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

[0] The following is a conversation with Robert Cruz, a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history of Afghanistan, Russia, and Islam.

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[67] This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Robert Cruz.

[68] Was it a mistake for the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, 20 years ago?

[69] Yes.

[70] As simple as yes, why was it a mistake?

[71] I'm an historian, so I say this was some humility about what we can, though.

[72] I think I'd still like to know much more about what was going in the White House, you know, in the hours, days, weeks, you know, after 9 -11.

[73] But I think the George W. Bush administration acted in a state of panic.

[74] And I think they wanted to show kind of toughness.

[75] They wanted to show some kind of resolve.

[76] You know, this was a horrific act that played out, you know, on everyone's television screens.

[77] And I think it was really a fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy within the White House, then the Oval Office.

[78] And I think they felt like they had to do something and something dramatic.

[79] 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.

[80] 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, you know, the actions of Al -Qaeda in Washington and New York and Pennsylvania.

[81] So as you watch the events of 9 -11, the things that our leaders were saying in the minutes, hours, days, weeks that followed.

[82] Maybe you can give a little bit of a timeline of what was being said.

[83] One was the actual invasion of Afghanistan.

[84] And also, what were your feelings in the minutes, weeks after 9 -11?

[85] I was in D .C. I was, you know, on the way to American University hearing on NPR what had happened.

[86] And I thought of the American University logo, which is red, white and blue.

[87] It's an eagle.

[88] And I thought, you know, Washington is under attack.

[89] And symbols of American power are under attack.

[90] And so, you know, I was quite concerned.

[91] And at the time lived, you know, just a few miles from the capital.

[92] And so, you know, I felt that, you know, it was real.

[93] So I appreciate.

[94] the sense of anxiety and fear and panic.

[95] And for two, three years later, in D .C., we were constantly getting reports, you know, mostly rumors and unconfirmed about all kinds of attacks that will fall the city.

[96] So I definitely appreciate the sense of being under assault.

[97] But in watching television, including Russian television that day, because I just, it just installed a satellite thing.

[98] So I was trying to watch world news and get different points of view.

[99] And that was quite useful to have an alternative set of eyes.

[100] In Russian?

[101] Yeah, in Russian.

[102] Yeah.

[103] Okay, so your Russians is good enough to understand Russian television.

[104] The news, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming that were not shown on American television.

[105] 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.

[106] 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 or being, you know, and it was really, they didn't hold back on that, which was quite, you know, fascinating.

[107] I think much of the world saw much more than actually the American public saw.

[108] But to your question, you know, amid that feeling of imminent doom, I watch commentators start to talk about al -Qaeda and then talk about Afghanistan.

[109] And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin, who's at NYU, who's a 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.

[110] And I thought, you know, he did a fine job, but I think it was formative in submitting the view that somehow al -Qaeda was synonymous with this space Afghanistan.

[111] And I think, again, I was no al -Qaeda expert then, and I'm not now.

[112] But I think my immediate thought went to war.

[113] And because my background had been with, at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war, who my encounter to New Uzbekistan, who were refugees and so on, I thought immediately, my mind went to the suffering of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep sweep up of course the 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're you and i are not experts in anything right what as a historian were you studying at the time and thinking about see uh is it is it the full global history of Afghanistan?

[114] Is it the region?

[115] Were you thinking about the Mujahideen and al -Qaeda and Taliban?

[116] Were you thinking about the Soviet Union, the proxy war through Afghanistan?

[117] Where you're thinking about Iraq and oil?

[118] What's the full space of things in your heart, in your mind at the time?

[119] I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was, you know, that's the sense of, you know, the suffering and the tragedy of the moment of, you know, the deaths.

[120] And that was, I think, I was preoccupied by the violence at the moment.

[121] But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan, as a kind of theater, to somehow respond to this moment.

[122] I think immediately what came to mind was that the 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.

[123] And I think it felt early on that Afghanistan was going to be used as a scapegoat.

[124] And intellectually, at the time, you know, I was teaching at American, university.

[125] My course is, you know, touched on a range of subjects, but I was trying to complete a book on Islam and the Russian Empire, actually.

[126] 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 in Tashkent.

[127] You knew everyone.

[128] Everyone had some Afghan merchants there.

[129] They found out I didn't have a place to live.

[130] I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly.

[131] This was 1997.

[132] I had a big idea.

[133] It was next door.

[134] Well, you lived in Uzbekistan?

[135] Yeah, in Tashkand, doing decision research.

[136] Because it was a hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia.

[137] Yeah.

[138] So just by accident, I ended with these young Afghans who took me in as roommates.

[139] And that, I think that, the sense of that community shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is.

[140] It was my first exposure to them.

[141] They were part of a trading diaspora.

[142] They had brought matches from Riga, Latvia.

[143] They had somehow brought blower and some agricultural products from Egypt.

[144] And they were sitting in closed containers in Tashkent waiting for these Pakistani state to permit them to trade.

[145] So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day.

[146] They would get dressed up.

[147] They put on suits and ties like you're wearing.

[148] They'd polish their shoes.

[149] And they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachos, then they had feast at lunch, and then at night we would go out.

[150] So part of my research, because I also had a bottleneck in my research, I was going to the state archives in Tashkent.

[151] And because of the state of Uzbekistan, you know, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do.

[152] So it took a while to get in, so I had downtime in Tashkent, just like these guys.

[153] So I got to know them pretty well.

[154] And it was really just an accidental kind of thing.

[155] 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 in the 20s.

[156] They'd already lived in six or seven countries.

[157] They all spoke half dozen languages.

[158] One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer and break dancer, trained in Tehran.

[159] His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.

[160] He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan during the Civil War, going to Uzbekistan, escaping death there.

[161] And these were very, you know, real stories.

[162] Can you also just briefly mention, geographically speaking, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you mentioned Iran.

[163] Right.

[164] Who are the neighbors of all of this?

[165] What are we supposed to be thinking about for people?

[166] I was always terrible at geography and spatial information, so can you lay it out?

[167] Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

[168] So, Tashkan, you know, is the capital of Uzbekistan.

[169] It was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century.

[170] The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty in 1865.

[171] It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917.

[172] It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, which becomes independent, finally in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapses.

[173] So these are all like these republics.

[174] are the fingertips of Soviet power in Central Asia.

[175] That's right.

[176] 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.

[177] For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends, hailed from Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s when leftists tried to cease power there in 1978.

[178] The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan, you know, crossing the border with his forces in 1979 to try to shore up this leftist government that had a cease power in 1978.

[179] And so for Central Asians in the wider region, you know, their fate had for some decades been tied to Afghanistan in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected in 1980s when the Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years.

[180] And here I refer your listeners and viewers to Rambo 3 as the guide to the historically accurate guide.

[181] The historically accurate, the Bible of Afghan history in Rambo 3 as a fantastic window onto the American view of the war, right?

[182] But for most Afghans, you know, there are people who fought against the social.

[183] Soviet Army.

[184] But of a certain generation, the guys I knew, you know, their mission was to survive.

[185] And so they fled in waves, you know, by the millions to Pakistan, to Iran.

[186] Some went north into Soviet Central Asia later in the 1990s.

[187] And some were displaced across the planet.

[188] So California, where we're sitting today, has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s in the East Bay.

[189] Can I ask a quick question?

[190] That's a little bit of a tangent, what is the correct or the respectful way to pronounce Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iran, Iran, so as a Russian speaker, Afghanistan, the on versus the N?

[191] Yeah.

[192] Is it different country by country?

[193] As an English speaker in America, is it pretentious and disrespectful to say Afghanistan?

[194] Or is it, or is it the opposite, respectful to say it that way.

[195] What are your thoughts on this?

[196] That's a fascinating question.

[197] I defer to the people from those countries to, of course, sort out those politics.

[198] I think, you know, I think one of the fascinating things about the region broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures and it's really quite cosmopolitan.

[199] So I think people are mostly quite forgiving about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan.

[200] It's not like Paris.

[201] Yeah, right, right.

[202] The French are not forgiving.

[203] No, no, yeah, exactly.

[204] I think people are very, very forgiving.

[205] And I think that, you know, Iranians are a bit, you know, more instructive in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right?

[206] Iraq, Iraq, you know, I think there's come to be a fit between certain ways of penance in these places and the position that Americans take about them, right?

[207] So it's more jarring when people say Iraq and it comes with, you know, a claim that a certain kind of person, you know, should be the victim of violence or right so does that yeah it's kind of like talking about the democratic party or the democrat party it's sometimes using certain kind of terminology to make a little bit of a sort of implied statement about your beliefs that's fascinating yeah i mean i think when i hear iraq and iran i mean i think it yeah is it intentional in the case of a democrat or is it just a you know and it's whatever i think again i think most iranians and afghanes people know have been very cool about that.

[208] What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's fair to say.

[209] I don't mean to speak for entire group of people, but I can just share with our non -Afghan friends.

[210] The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense because that's the name of the currency.

[211] And so lots of people ask, you know, why having, especially, again, it's more directed to Americans because, you know, we've been so deeply involved in that country, obviously for the last 20 years, right?

[212] So, Afghans ask why?

[213] After 20 years, are you still calling us the wrong name?

[214] What is the right name?

[215] They prefer Afghans.

[216] Afghans.

[217] Yeah.

[218] And Afghani is the name of the currency.

[219] And so...

[220] I just dodged the bullet because I was going to say...

[221] That's cool.

[222] No, no, yeah.

[223] That's really great to know.

[224] Yeah, yeah.

[225] 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.

[226] So I think that, you know, but I also appreciate that 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 this on social media, that is one kind of hot wire, right?

[227] Yeah, so the reason I ask about pronunciation is because, yes, it is true that there are certain things were mispronounced.

[228] kind of reveal that you don't care enough to pronounce correctly.

[229] You don't know enough to pronounce correctly.

[230] 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, I say Iraq, Iran, but I say Afghanistan.

[231] Yeah, that's great.

[232] As you do in your writing, Afghanistan suffers from much misunderstanding from the rest of the world.

[233] But back to our discussion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the whole region that gives us context for the events of 9 -11.

[234] Right, right.

[235] So yeah, if we go back to that day in the weeks that followed, in my mind went to the community I knew in Tashkent, which was interesting.

[236] It was, I mean, they were, so Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the U .S. about 9 -11, right?

[237] everyone wanted to know what was relationship between the horrific violence and that religious tradition with its, you know, one billion plus followers across the globe, right?

[238] That became the issue, of course, for American security institutions, for, you know, local state and police institutions, right?

[239] I mean, it became the, I think it was the question that most Americans had on their mind.

[240] 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 the the conversation went can ask a question what was your feeling on that morning of 9 -11 who did this is not isn't that a natural feeling it's coupled with fear yeah of what's next especially when you're in dc yeah but also who is this is this an accident yeah is this a deliberate terrorist attack is this domestic?

[241] What were your thoughts of the options and the internal ranking given your expertise?

[242] I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative that this was international.

[243] I mean, I'd also lived in New York during one of the first bombings in 94 of the World Trade Center.

[244] So it was clear to me that a radical community had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of.

[245] and I immediately thought it was a it was a kind of blow to American power and you know I was drawn by the symbolism of of a you know if you think of it as an act it was a kind of an act of speech if you will kind of a way of speaking to from a position of relative weakness speaking to you know an imperial power and that I saw I saw it as a kind of symbolic you know a speech act of that with horrific, you know, real world consequences for all his innocent victims for the fire and for the police and just the, you know, the horror of the moment.

[246] 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 we had drinking yep we had discussions about alcohol I mean Uzbekistan is famous for it's drinking it's drinking you know it's something to look forward to so I do want to travel to that part of it when was the last time you were in that part of the world early 2000s well then mid 2000s 2010s so wait so by the way we're drinking vodka what's the per yeah I mean the weapon of choice is Pakistan has incorporated vodka as as the um the choice um and that it it informs you know and it's but 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 i'm this is all you know culturally new to me and i'm you know a student of all that right as a grader student doing my work there so you're like the jane good all of vodka and russia that's right just observing that's right yeah yeah yeah and then you you get the you get the somagong the grass vodka you get you You know, I have, I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstan frontier that I'm not proud of, you know.

[247] But you got to know the people and some of them from Afghanistan.

[248] Yeah, yeah, but intellectually, so the thing, I mean, the fascinating thing there was it, and just as a, I mean, there's a whole, yeah, I'm an historian, right?

[249] 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 at different contexts.

[250] So many Uzbeks will say, you know, this is part of our national culture to drink and eat as we please, right?

[251] And yet, I'm a very devout Muslim.

[252] And so, of course, you can encounter other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right?

[253] 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.

[254] And so there are ways of thinking, ways of performing, ways of enjoying oneself that are shared across.

[255] Soviet and former Soviet space to this day, right?

[256] And you've written also about Muslims in the Soviet Union.

[257] That's right.

[258] There's an article that there was a paywalls that couldn't read it, and I really want to read it.

[259] Happy to share with you, yeah.

[260] Mosco and the mosque or something like that.

[261] Right, right.

[262] By the way, just another tangent on a tangent.

[263] Yeah.

[264] So I bought all your books.

[265] I love them very much.

[266] One of the reasons I bought them, and read many parts is because they're easy to buy.

[267] Unlike articles, every single website has the payable.

[268] So it's very, very frustrating to read brilliant scholars such as yourself.

[269] No, no, no. I wish there's one fee I could pay everywhere.

[270] I don't care what that fee is.

[271] Right, right.

[272] It allows me to read some of your brilliant writing.

[273] No, no, I think moving toward more kind of open source formatting stuff, I think is what a lot of journals are, 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 shall all think about and I think um you know we need to exert pressure on these publishers to to do that so I appreciate that this is what I'm doing here yeah yeah good yeah I appreciate it so uh so your thought was Afghanistan is not it's not going to be the center the source of where it's not the center of this and evading that country isn't going to fix, isn't going to fix the, you know, toxic malstorm of politics that produced 9 -11, right?

[274] I think of some of the personalities, just thinking about going back to the Tajikin story, which I'll end with.

