Laden projected, right?

01:06:45.400 | He wanted to say, we are one community, you know,

01:06:48.060 | if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right?

01:06:50.620 | But I think that's where the diversity

01:06:53.940 | of Muslim communities became important

01:06:55.580 | because outside of small pockets,

01:06:57.400 | I mean, they didn't accept his leadership, right?

01:07:00.060 | People wore t-shirts in some countries.

01:07:01.460 | I mean, non-Muslims wore t-shirts

01:07:02.420 | 'cause he was like, he stuck it to the Americans.

01:07:03.980 | So in Latin America, people were like,

01:07:07.180 | yeah, that was sad, but you know, finally,

01:07:09.620 | I mean, there was a kind of schadenfreude

01:07:10.960 | in that moment internationally.

01:07:11.800 | - Yeah, it's like Che Guevara or somebody like that.

01:07:13.820 | - Yeah, Che's the other character in Pesel's book, yeah.

01:07:16.460 | Yeah, that's right, that's right, yeah.

01:07:17.720 | - It's just as simple, it's not exactly what he believed

01:07:20.960 | or the cruelty of actions he took.

01:07:23.240 | It's more like he stood for an idea

01:07:24.960 | of revolution versus authority.

01:07:28.100 | - That's right.

01:07:29.020 | And that's a great way to understand Bin Ladenism

01:07:32.780 | and the whole phenomenon,

01:07:33.620 | but I think looking at the big picture,

01:07:35.400 | it's also, you wonder, will that ever end, right?

01:07:40.200 | I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk

01:07:42.180 | of being a kind of hyperpower like the US

01:07:45.160 | where you, in insisting on a kind of unipolar world

01:07:49.960 | in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created

01:07:53.620 | an almost irresistible target wherever the US

01:07:58.600 | wanted to exert itself militarily.

01:08:00.700 | - Before I go to the history of Afghanistan,

01:08:04.000 | the people, and I just wanna talk to you

01:08:05.960 | about just some fascinating aspect of the culture.

01:08:10.600 | Let's go to the end, withdrawal of US troops

01:08:15.600 | from Afghanistan.

01:08:17.100 | What are your thoughts on how that was executed?

01:08:20.720 | How could it have been done better?

01:08:24.480 | - Yeah, an important question.

01:08:26.040 | I mean, I would preface all this by saying,

01:08:28.240 | as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.

01:08:33.400 | I had hoped the war would end sooner.

01:08:36.560 | I think there were different exit routes all along the way.

01:08:39.920 | Again, I think there were lots of policy choices

01:08:43.480 | in September, in October when the war began.

01:08:45.960 | There were choices in December, 2001.

01:08:50.560 | So we could look at almost every six-month stopping point

01:08:54.080 | and say we could have done differently.

01:08:57.600 | As it turns out, though, I mean, the way it played out,

01:09:00.760 | you know, it's been catastrophic.

01:09:02.440 | And I think the Biden administration

01:09:06.600 | has remained unaccountable for the scale

01:09:10.240 | of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure

01:09:14.360 | that they're responsible for.

01:09:16.000 | - Well, okay, let's lay out the full.

01:09:19.360 | There's George W. Bush.

01:09:21.560 | There's Barack Obama.

01:09:24.080 | There's Donald Trump.

01:09:25.360 | - That's right. - There's Biden.

01:09:27.860 | So they're all driving this van

01:09:31.240 | and there's these exits and they keep not taking the exits

01:09:34.520 | and they're running out of gas.

01:09:36.520 | I do this all the time thinking,

01:09:37.960 | where am I gonna pull off?

01:09:38.960 | I'll go to the vertilis empty.

01:09:41.240 | How could have it been done better?

01:09:43.880 | And what exactly, how much suffering

01:09:48.760 | have all the decisions along the way caused?

01:09:52.400 | What are the long-term consequences?

01:09:54.240 | What are the biggest things that concern you

01:09:56.360 | about the decisions we've made

01:09:58.360 | in both invading Afghanistan

01:10:00.600 | and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have?

01:10:03.400 | - I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed,

01:10:05.960 | you know, the horrific scenes of the airport,

01:10:09.600 | you know, that was just one dimension.

01:10:11.680 | I think in the weeks to come,

01:10:14.440 | I mean, we're gonna see Afghanistan implode.

01:10:18.040 | There are lots of signs that malnutrition,

01:10:22.120 | hunger, starvation are going to claim

01:10:25.120 | tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands

01:10:27.760 | of lives this winter.

01:10:29.560 | And I think there is really nothing,

01:10:33.120 | there's no framework in place to foresaw that.

01:10:38.120 | - What is the government,

01:10:40.520 | what is currently the system there?

01:10:42.920 | What's the role of the Taliban?

01:10:44.760 | So there could be tens of thousands,

01:10:46.640 | hundreds of thousands that starve,

01:10:48.440 | either just almost a famine or starve to death.

01:10:54.400 | So this is economic implosion, this is political implosion.

01:10:58.120 | What's the system there like

01:11:01.560 | and what could be the one, you know, some inkling of hope?

01:11:05.040 | - Right, right.

01:11:05.880 | The Taliban sit in control.

01:11:08.640 | That's unique.

01:11:09.480 | When they were in power in the 1990s,

01:11:11.400 | from 1996, 2001, they controlled some 85 to 90%

01:11:16.400 | of the country.

01:11:18.880 | Now they own it all, but they have no budget.

01:11:22.420 | The Afghan banking system is frozen.

01:11:28.420 | - So the financial system's a mess.

01:11:30.980 | - And it's frozen by the US

01:11:32.380 | because the US is trying to use that lever

01:11:34.540 | to exert pressure on the Taliban.

01:11:36.980 | And so the ethical quandaries are, of course,

01:11:39.260 | legion, right?

01:11:40.580 | Do you release that money to allow the Taliban

01:11:44.060 | to shore up their rule, right?

01:11:46.780 | The Biden administration has said no,

01:11:48.940 | but the banks aren't working.

01:11:51.400 | If you're in California,

01:11:54.260 | you wanna send $100 to your cousin,

01:11:56.700 | so she can buy bread.

01:11:58.900 | You can't do that now.

01:12:00.020 | It's almost impossible.

01:12:01.400 | There are some informal networks.

01:12:02.620 | They're moving some stuff, but there are bread lines.

01:12:06.180 | The Taliban government is incapable,

01:12:09.340 | fundamentally, just of ruling.

01:12:10.740 | I mean, they can discipline people on the street.

01:12:13.640 | They can force people into the mosque.

01:12:15.700 | They can shoot people.

01:12:16.780 | They can beat protesters.

01:12:18.820 | They can put out a newspaper.

01:12:20.780 | They can have, they're great at diplomacy, it turns out.

01:12:23.900 | They can't rule this country.

01:12:24.900 | So essentially, the hospitals

01:12:27.820 | and the kind of healthcare infrastructure

01:12:31.680 | is being managed by NGOs that are international.

01:12:36.680 | But most people had to leave,

01:12:41.220 | and the Taliban have impeded some of that work.

01:12:44.760 | They've told adult women, essentially, to stay home, right?

01:12:48.020 | So a big part of the workforce isn't there.

01:12:51.760 | So I mean, the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt.

01:12:56.760 | Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors,

01:13:00.240 | I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy.

01:13:02.600 | It exports fruits.

01:13:05.520 | Pakistan has been closing the border

01:13:07.480 | because they're anxious about refugees.

01:13:09.040 | They wanna exert pressure on the international community

01:13:12.040 | to recognize the Taliban,

01:13:13.640 | because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power,

01:13:17.480 | because they see that in Pakistan's national interest,

01:13:20.440 | especially through the lens of its rivalry with India.

01:13:24.000 | So the Pakistani security institutions

01:13:27.400 | are playing a double game.

01:13:29.240 | Essentially, the Afghan people are being held hostage.

01:13:31.440 | And so the Taliban are also saying,

01:13:34.280 | if you don't recognize us,

01:13:36.280 | you're gonna let tens of millions of Afghans starve.

01:13:39.120 | - So to which degree is Taliban, like, who are the Taliban?

01:13:44.120 | What do they stand for?

01:13:45.720 | What do they want?

01:13:47.360 | Obviously, year by year, this changes.

01:13:49.880 | So what is the nature of this organization?

01:13:53.600 | Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful

01:13:57.800 | government sort of holder of power,

01:14:02.440 | or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so?

01:14:06.960 | - Yeah.

01:14:08.120 | I mean, the briefest answer would be that they are a

01:14:10.960 | clerical/military organization.

01:14:17.280 | They have, this is kind of a imperfect metaphor,

01:14:22.280 | but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan

01:14:28.200 | to describe them.

01:14:29.280 | And that has some attractive elements,

01:14:31.120 | because different people who joined the Taliban

01:14:35.080 | for different purposes at different times.

01:14:37.480 | But today, and people tell us,

01:14:40.120 | scholars who know more about the movement than I,

01:14:41.920 | have said, "Listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge

01:14:45.200 | of different actors and people and competing interests."

01:14:48.280 | And I think, so we have a lot of scholars who say,

01:14:51.000 | "Listen, it's polycentric.

01:14:54.040 | It's got people in this city and that city and so on."

01:14:57.280 | I think actually, I was always very skeptical.

01:15:00.000 | How do they know this?

01:15:00.880 | I mean, this is an organization that doesn't want you to know

01:15:04.720 | where their money comes from and so on.

01:15:06.760 | But I would say, now that we have a clearer picture

01:15:09.640 | of what has happened, I'd say they are a astoundingly

01:15:13.280 | well-organized clerical military organization

01:15:17.720 | that has a very cohesive and enduring ideology,

01:15:22.720 | which is quite idiosyncratic if we zoom out

01:15:27.040 | and continue the conversation we're having about Islam

01:15:29.120 | and how we think about radicalism and who's drawn to what.

01:15:32.760 | People throw different terms around to describe the Taliban.

01:15:38.520 | Some use a term that links it to a kind of school of thought

01:15:43.040 | born in the 19th century in India, the Doobandi school.

01:15:45.900 | But if you look at their teachings, it's very clear now,

01:15:49.960 | I think that these labels, it's like saying,

01:15:53.000 | "You're an MIT guy."

01:15:54.120 | Well, what does that mean?

01:15:54.960 | I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different,

01:15:58.400 | potentially, kinds of intellectual orientations, right?

01:16:02.360 | I mean, attaching the name of a school

01:16:03.900 | doesn't quite capture, I mean, university.

01:16:07.440 | - It's complicated.

01:16:08.280 | I mean, actually, MIT is interesting

01:16:09.520 | 'cause I would say MIT is different

01:16:11.360 | than Stanford, for example.

01:16:13.020 | I think MIT has a more kind of narrow-

01:16:16.520 | - Yeah, I hear you.

01:16:18.040 | Bad analogy on my part, maybe.

01:16:19.760 | - Well, no, it's interesting because I would argue

01:16:21.760 | that there's some aspect of a brand, like Taliban or MIT,

01:16:26.760 | no relation, that has a kind of interact,

01:16:32.040 | like the brand results in the behavior of the,

01:16:37.160 | like enforces a kind of behavior on the people

01:16:39.280 | and the people feed the brand.

01:16:40.960 | And like, there's a loop.

01:16:41.880 | I think Stanford is a good example

01:16:43.820 | of something that's more distributed.

01:16:45.180 | There's sufficient amount of diversity

01:16:48.260 | in like all kinds of like centers

01:16:50.040 | and all that kind of stuff

01:16:51.020 | that the brand doesn't become one thing.

01:16:54.700 | And MIT is so engineering.

01:16:57.220 | It's so good at that.

01:16:59.100 | - Okay, scratch MIT, scratch Stanford too,

01:17:01.620 | 'cause I think Stanford's more like MIT

01:17:03.580 | than you might imagine.

01:17:05.980 | - But isn't Taliban, isn't it pretty,

01:17:08.820 | I don't think there's a diversity.

01:17:10.700 | So yeah, sorry, so just to rephrase.

01:17:13.240 | So people say, oh, the Deobandi school.

01:17:15.120 | I'm like, what is that?

01:17:16.360 | I mean, the Taliban are, they're an ethnic movement.

01:17:20.500 | They represent a vision of Pashtun power, right?

01:17:25.500 | Pashtuns are people who are quite internally diverse,

01:17:30.000 | who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto,

01:17:34.960 | who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

01:17:40.560 | There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet, right?

01:17:42.840 | There's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere, right?

01:17:45.360 | So it's a global diaspora of sorts.

01:17:48.680 | Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination

01:17:51.160 | so that lots of Pashtuns can tell you

01:17:53.640 | the names of their grandparents,

01:17:54.680 | great-grandparents and so on.

01:17:55.600 | And that's kind of a, there's a sense of pride in that.

01:17:58.880 | Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity,

01:18:03.600 | but it's not universal.

01:18:05.320 | So for example, you can meet people who say,

01:18:07.760 | I am Pashtun, but I don't know Pashto.

01:18:10.680 | So as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous.

01:18:14.840 | It also means different things to different people

01:18:16.400 | at different times.

01:18:17.240 | So saying the Taliban are Pashtun

01:18:20.680 | requires lots of qualifiers

01:18:21.720 | because lots of Pashtuns will say,

01:18:24.040 | no, no, I have nothing to do with the Taliban.

01:18:26.480 | I hate those people.

01:18:27.480 | So the Taliban tried to mobilize other Pashtuns

01:18:32.680 | with limited success,

01:18:34.120 | but their core membership is almost exclusively Pashtun.

01:18:37.040 | And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans.

01:18:40.200 | We represent pious Muslims.

01:18:42.480 | And so in recent two, three years,

01:18:46.040 | they've gone further to say, no, we have other ethnic groups.

01:18:48.920 | We have Uzbeks, we have Tajiks, we have Hazaras.

01:18:52.680 | And in the north of Afghanistan, in recent years,

01:18:54.640 | they did do a bit better at drawing in people

01:18:57.280 | who were very disaffected because of the government

01:18:59.800 | and they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat.

01:19:02.600 | But if you watch, say, August 15 and who they've appointed,

01:19:06.060 | what language they've used, how they've presented themselves,

01:19:09.960 | it's clear that they are Pashtun, they are male,

01:19:14.520 | and they are extremely ideologically cohesive

01:19:17.520 | and disciplined, I'd say.

01:19:22.840 | So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah,

01:19:25.880 | some of that stuff was a way to fight a war.

01:19:28.080 | They are fundamentally a guerrilla movement.

01:19:33.000 | They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods.

