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Episode: S4 Episode 10 - "The Phantom Pain"

Author: Blowback
Duration: 01:01:10

Episode Shownotes

Donald Trump cuts a deal with the Taliban — and America begins its withdrawal.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_10
The crowd anticipates the first speech in 20 years from a man once considered Afghanistan's most wanted.

00:00:10 Speaker_05
In May 2017, after two decades on the lam, the man known as the Butcher of Kabul returned to the city that he had once blanketed with rockets years earlier.

00:00:22 Speaker_05
Golbadeen Hekmatyar, the cruelest commander of the Mujahideen and a favorite of the American and Pakistani intelligence services, strode back into the capital of Afghanistan with the look and the attitude of an elder statesman, ready to guide his country back to stability and prosperity.

00:00:42 Speaker_10
the leader of the prominent Afghan armed group Hezb-e-Islami, whom many regard as a warlord, is said to be behind bombings in the capital in 2012 and the following year.

00:00:53 Speaker_07
A few months earlier, Hekmatyar had negotiated amnesty with the US-backed Kabul government, against which he had formally deployed suicide bombers. As a result, the United Nations cleared his name from a sanctions program.

00:01:09 Speaker_07
The United States, after years of hunting Hekmatyar, publicly praised his rehabilitation by the UN. America was once again on good terms with one of the original Mujahideen.

00:01:26 Speaker_24
I call on Taliban. They should accept the desires and demands of the nation. Come stand with us. Be united to take the country out of this current unfortunate crisis and save the country from the bloodshed.

00:01:39 Speaker_05
This was not the feeling among more than a few Afghans.

00:01:43 Speaker_05
Quote, he just wants to have a political position for his family and for his party members in Afghanistan, said one Kabul resident whose uncle had been killed in the war between Hekmatyar and his ex-Mujahideen allies.

00:01:57 Speaker_05
He is the killer of the people of Afghanistan. On the other hand, Syed Mohammed, a cucumber salesman, summed up the feelings of many. Tired resignation. All the warlords are corrupt and have blood on their hands, he told the French wire service AFP.

00:02:15 Speaker_05
But we welcome Hekmatyar to Kabul because we are tired of war and conflict.

00:02:21 Speaker_07
This was the reality, the creeping feeling shared by almost everyone, after 20 years of US occupation, 10 years of Taliban and warlord rule, and before that, 10 years of Soviet occupation. Peace at any price.

00:02:40 Speaker_10
Other Afghans are not so happy, and many politicians would like Hekmatyar behind bars and not making speeches.

00:03:13 Speaker_07
Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 4, Episode 10, The Phantom Pain. Last time, we covered the war in Afghanistan through the Obama years.

00:03:27 Speaker_07
High-flying promises of a new strategy, a working strategy, crafted not by marauding cowboys from the Bush team, but the learned pragmatists of Team Obama.

00:03:39 Speaker_07
On the military side, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus were going to crack the code in Afghanistan, just as the latter had in Iraq.

00:03:48 Speaker_07
Meanwhile, the best minds in Washington would clean up the kleptocracy run by President Hamid Karzai and the country's infamous warlords. But corruption only got worse, and the violence dragged on.

00:04:01 Speaker_07
After six more years, the White House announced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan, and then quietly reneged on its promise, leaving thousands of troops and tens of thousands of military contractors in-country.

00:04:16 Speaker_05
Now, in this final episode of our season, we'll see the long-awaited negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, as we saw last time, perished in 2011. And here we'll see Mullah Omar was quick to follow.

00:04:33 Speaker_05
Who will take over the Taliban? And how will they deal with Americans? How did President Donald Trump, of all people, succeed in making a peace deal in Afghanistan?

00:04:46 Speaker_05
And once it comes time for the United States to exit after 20 years, how will President Joseph Biden execute the withdrawal?

00:05:26 Speaker_07
In February 2018, the Taliban sent a note to America, an open letter addressed to the American people, explaining that they were willing to come to the table and negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan.

00:05:42 Speaker_07
A war which, the Taliban said, was now producing only aimless slaughter and tons and tons of heroin.

00:05:51 Speaker_07
Hassan Abbas, professor at the National Defense University, calls this letter a powerful combination of a few twisted facts, a touch of sarcasm, and some straight talk.

00:06:04 Speaker_07
One Western official at the time remarked, I hate to say it, but they have started to hit where it hurts simply by telling the truth.

00:06:14 Speaker_05
President Donald Trump, too, thought the Taliban had a point. He thought the Afghan war was a loser. Getting the troops home was looking like another deal that he could tout come re-election.

00:06:27 Speaker_05
And so President Trump took a personal interest in getting the US out of Afghanistan. And that meant negotiations with the Taliban, ASAP.

00:06:37 Speaker_13
And he started saying, well, it will have to be a negotiated deal. And of course, we remember he was the deal making guy. And he said, let's talk to Taliban. which many people before him were making that case. Richard Holbrooke was making that case.

00:06:53 Speaker_13
Hillary Clinton on behalf of Richard Holbrooke made that case to Obama. Somehow President Obama was not convinced or somehow it fell through the cracks. But now it was, now we had gone through a certain point.

00:07:05 Speaker_13
Now there was not enough public interest also in the United States. It was no more the headlines. And that is when Trump said, let's seriously talk to them.

00:07:15 Speaker_05
For almost everyone outside the Taliban hierarchy, however, the question was, who was actually in charge of the movement these days?

00:07:46 Speaker_07
Mullah Omar, the founder and supreme leader of the Taliban, died in 2013 of tuberculosis in a hospital in Pakistan. The Taliban kept it a secret.

00:07:59 Speaker_07
In fact, the group continued to puppet Omar's corpse and release statements from him beyond the grave for years afterward.

