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[0] One year after the U .S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the situation on the ground in the country is bleak as the Taliban tightens its grip on citizens who suffer widespread poverty and oppression.
[1] In this Sunday edition of Morning Wire, we take a hard look at Afghanistan a year after the withdrawal, with a journalist who found herself detained by the Taliban and subjected to death threats during her recent visit.
[2] It's Sunday, August 14th, and this is Morning Wire.
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[8] What used to be a routine trip to the place where she was once the bureau chief for the AFP, journalist Lynn O'Donnell found herself interrogated, detained, and threatened by the Taliban.
[9] We spoke to Lynn recently about what she witnessed firsthand on the ground in the Taliban -controlled country.
[10] Lynn, thanks for talking with us.
[11] We'll get to your detainment and the death threats, but first, it's been nearly a year since the U .S. withdrew from Afghanistan.
[12] Where does the country stand now?
[13] Oh, gosh, where does the country stand?
[14] And let's start with terrorism.
[15] It is now the global containment zone for worldwide jihadist, Islamist terrorism.
[16] That's one thing.
[17] On the other hand, the Taliban who took over have shown that they have absolutely no interest, even if they had the capacity to govern.
[18] They're just not governing as a government should.
[19] What's the first thing that a government should do?
[20] Keep its people safe, make sure that they've fed, they've got a roof over their head, clean water.
[21] none of that exists in Afghanistan at the moment.
[22] People are literally starving.
[23] So as I mentioned before, I was just in Kabul, and goodness me, it's the saddest place I've ever been.
[24] You know, I was there a year ago.
[25] It was a place that was just dynamic and busy and, you know, just this joy of living, even though they were in the middle of a war.
[26] The people were friendly and open and, you know, welcoming.
[27] And I found a country that is so joyless and dark.
[28] There's no work, there's no money, there's hardly any food.
[29] Prices have soared because food is in short supply.
[30] Afghans eat bread.
[31] That's their staple.
[32] And you used to go with 10 Afghans, which is like, that's the currency and it's like worth a penny.
[33] You'd be able to get a huge disc of this delicious bread straight out of the oven from a corner bakery.
[34] Now you pay the same amount of money, 10 Afghanis, you get a third of that.
[35] Women are in burkers, outside these corner bakeries, sitting under the trees in the heat of the day, waiting for someone to come along and give them bread, or for the lack of customers to make the bake a board and just, you know, give them the bread.
[36] It's a terrible, terrible, humiliating, awful situation.
[37] Just awful.
[38] Yeah, it's tough to hear.
[39] What are the Afghani people saying?
[40] Do they blame the Americans and their withdrawal for all this?
[41] Yeah, there's a lot of deep disgruntlement.
[42] disappointment, a feeling of betrayal, a confusion about why it happened.
[43] Amongst most people, you know, I was in the city and I, you know, I lived in Kabul for a long time and the cities are different to the countryside.
[44] But in the cities, people really brought into the democratic experiment that followed the 9 -11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.
[45] They couldn't understand when Donald Trump did a direct deal with the Taliban.
[46] This is the enemy we were all fighting, our enemy, and yet Donald Trump bypassed the Afghan government and the Afghan people to deal directly with terrorists and did a deal that totally excluded whatever it was that the Afghan people may have wanted.
[47] That was the first betrayal.
[48] The second betrayal was by the Biden administration that decided to stick with the deal.
[49] I think Biden said at the time, this is America's deal.
[50] we feel obliged to stick by it.
[51] I could understand that.
[52] But then the total chaos of the evacuation really sealed the feeling that Afghan people have that they were utterly betrayed and their sacrifices.
[53] More than 100 ,000 people died fighting the Taliban side by side with the Americans and the Western allies, that their sacrifices were worth nothing.
[54] That's how they feel.
[55] Are there still Americans trapped in the country trying to get out?
[56] There are a lot of American citizens, yeah, people who worked with the military, with the government.
[57] That's the same of all the Allies.
[58] There are Western passport holders in their hundreds, if not their thousands, probably their thousands, still waiting for evacuation.
[59] There's still a lot of people in hiding.
[60] Those evacuations are going on very quietly, very secretly, very secretly to America, to European countries like Germany.
[61] But it's the Taliban that is standing in the way.
[62] and the price of a passport, say you have a passport, you have a green card, whatever, and you're able to go.
[63] But, you know, you might have five kids and a wife and your mum and dad.
[64] You all need to go because the sins of one spread to the rest of the family.
[65] You all need to go.
[66] And what if one of you doesn't have a passport?
[67] It's now costing thousands of dollars in bribes to the Taliban to get your passport.
[68] It's an awful.