[275] I mean, just observing, you know, real Muslims doing things and then asking questions about it and trying to understand through their eyes what the tradition means to them.

[276] And then, you know, you have a, we had a very narrow conversation about what Islam is that, you know, generated, immediately exploded in, you know, on the day of 9 -11, right?

[277] And then, of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam and Muslims, you know, was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia.

[278] So it became a perfect storm, I think, of demonization that didn't sit with, you know, what I knew about the tradition and with the actual people that I had known.

[279] And because then going back to, I mean, there are other friends and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tashkent for a moment, I mean, just that thought about my friends who had been, who would suffer a great deal in their short lives, who had been, you know, cast aside from country to country, but had found a place in Tashkent with some relative stability.

[280] And, you know, they wanted to go out every night.

[281] And, you know, they explained, you know, one friend, we talked about it with the alcohol and all it.

[282] And he didn't get crazy, but he was like, you can drink.

[283] think, but just don't get drunk.

[284] That's permissible within Islam, right?

[285] And he was, you know, ethnic Pashtun.

[286] I think Uzbek's had a different view, you know, often the more vodka the better, you know, and it doesn't violate, as I understand Islam.

[287] So even, you know, 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.

[288] So obviously, whatever kind of scholar you are, any kind of expert, whatever, you know, it's always disconcerting to see your field of specialization be flattened, right?

[289] And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments for violence.

[290] Mixed up with natural human feelings of hate and depression and pain.

[291] So, I mean, that day I vividly remember, I saw that with other PhD historians in different fields.

[292] We, you know, we oddly enough had lunch that day and it kind of deserted Washington, some places, was open we went.

[293] And we just thought, you know, this is going to kind of open up like a great mall of destruction.

[294] And, you know, the American state is going to destroy and it's going to destroy in this geography.

[295] And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons.

[296] And then I think if when, you know, I'd been doing some research on, I've kind of son then, I was kind of shifting to the south.

[297] And I'd been looking at the Taliban from a fall.

[298] for some years and you know I think it's clear now that in respect there were opportunities for alternative policies at that moment so what should the conversation have been like what should we have done differently because you know from a perspective of the time the United States was invaded by a foreign force what is the proper response or what is the proper conversation about the proper response at the time you think.

[299] You know, I know my colleague at Sanford, Conno Lisa Rice, would tell me this is above my pay grade.

[300] And, you know, she makes a point in her classes to talk about how difficult decision -making is under such intense pressure.

[301] And I appreciate that.

[302] You know, I am an historian who sits safely in my office.

[303] I don't like battlefields.

[304] I don't like taking risks.

[305] So I can see all those limits.

[306] You know, I'm not a military expert.

[307] I've been accused of being a spy wherever I'm.

[308] gone because of the way I look and because of my nationality and so on, but I'm not a spy, so I defer, you know, I respect the expertise of all those communities, but I think they acted out of ignorance.

[309] They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the, in a way there was a compensatory aspect of this decision making.

[310] I mean, the Bush administration failed.

[311] This was an extraordinary failure, right?

[312] So if we start.

[313] In which way?

[314] If we're going break down the nature.

[315] A failure of intelligence.

[316] I mean, if they, you know, if you follow the story of Richard Clark.

[317] Who's Richard Clark?

[318] 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.

[319] And if you look at the work of Conno Lisa Rice, she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaid -walled foreign affairs article that you can read, announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook.

[320] And it was all about great powers, it's about the rise of China, is about Russia.

[321] I mean, there's definitely a kind of hangover of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman who spoke, you know, the clip musician repeated again again, the idea of making sure the bear stayed in his cage, which is why the United States through a lifeline to the Central Asian states, hoping to have pipelines, hoping to shore up there, national sovereignty as a way of containing Russia initially, but also Iran, you know, which sits to the south and west, and then peripherally looking down the road to China to the east.

[322] So the bear is what, like Russia or is it kind of like some weird combination of Russia, Iran, and China?

[323] The bear is Russia and Russia is this, again, I'm trying to characterize the imagination of some of these national security figures.

[324] This is an image formed in the Cold War.

[325] I mean, it has deeper seeds in European and Western intellectual thought that go back at least to the 1850s in the reign of Tsard Nichols I, when we first when we first get this language about the Russian Empire is this kind of evil polity.

[326] Obviously, this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism.

[327] But the Clinton folks kept that alive.

[328] They wanted to make sure that, you know, American power would be unmatched.

[329] And they, being creatures of the cult war themselves, they look to Russia as a resurgent power well before Putin was even thought of.

[330] Yeah, I mean, this is, you mentioned one deep, profound historical piece in Rambo.

[331] It's probably the cult, this conflict has to do with another Celesteone movie of Rocky 4, which is also historically accurate.

[332] based on uh it's basically a documentary so um there there is something about the american power even at the level of connoisa rice these respected uh deep kind of uh leaders and thinkers about history in the future where they like to have competition with other superpowers right and almost conjure up superpowers even when those countries don't maybe at that the time at least deserve the label of superpower.

[333] That's right.

[334] A great point.

[335] Yeah, they're all some points.

[336] So, yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many, many exports.

[337] I mean, my my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Cockin, you know, was then writing great things about how, you know, if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP, you know, its capacity to actually act globally, it's all quite limited.

[338] But Condi Rice and the people around her, you know, came into power with Georgia W. Bush, thinking that, you know, the foreign policy challenges of her era would be those of the past, right?

[339] Richard Clark 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.

[340] The FBI had been following these people around for many months.

[341] And so, you know, by the time George W. Bush comes to power, lots of Al -Qaeda activists, or, well, not lots, but, you know, perhaps a dozen or so, are already, you know, training in the United States, right?

[342] 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 mostly they were Saudi, right?

[343] And that was known very early on or presumed very on.

[344] So again, if we go back to your big question about the geography, why Afghanistan, it didn't add up, right?

[345] It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target.

[346] It was a place to have explosions to seemingly recapture American supremacy.

[347] And also, I think, you know, there was, in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge.

[348] And this is a place to have some casualties, have some explosions.

[349] And then I think, you know, restore the legitimacy of the Bush administration by showing that we are in charge, we'll pay.

[350] And I think it was a very old -fashioned punitive dimension, which rest upon the presumption that if we intimidate these people, they'll know not to try this again, right?

[351] all these I would suggest are all misreadings of an organization that was always global.

[352] It had no real center.

[353] I mean, it called itself the center.

[354] That's one way to translate al -Qaeda.

[355] But that center was really in the imagination.

[356] Bin Laden bounced around from country to country.

[357] And crucially, I think a dimension that I don't claim to know anything new about, but it has endured as a kind of doubt is the role of Saudi Arabia and the fact that, you know, the muscle in that operation of 9 -11.

[358] was Saudi, right?

[359] I mean, this was a Saudi operation with, if one thinks, again, just on the basis of nationalities, Saudis, you know, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy, and the Egyptian guy, you know, had been studying in Germany.

[360] He was an urban planner, right?

[361] So if one thinks of the imagination of this, I mean, and in fact, if you look at the kind of typology of the figures who have led this radical movement, I mean, if you think of the global jihadists, they are mostly not religious scholars, but Laden was not a religious scholar.

[362] His training was an engineer.

[363] Some biographers claim, but he was a playboy for much of his youth.

[364] But really, these ideas, I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers.

[365] I mean, this is an imagination fueled by training and engineering.

[366] I mean, a lot of the sociology, if you do a kind of prospochography of a lot of these leading jihadists, their background, are not in Islamic scholarship, but actually in engineering and kind of practical sciences and professions, medical doctors are among their ranks.

[367] And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars who devote their whole lives to study of texts and commentary and interpretation.

[368] 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 in technical fields, who then bring that kind of mindset, if you're you will, to what Muslim scholars call it the religious sciences, which are, you know, a field of kind of ambiguity and of gradation and of subtlety and nuance and really of decades of training before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues like whether or not it's legitimate to take someone else's life.

[369] Were the relation to Afghanistan, who was bin Laden?

[370] Bin Laden was a visitor.

[371] If we look at his whole life course, part of it is an enigma still.

[372] He is from a Saudi elite family, but a family that kind of has a Yemeni, Arabian Sea kind of genealogy.

[373] 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 Bashar on the border, where they wanted to aid the jihad in some capacity.

[374] And for the most part, the Arabs who went opened up hospitals, some opened up schools.

[375] The bin Laden family had long been based in engineering construction.

[376] So it's thought that he used some of those skills and resources and connections to build things.

[377] You know, we have images of him firing a gun for show, right?

[378] it's not clear that he ever actually fired a gun in what we would call combat.

[379] Again, I could be corrected by this, and I think they're competing accounts of who he was.

[380] So he's kind of a, I mean, many of these figures who sit at the pinnacle of this world are, you know, fictive heroes that people, you know, map their aspirations onto, right?

[381] And so people like Mullah Omar, who was then head of the Taliban, was really seen in public.

[382] the current head held on is almost never seen in public.

[383] 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?

[384] 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?

[385] 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.

[386] I mean, let me offer some observations.

[387] I think, you know, there are others who know more about bin Laden and have former expertise in Al -Qaeda.

[388] So I'm coming in an adjacent way kind of from Afghanistan and from my historical training.

[389] So this is my two cents.

[390] So, you know, bear with me. I don't have the all -authoritative account.

[391] 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.

[392] I would endorse that.

[393] Definitely that's it.

[394] I mean, you put it in a very pity way.

[395] Yeah, so listen, he was a, so he was an engineer.

[396] He was said to be a playboy who spent a lot of cash from his his family.

[397] You know, like many young Saudis and from some other countries, he was inspired by this idea that there was jihad in Afghanistan.

[398] It was going to take down one of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union, who, you know, the Red Army did murder hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as two million Afghan civilians during that conflict.

[399] 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 called 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?

[400] Now we know much more about, like, what the Kremlin wanted, what Rajnev wanted, and how the Soviet elite thought about it because we have many more their records.

[401] But from the outside, you know, for Jimmy Carter and then 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?

[402] And it was kind of a move to take over our oil and, you know, to assert world domination, right?

[403] So there are lots ways in which this looked like good versus evil.

[404] In Congress, it looked like, you know, kind of again, but this time, this is our chance to get them.

[405] And there are lots of great quotes.

[406] I mean, disturbing, but really revealing quotes that American policy makers made about wanting to give the Soviets their Vietnam.

[407] 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.

[408] And so Bin Laden was part of that universe.

[409] He's part of that.

[410] You know, he's swimming in the ocean of these Afghan Mujahideen, who out of him size, you know, did 95 % of the fighting.

[411] they're the ones who died.

[412] They're the ones who defeated the Red Army, right?

[413] The Arabs who were there did a little of fighting, but a lot of it was for, you know, their purposes.

[414] It was to get experience.

[415] It was to kind of create their reputations like bin Laden began to forge for himself of being spoken for a global project.

[416] 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 was like, let's get out of here.

[417] This is draining the Soviet budget.

[418] It's an embarrassment.

[419] We didn't think about this properly.

[420] Let's focus on restoring the party and strengthening the Soviet Union.

[421] Let's get out of this costly war.

[422] It's a waste.

[423] It's not worth it.

[424] We don't lose anything by getting out of Afghanistan.

[425] And so their retreat was quite effective and successful from the Soviet point of view, right?

[426] It's not what we're seeing now.

[427] What year was the retreat?

[428] I mean, it began, so Mikhail Gorbachev came to power 1985.

[429] You know, he was a generation younger than the other guys.

[430] He was a critic of the system.

[431] He didn't want to abolish it.

[432] You wanted to reform it.

[433] He was a true believer in Soviet socialism and in the party as a, you know, a monopolist, right?

[434] But he's critical of the old guard and recognized that the party had to change and the whole system had to change to continue to compete.

[435] And so Afghanistan was one element of this.

[436] And so he pushed the Afghan elites that Moscow was backing to basically say, listen, we're going to share power.

[437] And so a figure named Najibullah, who was a Soviet -trained intelligence specialist sitting in Kabul, agreed.

[438] And he said, we need to have a more kind of pluralistic accommodations approach to our enemies who are backed.

[439] by the U .S. mainly, sitting in Pakistan, sitting in Iran, backed by these Arabs to a degree, getting money from Saudi.

[440] 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 the opposition.

[441] And for the most part, with U .S. backing, with Pakistani backing, with Pakistani backing, with Iranian backing, and with Saudi backing, the opposition said, no, we're not going to reconcile.

[442] We're going to push you off the cliff.

[443] And so that story goes on from at least 1987.

[444] The last Soviet Red Army troops leave early 1989.

[445] But the Nagebollah government holds on for three more years.

[446] It is the, I mean, they're still getting some help in the Soviet Union.

[447] Its enemies are still getting help from the U .S. mainly.

[448] And it's not to 92 that they lose.

[449] And then Mujadine come to power.

[450] They immediately, you know, they're deeply, fractured.

[451] And that's where bin Laden is watching all of this unroll.

[452] That's right.

[453] And he's, part of the mix, but he's also mobile.

[454] So he at one point, you know, goes, you know, is in Sudan.

[455] You know, he's moving from place to place.

[456] His people are all over the world.

[457] In fact, they, I mean, if you think of the, once the Mujahideen take power, you know, they have difficulties with Arab fighters too.

[458] And they don't want them coming in and, you know, messing with the Mujahideen regard this as like, you know, this is an Afghan national state that we're going to build.

[459] It's going to be Islamic.

[460] It's going to be an Islamic state.

[461] But, you can't interfere with us.

[462] And so there were always tensions.

[463] And so the Arabs are always kind of, I would say they were, Arab fighters were always interlopers.

[464] Yes, the Afghans are happy to take their money, send patients to their hospitals, take their weapons, but they were never going to let this be like a Saudi or Egyptian or whatever project.

[465] But then many of those fighters went home.

[466] They went back to Syria.

[467] They went back to Egypt.

[468] Some wanted to go back to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis were very careful.

[469] I mean, the Saudi has always used Afghanistan as a kind of safety valve.

[470] In fact, they had, you know, fundraisers on television, they chartered jets.

[471] They filled them with people to fly to Pakistan, get out and push hour and say, you know, go fight.