01:19:37.620 | Their rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich,

01:19:40.340 | taking from the privileged, giving to the poor,

01:19:43.100 | being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.

01:19:47.020 | And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing,

01:19:50.220 | their central theme, their brand is about public morality.

01:19:53.780 | And so their origin story, going back to 1994,

01:19:55.940 | is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals

01:20:00.940 | who were trying to rape people.

01:20:03.300 | And so there's a very interesting kind of like,

01:20:06.460 | if it's not like sexuality and on public morality,

01:20:10.780 | and really being the core of like,

01:20:12.820 | we're gonna restore order and public morality,

01:20:16.100 | and how that translates into governance

01:20:18.020 | is something they've never sorted out.

01:20:19.300 | I mean, how do you run a banking system

01:20:20.860 | if your intellectual priorities are really about

01:20:23.700 | the length of a beard?

01:20:25.380 | And then their path to power, in a kind of abstract sense,

01:20:29.260 | I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by,

01:20:32.100 | if you like, propagating the promise of martyrdom.

01:20:37.300 | And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way that,

01:20:39.780 | to make it sound ridiculous,

01:20:40.740 | make it sound like it's a moral judgment.

01:20:44.380 | It's simply, I think, a fact.

01:20:45.800 | It's a fact of their appeal that they promised young men

01:20:49.420 | who have known nothing else but studying in certain schools,

01:20:54.420 | if at all, but they've known fighting,

01:20:57.220 | and they've known victimization.

01:20:59.940 | And this isn't, I'm not asking for like sympathy for them,

01:21:03.180 | but I think the reality is that a lot of the,

01:21:05.380 | we know about the kind of foot soldiers is that they,

01:21:08.820 | they lost families in bombings, in airstrikes,

01:21:12.620 | in night raids, you know,

01:21:15.300 | I mean, orphans have always been a stream,

01:21:17.360 | living in all-male society,

01:21:21.000 | not knowing girls, not knowing women,

01:21:24.260 | hearing things from outside about places like Kabul.

01:21:27.420 | And so there's always been this kind of urban,

01:21:29.180 | rural dimension.

01:21:30.540 | It's not just that, but I think there's a whole imagination

01:21:35.540 | that being Taliban captures.

01:21:39.740 | And the whole martyrdom thing is really, it's,

01:21:41.980 | you know, I think to any religious person,

01:21:45.060 | I mean, it's not a bizarre idea.

01:21:46.860 | I mean, it animates, I mean, so many global traditions,

01:21:50.780 | you know, but I think the,

01:21:52.680 | but you try to tell like an army colonel, right?

01:21:54.780 | If you were to have a conversation with, you know,

01:21:56.820 | US Marine about this, I mean,

01:21:59.140 | someone get it from their own religious backgrounds,

01:22:01.320 | but I think the, it's an alien idea,

01:22:04.260 | but I think it is essential to kind of stretch out

01:22:06.300 | my notions of saying that's, that's attractive.

01:22:08.580 | And now one of the dilemmas going forward is that

01:22:11.360 | they've got to pivot from martyrdom.

01:22:14.180 | And some have been, some have told foreign journalists,

01:22:16.700 | I mean, it's good that we're in charge now,

01:22:19.140 | we're going to build a proper state,

01:22:21.740 | but I, it's kind of boring.

01:22:23.680 | I want to keep fighting, I want to,

01:22:25.580 | maybe I'll do it in Pakistan.

01:22:26.800 | - Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they are expressing

01:22:28.980 | that thought, some are not even honest sufficiently

01:22:32.040 | with themselves to express that kind of thought.

01:22:34.240 | If you're a fighter,

01:22:36.760 | you see that with a bunch of fighters

01:22:40.920 | or professional athletes, once they retire,

01:22:43.920 | they don't know, it's very, it's boring.

01:22:47.160 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:22:48.000 | - And so like, if the spirit of the Taliban,

01:22:51.860 | even the best version of the Taliban is to fight,

01:22:55.060 | is to be martyrs, is to,

01:22:56.860 | and paint the world as good and evil

01:23:00.340 | and you're fighting evil and all that kind of stuff

01:23:02.940 | that's difficult to imagine how they can run

01:23:04.660 | an education system, a banking system,

01:23:07.620 | respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds

01:23:12.060 | and religious beliefs and women

01:23:14.220 | and all that kind of stuff, so.

01:23:16.660 | - Yeah, and they've walked into Kabul

01:23:18.500 | and other major cities, some are young,

01:23:21.720 | they didn't know those places,

01:23:22.780 | but also the very important obstacle for them

01:23:27.000 | is that Afghan society has changed.

01:23:28.980 | I mean, it's not what, even for the older guys,

01:23:31.540 | it's not what they knew in the 1990s.

01:23:33.400 | Some always had some ambivalence about the capital,

01:23:37.540 | but now it's totally different.

01:23:38.540 | I mean, they've been shocked to see,

01:23:39.420 | I think to me, one of the most striking features

01:23:42.660 | of the last few weeks has been that,

01:23:44.460 | women have come out on the streets

01:23:47.140 | and have stood in their faces and said,

01:23:50.340 | we demand rights, we demand education,

01:23:52.220 | we demand employment, and these foot soldiers are paralyzed.

01:23:57.020 | They're not sure.

01:23:57.940 | - They don't know what to do with women, period.

01:23:59.820 | - Yeah, yeah, and they don't know what to do

01:24:01.300 | with being yelled at and having someone

01:24:03.300 | stick their fingers in their faces.

01:24:04.300 | I mean, this is not what they've imagined.

01:24:07.740 | And so I think, and at this juncture,

01:24:10.380 | there are still foreign cameras around.

01:24:12.500 | So they have committed acts of violence against women,

01:24:16.320 | against journalists, they've beaten people,

01:24:18.580 | they've disappeared people.

01:24:19.580 | - Even with cameras around, even in this tense period.

01:24:22.140 | - Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat

01:24:24.860 | and that's like it happened,

01:24:26.340 | it's gonna get much worse, I think.

01:24:28.540 | So the challenge now is, can the Taliban rule?

01:24:31.380 | And then this is where the diplomacy is so important

01:24:35.100 | because the Taliban can't rule in isolation.

01:24:38.620 | And they know that.

01:24:39.540 | And part of the success is due to the fact

01:24:41.780 | that they became very good at talking to other people

01:24:45.500 | in the last, I mean, it's been building for the last decade,

01:24:48.260 | but that's the last five years.

01:24:50.660 | And they always have Pakistan's backing.

01:24:52.300 | And so the Taliban are, we noted their military force,

01:24:55.860 | very effective guerrilla force.

01:24:57.300 | They beat NATO.

01:24:58.460 | I mean, this is, still hasn't sunk in.

01:25:00.940 | I mean, the fact that they, with light arms,

01:25:04.340 | using suicide attacks, using mines,

01:25:08.660 | improvised explosive devices, machine guns.

01:25:13.380 | In some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles.

01:25:17.140 | And from the summer,

01:25:19.060 | they got American equipment on a broad scale.

01:25:22.380 | They have airplanes.

01:25:23.220 | They have a lot that they will be able to use eventually.

01:25:25.820 | But still, basically it's a story of AK-47s,

01:25:30.740 | some American small arms and mines.

01:25:33.780 | So it's very Ho Chi Minh,

01:25:36.140 | very old school guerrilla fighting.

01:25:38.220 | And they defeated the most powerful military alliance

01:25:40.380 | in world history, probably.

01:25:41.460 | So that has not yet sunk in.

01:25:43.260 | What that means for American and global politics.

01:25:45.980 | And now they're trying to rule, right?

01:25:49.420 | They know they need international support.

01:25:52.500 | And their most consistent backer has been Pakistan,

01:25:56.140 | who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.

01:25:59.980 | Yeah, and this is very important for a Pakistani elite

01:26:02.700 | that of course is looking toward India.

01:26:05.340 | They wanna have their rear covered, right?

01:26:08.580 | They wanna make sure that these postures

01:26:10.740 | don't cause trouble for Pakistan.

01:26:13.100 | And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces,

01:26:15.420 | they like this vision of the Islamic State

01:26:17.940 | that the Taliban are building there

01:26:19.580 | because those are not citizen from their views

01:26:22.100 | of what Pakistan should be.

01:26:24.340 | But the Taliban have been smart enough

01:26:27.220 | to kind of diversify their potential international allies.

01:26:30.420 | So everyone in the neighborhood

01:26:32.580 | has wanted the US to leave, right?

01:26:34.860 | If we go back to 2001,

01:26:36.580 | there were Iranian and American special forces in the North

01:26:39.180 | working together against the Taliban to displace them

01:26:41.700 | using Iranian, American,

01:26:45.340 | and then Afghan resistance forces against the Taliban.

01:26:48.860 | And that was a real moment of Rav Pashmallah,

01:26:50.220 | if we go back to the missed exits.

01:26:52.940 | The relation with Iran could have been different

01:26:55.980 | at that moment, but the US under George W. Bush,

01:27:00.340 | devised this axis of evil language,

01:27:03.580 | put them together with their enemy Iraq and the North Korea,

01:27:08.660 | all that went South.

01:27:10.180 | That was the most opportunity.

01:27:12.460 | But in recent years, the Taliban in Iran

01:27:14.700 | have kind of papered over the differences.

01:27:19.140 | They allowed the Taliban to open some offices

01:27:22.580 | on Iranian territory,

01:27:24.460 | likely shared some resources, some intelligence,

01:27:26.540 | some sophisticated weaponry.

01:27:28.500 | And then the Taliban went to Moscow.

01:27:30.660 | And for the Putin administration,

01:27:32.900 | they've long been worried that,

01:27:34.460 | they see the Taliban as a kind of disease

01:27:38.620 | that will potentially move North,

01:27:40.620 | in fact Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,

01:27:43.180 | Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,

01:27:44.660 | and maybe creep into Russia's sphere of influence.

01:27:47.980 | Maybe that's why they have

01:27:49.380 | a bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan.

01:27:52.540 | I mean, the one forward base that Russia still has

01:27:56.300 | in Central Asia is in Tajikistan.

01:27:58.780 | And so the Taliban were always a worrying point,

01:28:01.820 | but also useful because they could say,

01:28:04.540 | well, in case the Taliban get out of control,

01:28:08.380 | we need to be here.

01:28:09.900 | And so Tajikistan said, okay,

01:28:12.220 | you're helping secure us.

01:28:14.100 | And yes, it impinges upon our sovereignty, but it's okay.

01:28:17.020 | So Putin said, let's give another black eye

01:28:22.220 | to the Americans and let's treat the Taliban

01:28:25.420 | as if they're the kind of government in waiting.

01:28:27.500 | Let's have them come to Moscow multiple times.

01:28:30.220 | This summer, for the last year or two,

01:28:32.620 | they've been talking to China.

01:28:34.340 | So the photographs of senior Taliban figures

01:28:39.340 | going from their office in Qatar,

01:28:40.820 | which was a major blow to the US-backed government,

01:28:43.500 | the fact that they were able to open up an office in Qatar,

01:28:46.380 | that at one point began to fly a flag

01:28:48.940 | of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,

01:28:51.380 | that basically said we're a state in the waiting.

01:28:54.300 | And as the US-backed Afghan government

01:28:56.980 | failed and failed and failed at ruling too,

01:29:00.540 | as they showed how corrupt they were,

01:29:02.580 | and as they really alienated more and more Afghans

01:29:04.700 | by committing acts of violence against them,

01:29:07.420 | by stealing from them,

01:29:09.260 | by basically creating a kind of kleptocracy,

01:29:14.260 | the Taliban said, we are pure, we are not corrupt.

01:29:20.720 | And look at us, we're winning on the battlefield.

01:29:22.700 | And internationally, look, we're talking to China.

01:29:25.300 | - We're talking to Putin, we're talking to China.

01:29:27.980 | We're a legitimate, powerful center of Central Asia.

01:29:31.260 | And also kind of hinting that we have a website.

01:29:34.540 | I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing

01:29:36.220 | because they began to, and this is important actually,

01:29:39.420 | they had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.

01:29:43.420 | Again, after having shot televisions

01:29:45.660 | and these kind of ceremonial killings

01:29:47.620 | of these infidel devices, right?

01:29:49.940 | They said, we have a government, we have commissions,

01:29:53.580 | we have a complaint line.

01:29:55.460 | They lifted all this technocratic language

01:29:58.020 | that you get from any UN document

01:30:00.420 | about good governance and all that kind of,

01:30:02.740 | generic language that the NGO world has produced for us,

01:30:05.540 | right, in English.

01:30:06.820 | They reproduced that in five languages

01:30:08.700 | on their Taliban website.

01:30:10.500 | And of course, I'm not saying anyone believed this,

01:30:12.380 | but it was like, just put me in coach.

01:30:16.260 | I know the playbook, I know how to run a government.

01:30:18.140 | And look, we have an agricultural commission.

01:30:20.760 | We have a taxation system.

01:30:24.300 | And again, this idea, and then on the ground,

01:30:26.260 | they had their own law courts

01:30:28.420 | and they would creep into a district,

01:30:30.460 | assassinate some people, the local authority figures,

01:30:32.940 | men of influence, talk to local clerics,

01:30:36.460 | either get them on board or kill them,

01:30:38.700 | and say, this state is corrupt,

01:30:41.320 | but we're bringing you justice.

01:30:42.300 | This is our calling card.

01:30:43.380 | We're bringing public morality and justice.

01:30:45.780 | And then to a broader world, they said,

01:30:49.060 | yeah, things didn't go perfectly,

01:30:50.500 | a whole Al Qaeda thing,

01:30:51.820 | we should be kind of do over on that.

01:30:56.120 | We're not gonna let anyone hurt you from our territory.

01:30:58.840 | We just wanna rule and people like us and look.

01:31:03.280 | And so if we look at the neighborhood, Iran,

01:31:05.960 | even Central Asian states after a while,

01:31:08.440 | recognizing they could make some money.

01:31:09.560 | I mean, one thing that Uzbekistan likes

01:31:11.500 | about the current arrangement,

01:31:13.080 | or they're not hostile to is that

01:31:16.000 | they have all these contracts.

01:31:17.520 | They can potentially make some money from,

01:31:19.820 | the pipeline dream remains alive,

01:31:23.400 | running natural gas, oil, to,

01:31:26.400 | it was to the Indian Ocean,

01:31:28.100 | to markets beyond Central Asia.

01:31:31.440 | It's sitting on a couple trillion dollars

01:31:32.800 | probably in mineral resources

01:31:34.160 | that China would love to have, of course.

01:31:36.560 | And so people are looking at Afghanistan now,

01:31:38.520 | after 20 years saying,

01:31:40.340 | under American rule, it was a basket case, right?

