The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz, a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Robert Cruz. Was it a mistake for the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?

- Yes. - As simple as yes, why was it a mistake? - I'm a historian, so I say this with some humility about what we can know. I think I'd still like to know much more about what was going on in the White House, you know, in the hours, days, weeks, you know, after 9/11.

But I think the George W. Bush administration acted in a state of panic. And I think they wanted to show kind of toughness. They wanted to show some kind of resolve. You know, this was a horrific act that played out, you know, on everyone's television screens. And I think it was really a, fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy within the White House, within the Oval Office.

And I think they felt like they had to do something and something dramatic. I think they didn't really think through, you know, who they were fighting, you know, who the enemy was, what this geography had to do with 9/11. I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us, not to say I was, you know, clairvoyant or could see into the future, but I think many of us were, you know, from that morning, skeptical about the connections that people were drawing between Afghanistan as a state, as a place, and the actions of Al-Qaeda in Washington and New York and Pennsylvania.

- So as you watch the events of 9/11, the things that our leaders were saying in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed, maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline of what was being said. One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan, and also what were your feelings in the minutes, weeks, after 9/11?

- I was in DC, I was, you know, on the way to American University, hearing on NPR what had happened, and I thought of the American University logo, which is red, white, and blue. It's an eagle, and I thought, you know, Washington is under attack, and symbols of American power are under attack.

And so, you know, I was quite concerned, and at the time lived, you know, just a few miles from the Capitol. And so, you know, I felt that, you know, it was real. So I appreciate the, you know, the sense of anxiety and fear and panic. And four, two, three years later in DC, we were constantly getting reports, you know, mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks that would befall the city.

So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault. But in watching television, including Russian television that day, 'cause I just installed a satellite thing, so I was trying to watch world news and get different points of view, and that was quite useful to have an alternative, you know, set of eyes.

- In Russian? - Yeah, in Russian, yeah. - Okay, so your Russian is good enough to understand Russian television. - The news, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming that were not shown on American television. I don't know how they had it, but they had, they were not filtering anything in the way that the major networks and cable televisions were doing here.

So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence of the moment, you know, in New York City of people diving from the towers and being, you know, and it was really, they didn't hold back on that, which was quite, you know, fascinating. Much of the world saw much more than actually the American public saw.

But to your question, you know, amid that feeling of imminent doom, I watched commentators start to talk about Al-Qaeda and then talk about Afghanistan. And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin, who's at NYU, who's a, you know, kind of long, very learned Afghanistan hand. And he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News to kind of lay this out for everyone.

And I thought, you know, he did a fine job, but I think it was formative in cementing the view that somehow Al-Qaeda was synonymous with this space, Afghanistan. And I think, again, I was no Al-Qaeda expert then, and I'm not now, but I think my immediate thought went to war, and because my background had been with, at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war, whom I encountered in Uzbekistan, who were refugees and so on, I thought immediately, you know, my mind went to the suffering of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep up, of course, the defenseless people who have nothing to do with these politics.

- So we should give maybe a little bit of context that you can speak to. - Yeah. - So assume nobody's an expert at anything. - Yeah. - So let's just say you and I are not experts in anything. - Right. - What, as a historian, were you studying at the time and thinking about, see, is it the full global history of Afghanistan?

Is it the region? Were you thinking about the Mujahideen and Al-Qaeda and Taliban? Were you thinking about the Soviet Union, the proxy war through Afghanistan? Were you thinking about Iraq and oil? Like, what's the full space of things in your heart, in your mind at the time? - I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was, you know, there's the sense of, you know, the suffering and the tragedy of the moment of the deaths.

And that was, I think, I was preoccupied by the violence of the moment. But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment, I think immediately what came to mind was that little I knew about Al-Qaeda at the time suggested that the geography was inaccurate, that this was a global network, a global threat, that this was a kind of, you know, a movement that went beyond borders.

And I think that it felt early on that Afghanistan was gonna be used as a scapegoat. And just intellectually at the time, you know, I was teaching at American University, my courses, you know, touched on a range of subjects, but I was trying to complete a book on Islam and the Russian Empire, actually.

But in doing that research, which took me across Russia and Central Asia, purely by accident, I had developed an interest in Afghanistan because, just again, a series of coincidences, I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, without housing, through an American friend who was like the king of the market in Tashkent.

He knew everyone, he ran into some Afghan merchants there. They found out I didn't have a place to live. I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly. This was 1997. I had a vague idea it was next door. - Well, you lived in Uzbekistan? - Yeah, in Tashkent, doing dissertation research, yeah.

'Cause it was, you know, hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia. - Yeah. - So just by accident, I ended up with these young Afghans who took me in as roommates. And that, I think, the sense of that community shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is. It was my first exposure to them.

They were part of a trading diaspora. They brought, they had brought matches from Riga, Latvia. They had somehow brought flour and some agricultural products from Egypt. And they were sitting in enclosed containers in Tashkent, waiting for the Uzbekistani state to permit them to trade. So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.

They'll get dressed up. They put on suits and ties, like you're wearing. They'd polish their shoes. And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios. Then they'd feast at lunch. And then at night, we would go out. So part of my research, 'cause I also had a bottleneck in my research.

I was going to the state archives in Tashkent. And because of the state of Uzbekistan, you know, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do. So it took a while to get in. So I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys. So I got to know them pretty well.

And it was really just an accidental kind of thing, but grew quite close to them. And I developed an appreciation of, which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this, these people had already lived, young guys, you know, in their 20s, they'd already lived in 67 countries.

They all spoke half a dozen languages. One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer and break dancer, trained in Tehran. His father was a theater person in Afghanistan. He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan during the civil war, going to Uzbekistan, escaping death there. And these were very, you know, real stories.

- Can you also just briefly mention, geographically speaking, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran. Who are the neighbors of all of this? What are we supposed to be thinking about for people? I was always terrible at geography and spatial information. So can you lay it out? - Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

So Tashkent, you know, is the capital of Uzbekistan. It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century. The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty in 1865. It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917.

It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, which becomes independent finally in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapses. - So these are all like, these republics are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia. - That's right. That's right. And they've been independent since 1991, but they have struggled to disentangle themselves from Moscow, from one another.

And now they face very serious pressure from China to form a kind of periphery of the great machine that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions to stretch across Asia. For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends hailed from, Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s when leftists tried to seize power there in 1978.

The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan, crossing the border with its forces in 1979 to try to shore up this leftist government that had seized power in 1978. And so for Central Asians in the wider region, their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected in 1980s when Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years.

And here I refer your listeners and viewers to "Rainbow Three" as the guide to-- - The historically accurate guide. - The historically accurate, the Bible. The Bible of Afghan history in "Rainbow Three," yeah. As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war. Right? But for most Afghans, there are people who fought against the Soviet Army, but of a certain generation, the guys I knew, their mission was to survive.

And so they fled in waves by the millions to Pakistan, to Iran. Some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in the 1990s and some were displaced across the planet. So California, where we're sitting today, has a large community that came in the '80s and '90s in the East Bay.

- Can I ask a quick question that's a little bit of a tangent? - Yeah. - What is the correct or the respectful way to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran? So as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan. - Yeah. - Or the an versus the an. - Yeah. - Is it a different country by country?

As an English speaker in America, is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan? Or is it the opposite, respectful to say it that way? What are your thoughts on this? - That's a fascinating question. I defer to the people from those countries to of course sort out those politics.

I think one of the fascinating things about the region broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures and are really quite cosmopolitan. So I think people are mostly quite forgiving about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan. - It's not like Paris. - Yeah, yeah, right, right. - The French are not forgiving.

- No, no, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I think people are very, very forgiving. And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right? Iraq, Iraq. I think there's come to be a fit between certain ways of pronouncing these places and the position that Americans take about them, right?

So it's more jarring when people say Iraq and it comes with a claim that a certain kind of person should be the victim of violence or, right? - It's fascinating. It's kind of like talking about the Democratic Party or the Democrat Party. It's sometimes using certain kind of terminology to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement about your beliefs.

It's fascinating. - Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran, I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional in the case of a Democrat or is it just a, you know, and it's a whatever. I think, again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people I know have been very cool about that.

What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's fair to say, I don't mean to speak for millions of people, for a group of people, but I can just share with our non-Afghan friends, the term Afghani is a kind of term of offense because that's the name of the currency.

And so lots of people ask, you know, why having, especially, again, it's more directed at Americans because, you know, we've been so deeply involved in that country, obviously, for the last 20 years, right? So Afghans ask why after 20 years are you still calling us the wrong name? - What is the right name?

- They prefer Afghans. - Afghans. - Yeah, and Afghani is the name of the currency. And so-- - I just dodged a bullet 'cause I was gonna say-- - That's cool, no, no, yeah, I hear you. - It's really great to know. - Yeah, yeah, and it's, again, I think, but I would emphasize that people are quite open and, you know, it's a whole region of incredible diversity and respect for linguistic pluralism, actually.

So I think that, you know, but I also appreciate that during, in this context, when there's a lot of pain, you know, in the Afghan diaspora community in particular, you know, being called the wrong name after 20 years, when they already feel so betrayed at this moment, you know, just kind of, if one follows us on social media, that is one kind of hot wire, right?

- Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation is because, yes, it is true that there are certain things when mispronounced kind of reveal that you don't care enough to pronounce correctly, you don't know enough to pronounce correctly, and you dismiss the culture and the people, which I think, as per your writing, is something that, if it's okay, I'll go with Afghanistan, just because I'm used to it.

I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan. - Yeah, yeah, it's great. - As you do in your writing, Afghanistan suffers from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world. But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the whole region that gives us context for the events of 9/11.

- Right, right. So yeah, if we go back to that day and the weeks that followed, my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent, which is interesting. It was, I mean, they were, so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US about 9/11, right?

Everyone wanted to know what was the relationship between the Serbic violence and that religious tradition with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right? That became the issue, of course, for American security institutions, for local state and police institutions, right? I mean, it became the, I think it was the question that most Americans had on their mind.

So again, I didn't imagine myself as someone who had all the answers, of course, but given my background and coming at this from Russian history, coming at this from studying empire and trying to think about the region broadly, you know, I was very alarmed at the way that the conversation went.

- Can I ask you a question? - Yeah. - What was your feeling on that morning of 9/11? Who did this? Isn't that a natural feeling? It's coupled with fear of what's next, especially when you're in DC. - Right, yeah. - But also, who is this? Is this an accident?

- Yeah. - Is this a deliberate terrorist attack? Is this domestic? - Yeah. - What were your thoughts of the options and the internal ranking given your expertise? - I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative that this was international. I mean, I'd also lived in New York during one of the first bombings in '94 of the World Trade Center.

So it was clear to me that a radical community had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of, and I immediately thought it was a kind of blow to American power. And I was drawn by the symbolism of it. If you think of it as an act, it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will, a kind of a way of speaking to, from a position of relative weakness, speaking to an imperial power.

And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that with horrific real world consequences for all the citizens, victims, for the firemen, the police, and just the horror of the moment. So I did see it as transcending the United States, but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily to do fundamentally about Afghanistan and the history of the region that I'd been studying and the community people that I knew who were not particularly religious, right?

The guys I hung out with actually wore me out because they wanted to go out every night. They wanted to party every night. - Drinking? - Yep. We had discussions about alcohol. I mean, Uzbekistan is famous for its-- - Drinking. - Its drinking. You know, it's-- - That's something to look forward to.

So I do wanna travel to that part of the world. When was the last time you were in that part of the world? - Early 2000s. Well, in the mid 2000s, 2010s. - So wait, so by the way, what drinking? Vodka? What's the weapon of choice? - Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice.

And it informs, you know, and it's, but the fascinating thing, you know, as a student is what you're observing as a non-Muslim, you know, I'm a non-Russian. This is all, you know, culturally new to me. And I'm, you know, a student of all that, right? As a graduate student, doing my work there.

- So you're like the Jane Goodall of vodka and Russia. - That's right. - Just observing. - That's right. - And studying. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get the Samogon, the grass vodka. You get, you know, I have, I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier that I'm not proud of.

(laughing) You know. - But you got to know the people and some of them from Kazakhstan. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But intellectually, so the thing, I mean, the fascinating thing there was that, and just as a, I mean, there's a whole, you know, I'm a historian, right? But there are great contributions by, you know, anthropologists and ethnographers who've gone across the planet and tried to understand how Muslims understand the tradition in different contexts.

So many Uzbeks will say, you know, this is part of our national culture to drink and eat as we please, right? And yet I'm a very devout Muslim. And so, of course, you can encounter other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right? But it's become kind of, I think it's very much, you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression in each of these places.

And so there are ways of thinking, ways of performing, ways of, you know, enjoying oneself that are shared across Soviet and former Soviet space to this day, right? - And you've written also about Muslims in the Soviet Union. - That's right. - There's an article that, there was a paywall, so I couldn't read it.

And I really wanna read it. Is-- - I'll be sure to share with you, yeah. - Moscow and the mosque or something like that. - Right, right. - By the way, just another tangent on a tangent. - Yeah. - So I bought all your books. I love 'em very much.

- Thank you, thank you. - One of the reasons I bought them and read many parts is because they're easy to buy. Unlike articles, every single website has a paywall. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So it's very-- - I hear you, I'm sorry. - Very frustrating to read brilliant scholars such as yourself.