[472] 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?

[473] Just send them abroad.

[474] You want to fight jihad.

[475] Go do that somewhere else.

[476] Don't bother the kingdom.

[477] But all this became dicier in the early 90s when some of these guys came back home.

[478] And some of the scholars around them said, you know, let's, we've defeated the Soviet Union, which is a huge, huge boost.

[479] 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.

[480] And so already watching the Soviet retreat across this bridge back into Uzbekistan, if you see these dramatic images of the tanks, you know, moving.

[481] a lot of people interpreted this as like, you know, we are going to change the world.

[482] And now we're training to the Americans.

[483] And our local national governments are backed by the Americans.

[484] So let's start with those places.

[485] And then let's go strike, let's go strike, you know, the belly of the beast, which is America, which is New York.

[486] And going back to bin Laden, your question about, you know, what motivates him, what motivated him, you know, again, he was not a rigorously trained Islamic scholar.

[487] And that I think, you know, when I, when this comes up in our classes, you know, I think especially young people, I mean, people who weren't even born on 11th.

[488] I mean, they're, shocked.

[489] They see, they see his appearance.

[490] They see him pictured in front of a giant bookshelf of Arabic books.

[491] He's got the Klasnikov.

[492] He's got what looks like a religious scholar's library behind him, right?

[493] 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, And we had to have a few people, a few experts, people like Bernard Rubin, who was an Afghanistan expert.

[494] So that was one way in which I think, you know, I'm not faulting him personally, but it's just one way in which that relationship appeared to be, you know, formed, right, of linking Afghanistan to that moment.

[495] If one looks actually, you know, what bin Laden was saying and doing, people like Richard Clark were studying this.

[496] There were Arab leaders.

[497] The Arab press was watching this because he gave some of his first interviews to.

[498] a few Arab newspaper outlets.

[499] But speaking of our American kind of, you know, monolingalism, a lot of we were saying wasn't known.

[500] And so I think for several years, people weren't reading what bin Laden said.

[501] I mean, experts are reading it in Arabic, but there was great anxiety around translating his works.

[502] So, you know, we have Monkamp, we have all this stuff.

[503] You can buy the collective works of linen, Stalin, Mao, whatever you want, in whatever language you want.

[504] But bin Laden was taboo for American publishing.

[505] So it was only a Verso in the UK that published a famous volume called Messages to the World, which was the first compendium of Bonin's writings.

[506] So he has a mind confit.

[507] He has a type, does he have a thing?

[508] I mean, it's a kind of collected works.

[509] It's a collected works.

[510] Okay.

[511] Of his, yeah.

[512] He had, well, like a blog.

[513] Yeah, yeah.

[514] It's a collection of articles versus.

[515] Yeah, these are interviews.

[516] These are his missives, his declarations, his, his, his, his, decrees, right?

[517] But I think just in terms of, you know, if we zoom out for a second about, you know, American policy choices and so on, the powers that be didn't trust us to know what he was really about.

[518] I put it that way.

[519] And I don't say that in a conspiratorial sense.

[520] I just think that it was, you know, it was a taboo.

[521] I think people, you know, there was a kind of consensus that, you know, trust us.

[522] We know how to fight al -Qaeda.

[523] And you don't need to know what they're about because they're crazy.

[524] They're fanatics, they're fundamentalists.

[525] They hate us, remember, that language?

[526] Us versus them.

[527] But if you read Bin Laden, that's when it gets messy.

[528] That's where bin Laden's argumentation is not fundamentally about Islam.

[529] And if you're sitting here with an Islamic scholar, he would say, you know, depending on which Islamic scholar, they would tend to go through and dissect and negate, you know, 99 % of the arguments that Bin Laden claimed was in Islam, right?

[530] but what strikes me as an historian who's again looking at this adjacently if reed bin Laden I mean the arguments that you 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 form or what's the nature of the enemy it's a 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.

[531] 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 it out now.

[532] And we now have compendia of the writings of al -Qaeda more broadly.

[533] You can purchase these.

[534] They're basically primary source collections.

[535] We now have that for the Taliban.

[536] I mean, what's fascinating about, I think, if you'd like this culture, acknowledging it's very, you know, diverse internally, is that these people are representatives of political movements who seek followers, they speak, they often are very, I'd say, skilled at visual imagery.

[537] And especially now, I mean, what's fascinating is that, I mean, the Taliban, you know, used to shoot televisions.

[538] they used to, you know, blow up VCR, you know, videotapes.

[539] They used to string audio and video cassettes from trees and kind of ceremonial hangings, right?

[540] That we're killing this nefarious, infidel technology that is doing the work of Satan.

[541] And yet today, in plastic, I mean, one of the keys to the top -line success is that they got really good at using media.

[542] I mean, brilliant at using their written words.

[543] spoken word music actually um and you know Hollywood Hollywood is the gold standard and these guys have studied how to create drama how to speak to modern users I mean Islamic State did this I mean the role of media new media I mean I am I follow and I am followed by senior Taliban leaders which is you know bizarre you know on Twitter on Twitter I don't know why they care about me I'm I'm nothing.

[544] They follow you on Twitter.

[545] I don't know why.

[546] This is no joke.

[547] This is no joke.

[548] So they're part of our modern world.

[549] It's how they talk and it's how they recruit.

[550] And this is part of the, this is why they are.

[551] You know, so bin Laden, if you read bin Laden, he, he speaks multiple languages, I would say.

[552] It's, it's environmentalism.

[553] You know, the West is bad because we destroyed the planet.

[554] The West is bad because we abuse women.

[555] So in class, you know, especially, you know, female students are very surprised to learn.

[556] and actually say, you know, this feminist argument is not, you know, we start with, you know, this is a murder, this is a person who has taken human life, innocent life of Nurembergian, and he is, you know, aspirational and genocidal.

[557] But let's try to understand what he's about.

[558] So we walk through the text, read them, and people are shocked to learn that it's not just about, you know, quotations in the Quran strung together in some irrational fashion.

[559] 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 right so if you have a student in your class who's from South Asia who knows about Kashmir you know he or she will say that's not entirely inaccurate you know the Indian state commits atrocities in Kashmir you know Pakistanis even that too you know Palestine is an issue right so you have in the American university setting people across the spectrum who get that, you know, Palestinians have had a raw deal.

[560] And so it's a victimhood is central.

[561] And it's Muslim victimhood, which is primary.

[562] But as a number scholars have written and I'm, you know, I definitely think this is a framework for what this useful.

[563] I mean, in this kind of vocabulary, in this same, 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.

[564] And seeing the visuals of that, I think that, you know, I think the American public has been shielded for some of this.

[565] But if you look at, you know, it's the carnage of the Iraqi army that George H .W. Bush produced, right?

[566] Or you think of, you know, the images of the suffering of Iraqi children under George H .W. Bush's sanctions.

[567] U .S. British airstrikes.

[568] Then you have Madeline Albright answer a question on 16 minutes.

[569] Do you think the deaths of half a million Iraqi kids is worth it?

[570] Is that justified to contain Saddam Hussein?

[571] 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.

[572] But these guys are, and they very capably use these vitches, use these tropes, and use facts.

[573] I mean, some of these things are not deniable.

[574] I mean, these estimates about the number of Iraqi civilian children dead, you know, that came from, I think, the Lancet and it came from, you know, those are estimates.

[575] But looking at this point of view of, of Amman, of, you know, Jaffa, of Nairobi, you know, just think around the planet.

[576] And if you see yourself as the victim of this great imperial power, you know, you can see why especially young men would be drawn to a road of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, a world of, of, of, of, of, of.

[577] self -sacrifice and the idea is that in killing others you are making them feel how you feel yeah because they won't listen to your arguments reasonably because they won't you know recognize Palestinian suffering Bosnian suffering right Chechen suffering you go across the planet right because they won't recognize our suffering we're going to speak to you in the only language that you understand and that's violence and look at the violence of of the violence of the the post -1911 world, right, in which American air power really becomes a global, you know, kind of fact in the lives of so new people.

[578] And then the big mistake after 9 -11, among many, I mean, fundamentally was taking the war on terror to some, you know, 30 or 40 countries, right?

[579] So that you have a more and more of the globe feel like they're under attack, right?

[580] And the logic is essentially it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, we're going to, convert you and turn you into Muslims and that's why we're doing this.

[581] That appears.

[582] That claim does appear at times.

[583] But it's, if you look at any given bin Laden text, I mean, there are 40 claims in each text.

[584] I mean, it's kind of, it's dizzying, but he's a modern politician.

[585] He knows the language of social equality, you know, that there's a class dimension to it.

[586] There is an environmental dimension to it.

[587] There's a gender dimension to it.

[588] And yes, there are chronic quotes sprinkled in.

[589] 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.

[590] So some of his decorations 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?

[591] 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 when we see that it's a it's a it's a these are kind of testaments toward recruitment of people who yes they're angry yes they're unhappy and this what you know I think for a broader public it's hard to get you're like well bin lond didn't suffer he wasn't poor like yeah I mean linen pole pot I mean they're speaking to they're empathetic to the suffering the landscape the full landscape of 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.

[592] And what you're saying has bin Laden perhaps accurately could speak to the ignorance of America, maybe the Soviet Union, to the suffering of their people.

[593] That's right.

[594] 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.

[595] I mean, charismatic politicians are good at telling accurate stories.

[596] It's not all fabricated, but they emphasize certain aspects.

[597] Right.

[598] And then the problem part is the actions you should take based on that that's right right so the the narratives and the stories may be grounded in historical accuracy right the actions then cross the line yeah the ethical line yeah we found that too i mean it's a again if you pick up just one of these texts i mean it's it's a clodiscope so the hill analogy is interesting because it's you know hitler spoke to he could speak to things like inflation right which really existed um but he also appealed to the irrational emotions of Germans, right?

[599] He sought out scapegoats, you know, Jews, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and so on, right?

[600] I mean, that's also there in bin Laden, too.

[601] I mean, the idea of, you know, an anti -Semitism, the constant flagging of Zionists and crusaders.

[602] It's a kind of shotgun approach to a search for followers, but I also hasten to add that it's for all of the things that we could take off saying, well, yes, Kashmiris have suffered.

[603] Chechens have suffered.

[604] Chechens have effort and so on, bin Ladenism never became a mass movement.

[605] I mean, it never really, I think the, I mean, this is the encouraging thing, right, about ideology.

[606] I mean, I think the, the blood on his hands always limited his appeal among Muslims and others.

[607] But bin Laden did have, I mean, he had a, there's a great book by a great scholar at UC San Diego, Jeremy Presthol, who wrote a great book about global icons.

[608] in which he has bin Laden, he has Bob Marley, he has two -pack, 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?

[609] They're also wearing, like, Tupac shirts.

[610] They're wearing Bob Marley shirts.

[611] And it's a way of looking at a kind of partial embrace of some aspects of, you know, the rebelliousness of some of these figures, some of the time by some people under certain conditions.

[612] 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.

[613] And I tend to think that perhaps it's actually hard to be Hitler.

[614] So a leader is so charismatic that he can rile a nation to war.

[615] and bin Laden perhaps were lucky was not sufficiently charismatic i i feel like if his writing was better if his speeches were better if his ideas were stronger uh better it's like uh more viral and then there would be more people right kind of uh yeah young people uniting around him so in some sense it's almost like accidents of history of just how much charisma how much charisma how much charisma particular evil person has person like bin laden i think it's fair evil evil works i think you think bin laden is evil oh yeah yeah yeah i mean he was a mass murderer um i'm just saying that you know his ideas were they're more complex than than we have tended to acknowledge um they had they have a wider potential resonance than we would acknowledge i mean and also i guess one fundamental point is that thinking about the complexity of bin Laden is also a way of removing him from Islam.

[616] He is not an Islamic thinker.

[617] He is a cosmopolitan thinker who plays in all kinds of modern ideologies which have proven to mobilize people in the past, right?

[618] So, you know, anti -Semitism, populism, environmentalism, and the kind of, and the urging to like you know do something about humanity do something about suffering that's why i think the actual you ask about like what motivates people to do this kind of stuff i think that's why if one goes below the level of leadership and this is being reported if you look at the the trial ongoing now in paris of uh the batiklan murders i think um the court allowed some discussion of the backgrounds of the accused and they come from different backgrounds but if there's any common bond it's kind of that they had some background in petty crime.

[619] Famously, in the 7 -7 bombings in London, the metropolitan police, you know, UK authorities looked at all those guys.

[620] And what people want is this idea that, like, they must be very pious.

[621] They must be, you know, super Islamic to do this kind of stuff.

[622] They must be fanatical true believers.

[623] But what they found with those guys was that some were nominally Muslim.

[624] Some went to mosques.

[625] Some didn't.

[626] Some were single, young guys with, like, criminal backgrounds.

[627] Some, you know, were like, sorry, they were, you know, kind of misfits who never succeeded in anything.

[628] But others had, you know, at least one thing, had a wife and family who he, you know, widowed and orphaned.

[629] And so there's no, I mean, for policing, I mean, if you're looking at that lens, there is no kind of typology that will predict who will become violent.

[630] And that's why I think we have to move beyond thinking, about religious argumentation narrowly or by itself.

[631] And think about things like geopolitics, think about how people respond to inequality, you know, the existential threat of climate crisis, of a whole host of matters.

[632] And think about this is a mode of political contestation.

[633] I mean, it's a violent one.

[634] It's one I condemn.

[635] It is evil, right?

[636] But these are people that are, they're trying to be political.

[637] They're trying to change things in some way.

[638] It's not narrowly about, like, I don't know, impose sure you law on you.

[639] You must wear a veil.

[640] You must eat this kind of food.

[641] It's not that parochial.

[642] But one, another quick thought about your interesting claim about charisma in this.

[643] I think that the one self -limiting feature of this subculture is that definitely, you know, I mentioned the enigma of not wanting to be seen and that the, the kind of invisibility is a productive force of a power.

[644] or, you know, which a colleague in mine who knows ancient history far better than I, you know, said this is, you know, when she looked at Milomar initially, or we talked up in Laden, I mean, this kind of studied posture of staying in the shadows, you know, is also a source of authority potentially because it, it advises the idea, and it's partly dictatorships do this well.