01:31:42.760 | There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent.

01:31:46.680 | The world did not start counting civilian casualties

01:31:49.160 | in Afghanistan until 2009.

01:31:51.120 | I mean, think about that.

01:31:51.960 | It went on for eight years.

01:31:53.520 | The Taliban were never really defeated.

01:31:54.840 | They just went to Pakistan.

01:31:56.160 | They went to the mountains, they went to the woods.

01:31:59.260 | And so all these different American operations,

01:32:01.640 | as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on,

01:32:05.460 | killed countless civilians.

01:32:09.480 | The US never accounted for that.

01:32:10.640 | We never even counted.

01:32:12.260 | Trump escalated the civilian casualties

01:32:15.560 | by escalating the air war.

01:32:17.320 | But a lot of this was like very ugly, on the ground,

01:32:20.280 | night raid stuff, where you drop into a Hamlet

01:32:22.800 | and massacre people.

01:32:25.900 | And then you're not honest about what happened, right?

01:32:27.960 | So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth

01:32:31.200 | of the Taliban from below.

01:32:32.760 | So the foot soldiers, they never ran out of foot soldiers.

01:32:35.160 | I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands,

01:32:39.360 | maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters

01:32:41.200 | over the last 20 years.

01:32:42.820 | But they just sprouted up again.

01:32:44.960 | And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture,

01:32:46.500 | the male bonding of martyrology, of martyrdom,

01:32:51.100 | and of revenge, and a sense of the foreign invader.

01:32:56.100 | And I haven't taught a ton of US military people,

01:33:01.540 | but through the Hoover, they put officers

01:33:04.420 | in our classes sometimes, and met a few wonderful

01:33:07.460 | Army and Marine officers who I really enjoyed.

01:33:10.780 | We came from the South like me,

01:33:13.060 | always had great rapport with them.

01:33:15.340 | And they expressed a range of opinions about this.

01:33:16.980 | I think that I learned a lot from someone who said,

01:33:19.180 | yeah, I mean, I get why they hate us.

01:33:21.780 | I get why they're still fighting because last week,

01:33:25.940 | we just killed 14 of their fellow villagers.

01:33:30.940 | So the officers, the guys on the ground fighting this war,

01:33:36.300 | we're not stupid about that.

01:33:37.420 | I mean, they got the human dimension of that,

01:33:39.580 | and yet no one got off the exit, as you said.

01:33:41.780 | People kept driving.

01:33:44.060 | But going forward now, internationally,

01:33:46.460 | it's critical that they have,

01:33:49.020 | and they've had meetings.

01:33:50.540 | I mean, what the Taliban have done since August 15th

01:33:52.740 | is a lot of diplomacy.

01:33:54.240 | They've had meetings, they've had people,

01:33:55.980 | they've had Tashkent come, they've had Beijing come,

01:33:58.620 | they've had Moscow come.

01:34:00.400 | I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad,

01:34:04.880 | from security people, from diplomatic circles.

01:34:09.340 | And they're counting on things being different this time.

01:34:12.020 | I mean, the first time around,

01:34:13.180 | the only people who backed the Taliban by recognition,

01:34:15.980 | giving them diplomatic recognition

01:34:17.700 | were the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the UAE.

01:34:20.340 | And because of Al-Qaeda, because of opium,

01:34:23.980 | because of some of the human rights stuff,

01:34:27.100 | the US pushed everyone to like,

01:34:28.500 | let's not recognize this state, even though the US did.

01:34:31.340 | I mean, Colin Powell famously, in the summer of 2001,

01:34:35.580 | we did give a few grants and aid to the Taliban

01:34:41.140 | as kind of like massaging negotiations.

01:34:44.540 | They kept talking about Bin Laden,

01:34:46.300 | but they also wanted them to stop opium production.

01:34:49.540 | I mean, Afghanistan throughout all this period

01:34:50.860 | we've talked about is the global center

01:34:52.420 | of opium production.

01:34:54.340 | I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy

01:34:57.580 | continued to today is devoted to the opium trade.

01:35:00.580 | - Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin,

01:35:05.380 | some of the painkillers.

01:35:09.300 | - And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to Hoboken,

01:35:12.820 | they are not the source of American deaths.

01:35:17.700 | They are part of a universal market, a global market,

01:35:22.900 | which I think any economist would tell you

01:35:25.980 | is part of the story of our opium problem.

01:35:29.700 | - Something I read maybe a decade ago now,

01:35:34.700 | and I just kind of looked it up again

01:35:36.540 | to bring it up to see your opinion on this,

01:35:38.460 | is a 2010 report by the International Council

01:35:43.100 | on Security and Development that showed

01:35:45.420 | that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province

01:35:50.420 | know nothing of the 9/11 attacks on US in 2001.

01:35:56.940 | Is this at all representative of what you know?

01:36:00.540 | Is this possible?

01:36:01.740 | So basically, put another way,

01:36:05.180 | is it possible that a lot of Afghans don't even know

01:36:10.100 | the reason why there may be troops

01:36:13.140 | or the sort of American provided narrative

01:36:17.500 | for why there's troops, American soldiers

01:36:21.380 | and American drones overhead in Afghanistan?

01:36:25.540 | - Right.

01:36:26.620 | I mean, my gut response,

01:36:28.740 | not knowing the details of this actual poll,

01:36:30.900 | is that that's a very unhelpful way to think

01:36:35.900 | about how Afghans relate to the world.

01:36:39.980 | And I think it could be,

01:36:42.420 | if you go to my hometown in North Carolina,

01:36:46.300 | if you knock on some doors,

01:36:48.220 | you may meet people who don't know all kinds of things.

01:36:50.780 | I could probably walk around this neighborhood

01:36:52.140 | here in California and there'd be all kinds of people

01:36:54.260 | who don't know all kinds of things.

01:36:58.020 | Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat.

01:37:01.540 | I mean, so we could make a lot of certain kinds

01:37:06.540 | of ignorance, I think.

01:37:08.180 | But I think what I would say,

01:37:09.980 | and then there's also a companion point maybe

01:37:12.140 | that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse,

01:37:15.140 | the return of the Taliban,

01:37:17.020 | there's been a big conversation about

01:37:19.220 | what Afghans think of us really.

01:37:21.780 | And this famous piece in "The New Yorker"

01:37:24.260 | was about how many people liked the Taliban,

01:37:28.740 | that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece,

01:37:33.740 | were sympathetic 'cause they'd lost family members

01:37:37.340 | and all the violence.

01:37:38.260 | And the idea kind of was that,

01:37:40.340 | we haven't thought about that at all.

01:37:42.500 | When in fact, of course we have and lots of people have,

01:37:45.340 | but I think if you're just dropping into the conversation,

01:37:48.300 | if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage

01:37:49.780 | of Afghanistan and the United States,

01:37:50.940 | I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during,

01:37:55.500 | of course, 9/11 and its aftermath,

01:37:57.780 | lots of coverage during Obama's surge,

01:38:00.860 | and then quickly dropped down the last decade

01:38:03.700 | has been almost nothing.

01:38:05.260 | So if you ask the same question about Americans

01:38:07.380 | or other Americans, I'm not sure what they would say to you,

01:38:09.500 | what percentage would actually know

01:38:11.380 | why the US is in X, Y, or Z either, right?

01:38:14.340 | But again, the Afghan side,

01:38:15.300 | just to return to that for a moment,

01:38:16.220 | I think that we can fetishize these provinces.

01:38:19.540 | They are a kind of a place where Taliban support

01:38:22.940 | has been greatest.

01:38:24.140 | Also where there's been the most violence,

01:38:25.620 | where the Americans have been most committed

01:38:27.300 | to trying to root out the Taliban movement.

01:38:30.420 | - This is Helmand and Kana.

01:38:31.660 | - Exactly, in the South.

01:38:32.500 | - What are the other parts?

01:38:33.340 | It's in the South of Afghanistan.

01:38:34.500 | - Yeah, and it's mostly Pashtun, not exclusively,

01:38:36.900 | but mostly Pashtun, mostly rural.

01:38:39.500 | - What is Pashtun?

01:38:40.380 | - That's the ethnic group

01:38:41.220 | that the Taliban claim to represent, right?

01:38:44.700 | So they are this group.

01:38:45.540 | - What other groups are there?

01:38:46.620 | - Okay, sorry, yeah, sorry.

01:38:48.020 | So in cities, you'll find everything, right?

01:38:50.980 | That is in Afghanistan.

01:38:51.900 | You'll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras.

01:38:54.740 | These are people who, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right?

01:39:00.740 | Most Uzbeks live in what is now Uzbekistan,

01:39:03.300 | but they form majorities in some northern parts of the city.

01:39:06.700 | I'm sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.

01:39:08.700 | But what I emphasize is that,

01:39:10.300 | and you can find online an ethnographic map of Afghanistan,

01:39:14.020 | and you'll see green where Pashtuns live,

01:39:16.860 | red where Hazaras live, orange where Uzbeks live,

01:39:20.460 | purple where Tajiks live.

01:39:22.500 | Then there are a bunch of other smaller groups

01:39:23.940 | of different kinds.

01:39:25.500 | There are Noristani, there are Baluch,

01:39:30.500 | there are different religious communities.

01:39:32.640 | There are Sunni, Shia, different kinds of Shia.

01:39:34.980 | - What are the key differences between them?

01:39:36.700 | Is it religious basis from the origins

01:39:39.980 | of where they immigrated from, and how different are they?

01:39:43.420 | - So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous, I think.

01:39:46.220 | I mean, there's a kind of mythology

01:39:47.300 | that some groups have been there longer, right?

01:39:49.580 | So they have a greater claim to power, but historically,

01:39:52.940 | I mean, it's like, you know, ethnic groups anywhere,

01:39:55.900 | people have different narratives about themselves.

01:39:58.500 | But many Pashtuns would tell you, not all,

01:40:01.900 | but many would say, we are the kind of state builders

01:40:04.780 | of Afghanistan, the dynasty that ruled much of the space,

01:40:09.660 | that was born in the mid 18th century,

01:40:12.140 | that ruled until 1973, more or less,

01:40:15.420 | generalizing, you know, it was a Pashtun dynasty.

01:40:18.500 | The Taliban have definitely said, to some audiences,

01:40:21.900 | we are the rightful rulers because we are Pashtun.

01:40:24.940 | The trick though is, I don't mean to be evasive,

01:40:28.620 | but just to convey some of the complexity,

01:40:30.700 | one quick answer as well, they're majorities and minorities.

01:40:34.460 | I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps.

01:40:37.440 | But I would say, suspend any firm belief in that,

01:40:40.980 | because that could be entirely wrong.

01:40:43.020 | In fact, there's never been a modern census of Afghanistan.

01:40:47.140 | So when journalists say, Pashtuns are the majority,

01:40:50.020 | they're the biggest group, I would say not so fast.

01:40:53.260 | I would say not so fast because of migration

01:40:55.620 | is one major issue, no major modern census.

01:41:00.100 | Actually, the Soviets got pretty close,

01:41:01.300 | but didn't quite, you know, find something comprehensive

01:41:04.100 | and didn't publicize it, knowing that it was,

01:41:06.340 | you know, modern times, ethnicity can be the source

01:41:09.100 | of political mobilization.

01:41:11.100 | It's not innately so, but it's been part of the story.

01:41:14.780 | But then you have mixed families, right?

01:41:16.060 | So a lot of people you'll meet,

01:41:17.780 | you'll encounter in the diaspora and around.

01:41:19.180 | I mean, well, I am, you know, my one parent is Tajik,

01:41:24.180 | one is Pashtun, right?

01:41:26.240 | Or I'm Pashtun, as I mentioned before,

01:41:28.020 | but I don't speak Pashto, right?

01:41:30.020 | Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as Shi'i Hazaras.

01:41:35.020 | In fact, I'm a Sunni Hazara, or I'm a secular Hazara,

01:41:38.140 | or I'm an atheist Hazara.

01:41:39.420 | I mean, everything's possible, right?

01:41:41.940 | One of my friends, if he were here,

01:41:46.140 | he'd say, "I'm Kabuli, I'm from Kabul."

01:41:49.140 | So if you think about it in Russian terms,

01:41:51.180 | you know, it means a lot if you're a Muscovite,

01:41:53.260 | you know, if you're from Pisa or Moscow,

01:41:56.100 | I mean, you know.

01:41:57.060 | - Yeah, well, even here, there's Bostonians,

01:42:00.980 | Texans, Californians.

01:42:04.460 | - Yeah, yeah, East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff.

01:42:07.340 | Those are all part of the mix here.

01:42:08.800 | So you asked about Kandahar and Helmand,

01:42:10.980 | then I would say, yeah, if you go out to,

01:42:14.180 | you know, a pomegranate field,

01:42:17.700 | you'll meet a guy who may reckon time differently

01:42:20.980 | from you and me, who may not be literate,

01:42:24.860 | he may not have ever had a geography lesson,

01:42:27.900 | but if you go one door over, you may meet a guy

01:42:30.780 | who, you know, whose life path has taken him

01:42:36.020 | to live in, you know, six countries.

01:42:38.500 | He may speak five languages.

01:42:40.340 | And these are all things I'm not saying,

01:42:41.420 | they're all, these are just because people,

01:42:42.780 | you know, have money, can go fly around.

01:42:44.060 | I mean, they're people who were displaced by war

01:42:46.860 | from late 1970s, right?

01:42:48.500 | Even already in the early '70s,

01:42:50.180 | people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran,

01:42:53.620 | you know, as labor migrants.

01:42:55.220 | And once you get to Iran, once you get to Pakistan,

01:42:56.980 | once you get to Uzbekistan,

01:42:59.500 | you then connect to all kinds of cosmopolitan cultures.

01:43:02.620 | In fact, I think one of the themes of the book,

01:43:04.900 | you know, that you may or may not have read,

01:43:06.020 | it may put you to sleep, you know,

01:43:07.940 | Afghan Modern was about, you know,

01:43:09.580 | conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place

01:43:11.820 | where for centuries, people went on the move

01:43:14.860 | and trade in this area.

01:43:15.700 | You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization

01:43:17.900 | of places like Helmand and Kandahar, you know,

01:43:20.620 | you fly in or you're part of a Marine battalion

01:43:24.420 | and you see people there and they look different.

01:43:26.580 | And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize,

01:43:30.180 | you know, they look like they've been there for millennia,

01:43:33.100 | right, the dress, the whatever, right?

01:43:35.180 | You think of technology,

01:43:36.020 | you think of the mud compounds and so on,

01:43:38.660 | you think of, you know, animal drawn transportation,

01:43:42.700 | that kind of stuff, right?