- No, no, no. - I wish there was one fee I could pay everywhere. I don't care what that fee is. - Right, right. - Where it gives, allows me to read some of your brilliant writing. - No, no, thank you, I hear you. No, I think moving toward more kind of open source formatting stuff, I think is what a lot of journals are thinking about now.

And I think it's definitely for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship, that's definitely an important thing that we should all think about. And I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers to do that. So I appreciate that. - This is what I'm doing here. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it, appreciate it. - So your thought was Afghanistan is not going to be the center, the source of where-- - It's not the center of this, and invading that country isn't gonna fix the toxic milestone of politics that produced 9/11, right? I think I'm just thinking of some of the personalities, just thinking about going back to the Tajikistan story, which I'll end with.

I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things, and then asking questions about it, and trying to understand through their eyes what the tradition means to them. And then we had a very narrow conversation about what Islam is that generated, immediately exploded on the day of 9/11, right? And then, of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam and Muslims was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.

So it became a perfect storm, I think, of demonization that didn't sit with what I knew about the tradition, and with the actual people that I had known. 'Cause then going back to, I mean, there were other friends and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tajikistan for a moment, I mean, just thought about my friends who had been, who had suffered a great deal in their short lives, who had been cast aside from country to country, but had found a place in Tajikistan with some relative stability.

And they wanted to go out every night. And they explained, one friend, we talked about it with the alcohol and all that, and he didn't get crazy, but he was like, "You can drink, but just don't get drunk. "That's permissible within Islam," right? And he was ethnic Pashtun. Ethnic Uzbeks had a different view.

Often, the more vodka, the better, and it doesn't violate, as I understand, Islam. So even, it's kind of a silly example, but it's just an illustration of the ways in which different communities, different generations, different people can come at this very complex, rich tradition in so many different ways.

So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are, any kind of expert, whatever, it's always disconcerting to see your field of specialization be flattened, right? And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments for violence, right? - Mixed up with the natural human feelings of hate and depression. - And hurt, in pain.

So I mean, that day, I vividly remember, I sat with other PhD historians in different fields. We, oddly enough, had lunch that day, and it kind of deserted Washington. Some place was open, we went. And we just thought, this is gonna kind of open up like a great mall of destruction.

And the American state is going to destroy, and it's gonna destroy in this geography. And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons. And then I think if one, you know, I'd been doing some research on Afghanistan then, I was kind of shifting to the South, and I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar for some years.

And I think it's clear now that in retrospect, there were opportunities for alternative policies at that moment. - So what should the conversation have been like? What should we have done differently? Because, you know, from a perspective of the time, the United States was invaded by a foreign force.

What is the proper response, or what is the proper conversation about the proper response at the time, you think? - You know, I know my colleague at Stanford, Connally Sirais, would tell me this is above my pay grade. And, you know, she makes a point in her classes to talk about how difficult decision-making is under such intense pressure.

And I appreciate that. You know, I am an historian who sits safely in my office. I don't like battlefields. I don't like taking risks. So I concede all those limits. You know, I'm not a military expert. I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone because of the way I look and because of my nationality and so on, but not a spy.

So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise of all those communities. But I think they acted out of ignorance. They acted, I think, because, I mean, if you think of the, in a way, there was a compensatory aspect of this decision-making. I mean, the Bush administration failed. This was an extraordinary failure, right?

So if we start- - In which way? If we're gonna break down the- - A failure of intelligence. I mean, if you follow the story of Richard Clark- - Who's Richard Clark? - He was a national security expert who was tasked with following Al-Qaeda. Who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration that he passed on to the George W.

Bush administration. And if you look at the work of Connie Lisa Rice, she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaywalled foreign affairs article that you can read announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook. And it was all about great powers. It was about the rise of China.

It was about Russia. I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman who spoke, the Clinton administration repeated again and again the idea of making sure the bear stayed in his cage. Which is why the United States threw a lifeline to the Central Asian states hoping to have pipelines, hoping to shore up their national sovereignty as a way of containing Russia initially, but also Iran, which sits to the south and west.

And then peripherally looking down the road to China to the east. - So the bear is what, like Russia? Or is it kind of like some weird combination of Russia, Iran, and China? - The bear is Russia. And Russia is this, I'm trying to characterize the imagination of some of these national security figures.

This is an image formed in the Cold War. I mean, it has deeper seeds in European and Western intellectual thought that go back at least to the 1850s in the reign of Czar Nicholas I. When we first get this language about the Russian Empire is this kind of evil polity.

Obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism, but the Clinton folks kept that alive. They wanted to make sure that American power would be unmatched. And they being creatures of the Cold War themselves, they look to Russia as a resurgent power well before Putin was even thought of.

- Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep, profound historical piece in Rambo. It's probably, this conflict has to do with another Celeste Stallone movie, "Rocky IV," which is also historically accurate and based on, it's basically a documentary. So there is something about the American power, even at the level of Condoleezza Rice, these respected deep kind of leaders and thinkers about history and the future, where they like to have competition with other superpowers and almost conjure up superpowers, even when those countries don't maybe at the time at least deserve the label of superpower.

- That's right, great point. Yeah, they're all excellent points. So yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many experts, I mean, my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Kakin, was then writing great things about how, if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP, its capacity to actually act globally, it's all quite limited.

But Condoleezza Rice and the people around her came into power with George W. Bush, thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era would be those of the past. Richard Clarke and others within the administration warned that, in fact, there is this group that has declared war against the United States and they are coming for us.

The FBI had been following these people around for many months. And so by the time George W. Bush comes to power, lots of Al-Qaeda activists, well, not lots, but perhaps a dozen or so, are already training in the United States. And what we knew immediately from the biographies of some of the characters of the attackers of 9/11, it was a hodgepodge of people from across the planet, but most of them were Saudi, right?

And that was known very early on, or presumed very early on. So again, if we go back to your big question about the geography, why Afghanistan, it didn't add up. It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target. It was a place to have explosions, to seemingly recapture American supremacy.

And also I think, in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge. And this was a place to have some casualties, have some explosions. And then I think, restore the legitimacy of the Bush administration by showing that we're in charge, we'll pay. I think that was a very old fashioned punitive dimension, which rests upon the presumption that if we intimidate these people, they'll know not to try this again, right?

All these, I would suggest, are all misreadings of an organization that was always global. It had no real center. I mean, it called itself the center, that's one way to translate Al-Qaeda. But that center was really in the imagination. Bin Laden bounced around from country to country. And crucially, I think a dimension that I don't claim to know anything new about, but has endured as a kind of doubt, is the role of Saudi Arabia, and the fact that the muscle in that operation of 9/11 was Saudi, right?

I mean, this was a Saudi operation with, if one thinks again, just on the basis of nationalities, Saudis, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy, and the Egyptian guy had been studying in Germany. He was an urban planner, right? So if one thinks of the imagination of this, I mean, and if you look at the kind of typology of the figures who have led this radical movement, I mean, if you think of the global jihadists, they are mostly not religious scholars, right?

Bin Laden was not a religious scholar. His training was an engineer. Some biographers claim that he was a playboy for much of his youth. But really, these ideas, I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers. I mean, this is an imagination fueled by training and engineering. I mean, a lot of the sociology, if you do a kind of post-pacography of a lot of these leading jihadists, their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship, but actually in engineering and kind of practical sciences and professions.

Medical doctors are among their ranks. And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars who devote their whole lives to study of texts and commentary and interpretation, and then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals, new Muslim authorities, who actually have secular university educations, often in the natural sciences or engineering and technical fields, who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will, to what Muslim scholars call the religious sciences, which are a field of kind of ambiguity and of gradation and of subtlety and nuance and really of decades of training before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues like whether or not it's legitimate to take someone else's life.

- With the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden? - Bin Laden was a visitor. If you look at his whole life course, part of it is an enigma still. He is from a Saudi elite family, but a family that kind of has a Yemeni, Arabian Sea kind of genealogy.

So the family has no relationship to Afghanistan past or present, except at some point in 1980s, when he went like thousands of other young Saudis, first to Pakistan, to places like Peshawar on the border, where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity. And for the most part, the Arabs who went opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.

The bin Laden family had long been based in engineering construction. So it's thought that he used some of those skills and resources and connections to build things. We have images of him firing a gun for show, right? It's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun in what we would call combat.

Again, I could be corrected by this. And I think there are competing accounts of who he was. So he's kind of a, I mean, many of these figures who sit at the pinnacle of this world are fictive heroes that people map their aspirations onto, right? And so people like Mullah Omar, who was then head of the Taliban, was rarely seen in public.

The current head of the Taliban is almost never seen in public. I mean, there's a kind of studied era of mystery that they've cultivated to make themselves available for all kinds of fantasies, right? - Do you think he believed, so his religious beliefs, do you think he believed some of the more extreme things that enable him to commit terrorist acts?

Maybe put another way, what makes a man want to become a terrorist? And what aspect of bin Laden made him want to be a terrorist? - Right, right. I mean, let me offer some observations. I think there are others who know more about bin Laden and have far more expertise in al-Qaeda.

So I'm coming at this in an adjacent way, kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training. So this is my two cents, so bear with me. I don't have the authoritative account. - Which in itself is fascinating because you're a historian of Afghanistan and the fact that bin Laden isn't a huge part of your focus of study just means that bin Laden is not a key part of the history of Afghanistan, except that America made him a key part of the history of Afghanistan.

- I would endorse that, definitely. That's it, I mean, you put it in a very pity way. Yeah, so listen, he was, so he was an engineer. He was said to be a playboy. He spent a lot of cash from his family. You know, like many young Saudis and from some other countries, he was inspired by this idea that there was jihad in Afghanistan.

It was gonna take down one of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union, who, you know, the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 2 million Afghan civilians during that conflict. It's very, you know, plausible and very, you know, completely understandable that many young people would see that cause as, you know, the righteous, pious fighters for jihad who call themselves Mujahideen, arrayed against this evil empire, right, of a godless Soviet empire that, I mean, there's even confusion about what the Soviets wanted.

Right, now we know much more about, like, what the Kremlin wanted, what Brezhnev wanted, and how the Soviet elite thought about it because we have many more of their records. But from the outside, you know, for Jimmy Carter and for Reagan, it looked like the Soviets were making a move on South Asia because they wanted to get to the warm water ports, you know, which Russians always want, supposedly, right?

And it was kind of a move to take over our oil and, you know, to assert world domination, right? So there are lots of ways in which this looked like good versus evil. In Congress, it looked like, you know, kind of Vietnam again, but this time, this is our chance to get them.

And there are lots of great quotes. I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes that American Postal Workers made about wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam. So the CIA funneled, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into this project to back the Mujahideen, you know, who Reagan called freedom fighters.

And so, Bin Laden was part of that universe. He's part of that, you know, he's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen who out of size, you know, did 95% of the fighting. They're the ones who died. They're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right? The Arabs who were there did a little fighting, but a lot of it was for, you know, their purposes.

It was to get experience. It was to kind of create their reputations. Like Bin Laden began to forge for himself of being spokesman for a global project. Because by the late 80s, when Bin Laden, I think was more active and began conspiring with people from other Arab countries, the idea that, you know, Gorbachev came to power in '85.

He's like, let's get out of here. This is draining the Soviet budget. It's an embarrassment. We didn't think about this properly. Let's focus on restoring the party and strengthening the Soviet Union. Let's get out of this costly war. You know, it's a waste. It's not worth it. We don't lose anything by getting out of Afghanistan.

And so their retreat was quite effective and successful from the Soviet point of view, right? It's not what we're seeing now. - What year was the retreat? - I mean, it began, so Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in '85, you know, he was a generation younger than the other guys.

He was a critic of the system. He didn't wanna abolish it. He wanted to reform it. He was a true believer in Soviet socialism and the party as a monopolist, right? But he was critical of the old guard and recognized that the party had to change and the whole system had to change to continue to compete.

And so Afghanistan was one element of this. And so he pushed the Afghan elites that Moscow was backing to basically say, listen, we're gonna share power. And so a figure named Najibullah, who was a Soviet trained intelligence specialist sitting in Kabul, agreed. And he said, we need to have a more kind of pluralistic accommodations approach to our enemies who are backed by the US mainly, sitting in Pakistan, sitting in Iran, backed by these Arabs to a degree, getting money from Saudi.

And he said, let's draw some of them into the government and basically have a kind of unity government that would make some space for the opposition. And for the most part, with US backing, with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing, and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no, we're not going to reconcile.

We're gonna push you off the cliff. And so that story goes on from at least 1987. The last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989. But the Najibullah government holds on for three more years. It is the, I mean, they're still getting some help from the Soviet Union. Its enemies are still getting help from the US mainly.

And it's not until '92 that they lose. And then Mujahideen come to power. They immediately, they're deeply fractured. - And that's where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll. - That's right. And he's part of the mix, but he's also mobile. So he at one point goes, is in Sudan.

He's moving from place to place. His people are all over the world. In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the, once the Mujahideen take power, they have difficulties with Arab fighters too. And they don't want them coming in and messing with, Mujahideen regard this as like, this is an Afghan national state that we're gonna build.

It's gonna be Islamic. It's gonna be an Islamic state, but you can't interfere with us. And so there are always tensions. And so the Arabs are always kind of, I would say they were, Arab fighters were always interlopers. Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money, send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons, but they're never gonna let this be like a Saudi or Egyptian or whatever project.

But then many of those fighters went home. They went back to Syria. They went back to Egypt. Some wanted to go back to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis were very careful. I mean, the Saudis always used Afghanistan as a kind of safety valve. In fact, they had fundraisers on television.