[645] I mean, it invites the idea that someone's working, and maybe it's the basis for a lot of Q &ON or other conspiracies today, that some, one's working behind the scenes and things are going to go the right way you can't see it that's almost preferable because you can kind of feel it and so not having someone out front can maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe and then the whole bin laden you know Omar thing like you can't see me or if you look at you know bin Laden's photographs and his video stuff I mean he's he's coy some observers have noted he's kind of effeminate he doesn't strike this kind of masculine.

[646] He's not a Mussolini.

[647] He's not a Hitler, macho.

[648] I'm standing, thumping my chest.

[649] He's not doing the theatrical chin, you know.

[650] The theater people tell us it's so aggressive.

[651] You know.

[652] Or chin?

[653] What?

[654] Bringing your chin up?

[655] I saw a great BBC theater person.

[656] It was kind of a it was a makeover show about how to become a better hitter.

[657] Oh no. A powerful, yeah, leader authoritarian figure.

[658] No, just how to like get ahead and line.

[659] life and then oh okay cool and just like about acting like how you can act differently right so it was it was a bbcc thing um and this woman claim that um you know sticking your chin out like a wrestler does right is the most like 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 like in wrestling styles that win or fighting or so on there's so many ways to well the chin i mean the chin is a Could be interesting, a verbal gesture.

[660] And I've watched enough Mussolini footage for my classes to try to pick the right moment.

[661] And the chin is, Mussolini is all about the chin.

[662] 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.

[663] Yeah, no, no, I'm saying it's, I'm saying it's...

[664] It's one of the many tools in the toolkit.

[665] Yeah, yeah, sure.

[666] So she definitely...

[667] It's not all about the chin, but it's a...

[668] But that's what I'm trying to tell you about bin Laden.

[669] I don't think he was deliberate enough with the way he presents himself.

[670] 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.

[671] 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 be shy.

[672] He saw spoken.

[673] His voice was low.

[674] He attempted to be poetic.

[675] It wasn't a warrior kind of image that he tried to project of like a tough guy.

[676] It was I'm, I'm demure, I'm humble.

[677] I'm offering you this message.

[678] And that the appeal that he was going for was to see, to project himself as a scholar, whose knowledge and humility, the whole package carried with it.

[679] authenticity and a valor that would animate, inspire people to commit acts of violence, right?

[680] So there's a different kind of logic of like, go and kill, right?

[681] So he presented himself in contrast to the imperialist kind of macho, power, bombastic, whatever, yeah.

[682] 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 to, or at least later in life.

[683] Yeah, no, he tried to look apart.

[684] Yeah, yeah.

[685] But I'm saying we're fortunate that whatever calculation that he was making, he was not more effective.

[686] 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, very, very, very, difficult to manage at the geopolitical level.

[687] Yeah, and we credit the, we credit the publics, you know, who don't, you don't bind to that, right, who see through this.

[688] We credit the critics, you know, barely on, great much, 9 -11 itself, one of the problems was that U .S. government officials kept kind of leaning on Muslims to condemn this, as if all Muslims shared some collective responsibility or culpability.

[689] and in fact dozens of scholars and organizations hundreds condemn this but their condemnations never quite made it out but it created a tension where you know if you wore a veil you must be 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?

[690] But I think that's where the diversity of Muslim communities became important because outside of small pockets, I mean, they didn't, they didn't accept his leadership, right?

[691] People wore t -shirts in some countries.

[692] I mean, non -Muslims wore t -shirts because he was like, he stuck it to the Americans.

[693] So in Latin America, people are like, yeah, that was sad, but, you know, finally, I mean, there was a kind of shot in Freud in that moment internationally.

[694] It's like Che Guevara or somebody like that.

[695] Yeah.

[696] Chet's the other character in Pissault's book.

[697] Yeah.

[698] Yeah.

[699] That's right.

[700] That's right.

[701] Yeah.

[702] It's just a symbol.

[703] It's not exactly what he believed.

[704] Exactly.

[705] Or the cruelty of actions he took.

[706] Right.

[707] It's more like he stood for an idea of revolution versus authority.

[708] That's right.

[709] And that's a great way to understand bin Ladenism and the whole phenomenon.

[710] But I think looking at the big picture, it's also you wonder, you know, will that ever end, right?

[711] I mean, is that, I mean, that's the risk of being a kind of hyperpower like the U .S. where you, in assisting on a kind of unipolar world in 2001, 2002, 2003, I think that created an almost irresistible target, you know, wherever the U .S. wanted to exert itself militarily.

[712] Before we go to the history of Afghanistan, the people, and I just want to talk to you about some fascinating aspect of the culture, let's go to the end, withdrawal of U .S. troops from Afghanistan.

[713] What are your thoughts on how that was executed?

[714] How could it have been done better?

[715] Yeah, an important question.

[716] I mean, I would preface all this by saying, you know, as I noted, I think the war was a mistake.

[717] I had hoped the war would end sooner.

[718] I think there were different exit routes all along the way.

[719] Again, I think there were lots of policy choices in September, in October.

[720] when the war began.

[721] There were choices in December 2001, so we could look at almost every six -month stopping point and say we could have done differently.

[722] As it turns out, though, I mean, the way it played out, you know, it's been catastrophic.

[723] And I think the Biden administration has remained unaccountable for the scale of the strategic and humanitarian and ethical failure that they're responsible.

[724] before.

[725] Well, okay, let's lay out the full.

[726] There's George W. Bush.

[727] There's Barack Obama.

[728] There's Donald Trump.

[729] That's right.

[730] There is Biden.

[731] 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.

[732] I do this all the time thinking, where am I going to pull off?

[733] I'll go to the vertical empty.

[734] How could have been done better and what exactly how much suffering have all the decisions along the way caused?

[735] What are the long -term consequences?

[736] 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?

[737] 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, one dimension.

[738] I think in the weeks to come, I mean, we're going to see Afghanistan implode.

[739] There are lots of signs that malnutrition, hunger, starvation are going to claim tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives this winter.

[740] And I think there is really nothing, there's no framework in place to force all that.

[741] 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 the famine or starve to death.

[742] So this is economic implosion, this is political implosion, what's the system they're like and what could be the one, you know, some inkling of hope?

[743] Right, right.

[744] The Taliban sit in control.

[745] That's unique when they were in power in 1990s from 1996, 2001.

[746] They controlled some 85 to 90 % of the country.

[747] Now they own it all, but they have no budget.

[748] The Afghan banking system is frozen.

[749] So the financial system is a mess.

[750] And it's frozen by the U .S. because the U .S. is trying to use that lever to exert pressure on the Taliban.

[751] And so the ethical quandaries are, of course, Legion, right?

[752] Do you release that money to allow the Taliban to, shore up their rule, right?

[753] The Biden administration has said no, but the banks aren't working.

[754] If you're in California, you want to send $100 to your cousin so she can buy bread, you can't do that now.

[755] It's almost impossible.

[756] There are some informal networks.

[757] They're moving some stuff, but there are bread lines.

[758] The Taliban government is incapable, fundamentally of ruling.

[759] I mean, they can discipline people on the street.

[760] They can force people in the mosque.

[761] They can shoot people.

[762] They can beat protesters.

[763] They can put out a newspaper.

[764] They can have their graded diplomacy, it turns out.

[765] They can't rule this country.

[766] So essentially, the hospitals and the kind of healthcare infrastructure is being managed by NGOs that are international.

[767] But many people had to leave and the Taliban have impeded some of that work.

[768] they've told adult women essentially to stay home, right?

[769] So a big part of the workforce isn't there.

[770] So, I mean, the supply chain is, you know, is kind of crawling to a halt.

[771] Trade with Pakistan and its neighbors, I mean, it's kind of a transit trade economy.

[772] It exports fruits.

[773] Pakistan has been closing the border because they're anxious about refugees.

[774] They want to exert pressure on the international community to recognize the Taliban because the Pakistan, Pakistan want the Taliban to succeed in power because I see that in Pakistan's national interest, especially to the lens of its rivalry with India.

[775] So the Pakistani security institutions are playing a double game.

[776] Essentially, the Afghan people are being held hostage.

[777] And so the Taliban are also saying, you know, if you don't recognize us, you're going to let tens of millions of Afghans starve.

[778] So to which degree is Taliban, like who are the Taliban?

[779] What do they stand for?

[780] What do they want?

[781] Obviously, year by year, this changes.

[782] So what is the nature of this organization?

[783] Can they be a legitimate, peaceful, kind, respectful government, sort of holder of power, or are they fundamentally not capable of doing so?

[784] Yeah.

[785] I mean, the briefest answer would be that they are a clerical slash, military organization.

[786] They have, this is kind of a imperfect metaphor, but years ago, a German scholar used the term caravan to describe them.

[787] And that has some attractive elements because different people who join the Taliban for different purposes at different times.

[788] But today, and people tell us, you know, scholars who know more about the woman 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 that listen they're there 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 clear picture of what has happened I'd say they were a astoundingly well -organized clerical military organization that has a very cohesive and enduring ideology, which is quite idiosyncratic.

[789] 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.

[790] Some use a term that links it to a kind of school of thought born in the 19th century in India, the Doe Bondi School.

[791] But if you look at their teachings, it's very clear now, I think that these labels, it's like saying, you know, you're an MIT guy.

[792] Well, what does that mean?

[793] MIT is home to dozens of different, potentially kinds of intellectual orientations, right?

[794] I mean, attaching in the name of the school doesn't quite capture, I mean, university.

[795] It's complicated.

[796] I mean, actually, MIT is interesting because I would say MIT is different than Stanford, for example.

[797] Yeah.

[798] I think MIT has a, more kind of narrow.

[799] Yeah, I hear you.

[800] Bad analogy in my part, maybe.

[801] 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.

[802] And like there's a loop.

[803] I think Stanford is a good example of something that's more.

[804] more distributed.

[805] There's sufficient amount of diversity in like all kinds of like centers and all that kind of stuff that the the brand doesn't become one thing.

[806] And MIT is so engineering.

[807] It's yeah.

[808] I think I think scratch MIT.

[809] Let's scratch same for two because I think Stanford is more like MIT than than than you might imagine.

[810] But isn't Taliban, isn't it pretty?

[811] I don't think there's a diversity.

[812] So yeah.

[813] Sorry.

[814] So just to rephrase.

[815] So so people say, oh, the day Bondi school.

[816] I'm like, what is that?

[817] I mean, but the Taliban are, they're an ethnic movement.

[818] They represent a vision of Pashtun power, right?

[819] The Pashtun are people who are quite internally diverse, who actually speak multiple dialects of Pashto, who reside across the frontier of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

[820] There are Pashtuns who live all over the planet, right?

[821] There's a community in Moscow, California, everywhere, right?

[822] So it's a global diaspora of sorts.

[823] Pashtuns have a kind of genealogical imagination so that lots of Pashtun can tell you the names of their grandparents, great -grandparents, and so on.

[824] And that's kind of a, there's a sense of pride in that.

[825] Pashto language is a kind of core element of that identity, but it's not universal.

[826] So for example, you can meet people who say, I am Pashtun, but I don't know Pashtun.

[827] So as you as you claw away at this idea, it's amorphous.

[828] It also means different things, different people at different time.

[829] So saying the Taliban, our Pashtun requires lots of qualifiers because lots of postures will say, no, no, I have nothing to the Taliban.

[830] I hate those people.

[831] So the Taliban tried to mobilize other postures with limited success, but their court membership is almost exclusively Pashtun.

[832] And they say, no, no, we represent Afghans, we represent pious Muslims.

[833] And so in recent two, three years, they've gone further to say, no, we have other groups.

[834] We have Uzbeks.

[835] We have Tajik's.

[836] 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.

[837] But if you want to say August 15 and who they've appointed, what language they've used, how they've presented themselves, it's clear that you know, they are Pashtun, they are male, and they are extremely ideologically cohesive and disciplined, I'd say.

[838] Right?

[839] So I think that a lot of the polycentricism, blah, blah, some of that stuff was the way to fight a war.

[840] They are fundamentally, you know, a guerrilla movement.

[841] They see themselves as kind of pious Robin Hoods.

[842] The rhetoric is very much about taking from the rich, taking from the privilege, giving to the poor, being on the side of the underdog, fighting against evil.

[843] And so, I mean, their bag, if you like, their thing, their central theme, their brand is about public morality.

[844] And so their origin story, going back to 19994, is that they interceded, they broke up a gang of criminals who were trying to rape people.

[845] And so there's a very interesting kind of like, emphasis on, like, sexuality and on public morality, and really be in the core of like, you know, we're going to restore order and public morality.

[846] And how that translates into governance is something they've never sorted out.

[847] I mean, how do you run a banking system?

[848] If your intellectual priorities are really about, you know, the length of a beard.

[849] 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 problems of martyrdom.

[850] And that sounds, I don't mean to say that in a way that, to make it sound ridiculous, to make it sound like it's a moral judgment.

[851] It's simply, I think, a fact.

[852] It's a fact of their appeal that they promised young men who have known nothing else but studying in certain schools, if at all, but they've known fighting and they've known they've known victimization.

[853] 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, they, they, lost families and bombings in air strikes in night raids you know i mean orphans have always been a stream um living in in all -male society uh not knowing girls not knowing women hearing things from outside about places like Kabul and so there's always been this kind of urban rural dimension it's not it's not just that but i think there's a there's a whole imagination that being Taliban captures.

[854] And the whole margin of thing is really, it's, you know, I think to any religious person, I mean, it's not a, it's not a bizarre idea.

[855] 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, a U .S. Marine about this, I mean, some would get it from their own religious backgrounds, but I think the, it's an alien idea, but I think it's essential to kind of stretch my imagination.

[856] I'm saying that's, that's attractive.

[857] 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.

[858] I mean, it's good that we're in charge now.

[859] We're going to build a proper state.

[860] But I'm, it's kind of boring.

[861] I want to keep fighting.

[862] I want to, maybe I'll do it in Pakistan.

[863] Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they are expressing that thought.