00:08:08 Speaker_05
In April 2015, reports the BBC, the Taliban announced that Mullah Omar was in fact very much alive and that he remains in touch with day-to-day Afghan and world events.

00:08:20 Speaker_05
When visitors from the so-called Pakistani Taliban questioned this reality, they were expelled from Afghanistan as doubting Thomases.

00:08:29 Speaker_05
In July of 2015, the ghost of Omar told the world that he backed peace talks with the Afghan government, saying negotiations are a quote, legitimate way of achieving the objective of ending occupation by foreign forces.

00:08:45 Speaker_05
But later that year, the Taliban made a confession. Their leader had departed this world.

00:08:52 Speaker_28
Afghan government and security sources say the fugitive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, is dead.

00:09:00 Speaker_07
The loss of such an iconic figure as Mullah Omar was devastating for the Taliban, writes Abbas. His two most influential deputies would end up competing to succeed their one-eyed leader.

00:09:14 Speaker_05
Mullah Baradar, Omar's brother-in-law, had overseen the actual military component of the Taliban's insurgent campaign following 2001.

00:09:24 Speaker_05
Baradar's goal had been to achieve a military stalemate and then to reconcile with the weak and desperate government in Kabul.

00:09:31 Speaker_05
And so while his troops fought, Baradar was in secret communication with Hamid Karzai's infamous CIA asset and drug trafficker brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. And for this, in 2010, the CIA manipulated the Pakistani ISI to capture Varadar.

00:09:52 Speaker_05
A joint operation in Karachi, masterminded by the Americans, kept Pakistan in the dark about who exactly they were going after. But once they seized Mullah Baradar, the ISI, quote, refused to allow CIA officials to interrogate him.

00:10:09 Speaker_05
And the Pakistanis, irritated at Baradar's private initiatives with Kabul, kept him in jail, then a guest house in 2013, surveilling him for years and denying him the ability to travel.

00:10:24 Speaker_07
Then there was the young blood Mullah Mansur, more of an administrative than a military leader, since Omar's death in 2013. He was basically, quote, a power-hungry man, known mostly for his business acumen and his network in the Gulf.

00:10:41 Speaker_07
The most interesting thing about him, in the words of a former U.S. intelligence analyst, was his, quote, Mullah Mansur also took under his wing Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of old U.S.

00:10:51 Speaker_07
friend-turned-enemy Jalaluddin Haqqani, and a commander in their eponymous Haqqani network. But in 2016, Mullah Mansoor's rising star fell to earth. Or, more accurately, a missile from a drone fell on him.

00:11:21 Speaker_07
It turns out Mansoor was staying not in the usual border territories, but in Quetta in Pakistan. Unlike the handling of Mullah Baradar, this time, Abbas concludes, Pakistan was quietly cooperating with the U.S.

00:11:36 Speaker_07
to eliminate the ambitious Mullah Mansoor, who many thought was becoming an obstacle to peace talks.

00:11:47 Speaker_05
With Mullah Baradar under house arrest and Mullah Mansoor in the next world, the stage was set for Omar's true successor to now come forward, Mullah Hebatullah.

00:12:00 Speaker_07
Hibatullah, a Kandahar native like Omar himself, was a one-time deputy chief of the Taliban's Supreme Court.

00:12:08 Speaker_07
He was cut from the same cloth as Mullah Omar in every regard, Abbas writes, rigid in his religious approach, calm in his demeanor, and with a palpable dislike for publicity and fanfare. He has a reputation as a strict disciplinarian."

00:12:27 Speaker_07
Hebutullah was actually responsible for convincing Omar to double down on suicide bombings, a tactic that was foreign to the Taliban until 2003.

00:12:38 Speaker_05
But it would also be under Hebutullah that the Taliban would put together a team. to negotiate directly with the Americans in Doha in 2018.

00:12:48 Speaker_20
There is tremendous potential between our country and Pakistan. I think Pakistan is going to help us out to extricate ourselves. We're like policemen. We're not fighting a war.

00:12:58 Speaker_20
If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don't want to kill 10 million people. Does that make sense to you? I don't want to kill 10 million people.

00:13:09 Speaker_20
I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth. It would be gone. It would be over in literally in 10 days. And I don't want to go that route.

00:13:25 Speaker_20
So we're working with Pakistan and others to extricate ourselves. Nor do we want to be policemen, because basically we're policemen right now.

00:13:33 Speaker_05
President Donald Trump seemed not overawed by the Afghanistan challenge, writes Hassan Abbas. He was neither ideologically focused on counterterrorism like Bush, nor hesitant like Obama. He did not hold back in pushing hard on the military.

00:13:49 Speaker_04
There's a furious reaction today after claims that President Trump called fallen American heroes losers and suckers. A Twitter page titled Not a Loser is trending.

00:13:59 Speaker_07
As we saw with Trump's Korea policy last season, in some ways he tested the limits of the Washington consensus, and in other ways committed to its excesses. In Afghanistan, while Trump would set the U.S.

00:14:14 Speaker_07
on the road to withdrawal, he initially, quote, adopted an aggressive posture, allowing U.S. military commanders to go on the offensive. In fact, under Trump, casualties of both enemy combatants and civilians would skyrocket.

00:14:31 Speaker_27
Now at 11, the mother of all bombs, the most powerful non-nuclear explosive America has ever used, dropped on ISIS.

00:14:39 Speaker_05
In spring of 2017, Trump made history by authorizing the military to drop the MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or alternatively, and more popularly, the mother of all bombs.

00:14:55 Speaker_05
The target was not in fact the Taliban, but a new group, ISK or the Islamic State of Khorasan, an offshoot of the now infamous Iraqi terror army known as ISIS. The target was, naturally, near the Pakistani border in the east of the country.