They chartered jets. They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan, get out in the shower and say, go fight. And it was one way that the monarchy, the Saudi monarchy, very cleverly, I think, created a kind of escape valve for would-be dissidents in Saudi Arabia, right? Just send them abroad.

You wanna fight Jihad? Go do that somewhere else. Don't bother the kingdom. But all this became dicier in the early '90s when some of these guys came back home and some of the scholars around them said, let's, we've defeated the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost. I think part of the dynamic we see today is that the Taliban victory is a renewed inspiration for people who think, look, we beat the Soviets.

Now we beat the Americans. And so already watching the Soviet retreat across this bridge back into Uzbekistan, if you see these dramatic images of the tanks moving, a lot of people interpreted this as like, we are going to change the world and now we're turning to the Americans. And our local national governments are backed by the Americans.

So let's start with those places. And then let's go strike the belly of the beast, which is America, which is New York. And going back to Bin Laden, your question about what motivates him, what motivated him, again, he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar. And that, I think, when this comes up in our classes, I think, especially young people, I mean, people who weren't even born in 9/11, I mean, they're shocked.

They see his appearance. They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf of Arabic books. He's got the Kalashnikov. He's got what looks like a religious scholar's library behind him, right? But if you look at his words, I mean, one fascinating thing about just our politics and just one thing that kind of sums all this up, I mean, the fact that on 9/11, we had to have a few people, a few experts, people like Bernard Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert.

So that was one way in which I think, I'm not faulting him personally, but it's just one way in which that relationship appeared to be formed, right, of linking Afghanistan to that moment. If one looks actually at what Bin Laden was saying and doing, people like Richard Clarke were studying this.

There were Arab leaders. The Arab press was watching this because he gave some of his first interviews to a few Arab newspaper outlets. But speaking of our American kind of monolingualism, a lot of what he was saying wasn't known. And so I think for several years, people weren't reading what Bin Laden said.

I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic, but there was great anxiety around translating his works. So we have Mein Kampf, we have all this other stuff. You can buy the collected works of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, whatever you want in whatever language you want. But Bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.

And so it was only Verso in the UK that published a famous volume called Messages to the World, which was the first compendium of Bin Laden's writings. - So he has a Mein Kampf. He has a type, does he have a thing where he-- - I mean, it's a kind of collected works.

It's a collected works of his-- - He had like a blog. It's a collection of articles versus-- - Yeah, these are interviews. These are his missives, his declarations, his decrees, right? But I think just in terms of, if we zoom out for a second about American policy choices and so on, the powers that be didn't trust us to know what he was really about.

I put it that way. And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense. I just think that it was a taboo. I think people, there was a kind of consensus that trust us, we know how to fight Al-Qaeda. And you don't need to know what they're about because they're crazy.

They're fanatics, they're fundamentalists. They hate us, remember that language? Us versus them. But if you read Bin Laden, that's when it gets messy. That's where Bin Laden's argumentation is not fundamentally about Islam. And if you're sitting here with an Islamic scholar, he would say, depending on which Islamic scholar, they would tend to go through and dissect and negate 99% of the arguments that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?

But what strikes me as an historian, who's again, looking at this adjacently, if you read Bin Laden, I mean, the arguments that he make are, first of all, they're sophisticated. They reflect a mind that is about geopolitics. He uses terms like imperialism. He knows something about world history. He knows something about geography.

- So imperialism is the enemy for him? Or what's the nature of the enemy? - It's an amalgam. And like a good politician, which is what I would call him, he is adept at speaking in different ways to different audiences. So if you look at the context in which he speaks, if you look at messages to the world, if you look at his writings, and you can zoom out now, and we now have compendia of the writings of Al-Qaeda more broadly.

You can purchase these. They're basically primary source collections. We now have that for the Taliban. I mean, what's fascinating about, I think, if you'd like this culture, acknowledging it's very diverse internally, is that these people are representatives of political movements who seek followers. They speak. They often are very, I'd say, skilled at visual imagery.

And especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that, I mean, the Taliban used to shoot televisions. They used to blow up VCR, videotapes. They used to string audio and video cassettes from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right? That were killing this nefarious, infidel technology that is doing the work of Satan.

And yet today, one of the keys to the Taliban's success is that they got really good at using media. I mean, brilliant at using the written word, the spoken word, music, actually. And Hollywood, Hollywood is the gold standard. And these guys have studied how to create drama, how to speak to modern users.

I mean, Islamic State did this. I mean, the role of media, new media. I mean, I follow and I am followed by senior Taliban leaders, which is bizarre on Twitter. - On Twitter? - I don't know why they care about me. I'm nothing. - They follow you on Twitter.

- I don't know why. This is no joke, this is no joke. They are part of our modern world. It's how they talk and it's how they recruit. And this is part of the, this is why they are. So Bin Laden, if you read Bin Laden, he speaks multiple languages, I would say.

It's environmentalism. The West is bad because we destroyed the planet. The West is bad because we abuse women. So in class, especially female students are very surprised to learn, and actually say, this feminist argument is not, we start with, this is a murderer. This is a person who has taken human life, innocent life over and over again.

And he is aspirationally genocidal. But let's try to understand what he's about. So we walk through the texts, read them, and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about quotations from the Quran strung together in some irrational fashion. He knows, I mean, at the core, I'd say is the problem of human suffering.

And he has a geography of that that is mostly Muslim, but he talked about the suffering of Kashmir. All right, so if you have a student in your class who's from South Asia, who knows about Kashmir, he or she will say, that's not entirely inaccurate. The Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir.

Pakistanis have done that too. Palestine is an issue, right? So you have, in the American university setting, people across the spectrum who get that, Palestinians have had a raw deal. And so it's a, victimhood is essential and it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary, but as a number of scholars have written, and I definitely think this is a framework for what this useful.

I mean, in this kind of vocabulary, in this framing, this narrative, today, in today's world, if we think of today's world being post-Cold War, 91 to the present, looking at the series of Gulf Wars, and seeing the visuals of that, I think that, I think the American public has been shielded from some of this, but if you look at just the carnage of the Iraqi army that George H.W.

Bush produced, right? Or you think of the images of the suffering of Iraqi children under George H.W. Bush's sanctions, US-British airstrikes, then you have Madeleine Albright answer a question on "60 Minutes" saying, "Do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids "is worth it? "Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein?" And she says on camera, "Yes, it's worth it to me." If you put that all together, I mean, American kids, and of course the American public, they're not always aware of those facts of global history, but these guys are, and they very capably use these images, use these tropes, and use facts.

I mean, some of these things are not deniable. I mean, these estimates about the number of Iraqi civilian children dead, that came from, I think, the Lancet, and it came from, those are estimates. But looking at this from the point of view of Amman, of Jaffa, of Nairobi, just think around the planet, if you see yourself as the victim of this great imperial power, you can see why especially young men would be drawn to a road of self-sacrifice.

And the idea is that in killing others, you are making them feel how you feel. Because they won't listen to your arguments reasonably, because they won't recognize Palestinian suffering, Bosnian suffering, Chechen suffering. You go across the planet, right? Because they won't recognize our suffering, we're gonna speak to you in the only language you understand, and that's violence.

And look at the violence of the post-1991 world, in which American air power really becomes a global kind of fact in the lives of so many people. And then the big mistake after 9/11, among many, I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror to some 30 or 40 countries, so that you have more and more of the globe feel like they're under attack.

And the logic is that essentially, it's not, it's free bin Laden, it's not, we're going to convert you and turn you into Muslims, and that's why we're doing this. That appears, that claim does appear at times. But it's, if you look at any given bin Laden text, I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.

I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying, but he's a modern politician, he knows the language of social equality. You know, that there's a class dimension to it, there is an environmental dimension to it, there's a gender dimension to it. And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in. And when he wants to speak that language, he knew that, you know, he's not a scholar.

So he would often get a few recognized scholars to sign on. So some of his declarations of jihad had his signature kind of sprinkled in with like a dozen other signatures from people who are somewhat known, or at least, you know, with titles, right? So as a kind of intellectual exercise, it's fascinating to see that he is throwing everything at the wall in one level.

That's one way to see that it's a, these are kind of testaments toward recruitment of people who, yes, they're angry, yes, they're unhappy. And this is what, you know, I think for our broader public, it's hard to get, you're like, well, bin Laden didn't suffer. He wasn't poor. Like, yeah, I mean, Lenin, Pol Pot.

- I mean, they're speaking to, they're empathetic to the suffering, the landscape, the full landscape of suffering. It's interesting to think about suffering, you know, America, the American public, American politicians and leaders, when they see what is good and evil, they're often not empathetic to the suffering of others.

And what you're saying is bin Laden perhaps accurately could speak to the ignorance of America, maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people. - That's right. - And I mean, if you look at the speeches and the ideas that are public of Hitler in the 1930s, he spoke quite accurately to the injustice and maybe the suffering of the German people.

It, I mean, charismatic politicians are good at telling accurate stories. It's not all fabricated, but they emphasize certain aspects. And then the problem part is the actions you should take based on that. So the narratives and the stories may be grounded in historical accuracy. The actions then cross the line, the ethical line.

- I thought that too. I mean, it's a, again, if you pick up just one of these texts, I mean, it's a kaleidoscope. So the Hitler analogy is interesting because it's, you know, Hitler spoke to, he could speak to things like inflation, right? Which really existed. But he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans, right?

He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and so on, right? That's also there in bin Laden too. I mean, the idea of, you know, an anti-Semitism, the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders. It's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers. But I'd also hasten to add that it's, for all of the things that we could tick off saying, well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered, Chechens have suffered, and so on.

Bin Ladenism never became a mass movement. I mean, it never really, I think the, I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right? About ideology. I mean, I think the blood on his hands always limited his appeal among Muslims and others. But bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a, there's a great book by a great scholar at UC San Diego, Jeremy Prestholt, who wrote a great book about global icons in which he has bin Laden, he has Bob Marley, he has Tupac, you know, he asked why, you know, when he's doing research in East Africa, why did he see young kids wearing bin Laden shirts?

They're also wearing like Tupac shirts. They're wearing bin Bob Marley shirts. And basically it's a way of looking at a kind of partial embrace of some aspects of the rebelliousness of some of these figures, some of the time by some people under certain conditions. - Well, the terrifying thing to me, so yeah, there is a longing in the human heart to belong to a group and a charismatic leader somehow, especially when you're young, just a catalyst for all of that.

And I tend to think that perhaps it's actually hard to be Hitler. So a leader so charismatic that he can rile a nation to war. And bin Laden, perhaps we're lucky, was not sufficiently charismatic. I feel like if his writing was better, if his speeches were better, if his ideas were stronger, better, it's like more viral, and then there would be more people, kind of young people uniting around him.

So in some sense, it's almost like accidents of history of just how much charisma, how much charisma a particular evil person has, a person like bin Laden. - I think it's fair, evil works, I think. - So you think bin Laden is evil? - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he was a mass murderer.

I'm just saying that his ideas were, they're more complex than we've tended to acknowledge. They have a wider potential resonance than we would acknowledge. I mean, and also I guess just one fundamental point is that thinking about the complexity of bin Laden is also a way of removing him from Islam.

He is not an Islamic thinker. He is a cosmopolitan thinker who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies, which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right? So anti-Semitism, populism, environmentalism, and the urging to do something about humanity, do something about suffering. That's why I think the actual, you ask about what motivates people to do this kind of stuff.

I think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership and this is being reported, if you look at the trial ongoing now in Paris of the Baraklan murders, I think, the court allowed some discussion of the backgrounds of the accused. And they come from different backgrounds, but if there's any common bond, it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime.

Famously in the 7/7 bombings in London, the Metropolitan Police, UK authorities looked at all those guys and what people want is this idea that they must be very pious. They must be super Islamic to do this kind of stuff. They must be fanatical true believers. But what they found with those guys was that some were nominally Muslim, some went to mosques, some didn't.

Some were single, young guys with criminal backgrounds. Some were like, sorry, they were kind of misfits who never succeeded in anything. But others had, at least one of them had a wife and family who he widowed and orphaned. And so there's no, I mean, for policing, I mean, if you're looking at it through that lens, there is no kind of typology that will predict who will become violent.

And that's why I think we have to move beyond thinking about religious augmentation narrowly or by itself and think about things like geopolitics, think about how people respond to inequality, the existential threat of climate crisis, of a whole host of matters, and think about this is a mode of political contestation.

I mean, it's a violent one, it's one I condemn. It is evil, right? But these are people that are, they're trying to be political. They're trying to change things in some way. It's not narrowly about like, I'm gonna impose Sharia law on you. You must wear a veil. You must eat this kind of food.

It's not that parochial. But another quick thought about your interesting claim about charisma in this, I think that the one self-limiting feature of this subculture is that definitely, I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen and that the kind of invisibility is a productive force of a power, which a colleague of mine who knows ancient history far better than I, this is when she looked at Mullah Omar initially, or we talk about Bin Laden, I mean, this kind of studied posture of staying in the shadows, is also a source of authority potentially, because it invites the idea, and it's partly dictatorships do this well.

I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working, and maybe it's the basis for a lot of QAnon or other conspiracy today, that someone's working behind the scenes and things are gonna go the right way. You can't see it. That's almost preferable because you can kind of feel it.

And so not having someone out front can maybe be more effective than having someone out in front constantly. - Maybe, maybe. - And then the whole Bin Laden, Mullah Omar thing like you can't see me, or if you look at Bin Laden's photographs and his video stuff, I mean, he's coy.