[864] Some are not even honest.

[865] sufficiently with themselves to express that kind of thought.

[866] 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.

[867] Yeah, yeah.

[868] 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, is to, and paint the world is good and evil and you're fighting evil and all that kind of stuff that's difficult to imagine how they can run an education system a banking system respect all kinds of citizens with different backgrounds and religious beliefs and women and all that kind of stuff so yeah and they've they've walked into Kabul and other major cities um you know some are young that they didn't know those places but also the very important obstacle for them is that afghan society has changed i mean it's it's not what even for the older guys.

[869] It's not what they knew in the 1990s.

[870] Some always had some ambivalence about, you know, the capital.

[871] But now it's totally different.

[872] I mean, they've been shocked to see.

[873] I think, to me, one of the most striking features of the last few weeks has been that, you know, women have come out on the streets and have stood in their faces and said, you know, we demand rights, we demand education, we demand employment.

[874] And these foot soldiers are paralyzed.

[875] They're not sure.

[876] They don't know what to do with women, period.

[877] Yeah.

[878] Yeah.

[879] And they don't.

[880] know what to do with being yelled at and having someone stick their fingers in their faces.

[881] I mean, this is not what they've imagined.

[882] And so I think, and at this juncture, there are still foreign cameras around.

[883] So they have committed acts of violence against women, against journalists.

[884] They've beaten people.

[885] They've disappeared people.

[886] Even with cameras around, even in this tense period.

[887] Yeah, but I think that when the cameras, you know, retreat and that, that's like it happened.

[888] It's going to get much worse, I think.

[889] So the challenge now is, you know, can the Taliban rule?

[890] and and then this is where the diplomacy is so important because the Taliban can't rule an isolation and they know that and part of the success is due to the fact that they were they became very good at talking to other people in the last I mean it's been building for the last decade but I said the last five years and they always had Pakistan's backing and so the Taliban are we noted they're a military force very effective guerilla force they beat 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, you know, improvise explosive devices, machine guns.

[891] In some, in recent years, they got sniper rifles.

[892] And, you know, from the summer, they got American equipment on a broad scale, right?

[893] They have airplanes.

[894] They have a lot that they will be able to use eventually.

[895] So, but still, basically, it's a story of AK -47s.

[896] some American small arms and mines.

[897] So it's very Ho Chi men, very old school guerrilla fighting, right?

[898] And they defeated the most powerful military alliance in world history probably.

[899] So that is not yet sunk in and what that means for American and global politics.

[900] And now they're trying to rule, right?

[901] They know they need international support.

[902] And their most consistent backer has been Pakistan, who sees them as an extension of Pakistani power.

[903] you know and this is very important for a Pakistani elite that of course is looking toward India they want to have their rear covered right they want to make sure that these costumes 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 they those are not so distant from their views of what Pakistan should be but the Taliban have been smart enough to kind of diversify their potential at national allies So everyone in the neighborhood has wanted the U .S. to leave, right?

[904] If we go back 2001, there were Iranian and American Special Forces in the North working together against the Taliban to displace them using, you know, Iranian, American, and then Afghan resistance forces against the Taliban.

[905] And that was a real moment of repartement if we go back to the missed exits.

[906] The relationship with Iran could have been different at that moment.

[907] But the U .S. on a Georgia -W.

[908] Bush devises access of evil language, put them together with their enemy Iraq and the North Korea, all that went south.

[909] That was the most opportunity.

[910] But in recent years, the Taliban and Iran have kind of papered over the differences.

[911] They allowed the Taliban to open some offices on Iranian territory, likely shared some resources, some intelligence.

[912] some sophisticated weaponry.

[913] And then the Taliban went to Moscow.

[914] And for the Putin administration, you know, they've long been worried that, you know, they see the Taliban as a kind of, you know, disease that will potentially move north.

[915] In fact, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and maybe creep into Russia's sphere of influence.

[916] Maybe that's why they have, you know, bunch of troops sitting in Tajikistan.

[917] I mean, the one, you know, forward base that Russia also has in Central Asia is in Tajikistan.

[918] And so the Taliban were always, you know, a worrying point, but also useful because they could say, well, you know, in case the Taliban get out of control, we need to be here.

[919] And so Tajikistan said, okay, you know, you're helping secure us.

[920] And yes, it impugent upon our sovereignty, but it's okay, you know.

[921] So Putin said, you know, let's, you know, give another black eye to the Americans and let's, you know, treat the Taliban as if they're the kind of.

[922] government in waiting.

[923] Let's have them go to Moscow multiple times.

[924] This summer, you know, for the last year or two, they've been talking to China, right?

[925] So the photographs of senior top -on figures going from their office in Qatar, which was a major, major blow to the US -back government, the fact that they were able to open up an office in Qatar that at one point began to fly a flag of the Islamic Emirate Afghanistan that basically said, we're a state in the waiting.

[926] And as the U .S.-backed Afghani government, government failed and failed and failed at ruling too, right, 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, you know, basically creating a kind of kleptocracy, right?

[927] 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.

[928] We're talking to Putin.

[929] We're talking to China.

[930] Yeah.

[931] We're a legitimate, powerful center of Central Asia.

[932] And also kind of hinting that, you know, we have a website.

[933] I mean, the whole digital angle is amazing because they began to, and this is important actually.

[934] They had a website which grew more and more sophisticated.

[935] Again, after having shot televisions and these kind of ceremonial killings of these infidel devices, right?

[936] They said, we have a government, we have commissions, we have a complaint line.

[937] they lifted all this technocratic language that you'd get from any UN document, you know, about good governance and all the kind of, you know, generic language that the NGO world has produced for us, right, in English.

[938] They reproduced that in five languages on their top -on website.

[939] And, of course, I'm not saying even believe this, but it was like, you know, just put me in, coach, you know, I know the playbook, I know how to run a government.

[940] And look, we have a, we have an agricultural commission.

[941] We have, you know, a taxation system.

[942] 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, you know, this state is corrupt, but we're bringing you justice.

[943] This is our calling card.

[944] We're bringing public morality and justice.

[945] And then to a broader world, they said, you know, yeah, things didn't go perfectly, a whole Al -Qaeda thing, you know, which we could have.

[946] how to do over on that.

[947] We're not going to let anyone hurt you from our territory.

[948] We just want to rule and people like us and look.

[949] And so if we look at the neighborhood, Iran, even the Central Asian states after a while recognizing they could make some money.

[950] I mean, one of the one thing that is Beckstein likes about the current arrangement or they're not they're not hostile to is that they have all these contracts.

[951] They can potentially make some money from, you know, the pipeline dream remains alive.

[952] running natural gas, oil, to the Indian Ocean, to markets beyond Central Asia.

[953] It's sitting on a couple trillion dollars, probably in mineral resources that China would love to have, of course.

[954] And so people looking at Afghanistan now, after 20 years, saying, you know, under American rule, it was a basket case, right?

[955] There was immense human suffering, incredibly violent.

[956] The world did not start counting civilian casualties in Afghanistan until 2009.

[957] I mean, think about that.

[958] The war went on for eight years.

[959] The Taliban were never really defeated.

[960] They just went to Pakistan.

[961] They went to the mountains.

[962] They went to the woods.

[963] And so all these different American operations, as you noted, under Bush, Obama, Trump, and so on, killed countless civilians.

[964] The U .S. never accounted for that.

[965] We never even counted.

[966] Trump escalated the civilian casualties by escalating the air war.

[967] But a lot of this was, like, very ugly on the ground, you know, night raid stuff, where you drop into a hamlet.

[968] and massacre people, and then you're not honest about what happened, right?

[969] So that dynamic continued to fuel the growth of Taliban from below.

[970] So the foot soldiers, they never ran out of foot soldiers.

[971] I mean, the U .S. and its allies killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of of Taliban fighters over the last 20 years, but they just sprouted up again.

[972] And part of that was the kind of solidarity culture, the male bonding of martyrology, of, you know, and of, you know, revenge and a sense of, you know, the foreign invader.

[973] And I've heard, I mean, I've, you know, I haven't taught a ton of U .S. military people, but through the Hoover, you know, they put officers in our classes sometimes.

[974] And met a few wonderful, you know, Army and Marine officers who I really enjoyed, you know, we came from the South like me, always had great report with them.

[975] And they expressed a range of opinions about this.

[976] I think that, you know, I learned a lot from someone who said, yeah, I mean, I get that I get why they hate us.

[977] I get why they're still fighting because, you know, last week, we just killed 14 of their, you know, fellow villagers.

[978] So the officers, the guys on the ground, you know, fighting this war, we're not stupid about that.

[979] I mean, they got the human dimension of that.

[980] And yet no one got off the exit, as you said.

[981] People kept driving.

[982] But going forward now, internationally, it's critical that they have, I mean, they've had meetings.

[983] I mean, what the Taliban have done this August 15th is a lot of diplomacy.

[984] They've had meetings.

[985] They've had people.

[986] They've had Tashkent come.

[987] They've had Beijing come.

[988] They've had Moscow come.

[989] I mean, they've had major visits from Islamabad, from security people, from the thematic circles.

[990] And they're counting on things being different this time.

[991] I mean, the first time around, the only people who backed the Taliban by recognition, giving them a diplomatic recognition, with the Saudis, the Pakistanis, and the UAE.

[992] And because of Al -Qaeda, because of opium, because of some of the human rights stuff, the U .S. pushed everyone to, like, let's not recognize the state.

[993] Even though the U .S. did, I mean, Colin Powell famously, in the summer of 2001, you know, we did give a few grants and aid to the Taliban.

[994] As I kind of like massaging negotiations, they kept talking about bin Laden.

[995] but they also wanted them to stop opium production.

[996] I mean, Afghanistan throughout all this period we've talked about is the global center of opium production.

[997] I mean, over the years, more and more of the Afghan economy continued to today is devoted to the opium trade.

[998] Opium, which is the thing that leads to heroin, some of the painkillers.

[999] And even if Afghan poppies don't make it to Hoboken, you know that they are not the the source of American deaths you know they are part of a a universal market a global market which you know I think any economists to tell you is part of the story of our opium you know problem something I read maybe a decade ago now and I just kind of looked it up again to bring it up to see your opinion on this is um there's a 2010 report by the International Council on Security Development that showed that 92 % of Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar province know nothing of the 9 -11 attacks on U .S. in 2001.

[1000] Is this at all representative of what you know?

[1001] Is this possible?

[1002] 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.

[1003] Right.

[1004] 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.

[1005] And I think it could be, you know, if you go to my hometown in North Carolina, if you knock out some doors, you may meet people who don't know all kinds of things.

[1006] 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.

[1007] You know, Kyrie Irving apparently thinks the earth is flat.

[1008] I mean, you know, so we could make a lot of certain kinds of ignorance, I think.

[1009] But I think what I would say, and then there's also, I mean, a companion point may be that in thinking about the withdrawal, the collapse, the return of the Taliban, there's been a big conversation about, you know, what Afghans think of us, really.

[1010] And this famous piece in The New Yorker was about how, you know, many people like the Taliban, you know, that many women interviewed supposedly in this piece, you know, were sympathetic because they'd lost family members and all the violence.

[1011] And the idea kind of was that, you know, we haven't thought about that at all.

[1012] When in fact, you know, of course, we have and lots of people have.

[1013] But I think if you're just dropping into the conversation, if you look at like an immediate arc of coverage of Afghanistan in the United States, I mean, the arc went from lots of coverage during, of course, 9 -11, it's aftermath, lots of coverage during Obama's surge.

[1014] And then quickly dropped down the last decade has been almost nothing.

[1015] So if you ask the same question about Americans or of Americans.

[1016] I'm not sure what they would say to you, what percentage would actually know why the U .S. is in X, Y, or Z either, right?

[1017] But on the Afghan side, just to return to that for a moment, I think that, you know, we can fetishize these provinces.

[1018] They are a kind of, you know, a place where Taliban support has been greatest.

[1019] Also, where there's been the most violence, where the Americans have been most committed to trying to root out the Taliban movement.

[1020] This is Helmand and kind of hard.

[1021] Exactly, in the South Afghanistan.

[1022] Yeah, and it's mostly Pashtun, not exclusively, but mostly Pashtun.

[1023] mostly rural.

[1024] What is Pashtun?

[1025] That's the ethnic group, you know, that the Taliban claim to represent, right?

[1026] So they are this group.

[1027] What other groups are there?

[1028] Okay, sorry.

[1029] Yeah, yeah, sorry.

[1030] So in cities, you'll find everything, right, that is in Afghanistan.

[1031] You'll find Uzbeks, Tajik's, Hazaras.

[1032] These are people who, you know, Uzbek is a Turkic language, right?

[1033] Most Uzbeks live in what is now Uzbekistan, but they form majorities in some northern parts of the city.

[1034] I'm sorry, of the country of Afghanistan.

[1035] 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 or Uzbek's live, you know, purple where Tajik's live, then there are much of other smaller groups of different kinds.

[1036] You know, there are Norstanis, there are Baloch, there are in different religious communities.

[1037] There are Sunni, Shia, different kinds of Shia.

[1038] What are the key differences between them, is it a religious basis?

[1039] It's from the origins of where they immigrated from, and how different are they?

[1040] Yeah.

[1041] So they're all, I mean, they're all indigenous, think.

[1042] I mean, there's a kind of mythology that some groups have been there longer, right?

[1043] So they have a greater claim to power.

[1044] But historically, I mean, it's like, you know, ethnic groups anywhere.

[1045] People have different narratives about themselves.

[1046] But many, many post -tunes would tell you, not all, but many would say, we're the kind of state builders of Afghanistan.

[1047] 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, was a Pashtun dynasty.

[1048] The Taliban have definitely said, to some audiences, we are the rightful rulers because we are Pashtun.

[1049] The trick, though, is, I don't mean to be evasive, but just to convey some of the complexity, one quick answer as well, there are majorities and minorities.

[1050] I mean, one finds that a lot along with those maps.

[1051] But I would say, suspend any firm belief in that, because that could be entirely wrong.

[1052] In fact, there's never been a modern census of Afghanistan.

[1053] So when journalists say, postures are a majority, whether the biggest group, I would say not so fast.