01:43:43.900 | Or the motorbike, right, at most is what they have.

01:43:46.620 | But in fact, if you follow those families,

01:43:49.200 | their trade has taken them to Northern India

01:43:51.900 | for centuries, right?

01:43:53.060 | The trade has connected them to cosmopolitan centers.

01:43:56.220 | You know, say they have a scholar in the family,

01:43:58.020 | that scholar may have studied all over the Middle East,

01:44:00.580 | South Asia, right?

01:44:02.180 | You know, their ancestors may have been horse traders

01:44:03.940 | who went all the way to Moscow, right?

01:44:05.620 | I mean, we have a sort of records of all these people

01:44:07.840 | traveling across Eurasia, pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.

01:44:12.580 | And so Afghanistan is this paradox

01:44:14.420 | of visually looking remote

01:44:17.280 | and looking like it's kind of stuck in time,

01:44:20.260 | but the family trajectories and the current trajectories

01:44:23.740 | are astoundingly cosmopolitan and mobile.

01:44:26.420 | And so, and a conception of being a world center

01:44:29.860 | is also quite strong.

01:44:30.900 | So, you know, another way to frame that question

01:44:33.260 | about like, do they know about 9/11 would be like,

01:44:36.220 | why should we know about 9/11?

01:44:37.420 | Because we are at the center of something important, right?

01:44:39.660 | We are the center of Asia.

01:44:41.140 | We are the heart of Asia.

01:44:42.900 | We have a kind of historic greatness.

01:44:44.540 | We are, you know, a proud culture of our own achievements.

01:44:48.900 | Right, so we're not worried about that, right?

01:44:51.780 | That said, I mean, sure, there are different narratives

01:44:54.340 | about why Americans are there,

01:44:56.100 | why people are being killed.

01:44:57.860 | You know, of course you'd find, you know,

01:45:00.300 | they want to convert us, you know, they want our gold,

01:45:03.180 | they want our opium, they want X, Y, and Z, right?

01:45:06.580 | There was a recent story about a Taliban official

01:45:10.700 | sitting in an office in Kabul and a journalist asked him,

01:45:12.500 | can you find in this rotating globe, find your country,

01:45:15.900 | find where we're sitting right now.

01:45:17.900 | And he was filmed not being able to do it.

01:45:21.460 | And so a lot of, you know,

01:45:22.380 | race-fiscated Afghans in the diaspora were saying,

01:45:24.260 | you know, ha ha, look at this.

01:45:25.900 | And that exists.

01:45:27.260 | I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom

01:45:29.860 | and there'd be a lot of kids who wouldn't know

01:45:31.380 | where Afghanistan is too, right?

01:45:32.620 | But I guess I wouldn't use those metrics

01:45:35.580 | to suggest that this is a place

01:45:38.260 | that doesn't have a sense of its place in the world

01:45:40.340 | and of geopolitics.

01:45:42.300 | I think if anything, being a relatively small country

01:45:44.500 | in a very complicated neighborhood,

01:45:46.620 | I mean, everybody, every cab driver,

01:45:48.340 | I mean, people have a, I mean,

01:45:50.620 | you know, this is where America is different

01:45:52.420 | because I don't think Americans have this sense.

01:45:54.340 | You know, we're talking about Moscow and stuff.

01:45:55.860 | I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers,

01:45:59.820 | I think a lot of them are gonna tell you, like,

01:46:02.300 | what's happening in the world and why, right?

01:46:04.460 | And it's just part of their thing, right?

01:46:07.020 | You can find that in Ghana.

01:46:07.940 | You can find that in Mexico City, right?

01:46:09.140 | You find that lots of places.

01:46:10.220 | So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated

01:46:13.660 | kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in.

01:46:17.940 | And a lot of them remarkably had done it firsthand,

01:46:20.020 | which is what struck me so much.

01:46:21.340 | And, you know, relating my experiences

01:46:22.980 | from the 1990s in touch camp places

01:46:24.460 | that these guys had already lived

01:46:26.380 | in more countries than I'd ever been.

01:46:28.420 | They already knew half those languages.

01:46:30.140 | I mean, this one friend's Russian was impeccable.

01:46:33.220 | And of course it helped.

01:46:34.980 | They had Russian girlfriends.

01:46:36.460 | They had, you know, they mixed with the police.

01:46:38.780 | They had run-ins.

01:46:39.620 | I mean, this wasn't something you got from a book, right?

01:46:42.940 | This was like hard knock life.

01:46:44.940 | I mean, one friend was from a wealthy family

01:46:47.620 | in this trading diaspora and he was imprisoned.

01:46:51.180 | I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan

01:46:54.060 | and he talks about how he started like running,

01:46:57.140 | running the jail, you know, taking cigarettes to people,

01:46:59.900 | doing little things and kind of, you know,

01:47:02.860 | these are not stories of like, oh, I went to Harvard

01:47:05.140 | and so I'm so learned because of this.

01:47:06.860 | I mean, it's a whole range of experiences.

01:47:08.860 | - The interesting thing is the survey is a survey

01:47:10.900 | and it doesn't reflect ignorance, as you're saying perhaps,

01:47:15.900 | but it may reflect a different geopolitical view

01:47:22.460 | of the world than the West has.

01:47:25.660 | So if, you know, for a lot of the world,

01:47:29.300 | 9/11 was one of the most important moments

01:47:33.260 | of recent human history.

01:47:35.620 | And for Afghanistan to not to know that,

01:47:38.580 | especially when they're part of that story,

01:47:41.460 | means they have a very different,

01:47:43.120 | like there could be a lot of things said.

01:47:46.180 | One is the spread of information is different.

01:47:49.700 | The channels of the way information is spread

01:47:52.580 | and two, the things they care about.

01:47:54.940 | Maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc

01:47:59.940 | of history where the bickering of these superpowers

01:48:03.980 | that seem to want to go to the moon are not as important

01:48:07.840 | as the big sort of arc that's been the story of Afghanistan.

01:48:11.300 | That's an interesting idea, but it's still a bit,

01:48:17.220 | if at all representative of the truth.

01:48:20.100 | It's heartbreaking that they're not,

01:48:23.380 | do not see themselves as active player

01:48:28.380 | in this game between the United States and Central Asia,

01:48:33.720 | because there's such a critical player.

01:48:37.460 | And I feel, and obviously in many ways,

01:48:41.620 | get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction

01:48:44.340 | with the, you know, invasion of Afghanistan for many years.

01:48:50.100 | And then this rushed withdrawal of troops

01:48:54.540 | and now the economic collapse and it's,

01:48:59.540 | it's sad in some ways.

01:49:04.100 | - No, it's very, I mean, you know,

01:49:05.220 | another way to put it is this.

01:49:06.740 | I mean, yeah, there's a range of knowledge

01:49:08.860 | and you're right, the information flows

01:49:10.660 | are peculiar to particular geographies

01:49:14.260 | and histories and stuff.

01:49:15.100 | I think that, you know, plucking out one sample

01:49:17.340 | from some fairly remote area,

01:49:20.220 | from one like follow the agricultural products.

01:49:22.740 | I mean, and this is where, you know,

01:49:24.940 | I think urban rural divides used to mean a lot more

01:49:29.540 | in the 19th century, right?

01:49:30.480 | So a lot of like nuts and bolts of history

01:49:32.720 | is about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions,

01:49:35.620 | you know, but I think that if one has the privilege

01:49:37.940 | of traveling a bit, you see that like urban areas

01:49:40.780 | are fed by rural hinterlands.

01:49:43.420 | And if you look, think of who actually, you know,

01:49:46.380 | brings the bread, the milk, you know,

01:49:48.220 | pomegranates and so on, it creates these networks

01:49:50.740 | and then, you know, mobility channels,

01:49:53.620 | information and so on.

01:49:54.940 | But yeah, but your broader point

01:49:57.220 | about like the tragedy of this,

01:49:58.060 | I mean, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student of mine,

01:50:01.140 | an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD,

01:50:04.220 | who's now, you know, doctor, he's a great scholar.

01:50:07.980 | You know, we've done several events now

01:50:10.620 | trying to just think through what's happened

01:50:11.980 | and of course she's very emotionally affected by it

01:50:14.620 | and she continues to ask a really great question.

01:50:17.340 | If I can get her phrasing right, you know,

01:50:19.780 | if you think of the cycle of like

01:50:21.140 | the Taliban being in power in 2001

01:50:23.540 | and the way in which that affected women in particular,

01:50:25.700 | you know, half Afghan, half of society, right?

01:50:28.980 | Then you think of this 20 year period of violence

01:50:31.020 | and, you know, missed exits, right?

01:50:34.380 | And repeated tragedy, but also it created a space.

01:50:38.340 | I mean, it created a space for a whole,

01:50:40.020 | I'd say generationally, it created a sense,

01:50:41.380 | a space for people to realize something new.

01:50:44.420 | And I think, so we have to attend to the dynamism

01:50:47.060 | of the society, right?

01:50:47.900 | So yeah, this happened mostly in Kabul,

01:50:51.140 | other big cities, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar,

01:50:53.940 | but you can't limit your analysis to that

01:50:56.740 | because things like radio, television,

01:51:00.580 | everyone got a TV channel.

01:51:02.380 | There's a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star

01:51:05.380 | that I recommend to your listeners and viewers

01:51:07.460 | that it's about a singing show, a singing contest show,

01:51:10.660 | but you see just for some of these things

01:51:12.140 | about like connections, I mean,

01:51:14.100 | it's a show by an independent television network

01:51:17.980 | that did drama, it did kind of infomercials

01:51:21.220 | for the government and huge American investment in it.

01:51:24.340 | So it wasn't politically neutral,

01:51:25.580 | but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff.

01:51:27.700 | But it did a singing show that became incredibly popular,

01:51:31.860 | modeled upon the British American,

01:51:33.820 | American Idol kind of stuff, and you can vote.

01:51:36.300 | So it had a kind of democratic practice element,

01:51:39.060 | but it's fascinating to see that, you know,

01:51:41.300 | people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this.

01:51:44.820 | You know, you think of like literacy rates.

01:51:47.020 | Literacy rates are imperfect and, you know,

01:51:48.940 | people who study, you know, medieval or modern Europe

01:51:51.620 | talk about how, yeah, no one could read

01:51:54.900 | and there weren't many books,

01:51:56.140 | but if someone had a book, it'd be read aloud

01:51:58.740 | to a whole village potentially or a gathering.

01:52:00.380 | So there was much, you know,

01:52:01.540 | some of these metrics don't get

01:52:02.380 | what people actually perceive as information or exposure

01:52:05.220 | because there's a magnifying power of open spaces

01:52:08.940 | and hearing radio in group settings,

01:52:11.580 | seeing television group settings,

01:52:13.860 | having telephone, you know, cheap telephones,

01:52:16.300 | which then become an access point to the world

01:52:19.460 | and social media, right?

01:52:20.420 | So all this stuff swept across Afghan society

01:52:23.180 | as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more.

01:52:28.180 | So Afghan society became, you know, in important ways,

01:52:31.220 | really connected to everything going on.

01:52:33.340 | And so you see that reflected politically

01:52:34.500 | in what people wanted.

01:52:35.340 | So you had some people, obviously,

01:52:37.380 | back to return to the Taliban.

01:52:39.100 | Some people wanted the status quo,

01:52:41.300 | but increasingly many more people wanted something else.

01:52:44.340 | And one of the great failures was

01:52:45.780 | to expose people to democracy,

01:52:48.060 | but only give them the rigged version.

01:52:50.100 | And so the US, you know, the State Department in particular,

01:52:52.880 | continued to double down on faked elections

01:52:55.140 | for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.

01:52:57.940 | - What kind of elections?

01:52:59.100 | - Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament

01:53:02.220 | and for president in Afghanistan again and again

01:53:06.820 | from the very beginning.

01:53:08.380 | And those elections were partly theater for the US,

01:53:12.340 | like for remaining on the road that you're describing,

01:53:14.460 | right, for not deviating, for not exiting,

01:53:15.900 | because we were building democracy there.

01:53:18.740 | In reality, the US government knew

01:53:19.900 | it was never really building democracy there.

01:53:22.040 | It was establishing control.

01:53:24.180 | And elections were one means to gather control, right?

01:53:27.140 | But then you had on the ground,

01:53:28.540 | especially among young people,

01:53:30.620 | going to university, you know,

01:53:32.780 | having experiences that were denied to them before,

01:53:36.260 | you know, they took these problems so seriously.

01:53:37.700 | So part of the disillusionment that we see today

01:53:40.140 | is that, you know, they believe what the US told them,

01:53:43.400 | that they're constructing democracy.

01:53:45.180 | And of course, you know, setting a psychos,

01:53:46.620 | maybe thinking, well, you know,

01:53:48.060 | you're not really doing that, you're backing fraud.

01:53:50.500 | - They believed it when they were younger

01:53:52.260 | and now they're actually smart enough

01:53:54.140 | to understand that it's a farce.

01:53:55.940 | - Yeah.

01:53:56.780 | - But in so indirectly had the consequence

01:53:59.220 | of actually working.

01:54:00.180 | (laughing)

01:54:01.140 | - Yeah.

01:54:01.980 | - And that it taught the young,

01:54:03.580 | well, over a period of 20 years,

01:54:05.300 | young folks to believe that democracy is possible

01:54:08.500 | and then to realize what democracy is not.

01:54:10.940 | - Exactly.

01:54:11.780 | - Just the current system.

01:54:12.600 | - Beautifully said, beautifully said.

01:54:13.440 | And so, but now look at us,

01:54:14.700 | now it's, you know, it's now November.

01:54:17.980 | And so this whole period,

01:54:21.700 | and I wouldn't say like, you know,

01:54:23.380 | I wouldn't cast the last 20 years

01:54:25.620 | if we're looking at all the achievements, you know,

01:54:27.860 | I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet,

01:54:30.300 | like, oh, this is something

01:54:31.700 | we should pat ourselves on the back for.

01:54:32.740 | I think that much has happened actually

01:54:34.640 | against what the Americans wanted.

01:54:36.020 | I mean, that the kind of free thinking, democracy wanting,

01:54:41.020 | I mean, even like, yeah, we could point out on the religious

01:54:43.300 | go back to the religious sphere.

01:54:44.140 | I mean, the African religious landscape

01:54:47.860 | became very pluralistic.

01:54:49.380 | Lots of young people wanted

01:54:51.660 | a different kind of secular politics.