Some observers have noted that he's kind of effeminate. He doesn't strike this kind of masculine, he's not a Mussolini, he's not a Hitler, macho, I'm standing, thumping my chest, he's not doing the theatrical chin, the theater people tell us is so aggressive. - Oh, a chin? Just what, bringing your chin up?

- I saw a great BBC theater person, it was kind of a, it was a makeover show about how to become a better- - A dictator? Oh no, a powerful, yeah, leader, authoritarian figure. - No, just how to get ahead in life. And then- - Oh, okay, cool. - And just about acting, how you can act differently, right?

So it was a BBC thing. And this woman claimed that sticking your chin out, like a wrestler does, right, is the most male-to-male- - I love this kind of- - Most aggressive- - Hilarious analysis that people have about power. - But watch the chin, watch the chin. - It's the same as analyzing in wrestling, styles that win, or fighting, or so on.

There's so many ways to do it. - Well, the chin, I mean, the chin is a, could be interesting verbal gesture. And I've watched enough Mussolini footage from my classes to try to pick the right moment. And the chin is, Mussolini's all about the chin, so. - And I have watched human beings and human nature enough to know that there's more to a man, a powerful man, than a chin.

- Yeah, no, no, no, I'm saying it's an act of aggression. I'm not saying it's- - It's one of the many tools in the toolkit. - Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. - So she definitely- - It's not all about the chin, but it's a- - But that's what I'm trying to tell you about Bin Laden.

I don't think he was deliberate enough with the way he presents himself. - What I'm saying about Bin Laden that makes him different from these other characters is that because he played it being the scholar, he played it being a figure of modesty and humility. And that meant that he was often, again, if you watch his visuals, I mean, yes, there's one video of him firing a gun, but if you watch how he moved, how he wouldn't look at people directly, how his face was almost, I mean, he appears to be incredibly shy.

He's not spoken, his voice was low. He attempted to be poetic, right? So it wasn't a warrior kind of image that he tried to project of like a tough guy. It was, I'm demure, I'm humble, I'm offering you this message. And the appeal that he was going for was to see, to project himself as a scholar, his knowledge and humility, the whole package, carried with it an authenticity and a valor that would animate, inspire people to commit acts of violence, right?

So it's a different kind of logic of like go and kill, right? - So he presented himself in contrast to the imperialist kind of macho power. - Bombastic, whatever, yeah. - So that's just yet another way of, and you have to have facial hair or hair of different kinds that's recognized.

We had a very recognizable look too, or at least later in life. - So yeah, no, he tried to look the part. Yeah, yeah. - But I'm saying we're fortunate that whatever calculation that he was making, he was not more effective. - Yeah. - I mean, there's, the world is full of terrorist organizations and we're fortunate to the degree, any one of them does not have an incredibly charismatic leader that attains the kind of power that's very difficult to manage at the geopolitical level.

- Yeah, and we credit the publics, you know, who don't bind to that, right? Who see through this. We credit the critics, you know? Fairly on, going back to 9/11 itself, one of the problems was that US government officials kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility or culpability.

And in fact, dozens of scholars and organizations, hundreds condemned this, but their condemnations never quite made it out. But it created a tension where, you know, if you wore a veil, you must've been one of them and you must be on team Bin Laden. And so a lot of the, you know, I think a lot of the popular violence and discrimination and profiling came out of that urge to see a oneness, which, you know, Bin Laden projected, right?

He wanted to say, we are one community, you know, if you are a Muslim, you must be with me, right? But I think that's where the diversity of Muslim communities became important because outside of small pockets, I mean, they didn't accept his leadership, right? People wore t-shirts in some countries.

I mean, non-Muslims wore t-shirts 'cause he was like, he stuck it to the Americans. So in Latin America, people were like, yeah, that was sad, but you know, finally, I mean, there was a kind of schadenfreude in that moment internationally. - Yeah, it's like Che Guevara or somebody like that.

- Yeah, Che's the other character in Pesel's book, yeah. Yeah, that's right, that's right, yeah. - It's just as simple, it's not exactly what he believed or the cruelty of actions he took. It's more like he stood for an idea of revolution versus authority. - That's right. And that's a great way to understand Bin Ladenism and the whole phenomenon, but I think looking at the big picture, it's also, you wonder, will that ever end, right?

I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk of being a kind of hyperpower like the US where you, in insisting on a kind of unipolar world in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created an almost irresistible target wherever the US wanted to exert itself militarily. - Before I go to the history of Afghanistan, the people, and I just wanna talk to you about just some fascinating aspect of the culture.

Let's go to the end, withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. What are your thoughts on how that was executed? How could it have been done better? - Yeah, an important question. I mean, I would preface all this by saying, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.

I had hoped the war would end sooner. I think there were different exit routes all along the way. Again, I think there were lots of policy choices in September, in October when the war began. There were choices in December, 2001. So we could look at almost every six-month stopping point and say we could have done differently.

As it turns out, though, I mean, the way it played out, you know, it's been catastrophic. And I think the Biden administration has remained unaccountable for the scale of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure that they're responsible for. - Well, okay, let's lay out the full. There's George W.

Bush. There's Barack Obama. There's Donald Trump. - That's right. - There's Biden. So they're all driving this van and there's these exits and they keep not taking the exits and they're running out of gas. I do this all the time thinking, where am I gonna pull off? I'll go to the vertilis empty.

How could have it been done better? And what exactly, how much suffering have all the decisions along the way caused? What are the long-term consequences? What are the biggest things that concern you about the decisions we've made in both invading Afghanistan and staying in Afghanistan as long as we have?

- I mean, if we start at the end, as you proposed, you know, the horrific scenes of the airport, you know, that was just one dimension. I think in the weeks to come, I mean, we're gonna see Afghanistan implode. There are lots of signs that malnutrition, hunger, starvation are going to claim tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter.

And I think there is really nothing, there's no framework in place to foresaw that. - What is the government, what is currently the system there? What's the role of the Taliban? So there could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands that starve, either just almost a famine or starve to death.

So this is economic implosion, this is political implosion. What's the system there like and what could be the one, you know, some inkling of hope? - Right, right. The Taliban sit in control. That's unique. When they were in power in the 1990s, from 1996, 2001, they controlled some 85 to 90% of the country.

Now they own it all, but they have no budget. The Afghan banking system is frozen. - So the financial system's a mess. - And it's frozen by the US because the US is trying to use that lever to exert pressure on the Taliban. And so the ethical quandaries are, of course, legion, right?

Do you release that money to allow the Taliban to shore up their rule, right? The Biden administration has said no, but the banks aren't working. If you're in California, you wanna send $100 to your cousin, so she can buy bread. You can't do that now. It's almost impossible. There are some informal networks.

They're moving some stuff, but there are bread lines. The Taliban government is incapable, fundamentally, just of ruling. I mean, they can discipline people on the street. They can force people into the mosque. They can shoot people. They can beat protesters. They can put out a newspaper. They can have, they're great at diplomacy, it turns out.

They can't rule this country. So essentially, the hospitals and the kind of healthcare infrastructure is being managed by NGOs that are international. But most people had to leave, and the Taliban have impeded some of that work. They've told adult women, essentially, to stay home, right? So a big part of the workforce isn't there.

So I mean, the supply chain is kind of crawling to a halt. Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors, I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy. It exports fruits. Pakistan has been closing the border because they're anxious about refugees. They wanna exert pressure on the international community to recognize the Taliban, because the Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power, because they see that in Pakistan's national interest, especially through the lens of its rivalry with India.

So the Pakistani security institutions are playing a double game. Essentially, the Afghan people are being held hostage. And so the Taliban are also saying, if you don't recognize us, you're gonna let tens of millions of Afghans starve. - So to which degree is Taliban, like, who are the Taliban?

What do they stand for? What do they want? Obviously, year by year, this changes. So what is the nature of this organization? Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful government sort of holder of power, or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so? - Yeah. I mean, the briefest answer would be that they are a clerical/military organization.

They have, this is kind of a imperfect metaphor, but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan to describe them. And that has some attractive elements, because different people who joined the Taliban for different purposes at different times. But today, and people tell us, scholars who know more about the movement than I, have said, "Listen, the Taliban is this kind of hodgepodge of different actors and people and competing interests." And I think, so we have a lot of scholars who say, "Listen, it's polycentric.

It's got people in this city and that city and so on." I think actually, I was always very skeptical. How do they know this? I mean, this is an organization that doesn't want you to know where their money comes from and so on. But I would say, now that we have a clearer picture of what has happened, I'd say they are a astoundingly well-organized clerical military organization that has a very cohesive and enduring ideology, which is quite idiosyncratic if we zoom out and continue the conversation we're having about Islam and how we think about radicalism and who's drawn to what.

People throw different terms around to describe the Taliban. Some use a term that links it to a kind of school of thought born in the 19th century in India, the Doobandi school. But if you look at their teachings, it's very clear now, I think that these labels, it's like saying, "You're an MIT guy." Well, what does that mean?

I mean, MIT is home to dozens of different, potentially, kinds of intellectual orientations, right? I mean, attaching the name of a school doesn't quite capture, I mean, university. - It's complicated. I mean, actually, MIT is interesting 'cause I would say MIT is different than Stanford, for example. I think MIT has a more kind of narrow- - Yeah, I hear you.

Bad analogy on my part, maybe. - Well, no, it's interesting because I would argue that there's some aspect of a brand, like Taliban or MIT, no relation, that has a kind of interact, like the brand results in the behavior of the, like enforces a kind of behavior on the people and the people feed the brand.

And like, there's a loop. I think Stanford is a good example of something that's more distributed. There's sufficient amount of diversity in like all kinds of like centers and all that kind of stuff that the brand doesn't become one thing. And MIT is so engineering. It's so good at that.

- Okay, scratch MIT, scratch Stanford too, 'cause I think Stanford's more like MIT than you might imagine. - But isn't Taliban, isn't it pretty, I don't think there's a diversity. So yeah, sorry, so just to rephrase. So people say, oh, the Deobandi school. I'm like, what is that? I mean, the Taliban are, they're an ethnic movement.

They represent a vision of Pashtun power, right? Pashtuns are people who are quite internally diverse, who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto, who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet, right? There's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere, right? So it's a global diaspora of sorts.

Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination so that lots of Pashtuns can tell you the names of their grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. And that's kind of a, there's a sense of pride in that. Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity, but it's not universal.

So for example, you can meet people who say, I am Pashtun, but I don't know Pashto. So as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous. It also means different things to different people at different times. So saying the Taliban are Pashtun requires lots of qualifiers because lots of Pashtuns will say, no, no, I have nothing to do with the Taliban.

I hate those people. So the Taliban tried to mobilize other Pashtuns with limited success, but their core membership is almost exclusively Pashtun. And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans. We represent pious Muslims. And so in recent two, three years, they've gone further to say, no, we have other ethnic groups.

We have Uzbeks, we have Tajiks, we have Hazaras. And in the north of Afghanistan, in recent years, they did do a bit better at drawing in people who were very disaffected because of the government and they were able to diversify their ranks somewhat. But if you watch, say, August 15 and who they've appointed, what language they've used, how they've presented themselves, it's clear that they are Pashtun, they are male, and they are extremely ideologically cohesive and disciplined, I'd say.

So I think that a lot of the polycentrism, blah, blah, some of that stuff was a way to fight a war. They are fundamentally a guerrilla movement. They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods. Their rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich, taking from the privileged, giving to the poor, being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.

And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing, their central theme, their brand is about public morality. And so their origin story, going back to 1994, is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals who were trying to rape people. And so there's a very interesting kind of like, if it's not like sexuality and on public morality, and really being the core of like, we're gonna restore order and public morality, and how that translates into governance is something they've never sorted out.

I mean, how do you run a banking system if your intellectual priorities are really about the length of a beard? And then their path to power, in a kind of abstract sense, I mean, a lot of that was very much driven by, if you like, propagating the promise of martyrdom.

And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way that, to make it sound ridiculous, make it sound like it's a moral judgment. It's simply, I think, a fact. It's a fact of their appeal that they promised young men who have known nothing else but studying in certain schools, if at all, but they've known fighting, and they've known victimization.

And this isn't, I'm not asking for like sympathy for them, but I think the reality is that a lot of the, we know about the kind of foot soldiers is that they, they lost families in bombings, in airstrikes, in night raids, you know, I mean, orphans have always been a stream, living in all-male society, not knowing girls, not knowing women, hearing things from outside about places like Kabul.

And so there's always been this kind of urban, rural dimension. It's not just that, but I think there's a whole imagination that being Taliban captures. And the whole martyrdom thing is really, it's, you know, I think to any religious person, I mean, it's not a bizarre idea. I mean, it animates, I mean, so many global traditions, you know, but I think the, but you try to tell like an army colonel, right?

If you were to have a conversation with, you know, US Marine about this, I mean, someone get it from their own religious backgrounds, but I think the, it's an alien idea, but I think it is essential to kind of stretch out my notions of saying that's, that's attractive. And now one of the dilemmas going forward is that they've got to pivot from martyrdom.

And some have been, some have told foreign journalists, I mean, it's good that we're in charge now, we're going to build a proper state, but I, it's kind of boring. I want to keep fighting, I want to, maybe I'll do it in Pakistan. - Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they are expressing that thought, some are not even honest sufficiently with themselves to express that kind of thought.