00:15:12 Speaker_05
Quote, America's biggest non-nuclear bomb, which costs $16 million and $300 million to develop, it was used on one of the smallest militias America faces anywhere in the world, reported Robin Wright.

00:15:27 Speaker_05
ISK is estimated to have only about 700 fighters in Afghanistan, compared to the 8,500 U.S. troops and the 180,000 Afghan troops on the ground there.

00:15:39 Speaker_05
Still, the Pentagon said, it is expected that the weapon will have a substantial psychological effect on those who witness its use.

00:15:49 Speaker_07
Both ex-president Hamid Karzai and the Taliban condemned the bombing. Quote, this is not the war on terror, but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons, said Karzai.

00:16:06 Speaker_07
Quote, using this massive bomb cannot be justified and will leave a material and psychological impact on our people, echoed the Taliban.

00:16:16 Speaker_18
Well, this was a bomb containing 11,000 pounds of explosives. It's the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal.

00:16:26 Speaker_05
In general, the Trump administration unleashed a new level of violence on Afghanistan. Quote, from 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths due to US and allied forces airstrikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased, reported Brown University.

00:16:44 Speaker_05
The number of civilians, researchers write, killed by international airstrikes increased about 330% from 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, to 2019.

00:16:58 Speaker_05
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated that drones, thought up by Clinton, greenlit by Bush, fully embraced by Obama, and now handed over to Trump, accounted for most of the aerial strikes.

00:17:13 Speaker_07
Despite this, the stalemate on the ground remained. And behind the scenes of carnage, everyone was moving closer to the negotiating table.

00:17:22 Speaker_20
The Taliban wants to make a deal. We'll see if they want to make a deal. It's got to be a real deal, but we'll see. But they want to make a deal.

00:17:29 Speaker_07
During the holiday of Eid in the summer of 2018, the Taliban won credit for respecting a ceasefire proposed by Kabul, even mingling with local security forces and civilians. The U.S.

00:17:43 Speaker_07
was apparently convinced Mullah Hibatullah had his finger on the pulse and could be dealt with. And so Trump insisted his team get to work on a deal. Quote, the president was even heard shouting at his White House staff, Where is my deal? End quote.

00:18:06 Speaker_05
The man for this job we have met by now. Zalmay Khalilzad, Afghan-American, one-time consultant for UNICAL, and ex-Viceroy of Afghanistan. The place for this job was Doha, in Qatar.

00:18:22 Speaker_31
The tiny state of Qatar is once again at the center of big hopes for peace in Afghanistan. The co-founder of the Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, arrived in Doha on Sunday, after being released from custody in Pakistan last year.

00:18:38 Speaker_05
Doha served as a kind of Switzerland for the warring Afghan parties ever since 2012, and it was there that the final negotiations under Trump would bear fruit.

00:18:48 Speaker_05
Quote, Zal started shuttling between Doha, Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington in a whirlwind, writes Abbas, trying to make everyone feel that they were part of the peace effort.

00:19:01 Speaker_07
But by the time negotiations were underway, there was a conspicuous absence of one party, the actual government of Afghanistan.

00:19:11 Speaker_07
Both the Taliban and the US had decided that before peace could be made between Kabul and the insurgency, there needed to be peace between the American occupiers and the Taliban.

00:19:22 Speaker_07
It made sense to the Islamic militants, as the Americans were the only thing stopping them from overwhelming the weak and venal government in Kabul.

00:19:31 Speaker_07
It made sense to the Americans, since getting a deal done with the Taliban would mean an end to the insurgency and the ability to withdraw. All of this, needless to say, did not thrill the administration of President Ashraf Ghani.

00:19:47 Speaker_05
At the same time, the Taliban leadership, now under Mullah Hibatullah, had to worry about selling concessions that came out of these talks to his underlings and the foot soldiers of the movement.

00:19:59 Speaker_05
The one thing the Taliban representatives knew that they had to get was a speedy and complete withdrawal of all American troops.

00:20:08 Speaker_07
Pakistan, of course, was happy to help. This was essentially Islamabad's final victory, in a project that went all the way back to the handshake between Zbigniew Brzezinski and General Zia.

00:20:21 Speaker_20
We've been there for 19 years in Afghanistan. It's ridiculous. And I think Pakistan helps us with that. I think we'll have some very good answers on Afghanistan very quickly.

00:20:32 Speaker_07
For Pakistan, writes Abbas, a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan meant the ouster of India from Afghanistan, their long-desired objective and fundamental motivation in supporting the Taliban from early on.

00:20:47 Speaker_07
Islamabad received backdoor updates from both the American and Taliban negotiators.

00:20:55 Speaker_05
If there was ever a meeting to witness, writes Abbas, it was one in Doha in mid-March 2019. The Taliban seated at the table were not what most would expect them to be. Some were former Guantanamo inmates, some former prisoners in Pakistani jails.

00:21:13 Speaker_05
Sitting across the table from them was the commander of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who at one point during the conversations told the Taliban that he respected them as fighters,

00:21:25 Speaker_05
and further surprised everyone by saying, quote, we could keep fighting, killing each other, or together we could kill ISIS.

00:21:35 Speaker_13
Ashraf Ghani himself also very quickly he started becoming authoritarian as well. And we are to be blamed also. Elections were not credible. This was all helping Taliban all along.

00:21:51 Speaker_13
Taliban were gaining not because they had some new military strategist and some new financial resources. It was because Afghanistan and Kabul was failing.

00:22:03 Speaker_07
The United States and the Taliban inked the deal on February 29th, 2020.

00:22:10 Speaker_26
After 18 months of talks and nearly two decades of war, the US and the Afghan Taliban have just signed a long-awaited deal aimed at paving the way to peace and the departure of foreign troops.

00:22:21 Speaker_07
At the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Zalmay Khalilzad shook hands with Mullah Baradar, who had by now re-emerged from Pakistani supervision as chief negotiator.