[1054] I would say not so fast because of migration is one major issue.

[1055] No major modern census.

[1056] Actually, the Soviets got pretty close, but didn't quite find something comprehensive.

[1057] and didn't publicize it, knowing that it was, you know, modern times, ethnicity can be the source of political mobilization.

[1058] It's not innately so, but it's been part of the story.

[1059] But then you have mixed families, right?

[1060] So a lot of people you'll meet, you'll encounter in the diaspora around.

[1061] I mean, well, I am, you know, my one parent is Tajik, one is Pashtun, right?

[1062] Or I'm Pashtun, as I mentioned before, but I don't speak Pashto, right?

[1063] Or I am Hazara, but you read about us, is as Shi 'i Hazaras, in fact, I'm a Sunni Hazara, or I'm a secular hussar, or I'm an atheist Hazara.

[1064] I mean, everything's possible, right?

[1065] One of my friends, if he were here, it'd say, I'm Kabuli.

[1066] You know, I'm from Kabul.

[1067] So if you think about it in Russian terms, you know, it means a lot if you're a Moskvich, you know, if you're from Beezer or Mosquah, I mean, you know.

[1068] Yeah, well, even here, there's Bostonians, that's right.

[1069] Texans, Californians.

[1070] Yeah, yeah.

[1071] East Coast, West Coast, all that stuff.

[1072] Those are all part of the mix here.

[1073] So you ask about Kondahar 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, you may not have ever had a geography lesson.

[1074] But if you go one door over, you may meet a guy.

[1075] who his life path has taken him to live in six countries he may speak five languages and these are all things I'm not saying they're all these are just because people have money you can go fly around I mean they're people who are displaced by war from late 1970s right even already in the early 70s people were traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran 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 of cosmopolitan cultures.

[1076] In fact, I think one of the themes of the book that you may remember how I've 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 put on the move and trade in this area.

[1077] You think of, you know, I think this mischaracterization of places like Helmand and Connhar, you know, you fly in or you're part of the Marine Battalion.

[1078] And you see people there and they look different.

[1079] And I think in our imagination, if I can generalize, you know, they look like, they've been there for millennia, right?

[1080] The dress, the whatever, right?

[1081] You think of technology.

[1082] You think of the mud compounds and so on.

[1083] You think of, you know, animal drawn transportation, that kind of stuff, right?

[1084] Or the motorbike, right, at most is what they have.

[1085] But in fact, if you follow those families, their trade is taking them to Northern India for centuries, right?

[1086] The trade is connected them to Cosmaltan centers.

[1087] You know, say they have a scholar in the family.

[1088] That scholar may have studied all over the Middle East, South.

[1089] Asia, right?

[1090] The ancestors may have been horse traders who went all the way to Moscow, right?

[1091] I mean, we have historical records of all these people traveling across Eurasia, pursuing all kinds of livelihoods.

[1092] 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.

[1093] And so, and a conception of being a world center is also quite strong.

[1094] 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?

[1095] Because we are at the center of something important, right?

[1096] We are the center of Asia.

[1097] We are the heart of Asia.

[1098] We have a kind of historic greatness.

[1099] We are, you know, a proud culture of our own achievements, right?

[1100] So we're not worried about that, right?

[1101] That said, I mean, sure, they're different narratives about why Americans are there, why people are being killed, you know, of course you'd find, you know, they're not.

[1102] They're want to convert us, you know, they want our gold, they want our opium, they want X by and Z, right?

[1103] 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 are we sitting right now?

[1104] And he was filmed not being able to do it.

[1105] And so a lot of, you know, race -fuscated Afghans in the diaspora were saying, you know, ha -ha, look at this.

[1106] And if that exists, I mean, I think I could go to my Stanford classroom and there'd be a lot of kids who wouldn't know where Afghanistan is too, right?

[1107] But I guess I wouldn't, 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.

[1108] 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.

[1109] You know, we're talking about Moscow and stuff.

[1110] I think, you know, Moscow cab drivers, I think, A lot of them are going to tell you, like, what's happening in the world and why, right?

[1111] And it's just part of, it's part of their thing, right?

[1112] You can find that in Ghana.

[1113] You can find that in Mexico City, right?

[1114] You find that lots of places.

[1115] So I think Afghans are part of a very sophisticated kind of mapping of the world and where they fit in.

[1116] And a lot of them remarkably had done it firsthand, which is what struck me so much.

[1117] And, you know, relaying my experiences from the 1990s and Taj -Kent places that these guys had already lived in more countries than I've ever been, they already knew half of those languages.

[1118] I mean, this one friend's Russian was impeccable.

[1119] And, of course, it helped.

[1120] They had Russian girlfriends.

[1121] They had, you know, they mixed with the police.

[1122] They had run -ins.

[1123] I mean, this wasn't something you got from a book, right?

[1124] This was like, hard -knock life.

[1125] I mean, one friend was my wealthy family in this trading diaspora.

[1126] And he was imprisoned.

[1127] I mean, they sent him to prison in Pakistan.

[1128] And he talks about how he started like running in the jail, you know, taking cigarettes to people.

[1129] doing little things and kind of, you know, it's, these are not stories of like, oh, I went to, I went to Harvard and so I'm so learned because of this.

[1130] I mean, it's a, it's a whole range of experiences.

[1131] 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.

[1132] Yeah.

[1133] So, you know, for a lot of the world, 9 -11, was one of the most important moments of recent human history.

[1134] And for Afghanistan not to know that, especially when they're part of that story, it means they have a very different, like there could be a lot of things said.

[1135] One is the spread of information is different.

[1136] The channels of the way information is spread.

[1137] And two, the things they care about.

[1138] 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.

[1139] 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 an active player in this game between the United States and Central Asia because they're such a critical player and obviously in many ways get the short end of the stick in this whole interaction with 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.

[1140] No, it's very, it's true.

[1141] I mean, you know, another way to put it is this.

[1142] 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.

[1143] I think that, you know, plucking out one sample from some fairly remote area, from one, like, follow the agricultural products.

[1144] I mean, and this is where, you know, I think urban rural divides used to mean a lot more in the 19th century, right?

[1145] 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.

[1146] And if you look, think of who actually, you know, brings the bread, the milk, you know, the pomegranates and so on, it creates these networks and then, you know, mobility channels, information and so on.

[1147] But yeah, but your broader point about like the tragedy of this, I guess if I can quote a brilliant student mine, an Afghan American woman who just received her PhD, who's now, you know, doctor, he's a great scholar.

[1148] You know, we've done several events now trying to just think through what's happened.

[1149] And, of course, she's very emotionally affected by it.

[1150] And she continues to ask a really great question.

[1151] And if I can get her phrasing right, you know, if you think of the cycle of like the Taliban being in power in 2001 in the way in which that affected women in particular, you know, half African, half of the society, right?

[1152] then you think of this 20 -year period of violence and, you know, missed exits, right?

[1153] And repeated tragedy that also, it created a space.

[1154] I mean, it created a space for a whole, I'd say generationally.

[1155] It created a sense, a space for people to realize something new.

[1156] I think so we have to attend to the dynamism of the society, right?

[1157] So, yeah, this happened, you know, mostly in Kabul, other big cities, Mazar Shereev, Herat, and Kandahar.

[1158] But you can't limit your analysis to that because things like radio.

[1159] video, television.

[1160] Everyone got a TV channel.

[1161] 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.

[1162] But you see just for some of these things about like connections.

[1163] I mean, it's a, it's a show by an independent, you know, television network that did drama.

[1164] It did it did kind of infomercials for the government and huge American investment in it.

[1165] So it wasn't politically neutral.

[1166] But it did talk shows, did all this kind of stuff.

[1167] But it did the same.

[1168] singing show that became incredibly popular modeled upon the British American, you know, American Idol kind of stuff, you know, and you can vote.

[1169] So it had a kind of democratic practice element.

[1170] But it's fascinating to see that, you know, people hooked up generators to televisions and watched this, you know, you think of like literacy rates.

[1171] 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.

[1172] But if someone had a book, it'd be read aloud to a whole village, potentially, or gathering.

[1173] So there is a which, you know, some of these metrics don't get what people actually receive as information or exposure because there's the magnifying power of open spaces and hearing radio and 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?

[1174] So all the stuff swept across Afghan society as it did elsewhere, you know, in the last decade or more.

[1175] So Afghan society became, you know, in important ways, really connected to everything going on.

[1176] And so you see that reflected politically and what people wanted.

[1177] 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.

[1178] And one of the great failures was to expose people to democracy, but only give them the rigged version.

[1179] And so the U .S., you know, the State Department in particular, continued to double down on faked elections for the parliament and for the presidency in Afghanistan.

[1180] What kind of elections?

[1181] Faked, fraudulent elections for parliament and for president and Afghanistan again and again from the very beginning.

[1182] And those elections were partly theater for the U .S., like for remaining on the road that you're describing, right, for not deviating, for not exiting because we were building democracy there.

[1183] In reality, the U .S. government knew it was never really building democracy there.

[1184] It was establishing control.

[1185] And elections were one means to gather control.

[1186] control, right?

[1187] 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.

[1188] So part of the disillusionment that we see today is that, you know, they believe what the U .S. told them that they're constructing democracy.

[1189] And of course, you know, sending psychists, maybe thinking, well, you know, you're not really doing that.

[1190] You're backing fraud.

[1191] 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 yeah in and that it taught the young vote 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 beautiful said and so but now look at us now it's you know it's now november and so this whole period.

[1192] And I wouldn't say, like, you know, I wouldn't cast the last 20 years for 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 in the back for.

[1193] I think that much of this happened actually against what the Americans wanted.

[1194] I mean, the kind of free thinking, democracy wanting, I mean, even like, yeah, we could point out on the religious sphere.

[1195] I mean, the, the African religious landscape became very pluralistic.

[1196] Lots of young people wanted a different kind of secular politics.

[1197] 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 leads.

[1198] They still tended to monopolize political power.

[1199] So all stuff was happening in different ways.

[1200] I mean, the Americans established this American University of Afghanistan, which was, I think, one of the best things the U .S. stood there.

[1201] And I regret that the U .S. didn't fund 20 more, you know, sprinkling them across the country.

[1202] making them accessible people because it was it was you know again it wasn't an engine of americanization it was just opportunity and so that the thirst for higher education was really extraordinary there was never never really met the u .s tended to put money in primary education which much of that too was was fraudulent but so you have all this interesting dynamism you have you know the arts you have a critical space i mean i i call it a public sphere in the classic european sense you know the afghan's made of their own and again it wasn't americanization it wasn't imposed, it's something that Afghans built across generations, but really with a firm foundation among youth, who wanted, importantly, a multi -ethnic Afghan society.

[1203] You asked about Pashtuns and that kind of stuff.

[1204] And a lot of that language in recent years was they were aware that the U .S. back government was playing ethnic politics and trying to kind of put people in the blocks and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity.

[1205] And there was a younger cohort of people who said, you know, we are Afghan.

[1206] And there's an interesting social media stuff where people would say, I am Hazara, but I'm also Tajik, Masa Uzbek.

[1207] I mean, it was a way of creating a multi -ethnic Afghan national identity that embraced everything.

[1208] I mean, they're very utopian, you know, super utopian, right?

[1209] But symbolically is very important that they've rejected being mobilized, politically, you know, voting as a Hazar or voting as whatever.

[1210] And of course, there were, communities who wanted to you know vote as that ethnic community but there are also people who said you know let's put a kind of civic nationalism first one that accommodates 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 sorting themselves in across you know multiple spheres of course it remained patriarchal of course there's struggles of course there's violence of course you know there's no utopia But the door and all that shut on August 15.

[1211] 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 the 20 years, like she asked, you know, why did you go to war in our country?

[1212] So why did you do this to us for 20 years when this was never about us?

[1213] You know, you never asked us if you wanted to come.

[1214] You never asked us what you wanted to build here.

[1215] You didn't ask us when you were coming and you didn't ask us when you're leaving.

[1216] You just did this all on your own.

[1217] And we tried to make the most of it.

[1218] And then you pulled the rug out from under us, you know, at the 11th hour.

[1219] And return to power, partly by diplomacy.

[1220] It wasn't at the end just a military loss.

[1221] I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions.

[1222] I mean, the idea you asked about alternatives.

[1223] I mean, giving up bagram.

[1224] I mean, holding to the timeline, I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold to the Doha agreement that Trump had signed.

[1225] I mean, every American president writes his or her own foreign policy, right?

[1226] 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, you know, false alternative.

[1227] But I think that's important for American audiences to hear that, you know, they're like, you came to.

[1228] here to experiment.

[1229] You came here to punish.

[1230] 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, impalpable.

[1231] And it's important for American politics since then.

[1232] Like you did, you worked out your problems, you know, on us, on our territory.

[1233] And now what do we have for it?

[1234] You know, and then the people who who had a stake in that system, imperfect is was, have been desperate to leave.

[1235] And so this, I don't know how much people are aware of this, but, you know, I'm a scholar.

[1236] I work in California.

[1237] You know, I have friends.

[1238] I edit a journal on Afghanistan and, you know, but I'm not a politician.

[1239] I'm not a soldier.

[1240] 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.

[1241] You know, that's the kind of like, you know, the symbol of voting with your feet, you know, is quite powerful.

[1242] I mean, there's a huge swath of society that doesn't want the system and is literally living in terror about it.

[1243] And actually women, you know, I mean, especially women of a certain age.

[1244] I mean, they feel like their lives are over.

[1245] I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide.

[1246] They feel betrayed.

[1247] And, and some people have done some good things and getting people out.

[1248] You know, I mean, some, you know, the U .S. military vets have been, you know, at the forefront of working to get out people, you know, that they know they owe.

[1249] But the U .S. government doesn't want these people.

[1250] I mean, they have created all these obstacles to allowing a safety valve for people to leave.

[1251] Looking forward from a perspective of leadership, how do we avoid these kinds of mistakes?

[1252] So obviously some interests, some aspects of human nature led to this war.

[1253] Yeah.

[1254] How do we resist that in the future?