If you're a fighter, you see that with a bunch of fighters or professional athletes, once they retire, they don't know, it's very, it's boring. - Yeah, yeah. - And so like, if the spirit of the Taliban, even the best version of the Taliban is to fight, is to be martyrs, is to, and paint the world as good and evil and you're fighting evil and all that kind of stuff that's difficult to imagine how they can run an education system, a banking system, respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds and religious beliefs and women and all that kind of stuff, so.

- Yeah, and they've walked into Kabul and other major cities, some are young, they didn't know those places, but also the very important obstacle for them is that Afghan society has changed. I mean, it's not what, even for the older guys, it's not what they knew in the 1990s.

Some always had some ambivalence about the capital, but now it's totally different. I mean, they've been shocked to see, I think to me, one of the most striking features of the last few weeks has been that, women have come out on the streets and have stood in their faces and said, we demand rights, we demand education, we demand employment, and these foot soldiers are paralyzed.

They're not sure. - They don't know what to do with women, period. - Yeah, yeah, and they don't know what to do with being yelled at and having someone stick their fingers in their faces. I mean, this is not what they've imagined. And so I think, and at this juncture, there are still foreign cameras around.

So they have committed acts of violence against women, against journalists, they've beaten people, they've disappeared people. - Even with cameras around, even in this tense period. - Yeah, but I think that when the cameras retreat and that's like it happened, it's gonna get much worse, I think. So the challenge now is, can the Taliban rule?

And then this is where the diplomacy is so important because the Taliban can't rule in isolation. And they know that. And part of the success is due to the fact that they became very good at talking to other people in the last, I mean, it's been building for the last decade, but that's the last five years.

And they always have Pakistan's backing. And so the Taliban are, we noted their military force, very effective guerrilla force. They beat NATO. I mean, this is, still hasn't sunk in. I mean, the fact that they, with light arms, using suicide attacks, using mines, improvised explosive devices, machine guns. In some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles.

And from the summer, they got American equipment on a broad scale. They have airplanes. They have a lot that they will be able to use eventually. But still, basically it's a story of AK-47s, some American small arms and mines. So it's very Ho Chi Minh, very old school guerrilla fighting.

And they defeated the most powerful military alliance in world history, probably. So that has not yet sunk in. What that means for American and global politics. And now they're trying to rule, right? They know they need international support. And their most consistent backer has been Pakistan, who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.

Yeah, and this is very important for a Pakistani elite that of course is looking toward India. They wanna have their rear covered, right? They wanna make sure that these postures don't cause trouble for Pakistan. And they like, I mean, for some of the security forces, they like this vision of the Islamic State that the Taliban are building there because those are not citizen from their views of what Pakistan should be.

But the Taliban have been smart enough to kind of diversify their potential international allies. So everyone in the neighborhood has wanted the US to leave, right? If we go back to 2001, there were Iranian and American special forces in the North working together against the Taliban to displace them using Iranian, American, and then Afghan resistance forces against the Taliban.

And that was a real moment of Rav Pashmallah, if we go back to the missed exits. The relation with Iran could have been different at that moment, but the US under George W. Bush, devised this axis of evil language, put them together with their enemy Iraq and the North Korea, all that went South.

That was the most opportunity. But in recent years, the Taliban in Iran have kind of papered over the differences. They allowed the Taliban to open some offices on Iranian territory, likely shared some resources, some intelligence, some sophisticated weaponry. And then the Taliban went to Moscow. And for the Putin administration, they've long been worried that, they see the Taliban as a kind of disease that will potentially move North, in fact Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and maybe creep into Russia's sphere of influence.

Maybe that's why they have a bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan. I mean, the one forward base that Russia still has in Central Asia is in Tajikistan. And so the Taliban were always a worrying point, but also useful because they could say, well, in case the Taliban get out of control, we need to be here.

And so Tajikistan said, okay, you're helping secure us. And yes, it impinges upon our sovereignty, but it's okay. So Putin said, let's give another black eye to the Americans and let's treat the Taliban as if they're the kind of government in waiting. Let's have them come to Moscow multiple times.

This summer, for the last year or two, they've been talking to China. So the photographs of senior Taliban figures going from their office in Qatar, which was a major blow to the US-backed government, the fact that they were able to open up an office in Qatar, that at one point began to fly a flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, that basically said we're a state in the waiting.

And as the US-backed Afghan government failed and failed and failed at ruling too, as they showed how corrupt they were, and as they really alienated more and more Afghans by committing acts of violence against them, by stealing from them, by basically creating a kind of kleptocracy, the Taliban said, we are pure, we are not corrupt.

And look at us, we're winning on the battlefield. And internationally, look, we're talking to China. - We're talking to Putin, we're talking to China. We're a legitimate, powerful center of Central Asia. And also kind of hinting that we have a website. I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing because they began to, and this is important actually, they had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.

Again, after having shot televisions and these kind of ceremonial killings of these infidel devices, right? They said, we have a government, we have commissions, we have a complaint line. They lifted all this technocratic language that you get from any UN document about good governance and all that kind of, generic language that the NGO world has produced for us, right, in English.

They reproduced that in five languages on their Taliban website. And of course, I'm not saying anyone believed this, but it was like, just put me in coach. I know the playbook, I know how to run a government. And look, we have an agricultural commission. We have a taxation system.

And again, this idea, and then on the ground, they had their own law courts and they would creep into a district, assassinate some people, the local authority figures, men of influence, talk to local clerics, either get them on board or kill them, and say, this state is corrupt, but we're bringing you justice.

This is our calling card. We're bringing public morality and justice. And then to a broader world, they said, yeah, things didn't go perfectly, a whole Al Qaeda thing, we should be kind of do over on that. We're not gonna let anyone hurt you from our territory. We just wanna rule and people like us and look.

And so if we look at the neighborhood, Iran, even Central Asian states after a while, recognizing they could make some money. I mean, one thing that Uzbekistan likes about the current arrangement, or they're not hostile to is that they have all these contracts. They can potentially make some money from, the pipeline dream remains alive, running natural gas, oil, to, it was to the Indian Ocean, to markets beyond Central Asia.

It's sitting on a couple trillion dollars probably in mineral resources that China would love to have, of course. And so people are looking at Afghanistan now, after 20 years saying, under American rule, it was a basket case, right? There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent. The world did not start counting civilian casualties in Afghanistan until 2009.

I mean, think about that. It went on for eight years. The Taliban were never really defeated. They just went to Pakistan. They went to the mountains, they went to the woods. And so all these different American operations, as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on, killed countless civilians.

The US never accounted for that. We never even counted. Trump escalated the civilian casualties by escalating the air war. But a lot of this was like very ugly, on the ground, night raid stuff, where you drop into a Hamlet and massacre people. And then you're not honest about what happened, right?

So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth of the Taliban from below. So the foot soldiers, they never ran out of foot soldiers. I mean, the US and its allies killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Taliban fighters over the last 20 years. But they just sprouted up again.

And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture, the male bonding of martyrology, of martyrdom, and of revenge, and a sense of the foreign invader. And I haven't taught a ton of US military people, but through the Hoover, they put officers in our classes sometimes, and met a few wonderful Army and Marine officers who I really enjoyed.

We came from the South like me, always had great rapport with them. And they expressed a range of opinions about this. I think that I learned a lot from someone who said, yeah, I mean, I get why they hate us. I get why they're still fighting because last week, we just killed 14 of their fellow villagers.

So the officers, the guys on the ground fighting this war, we're not stupid about that. I mean, they got the human dimension of that, and yet no one got off the exit, as you said. People kept driving. But going forward now, internationally, it's critical that they have, and they've had meetings.

I mean, what the Taliban have done since August 15th is a lot of diplomacy. They've had meetings, they've had people, they've had Tashkent come, they've had Beijing come, they've had Moscow come. I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad, from security people, from diplomatic circles. And they're counting on things being different this time.

I mean, the first time around, the only people who backed the Taliban by recognition, giving them diplomatic recognition were the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the UAE. And because of Al-Qaeda, because of opium, because of some of the human rights stuff, the US pushed everyone to like, let's not recognize this state, even though the US did.

I mean, Colin Powell famously, in the summer of 2001, we did give a few grants and aid to the Taliban as kind of like massaging negotiations. They kept talking about Bin Laden, but they also wanted them to stop opium production. I mean, Afghanistan throughout all this period we've talked about is the global center of opium production.

I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy continued to today is devoted to the opium trade. - Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin, some of the painkillers. - And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to Hoboken, they are not the source of American deaths.

They are part of a universal market, a global market, which I think any economist would tell you is part of the story of our opium problem. - Something I read maybe a decade ago now, and I just kind of looked it up again to bring it up to see your opinion on this, is a 2010 report by the International Council on Security and Development that showed that 92% of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province know nothing of the 9/11 attacks on US in 2001.

Is this at all representative of what you know? Is this possible? So basically, put another way, is it possible that a lot of Afghans don't even know the reason why there may be troops or the sort of American provided narrative for why there's troops, American soldiers and American drones overhead in Afghanistan?

- Right. I mean, my gut response, not knowing the details of this actual poll, is that that's a very unhelpful way to think about how Afghans relate to the world. And I think it could be, if you go to my hometown in North Carolina, if you knock on some doors, you may meet people who don't know all kinds of things.

I could probably walk around this neighborhood here in California and there'd be all kinds of people who don't know all kinds of things. Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat. I mean, so we could make a lot of certain kinds of ignorance, I think. But I think what I would say, and then there's also a companion point maybe that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse, the return of the Taliban, there's been a big conversation about what Afghans think of us really.

And this famous piece in "The New Yorker" was about how many people liked the Taliban, that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece, were sympathetic 'cause they'd lost family members and all the violence. And the idea kind of was that, we haven't thought about that at all. When in fact, of course we have and lots of people have, but I think if you're just dropping into the conversation, if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage of Afghanistan and the United States, I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during, of course, 9/11 and its aftermath, lots of coverage during Obama's surge, and then quickly dropped down the last decade has been almost nothing.

So if you ask the same question about Americans or other Americans, I'm not sure what they would say to you, what percentage would actually know why the US is in X, Y, or Z either, right? But again, the Afghan side, just to return to that for a moment, I think that we can fetishize these provinces.

They are a kind of a place where Taliban support has been greatest. Also where there's been the most violence, where the Americans have been most committed to trying to root out the Taliban movement. - This is Helmand and Kana. - Exactly, in the South. - What are the other parts?

It's in the South of Afghanistan. - Yeah, and it's mostly Pashtun, not exclusively, but mostly Pashtun, mostly rural. - What is Pashtun? - That's the ethnic group that the Taliban claim to represent, right? So they are this group. - What other groups are there? - Okay, sorry, yeah, sorry.

So in cities, you'll find everything, right? That is in Afghanistan. You'll find Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras. These are people who, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right? Most Uzbeks live in what is now Uzbekistan, but they form majorities in some northern parts of the city. I'm sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.

But what I emphasize is that, and you can find online an ethnographic map of Afghanistan, and you'll see green where Pashtuns live, red where Hazaras live, orange where Uzbeks live, purple where Tajiks live. Then there are a bunch of other smaller groups of different kinds. There are Noristani, there are Baluch, there are different religious communities.

There are Sunni, Shia, different kinds of Shia. - What are the key differences between them? Is it religious basis from the origins of where they immigrated from, and how different are they? - So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous, I think. I mean, there's a kind of mythology that some groups have been there longer, right?

So they have a greater claim to power, but historically, I mean, it's like, you know, ethnic groups anywhere, people have different narratives about themselves. But many Pashtuns would tell you, not all, but many would say, we are the kind of state builders of Afghanistan, the dynasty that ruled much of the space, that was born in the mid 18th century, that ruled until 1973, more or less, generalizing, you know, it was a Pashtun dynasty.

The Taliban have definitely said, to some audiences, we are the rightful rulers because we are Pashtun. The trick though is, I don't mean to be evasive, but just to convey some of the complexity, one quick answer as well, they're majorities and minorities. I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps.

But I would say, suspend any firm belief in that, because that could be entirely wrong. In fact, there's never been a modern census of Afghanistan. So when journalists say, Pashtuns are the majority, they're the biggest group, I would say not so fast. I would say not so fast because of migration is one major issue, no major modern census.

Actually, the Soviets got pretty close, but didn't quite, you know, find something comprehensive and didn't publicize it, knowing that it was, you know, modern times, ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization. It's not innately so, but it's been part of the story. But then you have mixed families, right?

So a lot of people you'll meet, you'll encounter in the diaspora and around. I mean, well, I am, you know, my one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right? Or I'm Pashtun, as I mentioned before, but I don't speak Pashto, right? Or I am Hazara, but you read about us as Shi'i Hazaras.

In fact, I'm a Sunni Hazara, or I'm a secular Hazara, or I'm an atheist Hazara. I mean, everything's possible, right? One of my friends, if he were here, he'd say, "I'm Kabuli, I'm from Kabul." So if you think about it in Russian terms, you know, it means a lot if you're a Muscovite, you know, if you're from Pisa or Moscow, I mean, you know.

- Yeah, well, even here, there's Bostonians, Texans, Californians. - Yeah, yeah, East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff. Those are all part of the mix here. So you asked about Kandahar and Helmand, then I would say, yeah, if you go out to, you know, a pomegranate field, you'll meet a guy who may reckon time differently from you and me, who may not be literate, he may not have ever had a geography lesson, but if you go one door over, you may meet a guy who, you know, whose life path has taken him to live in, you know, six countries.

He may speak five languages. And these are all things I'm not saying, they're all, these are just because people, you know, have money, can go fly around. I mean, they're people who were displaced by war from late 1970s, right? Even already in the early '70s, people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran, you know, as labor migrants.