00:22:34 Speaker_26
Under the deal, the US and NATO say that they'll pull out all foreign troops within 14 months if the Taliban honors its part of the agreement. And that includes a 135-day initial period to reduce violence.

00:22:48 Speaker_07
And a secret provision was a prisoner swap. 1,000 Afghan security personnel for 5,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners, some considered the most notorious, who had been rotting at the Bagram Air Base Detention Center.

00:23:05 Speaker_05
Author Malkhazian writes that Trump placed a deadline for withdrawal above everything else when he could have let Khalilzad, quote, wring more out of the Taliban.

00:23:15 Speaker_05
This, Abbas concedes, but also suggests that more than any individual detail, the general fact of American defeat after 20 years of occupation was all but guaranteed.

00:23:30 Speaker_04
NBC News now projects that Joe Biden has won the Keystone State, Pennsylvania, and its 20 electoral votes.

00:23:38 Speaker_01
And that means we can now project that former Vice President Joe Biden has been elected President of the United States. He is President-elect Joseph Robinette Biden at 77 years old. Chuck, we'll turn to you.

00:23:53 Speaker_19
It's one of the great days in American history.

00:23:59 Speaker_07
The American occupiers and the Taliban insurgency had made peace. Now, what of Afghanistan's actual government? Ashraf Ghani, quote, stalled things immediately. He wanted peace on his terms only.

00:24:15 Speaker_07
His ignorance of the Taliban's rapid ascendance would put a nail in his own coffin, Abbas writes.

00:24:22 Speaker_07
More so than even the Americans, who at least had the advantage of overwhelming, if not omnipotent, military might, the Kabul government was held in utter contempt by the Taliban opposition.

00:24:35 Speaker_07
What's more, Ashraf Ghani was apparently so out of touch that he reportedly didn't really believe the U.S. would actually leave when the time came.

00:24:44 Speaker_07
Rather than face facts and swallow an interim government with his enemies, Ghani retreated further and further into fantasy.

00:25:03 Speaker_19
President George W. Bush informed our nation that the United States military had begun strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

00:25:12 Speaker_07
On April 14, 2021, President Biden announced that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September of that year.

00:25:24 Speaker_19
War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

00:25:42 Speaker_19
And it's time to end the forever war. Thank you all for listening. May God protect our troops. May God bless all those families who lost someone in this endeavor.

00:25:57 Speaker_07
Joe Biden, as we saw several episodes ago, had long urged withdrawal from Afghanistan.

00:26:04 Speaker_07
Now, whatever the cost, including giving up a heavy US presence across the street from China in Central Asia, Biden's administration was as desperate to get out as Trump's had been.

00:26:17 Speaker_07
To its discredit, Abbas writes, the Biden administration had planned its withdrawal in the least efficient manner possible.

00:26:25 Speaker_07
Speaking with us, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid describes the withdrawal as necessary policy, but one that was carried out in a disastrous manner.

00:26:35 Speaker_14
Essentially, my feelings on the withdrawal were that the Americans were obligated, Obama was obligated to withdraw troops. It was a part of, you know, Trump was trying to withdraw, Obama was trying to withdraw.

00:26:49 Speaker_14
It became a fact of life for the Americans. The issue was, how was the withdrawal carried out? That, in my mind, was a total disaster. It was a failure of the American military, of the American political elite.

00:27:06 Speaker_14
A withdrawal of that caliber with tens of thousands of troops and the whole nation's security at stake should have been carried out in a much more staggered, slow process.

00:27:19 Speaker_05
Some say Biden was left with no choice. For example, Tariq Ali, who is as critical of U.S.

00:27:25 Speaker_05
policy as anyone, he writes, quote, Biden was simply ratifying the peace process initiated by Trump with Pentagon backing, which saw an agreement reached in February 2020 in the presence of the U.S., Taliban, India, China and Pakistan.

00:27:43 Speaker_05
The notion that Biden's hasty withdrawal has somehow strengthened the Taliban is poppycock. By mid-August, Ashraf Ghani was holed up in his office with his closest confidants.

00:28:00 Speaker_05
He took in reports that the Taliban were closing in on Kabul, and he cursed his long list of rivals, imagining a conspiracy between the Taliban and Hamid Karzai.

00:28:11 Speaker_05
Ghani tried to make inroads with specific Taliban leaders, and he sent feelers out to the Haqqani network. Maybe they could cut a deal. The day before the Taliban's turbaned warriors arrived at the city's gates, Ghani's phone buzzed.

00:28:27 Speaker_05
A call from one of the Haqqanis. Perhaps his scheme to collaborate was still possible. No dice. The word from Haqqani to Ghani was, give up and get out.

00:28:40 Speaker_07
Within hours, Ghani was on the move. One of his top advisors had already gone missing, and one can assume the memory of President Najibullah's gruesome demise at the hands of the Taliban all those years ago was as fresh in Ghani's mind as ever.

00:28:57 Speaker_07
Abbas chronicles the president's final moments in his homeland. Ghani was shepherded toward two helicopters waiting. There was one last hurdle. A handful of stressed out palace guards awaited him.

00:29:11 Speaker_07
A shouting match ensued, but someone in the fleeing party had thought through the final steps. The guards were paid to get out of the way. The helicopter set off for Uzbekistan, where Ghani had a connecting flight to the United Arab Emirates.

00:29:31 Speaker_05
In Kabul, none of the notorious warlords of yesteryear, including Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ismail Khan, were to be found. They, too, had abandoned their promises of fighting to the death, writes Abbas.

00:29:45 Speaker_25
People around the world are wondering why you decided to leave. In May 2021, just months earlier, you gave an interview to Der Spiegel.