[1255] I guess beyond my moral and intellectual capacity.

[1256] I'll just say this.

[1257] I mean, again, looking at it from my home ground is the university.

[1258] And I think of the intellectual, you know, ways of thinking that I think students should develop for themselves as citizens, right?

[1259] Maybe that's the way to start is like historical thinking.

[1260] 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, whatever.

[1261] you should study history yeah i mean you don't have been a story 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 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 carry the male or you're a brain surgeon whatever i mean i think it's it's a way of civic engagement and a way of like you know ethical being in the world that we need to familiarize us over because if you're American or if you're from a rich country, you know, you need to be aware of your effect on an energy -infect world.

[1262] 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.

[1263] I mean, we're all connected and we're all, we have ethical obligations.

[1264] That's one point to start, but I would just say this, and this is a lot for self -critique, and that is so much my teaching in like the themes of my research have been about empire, you know, how big states work.

[1265] not only on big territories like the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and stuff, but the way in which power often is projected beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see.

[1266] 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?

[1267] So I think part of, as I've seen my, job so far as 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.

[1268] And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role in showing effects that aren't, you know, obvious initially.

[1269] So empire is a framework to think about this.

[1270] And so you think about evading foreign countries, obviously if you're a scarl of empire, you've seen what that looks like, and that's horrific, right?

[1271] You look at things like racism as one of the ideological pillars of empire.

[1272] You know, that's horrific.

[1273] It must be critiqued.

[1274] It must be, you know, we must be educated against.

[1275] Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire is also something to highlight, you know, to rectify and so on.

[1276] You know, to be moral beings, we need to think about past inequality and the legacies of, legacies of violence and destruction that live on, I mean, living in the Americas.

[1277] I mean, look at, you know, we're all on stolen land.

[1278] 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?

[1279] 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.

[1280] out of Afghanistan, you know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing.

[1281] This is a kind of victory of anti -colonial.

[1282] 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.

[1283] Yeah.

[1284] 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.

[1285] And so, from a perspective of Afghanistan, it could be a victory against this idea of centralized truth of empire.

[1286] That's another way to tell this story.

[1287] And then in that sense, it's a victory.

[1288] In that sense also, I mean, you push back against this somewhat, this idea of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires.

[1289] Right, right.

[1290] And I'll say this, I'd say, you know, I mean, it's, I mean, I'm a critic of empire.

[1291] I mean, you know, colonialism is a political phenomenon that stays with us.

[1292] And I think, you know, we need scholars to point to the way in which it still works and still does harm.

[1293] But it's part of being an empire that you can just get up and leave a place, right?

[1294] That you can remake its politics on one day.

[1295] And then because it fails to advance your agenda at one moment, you simply walk away.

[1296] I mean, you know, we can point to other moments.

[1297] I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent, you know, the way that the British with Drew played a significant role in mass violence, you know, that accompanied partition.

[1298] It wasn't all the actions of the British that, you know, dictated that, right?

[1299] There were lots of actors who chose to pick up, you know, the knife to kill their neighbor and so on.

[1300] I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment as there's now in what's happening in Afghanistan.

[1301] But I think the capriciousness, I mean, the ability to act is if you're, your political decisions, about other people's lives, you know, or something that can be made, you know, in secret.

[1302] They can be made willy -nilly.

[1303] They 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.

[1304] 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 farther and say weigh the good and the bad of empire and he argues i think he gets a lot of flack for this from other historians yeah that like the british empire did more good than bad in certain moments of history and that's an uncomfortable truth yeah there's like levels it's a cake with layers of uncomfortable truths and it's not a cake at all because none of it tastes good right I mean, I would continue to disagree with now, for instance.

[1305] 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 partly 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.

[1306] I mean, I do think American power should contract.

[1307] And I don't think, and again, if I had to create a tally sheet of what Americans did in the U .S. I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan, right?

[1308] It could have done that without invading the country and killing people.

[1309] I'm not, I've not now become an apologist for empire.

[1310] I'm not, I'm not now a mini now Ferguson.

[1311] But, you know, ending empire is, I mean, it does how you, those decisions you make are in some ways a continuation of imperial hubris, right?

[1312] So you're not really out of empire yet.

[1313] You're not really contracting empire.

[1314] for those who were living it, you know.

[1315] But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way, it's be careful what you asked for.

[1316] You know, I mean, I wanted, I wanted the U .S. out of Afghanistan.

[1317] But I wanted there to be a political settlement.

[1318] I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right?

[1319] I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?

[1320] But why is going Afghanistan even needed for that?

[1321] You can play all those games of geopolitics without ever invading and taking ownership of the place.

[1322] 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 And then in and out, and then focus on education, on empowering women to into the education system, all those kinds of things that have to do with supporting the culture, the education, the flourishing of the place.

[1323] That has nothing to do with military policing, essentially.

[1324] Right.

[1325] I mean, I think, yeah, if you look at it to that lens, I mean, invading Afghanistan and then invading Iraq didn't end.

[1326] Al -Qaeda.

[1327] It didn't end terrorism, right?

[1328] It didn't really deflate these ideologies entirely.

[1329] There were, if you like, you could say there were you know, some limited discrediting of certain kinds of ideas.

[1330] But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing.

[1331] I mean, it spread.

[1332] I mean, it was never an Islamic thing.

[1333] It was never, you know, a Muslim thing.

[1334] Some Muslims adopted it in some places, but you know, the circuits of knowledge about how to of these kind of things, only expanded with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then they kind of became connected.

[1335] And then they became into the president.

[1336] I mean, Islamic State is, it's the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever, because it's on the basis of its supposed new stance as a counterterrorism outfit that it will get recognition from all its neighbors.

[1337] It will get recognition in Russia.

[1338] I mean, already with the evacuation of airport, the United States was collaborating with the Taliban against against, against, Islamic State and openly talking about the Taliban as if they were partners in the security operation.

[1339] So, and then al -Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan.

[1340] So trillions of dollars spent.

[1341] Yeah.

[1342] The drones up above bombing places that result in civilian death, the death of children, the death of fathers and mothers.

[1343] And those stories, even at the individual level, propagate virally across the land, creating potentially more terrorists.

[1344] 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 a momentum where no one person is sitting there betting a cat in an evil way saying we're going to spend all of this money and create more suffering and create more terrorism.

[1345] But it's just something about the momentum that leads to that.

[1346] And to me, honestly, I just, I'm still a sucker.

[1347] I believe in leadership.

[1348] I believe in great charismatic leaders and the power of that, one, to do evil and to do good.

[1349] And it felt like I honestly put the blame on George Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden for the lack leadership.

[1350] Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[1351] I agree.

[1352] Yeah, there is the military -dustle complex component, which is huge.

[1353] And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership, it's also, I'd say, the imbalance of power within Washington.

[1354] I mean, the Pentagon used this moment well, beginning in 2001, I think, to assert as authority at the expense of other institutions of national government.

[1355] Yeah.

[1356] I mean, the State Department, diplomacy, you know, has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.

[1357] And of course, I mean, other historians, U .S. historians, which I'm not formally a story of the United States, but we can go back to talk about Vietnam.

[1358] We can talk about lots of Cold War and post -Cold War engagements.

[1359] 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 is a defeat.

[1360] I mean, I think there should be accountability.

[1361] And if you, and this could be a kind of opening for a kind of bipartisan conversation.

[1362] 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 a K -47s, right?

[1363] Yeah, there should be a humility with that.

[1364] Yeah.

[1365] I mean, we should actually say that.

[1366] Like, literally the...

[1367] Oh, we lost.

[1368] You say we lost.

[1369] It wasn't just, you know...

[1370] The American military lost.

[1371] Yeah.

[1372] And I feel I have very mixed feelings, and, you know, it's...

[1373] I don't know a ton of veterans, but, you know, I've mentioned I've taught my share and have a student now, and, you know, they are suffering because they look at the sacrifices that they made that I didn't make.

[1374] I mean, American society did make the sacrifices.

[1375] I mean, men and women lost limbs, they lost eyes, they lost lives, you know.

[1376] There's been this, of course, quiet epidemic of suicide among veterans.

[1377] And I've heard some stories the fact that the State Department is seeing a similar surge of suicides because they see their adult life's work collapse.

[1378] They've seen their relationships.

[1379] I mean, they've seen, they were seeing phone calls in the middle of night from people who they entrusted with their lives, who they know are going to be targeted.

[1380] I mean, some have already been killed.

[1381] They've seen the, I mean, I think just, I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally what they believed in and what they, what they sacrificed for, you know, has vanished.

[1382] And I think that's a, that's bad.

[1383] I mean, historically, thinking of some of the precedence you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of, you know, first of all, at a human level, I feel horrible for those people who, you know, not have agreed with everything they had done and their choices in life.

[1384] But I respect the fact that many good people went out of, you know, the best intentions as young people to do the right thing and make things right.

[1385] And I respect that.

[1386] And I've met enough to know that there were people who saw the gray in complexity.

[1387] And that's, you know, all you can hope for.

[1388] But we don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans.

[1389] You know, if we look at the other post -war moments, And this is kind of a post -war moment where, you know, I think we need a conversation with American veterans about what they've gone through and what they're feeling.

[1390] And they still have skin in the game, you know, because their personal connections and of their histories and they're also going to be future leaders.

[1391] I mean, uh, veterans already.

[1392] Yeah.

[1393] People who have served are often great men and women.

[1394] That's true.

[1395] And, you know, throughout history, whether you sacrifice he served in fighting World War II, in fighting Vietnam.

[1396] that's going to mold you in different ways.

[1397] That's going to mold how you are as a leader that leads this country forward.

[1398] 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.

[1399] If we just look at the full context, at the end of this 21st century, how we're going to remember this, and how that's going to.

[1400] 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.

[1401] What's the role of oil and natural resources and opium and all those kinds of things?

[1402] What's the role of military power in the world?

[1403] And now with COVID, you know, it's like it's almost like the, because of the many failures of the U .S. 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.

[1404] And it's hard to know which is going to be more expensive.

[1405] They seem to be symptoms of something of a same kind of source.

[1406] problem of leadership, of bureaucracy, of the way information and intelligence flows throughout the U .S. government, all those kinds of things.

[1407] And that hopefully motivates young leaders to fix things.

[1408] Definitely.

[1409] I mean, I think if there's one theme that 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.

[1410] 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.

[1411] I mean, the fact of military defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this fire potentially.

[1412] If we think of its legacies and other post -war environments, when, you know, the veteran angle, you know, is one, when you have people who feel betrayed, I mean, they have been fodder for the far right in other settings.

[1413] I mean, interwar Europe is very much about mobilizing disillusioned veterans in the name of right -wing fascist politics.

[1414] If one thing's two of this moment of really increasing xenophobia, you know, our immigration debate is now talking about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all in the United States, you know, after 20 years.

[1415] And I think immediately the response in Europe, which I followed to some extent, you know, focusing on Germany, because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans leading up this collapse.

[1416] And now they have been, you know, a lot of right -wing, center -right politicians in Germany have been watching all this with an eye to, using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience to say, you know, in the context of recent elections, that, you know, we are the party who will defend you against these Afghans are going to be coming from this.

[1417] So, you know, what I've tried to emphasize in talking to different groups about this moment is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan or even the region.

[1418] I mean, obviously, malnutrition, hunger, will send Afghans to neighboring states.

[1419] 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 going to want your women.

[1420] And they will take, you know, the odd sexual assault case or the odd, whatever, dramatic act of violence that, you know, happens numerically in any population.

[1421] And they'll magnify that to say that, you know our far right group is going to save the nation and sorry that the main point i wanted to speak of leadership was that i think the serial well there were many many um carnal sons if you like but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits i mean what blocked some of those exits was um an absence of truth and transparency yeah and the lying and so i mean that the this is no secret anyone who's followed this but the we've allowed and you think of the general mistrust the government mistrust of authority across the board, of professors, of economists, of scientists, doctors, right?

[1422] Well, I actually think that's the hopeful thing to me about the internet is the internet hates inauthenticity.

[1423] They can smell bullshit much better.

[1424] And I think that motivates young leaders to be transparent and authentic.

[1425] So like the very, the very problems we've been seeing this kind of attitude of like of authority where oh the populace they're too busy with their own lives 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 that makes it easy for them to consume this decision right uh as opposed to to that i have i really believe i see there's a hunger for authenticity of of uh when you're making decisions when you're looking at the rest of the world and trying to decide uh untangle this complexity yeah the internet the public the world wants to see you as a leader struggle with the tension of these ideas to uh change your mind to see you know to recognize your own flaws in your own thinking from a month ago all that the full complexity of it also acknowledge the uncertainty as with COVID also with the wars you know I think there's a hunger for that and I think that's just going to change the nature of leadership in the 21st century I hope so I think you know all the things you've highlighted I mean accountability is part of that right I mean we need you know honesty openness and then you know acknowledge some mistakes I mean humility is the key to all learning right but also I mean you think just the headline from yesterday yesterday, the horrible drone strike, which was really the last kind of American military action on the day that the U .S. was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul, wiped out an entire family, mostly children.

[1426] You know, the U .S. acknowledged that, yes, this was not the ISIS bombing outfit that they thought it was.

[1427] But yesterday, they did a quick review.

[1428] I'm not an expert on drone strikes in the aftermath, but as he was literally more closely said, it was basically whole cloth taken from what the U .S. government has been saying after all these strikes, you know, reproducing the same language and basically pointing to technical errors, but denying that there were any procedural mistakes or flaws, or it was just kind of, they found little ways of acknowledging things not goes planned, but, you know, we follow the policies essentially, and, you know, that's it.

[1429] It's not a crime.

[1430] It's a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up.

[1431] And it's kind of the legalese that suddenly makes a war crime, not a war crime, you know.

[1432] And that is a reflex, I think, or refusal to take accountability.

[1433] 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.

[1434] And so they're not going to punish you for saying, I made them a mistake.

[1435] mistake.

[1436] Yeah.

[1437] Yeah.

[1438] I just had a conversation with Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and part of my criticism towards Anthony Fauci has been that it's like such subtle, but such crucial communication of mistakes made.