And once you get to Iran, once you get to Pakistan, once you get to Uzbekistan, you then connect to all kinds of cosmopolitan cultures. In fact, I think one of the themes of the book, you know, that you may or may not have read, it may put you to sleep, you know, Afghan Modern was about, you know, conceptualizing Afghanistan as a cosmopolitan place where for centuries, people went on the move and trade in this area.

You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization of places like Helmand and Kandahar, you know, you fly in or you're part of a Marine battalion and you see people there and they look different. And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize, you know, they look like they've been there for millennia, right, the dress, the whatever, right?

You think of technology, you think of the mud compounds and so on, you think of, you know, animal drawn transportation, that kind of stuff, right? Or the motorbike, right, at most is what they have. But in fact, if you follow those families, their trade has taken them to Northern India for centuries, right?

The trade has connected them to cosmopolitan centers. You know, say they have a scholar in the family, that scholar may have studied all over the Middle East, South Asia, right? You know, their ancestors may have been horse traders who went all the way to Moscow, right? I mean, we have a sort of records of all these people traveling across Eurasia, pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.

And so Afghanistan is this paradox of visually looking remote and looking like it's kind of stuck in time, but the family trajectories and the current trajectories are astoundingly cosmopolitan and mobile. And so, and a conception of being a world center is also quite strong. So, you know, another way to frame that question about like, do they know about 9/11 would be like, why should we know about 9/11?

Because we are at the center of something important, right? We are the center of Asia. We are the heart of Asia. We have a kind of historic greatness. We are, you know, a proud culture of our own achievements. Right, so we're not worried about that, right? That said, I mean, sure, there are different narratives about why Americans are there, why people are being killed.

You know, of course you'd find, you know, they want to convert us, you know, they want our gold, they want our opium, they want X, Y, and Z, right? There was a recent story about a Taliban official sitting in an office in Kabul and a journalist asked him, can you find in this rotating globe, find your country, find where we're sitting right now.

And he was filmed not being able to do it. And so a lot of, you know, race-fiscated Afghans in the diaspora were saying, you know, ha ha, look at this. And that exists. I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom and there'd be a lot of kids who wouldn't know where Afghanistan is too, right?

But I guess I wouldn't use those metrics to suggest that this is a place that doesn't have a sense of its place in the world and of geopolitics. I think if anything, being a relatively small country in a very complicated neighborhood, I mean, everybody, every cab driver, I mean, people have a, I mean, you know, this is where America is different because I don't think Americans have this sense.

You know, we're talking about Moscow and stuff. I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers, I think a lot of them are gonna tell you, like, what's happening in the world and why, right? And it's just part of their thing, right? You can find that in Ghana. You can find that in Mexico City, right?

You find that lots of places. So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in. And a lot of them remarkably had done it firsthand, which is what struck me so much. And, you know, relating my experiences from the 1990s in touch camp places that these guys had already lived in more countries than I'd ever been.

They already knew half those languages. I mean, this one friend's Russian was impeccable. And of course it helped. They had Russian girlfriends. They had, you know, they mixed with the police. They had run-ins. I mean, this wasn't something you got from a book, right? This was like hard knock life.

I mean, one friend was from a wealthy family in this trading diaspora and he was imprisoned. I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan and he talks about how he started like running, running the jail, you know, taking cigarettes to people, doing little things and kind of, you know, these are not stories of like, oh, I went to Harvard and so I'm so learned because of this.

I mean, it's a whole range of experiences. - The interesting thing is the survey is a survey and it doesn't reflect ignorance, as you're saying perhaps, but it may reflect a different geopolitical view of the world than the West has. So if, you know, for a lot of the world, 9/11 was one of the most important moments of recent human history.

And for Afghanistan to not to know that, especially when they're part of that story, means they have a very different, like there could be a lot of things said. One is the spread of information is different. The channels of the way information is spread and two, the things they care about.

Maybe they see themselves as part of a longer arc of history where the bickering of these superpowers that seem to want to go to the moon are not as important as the big sort of arc that's been the story of Afghanistan. That's an interesting idea, but it's still a bit, if at all representative of the truth.

It's heartbreaking that they're not, do not see themselves as active player in this game between the United States and Central Asia, because there's such a critical player. And I feel, and obviously in many ways, get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction with the, you know, invasion of Afghanistan for many years.

And then this rushed withdrawal of troops and now the economic collapse and it's, it's sad in some ways. - No, it's very, I mean, you know, another way to put it is this. I mean, yeah, there's a range of knowledge and you're right, the information flows are peculiar to particular geographies and histories and stuff.

I think that, you know, plucking out one sample from some fairly remote area, from one like follow the agricultural products. I mean, and this is where, you know, I think urban rural divides used to mean a lot more in the 19th century, right? So a lot of like nuts and bolts of history is about conceiving of these kinds of distinctions, you know, but I think that if one has the privilege of traveling a bit, you see that like urban areas are fed by rural hinterlands.

And if you look, think of who actually, you know, brings the bread, the milk, you know, pomegranates and so on, it creates these networks and then, you know, mobility channels, information and so on. But yeah, but your broader point about like the tragedy of this, I mean, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student of mine, an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD, who's now, you know, doctor, he's a great scholar.

You know, we've done several events now trying to just think through what's happened and of course she's very emotionally affected by it and she continues to ask a really great question. If I can get her phrasing right, you know, if you think of the cycle of like the Taliban being in power in 2001 and the way in which that affected women in particular, you know, half Afghan, half of society, right?

Then you think of this 20 year period of violence and, you know, missed exits, right? And repeated tragedy, but also it created a space. I mean, it created a space for a whole, I'd say generationally, it created a sense, a space for people to realize something new. And I think, so we have to attend to the dynamism of the society, right?

So yeah, this happened mostly in Kabul, other big cities, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, but you can't limit your analysis to that because things like radio, television, everyone got a TV channel. There's a wonderful documentary called Afghan Star that I recommend to your listeners and viewers that it's about a singing show, a singing contest show, but you see just for some of these things about like connections, I mean, it's a show by an independent television network that did drama, it did kind of infomercials for the government and huge American investment in it.

So it wasn't politically neutral, but it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff. But it did a singing show that became incredibly popular, modeled upon the British American, American Idol kind of stuff, and you can vote. So it had a kind of democratic practice element, but it's fascinating to see that, you know, people hooked up generators to televisions and watch this.

You know, you think of like literacy rates. Literacy rates are imperfect and, you know, people who study, you know, medieval or modern Europe talk about how, yeah, no one could read and there weren't many books, but if someone had a book, it'd be read aloud to a whole village potentially or a gathering.

So there was much, you know, some of these metrics don't get what people actually perceive as information or exposure because there's a magnifying power of open spaces and hearing radio in group settings, seeing television group settings, having telephone, you know, cheap telephones, which then become an access point to the world and social media, right?

So all this stuff swept across Afghan society as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more. So Afghan society became, you know, in important ways, really connected to everything going on. And so you see that reflected politically in what people wanted. So you had some people, obviously, back to return to the Taliban.

Some people wanted the status quo, but increasingly many more people wanted something else. And one of the great failures was to expose people to democracy, but only give them the rigged version. And so the US, you know, the State Department in particular, continued to double down on faked elections for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.

- What kind of elections? - Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament and for president in Afghanistan again and again from the very beginning. And those elections were partly theater for the US, like for remaining on the road that you're describing, right, for not deviating, for not exiting, because we were building democracy there.

In reality, the US government knew it was never really building democracy there. It was establishing control. And elections were one means to gather control, right? But then you had on the ground, especially among young people, going to university, you know, having experiences that were denied to them before, you know, they took these problems so seriously.

So part of the disillusionment that we see today is that, you know, they believe what the US told them, that they're constructing democracy. And of course, you know, setting a psychos, maybe thinking, well, you know, you're not really doing that, you're backing fraud. - They believed it when they were younger and now they're actually smart enough to understand that it's a farce.

- Yeah. - But in so indirectly had the consequence of actually working. (laughing) - Yeah. - And that it taught the young, well, over a period of 20 years, young folks to believe that democracy is possible and then to realize what democracy is not. - Exactly. - Just the current system.

- Beautifully said, beautifully said. And so, but now look at us, now it's, you know, it's now November. And so this whole period, and I wouldn't say like, you know, I wouldn't cast the last 20 years if we're looking at all the achievements, you know, I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet, like, oh, this is something we should pat ourselves on the back for.

I think that much has happened actually against what the Americans wanted. I mean, that the kind of free thinking, democracy wanting, I mean, even like, yeah, we could point out on the religious go back to the religious sphere. I mean, the African religious landscape became very pluralistic. Lots of young people wanted a different kind of secular politics.

But the old guard who wanted the status quo and wanted something that they'd fought for in 1980s tended to still get American backing as the political elites who still tended to monopolize political power. So all stuff was happening in different ways. I mean, the Americans established this American University of Afghanistan, which was I think one of the best things the US did there.

And I regret that the US didn't fund 20 more, you know, strengthen them across the country, make them accessible people. Because it was, you know, again, it wasn't an engine of Americanization. It was just opportunity. And so the thirst for higher education is really extraordinary there. It was never really met.

The US tended to put money in primary education, which much of that too was fraudulent. But so you have all this interesting dynamism. You have, you know, the arts, you have a critical space. I mean, I call it a public sphere in the classic European sense. You know, the Afghans made of their own.

And again, it wasn't Americanization. It wasn't imposed. It was something that Afghans built across generations, but really with a firm foundation among youth who wanted importantly, a multi-ethnic Afghan society. You asked about postings and that kind of stuff. And a lot of that language in recent years was they were aware that the US-backed government was playing ethnic politics and trying to kind of put people in the blocks and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity.

And there was a younger cohort of people who said, you know, we are Afghan. And it's interesting social media stuff where people would say, I am Hazara, but I'm also Tajik, I'm also Uzbek. I mean, it was a way of creating a multi-ethnic Afghan national identity that embraced everything.

I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian, right? But symbolically it was very important that they rejected being mobilized politically, you know, voting as a Hazara or voting as whatever. And of course there were communities who wanted to vote as that ethnic community. But there were also people who said, you know, let's put a kind of civic nationalism first, one that accommodates ethnic pluralism in a way that rejected a kind of majoritarian politics of one ethnic group dominating the thing.

So all this stuff was quite interesting. I mean, women were asserting themselves in across multiple spheres. Of course it remained patriarchal. Of course there were struggles. Of course there was violence. Of course, you know, there's no utopia. But the door on all that shut on August 15. So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer from the student, now professor, was it, you know, in trying to make sense of this, and you mentioned the tragic arc here, you think of the 20 years, like she asked, you know, why did you go to war in our country?

Basically, why did you do this to us for 20 years when this was never about us? You know, you never asked us if you wanted to come. You never asked us what you wanted to build here. You didn't ask us when you were coming and you didn't ask us when you were leaving.

You just did this all on your own. And we tried to make the most of it. And then you pulled the rug out from under us, you know, at the 11th hour and returned to power, partly by diplomacy. It wasn't at the end, just a military loss. I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions.

I mean, the idea, you asked about alternatives. I mean, giving up Bagram, I mean, holding to the timeline. I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold to the Doha agreement that Trump had signed. I mean, every American president writes his or her own foreign policy, right? So the Biden administration acted as if, and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied and that it was either this or 20 more years of war or some absurd kind of false alternative.

And so, but I think that's important for American audiences to hear that, you know, they're like, you came to here to experiment. You came here to punish. You came here to kind of reassert, you know, your dominance at the world stage, you know, to work out the fear and hurt of 9/11 that we talked about, which was so real, you know, and palpable and so important for American politics since then.

Like you worked out your problems, you know, on us, on our territory, and now what do we have for it? You know, and then the people who had a stake in that system, imperfect as it was, have been desperate to leave. And so this, I don't know how much people are aware of this, but, you know, I'm a scholar.

I work in California, you know, I have friends. I edited a journal on Afghanistan and, you know, but I'm not a politician, I'm not a soldier, but people assume that, you know, Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American to help get them out.

You know, that's the kind of like, you know, the symbol of voting with your feet, you know, is quite powerful. I mean, there's a huge swath of society that doesn't want the system and is literally living in terror about it. Naturally, women, you know, I mean, especially women of a certain age, I mean, they feel like their lives are over.

I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide. They feel betrayed and some people have done some good things in getting people out. You know, I mean, some, you know, the US military vets have been, you know, at the forefront of working to get out people, you know, that they know they owe.

But the US government doesn't want these people. I mean, they have created all these obstacles to allowing a safety valve for people to leave. - Looking forward from a perspective of leadership, how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes? So obviously some interests, some aspects of human nature led to this war.

- Yeah. - How do we resist that in the future? - I guess beyond my moral and intellectual capacity, I'll just say this. I mean, looking at it, again, looking at it from, you know, my home ground is the university and I think of the intellectual, you know, ways of thinking that I think students should develop for themselves as citizens, right?

Maybe that's where to start is like historical thinking. I mean, these are all, you know, I try to tell people, you know, if you want to do robotics, computer science, you'd be a doctor or whatever. - You should study history. - Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be an historian like me and it's, you know, my job isn't perfect.

My profession is deeply flawed, right? But as I get older, I'm like, there are fewer and fewer historians actually like, you know, I want to hang out with and stuff. So it's like, I'm not offering myself as like a model for anything, but you know, whether you're a, you know, you carry the mail or you're a brain surgeon, whatever.