01:54:53.500 | But the old guard who wanted the status quo

01:54:57.980 | and wanted something that they'd fought for in 1980s

01:55:00.980 | tended to still get American backing as the political elites

01:55:04.100 | who still tended to monopolize political power.

01:55:06.960 | So all stuff was happening in different ways.

01:55:09.560 | I mean, the Americans established this

01:55:11.600 | American University of Afghanistan,

01:55:12.880 | which was I think one of the best things the US did there.

01:55:14.640 | And I regret that the US didn't fund 20 more,

01:55:18.080 | you know, strengthen them across the country,

01:55:20.000 | make them accessible people.

01:55:20.840 | Because it was, you know, again,

01:55:23.240 | it wasn't an engine of Americanization.

01:55:26.480 | It was just opportunity.

01:55:27.320 | And so the thirst for higher education

01:55:28.720 | is really extraordinary there.

01:55:29.920 | It was never really met.

01:55:31.100 | The US tended to put money in primary education,

01:55:34.240 | which much of that too was fraudulent.

01:55:37.120 | But so you have all this interesting dynamism.

01:55:38.480 | You have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space.

01:55:42.280 | I mean, I call it a public sphere

01:55:43.720 | in the classic European sense.

01:55:45.760 | You know, the Afghans made of their own.

01:55:46.880 | And again, it wasn't Americanization.

01:55:49.240 | It wasn't imposed.

01:55:51.560 | It was something that Afghans built across generations,

01:55:54.280 | but really with a firm foundation among youth

01:55:58.400 | who wanted importantly, a multi-ethnic Afghan society.

01:56:01.660 | You asked about postings and that kind of stuff.

01:56:03.740 | And a lot of that language in recent years

01:56:06.500 | was they were aware that the US-backed government

01:56:09.860 | was playing ethnic politics

01:56:11.900 | and trying to kind of put people in the blocks

01:56:14.500 | and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity.

01:56:17.880 | And there was a younger cohort of people who said,

01:56:19.860 | you know, we are Afghan.

01:56:21.580 | And it's interesting social media stuff

01:56:23.300 | where people would say, I am Hazara,

01:56:25.620 | but I'm also Tajik, I'm also Uzbek.

01:56:28.380 | I mean, it was a way of creating

01:56:30.440 | a multi-ethnic Afghan national identity

01:56:33.600 | that embraced everything.

01:56:35.000 | I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian, right?

01:56:37.880 | But symbolically it was very important

01:56:39.280 | that they rejected being mobilized politically,

01:56:42.980 | you know, voting as a Hazara or voting as whatever.

01:56:45.400 | And of course there were communities

01:56:46.880 | who wanted to vote as that ethnic community.

01:56:50.720 | But there were also people who said, you know,

01:56:52.240 | let's put a kind of civic nationalism first,

01:56:55.120 | one that accommodates ethnic pluralism

01:56:57.800 | in a way that rejected a kind of majoritarian politics

01:57:00.240 | of one ethnic group dominating the thing.

01:57:03.440 | So all this stuff was quite interesting.

01:57:04.640 | I mean, women were asserting themselves

01:57:07.180 | in across multiple spheres.

01:57:09.640 | Of course it remained patriarchal.

01:57:10.800 | Of course there were struggles.

01:57:11.620 | Of course there was violence.

01:57:12.460 | Of course, you know, there's no utopia.

01:57:14.220 | But the door on all that shut on August 15.

01:57:18.880 | So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer

01:57:22.080 | from the student, now professor,

01:57:25.640 | was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this,

01:57:28.560 | and you mentioned the tragic arc here,

01:57:30.960 | you think of the 20 years, like she asked, you know,

01:57:35.120 | why did you go to war in our country?

01:57:37.640 | Basically, why did you do this to us for 20 years

01:57:39.280 | when this was never about us?

01:57:41.480 | You know, you never asked us if you wanted to come.

01:57:43.920 | You never asked us what you wanted to build here.

01:57:46.440 | You didn't ask us when you were coming

01:57:47.480 | and you didn't ask us when you were leaving.

01:57:49.440 | You just did this all on your own.

01:57:51.500 | And we tried to make the most of it.

01:57:53.840 | And then you pulled the rug out from under us,

01:57:55.880 | you know, at the 11th hour and returned to power,

01:58:00.480 | partly by diplomacy.

01:58:02.120 | It wasn't at the end, just a military loss.

01:58:04.480 | I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions.

01:58:07.000 | I mean, the idea, you asked about alternatives.

01:58:08.520 | I mean, giving up Bagram, I mean, holding to the timeline.

01:58:12.760 | I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold

01:58:14.280 | to the Doha agreement that Trump had signed.

01:58:17.660 | I mean, every American president

01:58:19.840 | writes his or her own foreign policy, right?

01:58:21.960 | So the Biden administration acted as if,

01:58:24.600 | and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied

01:58:27.360 | and that it was either this or 20 more years of war

01:58:31.400 | or some absurd kind of false alternative.

01:58:36.080 | And so, but I think that's important

01:58:38.040 | for American audiences to hear that, you know,

01:58:40.040 | they're like, you came to here to experiment.

01:58:42.240 | You came here to punish.

01:58:44.240 | You came here to kind of reassert, you know,

01:58:47.880 | your dominance at the world stage,

01:58:49.920 | you know, to work out the fear and hurt of 9/11

01:58:53.520 | that we talked about, which was so real, you know,

01:58:55.120 | and palpable and so important for American politics

01:58:58.280 | since then.

01:58:59.120 | Like you worked out your problems, you know,

01:59:01.240 | on us, on our territory, and now what do we have for it?

01:59:06.240 | You know, and then the people who had a stake

01:59:08.880 | in that system, imperfect as it was,

01:59:12.280 | have been desperate to leave.

01:59:13.780 | And so this, I don't know how much people are aware of this,

01:59:15.680 | but, you know, I'm a scholar.

01:59:18.000 | I work in California, you know, I have friends.

01:59:21.080 | I edited a journal on Afghanistan and, you know,

01:59:24.800 | but I'm not a politician, I'm not a soldier,

01:59:26.880 | but people assume that, you know,

01:59:28.840 | Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me

01:59:31.200 | and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American

01:59:34.800 | to help get them out.

01:59:36.080 | You know, that's the kind of like, you know,

01:59:39.520 | the symbol of voting with your feet, you know,

01:59:42.320 | is quite powerful.

01:59:43.160 | I mean, there's a huge swath of society

01:59:46.000 | that doesn't want the system and is literally

01:59:49.000 | living in terror about it.

01:59:50.640 | Naturally, women, you know, I mean,

01:59:51.960 | especially women of a certain age, I mean,

01:59:53.920 | they feel like their lives are over.

01:59:54.840 | I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide.

01:59:56.880 | They feel betrayed and some people have done

02:00:02.440 | some good things in getting people out.

02:00:03.600 | You know, I mean, some, you know,

02:00:05.800 | the US military vets have been, you know,

02:00:08.200 | at the forefront of working to get out people,

02:00:11.040 | you know, that they know they owe.

02:00:14.600 | But the US government doesn't want these people.

02:00:17.640 | I mean, they have created all these obstacles

02:00:19.720 | to allowing a safety valve for people to leave.

02:00:24.720 | - Looking forward from a perspective of leadership,

02:00:27.880 | how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes?

02:00:31.200 | So obviously some interests, some aspects of human nature

02:00:35.320 | led to this war.

02:00:36.720 | - Yeah.

02:00:37.560 | - How do we resist that in the future?

02:00:41.120 | - I guess beyond my moral and intellectual capacity,

02:00:44.600 | I'll just say this.

02:00:45.440 | I mean, looking at it, again, looking at it from,

02:00:46.480 | you know, my home ground is the university

02:00:48.040 | and I think of the intellectual, you know,

02:00:53.040 | ways of thinking that I think students

02:00:55.960 | should develop for themselves as citizens, right?

02:00:59.120 | Maybe that's where to start is like historical thinking.

02:01:02.000 | I mean, these are all, you know,

02:01:03.680 | I try to tell people, you know,

02:01:04.960 | if you want to do robotics, computer science,

02:01:07.520 | you'd be a doctor or whatever.

02:01:08.760 | - You should study history.

02:01:10.160 | - Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be an historian like me

02:01:11.760 | and it's, you know, my job isn't perfect.

02:01:13.360 | My profession is deeply flawed, right?

02:01:15.160 | But as I get older, I'm like,

02:01:17.680 | there are fewer and fewer historians actually like,

02:01:19.360 | you know, I want to hang out with and stuff.

02:01:20.520 | So it's like, I'm not offering myself

02:01:22.280 | as like a model for anything, but you know,

02:01:24.280 | whether you're a, you know, you carry the mail

02:01:26.480 | or you're a brain surgeon, whatever.

02:01:27.880 | I mean, I think it's a way of civic engagement

02:01:30.560 | and a way of like, you know, ethical being in the world

02:01:32.760 | that we need to familiarize ourselves with.

02:01:34.560 | Because if you're an American

02:01:36.000 | or if you're from a rich country, you know,

02:01:38.200 | you need to be aware of your effect

02:01:40.280 | on an interesting world.

02:01:42.280 | You can't say anymore that you don't know or care

02:01:45.120 | what's happening in Afghanistan

02:01:46.840 | or really circle the globe and point to a place.

02:01:49.600 | I mean, we're all connected and we're all,

02:01:52.080 | we have ethical obligations.

02:01:53.480 | That's one place to start, but I would just say this,

02:01:55.960 | and this is a, I'll offer a self critique,

02:01:57.560 | and that is so much of my teaching

02:02:01.160 | and like the themes of my research have been about empire.

02:02:03.040 | You know, how big states work,

02:02:05.440 | not only on big territories like the Russian empire

02:02:07.480 | and Soviet Union and stuff,

02:02:08.320 | but the way in which power often, you know,

02:02:11.440 | is projected beyond those boundaries

02:02:13.000 | in ways that we don't see.

02:02:14.120 | So this is where things like neoliberalism

02:02:16.920 | or just, you know, if you want to take capitalism

02:02:18.800 | or just things that, you know,

02:02:20.840 | the idea of humanity or of liberalism or of humanitarianism,

02:02:24.880 | ideas that move beyond state boundaries

02:02:26.880 | are all things that we think about

02:02:29.400 | as affecting power in some ways

02:02:30.720 | that often harm people, right?

02:02:33.680 | So I think part of, as I've seen my job so far

02:02:36.120 | is to think about, you know,

02:02:37.640 | building upon the work of my people in grad school

02:02:39.960 | and, you know, scholars that have affected me.

02:02:42.160 | I mean, you know, we're all concerned with how power works

02:02:44.880 | and its effects and trying to be attuned to

02:02:48.240 | understanding things that aren't visible, right?

02:02:51.000 | That we should be thinking about,

02:02:51.880 | that should be known to us.

02:02:52.960 | And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role

02:02:55.280 | in showing effects that aren't, you know, obvious initially.

02:03:00.280 | So empire is a framework to think about this.

02:03:03.200 | And so you think about evading foreign countries,

02:03:05.920 | obviously, if you're a scholar of empire,

02:03:07.960 | you've seen what that looks like,

02:03:09.520 | and that's horrific, right?

02:03:11.600 | You look at things like racism

02:03:13.040 | as one of the ideological pillars of empire,

02:03:16.720 | you know, that's horrific, it must be critiqued,

02:03:18.280 | it must be, you know, we must be educated against.

02:03:20.880 | Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire

02:03:24.080 | is also something to highlight, you know,

02:03:25.400 | to rectify and so on.

02:03:26.600 | You know, to be moral beings,

02:03:28.600 | we need to think about past inequality

02:03:31.240 | and the legacies of violence and destruction that live on.

02:03:35.160 | I mean, living in the Americas, I mean, look at, you know,

02:03:37.360 | we're all on stolen land, we're all in the sense,

02:03:41.360 | living with the fruits of genocide and slavery

02:03:43.720 | and all those things that are hard

02:03:44.800 | to come to terms with, right?

02:03:46.960 | But the last few months in Afghanistan,

02:03:49.680 | and thinking about empire, I think made me more humble

02:03:53.360 | when I read people who say, to put it simply,

02:03:58.040 | have taken some joy in this moment, saying like,

02:04:00.400 | well, the Americans got kicked out of Afghanistan.

02:04:03.920 | You know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing.

02:04:07.040 | This is a kind of victory of anti-colonial.

02:04:09.580 | - You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan

02:04:14.000 | that America is not some kind of place

02:04:16.920 | that has an ideal of freedom and all the kind of things

02:04:19.860 | that we American tell ourselves,

02:04:21.960 | but it's more America has the ideal of empire,

02:04:25.800 | that there's one place that has the truth

02:04:28.440 | and everybody else must follow this truth.

02:04:31.720 | And so from a perspective of Afghanistan,

02:04:34.280 | it could be a victory against this idea

02:04:36.400 | of centralized truth of empire.

02:04:38.660 | That's another way to tell this story.

02:04:41.600 | And then in that sense, it's a victory.

02:04:43.440 | And in that sense also, I mean,

02:04:46.560 | you push back against this somewhat,

02:04:49.300 | this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empire.

02:04:54.600 | - Right, right.

02:04:56.160 | And I'll say this, I'd say, you know, I mean,

02:04:58.560 | I'm a critic of empire.

02:04:59.980 | I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon

02:05:04.080 | that stays with us.

02:05:05.040 | And I think, you know, we need scholars to point to the way

02:05:07.920 | in which it still works and still does harm.

02:05:10.120 | But it's part of being an empire

02:05:12.840 | that you can just get up and leave a place, right?

02:05:15.760 | That you can remake its politics on one day

02:05:19.800 | and then because it fails to advance your agenda

02:05:22.600 | at one moment, you simply walk away.

02:05:26.160 | I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.

02:05:27.840 | I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent, you know,

02:05:30.860 | the way that the British withdrew

02:05:32.860 | played a significant role in mass violence,

02:05:37.780 | you know, that accompanied partition.

02:05:40.100 | It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know,

02:05:43.200 | dictated that, right?

02:05:44.380 | There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know,

02:05:47.660 | the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.

02:05:49.860 | I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment

02:05:52.020 | as there is now in what's happening in Afghanistan.

02:05:54.700 | But I think the capriciousness, I mean,

02:05:57.700 | the ability to act as if your political decisions

02:06:02.700 | about other people's lives, you know,

02:06:06.400 | or something that can be made, you know, in secret,

02:06:09.600 | that can be made willy-nilly,

02:06:11.860 | that really are beyond the accountability, you know,

02:06:14.620 | of those who are actually going to live with

02:06:17.300 | the consequences of shifting the cards on a deck

02:06:20.620 | in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't.