00:29:55 Speaker_25
in which you said, and I'm not going to quote you, no power in the world could persuade me to get on a plane and leave this country. It is a country I love and I will die defending. But you did get on a plane and leave the country. Why?

00:30:08 Speaker_12
I did get on a plane because it became impossible to defend it. From the presidential ground, all the presidential protection force melted and put on civilian clothes. The minister of defense had left.

00:30:26 Speaker_12
I was ready to go to the minister of defense because he had called me that Kabul could not be defended. And I said, I'm going to come to the ministry. The ministry was empty. He was on a plane. I was the last to leave.

00:30:39 Speaker_12
And the reason I left was because I did not want to give the Taliban and their supporters the pleasure of yet again humiliating an Afghan president.

00:30:50 Speaker_08
Taliban is in control of Afghanistan. The country's president has fled. And Western countries are scrambling to get people out. And this took the US by surprise.

00:31:01 Speaker_16
I did not, nor did anyone else, see a collapse of an army that size in 11 days.

00:31:06 Speaker_08
But that's what happened.

00:31:08 Speaker_07
On Monday, the final flight of American troops left Kabul, wrote The New Yorker in August 2021. Quote, for months, refugee organizations and military officials had urged the Biden administration to begin evacuating Afghans who had backed the U.S.

00:31:27 Speaker_07
effort. The White House demurred, worried that such a move would signal a lack of faith in the Afghan government. As a result, the operation, crammed into the span of a few weeks, was unnecessarily rushed and poorly planned.

00:31:43 Speaker_07
An estimated 200,000 Afghans who were unable to get out now face retaliation from the Taliban."

00:31:53 Speaker_05
The 300,000-man-strong Afghan army crumbled, writes Tariq Ali. Thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government.

00:32:07 Speaker_07
In contrast to the Soviet withdrawal over 30 years earlier, where a delicate but functioning government remained in place and Russian diplomats and civilians remained in country, the U.S. withdrawal was pure chaos.

00:32:22 Speaker_07
The Ghani government, writes Melvin Goodman of Johns Hopkins University, didn't last for 24 hours.

00:32:30 Speaker_29
Mr. President, there had not been a U.S. service member killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020. You set a deadline, you pulled troops out, you sent troops back in, and now 12 Marines are dead. You said the buck stops with you.

00:32:47 Speaker_29
Do you bear any responsibility for the way that things have unfolded in the last two weeks?

00:32:52 Speaker_19
I bear responsibility for, fundamentally, all that's happened of late. But here's the deal. You know, I wish you'd one day say these things. You know, as well as I do, that the former president made a deal with the Taliban. Remember that?

00:33:13 Speaker_19
I'm being serious. No, I'm asking you a question. Because before... No, no, no, wait a minute. I'm asking you a question.

00:33:30 Speaker_05
A year after the American withdrawal, news came out of Afghanistan regarding an old friend.

00:33:37 Speaker_31
We're getting more details about the U.S. mission that's killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

00:33:44 Speaker_05
NBC News reported a CIA drone strike killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had by now naturally replaced Osama bin Laden as the official leader of al-Qaeda.

00:33:55 Speaker_05
American intelligence officials found that Zawahiri had moved from Pakistan to, quote, a Taliban-supported safe house in downtown Kabul.

00:34:05 Speaker_07
Alive at the time of this recording, but also under fire, is Golbadeen Hekmatyar. His office was attacked by suicide bombers in 2020, according to Reuters, perhaps proving that his reputation in Afghanistan has not improved.

00:34:22 Speaker_05
After all these years, his days running drugs with the CIA, shelling his own capital, and teaming up with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Hekmatyar remains playing kingmaker, declaring himself the voice of the people.

00:34:38 Speaker_07
Others have opted for more comfortable environments. General and ex-Vice President of Afghanistan, Rashid Dostum, evacuated his lavish palace in northern Afghanistan for safe haven in Uzbekistan.

00:34:53 Speaker_07
And from Turkey, Dostum has reportedly assembled a, quote, High Council of National Resistance, whose demand is for the Taliban to negotiate the warlord's return and include them in a government.

00:35:06 Speaker_05
The Taliban, however, don't appear too nervous about the once feared Dostum. The warlord's opulent headquarters have since been raided and occupied by the Taliban.

00:35:17 Speaker_05
A long and endless corridor with a thick apple green carpet, reports Al Jazeera, a young fighter sleeps slumped on a sofa, his Kalashnikov rifle resting against him as exotic fish glide above him in one of seven giant tanks.

00:35:36 Speaker_07
Zbigniew Brzezinski, arguably the prime architect of the Afghan jihad, died in 2017. Author Pyotr Petsak writes approvingly that, quote, although Zbigniew Brzezinski is dead, his work is very much alive.

00:35:54 Speaker_07
The Biden administration follows Brzezinski's geostrategic blueprint, which supports Ukraine militarily, logistically, diplomatically, and politically.

00:36:06 Speaker_05
What's more, one of Brzezinski's sons is the current ambassador to Poland, and his daughter, Mika, much like Jenna Bush, daughter of George W., she's a TV anchor and morning show personality at MSNBC.

00:36:21 Speaker_06
Don't forget the Soviets were busy training terrorists all over the place in the 80s. Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still the Soviet Union?

00:36:31 Speaker_06
So yes, compared to the Soviet Union and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant.

00:36:37 Speaker_23
So you're suggesting that it was the Soviets who instrumentalized Islam? Yes, well, who else?

00:36:43 Speaker_07
Gustav Rakotos, the foul-mouthed honcho of the CIA's jihad, who commissioned the training of jihadis in terror and assassination, officially retired from the CIA after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

00:36:58 Speaker_07
He went on to write an intelligence newsletter for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. before returning to the CIA on contract. He died in 2005.