I mean, I think it's a way of civic engagement and a way of like, you know, ethical being in the world that we need to familiarize ourselves with. Because if you're an American or if you're from a rich country, you know, you need to be aware of your effect on an interesting world.

You can't say anymore that you don't know or care what's happening in Afghanistan or really circle the globe and point to a place. I mean, we're all connected and we're all, we have ethical obligations. That's one place to start, but I would just say this, and this is a, I'll offer a self critique, and that is so much of my teaching and like the themes of my research have been about empire.

You know, how big states work, not only on big territories like the Russian empire and Soviet Union and stuff, but the way in which power often, you know, is projected beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see. So this is where things like neoliberalism or just, you know, if you want to take capitalism or just things that, you know, the idea of humanity or of liberalism or of humanitarianism, ideas that move beyond state boundaries are all things that we think about as affecting power in some ways that often harm people, right?

So I think part of, as I've seen my job so far is to think about, you know, building upon the work of my people in grad school and, you know, scholars that have affected me. I mean, you know, we're all concerned with how power works and its effects and trying to be attuned to understanding things that aren't visible, right?

That we should be thinking about, that should be known to us. And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role in showing effects that aren't, you know, obvious initially. So empire is a framework to think about this. And so you think about evading foreign countries, obviously, if you're a scholar of empire, you've seen what that looks like, and that's horrific, right?

You look at things like racism as one of the ideological pillars of empire, you know, that's horrific, it must be critiqued, it must be, you know, we must be educated against. Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire is also something to highlight, you know, to rectify and so on.

You know, to be moral beings, we need to think about past inequality and the legacies of violence and destruction that live on. I mean, living in the Americas, I mean, look at, you know, we're all on stolen land, we're all in the sense, living with the fruits of genocide and slavery and all those things that are hard to come to terms with, right?

But the last few months in Afghanistan, and thinking about empire, I think made me more humble when I read people who say, to put it simply, have taken some joy in this moment, saying like, well, the Americans got kicked out of Afghanistan. You know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing.

This is a kind of victory of anti-colonial. - You could see from the perspective of Afghanistan that America is not some kind of place that has an ideal of freedom and all the kind of things that we American tell ourselves, but it's more America has the ideal of empire, that there's one place that has the truth and everybody else must follow this truth.

And so from a perspective of Afghanistan, it could be a victory against this idea of centralized truth of empire. That's another way to tell this story. And then in that sense, it's a victory. And in that sense also, I mean, you push back against this somewhat, this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empire.

- Right, right. And I'll say this, I'd say, you know, I mean, I'm a critic of empire. I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon that stays with us. And I think, you know, we need scholars to point to the way in which it still works and still does harm.

But it's part of being an empire that you can just get up and leave a place, right? That you can remake its politics on one day and then because it fails to advance your agenda at one moment, you simply walk away. I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.

I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent, you know, the way that the British withdrew played a significant role in mass violence, you know, that accompanied partition. It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know, dictated that, right? There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know, the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.

I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment as there is now in what's happening in Afghanistan. But I think the capriciousness, I mean, the ability to act as if your political decisions about other people's lives, you know, or something that can be made, you know, in secret, that can be made willy-nilly, that really are beyond the accountability, you know, of those who are actually going to live with the consequences of shifting the cards on a deck in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't.

- I would love to hear your conversation with somebody I just talked to, which is Neil Ferguson, who argues on the topic of empire, that you can also zoom out even further and say, weigh the good and the bad of empire. And he argues, I think he gets a lot of flack for this from other historians, that like the British empire did more good than bad in certain moments of history.

And that's an uncomfortable truth. There's like levels, it's a cake with layers of uncomfortable truths. And it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good. - Right. I mean, I would continue to disagree with Neil Ferguson. So I'm still working out where I am and what this moment does to kind of, I think, qualify my understanding of the past into, I think, in a moment of humility, you know, I do, and I'm probably reacting to the kind of, you know, as you put it, I mean, the idea that this is like a good thing that American power has been defeated here.

I mean, I do think American power should contract. And I don't think, and again, if I had to create a tally sheet of what the Americans did in the US, I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan. Right? It could have done that without invading the country and killing people.

You know, I've not now become an apologist for empire. I'm not now a mini Neil Ferguson, but, you know, ending empire is, I mean, those decisions you make are in some ways a continuation of imperial hubris, right? So you're not really out of empire yet. You're not really contracting empire for those who are living it, you know?

But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way, it's be careful what you ask for. You know, I mean, I wanted the US out of Afghanistan, but I wanted there to be a political settlement. I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right?

I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right? - But why is going to Afghanistan even needed for that? You can play all of those games of geopolitics without ever invading and taking ownership of the place. It feels like the war. - Yeah. - It feels like, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what military force is necessary for, except for targeted intense attacks.

It feels like to me, the right thing to do after 9/11 was to show what was a display of force unlike anything the world has ever seen for a very short amount of time, targeted at, sure, a terrorist, at certain strongholds and so on. - Yeah. - And then in and out, and then focus on education, on empowering women into the education system, all those kinds of things that have to do with supporting the culture, the education, the flourishing of the place.

It has nothing to do with military policing, essentially. - Right. I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it through that lens, I mean, invading Afghanistan and then invading Iraq didn't end Al-Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right? It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely. If you like, you could say there were some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.

But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing. I mean, it spread. I mean, it was never an Islamic thing. It was never a Muslim thing. Some Muslims adopted it in some places, but the circuits of knowledge about how to do these kind of things only expanded with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then they kind of became connected, and then they became to the present.

I mean, the Islamic State is, it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever, because it's on the basis of its supposed new stance as a counter-terrorism outfit, that it will get recognition from all its neighbors. It will get recognition in Russia. I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport, the United States was collaborating with the Taliban against the Islamic State and openly talking about the Taliban as if they were partners in this great operation.

So, and then Al-Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan. - So, trillions of dollars spent. - Yeah. - The drones up above bombing places that result in civilian death, the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers, and those stories, even at the individual level, propagate virally across the land, creating potentially more terrorists.

And a cynical view of the trillions of dollars is the military-industrial complex, where there's just a momentum, where after 9/11, the feeling like we should do something led to us doing something, and then a lot of people realizing they can make money from doing more of that something. And then it's just the momentum, where no one person is sitting there petting a cat in an evil way, saying, "We're going to spend "all of this money and create more suffering "and create more terrorism." But it's just something about that momentum that leads to that.

And to me, honestly, I'm still a sucker. I believe in leadership. I believe in great charismatic leaders and the power of that one to do evil and to do good. And it felt like, I honestly put the blame on George Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden for the lack of leadership in this.

- Yeah, definitely, definitely. I agree, yeah, there is the military-industrial complex component, which is huge. And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership, it's also, I'd say, the imbalance of power within Washington. I mean, the Pentagon used this moment, well, beginning in 2001, I think, to assert its authority at the expense of other institutions of national government.

I mean, the State Department diplomacy has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing. And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians, which I'm not, formally a historian of the United States, but we can go back to talk about Vietnam. We talk about lots of Cold War and post-Cold War engagements.

And I think we need a reckoning about how the United States uses military power, why we devote so much to our military budget and what could be available to us if we had a more sensible view of the value of military power, of its effectiveness. And I think we're willing to hammer home that this was a defeat.

I mean, I think there should be accountability. And if you, and this could be a kind of opening for a kind of bipartisan conversation, because if you are a kind of American militarist, I mean, you have to look at the leadership that got you to a place where you were defeated by men wearing sandals, firing AK-47s, right?

- Yeah, there should be a humility with that. - Yeah. - I mean, we should actually say that, like literally the-- - Oh, we lost, you should say we lost. It wasn't just, you know-- - The American military lost. - Yeah, and I feel, I have very mixed feelings and it's, I don't know, a ton of veterans, but Mitch and I have topped my share and have a student now, and they are suffering because they look at the sacrifices that they made that I didn't make.

I mean, American society didn't make the sacrifices. I mean, men and women lost limbs, they lost eyes, they lost lives. There's been this, of course, quiet epidemic of suicide among veterans. And I've heard some stories, the fact that the State Department is seeing a similar surge of suicides 'cause they see their adult life's work collapse.

They've seen their relationships. I mean, they've seen, they've received phone calls in the middle of the night from people who they entrusted with their lives, who they know are gonna be targeted. I mean, some have already been killed. They've seen the, I mean, I think just, I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally what they believed in and what they sacrificed for has vanished.

And I think that's bad. I mean, historically, thinking of some of the precedents you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of, first of all, at a human level, I feel horrible for those people who, I may not have agreed with everything they had done and their choices in life, but I respect the fact that many good people went out of the best intentions as young people to do the right thing and make things right.

And I respect that. And I've met enough to know that there were people who saw the gray in complexity and that's all you can hope for. But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans. If we look at the other post-war moments, and this is kind of a post-war moment where, I think we need a conversation with American veterans about what they've gone through and what they're feeling.

And they still have skin in the game, because their personal connections and of their histories- - And also gonna be future leaders. I mean, veterans- - Already, yeah. - People who have served are often great men and women. That's- - That's true. - And throughout history, whether you sacrifice, you served in fighting World War II, in fighting Vietnam, that's going to mold you in different ways.

That's going to mold how you are as a leader that leads this country forward. And so you have to have an honest conversation about what was the role of the war in Afghanistan, the war in the Middle East, the war on terror in the history of America. If we just look at the full context at the end of this 21st century, how are we going to remember this?

And how that's going to result in our future interactions with small and large countries, with China or some proxy war with China, with Russia or some proxy war with Russia. What's the role of oil and natural resources and opium and all those kinds of things? What's the role of military power in the world?

And now with COVID, it's almost like, because of the many failures of the US government and many leaders in science and politics to respond effectively and quickly to COVID, we kind of forget that we fumbled this other thing too. And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive.

They seem to be symptoms of something, of a same kind of source problem of leadership, of bureaucracy, of the way information and intelligence flows throughout the US government, all those kinds of things. And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things. - Definitely. I mean, I think if there's one theme that jumps out to me in thinking about this moment, I mean, if we recognize that we live in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States and in other countries that have long been proud of their democratic traditions, if we see them be under assault from certain quarters, I think military defeat is yet another addition to all the aspects of this that you mentioned.

I mean, the fact that military defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this fire, potentially if we think of its legacies and other post-war environments, when the veteran angle is one, when you have people who feel betrayed. I mean, they have been fodder for the far right in other settings.

Interwar Europe is very much about mobilizing disillusioned veterans in the name of right-wing fascist politics. If one thing's too at this moment of really increasing xenophobia, our immigration debate is now talking about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all in the United States after 20 years. And I think immediately the response in Europe, which I follow to some extent, focusing on Germany, because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans leading up to this collapse.

And now they have been, a lot of right-wing center-right politicians in Germany have been watching all this with an eye to, I think using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience to say, in the context of recent elections, that we are the party who will defend you against these Afghans who are gonna be coming from this.

So, what I've tried to emphasize in talking to different groups about this moment is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan or even the region. I mean, obviously malnutrition, hunger, will send Afghans to neighboring states, but where the European right is resurgent, this has been a gift, right? To say that the Afghans are coming, they're brown-skinned, they're Muslim, they're uneducated, they're gonna want your women.

And they will take the odd sexual assault case or the odd whatever dramatic act of violence that happens numerically in any population, and they'll magnify that to say that our far-right group is gonna save the nation. And sorry, the main point I wanted to speak of leadership was that I think the serial, well, there are many, many carnal sins, if you like, but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits, I mean, what blocked some of those exits was an absence of truth and transparency and the lying.

And so, I mean, this is no secret anyone has followed this, but we've allowed, and you think of the general mistrust of government, mistrust of authority across the board, of professors, of economists, of-- - Scientists. - Scientists, doctors, right? - Well, I actually think, that's the hopeful thing to me about the internet is the internet hates inauthenticity.

They can smell bullshit much better, and I think that motivates young leaders to be transparent and authentic. So like-- - I hope so. - The very problems we've been seeing, this kind of attitude of authority where, oh, the populace, they're too busy with their own lies, they're not smart enough to understand the full complexities of the things we're dealing with, so we're not going to even communicate to them the full complexities, we're just going to decide and then tell them what we decided and conceive some kind of narrative that makes it easy for them to consume this decision.

- Right, right. - As opposed to that, I really believe, I see there's a hunger for authenticity of when you're making decisions, when you're looking at the rest of the world and trying to decide, untangle this complexity, the internet, the public, the world wants to see you as a leader struggle with the tension of these ideas, to change your mind, to see, to recognize your own flaws in your own thinking from a month ago, all that, the full complexity of it, also acknowledge the uncertainty as with COVID, also with the wars, I think there's a hunger for that and I think that's just going to change the nature of leadership in the 21st century.

- I hope so, I think all the things you've highlighted, I mean, accountability is part of that, right? I mean, we need honesty, openness, and then acknowledgement of mistakes, I mean, humility is the key to all learning, right? But also, I mean, you think just the headline from yesterday, the horrible drone strike, which was really the last kind of American military action on the day that the US was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul, wiped out an entire family, mostly children, the US acknowledged that, yes, this was not the ISIS bombing outfit that they thought it was, but yesterday they did a quick review and I'm not an expert on drone strikes in the aftermath, but as he was looking more closely, he said it was basically whole cloth taken from what the US government has been saying after all these strikes, you know, reproducing the same language and basically pointing to technical errors, but denying that there were any procedural mistakes or flaws or it was just kind of, they found little ways of acknowledging things that goes plan, but we follow the policies essentially and that's it, it's not a crime, it's a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up and it's kind of the legalese that suddenly makes a war crime, not a war crime, you know, and that is, I feel like, are feasible to take accountability.