02:06:23.500 | - I would love to hear your conversation

02:06:25.460 | with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson,

02:06:28.460 | who argues on the topic of empire,

02:06:30.980 | that you can also zoom out even further

02:06:34.700 | and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire.

02:06:38.220 | And he argues, I think he gets a lot of flack for this

02:06:41.260 | from other historians, that like the British empire

02:06:45.780 | did more good than bad in certain moments of history.

02:06:50.420 | And that's an uncomfortable truth.

02:06:52.860 | There's like levels, it's a cake

02:06:55.340 | with layers of uncomfortable truths.

02:06:57.900 | And it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good.

02:07:00.820 | - Right.

02:07:01.660 | I mean, I would continue to disagree with Neil Ferguson.

02:07:04.180 | So I'm still working out where I am

02:07:06.500 | and what this moment does to kind of, I think,

02:07:08.820 | qualify my understanding of the past

02:07:12.020 | into, I think, in a moment of humility, you know, I do,

02:07:15.500 | and I'm probably reacting to the kind of, you know,

02:07:18.260 | as you put it, I mean, the idea that this is like

02:07:20.620 | a good thing that American power has been defeated here.

02:07:23.180 | I mean, I do think American power should contract.

02:07:25.820 | And I don't think, and again, if I had to create

02:07:29.220 | a tally sheet of what the Americans did in the US,

02:07:32.060 | I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan.

02:07:34.620 | Right?

02:07:35.500 | It could have done that without invading the country

02:07:37.700 | and killing people.

02:07:38.540 | You know, I've not now become an apologist for empire.

02:07:41.500 | I'm not now a mini Neil Ferguson,

02:07:44.460 | but, you know, ending empire is, I mean,

02:07:48.740 | those decisions you make are in some ways

02:07:53.740 | a continuation of imperial hubris, right?

02:07:56.620 | So you're not really out of empire yet.

02:07:59.380 | You're not really contracting empire

02:08:01.020 | for those who are living it, you know?

02:08:03.500 | But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way,

02:08:05.580 | it's be careful what you ask for.

02:08:08.140 | You know, I mean, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan,

02:08:11.000 | but I wanted there to be a political settlement.

02:08:14.980 | I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake

02:08:16.980 | and I wanted to eat it too, right?

02:08:18.100 | I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?

02:08:20.580 | - But why is going to Afghanistan even needed for that?

02:08:22.740 | You can play all of those games of geopolitics

02:08:26.260 | without ever invading and taking ownership of the place.

02:08:30.140 | It feels like the war.

02:08:31.660 | - Yeah.

02:08:32.500 | - It feels like, I mean, I'm not exactly sure

02:08:35.660 | what military force is necessary for,

02:08:38.420 | except for targeted intense attacks.

02:08:41.820 | It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9/11

02:08:46.500 | was to show what was a display of force

02:08:49.940 | unlike anything the world has ever seen

02:08:52.040 | for a very short amount of time,

02:08:54.180 | targeted at, sure, a terrorist,

02:08:57.220 | at certain strongholds and so on.

02:08:59.620 | - Yeah.

02:09:00.460 | - And then in and out, and then focus on education,

02:09:03.460 | on empowering women into the education system,

02:09:08.460 | all those kinds of things that have to do

02:09:10.700 | with supporting the culture, the education,

02:09:13.940 | the flourishing of the place.

02:09:16.380 | It has nothing to do with military policing, essentially.

02:09:21.220 | - Right.

02:09:22.060 | I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it through that lens,

02:09:25.060 | I mean, invading Afghanistan and then invading Iraq

02:09:28.060 | didn't end Al-Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right?

02:09:33.060 | It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely.

02:09:37.420 | If you like, you could say there were some

02:09:42.740 | limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.

02:09:47.180 | But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon

02:09:48.540 | of suicide bombing.

02:09:50.620 | I mean, it spread.

02:09:51.700 | I mean, it was never an Islamic thing.

02:09:53.780 | It was never a Muslim thing.

02:09:55.420 | Some Muslims adopted it in some places,

02:09:58.140 | but the circuits of knowledge about how to do

02:10:00.780 | these kind of things only expanded

02:10:02.780 | with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq,

02:10:05.740 | and then they kind of became connected,

02:10:06.900 | and then they became to the present.

02:10:08.420 | I mean, the Islamic State is,

02:10:10.260 | it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever,

02:10:12.620 | because it's on the basis of its supposed new stance

02:10:17.140 | as a counter-terrorism outfit,

02:10:20.100 | that it will get recognition from all its neighbors.

02:10:22.500 | It will get recognition in Russia.

02:10:24.420 | I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport,

02:10:26.900 | the United States was collaborating with the Taliban

02:10:29.380 | against the Islamic State and openly talking

02:10:33.540 | about the Taliban as if they were partners

02:10:34.980 | in this great operation.

02:10:35.820 | So, and then Al-Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan.

02:10:39.300 | - So, trillions of dollars spent.

02:10:42.300 | - Yeah.

02:10:43.860 | - The drones up above bombing places

02:10:48.540 | that result in civilian death, the death of children,

02:10:51.220 | the death of fathers and mothers,

02:10:53.260 | and those stories, even at the individual level,

02:10:56.100 | propagate virally across the land,

02:10:58.980 | creating potentially more terrorists.

02:11:01.740 | And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars

02:11:04.940 | is the military-industrial complex,

02:11:08.500 | where there's just a momentum,

02:11:10.660 | where after 9/11, the feeling like we should do something

02:11:15.660 | led to us doing something,

02:11:18.780 | and then a lot of people realizing they can make money

02:11:21.620 | from doing more of that something.

02:11:23.540 | And then it's just the momentum,

02:11:25.420 | where no one person is sitting there petting a cat

02:11:29.500 | in an evil way, saying, "We're going to spend

02:11:32.340 | "all of this money and create more suffering

02:11:34.540 | "and create more terrorism."

02:11:36.140 | But it's just something about that momentum

02:11:37.900 | that leads to that.

02:11:39.300 | And to me, honestly, I'm still a sucker.

02:11:42.580 | I believe in leadership.

02:11:43.980 | I believe in great charismatic leaders

02:11:47.540 | and the power of that one to do evil and to do good.

02:11:51.540 | And it felt like, I honestly put the blame

02:11:56.500 | on George Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden

02:12:01.500 | for the lack of leadership in this.

02:12:03.060 | - Yeah, definitely, definitely.

02:12:05.140 | I agree, yeah, there is the military-industrial complex

02:12:07.540 | component, which is huge.

02:12:09.420 | And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership,

02:12:11.340 | it's also, I'd say, the imbalance of power

02:12:14.340 | within Washington.

02:12:15.180 | I mean, the Pentagon used this moment,

02:12:18.780 | well, beginning in 2001, I think, to assert its authority

02:12:24.700 | at the expense of other institutions of national government.

02:12:27.980 | I mean, the State Department diplomacy

02:12:31.900 | has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.

02:12:35.060 | And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians,

02:12:38.020 | which I'm not, formally a historian of the United States,

02:12:39.700 | but we can go back to talk about Vietnam.

02:12:42.100 | We talk about lots of Cold War

02:12:44.420 | and post-Cold War engagements.

02:12:46.260 | And I think we need a reckoning

02:12:49.060 | about how the United States uses military power,

02:12:51.780 | why we devote so much to our military budget

02:12:55.260 | and what could be available to us

02:12:56.820 | if we had a more sensible view

02:12:59.980 | of the value of military power, of its effectiveness.

02:13:03.100 | And I think we're willing to hammer home

02:13:04.940 | that this was a defeat.

02:13:05.940 | I mean, I think there should be accountability.

02:13:07.260 | And if you, and this could be a kind of opening

02:13:09.820 | for a kind of bipartisan conversation,

02:13:11.260 | because if you are a kind of American militarist,

02:13:16.260 | I mean, you have to look at the leadership

02:13:18.500 | that got you to a place where you were defeated

02:13:20.700 | by men wearing sandals, firing AK-47s, right?

02:13:25.700 | - Yeah, there should be a humility with that.

02:13:27.820 | - Yeah.

02:13:29.540 | - I mean, we should actually say that,

02:13:31.820 | like literally the--

02:13:34.220 | - Oh, we lost, you should say we lost.

02:13:35.780 | It wasn't just, you know--

02:13:37.820 | - The American military lost.

02:13:40.740 | - Yeah, and I feel, I have very mixed feelings

02:13:43.660 | and it's, I don't know, a ton of veterans,

02:13:46.380 | but Mitch and I have topped my share

02:13:48.180 | and have a student now, and they are suffering

02:13:52.380 | because they look at the sacrifices that they made

02:13:54.300 | that I didn't make.

02:13:55.300 | I mean, American society didn't make the sacrifices.

02:13:57.100 | I mean, men and women lost limbs,

02:13:59.460 | they lost eyes, they lost lives.

02:14:01.220 | There's been this, of course,

02:14:03.780 | quiet epidemic of suicide among veterans.

02:14:08.020 | And I've heard some stories,

02:14:10.900 | the fact that the State Department

02:14:12.340 | is seeing a similar surge of suicides

02:14:14.780 | 'cause they see their adult life's work collapse.

02:14:19.780 | They've seen their relationships.

02:14:20.780 | I mean, they've seen, they've received phone calls

02:14:22.780 | in the middle of the night from people

02:14:24.460 | who they entrusted with their lives,

02:14:26.500 | who they know are gonna be targeted.

02:14:28.380 | I mean, some have already been killed.

02:14:30.860 | They've seen the, I mean, I think just,

02:14:32.820 | I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally

02:14:35.660 | what they believed in and what they sacrificed for

02:14:39.300 | has vanished.

02:14:41.820 | And I think that's bad.

02:14:44.740 | I mean, historically, thinking of some of the precedents

02:14:46.780 | you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of,

02:14:49.580 | first of all, at a human level,

02:14:51.340 | I feel horrible for those people who,

02:14:53.260 | I may not have agreed with everything they had done

02:14:55.540 | and their choices in life,

02:14:56.660 | but I respect the fact that many good people

02:14:59.300 | went out of the best intentions as young people

02:15:03.540 | to do the right thing and make things right.

02:15:05.940 | And I respect that.

02:15:07.220 | And I've met enough to know that there were people

02:15:10.020 | who saw the gray in complexity

02:15:12.220 | and that's all you can hope for.

02:15:14.500 | But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans.

02:15:19.340 | If we look at the other post-war moments,

02:15:23.500 | and this is kind of a post-war moment where,

02:15:25.980 | I think we need a conversation with American veterans

02:15:27.740 | about what they've gone through and what they're feeling.

02:15:31.060 | And they still have skin in the game,

02:15:33.100 | because their personal connections

02:15:33.980 | and of their histories-

02:15:35.500 | - And also gonna be future leaders.

02:15:37.260 | I mean, veterans- - Already, yeah.

02:15:40.260 | - People who have served are often great men and women.

02:15:43.940 | That's- - That's true.

02:15:45.100 | - And throughout history,

02:15:50.100 | whether you sacrifice, you served in fighting World War II,

02:15:54.500 | in fighting Vietnam,

02:15:55.940 | that's going to mold you in different ways.

02:15:58.780 | That's going to mold how you are as a leader

02:16:02.620 | that leads this country forward.

02:16:04.740 | And so you have to have an honest conversation

02:16:07.180 | about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan,

02:16:12.180 | the war in the Middle East,

02:16:14.980 | the war on terror in the history of America.

02:16:18.060 | If we just look at the full context

02:16:20.100 | at the end of this 21st century,

02:16:22.340 | how are we going to remember this?

02:16:24.420 | And how that's going to result in our future interactions

02:16:27.820 | with small and large countries,

02:16:30.540 | with China or some proxy war with China,

02:16:32.860 | with Russia or some proxy war with Russia.

02:16:36.420 | What's the role of oil and natural resources

02:16:38.540 | and opium and all those kinds of things?

02:16:40.620 | What's the role of military power in the world?

02:16:45.260 | And now with COVID, it's almost like,

02:16:52.260 | because of the many failures of the US government

02:16:57.260 | and many leaders in science and politics

02:17:02.260 | to respond effectively and quickly to COVID,

02:17:07.300 | we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too.

02:17:12.300 | And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive.

02:17:15.300 | They seem to be symptoms of something,

02:17:21.020 | of a same kind of source problem of leadership,

02:17:26.020 | of bureaucracy, of the way information

02:17:31.740 | and intelligence flows throughout the US government,

02:17:34.500 | all those kinds of things.

02:17:35.660 | And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things.

02:17:39.340 | - Definitely.

02:17:40.180 | I mean, I think if there's one theme

02:17:41.140 | that jumps out to me in thinking about this moment,

02:17:43.060 | I mean, if we recognize that we live

02:17:45.100 | in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States

02:17:48.540 | and in other countries that have long been proud

02:17:50.900 | of their democratic traditions,

02:17:51.860 | if we see them be under assault from certain quarters,

02:17:54.260 | I think military defeat is yet another addition

02:17:57.740 | to all the aspects of this that you mentioned.

02:18:00.060 | I mean, the fact that military defeat is a giant match

02:18:04.060 | that you're throwing on this fire,

02:18:05.060 | potentially if we think of its legacies

02:18:07.820 | and other post-war environments,

02:18:09.140 | when the veteran angle is one,

02:18:12.740 | when you have people who feel betrayed.

02:18:15.540 | I mean, they have been fodder for the far right

02:18:17.900 | in other settings.

02:18:18.900 | Interwar Europe is very much

02:18:19.860 | about mobilizing disillusioned veterans

02:18:23.060 | in the name of right-wing fascist politics.

02:18:25.320 | If one thing's too at this moment

02:18:28.980 | of really increasing xenophobia,

02:18:32.100 | our immigration debate is now talking

02:18:33.900 | about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all

02:18:36.460 | in the United States after 20 years.

02:18:39.060 | And I think immediately the response in Europe,

02:18:41.580 | which I follow to some extent,

02:18:43.340 | focusing on Germany,

02:18:45.220 | because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans

02:18:49.100 | leading up to this collapse.

02:18:50.820 | And now they have been,

02:18:52.100 | a lot of right-wing center-right politicians in Germany

02:18:57.100 | have been watching all this with an eye to,

02:19:01.220 | I think using it to their advantage

02:19:02.500 | for a domestic German audience to say,

02:19:06.380 | in the context of recent elections,

02:19:07.700 | that we are the party who will defend you

02:19:09.820 | against these Afghans who are gonna be coming from this.