[1439] If you make a small mistake, it is so powerful to communicate.

[1440] I think we messed up.

[1441] We thought this was true.

[1442] And it wasn't.

[1443] So the obvious thing there was with masks early in the pandemic.

[1444] There's so much uncertainty.

[1445] It's so understandable to make mistakes or to also be concerned about what kind of hysteria, different statements you make lead to.

[1446] Just being transparent about that and saying we were not correct and saying the thing we said before.

[1447] That's so powerful to communicate to gain trust.

[1448] And the opposite it is true when you do this legalese type of talk yeah yeah it's it destroys trust and i again i i really think the lessons of recent history yeah teach us what it what how to be a leader and teach young leaders how to be leaders and i so i have i have a lot of hope yeah good partially thanks for the internet yeah yeah that's great yeah no humility i mean we you know we need humility accountability honesty And, yes, studying the past is an important way to do that.

[1449] I mean, to learn from past mistakes.

[1450] And obviously, there's stories of inspiration and courage.

[1451] And, you know, we can take some kind of assistance from that, too.

[1452] But also learning from learning how not to do things, right?

[1453] And then, you know, analogies whenever, like, one -to -one.

[1454] I mean, we talk about Vietnam.

[1455] I mean, I think many Vietnam veterans would say, you know, this is like deja vu.

[1456] You know, I mean, there's the story, the visuals of the Kabul airport and of the Saigon embassy, we're not the same, but close enough that people would juxtapose them, all all that's right not, but I would just ask people that, you know, over -analogizing is also, you know, a kind of path down, making errors of judgment and comparison, and then sameness.

[1457] But it's stretch.

[1458] I mean, like 9 -11 itself, I think the idea that people lack the imagination within our security apparatus to think this is even possible, right?

[1459] And you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock on a cockpit door, you know, could have wanted all this.

[1460] And, you know, again, I'm not saying either the time or in hindsight that I am on mission about all this, but, you know, I had just been living in Germany the year before.

[1461] 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.

[1462] And so if you kind of dig, you know, it wasn't unimaginable that you would use an airplane as a weapon.

[1463] And the Bush administration kept saying, no one had ever heard of this who would do this 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 because they tricked this guy into doing it but they wanted to bomb the greenwich observatory for some obscure political purpose um so that's an instance in which you know the novel right to go back our kind of humanities pitch, right?

[1464] That, I guess my point was that, you know, as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination, right?

[1465] I think part of expanding our imagination is by, you know, I mean, obviously delving into your fields, you know, of engineering and the sciences and robotics and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape.

[1466] And then, but also we find this in film, poetry, literature.

[1467] I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do to really educate ourselves more fully, right, across the, across the spectrum of everything humans need to imagine, to reimagine security.

[1468] You know, so much what we talked about today, I mean, so much of, you know, our security is affected by this perception of their insecurity, right?

[1469] Which unleashes a whole web of emotions.

[1470] 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 speak to to the spirit of the people that may humanize them and maybe speak to the concerns and the hopes they have?

[1471] Yeah, I think, you know, 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 of viewers at Snapshot.

[1472] So there is Afghan Star, are, you know, which really brings you to the homes of a set of people who, you know, they want stardom, they're artists, they want to express themselves, some want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries, those women who gets into hot water for dancing.

[1473] But, you know, 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?

[1474] I think it's very, humanizing portrait.

[1475] 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.

[1476] And it's about a women's prison.

[1477] And it's incredibly revealing because it's about young girls and what they want.

[1478] Well, not just young, but young, teenage, and then some middle -aged people who were accused of moral crimes, ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to, to having sexual relations outside of marriage.

[1479] And so it shows in a way continuity with the previous Taliban regime and that women are in prison for things that you wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere and that Islamic law operates as the kind of judicial logic for these punishments.

[1480] But in letting these women kind of speak for themselves, I mean, it's fascinating.

[1481] I mean, I don't want to give too much away, but women make varying choices in this film that land them in this predicament.

[1482] So they don't all profess innocence.

[1483] Some are like, I'm guilty, but they're guilty for reasons.

[1484] In one case, one woman is guilty.

[1485] She's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure on her fiancé to finally marry her.

[1486] You know?

[1487] So you get ethnicity, you get like, you know, kind of Romeo and Juliet things or their families don't like each other necessarily.

[1488] But they find each other.

[1489] You have questions of, like, love.

[1490] money, clothing, furniture.

[1491] It's beautiful.

[1492] I mean, there are parts with it, I remember showing it in class.

[1493] There was a wonderful Afghan student who was, I think, a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford.

[1494] And she's a genius.

[1495] She's amazing.

[1496] You know, it was awkward for her because I'm talking about young women having sex and stuff.

[1497] And it was just, it wasn't, you know, the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted.

[1498] And obviously, there's so much more where they're great writers and, you know, musicians.

[1499] And, I mean, you know, music is a huge thing.

[1500] I mean, poetry, all those things are great.

[1501] So she found it, you know, I hear you.

[1502] I mean, it's kind of a taboo subject, but I thought the American students seeing it really identified with these women.

[1503] Because they're just so real.

[1504] And so, you know, young people trying to find, like, I mean, relationships that are universal and circumstances that are very difficult.

[1505] Love.

[1506] Love is universal.

[1507] Yeah, yeah.

[1508] So it's, I mean, we do have resources to humanize.

[1509] I mean, you know, some of your people will know, Kyle Hussaini, you know, is it.

[1510] African American, he's done his stuff, but there are a number of novelists and short story writers who do cool things.

[1511] I think that another tragic aspect of this moment is that those people have now pretty much had to leave the country.

[1512] So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you named Khadam Ali, is a Hazara based in Australia.

[1513] It has extraordinary work in blending a tradition of Persian miniatures with contemporary.

[1514] political commentary.

[1515] His work is between Australia and Afghanistan, but he also, he had to flee.

[1516] I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul.

[1517] But it's an extraordinary kind of visual language that he's adapted that has been shown all of the planet now.

[1518] He's got some of his work is in New York galleries, is in Europe.

[1519] 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, you know, our modern crisis of all the main people who were displaced across our planet.

[1520] And he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them in a way that everyone can get.

[1521] I mean, the visual imagery experts will know that it's from, you know, like the the Shanameh, like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to, that Afghans are attached to, that people can quote, you know, at length that has mythical figures of good and evil that kids grow up embodying their names, the names of the characters that are It's called The Book of Kings.

[1522] The heroes and villains are the staple of conversation and poetry.

[1523] And, you know, like Russians, I mean, the kind of, the resort to literary references and speak is something that Americans don't do.

[1524] Most Western countries don't do.

[1525] But the fact that everyone's got to know this character, everyone knows this reference, the wordplay, the linguistic finesse in multiple languages is, you know, a major value of Afghan storytelling.

[1526] As an outsider, I'm scratching it the surface of the surface.

[1527] Yeah, but there's a depth to it.

[1528] It's just like, it is fascinating.

[1529] The layers, yeah.

[1530] With the layers of Russian language, that's...

[1531] The culture, it's a...

[1532] I've been struggling, and this is kind of the journey, I'm embarking on to convey to an American audience what is lost in translation.

[1533] Yeah, yeah.

[1534] Between Russian and English.

[1535] And it's very challenging in some of the great.

[1536] translators of the Skiy, of Tolstoy, of Russian literature, struggle with this deeply, and they work.

[1537] It's an art form just to convey that.

[1538] And 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.

[1539] I mean, the humor thing is that that's, you know, I'm so much our visual imagery is about, like, this sad place and dower or whatever, but the, I mean, socially, again, I'm going to engage in some stereotypes about generalization stuff.

[1540] but just the um you know the afghan friends that i've come to be close with them really love i mean the the humor there's so much there i have common common stuff of like when i go to ireland it's one of my favorite places and just like the i feel a sense of pressure like the humor all around me the time i mean i feel like there's something between iron like Ireland and russia with the humor stuff where it's like you've you got to be on your game if you want to be you know so it's yeah it's not i feel like you know what i mean the intensity of conversation conversation in terms of yeah you have to be on your game in terms of wit and so on i mean you have to there's certain people i have like when i talked on this podcast they're like that uh certain people from the jewish tradition have that totally like where the wit is just like yeah okay i have to oh yeah i really have to pay attention yeah yeah it's a game it's like it's it's it's it's it's like uh you know what it feels like it feels like speed chess or something like that and you really have to uh focus and play and at the same time there's body language and then there's a melancholy nature to it, at least in the Russian side.

[1541] The whole thing is just a beautiful mess.

[1542] Yeah, I mean, there's a funny TikTok video that went around that I got from like some Afghan acquaintances that was a, that he's an Irish comedian kind of highlighting you know, kind of Irish and German national stereotypes around hospitality.

[1543] And this Afghan moment said, you know, I didn't know that the Irish were just white Afghans because the whole like, you know, the hospitality, like politics of like, of refusal.

[1544] You know, you don't, you don't take something that's offered you the first time you don't I mean it's the the culture of um of receiving a guest you know that's you know Americans aren't I mean that's not you know that's not always I mean they're different the regional cultures where that's the thing there's whatever but it's I mean the kind of like generosity and the kind of you know that that's that's real I mean that's and that's a cool thing that's amazing that's um you know the food I mean going on just the superficial things but the but all that the the warmth of hospitality and um of wit and humanity.

[1545] I mean, it's, that, that's what we don't see viewing the place just through war and geopolitics and the moving pieces of the map and stuff.

[1546] And that's, and that's hard to see when, you know, their gaps in language and in religious tradition and all that stuff.

[1547] And then, you know, being open to the fact that people do things differently, you know, and it's, and the gender dimension there's important, right?

[1548] They're, they're kind of, you know, arguably each culture has a kind of gender dynamic that's different.

[1549] And so I think it's helpful to have humility in thinking that some Afghans will do something, something's different differently, you know.

[1550] But then you'll also have Afghans who say, everyone should be educated, everyone should work, and so on and so on.

[1551] So there's no single way of, yeah.

[1552] And there is a gender dynamic in Russia, too.

[1553] We need to be respectful of that, like.

[1554] And that's not always what it looks like at first.

[1555] Yeah, exactly.

[1556] There's layers.

[1557] Like where power is.

[1558] I mean, that's definitely.

[1559] I don't know.

[1560] Yeah, that's a whole other conversation where the power is.

[1561] Yeah.

[1562] Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, who was born in the land that is now Afghanistan.

[1563] Is there something in his words that speaks to you about the spirit of the Afghan people?

[1564] I mean, everyone owns Rumi.

[1565] I guess I'd say, I mean, that's going to get me in trouble with certain Afghan fans of Rumi who want to see him as an Afghan.

[1566] I would say...

[1567] Are they proud of Rumi?

[1568] Do they see him as an Afghan?

[1569] Do they...

[1570] Yeah, I mean, it depends.

[1571] I mean, some people will be militant.

[1572] say, you know, the Iranian's going to have him.

[1573] He's ours.

[1574] But they're also saying, you know, he's, I mean, you can say, again, he's like a Rorschach blot.

[1575] I mean, he's, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian, he's Iranian, he's Afghan, he's a Turk.

[1576] I'm trying to think of the analogy, but he's something special to everyone.

[1577] So I guess I would, I would not walk into that conversation and claim that he's one or another, but it's a cool thing.

[1578] I mean, it's the, but I'm glad you brought that up because that's a good way of seeing A, seeing something that Afghans, I mean, we live in our country to Afghanistan and say, okay, Rumi's everyone, you know, Madonna helped make a 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.

[1579] And his, his translations are very much disputed where you have people be like, there's some awful Rumi translations and there are.

[1580] There are also a lot of, speaking of the internet, there are lots of fake Rumi quotes.

[1581] Yes.

[1582] You know, like, Rumi said always be your best.

[1583] we didn't say that I mean that's kind of so stuff like that but but the cool thing is like the I mean I think you can read Rumi as a religious think but you can also you know read Rumi as a you know in an Islamic sense but you can also read them as a kind of spiritualist or an ethosist or moralist and so I think that's I like the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan ecumenicism and cosmotism you know the theme I keep emphasizing of of meeting actual Afghans who were actually, you know, fluent in Russian, fluent German, fluent Turkish, they know Dari, they know Pashto, they've gone to university, or sometimes they haven't.

[1584] And yet, I mean, they are, I like the category of the popular intellectual, you know, the intellectual who 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, Afrikaans or war representative there.

[1585] 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.

[1586] But sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not.

[1587] Because of, again, not because of some fairytale story of curiosity wanting 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.

[1588] I mean, also, you think about, like, professions.

[1589] Like, you know, ask, ask Afghan, you know, what does he or she do for a living?

[1590] And what have they done in the past?

[1591] I mean, the answers one gets, shoe salesman, tax cop drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.

[1592] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1593] I mean, that's not just Afghan, but that's, you know, that's very common.

[1594] But it's also Russia is the same.

[1595] That's right.

[1596] I think it's, whenever there's complexities to the economic system and then, you that's right a short term and the long -term history of how the country develops and it's basically the people figuring out their way around a mess of a country politically yeah but a beautiful flourishing culture and a humanity yeah and that that creates super interesting people yeah yeah so we can often see okay there's taliban there's war there's uh economic malfunction there's harboring of terrorists there's opium trade all that kind of stuff but there's humans there with deep intellectual lies uh and uh like i love the movie love crimes and the same kind of uh hopes fears and desire to love the the old romeo juliet's story and i think rumy to me represents that the wit the intelligence but also the just eloquent and just beautiful representation of humanity of love.

[1597] Some of the best quotes about love are from him.

[1598] Half of them fake.

[1599] Half of them real.

[1600] The best ones are real, right?

[1601] The best ones are real.

[1602] The best ones are real.

[1603] Robert, this was an incredible conversation.

[1604] 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.

[1605] It's It's a beautiful country, and it's full of beautiful people.

[1606] You made me think about a lot of new things, too.

[1607] So it was definitely great online, too.

[1608] So thank you so much.

[1609] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Cruz.

[1610] To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

[1611] And now, let me leave you some words from Winston Churchill.

[1612] History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

[1613] Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.