- I think people are really sick of that in a way where the opposite is true, which is they get excited for people who are not, for leaders who are not that, and so they're not going to punish you for saying I made a mistake. So I just had a conversation with Francis Collins, the director of NIH, and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci has been that it's like such subtle, but such crucial communication of mistakes made.

If you make a small mistake, it is so powerful to communicate, I think we messed up, we thought this was true and it wasn't. So the obvious thing there was with masks early in the pandemic, there's so much uncertainty, it's so understandable to make mistakes or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria different statements you make lead to, just being transparent about that and saying, we were not correct in saying the thing we said before, that's so powerful to communicate, to gain trust.

And the opposite is true. When you do this legalese type of talk, it destroys trust. And again, I really think the lessons of recent history teach us how to be a leader and teach young leaders how to be leaders. And so I have a lot of hope. - Yeah, good.

Actually, thanks for the internet. - Yeah, yeah, that's great. Oh, humility, I mean, we need humility, accountability, honesty. And yes, studying the past is an important way to do that. I mean, to learn from past mistakes and obviously there's always inspiration and courage and we can take some kind of assistance from that too, but also learning how not to do things, right?

And then analogies are never like one-to-one. I mean, we talk about Vietnam. I think many Vietnam veterans would say, this is like deja vu. I mean, the story, the visuals of the Kabul airport and of the Saigon embassy were not the same, but close enough that people would juxtapose them.

All of us right now, but I would just ask people that over-analogizing is also a kind of path down making errors of judgment and comparison and then sameness. But it's stretched, I mean, like 9/11 itself. I think the idea that people lack the imagination within our security apparatus to think this was even possible, right?

And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock on a cockpit door, could have blunted all this. And again, I'm not saying either the time or hindsight that I am omniscient about all this, but I had just been living in Germany the year before and there was a plot there that this guy was hatching from Germany to blow up the mausoleum of Ataturk in Ankara with an airplane.

And so if you kind of dig, it wasn't unimaginable that you would use an airplane as a weapon. And the Bush administration kept saying, no one had ever heard of this, who would do this? I'm like, well, not a lot of people do this. And then at that very moment, my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel, "Secret Agent," which was about a conspiratorial organization that wanted to bomb, actually in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing 'cause I think they tricked this guy into doing it, but they wanted to bomb the Greenwich Observatory for some obscure political purpose.

So that's an instance in which the novel, to go back to our kind of humanities pitch, that I guess my point was that, as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination. And I think part of expanding our imagination is by, I mean, obviously delving into your fields of engineering and the sciences and robotics and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape.

And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature, I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do to really educate ourselves more fully across the spectrum of everything humans need to reimagine security. So much of what we talked about today, I mean, so much of our security is affected by others' perception of their insecurity, right?

Which unleashes a whole web of emotions. - Can you tell me about the Afghan people, what they love, what they fear, what they dream of for themselves and for their nation? Is there something to say, to speak to, to the spirit of the people that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns and the hopes they have?

- Yeah, I think I, as an outsider, I hesitate to make any grand statement, but I would say, listen, I mean, there are a number of documentary films that are incredibly rich, that will offer your listeners and viewers a snapshot. So there is "Afghan Star," which really brings you into the homes of a set of people who, they want stardom, they're artists, they want to express themselves.

Some wanna push political boundaries, cultural boundaries. There's a woman who gets into hot water for dancing. But you realize that, I mean, people, I mean, they love art, they love music, they love poetry, they love expression. You know, people want to care for their children, they want safety of their families, they want to enjoy what everyone enjoys, you know?

I think it's a very humanizing portrait. There's another great documentary film called "Love Crimes of Kabul," which is a great snapshot of the post-2000 world that the Americans shaped a lot of ways. And it's about a women's prison. And it's incredibly revealing 'cause it's about young girls and what they want.

Well, not just young, but young, teenage, and then some middle-aged people who are accused of moral crimes, ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to, to having sexual relations outside of marriage. And so it shows, in a way, continuity with the previous Taliban regime in that women are imprisoned for things that you wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere, and that Islamo-claw operates as the kind of judicial logic for these punishments.

But in letting these women kind of speak for themselves, I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, I don't want to give too much away, but women make very interesting choices in this film that land them in this predicament. So they don't all profess innocence. Some are like, "I'm guilty," but they're guilty for reasons.

In one case, one woman is guilty. She's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure on her fiance to finally marry her. So you get ethnicity, you get kind of Romeo and Juliet things where their families don't like each other necessarily, but they find each other. You have questions of love, money, clothing, furniture.

It's beautiful. I mean, the parts with it, I remember showing it in class. There was a wonderful Afghan student who was, I think, a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford, and she's a genius. She's amazing. It was awkward for her because, talking about young women having sex and stuff, and it wasn't the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.

And obviously, there's so much more. They're great writers and musicians. And I mean, music is a huge thing. I mean, poetry, all those things are great. So she found it, I hear you. I mean, it's kind of a taboo subject, but I thought the American students seeing it really identified with these women because they're just so real.

And so young people trying to find, I mean, relationships that are universal in circumstances that are very difficult. Love, love is universal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean, we do have resources to humanize. I mean, some of your people will know Khaled Huseini. You know, he's an Afghan-American.

He's done his stuff, but there are a number of novelists and short story writers who do cool things. I think that another tragic aspect of this moment is that those people have now pretty much had to leave the country. So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you named Khadam Ali, who's a Hazara based in Australia.

He does extraordinary work in blending a tradition of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary. His work is between Australia and Afghanistan, but he also, he had to flee. I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul, but it's an extraordinary kind of visual language that he's adapted that has been shown all over the planet now.

He's got some of his work is in New York galleries, is in Europe. He's been shown in Australia, but he talks about migration in a way that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center, but it's totally universal about our modern crisis of all the millions of people who are displaced across our planet.

And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them in a way that like, I think everyone can get. I mean, the visual imagery experts will know that it's from like the Shahnameh, like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to, that Afghans are attached to, that people can quote at length.

That has mythical figures of good and evil that kids grew up embodying. They're named the names of the characters that are, it's called the Book of Kings. The heroes and villains are the staple of conversation and poetry. And like Russians, I mean, the kind of, the resort to literary references and speak is something that Americans don't do, most West European countries don't do, but the fact that everyone's gotta know this character, everyone knows this reference, the wordplay, the linguistic finesse in multiple languages is a major value of Afghan storytelling.

As an outsider, I'm scratching at the surface of the surface. - Yeah, but there's a depth to it. It's just like, it is fascinating. - With the layers, yeah. - With the layers of Russian language that's the culture. - Exactly. - I've been struggling, and this is kind of the journey embarking on to convey to an American audience what is lost in translation between Russian and English.

It's very challenging, and some of the great translators of Dostoevsky, of Tolstoy, of Russian literature struggle with this deeply. It's an art form just to convey that. It's amazing to hear that Afghanistan, with a full mix of cultures that are there, have the same kind of wit and humor and depth of intellect.

- I mean, the humor thing is, so much of our visual imagery is about this sad place in Daur or whatever, but the, I mean, socially, again, I'm gonna engage in some stereotypes about generalization stuff, but just the, you know, the Afghan friends that I've come to be close with and really love, I mean, the humor, there's so much there, I have common stuff of like, when I go to Ireland, it's one of my favorite places, and just like the, I feel a sense of pressure, like the humor all around me all the time, and I feel like there's something between Ireland and Russia with the humor stuff, where it's like, you've gotta be on your game if you wanna be, you know, so it's, it's not, you know what I mean?

- The intensity of conversation in terms of, yeah, you have to be on your game in terms of wit and so on. I mean, you have to, there's certain people I have, like, when I talk on this podcast, they're like that, certain people from the Jewish tradition have that, like where the wit is just like, okay, I have to, oh yeah, I really have to pay attention, it's a game, it's like, you know what it feels like?

It feels like speed chess or something like that, and you really have to focus and play, and at the same time, there's body language, and then there's a melancholy nature to it, at least on the Russian side, and the whole thing is just a beautiful mess. - Yeah, I mean, there's a funny TikTok video that went around that I got from some Afghan acquaintances that was, he's an Irish comedian, kind of highlighting Irish and German national stereotypes around hospitality, and this Afghan woman said, "I didn't know "that the Irish were just white Afghans," because the whole hospitality, politics of refusal, you don't take something that's offered to you the first time, you don't, I mean, it's the culture of receiving a guest, that's, Americans aren't, I mean, that's not always, I mean, the regional culture is, that's a thing, there's whatever, but it's, I mean, the kind of generosity and the kind of, that's real, I mean, and that's a cool thing, and that's amazing, that's, you know, the food, I mean, going off just the superficial things, but all of that, the warmth of hospitality and of wit and humanity, I mean, it's, that's what we don't see viewing the place just through war and geopolitics and the moving pieces of the map and stuff, and that's hard to see when there are gaps in language and religious tradition and all that stuff, and then, you know, being open to the fact that people do things differently, you know, and it's, and the gender dimension there is important, right, that they're kind of, you know, arguably each culture has a kind of gender dynamic that's different, and so I think it's helpful to have humility in thinking that some Afghans will do some things differently, you know, but then you'll also have Afghans who say, every woman should be educated, every woman should work, and so on and so on, so there's no single way of, yeah, yeah.

- And there is a gender dynamic in Russia, too, that we need to be respectful of that, like-- - And that's not always what it looks like at first. - Yeah, exactly, there's layers. - Like where power is, I mean, that's definitely, I don't know, yeah. - Yeah, that's a whole 'nother conversation of where the power is.

- Yeah. - Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet who was born on a land that is now Afghanistan, is there something in his words that speaks to you about the spirit of the Afghan people? - I mean, everyone owns Rumi, I guess that's, I mean, that's gonna get me in trouble with certain Afghan fans of Rumi who wanna see him as an Afghan, I would say.

- Are they proud of Rumi? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Do they see him as an Afghan, do they-- - Yeah, I mean, again, it depends. I mean, some people will be militant and say, you know, the Iranians can have him, he's ours. But they also say, you know, he's, I mean, you can say, again, he's like Rorschach blot.

I mean, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian, he's Iranian, he's Afghan, he's a Turk. I'm trying to think of the analogy, but he's something special to everyone. So I guess I would not walk into that conversation and claim that he's one or another, but it's a cool thing.

It's the, but I'm glad you brought that up 'cause that's a good way of seeing something that Afghans, I mean, we live in our country, Afghanistan, and say, okay, Rumi's everyone, you know, Madonna helped make him famous in the United States, you know, for better, for worse. They used to sell stuff at Starbucks and that's all complicated and embarrassing.

And his translations are very much disputed where you have people be like, there's some awful Rumi translations and there are, there are also a lot of, speaking of the internet, there are lots of fake Rumi quotes. - Yes. - You know, like Rumi said, always be your best. Like, Rumi didn't say that.

You know, that was, you know, I mean, that's kind of silly stuff, but then the cool thing is like the, I mean, I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker, but you can also, you know, read Rumi as a, you know, in an Islamic sense, but you can also read him as a kind of spiritualist, right, as someone who, or an ethicist or moralist.

And so I think that's, I like the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan ecumenicism and cosmopolitanism. You know, the theme I keep emphasizing of meeting actual Afghans who were actually, you know, fluent in Russian, fluent in German, fluent in Turkish. They know Dari, they know Pashto. They've gone to university or sometimes they haven't.

And yet, I mean, they're, I like the category of the popular intellectual. You know, the intellectual who isn't, isn't formally educated necessarily. Although of course that's represented too, especially increasingly now with this generation of going to university all over the world, you know, Stanford, MIT, everywhere. Afghans are well represented there.

But just being, I don't have any kind of worldly knowledge that is not limited to a province, to a village, to a hamlet, but sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not because of, again, not because of some fairytale story of curiosity, wandering the globe out of, you know, some sense of privilege, but out of necessity, out of survival, of having to adapt.

And it's really extraordinary that, I mean, also we think about like professions, like, you know, ask an Afghan, you know, what does he or she do for a living? And what have they done in the past? I mean, the answer is one gets, shoe salesman, tax cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.

- Yeah. - I mean, that's not just Afghan, but that's, you know, that's very common. - But it's also Russia is the same. - That's right. - I think it's whenever there's complexities to the economic system and the short-term and the long-term history of how the country develops. It's basically the people figuring out their way around a mess of a country politically, but a beautiful flourishing culture and humanity.

And that creates super interesting people. - Yeah. - So we can often see, okay, there's Taliban, there's war, there's economic malfunction, there's harboring of terrorists, there's opium trade, all that kind of stuff. But there's humans there with deep intellectual lies. And like, I love the movie "Love Crimes" and the same kind of hopes, fears, and desire to love the old Romeo and Juliet story.

And I think Rumi to me represents that. The wit, the intelligence, but also the just eloquent and just beautiful representation of humanity, of love. Some of the best quotes about love are from him. Half of them fake, half of them real. - The best ones are real. - The best ones are real.

The best ones are real. Robert, this was an incredible conversation. - Oh, thank you for having me. - Thank you for the tour of Afghanistan and making me, making us realize that there's much more to this country than what we may think. It's a beautiful country and it's full of beautiful people.

- You made me think about a lot of new things too, so it was definitely great on my end too. So thank you so much. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Cruz. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill.

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)