00:37:11 Speaker_05
Michael Vickers, one time whiz kid, who turned the Jihad into a veritable Rube Goldberg machine. Vickers worked in the Obama administration as a counter-terrorism advisor, where he attempted to snuff out some of his old recruits.

00:37:26 Speaker_05
And he's now a board member at the arms dealer BAE, alongside fellow Afghanistan veteran, General John Campbell, and ex-CIA director, Gina Haspel.

00:37:37 Speaker_07
Another CIA director, Bill Casey, who presided over the Afghan Jihad in the 80s, was tarnished, though never formally charged, in relation to another secret operation.

00:37:49 Speaker_07
The day before he was to testify before the Senate on the Iran-Contra scandal, Casey suffered multiple seizures and checked into the hospital.

00:37:58 Speaker_07
Months later, reports the New York Times, Mr. Casey died less than 24 hours after the first witness in congressional hearings on the affair named him as having assisted in arming the death squads in Nicaragua.

00:38:13 Speaker_07
Wherever Casey is now, it no doubt pains the devout Catholic to know that at his own funeral, he was verbally lashed by a bishop. with President Reagan and former President Richard Nixon sitting in a front pew," wrote the Los Angeles Times.

00:38:29 Speaker_07
The bishop conducting the funeral of former CIA director William J. Casey said yesterday that Casey's belief in the moral strength of the administration's positions had blinded him to the ethical questions raised by his church about U.S.

00:38:46 Speaker_07
military policies.

00:38:50 Speaker_28
If he was expecting a hero's return, then perhaps the former president, Pervez Musharraf, was disappointed. By Pakistani standards, this is a small crowd.

00:39:00 Speaker_05
General and ex-president Pervez Musharraf was chased out of Pakistan in 2008 and again in 2016. He was charged with high treason for suspending the constitution and charged with the murder of his political rival, Benazir Bhutto.

00:39:16 Speaker_05
Though out of the country, Musharraf was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in absentia.

00:39:23 Speaker_07
The general was never formally convicted for Bhutto's assassination. Friendly judges in Lahore would later revoke the death sentence.

00:39:32 Speaker_07
After all, Musharraf was still respected within the military and the ISI, who remain, in the opinion of most, a shadow government in Pakistan.

00:39:43 Speaker_07
Newsweek reported that Musharraf's speaking fees while out of the country ranged from $150,000 to $250,000 a pop. Musharraf died in February 2023.

00:39:57 Speaker_02
But I do have to ask you, Mr. Haqqani, because you know very well that you are under personal sanctions by the United States, which also has a multi-million dollar bounty on your head.

00:40:10 Speaker_07
Jalaluddin Haqqani, with his fiery red beard, died secretly at some time between 2015 and 2018. He left the family business to his sons, who have become Taliban leaders in their own right.

00:40:26 Speaker_05
And what of Haqqani's number one fan, Congressman Charlie Wilson?

00:40:31 Speaker_09
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that up to three more combat brigades will be sent to Afghanistan. Do you think this is the right approach?

00:40:39 Speaker_00
I don't know anything else to do, really. We have several reasons to do that. One is to try to defeat the Taliban, if we can, and try to have a sensible civilian government for Afghanistan.

00:40:56 Speaker_00
Another reason is that we need to catch Bin Laden, and that's the only way to do that. I believe that he is in the tribal areas. I might have occupied some of the same caves that he's currently occupying.

00:41:10 Speaker_05
Wilson had retired from politics in the 1990s, at least formally, instead becoming a lobbyist for Pakistan. The University of Texas at Austin now features a Charles N. Wilson Chair in Pakistan Studies.

00:41:27 Speaker_07
Wilson died of cardiac arrest in 2010. After the memorial service, reports the Dallas Morning News, Wilson's widow, Barbara, welcomed a small group of her late husband's intimates to their home on the golf course in Lufkin, Texas.

00:41:46 Speaker_07
Next to an American eagle sculpture in the living room, the words of Abdur Rahman Khan, Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, are emblazoned on a brass plaque. Quote, My spirit will remain in Afghanistan, even though my soul will go to God.

00:42:07 Speaker_07
My last words to you, my son, are, never trust the Russians.

00:42:15 Speaker_05
Asked by an ABC News team whether he remembered Charlie Wilson, Gulbadin Hekmatyar fondly recalled that he was, quote, a good friend.

00:42:31 Speaker_05
Since the August 2021 withdrawal, supposedly as a policy meant to oppose Taliban rule, the United States has frozen billions in the Afghan central bank's assets.

00:42:44 Speaker_05
Now, quote, at least 43 percent of the population is living on less than one meal a day, reports NBC, and 97 percent of Afghans are expected to be living below the poverty line.

00:42:58 Speaker_05
70% of homes are, quote, unable to meet basic food and non-food needs, according to the magazine In These Times. Reports have emerged of Afghans selling their daughters and their kidneys in an effort to survive hunger and rising debt.

00:43:18 Speaker_05
Years ago, when asked what would happen if the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, Mullah Lajoya responded, you know, we women in Afghanistan and we in civil society, we have three enemies, three opponents in our country. One is the Taliban.

00:43:35 Speaker_05
Two is this group of warlords disguised as government that the U.S. supports. And the third is the U.S. occupation. Malalai said, if you in the West could get the US occupation out, we'd only have two.

00:43:58 Speaker_07
Tariq Ali sums up the legacy of that opponent that has been removed.

00:44:04 Speaker_07
Quote, in one of the poorest countries of the world, billions were spent on air conditioning the barracks that housed US soldiers and officers, while food and clothing were regularly flown in from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.

00:44:20 Speaker_07
A huge slum grew on the fringes of Kabul as the poor assembled to search for pickings in dustbins. End quote.

00:44:29 Speaker_07
Meanwhile, Afghan land is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, reports Brown University's Costs of War Project, which kills and injures tens of thousands of Afghans, especially children.