02:19:11.460 | So, what I've tried to emphasize

02:19:13.420 | in talking to different groups about this moment

02:19:15.220 | is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan

02:19:17.740 | or even the region.

02:19:18.580 | I mean, obviously malnutrition, hunger,

02:19:20.740 | will send Afghans to neighboring states,

02:19:23.180 | but where the European right is resurgent,

02:19:27.260 | this has been a gift, right?

02:19:28.700 | To say that the Afghans are coming,

02:19:30.780 | they're brown-skinned, they're Muslim,

02:19:32.540 | they're uneducated, they're gonna want your women.

02:19:35.060 | And they will take the odd sexual assault case

02:19:37.980 | or the odd whatever dramatic act of violence

02:19:41.540 | that happens numerically in any population,

02:19:45.460 | and they'll magnify that to say that

02:19:47.260 | our far-right group is gonna save the nation.

02:19:51.820 | And sorry, the main point I wanted to speak of leadership

02:19:54.740 | was that I think the serial,

02:19:56.820 | well, there are many, many carnal sins, if you like,

02:20:00.260 | but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits,

02:20:02.660 | I mean, what blocked some of those exits

02:20:04.820 | was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying.

02:20:09.740 | And so, I mean, this is no secret anyone has followed this,

02:20:12.300 | but we've allowed,

02:20:15.220 | and you think of the general mistrust of government,

02:20:17.540 | mistrust of authority across the board,

02:20:21.900 | of professors, of economists, of--

02:20:24.100 | - Scientists. - Scientists, doctors, right?

02:20:26.820 | - Well, I actually think,

02:20:27.820 | that's the hopeful thing to me about the internet

02:20:30.220 | is the internet hates inauthenticity.

02:20:34.180 | They can smell bullshit much better,

02:20:36.220 | and I think that motivates young leaders

02:20:38.340 | to be transparent and authentic.

02:20:40.620 | So like-- - I hope so.

02:20:42.460 | - The very problems we've been seeing,

02:20:45.300 | this kind of attitude of authority where,

02:20:49.220 | oh, the populace, they're too busy with their own lies,

02:20:53.260 | they're not smart enough to understand the full complexities

02:20:56.140 | of the things we're dealing with,

02:20:57.620 | so we're not going to even communicate to them

02:20:59.860 | the full complexities, we're just going to decide

02:21:02.900 | and then tell them what we decided

02:21:05.340 | and conceive some kind of narrative

02:21:08.140 | that makes it easy for them to consume this decision.

02:21:12.300 | - Right, right.

02:21:13.500 | - As opposed to that, I really believe,

02:21:16.620 | I see there's a hunger for authenticity

02:21:18.820 | of when you're making decisions,

02:21:21.780 | when you're looking at the rest of the world

02:21:23.780 | and trying to decide, untangle this complexity,

02:21:27.540 | the internet, the public,

02:21:30.340 | the world wants to see you as a leader struggle

02:21:33.180 | with the tension of these ideas,

02:21:35.420 | to change your mind, to see,

02:21:38.820 | to recognize your own flaws in your own thinking

02:21:41.260 | from a month ago, all that, the full complexity of it,

02:21:44.260 | also acknowledge the uncertainty as with COVID,

02:21:47.620 | also with the wars, I think there's a hunger for that

02:21:51.780 | and I think that's just going to change

02:21:53.340 | the nature of leadership in the 21st century.

02:21:56.300 | - I hope so, I think all the things you've highlighted,

02:21:58.580 | I mean, accountability is part of that, right?

02:22:00.820 | I mean, we need honesty, openness,

02:22:04.700 | and then acknowledgement of mistakes,

02:22:06.660 | I mean, humility is the key to all learning, right?

02:22:08.860 | But also, I mean, you think just the headline

02:22:10.820 | from yesterday, the horrible drone strike,

02:22:14.620 | which was really the last kind of American military action

02:22:18.140 | on the day that the US was, I think,

02:22:20.420 | mostly departing from Kabul,

02:22:22.660 | wiped out an entire family, mostly children,

02:22:25.500 | the US acknowledged that, yes,

02:22:27.020 | this was not the ISIS bombing outfit

02:22:29.540 | that they thought it was,

02:22:31.300 | but yesterday they did a quick review

02:22:34.580 | and I'm not an expert on drone strikes in the aftermath,

02:22:36.940 | but as he was looking more closely,

02:22:38.740 | he said it was basically whole cloth taken

02:22:41.860 | from what the US government has been saying

02:22:44.900 | after all these strikes,

02:22:46.700 | you know, reproducing the same language

02:22:48.100 | and basically pointing to technical errors,

02:22:51.740 | but denying that there were any procedural mistakes

02:22:56.740 | or flaws or it was just kind of,

02:22:59.780 | they found little ways of acknowledging things

02:23:01.820 | that goes plan, but we follow the policies essentially

02:23:06.340 | and that's it, it's not a crime,

02:23:09.700 | it's a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up

02:23:13.700 | and it's kind of the legalese

02:23:15.620 | that suddenly makes a war crime, not a war crime,

02:23:19.220 | you know, and that is, I feel like,

02:23:22.460 | are feasible to take accountability.

02:23:24.660 | - I think people are really sick of that

02:23:26.660 | in a way where the opposite is true,

02:23:29.580 | which is they get excited for people who are not,

02:23:33.660 | for leaders who are not that,

02:23:35.500 | and so they're not going to punish you

02:23:37.660 | for saying I made a mistake.

02:23:40.260 | So I just had a conversation with Francis Collins,

02:23:44.740 | the director of NIH,

02:23:46.220 | and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci

02:23:49.340 | has been that it's like such subtle,

02:23:54.180 | but such crucial communication of mistakes made.

02:23:58.940 | If you make a small mistake,

02:24:00.540 | it is so powerful to communicate, I think we messed up,

02:24:05.540 | we thought this was true and it wasn't.

02:24:08.620 | So the obvious thing there was with masks

02:24:11.220 | early in the pandemic, there's so much uncertainty,

02:24:14.620 | it's so understandable to make mistakes

02:24:17.020 | or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria

02:24:21.140 | different statements you make lead to,

02:24:23.420 | just being transparent about that and saying,

02:24:25.780 | we were not correct in saying the thing we said before,

02:24:28.120 | that's so powerful to communicate, to gain trust.

02:24:33.120 | And the opposite is true.

02:24:35.180 | When you do this legalese type of talk, it destroys trust.

02:24:40.180 | And again, I really think the lessons of recent history

02:24:45.780 | teach us how to be a leader

02:24:51.060 | and teach young leaders how to be leaders.

02:24:53.580 | And so I have a lot of hope.

02:24:56.180 | - Yeah, good.

02:24:57.020 | Actually, thanks for the internet.

02:24:58.600 | - Yeah, yeah, that's great.

02:25:00.160 | Oh, humility, I mean, we need humility,

02:25:02.240 | accountability, honesty.

02:25:03.600 | And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that.

02:25:07.720 | I mean, to learn from past mistakes

02:25:09.720 | and obviously there's always inspiration and courage

02:25:11.920 | and we can take some kind of assistance from that too,

02:25:14.680 | but also learning how not to do things, right?

02:25:19.100 | And then analogies are never like one-to-one.

02:25:23.120 | I mean, we talk about Vietnam.

02:25:24.460 | I think many Vietnam veterans would say,

02:25:27.300 | this is like deja vu.

02:25:28.500 | I mean, the story, the visuals of the Kabul airport

02:25:31.700 | and of the Saigon embassy were not the same,

02:25:35.580 | but close enough that people would juxtapose them.

02:25:38.220 | All of us right now, but I would just ask people

02:25:39.620 | that over-analogizing is also a kind of path down

02:25:44.620 | making errors of judgment and comparison and then sameness.

02:25:49.640 | But it's stretched, I mean, like 9/11 itself.

02:25:52.420 | I think the idea that people lack the imagination

02:25:56.600 | within our security apparatus

02:25:58.120 | to think this was even possible, right?

02:26:00.560 | And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock

02:26:03.400 | on a cockpit door, could have blunted all this.

02:26:06.400 | And again, I'm not saying either the time or hindsight

02:26:10.040 | that I am omniscient about all this,

02:26:11.800 | but I had just been living in Germany the year before

02:26:15.120 | and there was a plot there that this guy was hatching

02:26:18.240 | from Germany to blow up the mausoleum of Ataturk in Ankara

02:26:22.280 | with an airplane.

02:26:23.600 | And so if you kind of dig, it wasn't unimaginable

02:26:27.500 | that you would use an airplane as a weapon.

02:26:29.760 | And the Bush administration kept saying,

02:26:31.600 | no one had ever heard of this, who would do this?

02:26:33.760 | I'm like, well, not a lot of people do this.

02:26:35.560 | And then at that very moment,

02:26:37.200 | my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel, "Secret Agent,"

02:26:41.260 | which was about a conspiratorial organization

02:26:44.120 | that wanted to bomb, actually in retrospect,

02:26:47.520 | it was kind of suicide bombing

02:26:49.000 | 'cause I think they tricked this guy into doing it,

02:26:50.720 | but they wanted to bomb the Greenwich Observatory

02:26:53.520 | for some obscure political purpose.

02:26:55.400 | So that's an instance in which the novel,

02:27:00.880 | to go back to our kind of humanities pitch,

02:27:02.520 | that I guess my point was that, as you mentioned,

02:27:06.480 | we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination.

02:27:09.960 | And I think part of expanding our imagination is by,

02:27:14.160 | I mean, obviously delving into your fields of engineering

02:27:17.280 | and the sciences and robotics and artificial intelligence

02:27:19.840 | and all that rich landscape.

02:27:20.920 | And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature,

02:27:24.760 | I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do

02:27:28.560 | to really educate ourselves more fully

02:27:31.520 | across the spectrum of everything humans need

02:27:34.920 | to reimagine security.

02:27:37.720 | So much of what we talked about today,

02:27:38.720 | I mean, so much of our security is affected

02:27:42.720 | by others' perception of their insecurity, right?

02:27:45.360 | Which unleashes a whole web of emotions.

02:27:49.680 | - Can you tell me about the Afghan people,

02:27:53.520 | what they love, what they fear,

02:27:57.000 | what they dream of for themselves and for their nation?

02:28:00.080 | Is there something to say, to speak to,

02:28:02.880 | to the spirit of the people that may humanize them

02:28:07.320 | and maybe speak to the concerns and the hopes they have?

02:28:10.760 | - Yeah, I think I, as an outsider,

02:28:13.960 | I hesitate to make any grand statement,

02:28:16.320 | but I would say, listen, I mean,

02:28:19.040 | there are a number of documentary films

02:28:21.560 | that are incredibly rich,

02:28:23.440 | that will offer your listeners and viewers a snapshot.

02:28:26.200 | So there is "Afghan Star,"

02:28:29.480 | which really brings you into the homes of a set of people

02:28:32.480 | who, they want stardom,

02:28:34.280 | they're artists, they want to express themselves.

02:28:36.680 | Some wanna push political boundaries, cultural boundaries.

02:28:39.920 | There's a woman who gets into hot water for dancing.

02:28:42.640 | But you realize that, I mean, people,

02:28:46.440 | I mean, they love art, they love music,

02:28:48.000 | they love poetry, they love expression.

02:28:50.680 | You know, people want to care for their children,

02:28:52.800 | they want safety of their families,

02:28:54.240 | they want to enjoy what everyone enjoys, you know?

02:28:57.400 | I think it's a very humanizing portrait.

02:29:00.600 | There's another great documentary film called

02:29:02.800 | "Love Crimes of Kabul,"

02:29:06.680 | which is a great snapshot of the post-2000 world

02:29:10.080 | that the Americans shaped a lot of ways.

02:29:11.560 | And it's about a women's prison.

02:29:13.640 | And it's incredibly revealing

02:29:15.560 | 'cause it's about young girls and what they want.

02:29:19.880 | Well, not just young, but young, teenage,

02:29:22.280 | and then some middle-aged people

02:29:23.440 | who are accused of moral crimes,

02:29:26.240 | ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to,

02:29:29.960 | to having sexual relations outside of marriage.

02:29:33.760 | And so it shows, in a way,

02:29:35.760 | continuity with the previous Taliban regime

02:29:38.680 | in that women are imprisoned for things

02:29:41.120 | that you wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere,

02:29:42.360 | and that Islamo-claw operates as the kind of judicial logic

02:29:46.920 | for these punishments.

02:29:50.240 | But in letting these women kind of speak for themselves,

02:29:52.760 | I mean, it's fascinating.

02:29:53.600 | I mean, I don't want to give too much away,

02:29:55.120 | but women make very interesting choices in this film

02:29:58.840 | that land them in this predicament.

02:30:00.360 | So they don't all profess innocence.

02:30:04.160 | Some are like, "I'm guilty,"

02:30:05.160 | but they're guilty for reasons.

02:30:07.040 | In one case, one woman is guilty.

02:30:08.600 | She's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure

02:30:11.240 | on her fiance to finally marry her.

02:30:13.160 | So you get ethnicity, you get kind of Romeo and Juliet things

02:30:18.560 | where their families don't like each other necessarily,

02:30:20.640 | but they find each other.

02:30:22.040 | You have questions of love, money, clothing, furniture.

02:30:26.340 | It's beautiful.

02:30:28.600 | I mean, the parts with it, I remember showing it in class.

02:30:31.000 | There was a wonderful Afghan student who was,

02:30:33.720 | I think, a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford,

02:30:35.960 | and she's a genius.

02:30:36.880 | She's amazing.

02:30:37.720 | It was awkward for her because,

02:30:40.600 | talking about young women having sex and stuff,

02:30:42.320 | and it wasn't the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.

02:30:46.840 | And obviously, there's so much more.

02:30:47.760 | They're great writers and musicians.

02:30:50.440 | And I mean, music is a huge thing.

02:30:52.280 | I mean, poetry, all those things are great.

02:30:54.440 | So she found it, I hear you.

02:30:57.560 | I mean, it's kind of a taboo subject,

02:30:59.120 | but I thought the American students seeing it

02:31:02.280 | really identified with these women

02:31:04.800 | because they're just so real.

02:31:05.740 | And so young people trying to find,

02:31:08.600 | I mean, relationships that are universal

02:31:10.840 | in circumstances that are very difficult.

02:31:14.880 | Love, love is universal.

02:31:16.720 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:17.560 | So it's, I mean, we do have resources to humanize.

02:31:18.980 | I mean, some of your people will know Khaled Huseini.

02:31:21.840 | You know, he's an Afghan-American.

02:31:23.840 | He's done his stuff, but there are a number

02:31:26.120 | of novelists and short story writers who do cool things.