[69] It's a criminal enterprise that is holding people hostage.
[70] Now, I want to get to what happened to you last month.
[71] We actually had an interview set up with you that was interrupted.
[72] You were detained by the Taliban and are now banned from returning to Afghanistan.
[73] Obviously, you knew you were going into enemy territory in Kabul.
[74] But were you surprised by anything that you saw?
[75] Oh, yes, I was surprised.
[76] I didn't think that they would be so rude or nasty or stupid, really, to expose themselves the way they did.
[77] As you said, I knew the risk.
[78] A proper media visa from the Afghanistan embassy here in London.
[79] It's not a Taliban embassy, it's a Republic embassy.
[80] But I got into the country.
[81] I got through passport control.
[82] I registered as a foreigner, as we're supposed to do when we go into Afghanistan.
[83] You sign a paper with all your details and hand over a photograph.
[84] And I knew that the next day I would be expected to turn up at the foreign ministry and present myself as a visiting foreign correspondent.
[85] And I did all of that.
[86] And I sat down at a desk with the guy who calls himself Abdul Kaha Balke, not his real name, who is a spokesman for the foreign ministry.
[87] He has a New Zealand passport.
[88] He lived in New Zealand for a long time.
[89] He still has family living free in Wellington.
[90] And yet he sat there and he called me a white supremacist colonialist.
[91] He had a list of stories that I have done over the past year or more and said that I'd made them up, that they were untrue, that I was a liar, that the security agency would request my departure, immediate departure from the country because they didn't recognize me as a journalist, and he threatened me. He reminded me of a Taliban suicide attack on a busload of employees of a local television station in 2016.
[92] called TOLO TV, TOLO News, after they did broadcast an incorrect and unsubstantiatable report about the Taliban.
[93] And the Taliban asked them to retract it and corrected, and for some reason, they refused.
[94] And after months of warnings and surveillance that the people at the station knew was going on, the Taliban bombed a bus carrying a couple of dozen employees of Tolo home, and they said this was the retaliation.
[95] Now, he told me that because he said, this is how we treat people who do false reports and you do false reports.
[96] Wow.
[97] So the following day, guys from the intelligence agency came to my guest house.
[98] They took me away at gunpoint.
[99] They interrogated me, shouted at me and threatened me for four or five hours.
[100] And they made me tweet admissions that my work was fantasy.
[101] I'm not a real journalist.
[102] I make stuff up.
[103] and they also made me make a confessional video.
[104] But the whole experience was so Kafkaesque.
[105] It was surreal and darkly comic at the same time as being unpredictable and therefore quite frightening.
[106] It was a very telling expozy of the way the Taliban are trying to run the country, badly with violence and with impunity.
[107] How exactly were you released, and do you worry about retaliation?
[108] Well, I was held for four or five hours.
[109] I was taken to the headquarters of the intelligence agency.
[110] This questioning and forced confession and everything went on until the evening.
[111] And then they delivered me back to my guest house.
[112] I don't fear retaliation because I'm out.
[113] This is the privilege that I have as a foreigner I could leave.
[114] They came to the guest house manager and threatened management.
[115] We can close you down any time.
[116] They detained my driver, who was an old friend.
[117] They kept him for three days.
[118] They beat him up.
[119] They deprived him of sleep.
[120] And when they took him home, they kept his car and his phone, which they've subsequently given back.
[121] They followed me. They locked onto my phone and they tracked me and they detained people that I had met with and interrogated them as well.
[122] And so I think I'm safe because I'm back home in London.
[123] but I don't think it would be wise of me to try to go back again because anybody I'm associated with is in danger and they don't have a profile.
[124] The Taliban was stupid enough and I told them it was a silly idea to make me do this.
[125] I said, you're going to look silly.
[126] They had a bit of a debate about the meaning of the word silly and decided I didn't know what I was talking about but hey, what they do with Afghans is they detain them in community, in a caro in places that their parents don't even, you know, the family don't know where they are for reasons that they may never find out themselves and they are beaten and they are sometimes killed.
[127] They're forced to go into hiding.
[128] A couple of people who I did speak to while I was there described the situation to me as a reign of terror, which sounds like it's hyperbolic, but what it really means is that they are afraid of what would happen to them without anybody else knowing.
[129] They have no idea what the parameters are because there's no law, there's no law in order, and there's no security.
[130] It's rule of the gun.
[131] Well, Lynn, again, we're just glad you're safe and thank you so much for joining us.
[132] Thanks a lot.
[133] I really appreciate it.
[134] That was journalist Lynn O'Donnell, former AFP Afghanistan Bureau Chief, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morningwire.
[135] From all of us here at Morningwire, we hope you're enjoying the show.
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