00:44:46 Speaker_05
As for the status of women, writes Ali, nothing much has changed. There has been little social progress outside the NGO-infested green zone.

00:44:56 Speaker_05
Despite repeated requests from journalists and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex work industry that grew to service the occupying armies, nor are there credible rape statistics.

00:45:09 Speaker_05
although US soldiers frequently used sexual violence against terror suspects, raped Afghan civilians, and green-lighted child abuse by Allied militias.

00:45:22 Speaker_07
As we mentioned in our first episode this season, the American War is in many ways a sequel to the British Opium Wars of the 19th century.

00:45:31 Speaker_07
Trillions have been made in profits and shared between the Afghan sectors that serviced the occupation, writes Ali. Western officers were handsomely paid off to enable the trade. One in ten young Afghans are now opium addicts.

00:45:47 Speaker_07
Figures for NATO forces are unavailable.

00:45:50 Speaker_05
Now, despite the Taliban once again cracking down on Afghanistan's astronomical levels of heroin production,

00:45:58 Speaker_05
Western experts from think tanks like Brookings are publishing articles such as How the Taliban Suppressed Opium in Afghanistan and Why There's Little to Celebrate.

00:46:09 Speaker_05
Seven years earlier, with a different government in power, this same expert warned of the Taliban terrorism-drugs nexus in Afghanistan.

00:46:26 Speaker_15
The real statistic is much higher. Usually through mainstream media, they decrease the civilian casualties.

00:46:32 Speaker_15
They call them terrorists sometimes in the name of so-called terrorists that they are fighting or they killed, but ordinary people were the victims.

00:46:42 Speaker_15
It seems like when they are saying good war, bad war through their media, Iraq is bad war, Afghanistan good war, while we have many things in common.

00:46:52 Speaker_07
Numbers on casualties, as we found in several seasons of this show, can be hard to state definitively.

00:46:59 Speaker_07
Roderick Braithwaite writes that, quite often in wars like these, casualty figures are more or less inaccurate guesses, often put into circulation for propaganda purposes.

00:47:11 Speaker_05
During the Iraq war, we saw by now lower estimates rest at around 600,000 dead, higher ones over 1 million. In the US war in Korea, we saw estimated deaths range from 2 million to 3 million people.

00:47:28 Speaker_07
Civilian body counts during the American occupation in Afghanistan are particularly difficult to calculate, since, as we covered, so much violence was fueled by disguising local disputes as quote-unquote insurgent activity.

00:47:44 Speaker_07
What's more, as Ali writes, enemy deaths that included civilians are often not counted. The US government itself has never issued an official tally, much as in Iraq.

00:47:57 Speaker_07
And as we've seen, the war was hardly a purely Afghan affair, with just as much violence and carnage happening across the border in our ally, Pakistan.

00:48:09 Speaker_05
Brown University, whose Costs of War project has done its best to disentangle the reports of civilians from combatants, reports that, quote, about 243,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan war zone since 2001.

00:48:28 Speaker_28
The Taliban and US meet face to face as Afghanistan endures one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Afghan funds in the West remain frozen while repression of women and rights abuses continue. Will the talks bring Afghans some hope?

00:48:44 Speaker_05
In July 2021, Tariq Ali writes, a senior Taliban delegation visited China, pledging that their country would never again be used as a launchpad for attacks on other states, end quote.

00:48:58 Speaker_05
the Chinese remained insistent that the situation of women must improve. But they talked trade. Have no doubt, writes Tariq Ali, Beijing will replace Washington as the capital of importance for Afghanistan.

00:49:15 Speaker_07
Since the Taliban takeover of 2021, India has tried to chart a more neutral course.

00:49:22 Speaker_07
Pakistan essentially won in Afghanistan, and with China welcoming the Taliban to Beijing, New Delhi appears to be ready to live with the Taliban, to help rebuild Afghanistan where it can, and avoid rocking the boat.

00:49:38 Speaker_07
Critics accuse the United States of punishing the Afghan people in order to try and undermine the admittedly brutal Taliban government. But it may be worse than that.

00:49:49 Speaker_07
Malalai Joia, at least, tells us that the appearances of America cutting off the Taliban may be deceiving.

00:49:57 Speaker_15
Yes, the U.S. has imposed banking freezes and other so-called sanctions that have hurt the people of Afghanistan, while they are funding the Taliban to the tune of $14 million a week to create a supposedly so-called all-inclusive government.

00:50:16 Speaker_15
The only person who damages the ordinary people, you know, acting we are against Taliban, but in the meantime, funding them in the name of the so-called humanitarian support. Of course, these money go to the Taliban.

00:50:29 Speaker_15
And the banking freeze, what they did, who damaged the ordinary Afghan people, not their profits.

00:50:35 Speaker_07
Sure enough, here's NBC News, April 2023.

00:50:41 Speaker_05
The head of the U.S. government watchdog for the war in Afghanistan said Wednesday that the U.S. may have provided billions in taxpayer dollars to the Taliban and Afghan terror groups since the withdrawal of American troops.

00:50:56 Speaker_05
But even he doesn't know the full extent of the problem.

00:51:01 Speaker_11
As I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban.

00:51:12 Speaker_11
Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.

00:51:27 Speaker_02
Mr. Sirajuddin Haqqani, welcome to the program. Now, this is what a top Western official told me just before I got here. He said, we're in a new world. The guy, that's you, has a huge amount of American blood on his hands.

00:51:46 Speaker_02
He's got, in the Taliban, the tightest ties to extremist movements. He was also one of the first to put women back to work in his ministry. We have seen his ministry take promising steps to contain terrorism. To call it a paradox is an understatement.