02:31:30.480 | I think that another tragic aspect of this moment

02:31:33.360 | is that those people have now pretty much

02:31:35.160 | had to leave the country.

02:31:36.240 | So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you

02:31:40.000 | named Khadam Ali, who's a Hazara based in Australia.

02:31:45.000 | He does extraordinary work in blending

02:31:49.200 | a tradition of Persian miniatures

02:31:51.680 | with contemporary political commentary.

02:31:53.920 | His work is between Australia and Afghanistan,

02:31:57.080 | but he also, he had to flee.

02:31:58.360 | I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul,

02:32:00.240 | but it's an extraordinary kind of visual language

02:32:05.400 | that he's adapted that has been shown

02:32:06.960 | all over the planet now.

02:32:07.800 | He's got some of his work is in New York galleries,

02:32:09.360 | is in Europe.

02:32:10.200 | He's been shown in Australia,

02:32:12.200 | but he talks about migration in a way that puts Afghans

02:32:15.640 | and Hazaras at the center, but it's totally universal

02:32:18.760 | about our modern crisis of all the millions of people

02:32:23.760 | who are displaced across our planet.

02:32:25.840 | And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them

02:32:29.520 | in a way that like, I think everyone can get.

02:32:32.320 | I mean, the visual imagery experts will know

02:32:33.760 | that it's from like the Shahnameh,

02:32:36.960 | like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to,

02:32:39.960 | that Afghans are attached to,

02:32:41.000 | that people can quote at length.

02:32:44.240 | That has mythical figures of good and evil

02:32:45.640 | that kids grew up embodying.

02:32:47.960 | They're named the names of the characters that are,

02:32:50.960 | it's called the Book of Kings.

02:32:53.080 | The heroes and villains are the staple

02:32:54.520 | of conversation and poetry.

02:32:56.940 | And like Russians, I mean, the kind of,

02:33:01.040 | the resort to literary references and speak

02:33:03.720 | is something that Americans don't do,

02:33:05.920 | most West European countries don't do,

02:33:08.000 | but the fact that everyone's gotta know this character,

02:33:10.000 | everyone knows this reference, the wordplay,

02:33:12.640 | the linguistic finesse in multiple languages

02:33:16.200 | is a major value of Afghan storytelling.

02:33:20.600 | As an outsider, I'm scratching at the surface of the surface.

02:33:25.320 | - Yeah, but there's a depth to it.

02:33:26.160 | It's just like, it is fascinating.

02:33:28.040 | - With the layers, yeah.

02:33:29.080 | - With the layers of Russian language

02:33:30.880 | that's the culture. - Exactly.

02:33:33.400 | - I've been struggling, and this is kind of the journey

02:33:37.520 | embarking on to convey to an American audience

02:33:43.220 | what is lost in translation between Russian and English.

02:33:48.220 | It's very challenging, and some of the great translators

02:33:51.560 | of Dostoevsky, of Tolstoy, of Russian literature

02:33:55.240 | struggle with this deeply.

02:33:59.080 | It's an art form just to convey that.

02:34:02.000 | It's amazing to hear that Afghanistan,

02:34:03.760 | with a full mix of cultures that are there,

02:34:06.720 | have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect.

02:34:11.080 | - I mean, the humor thing is,

02:34:13.120 | so much of our visual imagery is about this sad place

02:34:15.320 | in Daur or whatever, but the, I mean, socially, again,

02:34:18.560 | I'm gonna engage in some stereotypes

02:34:19.800 | about generalization stuff, but just the,

02:34:21.800 | you know, the Afghan friends that I've come to be close

02:34:25.680 | with and really love, I mean, the humor,

02:34:28.400 | there's so much there, I have common stuff of like,

02:34:31.400 | when I go to Ireland, it's one of my favorite places,

02:34:33.400 | and just like the, I feel a sense of pressure,

02:34:36.280 | like the humor all around me all the time,

02:34:38.080 | and I feel like there's something between Ireland and Russia

02:34:41.920 | with the humor stuff, where it's like,

02:34:43.760 | you've gotta be on your game if you wanna be, you know,

02:34:46.240 | so it's, it's not, you know what I mean?

02:34:49.000 | - The intensity of conversation in terms of,

02:34:52.920 | yeah, you have to be on your game

02:34:54.280 | in terms of wit and so on.

02:34:56.000 | I mean, you have to, there's certain people

02:34:58.160 | I have, like, when I talk on this podcast,

02:34:59.680 | they're like that, certain people

02:35:01.680 | from the Jewish tradition have that,

02:35:03.400 | like where the wit is just like, okay, I have to,

02:35:06.920 | oh yeah, I really have to pay attention,

02:35:09.360 | it's a game, it's like, you know what it feels like?

02:35:12.400 | It feels like speed chess or something like that,

02:35:14.680 | and you really have to focus and play,

02:35:17.440 | and at the same time, there's body language,

02:35:19.520 | and then there's a melancholy nature to it,

02:35:22.280 | at least on the Russian side,

02:35:23.520 | and the whole thing is just a beautiful mess.

02:35:25.800 | - Yeah, I mean, there's a funny TikTok video

02:35:27.080 | that went around that I got from some Afghan acquaintances

02:35:30.320 | that was, he's an Irish comedian,

02:35:33.120 | kind of highlighting Irish and German

02:35:37.160 | national stereotypes around hospitality,

02:35:39.760 | and this Afghan woman said, "I didn't know

02:35:41.920 | "that the Irish were just white Afghans,"

02:35:45.000 | because the whole hospitality, politics of refusal,

02:35:48.360 | you don't take something that's offered to you

02:35:51.560 | the first time, you don't, I mean,

02:35:52.880 | it's the culture of receiving a guest,

02:35:57.080 | that's, Americans aren't, I mean, that's not always,

02:36:01.480 | I mean, the regional culture is, that's a thing,

02:36:03.520 | there's whatever, but it's, I mean,

02:36:05.200 | the kind of generosity and the kind of,

02:36:08.560 | that's real, I mean, and that's a cool thing,

02:36:11.480 | and that's amazing, that's, you know,

02:36:13.160 | the food, I mean, going off just the superficial things,

02:36:14.840 | but all of that, the warmth of hospitality

02:36:19.080 | and of wit and humanity, I mean, it's,

02:36:23.600 | that's what we don't see viewing the place

02:36:25.840 | just through war and geopolitics

02:36:27.720 | and the moving pieces of the map and stuff,

02:36:29.160 | and that's hard to see when there are gaps in language

02:36:33.560 | and religious tradition and all that stuff,

02:36:35.840 | and then, you know, being open to the fact

02:36:38.440 | that people do things differently, you know,

02:36:41.080 | and it's, and the gender dimension there is important,

02:36:43.520 | right, that they're kind of, you know,

02:36:46.920 | arguably each culture has a kind of gender dynamic

02:36:48.800 | that's different, and so I think it's helpful

02:36:50.360 | to have humility in thinking that some Afghans

02:36:53.120 | will do some things differently, you know,

02:36:55.720 | but then you'll also have Afghans who say,

02:36:57.720 | every woman should be educated,

02:36:59.840 | every woman should work, and so on and so on,

02:37:01.280 | so there's no single way of, yeah, yeah.

02:37:03.480 | - And there is a gender dynamic in Russia, too,

02:37:05.800 | that we need to be respectful of that, like--

02:37:07.880 | - And that's not always what it looks like at first.

02:37:10.080 | - Yeah, exactly, there's layers.

02:37:11.360 | - Like where power is, I mean, that's definitely,

02:37:13.160 | I don't know, yeah.

02:37:14.320 | - Yeah, that's a whole 'nother conversation

02:37:16.040 | of where the power is.

02:37:17.240 | - Yeah.

02:37:18.240 | - Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet

02:37:20.680 | who was born on a land that is now Afghanistan,

02:37:24.040 | is there something in his words that speaks to you

02:37:26.960 | about the spirit of the Afghan people?

02:37:29.480 | - I mean, everyone owns Rumi, I guess that's,

02:37:33.040 | I mean, that's gonna get me in trouble

02:37:34.040 | with certain Afghan fans of Rumi

02:37:36.040 | who wanna see him as an Afghan, I would say.

02:37:39.520 | - Are they proud of Rumi?

02:37:42.000 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:37:42.840 | - Do they see him as an Afghan, do they--

02:37:44.680 | - Yeah, I mean, again, it depends.

02:37:46.160 | I mean, some people will be militant and say,

02:37:49.880 | you know, the Iranians can have him, he's ours.

02:37:52.240 | But they also say, you know, he's,

02:37:55.960 | I mean, you can say, again, he's like Rorschach blot.

02:37:58.040 | I mean, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian,

02:38:02.320 | he's Iranian, he's Afghan, he's a Turk.

02:38:05.980 | I'm trying to think of the analogy,

02:38:06.820 | but he's something special to everyone.

02:38:08.960 | So I guess I would not walk into that conversation

02:38:11.160 | and claim that he's one or another,

02:38:12.480 | but it's a cool thing.

02:38:13.320 | It's the, but I'm glad you brought that up

02:38:15.880 | 'cause that's a good way of seeing something that Afghans,

02:38:20.720 | I mean, we live in our country, Afghanistan,

02:38:22.280 | and say, okay, Rumi's everyone, you know,

02:38:24.760 | Madonna helped make him famous in the United States,

02:38:26.440 | you know, for better, for worse.

02:38:27.900 | They used to sell stuff at Starbucks

02:38:29.200 | and that's all complicated and embarrassing.

02:38:32.040 | And his translations are very much disputed

02:38:35.200 | where you have people be like,

02:38:36.480 | there's some awful Rumi translations and there are,

02:38:38.880 | there are also a lot of, speaking of the internet,

02:38:40.920 | there are lots of fake Rumi quotes.

02:38:42.960 | - Yes.

02:38:43.800 | - You know, like Rumi said, always be your best.

02:38:46.120 | Like, Rumi didn't say that.

02:38:47.840 | You know, that was, you know,

02:38:48.680 | I mean, that's kind of silly stuff,

02:38:49.520 | but then the cool thing is like the,

02:38:52.160 | I mean, I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker,

02:38:56.400 | but you can also, you know, read Rumi as a,

02:38:59.040 | you know, in an Islamic sense,

02:39:01.360 | but you can also read him as a kind of spiritualist,

02:39:03.080 | right, as someone who, or an ethicist or moralist.

02:39:05.200 | And so I think that's,

02:39:07.000 | I like the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan ecumenicism

02:39:12.680 | and cosmopolitanism.

02:39:14.080 | You know, the theme I keep emphasizing

02:39:15.360 | of meeting actual Afghans who were actually,

02:39:19.200 | you know, fluent in Russian, fluent in German,

02:39:22.400 | fluent in Turkish.

02:39:24.000 | They know Dari, they know Pashto.

02:39:25.640 | They've gone to university or sometimes they haven't.

02:39:29.600 | And yet, I mean, they're,

02:39:31.400 | I like the category of the popular intellectual.

02:39:35.320 | You know, the intellectual who isn't,

02:39:37.200 | isn't formally educated necessarily.

02:39:38.960 | Although of course that's represented too,

02:39:40.480 | especially increasingly now with this generation

02:39:42.080 | of going to university all over the world,

02:39:43.560 | you know, Stanford, MIT, everywhere.

02:39:45.360 | Afghans are well represented there.

02:39:48.360 | But just being, I don't have any kind of worldly knowledge

02:39:51.440 | that is not limited to a province,

02:39:54.200 | to a village, to a hamlet, but sometimes it is,

02:39:57.000 | but sometimes it's not because of,

02:39:59.680 | again, not because of some fairytale story of curiosity,

02:40:04.560 | wandering the globe out of, you know,

02:40:07.720 | some sense of privilege, but out of necessity,

02:40:11.040 | out of survival, of having to adapt.

02:40:12.560 | And it's really extraordinary that,

02:40:15.400 | I mean, also we think about like professions,

02:40:16.920 | like, you know, ask an Afghan, you know,

02:40:20.960 | what does he or she do for a living?

02:40:22.800 | And what have they done in the past?

02:40:23.960 | I mean, the answer is one gets,

02:40:25.520 | shoe salesman, tax cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.

02:40:30.520 | - Yeah.

02:40:32.200 | - I mean, that's not just Afghan,

02:40:34.000 | but that's, you know, that's very common.

02:40:35.800 | - But it's also Russia is the same.

02:40:37.880 | - That's right.

02:40:38.720 | - I think it's whenever there's complexities

02:40:40.440 | to the economic system and the short-term

02:40:43.600 | and the long-term history of how the country develops.

02:40:46.880 | It's basically the people figuring out their way

02:40:50.000 | around a mess of a country politically,

02:40:54.200 | but a beautiful flourishing culture and humanity.

02:40:59.200 | And that creates super interesting people.

02:41:01.480 | - Yeah.

02:41:02.640 | - So we can often see, okay, there's Taliban, there's war,

02:41:05.680 | there's economic malfunction,

02:41:09.620 | there's harboring of terrorists, there's opium trade,

02:41:11.960 | all that kind of stuff.

02:41:12.800 | But there's humans there with deep intellectual lies.

02:41:16.760 | And like, I love the movie "Love Crimes"

02:41:21.200 | and the same kind of hopes, fears, and desire to love

02:41:25.760 | the old Romeo and Juliet story.

02:41:27.720 | And I think Rumi to me represents that.

02:41:30.000 | The wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent

02:41:37.160 | and just beautiful representation of humanity, of love.

02:41:40.860 | Some of the best quotes about love are from him.

02:41:44.700 | Half of them fake, half of them real.

02:41:48.100 | - The best ones are real.

02:41:49.380 | - The best ones are real.

02:41:50.860 | The best ones are real.

02:41:52.020 | Robert, this was an incredible conversation.

02:41:53.860 | - Oh, thank you for having me.

02:41:54.700 | - Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan

02:41:59.380 | and making me, making us realize that there's much more

02:42:04.900 | to this country than what we may think.

02:42:09.000 | It's a beautiful country and it's full of beautiful people.

02:42:13.480 | - You made me think about a lot of new things too,

02:42:15.000 | so it was definitely great on my end too.

02:42:17.440 | So thank you so much.

02:42:19.280 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:42:20.720 | with Robert Cruz.

02:42:21.960 | To support this podcast,

02:42:23.400 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:42:26.040 | And now let me leave you with some words

02:42:27.920 | from Winston Churchill.

02:42:29.800 | History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

02:42:35.360 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:42:38.520 | (upbeat music)

02:42:41.100 | (upbeat music)

02:42:43.680 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #244

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