00:52:05 Speaker_02
This is not just my opinion, it's the opinion of every single envoy who works on these issues. So on the one hand, they believe you're a terrorist, I'm sorry to say, that's they who say that. On the other hand, they think they can work with you.

00:52:23 Speaker_02
What do you say to that?

00:52:28 Speaker_05
I would say that this is a judgment that they should make.

00:52:32 Speaker_05
In a sane world, writes Harper's Magazine correspondent Andrew Coburn, the attacks of September 11, 2001 might have permanently ended Washington's longstanding taste for mixing Islam with politics. But old habits die hard, end quote.

00:52:50 Speaker_05
America's war in Iraq generated the biggest global recruitment drive of jihadism since Operation Cyclone itself.

00:52:59 Speaker_05
By the Obama years, a key hotspot was next door to Iraq in Syria, where despite having just removed itself from the Iraqi mission, America recommitted itself to toppling an uncooperative secular strongman, but this time in the retro Cyclone style.

00:53:19 Speaker_07
In the spring and summer of 2015, Coburn writes, a coalition of Syrian rebel groups, calling itself Jaish al-Fatah, the Army of Conquest, swept through the northwestern province of Idlib, posing a serious threat to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

00:53:38 Speaker_07
Leading the charge was al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, known locally as Jabhat al-Nusra.

00:53:45 Speaker_07
The other major component of the coalition was Ahrar al-Sham, a group that had formed early in the anti-Assad uprising and looked for inspiration to none other than Abdullah Azzam, one of the original Afghan Arabs.

00:54:03 Speaker_05
This potent alliance of jihadi militias had been formed under the auspices of the rebellion's major backers, writes Andrew Coburn. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. But it also enjoyed the endorsement of two other major players.

00:54:21 Speaker_05
At the beginning of the year, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had ordered his followers to cooperate with other groups.

00:54:30 Speaker_05
In March, according to several sources, a US-Turkish-Saudi coordination room in southern Turkey had also ordered the rebel groups it was supplying to cooperate with Jaysh al-Fatah.

00:54:45 Speaker_05
The groups, in other words, would be embedded within the Al-Qaeda coalition.

00:54:54 Speaker_07
A few months before the offensive against Assad, a member of one CIA-backed group had explained the true nature of its relationship to the al-Qaeda franchise, Coburn writes.

00:55:06 Speaker_07
Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United States to appear independent so that they would continue to receive American supplies.

00:55:20 Speaker_05
When I asked a former White House official involved in Syria policy if this was not a de facto alliance, Coburn says the official put it this way, I would not say that Al Qaeda is our ally, but a turnover of weapons is probably unavoidable.

00:55:40 Speaker_05
I'm fatalistic about that. It's going to happen.

00:55:44 Speaker_07
That answer doesn't sound all that different from what CIA bagman Milt Bearden had said all the way back in the 1980s. Quote, we stand by our position that once the stuff's delivered, we lose all control over it.

00:56:04 Speaker_15
In fact, practically, they supported, empowered directly and indirectly the terrorism in Afghanistan. Terrorism itself was a strategic tool in the hand of the U.S.

00:56:16 Speaker_15
and NATO to use it against our people and wage their war, not only in Afghanistan, what they did in Iraq and Syria and Yemen and Libya. And now, look what is happening in Ukraine. When you hear the news, the history of Afghanistan is repeating there.

00:56:43 Speaker_22
Caroline has this great tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail. Uroboros. I don't know what that means. A snake. It's called Uroboros.

00:56:52 Speaker_05
A report in the Washington Post, April 2022. When the United States wanted to purchase a fleet of helicopters for the Afghan government in the early 2010s, it chose the Mi-17 sold by a Russian state-owned arms exporter. The decision infuriated U.S.

00:57:11 Speaker_05
lawmakers, who felt the Pentagon should choose an American manufacturer.

00:57:16 Speaker_05
But the Defense Department stayed the course, saying the Russian helicopters were relatively inexpensive, functioned well in Afghanistan's desert expanses and high altitudes, and Afghan pilots knew how to fly them.

00:57:35 Speaker_07
A decade later, the paper writes, neither Congress nor the Kremlin could have anticipated that those helicopters would be used against Russian forces in Ukraine by way of arms transfers engineered by the United States in response to Moscow's invasion and the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan.

00:58:00 Speaker_05
The MI-17's unusual journey went unmentioned in the announcement last week by President Biden touting his approval of an $800 million security package, dramatically expanding the scope of military aid that Washington is supplying to Kiev.

00:58:22 Speaker_07
Forty years after the U.S.

00:58:24 Speaker_07
sent billions of dollars worth of weapons to Islamic warriors fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, it now sends Russian-made helicopters purchased to kill Islamic warriors fighting Americans in Afghanistan to kill Russians in a proxy war inside of Ukraine.

00:59:14 Speaker_26
Now go! Let the legend come back to life!

00:59:30 Speaker_05
That just about does it for Blowback Season 4. We'd like to thank all of our guests, Ahmed Rashid, Malalai Joya, Hassan Abbas, Seymour Hersh, Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould, Anatole Levin, and our friends at Sleazoids.

00:59:44 Speaker_07
And as always, we'd like to thank Matthew Giles, our fact checker, Davidson Barsky, our archival assistant, and Jesse Garacia, my assistant editor.

00:59:53 Speaker_05
Now, if you'd like to listen to our bonus episodes, all 10 of them, including full-length interviews with our aforementioned guests, then make sure that you are a subscriber.

01:00:05 Speaker_07
All you have to do to subscribe to Blowback for $25 a year is go to www.blowback.show. You also get access to ad-free archives of all of our previous episodes, merch discounts, and first dibs on future Blowback releases.

01:00:22 Speaker_05
Like, for example, Blowback Season 5, which comes out later this year and covers America's deadly relationship with Cambodia. Adios. Bye.